The 4th part of our series Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart Falls Apart It's time to move on to... episode 3 of season 2 of Things Fell Apart. This episode features the worst example of both sidesing I've ever heard. It's astonishing. An interracial family was driving in the woods to go camping during the pandemic. A group of angry right wing racists, with guns and dogs, follows them and cuts down trees to block the road and prevent their escape. You might be wondering how in the world someone could "both sides" this event. Welp, Jon Ronson finds a way. And it's... oof. Just yikes. If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas, that's Lydia.
How you doing?
Hello, I am doing all right.
Are you ready for some more both-sizing-the-truth-into-oblivion?
Yes and no.
Good answer, yeah.
Let's have someone from each side on to debate the yes and no.
Anyway, this one, okay.
So we're on to episode three, not of us, not our numbering, but of the season two of Things Fell Apart.
We skipped the first one because there wasn't much there to object to.
It was more or less fine.
And then, you know, we did a lot on the second episode and now we're on episode three.
Yeah.
This one, huh, okay.
This one is both the worst both sides.
This might be the worst both sides-ing.
I'll be honest.
I think it's the worst both sides-ing, but I don't think it's like the most consequential.
I think easily both sides-ing trans people's existence.
That's worse by far in terms of the effect and harm and all this.
This one is maybe just the sloppiest, laziest Just in terms of how shitty it is.
Yeah.
This one is so lazy that I almost didn't notice it at first.
It's kind of blended in, but I cannot wait to tell you how bad this one is.
Okay, so season two, episode three is called Tonight's the Night, Comrades.
And it starts, as a lot of this series does, it starts with a good, compelling portrayal of something that is like, okay, cool.
It's almost like credibility building in a way.
Right.
If I were to be cynical about it, but he tells a story and I'll take it at his word that he's approaching this from the perspective of, here's an insane thing that happened, now let me try to explain How this is a both sides issue, essentially.
But the thing he does in the beginning is good storytelling.
This is the one, if you've listened to the series, about that insane fucking story about a family that was just trying to go camping during lockdown, and how they were surrounded and terrorized by right-wingers thinking that they were Antifa.
Armed right-wingers.
You're right.
I thought that one without saying, but you're right.
Yeah.
Call it out.
Yeah.
So this is a horrifying story.
I cannot imagine the level of fear that would be involved in this.
This is downright terrifying.
Add to it, this was a mixed race family.
So if it were you and I, and we were caught up in something like this, we could count on our white privilege to get us out of that most likely.
Not 100%, but it is likely that if a bunch- It's a tool in our tool belt.
It's not even a tool.
It's like 90% of the outcome.
If a right-wing mob surrounds your van in the woods and has cut down trees, which is what happened, cut down trees behind them, trap them.
That would be so fucking scary and traumatizing.
I can't even imagine that would be the worst of the worst.
I would be so terrified.
That would scar you for life, I think.
No matter what happened, even if nothing occurred, an armed group of fucking insane racists Now imagine that you're anything but white.
And then that's a level of fear that truly, I think we can only imagine.
Because of the horrific history in this country of mobs of white people doing things to non-white people in ways that are just too horrifying to even consider.
I can't imagine how shitty that must be for this family.
So like, this is horrible.
This is describing something That is truly, truly scarring and terrible.
And I'm not saying that he did anything wrong in portraying it.
It's an effective portrayal.
I think I would have probably made more, as I am doing here, about how scarring this is.
But, you know, minor.
Nothing wrong with this, as has often been the case with these episodes, as we'll see.
Nothing wrong with the first five minutes of it that talks about, you know, this kind of thing and portrays A horrifying event, you know, and gets you emotionally involved and makes you want to hear more.
Yep.
And so just to make sure I told the story, I'm not going to retell the whole thing, but it is that it's like I said, it is that family.
So there's a group of right-wing nutjobs and this small town in Washington, you know, in kind of the woods.
And these idiots have decided that this is the best.
Do you remember why this happened?
For whatever reason, that detail's not sticking in my mind.
That's amazing.
I'm so happy.
That's what I was hoping for, because it's the best.
It's the fucking... I remember this in real time.
Not this part, I didn't know that this was happening in real time, but the coverage and the bullshit that led to this, I do actually remember at the time.
Because like all these episodes, this is during lockdown after George Floyd, so things are tense, shall we say, of course.
Okay.
And there's a fucking tweet that goes around.
It is so fucking good.
You gotta remember how much Fox News, they continue to, but how much Fox News has demonized and talked about Antifa as this evil thing and blah, blah, blah.
They've made this scary, as they do, as Fox News, the entirety of their existence is finding a thing for someone to be scared of and scaring the fuck out of them.
Like scaring the fuck out of boomers about a thing.
And so in that backdrop, there's a tweet from a newly created account, at Antifa underscore US.
It's so good.
I remember this tweet.
Quote, tonight's the night comrades, with a brown raised fist emoji.
And tonight we say fuck the city and we move into the residential areas, the white hoods, and we take what's ours.
Okay.
It's so fucking good.
It's so funny.
It's perfect because I saw that and it was the funniest, obviously fake thing that I've ever... To be able to believe that that's real, like what has to go wrong in a human's brain to be able to believe that Antifa, first of all, they've got an organized main account at Antifa.
Headquarters.
Yeah.
It's a federalist system, you know, with Antifa.
So there's cities.
But, you know, at Antifa underscore US is calling all the shots.
So, you know, that's that's how it works.
Imagine believing there's any plausibility to that.
Not only that, that they would like say, all right, now we're going to we're done with the city, you know, where we are, like where the people are, where any of this would even matter.
Yeah.
We Antifa are, I guess, everywhere, like everywhere.
We're going to now move to the residential areas.
Which residential areas?
All of them.
I don't fucking know.
Simultaneously.
Just like think about the math of that.
Like any one of the biggest city that had one of these protests, how many Antifa are you even talking about?
You know, like maybe a hundred sometimes.
And then like, okay, for every city, how many fucking suburbs are there?
Nonetheless, when you get to tiny fucking towns called like Squim or whatever that bullshit Washington town is, it's in the woods.
Like, just mathematically, how in the world is that going to work?
Like, how is that going to work?
And this fucking tweet was taken seriously.
Like, they actually, their brains are so broken that this group of, you know, racists, Took that seriously to the point where they first go to where there was a Black Lives Matter rally in the, you know, town.
Population four or whatever.
And some saint of a person out there is putting on a like supportive rally because George Floyd has been killed and, you know, like wanting to show that solidarity, which is a scary thing to do in a place like that.
And I do really like those kinds of people.
I'm too fucking scared to do that.
I'm not doing it.
I'll be honest.
I'm too scared to do that.
I couldn't imagine putting on that kind of rally in a small town like where I grew up.
I don't want to risk getting shot by an angry fucking white person.
Yeah, not worth it.
Not worth it to me.
So the people who do that are heroes.
I haven't done that.
That's brilliant.
And so these assholes go and first confront that rally.
So they show up to that rally and there's a big confrontation.
The ringleader here is this gun shop owner, because of course it is a gun shop owner.
And he's kind of the ringleader here.
And there's a bit of video of confrontation here.
We can listen to some of this.
The intel that we had was that Antifa was here, not peaceful protesters.
The Intel, already hilarious.
Hey, the Intel that we had is that Antifa was in our fucking town of Squim.
What is the population?
I forget if I've already searched that.
Let's see.
Squim, it's spelled C-quim, but they just say Squim. 8,000.
Eight thousand.
So to me, that's a big city, but compared to where I grew up, you know, that's like three times the size of where I grew up, but that's still nothing.
Like three times one is three.
So there's three citizens there.
No, it's tiny.
You know, it's a tiny place.
And the idea that Antifa was going to show up, like, what do you think Antifa is?
Like, like, is it a, Paratrooper army that can like, you know skydive places.
Like what what how how are they showing up?
Mission impossible.
Yeah, like to your stupid town of Squim.
No offense, but like what?
I'm sure it's lovely.
Yeah.
Anyway, so so that's his intel.
I already was funny.
I'm gonna restart that two seconds just to hear it.
So I would just like to say the intel that we had was that Antifa was here, not peaceful protesters.
All over the internet.
Okay, well here's the thing.
Alice was only on Facebook.
My personal Facebook was a swim event that I attended.
So where did you hear that?
It said that people were being bused in at noon and most of them were at Tifa and they were going to burn and break windows online.
And you felt that your response to that was to use your business as a network?
So my response was to that we were not going to allow that to happen in our town.
So we will fuck anybody up who breaks our windows and burns our city.
We are not for that you guys.
Yeah.
Two different things.
- Two different things.
- This woman is doing peaceful protest.
They're not breaking our windows.
They're not burning our city down.
We stand toe to toe and side by side with these people.
- Two different things.
- But we do not stand side by side with people that want to break, slaughter, and kill cops.
We're not for that.
And when we saw what Antifa posted two nights ago about coming to the rural areas and burning down our houses and killing our white babies, we are not for that.
I don't remember that.
That's why you got that response from us.
This young lady right here-- What if they would have said black babies?
I would have done just the same.
I was in Sierra Leone from 1996 to 97.
We already heard about that.
We already heard about that.
You did a lot of speaking about that.
So, all right, this goes on.
And there is some interesting humanity to this obviously effectively racist gun shop owner.
There's some interesting stuff to tell about that.
In his mind, he thinks he's righteous.
And he thinks that like, oh, hey, I support these protests that are peaceful.
To him, this is like the anomaly.
It's just all those non-peaceful protests that I've been scared shitless about by Fox News and other right-wing outlets.
Those are the ones I'm here to stop.
And he comes to an actual protest and finds, wait, that isn't real.
There's nothing to do.
And so they have this weird discussion where he's not like it's funny because like it's this antagonistic conversation these two are having.
But he's also like trying to like signal like you're fine.
I agree with you.
You're great.
This woman's great.
We're here for the, you know, but they've already clearly caused quite a bit of stress to the people because this was a protest where kids were at it.
Yeah.
Like this guy, Larson brought people with huge assault rifles and people with German shepherds, like just Stuff that is clearly going to be scary to see.
Like, it's going to be scary to see.
When you see an angry group of white people with guns and dogs, like, that has obviously racial weight to it.
So she included her five-year-old son, you know, and they were just having a little demonstration, which was impressive.
It said it had 500 people, which for a town of 8,000 is, you know, that's crazy.
But that goes to show just how, you know, these George Floyd protests were huge.
It was amazing that that happened in retrospect, you know.
And again, I'm someone who is often focused on the negative because when you're trying to do anything you can to point the country in a better direction, it's easy to focus on where it's going wrong.
But the fact that there's so many people willing to do demonstrations like that, even in the town of fucking Squim, is a really cool thing about our country.
The bright side, it's the more hopeful side of things that I often can lose sight of.
So that's really moving.
But then these assholes come, as I've already said, and they have guns, they have dogs.
They also start like, I don't know if it's them, but one way or another, like rumors through the crowd start happening.
Oh, there's people in Black Block breaking wind.
Like someone anonymously said, oh, I had to leave because that was happening and it's There's no proof of that, but, like, that's what was kind of happening.
And so after that, then, sometime after that is when the family thing happens.
9-1-1, where's your emergency?
As this is happening, a guy calls 9-1-1 and says he sees a bus at a gas station between Scrim and Forks with everybody inside all in black.
They're all dressed in black.
It's an anonymous caller.
And then on social media, you start seeing people post about it, specifically in a local group for Forks citizens on Facebook, about Forks could be next.
You could not imagine a lower value target for a political act of domestic terrorism than this extremely small, generally poorer forest town in the middle of nowhere.
But for whatever reason, the town whips itself into a fury.
So fucking dumb.
And then Big Bertha trundles into town, and it was just this terrible coincidence.
Part of them must have been thinking, like, at last, at last Antifa are coming here so we can be on the cliff face of the culture war.
People were thrilled.
I spoke to folks who were very open that they had been, quote unquote, waiting for their opportunity to show folks what they're made of.
To the point that by the time this completely innocent, sweet family comes into town, dozens of men, who are all gun owners, are ready for a fight.
Jesus Christ.
So this family who has no idea about any of this, again, a mixed race family who just went to go camping to get out because of COVID and being stuck, you know, they just go to go camping and they get stopped by these people.
And I won't go through it again, but just to be followed.
And then to, they start like building their camp.
They're like, all right, we're going to camp here.
And they hear chainsaws in the distance.
And they're like, what is happening?
And they get spooked and they're like, all right, we gotta, we gotta get the fuck out of here.
So they pack up and then they find they can't get out because the one road has been blocked by trees that they cut down.
That's so crazy.
This group of insane racists has cut down to trap them there, which again, I cannot imagine going through that.
That is just horrible and I can't imagine it.
Now, not that it matters that much, but here's a really funny thing, and I'm amazed we even know this.
Remember that fake tweet?
Yeah.
Written by white supremacists!
It could have been just like leftists making fun of the right, like that often happens, you know?
Yeah.
Honestly, I would have thought it was that.
I would have thought it was people who are leftists making fun of how gullible people on the right are by doing this stupid fake Antifa tweet about how they're coming to square, they're coming to the white hoods.
So goddamn funny.
But not only was it not the real Antifa headquarters, That wasn't that.
It was fucking white supremacists who did it.
Yeah.
Twitter did an investigation because they blocked and they banned the account.
Right.
And they actually somehow they found out.
I didn't look into it that much, but it's it's widely agreed and not at all controversial that that was a white supremacist group that did that.
Man.
Fucking amazing.
So now I've presented to you pretty much all of the things that happened and how things went.
And so you might ask yourself, in a story of how on one side you've got, in my opinion, saintly people who are putting on a demonstration to show solidarity for black people who are being killed by cops.
Right.
And then you have, on the other hand, I don't know anything about this family really, but innocent, completely uninvolved family of people who are now terrified and probably scarred for life by this, I would be anyway, who are just trying to go camping, who are terrorized by scary racist group of white people with guns and dogs.
And then on the other side, you have the group of racists with guns and dogs, and you have the fake Twitter account, which was run by white supremacists.
So one might ask, how are you going to both sides this one?
Yeah.
What's the other side?
Yeah.
How are you going to do it?
Even now, even though I know the answer, I'm still, I'm actually doubting how John's going to pull this off.
Right.
I'm like, I've seen, I have it in my notes, but I still, it's that silly.
Where is the boat?
Well, that family, you know, they shouldn't have, uh, no, that doesn't work.
Uh, the demonstration.
No, there's nothing wrong with the demonstration.
I don't know, man.
How are we going to do this?
Well, now's a good time maybe to read the description of the episode.
Okay.
Description is how an American media polarized over Antifa.
Okay.
Polarized over Antifa.
Interesting.
Led to an innocent family on a Twilight-themed lockdown escaping camping trip, getting barricaded in the woods by armed hostile townspeople.
So the American media polarized over Antifa led to that.
Well, right away, polarized, two sides.
So this description, now, am I being unfair by reading too much into this description?
Because this description really makes it sound like what led to the innocent family being terrorized was the American media that was polarized over Antifa.
No, I think that's a fair interpretation of those words.
Yeah.
Especially because it's just what the words were.
Yeah.
So, but maybe, oh, that's just a quick description.
I know my podcast descriptions are very quick and not good.
So, but, uh, I feel like these are a little more thought out than mine because this is a scripted BBC fucking show where they've put some thought into these, but that'll at least give you a hint as to where we're going here.
So the episode goes on to say, here's the real thing that went wrong.
And this is what this series likes to do.
John likes to find connections to things and sometimes they are interesting connections.
Sometimes, you know, they're just not, they're just kind of like.
Things that are technically related in ways that don't matter.
But whatever, that's the least of my complaints about this.
It's a way to frame things.
It's a way to make a podcast interesting.
No big deal.
But he goes to someone who says, hey, Roger Ailes leaving Fox News was the problem or not the problem.
That's the start.
That's the like, how did we get to here?
Well, it started with Roger Ailes leaving Fox News because even though Roger Ailes, you know, was an evil piece of shit.
Well, they don't say that because that would be not both sides, you know, even though he was not great.
He at least kept Fox News from being like fully batshit is the theory like he he kept the news side of Fox News closer to reality and Fine, that might be true.
But again, I'm still wondering how we're getting to the both sides here.
And you might be wondering yourself, too.
Personally, I don't really care enough to evaluate this Fox News Roger Ailes theory.
It doesn't matter to me.
It's worthless.
I don't care about that.
But that's where he starts.
And I mean, sorry, if like your news network hinges on keeping a sexual predator at the top of your company, then you have bigger problems and you probably need to figure those out as a news network.
So, on one hand, he gives mouth service, or lip service?
Lip service.
Maybe he's giving mouth service, I don't know.
Yeah, that was a good you thing.
He gives lip service to how bad Fox News' coverage of Antifa was.
And Trump's demonizing it.
Pays lip service to that.
I could do a lot more on that.
I was trying to find a good compilation, but I actually can't find one.
It's weird now.
This is already like four years ago.
I know I've seen some good compilations, but anyway, if I just search Fox News Antifa, it's endless, endless headlines.
Antifa returns with a vengeance on college mobs.
Journalist speaks out after Antifa attack.
Antifa, professional agitators, and these are actually recent.
They're still doing it.
I didn't even bother to put the filter on.
Antifa is the armed instrument of blah-biddy-blah.
Like, if you're just looking at the headlines, it's cut off there.
But it's like, Antifa rioters committed acts of domestic terrorism.
This is pages of Google results.
Pages.
So that's the one side.
That he spent a little time on and you could, I could read these for, we could fill out the next several months of WTW just me reading these headlines.
Mom speaks out after Antifa targets school board meeting.
Okay.
It's just, it's nonstop.
It's nonstop.
It was such a convenient weapon for them.
And I actually, I found someone who did a study.
I didn't look too into it, but this is just to give you an idea.
This is a Washington Post article by, uh-oh, I don't know how to pronounce this, Kurdnifer?
Sorry, Kurd, if I pronounced that incorrectly.
They did a study, it says, how I did my research.
I collected material from 29 U.S.
right-wing or far-right websites ranging from Fox News and Breitbart to lesser-known outfits like Liberty Nation or the Western Journal that present themselves as alternative news sources.
I collected a total of 437 articles posted between May 25th and June 4th featuring the term Antifa.
Wow.
And then they, you know, blah, blah, blah.
He basically found a way to code them, you know, like as they were.
So this Professor Kurt Knupfer is a professor of political science, so that makes sense.
Here, under the headline of how does the right wing describe Antifa, the right wing websites use a variety of terms to characterize Antifa, even some we might consider mutually exclusive using organization or movement interchangeably and using the vague term group most often.
Yeah, it's so convenient that it's either like this Organization or it's just like this nebulous thing.
Out of 430 articles, I found only 18 mentions of an actual person or institution and almost no direct quotes by anyone identifying themselves as Antifa.
Yep, 20% identified Antifa as a terrorist entity, etc.
So it's basically, this is the way to keep people really scared.
Yeah.
Just to kind of skip down to the end, there was something here that I thought was interesting.
Right-wing websites are creating a, quote, floating signifier around Antifa, which might serve as a convenient catch-all scapegoat for those intent on criminalizing dissent.
So that's what's going on here.
That's what the right is doing.
And you're still wondering, OK, well, what is the left doing?
What's the other side?
Well, let's see.
Let's play from the podcast a little bit.
And he first even acknowledges what's actually the real truth here for a minute.
The truth is Antifa weren't anywhere near as violent as Fox was making out.
It's true that in the days after George Floyd's murder, people identifying as Antifa were arrested for looting and for instigating violence in New Jersey and Austin and Minneapolis and Portland.
But according to the FBI, the vast majority of that lawlessness was committed by criminals who weren't motivated by ideology.
I would like to remind everyone that this is Donald Trump's FBI.
Yeah.
Donald Trump's own administration, the FBI, says not even we can find a fake fucking Antifa terrorism.
It actually is worse than that.
They were actively trying to put resources on looking for Antifa stuff.
Yeah.
They were moving resources from investigating white supremacist terrorism and opportunities there.
I think that's real.
Yeah, a thing that's real that they had been spending time on and they were told to redirect those resources and start looking into Antifa to the point where even on January 5th, 2021, the president, Donald Trump, at the time,
Issued a memo asking the Secretary of State to declare Antifa a terrorist organization so they could start saying immigrants coming over that might be affiliated with Antifa, whatever that means, could be denied entry because they're part of a terrorist organization.
January 5th, what happened the next day?
Antifa didn't storm the Capitol.
Wow.
Yeah.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah.
Just obsession with Antifa.
Yeah.
As a way, as a floating signifier to be the catch-all for things that they should be scared of.
It's perfect.
It's textbook fascism, obviously.
And even John Ronson acknowledges that.
He even acknowledges, hey, yeah, not really, not really a problem here.
So, gosh, still really wondering how we're going to get to the both sides here.
Well, it's coming up.
The right-wing media was presenting a very one-sided view of Antifa.
Drumroll.
But then again, so were parts of the left-wing media in their way.
In their way.
But then again, so were parts of the left-wing media in their way.
Already, we're just- He's like really trying, man.
I know, like that's why both-sides-ing is such a bad fucking idea.
It just skews the truth so- Like you have to bend your perception of the universe to a breaking point to try to make any sort of both sides here.
We're not even close to done.
That's just how he introduces it.
And already I was like, what the fuck are you talking- You've already had to qualify it with parts of the left-wing media in their own way.
So let's see what he means by that.
My name is Lee Fong.
I'm an investigative reporter.
Okay, so now we're getting introduced to Lee Fong, who is going to feature in a future episode.
One reason this was so fucking confusing was I kept thinking like, there's a debunk I need to do on him, but it's because he comes back in like episode, whatever it is, five or something, six.
And so a pin in that, but now after having presented that the left-wing media is doing this in their way, a portion of them are doing this in their way.
Now we have on this person who's going to explain how.
My name is Lee Fong.
I'm an investigative reporter.
Until recently, Lee reported on Antifa for The Intercept, an independent left-wing news site.
As a teenager, he had been a member of Anti-Racist Action.
They hunted out neo-Nazi groups and did battle with them.
As a young man, you know, that was very exciting to join something that was that confrontational, that had direct action against a very clear enemy.
Not for nothing.
Isn't it weird that they always do the bolstering of the liberal cred of the obviously now going to be some sort of at least, if not right-wing, he's going to at least obviously express an anti-left view?
Yeah, left-wing media, The Intercept, etc., etc.
Yeah, and you never hear it the other way.
On Ronson's show, you never hear the person on the left giving their reason why, well, you know, I used to be like super racist and I used to treasure those times that I would, you know, join a group of white people that would scare families, you know, like the reason is because Ronson knows his audience is on the left and he is conditioning them to accept criticism from someone who's not on the fucking left.
It's so common.
How is this even relevant?
Oh, I used to love being part of these anti-racist groups as a kid.
I didn't check this.
It doesn't matter.
It's nothing.
But it's just one of those cues that when you're like me and you've listened to so much of this fucking nonsense, right away I'm primed.
Oh, that's them prepping me to hear criticism of the left.
That's how they do it.
Yeah.
That's how both-siders or just people anti-left, either or, that's how they do it.
So that's the world that you grew up in.
Yeah, that's where I grew up too.
So naturally, I should trust his insight on this.
And you're working at The Intercept and you're reporting on a kind of modern day version of that Antifa.
I sounded like Donald Trump, what I said.
Yes.
You had increasing violent clashes in the streets.
Groups that were either Antifa or other far-left protest groups clashing with alt-right or pro-Trump groups in the streets.
I saw many documented cases of protesters attacking journalists.
There's this claim that any journalist who attends one of these protests and documents it, does their job as a journalist, is somehow doxing protesters who want to stay anonymous, and therefore there's justification to attack reporters.
This is audio of the photojournalist Mireille Nistein.
She's worked for The Washington Post and The Atlantic and Vice, having just been attacked by members of Antifa in 2021.
They're dressed entirely in black with their faces completely covered.
She gets too close to them and they knock her to the ground and spray her in the eyes with pepper spray.
They throw full soda cans and paint at other journalists too.
I tweeted about cases of really absurd violence and a number of my colleagues were very upset.
It became a big fight internally.
Lee was never more at odds with his co-workers than during the days after George Floyd's murder.
You couldn't say that hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets were all Antifa.
That's far from the truth.
Most of the protests were non-violent, but there were huge amounts of urban violence, of protesters, of Antifa, of opportunistic looters who just saw a moment of crisis that could be exploited.
At the time, Fox and the other right-wing media was constantly going on about how terrible Antifa were and blaming Antifa for everything, including the opportunistic looting perpetrated by people who weren't ideological at all.
So this person, who I very believe was part of these anti-racist groups when he was young and just totally has that credibility, is now saying actually the Antifa was very violent kind of thing.
I don't even know that I have time to go into how many ways it's wrong, but also doesn't matter and has no bearing on anything.
So I did ask you to tackle a little bit of this part of it, just to get some information on like, you know, the Antifa violence.
What do you have for us?
Yeah.
If you remember, in the wake of George Floyd, the number of demonstrations and protests was Phenomenal.
It was huge.
You know, there's like one day where there was over 3,500 protests happening.
To this day, I mean, protests still kind of continue.
And of all of these protests, from the data that I'm looking at, looking into political violence in America, a poll suggested that 42% of respondents believed that most protesters associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are trying to incite violence or destroy property.
And when you look at the violence of these protests, it's actually 93% of them had no violence at all of, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of demonstrations.
Very, very minor.
In California, there was a neo-Nazi rally.
I don't know if you remember this at the Capitol.
I do, yeah.
Yeah, where people were stabbed.
And what ended up happening with that is California pursued criminal charges against eight activists that were affiliated with Antifa that were either stabbed or beaten.
They were the ones that were stabbed or beaten.
And they were charged.
For a variety of different things, like someone had a skateboard and had a black bandana.
So they said, oh, that could have been used as, you know, a deadly weapon.
And because of the black bandana, that's conspiracy, disturbing the peace.
So these individuals had sometimes a dozen charges.
I think in total, they investigated 100 Antifa counter protesters from this one event and recommended more than 500 total criminal charges against the Antifa counter protesters.
Eight of them went forward, moved forward for charging.
And again, zero neo-Nazis.
What?
No stabbing charges, no assault charges, like nothing.
Wow.
Nothing.
Well, hun, they can't charge themselves.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
Some of those who bring crosses.
And so that raised a lot of questions in California in particular, which, you know, I think is the story nationwide anyway.
But in California, you know, to kind of see that disparity in something that was like essentially our backyard.
But in reality, when we're looking at violence committed by members of Antifa, whatever that means, people who identify themselves as anti-fascist, there has been one death in the last 20 years.
One.
Yeah.
That's it.
It's ridiculous.
And not only that, what I think is frustrating too about this whole thing is we've somehow lost the context of why these protests are even happening in Ronson's episode.
Like, nowhere in Ronson's episode is all the police violence that they're protesting against.
And it's kind of combining two things, you know, like there's George Floyd protests But then there's also, and this isn't something I'm an expert in or have looked into, there's a lot of interesting stuff about this, about anti-fascist groups and how they operate.
There's also anti-fascist groups are going out to meet these Nazi fucking groups in the streets and not let them take hold.
And like, there's a whole philosophy there that I think is really interesting and compelling.
And neither of those cases Is Antifa going out to try to crime, you know?
Like, it is by definition a responsive show of sometimes force.
It's a responsive presence, Antifa.
Like, just definitionally.
They don't go, let's do an Antifa rally that is crimes.
Like, that doesn't happen The reason they're at a lot of these cities, especially like Portland, is because there's massive right-wing fucking white supremacist Nazi support there in groups.
And there's all these stories about how those groups, especially in Portland, by the way, are connected to the police.
And oh, the police give a heads up when they're going to be like all this coordination and shit.
And meanwhile, Antifa, I have no idea, If 100% of everybody who ever tries to identify as Antifa and do Antifa stuff, if they've always been righteous and done a perfectly righteous cause, it doesn't fucking matter.
It's nothing.
It's not relevant to the key problem here, which is the police violence.
I was looking at, there's some databases people have made of just the police brutality just from this time period, like May 25th.
And it's like, it's truly, truly disturbing.
This was nationwide.
So many people shot, rubber bullets, people lost eyes, people lost limbs.
Police were terrorists and fucking terrorized the population.
And Antifa was involved in the other side of that sometimes, but also Antifa was often just, you know, going at it with the white supremacists.
Again, some same people sometimes.
But like, that's the main thing to be talking about here.
That's what Antifa's doing.
That's why they are there.
They're not there to do looting.
Like, that's not really, it's not relevant to anything.
Looting happens, obviously.
Looting happens after Super Bowl wins.
Looting happens.
Yeah, or losses.
Famously, was it Vancouver?
Who's the team, the hockey team that like, the city just got ruined after they lost?
I think it was Vancouver.
Oh, all I can think about is, what is it, Philadelphia, when they lost their mines?
I can't remember.
There's Boston.
Yeah, that always happens.
There could have been some violent happenings at protests, but why are you not also talking about the outbreak of police violence, which is...
One million times.
Any act of police violence against protesters is, in my opinion, among the worst constitutional violations that can happen.
It's so fundamental to what we allegedly believe in in this country, free speech and to our constitutional rights.
These were horrifying.
I mean, so many people were killed.
People were maimed.
By police who don't fucking give a shit and find it funny and just want to hurt people.
And it's disgusting.
And if there are a way to abolish all of police forces and replace them with something effective, I wish we could do that immediately.
It's just sickening.
And to not talk about that at all is fucking crazy.
But even setting that aside and trying to evaluate this claim, He plays audio from something where he said that a journalist was attacked.
And I went down a little rabbit hole on this one because I, you know, fair is fair.
I wanted to see like, well, what happened there?
Right.
And Moreni Stabe is the journalist.
I found that audio and this is just weird.
It's sort of a little like side adventure here.
This is the weirdest thing.
Now it doesn't matter that much, you know, again, because it's not really devastating to my theory of the world if.
A person in Antifa, in BlackBlock, who I don't even know.
By the way, who is that person?
That we know that often the right tries to pose as Antifa.
Oh yeah.
As they did on Twitter to start this whole fucking thing.
Like, so it's not devastating to my worldview that someone in BlackBlock might do a crime.
Yeah.
Or attack someone or be an asshole.
That doesn't matter.
It's inconsequential.
Unless you found that it was happening all over the place and Antifa were abducting and killing thousands of people.
It's nothing.
It's not relevant.
It's just when you're looking at a two-sided issue and one side is one million percent wrong and the other side you can find some like tiny detail that might be wrong, it's de minimis.
It's actually bad to even focus on that because it just distracts from the actual truth.
I always use climate change.
I mean if you want to try to find where like Some researcher had a typo in their fucking otherwise scientifically accurate climate change paper.
It's not worth it.
It doesn't mean the typo didn't happen or that somebody messed up data in one paper somewhere, whatever.
It doesn't mean that didn't happen, but it's not relevant.
And you end up legitimizing the insanity.
When you present that as both sides, even if you try to present it in the context of minimizing it, just by putting it on a stage in a both sidesy way, it kind of elevates it.
It's just not relevant.
So the fact that this could happen doesn't matter.
But I still wanted to look into this to see what this was.
And first off, she was first sprayed with WD-40 by a right winger.
And that's part of it that doesn't get reported at all places.
But then after that, there are people that do seem to be Antifa that try to take her camera.
And first of all, she goes to them and like gets in their face.
It's kind of a back and forth.
And it seems as though they're familiar with each other because the person yells at her that she risks spreading COVID.
And when she did this reporting in Columbia, which by the way, this is so obscure.
So let me play this video and we can kind of hear what happened.
Flash all of your cameras and your phone.
Fuck you.
Get the fuck out.
Get the fuck out.
Get the fuck out, Kata.
You fucking endangered people by flying to fucking Columbia and endangering everyone by opening them up to COVID.
You will.
Talk to everybody who flew to Florida, bud.
So that idiot, whoever that is, used a lot of sexist language that, like, that got fucked.
Fuck that guy.
I don't care.
He might be Antifa, whatever.
It sounds like he is on that side of things.
So they have problems with how she's conducting herself around them.
There are complaints about reporters like this and this is what happens with Andy Ngo.
I don't think she's an Andy Ngo.
I'm not saying she is.
There are people like Andy Ngo who like to provoke Antifa to get them to do things to them so that then they can be martyrs.
That is a thing that happens.
And so there's some amount of like, she's provoking them, she's standing up to them a little bit, but this guy also sounds like an asshole and I don't know what the fuck he's talking about.
It doesn't even make any sense, but it shows a familiarity.
I mean, the fact that he accurately references that this obscure reporter no one's ever heard of did coverage in Columbia, there's a familiarity there.
And the point is, Often, we find this a lot on Where There's Woke.
People take events that are probably just like personal fucking grievances and personal relationships, probably, or little minor interpersonal whatevers that happen all the time, and they try to cast it in a wider, make-a-giant-pattern-out-of-it political lens.
Mm-hmm.
And like, whatever this is, I don't think you can generalize based on this interaction, which by the way, you didn't hear any of that on Jon Ronson's show.
No.
You just heard an attack that happens a little bit later.
You can't really generalize that.
Like, oh no, first they're, you know, throwing away the camera of a reporter who they clearly have like some interpersonal beef with.
You know, on the street, like next they're going to come for white babies.
And like, it's just that you can't generalize that it's not, this is a specific conflict between a journalist and a group of Antifa people that she kind of knows.
I'm not saying that it's right to like, obviously I'm not, but like, you can't use this as yep.
See.
And so these protests are more violent than, you know, it's like, no, it's not really, you know, like it's very specific what's happening here.
And then what really gets me about this and why I could, I watched so many, I Zapruder filmed this because there's, you heard a scream in that video that Ronson played.
And for the life of me, it is the weirdest thing.
It's not her.
I've watched this so many times and this isn't even me like getting all grassy and all.
Yeah, conspiracy theory, yes.
I don't even think that she would think it's... I don't think it's important to the story.
She does get, like, shoved a little bit, but a scream happens simultaneously that, like, everybody talks about as though it's her.
So they want her to go away and stop covering her.
And so that scream, that blood curdling scream, and there's another angle of it.
I know people aren't seeing this, but like, it makes no sense.
Like if that is her, then it's the fakest bullshit in the world.
And she's trying to look like she's being murdered when all that happened was like someone was shoving her a little bit, but not in a way, like imagine getting shoved and screaming like that.
It doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
I actually think it might be an unrelated scream or something.
Like, I can't figure that out.
There's also, when you watch the video, they take her camera, I think, or they might, they might smash her phone.
Again, not endorsing any of that, but also what happens if you watch it is someone takes her camera and then she runs around in the most professional wrestling, trying to look like she's getting thrown around way.
Like does a full like turn, run around and then fall in the most unnecessary way.
Like it's Remy throwing a fit when we don't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like, I hate to go down that road, but really, if you watch it, I don't know how to interpret it any other way.
It still doesn't take away from the fact that these people damaged your property.
Yeah, that happened.
Don't agree with it.
Bad.
Don't do that.
But the other side, I think it's important to voice the other side of this, which you heard Ronson and that journalist Lee Fong kind of talk about, which is you got to remember that racist police officers are abducting Antifa and unmarked vans.
That happened.
Yep.
So Antifa has interest in not being identified.
That's why they're doing what they're doing.
And certain journalists feel like they have a right to try to identify them.
I don't know why they feel that way and I don't know why they feel like they should be allowed to do that.
It's like the same approach that journalists were taking with the jury for Trump for a bit.
I guess, yeah.
You don't have an expectation of privacy out and about on the streets when you're protesting.
You actually don't, legally speaking.
But also, I don't know why you have... It doesn't go the other way that journalists have an expectation of being able to identify everybody on the street.
It also doesn't go that way.
Now, Li Fong tries to present this as though, again, he tries to generalize.
He tries to say, so actually what happened was they had this theory that any media that took their picture, you could attack them because it's an act of violence against them.
And that's not at all what I see.
What I see is I think there are journalists who got really in these people's faces and tried to identify them or tried to take a lot of pictures of them or things that they perceived as threats.
And right or wrong, probably wrong, like they attack some of them sometimes And they have backstories that we don't know because this is clearly a very personal interaction.
The guy knows details that I had a hard time even finding.
I tried to find that Columbia coverage and I did find it eventually, but like they are familiar with each other.
This is an interpersonal thing.
It is not the case that Antifa attacked every journalist who took a picture of them.
That's just, that's not how it worked.
Like mathematically, we know that's not how it worked because they, they also want, Antifa also want some amount of coverage.
So it's trying to generalize from a very hyper-specific example.
Oh, here's the other thing.
This was again, part of this rabbit hole.
This Mareni Stabe, this is a photo journalist.
And she later, when I first searched her, what came up was weirdly enough, she got busted for staging a photo.
- Jeez. - And so she staged like this perfect protest photo where she had like a kid throw away a mask.
So it was like a mask burning COVID thing.
And then the video behind it was kind of revealed somehow.
And it shows her kind of like, instead of it being like, oh, it's just this picture of a kid burning a mask, Wow.
And again, this is what's interesting about Marini Stabe.
She's doing this from like kind of a leftist perspective often.
I don't know what her personal views are, but her coverage, you know, again, staging that photo of a kid burning a mask was for the purpose of selling it to kind of people on the left, like selling it as look at these crazy mask burners.
They're even indoctrinating their children.
Right.
And she also sued Portland police for a bunch of times that she was roughed up by them.
And she, I believe she settled with them.
Another thing that's not mentioned at all in Ronson's podcast was the fact that like this person has been attacked by police far more than she was attacked by Antifa.
Yeah.
She didn't sue the Antifa folks.
Well, we'll see.
Maybe.
I don't think that she did, but she actually won.
They got a settlement about that.
She documented all kinds of violence that police committed.
So she's an interesting figure.
I don't really know what her deal is other than I think she wants good coverage.
I think she wants her journalism to be valuable, I think, which is I'm not saying that makes someone evil or anything, but it does seem weird that I think she's coming from mostly a left perspective.
But of course, as always happens when someone is attacked by Antifa, then the right wing media, all of them want to interview her and like, you know, kind of make hay out of that.
But later on.
She was busted for staging this photo to the point where all her stuff on like Getty Images was taken down, like all of her photos.
So it says Getty terminated its relationship with Stabe and they put out a statement saying we will not be working with this photographer in the future.
She deleted some of her photos.
Reuters, like a year later, is actively taking down photos Reuters had previously published.
They tweeted, we are deleting tweets containing photos with the byline Marini Stabe that are associated with Reuters.
So like, that's a big deal.
Like that's a fall from grace.
Yeah.
In total fairness, I don't know what that means about this attack.
I mean, she was attacked.
It's on video that they did take her camera.
By the way, the thing that they were trying to do was take her camera.
They weren't trying to physically hurt her.
Not that that excuses it, but it's a little different from saying what they're going to do is physically hurt and attack journalists just for being journalists.
I think it was related to a specific claim that this person was worried about a photo she took of them, someone who's trying to stay anonymous, and so they wanted to destroy her camera.
Still not an okay thing to do.
Right.
It's still different than saying like, this guy just wanted to like stab her or something.
You know, it's like, it's a different thing.
It's still a bad thing, but it's like, it's a different category than Antifa are violent kind of thing or whatever.
Yeah.
So I don't know what to do with all that.
The fact that like this, this attack is clearly really exaggerated by her in the video.
And she does this run around fucking pro wrestling fall.
And if that's her scream, I don't even think it is.
But if it is, it's the fakest bullshit I've ever heard in my life.
Cause like, it's not, if you look at what's happening when she screams, it doesn't make any sense.
And then she talked about it, which fair enough, I guess, like she can talk about being attacked I don't know what her deal is.
I really don't know what to think.
It was this weird kind of journey I went down.
Point is, this is a very singular event between specific people.
How representative is it?
I don't know.
Nobody made the case.
Nobody in Ronson's podcast made the case that this is representative of anything.
They brought up an example.
They played some audio from it with a scream.
That's not actually, I don't think related to anything happening.
And then they said, and so there you go.
All kinds of violence.
Yeah.
And he says like, Oh, I don't think it was fair to say that there's, there's all Antiva, but it's not like, there's no hard data in there.
There's no facts.
That's that.
There's not a satisfying like button to put on that very specific Marini Stabe attack thing.
It's just weird.
Like I don't totally know what to think about it.
But again, that often comes up on the show where it's like, hey, I looked into this and it was a weird event that happened between two people.
Yeah.
Is there any reason that I should know what all that was about and who is exactly right and who's exactly wrong?
I don't know.
Here's what I'll tell you.
When I look at hundreds and hundreds and thousands, actually, acts of police violence against protesters, that is not a spat between two people who know each other.
That is not, you know, that is something that is clearly evil and wrong and unconstitutional happening at a systemic level.
That is something you should focus on.
That's not looking at all, well, it's just an anomaly over here.
That police officer actually knew that guy was like, no, even if you found an example of that, that's not what's happening.
It's a systemic problem that is far worse than anything else you're talking about here.
And so we go on because it gets even worse.
At the time, Fox and the other right-wing media was constantly going on about how terrible Antifa were and blaming Antifa for everything, including the opportunistic looting perpetrated by people who weren't ideological at all.
That's the one side.
How was The Intercept covering Antifa?
The Intercept covered the protest by saying that this was a revolutionary moment.
They had on a professor who said that looting is kind of a fake term that's simply a redistribution by another means.
The tradition in this country has been to identify looting as criminal behaviour.
Lee means Professor Robin DG Kelly, who was interviewed by The Intercept in June 2020.
What I tried to do in the article was kind of flip the question of what is a looter?
And what we've seen often is that the very system of racial capitalism has been the looter.
One thing I love in these is when you don't even have to do any research to hear that the way that Lee Fong characterized something is not even consistent with their own clip that they played in the fucking thing.
Yeah.
Cause that sounds like somebody putting looting into proper context is what it sounds like to me.
Yeah.
And so of course I had to look into this Robin DJ Kelly interview.
I found the one and it's interesting of course.
And it's very valid.
And it talks about like, Hey, who's the real fucking looter.
I'm looking at the transcript right here.
He talks about looting being a Hindi term and the origin is like the British looting of India.
So that quote we heard that was like, who's doing the looting?
What I try to do is flip that question.
The system of racial capitalism has been the looter.
For one, again, that's not consistent with what they said he was doing.
Yeah.
It sounds like he's just saying, OK, sure.
He's not saying looting doesn't exist or that the looting was right.
He's saying what's more important, people who in a riot or when otherwise there's like a breakdown of law?
People who go and steal a fucking stereo or whatever the equivalent would be these days.
God, that's an old thing to say.
Now that I think about it, people go in and steal something from a shop.
What is more important?
That one event by random people who, by the way, they're stealing because of the very fucking capitalist system that has probably left them poor.
You don't see a bunch of like doctors looting.
You know, you see people who don't have anything.
What's more important that or racial capitalism that has looted their entire lives for centuries?
Versus the way that Fong characterizes it in the episode, that looting is a fake term, simply a redistribution by another means, which has nothing to do at all.
Yeah, I searched the document, and again, this is the very interview he's talking about.
That's not at all what he says.
He uses the word redistribution once, but it's in a totally different context that has nothing to do with that.
It's saying what is essentially the truth, which is, don't fucking focus on this!
And acknowledging and pointing out that this is a tactic.
It is a tactic of fascists.
It's a tactic of the status quo warriors.
It is a tactic of white America to focus on incidents of looting during protests by likely people of color and demonize those people and focus on that rather than on the underlying problem, the entire reason we're here, which was police violence.
I mean, that's just been the case forever.
Rodney King, right?
Everyone focused on the riots.
Vietnam protests.
Everything.
Literally every single protest ever has this.
It's not interesting.
It's not worthwhile.
It is getting you further from the truth to point out.
So this scholar is doing a truthful thing.
You know, maybe some of the rhetoric is like a little far left for some people or whatever.
But also it could be academic in that way too, right?
Like it's supposed to spark conversation and discussion and not necessarily be like policy.
It's just a way of thinking about it.
And the article he's referencing, by the way, was an opinion piece that the New York Times published that says, what kind of society values property over black lives?
The hackneyed emphasis on why loot obscures the question which black people have asked for centuries.
Does that sound like he's saying like looting is good?
No.
Saying it's a distraction.
Yeah.
And you're all falling for it.
This is not a close call.
Like the whole article is talking about just the ways that the right and white America uses looter to talk about black people and to distract from the issues.
And it's just a form of racism.
Yeah.
That says nothing about like, therefore, it's great that they're looting.
That's redistribution.
That's nowhere in this at all.
At all.
And so I like to do this, the tally of the both sides here because Ronson, by the way, and this is as much as I can't help it.
I like John Ronson.
Like I just have always found him enjoyable.
And I think he's a good person trying to do the right thing in his mind.
I think this is where I get most annoyed at him just in terms of this little like chuckle he gives because he sounds like he's identified Wow, he's identified this real contradiction, this real, like, both-sidesy thing.
Ready?
So, in the right-wing media, these looters were being kind of subsumed into Antifa.
It's Antifa doing all of this.
In the left-wing media, it's the same thing, in a way.
People were saying, oh, these looters, they aren't looters, they're redistributing wealth.
Yeah, they're all Robin Hood.
On the left wing, it's the same thing.
Yeah, it's really confusing why he, again, this is scripted and edited, they presented this still knowing that the clip from the video would precede it.
And so he had the opportunity to cut this and say, hey, that doesn't actually match with what I just heard with my own ears.
It's almost like he's looking at it with the same biased lens that his interviewee is looking at it.
Yeah, it's really disappointing.
Yeah.
It's the same.
He even says the same.
Like, it's just you couldn't both sides this harder if you tried.
And I just want to keep in mind, what fucking relevance is any of this to the family getting terrorized by racists in the woods?
And the left-wing media, it's the same thing in a way.
People are saying, oh, these looters, they aren't looters, they're redistributing wealth.
Not what they said?
Nope.
Not at all.
I'm going to keep going and then we can do the scorekeeping.
We can sum.
I love doing it.
We can tally the both sides.
Yeah, they're all Robin Hood.
I mean, there was a lot of spin going on where the actual reality was just muddled.
Yeah, muddled.
It was all kinds of vile.
Something in the middle, wasn't it?
This was a crisis that everyone attempted to exploit in some way, whether you were a looter or a broadcast journalist.
What?
There was not a lot of nuance or care for your community.
If you want evidence of how there's two Americas, each with their own completely distinct media, look at how Antifa was reported on in 2020.
During the week the family set off on their twilight camping trip, Americans were getting wildly different impressions of Antifa depending on which media they consumed.
What?
How an American media polarized over Antifa led to an innocent family, blah, blah, blah.
Being terrorized.
So we went from Antifa is this insanely demonized thing by the right, and I won't go through it all again, but that is like a billion, if we're trying to score it, that's like 11,000 million on the fake, completely wrong, ideologically motivated lies.
And then on the other side, we have, we set up a fake claim of, well, the other side's reporting that it's all great and there's no such thing as violence that's ever happened ever, which is not a real standard to judge anything by.
They set that up.
And then they bring on Lee Fong to pierce that bubble, that fake position, to say there is violence, there are journalists attacked, and the looting does happen, which is Somehow contradictory to the thing they played that doesn't contradict it.
So like, what is that?
What is the both fucking sides?
To say nothing of the fact that the best they can do is an obscure interview of an academic in the Intercept!
How popular do you think The Intercept is?
It's a leftist, at the time, very niche publication that interviewed an academic who didn't even say the thing you're saying he said.
Yeah.
He just said like, yeah, stop focusing on the fucking looters.
It's a distraction!
What relevance does that have?
What you're trying to set up with your both sides bullshit, with this family, is that... See, it was the polarized coverage that led to Antifa.
What is the left part of that that contributed to this?
In what way?
Did the family only go camping because they firmly believed there was no such thing as Antifa violence?
Was that the reason?
They went camping?
Well, of course they wouldn't have gone camping had they known the truth about Antifa violence and how looting happens.
What the fuck are you talking about?
What is the both sides?
Yeah, what is this episode?
I think that's kind of what I'm coming to.
It's amazing.
Why are you both sides-ing this?
It's incredible!
It's incredible.
What part of the other side contributed to anything you're talking about here?
You have people doing a peaceful protest.
Were they doing that badly or wrongly or in a way that only happened because they had bad media about Antifa?
Because they heard an academic say that stop focusing on the looters?
Like did that, did that contribute to the left being wrong in some way?
That is it all of both sides to the right?
Which was the group of racial terrorists that cut, chopped down trees and trapped a family?
Stock them, yeah.
What are you talking about?
Both sides!
This is the worst both sides-ing.
It's absolutely, this is insane.
Why are you even doing this episode in this way?
Yeah, yeah.
So I mean the last like sort of 10 minutes of this is about how the family is too fucking terrified even they don't even want to talk to anybody and the town tries to reach out and be like, hey, they're not representative of anything.
And then they're like, okay.
Cool.
In fact, I found a quote.
It turns out someone in the family did do one interview, and they're like, yeah, okay, so like, I don't know, the Chamber of Commerce or some shit reached out to us, but like, nobody who, you know, trapped us and accused us of being an Antifa, they didn't reach out.
Like, what is, you know?
Matthew's screen captured comments like, wonder if they feel like they just drove into a horror movie.
It's horrible.
And it's like The Purge, and let them starve.
He tweeted the screenshots and they went viral, which led to an unexpectedly happy outcome.
More than 200 Clallam County residents paid for an ad in the family's local paper.
Quote, We are saddened and disgusted by the threats and violence that your family encountered while trying to enjoy the beauty of our home.
We apologise for the frightening experience you had.
We acknowledge that you may never come back here again, and we understand that feeling.
However, if you did return one day, we would be honoured to make amends.
Did the family ever go back?
No.
To my knowledge, they refused to.
They want to forget it ever happened.
It was a traumatic experience in their life, and they just want to move on.
And what about Seth, the man who started it all?
He apologised too, on his Facebook Live.
So I just wanted to come on, make this short video, just let everybody know I'm not racist.
I didn't say ice, ice, ice.
I said heist, heist, heist.
And that was a command to my dog Rambo.
I totally miffed up.
I jumped the gun.
I knee jerked this.
There was this squim organizer girl.
She actually owns a business here and she was pretty pissed at me.
And I can understand why she said I ruined her event.
So thank you everybody again for watching.
I'm sorry for what went down today.
No, it sucks is I can't.
That video is no longer up and I can't I can't find it.
I tried the archive.
I tried it, but it's like it's like a Facebook live video.
So it's not I don't you know.
So I am really curious.
I don't know how they have it.
Actually, there must it must be somewhere.
But I wanted to hear what he said, but I just ran out of time trying to find it.
It's not super important, but this fucking guy, you know, like, there's a part of him that does try to not be a piece of shit, but it doesn't matter.
Like, overwhelmingly, his actions are being a piece of shit.
And he tries to play this little puppy dog, like, oh, I'm just blah blah blah, but like, I'm not buying it.
His instincts are shitty.
And I wanted to find the full video to see where he inevitably probably said some racist shit.
Who knows?
And now we're going to hear the terrible consequences of this piece of shit.
Thank you everybody again for watching.
I'm sorry for what went down today.
But the apology wasn't enough to save his business.
People started boycotting his gun store.
Eventually he did go out of business and now he sells tiny homes across the street.
So that's weird.
So he went out of business, but he also is doing a business right across the street.
He also has a different business.
Literally across the street from where he was.
So it sounds like, could there be something else involved?
I don't know.
And it's also weird too, because it's a gun store.
So the clientele... Yeah, it made no sense to me.
I tried to research this I found the business.
It does seem to have gone out of business, but then actually weirdly he just revived it like it with the Secretary of State or whatever it had gone.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, it had like lapsed and then he just recently revived it.
I don't know if they're moving or if he's just, you know, bringing the entity back for some reason.
But the point is I have no faith at all that this is accurately I don't think so.
Who knows?
Maybe it is but also it doesn't make any sense to me and also who gives a shit even if so.
It really is trying to bolster up the other side of this story so that oh yeah our polarized media boy look at the look at the consequences of this.
On one hand we have a family who was terrorized beyond fucking belief and another guy he lost his business and it's like I don't know man I hear no proof of this at all, and it doesn't make sense to me.
Gun store customers, I feel like are not going to care that that happened.
You know, like it just doesn't.
I don't know.
The story may have ended for the family with apologies from a shamed townspeople, but at its heart is something troubling and ongoing.
It's the story of a media that cares less than it used to about evidence-based values and has instead become overly influenced on both sides by culture war activists and agendas.
I'm sorry.
Agendas.
Yeah.
A media on both sides.
Now, what examples did we hear, hun, in that entire episode?
We heard Fox News.
Mm-hmm.
And we heard one interview from The Intercept, an obscure leftist publication that- That was summarized in an inaccurate way.
That's actually a professor making incredibly reasonable points.
But nevertheless, it's being hijacked by culture warriors.
But what is the other, what is- Yeah, this is very confusing.
It doesn't make any fucking sense.
This kind of journalism can be powerful and important, but it can also lead to all sorts of trouble.
Yeah, I think it's really remarkable the way that he ends this episode is about media that doesn't care about evidence-based values.
When the deep research I've done that I can't wait for folks to hear, it's just really honestly hilarious to me that that's a sentiment that he's sharing here.
So hypocritical.
He's not even supported by his own fucking podcast at all.
At all!
Why?
Okay, here's what I want to go out on.
When you hear Jon Ronson's very tidy, scripted, produced, with annoying music the whole time, podcast, BBC trappings, all that, it sounds effective and I think a lot of people probably don't think too critically about what's happening.
But I want to, for a second, encourage everyone to think, if you were making this episode, I want you to think about that.
Because I think when you look at it like that, taking on perspectives like that, I think is revealing.
You have a story about a family who was terrorized by right-wingers who were misled by right-wingers who were saying they were Antifa.
You have example after example of Fox News demonizing Antifa.
And you have a story of a peaceful protest that was ruined by these same people who were far-right-wingers who were misled by right-wingers.
All the way down, if you were just, like, looking at, okay, what story should I tell?
How should I structure this?
What should I do?
Why in the fuck would you get anywhere near both sides on this?
At all?
Like, there are some issues where I could see it, like, oh, okay, that might lead me into a both sides framing in a certain way.
But, like, wouldn't you just see all this and be like, Holy shit, I need to tell the story of how a group of people are so fucking deranged by their own media diet.
Yeah.
That they terrorized a poor family over a fake tweet that is so obviously fake.
Anyone with half a brain could tell you it was fake.
How did those people get so misled?
How could their brains be fucking rotten by hatred so much that they wouldn't see that this was obviously fake?
That's the story there.
That's the story to tell.
That was the story I would tell.
I'm not saying it's the only valid story.
There may be other valid stories.
How would you get to a both sides point?
Where would you even get that?
At what point in that story, what interview did it?
Like what, what part of the process of reporting did you say, ah, this is a chance to tell the other side of it.
I don't, what?
Seriously.
And I'm making this point for an important reason because it comes up a lot in this series.
I think it's because the guys he goes and talks to first, the people who goes and talks to first are right-wing culture warriors.
And then like, I think he often accepts their bullshit framing and then reports from that direction.
Yeah.
And that's what you have to do to both sides this because no rational person would both sides this.
This is not a both sides issue.
It's not even close.
Yeah.
This is so weird.
And the only way that he comes about answering that question about like how did this happen to warp their brain so badly that they would believe this is that Roger Ailes should have stayed with Fox News.
That's the closest we got.
Yeah.
Unreal.
So that's why I think this was the worst both sides.
The worst in that is the most logically incoherent and or lazy, like it's just nonsense.
Fucking nonsense.
Like had to stick with the format of the show and tried to figure out a way.
Someone put a gun to my head and said, you have to both sides of the story.
I'd be like, oh God.
All right.
I guess the left said that.
Sleuthing was fun.
I don't know.
I don't know how you would do it.
It's impressive that he found a way.
Anyway, so that's this one and it sucked.
And there's plenty more suckage where that came from.
There certainly is.
Next time on Where There's Book.
Yeah, maybe.
No, not doing that music.
I like our preview music better.
Thanks so much for listening.
There's plenty more where this came from.
You're the best.
Patreon.com.
Please support the show.
- Thank you. - Do you remember why this happened?
Twilight?
Oh, why they, why the right-wingers came out.
Yeah, as much as we can blame Twilight for, I don't think we can blame it for this.
