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Jan. 30, 2020 - I Don't Speak German
01:04:00
Episode 42: Augustus Sol Invictus

This episode, Daniel tells us about Austin Gillespie, AKA Augustus Sol Invictus. Content Warnings.

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Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
And here we are with episode 42.
It's the meaning of life.
And yeah, a lot been happening lately.
A lot been happening lately in the world of Nazis.
The mall's worst store, world of Nazis.
What do you get when you multiply six arrested base members by eight?
Exactly, yeah.
I'm not good enough at maths to get that joke.
Pop culture references I can do, maths I can't.
But yeah, here we are, episode 42, and yeah, a lot been happening in the world of Nazis, and again, we're not going to talk about it.
Not this week, anyway.
We kind of have to apologize to you, listeners, at least those of you who follow us On Twitter, because we have made various promises about what's next for the last little while.
Oh, next episode, we've said confidently, is going to be this.
Next episode is going to be that.
And we've kind of reverted to our original plan, except that it wasn't going to be this one.
It was going to be the one before this one.
I don't know.
And we are going to be talking a little bit informally today about Augustus Invictus, who was in the news about 10 years ago, it feels like.
Like three weeks ago, he was arrested.
And it's like, oh, yeah, we should totally do that on the next episode.
And then the world blew up.
That's kind of what happened.
That's right.
And it's been glorious.
And we're not going to cover any of it.
We are not a news coverage podcast.
We are a... It's a good thing, really, isn't it?
Slow but steady wins the race is kind of how I treat this podcast.
Our goal is to be kind of slow and thorough, although we're not necessarily... I don't know.
Doing Augustus is complicated.
Anyway, we'll get there.
We'll figure it out.
One aspect of all the stuff that's been going on lately has been a fair amount of Cantwell news.
But I'm afraid we're not going to be covering that this week either.
Although we do have something special lined up for you, hopefully next week.
Maybe Daniel and I, possibly Daniel and somebody else, are going to be covering the Cantwell news.
So we're excited about that.
Indeed, and just by the time this episode comes out, I will have most likely recorded an episode of Jared Holt's shitpost alongside a very prominent person who you are very likely to know if you listen to this podcast.
And if you follow my Twitter feed, you probably have already seen.
And yeah, we covered a little bit of the Cantwell news, but believe me, there's much, much, much more.
And you're going to want to tune in for the next episode.
So just, this one is boring.
Don't, just tune out and just tune into the next one.
That's kind of why.
Yeah, skip, skip this one.
Don't listen to this one.
Nobody needs to hear this one.
Yeah, this is rubbish.
Yeah, just come back next week for the Campbell News because holy shit!
Just briefly, he finally filed the bullshit filing that he had to do for this legal case which was just a document in support or in opposition to a motion that affected another person and he wrote 300 pages and thought he was going to overturn his entire fucking case.
And I'm pretty sure the judge glanced at it and then set it in the trash can.
So this thing that this guy spent presumably weeks developing made no... like the decision had basically already been made by the time he even filed it.
So good on you, Chris.
Waste as much time as you choose to on nonsense.
This is the legal filing, which if you follow me on Twitter, included a quote from Hitler credited to A famous 20th century statesman.
So, in case you were worried about what the legal acumen of Christopher Cantwell is, that gives you a clue.
And then, on a completely separate legal thing that's happening with Christopher Cantwell, he got arrested for threatening a fucking Nazi.
And trust me, we're gonna deal with all that next week.
Yeah, this is just a trailer.
This is just a trailer for, like, all the bullshit.
All the bullshit.
Believe me, if you were wondering where your Catwoman news went, you'll get it next week.
It's gonna be the pure mainline stuff.
Yeah, we're going to inject it into your ears.
We're going to inject it into your veins, or you can just boof it, and that has particular relevance to Cantwell, which we're just going to leave there.
So next week, get ready for the motherlode of Cantwell news.
Yes, indeed and all sorts of other stuff going on in the world of Nazis and those who oppose them or supposedly oppose them And we are hopefully going to be covering lots of complex and delicate and fascinating stuff about that at some point in the future But we have to be a bit general and non-specific about that at the moment, but do keep your ears open for forthcoming podcasts, but This is episode 42 and this is Augustus Invictus.
And I think, nothing else preliminary we need to cover before I ask you who is, what is, I don't know, tell me about Augustus Invictus.
Augustus Olymvictus, not actually a Roman Emperor, kind of sees himself as a bit of a Roman Emperor.
He is a...
God, so much here.
One of the issues that I run into with a lot of these guys is that they have this kind of extended history that they scrub from the internet and so you kind of find in little bits and bobs with news stories from prior to the time that I started following them and prior to the stuff that's existing on the internet.
you know, you really only get kind of little bits and pieces.
And I try to have a something like kind of a good sense of who these people are and some sense of kind of like the history before I come on here.
And it's been really difficult with Augustus Invictus just because he, more so than even a lot of these other guys, is very aware of his image and he's very aware of his ability to sort of like mask himself behind other kinds of movements and other kinds of ideologies.
Although it's kind of unclear to say like maybe he kind of believed a certain thing at a time and then kind of progressed or maybe he was hiding.
And so more so even than like someone like Andrew Anglin, it's really difficult for me to kind of get like a clear picture and to say kind of definitively I have a really good sense of kind of where he is.
And so his actual ideology is kind of, there are some question marks on this for me, but I feel comfortable kind of talking in generalities about who this guy is and kind of where he comes from.
Invictus is someone who has been on my radar for a while, and we were going to kind of cover him eventually, and then he got arrested at the end of December 30th, 2019.
And then it was kind of released in the first couple of days of 2020.
It was originally broken by a friend of the pod, Nick Martin, who has written extensively about me.
Hypothetically, he'll be coming on this show at some point in the future when he has an open invitation.
And I also want to be clear.
Something that I get a little bit of criticism for in doing this podcast is not talking about personal lives.
They're not talking about sort of allegations of abuse and sexual assaults and those sorts of things.
And some of these figures' pasts and some of these figures' concurrent circumstance.
And I want to be clear that that's not out of a kind of lack of a willingness to delve into those topics, and not out of a lack of taking those topics seriously, as much as I don't want to give these guys the excuse that I'm covering that as a way of sort of smearing them, as opposed to kind of talking about the very public things that they actually say and believe.
And maybe sometimes I err on the side of caution on that, and maybe sometimes I should highlight some of that a little bit more.
But it is kind of one of those things, it's kind of a decision that I've made in terms of how to cover these guys, is I mostly talk about sort of ideology and about sort of their public lives as opposed to, you know, the other stuff that I might be able to cover.
I mean, I go out of my way to be overly fair to these guys.
I'm outraged that you face criticism, to be honest.
How dare people criticise my talent?
You come on here and do it.
I'm joking, I'm joking.
Obviously I'm always welcome to hear criticism in that regard, and I do take that seriously also.
Absolutely.
Pay no attention to my stupid jokes.
We're always ready to hear when we're doing it wrong.
Right, absolutely.
And, you know, also praise.
Always, always nice to get praise.
But, you know, obviously we make mistakes in terms of how we cover these and sort of the tone that we reach.
I get enough of that to know that there are people paying attention to it and people care.
But, honestly, I don't, you know, most of the time people think we hit the right tone here.
If they don't think that we do, I don't get a ton of email to that regard.
But I do sometimes get people saying, hey, why didn't you cover the fact that this guy has child pornography and that sort of thing.
So the proximate reason that we're covering Augustus Invictus is he was arrested for threatening and kidnapping his wife.
And I actually have the arrest warrant.
Up here, and I'm gonna just read a bit from the warrants just to give you a sense of what this looks like The defendant and and this is all alleged obviously he has not been convicted of this there is the There is the joke Augustus convictus around this which Hillary sergeant friend of the pod May or may not come on at some point, who is delightful, and you should follow her on Twitter.
She's amazing.
We'd love to have you, Hilary.
Come on.
We have had this conversation.
Anyway, yeah, she's great.
Is she great?
Yes.
She came up with that one, and I told her publicly I was going to steal it.
So I'm stealing it!
And so therefore she doesn't have it anymore.
I now own it.
I like the white man than I am.
It's a primitive accumulation.
It's the basis of all rights.
So, reading from this arrest warrant.
The defendant did willfully and unlawfully violate SC code of laws, yada yada, domestic violence of a high and aggravated nature.
The defendant did this between 12-12-2019 and 12-18-2019 by striking, and then this redacted, with his hands and fists and threatening to shoot her if she did not listen to him.
The defendant demonstrated extreme disregard for human life by pressing a firearm to her head while beating and threatening her.
The defendant also forced the victim to travel to Florida with him against her will and was also charged with kidnapping.
After the assault, the defendant took the victim's cell phone to prevent her from calling law enforcement.
This incident did occur at, and then there's an address within the city limits of yada yada, New York, South Carolina.
So, Okay, so yeah, if he likes Latin, let's stipulate that this is sub judice.
But yeah, what a piece of shit.
Right, exactly.
So there are also allegations previously of him essentially, back in 2017, bringing on young women into his life.
By young women, I mean very young women, teenagers.
And so bringing them into what amounts to a sort of like, you know, abusive sexual relationship between him, like aside from his wife.
And look, far be it from me to criticize people's consensual sex lives.
You know, whatever you choose to do, I'm certainly not going to, you know, kind of get in the way of that.
But if you're sort of a grooming young woman, And doing this without the sort of consent of your partner and, you know, essentially, you know, sort of raving on girls, that goes beyond the sense of what we consider kind of reasonable sexual adventurism here.
Yeah.
And now those things have been... Kink we don't have a problem with.
crime we do right those things have been alleged so far as i know there is not a kind of legal proceeding against him um and again that's something that i would normally um lied from the podcast again less out of a desire to to whitewash that or to say that that's not important as much as it is it is an allegation and there's not much i can do about it except kind of reports that there is an allegation and um you know so
but um in light of uh this current um essentially kidnapping his wife and uh putting a gun to her head and then she is she eventually escapes and then travels back to south carolina and calls the cops on it and then he gets arrested And all of this, there are a lot of details that are still very fishy on this.
There are questions about whether she's actually a white nationalist herself, or to what degree that she's involved in all this.
I have no idea what the real story behind this is, but this is sort of the process of reason that we decided to just go ahead and cover this guy now.
He's always been on kind of the It's not our usual thing to talk about this stuff, but I think it's good to acknowledge that this subculture is absolutely rife with the abuse of women, and it doesn't make any difference what these women's politics is.
It's still disgusting.
No, absolutely.
I wasn't trying to pretend.
No, I know you weren't.
I was just stating our position as a podcast, you know.
Yeah, no, it's really, to me, it's like it's unclear exactly what was going on there and why this is happening.
Augustus Invictus is probably closely affiliated with some of the people who have been arrested In the last couple of weeks.
And we'll kind of get to that as we talk about who this guy is.
There's a lot that's still up in the air on this.
There is a degree to which it's uncomfortable covering this in any kind of detail at this point.
So, who is Augustus Invictus?
Born Austin Gillespie.
I'm gonna go time it and see how long it took you to actually start answering my question.
A long time.
A long damn time.
That's how we do things here.
Completely disorganized.
As we say, slow, but we get there in the end.
We get there in the end.
That's the way it goes.
He was born Austin Gillespie.
At some point he renamed himself Augustus Sol Invictus.
Augustus Sol Invictus is Latin for majestic unconquered son, in case you are curious how this guy feels about himself.
And again, there's not a whole lot of information about him until about 2013.
In 2013, we know he went to law school.
We know he was considered bright.
He graduated near the top of his class.
He was this kind of libertarian douchebag.
And we know that there was a piece by some of his law school students, his fellow students, kind of talking about, yeah, there's just this weird guy who was talking about eugenics and kind there's just this weird guy who was talking about eugenics and kind of publishing pieces that were sort of advocating Now, Invictus kind of claims, no, I wasn't advocating eugenics.
I was making a legal argument about how eugenics should, you know, the end of eugenics was a sign of the fall of the United States in the sense that we stopped reaching for the greater man and the greater sense of humanity and this the end of eugenics was a sign of the fall of the United States in the sense that we stopped reaching And we started, you know, kind of...
worshiping weakness when we stopped being openly eugenicist, which gives you some sense of where this guy was even back in 2013, 2014.
So arguing for eugenics, basically.
Arguing for eugenics, right.
But his claim is like, I'm not saying that the U.S. should actually endorse a policy of eugenics in like the modern day.
I'm saying it was just like a real failure of imagination of like our culture when we stopped doing eugenics back in the day.
Clearly, that's a different thing.
I'm not saying it's good.
I'm saying that not doing it is bad.
Right.
Or not doing it was bad when we stopped doing it.
When you kind of understand that level of sophistry, you sort of get a sense of Who sort of the way that Invictus talks in a lot of his interviews and a lot of you know, he You know, he is a he is actually a lawyer and he splits hairs like the best of them He's very he's very good at that.
He's very good kind of playing that game And I kind of engaging in that sense of plausible deniability And so if you did listen to this podcast, you would find many many things to criticize me for already, but thankfully he's behind bars and will very likely not get out anytime soon.
So I don't have to worry too much about that.
I don't know, if I guess this is a convict of society, I have a feeling we'll find a nice crowdfund that will solve that problem for us.
So he graduates law school.
He's kind of known as being this kind of controversial figure.
And then he kind of comes out about 2015.
He announces his candidacy for the US Senate under the Libertarian Party banner.
And he announces his candidacy in 2015, running for election in 2016.
And now, running in the primary for the Libertarian Party ticket for U.S.
Senate, this is not exactly the way to win an election, necessarily.
In fact, he loses the primary by a landslide, by about 75-25, something on that order.
Well, this is kind of his stepping on the stage of public policy and making a name for himself.
You can find videos from that time.
He does have a couple of YouTube channels that still exist, and he has kind of re-uploaded stuff over to BitChute and that sort of thing.
And one of the sort of key bits of that is he has a video entitled, Who Do We Shoot?
And this is him kind of speaking at, it looks to be kind of a bar, kind of stand-up or something of that nature, talking about the need for revolutionary violence against the state.
And this is kind of an explicitly libertarian angle, as opposed to kind of an overtly fascistic angle.
In kind of interviews around this time, we'll get to this in a second, he claims to have not ever heard of sort of the neo-reaction movement.
He He's not familiar with the terminology.
But he speaks very clearly in those same kinds of terms.
He speaks in terms of freedom and this kind of right-libertarianism, this kind of Rothbardian vision of economics.
He's also clearly in favor of eugenics.
He kind of believes in race science.
He's got a lot of those kinds of things kind of lined up behind him.
And so it's very clear, kind of looking at him in 2015, that he's very much poised to be that kind of typical alt-right guy.
Yeah, he's a member of a species with which I have some familiarity.
Yes.
Notably about Augustus Invictus, and this kind of comes up here a little bit later, He's also someone who has eight children.
I believe two of which are adopted.
But he does have eight children, and they are Hispanic children.
His wife is Hispanic.
And so, despite being an overt racist and racialist, he is a quote-unquote race mixer by the standards of these figures.
And again, believe me, this is going to come back to haunt him when we get to his more modern pursuits, shall we say.
So I'm kind of cursory looking back through the history on this guy in preparation for the podcast because he is someone who I've been aware of since I started kind of following this stuff.
His name kind of gets floated around.
He does do kind of guest hosting bits.
He had his own podcast.
He had a couple of podcasts.
He had his own kind of history with this stuff.
But I did kind of look back, and the earliest kind of guest appearance that I managed to find was, he was on episode 44, very early, in Christopher Cantwell's podcast history.
And at that time, that's when, it's funny to listen to Christopher Cantwell back in 2015, because he was so much more cogent and reasonable back when he was a libertarian, and before he was completely crushed by everything else in his life.
Despite the fact that he's speaking kind of libertarian nonsense, he hadn't devolved into baby talk and wild conspiracy theories.
Yeah, yeah.
We've talked about this before in our groundbreaking double Christopher Cantwell episode.
Yes, yes.
But Invictus definitely kind of comes on and he's, you know, and Kent will ask him, like, so you have things like the imagery, some, are you a fascist?
And, you know, Invictus is like, no, no, I don't, I don't consider myself a fascist.
Of course, I'm not a fascist.
I'm, you know, I'm a libertarian.
I believe in freedom.
And Campbell's like, well, he has the fascists in some of his campaign literature and some of the imagery on his website.
He's like, well, yeah, that imagery, you know, it dates back to the Romans and it's part and parcel of even kind of US, you know, it's on our money.
It's on our, you know, it's part of our own iconography.
And so we're kind of using it in the same way.
We're harkening back to the Romans and not to kind of Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany or anything like that.
Um, a while later, you know, kind of a year or two later, he's a little bit more explicitly kind of allying himself with some of the guys at the Daily Shoah.
He's spending a lot more time kind of hanging out in these kind of explicitly fascist spaces.
I think he still distances himself slightly from calling himself an overt fascist, but he's certainly an overt racist and he's certainly someone who believes that public policy should reflect racial realities and that sort of thing.
And so whether or not he calls himself a fascist is kind of an academic question to me.
I mean, he's part and parcel of this movement, and so there does seem to be a little bit of a shift ideologically between 2015 and 2016 or 2017.
At which time he's a lot more kind of overtly part of this movement.
He was a scheduled speaker at Unite the Right on August 12th, 2017.
That's the big Charlottesville rally for anyone who isn't intimately aware as I am.
And in fact, he was present at the August 11th Torchlight Rally at which multiple people were assaulted.
He was kind of carrying a torch at that time, and for a long time he had a video of that incident posted on his YouTube channel.
That has since been deleted, but as we say regularly on this show, it would be a shame if someone managed to archive that.
It would.
After Unite the Right, he kind of drifts around a little bit.
He is, again, a practicing lawyer, although one of the things that you sort of hear a little bit here and there is that some of his lawyers...
Law licenses you do have to kind of renew those state by state.
He's licensed in a handful of states He did some legal work for some of the people who were Charged after Unite the Right, but he didn't have He wasn't licensed to practice in Virginia for instance and so he wasn't able to kind of directly cover those things but he starts something called the American Legal Defense Fund the ALDF and
And this was designed to be something that could solicit donations from other white nationalists, from Nazis, as a way of kind of covering legal costs for people who ran into legal trouble, you know, saving the white race or whatever.
So far as I know, none of those funds were ever dispersed to anyone during any legal battle that they had.
And so, maybe they just didn't really collect a lot of money, and maybe that went somewhere else.
And I certainly would not hazard a guess about what the answer to that question is.
Couldn't possibly.
Yeah.
We're going to stay on the side of not speculating as to that.
And if anyone does have sort of evidence that somebody did receive some funds for that, please let me know.
So far as I know, I haven't heard anyone kind of publicly saying, like, yes, I received money from the ALDF.
It seems to be kind of completely a grift on the part of Augustus Invictus to kind of take money out of the movement.
Um, gradually he kind of drifts away from, so we run into this thing like the Optics Wars after Unite the Right, and this is something that we covered in some detail in Episodes 3 and 4 of this podcast.
We're talking about like after Unite the Right, you sort of get this split in the alt-right that between people who wanted to have like some degree of kind of mainstream respectability the way they had,
In the run-up to the 2016 election, and those who were looking to be kind of a little bit more overtly, you know, using swastikas and being kind of more overt Nazi symbology, and do a lot more kind of like street violence and advocate for revolution, that sort of thing.
Invictus definitely maintains a, like, kind of a foot in the door of the Of those kinds of mainstream people, of the people who are kind of looking more at the quote-unquote optics cups, as they call themselves.
Or as they are called.
They don't call themselves that, but as they are called.
While increasingly aligning himself with the more kind of violent subculture.
And I suspect that maybe the ALDF is sort of meant to do that for him.
like if he's kind of claiming to raise money and he does have kind of legal expertise and he is kind of able to give legal advice to people, that is a reason to kind of keep you in your arm even if you don't agree with all of his opinions.
But it is, you know, his podcast, the show that he ran for years kind of off and on, was called, and I'm going to pronounce it the way it is, It's Guerrilla Radio.
But he pronounces it Guerrilla Radio, just to give you that slight hint of pretension that you just wouldn't get otherwise.
Slight hint.
Exactly the kind of thing you would expect from someone who would call himself Augustus Solon Victus, right?
Pretty much, yeah.
Yeah.
So he creates this podcast.
It's gone through a couple of iterations, just as the previous versions got deleted from the internet.
He lost his hosting, he lost his YouTube channel.
After his arrest, he was up to version 3.0.
Um, you can find some of the old episodes kind of scattered around.
Um, the Internet Archive has some and, you know, they're kind of around.
But, um, his, uh, YouTube channel, which had his, uh, the most recent stuff, the 3.0 stuff.
He got wiped shortly after his arrest, and again, it would be a shame if someone managed to save that before it went away.
Again, terrible things.
But he kind of started to align himself.
He called it Guerrilla Radio because, like Cantwell in a lot of ways, he considered himself pretty explicitly to be doing war propaganda.
His goal was, you know, look, you know, and this is kind of, there's a lot of this kind of goes around the libertarian movement as well as kind of the alt-right.
Look, we're under occupation by a hostile force, and that's the US government.
We're under occupation by Zog, by the Jews, although he wouldn't necessarily put it in those terms kind of back in the old days.
But this is, you know, kind of violence being done against us in order to kind of take resources from us in order to not allow us to live the way that we want.
And, you know, some degree of violence is absolutely justified in terms of resisting that force.
And, you know, certainly I believe that we will have people in this audience who are pushing for some kind of, you know, kind of socialist and left-leaning revolution.
And, you know, I'm not going to disagree with that here, but that's certainly his kind of explicit aim.
That's the kind of thing.
And he kind of considered himself to be doing propaganda on that angle.
During his senatorial campaign, he released videos, which are really just kind of audio snippets, mostly audio snippets of him talking, that had, you know, kind of his campaign, like a logo, and then he'd put it up on YouTube, and he called them Fireside Chats.
And it's interesting, like, back in that time, he had much more of a kind of southern, kind of mid-Atlantic accent, very kind of broad.
But it's interesting that he called it Fireside Chats, which is obviously kind of hearkening back to FDR, despite the fact that he's doing this kind of explicitly right-wing kind of radio show that builds very explicitly around, you know, kind of a revolt against the modern world, a revolt against kind of a revolt against the modern world, a revolt against modernity and a revolt against the current state of the government.
So, Yuri Radio kind of fills that same kind of niche.
I haven't listened to a lot of that stuff from those early days, but it does kind of fill that same kind of thing.
He does a lot of interview segments, he brings people on.
Chris Cantwell guested on one episode of that, kind of in the early days.
He was in the mix.
He was one of those major figures in that 2016-2017 era.
And then after Unite the Right, he falls a lot more in with the quote-unquote Wignat crowd.
And he falls in with, ultimately, gets closely connected with people like the Boat Patrol, the Boy Top guys, and those kinds of figures.
I'm trying to Wignat.
That's Wigger Nationalist, isn't it, if I remember.
Yes, yes.
So, yeah, I use the term wingnut, and, you know, I apologize for even having to kind of use it in this way.
But, you know, it is something, it is a word that gets used incredibly regularly on that side, and it is Uyghur nationalists.
So it is like, you know, we are, we are not the ones wearing, you know, khakis and white polo shirts.
We're in the, you know, we're in the kind of lower class, working class.
We work with our hands, we get dirt under our fingernails.
We are the unrespectable ones who believe in some version of white nationalism, so they call themselves Whig Nets.
And a lot of the people who sort of call themselves that are nonetheless, you know, there's a wide variety of opinion kind of within that crowd as well.
Various people who, you know, can call themselves that who are, you know, kind of not really, you know, any sense of, you know, kind of blue collar guys, or even if they are, they are not, you know, kind of Willing to kind of get their hands dirty with this stuff in the same way that other ones are.
A lot of the term ends up being kind of used to describe people who are advocating for, you know, kind of armed revolution, who are kind of more on that siege pill side.
But it does get used by some people to describe themselves as just being kind of a little more blue collar, white nationalist kind of types, as opposed to the kind of more Richard Spencer, you know, who is this kind of old school blue blood, you know.
It's almost in contrast with those kind of more
Famous figures who kind of get some degree of a kind of blue blood money or they get washed money They get they get they get to make their living making podcasts and writing books and stuff so so it is meant to be in contrast to that and Invictus starts to ally himself more and more with that side which makes sense because he is someone who is Overtly kind of advocating for armed conflict he is he is overtly you know kind of claiming I'm making
I'm making war propaganda.
We're going to make war against the US government at some point.
I mean, there's just no, I mean, he sees it as no option.
And so as he kind of moves into, you know, kind of 2018, 2019, as the, as the kind of divisions become clearer, He allies himself much more closely with the Vanguard Stream and the Void Talk Live kind of crew.
I don't know that he explicitly, well, yeah, no, I mean, you know, it's certainly in the same orbit as this guy, Dick Mackey, who we talked about in episode 29 to some degree, who is kind of the HPIC of the Bull Patrol, that sort of thing.
He increasingly is distanced from Chris Cantwell, as everyone is at this point, and starts kind of running legal defense for a lot of these guys.
Now, one of the things that he does, I mean, he interviewed James Mason on one of his episodes, like a fairly recent episode of Guerrilla Radio.
He interviews James Mason, and this was just a few months ago, and he apparently traveled to Mason's home, which is, from all that we understand, is in Denver, Colorado.
I mean, there are photos of Invictus at some diner.
You know, somewhere with James Mason, and he interviews Mason.
One of the things that you, if you kind of Google Augustus Invictus, one of the first things that you find is this story of him sacrificing a goat.
Oh yes, the goat.
Yes, the goat.
This is one of those salacious details.
Now, Invictus considers himself a pagan.
He has considered himself a pagan since he was 13 or 14.
He's, I think, 13 or 14.
He must have liked the witch.
I don't know.
I don't know that he's...
I haven't heard him discuss it.
But it's one of those, like, salacious details that you kind of get into where, like, oh, Augustus Invictus, you know, he sacrificed a goat.
I find like that's, it is kind of one of those things like kind of talking about like people's sex lives and things.
It's like, you know, you've got a, you've got a like revolutionary like fascist who's like, Hangin' out with, like, terrorists here, and, like, your lead is, like, he wants sacrificed a goat?
Um, you know, like, you know, like, that's, that's, not to, you know, not to, you know, I understand that people have different opinions about eating meat, but, like, sacrificing a goat is, uh, and drinking its blood is certainly, uh, less, uh, You know, that goat probably suffered less than the food that I had for dinner today did.
Let's just put it that way.
You know, factory farming is far more cruel than killing a goat and drinking some wine.
Absolutely.
I'm a vegetarian and I'm concerned about animal welfare.
Cruelty.
Yeah, it's not the first consideration with this guy, Clay.
Right, right.
But it is this bit that becomes the thing that people talk about.
When they talk about Augustus Invictus is, you know, he's got these weird religious beliefs.
And, um, I, I mean, that's, I mean, let's, let's call it what it is, and that's, that's kind of rank bigotry in some sense, is to, is to say, like, he's, you know, because he's a pagan, he's weird, as opposed to, you know, uh, talking about, like, You know, the fact that he doesn't think the Holocaust happened.
Yeah.
Seems like a much more kind of serious thing to talk about.
And, you know, I think that that's one of the things that kind of gets, you know, certainly in the mainstream media, that's the thing that kind of first comes to people's attention for in 2015, because this came out while he was running for that Libertarian seat, or that Libertarian nomination for Senate.
It's probably also tarring most neo-pagans with an unfair brush as well.
I don't imagine many of them would take part in stuff like that.
Now, that said, there are also connections to these things called Wolves of Vinland, and I don't quite have the details on that in front of me, but this does seem to be a fairly violent group.
It kind of has its roots in Eastern Europe or in Scandinavia, I believe, that has this kind of extended background with, you know, that they've actually done things like set fires.
They've done some fairly kind of hardcore stuff in terms of actual kind of white nationalist violence.
He does have connections to that group and there are Certainly allegations and hypotheses that he might have connections to other kinds of groups that I'm not comfortable talking about publicly on this podcast but that certain people listening will probably kind of be be nodding at this point and And hopefully we will be able to kind of nail some of that down and talk about it a little bit more concretely at some point in the near future.
But suffice to say that there are incredibly violent groups that have, you know, satanic connections that
Definitely have a lot to do with sort of the modern-day white nationalist movement around the world that actually so qualify the whole thing as an international terrorist organization and There is like kind of some question about whether Augustus Invictus may be connected to some of that But there is no and there's no kind of concrete evidence that I can point to that's all kind of speculation and
That said, when he interviews James Mason, now James Mason is all about, you know, Charles Manson is the new incarnation of Adolf Hitler.
enough Hitler was the new incarnation of Jesus Christ and has this kind of very bizarre theology around this kind of like Christian nationalism built around kind of the burning fire of breaking down society etc etc but an explicitly kind of Christian theology which Invictus absolutely Invictus is overtly pagan.
So it is fascinating when two people with completely conflicting theologies that are both, with all apologies to people's faith, kind of batshit insane by my perspective, disagree with kind of batshit insane by my perspective, disagree with one another and yet agree to disagree.
Because ultimately what they agree on is getting rid of all the non-whites in our society.
That's kind of a fascinating conversation there.
But yeah, as the months go on and as 2019 goes on, he spends a lot more time within this siege pill community.
He becomes much more connected to it.
He was actually doing a thing called the Revolutionary Conservative.
This is a website, blog, and then it became a YouTube channel.
He was posting things there.
And that was part of the Heel Turn Network, which we literally mentioned on episode one of the show as a thing that Richard Spencer was connected with.
And Richard Spencer and the Joy Talk guys, Vanguard Streaming, and Augustus Invictus and a couple of the people were all kind of doing live streams as part of this singular network.
And then that fell apart just a few months after we started talking about it.
And Augustus Invictus was a big part of that originally.
He ends up, after that split, he ends up kind of going off with the Siege Pro guys, and he ends up kind of not quite being... He's not part of Vanguard Streaming, but he's definitely hanging out with those guys a lot more than he's hanging out with the Richard Spencer crowd.
And he is kind of pushing a lot more for this race war, this revolution stuff.
And he starts doing legal work, presumably pro bono.
I mean, I don't know if he's getting paid for it.
But he starts doing legal work for a lot of these guys, because as the mass shootings of last summer start happening, as you start getting more and more pressure on them from legal authorities, he starts sending cease and desist orders.
He starts doing their legal work for them.
Come on to go talk live a couple of times and talks about like here's what you do and do not say to police for instance and giving them pretty explicit legal advice so Invictus is very much a part of this side of the movement.
He's very much allied with them during during the whole last year he also decides he's gonna run for president and Turns out it could get worse.
Believe it or not, it gets worse.
He decides he's going to run for president, and explicitly as part of his platform, the thing that he says is that building a wall is sort of the cuck position.
It's not enough to build a wall, it's not enough to keep people out.
The Mexican government is clearly not able to control Their own borders and particularly their southern border because a lot of the worry that these guys have it's not even like Mexicans are coming from the southern border across into the United States Because a lot of them will sort of go well at least those are like sort of descended from like Spanish people and Spanish people Europeans and like what we don't necessarily want them in our country because they're mixed blood with the
The native population, these are kind of quote-unquote mestizo people.
At least they're sort of, you know, something like us and we can kind of deal with that.
But the real fear is that the people from further down into Central and South America, people with less Spanish blood, are coming through Mexico into the United States.
And like, what, we need like Aztecs in our country?
You know?
I promise you this is a legitimate position that these people hold.
I am NOT exaggerating.
So, Augustus, as a way of stemming the tide of these people coming across the southern border, says that the United States should have a warrior-like mentality in terms of its foreign policy, and instead of doing just kind of a pure defense of the southern border, we should recolonize Mexico.
and essentially take control of Mexico through our military might and enforce the southern border at the southern Mexican border to prevent these people from even getting into Mexico and giving a whole country's worth of buffer so that people cannot get into the United States borders proper.
And so when we say that some of these guys are explicitly pro-colonialists, this is literally his policy.
This is literally what he advocated for in so many words and not ironically in the slightest.
This is overtly, you know, this is where he was.
And it does speak to this kind of like warrior mindset and all of his audio and all of the things he has to say, he uses this mindset of like, you know, we need to kind of go back to this like age of conquest.
We need to go back to this age of this kind of warrior culture mindset.
We need to re-embrace this kind of vision of masculinity, this vision of a true masculine culture, a true masculine white society that is going to stand astride the world and not be cowed by the communists and by the women.
All these guys are vicious misogynists, which you knew because he's violent against women and he's raping people.
Allegedly.
Allegedly, yeah.
But, you know, it is not just a personal quirk, as we should say, but also an explicit ideological quirk.
And that's incredibly common with these guys.
It's almost universal.
I mean, I'm tempted to say it is universal.
These guys are, to a person, vicious misogynists.
I mean, it's just part of that world.
Um, and so, um, that's him, that's him kind of running for president.
He was running, he was kind of working on this presidential run.
Um, you know, it's unclear, like, what he was really trying to do with that, except to kind of make a name for himself and to kind of push his ideas into the mainstream.
like using these ideas as a way of trying to kind of push the Republican Party or kind of American electoral politics towards a more kind of aggressive stance on some of these issues.
But he never really got anywhere with that.
I mean, it did seem maybe like kind of another rift.
But he was doing these sort of like weekly fireside chats and these weekly kind of audio blogs or kind of vlogs on his YouTube channel up until the time that he got arrested.
And, yeah, no, it was just part of the thing he was doing.
Yeah.
Again.
um laughs Promptly worth noting, something that we should definitely cover, is that while he was kind of involved with this siege pill community, at a certain point he had a falling out with some of them.
Oh really?
What a surprise!
What a surprise that these guys were fighting amongst themselves over nonsense.
Who ever heard of such a thing?
I mentioned that he had eight kids, and that they are non-white.
He has a Hispanic wife, and some of his kids are non-white.
This is not something I have any... I'm not here to bring his children into this.
No, no, no.
This is not something that we do here.
But apparently there was one of these.
It was on the show The Gas Station, which we mentioned in episode 29 of this podcast, which is one of the kind of live stream shows that for a long time was archived on some Bitship channel, but it got deleted at some point after we did episode 29.
Again, I can't imagine why that happened.
Why?
But they were still kind of live streaming after they deleted their archive, and it still kind of went up.
But apparently on one of these shows, they decided to kind of take a dig at Invictus.
One of these guys decided to start kind of talking about his kids and they found photos of his children and were putting those up on screen and using the most kind of vicious racial slurs towards them.
Nice.
Stay classy guys.
For some period of time, not just like, kind of like, oh, you do 30 seconds and you just kind of end up, but like, really, really vicious stuff.
And it drove a wedge in the entire CHPL community, because basically there were people that were like, yeah, fuck that guy, he's gotten all the white kids, he's a race mixer, you know, like, he gets the bullet with the rest of them.
And then, you know, the other guy was like, yeah, but this guy's actually, like, kind of on our side, and he's a good guy, and you know, all that sort of thing.
In the wake of that, he actually doxxed three of these figures who were instrumental with the movement, instrumental with him doing this live show.
And were, at least some of them, at least one or two of them, were working on his campaign.
You know, were people who had previously worked for him.
Um, and, uh, essentially he says, you know, like, look, you know, you're either, you've either got loyalty or you don't.
You're either a warrior or you're not.
And, you know, the cost of disloyalty, the cost of, uh, you know, is, is death.
And while, you know, under the laws of the U.S., uh, under the laws of the United States, I can't come and kill you, um, you know, come, come when we control it, you know, that will be something we get to do, of course.
Uh, but currently I can't kill you, but what I can do is, uh, is dox you.
And so he gave, um, their names, or presumably, um, I'm not gonna reveal them here, um, A, I don't have them in front of me, and B, um, these haven't been confirmed and there's no, you know, that's just not what we do here, but he gave their names and, uh, enough identifying information so that they knew that he had their, their, their phone info.
Um, and then, uh, said, yeah, go, uh, delete everything off your phones before the cops come and find you.
And that's the thing.
Wow.
What a warrior.
What a warrior.
It's a well-known thing that Roman centurions used to do.
The penalty for treachery is death, but I'm not allowed to do that where I happen to be now, so I'm just going to tattle your names and addresses to them.
I'm going to do a YouTube live show.
I'm going to do 30 minutes of, like, nattering on about nothing and, you know, about, like, why I need to do this.
And then give your actual docs information at the very end.
And that's essentially what he did.
And so I will link to a piece of Amy Whitman that kind of covered that at the time.
The spirit of the legions marches on.
Right, right.
This is exactly what Nero would have done, motherfucker.
Yeah, exactly.
So, um, that does kind of lead me to the thing, to the thing.
We've seen all these arrests around the base, which is definitely connected to the siege boat community.
Did you know that means Al-Qaeda in Arabic?
Yes, I'm aware.
It's a little fact for you there.
Yeah, it's a fact for me, in case I wasn't aware.
And so he has this – so he's been arrested.
And based on all these arrests and based on all this kind of stuff kind of coming out and based on the fact that he was willing to sell his comrades when they were just making fun of his children, which is vile behavior.
I'm not infending that in any way.
No, no shitty thing to do.
Just an incredibly awful thing to do to some of these kids.
I'm pretty sure he's singing to the feds.
Let's just put it that way.
I'm fairly sure, you know, they walked in there and I'm pretty sure he decided that he was probably not a difficult person to convince to talk about as his buddies.
Let's just put it that way.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
I have no idea.
Law enforcement doesn't talk to me.
Believe me.
The cops do not trust me.
Nor I them, for that matter.
We can be fairly certain that more will come of this.
We'll be watching his legal woes with interest.
Yeah, that's kind of all I got right now.
There's so much more to this guy.
I mean, I did a lot of digging just trying to, like, you know, I felt like every time I kind of hit rock bottom with sort of the details in this guy, I kept kind of finding more stuff and just kind of more, like, kind of, kind of bizarre, like, kind of videos that he'd done and kind of more stories about him.
A lot of it is kind of uncorroborated and a lot of it is sort of like there's a lot of kind of contradictory stuff out there and so it's kind of hard to know exactly how to talk about it, but this is somebody who's been in this for a while now.
This is somebody who, regardless of how...
I mean, he could very easily go to prison and spend the rest of his life writing books.
He could be like that guy or something.
Who knows what the long-term story of this guy is.
We'll keep you posted, but that's kind of all I've got.
Sorry, I've been kind of just rambling to a mic for an hour.
He sounds pretty generic in many respects, to be honest.
I mean, he is and he isn't, because he's much more...
He is kind of one of those guys, he's not one of the major figures that I kind of put on the top tier of important people in the movement, in terms of his influence.
But he's much more open about what he believes in.
He's much more kind of overtly violent.
He's much more kind of overtly revolutionary.
but who are overtly kind of willing to talk openly about the need for political violence.
And that does set him apart from a lot of these other figures, especially as early as he was doing it, because he was kind of talking that way back in 2015.
I suppose there is something to the honesty of that, without implying any admiration at There is something to the willingness to just say it.
The other thing that seems to mark him out to me, to the extent that anything does, is the fact that he is a qualified and practicing lawyer and that he's doing legal work for them.
Yeah, I mean, there are quite a few of these guys who do have some degree of kind of legal acumen, so there are kind of other lawyers who are involved in this.
Invictus, both being a lawyer and being willing to kind of ally himself with the siege pill crew, is pretty unique.
You really don't see a whole lot of that otherwise, and it does allow him to, again, kind of maintain this kind of arrow respectability while also being, you know, again, kind of an open revolutionary.
And, again, I do want to be clear that, you know, we on the left have certain ideas about, you know, kind of socialist revolution and about, you know, kind of what society should look like and what kind of taking the levers of power means.
But we're not advocating for armed revolution, streets run with blood, millions of people dead, you know, sorts of ideas.
We're not advocating for, you know, kind of racial holy war here.
It's interesting that, yeah, the paradox, I suppose, is that he's a lawyer and he does legal work openly in the service of what he, I suppose, would admit is, by the current regime, you know, illegal aims.
Which is, it's actually quite reminiscent of, you know, the OG Nazis back in Germany, because one of the biggest professional groups in the Nazi Party was lawyers, you know.
Well, and, uh, you know, even when he was running, even in that episode of Radical Agenda, episode 44 that he was on, um, there is this, uh, you know, he, you know, Chris asked him, like, so you're advocating revolution and you're running for Senate?
Like, these things don't quite work together, right?
Um, you know, uh, he, when even Catwall is kind of calling you out for your shit, you know, there's something wrong there.
but his answer to that is effectively like well look you know while these kind of you know leave us a power exist if we can use them to make to make change we should do that or if we can kind of use a campaign as a way of pushing these ideas into the mainstream and kind of doing that sort of thing and that's a tool that we have we call for revolution you know if necessary sort of thing so you know he does have he does have kind of ways of squaring that circle
I mean you know if I agree to his aims I would you know broadly agree with but of course he's a fucking Nazi pushing for race war so not something I agree with clearly so So yeah, again, there's a lot more to this guy.
We have just kind of scratched the surface.
I guarantee you we're going to revisit this as the, maybe we'll do Invictus News instead of Cantwell News for a while, as the legal case kind of runs through the process and as maybe some more details come to light.
But I feel comfortable leaving it there for now.
We've done a little over an hour.
Should we just announce?
Should we just announce?
I mean, who?
Yeah, go ahead if you... We have made a... Emily Gursinsky is going to be on the next episode, and we are going to spend as much time as she feels comfortable doing, making as much fun as she feels comfortable doing, of Christopher Cantwell, who is now spending his time in jail.
And I am only hoping he does not start a podcast and it's live from the Federal Penitentiary or some shit that I have to listen to, because it's been pretty glorious to not have to deal with that fucker for a while.
So, you know.
Yeah, we're gonna be covering, you know, kind of the, maybe the last of the Cantwell News in the next episode with Emily Krasinski.
Maybe.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Probably not.
There will always be more Cantwell News, but, you know.
We will see.
But yeah, I've spoken to Emily.
She is excited to come on.
We've been talking about it for a while.
Even once the legal filing where he quitted Hitler came out, she was like, oh yeah, we've got to do this.
We've got to do this soon.
And then he was arrested the next day, or two days later.
And it was like, oh yeah, we gotta do this.
We almost did it this weekend, but she was traveling, so it's like, oh, we can wait a week, it's gonna be fine.
So next week, Emily Gershensky will be here, and we will be talking about Christopher Cantwell, and it will be glorious.
It will indeed.
And we've got a lot of other good stuff coming up for you, and hopefully... I hate to announce it, because it always moves around, but we will see.
Yeah, I think our listeners know by now that whenever we announce anything, it's always got a big asterisk next to it.
If we announce a topic, it's definitely not going to happen.
That's the key.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the ones where we just kind of plan them quietly, and then that goes off without a hitch.
But the second I say, next week we're doing Augustus Invictus, it takes like six months.
It's our version of Heisenberg uncertainty.
We pin it down, it's always, by definition, somewhere else.
Yeah, so that was episode 42.
Thanks for listening and thanks everybody who listens and retweets and shares and talks about us and especially, maybe not especially, but you know, with a special kind of thanks to those of you who help us out on our Patreons.
It's enormously appreciated.
I did get a couple of new big patrons this week, so thank you very much to those of you.
Yeah, me too, and they're amazing.
And I had to sadly say goodbye to one of my patrons who, and this is not, no, I'm not having a go at them.
They were, you know, thank you for sticking around while you could, patron, who pledged me $4.17 a month, which I loved.
I just loved that pledge.
So yeah, it's a shame you've gone, but while you were there, you were my favorite.
Because it's just a wonderfully specific amount.
So yeah, that's goodbye from Daniel, and goodbye from me, Maximus Cleverus Massivus Coccus, as I've decided to rename myself, because I'm very secure.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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