Recorded on the eve of the Richmond rally, this episode sees Daniel joined once again by David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert; author of Alt America) to talk about a group currently in the news, The Base, and expand a bit on the so-called 'Boogaloo' we've talked about in previous episodes. Content Warnings. Notes / Links: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/19/1912573/-Beyond-Monday-s-gun-laden-march-in-Richmond-militias-plans-for-a-civil-war-look-to-go-national?_=2020-01-19T13:54:23.630-08:00 https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/1218543762374348800 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mexp/neo-nazis-are-organizing-secretive-paramilitary-training-across-america https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/15/1879107/-A-Neo-Nazi-militia-training-in-the-NE-Washington-woods-fits-into-the-region-s-dark-history https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/us/virginia-gun-rally-explainer.html https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/28/1888326/-The-Hokoana-trial-Inside-the-Antifa-shooting-incident-the-media-don-t-want-to-talk-about https://medium.com/@justinward/race-war-preppers-a16c4ab5e5c6
Alright, and welcome to episode 41 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast that talks about things that terrible people do say and believe.
Usually, my name is Daniel Harper, I'm usually joined by my co-host Jack Graham, but he just didn't want to do it today.
Not really.
We do have a special guest host, which he's been on before, to talk about conspiracism and the far right.
He's been a journalist covering this material for over 30 years now.
Once again, joined by David Nywart.
Welcome, David.
Thanks for having me again, Daniel.
As always, thank you.
So we were going to do Augustus Invictus this week, and then we had another topic that we were going to cover, and then news events overtook us again.
And so today we are going to be talking about something that I get a lot of requests to cover.
Uh, sort of the broader militia movement, um, and sort of its history and sort of the current incarnation.
Um, but we're really going to be covering this, the, the Boogaloo concept and the, uh, rally in Richmond, Virginia.
And the various players are involved.
Uh, now the, the one difficulty we have here is that we are covering this, we're recording this on the Sunday before the rally.
Um, and this episode won't come out until a couple of days after the rally.
So, uh, everything that we're about to say may be completely useless by the time you hear it, but we're going to take that risk.
So, David, why don't you, I know you wrote a piece, you put it out today on the Daily Kos about this rally and about sort of the background that's been happening for it.
Why don't you kind of just walk us through what you expect and kind of give us the background a little bit.
Well, sure.
Of course, this has been brewing for a while now.
The far right Has been talking about this, you know, doing this rally for two or three months now, and the more hyped up they get about it, the more they've really looked at become, you know, come to look at it as an opportunity for declaring civil war, creating a civil war situation.
And, you know, and accompanying that is the usual paranoia.
Uh, there's a very popular conspiracy theory floating around on Far-right social media that argues that the United Nations is going to be bringing in troops to help support Governor Northam's attempts to, you know, pass this gun control legislation.
And that, of course, is what they're all on about, is that the Democrats now control both the legislature and the governorship in Virginia, and so they're planning to pass some Actually fairly temperate gun control measures that have, you know, very nearly passed in the not-so-distant past and now are pretty much certain to pass.
So, yeah, and so these guys are all coming, planning to come to Richmond on Monday Monday, this coming Monday, is what would normally be the annual lobby day in Virginia.
And this is an old tradition in Virginia, where lobbyists once a year are asked to vacate the halls of power in Richmond, and ordinary people can come to Richmond and lobby for their causes.
Well, in recent years, this has been Overwhelmed by this organization called the Virginia Citizens Defense League, which has used Lobby Day as a way to flood the halls of Richmond with gun nuts, basically, who think that the, you know, who argue that the Second Amendment
um allows them to use any is absolute in its meaning and they're able to use any kind of weapons without any kind of regulation and so on and so forth and you know and honestly Daniel I don't know about you I've heard some of these guys actually arguing well second amendment allows me to have a missile launcher or a tank you know They will usually step just short of nuclear arsenal.
That's usually the point at which they go, well, maybe not just literally everyone should be allowed to have an atomic weapon, but like everything up to there.
And they tend to not discuss things like, you know, do you mean like, you know, chemical warfare, biological agents, you know, that sort of thing.
I think, I think when you get to that scale, there is a sort of recognition that like, no, this could actually like kill a whole lot of people by just being mishandled or whatever.
They do seem to like but yeah pretty much everything up to there and I'm pretty sure you can find examples of even people saying like oh no no thermonuclear warfare you should be able to just own one yeah no um you know it's not that I literally never seen it but but that usually are the people were even like even the fringe of the French tends to go um yeah maybe not quite that far not so and I actually can't I've got it there's a guy out here in the northwest called Gavin Sein who makes that argument so and he's he's part of the the
far right gun scene out here and of course this is who and some of these guys uh that are going to be showing up in Richmond tomorrow I'm pretty sure are going to be from the northwest so at any rate they're apparently Joey Gibson it's Joey Gibson is rumored to be there as of like an hour ago I was seeing that so you know great great yeah yeah yeah no it's going to be uh an all-star cast uh just to be clear a lot of stuff is really unclear about kind of what who and what's going to be there because things have been really like
It seems like there's a lot of back and forth about people kind of arguing who should go and who shouldn't go, so a lot of what we're saying here is tentative, you know.
Yeah, well what I clearly have seen is that anti-fascists are pretty unified in saying stay away.
Right.
Except for... We do know there will be a presence, but they're trying to recommend that the The rank-and-file, you know, that there should not be... don't make themselves targets, essentially.
Yeah, and don't go there for confrontation or try to create one.
Right.
Yeah, and I think that that's astute, because these guys are going to invent one anyway.
Right.
Trust me, I believe that there is going to be some gunfire of some kind tomorrow.
I could be totally wrong about that, but You get this many wackadoodles in one place at the same time, and when these guys start drinking, which a fair number of them do, you know, when they get in their cups, they get to be very manly, if you know what I mean.
Sure.
As if toxic masculinity was not a thing.
Or not to show their manhood off.
Right.
So I do want to just want to highlight, I mean you said like very reasonable gun restrictions.
I just, you know, the audience of this podcast will have a variety of opinions about what is it is not a reasonable gun restriction, and I'm not here to get into that debate.
The actual thing is that, as I understand it, it's basically three basic components of this law, and that is it's limiting purchases of handguns to one each month, It requires background checks of gun buyers, and it's going to allow local governments to ban guns in like parks and public buildings.
Yep, that's exactly right.
I saw that from the New York Times I have in front of me, so I just read it verbatim.
My apologies.
So these three things, now again, The degree to which this will be leveraged against people of color, other minorities, etc.
That's a complicated question, but this is not the argument that these kind of Second Amendment militia types are making.
They view this as essentially a gun grab.
They view this as the first step towards totalitarianism, towards an actual full-scale, we're not allowed to have guns anymore kind of issue.
Right.
No, no.
They actually see this as the first step in A far left Marxist takeover of America.
And this is part of the rhetoric that's coming around this.
I listened in to an interview from Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers recently, in which he said essentially exactly that.
Let me read you what he said.
So what you have is basically a socialist, or I would call it a Marxist, assault on the Constitution across the country, and their number one target, of course, is the right to keep and bear arms, but not just that.
Also, free speech and assembly, your due process rights.
So these guys are seeing all of this as, you know, the grounds for declaring civil war.
And this is really a unified thing and it runs across the spectrum of the far right from really the Patriot Militia movement to if we have a more moderate element of the far right, it's the Patriot Militia folks.
But it also very much includes these neo-Nazis and members of the base and Atomwaffen who are Clearly also planning to participate in this.
And we know this, of course, because there have been arrests, right?
Just a little bit of legal activity regarding the base recently.
I think there are a total of seven, although I was hearing a rumored eighth, but I haven't seen the confirmation of the eighth.
Three in Georgia, three in Maryland, and one in Wisconsin.
Correct.
I'm just going to say, if you like reading arrest warrants and affidavits, these are entertaining ones.
You know, I hate to laugh too much at this, but there's a comedy of errors element to this here, especially when you start kind of putting the pieces together on it.
The first three were probably the most interesting as far as that goes, except that the second set had a bunch of emails that were kind of fun to go through.
But that first that first trio of arrests was pretty chilling partly because one of the the people arrested was this guy Patrick Matthews who had been a military guardsman reserve a reservist in Canada who had to go on the lam when his activities as a member of the base were revealed to the public because he was going around and
His town in Manitoba and plastering up flyers for the base, recruitment flyers.
And when people realized it was a guy who was a member of the military, well, there was a story in the local news in the Winnipeg paper.
And there was, you know, there was quite a bit of stink about it.
And his helm got raided by the Canadian authorities and he went on the lam.
And the assumption was that he had, in fact, crossed into the United States.
And what we were hearing, of course, is that he was now hooking up with members of the base in the United States.
And it's my understanding that he crossed on the Montana border, which is not very far from where I live, and we've had a lot of Activity by the base here in in Washington State.
So I was very concerned that Matthews was potentially over here, but it turns out that he was in fact over there in Maryland, at least in more recent months.
Yeah, no, my understanding is that he had traveled.
He looks like he traveled across country a little bit because they had the other two guys had picked him up in Michigan.
Um, which, uh, my neck of the woods in case anyone doesn't realize that by now.
Um, and then, um, they pick him up there, they take him back to Maryland, um, and they're, they're planning on this, uh, I mean, they're, they're essentially arrested on, on weapons charges at that, right?
Like that's, that's, that's the big bulk of kind of what they tend to get these guys on is, you know, traveling across state lines with illegal weapons effectively.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, that was a very interesting set of arrests and partly because they had, uh, had in fact, uh, made themselves an automatic gun and they talked among themselves about opening fire at the event tomorrow.
Right.
And so, you know, we've got to give good credit to the FBI for swooping in and nailing these seven people, and particularly the three that we know we're planning to participate in tomorrow's event.
I just wonder how many others out there there might be who haven't been caught yet.
I mean that's what you worry about for tomorrow is that that yeah they were able to catch these three guys but boy there's there's a lot of nutcases all gathering there tomorrow and a lot of them are going to be heavily armed.
Right.
And the last guy, the guy in Wisconsin, he's a Jordanian American, from what I understand, who had defaced a couple of synagogues up in Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Yeah.
And he was kind of part of this Great Lakes subgroup.
But the final three, or the middle, the other three, the three in Georgia, were interesting because they had Yes.
made a deliberate and uh made significant steps towards a plan of murdering an anti-fascist couple in their homes and burning it to the ground and uh if you've been following the drama around my life for the last few months uh that is uh very um um reminiscent yeah it's chilling yes yeah
Because, you know, you realize that, I mean, and this is the thing, we all deal with these threats, and we unfortunately get a lot of people who say, ah, they're just fantasists, you weren't really in danger, and that sort of thing, and sort of dismiss the nature of the threat.
And no, the reality is that we're just lucky, and these guys, mostly we're lucky that these guys tend to be kind of incompetent.
Right.
Apparently they were going to kill one of the guys specifically because he was incompetent and they thought he would rat them out or give them away.
Yeah.
One of the most amusing bits.
Ironically.
One of the most amusing bits is, one of the affidavits begins with a long set of statements said by these guys talking about how important their OPSEC, their operational security is.
Yeah, so I feel like maybe we should back up just slightly and tell people who the base is.
at it and everything.
And they were saying all this directly to an undercover FBI agent.
So, you know, it's, you know, we take our dark humor where we can.
But, yeah, so I feel like maybe we should back up just slightly and tell people who the base is.
I mean, I feel like we're kind of jumping around just a little bit.
Sure.
And then we'll kind of get into what the main thing that we were going to talk about, which is this sort of the Boogaloo concept.
I think we're going to call this one the Larger Boogaloo because we've covered it a bit in the Siege Pill episodes.
Right.
But it does have a larger meaning.
So let's talk a little bit about the base and its origins.
And I know you've written quite extensively on this as well, so I'll kind of lend it to you, if you don't mind.
Sure.
Well, you know, the BASE is essentially a neo-Nazi terrorist organization that formed initially online in their own communities.
There were a couple of key organizers who were responsible for sort of organizing this platform that they were working on.
And They eventually, there was a lot of crossover between what they wanted to do and what the Atomwaffen guys and the guys on Iron March were talking about.
So there was a lot of cross-pollination between Atomwaffen and the base and you'll find dual membership among them.
But really the base was a somewhat separate group that was really built out of
People who, these guys who believe in James Mason and the whole thing with the book Siege, Mason wrote that's essentially, Mason was a devotee not just of Hitler but also of Charles Manson and he wanted to create, you know, what they called, what Manson called, the Helter Skelter, which was the great race war to come.
And, of course, that concept has transmuted into the Boogaloo now in recent years, because that's what they want to do.
First is tragedy, second is farce, right?
That's always the way it goes.
It always seems like it, except actually I'm not so sure these guys are farce, because they're out there doing paramilitary operations in the wood.
Uh, Woods and, and, uh, you know, so far they haven't, as far as I know, actually killed anyone yet.
Uh, whereas Adam Buffen has.
My understanding of the base, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that they sort of marketed this or they sort of like propagandized it as sort of a nationalist survivalist kind of idea.
You know, it does have, now Norman Spear, who sort of spearheaded the formation of the base, seems to have come out of the Northwest Front, which was Harold Covington's outfit.
Yes.
And he appeared on a couple of episodes of this thing called Lone Wolf Radio, which it would be a shame if those episodes still existed somewhere.
It would be a damn shame if somebody managed to get them.
Yeah, I know.
Because they have been deleted.
But he did appear on this show, and he does kind of talk about it.
In early 2017, he's still on the Northwest Front train, and he's kind of pushing Harold Covington's idea of a Northwest Territorial Imperative.
Early 2019, after a Vice article, a Vice News article kind of comes out, he goes and then he's rebranded himself as Ronald Wolf, and he's got a voice distorter on, and he's doing more explicitly bass activity.
And again, he's advertising it as something that's a little bit more like a training regimen for people who would kind of go off and do their own thing, as opposed to something that's Like, explicitly designed to create terror incidents, maybe?
Although it's kind of a- because there's obviously there's a propaganda wing and then there's like what they're actually doing sort of thing and there's always a slippery terminology here.
But I think it's clear that the base is kind of after a slightly different model than, say, something like Atomwaffen, which is much more sort of like the independent actors sort of creating stochastic terrorism, whereas the base, to the degree that it's advocating activity, it's a much more sort of formalized militaristic structure is kind of what they seem to have in mind.
And also much more survivalist-oriented, as you mentioned.
So one of the sort of oddities about reporting on them is that you'll hear Especially a lot of journalists who don't operate well in this sphere love to seize on is, oh, guess what?
The base translates as Al-Qaeda.
And no, they're not really connected.
And that wasn't the inspiration from that.
To be fair, when I originally, like, found out about the bass, that was my immediate thought.
Well, clearly, they're just aping Al Qaeda, right?
So, like, that's the obvious... it's the obvious inference.
And in fact, I argued that publicly until somebody told me I was full of shit on that.
Well, only somewhat.
Let's be clear about that.
Because Norman clearly named it Especially if you, you know, read the old chats and things like this.
A lot of the whole reason for the name of the group as The Bass was that this was a reference to Balkanization and, you know, Norman's vision of this self-sustaining survivalist prepper world.
The basses that they wanted to have after the shit hit the fan, right?
The collapse of Zog and all of whatever it is that they were seeing and so he was seeing it as this is going to be the base where you can come and then later he realized that oh yeah it has this coincidental connection and and I don't think he's tried to dissuade people from seeing it or from referencing it because it kind of conveniently fits into their we want to do a terror
A threatening posture but so it's convenient for him to not discourage it but truly in truth the connection between with the base and al-qaeda is very thin.
Right yeah no so yeah no clearly so so anyway so everyone working just just to let everybody listening to my words right now know Everyone working in this space who's been at it for more than 10 minutes knows that Al-Qaeda translates to the base in Arabic.
You don't have to say it anymore.
I promise you.
Please, please don't keep repeating it.
Emily Gorchansky changed her display name on Twitter to, yes I know the base translates to Al-Qaeda.
Anyway, moving on.
Um, so well, I mean, I gotta say, and so let's go back, let's backtrack a little further back to this, to the March Monday.
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Cause I'm actually, this is where, I mean, even though we've had these neo-Nazis get arrested and stuff, People need to understand that the violent ethos lying underneath this ceiling here is not just restricted to these neo-Nazis.
It's actually part of the regular rhetoric that these militia, Patriot militia types use.
There was a guy in, a guy named, he goes by the nom de plume Ace Baker on Facebook.
He's got 540,000 followers and he runs these live streams in which recently he's been urging people to attend the Monday rally.
And he's particularly taken on this or targeted this African-American legislator who has been defiant about the whole thing.
And during the recent live stream, let me read you the quote that he said, directed at this legislator.
He said, you should be pulled out of office by the hair on your head, walking down the streets of the Capitol, walked up to the steps of a swinging rope that's placed around your neck because you, sir, are a tyrant and you're committing treason.
And you would be a good example to set for the other elected officials who are doing the same thing.
Notice, of course, that he's talking about a black man, you know.
Well, that's purely an ancillary detail, David.
I mean, they will claim all day that they are not racist, so we have to just take them at their word on this, correct?
Yeah, no history there, folks.
Just pretend that history didn't happen.
Yeah, we did an epic, our longest episode yet, with Jason Wilson, who came on and described the entire history of the militia movement and far-right racism in the Pacific Northwest.
So just go back and listen to that one.
It's a couple back.
As you know, Jason and I are pals, so I did actually listen to that episode.
It was terrific.
Yeah, no.
So we don't have to get quite in depth on that again.
Yeah, no, no.
But this is the point is that the part of what is swelling up here is this extreme radicalism.
And ultimately, I mean, part of Foy Rhodes' interview, I found was very worrisome because he began talking about not just the Rally Monday, but the fact that they have all these counties and cities all around rural Virginia adopting the sanctuary, or what do they call it, the Second Amendment sanctuaries.
Uh, statutes laws that basically declare themselves, uh, Nolan, you know, all federal laws about or state laws, uh, Nolan void and that anybody can do whatever they want under, uh, you know, the purview of their counties.
And he of course sees one of the things you got to understand is that this is part of the patriot rhetoric that we've been hearing for years and years and years.
It was really one of the some of the organizing stuff that I used to hear back in the 90s was this so-called constitutionalist view and it was derived from The old posse common taught us in these racist systems.
And one of the things they did in the 90s was kind of strip out the overt racism and anti-Semitism that was present in the original posse version and sort of presented as, we're just patriotic Americans.
And this constitutionalism really is at the heart of what we call the Patriot Movement.
But it's this really radical re-reading of the Constitution in which the federal government is incredibly limited in its reach.
It's really only allowed to organize a federal army.
And the supreme law of every place on earth is the county sheriff.
And the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officers Association, CSPOA, which is a thing nationwide.
What's his name?
David Clark, who was, I think, police chief of Milwaukee.
And a big Trump ally.
Big Trump ally.
He's the African-American man with the big 10-gallon hat.
All the time.
Right.
But certainly, like, out West, I mean, I remember seeing a graphic where I think all but three counties in Colorado have a county sheriff who is a member of the CSPOA.
Right.
I mean, this is a massive thing out in the American West, and I think it gets... Not just in the West, throughout the Midwest as well.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
It's big around here too, don't worry.
I'm aware.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, this is part of the problem.
You know, the Southern Poverty Law Center did a really good report on the CSPOA by Ryan Lenz back in, I think it was 2015, called Lying in the Sand.
And I urge everyone to go back and read that because it's actually really important to understand that this is part of the underlying story that we're dealing with here today.
And that's what these guys, and you know, the CSPOA, Let's just get everybody straight.
CSPOA or the constitutionalist view was what drove the Bundys at Bunkerville, drove Ammon Bundy again at the Malheur standoff.
So we've already had two really large federal standoffs involving these constitutionalists.
And the federal government has had difficulty dealing with them, figuring out how to deal with them in both of those cases.
So What we're looking at tomorrow could very well be the beginning of a sort of extended program throughout rural Virginia.
in which this kind of resistance takes place.
And that was exactly what Rhodes was talking about in this interview.
He said, yes, it could come down to a standoff.
And we want to we're going to be there, you know, for for these people throughout Virginia to help them organize their local militias to stand up to the state government and the evil New World Order, essentially.
And this is something that's been on their agenda for a very, very long time.
And what's happening tomorrow could very well be the start of their attempts to really manifest it.
I mean, to really do something like a Bundy standoff in potentially Richmond, Virginia, potentially in a city.
Although, you know, we're kind of expecting it more in, you know, you might see a little bit more in those Second Amendment sanctuary counties, which is... I think that's where it's more likely to occur.
Right, right.
But it's certainly not... I mean, I'm not trying to be alarmist.
And again, this episode will come out after whatever happens on January 20th.
there's real concern and i'm seeing a lot of conversation a lot of chatter and sort of like my circles uh of of you know it's been something that's been brewing for a while people are really worried about this being sort of a another you know sort of so that's the kind of thing we saw unite the right but this time you know much more heavily armed um and uh without these sort of it's without as much of the explicit white nationalist angle i mean you know if those three members of the base who were uh essentially about to take 1500 rounds and unload them into
uh as many people as possible on the in richmond uh those three are no longer a threat an immediate threat but who knows uh kind of what's what who else might be planning to attend and uh i mean it really feels like a it really feels like a powder keg yeah yeah To a lot of people in that area.
And that is, you know, it's concerning.
I'll be honest with you, having been in the crowds of these guys, having been around the three percenters and these Oath Keepers, there are guys in their ranks who are in fact very competent.
They're competent not just with handling arms, but also ordinance.
And they're capable of, I mean, the main thing I would kind of be looking for, frankly, tomorrow is a truck bomb.
I think that that's a very possible likelihood, because some of these guys are very much capable of setting one of those off.
So, yeah, it's all very frightening and disturbing.
I don't know.
I mean, we could wind up with a perfectly peaceful day tomorrow, but even if so, this ain't going to be over anytime soon.
These guys are really circling around the state of Virginia right now, and they want to cause trouble.
I mean, that's what they do.
So, let's get to that dark imagination aside.
Let's find lighter topics and talk about this concept of the Boogaloo.
Which, again, we've kind of mentioned it a few times and I kind of described it with relation to Siege back in episode 28 when we talked about James Mason's writings and with this kind of, you know, Very online, kind of a terrorist encouraging community.
What I only kind of realized a little bit later is that the term has a little bit longer of a a background, a little bit more heritage than just a few months ago within those circles and that it sort of seems to have come out of libertarian circles and sort of this, these kind of like right libertarians and ultimately in this kind of like hardcore gun culture.
So why don't you give us kind of your perspective on the term and where you kind of see it coming out of?
Well, actually, I have to confess, Daniel, I've only been seeing Boogaloo popping up relatively, like you say, the last couple of months.
I think it goes back a year or two.
I think it's older than I thought it was, but I think it's only a couple of years because, or at least a couple of years, because I found like Facebook groups that were, you know, kind of 2017 and 2018, and they'll sometimes use the term Big Igloo is to avoid the the Boogaloo filter, and so whenever you see, you know, t-shirts and that sort of thing, and ironically, again, I don't spend much time on Facebook, But the really nutty stuff seems to go on on Facebook.
Just the really off-the-wall stuff.
So yeah, I believe it is, I mean, obviously the concept predates the term, but even the term itself is a little bit broader.
Right, well, so I only saw spot use of it popping up in, mostly in discussions about a response to, remember in 2017,
The Alex Jones world and all of the far right, including the bikers for Trump and all those folks, were completely freaked by the idea that a cadre of communists were going to be descending on the Capitol on the day of Trump's inauguration and preventing him from taking the oath.
And then a couple of like a year later, they became convinced that they were plotting for a coup.
No, it wasn't quite the year.
It was on November 4th, 2017, that they were saying there was going to be this mass coup run again by Antifa and the communists.
And of course, none of this happened, but it was in the discussions around that online that I saw people saying, hey man, if they want to do that dance, we can boogaloo.
And I didn't, I didn't cotton to what that was referenced to right away.
But I will say that the concept of a race war or a civil war within America around race or really around
um you know right very far right ideology versus against everybody else you know because they conflate liberalism with communism and socialism anyway right so we're all evils and we're all targets it doesn't matter if you're voting for joe biden you might as well be a supporter of chairman Mao that's the you know that's pretty much it yeah exactly so and of course Pelosi is also
Because it's all being financed by George Soros and the Jews.
But honestly, this has a really long lineage and goes back to my very earliest days in the late 70s and early 80s when I was covering the radical right in northern Idaho where we were dealing with the Aryan nations.
And out of the Aryan Nations, of course, we had that group, The Order, that ran a national terror campaign robbing banks and armored cars and assassinating radio talk show hosts in Denver.
And they finally got caught in December of 1984, not far from where I now live, So, you know, those guys were believed that they were, you know, they were robbing all these banks and getting all this money with the intent of fomenting a race war.
And they got the idea, in fact, from the neo-Nazi book, The Turner Diaries, which was a blueprint for such a civil war, a civil war based on race or race war.
And it's It's been really, and it's just been nurtured for a really long time.
Mostly, so by the 90s, it kind of transmutated into just, they took out the overtly racist elements and didn't talk about a race war anymore.
They started talking about a civil war.
And this was something that I used to hear from the militia folks in Montana and Idaho back in the 90s all the time.
Sure.
But it really kind of went away.
There wasn't a whole lot of talk about it during most of the Bush years.
But, you know, during the Clinton years, they were really up in arms and getting ready to resist the new world order.
And a lot of that became muted during the Bush years.
But as soon as Barack Obama came along in 2008 and was running for the presidency, we really started seeing all this stuff come bubbling right back up to the surface so that You know, I mean, we were hearing, and it was getting into the mainstream.
That was the crazy part.
I mean, you go on Glenn Beck's, once Obama won the presidency, it just went crazy.
You could go on Glenn Beck's Fox News show and he would be there warning Americans about, oh, it's going to look like a Mad Max hellscape by 2014.
He really was warning about people about run by independent militias and biker gangs.
You know, that was what he was saying that, you know, in 2009, that five years later, the world was going to be this dystopian hellscape.
And And we had people like, you know, the very early Oath Keeper, Charles Dyer, who went on, who got huge numbers of hits on YouTube by going on and doing these rants with a death mask on, you know, what's a very popular siege mask now.
First guy I saw doing it was Charles Dyer back in 2010, warning Americans that there's going to be a civil war under Obama.
And so this has been bubbling up for a very, very long time, and it has been encouraged by people like Alex Jones, particularly remember the whole Jade Helm thing, and Michael Savage, who published a book in, what was it, 2011 called, or no, I think it's 2014, called How to Stop the Coming Civil War.
You know, and his answer was, well, just the way to win is to elect far-right Republicans to every office, because then you win.
You don't have to fight for it.
Well, it is interesting how a lot of the difference that we see is that between this sort of like kind of naked electoralism, There's a civil war that's going to be brought on by the Democrats, and they're just going to come and they're going to take all your guns, and the way we solve that is elect the most mainstream, low-tax Republican you can, who's going to give all the money to the corporate interests.
And essentially, just sort of encoding it, it's using this sort of idea of civil war and heightening this tension as a way of pushing a partisan political agenda.
You know, to some degree.
But then, like, on top of that, so, like, Glenn Beck basically admitted that he was full of shit, like, after Trump was elected.
You know, he kind of just comes out and is like, oh yeah, I was, and now he's back on his, now he's back on his thing, but like, he was definitely doing that kind of like, oh no, I never, that was the character I was playing, come on, that was the thing, you know?
So you can believe what you want to believe.
He did an apology tour with Samantha Bee and all that kind of stuff, and I was going, uh, yeah, right.
Yeah, but yeah, you're, Honestly, they're both bullshit as far as I'm concerned, but we can... You and me both.
Yeah, no, I mean, obviously Alex Jones would be another kind of example of this, and this kind of like broad kind of conspiracy-minded stuff, this sort of like really off-the-wall sort of people find entertaining in this kind of nonsense.
That then, um, gets, it becomes just sort of part of the air that people breathe.
It becomes part of your media environment.
And then, you know, because, like, Alex Jones isn't saying, like, the Jews are doing this.
He's saying the globalist elites, and he's kind of, it's sort of this mishmash of, like, no ideology at all.
Code words.
I mean, who knows how much Alex Jones believes in this shit, right?
You know, because he too says like, oh no, I'm just playing a character.
You know, whenever his, like, his alimony payments are in dispute.
Like, I'm not actually a violent racist, you know.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, I think it's a combination.
It's always hard to tell how much these con artists actually believe their own con, but I think a lot of their key to success is actually there's a level at which they really do believe it.
Alex Jones brought on Richard Spencer onto his InfoWars show a few days ago.
To encourage him to go to Richmond.
And apparently, from what I'm understanding, again just kind of looking on Twitter before we start recording, there are Alex Jones, like, tactical Humvees parked on the streets of Richmond right now.
And on the show, Richard Spencer said, like, oh yeah, I'll go and if you're going to be there, Alex, I will go there with you.
Yeah.
Presumably Richard Spencer is going to be a part of Alex Jones' contingent in Richmond, Virginia tomorrow?
Maybe they'll all have tiki torches like last time.
Oh god.
Maybe they'll put them on the ends of the rifle barrels or something.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No.
Oh god.
Who knows?
Who knows what they're going to say.
He's using weapons this time, most likely.
Yeah, no.
So I do think it's interesting that another angle on this, and we're kind of highlighting the – there are distinctions between Alex Jones and Richard Spencer.
There's an There's a distinction between something like the base and the patriot movement and the, you know, the CSPLA and various things.
But they all do tend to use the similar rhetoric, and they do tend to use the same kinds of... They tend to work together against what they see as the left or the far left, whenever their issues are involved.
And what I find Really interesting is that in the Turner Diaries, which I mean, I assume we have both read at least once, you know, literally the opening pages of the Turner Diaries are a gun-grabbing scenario after something called the Cohen Act is passed.
Which, that's certainly not coded language at all.
It's called the Cohen Act.
And, you know, the protagonist of the novel is having his guns seized by a pack of like Quote unquote roving Negroes who are kind of coming in and taking his guns and he's like, well, yeah, these these dumb black people aren't going to find the guns that I the one gun I've managed to hide.
But if there's a competent police officer, they're going to find it.
And so this idea of gun confiscation.
That a sort of racial war is sparked by gun confiscation goes back to kind of the very early days of this movement.
I remember, I was a big Robert Heinlein fan as a teenager, and if you read in his book, Expanded Universe, it includes some of his patriot stuff that he wrote, the anti-communist stuff that he wrote, the strivalist stuff that he wrote right after World War II.
And, um, it includes advice about, like, hiding guns, and not submitting to federal gun registries, and, you know, this sort of, like, survivalist idea.
And at that point, it was like, well, a nuclear war is going to come, and the communists are going to invade, and, you know, we're going to have to, like, fight them off, you know, house by house, and, like, a red dawn kind of scenario.
Ron Hubbard had a similar background, by the way.
Right, yeah, sure.
And so we see, I mean, this stuff does kind of go back into, I mean, you know, earlier than that really, but I mean, even its modern incarnation, you know, goes back to right after World War II, and this kind of like overtly anti-communist, kind of pro-American idea.
Even this, the broader idea of like, you know, the Tree of Liberty watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots stuff.
Right.
I mean, that line shows up in, again, just referencing Heinlein, it shows up in the Puppet Masters, which is published in 1953, you know?
And, you know, so it's... Not Starship Troopers?
Oh, I'm sure it's the story of Starship Troopers as well, and that one was a juvenile written for, like, you know, teenagers, teenage boys.
That's practically a boy's love magazine.
Yeah, that's right.
Fascism for teenage boys.
I didn't realize it either.
I loved, when I was a teenager, I thought Stranger in a Strange Land was a great book and it wasn't until I started actually studying literature that I realized it was trash.
I think I loved that one a little bit longer than some of the other ones but, you know, that's a, you know, anyway.
Yeah, it's probably his best novel, certainly his best written.
Yeah, no, We can talk Heinlein in another space.
Let's talk about Monday instead.
Yeah, let's do that.
Kind of get into some of the nitty-gritty of what we're thinking.
Well, certainly, I just think, you know, I hope people are able to, you know, I hope people stay away.
And I hope that the people who are in Richmond and have to live there and have to deal with these clowns crowding their streets, because I can tell you it's intimidating as hell.
They all drive big-ass pickups.
They all run around.
They're all jacked up.
They all have guns, and they all love to engage in intimidating behavior.
So it's going to be an ugly scene in Richmond tomorrow, and I hope everybody comes out okay.
But I have no great expectation that it will.
So because you get that many you get that many cranks in one place and honestly I don't I would be surprised if nothing happens during the day and then things happen at night because that's certainly what we've seen here in the northwest with and on the west coast with a lot of these fire riot events is that they will go have their protests during the day
And then filter out to their cars and then go hit the neighborhoods where they know anti-fascists hang out to try to create violence in those neighborhoods.
And that's been a bigger problem.
That's when most of the violence has actually occurred at most of our, around most, between the far right and the anti-fascists here.
Well, even the James Alex Fields car attack, I mean, that was after the, you know, the event, you know, it's after the thing.
I mean, that one didn't happen so much, but, you know, it's certainly, you know, he's frustrated and he's trying to get home and, you know, presumably he sees this group of cheering.
anti-racist people and makes a horrible decision.
I mean, we've seen there was an incident, I believe in Nashville, where Matt Heimbach and his crew, back when he was irrelevant, the traditional workers party, or traditionalist workers party, it's always like unclear what that term is, but they were in a bar and just beat some African-American but they were in a bar and just beat some African-American people up outside the bar, if I remember those details Yeah, you're right.
It is after these events that you start to see when the energy of the day dissipates and maybe some of the simmering anger.
They're antsy still for more.
And they have a lot more time to consume alcohol and that really is a major factor in a lot of this.
Although I should probably...
In some of these cases, a lot of these guys are doing crystal meth, too, frankly.
Sure, yeah.
Well, yeah, we've been going, I mean, about an hour.
It's kind of a little bit of a short episode.
Do you have anything else?
I know you've written a detailed piece.
We'll link it in the show notes.
We'll put some background material on the base and some of this other stuff.
I think we've definitely hit the high points.
Did you have something else you wanted to throw in here while we're recording?
Let's put it this way, Daniel.
I think the thing to understand here is that Vince, one of the things that really has been happening at these street events that has been possibly the most disturbing to me is that It's really radicalized.
What we're really seeing is a lot of these guys getting really deeply radicalized by attending these street events when they weren't that radical before they got there, and particularly this is true of the Patriot militia types who Believe that they're you know, a lot of these guys are well-meaning Patriots who have a pretty shallow understanding of history and what?
How gun rights actually work, but well, you know They really sincerely believe they're doing the right thing and believe that they're sincerely standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law and blah blah blah and And they've been persuaded of this by, you know, all of, I mean, a lot of their belief systems are being backed up by a lot of mainstream garbage.
You know, people like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and stuff that's out there in the mainstream, as well as, of course, the Alex Joneses and Infowars.
And so these guys have been actually preparing Folks who are still on the far right and within the realm of what I call alt-America, that alternative universe that they all occupy that's full of conspiracy theories.
And it's effectively radicalizing them by exposing them to and having them rub shoulders with people who are overt fascists and neo-Nazis.
So I've been seeing guys who start out as, you know, just kind of like biker militia types.
You know, I like to fly a flag on my bag type stuff, and they got their guns, and you can't take my guns away.
My God, my country, my guns, and low taxes.
Yeah.
Which, you know, has its problems.
But, you know, hey, you know, like that's, you know, within the realm of, you know, reasonable.
That's not like overt ethnic cleansing in genocide.
Right.
Right.
You know, there's a difference.
Then they start hanging out with Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, and they start jacking up the rhetoric, and pretty soon they're talking about going to the homes of Antifa leaders and shooting them, you know?
And the overt anti-Antifa stuff that is all over the place, and
Our good buddy Andy Ngo, who I think we're going to be talking about a lot more in a future episode, but, you know, has made a career out of this, of mainstreaming, you know, of taking, you know, kind of ugly mug shots of people and saying, like, transgender Antifa activists, violent thug arrested, you know, for, you know, and there's just no, like, there's just no parallel between
I mean, not to say there aren't people who do things they shouldn't do and do it under the cover of anti-fascism.
We're not pretending that.
But these are not people going for ethnic cleansing.
They're not plotting mass murder on that kind of scale in the way that we're seeing in these far-right groups.
I mean, you know, Daniel, that I've had my own problems with antifascists dating back to inauguration night 2017 when I was covering a Milo rally and the young antifascist man standing next to me was shot and nearly died.
And I was a witness in his trial.
The video evidence that I shot that night wound up being critical to charging the young alt-right couple who had shot him with, you know, with shooting him.
And so, but the problem was that 45, even though I was standing right next to him 45 seconds before he was shot, One of the things that happened was just in that 45 seconds before, I was hit from behind by a young anti-fascist woman who thought it would be clever to knock the phone out of my hand because, you know, they do knock people's phones away.
Actually, it was out of a selfie stick that I was holding up, but knocked my phone away and sent it skittering across the bricks there at UW.
By the time I had retrieved it, I heard a gunshot and there was Joshua Dukes laying there with a near-fatal gunshot wound.
So my video, I actually would have had the evidence.
It took the police three months to file charges because they didn't have a very clear view of what actually happened and I would have been able to provide them with that.
And so, and you know, of course, I hear from anti-fascists, well, we don't want to cooperate with the cops anyway.
And, you know, I'm one of those guys that I've been working in hate crimes and domestic terrorism for decades.
So I have to work with law enforcement and I've never had a problem working with law enforcement.
But, you know, and I understand people's hesitation to do with it, but please don't second guess me for working with the police.
It's something that I do very carefully.
I have a great deal of experience with it, and I wasn't going to be allowing them to expose or even look at evidence that might have wound up in the prosecution of anybody who was an anti-fascist.
I had an agreement with the investigators that any evidence from my video would only be used for this case.
And I was great with that, you know, because I knew that it was this alt-right couple that had shot the guy.
So, and I had actually been recording the husband of this couple all night because he was a real troublemaker.
So So anyway, so there are tactics that the anti-fascists use that I really don't agree with.
But that's because I'm a journalist, right?
And we're going to have to agree to disagree.
I totally understand why they do it.
But so I do work hard with the local anti-fascists so that they know who I am and they know I'm not going to be doxing them.
And so generally it's worked out very well.
They don't bother me.
They know who Andy Ngo is, though.
They go bother him.
Well-deserved.
But at any rate, the thing that came out of that The whole trial was that what really disturbed me the most was the way both, I mean, the defense attorneys really tried to make their case in the trial be about how well these guys were just defending themselves from the evil anti-fascists.
And so the media depictions of anti-fascists as this great existential threat to democracy and free speech have really had this toxic effect.
Both, I mean, within the realm of law enforcement, but just also in the general public's understanding of what's going on here.
So people, I don't, so certainly one of my crusades that I have been trying to engage on as a journalist, one of the things, part of the narrative that I'm trying to change is To get people to understand that no, actually, anti-fascists are a very complicated phenomenon.
There is a handful of them who engage in violent tactics, but they really tend to not be in the mainstream of anti-fascism.
And they also, I mean, they're all they all argue for violence in the sake of self-defense, which I don't actually argue with.
You know, I think that's that's actually makes good sense.
Yeah, but what if your race has been genocided, David?
What if we as white people are being slowly wiped out by people with three parentheses?
Isn't that just self-defense, ultimately?
But the main thing is look at the record, people.
I mean, I've been dealing with right-wing domestic terrorism for 30 years now, and I can tell you there just is no comparison at all in terms of the body count and the numbers of incidents.
You know, I put together this database on domestic terrorism between 2008 and 2017 that we published in Reveal News that really showed that it was almost as far as Compared to even Islamist terrorism, it was more than two to one right-wing extremists who were engaging in domestic terrorism in that time period.
And far-left terrorists were hardly even in the picture.
We had, what, 115, I think, incidents of domestic terrorism from the extremist right, About 60 examples of Islamist terrorism and 18 examples of far-left terrorism.
And none of those, and the lethality of the far-left was, there was really only one incident and that's the Dallas police shooting that had lethal consequences.
Otherwise, the body count is just phenomenally different, and the sheer numbers and volume of incidents is just overwhelmingly on the extremist right.
So, let's be clear, anti-fascists have never killed anyone.
Right-wing extremists?
It's going to take me all night to give you a list of people they've killed.
Timothy McVeigh alone is, what, 168?
Just in the last couple of years.
I mean, let's go to El Paso and Christchurch and Pittsburgh, please, you know?
That's just not a comparison.
And it's ridiculous to hold them up as equivalent.
It's just obscene and ridiculous.
And media people who get lazy about this stuff just drive me right up the fucking wall.
No, I agree.
One more thing I did want to highlight just before we, um, because I, um, I've been following, uh, you know, the, the, uh, Matt Shea's, uh, radio show.
Yes.
And, uh, this guy, uh, Jacob, uh, John Jacob Schmidt.
I want to call him Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, but that was John Jacob Schmidt.
Well, that's what he's actually playing off of, you know.
Right, right.
No, obviously that's the thing.
He's, you know, because he's like, oh, I'm John Jacob Schmidt.
And if that's your name, that's my name too, or something.
Like, you know, um, it's... My name's Jingleheimer.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've been kind of following that, and that's the Radio Free Redoubt show, and I actually listened to the one from two days ago, prepping, like today, as we were prepping for this episode, and I've been kind of following him for a little while, and for instance, when I think it was Connor Climo was arrested, he's one of the Attawafing guys who was arrested on
Weapons charges and he was planning on kind of killing some people in Las Vegas and You know had I believe he had some bomb making supplies.
I mean, you know some some pretty some pretty awful stuff and I'm talking about like how some of the red flag laws were used against some of the various other kind of Adam Woffin wasn't connected if you're a Craig connected people and And then we use that as a, you know, this is the tip of the spear, guys.
Like, this is the thing, like, we may not agree with these, like, radical socialist Nazis, but, you know, we've got to protect their gun rights, because this is the way that they're going to come for the rest of us, and they're just going to start calling the rest of us Nazis, essentially.
And, um, this is, I mean, you know, not to put too fine a point on this, this is the, this is the point of, um, you know, the Turner Diaries, this is the point of Siege, this is the point of the, the rhetoric.
I mean, you know, even, even, uh, Manson himself, um, you know, the idea is not, we're gonna, I mean, the base is a little bit different, you know, because the base is kind of like arming kind of paramilitary stuff for themselves, but the idea of the Boogaloo is ultimately, um, to some degree, um, it is to, um,
To create tension in society, to force the cops to fight the people who are right-wing, but not as right-wing as they are, and to kind of force the two groups to battle, so that eventually, something something white ethnostate, or something something Civil War, streets drawn with blood, white people take control, something something, you know.
Billy Roper runs on a very similar kind of model, you know.
You know, there's this sort of combination of survivalism and everything, but I do think it's important to note that, like, these guys, you know, who are planning this, these kinds of, like, terrorism, they're not planning to fight this war themselves.
They're planning to sort of make society collapse by making other people do their dying for them, effectively.
Sure.
Create as much so chaos as Far and wide as they can.
Get everybody all stirred up and whipped up and at each other's throats and make sure that there's a lot of weapons involved.
Right.
Exactly, and they're using these kinds of Second Amendment issues.
They're using this kind of like constitutional, you know, stuff.
They're using this propaganda in order to sort of push this idea further and further into the mainstream.
And the reality is that, I mean, and I've, you know, regardless of how you feel about guns, I mean, this is a leftist podcast.
I assume that most of our audience is not gonna have a particular issue with gun ownership, but however you feel about guns, Doing it like a mass like federal agencies going through this country and like disarming people, that is the quickest way to see mass bloodshed in this in this country.
I can't imagine an easier way to do that.
It's just not, it's just not, you know, if you understand the right wing at all that's just that's just the reality of it regardless of how you feel about that, you know.
enjoy Beto O'Rourke's charm but when he did that thing at that campaign event that said yes we're going to take your guns away I was like oh oh yeah and they'll use it as propaganda forever they will use that as propaganda forever ever yeah and not only that it's I don't know anybody because I've been of course engaged in anti-gun uh you know in gun control activism for you covering it for a long time
and and I know a lot of the people who run you know it's particularly in DC who run the organizations that work to pass gun control legislation And of course, not one of them.
Would ever even suggest such a thing, you know, because they know better.
It's sort of like, you know, I also work with immigrant groups, people who are all about sort of defending the rights of immigrants.
And you'll never hear any of those guys talk about amnesty or open borders because they're not interested in that.
And they aren't interested in promoting any legislation that would create it.
They are interested in defending the interests of human beings.
You know, I'm not a big like nation-state kind of guy, let's just put it that way.
You know, I'm a worldwide socialist kind of guy, you know, but like there's a reality to the situation here and you know certainly we're not gonna Create, um, you know, our multicultural utopia by, um, you know, we're not planning on doing this through like worldwide bloodshed of like all Republicans are going to die or anything like that.
It wasn't on my list.
Oh yeah.
Let's round up and kill all the conservatives.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I know.
I, I, I haven't actually ever seen a leftist, even the most vile leftists, You know, the ones who have lost their sanity and humanity as well.
I haven't even seen any of them argue that.
But I see them.
I see right wingers argue it all the time about liberals and leftists and people of color and Jews.
You know, they're all going to round us up and put us in concentration camps because they and they argue, of course.
I mean, that's part of their claim is that, oh, well, they're planning to do that to us.
Like just like there was recently A post floating around on right-wing social media about the supposed Antifa kill list.
You're right.
That's not what Antifa does.
There's an Atomwaffen kill list because they kill people!
They'll use Connor Betts as their go-to example.
Connor Betts was not an anti-fascist.
No, he wasn't.
He was a Twitter user.
He interacted with some people that I know, that I like personally.
But he did not do the thing that he did.
That's not part of the process of what anyone would ever argue what did it reflect a left-wing cause in any regard like he went and he went and like shot up a bar well like you know he shot his trans uh brother got his trans brother brother okay um yeah no we um and uh i had i'm talking to some people who suspect there's some greater complexity there which hopefully we can talk about on this show Yeah, yeah.
I haven't delved that case enough.
All I know is that we are assessing that case as in terms of the database we're creating.
And he's just kind of in this, he's this one case that we can't really ascertain a motive.
Uh, and we do, we do include left-wing cases in our database when it's clear, and there are, you know, there's some things that are, that are clearly left-wing in his background, but there's absolutely a non-indication that the act itself was politically motivated or was intended to send a any kind of a political message and be um there is a lot of contradictory evidence
uh regarding this guy in terms of what his actual political orientation was particularly the extreme misogyny in which he indulged so uh which i think raises all kinds of questions about his supposed support for elizabeth warren i I suspect that that was actually kind of trolling, but... Sure.
Well, yeah, there's a, that's a, sorry to kind of bring it up, but that's kind of the one that we always get smeared with.
It's like, well, how about, how about Conor Betts, you know?
Yeah, well, Conor Betts isn't anti-fascist.
Yeah.
I mean, Willem van Spronsen... Yeah, we can't say that there was no anti-fascist terrorism anymore because of van Spronsen.
And I have a lot of friends here in Seattle who were friends with van Spronsen, particularly in the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, to which he belonged.
I know a number of those folks, and they're actually some of my favorite people among the ranks of anti-fascists, because they're cool, actually, some of them.
But I never met Vance Bronson, and for them, the whole Vance Bronson issue is very agonizing, but I have to look at it very cold-bloodedly as a guy who deals in domestic terrorism, and it was, I'm sorry, that was left-wing domestic terrorism.
So, you know, I don't want to include it, but Everything he did was right up the alley, so.
Well, the only thing I would argue is that the only person he killed was himself.
Yeah, no, I know.
He didn't kill anybody.
That's right.
Other than that it was a suicide by cop.
And it was pretty clear that that was kind of what he wanted.
He wanted to go out and make a point as his way of going out of the world.
But nonetheless, he really kind of, I think he made things difficult for Anti-fascists in terms of the national discussion around them.
Definitely through kind of a monkey wrench.
Certainly what I've been trying to say in explaining that anti-fascists aren't a threat And up until he did that I was able to say they've never engaged in any act of terrorism and that kind of threw that line out the window.
And look it's not about me or it's not about that but it's but it certainly is about public perception regardless of how you feel we do live in a democratic society and how we, the way a democratic society works is we I do have to persuade people who don't have our same political views that we are doing the right thing.
And part of the way you do that, of course, is, I believe, to maintain a civilized approach to matters of violence.
And unfortunately, I thought that was a step out.
Fair enough.
I understand the people who loved him and stuff like that.
I understand that before he did this he was a wonderful guy to be around.
I think there's some complexity around that one.
We're a little bit far afield and I think we can start to wrap up here.
here um but you know that's that's a part of yeah i think that's also something i will jack jack edit some but i think we can yeah um i think that part of what we part of the reason we kind of land there is because there is a complexity to some of these issues at some times about like what is the the the proper use of Of violence and what is the proper way?
How do we even define violence within these within this kind of world?
And I think it is worth highlighting this sort of difference between the sort of philosophical approach is taken by even, you know, even if you are going to consider violence, Bronson and active domestic terrorism, which, you know, we could.
I'm sure people listening to this are going to get angry at me for even including that, but I'm willing to take the argument as it lays, and to say, even if we consider that an act of domestic terrorism, You know, the results of that don't compare to what we've already seen versus what we might see tomorrow in Richmond.
No comparison.
There is no comparison.
There is no comparison.
And so this is part of why I keep saying, The media narrative, even with Willem's act thrown in, is just wildly out of whack.
And the public's perception of what the conflict is about Right.
And our hearts go out to everybody who, all the good people who both live in Richmond and will be in Richmond.
Yes.
And hopefully by the time this is released we will not have another bloodbath to report on.
Yeah.
And let's be clear, I'm also concerned, having been a rural dweller myself, I know a lot of the folks who are in these rural Virginia counties.
are not right-wing extremists and are frequently victimized by them and actually frequently have to kind of live in terror of them so my heart goes out to them too because I think that like I say I don't think this is going to end tomorrow and I think it's going to filter out into these rural counties and No, I wasn't trying to leave them out of this.
I was focusing on the actual event, but obviously you're correct.
I mean, you know, this is a bigger problem.
Hopefully, you know, what this podcast does and what your work over the decades has done, which I've been reading for a long time, as we revealed in the first time you came on, you know, is to help to understand what's actually going on in these movements, to help to differentiate between is to help to understand what's actually going on in these movements, to help to differentiate between the different groups and to understand the very
But also to understand how they all do work together in ways in this greater Boogaloo concept, this idea of the oncoming Civil War, and the idea that it's going to be kind of brought about by harsh gun control.
control measures and the way they use rhetoric to make very reasonable quote unquote reasonable gun control measures to seem like extreme gun control measures i think is a really important thing that you really can't understand this any of this movement without really understanding that kind of central concept and so um i'm really glad we we explored it a bit here yes if although we were a little bit scattershot so well that's what you have editors for Yeah, well, that's what this podcast kind of is.
It's a scattershot conversation of me putting notes together.
That's all this is meant to be.
David, tell us where we can find you on the internet and where your work can be located.
We'll put a bunch of links in the show notes.
Please give me anything, everything you've got on this topic, we will put it in the show notes for sure.
So I am a staff writer at Daily Kos, which apparently, I discovered today, has just a terrible reputation among anti-fascists.
But, you know, it is what it is.
I really don't think about that.
You filthy liberal!
Well, you know, the truth of it is that, you know, they offered me a superior salary to what the Southern Poverty Law Center is paying me, and they've given me a lot more freedom to write than I had at SPLC.
And so it's been a very good thing and they've been very, very supportive of my work.
So I love working for Daily Kos.
Yeah, I understand that they're not everybody's favorite outlet, but they're good folks.
So you can find my work at dailykos.com.
And I'm also very active on Twitter under my name, David N-E-I-W-E-R-T, and come and watch me.
Oh, I recently tangled with Michael Tracy's white nationalist followers.
That was a lot of fun.
Yeah, follow David's Twitter.
It's always amusing to see the baby right-wingers just try to flex on him.
It's always amusing.
It's always fun to drop those little nukes into their laps, isn't there?
In Minecraft, of course.
And you can find me, I'm at Daniel Lee Harper, if you don't know that already.
I can't imagine you listen to this podcast and are on Twitter.
Although this podcast gets more listens than I have Twitter followers, so there are many people who do not follow me on Twitter who listen to this podcast, so I find people...
I find people referencing the podcast with my name in it and not tag me on Twitter, which is kind of a weird kind of thought, but no, it's fine.
So yeah, you can find me there if you haven't, and if you're on Twitter, whatever, do the thing.
And yeah, thanks again, David, and we will bring you back very soon, I suspect.
Yes, as soon as I get my next project done, we'll be back in touch.
Yeah, no question.
Well, thank you very much, and yeah, cheers.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Daniel.
No problem.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
We're on iTunes and show up in most podcast catches.
You can find Daniel's Twitter, along with links to pretty much everything he does, at Daniel E Harper.
Daniel and I both have Patreons, and any contribution you can make genuinely does help us to do this, though it also really helps if you just listen and maybe talk about us online to spread the word.
