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Sept. 4, 2020 - I Don't Speak German

01:40:35

63: American History X

Another of our occasional movie episodes, this time looking at famous (and bad) 90s movie American History X starring Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead. Content warnings apply. Also, we introduce our new theme music, courtesy of Lune the Band.

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	This is I Don't Speak German.
	I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to white nationalists, white supremacists, and what
	Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
	Content warnings always apply.
	And it's episode 63 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast that you're listening to. the podcast that you're listening to.
	And I'm Jack Graham, he, him, here as usual at IDSG Towers with my personal servant who researches Nazis for me, Daniel Harper, also he, him.
	Hello, Daniel.
	I'm doing well, still researching Nazis, still watching bad movies from the 90s about Nazis and talking about them.
	Yes, that's right, because this episode is, finally, finally it's not about people called Weinstein, this episode.
	Or teal, or about penises.
	That was the other thing.
	This movie is not about penises.
	Yeah, that was very much the other thing, wasn't it, last week.
	And thankfully that's all behind us, so to speak.
	And we're now venturing back to movie land, back to the silver screen, as we sometimes do on this show.
	So yeah, it's a slightly more fun episode, I suppose?
	Yeah, these are supposed to be the ones that give us a little bit of a break from the monotony of the regular episodes, and sort of like, you know, Less of a research-heavy component, and so it is, you know, it is meant to be something a little bit lighter for everybody, but this one we delayed a few times, so I ended up having to re-watch this film like three times to prep for, and so this has been, you know, about as deeply unplanned.
	This is the only episode we've recorded so far.
	Yes, and preserving the usual research ratio that's involved in the making of this show, I have not done that.
	I watched it once when we were originally going to record on this, which is, god, I don't know, was it a month ago?
	A month, about six weeks ago.
	Yeah, yeah, we were going to do this.
	This is going to be kind of a quick and dirty one, and then, yeah.
	Things happen, we gotta talk about Boogaloo and all that sort of bullshit.
	That's right, we had to talk about the Boogaloo and then we had to spend three weeks talking about the Weinsteins.
	Had to.
	But we did.
	And yeah, so, as I say, I've not rewatched it.
	Well, I have, but weeks ago.
	I've not rewatched it again, unlike Daniel, who's far more conscientious than me.
	So if I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the details, listeners, you'll just have to pardon me, and if you don't, I don't really care.
	Because this is the episode in which we finally talk about American History X. Which is a movie, it's quite a famous movie isn't it?
	It's quite well known, I think.
	I get the impression that people know about it when you talk about it.
	Yeah, I mean, ironically, this is our second Ed Norton picture that we've discussed on the podcast.
	Not directed by David Fincher, although we are planning to do another David Fincher film for the next movie episode, which will probably be out in a few weeks, as the scheduling happens.
	But yeah, no, this was kind of a big Oscar bait movie at the time.
	I remember this, it was released in 1998.
	I remember it being something that Ed Norton got a lot of awards notice for.
	I think he got an Oscar nomination for it.
	This was really early in Ed Norton's career.
	This was a year before Fight Club.
	He had come out guns blazing in 1996 with this movie Primal Fear in which he plays a man Well, he was kind of recognized very early on as being someone who both had sort of movie star good looks and serious acting chops.
	So he was taken very seriously from the beginning of his career.
	And he had spent most of the last year since then working with some really big name directors and working on some really big name projects.
	And this was sort of like going to be his, this was supposed to be like his Oscar role, right, as this kind of young actor.
	And he definitely saw it that way.
	And this film definitely has, I mean, I'm always uncertain as to kind of how far we should go on these in terms of talking about the film itself.
	This has kind of a story production history, like famously story production history.
	Oh, yes.
	Yes, indeed.
	This was originally going to be directed by Dennis Hopper, believe it or not.
	Who ended up not being able to do it, and then they give it to this young music video director named Tony Kaye, who butts heads with Ed Norton throughout most of the production time.
	And then as he was in post-production, Ed Norton essentially takes the movie away from him and then edits in more of himself, Ed Norton?
	More of Ed Norton, yeah.
	And we can kind of talk about what seems to have been added.
	I've never, I don't think anybody's ever seen like the Tony Kaye cut of this.
	But like essentially in terms of like that kind of battle, Tony Kaye ends up kind of getting buried by Hollywood.
	He eventually kind of comes back in 2006 with the release of this documentary about abortion called Lake of Fire, which I saw a number of years ago and have fond memories of.
	I have to see if it really holds up, but it's sort of a very interesting documentary about the abortion debate in the United States.
	And sort of like it does kind of view all sides in this sort of interesting way.
	And it's shot over the course of like seven years or something.
	And so, but other than that, he really has not made a big mark on the industry.
	And so this is kind of like his only narrative film in a lot of ways.
	He went public with his...
	He made the cardinal sin, didn't he, of going very, very public with his dissatisfaction with the studio and their decisions and with the Ed Norton cut of the film, which was the one that was released, I believe.
	There's actually a chapter of John Ronson's book, Them, Adventures with Extremists, Where John Ronson, which is quite a well-known book, it's kind of John Ronson's first big book, and you know there's a chapter where he hangs around with Tony Kaye and he recounts that very interesting experience and Tony Kaye's aggressive attempts to sort of persuade
	Or possibly browbeat the studio into letting him have his own way and doing rather, it has to be said, rather eccentric things like sort of getting a rabbi and a Catholic priest and an imam and things like this to come to the meeting that he's having with a representative of the studio in order to Encourage a spiritual atmosphere in the negotiations.
	So and I think he took out a big newspaper ad or something.
	He did Yeah, something like that.
	Yeah.
	No, this is this is the kind of behavior you get to do after you've made a giant hit for a studio They'll sort of give you a lot of leeway to do this kind of stuff But this isn't something you get to do You don't get to be this much of a prima donna until you've made a Spielberg level hit at this point Yeah.
	Well, you mentioned David Fincher and David Fincher's a good comparison because he was also a young, up-and-coming music video director when he was selected to make Alien 3.
	And Alien 3 was a nightmarish experience for everybody involved.
	It was generally agreed to be a terrible film.
	I actually love Alien 3.
	I think it's brilliant.
	But it was generally, you know, it was taken, the final cut was taken away from him, it was cut to ribbons, etc.
	Fincher was undermined, I mean, I'm not a big Fincher defender, don't get me wrong, but he was, you know, undermined at every stage by studio, star, etc, etc.
	But he just took it on the chin, you know?
	Tony Kaye didn't do that.
	Right, right.
	And, you know, and ultimately it also kind of matters that, like, if this film had become, like, a major, Awards winner in the end.
	I think that Tony K might have had different a different career as well I think yeah, it was sort of recognized.
	I mean it still sort of gets credit for being this really great film about This moment and in this era and this sort of like world is sort of like seen as this sort of you know Well-made film about you know organized hate or whatever Which it is not But it is seen that way by a lot of people.
	It does have that kind of like liberal hectoring sort of attitude towards, you know, kind of far right organizing and organized hate.
	But it does kind of have that reputation.
	And yet it didn't really win a lot of awards.
	It really didn't win.
	I mean, it did win some awards, but it wasn't sort of like that kind of big Oscar winner at the end.
	And it also didn't do well at the box office, which I mean, it made about $20 million off of a $20 million budget, which was, you know, kind of a little movie that made a little bit of money.
	You know, had there not been the sort of drama in its making, I think Tony Kaye would have gone on to make more stuff.
	But ultimately, you know, he butted heads with Hollywood.
	And that's the, I mean, that's just kind of like the end of that story, right?
	Yeah, sounds like it.
	But yeah, I mean, I don't know if you saw it at the time.
	I didn't see it until years later.
	I didn't see it until years later.
	Right, okay, well my experience is quite different because I didn't see it at the cinema but I did see it quite soon after it came out.
	So it came out in 98, I would have seen it the following year or year 2000 or something like that.
	And at the time I thought it was great, I loved it.
	So it's very much a film that I have become disillusioned with as I have learned more, let's put it that way.
	No, no, for me this was one that like I kind of knew by reputation because because it was one of the I was I was like a movie nerd at the time it was I had sort of gotten into like the the online movie buzz stuff on like any cool news around that time when this movie came out.
	And so it was one that I knew by reputation for years and years and years, long before I ever saw it.
	And I was not really avoiding it.
	I was just, it was just sort of like it never sort of presented itself to me.
	I don't think it played in theaters near me.
	I think it was a fairly limited release.
	It might have played and I just never kind of saw it.
	But I saw a lot of movies around that time.
	And for whatever reason, it just never kind of like clicked.
	It's like, oh, I need to see American History X. And I think maybe because You know, I just wasn't interested in watching the movie in which Edward Norton plays the skinhead.
	Just kind of never struck me as something I wanted to see.
	I'm not sure why I avoided it.
	I don't think I ever really avoided it as much as I just didn't see it.
	So you didn't look at the poster and think, you know, I can't see that because I haven't seen American History 1 through 9 yet, so I won't know what's going on.
	I thought it was the sequel to Malcolm X. That would be the other joke.
	But yeah, no, I guess we should at least sort of discuss, I mean, I figure people, if you're interested in this podcast, you've probably either seen it or you've decided you're not going to see it.
	Certainly if you're listening to this episode, but I mean, we should probably talk about the plot a little bit because there's a lot of kind of devil in the details to this.
	Yeah.
	And the narrative surrounds, I mean, it's sort of the story of this guy.
	Um, this fictional character, Derek Vinyard, who is played by Edward Norton, whose father dies, whose father is a firefighter, who dies, um, who was shot by an African American family while he's putting out a fire, uh, kind of off screen.
	Um, and then afterwards, Ed Norton's character, Derek, becomes, um, increasingly radicalized and becomes increasingly kind of under the sway of this guy, I think, I think the character's name is, uh, Cameron Alexander.
	Who is this sort of father figure, kind of neo-nazi.
	He seems to be modeled after Tom Metzger.
	If there's any, you know, at least kind of looking at it now, it seems to be he sort of fits into that kind of similar place, although there's not like a sort of direct reference to that.
	There's this there's this parallel narrative.
	There's this parallel narrative between a sort of present day and then the sort of like three years past.
	But in terms of like sort of the background narrative, Derek is spending the night with a with his young lady friend who is Feruza Balk, who is a Quite enjoyable.
	If there are pleasures to be found in the film, I think she's one of the highlights.
	She's always brilliant in everything.
	She's always great.
	Favorites of bulk.
	I think some of the dialogue that she's given to do does not do her any favors, but she does what she can do.
	Her character is not exactly the most complex, shall we say.
	No, no.
	But they're spending the night together after a debate that Ed Norton's character has with his family.
	And then after a brawl or a sort of a battle, a basketball battle with the local African-American gang or whatever, some African-American men come and decide to invade Ed Norton's home.
	After which Ed Norton does the curb stopping, which sort of creates the central moment of the film.
	If people remember one thing about the movie, it's usually that Ed Norton kills a guy by making him put his teeth on a curb, on a concrete curb, and then bashing his head in.
	Stomping on his head.
	Stomping on his head, yes.
	Ed Doran's character goes to prison where he meets a nice black man and is de-radicalized and comes back out of prison and is no longer a Nazi.
	At the same time, this is paralleled with a sort of current day story in which Derek's brother Danny, who's played by Edward Furlong, who audiences may remember, He's the kid from Terminator 2.
	That's the one thing everybody knows that he knows this guy from.
	Which is ironic because I seem to be the only person in the world who's never seen Terminator 2.
	So when I finally do watch Terminator 2, he will be the kid from American Mystery X to me.
	Fair enough, fair enough.
	you know, Ed Furlong, not, I mean, he's, he's doing, he's given it his all.
	I think he's doing, he's kind of doing what he has to do.
	And he kind of becomes the, the thing is that the film kind of doesn't, really doesn't know if it's supposed to be about Danny or Derek.
	And it does sort of like, it's trying to do these parallel narratives because it sort of shows a lot of this backstory of Derek, Derek's pre-prison life in backstory, Because the narrative, the spine of the film is about Danny...
	Can I just break in just to emphasize how overpoweringly 90s this is.
	The sequences set in the past are all in grainy black and white wobbly cam.
	Right.
	And the sequences set in quote-unquote the present are all in this sort of this sun-drenched colour.
	It's that 90s.
	No, it is very, very 90s.
	This is pre-Pleasantville.
	And apparently all those sequences were shot in color and then converted to black and white in post-production.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, that's at least sort of implied by some of the reading I did, a little bit of the background reading.
	I would never have known that that wasn't originally black and white cinematography.
	Um, you know, in a bunch of, you know, it is, this is sort of a thing that was kind of in vogue a bit at the time.
	I mean, JFK takes advantage of this same kind of technique, but they actually filmed that ahead of time using color film and using various stocks, etc., etc., and this seems to be a little bit more kind of artificially trying to build some kind of dynamic interest in.
	It does help to keep us, I think, oriented in terms of what's in the present and what's in the past.
	That's true, yeah, because it would be a bit confusing otherwise, I think.
	Right, I mean, I think it's effective.
	I mean, if you remember the film Traffic, which is a couple of years later, I don't know if you've seen that one.
	This is the sort of film about the drug wars in which they literally put yellow filter over everything that happens in Mexico, blue filter over, you know, and so literally you're color-coded from sequence to sequence in terms of this kind of big multi-narrative film.
	This was sort of a thing that was kind of happening at the time.
	Yeah, yeah, because you had, sorry this is digression, but again it's a very 90s thing.
	Altman was back making movies, big ensemble movies with several threads, and you had movies like Happiness, by that guy.
	Todd Solons.
	Todd Solons, yeah.
	This was, again, very much of that moment.
	Yeah, no, Happiness is in the same year.
	I mean, the film Magnolia is the next year.
	So is American History X. So, you know, these kind of like big ensemble films were kind of happening.
	I mean, Shortcuts was 93.
	So, I mean, again, this is a very kind of 90s.
	That's the Altman film I was reaching for.
	And the absolute nadir of the genre, Crash.
	Well, yeah, which is a few years later, I mean, which is, you know, if there is a film that is more cringeworthy around its treatment of race in American History X, it's definitely Crash, which actually won the awards that American History X did not.
	But we're given this, so Danny Vineyard, who's Edward Furlong, is, he tries to do a book report ...about a civil rights hero, Adolf Hitler.
	Bye!
	Principal, who's played by Avery Brooks, Dr. Bob Sweeney, who we're told has like two PhDs apparently, and is a sort of like tough, tough-as-nails principal who's really kind of trying to mold these kids into kind of better people, who takes a special interest in Danny because he remembers Derek, because Derek was previously one of his students, assigns him to do a
	A report called American History X, which creates the narrative of the film.
	So he has to write this book report by the next day, which is also the day that Derek is released from prison.
	And then there's a party hosted by the Tom Metzger figure that happens on the same night.
	There's a lot going on and there's a lot going on like I mean this is kind of one of the one of the like You know things that kind of break suspension of disbelief for me like very very quickly is that not only we're telling these two narratives But it is sort of like all this happens over the course like the spine of the movie is really like 24 hours It's one day it sort of begins with there's a confrontation in a bathroom between Danny vineyard and some african-american students who
	Who end up killing him, spoiler alert, at the very end of the film.
	And then you get, like, Derek is released from prison, and you get the backstory on Derek, and you get the party, and you get sort of this conflict, and this sort of family conflict, and you get the background on why Derek became a Nazi, and you get this kind of, there are some other kind of sideline characters, and all this happens over the course of a single day in terms of sort of real narrative space, and this is just not I mean, A, it's not realistic, but B, it's just not believable.
	Like, it doesn't sort of match the thing.
	Yeah.
	I'm reading... Danny's conversion is even less than that as well.
	I realise Danny isn't like the committed, entrenched neo-Nazi that Derek is, right?
	Right.
	But Danny is, at the start of, well, it's not even at the start of the film, it's at the end of the school day.
	He has his conversation with the principal.
	So this is like, I don't know when they break up in Venice Beach, but let's say it's 5pm, something like that.
	At 5pm, he's a committed Nazi to the point where he's defending Adolf Hitler in reports that he, you know, that he submits to his teacher.
	Right.
	And he's taking down all his swastikas and stuff in his bedroom that night.
	So, you know, at the absolute latest, that's like 2am?
	Yeah, no.
	That's all it takes Danny to be completely deprogrammed.
	And in the meantime, his brother is released from prison.
	They have a heart-to-heart about stuff.
	He goes to the party and he writes this report, which, you know, doesn't seem like a very well-written report.
	It seems like a very kind of bullshit.
	Like, at least we do kind of get the, this isn't well-written.
	Like, this isn't supposed to be, you know, it's very kind of short declarative sentences and I kind of watch Danny with his word processor open in a very 1998 way where he's typing things and deleting them and it's almost like Doogie Howser level.
	You know, kind of writing.
	And, you know, you sort of buy that.
	I mean, this isn't supposed to be, like, great writing, so it's fine.
	But, you know, he does seem to do a whole lot in addition to, you know, write this paper, which hypothetically is supposed to be something that he's put, like, some amount of time into that is sort of, like, helping to change his life, right?
	Yeah.
	But then like he takes all the stuff down and then he goes he goes back to school the next day and he's confronted by the same kids who he had sort of scoffed at before and one of them fucking shoots him through the head and this is supposed to be the big like oh whoa is the world how did we come to this place kind of thing.
	Yeah.
	And it's very after-school special.
	Like, it's very, very after-school special.
	Oh, God, yeah.
	It's treacly and it's superficial and it's, like, deeply sentimental and mawkish.
	In this way that I think Spielberg would sort of like turn his nose up and go like, yeah, that's a little bit too far guys You know, maybe maybe when Maybe when Derek wins on the basketball court Which is sort of the way that all this begins is like there's this turf war on a basketball court which is where the Tom Metzger character is kind of sitting around and
	And, like, cheering Derek on to, like, you know, beat these guys in basketball so that, like, they get control over this.
	It's like, who cares?
	And yet they play this game and they score it with, like, this orchestral, like, boys choir kind of score.
	Like, it practically ends with, like, hallelujah at the end of, like, the white nationalists, the Nazis have won the battle That's all over my notes.
	I've got to tell you, that page of my notes from watching this, I've got like in big capital letters, inspirational Hollywood score, WTF question mark question mark.
	Because that scene, basically they're betting over ethnic cleansing.
	If we win this game of basketball, we get to ethnically cleanse the basketball court.
	And it's completely given to us from the Nazi perspective.
	Apparently the white guys are all Nazis.
	Yeah, there's nobody playing basketball on this court who's white, who isn't also a Nazi, because he says, you know, tell you what, if we win then we get this court.
	There's no white guy on the court who says, actually hang on, I'm not up for that.
	But apparently they're all Nazis, and this whole game of basketball is completely from this perspective, complete with this As you say, absolutely.
	I'm so glad you brought this up, because this is one of my big things.
	This completely tone-deaf, perfect phrase.
	Inspirational, choral, Hollywood, you know, triumphant soundtrack.
	And you just watch that and you think, what were they thinking there?
	Yeah, apparently, and this is just from the Wikipedia page, which I have open in front of me, but apparently The composer, Ann Dudley, says she wanted the music to be big and LJ-ic.
	She employed a full orchestra and a boy's choir and decided against using hip-hop sounds.
	Okay.
	She said, the neo-nazi faction is personified in the music by a boy's choir.
	What could be a more Aryan sound?
	A calming string orchestra instead provides a much more expressive and timeless palette.
	And it's like, it does feel like to a certain degree, like everybody making the film is making a slightly different movie, right?
	Where, you know, there's a sort of a version, like Tony K's making a version where what he wants it to be is this sort of like fast-paced movie about sort of like this inner city conflict that isn't, that has a little bit of like this sort of family backstory.
	But it's really about, you know, this conflict and about, you know, kind of giving this kind of phenomenalistic approach to this world.
	The screenwriter, David McKenna, is, you know, he wrote the story, he wrote the screenplay largely based on kind of his own childhood and his own kind of youth growing up in Los Angeles as part of the punk scene.
	And I want to put a pin in there.
	We're going to come back to that here in a few minutes, right?
	And so for him, it's sort of a story about the root causes of racism and how it sort of grows up in the home.
	And so he's sort of writing this family drama, right?
	Ed Norton is sort of in a movie that's about how awesome Ed Norton is as an actor.
	And so he edits back in all the bits that are, you know, like him.
	Like, there are long sequences in which Ed Norton totally owns the liberal cucks in debate.
	Like, there are extended sequences in which these guys, like, sit and argue over, like, the dinner table.
	In various ways.
	And Ed Norton always wins every argument in this.
	And even after he wins, you get Elliot Gould, who I quite like, I'm a big fan of Elliot Gould, as this man who is dating Ed Norton's mom, who is played by Beverly D'Angelo, who you might know from the National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation movies.
	She's Chevy Chase's wife in the house.
	And, you know, there's a lot of, like, sitcom actors and Star Trek actors.
	There are at least two actors here from the Boy Meets World sitcom that was on at the time.
	And there are two actors who were on Star Trek series at the time.
	Nineties Trek, yeah.
	It was very... So that tells you sort of what the casting is like here.
	But Elliot Gould literally is, like, playing, like, the very nice liberal Jewish man who is explaining, like, well, no, there are, you know, sociological factors that go into, like, creating crime.
	And his whole, like, job in the film is to just be owned by Ed Norton in the sequence.
	And at the end, you know.
	Yeah, and run away.
	And then run away.
	And then you never see him again.
	You know, it's just kind of done.
	And yet he's right!
	He's right!
	I'm not going to sidetrack you, I just want to say the film starts with Danny putting his book report in and the Elliot Gould character is also his teacher.
	This guy who used to be dating his mum is also his teacher.
	The guy that he handed the book report in.
	Explicitly a Jewish man as well.
	He hands in a book report to this guy saying, you know, Mein Kampf's great, Hitler was great.
	And Elliot Gould's character is furious about this at the principal, the Avery Brooks character.
	He's saying, you've got to do something about this, this is unacceptable, I'm really angry, this kid, etc, etc.
	And the disdain!
	With which that is treated by the Avery Brooks character, the principal.
	Right.
	And, you know, he kind of talks to this guy like he's failing in his responsibilities as a teacher.
	And it's all down to the fact that he's got a grudge against the kid because he used to date the mum and now he doesn't date the mum anymore.
	And I'm watching it and I'm like, he's absolutely right.
	This is completely unacceptable.
	And the Avery Brooks character's response And it's very strongly implied that he's the admirable teacher, the one who's doing the right thing, and the Elliot Gould character is kind of this ignoble, lazy guy who's just running away from his responsibilities as a teacher, who's a Jewish man who's essentially been given this racist attack upon him in the schoolroom by one of his pupils.
	He's wrong to be angry about this, and the correct approach is the Avery Brooks approach, which is to give extra time and extra favours and extra chances to this little neo-Nazi.
	Yeah, this little 17-year-old neo-Nazi, yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, I'm watching it and I'm thinking, no!
	The Elliot Gould teacher is the one who's right here!
	His is the reasonable attitude!
	And this is where we have to step back.
	I mean, I feel like we've kind of given this film, we've described the context of it, and I think given at least sort of a broad portrait of the stuff that doesn't work here narratively, right?
	Some of it.
	Some of it.
	I mean, we can get back to that, but I do want to focus here and kind of get back to, like, our main reason that we cover these things is to sort of, like, talk about, like, what's here and what's not and what's, you know, and how does this look through the lens of, you know, the kind of modern rise of, you know, fascism and
	In America and around the world, and telling you that this was based on the screenwriter's background in the punk scene in Los Angeles in sort of like the late 80s, what strikes you as missing from this subculture?
	There's something that is immediately obvious to me upon re-watching it that I didn't necessarily, that wouldn't have occurred to me in 1998, but there is definitely one feature that is absolutely missing from the film, and I'm wondering if If anything kind of jumps out at you there.
	I'm not trying to put you on the spot.
	You're not trying to put me on the spot.
	That's exactly what you are doing.
	I hate it when you ask me these rhetorical questions because I never get the thing I'm supposed to get.
	So why don't you just tell me, you bastard?
	I am such an asshole.
	I should tell you that I'm going to ask you these things ahead of time, but no.
	You'll notice there's no anti-fascists in this film.
	There are no sharps.
	There are no anti-racist skinheads in this film.
	And that would absolutely be a huge part of what was going on in a punk scene in Los Angeles in 1993.
	Okay, this is fine, because this relies upon sociological knowledge that I can't be expected to have.
	I feel fine about not knowing.
	Right.
	So not only would, you know, the film shows, I mean, A, the film is absolutely Let's just put a pin in this right now.
	I have spoken to former Neo-Nazis who told me they used to put this film on when they were feeling down about themselves when they were Nazis.
	Who used to put this on as like, this is kind of a white power movie for them.
	And viewed through that lens, it's very easy to see.
	It's like, A, Ed Norton wins every rhetorical fight in the movie.
	B, he's a fucking badass, right?
	Yeah.
	And we can talk a little bit with that.
	He becomes this not only skinhead, but king of the skinheads.
	He's running this gang.
	he's supposed to be this kind of like major figure within sort of this rising neo-fascist movement in in the world of the film and then you know you kind of view it as like and then a bunch of liberal cucks like had to make him like lose in the end and he had to like deconvert but ultimately because the arguments against it are so weak there is no kind of battle there is no there is no answer to it right but also
	It's incredibly charismatic and buff and sexy and cool all the way through the fucking film.
	I mean, I know as a fact that this is something, you know, there are a lot of these guys, these Nazi guys who love this fucking film and I can see why.
	And as you say, it's not just the fact that Edward Norton is showing off.
	Because the kind of good actor... I mean, I do think Edward Norton is capable of very good acting.
	But the kind of good acting that he does is that very Hollywood kind of good acting.
	You know, exactly the kind that the Academy likes.
	Which is very self-consciously... It's like they're all trying to be De Niro in the 70s.
	I am an actor, don't you see?
	It's like they're all trying to be De Niro in the '70s.
	And it's-- He's saying, I am an actor, don't you see?
	An actor, yeah.
	I am not playing Edward Norton here.
	I am now a neo-Nazi.
	Let me say the slurs in exactly the way that will be discomforting in a way to the Academy voters, but not so discomforting that they won't vote for me.
	I'm not saying he's as bad, but the terminus of this is Jared Leto sending dead animals to his co-stars on Suicide Squad and shit like that.
	It's very much that sort of acting.
	It's very narcissistic and show-offish acting.
	And he is showing off how fucking badass and cool and charismatic he is all the way through the movie.
	And as you say, he wins all the arguments.
	And there's one bit of the movie that I really like, which is that when the sister tries to argue with him, right?
	And she hasn't got the arguments.
	She knows he's wrong.
	She absolutely knows he's wrong.
	And she's right to know that he's wrong.
	But she hasn't got anything to come back at him with.
	So he bulldozes her.
	To the point where he infuriates her so much, not only with that but with his abusive behaviour towards the family, that she comes at him with a baseball bat.
	That's actually, I think, that's actually really good.
	Because that's something that happens.
	People encounter these bastards and they know that they're wrong.
	But they don't know why, and they can't argue with them, so they get into arguments with them and they get bulldozed.
	Because these guys, the clever ones anyway, they can bulldoze you in debate if you don't know what you're doing.
	And it's a fantastic moment.
	It shows that you can lose the debate to these bastards.
	They're still wrong, but the trouble is that the movie relies upon the knowledge that he's wrong being this given that the audience already knows.
	Right?
	And of course, in the real world, there's a hell of a lot of people in the audience who don't know that.
	And the people that don't know that are watching the film and thinking, yeah, go on, Derek, you've just won the argument.
	Well, and you notice in that very confrontational kitchen scene, which I think is the one you're referring to, Lots of arguments over kitchen tables in this.
	This is the big Elliot Gould scene in the middle of the film.
	At the end of the day, what Derrick does is he does have talking points that he spews, but ultimately the way he wins the argument is he stands up and he gets really aggressive with the older Jewish man who is dating his mom.
	And he exerts his sort of masculine dominance and he exerts a physical space and he like Actively assaults his sister in the in the film like this is yeah clearly portrayed and this something that like Again, the film is really getting at something here.
	I think this is one is sort of difficult as it is to sort of This feels very true to life in a very real way, and this is how he would win this argument.
	Essentially, he would yell louder, he would talk over people, or he would just get actively violent.
	Because ultimately, if you were to slow down and ask him, OK, let's talk through all these things, let's have this real conversation, he wouldn't have the actual data to back this up.
	He wouldn't have a real argument.
	It's surface level.
	It's an inch deep.
	But you need to have the knowledge to come at him with.
	Right, but the talking points are designed, and in fact you even see earlier in the film, you see Ethan Suplee's character.
	Ethan Suplee, he was another Boy Meets World guy at this time.
	He was actually playing on this American child sitcom.
	Alongside William Russ, who plays Derek and Danny's father in the film, who we see at the end, who's the fireman who's killed, who creates this whole thing.
	He was on the sitcom Boy Meets World at the time, which is... I don't know, it just amuses me that you've got two actresses from Boy Meets World on this violent neo-Nazi movie.
	Ethan Suplee plays Seth, doesn't he?
	He plays Seth, right.
	He's in a couple of... He later went on to be in My Name is Earl, which is kind of a fun sitcom with Jason Leigh.
	He was in some Kevin Smith movies.
	I mean, he was kind of this indie actor around the time and he was kind of a child star who had kind of become a little bit of a character actor.
	I think he's still acting.
	I mean, he's like 40 or 45 years old or something at this point.
	i think he's quite good in that he actually sort of like buries himself a little bit more in the role and he's allowed to sort of be the this character and he is able to sort of convincingly inhabit the neo-nazi without having to be showy about it
	i mean he does have some moments that are just kind of like screenwriters conceits like at one point he is eating a jar of jelly beans and he reaches in and pulls out the black one and throws it aside and then like eats the like pours the rest of them down his fat gullet um and so there is some like fat joke kind of stuff kind of going on with this as well and the film like leans heavily onto that and so
	So, he does have some, like, really cringy moments, but it's weird that, like, Ethan Suplee is able to sort of sell that in a way, like, I buy him as that character in a way that I don't necessarily buy Ed Norton, who seems to be always kind of, like, standing from his character from a step removed.
	And in a way, Ethan Suplee along with Farooza Bogg are probably the two most convincing racists in the film.
	At least for me, I don't know how you feel about the performances there.
	We don't necessarily have to get into it, but... Yeah, no, I mean, I think the thing about that character, for me, the Seth character, is that he seems...
	He seems very self-consciously designed to be kind of this grotesque figure.
	They cast this guy who's very, very big and they make him sort of lech over the younger sister and he's kind of clueless and etc, etc.
	So it seems to me, I mean I think it's a fine performance, he is good in it and I agree with you, him and Fairuza Balk, probably the best performances in the film.
	Although I do want to actually say Jennifer Lee and does very well as the younger sister.
	Yeah, no, no, I agreed.
	But the problem with that character for me is that he just seems transparently like an attempt to cope with the fact that Edward Norton is...
	It's so cool, you know?
	It's like a desperate attempt to compensate.
	You've got Edward Norton who's buff as fuck and charismatic and everything, so you don't want to actually... It feels calculated.
	You don't want to actually say, oh Nazis are cool.
	Badasses.
	So the next Nazi in it has to be this sort of grotesquely huge idiot.
	And it just feels so... I mean, firstly, it doesn't work.
	Of course it doesn't work.
	And secondly, it just feels so calculated to me.
	Right, right.
	And he is this kind of, like, he is, you're right, he is grotesque, but he is this sort of kind of lovably grotesque in a way, you know?
	There's... I can't go with you there.
	I don't know, like, because he's a charming actor, I think, is kind of where I'm going with that.
	I'm not trying to say, I mean, he is a disgusting character, and I'm not, I'm not gonna go with you, but I think that, like, I can recognize that character in some people that I kind of knew and grew up with, let's put it that way, you know?
	This is not, Like, as strange as it sounds, this is a sort of recognizable human being.
	Oh yeah, much more so than Derek, yeah.
	Right, right.
	And he has, like, you see him at certain points in the film.
	At one point he has this, like, video camera out and he's, like, recording Danny.
	This is before, like, this is kind of as Derek is kind of, like, getting home from prison.
	And he's recording Danny and he's making Danny kind of, like, recite the talking points.
	These sort of, like, Nazi talking points into the camera.
	Yeah.
	And, like, kind of judging him on, like, no, you have to do this better than that.
	And there is, like, the way that this stuff kind of gets, like, programmed and reprogrammed into people.
	And the way that it's sort of, like, self, it's reinforcing itself through a culture and through interpersonal relationships.
	I think there is something interesting there.
	I mean, and again, these moments feel, if not like 100% authentic, they feel believable to me.
	This feels like sort of a, like there's something there that the film is trying to say that's kind of buried in this kind of trickly nonsense around it, right?
	Well, apparently the writer did do a hell of a lot of interviews with guys who were actually on this scene.
	And again, you were saying earlier, I think it's a very good way of saying it, that everybody involved is making a slightly different movie.
	And I think the writer probably envisaged something a good deal more subtle than this.
	And as you say, that peeps through every now and again in little moments like that.
	But sadly, I mean, it's very difficult to get through.
	I don't want to sound unsympathetic because it's incredibly difficult to get through in drama that's also satisfying the complexities of situations like this.
	But I think they do get lost, don't they?
	Right.
	Very heavily.
	Right.
	Because, you know, at the end of the day you don't remember, like, those sequences, you know, as a viewer, sort of a casual viewer.
	You remember kind of the big show-off moments of Ed Norton, you know, like smashing the guy's face into concrete.
	You remember some of the later stuff, and believe me, there's so much that we haven't even touched on yet.
	But you don't remember those more subtle moments, and I feel like there is an element of that that kind of gets lost in the noise.
	The other thing I was going to, you highlighted that McKenna, the writer, did a lot of interviews with people in this scene for the movie.
	Another detail that actually rings true is the fact that Ethan Suplee is singing along with a Nazi audio tape.
	In the van.
	As far as I can tell, that was not a pre-existing bit of music, but there is a white nationalist band that later recorded a version of that song.
	Oh, great.
	Wonderful.
	I should tell you a little bit.
	The other thing that I'd like to highlight is that this film sometimes gets called the story of this guy Frank Meek.
	That's M-E-E-I-N-K.
	I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce his last name, who sometimes gets credited as, quote, unquote, the original former, a.k.a. the original former Nazi, because he's kind of one of the early guys who kind of came out of the scene, who got out of it and then started kind of going around and doing the lecture circuit and giving talks to schools and that sort of thing. who got out of it and then started kind of And he's kind of he's he's called the original former.
	He has had relationships with various, you know, former white nationalist organizations and kind of de-radicalization organizations over the past.
	It's unclear to me how much, so I've never talked to Frank Mink.
	I don't know him.
	I know people who know him.
	Uh, he's supposedly a pretty nice guy.
	I think he gets involved in some, some bad shit from now on.
	Some of the organizations he's worked with, we've had problems with in the past, let upon light.
	Um, but, uh, he, uh, from everything that I've been told, he is, uh, he is, he is a pretty nice guy and he is like, he is legitimate and he is not someone who is, um, self-aggrandizing more than he has to be just to sort of like make his career happen.
	Um, at the same time, he sometimes gets billed as like the guy that American history X is based on.
	And it's unclear to me how much he has kind of leaned into that identity in the past.
	Um, this seems to be complete nonsense.
	It seems to be kind of made up by like, like somebody speculated that the story of American history X seems to parallel Frank Mink to some degree, although not to a large degree.
	I mean, the actual backstories are very, very different.
	And when you listen to Frank tell a story, it doesn't match the details of the film at all.
	And the film seems to come from David McKenna, the screenwriter's kind of previous experiences in terms of just kind of people he knew.
	But that does kind of come out from time to time.
	This does get called like, oh, this is Frank Mink's backstory, which doesn't seem to be true at all.
	And I just wanted to kind of highlight that here is that From my understanding, it just isn't true.
	It's just nonsense.
	um but right um you know um yeah um should we should we talk a little bit more about the uh so so the thing that kind of kind of strikes me again upon re-watching is you know anti-fascists are not present at all in this film like there is no yeah there is no sort of sort of like organized anti-fascist presence and that would absolutely be the nearest go ahead go The nearest thing you have, actually, is the cops.
	The cops are presented very positively.
	They're very worried about these right-wing gangs.
	Deeply concerned.
	Yeah, they're working, you know, current events show how ironic that is.
	Not to get into that huge topic.
	They're working very closely with, you know, the Avery Brooks principal character, who's sort of, as you say, there's no anti-fascism in this.
	The nearest thing is the cops working with Avery Brooks, who's got this...
	This very questionable sort of self-reliance, personal responsibility, you know, black respectability politics extended to Nazis thing going on.
	That's about it really, isn't it?
	Well, there's no organized resistance, there's no flyering campaign or anti-flyering campaign.
	You don't see them at the club, they don't invade the club or protest outside the club.
	There's no activity of that kind at all.
	And the film could have decided to include that element and kind of use it as a way of showing the sort of antagonism and showing sort of the difficulty.
	And I mean, ultimately you could kind of make Ed Morton seem even more like a badass by like confronting the anti-racist protesters or whatever, but they're left completely out of this film and they're left out of almost every narrative of this kind.
	And I think there's a structural reason for that.
	And this is where I'm going to stand on my soap box for just a second.
	If you will allow me to.
	And that is that, let's hope the box doesn't break.
	We'll get to that in a second as well. - You know.
	Well done, well done.
	If I'm a journalist writing of a piece about far-right extremism, it's very easy for me to tell a story or to sell a story to an editor that is
	I ran into this guy who used to be in this terrible movement who has gotten out of it and he's trying to clean his life up and he learned that by learning empathy and kind of peace and understanding of other people and he finally ran into and met the funny black man in prison who told jokes and talked about sports and this is literally what happens in the film is that Ed Norton goes to prison.
	He's working the prison laundry.
	And then his co-worker in The Laundry is this like charming black guy, the funny black dude who apparently he never met a nice black man before in his life.
	There's virtually no African-American character other than Avery Brooks is Sweeney and this guy who is Guy Torre as Lamont.
	He doesn't even get a last name, who is like this key figure in the Ed Norton character's life who like converts him from being a neo-Nazi by being charming and funny and a black man.
	By being a sort of... a sort of minstrel, let's just fucking say.
	Yeah, no, no, exactly.
	He's, you know, the quote-unquote, the magic negro character.
	You know, he kind of comes in, he saves the white man from himself, and then he leaves the movie.
	And from the other scary black guys in the prison.
	It's strongly implied that after the Ed Norton character disses the Aryan Brotherhood gang, I don't call them Aryan Brotherhood, but the prison gang, the white power prison gang,
	He is raped in the shower by members of the gang and that's a sort of come to Jesus moment where he starts to sort of leave the movement and he is befriended by this black guy Lamont and it is through those kind of like built relationships and Lamont Because all black people just listen to one another and they always just, one black guy could say, hey lay off, lay off the guy with the swastika on his chest, he's a friend of mine, it's fine.
	Apparently that's just how this works, you know?
	There's no like, other than Avery Brooks.
	There's lots of Star Trek actors in this.
	I think that's because in this, the black people, they just work like the Borg.
	It's just a hive mind.
	And so other than Avery Brooks is Bob Sweeney, who does have a characterization and has motivations and desires, but he's even like a cardboard kind of cut out of the character.
	There's no African-American character who has any kind of real presence in the film as a human being.
	And in fact, they are almost entirely threats to our Nazi character.
	And so the Nazis are antagonized by, and genuinely so.
	You can read this film as, well, no.
	What happened was Ed Norton became a cock, and he didn't teach his boy to defend himself properly.
	He wasn't there in that bathroom at that time to defend the kid, to defend his brother for...
	From the Rampaging Blacks, you see?
	From the Black Gangs.
	It's very easy to just sort of write, you know, just kind of tell that story.
	Like, yeah, this is our story for that, you know?
	Yeah, and that's, you know, there's a lot of Nazis that love this film because they read it that way.
	Exactly.
	You know, they might be aware that they're reading it against the grain, but it's perfectly readable that way.
	They're perfectly aware, they're perfectly aware that Tony Kaye is Jewish, they're perfectly aware that this, you know, this is a project that quotes Jew Hollywood, etc, etc.
	But like it is, it's very easy to just sort of like read and go like, yeah, even, even the lying Hollywood people
	Can't help but reveal the reality of this situation and it is the implicit racism that kind of comes with Hollywood productions, you know, it's just it's built into the fabric that there was no african-american person on set Asking these questions in a way that actually could be Given authority in the film, you know, it's a that's that's ultimately kind of what happens, right?
	Absolutely, yeah.
	And it's rooted in, you know, something that media was... American pop culture media was absolutely obsessed with in the 90s, which is this concept of... Firstly, you know, the trope of the gang, the gang violence, the gang feud thing.
	Right.
	And secondly, the trope of the cycle of violence, right?
	Like, it was every... I mean, it's still ubiquitous now, but it was...
	Everywhere in the 90s, right the way across the media, this thing about like, you know, paranoia about gangs and paranoia about the cycle of hate, the cycle of violence.
	I remember an episode of Law and Order, right, and you know, Law and Order sort of repeatedly does their race episode, yeah, and they're always the fucking same.
	Every year or two, every year or two, they drop in like, this is the serious one about race in America, race in New York City.
	And, you know, if I was to start talking about that, we'd be here for the length of an entire podcast.
	But let's just say that the Law & Order race episode that they remake every year, right?
	And there was one... You know how sometimes things get just burned into your brain for some reason?
	This is burned into my brain.
	There's this story about, you know, like a black kid accidentally gets shot when somebody lets a gun off.
	And, of course, the black community just go completely crazy.
	They're hysterical because they take it as a racial killing.
	And you get killings back and forth and it ends with, I can't remember, it's a white kid shot in the street or something.
	And the detective sort of looks at his partner and he says, welcome to the Gaza Strip.
	Oh god.
	Yeah, I remember that one.
	It's so fucking foul, but it represents this absolute obsession with this paranoid obsession with gang violence and this idea of racism as this completely contextless cycle of hate, you know, cycle of violence.
	And this film is just embedded in that, completely embedded in that.
	And the other thing it's embedded in is, again, this thing that crops up again and again and again in American, and, you know, not just American, but American mainstream pop culture, is the white forgiveness, white guilt expiation fantasy.
	It's in everything from Dances with Wolves to Avatar.
	And that's what this is as well.
	This movie, the stakes here are... It's nothing to do with black people.
	It's nothing to do with whether black people get to use a basketball court or get to not be murdered in the streets or whatever.
	It's nothing to do with that.
	It's certainly nothing to do with whether a Jewish man gets to not be racially harassed at school.
	The movie doesn't give a shit about that.
	Or gets to have a relationship with Beverly D'Angelo.
	Which is really what the film should have been about.
	Like, weren't you the mom in the National Lampoon's movies?
	I would like to be in a relationship now.
	I can do this better than Chevy Chase can, I assure you.
	Well, you know, obviously.
	He was in Memoirs of an Invisible Man.
	I was in The Long Goodbye.
	I've worked with Altman.
	Who are you going to go with here?
	Sorry, I'm telling jokes because it's serious content.
	Anyway, please continue.
	You are correct.
	That's okay.
	My point, in my usual sort of windy way, what I'm saying is the stakes here are the souls of white people.
	It's Edward Norton's soul and Edward Furlong's soul that are at stake here.
	That's the only thing that matters.
	Will they be redeemed?
	Yep, exactly.
	And this is kind of where I was going before we got sidetracked.
	I think it's very worthwhile to go there, but I want to kind of come back to that central point, and that is that The way that you confront neo-Nazis, the way that you deal with neo-Nazis in your community within this framework is by being empathetic towards them.
	It is by sort of saving them from their worst excesses.
	It is by Turning the other cheek and being friendly, and it is on the victims of these communities.
	It is on, like, we see horrific acts of violence by neo-Nazis against people of color who are never given, like, a real agency or a real perspective.
	We're never told what they feel about what Edward Norton did to them, right?
	They never get, like, a line, even a single line of dialogue about that, you know?
	They're completely dehumanized within the context of the film, right?
	And so it's all about, like, we need to feel bad for Edward Norton because he lost his father.
	And of course he's going to lean into this kind of racialized system of abuse.
	And the only kind of... We get Davina.
	I love that, like, this family is a little like Derek, Danny, Doris, and Davina.
	Like, that's... Oh, and the father is Dennis.
	They're all Ds.
	I don't know why they're all Ds.
	It seems very, you know... Anyway.
	I think it's actually an attempt, and you know, I could get sidetracked on this as well, but I'm not going to.
	I think it's actually an attempt to sort of draw, in a sort of cutesy, chintsy way, a picture of a working class family.
	Yeah, no, no.
	Because this is very much the slander of racism being this problem with the white working class as well, isn't it?
	Right.
	And, you know, I've known families where, you know, like it ends up being like, you know, a Sam, like a Sam or Samantha, Steve, Mary, and then they name all their children with S names because it's cute.
	Like, you know, it does strike me as like this kind of weird choice that they do in the film, but it is something that you do see from time to time.
	But it is this kind of weird, like, cutesy, like, Ozzie and Harriet leave it to Beaver thing.
	I think there, I think there is something there that there is, again, like a subtle thing in the film that Again, there's a better film that's sort of aching to like kind of get its way out in those kinds of details, right?
	But again, going back to the thing, like, it's very easy to kind of tell the story.
	It's very easy to sell the vision of, like, the way you combat racism is through nonviolence.
	We have to follow Dr. King's dream and not view people through the color of their skin, etc., etc., etc.
	And we certainly can't confront people with, you know, violent action in the street.
	We can't actually fight fire with fire because, like, we have to be better than that.
	We have to take the high road.
	And when you talk to, like, former white nationalists, you know, it's very easy to sell the story.
	And they sell this story of, like, an, I was a violent person.
	It's like a, you know, you hear them and they talk about, uh, you know, like those, those like kind of like old time preachers, you know, who were like, I sinned for years.
	I had women, I had drugs.
	I was, I was buried in my own lust and my own alcoholism.
	And then I saw the light Jesus entered my heart and now I am better and I'm here to help you be better as well and the sort of the former phenomenon this sort of like famous former white nationalist phenomenon fits that mold very well when in fact the real story if you like look at the history of these preachers is like yeah and then I went to jail and Or, and then, like, the guy whose wife I was fucking beat the shit out of me, and I realized I had to do things differently.
	Or, you know, you get some kind of, like, narrative that looks a lot more like that.
	I ran into, like, consequences for my behavior.
	And then, you know, that started me down a road of soul-searching.
	And so the fact that, like, anti-fascists and, like, sort of the sharps, the skinheads against racial prejudice, the good skinheads, are nowhere to be found in this film, it tells this sort of liberal, peaty version.
	And again, I know quite a few white nationalists, former white nationalists, and I know a few current white nationalists.
	They show up in my mentions, don't worry.
	But I know former white nationalists who will tell you, like, look, yeah, this story is nonsense.
	Like, it's, you know, the whole, like, You know, I got doxxed, and you look at yourself in the mirror the next day, and it's a very different, suddenly, you know, you get the cold splash of water on your face, and you realize that, like, I have to live my life differently now.
	And some people dig right in and do the thing, and some people, like, that becomes the path they go down.
	But ultimately, the idea that we can just hug the hate away, It is this very liberal peony.
	It is this very pleasant, nice version of events that speaks well.
	It sells well in movies like this, and it sells well in deradicalization programs.
	It sells well in various ways, but it doesn't actually match reality in a lot of cases.
	It's very difficult to get real numbers on this.
	But certainly, there are people who leave for their own reasons.
	I mean, there are all kinds of reasons that people leave.
	But we never see the version of, like, and then I got hit in the face with a baseball bat from an anti-fascist.
	And I spent a couple of weeks in traction and then went, like, yeah, maybe I need to do things a little bit differently.
	Or I lost my job 20 times because I was doxed over and over again, and I realized I actually have kids that I want to feed, and maybe I need to stop living my life this way.
	Question some of my life choices.
	You never hear that version because it's prosaic and that's like gives Credence to the idea that like maybe sometimes you know, you need to use a little force here and there are some natural consequences to spreading this hate and The victims are always de-emphasized in these kinds of narratives, you know Edward Norton doesn't go around to the people he victimized for three years and You know, you don't see him at the family of the man he murdered and served three years for, right?
	You don't see him go to that family, you know, hat in hand, objectively apologizing and trying to make amends for his failure as a human being.
	You know, you never, you don't, and like all of this stuff is completely left out of this movie, and we should come back to the movie.
	I mean, I think there's some more interesting stuff, but I do want to like really lean into this and say This is a problem with sort of de-radicalization programs.
	It's kind of like big name de-radicalization programs in general.
	And we have had a very kind of public back and forth with Light Upon Light and Matt Heimbach and Jeff Shoup to a lesser extent.
	And I'm not going to name, I don't really know a lot of these kind of other people like personally.
	I know I've spoken on the phone to a number of kind of formers who are well known as formers who are doing Presumably good work, but like the organizations, these big organizations almost never focus on anything that's sort of victim-centered or anything that's kind of based on like actually making people make amends for the crimes.
	The crime, whether they're like legal crimes or whether they're moral crimes that they have committed over the course of their lives.
	Well, you get a jail-free card, right?
	I mean, there's this guy, Daryl Davis, who's currently working with Light Upon Light, whom I've never had a personal conversation with.
	He tweeted at me, I mean, he knows who I am, to some degree, who was the subject of this documentary, Accidental Courtesy.
	And this is the you know the african-american blues musician who took it upon himself in the late 70s early 80s to start visiting like clan rallies and to talk to clan members and try to befriend them and get them to Leave organized hate and he claims like I have convinced over the course of 30 years or so 30 40 years however long it is something like 200 clan members have left the clan and And when you poke him on that, it's kind of like, well, yeah, who?
	Like, can we talk to them?
	And the number that you can like confirm as having left is much smaller than that, right?
	Which is not unreasonable that people don't want to talk about their history in the clan.
	I mean, I'm not, I'm not calling him a liar or whatever, but like his number is something like 200.
	That's sort of what he claims.
	It's sort of the commonly given number.
	But at the same time, it's like you've also been doing this for like 40 years, right?
	You know, and you have put enormous amounts of your time into this.
	And you have literally gone on the stand and defended some people currently in the Klan.
	It's currently in like white supremacist movements.
	You have defended their character in ways that have like lessened their sentences and have done.
	In a lot of ways you have done material help to these organizations that you are claiming to combat.
	And while this work is messy, I'm not arguing otherwise.
	Anyone who does anything in this sphere understands that You end up in places that are kind of morally gray, that are questionable.
	You end up asking yourself, like, what's the best choice of action?
	And ultimately, we are all beholden to our own consciences.
	And I'm not trying to hold up Daryl Davis as like, you're a terrible person for doing this.
	But if this is the model, if this is the one that kind of gets elevated in our media ecosystem, as this is how you combat hate, quote unquote, There's a lot that's left out of that and there's a lot of like kind of realistic This is what actually works on the ground and the truth is we don't know what works on the ground One of the things that I've been trying to do a low-key is to look into How do radicalization programs like their history and sort of like is there good data about like how this works at all?
	Do we have any kind of like research?
	It's almost as if, you know, stopping fascism and stopping racism and protecting the communities they attack, it's almost as if those aren't big priorities for society.
	It's almost as if there's this sort of, like, grift industry that's built around kind of selling this particular vision of how de-radicalization works.
	Yeah, this Hallmark movie version.
	This Hallmark movie version, this very kind of treacly, literally sitcom actor version of this kind of narrative that may or may not represent reality.
	And I'm perfectly willing to go with you, like, look, we need to have conversations with people and we need to kind of bring people out of this.
	Like, I have spoken to people who do this work, who really do put hours and hours and hours into trying to help people who want to leave the movement and leave the movement.
	And it is, like, lots of talk therapy, lots of, like, exit counseling.
	This is important, detailed, very, very difficult work.
	When people do want to leave and, like, how to get them out, how to get them out safely, how to get them out in ways that will actually help them and that will, like, keep them out is a really, really important conversation.
	And nobody, literally nobody, even black bloc in the street, are not going to argue with you on that, right?
	Like, everybody agrees that this is necessary work.
	It just doesn't work in the way that, like, I met a nice black guy and suddenly I was reformed 20 minutes later.
	Like, that's just not how it works.
	And yet that's the version that were sold in these kinds of films, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's not just morally and politically obnoxious to load the responsibility for making the priority the salvation of white souls from hate and loading the responsibility for that onto black characters who are then drawn in grotesque, flat, two-dimensional, minstrel sort of ways.
	It's not just that that's morally and politically wrong.
	It's also just a misrepresentation of how these things really work.
	Because it's not an attempt to really grapple with them, it's an attempt to tell this feel-good story.
	I mean, you mentioned the old-style preacher that does the thing about how, you know, I used to be a sinner, I used to go with loose women and I used to do... You know, a lot of the attraction of that for the audiences that go to listen to that guy is to hear about the loose women and the drink.
	Absolutely.
	Tell me again about how bad you were in the old days.
	Tell me about the strippers.
	I really want to know.
	Exactly how sinful were those dirty women.
	And then you get the alibi of the Reformation and you get to feel good about yourself afterwards.
	And that's exactly what this is!
	This is a white saviour redemption fantasy for white people.
	You get to sort of salaciously enjoy the evil Nazis hurting the victims, like the woman in the store, etc.
	It's horrible.
	But, you know, the audiences that are coming to this, they're coming to it for the... And I'll say it.
	I was a young man.
	I thought this was great.
	It was working on me on that level.
	You know, because I got to enjoy the, oh look at the evil Nazis, look at that poor woman, and then I get the payoff, which is the, but we can all be friends, you know, if only we just, you know, learn to, you know, and all that sort of treacly, one-dimensional shit.
	Right, and just to be clear here, I mean, you know, we could be accused of sort of, like, highlighting in this same kind of thing of, like, you know, let me tell you about how bad the Nazis are and you get to, like, vicariously enjoy it through me.
	Nothing's pure.
	Right.
	Well, right, nothing's pure, you know?
	And I take that responsibility very seriously in terms of, like, doing this in a way that, like, there are reasons that we don't lean into certain kinds of aspects of this that would give us a much greater audience and more money, frankly, you know?
	There's a reason that we kind of do this.
	We balance out sort of like a humorous kind of telling of this kind of stuff alongside like a big dollop of information and knowledge and like actual kind of original research where it would be much, much easier to just like play clips and laugh at them for 45 minutes a week.
	It would save me so much time and effort if we could just do that.
	It would be so much more fun and people would enjoy that.
	But there's a reason we don't do that this way.
	Right.
	You know, even though we do like play clips and stuff now, like it's, it's in, if we're going too far in one direction, the other, I'm certainly interested in hearing people's perspective on that.
	And people do send me messages about that.
	Um, but that's something that we are always trying to do here is to do this responsibly.
	Right.
	And to not do it the way that these movies kind of, you know, salaciously lean into it.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Absolutely.
	No, I was just going to say, you know, we do want to hear feedback.
	We want to know what we're doing wrong, particularly from people who are more at the sharp end of this sort of thing than we are, you know?
	Indeed.
	Which brings us to our friend of the pod, Matt Heimbach.
	Friend of the pod meant ironically, in case anybody wanted to take that out of context.
	Yeah, yeah.
	As I said in the most recent episode, I mean, you know, people did sort of question.
	People have been questioning me like, hey, why are you giving that guy your time?
	Why did you do this?
	Why are you, you know, caring what a Nazi thinks even if he claims to be reformed or whatever?
	And there are lots of reasons for that.
	One is just for, you know, I did kind of ask him because he claimed to be reformed.
	I did ask him to message me.
	I was interested in kind of hearing from Matt and kind of getting his perspective.
	And he did provide me with that.
	I learned a lot from that process.
	I have not spoken to him in a few weeks at this point.
	I think we kind of left well enough alone there.
	My perspective on Matt Heimbach is that And this is something that, like, came out since we recorded, or I found after we recorded.
	So the episode 5 of that episode, and you'll have to look back at our Matt Heimbach episodes to kind of get the background on this because I'm not going to get back into the detail on it, but we recorded our first episode about Matt Heimbach, you know, reformed racist.
	And I have talked about this podcast he was doing with Light Upon Light, this Take a Walk on the Right Side podcast.
	Episode 5 of that podcast about the book Siege was released on May 16th.
	I found a BitChute channel recently with a single video on it under Matt Heimbach's name, and it's clearly Matt Heimbach and a buddy of his speaking into microphones.
	It seems to be a fragmentary episode.
	I'm not sure quite why it went up, but it is a BitChute channel, and this episode was dated May 23rd, and it's called National Bolshevik Radio.
	And it has a deep connection to some of the earlier action podcasts that Meit Heimbach was doing back when he was a kind of full-fledged Nazi.
	Except that instead of opening up with German music, it opens up with Soviet music.
	And they talk about, like, how white nationalism is not white supremacy.
	It's the same fucking talking points.
	And this is recorded, or at least released, after all the shit that Matt Hanebach was saying to Jesse Morton about his intentions in terms of, like, leaving the movement and wanting to work cross-racially and all this sort of thing.
	Again, it's the exact same logic.
	Matt Heimbach in conversation with me said, like, you may see this as, like, kind of a minor difference of opinion that I have moved.
	He claims I went from being, like, a nationalist to being a Marxist.
	And you may see that as, like, it's just a tiny gap.
	But for me, like, that's a distinction that makes all the difference.
	And you're still selling the same kind of vision of reality.
	Whether you call what you're working for an ethnostate, or whether you call what you're working for an intentional community of Russian Orthodox people, Organized across racial lines, but calling yourself a Soviet makes very little difference to me.
	If you're trying to create repressive social structures that are organized, even if they were like actively multiracial, you know, if you're, you know, being fucking misogynist, and if you're, you know, you know, oppressing trans people, etc, etc.
	I don't think that's okay, right?
	And like immediately what these guys always want to do whenever you start to have this conversation is like, well don't we have a right to sort of live our lives?
	Shouldn't we be able to sort of build communities for ourselves?
	Aren't you just oppressing us with your values?
	And it's like, you know, and then they can, aren't you just exhibiting the same thing that like the neoliberal American empire is doing by imposing its values upon the rest of the world through military action?
	And it's like, you have such a blinkered vision of like the way all this shit works, right?
	You know, Heimbach.
	It's the same talking points, different rhetoric.
	Heimbach said to me, and, you know, and again, I've promised not to kind of reveal exact details, but he starts bringing up like the People's Republic of China.
	You know, they don't, they're not too fond of, they're more fond of like, you know, abortion and gay people than like my old grandmother would be.
	But they're certainly not as far as you are.
	And aren't you really just, since that's a successful version of socialism, isn't that much better than, like, what, how do you get to criticize them as a, you know, kind of, aren't you just being racist?
	And it's like...
	I get to oppose oppression structures wherever I find them.
	This isn't an argument.
	This is complete nonsense.
	I have a vision of the way the world should be that doesn't involve oppression from anyone.
	And if people choose to live in restricted communities, there are ways of dealing with that.
	And there are adult conversations we can have.
	But you don't get to compare, like, in my church, I think women should have to wear a hair covering because I believe that's what God wants me to do.
	In my little church.
	You don't get to compare that to genocide and like think of those things interchangeably in some way and like I don't get to oppose one because I I can't oppose one because I don't I can't oppose the other like it's it's You're just talking in circles.
	You're just pretending to be this you're thinking you're getting the bigger the better end of the bargain the better version of this rhetoric because you're doing what Derek does in the movie right because what Derek does is
	It's he's sort of like he's charming and he talks really quickly and he you know kind of stands up and he says like well you're the one oppressing me ultimately no white people are the ones who are actually oppressing the society and like don't can't we aren't we allowed to be socially conservative anymore like no it's really the trans people they're the ones oppressing me you know and it's you're just it's reactionary garbage is what it is yeah you know It's just the same old crap.
	It's just, well, what about my personal freedom to refuse to make a gay wedding cake?
	You know, relocated to, you know, the People's Republic of China.
	Right.
	It's the same fucking fallacy, relocated and couched in different language.
	That's all it is.
	And it's nothing to do with fucking socialism.
	Right.
	It doesn't.
	And, you know, the idea, the fact that Matt Heimbach is calling himself a Marxist is something that's just...
	I laugh.
	It's beneath content.
	I laugh, I laugh, I laugh.
	One other thing that he did publicly was in a Light Upon Light webinar, he got into the comments and he starts, like, praising a Polish resistance fighter, I forget the guy's name, but he starts, like, praising this guy who was, like, a vicious anti-Semite because this guy was, like, saving his people from the, you know, oppressive powers without He calls him a saint of the church, although this guy is not a saint of any of the Orthodox churches, as far as I know, as far as anybody that I've talked to knows.
	He also actively praises David Irving, who is sort of the father of modern Holocaust denial.
	And I did bring this up to him in our most recent DM conversation, and I questioned him and said, like, dude, if you want to get respect, then maybe not standing for David Irving would be a good idea, right?
	And his response was, David Irving is a historian, period.
	And you know, that's enough.
	That's okay.
	There you go.
	Whether you call yourself, whatever you're calling yourself, you're a fucking Nazi.
	If you still have any degree of respect for David Irving, as thoroughly debunked as that man's work has been over and over and over again.
	Yeah, no, we know where your sympathies lie.
	Look, if you say that, if you say David Irving is a historian who should be listened to, effectively you're engaging in Holocaust denial.
	You're a fucking Nazi.
	You either know, or if you don't know, you have no excuse for not knowing and you shouldn't be talking about this.
	But they know.
	Right, and it is completely disorganized.
	It is established that that guy is a falsifier of history.
	It is established beyond intelligence.
	Go read Richard Evans' Lying About Hitler.
	We've recommended that book before.
	It's a great book.
	You don't even have to buy a book.
	You can just go read The Holocaust Denial on Trial.
	I can link it in the show notes.
	You can go and read.
	Evans summarizes the basic arguments very, very well.
	Forensic.
	And so I think it's worthwhile to have had the conversation and to get that perspective and to realize whatever Heimbach says about himself, he has not really come to terms with this.
	He does not believe that political white nationalism is something that should be opposed directly, and that he doesn't see the evil that is inherent in that, the state force that is just inherent in that belief system, and the oppression that's inherent in that belief system.
	And the fact that he is being platformed by organizations, the fact that he is treated as, like, a reformed Nazi or a former Nazi or, you know, whatever, who is supposed to be this kind of, like, moral paragon that we should all follow because he is preaching, like, some vision of nonviolence.
	It's reactionary garbage, and there's plenty of... I've been looking at Jesse Morton's Twitter, and there's a lot of bullshit there.
	He retweeted the Unity 2020 ticket, the Brett Weinstein's Unity 2020 ticket.
	He said, wow, this sounds like a really nice idea, you know?
	I'm like, oh yeah, no, wow.
	That's the level of political knowledge that that man has.
	um it's it's it's just you know it's it's complete it's complete it's complete ahistorical nonsense it's completely out of context and again there is no focus on victims and this is this is almost universal throughout these organizations that they almost never have any real emphasis on the victims of this violence it's always about
	Bringing up the former white nationalists is about bringing up the former Nazi the former quote-unquote extremist and showing how they have reformed and lauding them for having reformed as opposed to like challenging them on the actual evil that they've put out in the world and Again, I know a number of people who are former white nationalists who are actively working to make the world better a better place who know that they can't ever really answer for their crimes and who don't and
	Asked to be platformed for that reason.
	Who, you know, are doing what they need to do, who are making amends but understand that people aren't ever going to trust them, and are not making a living at this, you know, and are not getting the laudatory, the adulatory praise.
	I mean, you know, again, sorry to sort of like sideline the movie episode, but it's all part of the same story, right?
	In that movies like American History X put lie to this sort of version of how this works that is then manipulated by these organizations to put resources and fame and praise into the former white nationalists instead of focusing on the actual things that we should do to solve these problems for real.
	Yeah.
	No, that's not sidetracking us.
	That's the point of talking about it.
	That's the serious point that's lost in the film and the sort of conversation that the film provokes and supports.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Alright, yeah.
	I think it's very, I mean just to say one more thing about the film.
	One thing that I find really telling about the film is that it ends with the quote from Danny's report that he has in.
	And he quotes from Lincoln's first inaugural address, right?
	He quotes the lovely, you know, stuff about we must not be enemies but friends and the better angels of our nature and all that.
	Now that's from the first inaugural address, okay?
	Those are bromides and platitudes from a Lincoln who is saying, you know, if I can save the Union without freeing a single slave, I will do that, right?
	The second Inaugural Address, after Lincoln has been to a certain extent radicalised by what is effectively a slave revolt via the Union Army, there's stuff in there about how if the unrequited toil drawn by the lash from 200 years of servitude.
	If every single drop of that blood has to be paid for by the blood of our enemies, then that's the judgment of the Lord and it's righteous.
	You could quote from the fucking second inaugural address because it's a hell of a lot fucking better.
	And I think the fact that they don't, the fact that they quote the saccharine platitudes from the first one, from the pre-radicalized Lincoln, that's a problematic way of putting it, but you know what I mean.
	I think that tells you everything you need to know about this movie and where it's coming from.
	Absolutely.
	No, I agree.
	I missed that detail, but you're absolutely right.
	You know, it is.
	Empty platitudes is empty bromides.
	Ultimately, that is what it is.
	The other thing I find disturbing about this is basically it thinks he's an abuser of his family, because he is.
	He's a domestic abuser of his family, his mother and his sister.
	They think that he's doing that because he's a Nazi.
	Well, no.
	He's not behaving like that in the home because he's picked up some bad memes from his father and he just feels pissed off.
	He's not an abuser because he's a Nazi.
	He's a Nazi because he's an abuser.
	And the film just completely fails to reckon with that.
	He goes into prison, he meets the one nice black guy who informs him that courts aren't always fair to black people, which he didn't know before.
	You know and they have a little joke with each other and he comes out and the scales fall from his eyes and he's not pissed off anymore and suddenly he's just this completely and again it's this it's this reformation redemption fantasy and it's very very unhelpful I think.
	I mean it would be different if he was the one who was killed at the end, maybe.
	Well yeah, this is the other thing.
	Ultimately it's a tragedy, isn't it?
	And the tragedy is that Danny doesn't get a chance to have this wonderful future as a wonderful kid who was a racist for 24 hours and then got talked out of it.
	We've been a racist for a while.
	A lot of kids, a lot of people play with this in their teenage years.
	I live in Michigan.
	There are a lot of people in this state who have swastika tattoos that they don't show.
	Not because they believe it, but because they used to and haven't been able to afford to get them removed or it gives them some cachet or whatever.
	Like, this is, this is, this is, it is not unusual to run into people who have dabbled in this in the past and who kind of left it behind as sort of, like, youthful stuff.
	And, like, no one is trying to equate that person with, like, David Duke or whatever.
	And, you know, like, if you've left, then you've left.
	That's fine.
	I'm not, you know, just be quiet about it.
	You know, be quiet about your politics.
	Unless you want to actively work on our side, you know, just be quiet, stay away from my microphone, and I no longer, and I don't have to care about you for a while, you know?
	Don't go to any fucking events and beat down communists or whatever.
	That's the flip side of that.
	People do dabble in this, and it's very possible that Danny was that kid.
	I played with these ideas, I was influenced by a member of my family, and then it was like, oh man, I realized that was some fucked up shit.
	Move away from that life, you know, it's entirely possible.
	That's sort of an alternate narrative that we can kind of get from from Danny's story But again, that's not the version that we're seeing in in the movie because the version that we're seeing the movie is the sort of like Treacly I was awful and then I you know changed my ways I do love that every like Nazi in a movie has like the entire like bedroom wall filled with like swastikas You know the fascists like big photos of Hitler.
	I mean, it's not this is not a This is something that does happen.
	Don't get me wrong, James Alex Fields, the man who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville at the right, it was revealed after the trial that he had a giant portrait of Adolf Hitler in his bedroom.
	Yeah.
	Like it's like your parents never never saw that you know when you were like sharing Hitler memes and you're just kind of like you know like in like phone calls and like texts with your mom and she's like oh no that's just like funny like goofy that's my son just being just joking around and he's got a giant portrait of Hitler in his bedroom.
	Like, yeah, for irony, I guess, I don't know, like, yeah, no, it's the psychology of, like, and again, that would be a really interesting story, like, what's the mom's story?
	How is she kind of dealing with this, you know?
	Like, I mean, we see her kind of devolve into alcoholism in the film.
	At least that's sort of implied, right?
	Is that she's, you know, just kind of killing herself with a drink.
	And I can imagine if you have, you know, two Nazi sons and, like, milquetoast liberal daughter, you know, fighting all the time.
	I mean, you know, again, there's an interesting sort of, like, family drama that could be told here that kind of gets left completely aside for the redemption narrative of Ed Gordon.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And completely, completely left aside in all the, you know, the tragedy and redemption of this white family is the black people that he murdered.
	Yeah exactly.
	I mean you were talking about that earlier and I was talking about tropes of 90s cinema and I was sort of powerfully reminded of Born on the Fourth of July which is a hell of a lot better on sort of the politics of Vietnam and resistance than a lot of stuff.
	But there's this whole thing in that movie about how in the process of slaughtering a Vietnamese family, the Tom Cruise character accidentally kills one of his soldiers in his own unit.
	And you get this scene where he goes and visits the family and it's heart-rending where he confesses to accidentally killing his buddy.
	And it's, you know, it's absolutely clear, and I have to be fair to Oliver Stone, you know, he's telling a particular story at this point and he does try to tell the story from the Vietnamese, partially anyway, from a Vietnamese point of view in a later film.
	But in this film it's just, yeah, it's just completely obvious that, like, You know, the problem here is that he accidentally killed one of his white American buddies.
	In the process of mowing down the Vietnamese, I accidentally winged one white guy.
	He bled from his arm for half an hour, and that was the thing that made me think the Vietnam War is wrong, don't you see?
	Yeah.
	But it's okay, because I'm redeemed, and it's coming from the same place.
	It's where I saw the light, and now I'm going to vote against Nixon, and that's how you know that I'm a good person, because I'm going to vote against Nixon.
	And this is exactly the mindset that has self-righteous fucking white people preaching to anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter protesters about how they should listen to Dr. King and judge people by the contents of their characters.
	This is exactly where this leads.
	I could go on, I could go and talk about Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying right now because I've been continuing to follow their stuff and every episode is worse than the one before and every episode I think you can't get more obviously awful in every episode it does.
	I have one more thought about the movie that's not related, but I think is worth coming out on, just as an interesting point.
	Just be grateful, listeners, that you're not now into episode four of The Weinstein Chronicle.
	Indeed, indeed, because I could have.
	We could have continued.
	One of the things that interests me is that Edward Norton, as an actor, I think is very good.
	At the, like, the dinner table sequences and in this sort of, like, you know, kind of the clean-cut version of these arguments, like, when he is sort of, like, making, like, when he's, like, talking to the street gang before they do the violence in the market.
	You know, he's kind of talking about, like, unemployment numbers, and he's talking, he's kind of giving this kind of, like, straight-list vision of these events.
	Well, that's not how you, like, motivate a street gang to go do violence, you know?
	Like, that's not the kind of thing you do.
	And then he kind of later moves into kind of more of the team building, kind of the violent stuff.
	But like the reality is that like, especially, and maybe this is kind of knowing who Ed Norton is now and sort of having a better like kind of perspective on him.
	Like he looks the part, like he's sort of, he's got the swastika tattoo.
	He's well muscled, you know, he's got the, he's got the white boxers and you know, like he looks, he looks the part, but I can't see him as anything other than like vanilla white bread Ed Norton in the role.
	Right.
	I, I still see the kind of the the dough the dough face underneath that and that's not you know, Ed Norton You know, I know I'm no great imposing figure myself But you know, I don't I don't buy him as sort of the like the the violent skinhead kind of vision of this character Um, and it wouldn't have been a very different but an interesting story because the film kind of wants to have it both ways.
	He's supposed to be both this sort of like violent skinhead and the sort of the new leader who's going to take over from this for this Cameron Alexander figure, right?
	He's supposed to be sort of like the new leading light.
	And so he's supposed to be kind of both David Duke And the leader of the the Hammerskins.
	And I think the version of this movie in which he sort of like starts to become David Duke is like less salacious but more interesting, right?
	And like he gets into like he starts running for like local political office and he's starting to kind of do these things and he's like arguing with people and that's where you can actually get like the real back and forth with like kind of the Elliot Gould character not over a dinner table but in you know sort of public forums and that sort of thing.
	And like that version of that story Of, like, it's not just that he committed horrifying acts of violence directly against African American people, but that he was, like, looking to use the resources of the state to do that violence on his behalf would be, again, another more interesting kind of version of this that I think Edward Norton, like, I would love to see him do that now!
	I think Edward Norton would be great in a movie made next year as sort of the David Duke kind of character.
	I think he could pull that off for sure.
	It's certainly based on what we see from American History X. I don't think that he's interested in kind of revisiting this part of his career, but I mean, again, another better movie is sort of like peeking out from inside this in a weird way.
	Yeah, no, I very much agree.
	But they, as you say, they kind of combine the two versions of the neo-Nazi in one so that they can have it both ways, because they want the exciting scenes with the violent, charismatic skinhead leader, but they also want the conceit of him being a thoughtful, intelligent young man.
	Of course, that's how you get through to him in the end.
	And of course he has to go to prison because that's how he gets rehabilitated in this universe.
	Okay, great.
	Prison works here.
	Yeah, prison doesn't make him more violent.
	This is another sideline.
	You know, this is another sideline.
	One of the things that we kind of run into over and over again is that we have members of the base and members of the Vic Mackey person.
	We won't name him, but he's had some issues with the law in terms of he's currently having hearings about his gun being taken from him.
	And it turns out he had a gun but no bullets, which you can interpret as like, oh he never had any bullets to begin with, or he knew the hammer was coming down and he got rid of all his ammunition.
	You can ask yourself which version of that I believe.
	But we will refrain from saying things that are possibly legally actionable.
	Well, if you do, it's the Daniel with the 14-inch.
	Yeah, that version was the one who said it.
	But what they do is they go after these guys on... It's very easy to get people on gun charges.
	It's very easy to say, you were carrying a weapon across the state line, therefore that's the thing that we're going to come after you for.
	And that's the thing that we're going to because it's an easy conviction and you get like a year or two of jail and maybe some probation or whatever but you're not really combating the actual like crime that's committed and you're not combating the actual sort of like issues that's at stake here which is this sort of like organized nature of this like kind of hate movement this decent centralized but organized kind of nature of this and so
	Again, it kind of feeds into this vision of reality in which we confront the direct violence, the direct things that we can very easily prove in our legal structures, but we don't actually go after the root causes.
	We don't go after the material conditions that create this.
	And we don't go after this in a way that is, like, sort of systematic.
	We just sort of, like, paper over the edges and call it good.
	Oh, yeah, he went to prison.
	Yeah, he went to prison for a year.
	Like, whatever.
	You know, like, I'm glad he's off the street for a while, but, like, prison is only going to further radicalize him, and I don't know.
	It's a big, complicated problem.
	Sorry to kind of throw that in here at the end, but it is something that the film doesn't really address, you know?
	Like, he goes to prison for three years, and then he comes out, and it's like, I am now reformed!
	Hello!
	Hallelujah!
	And it's like, well, you know.
	Yeah, we'll see.
	Isn't that nice?
	The prison system works!
	The carceral state, another win for the U.S.
	prison industrial complex.
	Well, because it gives you the opportunity to A. meet a nice black person, which is all you really needed, and B. get raped.
	Oh, God.
	Oh, that's...
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's just a huge problem by itself, but the whole idea of him getting disillusioned because it turns out the other Nazis or the Aryan Brotherhood or whatever they are, they're making too many accommodations and they're not sincere, you know?
	They were working with the Latin gang to sell drugs.
	Yeah.
	And that was just big beef with them.
	Yeah.
	That's so dumb.
	I'm sorry, that's just dumb.
	I mean, but I would, you know, it is one of the things where if like the Ed Dorton character was supposed to be kind of a stupid dipshit, Who was in over his head who yeah, I kind of like that that vision of the story like I could sort of believe like oh Yeah, I was disillusioned because I kind of went in there and it turned out they didn't believe in any shit They were just working with the they were working with the the mudbloods over there and doing their thing, you know, like I don't what?
	There's money to be made kid.
	What are you talking about?
	You know, some of these guys are completely disingenuous.
	I mean, again, another sort of better vision of the film, sort of like peeking his head out.
	There is so much interesting stuff in here, but none of it fits together.
	Yeah, no, it puts up a fairly good front, or at least it did in the 90s of being a good film, but the minute you subject it to any scrutiny it becomes a shambles really, and I think it's fair to say actually quite a dangerous one.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So I think... I think that's a good place to end.
	I mean, we could go on for another hour or two about, like, all the, you know, getting to the nitty-gritty of, like, some of the bullshit in the film, but I think we've... I think we've hit this one pretty hard.
	I think we're done.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I've got a lot more notes, but I think I've hit the main notes of my issues.
	Okay, so that was episode 63, and thanks for listening.
	That was us talking about a movie.
	What's the next one again?
	Remind us.
	The next one, I think I've got a guest coming on for the next one.
	Kind of an emergency episode, but I don't want to tease that until it actually is recorded.
	So, yeah, looking forward to that.
	Okay.
	I might or might not be on that one.
	I'm going to try to be on.
	If it happens.
	I think it will eventually happen.
	I just don't know if it's the next episode.
	But if it happens, it will be a good episode.
	So I look forward to it.
	Yeah, I've remembered what you're talking about now and that will be good.
	And as I say, I will try to be on for that.
	I'm going to try to be on for guest episodes more often.
	So yeah, look out for that fairly soon, we hope.
	And in the meantime, thanks for everything you do to support the podcast, listening and sharing and spreading the word, and even dropping us the odd dollar.
	That's also very appreciated.
	And until next week, hopefully next week, bye-bye.
	Bye-bye.
	That was I Don't Speak German.
	Thanks for listening.
	If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
	If you want to contact myself or Daniel, we're both on Twitter.
	I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore and Daniel is at Daniel E Harper.
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	This podcast is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find details about it.

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