89: Sounds Like Hate, with Geraldine Moriba and Jamila Paksima
For Episode 89, Jack takes a break and Daniel chats with Geraldine Moriba and Jamila Paksima of the excellent Sounds Like Hate podcast. Content warnings, as ever. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: Sounds Like Hate official website https://soundslikehate.org/ Geraldine Moriba [Twitter] https://twitter.com/GeraldineMoriba Jamila Paksima [Twitter] https://twitter.com/JamilaPaksima Justen Watkins and Alfred Gorman [arrested] https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7mme4/a-leader-of-neo-nazi-terror-group-the-base-was-just-arrested-in-michigan
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
All right, and welcome to episode 89 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which we talk about awful people, places, and things.
Mostly people.
I'm Daniel, and if you know the drill around here, if I'm talking first, it means that Jack will unfortunately not be joining us today.
But instead, I am joined by Geraldine Moriba and Jamila Paksima, producers slash hosts of the Sounds Like Hate podcast, now in its second season.
Today, I think we're probably going to spend a bit of time talking about the bass, but we'll see how it goes.
Geraldine and Jamila, welcome to I Don't Speak German.
Thank you.
Glad to be here.
Yes.
We don't speak German either.
Well, yeah, that's that's the that's the one requirement for this podcast is you are not allowed to speak German.
Come on.
Actually, that's not true.
I think there are certain people who speak German who would be allowed on.
But, you know, it's a rule around here.
We just we're not allowed to speak German.
So yeah, you two co-host and produce the Sounds Like Hate podcast, which is, I guess, I don't know if it's part of the SPLC or, you know, kind of like, I don't know, just tell us a little bit about Sounds Like Hate and about kind of your backgrounds and how you got into doing this stuff, because I find that people often find circuitous routes into covering kind of far-right and white supremacist material.
And so just whoever wants to start, please feel free to let me know.
Well, I'll kick it off.
This is Geraldine.
And, you know, my entire career has been based on reporting news stories about social equity, justice, the evolution of culture.
And I'm really very interested in reporting on America's challenges, specifically with systemic racism.
And I've developed a body of experience that I apply to unpacking, specifically now, the rising rates of white domestic terrorism.
So I was approached by the SPLC to create a podcast.
And when they approached me, I immediately had an idea of what could be done.
I'm a documentary filmmaker.
Jamila is a documentary filmmaker.
We're journalists.
But I knew what I wanted to do was get into the heads of some of these people and to try to understand why they do what they do.
Little did I know at that point that Trump would be doing things like placing an executive order banning anti-racism workshops in the federal government and including federal contractors or that white supremacists would be So bold to put their accelerationist plans on social media, or the insurrection would happen.
Like, I didn't see any of that coming when I agreed to do this.
But what it all confirmed is it's all the epitome of white privilege, and it confirmed that the focus of Sounds Like Hate was the right choice.
For us, the editorial challenge motivated Us to just keep going and I invited Jamila to be my production partner after I was approached by SPLC because we've been working together on other independent projects before and I've always been impressed by her passion for human rights reporting and her dedication to stories about people and communities and conflict and crisis and right now that's what's happening here.
So together we're trying to create An audio documentary series to kind of tease out the motivations behind hate and and we're just really examining the ways that extremist groups are encouraging violent terroristic behavior and and and Even an international network of prepping that's happening for the collapse of America and other countries.
And it's not pleasant reporting at all.
It's uncomfortable.
And it's not a conversation that people want to hear.
And even the title of our podcast, Sounds Like Hate, isn't something that's inviting.
It's not like, come play with my puppy, you know?
And people, We want to speak to, most often don't want to speak to us, but our mission is to tease out these stories.
Well, I will tell you that Geraldine and I are career documentary filmmakers, and we also have our careers in television prior to that.
Geraldine and I have been talking for a while, but she had a bug, you know, to like do a podcast for years.
And she's like, we've got to do one.
And she turned me on to podcasting and the storytelling.
And so this is our first podcast documentary.
Well, I'm so proud of what we've already been able to accomplish and how deep we can go into some folks' stories.
And I think that sometimes we tag team and sometimes we go out individually, but we each bring a lot of different strengths to the storytelling.
And I think some of it has to do with just being in this business as journalists for decades, knowing how to tell a really strong documentary story and gather all the evidence so that we can do some true reporting.
I know you did some in-house visits on some people that were very intimately connected to me in a weird way, so we will definitely be digging into that here shortly.
Before we get there, much of your, certainly the first three episodes of Baseless, and Baseless is one of the sort of sub-threads in the kind of larger Sounds Like Hate podcast, I'd recommend, I've listened to every episode that's been released to date.
It's Good work.
Very excellently done.
I think idiosyncratic German listeners should check it out for sure.
One of the things that was fascinating to me is how much of the Baseless series is based around these, what is it, 83 hours of vetting calls that were recorded by wire and that you two obtained for this podcast series.
And you know, much of my work is spent like listening to like propaganda, like the overt stuff that these people produce for their for new to get new people into it or to encourage people in the movement.
Whereas the stuff that you're listening to is, you know, kind of is them.
Talking amongst themselves for something that isn't meant to be put out there.
I find a lot of similarities in terms of the kind of content, because a lot of what I listen to are these multi-hour live streams in which they really do let down their hair and say the same things that you're hearing on the vetting calls.
I'm wondering, just for you two coming at it, Um, you know, without necessarily kind of a long history in this stuff or, you know, just, just what was the experience like of listening to all that audio and then having to go and like dig into the details of like, what is Patriot Front exactly?
What do all these words mean?
I mean, it is like, there's a jargon that you really have to kind of gather and you really have to kind of be, be up to.
And that's kind of one of the metaphors of the title is we're wanting to speak German by listening to these people.
What was it like for you kind of getting into this and how would you see the differences or similarities between those kinds of like private conversations and the more kind of public pronouncements if you've been exposed to any of that at all?
Well, I'll tell you, we, even before we chose to proceed with the story about the base and the vetting calls, we spent months actually digging in and studying all the different groups, understanding what they're about, how they differ, where they have similarities.
We also decided that we didn't really want to amplify who their leaders are.
And so there's some intentionality about what we do and do not say, but we've studied and researched them.
Quite in depth so that by the time we heard about this opportunity for this audio, we knew exactly what we wanted to do with it.
I have worked on a lot of investigative pieces in the past from when I worked at NBC.
I've spent hours listening to FBI secret tapes and, you know, Philly Mob and other things like that.
So listening to hours of recordings, it was something unfortunately I was quite familiar with.
And whittling it down, we needed to come up with a massive process of how to do it, because once we did get this, like, bounty of information, we were, okay, how are we going to filter through it?
How are we going to make decisions about who we're going to profile?
And Geraldine and I came up with a process.
We got a small army of people to help us Listen and create transcripts.
And then we did machine learning on it, which which is something that Geraldine brought to the table because she had worked at night.
She's a Knight Fellow and did a lot of work in AI.
So I'm going to pass the buck over to her to explain why we decided to do machine learning on the content.
Yeah, I mean, just to back up a little, in some circles, it's really sexy to hate.
You know, hate is not something, as a result of Trump, it's not hiding in the shadows or at home over dinner or private conversations at work or school.
It's out there for everybody to see.
It's expressed by leaders.
It's expressed by politicians.
It's expressed in our workplaces.
And it's expressed violently.
By extremists, which means like right now there is an unprecedented opportunity to measure and document and and by measuring and documenting what's been there all along but hiding, we can actually create cultural change and we can help heal our country and move it to towards a better place.
So we analyzed 83 hours of these secret audio recordings that were Inside a vetting room.
It was inside the room where they were determining who was good enough to become a member of their organization.
Before I get into the analysis and some of what we found, I just want to point out that You know, you're asking how quickly we got up to speed, and it was a lot of work.
And some of it is just, it's ridiculous.
The grievances that were expressed on these calls are petty and silly.
The pain, though, that people feel is real.
So they have Grievances, but the way that they interpret it and feel it is authentic and real to them.
But as awful as these recordings were, there were definitely moments of humor.
The names they call themselves, the reasons that they hate, it's just often ridiculous.
You know, we had this little army of people who were going through it.
What was important to us was we didn't want to just tell anecdotal stories.
We wanted to capture what these guys were saying when they think nobody's listening.
We wanted to see what was at the center of this recruiting process and try to learn from it.
And, you know, we could have simply just strung together a lot of clips, but it was important for us to find out what their fragilities are, what their fears are, why they believe what they believe, and just expose
To me, my opinion is the stupidity of hate and encourage us to act in socially beneficial ways.
So we worked with a machine learning expert, a computer scientist at Stanford, as well as a team of people at the DC or D lab in Berkeley, at UC Berkeley.
And to help us forensically analyze the hate speech in the recordings and try to uncover a picture of in-group behavior and the way extremists communicate with each other when they think they're speaking to people who share their values.
And it's really different in some ways than the way they speak when they're on social media and they're projecting An image of themselves they want you to see or so it might be for recruiting purposes or a fair tactic or to try and unite people.
But when they're privately talking, they mostly sound like regular guys for the most part.
They absolutely go off the scale once in a while and say things that are so Horrible.
But that's not constant.
For the most part, because it's in-group behavior and they like each other and they share values, a lot of it is really jovial and they're playing with each other and poking fun at each other and sharing what they have in common.
No, I definitely agree.
And again, you get, you get some of that, you know, some of that intimacy.
I mean, there was again, when they, even when they're publicly broadcasting, but in places where they don't think a lot of anybody outside their group is listening.
I mean, I heard somebody break down crying because his like best friend from high school had just died on one like broadcast, you know, like right between talking about race war.
And he's like, yeah, I just, I'm really beaten up right now because like my friend just died.
And I knew it from high school and I just don't know what to do with myself right now because that's how I feel.
And, you know, you do get into this stuff.
I mean, you know, one of the things that we try to do here is to emphasize both the humanity of these people and kind of the horror and to kind of use humor to kind of bridge those two gaps in some ways.
And I think your show, you know, your journalism, I should say, does some very similar work in terms of trying to examine these kind of personalities as people without ever like forgetting who they really are. - Yeah.
And I think that leads us to bad acts.
The events of late 2019 that involved me, and I think most people kind of know this story already.
I'll put a link to the Wrong House, to Nick Martin's Wrong House piece, and obviously please go listen to the baseless, at least the baseless bits of Sounds Like Hate, but this is events in which I was threatened Not me personally, but people who lived in a house formerly owned by another Daniel Harper is the quickest way I can kind of summarize that.
And at the time, in 2019, I had no idea who these people were.
There was no, you know, but about a year later, arrests were made and there are court cases currently going about.
And it turns out that the two people doing the threatening from the base were these two men, Watkins and Gorman.
And I know Jamila, you actually spent quite a bit of time here in Michigan Exploring kind of the actual facility, the farmhouse, that these people were in.
And you get a bit of that in part four, I believe, of Baseless, or maybe part five.
But tell us what was it like to visit this compound and what kinds of materials did you find?
What did you see that maybe didn't make it into the full documentary?
Well, this home that is in Bad Axe, which became the headquarters for the Michigan base, and was the home of Tristan Webb's father.
His name is actually Eric Webb.
And he allowed me to join him going back for the first time to check out the aftermath after the FBI raid.
I've been there for several hours.
I think it was just under two weeks from when it had happened.
It was one of those, like, let me ask and see if he'll say yes.
And he did.
And I was like, okay, well, off we go.
I have a lot of questions about Eric Webb.
Sorry to interrupt, but one funny thing is, The pseudonym that his son Tristan used was his father's name.
He didn't even make up something.
He used his own father's name as a pseudonym on these calls.
So it wasn't that hard to identify him.
It's a very telling detail.
And again, just to, I want to get back to Jamila, to your experience, but I just want to put a pin right here.
Very telling as well that his father is a kind of Apparently deeply involved QAnon believer.
It has its own like deep conspiracist nonsense but rejects the white nationalist version of the Jewish conspiracy.
So this is something I think I want to get into that for sure.
There's a big debate there, too, about how much he believes there.
Anyhow, yeah, he's a fascinating character.
We actually first spent about an hour, hour and a half at his home.
He is definitely a prepper in his own home and has been prepping and instilled that in his own son.
We go together and, you know, we have to decide all kinds of things.
Like, I knew that there were probably going to be guns and things because it's Michigan.
Everybody's got guns.
And, you know, so I was like, maybe I shouldn't be in the car with him.
Maybe I should just follow so I can get out of there if something goes wacky.
You know, like you have to think about these things as a journalist.
So I didn't travel alone.
I had a colleague with me, which was also part of being smart.
And when we arrived, it was just like it was fascinating to sort of see him be startled by everything, because he hadn't been there in four or five months.
And when something bad had gone down when he tried to get his guns the last time he was there.
And when he was there before he didn't enter the house.
So he hadn't been inside in a very long time.
Maybe close to, you know, a year or so.
So we arrived and there are about three cars in the driveway.
Some of them have their tires slashed and so forth.
And he said, Well, that's Tristan's car.
We slashed his tires so that Watkins wouldn't take his car.
Because Tristan left a few weeks before the FBI raid, coincidentally.
Just to be clear, Tristan is Eric's son.
Tristan was able to stay in the house, just for the audience.
Tristan was able to stay in the house, given permission by his father.
And in that process, Justin Watkins and what is his name?
Eric Gorman become, are kind of the leaders of this base cell.
And they kind of move in and set up shop and create a paramilitary camp there.
So despite the fact that the house is sort of not owned by Eric, or not owned by Tristan, owned by Eric, but Tristan is the one kind of allowed to be there and is sort of the man of the house.
But eventually it kind of becomes something that's more controlled by Watkins and Gorman, But it was a military base before Tristan left.
It was already established.
Right.
Yeah.
No, no.
Yeah.
Thank you for clarifying that point.
I wasn't trying to.
I mean, paramilitary base, not military, paramilitary.
It was a militia.
It was a militia.
So the other piece of this, which is also, you know, we don't go into it too deeply, but Believe it or not, Tristan's mother was living there during all of this time, while Watkins and Gorman and several other young men were living there.
At some point, I mean, we were able to identify five individual young men living there, including Tristan.
And as we had heard on the recordings, Tristan was all about inviting everybody up.
You know, he just wanted it to be a great place.
In fact, he was like, as long as you come and clean up and don't leave beer bottles, my mom will be okay.
She's okay with this.
And there may be, you know, you know, we were not able to talk to her.
So we weren't able to verify things from her, which is why we haven't Spoken too much about her level of involvement, but clearly she was fully aware of what was happening.
She was living in this house and occasionally Tristan's younger brother was there as well.
So none of this was happening in hiding, but what had become clear was they Went there with the intention of trying to create a compound initially, and this is what Tristan had said to me on his phone call in his interview, was that that was the original goal, that they could come and they could train in the area, and whoever wanted to join them could.
They all had like minimum wage jobs, many of them worked at Walmart down the street, Yeah, a lot of got fired from their jobs and they were trying to like live off the land.
Eric Webb was hoping that they were going to farm it and take care of it.
They had animals that they couldn't afford to feed, and Eric Webb was constantly paying the bills to try to take care of that.
So when we arrived, there was lots of beer bottles and trash everywhere.
There were these three cars that none of them were functioning.
Most of the tires had been slashed, so nobody would steal them.
I think that was one of the theories.
If they slashed the tires, nobody would take the car.
And the first thing we see is like a is a garage and this garage apparently had was the de facto like Hitler room is what they used to call it and it had everything that was was Nazi related paraphernalia had already been removed by The FBI, but it was, you know, a ramshackle like things were all over the place, family photos are in, you know, on the floor.
And Eric was going through it, finding like these memories of raising his kid, his wife with, you know, a couple of children when they were younger, things like that.
And then we saw homework for For Gorman, but then there was also like lots of canisters of like these giant Bunsen burner things so you could like feed a lot of people off of a fire.
There's a lot of survivalist kind of paraphernalia in there, in and around there.
Lots and lots of gas cans and Eric Webb was really upset because apparently there were Lots of solar panels that had disappeared and a few other things which he thinks maybe got stolen or sold or other things like that.
And then we walk towards the big barn and that's where all the, I guess they had a number of hogs and pigs, chickens.
They also were raising cats and dogs.
It was a mess.
It was filthy.
You wouldn't want your animals living in that situation.
And there were feed bags everywhere.
All over the garage and the big barn.
And trash.
Piles and piles of trash.
Everywhere.
We, I think they had these like little secret rooms in the back of the barn where they would have certain meetings and I believe from some of the photographs that we've seen they would do their paramilitary training on the back side of the barn because that's what looked really familiar to me and they and they pose and they take a lot of their photographs and propaganda pictures back there.
We were able to, you know, learn that they were constantly Just practicing shooting.
It was maddening, annoying to people who lived in the community.
How isolated is this place?
I mean, it's about 15-20 minutes out of downtown Bad Axe.
It's a total rural country road.
And it is just flat farms, one after another.
And they don't really farm anything in particular there anymore.
So it's not hidden by trees.
It's really like a big open plain and there's not much you can hide actually.
There are bushes and things like that.
Basically what you could hide is inside any of the structures or buildings.
Then there was a small tool shed.
And I asked if we could go in there and that's where for some reason I guess there was propaganda pinned to all the walls of all kinds of racist caricatures of blacks and white people and what should be done to them and How their brains don't work, how black people's brains don't operate the same.
It was just vile, vile content.
Were there any like identifiable groups that were clearly sort of in that propaganda?
Or is it kind of more generic?
I mean, what's the... It's actually like a newsletter of some sort.
Where it's all hand-drawn, it's from 2020, and it looked like, what I said was like, this looked like propaganda from the Nazi era to me.
It was just like these old drawings of just over-exaggerated everything about people, and And it was about white men and it was about Jews and it was about blacks.
And the father was like really upset and he starts ripping it off the walls.
And he's like, and I have some pictures of it so I can share it with you later if you want.
But we decided not to publish the name of the company that actually sells this.
It's online.
And clearly they were subscribing to whatever that was.
There were like cases of peroxide, weird things around, just sitting around.
And then there were lots of bags of trash.
Peroxide, are you talking about like consumer grade, like hydrogen peroxide that you'd buy in a store?
Or are you talking about like... Like in brown bottles in a case.
Just odd things.
And what had happened was, as we arrived, Eric Webb's ex-wife was there.
So she saw us, and she was trying to hightail, and I was trying to ask her if she would talk to me, but she didn't want to talk to me.
And she had apparently been there and had been cleaning up.
But when we walked in, you would never know anything was really cleaned up.
So I guess, I don't know how long she had been there cleaning up.
But she also got scooted out of that house.
Her and Tristan left two weeks before the FBI raid.
Then when we walk in the house, that's where almost every single window had hate is not a crime stickers on every window.
There was swastikas drawn on backs of doors.
And first room that we really went into was Tristan's bedroom.
He didn't really have a bed.
He had a military cot.
And he had weights, he had musical instruments, but he had a lot of these white power stickers all over his room, on his window.
And what I found interesting was because I had just spoken to him a couple of days prior to walking through that house, he kept insisting to me that he's just a white separatist and that he's not a racist.
But everything I saw there was, I mean, there's no doubt.
It's the standard line.
It's the standard line.
Like, I don't speak German, listeners understand.
How can you say you're not a racist?
That's the thing they always say.
This is the most racist thing I've ever seen.
And he's like, I don't believe racists should oppress each other.
And I'm like, everything that you're saying here is about oppression.
Well, what he means is, I don't think the races should oppress each other because I believe the Jews are oppressing me now.
That's what he means by that.
I mean, you know, like, let's be... Wasn't he the one who was saying, I don't think the Holocaust happened, but I think it should have, like, on your podcast?
And he's not the only one.
On our recordings, that was a repeated, repeated sentiment.
We heard it multiple times, you know, and that is pretty disturbing.
And as we went on with the interview and walking around the house, it wasn't until way, way, almost at the very, very end of the interview, Eric Webb tells me that they have Jewish relatives and that actually they have Jewish blood in them.
I was like, didn't you press your son for this and tell him?
That this is his own heritage.
And, you know, he just kind of like dismissed it.
I like he wouldn't register with him.
He felt very separate from that.
Yeah.
So I would say out of all of it, like the downstairs was OK.
Not so great until we saw that there was a gun cabinet.
There were, you know, some there had been a lot of boxes of empty shells that they had had and then empty cases for guns on the floor.
I kind of pushed Eric Webb because he's like, well, all the guns were locked up in a cabinet, but it was like this little curio cabinet from his grandfather with a glass in front of it.
And I was like, okay, that is not going to stop a bunch of boys who want to play, you know, cowboys and Indians out there.
So I thought that was a bit ridiculous, thinking that that was like a safe way to keep guns.
And from talking to the grandmother, apparently these guns were everywhere.
They would be sitting around the couches, they would be in their bedrooms, would be sitting in drawers.
There was just like no real good safety measures taken whenever she walked through trying to see, you know, how they were handling the guns, which is why the grandmother herself also Then ended up approaching the FBI about the condition of the house and who was living there and her concern.
This is Eric's mom, just to be clear.
That's right.
This is Eric Webb's mother.
Her name is Carol Teagarden.
So I would say that was the downstairs.
And then upstairs was just two bedrooms.
And that's where I think that was the most disturbing part.
So when you go up the stairs, the room to the left was painted black on the walls.
And the largest swastika, I mean, it was really quite big, was spray painted on a bathroom door.
And the bed was overturned.
It smelled like cat urine in there.
There were all kinds of like job applications, census things, you know, and that's where Dustin Watkins, that was Dustin Watkins' room.
And in there, it was piles and piles of clothes.
Again, all these stickers and Spam lunch meet singles, I don't know why, you know, just an array of things.
And then in the other room, which I guess sometimes, I guess, Gorman was in, or someone named Tommy sometimes stayed there, there were some peculiar things, like there were some bottles, like we weren't sure what they were, if it was medication or drugs, and Eric Webb is an optometrist, so he was trying to sort of assess that.
We saw some needles.
Apparently, one of the guys who stayed there was diabetic, but the needles, like, my own mother was diabetic.
Like, they were really large needles.
They weren't, you know, insulin needles.
I've seen those before.
But we just weren't sure whose room it was last and who it belonged to.
But there was definitely some other things going on there.
I mean, even Eric Webb was like, I think it looks like they might be doing crack or something, but you know, it was hard to tell.
So we didn't talk about that too much.
It's the thumb, and for those of us who, those who are not Michiganders in this audience, are not familiar with Michigan, there is a rampant drug problem along even the non-Neo-Nazis in the thumb of Michigan.
And, you know, of course, we have empathy for those people for their drug addictions, although not for being Neo-Nazis.
That's not something I have particular empathy for, unless they want to get out and help the rest of the world be better.
Anyway, Well, it turns out that I guess that Justin Watkins was using illegal steroids.
And I don't know if they were injecting it or taking it as pills, but that he's been charged with that in the in the current case.
So it kind of matches part of what the story of what Tristan told me is that he was the thing about Watkins is he was obsessed with training.
And He would make these guys train all day long as much as he can.
And it really started to concern Tristan because everything to him seemed about training.
And he wanted to really just figure out how to make this property work and be sustainable.
But everyday training and being in the gym and being ready for when this collapse is going to happen.
I mean, they were always preparing for this.
They really had two missions.
I mean, one mission was physical training and learning how to shoot and be physically fit and prepared for a collapse of America they were hoping for and anticipating.
But they were also trying to build a community.
And in the recordings that we have, you hear Tristan, when he was using the pseudonym Eric, Describe his dream of an all-white state and community and land he wanted to buy with the help of his mother's family, who he said was like-minded, and he thought they were going to help him buy land so they could start creating these enclaves of all-white
People who they would test before they came in to make sure they were really white, authentically white, and have their own economy.
So in the recordings, there's an extensive conversation specifically about doing that.
So it was twofold.
One was creating, and that's why he invited so many guys to the house, It was a property that was in his family, and they were trying to start amassing skills and money so that they can get other land and start living off the land in other places.
Watkins was trying to persuade somebody to sell an adjacent property, apparently.
And, you know, there's a lot of diluted dreaming and scheming.
And one of these things was they were going to build a tunnel between the land, his land and the other land.
We had heard about that in some of the conversations.
Well, at the same time, they can't feed their hogs.
Yeah, they can't even pay for their own things.
And actually, it seems that Eric Webb's ex-wife, or Tristan's mom, helped them both figure out how to collect unemployment, a lot of the young men to collect unemployment when COVID happened, so that they would at least pay her a nominal rent or something.
So she was kind of enabling them in a little bit in that way.
to cover some of the expenses.
But like you said, for people who haven't been to Michigan, this is the thing I found astounding.
I'm like, who is going to come up here and raid your farm?
It's so far away from civilization.
And why would they pick your land over your neighbor's land?
It was so preposterous.
I mean, two hours from Detroit, you got to just drive and drive.
And all there is is convenience stores, no supermarkets.
It's a small town America.
I'm like, nobody's coming to steal your land.
And that you're not going to be attacked by all these different races because you're white.
Like I couldn't even figure out where the fear came from.
Yeah, I mean, well, that's always a big, deep, complicated thing.
But like any mention of, you know, if you're on the east side of Michigan and you're a white separatist or a white nationalist or whatever, the specter, the looming specter of Detroit is always in your mind.
That's just sort of the reality.
And so it matters not that it's two hours away and people in Detroit have no interest in your little farm or whatever.
It's there's always this kind of shadow that's in their mind that's going, that it's going, that eventually the race war is going to happen.
And, you know, images of the worst riots imaginable And that's just going to come and invade all of our communities eventually.
So we have to be prepared for that because ultimately when society collapses, these people being African American are not able to fend for themselves because they have lower IQs and because they have no agency, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so all I know how to do is take that's the essential logic behind that.
They've watched too many zombie movies.
Right.
I mean, you know, there's a deep there's a deep thing between the zombie mythology.
I mean, you know, ultimately, if you look historically, the way that, you know, the zombie myth comes from Haiti, and it definitely seems to arise from some fear of, you know, kind of Haitian slave revolts after the Haitian Revolution.
So, I mean, sorry, I'm not trying to lecture you on this.
I'm just saying, like, this is very part and parcel.
The imagery runs straight through from... It's all racist.
It's entirely part of this continuity that's happened generation after generation of racism.
And it's so embedded in American culture that most people don't even recognize it when they're expressing it or hearing it.
Absolutely, absolutely.
There was this incident, there was a George Floyd protest in Little Bad Axe over the summer and that also raised a lot of attention to the three of the guys who were living in this house because they showed up in all their paramilitary gear and all of their guns and their dad's AR-15 and SR-65, whatever, all these different numbers and
They showed up because they believe, according to Tristan, there were people from other towns that came to demonstrate in Badax, and this was proof that people would come to Badax.
Right.
They didn't actually see that most of the people who were there were from Badax, and they were protesting George Floyd.
It's death because they thought it was wrong.
You know, I mean, it's just that they just see things so differently.
And that, I think this is the part that I want to try to understand better.
Like, why can't they see what other people see?
Well, there's the normal people, like, I mean, speaking for the racist point of view, there are normal people like you and I who believe all the completely obvious things about race and IQ and the supremacy of Jewish people, et cetera, et cetera.
And these are normal beliefs that normal people hold.
And your father's father believed this, and this is part and parcel of this country up until post-World War II.
And suddenly, The Holocaust myth happens in 1965 and all of the kind of civil rights era reforms, et cetera, et cetera.
And now suddenly we're not allowed to speak these ideas publicly that most people actually believe.
And so if you believe that you and your community are basically normal, then any person acting against that kind of ideology is kind of automatically an interloper.
It's automatically someone coming from outside of your community, even if they've lived there their entire lives or ultimately they're being controlled by this kind of outside mental force.
AKA the juice or media or kind of whatever.
And that this is, this is kind of how they think about the world and it's how they exclude anyone who disagrees with them is kind of automatically on that outside And that's why they form such like strong in-group ties to the people that believe the things that they believe.
So simultaneously, we are a tiny group of people, six people in a farmhouse in Michigan, plotting a race war.
And simultaneously we express the like democratic will of the majority of people, white people in North America, because they would believe what we believe if they were not controlled by the insidious forces and put three parentheses around that.
Like that's how I understand it.
Right.
Sorry.
No, no, you're right.
We're a little bit far, a little bit far astray here.
I did, I did, I know we're kind of running up on our, on our, on our hour here.
So if you'll let me kind of move into something else that I found really interesting about your reporting is you actually include quite a bit of Tristan, Tristan Webb's talking, like Geraldine, you interviewed Tristan for the podcast, I believe.
Jamila did.
Oh, Jamila did.
OK, I'm sorry.
My mistake then.
I thought it was you.
But so you interviewed Tristan for the podcast and you had you used quite a bit of him talking.
I mean, quite a bit, quite a bit of his audio.
And that's what went into that decision.
What were you trying to kind of get across in that?
Because there is a kind of perspective of no platforming, you know, these guys.
So kind of walk me through that a little bit.
Well, I'll tell you that Geraldine and I debate this quite a bit, every sentence, especially when it is, you know, propaganda, professing lies or platforming, but there's a piece of it that we felt like Where he was trying to say that he was different, that he was changed now that he was removed from it all.
And it was clear that he's still completely bought into this ideology.
And so I think that that is part of why we included it.
But we do carefully spend time trying to decide, you know, how much of this hate are we going to put out there?
And allow and so it's a fine line and we also work very hard not to use any imagery of hateful symbols as well in our names of books that we have.
Just creators of these ideologies like we don't get into that depth.
We'll never use any of their photographs of them out there with their guns and all of that because you know that's what they would want like There's no bad PR, I guess, even in accelerationism, but we don't want to be a part of that.
Is this particular episode with Eric and Tristan and Carol, what we had was a family unit.
It's three generations.
And it is the paternal line, Tristan and his father and then his father's mother.
And there's a maternal line with another story that we were also trying to capture.
But what's really important, and the reason why we let the audience hear what Tristan was saying, is we wanted the audience to also hear Tristan's father's response to what his son was saying.
Because what you see is an absence of paternal Intervention.
What you don't see is a father.
This man clearly loves his son.
I'm not at all questioning anybody in this family, their loyalty or allegiance for each other or caring for each other.
That is clear.
What you don't hear are questions or The type of support that Tristan needs being offered again and again and again.
We're told that Tristan has needs that were identified when he was in school.
And he's a young man that needed support.
But even though he needed support, he didn't receive it.
And it is not a defense for his behavior, because there are a lot of people who have medical reasons, mental health reasons, and don't have intervention, and they don't become neo-Nazis.
So it's not at all a defense for his behavior.
But Tristan had a father and a grandmother and a mother and other grandparents This is not a child on the street.
This is a kid in a very close family that loves him.
He lived with them, and yet right there in front of them, because they're participating too, and training him.
To have the beliefs he has, and they allow it, and it's beyond allow.
Tristan says in the recordings that his mother's a believer, and that his mother's family is a believer, and that his mother's family perceives his father's family as pests, and as people who are interfering in their white supremacy views, which they see as right.
So Tristan's behavior does not come out of a vacuum.
And that's why we thought it was important to hear a little bit of it, and then hear a little bit of his father's reaction.
Because every time his father is, a fact about his son is revealed in the reporting, his father is surprised.
I didn't know that.
And then he explains it away.
And his explanations don't hold water.
And just to add on to that, in the recordings that we had in these 83 hours of recordings, 88% of the ages mentioned on those recordings were recruits under the age of 30.
20% of them We're 17 to 25 years old.
These are young people, and they're learning about this group and other groups and these nationalist, socialist ideas, mostly from two platforms, at least in our machine learning analysis, and it was iFunny and Telegram.
Terroristic ideologies spread easily through social media, and some people are already hearing bits of it at home, some are not, but they're easily targeted where they gather on social media, you know, on gaming platforms, on YouTube, and when they join a group like The Base, they find community.
And they find a sense of belonging.
And that's what Tristan ultimately was trying to create at his father's home.
But his father basically said, here's my house.
I own it.
You guys can do whatever you want.
I hope you do a good job with the farm.
I hope you start farming.
I hope you do a good job with the pigs and the other farm animals.
And then he walks away.
He had not entered his own home in about a year.
And they chased him away with guns right before they finally turned to the FBI to intervene.
Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned that the extended, the maternal line of the family was so dismissive of Eric Webb, because Eric Webb as a, you know, a QAnon guy, and that's something that I would, I'd really love to learn more about, more about Eric's, exactly how deep he was into QAnon and what, where his kind of conspiracy mindset goes.
But the overt white nationalists see those kinds of figures as inimicable to their movement because They're selling the kind of weak-sauce version.
They're selling the the off-ramp to the kind of overt white nationalist, overt white supremacist stuff.
Because if you're selling like a conspiracy that doesn't involve the protocols of the elder society, then you're not selling the real true story.
And this is it's created by You know, a lot of them will say that QAnon is created by Jewish influence or whatever as a way of getting people off of the real target.
And so like that, that tracks very closely for me.
I did.
I did.
You know, obviously, in the reporting, you do get a sense of Eric's beliefs and kind of kind of the conspiracy mindedness, the prepper kind of aspect of it.
How much This is a tough question.
How much do you really believe Eric when he says he doesn't know what was happening?
How trustworthy do you find some of these statements?
Several times in the podcast, I found myself kind of going, yeah, there's kind of more going on here.
He knows how to kind of play it up for the microphone, if you know what I'm saying.
Again, that's not me trying to be critical of the podcast.
I think that's an intentional thing.
But Like, how honest do you feel like Eric and, by extension, Tristan have been to you in the production of this podcast?
So, there's a couple of things, and I do want to address the QAnon piece as well.
As far as Eric Webb talking about him not knowing things, his essential, I guess, explanation for this was that he was a divorced father.
He lived in another city And his wife was raising kids most of the time.
He claims to have tried to get custody of his children, his two- Right, Tristan has a brother.
Right, Tristan has a brother, younger brother.
And they live sometimes an hour to two hours apart.
And so he, I think, he did say, I kind of left it to her to do a lot of the discipline.
And he did not really, Take a lot of control over those boys, especially in Tristan's case.
He also, you know, and I think that that's why the grandmother got so involved because she could sort of see him slipping.
And by middle school, you know, when apparently there was a lot of depression, there was some suicidal ideation.
And I don't you know, they were very careful about how much they shared about that.
Tristan himself said, like, he didn't want to go to therapy and all of this.
No, the father didn't deny that part, but I don't think he did everything that he possibly could as a father to intervene.
He says he called CPS and he says he talked to the police and sheriff and FBI to try to get his kid out of there, but he couldn't.
So he felt like his hands were tied.
And those were his excuses.
So is he lying or, you know, he's just managing what he can.
The other thing is he sent Tristan on two trips to Australia where it turns out that he had a...
You know, white supremacist girlfriend in Australia.
And the grandmother took him on the first trip.
And dad foots the bill.
Dad foots the bill.
And even though he didn't know anything about what was going on in the house and bad acts, he was buying them ammo because it was so hard to find ammo during COVID.
He was buying them feeds.
So each of those little acts are enabling what's going on there.
It's kind of blessing what is happening without really taking a deep look.
And as far as the QAnon thing, I mean, Eric Webb will tell you that this is his mother's theory.
He says he's not a QAnon believer, but his Carol, his mother, Has totally different opinions about that.
So there's a lot of division in that family.
And there's a lot of infighting, there's a lot of speaking and not speaking to each other and then coming together and breaking apart, which I think is probably really typical of a lot of homes.
And Eric Webb is a prepper and had been for a long time.
And that's not to say white supremacists, all preppers are white supremacists at all, but a lot of the behavior that Tristan is practicing is learned, some of it.
Right.
Yeah.
And it strikes me that a lot of, you know, again, reading between the lines of what I kind of got from Eric and kind of just from what I know of the history, et cetera, he strikes me as more of the kind of, you know, kind of Christian prepper type, more that kind of 700 club.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, kind of, kind of a little, the old school, the old school, um, and the way that he describes, um, you know, no, we're not Nazis.
We're not white supremacists, you know, Jesus, Hitler, like those are two diametrically opposed things.
And we're in favor of Jesus, but not in favor of Hitler.
Like this is straight, you know, moral majority, like 1980s stuff.
And if he grew up in that kind of environment, It does strike me.
And these are both far-right ideologies with deep fundamental flaws, obviously, but they are diametrically opposed to one another.
So, you know, I don't know.
He's a Christian prepper and church is very, very important to him.
And he's written a Christian book, which he was going to give me, but I didn't get it.
And I think that there was something there where he was supposed to be You know he talked about like how when he goes to church like he mixes with all races and his neighbors from Nigeria and he doesn't know how his son got these ideas in his head but also apparently there's something about Eric Webb like he's not allowed to be a member of the church that he really wants to be a part of like there's something that he doesn't quite measure up but it was something that he that frustrated him.
Fair enough.
Well, we're kind of here about an hour.
I did want to let the two of you kind of, if you had anything you wanted to add, anything I didn't get into, any kind of extra comments or anything, please feel free to kind of put it out there for the audience if you've got anything.
Well, I think, I mean, for us, Us working on this podcast, I really feel like our families and our communities have a huge responsibility here.
And it was really clear in this storyline that there could have been so many interventions along the way, and there haven't been.
And now, you know, a lot of the, I mean, a lot of people are trying to figure out, like, how are we going to confront this?
How are we going to manage what's going on with hate?
How are we going to have conversations with people who don't want to sit in the same room together at the same table?
It's all grassroots work.
And so I'm just, I'm just really curious about ways that it does work and how it will work and how do you bring people across the line slowly?
And do people, you know, do you have to, Agreed to get along.
You know, you don't have to agree to live peaceably next to each other.
And I think that that's something that is lost today.
And I would add the one thing we didn't talk about is in both episodes, we consciously try to include solutions.
We don't want to leave people hanging.
And there's a great professor of sociology who's doing research, Peter Simi, Pete Simi, who explains, who even talks about his own son, and that his son was exposed to certain elements and how he as a parent Did everything he could to intervene and make sure his son didn't go down this other path and was successful at it.
It was really important to us to not just put the hate out there, but to also offer families or friends and people listening an idea of what they can do themselves.
And the reality is with this podcast, Podcast sounds like hate.
We're not afraid of telling the truth.
What we're worried about is what happens if we miss it.
So we're trying to listen to what people are saying.
We're trying to watch what they're doing.
And we're reporting these stories that make us sometimes really uncomfortable.
I mean, until Trump came along, we really weren't talking about it too much.
And that's why podcasts like yours I don't speak German.
We don't speak German.
It's really important, because in the end, as journalists, our job is not so much to report what nobody else has seen, but actually to examine what few people are reporting, yet everybody sees.
Yeah, no.
I mean, one of the great comments I got very early when I was doing this podcast was in a comment thread somewhere, and somebody said, I never had the strength to look under this like disgusting log and see what was growing underneath until I started listening to I Don't Speak German.
And now I have the tools to go and look at this for myself and to go try to solve this in my own family, in my own life around me.
And that's like, yeah, no, that's exactly what we're trying to do, you know, is like, we're not doing this alone.
We have to have solidarity across all kinds of different kinds of people in terms of like rooting this out where it is and you know the manifestations over the course of the last 70 years frankly I mean this is not a new problem and you know ultimately we have to kind of think of it that way in order to really kind of get a handle on it.
So yeah, I agree completely.
Tell us where we can find you on the internet or otherwise tell us link yourself.
I've got links to sounds like hate into your Twitter handles already in the show notes.
Any further links, let me know, but tell us where we can find you.
Well, there's a lot of information at soundslikehate.org and you can download and subscribe to the podcast anywhere that you get podcasts and And of course, we, same thing as you, we love to get reviews and we just hope people listen and share their views with us.
Wonderful.
All right.
Anything else to add?
No, thank you for having us on.
This is really an important opportunity, and we really appreciate the work you're doing, because this is not pleasant work.
It's hard, and sometimes we find ourselves in difficult situations, as you did.
And the family that was mistaken to be you, who were targeted, it's unfortunate, and it shouldn't happen.
No, absolutely.
I completely agree.
And of course, my heart goes out to, you know, to the victims of this every day.
That's another thing that we try to do is to highlight the victims as well as the perpetrators of this sort of thing.
So, yeah, thank you for being on.
Thank you for taking an hour of your Saturday to come and hang out with me and give me some free content.
I appreciate it.
And please, listeners, go check out the podcast.
This has been a pleasure.
Anything else you've ever got to, anytime you want to come in and talk to me again, you're welcome back anytime.
Good work.
Thank you.
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 me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
If you want to help us make the show and stay 100% editorially independent, we both have Patreons.
I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
