Episode 24: Conspiracy Theories and Online Radicalisation (with David Neiwert)
This week, Daniel is joined by special guest David Neiwert, author of Alt-America and The Eliminationists, to discuss conspiracy theories and online radicalisation, Andy Ngo and concrete milkshakes, and David's recent temporary Twitter suspension. Content warnings, as always. Alt-America Alt-America at Amazon David Neiwert's Orcinus blog David Neiwert Twitter Suspension David Neiwert discusses his Twitter suspension Andy Ngo commits journalistic malpractice about hate crimes, a David Neiwert Twitter thread Video of skirmish involving Andy Ngo Vic Berger, "Andy Ngo Attacked! (In Context)"
I am welcome to episode 24 of I don't speak German the podcast about the conversations that really really awful people have with each other neo-nazis clan people and other assorted nasties normally would have a I'm Daniel normally would have a regular co-host Jack.
But he decided not to show up today because he's lazy, and instead we are joined by someone who is nearly as knowledgeable about the far right as Jack.
Today I'm joined by someone with literally 30 years of experience covering these assholes, someone that I've respected since about 2003 when I started reading his blog.
This is a big moment for me.
Thank you for joining me on this podcast today, Mr. David Niewert.
Pleasure to be here, Daniel.
And because I don't speak German, I was just recently informed that I've been mispronouncing his last name for 15 years or so.
So, you know, yay for us.
But so anyway, thanks for joining.
We are going to be talking about the topic that Dave suggested.
May I call you Dave?
Sorry, David or Dave?
I forgot to ask you.
I'm all of the above.
Okay.
Well, the topic that Dave here suggested was we're going to be talking a lot about kind of YouTube and YouTube radicalization and conspiracy theories.
But before we get there, we did want to kind of talk briefly about something that's been in the news, and that is basically this whole bunch of bullshit around Andy Ngo.
Now, Dave, I know you have a history with Mr. Ngo, and I was hoping you could kind of share some of that with the audience.
Well, I've just observed Andy at these rallies that we both cover, or at least both attend.
I will say I cover them.
I don't believe Andy is actually covering them.
He calls himself a journalist, but he lacks the ethics Of a journalist in just about every regard, so I think he's a provocateur activist who acts in the guise of a journalist to be, you know, cause problems, which is what he's really good at.
I mean, yeah, I've been to about a dozen of these events we've had on on the West Coast the last couple of years.
Most of them organized by this guy, Joey Gibson, out of Vancouver, Washington.
And his outfit's called Patriot Prayer.
He's developed a contingent of Associated Proud Boys who also marched with him up until about three months ago when they had a big falling out over this woman who was in there.
Ranks.
Anyway, that's a little... Is that Haley Adams?
Am I remembering that correctly?
Yeah, Haley.
But at any rate, Andy's been going to these things, right?
And I've been seeing him.
Not just Patriot Prayer, of course, but just about any time there's a right-wing event of any size on the West Coast, he's there.
And what Andy does is he actually goes to these things.
He's become well enough known that he's very identifiable by the folks on the far left.
But even before he was that well known, he would he would walk over and join the ranks of the anti-fascists and stuff with his camera out and start taking pictures of like lists with people's names on them.
It was a really bad idea with anti-fascists.
I myself have had some dealings with them where I've been whacked for carrying a camera around, and I'm not a fan of their tactics, especially when it comes to that.
I think attempting to, and it's actually interfered with my work a couple times, so I really strongly disapprove of the way anti-fascists will
Actually, black journalists who are doing their work and, you know, and I've spoken up about it, but at the same time, it's nothing compared to what I've seen folks on the right doing, which is just outright violence that's, you know, intended to harm people.
And so I'm actually much more scared of the far right than I am of The anti-fascist left because, um, you know, I, uh, after being around him a little bit, I just learned to respect, sort of respect their rules.
I didn't take pictures of their faces or anything like that.
And, um, certainly didn't walk up and try to take photos of their, um, uh, of the, the lists of names that they would have at organizing tables, you know, which is what Andy was doing.
And then there was, but more than anything, he was going in there in a way that was intended to provoke these violent responses.
And they were, which is not what you're supposed to do as a journalist.
Generally, as a journalist, you're there to observe.
You're there to observe and record.
It's not your business to create a scene.
In fact, that's one of the most unethical things that he does.
Look, I worked in newsrooms for 25 years before I started freelancing.
And I don't know any working reporter who doesn't understand that one of the first rules of being a journalist is you don't make yourself the story.
You're not the story.
The story is the story.
What you're covering.
So so he's this guy isn't acting like a journalist in the first damn place.
And because he's going in there with the intent of making himself the story, and he's causing problems.
So yeah, in two weeks before this most recent incident with milkshakes, Andy was involved in a scene at a cider bar in Portland, where a woman got attacked with a baton.
And Andy actually doxxed that Women as a victim online in his stories.
He does other unethical things.
He wrote a piece for the New York Post.
Talking about supposed hoax hate crimes and I've studied hate crimes for years and I can tell you one of the first things you don't do is is is right about these things in a way that actually accuses puts the victims at risk of greater harm.
One of the real problems we have in the area of hate crimes is not that there are too many hoaxes.
There are hoaxes, and it happens, but they're usually less than 1% of all hate crimes that are occurring out there.
Relatively speaking, in terms of the actual Real world phenomenon and the crimes are they're very much a minor problem.
They're mostly a big problem in terms of perception.
And so I understand the need to talk about perceptions, but you don't do it in a way that worsens that perception.
And Andy writes about them in a way that makes it seem like all hate the vast majority.
There's a large number of hoax hate crimes out there and there just really aren't.
What really is the problem is under-reporting.
We have an epidemic of hate crimes going unreported and unenforced.
Because people are afraid of reporting them to the police.
A lot of times, particularly if you're a gay person in a rural area, you're not going to be reporting those crimes.
Or if you're a Latino or an immigrant who's at risk of being deported, you're not going to be reporting those crimes either.
If you're a Muslim who is just trying to fit into the community and doesn't want to cause problems, But you're a victim of a hate crime.
You're not going to be reporting that either.
And that's what happens.
And one of the things, one of the real reasons that people have this fear is that, you know, they'll be accused of faking it.
And so what Andy Ngo does with his reportage on hate crimes and on hoax hate crimes is actually significantly worsen the problem.
And that's, you know, go straight to the SPJ Code of Ethics for reporters, for journalists.
One of it is the, you know, number one rule is cause no harm.
Do not make things worse for the victims of crimes.
And he's doing that.
So, Most of the reporters that I know, the most of the working journalists that I know, take a very, very dim view of, at least those of us who've been out there working on the streets and watched Andy in action, I can tell you we take a very, very dim view of his ethics and his behavior.
Yeah, I mean, for me, I don't follow him closely.
I've been kind of more focused on Tim Pool in that kind of similar vein lately.
You know, Neo was connected to, or kind of deeply connected with, Quillette, and I know we were You know, this podcast is going to have to do something on Quillette down the line.
Also, Patriot Prayer.
We're definitely going to cover some of the things that came up in that little bit.
We will do full episodes on Patriot Prayer and sort of the larger stuff that's kind of going on in Portland.
We've got some other guests hopefully coming up in the next couple of months to discuss that.
I think Jason Wilson has agreed to come on.
That's awesome.
Both Jason and Alexander Reed Ross and Shane Burley, those three guys have all been out for these things and they can tell you as much, if not more, about them than I can.
Sure.
Um, but, you know, in terms of the incident that we're referring to, I mean, I guess we didn't really describe too much, but, you know, it's literally street activism.
There's a video that comes out of Andy hit with a milkshake hit with silly string.
There's a bit of a scuffle.
There's really no kind of context in terms of the, uh, The incident, I mean, you know, and then he was claiming he had a brain hemorrhage.
I mean, there are two details that he kind of kind of come up over and over again.
And it's the concrete milkshakes, which, you know, there was there was this speculation that there was concrete in the milkshakes.
I think I think we all police bureau.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, no.
It sure gave these guys a lot of traction.
Yeah, so, Andy, it was actually, so it happened the day after I flew out of the country on a two-week vacation in Greece.
Aren't you happy you weren't there to cover this one?
I'm kidding.
Well, except, yeah.
Anyway, so I watched it all from afar, and I could tell you what happened.
I wasn't there.
But yeah, Andy walked over, these guys knew who he was.
He had his camera out, probably had it in their face.
They were ready with milkshakes and they dumped him.
And yeah, it looked like somebody, I'm not sure if he got punched or got a shoulder in the face or what, but his face, yeah, he got bruised up pretty good.
And, you know, honestly, this is the kind of thing that he goes into these situations actually trying to create.
I think it's very unfortunate that anybody responds.
um but uh and dumping a milkshake on him frankly is harmless except then the Portland Police Bureau tweeted out a tweet saying we've heard that there was concrete in some of these milkshakes that were being distributed and then they couldn't decide if it was because the milkshakes were hardening and they were becoming like rocks that were being thrown or if there was some caustic solution in the milkshakes and I was I was literally just kind of like chatting with people going like if I wanted to make a caustic milkshake like
Concrete is not the way that's that's like the worst way to do that.
Like, you know, I don't want to give people ideas here, you know, but I am kind of leaning into our topic here a little bit in terms of like the way that these kind of like conspiracy theories, the way that this kind of stuff starts to get legs.
Because I've been kind of listening to, because Yo has gone on a ton of like shows on like the Rubin Report.
He went on a ton of stuff kind of talking about this incident and kind of taking this what, you know, ultimately is a scuffle in a street.
You know, ultimately, I mean, this, this, you know, and, and two details that really like the concrete milkshakes, the caustic milkshakes, and the brain hemorrhage, neither of which have any particular evidence in support of them being real at all.
And like those two details get reported over and over and over again as fact.
And the fact that we're seeing this in real time just strikes me as like one of these – like it's just becoming accepted fact now that, oh, yeah, these two things are true.
And yet there's no evidence for them except that they've just been reported over and over again.
He flew out to the East Coast to be on Tucker Carlson's show two days afterwards, right?
I know any doctor who would allow somebody with a brain hemorrhage to fly two days after he received that injury.
I think that a doctor would say no, but who knows.
Yes, but there's absolutely, I would like to see Andy produce evidence that he actually received that diagnosis.
Before he claims it again.
Certainly, there is zero evidence that there is concrete in any of those milkshakes or any kind of caustic materials other than, you know, soy milk, which... That was, yeah, well, what I think everybody asked, including all the reporters in Portland, asked, well, What was your source for that?
I mean, my question was, you know, 4chan?
That must be where they got it.
That sounds like something off of 4chan.
Because it's just pure, pure, wild speculation, which is exactly kind of the shape of conspiracy theories nowadays anyway, as you know.
And yeah, I just finished putting together a book That will be out in May or June of next year titled The Blue Pill.
That is subtitle is an antidote for the conspiracy theories that are killing us.
And one of the things that we really looked at was that is something that there have been some recent texts actually examining the fact that the shape of modern conspiracy theories is very different.
from what they originally were.
When it was JFK and UFO conspiracy theories, they were always built on actually anomalistic evidence, right?
That was typically how you had a conspiracy theory.
You'd find anomalistic evidence and then build a theory around explaining it that, of course, diverted from the official narrative.
But Nowadays, and this was something actually that I did try to explore somewhat in my book, Alt America, which was, which is that these conspiracies, that conspiracism has been shaped
A modern conspiracism has been really heavily shaped by the kind of stuff that came out of the militia movement, militia patriot movement of the 1990s, which was essentially unmoored from any actual evidence.
Other than that, you know, the militia in Montana used to like find these photos of troop movements and or of troops being and material tanks and stuff being moved around by rails.
And publish it as speculating that they were getting ready to impose a New World Order on the rest of us.
And eventually that's all that like FEMA camp nonsense and you know like a lot of the stuff like they'd they'd read documents from like like UN innocuous like planning reports or whatever and suddenly like the agenda 21 material if you you know for anybody who's kind of seen some of that kind of stuff going around like agenda 21 which is you know
I don't remember the details of exactly what it is in the real world, but it becomes this like plan for the subversion of all national sovereignty under a, you know, one world government that's going to destroy white civilization or whatever.
This like toothless plan by a bunch of like, you know, bureaucrats and ambassadors in the UN, you know.
become you know any any and and they're literally like youtube channels where people will just read these documents and be like and it says right here like you know our obligation to you know and they only give this to white countries and so there's this there's this they just take like these little bits of thing that they have and just turn it into this like broad you know destructive force right you know
well they were taking stuff that was no longer anomalistic things that were just perfectly normal and interpreting them through a conspiracist lens and And this fundamentally makes anything, any event can be then twisted into a conspiracy theory.
And we've seen that ever since.
But especially, you know, during the early 2000s, it was really fueled by the 9-11 stuff and the fact that the government was trying to suppress a lot of information about What happened in 9-11 mostly to cover the fact that the Bush administration was incompetent, right?
That was that was the main cause but as always happens when the government tries to suppress information and And rightly so, in some ways.
Let's not deny that the CIA is lying to us all the time, that the FBI redacts documents, that the FBI has gone after leftist groups and does absolutely terrible things around the world.
This is a leftist podcast.
We are not fans of the FBI full stop here.
Well, I was mentored by Frank Church, who was the Church Committee Senator, and I'm very, very intimately familiar with the nefarious workings of the CIA, but I also know how they actually work.
And yeah, it's not, and more, I mean, all of this stuff, I mean, Stephen Lewandowski made a really interesting comment to me when I was interviewing him for this book.
He's a professor from University of Adelaide in Australia who's done a lot of work on conspiracism, mostly around climate denial conspiracism.
But he he pointed out, you know, that that, you know, there, of course, are real conspiracies that have been proven over the years.
And I do discuss those in the book.
But almost all of those conspiracies are actually eventually uncovered by.
The work of real journalists, of people doing serious work, who do investigative work, and it's not, it's never, ever, ever exposed by these crackpot conspiracy theorists, right?
Right.
None of these, none of these guys actually have ever proven a single theory to be correct, ranging from FEMA camps to contrails to what have you.
Uh, because it's all for them.
It's, it's stuff that's just purely speculation on their parts.
And, uh, it's all fueled by, uh, speculation.
It's, it's just pulled out of their asses seriously, you know, and so of course, then your provenance is, is not going to be, I can say this as an investigative journalist, If you're starting from that kind of premise, nothing's going to work out for you.
It never does.
Speculation only works when you have a set of facts to work with in the first place.
Right.
I mean, you know, I sort of, you know, we could get into some of the details on some of that.
I don't know if you have like a particular conspiracy, something in particular in mind that you'd like to go into the details on.
But, you know, I've got a couple that, you know, kind of pop out in my mind.
Namely, I mean, the Jewish question is kind of the big one that, you know, that I just get inundated constantly with.
But that just seems to be kind of find a Jewish name and then put all blame onto them.
Seems to be kind of the typical...
And honestly, one of the things that I, in putting this book together, I also, you know, tried to do, assemble a sort of brief history of conspiracy theories.
And as far as I can tell, you know, the earlier conspiracist theory that goes back to our, to really the origins of conspiracism is anti-Semitism.
It dates back to, I mean, the earliest conspiracy theories was the blood libel.
Right.
I believe the Jews were secretly murdering children in order to leaven their matzo dough with, right?
And so, Gentile children, of course.
And that then became, that then mutated into, you know, in the Early 1900s into the Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion conspiracy theory.
But really, that was those were the some of the very earliest that was the very earliest conspiracy theory.
And and I think anti-Semitism, that kind of blind hatred is also what undergirds so much conspiracism as well.
It's it's really kind of an ugly side of human nature.
Yeah, I mean one of the things that I mean so so I don't know if you if you have a you know a personal history with any I was a I was a JFK conspiracist for four years I was one of those guys, you know, I You know stop me if you've heard this before I saw JFK when I was like 20 years old and got like obsessed You know, it was one of those situations and You know, even on 9-11, my immediate thought was like, oh, Bush did this.
That was my, like, literally standing in front of a television watching the planes.
You know, I was kind of, I was right on that, like, oh, it's the oil pipeline in Afghanistan.
And, you know, and ultimately you kind of, you know, I kind of, in a way I processed through that before the big truther movement really came out, you know, which is kind of my immediate response.
But I did the JFK thing for years and like, it was really, Getting out of it just was just a matter of kind of trying to understand the the sort of the basic logic in a way and that you know like.
So much of the what drives it, at least for me in my experience, and from what I kind of hear people kind of talking about, and as people kind of get into it, is that you completely discount any official narrative as obvious blatant lies.
Right.
And it's expressed total skepticism towards that story.
Okay, fair enough.
But skepticism also means using that method towards all your other sources as well.
And so instead, like, oh yes, the government agency that, you know, put out these experts who spent years studying, you know, like, ballistics models and who will tell you.
This sounds really plausible to us.
There are some things we don't quite have answers for, but all of that gets completely set aside because, like, obvious CIA plant, you know, like, hologram conspiracy, whatever, but, like, some guy on YouTube can make a 12-hour video about, you know, about it, and, and, but that's, that's the God's honest truth, you know, and, and there's, there seems to be a lack of willingness and, and that does seem to be, you know, psychological to some degree, but it also, I think, reflects, and this is kind of what I, kind of my thing with, with
Yeah, so many conspiracy theories reflect a sort of there is something real at the heart of them, you know, like the JFK conspiracy stuff is, you know, it's not just the distrust of like who killed Kennedy, but it's sort of a growing distrust with government sources in terms of like the Vietnam War kind of getting started for real and.
You know, kind of leading into, you know, the Nixon administration and all that kind of stuff, you know.
So, this kind of growing distrust gets manifested as distrust of things like the Warren Commission report.
And you see that over and over again with this stuff, that there is some, you know, like the Pizzagate nonsense, you know.
Like, yes, rich and powerful people are doing terrible things and having sex with underage children.
I agree.
There's not a basement of comic ping pong where billionaires order cheese pizza.
It's child pornography.
Anyway, sorry, I'm kind of babbling here, but that's kind of my central thesis with this stuff.
Sure.
Well, and just like, you know, the FBI did engage in a conspiracy against citizens with the whole COINTELPRO program.
I mean, that stuff is all very real.
It's all thoroughly documented.
One of the things that so Chip Berlay is an old friend of mine and he has pointed out he sort of has a cool formula for thinking about this, which is basically that it's actually really simple to distinguish conspiracy theories from or or, you know, conspiracy theory fodder from actual conspiracies.
And that's just it's really in their total architecture.
The there are three elements that real conspiracies have or rather three limitations that real conspiracies have that conspiracy theories do not.
They're limited by time, they're limited by in scope, and they're limited in the numbers of actors.
And a conspiracy theory doesn't have any of those limitations.
It can go on forever, it can be global in scope, and it can have massive numbers of participants.
Well, what we actually know about real conspiracies is that they don't succeed with those elements.
You know, they don't succeed If they last too long because they're eventually found out or if they have and they're eventually found out if there are too many participants, so on and so forth.
And so, yeah, those that's actually a pretty simple formula.
It doesn't really get at the essence of the difference between them.
But for somebody who's just approaching dealing with conspiracy theories, I just say, well, so here's here's a rough way of being able to tell them.
Right off the bat, the difference between what could be a real conspiracy and what's not.
Yeah, it helps you sort of, sort the tweed from the shade.
But then, then, you know, in the long run, it takes It takes real work in a lot of regards to actually disprove a conspiracy theory.
But you know what?
It doesn't matter.
Conspiracy theorists don't care.
And in fact, the more evidence that you provide to them, the more likely you are to drive them further down the rabbit hole And because they they'll just see your evidence as proof as further proof of the conspiracy itself.
Oh, it turns out those guys ran on it too.
That's literally how I would think with some of the JFK stuff, because I did attempt to sort of get a balanced view of the things.
But you always come back to, but the witnesses, there are so many witnesses that heard this, and there's always that something that gets stuck in your head.
If you can't challenge that particular thing, it's so difficult, you know, and I do, you know, for me, when I try to, like, confront people with these kinds of, you know, these kinds of ideas, and when I do kind of have this conversation, a lot of it is think through the logic, like, think, like, actually put together.
your version of events and like what evidence do you have for you know that sequencing of events that sort of has happened as opposed to finding holes in an official narrative like like put it together from step one pretend I don't know anything about this and tell me what happened and I mean it's always this sort of you know giant gaping gaps between you know it's like you just have to sort of assume Huge, huge chunks of it.
It's like, well, yeah, but nobody's researched that because it goes against the official narrative or whatever.
And it's always, it just seems like it's so difficult to sort of convince people out of some of this stuff, you know, once they've kind of caught into it.
Right.
Not only is there kind of an intellectual kind of exercise to it, but there's kind of the sunk cost fallacy.
People are emotionally invested in these things that they spend a lot of time with and feeling like, oh, I know things that the rest of the world doesn't.
I'm smarter than the rest of the world because I see what really happened here.
That's the main appeal of conspiracism, right?
That you have secret knowledge nobody else has, except just a handful.
You got a big lead on all your friends.
Right, right.
And you're going to be ready for the end of the world before anybody else.
Something like that, you know, or whatever it is the end that they're looking at is.
And the unfortunate And that's part of their appeal, is that they feel really empowering, right?
That's a cool special power.
But the bizarre thing is, as with all things related to conspiracy theories, it's actually an inversion of what actually happens, because the long narrative of conspiracism is incredibly disempowering, which is that you're up against
Forces so powerful and so nefarious that you have no chance of defeating them even with your special secret knowledge and ultimately the the end point of conspiracy theory thinking is Some guy, you know moving off to the wilds of Montana and believe me being from Montana and Idaho I've met plenty of them who do exactly this move off to some cabin in the middle of the woods somewhere set up your your
I mean, certainly one of the first things you do is you cut yourself off from all political power because you stop voting, you stop participating in the democratic process.
And in a democracy, that's actually the only political power you have, right?
So so and this is part of what bothers me about conspiracism because I think it it actually benefits the oligarchs and the real the very real conspiracy of established wealth and power to maintain his position that we see going on every day in our daily lives and is just kind of part of the normal warp and woof of how we how modern society operates.
Which is that we know that the people who have money and power already are writing the laws in a way that benefit them, writing the tax laws in a way that benefit them.
These are things that are going on right in front of our faces, and we know it, right?
And so what this, what conspiracism does is actually distracts us from dealing effectively with that, you know?
It's really, so it's, It benefits exactly the people that you shouldn't, that are, you know, causing the problems.
Yeah, it benefits the billionaire class, the capitalist class, who actually is, you know, stealing your wages and, you know, building this system that goes to war, if you think, oh, it's all the Jews doing this, you know, like, it's beneficial.
And as a leftist, I take a quite serious look at material notions of history and of society.
We have to confront the actual, real material basis of the problems in our world in order to have any hope of...
You know, overcoming those things, and it's, you know, there really is a sense in which, you know, it's, yeah, the conspiracy itself is a conspiracy of the oligarchs.
Please don't let me say it in that many words, but I mean, there is a sense in which, you know, like we, you've picked, you've identified in some ways a real problem, i.e., you know, a concentration of wealth, but you've blamed the wrong people and therefore you're just completely wrong.
from from the get-go you know that that's that's sort of the process for me right and and you're actually benefiting those people by by allowing that distraction to keep you from you know even just on a very low level you know i mean i'm not a low level but it's certainly something that that's relevant to the to the most recent news cycles keep you from you know even just on a very low level you know i mean i'm not a low level but certainly something that that's relevant to the to the most recent news cycles
you know if you're blaming uh impoverished brown people from coming from some central and south america uh on low wages instead of you know your employer that's that's you know you're literally you are literally you know scapegoating and you're just working for the benefit of the people who are actually ripping you off i mean you know it's yeah you know something that i've said a couple of times is you know it's funny
how none of these people who like complain about wage loss through you know illegal immigration or whatever they never seem to be in favor of like unionizing they never seem to be in favor of minimum wage laws it's just like you like blame brown people like that's just the the answer to it and it's it's just it's like it just kind of goes to show you that they're not really all that concerned with the thing that they're actually concerned they claim to be concerned about but That's slightly off our topic here, but you know.
Well, yeah, it's that's part of the sort of underlying cultural issue, though, that that does help enable this stuff.
And there are a lot of cultural forces involved in why people are attracted to conspiracism.
And those are I would never minimize that point.
It's actually very important.
And in You know, the really sad part is, especially as we're seeing these things like QAnon spitting out of control and a lot of the conspiracism around Trump, it's, you know, it's really dangerous because we're really putting democracy itself at risk.
And that's, I think, the key there is that it doesn't just benefit oligarchs, it benefits authoritarians.
Oh, no, absolutely.
No, I definitely agree with that.
I mean, one of the things that I get from your work, and just in kind of a large general sense, but I think very specifically in The Eliminationist, one of your one of your previous books, which I'm a big fan of, is the way that this sort of the far-right ideology Is infected it sort of comes from these?
Incredibly fringe elements, and then gets kind of cycled up through These networks into things like suddenly Fox News is talking about it and using some of the same language And then because Fox News is talking about it suddenly You know CNN has to cover that Fox News is talking about it suddenly just becomes Something that we're all kind of talking about and I mean we see this again kind of going back to the the the concrete in the milkshakes thing and
You know like suddenly like one guy kind of pushes it from 4chan and then like the social media networks kind of allowed to spread enough that suddenly it has to be
Uh dealt with in some way even if to debunk but then sort of the right wing sources was just sort of accept it as as a given and then suddenly it just becomes like a thing that's just like oh clearly there was you know sources say there may not have been concrete but ultimately you know it's just it's you know and it just that's just such a such a crystallizing example for me of of you know the just the way this works and of course it works one of the things that I've seen in the last
Since the Trump since the inauguration basically, I mean one of the things that really kind of like has been Depressing for me personally is that you know for a long time?
It really wasn't you didn't really see this among like kind of kind of left of center people Not to the same degree that the that the right of center folks were kind of like talking about their their you know FEMA camps or whatever but like at least the liberals were on firm, like, reality-based ground.
But some of the stuff around, you know, there's real stuff in the Mueller investigation, and then there's the absolutely absurd Louise Minch kind of stuff.
And to see that, like, now that it's crossed the political divide in the United States.
Well, I mean, the left has always had its tendency to conspiracism, and I certainly encountered this even back in the 90s, when we used to see a lot of folks on the left adopting contrail conspiracy, mostly health-related conspiracy when we used to see a lot of folks on the left adopting contrail conspiracy, mostly health-related conspiracy theories, and especially the view that, which was originally promoted by the John Birch Society, that cancer Right.
Yeah, I don't want to discount that.
Certainly that's an element as well.
So it's always been there on the left, but it was really, and it really flared up right after 9-11.
There was a lot of folks on the left, especially the far left, who were promoting, you know, these theories that it was secretly Mossad or whatever.
And especially the European far left is where we saw a lot of Post 9-11 conspiracy theories popping up.
However, I would say by 2004 or so, it was really being dominated.
The whole industry around conspiracy theories became dominated by InfoWars and Alex Jones and the whole right-wing side of things.
And Jones very much comes from that John Birch Society.
Background.
I happened to grow up in southern Idaho in the 1960s when John Birch Society had a very powerful relationship with the LDS Church.
I was not LDS, but I was raised in a community that was 70% of my graduating class was more And so it was everywhere.
And you'd go to your friend's homes and there was that Cleon Skousen book, The Naked Communist, hanging out along with the No One Dares Call It Conspiracy and so on and so forth, right?
All of these famous conspiracies.
So there was really very much this John Birch Society style conspiracism was part of the the culture that I grew up in and so I developed a sort of immunity to it very early on and it's been really helpful because yeah you you learn to it's very easy to spot for me now the the fake stuff and the real and separated from what might be real
And yeah, this is where all that's sort of the origins of a lot of this is Bircher style conspiracism, but
Under the Jones influence, and sort of, not just Jones, there's this whole industry out there of people who are, they're competing amongst each other as conspiracy theorists, as you know, by constantly pushing the envelope, by being as more outrageous than the next guy, doing, saying something that's even crazier than the next guy, as a way of actually drawing YouTube hits, right?
That's what they're about.
I mean, Red Ice, which I'm sure is a, you know, an outlet you're familiar with, which people have been asking me to do a full episode on Red Ice.
We'll do it.
We'll get there, you know.
It's funny, every time I mention the subject, it's like people want me to do a whole episode on it, you know.
Oh man, they drive me crazy.
Partly because they're just They're openly neo-Nazi as far as I'm concerned.
Oh, no, definitely, definitely.
I mean, but they definitely start out, I mean, if you look back at the early days and sort of their early branding, it's certainly – it acts like a little bit more of a sort of an Alex Jones competitor, like a slightly more staid Alex Jones essentially.
Like we're Alex Jones without the making the frogs gay stuff.
And then as they've kind of moved on, they get – The quality on Mars, yeah.
They get increasingly white nationalists, and so now they're just like straight-up white nationalists.
But they somehow seem to still brand as like, oh, no, we're just kind of doing the off-the-wall stuff.
I mean another – I mean if you were sort of inoculated by your background in Idaho, I mean I think – You know, I remember reading, like, GeoCities, like, crazy websites in the 90s, right?
You know, like, like, I, you know, I, I sort of came up in that.
I was one of those teenage libertarian types, and, you know, don't worry, I recovered, you know, once I reached my adulthood, you know.
No, well, I, some of the, some of the most actually interesting people, there's a guy named, Chris, oh gosh, he runs the Dry Cleaner podcast out of London, and his is also about, he is also a former conspiracy theorist who does, who now does, you know, the Lord's work, which is, you know, debunking this stuff is kind of, in some ways,
It's useful, but after a while it's God you just spinning your tires in the mud because it just gets heavier and thicker.
And so I'm kind of focused more on.
Actually anymore, I'm more focused on trying to help people who have family members who've gone down these rabbit holes.
Because trying to reach the guys, the people who succumb to the theories, is really become just a giant waste of time.
I'm interested in trying to reach people who haven't been I haven't gone down the rabbit holes yet and actually need the tools for dealing with this stuff in their lives because it affects every single one of us.
I don't know a single American who doesn't know somebody who's become a conspiracy theorist.
Everybody I know knows a conspiracy theorist.
I know people who are scientists who believe in, like, the flat Earth.
Like, legitimately.
I know, I know.
No, I do a fair amount of work in whale conservation.
It's the part of my life where I can actually get away from all this and enjoy some sense of reality.
But even there, some scientists or people I know who are engaged in Animal rights activism, mostly, also have gone down some of these conspiracy rabbit holes as well.
Oh, and let's not forget that the anti-vax stuff is very much left-wing.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I feel like there's this sort of like natural news hub, you know, this sort of anti-authoritarian group that Panders both to sort of like, you know kind of the hippie far-left crowd and the you know Kind of like guiding guns far-right crowd.
Yeah to me to me it's it's fairly matched and so I don't really consider like like alt-med stuff a Necessarily like a left-wing phenomenon because it you know, it's it's sort of like just a common like it's just the noise and the signal sort of thing, you know, so You're right.
Well, it's actually, he's a pretty interesting phenomenon because he's part of what I see happening.
Yes.
Inevitably, the folks who, the sort of left-wing conspiracy theorists who succumb to this stuff, inevitably, I've found if they keep diving down those rabbit holes, they become very right-wing as well.
Because that's where really this whole thing drives.
And he plays this really key role in doing that flip.
You know, getting them to do the flip from left to right.
Well, it's almost like inviting people in on, like, we're concerned that corporations are going to control the food sources of the future.
Like, like a concern about, like, really legitimate questions about, like, genetically modified organisms and sort of, like, how about farming techniques and things that we really should, like, have a real conversation about.
And then sell that through, and then these things are giving you cancer, actually, which there's absolutely no evidence of that.
And then selling through that, then you sell the The version that is well, no, there's actually a secret cabal that is Forcibly giving you cancer so that you won't like live as long or they're putting stuff in the food That's gonna make you less masculine and then eventually you get to and it's the Jews It's the Jews doing all of this and you know, I'm it's not I'm not saying natural news is itself like selling Quite that full-throated version of that.
But certainly, you know, you see people do this all the time.
I mean, we did Andrew Anglin last week, and Andrew Anglin got started watching Infowars, listening to Infowars, like when he was like 13 or whatever, you know?
Cantwell, Christopher Cantwell is another figure who said, you know, kind of got started watching Alex Jones back in the day, you know, just kind of, and it becomes like you're kind of your baseline Yeah, yeah, yeah.
is like, well, maybe Alex Jones isn't 100% right, but he's got some good points.
And then it just sort of becomes an on-ramp onto this stuff.
And just going back in the history, I mean, I'm sure you're aware.
Rents, Rents.com, which is very much this kind of woo-woo, alt-med, crackpot stuff, and also hosts David Duke's terrible radio show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
Yeah, sorry.
I'm just kind of listing examples there of how this stuff, you know, like really prominent figures got started as basically just curious kids watching Alex Jones.
I think there's a real phenomenon there.
Well, and Rents was part of the ecosystem that we had in the 90s.
They were mostly, there was a lot of stuff that got passed around back in the 90s through email forwards.
I don't know if you remember that.
I do.
I do.
I'm just old enough to remember that.
I think most of the audience will not know what an email forward is in this context, but... No, no, definitely.
I remember that.
I remember, like, the Newsmax for, you know, like, I'm old enough to remember WorldNetDaily, you know, so, you know, it's a, you know, anyway, which is still around.
It's still there!
It's still around.
It's the Newsmax, yeah.
And they're still doing the same stuff.
Yeah, no, actually, I was really hopeful that WorldNetDaily would find Finally succumb back in 1999 when they were going full steam ahead on the Y2K apocalypse stuff, right?
I mean, if you went to WND back then, Joseph Farah, the publisher, was publishing story after story after story warning of the giant apocalypse that was going to happen because of the Y2K bug.
And telling people to load up their basements on beans and rice and water, you know?
And afterwards, you know, when nothing happened, you had a bunch of people with beans and rice in their basement going, God damn, I hate being made a fool of!
And so there was a huge downturn in the Patriot movement back then as a direct result of that stuff.
When I was really kind of hopeful that this stuff would start going away.
And it certainly, in the first initial years after 9-11, there was very, very little Patriot militia activity for quite a few years.
I think the SPLC numbers got down to like 131 militia groups in 2003 or 2004.
Militia groups in, what, 2003 or 2004.
But, you know, being from rural Idaho and Montana, I always keep my ear to the ground on this stuff.
And I could tell I hadn't really ever completely gone away.
And then it really started flaring back up in the late 2000s, or especially once Barack Obama announced his candidacy and then became president.
It just Took on a whole life of its own.
It's amazing how a crypto, quote unquote, crypto racist movement lay fallow during a warmongering Republican presidency, but just sprouted back up almost out of nothing the second that a black guy shows up.
Yeah.
Funny how, what a coincidence, right?
Yeah, well, it would have been there.
I mean, there was actually a lot of conspiracism around the whole Clinton presidency in the 90s.
Of course, he was the center of the New World Order conspiracy theory and the black helicopters and the troop movements.
Right.
But so any liberal was going to get that treatment no matter what.
But the fact that it was black, oh, man, that just that made it there was a black man.
It was it made it it We were getting the Klan and Aryan Nations and white nationalists all joining in very avidly.
So, and that was certainly what we saw, you know, by 2011, I think, or 12, we saw kind of a peak of Patriot militia organizing to the point that levels far higher than anything we saw in the 90s.
I think over a thousand groups in 2012.
And then it started declining again in large part because of the arrival of social media and online radicalization.
The radicalization wasn't taking place in militia meetings anymore, it was all taking place online.
So how would you say, I mean, just kind of leading us into what was originally our, we're having a, I think this is a fun episode, but You know, leading back into YouTube and, you know, we did an episode on YouTube and sort of the way that, you know, those vectors work already.
But what's your, what are your thoughts about how YouTube and social media more generally accelerate this process?
of leading people down these rabbit holes.
I mean, I think you were kind of leading that way with your last comment, but I would like to, if you got like, so a little more complete thesis statement maybe, like what's been the effect of these kind of always online communities in terms of feeding this stuff?
Well, yeah, it's certainly the, it's possible now for people to have, to lead almost the entirety of their social lives online.
Which is not a good thing because online interaction is really prone to dehumanization.
It takes place really easily there, and especially because it's so disembodied, you're not actually dealing with the person of the voice or you're not hearing intonation.
You're not seeing gestures.
You don't actually have a body there.
That you recognize as being who you're interacting with.
You're just really interacting with bits on a screen.
And so that's part of the dehumanization process that takes place online.
But it's also it's why it's part of why we have so much trolling culture.
And one of the things that YouTube and and Twitter and Facebook, all of Facebook's Facebook's
Algorithms are changing, so it's possibly not quite so egregious anymore, but certainly YouTube is every bit as bad as it always was in terms of how it, the way, you know, I mean, what these guys are after is for you to hang out on their website for as long as possible.
They call that engagement.
And engagement is all about, you know, basically getting you to hang around for as long as you can.
So they're constantly, as soon as you're done watching a video, they have a new video queued up for you to watch, right?
And it's based on an algorithm.
Well, for years, of course, it was, you were getting just tons of, I mean, tons of conspiracy videos being queued up next for you to watch, in part because those were the ones that had produced the most engagement elsewhere, right?
Right.
And what it really came down to was that engagement equals controversy.
That you're going to pull people in more if you have videos for them that sound outrageous or controversial and will pique their interest.
Right?
And so what was happening was people were getting this steady diet of increasingly Radical information, and I think Dylan Roof's sort of saga with his Google search that led him to the Council of Conservative Citizens and these fake black crime statistics that Donald Trump later retweeted.
Which ultimately come right out of like American Renaissance and then there's all this stuff in the 90s too.
I mean, you know, it was all over the place.
Yeah, it was all written by Jared Taylor back in 99 in The Color of Crime.
That is linked in our American Renaissance episode if you want to go back and look at that.
There you go.
Yeah, and so, and I'm sure you've discussed this, that The roof paradigm really is kind of a model for this online radicalization, because you can just see the step-by-step process by which he kind of spiraled upward into this world of radicalization.
And a lot of it actually has to do with what an information scientist named Michael Caulfield has written about He talks about curation and the curation process is what you've watched previously and the kinds of things that you watch, the algorithms respond to your curation and will
Uh, provide more videos that are in the line of what you're looking for.
So you get into this closed information loop partly because of the things you've already watched, right?
Right, right, yeah.
Well, I mean, one of the jokes I tell is like people really don't want to see what my YouTube recommendations look like.
Because I, you know, I will legitimately have to go, like, watch videos, like, music videos for a while just to, like, get away from, you know, the far right wall of awfulness that is the YouTube recommendations, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Orca videos in my case, but yes.
Oh yeah, sure, no, no, I get it.
Yeah, no, no, I was, I was watching science videos today, you know, just, just, you know, play some, play some old, you know, chemistry videos and, you know, that's always fun, but...
And Google throws up these ads, you know.
If I spend too much time researching neo-Nazis on Google, pretty soon I'm actually getting ads from the Google ads that were paid for by neo-Nazis to take me to You know, all the latest version of the Turner Diaries, you know, it's like guys are trying to sell me the Turner Diaries.
You know, I think for me, this is happening.
It's funny how the algorithms have changed since I've been following it on YouTube.
It does seem to be better now than it has been.
For a while they were literally feeding me 1930s German Nazi propaganda.
Like, I got fed the Eternal Jew.
as a like youtube recommendation right right and you know and not even when i was watching that extreme stuff you know like nowadays i i seek out the furthest that i can but you know certainly at that point i was more you know like certainly like watching like sargon stuff you know and and stuff that's fairly milquetoast in terms of the stuff that we're kind of discussing on this podcast but you know they're still feeding me like the eternal jew jesus christ guys like you know it's trying for the world
yeah yeah no definitely will Yeah, oh, I know.
And if not that, then, you know, William Pierce's favorite hits are... Here's what David Duke thinks of... Right, right.
David Duke radio interviews and stuff, you know.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that they are now trying to grapple with this stuff and I hope that they make a good faith effort to do so.
I'm not entirely convinced that they are, but as you may recall, I went through a two-week suspension on Twitter recently.
Yes, no, I mean you could feel free to tell that story if you'd like to.
I was not necessarily planning to ask you about it.
It's because we had so much else to talk about, but please feel free.
Yeah, well I The cover of my book, Alt-America, has this very clever design with the red, white, and blue American flag, but the little stars have all got Klan hoods on them, right?
So I took that image and stripped it across the top of my Twitter profile, because it's great.
It promotes my book, and it also kind of tells you what I'm about, right?
That I'm about fighting these guys.
But I got suspended by a guy with a Pepe figure in his profile picture and his, not just his profile picture, but his avatar.
Pepe reported me to them and they shut me down or they suspended me for that Book cover.
And I, as a matter of principle, I've had too many other fellow journalists get suspended by Twitter for doing their jobs.
And I just said, you know, I'm going to fight this because this Twitter's got to figure this out.
And, you know, hopefully make a little bit of a stink about it.
And so for about two weeks, it went on.
And there were a lot of people who rallied to support me to Get Twitter to back down.
And so I wound up having conversations with some policy folks at Twitter and, you know, I kind of got familiar with their POV on this, but they certainly got familiar with mine as well, which is that You know, they can't be counting on algorithms to make these decisions.
But also, I think the bigger problem is that they have really inconsistent enforcement, and they need people who are better trained to actually identify and understand the problem that they're trying to cope with.
Well, as it is now, they're just too easily gamed, and they still are.
It's still way too easy.
For Nazis and neo-Nazis who are not using, you know, intentionally gaming Twitter's rules by not using overtly hateful images and instead are using wink and nudge racism like the Pepe image to do their thing.
They'll go and get actually people who do the serious work of reporting on these guys into trouble.
And, you know, that's just got to end.
And so I'm still in conversation with folks at Twitter about this.
I'm hopeful that we'll be able to make some concrete change in that regard.
But right now, it's way too easy for these guys to game Twitter and not take anybody's advantage.
Well one of the things that I've said again before is that really these guys only have to survive the 30 second glance from an overworked content moderator in terms of keeping their content just on the side of the line.
Um, and so, you know, you and I can look at these guys and go, well, this is obviously code for this other thing.
But, you know, these content moderators are not looking at it with the same perspective.
And, you know, there's... One of the things that, like, Richard Spencer has said many times and Christopher Cantwell has said many times is, like, what we want is a clear set of rules that are, like, set in stone.
Because the second you put a set of clear rules set in stone they'll just know exactly how far they can go and then just like it's it's the digital equivalent of like I'm not touching you with the finger in the face you know that's that's sort of the metaphor I used to describe I mean that's exactly what they'll do the second year and so there's not really an easy answer to to this because the whole point is the second you put down some set of rules or some guidelines they're just going to learn how to game them and there's no it's a kind of a xeno's paradise kind of problem
you can never actually get rid of it because ultimately the whole point is to dance around that line you know well and and the crazy thing of course is that that puts i mean twitter is doing all this um in the name of protecting free speech
and yet the the part that's the really sadly cynical part of what's going on is that you know these guys are uh cynically manipulating the rules of free speech for their own benefit and they have absolutely no benefit interest in respecting anyone else's free speech and Certainly, if they ever gain power, there's not going to be any free speech for anybody.
You know, that's how fascists have always worked.
They've always been willing to use the assets of democracy to destroy it, to twist it upon itself and destroy it.
So, yeah, they want to, you know, they want to claim that, well, we just have the same free speech as everyone else, even though their speech is actually intended to take other people's freedoms away and other people's free speech rights away.
So It's a it's a crassly cynical manipulation.
And at some point, these libertarian tech types need to understand they're being played.
Well, of course, some of those guys are clearly, you know, a little bit more in the bag than they pretend.
Oh, yeah, we're all about free speech.
And, you know, Not so much.
You're more like Andy Ngo.
Right, right.
I mean, you know, well, Tim Pool, I know when you were suspended, Tim Pool, don't worry, we're doing a Tim Pool episode.
It's coming.
It's coming, guys.
Don't worry.
Tim Pool's been pissing me off lately.
I mean, in many ways, you know, when you were suspended, he, you know, kind of came out there and said, you know, yeah, I think this is good because it means that, you know, the left doesn't, the left, broadly speaking, doesn't get to use these symbols, that context And, you know, like we, we, you know, free speech means free speech.
And he's like, clearly, You know, in the bag for the far right.
He's just, he just spends all his time attacking the, the left quote unquote, the, the SJW woke police or whatever.
And you know, the whole point of like, no, context doesn't matter.
It's like context matters direly.
Like, I don't know.
Like, yeah.
How can you, how can you pretend to.
Any sense of journalism or writing or communication and think context is irrelevant.
Context is clearly relevant.
Context is actually everything so and that's something I try to explain.
It's it's why I do journalism.
You know it's it's I'm trying to provide people with context and to me that's what real journalism is.
And these guys.
Yeah, the guys like pool and yo and And a whole bunch of these guys claiming to be journalists are making a travesty of the profession.
And me as a crusty old news editor who used to, I used to pull ticker tape off the wire and hand it to the typesetter, you know.
I take a very dim view of this and I think it's kind of, I have absolutely no use for them.
I think it's a disgrace.
Just as a personal matter.
I mean, I don't really consider this journalism.
I mean necessarily, you know what, you know, I'm a guy with a microphone and a Twitter feed and it's time to listen to podcasts, you know, but I think about the level of effort I go to to actually be fair to like overt genocidal racists and the amount of effort that I go into to actually be fair to them and to like be honest about what they do and don't believe through their maze of humor and
And then I see someone like Tim Pool with, like, most of a million subscribers making a full-time job out of this, just spewing bullshit for hours a day.
And it's upsetting.
We'll just leave it at that.
Yeah, well, as you know, it's a grift.
It's actually a grift.
Yeah, especially this whole business with pretending to be sort of idiosyncratic and independent thinker and that sort of thing.
It's just a grip.
Yeah.
Hashtag Quillette.
Let's just leave it there.
I recently discovered that Quillette had a podcast, and I literally went, Quillette has a podcast.
Facepalm, dear Jesus.
Okay, fine.
I added it to my feed.
It was a really depressing moment.
Suddenly, oh, I have to follow this now.
Goddammit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, it's spreading.
So that's the sad thing.
It's been pretty upsetting to see all this growing.
I have to tell you, for a long time, those of us who Did this work.
We're really waiting for the old farts that mostly dominated the white nationalist and hate movement to die out.
You know, William Pierce died.
Richard Butler died.
We were waiting for Jared Taylor and David Duke to finally kick the bucket someday, you know?
And then maybe this stuff would go away.
But no, no such luck.
Thanks to the alt-right and its rise, it's not going away.
In fact, it's possibly worse than it's ever been in my lifetime.
So, I'm actually really grateful that there is a whole generation of young people who are now taking this on because, honestly, for most of Post 1999 era, I would say.
Been kind of lonely out here.
Sure.
No.
And you've been doing the good work for a long time.
So I feel like we should wrap up here.
We've been going for a little over 90 minutes.
I thank you very much for your time.
Is there anything you'd like to kind of get out there to my audience that we haven't covered today?
So I would encourage anyone who wants to understand the sort of historical background of all this, of what we've been talking about, to pick up a copy of my book, Alt-America, The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.
It's out in paperback, and I think it does a pretty good job of sort of giving historical context.
I'm not a political scientist, so I don't provide a whole lot of the larger political context that's, I think, necessary to understand this phenomenon.
But if you want to see how we got where we are now, Alt America is a good place to turn, and I hope people find it a useful resource.
No, definitely.
I would highly recommend Alt America.
It's a very good book and also, again, The Eliminationist is one of those that really... It's older now because it was published in 2009 or 2010?
Yeah, 2009, so it's a decade old now, but it's very ripe right now.
Again, one of the things that interests me and one of the things that I kind of got from you that I've been trying to do in this project is to Explain how these kind of like ideological connections these kind of media connections the way that these memes spread From you know again these kind of really marginal figures up into you know Tucker Carlson is literally like quoted by Chris Cantwell And then he reads from Mein Kampf saying like it's the same thing.
It's you know like yes, I agree I wish more people would would would understand that and realize how how terrible Tucker Carlson has become but I Transmission belt.
Yep.
That's what we call the transmission belt, and it actually is a real thing.
Oh, definitely.
Well, so thanks again, Mr. Nywert.
Thank you again.
I apologize.
In the misbegotten take, I got his name wrong.
I've been pronouncing it wrong for a long time, but thank you very much, David, for being on the show.
You are welcome back at any time you would like to come back, and we will definitely pump your book when it comes out again.
Great.
Thanks again.
And for the audience, next week we might have something.
I've got something fun that we might do as kind of a lark.
And then the week after that, the plan is to do Kevin MacDonald and the Culture of Critique, which I am currently in the process of rereading, which is a lovely experience.
So thanks a lot for listening and we'll see you next time.
