I Don't Speak German, Episode 20: Gavin, Goad, and Edgelord Comedy (with Samantha Kutner)
Samantha Kutner returns to talk about Gavin McInnes again, including his book and some of his influences. Warnings apply. NOTE 23/8/20: Since original publication this episode has been edited to remove references to an organisation with which Samantha Kutner is no longer affiliated. Links have also been removed from below. Gavin McInnes "The Death of Cool." Jim Goad's Group Hug "The Surprisingly Mainstream History Of The Internet's Favorite Anti-Semitic Image" https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1115860103788412928 Proud Boys News Sources Samantha (@ashkenaz89) has been consulted with. 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 Incident map link. https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1051237360338259969 Incident Map Support for Samantha Patreon: patreon.com/ashkenaz89 Paypal: paypal.me/SKutner Venmo: @ashkenaz89 The “misgendering” of Alex McNabb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1RzRhazhV0 The Truth about Charlottesville https://www.wired.com/story/leaked-alt-right-chat-logs-are-key-to-charlottesville-lawsuits/ https://www.bustle.com/p/leaked-unite-the-right-chats-prove-members-had-violent-intentions-for-charlottesville-79647 Edging Into Extremism https://www.patreon.com/posts/edging-into-23433586 For Proud Boys and Others Considering Leaving Insights from former Proud Boys https://medium.com/@ashkenaz89/proud-of-your-boy-notes-on-leaving-94172fa2bbcf Organizations that Can Help You Leave https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1088954326402228224 Mental Health Resources for Men https://mantherapy.org/ https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
Hello, Jack here, speaking on the 23rd of August 2020, so a bit after this episode of I Don't Speak German was originally published.
This is just a short note to let you know that since its original publication, this episode has been edited, changed from its original form, to remove a reference to an organisation with which Samantha Kuttner is no longer affiliated or associated.
Thanks very much, and enjoy!
Alright, welcome to I Don't Speak German, episode 20.
And since I'm the one talking first, you know, it's because Jack isn't here today.
Jack is very, very busy both this week and next, so we're going to have a couple of guest appearances, I think, before the end of June happens.
But today I am once again joined by the person who came on for episode 13, I believe, or 14, Sam Kuttner.
Samartha, say hi.
Hi, guys.
Samantha, in case you don't remember, is the Proud Boy Whisperer, an expert on Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys.
So we thought we'd kind of just do more of a casual episode.
I don't have a lot of notes in front of me, stuff that I really am kind of desperate to cover.
But we were really kind of talking in the back channel, and we were talking about sort of the sort of edgelord comedy roots of Gavin McInnes and Jim Goad.
And so this is going to be kind of about, you know, Jim Goad, Gavin McInnes, and kind of the edgelord comedy scene of the 90s and 2000s, and sort of like how those kind of connections work.
And so, yeah, how's it going?
It's going pretty good.
I graduated.
I'm ready to do this work full time and get to see my family this week.
I'm happy.
Good to know.
And just, Samantha is in New York City at the time of recording, so if you hear a little bit of background noise, that is to be expected.
So, yeah, I think you were the one who first kind of approached me about doing another episode, and so kind of what's on your mind, I guess, is the best place to start.
I was thinking about the various connections that Gavin has to the alt-right, and I'm not sure how many people know this about him, but his ideological predecessor was Jim Goad.
He's part of the reason why Vice had that edge and that counterculture appeal, because Gavin McGinnis was
such a fan of Goad, so I think that talking about who Goad is and talking about Gavin's memoir is something that might illuminate these alt-right connections further and hopefully show the the public that, you know, despite Gavin's position, you know, we're alt-right, we're not alt-right, they are basically fully functioning alt-right Yeah, sure, I would agree with that.
I mean, I have followed Jim Goad for a couple of years now.
view women in the way that they view marginalized communities.
So I think talking about them as people would be important to kind of make these connections a little clearer.
Yeah, sure.
I would agree with that.
I mean, I have followed Jim Goad for a couple of years now.
I have not done kind of a full deep dive on his background.
But when you said you wanted to do this, I thought I would kind of go back and refresh a little bit.
And I've definitely kind of decided that I need to do a deep dive on Jim Goad.
And I think I am going to eventually do a full episode on him.
But he has a podcast now called Jim Goad's Group Hug and he's done a ton of white nationalist podcast appearances and while Gavin really stands aside from kind of the overt I mean, he's pretty openly white nationalist, white supremacist, you know, however you want to kind of define those terms.
with a lot of that, to what degree he is affected with that, we can kind of set aside for now.
Tim Goad really doesn't hide from it at all.
I mean, he's pretty openly white nationalist, white supremacist, however you want to kind of define those terms.
I mean, he has been on the Daily Show podcast twice and just kind of smiles and nods and agrees with everything those guys have to say.
He is kind of obsessed with the idea of, you know, white, this is the original sin.
He even got a book that's kind of tied up to something to that effect.
And he spends a lot, I mean, he's pretty overtly race-realist.
He's pretty overtly, you know, anti-semitic.
I mean, you know, it's just, you know, the straight-up, you know, Jim Goate is a white nationalist.
I don't think that...
If you put that to him, I don't think he would even necessarily deny that.
It's just, oh yeah, no, sure, I'm a white nationalist.
So there is a difference between that and Gavin, who likes to play ideas but not really embrace them overtly.
That's true.
When he interviewed McNabb, Jim Goad... Are you talking about Alex McNabb?
Yes.
When Jim Goad interviewed my new friend... Should we tell that story?
Or maybe we'll just link to the video in the show notes?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think that most of that story, it's pretty easy to discern what happened from the video, so yeah, feel free to link that.
Okay.
Alex Renab is the Nazi EMT we talked about to some degree in Episode 9 about the Daily Shoah.
He's one of the main co-hosts of the Daily Shoah.
He is definitely, you know, kind of right up there.
the whole time, so there's no confusion about who Alex McNabb is.
But Samantha had a little bit of a run-in with him on Twitter, and we will wait to that in the show notes.
But yeah, Alex McNabb was interviewed on Jim Goad's group Hug, probably about a year ago at this point.
Yes, I think they dated it 11 months after Charlottesville.
Okay, so yeah, July 2018.
Yeah, Goad had him on because he was an EMT at the time, and he wanted more insight into the opioid epidemic.
Right.
So you listened to that episode.
I did not get a chance to re-listen to that one this week, but I did listen to that one.
So what are your thoughts about the chap that our Nazi buddy in gym, Goat?
Yeah, I think these are dangerous figures.
Like, most people have this idea of a hate monger being, you know, just belligerent and just spouting vitriol with no craft or style or substance, but Jim Goad is very eloquent in most of his positions and he has training in journalism but he is heavily biased and self-identifies as a hate monger
so in the episode you'll see him reference you'll see him reference Heather Heyer and in calling like in describing Charlottesville.
He doesn't say a counter protester died or a woman died at this event.
He describes her as a severely overweight woman.
Which is the standard meme that kind of came out of her death on the far right, is that because she was overweight, well, you know, the nice version of that is, well, she was overweight, she was kind of, you know, asking for it, being out in the hot sun, doing this, and that she was just kind of over-exerting herself, and that she was gonna die anyway, you know, like, and, and on the, on the kind of a, Nasty end of that.
That's the nice version should tell you something, but the nastiest version of that is like, well, she was just kind of a worthless sack of slop anyway.
So, you know, no harm, no foul.
It was just a fat girl who died, you know?
Yeah, most of his segments before he talks with McNabb are just heavily misogynistic.
There was a feminist that he used kind of as a straw man, I forget what it was but it was kind of a reactionary position, she took and he said That nobody ever cared about her enough or had enough passion for her to beat her.
Right.
I laugh out of recognition of the years all the time.
Sorry, it's not meant to be.
It's not like a merciful thing for me.
And so you've heard that that's a common thing, that like, you know, you express your love for your woman through beating them?
Or through control, through like, you know, look, I'm the man, I'm in charge, I'm the one who's supposed to know what's going on here, and, you know, you're making bad decisions and I'm here to protect you, and protecting you often means protecting you from yourself.
And, you know, this is not in a sort of, you know, consensual BDSM-y way either.
This is, you know, like, this is just the way society is supposed to work.
I mean, these guys, I mean, ironically or not ironically enough, misogyny and transmisogyny is the topic of the next episode I'm going to record with another guest.
And so we'll get much more deeply into this, I think, next episode.
But yeah, no, it's certainly not, I mean, it's pretty much due rigor for these guys to just You know, misogyny lies at the heart.
Yes.
It holds them all together.
It's where these guys start, yeah.
Yeah, like when... I've always... I've tried to understand...
What possesses a man to express his love for a woman in that way?
And I feel like it's not, I mean, obviously not anything to do with love, but more about anxiety.
Like, you have stepped outside of the role that I have given you, and I do not know what to do with this.
So, get back into this role or suffer the consequences.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is anxiety, a lot of it is a feeling of, you know, but also sort of the socially programmed, you know, what I'm supposed to do as a man is to have a woman who is going to obey me, who's going to do what I tell her to do, and is not going to outarm me, or is not going to do, you know, these various things, and so it's sort of a status signaling to the society and to other men in their lives.
I re-watched A Hot Tub Time Machine a couple weeks ago, which is kind of one of those stupid comedies, and it's like, yeah, this is kind of misogynistic, but at least it's in sort of a charming way.
Anyway, it's just one of those, like, it was on, I watched it.
I'm not proud of it, but I'm not apologizing for it either.
But one of the things is that one of the leads Has like taken his wife's last name, like they've done a hyphenated last name.
And that's just such this like, my God, man, where are your balls if you're going to allow yourself to do that?
I mean, that's just, you know, the idea of like not being a proper man and making her take your name is this, you know, this is kind of ultimate.
You know, like, rejection of masculinity.
And this is a mainstream comedy from like 10 years ago, you know?
Yes.
And, you know, these ideas, I mean, this is not, in any sense, a kind of a foreign idea.
I mean, my wife and I, I mean, she kept her last name, I kept mine.
We didn't, neither one of us changed our names, and it's kind of weird, even among the kind of, like, lefty circles that I move in sometimes, necessarily.
I mean, nobody questions it, but it is kind of a weird thing.
Yeah, I mean I think it's obviously a very different kind of thing that we're talking about this sort of like much more overtly violent misogyny, but I think it reflects the same kind of background, right?
Yeah, and it was for me in my research it was coming into direct contact with just raw misogyny that made me more attuned to the more subtler forms and I don't react or overreact or get angry when I see these things because they are so normalized.
Just expectations of women and their bodies and their skills and how common it is to insult a woman's appearance first before anything.
Like especially female academics insulting their Their appearance is like insulting their credibility as an academic.
Like, it has the same effect.
Male academics experience things like that, and it's just strange that that's an ad hominem attack, and it should be recognized as an ad hominem attack, which means the person has most likely lost their argument, but there is this kind of unconscious thing that if you insult a woman's appearance, it's very easy to put her into the angry feminist or crazy cat lady role.
Right.
And one of the things you run into, particularly on this gender question, on this kind of issue of misogyny and feminism and such, and the way these guys talk about it, that you'll hear a lot of the Basically, they noticed that, you know, men tend to vote differently than women and men, you know, kind of prioritize different things in politics.
And then that becomes a hard and fast, you know, kind of like biologically driven rule.
And they build all this kind of like pseudoscientific nonsense around like this thing called RK selection theory.
And, you know, that women are designed to nurture because they have eggs and they can only give birth to so many children, et cetera, et cetera.
Whereas a man is supposed to go out and spread his seed.
And, you know, there's this whole kind of pseudoscientific explanation.
But then just kind of ends up being like, well, and then like people just don't make good decisions on increased amounts of estrogen.
And one way you can increase your testosterone is by, you know, working out and being more fit, et cetera, et cetera.
And so, you know, overweight men and, you know, quote unquote less masculine men.
I have a giant beard.
I have a broad shoulder.
I don't know.
But I'm not like the Chad, obviously.
But someone like me, who looks like this, they would just look and they say, well your face is too round, obviously you're not a real man, and obviously you're just wrong.
You know?
And the truth of the matter, you know, so it is sort of...
Like making the ad hominem justified in the argument by through this kind of use of a kind of nonsense.
This is not really something like Goethe or Gavin necessarily would would kind of put forward in so many words I think but certainly there's a lot of Gavin's work is kind of his sort of anti-feminist work where he will talk about you know how feminism robs women of the
Their true value of becoming mothers and taking care of children etc and that's something you hear over and over again And so there is this sort of like biological reductionist essentialist argument that tends to kind of run through these things yeah, it's hard for me to listen to Gavin because it's like a it's like a comedian that has one act and he just keeps doing different not even different variations of the same act, but just like a
The same act over and over and over again and it's like repetitive and like not funny.
I know that people call him a comedian but like don't you have to be funny to be a comedian?
Is that not the prerequisite?
He has a certain facility with words occasionally.
You and I have both read his book.
I read his book this week.
In fact, I read it the night before last.
I kind of crammed through it in preparation for this podcast.
And boy is it, you know, occasionally, I mean, he's got like some, he spends a lot of time talking about his dick.
He spends a lot of time talking about his farts.
He spends a lot of time talking about, you know, bodily fluids.
He describes awkward sexual experiences and he describes kind of really bad drug trips that he's done and the time he got arrested for driving when he was a kid and all that sort of thing.
Um, and occasionally he has, like, I mean, there's like one moment that I actually kind of went, okay, that's actually, like, it's crude, and it's completely juvenile, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you this one where, um, he was describing his now-wife, like, after he had gotten in a fight, and he had lost the fight, but, uh, the, the premises that women get, like, their, their panties just drop to the floor when they see a man fighting, because it's just, like, a natural, like, impulse or whatever, and, uh, he described his, his wife's, uh,
response is she had a wide on for him, which I thought, you know, that's that's as stupid and crude as that is.
I'm going to give you that one, Gavin.
That one's that was not bad, you know, within the context of it being a terrible thing to begin with.
So he does have the occasional line that sort of that sort of works for me a little bit.
And I'm like, I'm going to be, you know, a lot of this podcast is sort of like sitting around and like explaining the jokes You never feel more square than when you're the guy explaining the jokes to people, right?
It's kind of this inherently dweebish, nerdy thing to do.
I don't care that it's a juvenile book.
It's perfectly fine if he wants to write a 400 page book about his farts.
I wouldn't pay any attention to it at all were he not also leading a racist street gang.
That matters to me a lot more.
So we look to his book for clues about What he's all about, and so you're kind of forced to read it, but like, I don't care that he tells stupid jokes.
I don't care that people enjoy his stupid jokes.
That's fine.
It's the, like, being a misogynist racist shithead with a huge following.
That's the part that bothers me.
Yeah, I mean, the thing that bothers me, I mean, I think there are some phrases, too, that I thought were interesting, like, ice cream thought.
I think, I think that was, like, just little words.
I'm like, okay, yeah, I'll give you that one.
Sure.
Like, little things that I liked, but the overall picture and what I got is the making of this extremist leader before he became one.
He describes growing up and wanting to be disruptive for the sake of being disruptive.
From the time he was little and then moving on to the punk scene and getting involved in that and then dabbling with employment before faking a disability to go on welfare and start working for a magazine based out of Montreal.
Yeah, he literally becomes a welfare chief and then convinces his buddy to become a welfare chief because that's the only way to get the job at the magazine.
And then he parlays that into, that eventually becomes Vice, which makes him a millionaire.
Yeah, and that's what I wanted to talk about.
Seriously, right?
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Is that like a different kind?
Everything I have is built on cheating.
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Is that like a different kind?
Is it government issued bootstraps?
You know, it's okay.
It's okay when I do it.
It's just not okay when those other kinds of people do it, don't you understand?
Yeah, he's always been out, you know, like, in his own, like, protecting himself.
And I interviewed an anti-fascist.
I mean, one thing that people don't know about me is that I've interviewed just as many anti-fascists as I've interviewed Proud Boys.
You don't see a lot because it's not usually anti-fascists that are attacking me, it's usually people like my new friends, followers who say stuff like, press G for gas, you know?
Oh yeah.
Um, but anyway, um, one anti-fascist that I interviewed seems to think, uh, cause he was, uh, well actually I don't want to give anything away about his ethnicity, but he's like very similar, uh, to, uh, to Gavin and, and he understood the, uh, like the Scottish temperament of being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole.
Um, and he was of the opinion that, You know, Gavin is not really committed to anything.
He's just really wanting to see how far he can take something.
And as soon as it got hot for him, he left.
Yeah, I mean, he resigned from the, like, I'm stepping down as leader from the Proud Boys is what the news media is going to say, but that's not true because I can't step down from something, you know, it's never, like, he plays this, like, word game.
I mean, he's constantly, you know, I'm doing this, but I'm not doing this, but I am, and I mean, it's just that, that kind of, that, that, you know, soft shoe approach, you know, he's like Frank Sinatra, just constantly dancing around, like, the thing that he's, you know, and just daring Anyone to take him seriously or not take him seriously in a weird way.
Yeah, and goading the media.
I mean, his parts and his assessment of the media, I mean, the fact that he's been able to manipulate them for so long is kind of a testament to, you know, how embedded he is in these different journalistic and literary, well not literary, but journalistic circles.
Yeah, I mean, he even has a chapter in his book where he talks about how he lied to the media.
And, like, describing the exact process where he would basically just, like, make up something, uh, it's dream and make up some story and then, like, feed it to a media figure.
And then when they didn't vet it properly, he then goes, yeah, you see, I lied and they bought my lie.
Look at how terrible they are.
Yeah.
I mean, that's not to justify shoddy reporting at all, but there's also the sense of, you know, I think a lot of the covers that Gavin gets, especially kind of in his earlier career, is less, you know, let's take this guy completely seriously and more, oh, this is going to sell some newspapers.
This is kind of like, we know he's just kind of a rocketeer who's going to, you know, do some extreme shit for publicity.
Let's give him that publicity.
I mean, you know, I'd have to go back and kind of look at the at the coverage but i mean it does it does kind of delight me to see where he's like oh no i've been lying to the media my entire career it's like yeah no you didn't stop in 2012 you dig seriously like um people in new york thought the same way about uh trump that he was this entertaining figure and you know he's good publicity and uh you know kind of a new york uh fixture
uh you know a con man but kind of like consistent in his in his con and you know no one took him seriously until they took him seriously and that's kind of the danger um that um Figures like Gavin have.
They have the potential for people to take them seriously, at least internally.
Gavin could still be the leader of the Proud Boys while maintaining his position with the media that they're just a fraternal drinking organization.
If you have any misconceptions about us, don't believe the Lugan Press.
Come check out the Proud Boys, you know?
Yeah, it's like, come and, I mean, it's interesting how, um, I don't know, this is, this is, you know, slightly, kind of a different topic, but, uh, there's this, uh, movie that's been released, I call it a movie, I put that in heavy quotations, uh, called, uh, You Can't Watch This, or something similar, um, I refuse to pay the, like, ten bucks they want for it, or three bucks for a rental, um, for a 51 minute documentary, of which about 25 minutes of footage are on a free YouTube page,
But it's literally like they're taking like Alex Jones and Gavin and a couple of the figures and getting them to kind of tell their sob stories about how, you know, oh, I was banned from this piece of social media and my YouTube channel got demonetized and I can't make money off this anymore.
And it's, you know, Gavin sitting in this kind of like Canadian hipster, you know, kind of flannel, you know, kind of dad, you know, Yearning towards granddad kind of look, sitting and kind of intoning about like, and then these antifascists, they just want to attack me.
I don't understand.
And there's one where he's, you know, driving around and he's talking about how his neighbors, how after the incident in New York City, where, you know, some antifascists were, you know, assaulted by cowboys.
And he did have to step down.
Once that kind of came out, a bunch of his neighbors put up, you know, he has no home here signs.
And it's like it's an affront to him.
You know, like, oh, they're being mean to me.
They're being like the real Nazis at me for not like, you know, if they thought I was a pedophile, then they would come in.
And like if I thought somebody was a pedophile, I would go and like have a conversation with them.
And I'd want to like learn and talk to them and try to figure it out.
But they don't want to talk.
They just want to like call me dirty names.
And it's like your entire fucking career is built on telling people awful names and building, you know, hate against people.
I'm sorry.
And he reveals this.
As racist as Richard Spencer does not give you a pass.
You know what I mean?
Seriously, Richard Spencer got him the job at Tacky Mag.
So he really like.
He really has no grounds to stand on, but because he has that way with words and frames things in a certain way and has an audience that appreciates him, he's able to get away with a lot and portray himself as the victim when he has been for decades the aggressor.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, I guess The thing that kind of gets me about the book, I mean again just kind of reading through it is just how, I mean again just how juvenile it all is.
I mean it really is just the story of like drug trips that he's in.
I mean it's just, it's incredibly, I mean it's incredibly repetitive and juvenile.
It also kind of like, it really avoids any sense of like the content of the stuff he's producing at that time.
I mean, he spends a lot of time talking about, like, the time I gave myself an STD because he got gonorrhea, and then jerked off, and then wasn't too embarrassed to go to the bathroom and get rid of the ejaculate, and so he swallowed it, not realizing that he was going to now give himself gonorrhea up his throat.
This is not a political leader, people, yeah.
I mean, I mean, you know, like, people do dumb, I've done dumb stuff, you know, I like to drink and don't get me wrong.
I, you know, there certainly have been times when I have, I could tell, I could tell terrible stories about myself as well.
And, you know, there is a place for that.
I mean, you know, certainly, you know, kind of people Telling stories and trying to kind of get at something about their experience is worthwhile But you know none of none of Gavin's Anecdotes really seem to lead to anything He just sort of like gets married at the end of the book and then has some kids And it's just like and then I just kind of gave that up And you know like you know what the you know what the really good drug is it's having a wife and family That's the that's those are the really good drugs, and yet.
He's been talking I mean he was published in I think the American conservative Published by Pat Buchanan in like 2003 talking about how, you know, Vice magazine was a mechanism to make the kind of upcoming youth culture more right-wing.
You know, I mean, this is a guy who's been, you know, kind of manipulating media and has been kind of pushing a political agenda for a really long time.
And yet none of that is really in the book.
It's all Just sort of like he does these appearances.
He goes on Bill Maher's show in 2001 I think.
He does a lot of that kind of stuff, but there's no sense of engagement with Well, there are a few things that stood out to me in the book beyond all of the... Right, right, sure.
I'm not saying it's entirely that.
There's some other stuff.
in the name of, yeah, we're just gonna tell Dick and Farn jokes. - Well, there are a few things that stood out to me in the book, beyond all of the-- - Right, sure.
I'm not saying it's entirely that.
There are some other stuff.
I'd be interested in what you-- because I have some passages I could read out if you're interested. - Oh, for sure.
So, when he's on that overseas job, was it... In Taiwan?
Yes, in Taiwan.
I read the book more recently, so I've got the details handy.
He wasn't referred to as white because in Taiwan you don't refer to white people as white, you refer to them as Western.
And that stuck out for me because the Proud Boys slogan is, we're proud Western chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.
And so that Western and that distance and you hear, I mean it was on He was on a YouTube show where someone had him cite the 14 words, and he did, but just replaced white with western.
Yeah, no, and of course that's... You're kind of giving away the game there, Gavin, right?
You know, there's no... But at the same time, it gives him this sort of plausible deniability, which I think is interesting.
Interesting angle.
I mean, we kind of talked about that in the last episode we did on Gavin.
So this is from a bit where he's talking about his experience in the punk scene in Montreal in the late 80s and like 88, 89 when he would have been 18, 19 years old.
Now, let's be clear here.
If you were in the punk scene in Montreal in the late 80s, there were basically two types of punks.
There were the skinhead Nazis, and there were the skinhead anti-Nazis.
So he does talk about this, and I think this is an interesting little move here he makes.
So he says, um, the skinheads thing also got to be pretty tedious after a while.
Everybody talked about them so much.
I had to put up a sign that said no more talking about skinheads.
We all pretended it was about fighting fascism, but at the end of the day it was middle class white kids, us, fighting working class white kids, them, and they were way better fighters.
Those little minorities and Jews we were supposedly defending didn't give a shit about our war, nor should they have.
It wasn't about them, it was a bunch of class.
It was just another version of political correctness and all that bullshit we were copying from our parents.
He has a ballot as the upper class assigns the lower class as how to think.
Hey, uneducated plebs, we were saying with our noses in the air, it's not black anymore, it's African American.
Didn't you get the dictum?
Let's fight.
Somewhere along the road to the tavern, the high jinks have become pedantic.
Besides, fighting hurts.
So, he's literally, like, defending, and again, let's be clear here.
These are the hammer skins.
This is the like largest organized gang of skinhead Nazis in the world at this time.
These were like violent perp stomping like American History X is based on like these guys you know.
American History X is the like it's the nice and polite version of these guys and this is Gavin's like response he's like yeah we were just a bunch of like upper middle class kids you know just beating up on the working class kids and this like conflation of like Nazi skinheads with working class is overtly something that Nazis do.
Yes, yes.
Sorry, yeah, just your thoughts on that.
He really excels at downplaying the severity of the threat.
He's also repeatedly said white supremacy is an academic fabrication and Nazis don't exist now.
It's the social justice warriors who are summoning them into existence by making them a thing.
Um, so he has just repeatedly, he's repeatedly used variants of the white supremacy as an academic fabrication.
And, you know, it's one of those propaganda techniques.
If you say a thing enough, eventually some people can see it as true.
And, you know, his fans are not going to, like, check.
No, no, no, they don't check.
They do like to harass people, though, when anything is even mildly uncomfortable for them.
Which, I'm sure you don't have personal experience with that.
I've got so much.
Right now it's really interesting on Instagram where I will share photos and use things like diversity and inclusion because I know that people who follow me are very much opposed to that.
So, it's very predictable that somebody's going to respond.
So, my dance group performed for the National Guard last Friday, and I took a photo and said, you know, we're promoting diversity and inclusion.
And, uh, they took my photo and added it to their Instagram stories and said, oh yeah, you know, she's all about diversity and inclusion, but for Jews, sure.
For Muslims, yeah.
Not us Christians, though.
And, like, they had the OK sign and a bunch of, like, of those symbols.
And, uh, what else did they do?
Yeah, so they're, I don't know, they're just, it's a very weird dialogue we're engaging in right now.
So, it's not harassment.
I think we're just playing with each other at this point.
I don't know.
I just feel like there's better ways to get female attention than... than like harassment?
No, come on.
That's the only way to get girls over harassment.
Clearly, you just don't know what it's like.
Why should I listen to you?
Yeah and then when you compare it to the YouTube where I get comments like press G for gas and you know we're going to wipe your people out of existence and you know them spelling out you know G-A-S to like try to avoid getting suspended from YouTube or having their accounts deleted.
Like when you go from that to the I don't know garden variety misogynistic generalized hate group variety.
In comparison, it doesn't seem so bad, but that's part of the problem.
They're all bad, and they're all bad for pretty much the same reason, but Proud Boys have been able to maintain their stance by saying, no, we're not neo-Nazis, we're not alt-right, but they act in ways that Very much align them with the alt-right.
The events that they co-attend, the events that they've organized, the events that they target for their attacks and their intimidation attempts.
They are, in my opinion, alt-right.
I believe that wholeheartedly.
They'll say things like no JQ and we're not
We're not ethno-nationalists, we're civic nationalists, but if you're co-attending and you're all going to the same events, you're all embedded in this larger ecosystem of male grievance groups, you use similar terminology, you both systematically dehumanize other people, and you systematically desensitize yourself through memes,
They're gonna have to prove how they're not alt-right.
And I think that's been a consistent problem, is alt-right people keep showing up.
Like, you mentioned Hammerskins earlier in his memoir, and Hammerskins have shown up to events.
He does not use the word Hammerskins, I just know that that's who he's talking about.
He does not use the word.
Yeah, no, you're right.
Hammerskins definitely show up to those same kinds of events.
It's interesting how many ex-Proud Boys end up being overt National Socialists.
I could name several semi-prominent YouTubers and podcasts that I follow who have moved in and out of the Proud Boys over the last couple of years.
And who usually either get kicked out over being a little bit too overt about their Nazi shit or end up leaving because they find the Proud Boys to be a bunch of cucks or whatever.
Like what?
You won't talk about the Jews?
Clearly you're not a real organization.
I do have another segment from the book I'd like to highlight here if you don't mind.
Of course!
So there's a little bit of language in this.
I'm going to just read it.
But there are a couple of slurs that I would rather not use otherwise, but it is in the book.
This is Gavin talking about celebrities.
And this is kind of in the heyday of Vice when he was hanging out with a bunch of New York City celebrities and such.
And this is just kind of a list of names of people that he knows and what they're like.
So I want you to listen carefully and see if one of these names jumps out at you more than the others.
Aside of all that, they're all pretty much what you'd expect.
Zach Galifianakis is weird.
Curtis Mayfield is, was, a sweetheart.
Chloe Sevigny is quiet and horny.
Rufus Wainwright is a baby megalomaniac.
Rip Taylor is high maintenance.
Jimmy Kimmel is hilarious and mean.
Jennifer Aniston is kind and normal.
Patton Oswalt is smart.
Debbie Harry is a cunt.
Lou Reed's an asshole.
Cameron Diaz is dumb.
Selma Blair is insecure.
Kristen Schaal is quick.
Jason Bateman is a douche, Fred Armisen is shy, David Duke is a health nut, Louis C.K.
is concerned about your kids, Paul Stanley thinks he can paint, Steven Seagal is grumpy, Aziz Ansari is all over the place, America Ferrera is small, Janine Garofalo is smaller, Sarah Silverman is funny, is as funny as you think she is, but gets pissy when there's no pot, and Ghostface Killah is exactly like your best friend.
One of these names is not like the others!
David Duke!
David Duke!
Just throws it in there!
As a celebrity that he knows!
And that's how dangerous he is.
Nobody else but you, me, and people who are looking for these things can pick up on that.
I mean, he literally just drops it into this long list of, you know... Well, wait, let me have my sister weigh in on that, because she gave me a look.
She's sitting right next to me.
So, not to insult anyone's intelligence or anything, but, like, the statement I just made.
Oh, no, I was just saying, don't say, like, oh, not anyone else.
You're kind of crashing into Scientology, man.
Like, I'm the only person who could save someone in a car crash.
It's just like, yeah, people could realize that there's an outlier in that group.
But, yeah, I mean, it's very subtle.
It is very subtle, yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, most people know who David Duke is, but that's his style, is to hide this hatred within this slew of seemingly normal things and seemingly normal positions and seemingly legitimate grievances.
Right.
And, uh, I mean, you know, it's, it's, he's also, you know, he credits, I mean, we should talk a little bit more about Jim Goad, I think, and he does credit Jim Goad as being the person who kind of taught him how to write and got him into writing.
And Gavin, for whatever we can say about him, he's been a professional writer for three decades at this point.
So there is a market for that, but he definitely credits Jim Goad as being one of those guys.
Look, Jim Goad was hanging out with Tom Metzger, who founded the White Aryan Resistance in the 80s.
Jim Goad came up As one of these kind of edgelord neo-nazis.
And what I find interesting, and what I'm going to have to explore in more detail in another place, I think, because I'm not quite ready to put all the pieces together, but Jim Goad kind of got famous in the 90s, in the early 90s, as being kind of part of that scene.
Part of that punk rock, comedy, kind of edgelord zine scene.
You know, at that time there was a little bit of a sense of, you know, oh, you can just kind of put on the swastika, you can put on the iron cross, you can kind of put on this imagery, and it's just going to be kind of an edgy look for your band or for your zine or whatever.
But even at the time, there was this kind of sense that someone like Tom Metzger, who was famous in the early 90s, one of the things that he did was put out Adolf Hitler, Bart Simpson t-shirts, like Bart Simpson as Adolf Hitler.
I cannot find an image of that anywhere.
I would love to see it and get one.
My Google Foo has failed me several times in looking for that, but this was definitely a thing that he did.
He got a cease and desist letter from Fox for putting out these things.
But this idea of smuggling in this overt neo-Nazism under the guise of, oh, we're just doing edgelord comedy, I think is very much what's going on.
And this is just mainstream Internet culture today, I mean, this is kind of what these guys do, but it allows them a certain level of plausible deniability.
And that's what I think is really kind of fascinating about this kind of that era in Goethe and Gavin.
Interestingly, like, Patton Oswalt is in that list, and he's somebody who was very much a, you know, very much in that kind of Edward comedy thing at that time, and in that same scene, and they kind of all, you know, Goat and Patton Oswalt kind of came up together.
And to hear Goat tells it, he still thinks that Patton Oswalt is still kind of a buddy of his.
No telling.
I haven't seen Patton say anything specific about how he feels about Jim Goat being a neo-Nazi these days.
But it wouldn't surprise me to know that they had some kind of fond friendship between each other.
I don't know.
You've probably seen the comic.
I mean, I'm sure you have seen the drawing, the Happy Merchant.
Yes.
Yeah, that was drawn by this guy, A. Wyatt Mann, who was a cartoonist who was in these scenes.
He was like a good buddy of Goat's, even now.
And, you know, there's a piece.
I've got it.
I will put it in the show notes.
There's a piece by Joseph Bernstein in BuzzFeed from 2015 called The Surprisingly Mainstream History of the Internet's Favorite Anti-Semitic Image.
And he connects pretty convincingly that the A. Wyatt man figure is this guy, Nick Bugis, who worked with Jim Goad back in the day.
I mean, there are photos of them together.
They're still buddies.
He's like a filmmaker.
He's in this kind of edgelord scene of Satanism and Nazi stuff.
Just this kind of weird art project stuff in New York City in the 90s.
There is this kind of connection to the mainstream there.
And think about how many years ago it was that Fox News issued a cease and desist letter because that t-shirt was too edgy and very anti-semitic and just a few days ago Laura Ingraham had Paul Nellen, a known Neo-Nazi figure on a list of endangered conservatives or whatever it was.
Yeah, like a conservative and, you know, blocked from social media.
And it's like, you know, Paul Nealon wasn't like a guy who, you know, put his foot in his mouth.
You know, Paul Nealon will get an episode.
We will cover him down the line a little bit more.
But Paul Nealon has been leaning very heavily into openly violent action kinds of rhetoric.
And he's kind of pretty close to liberal terrorists at this point.
I mean, this is not someone who deserves to have a Twitter account.
Yes.
And I know that...
I don't know what Patton Oswald has said about Goad, but I know that Patton Oswald has very publicly denounced Proud Boys on Twitter.
He's very vocal about that.
Yeah, I mean, he's definitely on that kind of progressive liberal side.
I don't think he would, like, call himself a socialist or anything, but, you know, I think Patton Oswalt, I mean, I was a big fan of Patton Oswalt back in the 2000s, and, you know, I'm kind of maybe less of a fan of him today.
I think he's I think maybe I've just aged out of his material a little bit.
Or maybe he's kind of aged out of his own material.
I don't know.
It's kind of a complicated question.
He's a talented guy.
He's one of my all-time favorite comics in terms of the number of hours I've spent laughing at his jokes.
But he is definitely using his Twitter more for the services of good these days.
If he's maintaining some kind of friendship with Jim Goad, that's between him and his conscience.
I'm perfectly willing to let him have whatever he's getting out of that.
It's just sort of like the connections and the way that it sort of like hides in plain sight.
Oh no, I'm putting out the swastika.
It's for the edgy value.
It's for the meme, yo.
For the lulz.
Yeah, it's all for the lulz.
And yeah, there's kind of a fascinating thing going on there in terms of And particularly in that kind of alternative culture, you still see some of that today.
I mean, you still see some people who are like, teens, who are like 12 in Europe, you know, kind of my age, or even younger, who kind of ran across this stuff when they were super young and just kind of got fascinated by it and then kind of ended up becoming Nazis.
And to be clear, not everybody who ran into that became Nazis.
In fact, I mean, the vast majority of them didn't.
And, you know, there's certainly, you know, like, people can kind of go through a phase of kind of going through this kind of goth phase and liking leather and liking the swastika and just kind of liking the aesthetics.
And then, you know, kind of grow up a little bit and go like, oh no, that's really nasty shit, I shouldn't be involved in that.
But there is, you know, the degree to which the subculture is telling you,
The establishment is against you because, you know, there are a bunch of squares and they're, you know, just trying to oppress your ideas and they're just trying to go against you in the way that this sort of right-wing ideology, this kind of racist pseudoscience and this, you know, overtly, you know, ethnic cleansing kind of policy agenda just sneaks in under the guise of this kind of punk rock subculture.
And there's no one who's more Yeah, Gavin has managed to rebrand conservatism as the new punk rock.
Gavin and Jim Goad.
And that's what's kind of fascinating about it, is that it goes back almost 30 years at this point. - Yeah, Gavin has managed to rebrand conservatism as the new punk rock.
And it's very interesting to see counterculture as fascism, basically.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I mean, it's this sort of gray area, this sort of intentional, this kind of willful blending of the lines.
I mean, this idea that, like, you know, this liberal, quote unquote, liberal egalitarian orthodoxy is this, like, oppressive thing that's just kind of, like, enveloping all of us.
And that ultimately, what we're suffering, you know, any kind of, like, idea that, like, well, maybe all people aren't equal.
And that those ideas are being suppressed and that makes you sort of cool to be willing to sort of consider or embrace that kind of idea.
I mean, it's incredibly toxic.
Yeah, and I can't say I empathize with taking the, you know, free speech, free speech route, but when I was temporarily suspended from Twitter for the thing with my new friend, I felt that like, wow, really?
This is exactly what I did and community guidelines were enforced in this way?
That's not really equitable.
We should probably tell the story, just briefly here.
Alex McNabb, the Nazi EMT, is, you know, had created an account which was a, you know, the Avatar, et cetera, was a female Asian cyclist.
And he was kind of getting involved in kind of threads between you and I and sort of inserting himself in there.
I knew it was him because I recognized his speaking voice and because it had been pointed out to me by people, oh yeah, this is Alex McNabb, just be aware of who it is.
And I just kind of pointed out, oh, by the way, this is Alex McNabb, and kind of told who he is and just be aware that that's who you're talking to.
This is not who he pretends to be.
And then he puts out the, you know, what are my pronouns?
Are you misgendering me?
And I think you said, oh, you're he him.
And then he reports you for transphobia.
It's so funny when you think about it.
I told that story to people and it was literally like, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
It's really ridiculous.
It makes sense if you're a content moderator going through, you know, a thousand images an hour and trying to make split second decisions and going like, well, yeah, let's, you know, and that's all the cover that they need.
You know, it doesn't matter that 30 seconds worth of attention would tell you who this guy is.
You know, it only has to pass the five-second inspection test and suddenly, boom, you're gone.
And that's exactly how a lot of these kind of harassment campaigns are designed to work.
It's just designed to be this like instant reflex kind of thing.
Yeah, I wonder who handles the appeals section when people are like, wait a minute, here's the context you need.
Because I know that some type of algorithm is involved and I know that humans are also involved.
And ideally, Twitter and all these social media platforms would like to create the perfect algorithm that sifts through content.
But language is so fluid and symbols are used and constantly changing that You can't track this stuff, and it might mean one thing in one context and one thing in another, and it's kind of a shitshow.
Well, and the photojournalist, I think Sandy Bouchon, I might be mispronouncing her name, was banned from Twitter for, or she had like a temporary suspension, I think, like a seven-day suspension or something, for tweeting out images of Like, Neo-Nazis carrying paraphernalia.
And suddenly, you know, somebody mass-reported that and said, like, this is her tweeting this out, supporting it.
You know, and so again, the context gets lost.
And then Tim Pool puts out a video going like, yeah, you see you, like, censorious, regressive leftists who want to, like, ban Nazis?
You see how, like, the context just can't matter.
You know, obviously, you know, you've got to allow absolute unfettered free speech, or it's going to be used against you as well.
And it's like, there's this extreme, like, Yeah, the truthful elements are just kind of outcrowded by the inherent bullshit of Tim Pool's position.
Yeah, I mean, Tim Poole, I'm probably going to have to do a Tim Poole episode down the line somewhere.
I try not to do the more kind of marginal alt-right figures, but Tim Poole is definitely, he's playing in a lot of ways a very similar game.
He's just kind of doing it in the guise of being a journalist, you know, and of course he only ever punches towards the left.
He's always defensive of right-wing figures, regardless of how far to the right they are.
And yet, we'll say, like, any kind of hint of criticism of the far-right figures by a leftist organization, by the SPLC, or by individuals, by journalists, is, you know, he just swallows all that right-wing bullshit, you know, like a hook, line, and sinker.
And, you know, that has the effect of just pushing everything further and further to the right, which is, again, exactly what Gavin has spent, you know, 15 years at least doing in the political arena.
And I think about Jim Goad's episode where he had McNab on and Goad framed himself as a journalist and said he had training in journalism and you need to approach things like the way a scientist would.
But in the way that he described Charlottesville with McNabb, who was there, the narratives were, it was about the Confederate statue, even though Discord chats show that the statue was just a pretext for violence.
They said that the anti-fascists were the aggressors.
And there's like video evidence like he's completely he's saying you've got to be objective and just tell the facts well Completely accepting the far-right narrative of the events and just repeating their talking points verbatim I mean, you know down to talking about Heather Heyer as like quote-unquote a fat chick who had a heart attack next to a car Yeah, so so that the danger is is
He frames himself as a journalist, it gives him an air of legitimacy, and he's very clearly biased in favor of the actual neo-Nazi who was at Charlottesville, and he was very supportive of that, and it's problematic because I really don't know anymore how many people know the difference.
Like, I don't know how many people watched the Fox News segment with Laura Ingraham and thought nothing of seeing Paul Nehlen on that list.
Yeah, well, I mean, how many people really know who Paul Nehlen is at this point who aren't kind of following that world?
The thing is, Nealon was endorsed by Trump back in his run against Paul Ryan in 2016.
He was kind of one of those guys.
He lost the election by a landslide, which was always obvious.
He did a ton of far-right, he did Fashion of the Nation and he did a bunch of other podcasts like that.
And then Red Culture Critique a few months afterwards.
Went down into this ever spiraling path of evil basically.
Into overt violent rhetoric neo-nazi-ism.
Um, and, and so, you know, if you're, if you're Lauren Ingram, you have this kind of plausible deniability of like, oh no, he's just, he's just a politician.
He's just this guy who is like, he's a Trump supporter.
Clearly, you know, that's, I love that term, you know, anti-fascists, they're just going after innocent Trump supporters.
Really?
Yeah, and it's like, well, sure, and then follow that logic with, sure, the KKK is just a white activist knitting circle, and Identity Europa just wants peaceful ethnic cleansing, and, you know, like, it's always the, they just want this, what's so bad about this?
Or, you know, I had no idea Russia helped me in the election, like, what, is that a crime?
What, am I a Russian bot now, you know?
But yeah, so did you have any more thoughts about the Jim Goode, Alex Knapp conversation in terms of like the content?
Because I find the opiate crisis comes up a lot in terms of people saying, like, what radicalized you?
What kind of pushed you in this direction?
And the fact that nobody cares about Appalachia and that white people in West Virginia are being addicted to pills.
And then, of course, it's the Sackler family, in parentheses.
Ultimately making all this money off of white people dying of opioids and there's some really terrible things going on there and some really terrible discovery and some stuff in court documents which, I mean, the Sackler family is pretty fucking evil.
They don't help people because they're Jews.
No.
Yeah, you can be greedy regardless of Race, class, ethnicity, or gender, just as easy as you could be a bigot regardless of race, class, ethnicity, or gender.
But I do find, I mean, the relationship between Goad and McNabb is interesting because, you know, I think, I mean, they seem to have become like friends.
I think Goad even sent McNabb a copy of Goad's most recent book, like a signed copy, and he sent it in the mail.
He published it, and so it does seem like those two get along pretty well.
Goad did appear on two episodes of The Daily Show, both of which were paywall episodes, and You know, it turns out there's absolutely no way of getting a hold of those episodes without paying these guys.
I mean, there's just no possible way.
Yeah, and that's something Jode commended McGaab.
Yeah, that's something that Jode commended McGaab for.
McGaab?
McGaab.
It's a hybrid of Gavin McGinnis and Alex McNabb.
It's the same thing, right?
No, but he said...
You guys are one of the first The Daily Showa guys.
You've actually figured out a way to monetize antisemitism.
Yeah.
And that's true.
And they learned that paywall technique from Cantwell, from Chris Cantwell.
Chris Cantwell got them to do that back in early 2017, believe it or not.
Um, what I do think, um, the issue that they were talking about, opioid addiction and pharmaceutical companies incentivizing
pain management over other aims and doctors having the tendency to not treat the poor for their underlying more severe causes but just you know kind of medicate them so they don't feel pain and like treat the surface level symptoms like that's that's accurate that's true that's unjust and in a way like they kind of sounded like
Like anti-fascists expressing concerns about the influence of pharmaceutical companies, but their version of it was, you know, it's a Jewish plot to kill the white working-class males.
But I think the way that you frame the opioid issue is very similar to understanding how hate can be addictive.
You're not addressing what's really going on with yourself.
You're not being honest with yourself when you join these hate groups and these movements and you feel this nihilistic pull towards organizations like Identity Europa or the far right.
You're really just putting a band-aid on a larger issue.
Like, there is something in your life that went very, very, very wrong, which may or may not have been your fault.
And it drove you to these groups, and you're now actively looking to harm people because you have You have made them the reason that you're suffering.
And I just feel like all of the people that commented on my YouTube channel really should take a look inward for themselves and think about what led them to these groups.
Because it's not coming from a place of being sure of yourself or being well-adjusted or being successful with women.
It's coming from a darker place that they don't want to get in touch with.
And I feel like If these figures don't get in touch with that it like the the myth of like this this Jewish conspiracy and global influence is just going to keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger because they're they're distancing themselves from the real issue at hand.
I think they really just need to like get right with themselves and you know whatever don't even leave the group but but just think about like what Got them here.
I don't know if they've thought about that and what led them to this point, you know?
Because nobody wakes up or nobody is born thinking, like, let's gas the Jews, you know?
It's conditioned over time and it's not a natural process.
When people grow up, They don't dream of joining a white supremacist movement.
They dream of things like Christian Picciolini dreamt of, of fitting in, of belonging, of having more time with his family perhaps.
They don't seek out these groups.
It's often People who seek them out through very sophisticated recruitment tactics and they appeal to their needs of belonging or wanting to soothe the pain of rejection.
So I think a lot of people that are in the, you know, the rights and different groups Should really take some time to reflect on what brought them here because I can guarantee you those issues that drove them to the group are still there.
They just happen to have those issues and now also be affiliated with neo-Nazi organizations.
Yeah, no, definitely.
I mean, I kind of put this very simply is that, you know, people don't You know, you don't hear, like, neo-Nazis talking about the opioid crisis as not being adequately handled by society and that, you know, people aren't talking about it enough.
Hey, let's institute, like, universal health care.
It's like, now let's go after the Jews.
Or, you know, it's because, you know, white people are not being, you know, properly, or being, you know, shunned by society.
You know, they don't look at, like, falling wages and, you know, those kinds of problems and say, Hey, you know, we need union and minimum wages and improved worker protection laws.
No, they just demonize immigrants.
And ultimately, what that's a sign of is that there is – what fascism does essentially, what the ideology – What the structure does is sort of take legitimate complaints that people have about their real material lives and then shunt those real complaints off into ineffective things that are not going to like actually challenge the structure of a capitalist system.
And so, you know, it is like the rise of fascism is very much kind of built around this kind of failure of Capitalism to actually take care of people.
It is like an inherent, you know, kind of failure of the system.
And ultimately, it often manifests as a kind of direct attack on the left.
And so, I mean, these get to be like complicated structures, but it is here that I think Gavin, you know, kind of reveals himself most overtly as a fascist.
Because ultimately, he is, you know, whether he is, you know, a kind of bonafide racist in the way that some of these other figures are, You know, I'm agnostic on that issue, it doesn't really matter, but ultimately his big thing is, like, you have to go after the left, you have to fight the left, you have to beat the left senseless.
And that is what makes him so obviously fascistic, ultimately.
And one thing we didn't talk about, both Goad and Gavin, talk constantly about their fighting prowess and about how great it is to fight, how great it is.
It's a manly thing.
We men in this society are too weak these days, and look at all those soy boys out there and anti-fascists who can barely hurt flies.
I mean, there's this valorization of combat, which is actually codified by the Proud Boys.
But GOAT is kind of right up there as well.
I mean, they talk about it constantly, and these are men in their 50s.
I think Gavin is 48 or 49, and GOAT is in his 50s, maybe even almost 60 at this point.
I mean, there are more things to your life than your ability to take and give a punch, you guys.
You're not 12 years old.
Yeah, I think, like, how to avoid a RICO warrant would be more of a fitting skill set for Kevin to learn.
Yeah, no, definitely.
We'll have to see how that goes, but yeah, no.
Well, I feel like we've been going for a little over an hour now.
I feel like we've got a show here we can start to wrap up here.
Hopefully the audience enjoyed the more casual chatting here.
I will put together some notes, so there will be some show notes, but it won't be nearly as copious as previous episodes.
Samantha, do you have any other thoughts, anything you wanted to get to while we were sitting here?
Yes, so I would like to talk about my aims for this summer, specifically with the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer Incident Map.
It's a project I have been working on since the New York incident in October of 2018.
I have been Collecting and curating and analyzing incidents that the group has either directly organized or been involved in since they started in 2016.
And I would love your support!
So if this is a project that you feel is important and you'd like to see how violent extremism operates in America today, I would suggest becoming a patron supporter.
My Patreon account is patreon.com slash Ashkenaz89 and your support buys me more time to conduct this type of analysis and will hopefully enable me to launch the Proud Boys Incident Map and Dashboard with the accompanying website at the end of this summer, if not earlier.
Wonderful and we'll put a link to that in the show notes so people can go and support that if they'd like to.
Well that is that.
I think that just I would suggest everyone just brush up on media literacy skills because it's going to continue to be a problem and if you don't know the differences and how these narratives are being pushed it leaves you susceptible to endorsing things that you may not have endorsed otherwise.
So read up on what you can, ask questions, be skeptical when you approach media.
Even if it's something that pretty much aligns with your ideology, just take a minute or two to step back and see if there's some overarching narrative that they're trying to report rather than reporting the news.
I have a question.
Oh sure, Steph.
So the whole thing with Who's speech being, like, it was being deliberately slowed down so that it looked like... Nancy Pelosi's speech?
Yeah.
So, I mean, is that something that we're going to see more of with videos being doctored and different types of... Yeah, I think that they're testing it out now and it will ramp up when the... Election.
Yep.
Yeah, what are your suggestions for people as we approach the new election cycle that we're about to face?
Mine?
I mean, that's so far away from me right now, I'm not really thinking about it.
I mean, ultimately, the reality is that this far-right, this alt-right, this overtly neo-Nazi rhetoric and ideology, it's just going to ramp up even more as the election gets closer, if 2016 is a model.
We'll see if they really kind of keep pushing for Trump.
I think that moment has kind of passed.
I think they've given up on Trump.
But I think you're definitely going to see A lot of, you know, a lot of horseshit out there around this.
A lot of, you know, kind of false narratives, a lot of, you know, stuff.
Ultimately, this kind of right-wing media swap is something that's been a problem for 30 years at this point.
It's just getting, like, the social media and Twitter and the...
The realities of sort of the kind of instant news cycle have just exacerbated that.
I mean, that's definitely a topic we're going to have to cover at some point in the near future in this podcast.
But yeah, no, I mean, one of the problems, I mean, one of the things that I'm trying to do here is to help people to understand the specific connections between this sort of white nationalist ideology and these kind of more moderate and hiding figures.
And that's why it's important to look at somebody like Gavin, It's ultimately not hiding very well at all, but he hides well enough to spin his way out of his conflicts.
It is incredibly dangerous.
Agreed.
Alright, I think that wraps it up for us.
Samantha, tell us, we've got your Patreon there, you have Twitter as well.
Where else can we find you?
I have been interviewed to offer my perspective for the daily costs.
And you can find me, I'm most active politically on Twitter, but I have been dabbling on YouTube, so I'm also on YouTube.
My channel's just my name, Samantha Kuttner.
Alright, and we'll throw a link to that in the show notes, and particularly the video you did about Alex being a dab will definitely include that one.
Yeah, you can find me on Twitter.
I'm at Daniel Lee Harper.
I do have a Patreon, which is linked in my Twitter page, so that's a good way to support this podcast.
If you enjoy it, again, I hope you enjoy this slightly more casual chatty episode, but we're trying out some different things and seeing how people like it.
So please comment, let me know, send me some emails.
I'm way behind on all my correspondence.
I'm about three weeks behind at this point.
I apologize to everyone who has not gotten emails from me.
I think some people are getting kind of irate at me, but I've been working on it.
I've been sick for a little bit, but it's okay.
Next time, we're supposed to have another guest.
I'm not going to announce that just yet because I haven't gotten a firm confirmation, but we are going to be talking about, hypothetically, we'll be talking about misogyny and transmisogyny.
And sometime before the end of June, Jack will be back and we'll be talking about Sam Harris.
