79: Tom Metzger Part 2 & The Origins of Online Hate
This week, we finally get to the conclusion of our coverage of Tom Metzger (Part 1 here), which takes us on a journey through the early history of hate online. Content Warnings. * Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. From Jan 2021 onwards, patrons get exclusive access to one extra episode a month. Our first bonus episode is on the 1971 Peter Watkins movie Punishment Park. Our February bonus ep will be on Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 * Intro links: This Podcast Has Been Declared a Riot: https://this-podcast-has-been-declared-a-riot.simplecast.com/ Even More News, "Reddit and Robinhood for Rubes." https://evenmorenews.libsyn.com/reddit-and-robinhood-for-rubes-ep-132 Computer/Hacker History: Livescience, "History of Computers, a Brief Timeline." https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html Hackers: History of the Computer Revolutin, by Steven Levy. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hackers/9781449390259/ Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, by Bruce Sterling (full text at Project Gutenberg). http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101 Main Podcast Links: 1985.Cyberhate PDF: simson.net/ref/leaderles/1985.CyberHate.pdf Chip Berlet, "When Hate Went Online," adapted from a talk given in 2001, Revised 7/4/2008. https://www.researchforprogress.us/topic/when-hate-went-online/ "While investigating the assassination of Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg by neonazi White supremacists, the FBI began to unravel hate group telecommunications by tapping the modem telephone line of Robert Miles. [...] "The three earliest race hate BBS systems were: Info. International Network, Aryan Liberty Net, and White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R.) Net. [...] "Next to come online (in late 1984 or early 1985) was the White Aryan Resistance BBS in Fallbrook, California, under the auspices of Tom Metzger. Metzger announced the “W.A.R. Computer Terminal” in War ‘85, the newspaper of his White Aryan Resistance (Metzger, 1985). It originally ran on a Commodore 64 with a 300 bps modem (Sills, 1989). Today, most modems run at 56,000 bps, but back then, 300 bps was cutting-edge technology. According to Metzger, “Already White Aryan comrades of the North have destroyed the free speech blackout to our Canadian comrades” (Metzger, 1985). One of the first messages sent out by Metzger was directed at “any Aryan patriot in America who so desires” to arrange for local cable access channel broadcast of Metzger’s new cable TV program “The World as We See It,” later renamed “Race and Reason.” During this same period, there were over one dozen call-in telephone hot lines with recorded messages containing racist and antisemitic material." Overthrow, April/May 1985. "One of our correspondents made an interesting discovery last month. She found the telephone number for one of the bulletin board systems operated by American Nazis. With this number she was able to log on and get the information that the media has lately been all bugeyed about. Now we are prepared to talk intelligently on the matter. [...] "Our point here is simply this: you computer hackers and phone phreaks that are reading this have the ability to uncover and analyze circumstances in ways that most people can't. Some of you have the ability to recognize touch tones by ear. A few can tell where their calls are going by the sounds they hear. And still others are able to get into more than a few major systems and find the interesting stuff almost immediately. There is a very definite need in this world for such intelligence. Every authority figure in existence would like to get a piece of your abilities but very few are deserving of them. Besides, who really enjoys selling out?" Dark Contagion: "Bigotry and Violence Online." PC Computing, December 1989. (see PDF for text) Modern day: Willamette Week, "Kyle Brewster, Convicted in 1988 Killing of Mulugeta Seraw, Fought at Jan. 6 Pro-Trump Rally in Salem" https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/01/17/kyle-brewster-convicted-in-1988-killing-of-mulugeta-seraw-fought-at-jan-6-pro-trump-rally-in-salem/ "Kyle Brewster, 51, was one of three racist skinheads who attacked a group of Ethiopian immigrants in Southeast Portland on Nov. 13, 1988. While Brewster fought with a 28-year-old airport bus driver named Mulugeta Seraw, his fellow white supremacist Ken Mieske repeatedly swung a baseball bat into Seraw's skull. Mieske kept hitting Seraw while Brewster, then 19, kicked him with steel-toed boots. Mieske was convicted of murder and Brewster was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in Seraw's death. Released from prison in 2002, Brewster went back behind bars in 2008 for violating his parole by associating with members of the white supremacist group Volksfront. While finishing his term, Brewster was convicted of assaulting a prison guard. [...] "A WW correspondent says he observed Brewster brawling with leftist counterprotesters in a melee on the Capitol lawn. Brewster was also photographed donning a respirator mask and carrying a can of hornet- and wasp-killing pesticide, which he sprayed at left-wingers during the clash. Amid the fighting, Brewster and at least three other right-wing brawlers allegedly tackled a single counterprotester and briefly beat that person."
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 each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And welcome back to good old IDSG.
IDSG 79 this time.
And it's finally, finally, as promised, as long promised, Tom Metzger Part 2.
The Metzgering.
Hello, Daniel.
Hello, Jack.
Lovely to be here.
Not so lovely to be talking about Tom Metzger, but we are going to get to talk about old style computer networks, which I think that's really what the people come here for, is a discussion of ancient computer technology.
I think that's it.
Yeah, I think we finally cracked what our audience are actually interested in.
They've been pretty quiet about it, but we finally figured it out.
The silent majority are like, tell me, Daniel, how much did an Apple IIe cost in today's dollars in 1982?
I have to say I admire their tenacity in turning up, you know, to listen to episode after episode of a podcast that isn't even remotely about that, just in the hope that one day it would become about that.
And their patience has been rewarded.
It's a thing of beauty.
We're transitioning into an old school computer podcast now, so that's, you know, we're done.
The Nazis have been completely defeated.
We are using this as the transition.
The next episode is going to be about tape drives.
No, no, we're not doing that.
I'm not remotely qualified to do it to begin with, but no, we're not doing that.
No, we're not, sadly.
I was looking forward to getting some sound effects, you know, of the old dial-up modems and putting them on the intro, but no.
Well, the era we're talking about today is actually before even those old dial-up modems, but we'll get there, we'll get there.
OK.
But first, we are immediately returning to our new segment, which was a soar-away success.
Instantly, everybody was talking about it, just world-shatteringly popular, which we've tentatively called, well, I did anyway, Daniel Answers a Question.
But I think we're going to try to come up with a better name than that in future, but that's what it's called at the moment.
So, da-da-da-da-da, Daniel Answers a Question, new segment.
Daniel, answer a question, for God's sake.
So, one of the very common questions I get, and I promise I will actually put out a mechanism by which people can ask new questions, but for right now we're just going through the really common ones.
But really, like, one of the most common questions I get is, it goes something in the form of, How do I get to do what you do, or how do I get to become an Antifa?
And those are two completely separate questions, and either one we could spend two full episodes on, but we're gonna do this in just a couple minutes.
Yeah, obviously my instinct at this point is to go into a protracted bit about how you have to apply for a membership of Antifa at Antifa Central and go through a rigorous training and a recruitment program, etc.
So that, you know, First of all, we've got to talk about the deuce.
That's really the first step.
Your weekly tithe, to me personally, no.
Because it's a pair of ice cream.
The advice that I give to people nowadays, and the reason that I decided to answer this on mic, is because there actually is a whole other podcast which deals with this, and it's entitled, this podcast has been declared a riot.
It was previously called Jungle to Jungle, and it's a podcast for anti-fascists by anti-fascists.
And if you go to the first one that's titled, especially that very first one, With the new title, they go through, you know, how they kind of got into it and, you know, what kind of things they expect and what not to expect and what not, you know, like, basically, if what you're trying to do is to, like, be a hero and save the world, you shouldn't join, you're not, you shouldn't join an affinity group.
It's just not a thing that you should do.
You know, so I'm not even going to answer it.
I'm going to tell you to go and listen to that podcast, which these are people who are actually on the ground anti-fascist, which I am not.
And they will give you a much better sense of, you know, how to actually do this.
And the short version of it is you should help people around you in your community.
There's a lot more to anti-fascism.
In fact, there's infinitely more to anti-fascism than showing up and confronting people in the street.
That is a part of what's done, but ultimately, you're going to spend a lot more time, you know, like delivering food to people, that sort of thing, in order to do effective anti-fascist work.
The other thing is, how do I get to do what you do?
And the answer to that is, Find some niche of some Nazi near you or something that isn't being well covered in your opinion and just start listening and covering it.
It's not all that complicated.
One of my favorite things is when somebody sends me a message and says, I discovered this obscure podcast out there.
I discovered this obscure YouTube channel.
I've been watching it for a while.
Do you have any background on it?
Do you have any in the like?
It becomes like a sharing of information because I'm not doing anything special.
I'm just listening to these people talk and reporting on what they say.
And the best way to start doing this is to not go over the same material that I'm going over, but to find something that's kind of obscure or something that's kind of interesting, something that's like local to you or something that's like within your wheelhouse, and start following that and start kind of researching that.
And that's really what I recommend to people.
Like, if you really want to kind of get involved, There is no organization, there is no membership, there is no ideology.
It is done by action.
And the way to do it is to just kind of start doing it.
And you'll know if it's for you very quickly, I assure you.
But that's my advice.
Yeah, it's so often the way in life really, the way to do something is just to do it.
I've found anyway.
Relatedly to this, I should say that I recently discovered, I didn't realise this because I'm sort of old and stupid, but I didn't realise that my DMs on Twitter weren't open.
Somebody remarked upon it on Twitter, you know, I'd like to send Jack a question but his DMs are closed.
I thought, are they?
So I went and had a look, and indeed they were.
So my DMs are now open.
So if you want to ask me something, please go ahead.
If you want to do it in private, you can now do that.
I now take direct messages on Twitter, and maybe I'll answer questions on the show as well.
I can't promise to answer every query though, but yeah, if you want to say something, send it to me.
We can't answer everything and I don't even respond to like I mean honestly I get a lot of stuff that looks pretty sketchy and even the ones that don't I can't always respond but I assure you I do try to read them all and I kind of take that as things that need to be covered in the future so
Yeah, I would say to people thinking of contacting either of us that, you know, don't be paranoid, but if you're going to contact us out the blue, try to put some effort into looking legit, because we do both have to consider the possibility whenever we get messages from strangers that, you know, they're suspicious.
Right.
If you've got two followers and you're like, hey, I want to know what you know about such and such Nazi group, I'm going to assume you're a member of that Nazi group asking me for what I know about them.
Yeah.
Just try to put yourself in our position when you're formulating your remarks.
That's the thing, I think.
Okay, so straight on to the main topic, which is, as we said, Oh, one more thing before we get there.
I was thinking about delaying the Metzger episode one more time, and decided against it.
I was thinking about covering the GameStop thing, and the stocks, and the short sellers, and all that sort of thing.
And I've decided, because there is some Nazi influence involved, and that has not been well covered, although Hillary Sargent's been all over it on Twitter.
So go check her out, obviously.
But there was a very good, like, explainer done by Even More News.
That's Cody Johnson and Katie Stoll.
And they had a guest on who is very much, very knowledgeable.
She is a socialist who is also a...
Like, works in finance, so that's an interesting combination.
And she is an expert on these things, and she describes to some detail exactly what's going on in this GameStop thing.
And so, I put a link in the show notes, so go and listen to that.
That's the advice I have for knowing more about the GameStop thing.
For now, we will probably end up having to cover it at some point in the next month or two.
I assume this is not over at this point.
So, I'm tracking it.
But it's a thing, so yeah.
Back to researching and podcasting on shorting stocks and things like that, Daniel.
It makes you nostalgic, doesn't it?
Oh man, that one will never see the light of day.
OK, now we move on to our main topic, which, as we said, is finally, at long last, Tom Metzger Part 2.
Although, as Daniel indicated, it's going to be kind of a springboard into a wider discussion.
So Daniel, where do you want to start with this one?
Well, we're gonna start, and one of the things that's really interesting about Metzger, and to the extension of kind of talking about these guys in general, is the technical sophistication that they have.
And this episode is going to kind of be about, because ultimately, I think there's a sense that the YouTube algorithm is sort of creating this resurgence of, like, white nationalism online, or that social media is doing it.
And there's not to say that The current algorithms and the current systems that we have are not exacerbating some of these problems.
But ultimately, using technology to spread this kind of white power, white nationalist, white supremacist ideology and organizing in these kind of technical spaces has been going on since the earliest days, not just of the internet, but pre-internet.
And so I have here a bit from the zine, Overthrow, which is a yippie zine.
I'm not like deeply invested in the kind of 80s leftist subcultures, but they were essentially a, you know, kind of an anarchist collective sort of group built around mutual aid, etc.
And they were deeply involved in like culture jamming and that sort of thing and kind of using technical skills and living off the grid.
So they saw themselves as sort of this like combination yuppie and hippie in a way is kind of my understanding.
But it's kind of a group.
As far as I know, it doesn't really exist anymore.
But they published a lot of zines back in the 80s, and one of them was called Overthrow.
And in the edition from April, May 1985, there is a very brief segment, and I'm going to read bits of it here. - Sure.
One of our correspondents made an interesting discovery last month.
She found the telephone number for one of the bulletin board systems operated by American Nazis.
With this number, she was able to log on and get the information that the media has lately been all bug-eyed about.
Now we are prepared to talk intelligently on the matter.
I'm skipping forward here.
Our point here is simply this, they describe a bunch of like the kind of technical details of what they find on this bulletin board system.
And don't worry, we're going to talk about what that means here in a second.
But then they move on to say, our point here is simply this, you computer hackers and phone freaks, and we'll talk about what a phone freak is as well.
That are reading this have the ability to uncover and analyze circumstances in ways that most people can't.
Some of you have the ability to recognize touch tones by ear.
A few can tell where their calls are going by the sounds they hear.
And still others are able to get into more than a few major systems and find the interesting stuff almost immediately.
There is a very definite need in this world for such intelligence.
Every authority figure in existence would like to get a piece of your abilities, but very few are deserving of them.
Besides, who really enjoys selling out?
So first of all, this could definitely be written to somewhere anarchist collectives who are doing like online OSINT research on Facebook groups for the FBI seeking information.
About the capital coup people, right?
This is It's like the more things change the more they stay the same, right?
But this is a this was this was a piece.
It was published in this magazine it was a month or two later published in the the second in only the second year of existence the the zine at 2600 which was It was and still is sort of the foremost place to go for technical information about the hacking subculture and, you know, hacking as a technical skill.
It's where people kind of communicate with each other and learn their skills and all this sort of thing.
It's less sort of immediately relevant today.
It does have kind of an online edition, but the archives are absolutely essential if you want to understand kind of the world of You know, what computer networks were like in the mid 80s up to, you know, 2000 or so, at which point kind of the internet takes over.
I was listening to you recite that and I was getting powerful waves of nostalgia, not really for having been involved in anything like that at the time, but for the science fiction I was reading in the late 80s and 90s, you know, cyberpunk, because that was all that was very heavily focused on You know, scrappy ragtag bands of rebels, and they were all hackers and so on, and anarchists and so on and so forth, trying to hack the system, etc.
You know, I heard it in Ice-T's voice, you know, capped off with, loop it through Jones.
Yep, no, I get that.
Yeah, go check out the classic, the seminal work, Johnny Mnemonic, for more on this.
No, most movies about the hacker subculture are actually very, very bad.
Although they tend to get the social dynamics pretty accurate, like the film called Hackers.
It's pretty good if you want to understand the text of what's happening, but all the technical details are completely wrong.
So, anyway, I was never, just to be clear about this, I was never a computer hacker, I was never really into that, but I do, you know, I've been a technical sophist... Yes, as I've just told you listeners, I've only just realised that my Twitter DMs weren't open, so clearly...
I was never an anarchist hacker or anything like that.
Right.
But I do run Linux on this laptop.
I do have some kind of technical sophistication in terms of understanding things, but I'm not a coder.
I'm not really that kind of guy.
I did a little bit of sysadmin work in high school, and that's kind of the limit of my technical expertise.
I've always enjoyed kind of reading about this stuff and I consider myself a bit of like an amateur, like a very amateur, very like a dilliant observer of this kind of history and like I enjoy reading about it.
I follow some Twitter accounts where they like take apart old mainframes and that sort of thing.
So let's rewind slightly and go back to the earliest days of like computing.
And so I put this link to a live science link, which is like a history of computers, a brief timeline.
So if you know literally nothing about this, it'll at least kind of give you the thing.
It kind of goes back to the late 18th century with, you know, like the earliest what we could call like the origins of computers were actually like weaving patterns that were built into mills.
In the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and that basic technology comes down to us like a century and a half later in the 1940s or so as punch cards, which then when they start being built into kind of large electrical systems, the earliest computers start to kind of use that same basic technology. the earliest computers start to kind of use that same Generally, the very first computer is ENIAC, and that was in the late 1980s.
Kind of earlier versions were during World War II, and they were built to do like ballistics tests, like ballistics calculations, and they were built to do breaking of cryptography, breaking of enemy codes.
So that's kind of the beginning of what computers were.
Over the course of the next 10 years, The mainframes get smaller and they get a little bit less expensive and you start to see like major technical universities embrace them.
And start to buy them and use them for their own kind of technical work.
And you have to understand that this is, like, the early, early computers in the late 40s are literally, like, you could solve, like, one problem with a single, like, system, but you could reprogram it.
So you could set up a ballistics test run and kind of figure out, like, how far a given missile would go given so much thrust, etc.
And you could run that calculation, which would take A bunch of people, a long time to calculate by hand if you didn't have the computer to do it for you.
And so it's really useful if you're building rockets to be able to kind of do these things pretty quickly.
But it still meant a day of like literally plugging and unplugging cables in order to run like a single calculation or a single kind of algorithm that you could then get a calculation fairly quickly, much more quickly than you could do it if you had to pay a bunch of people to sit down and do the manual calculations themselves.
Over the course of the next decade or so, they get smaller, and they start to be used in major corporations to store data, to store phone numbers, to store sales data, etc., etc.
And there's this kind of long history of – there's this kind of army of tech people in the bowels of these giant companies starting to use these systems not just for their main job, but they kind of build this communication.
They start to build kind of the first memes where they're like literally programmers using like programming jargon and like messages to one another on like internal systems and such.
So there's this kind of interesting subculture that starts to develop.
In the late 50s in 1959, the Texas Railroad Modeling Club, the TRMC at MIT, is a group of teenagers who start – Model railroad enthusiasts basically come in two is a group of teenagers who start – Model railroad enthusiasts The first variety is people who really like the technical details of how to make the trains as accurate as possible and to make the landscaping and the scenery and kind of like the artistic side of it.
And then there are people that really like building big and complicated switching systems.
And those people within this railroad club find out that MIT has this big spiffy new mainframe that if you were willing to just sort of hang out in the lab at the right time, like two in the morning, If some guy failed to show up for his shift on this big machine, you could just kind of go play with it.
And apparently the administration was kind of okay with letting him do it.
Like there was somebody who kind of knew that like, okay, this is a sort of thing that is going to be the wave of the future.
And they were right.
And if you want this full story, I'm going to recommend a book called Hackers.
And this is written by Stephen Levy.
The original edition is published in 1984, so the book goes up to about the Atari era, which is kind of where we're going to get to very shortly.
But it tells this history in kind of loving detail.
It is considered basically the Bible of this history.
If you want to know, go check out that book.
Highly recommended.
So, up to about the mid-70s.
You're looking at, you're really still looking at like giant mainframes.
They get faster, they get a little bit smaller, they get a little bit smaller, you can, more people can connect to them through these hardwired dumb terminals.
A subculture continues to develop over the years, up to about the late 70s, in which case the first computers, the first personal computers start to be developed.
The most successful, and the one that really kind of breaks into the mainstream, is the Apple IIe, which was released in 1982.
This would have retailed for something like $2,500 in 1982 money, or about six grand today.
So these are not inexpensive machines, and just to be clear, the Apple IIe has far, far less computing power than Oh, if you're still wearing a watch, your watch has more competing power than, like, by far, than the Apple IIe.
Like, the cheap Mickey Mouse watch that you had in the 80s, probably, or not the 80s, but you know what I mean.
Like, it is not at all uncommon to have, you know, very, very simple.
I believe a, I saw this thing online where somebody on Twitter … was taking apart a home pregnancy test, which had a 286 chip in it, to literally just display a plus sign or a minus sign, depending on whether it was positive or negative.
That 286 chip that was in the pregnancy test, which cost a dollar, had something like 100,000 times the processing power of that Apple IIe in 1982, just to be clear.
Now, why did I go through all that for you?
First of all, I think it's kind of interesting history, and I see references where people – I was listening to a podcast where they were talking about 2002, and then they go dot dot dot, you know, the early internet.
And these are smart, very wonderful people who make a great podcast.
I'm not at all complaining about like, you know, I'm not going to name it.
It's fine.
It doesn't matter.
But it does just kind of, I just listen to that and go, my God, I'm old because I've been on the Internet since 1995.
And even that was kind of like fairly late in terms of a lot of this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I know what they mean when they say, when they call 2002 the early internet, because the internet is very different.
I too was on the internet a little bit after you.
I suppose I started sort of 98, 97, something like that, but even it was a very different thing back in those early days.
But yeah, it's in real terms, yeah, it's been going a lot longer than that.
Right, yeah.
The first PC my family had was a Windows 3.1 machine, so we prostated the DOS era, but not by much, but predated Windows 95.
So I remember when Windows 95 came out, it had the Start button and it had this giant ad campaign around it.
And it was this big, new, exciting thing.
And that's kind of when people first started really getting computers for the first time.
And that's kind of the big jump was right there.
That's also around the time that internet service providers that weren't kind of walled off systems like America Online and Prodigy started to have their heyday, right?
You started to see that, and that's kind of when things started to blow up for real.
But that's in the like, you know, the modem era, right?
You know, that's in dial-up modem era.
Yeah.
But this is still significantly later than what we're talking about in like 1982, 1983, 1984.
Which were the very first like network computers were not, you call into an internet service provider.
So like today I have my internet service provider through, I buy, I pay for internet service through a company.
That internet service gives me access to this kind of larger web, this larger internet, through a service called TCPIP.
It's a transfer protocol mechanism, and it's kind of the basis of the internet.
It was invented in the early 90s.
In this era, what we're talking about, like, so the first, like, personal computers didn't really connect to anything.
It was just sort of a thing that you could play games on or do work on, or you could do kind of various things.
You could run software, but didn't connect to anything.
You had to buy a separate modem and most of the early ones if you've seen like war games where you have to like take the phone out and plug it into like a holder and then you had to get it just right or else it wouldn't like dial properly and it was this hugely complicated technical thing that costs again hundreds of dollars to be able to do but what you could do suddenly is you could call a particular number and if that other number had a computer on it with a modem that was listening then you could
Dial into that computer and you could trade information back and forth from my computer to your computer and the earliest versions of that kind of start off in about 1978 with it basically hitting the mainstream around 1982 or so and so here I'm going to start quoting from another from another piece and this is a
A piece that's adapted from a talk that a researcher named Chip Berlay gave in 2001.
And he is someone who has been, he's still alive, I actually don't know him at all, but he is still around and he was researching these kind of computer networks going back to 1985.
Um, and had first kind of noticed this stuff after this piece was published in, um, the Yippie Magazine and then later in 2600.
And he starts to sort of do some research and he starts finding these things.
And, uh, he says that the, um, the very first, uh, here, I've just got it quoted here.
Sorry, let me see if I've got a...
While investigating the assassination of Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg by a Nazi white supremacist...
Yeah.
This is The Order, by the way, which we have mentioned in previous episodes, which we may talk about a little bit more in the details of this here in a second.
And this case was made into a movie by Oliver Stone, wasn't it?
Called Talk Radio.
Yeah.
Talk radio, yeah.
Which may be one of our special episodes one of these days.
Yeah, probably down the line we should definitely do that.
Talk about the order, I guess.
But while investigating the assassination of Denver radio talk show host Allen Berg by neo-Nazi white supremacists, the FBI began to unravel hate group telecommunications by tapping the modem telephone line of Robert Miles.
A little bit further.
The three earliest race hate BBS systems and BBS's bulletin board systems were Info International Network, Aryan Liberty Net, and White Aryan Resistance, WAR Net.
Where do you know White Aryan Resistance from?
Check out episode one of our coverage of Tom Metzger.
Yes.
Next to come online in late 1984.
So he covers the first two networks and the Info International Network is this guy George Dietz.
He's republishing old bits of this thing called the Liberty Net zine, which was a Klan zine.
It was this thing, Liberty Bell, partly Liberty Bell.
And it was published from the late 70s up to about 1999.
We've actually referenced it previously because one of the editions in, I believe, the early 90s actually calls out Fred Leuchter for being an absolute dipshit and not knowing anything about chemistry.
Key wrecked.
Anyway, Aryan Liberty Net, that was created by the members of the Aryan Nations in Idaho.
And so that's where the Aryan Nations, we covered the Aryan Nations in a previous episode.
Again, we're talking about the white separatist movements, and this was eventually bankrupted years down the line.
But there's a long history behind the, pardon me, the Aryan Nations.
And it eventually kind of transmogrifies into Harold Covington's group and Richard Butler and a lot of those other guys.
Anyway, long history there.
We've kind of discussed it in a previous episode.
But the third is white Aryan resistance.
And so the earliest of these seem to come online in about March 1984, meaning that within like a couple of years of these things becoming even technically feasible for even the most hardcore of hobbyists who are interested in trying to connect computers together.
And they're trying to build these BBS networks.
There are white supremacists online.
There are white supremacists using this to spread their literature and to spread their ideas and to use this to add.
As a way of communicating with one another.
White nationalists, white supremacists, and white power groups have always been at the forefront of technology.
Notably, they were discovered by the FBI by searching through the details of the history or the connections brought about from this group, the Order.
And the Order is known for, again, we covered this in the past, robbing armored trucks, And stealing a whole bunch of money.
And the details of where that money actually went and what it was spent on has never really been uncovered.
Nobody knows quite where that money went.
I'm not going to suggest anything, but the Apple IIe in 1982 cost about $6,000 in today's money.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so we'll just leave that sentence there.
Yep.
So, continuing in Chip Berlay's 2001 piece.
Next to come online in late 1984 early 1985 was the White Aryan Resistance BBS in Fallbrook, California under the auspices of Tom Metzger.
Metzger announced the WAR Computer Terminal in Warren 85, the newspaper of his White Aryan Resistance.
It originally ran on a Commodore 64 with a 300 BPS modem.
Today, most modems run at 56,000 BPS, but they feel 300 BPS is cutting-edge technology.
Again, this was written in 2001.
Even in 2001, that was the early broadband internet.
Some people still had dial-up, and 56K was the max.
You know, today we'd have 56,000 BPS, but back then it was 300 baud.
So if you think about how slow 56k feels, you know, 300 baud is, you know, like 1 20th of that.
300 baht is, you know, like 1 20th of that.
So, yeah.
According to Metzger, already white Aryan comrades of the north have destroyed the free speech blackout to our Canadian comrades.
One of the first messages sent out by Metzger was directed at any Aryan patriot in America who so desires to arrange for local cable access channel broadcast of Metzger's new cable TV program, The World As We See It, later renamed Race & Reason.
During this same period, there were over one dozen call-in telephone hotlines with recorded messages containing racist and anti-Semitic material.
Meaning, not only is Metzger running a BBS, but he has multiple incoming phone lines and multiple setups by which he is having people call into those numbers and download One by one, the data, text files that have this racist, anti-Semitic, you know, hateful literature on them.
He is a hub.
He is an early hub for this.
He is right on the cutting edge of this stuff.
In 1984, 1985, he is one of the big leaders.
And again, think about how much all that hardware must have cost back in the day.
Yeah.
One more thing I'm going to read here for you before we kind of have a little bit more of a discussion based around this is the piece from Nesso.
I've linked, I think I mentioned this earlier, I've linked in the show notes a PDF file called 1985 Cyberhate, which includes PDF scans of a bunch of this kind of old stuff That I've found in order to like old magazine articles and old pieces that have some of this background, some of this history in them.
A lot of this stuff has never been digitized or it's never been put online because a lot of these computer magazines at the time never lived long enough to make it to the internet era, at which point they would have an online presence at all.
And my understanding, like, a whole lot of this stuff I can't even find scans or PDFs for, like, the full magazine.
It thankfully still exists in this form, but it's a very kind of low-quality black-and-white PDF scan.
But there's a ton of great information in this, and if you are at all interested in this kind of background material, you should definitely be checking out this document, because there's a ton of, like, old stuff here, and it gives a lot more of the, like, the kind of the background details here.
But, In this piece, which I did not, this text is not in the show notes because it's a bad PDF that I'd have to cut and paste, but this piece called Dark Contagion, Bigotry and Violence Online.
It's written by Peter Stills, and it is in the, let me see if I've got it in front of me, the December 1989 issue of PC slash Computing.
And if anybody has this full issue somewhere, I would love to take a look at it.
It's a detailed piece a few years later talking about where white supremacist online stuff was by the late 80s.
So here's how he describes Metzger.
Tom Metzger, a blue-collar entrepreneur who owns and operates a television repair shop in Fallbrook, started the warboard from his home in 1984 using a Commodore 64 at a lumbering 300BPS.
Its single phone line was constantly busy indicating the high demand for online white supremacist material and the number of neo-Nazis with the technology to access such information.
Racist groups quickly hailed the Warboard as a technological breakthrough, which helped spawn Metzger's reputation as the technology godfather of the white supremacy movement.
Today, War has more than 2,000 members, many of whom are skinheads.
He has become a figurehead, helping provide leadership to the loosely strung movement.
Short and balding, Metzger is physically unimpressive, yet his prowess as a master of white supremacist rhetoric is legendary.
He now hosts his own public access TV show, Race and Reason, a cable program currently broadcast in Atlanta, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and seven other US cities.
Then it goes on to describe the technical details of his board.
It turns out the Commodore 64, by 1984, the Commodore 64 had been released, and that was the beginning.
That was a much cheaper machine that you could buy.
It didn't cost as much as the Apple IIe.
It was less powerful.
It didn't have a color screen and that sort of thing.
But it was a workhorse.
You could use it to do a lot more stuff.
But Metzger, again, is at the forefront of this kind of technological material.
He's using a software, a BBS software called Phytonet.
There's actually a quote from the developer of Phytonet, Bay Area resident Tom Jennings.
He regrets the group's use of his software.
I don't like them using Phytonet, Jennings recently complained, but I suppose it's inevitable.
And so over the course of this article, you then see other boards.
In the five years between 84 and 89, in which case Metzger had been operating this thing, There were many, many other skinhead boards that were using Metzger's And basic technology that we're using, kind of that basic idea and the basic, you know, the ability to kind of buy a Commodore 64 and set up an independent phone line to spread more and more of this material around the kind of early internet.
And one of these boards, the American Front, another skinhead BBS located in San Francisco, home of the Bay Area skinheads, Bash, carries several accounts under a file called Hall of Fame Heroics.
And includes November 1988, the beating of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw, who with baseball bats in Portland, Oregon.
And the article clarifies, Seraw died, three skinheads were charged with murder.
We're going to come back to that in a second.
But again, if you remember episode one of this series, Mulugeta Seraw was connected to, the three men who murdered him were connected to Tom Metzger.
And, in fact, it was a civil suit relating to that murder that eventually bankrupted Metzger and shut all this shit down.
I guess, again, the reason I'm highlighting this and the reason I think this is important is because today you see, you know, all these guys moving to DLive.
You see them, like, hopping on any platform as soon as it's available.
They avoid bannings.
They avoid deplatforming.
And they're always looking for the new thing that they can use to spread these kind of ideas.
And they're looking for places where other people kind of already are, which wasn't necessarily a thing you could do in the 80s because you had to know that phone number and you had to dial directly into it.
At that point, it looks a lot more like they're kind of spreading propaganda amongst themselves.
And so instead of having to go and hand out leaflets, instead of having to go and, you know, like actually be in physical space where anti-fascists could disrupt them and where they could be subject to kind of legal liabilities.
um, They were using these BBS systems in order to kind of spread those ideas themselves.
And notably, the yippies find them very quickly and start saying, like, we need to find a way to deal with this shit, right?
And in that yippee piece, in that thing I read to you, you know, they talk about phone freakers.
And phone freaking was a thing that, you know, people learned how to whistle various tones that would allow you to get, you know, make a long-distance call without having to pay for it and, you know, like kind of various other, you know, technological things.
In fact, The title of the zine, 2600, 2600 is the tone in Hertz.
You had to whistle in order to make a long distance phone call on most phone systems at the time in 1984.
And so there is this kind of direct, like these people, they just want to sit and talk online.
They just want to talk to each other on the phone for hours and hours and hours, and all their friends live outside of their local dialing area, which again is a thing that I don't think anybody even understands.
Nobody below the age of 25 understands what a long-distance call even is anymore, right?
But this was a big deal.
This was a big deal.
They would rack up phone bills worth thousands and thousands of dollars and then charge it to other accounts.
And these are just kind of your ordinary hackers.
And there's another book, which you can read for free online, You can also buy a copy, but you mentioned cyberpunk and Bruce Sterling, who is one of the kind of godfathers of cyberpunk, he along with William Gibson, I think you could argue, are sort of the two people that sort of created the genre.
Sterling wrote a nonfiction book called The Hacker Crackdown.
It was originally published in 1992.
And it covers a lot of the same error and it covers some of these kind of long stories of like how these kind of anarchist computer hackers, how this kind of hacker subculture interacted with law enforcement and some of the problems that just kind of come about even understanding what intellectual property means when you can just like download a file and copy it for free.
And this is in 1992 prior to, you know, anything like that.
Everything, yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
So yeah, there's a ton of that stuff.
And if you read all these articles that I've posted for you, you can read a lot of this kind of background.
It's really, really fascinating stuff.
And it gives us this historical context for the larger point here, right?
It gives us an idea about what the history is.
And again, the reason the history matters and the reason That this, which seems so distant from us today, is actually something that is very intimately connected to the present day.
And I've got a piece from Willamette Week, and this was published on, I believe, January 18th.
But it's entitled, Kyle Brewster, Convicted to 1988 Killing in Mulugeta Saraw, Fought at January 6th Pro-Trump Rally in Salem.
And so I'm not at the Capitol, but in Salem, Oregon.
Here's some of the text.
Kyle Brewster, 51, was one of the three racist skinheads who attacked a group of Ethiopian immigrants in southeast Portland on November 13, 1988.
While Brewster fought with a 28-year-old airport bus driver named Mudugeta Sarra, his fellow white supremacist, Ken Mieske, repeatedly swung a baseball bat into Sarra's skull.
Mieske kept hitting Sarra while Brewster, then 19, kicked him with steel-toed boots.
Mayeski was convicted of murder, and Brewster was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and Serra's death.
Released from prison in 2002, Brewster went back behind bars in 2008 for violating his parole by associating with members of the white supremacist group Volksfront.
While finishing his term, Brewster was convicted of assaulting a prison guard.
A little bit further down, a WWE correspondent says he observed Brewster brawling with leftist counter-protesters in a melee on the Capitol Lawn.
Brewster was also photographed donning a respirator mask and carrying a can of Hornet and wasp-killing pesticide, which he sprayed at left-wingers during the clash.
Amid the fighting, Brewster and at least three other right-wing brawlers allegedly tackled a single counter-protester and briefly beat that person.
The long shadow of Metzger's activities led right into the current political climate.
This is literally the same guy who was convicted of murdering Seurat back in 1988, who gets out of prison.
He serves his time.
I'm not going to argue with that.
But then starts associating with white supremacist groups again, and is even now still continuing engage in direct political violence, a little spraying wasp killer against anti-fascist and leftist.
And that's where we are.
Yeah.
What was the reach of this sort of very early propagandizing?
I mean, it sounds like it's, from your description of it, just as a technical process.
Like, the stuff that, for instance, Tom Metzger was distributing via his BBS, that was going to people who had to come looking for it, you know?
So, it was being distributed to people who were already in this subculture, but Right.
Presumably they were printing it out and trying to then distribute it themselves in the real world?
Well, there would have been sort of like mimeographed versions of it.
There would have been like printed versions of this material that they were kind of handing out and giving to people and are like putting on lampposts or kind of doing whatever there.
They had physical distribution networks.
One thing that I was maybe unclear on and I wasn't quite sure exactly where the facts were when we recorded the first episode of this, was I might have implied that Metzger was like a record producer within the White Power music scene, which he wasn't that.
He seems to be more of a promoter, someone who would like set up like White Power music festivals and someone who would set up He would kind of get bands to be able to play shows, and he took a cut of the proceeds, and that's how he funded a lot of his work, both through his day job where he's a television repairman, but also through this skinhead subculture in the 80s by involving himself deeply in this kind of white supremacist, white power, heavy metal music, right?
Well, those shows would have been where people Who are maybe just kids who maybe, you know, I mean, the skinhead culture, there were lots of people of various political leanings who sort of got up who came to the skinhead culture, who came to appreciate that.
And while there were and still are active anti-racist and like physically anti-racist, Skinheads.
In fact, the Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.
Sharps, well-known for being some of the toughest motherfuckers on the block, okay?
No question about that.
You can find old-school Nazis even today who will talk about how terrifying the Sharps were in the 80s and 90s.
80s and 90s.
So, you know, no skin off that.
So you did have actively anti-racist, actively anti-fascist skinhead groups.
But you also had this kind of large group of kind of the non-politicized just kids who liked the music and who didn't necessarily care if it was somebody singing about white power or something.
Somebody seeing or you know, whatever and then there's kind of a lot of stuff even and even in the midst of that even You know, there's a lot of gray area there within this within this scene and there still is The the metal scene.
I'm not a metal.
I'm not a metal head.
So I can't claim to be You know deeply invested in this personally.
I know that there have been kind of other pieces that have tried to Can track the various strains of this but within So you'd find these kids were interested in skinheads, interested in being skinheads back in the 80s for whatever reason, because they liked the subculture, they liked the look, they were disaffected and were just looking for a place to belong.
It was a very common thing in like cities in the 80s and 90s.
You cut all your hair, you get interested in heavy metal, you show up to all these clubs.
Everything's fine.
It's your life.
Whatever.
No complaints on that regard.
But a bunch of these white power guys were using this subculture as a way of kind of spreading their ideas in a way to make money off of selling records.
Yeah.
And then that money gets funded back into making more leaflets and buying more computers and buying a Commodore 64 and setting up your own telephone line, etc, etc.
And so there's a combination of An in-person leafleting and flyering campaign and infiltrating this subculture and kind of creating this subculture and this more high-tech computer-based kind of communication back and forth.
And so you do see these kind of online-offline networks progressing in parallel as a way of spreading this message further and further.
Metzger himself has to get out of it in the early 90s, again after he was sued, after he lost his lawsuit.
He basically lost everything and he had to start over, and that's kind of the beginning of the end for Metzger.
That's about the time that he starts showing up on CNN in a suit and tie, but still kind of expressing the same general ideas and the same general violence, the same general support of skinheads, but he softens the edges of it, and he starts kind of sounding a little bit more like David Duke.
It's also worth noting that Louis Beahm, who was creating that second network, which we talked about, not the very first one, but the second one, the one before Metzger, was actively the creator of this leaderless resistance concept, or at least the person spreading the leaderless resistance process.
And was the person who was most involved with creating the, you know, kind of what leads to the Terrorgram stuff 30 years later.
He's, you know, and so again, these networks are built around both kind of spreading an ideology and spreading like political messaging, but also directly organizing like planned campaigns of violence on some level.
And so, this again speaks to the degree to which, while you can talk about, like, lone wolf terrorists, and you can talk about Timothy McVeigh as a lone wolf, Timothy McVeigh is connected into a subculture that is doing these things.
He was not one of the people, like, tracking things online, as far as we know, or in these kind of early internet, early BBS systems, but These guys who attacked Mullah Ghadassara, they're directly connected to Tom Metzger through the skinhead culture.
No doubt that there were many people who committed various crimes who at some point connected to one of Metzger's computers, or who read material that was produced by someone who had connected it, who had gotten it from Metzger's computers, if you kind of get where I'm going there.
Like there's a long and detailed there's a there's a network that is being created and so this idea in the mainstream media this idea in when we talk about these things particularly when you want to pretend that like white supremacy is not something that is involved that does not involve our kind of larger cultural mores or when you're trying to pretend that You know, oh, these guys are just crazy.
It's just a little nut.
No, there's a network of people around them who, the second they go beyond a kind of a prescribed limit of violence, immediately get cut off by the more respectable members so that they can then continue to engage in the same kinds of incitement of violence against people.
I was going to ask about the long-term effect, and I think you've kind of already answered me, because it sounds like what you're describing is the early version of what we see now in the form of stochastic terrorism, which we've talked about on this show before.
As you say, Timothy McVeigh, not that we know of, you know, downloading stuff from Metzger's BBS, but part of the subculture which is being fed and expanded by things like this.
So, I mean, McVeigh himself stated, stated Elohim City, which was a white power group modeled on the Aryan Nations compound.
It was a different group and it kind of had its own origins, but the same cultural relevance is there and the same kind of like network of connections, whether it was done digitally or whether it was done through just people kind of meeting in person, you know, like the computer network allows you to spread information clandestinely and more quickly.
And without being in the eyes of the authorities and without being in the eyes of, you know, kind of the normies, right?
It allows you to build this kind of like secret thing.
And the connections between you and other people in the movement can stay relatively hidden, which eases the process of disconnecting yourself from somebody in the movement when they suddenly do something like commit a public atrocity and you want to dissociate yourself from them.
Right, right.
I mean, you know, it's James Alex Fields having a meme, a running over protesters meme on his phone when he was found, and they found it as like a social media history where he was posting all this stuff on James Alex Fields.
For anybody who doesn't remember, he was the man who murdered Heather Heyer and injured, I think, 24 others is the final number, in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th, 2017.
But then everyone involved in the movement, everybody with a podcast, everyone with a network, everyone with a website, disavows themselves from James Ellis Shields.
Oh no, we don't know that guy.
Nobody knew him before.
He was just a guy.
He was out there.
He was just spreading the memes.
But he was like, we don't encourage that.
And so they get to continue to maintain their presence.
They get to continue to maintain their lack of legal accountability, despite the fact that they have not changed their messaging at all.
And in fact, they defend James Alex Fields, and they think that Donald Trump should have pardoned him, at least on his federal charges.
That's literally where they go with this stuff.
Yeah, yeah, not to veer completely off topic, but that does, you know, what you're saying makes me think about Donald Trump standing in front of a crowd and saying, march to the Capitol building and I'll be there with you and we'll take back our government by force and you can't be soft if you're having your country stolen from you.
But do it peacefully, by the way, folks.
And then when they do what they do, it's, oh no, I didn't mean no violence.
Go home, folks.
We love you.
You're special, but don't be violent.
And now, of course, rejecting any possible responsibility for what happened.
It's not entirely dissimilar, is it?
No, no.
I mean, it's the same... I mean, this is, again, like, I know I kind of went through a lot of history there, and I know it's drier than, you know, us laughing a little bit more and me having the whiskey, which I apologize for having the whiskey!
Oh, that made the show, don't worry.
People want the unedited version and you will never get to hear the unedited version.
Yeah, pretty embarrassing.
But, like, the whole, you know, the whole...
The whole process, the whole thing is important to understand.
The idea that these are networks of people that are built around a lack of accountability and a degree of deniability is central to understanding why these networks are important and why they continue to exist.
And why, despite the mainstream stereotype of, The skinhead being this kind of dumb fuck with missing teeth, or being like the racist Klan guy being a hillbilly or whatever.
No, these people are always at the cutting edge of technical sophistication if it allows them to get their messaging out there more quickly, right?
Yeah.
If it allows them to do something to spread their stuff without having to be accountable for it.
The other thing I think that this implies, and you know, well, I certainly suggested that some of the money stolen by the Order may have gone to some of this stuff, and I'm not directly alleging that because I don't want to be sued.
We don't.
It's a big question mark.
We don't know.
It's a suspicion.
It's certainly suspicion, especially when you start digging into the murder of Allen Berg, and you start connecting to the various nodes, and very immediately you find this brand new computer network that had only existed for a few months.
Like, that implies that there's a pretty direct connection between some of these guys and the fact that certainly Beam and Metzger are actively promoting a form of leaderless resistance and a form of, you know, kind of direct terrorist acts against the government.
And against individuals as a way of perpetuating a non-political solution.
They're sparking off race war.
They're literally preaching this, although again, they keep that slight degree of respectability by not saying it as directly and by not ever being in the place of doing an act of violence themselves.
That's the way it happens, right?
Yeah, and that's really the great gift of the internet for these people, isn't it?
It's not just the ability to spread your net wider, it's also the ability to be at that anonymous remove.
Of course, less so now, because the internet is the world we live in, and everything you do online leaves traces.
So when, for instance, you have something like James Alex Fields, you can see everything he was looking at, etc, etc.
But even so, they still manage it.
No, no, absolutely.
And, I mean, you know, you asked how large this was, or it kind of indicated you were curious about how large it was.
In the article from 1989, he quotes that Metzger claims to have approximately 2,000 members on his messaging board at that time.
And of course, you should never trust anything that these guys say, but you can pretty easily identify that at that point.
You can look at what kinds of messages and about how many people are on each board.
I mean, I feel like that's not an unreasonable number to have been on that board.
Now, 2,000 members is tiny by the standards of a modern internet forum, obviously, but In the sense of, like, in 1989, dialing it directly into a particular internet board, like, that would have been – like, that's massive.
Like, that's a massive, massive thing, you know?
The whole-earth electronic something.
It's called The Well, and it's a Bay Area thing.
It was founded in 1985.
And I believe the numbers that it had were not hugely dissimilar from that.
I'd have to look at that and see exactly how many it had.
But this was one of the precursors to the modern internet.
Again, in the BBS days, it was one of the first things that built the social expectations that we would see into the early internet up to the mid-'90s, the late-'90s.
And I don't think in 89 it would have had more than a few thousand members.
I mean, I think it would have had more than 2,000.
But not 20,000 or 200,000, you know?
I mean, so it's worth keeping that in mind.
Yeah, and the way any medium develops is part of what it turns into.
Every new communication medium has been pushed forward partly by... I mean, every new communication medium is pushed forward to a large extent by pornography.
In history, and also by things like political pamphleteering.
You know, the printing press.
It exploded across the world and had an enormous sociological effect to a huge degree because of political pamphleteering.
And obviously you didn't have fascism back then, but you certainly had politics.
And we only have to look at the way the early Nazi party exploited radio and newspapers.
And look what that turned into, you know, and that became foundational to the entire Nazi state.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you could also, because you could copy this information very quickly, you know, at least, you know, in terms of the time, you could copy all this data, you could store it on your own computer, and then, like, print it off, or you could connect to another computer later, and you could kind of spread this stuff around, it becomes a way of doing the sort of, like, samizdot method of sharing information.
Yeah, yeah.
You don't need a kind of big media presence in order to Find your followers and to influence them into your ideology and into your political movement.
And I think this is, I think it's also interesting that this is, you know, the kind of early to mid 80s.
This is also the time at which James Mason is writing Siege, which was a newsletter.
I found no evidence that Siege was ever, that any of that material was ever on like Metzger's server or Metzger's computer or anything.
I've been really trying to find, like, a lot of the information you find on this stuff is like, you know, oh look, there's a link to a bunch of stuff that looks interesting, and then you click on it, and then it's completely gone from the internet.
And it was completely gone from the Internet 20 years ago.
Yeah.
And then you find the Internet Archive links, and the Internet Archive links are all broken, because the stuff is so old, you know.
Archiving kind of really obscure stuff is a problem that everybody has at this point, and even the most well-kept archivists are having difficulties with it.
Yeah, it's a problem.
But that's part of why this episode got delayed so many times, is that I kept finding rabbit holes that would turn up nothing in the end, because I just couldn't find the source I was looking for.
It just literally wasn't available anywhere.
A lot of the stuff had just been completely lost at this point.
So, I don't know, you might not have an answer for this, but how directly has this early stuff fed into today's far-right internet?
Because I remember, you know, in the 90s when I was watching TV documentaries, if there was a documentary about the internet, the end of every documentary would always have, like, a montage of people scrolling webpages, you know, Nazi webpages, with little GIFs of, like, skulls and crossbones and stuff, and did six million really die in a link with blue underlined and stuff like that.
It was always how you ended your documentary about the internet.
An increasing number of hate sites, etc, etc.
So what's the, you know, does it feed directly in or is there some sort of break?
Yes and no.
It's both, right?
And because these things are always a question of degrees, right?
And of, you know, grey area.
I mean, I showed you in the last Metzger episode that Tom Metzger himself, like one of the last public appearances he did was on A Terragram podcast with Vic Mackey, right?
Yeah.
So there is a direct connection there.
Tom Metzger was on Twitter.
He harassed me a couple of times when he thought he could intimidate me.
He had a website.
He was still producing content up until fairly recently.
Your claim to fame there, Daniel.
Yeah, that's it, that's it.
His Twitter handle was Terrible Tommy, by the way, so that tells you.
Like, look at that boomer, right?
Okay, boomer.
Terrible, Tommy.
But yeah, no, I mean, it's one of those, it's one of those things where there was this kind of like era of discontinuity.
And I think that that's partly because, like, as the BBS era ended, and as the kind of modern internet era began, a lot of that stuff, like the Stormfront forums become, and we're gonna do a whole episode on Stormfront down the line, That's why I haven't really talked about it.
I thought about kind of slamming it all into one episode, but no, we'll do Stormfront.
Stormfront deserves its own episode.
But Stormfront started off as one of these early BBSs in the early 90s, and then kind of gradually as the internet becomes a thing, it just sort of migrates over into being a website.
Like one of the earliest, not one of the earliest websites, but certainly one of the earliest popular websites was… You know, Stormfront 1996, you know, one of the first, you know, kind of person making their own personal website as opposed to something created by a brand or created by an institution or, you know, one or whatever.
I mean, 1996 is super, super early for this stuff, right?
Yeah.
But yeah, no, so, and the, like, archiving the text of the, like, today you can store PDFs very, very easily and you can just have it, You know, it's on a thumb drive.
It's like, it's nothing to have, like, you know, 20 years of Liberty Bell PDFs on a, on a thumb drive.
Like, that's super, super easy to do.
At the time, image files were really, like, difficult to store.
They were just large and bulky and hard to download and hard to get access to.
And so a lot of this stuff turns into text files where somebody has to, like, type it into a forum or somebody has to type it into a file or, you know, Kind of produce it that way so that it can be shared.
So there is, I think, a kind of discontinuity to where like the exact material kind of gets lost.
But then it gets rediscovered as the Internet Archive starts to be available and people did scan some of this stuff and did kind of bring it back.
And, you know, obviously Metzger, you know, Metzger has had his fans.
I mean, people will still today kind of talk about, you know, kind of how great Metzger was and what a fighter he was and, you know, how much they admired him.
Uh, you know, I mean, Louis Beam obviously has, you know, kind of direct connection.
Um, you know, the skinhead movement is not what it was, um, in the, in the 80s, but, uh, you know, none other than Matt Hypock was, uh, trying to recruit hammer skins into his, um,
White Nationalist Party, I forget exactly what he called that party, but he was trying to... The Nationalist Front, that was the thing, where it was this combination of many different, you know, kind of national socialist groups and various things, and he was trying to recruit among the Hammerskins, which are the kind of a later version of the skinhead movement.
He was trying to recruit skinheads in, like, 2012, 2013.
Like there's no, there's no question about that.
And so there's always been a, you know, there's always been a kind of fluidity about like which group and which movement and who's talking to who and where the kind of communication comes from.
And so the BBS era itself ended.
And I think there is a kind of moment at which there's the new thing, but people also did kind of come back to a lot of this material and it is still used in a lot of ways.
And it's more like the social subculture that I think matters more than the technical stuff.
Yeah.
Because we got into sort of the technical details, which matter in the sense of, like, if we're understanding the material reality of these guys, if we're understanding the material conditions that give rise to this kind of stuff, you have to have at least a generalized understanding of, like, how the technology worked in order to have that conversation.
But ultimately, what it did was it taught them how to organize, and it taught them how to do this.
And using Super Chats To feed money to Nick Fuentes on DLive, or on whatever his new platform's gonna be now that he's getting kicked off of DLive, looks very similar to sending money to Tom Metzger so that he'll send you a CD of his rantings, and so he'll send you a book or whatever.
As they get more and more banned from mainstream platforms, and as This sort of hammer comes down on them.
And I'm not even like the legal hammer, but just this sort of the attentional hammer comes down on them.
I'm already starting to see some of these guys start talking about like, maybe we're just gonna have to start fucking mailing money to each other again.
Like, you know, like, and these are like, these are young kids.
These are not guys that remember the 80s.
These are guys who are 30 and 40 who are kind of going like, we're gonna have to, you know, so The pattern is going to remain the same.
And if they do go to that, like more and more, if they do start using kind of physical locations instead of the internet, it is harder to track, obviously, for obvious reasons, but it also slows them down considerably.
And so there's always this kind of push and pull with these things in terms of, you know, how to do it.
And that's why research in anti-fascist work and going back to the beginning, the question at the beginning, why like basic research, like sitting online, And, like, following these people on Facebook and doing that level of research, just lurking in their forums and taking screenshots, can mean a whole, whole lot.
Because, like, those archives, once they exist, they can be used for further research, right?
I mean, you know, and it's all part of the same thing.
Literally, the reason that we know about this history to begin with is because somebody, like, wrote into a Yippee magazine in 1985 and said, I'm a computer user, I dialed this weird number and suddenly I found this thing where I found a number that had a bunch of white nationalists on the other end of it, and we should know about that and do something about it!
Yeah?
Yeah!
That's some, I don't even know, I don't even think that person's ever been identified, but whoever wrote that led to the ability for us to understand how this network works, and so you never know what little piece is gonna prove important down the line, is one of the other things, you know.
Yeah, indeed.
So, if it's not presumptuous, a salute to our forebear there.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
I think there's one more thing that's worth, and I'm surprised you didn't highlight this already, but these are also people, I mean, we can talk about like, oh, maybe they got the money from the Order or whatever, but even the people who were in the Order had to own, you know, They had to spend a lot of money on their military-grade hardware, etc.
But if you're buying computer systems in 1984, and you've got a bunch of modems and all that stuff, you are not a poor hillbilly from the sticks.
No, no.
These are people, upwardly mobile, upper-middle class, these are people of some means, especially Metzger owned a television repair shop, you know, which he may have been a sole proprietor.
I'm not sure if he had employees or whatever, but he owned a repair shop.
Like, that's what he did.
He did not answer to a boss.
And this is always the source of, you know, the bulk of far-right, white nationalist, fascist organizing is people in that class position.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's just so obvious to me now that it feels like it's not worth commenting on.
But of course I forget there's always people ready to try to misunderstand this issue.
So it is very much worth commenting on.
Yeah, it's worth highlighting and it's worth highlighting that it's not something that's just happening today, it was something that was happening in the early to mid 80s.
Yeah, absolutely.
If you trace fascism right the way through its entire history, that is always in what, you know, obviously things are very sociologically different in different times and places, but that sort of layer of people, that's always where you find the fascist base.
Always that middle layer.
Yeah.
I, one of the things that I've been trying to do kind of, um, low key for, I mean, for years now, ever since I first started this project and thought like, Oh, I should track back the earliest instance of white supremacist stuff on the internet, like the first time somebody used a computer to spread Nazi ideology.
The earliest I can find is either late 1983 or early 1984, with that first bulletin board system.
If it was ever spread on like a mainframe, like an AT&T mainframe or IBM mainframe in some bank somewhere or something, that has apparently been completely lost to history.
If anybody has any background on that, I would love to find an earlier example of it.
But from my understanding, this is the very beginning of like this kind of material, this kind of ideology being spread using a computer of some kind.
Well there you go.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn it had happened right at the very beginning on that AT&T thing you were talking about.
I imagine it's been with us the entire time right from day one.
Yeah.
Okay.
No.
Um, yeah, I'm pretty sorry.
Kind of a shorter episode today and I apologize.
I, again, I did a ton of work for this and I apologize.
It's again, a little bit drier and a little bit shorter, but, um, I gave you a ton of reading material, so please go and enjoy the reading material.
No, I think this was an interesting one.
Bit more substantial than me just getting angry and, and thumping books around last week.
And, but, uh, yelling at Jimmy door, which was an enormous amount of fun.
Oh yeah, I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but it was a junk food episode last time, whereas this is a substantial meal.
Before we go, I think, do we have a correction to make about a mistake we made last episode?
Something about Sam Seder not starting at the Young Turks?
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
We were both under the impression that Sam Seder had started with the Young Turks.
Some of the people at the Majority Report had previously worked with the Young Turks, but Sam Seder had not.
So, apparently, the confusion there is that the Young Turks was associated with a handful of other Sort of early internet radio networks in its kind of early days.
And they were like, the majority report was kind of lumped in with the Young Turks in some, you know, kind of packages.
Yeah.
I forget exactly how the details worked, but they were kind of associated with one another.
I mean, not part of the same group.
So like, you know, Sam Seder never worked for Chink Younger.
So yeah, that's a That's a correction worth making.
I had completely forgotten about that in my searching through old articles from 1989 over the course of the last few days.
But yeah, no, that's a correction worth making.
We did say that Sam Seder had worked for the Young Turks, and that is actually mistaken.
So apologies to Sam Seder, and fuck you, the Young Turks.
Yes, and as indeed with the first part of the Tom Metzger coverage, this episode again is dedicated to the memory of Mulugeta Soror and indeed to everybody and anybody who has ever been a victim of Tom Metzger and his decades-long career of spreading hatred.
Fuck that guy.
And also, since we spent so much time looking at the Louis documentary, the Louis and the Nazis documentary last time, which I did re-listen to that episode, and we did spend an enormous amount of time talking about that documentary because I was interested in that.
Imagine if Louis Theroux had started asking some of these questions in 2003.
Wouldn't that have been interesting?
And wouldn't that maybe have given us some context and some information that might have led to this not happening today?
Yeah, yeah.
If somebody with the research powers and the media pull of the BBC had been like, so tell me about that early computer network in 1985.
Might have been a little more interesting than saying, like, hey, don't you think that's racist?
I'm just saying.
Media people at that time, they were content to just do their little bit at the end of the show, where they showed you a montage of people scrolling through Holocaust denial sites and said, ooh, look, scary.
That was basically all you heard.
Yep, that's it.
Whereas here, you get the real meat and potatoes.
The real meat and potatoes!
I'm reading from old PDFs, that's the way to do it.
We have a millionth of the reach, so that's the flip side of that.
It's quality, not quantity, as I always say.
Should we announce our February movie, since we've picked it already?
Yes, let's do that.
Sure, and wrap up and be done.
We have decided to, for our Patreon-exclusive movie episode for February, we kind of went back and forth on this, but we are going to be talking about The Third Man from 1949.
This is Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles film.
And if you haven't seen it, you should definitely check it out.
It is not hard to kind of find a rental in various places.
And I'm sure if you were interested in pirating it, it would be easily piratable, although I definitely do not officially recommend that anyone do such a thing in my official capacity under my real name.
But, you know, it is it is worth checking out.
We will be recording that in the next couple of weeks and releasing it sometime in the month of February.
So look forward to that.
And I think the goal that we're, I mean, certainly kind of where I'm wanting to go with the movie episodes, particularly since they're Patreon exclusives, is to kind of think more seriously, not really do like movie reviews as much as discussions of issues that sort of the films bring up in relation to our main topic.
And then I suspect we're going to use the third man to talk a bit about the response.
Of our respective governments to the COVID-19 pandemic is kind of where I think we're going with that one.
I suspect so.
Although we'll probably just also talk about how great Orson Welles is.
Well, yeah, we do have a tendency to talk about how great Orson Welles is, but we'll try to keep the gush to a minimum and talk a bit more seriously about, for instance, things like Public health policy, medication, etc.
And also maybe some other issues that that fascinating film raises.
So that'll be February for our Patreon backers.
Yeah, which thank you.
I get a new notification just about every day for someone, you know, new dollar per new dollar, you know, to me every month.
And thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
I do.
So do I. It really is amazing.
Thank you so much.
Okay, that was episode 79.
Thank you for listening.
Do we know what the next one's going to be about?
The main episode, I mean?
I have a couple of interviews to schedule and so I'm hoping, I don't want to announce it just in case the scheduling isn't going to work right, but there will be, I think the next episode will be an interview episode of one of the two people that I have scheduled to come on in February.
Until I know exactly what the scheduling is on that, then we'll not announce it so we don't wet people's whistles before it's ready to go.
But yeah, so interview, almost certainly an interview in the next week or two.
Okay, great.
You can rely on us to pick brilliant guests, I think.
We've had a little bit of a problem with that in the past, but going forward, I will be making better decisions, I assure you.
Certainly all our recent ones have been amazing.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Okay, thanks for listening and toodaloo.
Toodaloo.
Cheers.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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