The Silly Bastards Behind the Modern Fascist Movement

time you hear this. I went to unite the Right two point oh the Nazi gathering in d C and counter protested it with a bunch of people, um, other activists, And so rather than hosting this with a guest comedian, I'm I'm hosting it with another house stuff Works host bridget Todd, who hosts afropunk solution sessions and stuff Mom Never told You, And I'm I'm there with a couple of different DC based activists who we all sort of marched and unite the Right two point oh together and

yield at Nazis together. So that's who I'll be with. It'll have a different feeld from a normal episode. So we we included another normal episode this week so those of you who just want the normal thing can get the normal thing. And then we have this kind of weird two parter about the modern fascist movement in the Marorca. So hopefully you'll like all of it if you don't. There should still be something for you here. Hey, everybody,

I'm Robert Evanson. This is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, normally we record this story in a comfortable little recording studio in Los Angeles, but this week I am in Washington, d C. For Unite the Right two point oh, which has been build a white civil rights rally by racists and a

fascist march on Washington, d C. By everybody else. I'm here with a group of d C and and East Coast in general locals, and we're all gonna be marching together. Why don't you guys introduce yourselves. Hi, I'm Hanna Essenger. I live in Roanoke, Virginia, and in my podcast is The Kitchen Table Fault. And I'm here because I grew up in this world and I'd like to fight against it.

My name is Nick Wood. I was a marine, and I also grew up in very conservative circles, and uh I likewise, I feel the need to fight back again my old people. Um. I'm Bridget Todd. I'm the host of two podcasts on this very network. Stuff I've never told you in Afropunk Solution sessions. I live here in d C. And DC is my home, and so when Nazis come to my home, I have to show them they're not welcome. Yeah, and I just don't like Nazis.

Uh So, so I've spent because I don't like Nazis, I've spent most of the last two weeks reading everything they've said to each other on the Internet. So there's this group of journalism collective called Unicorn Riot, and over the last couple of years they have gotten dozens of leaks of like huge chunks of chat logs between all of these different far right groups, the Traditional Workers Party uh and and anti comm and like groups that are

essentially Nazi groups. Um. So that's what this podcast is about. We've taken all of their conversations. I've read them, I've I've analyzed them. Uh And, so we're gonna be talking today about the first post two thousand sixteen wave of American fascist activists. Uh So, Yeah, I'm just gonna get into it. Um. I'd like to give a start by giving an overthrow view of the folks were talking about. So, the Traditional Workers Party or t w P, was a far right group that was profiled in that New York

Times article A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland. Um, that's the article that got widely panned for the New York Times, basically giving a Nazi a big platform to talk about being a Nazi. We've never done that before. Um. And the the t WP, like most of these groups, claims not to support racism, but they also sold swatsticka arm bands on their website, so you know, you can

make that judgment for yourself. They dissolved earlier this year, not because the government rated them, but because their leader was caught having sex with his spokesman's wife and his spokesman was also his father in law. Uh. And so the spokesman deleted their website. Uh. And yeah, but some of these guys are still active. Yeah. I love that. Even though they're these like Nazis, they still have messy personal and we'll be getting into that a little later.

They all got messy, messy personal stuff, um the master. Yeah. So Anti comm is another one of these groups, and they're big source of a lot of the conversations I read. They were billed as a right wing counter to Antifa. I'm going to read a quote from their spokesman that shows sort of how they marketed themselves to the world. Quote from the beginning, We've attempted to make it clear that though we defend free speech, we do not have

and will never have, an official political platform. We accepted members regardless of ethnicity or gender, provided that they agree with the cause and can satisfy the physical requirements to join, although the political and racial makeup of our members varies wildly. We have Korean libertarians, gay and archo capitalists, Latino nationalists, and even some liberals interests. Our common mission has prevented

us from splitting over such political lines. That's all lies, because you can read what these people said to each other in private on discord, and it's stuff like freedom of speech is merely a tool used to be able to persuade the masses. We want to destroy anti FA because they're Marxists. In this message from a guy named King Bobo Man, I'm all for no race mixing, even

if it is fascist in practice. So as we'll get into anti com was part of like an attempt to sort of rebrand the far right as an opposition to communism rather than a nationalist racist group. Racist. We have black friends, Yeah, we have we have black friends. Look at this, Look at this one guy who's not white

that we brought to the rally. Like, see, we're fine. Um. And a lot of them will admit behind closed doors to being fascists, like this quote from February of two seventeen from a user named Max and the Anti comm server. I'm both and cap and a fascist. I think either can work, so I'd be okay with either. Which if you're in anarchic any kind of anarchist, you can't also be a fascist. They don't work together, guys, But they're dumb.

These are all dumb. Um. Another big group of fascists in our modern world, or the Oregon Nazis, they're not one distinct group. Patriot Prayer is an Oregon based far right. I would call them fascist group. They're the people who were just active in the big Portland protest um. They had a discord server called Cascadian Coffee Company that was a general all of the fascists and Oregon uh talk on this channel, so we'll be hearing a lot from them today. Um, there are a lot of groups we

could get into. Vanguard America is one the Nazi who killed Heather Hair at Charlottesville last year was a member of Van Guard America. UM. They split up recently into Patriot Front identity Europa is basically a Nazi group, couched and we're just proud to be European, but we also want all immigration to end. Um. They were at Charlottesville too. There's the League of the South, There's there's a lot

of different groups of racists in Europe. Yes, Richard Spencer just got stopped from going, i think, to the Netherlands to try to give a speech. Yeah. Yeah, well Europe, Europe seeing what happens if you let Nazis march. It doesn't end well. Um. So this brings us to Jason Kessler. He's the single person who best embodies the first wave of modern American fascism. He graduated from the University of Virginia in two thousand and nine with the BA and psychology.

He seems to have been at one point a Democrat who voted for Barack Obama. He claims to have been

at Occupy Wall Street in two thousand eleven. And in my time and pouring through archived Nazi chats, I found that a lot of fascist activists have a similar background, and one conversation from last May, a user named Yarbal's talked about his time with Occupy and said, back then, I just hated the banks in the Fiat system, not the parentheses, parenthesis parentheses, banks in the parentheses parentheses parentheses,

Fiat system, which is Nazi. When they when they put three uh those marks on either side, it means they're talking about Jewish people, Like that's one of the coded phrases they have. So one of the weird things about these guys that they try to hide from the right wing activists that they're trying to like cozy up to because they're trying to pull a lot more of the

American conservatives their way. But these guys are all pretty anti capitalist because they're they're actual Nazis, Like they they believe in having a strong social welfare system just for white people, like that's part of why they want to kick everybody else out. But they try to hide that because they know that the modern American right wing won't get on board with it. I don't know. Yeah, they're

also anti Marxist. This makes no sense. I mean, yeah, I guess we'll talk about how good they are at it in a little bit. So most of these guys, if you like, if you search through like the chats, just search for the term red pilled um and it'll you'll find a bunch of conversations where various Nazi activists talk about how they first got radicalized, essentially, and almost

all of their journeys start on YouTube. Um. One of the videos that I found a number of people commenting on was called the Lion of Europe or Hitler the Lion, and it gets removed a lot, but the video is essentially, uh,

it's edited like a movie trailer. It's like a little four minute video and it starts with like a dramatic voiceover and like clips from the movie three hundred and clips from various World War two movies that show Nazis fighting, interspersed with like Gears of War and video game clips, and there's like this voiceover talking about Uh. It's basically it's it's it's telling like a what's the one I'm

looking for here? It's a guy giving a story that's supposed to be Yeah, it's a propaganda piece, but it's framed as like an apocryphal story about like a lion fighting jackals, and obviously the jackals are supposed to be everybody that's not white people. Yeah, it's exactly. I've heard lion imagery used using conjunction with Trump too. Yeah yeah, and that's like the they're not they don't veil it

that much. Yeah. So it's like one of the things that's interesting to me is that this video and a couple of other little videos I found, it's a mix of like historical footage, movie footage, but also video game clips because these guys are all gamers, Like that's a huge recruiting ground for the farm. Their practice in gamer Gate, a lot of them did, if you so if you search gamer Gate and the archives, you'll find a number of people talking about having first like that was their

first experience and activism was gamer Gate. Um, and it led a lot of them to the election, which the term online and like alright, circles is the great meme war. Um. Yeah, it's really like they're very lame. It's frustrating to have to take the it's seriously now. Yeah. Well, and what's funny to me is that the far right activists that when they like the so the actual nazis the people who are in the groups that will be marching today

Unite the Right two point. Oh. They tend to call the r alt right the alt light and they make fun of them too. Um, they don't like them, but they see them as a recruiting ground. So like the alt right hasn't been isn't like they're closer to where these people want the Nazis, Yeah, yeah it is. It's like r OTC. It's where their kids come up. Um.

But there's also like, uh, where is it? Um. You'll also find like frustration expressed from far right activists about gamers and stuff, Like I found quotes from a couple of people like complaining that their discord chat had a server, had like a chat room for video games, but didn't

have anything focused on exercise and weightlifting and fighting. And he was like like, we're focused, Like you guys are too big and nerds basically, and you're making us look bad because you come out to these protests and your chubby and like, you don't look good in your armor. You don't look scary, you don't look like the master race like the Nazi. Yeah, even Nazis don't like Nazis. You end up looking like a third string Ninja Turtle. Mm hmm. So um. Back to Jason Kesler a little bit.

He's the guy who organized Unite the Right, the original Unite the Right rally um, which was the second rally that Nazis had carried out in Charlottesville. There was a few weeks before Unite the Right, like a torchlent march um that was sort of the precursor to, uh, the first bloody Charlottesville battle. And he's the guy who organized this most recent thing. He also used to write for a website called The Daily Caller, which is owned by Tucker Carlson and it's the home of Ben Shapiro on

the Internet. I've heard of these Oh good have you been? Have you? Have you personally attacked by benchfu? Yeah, you know you're a so and so and DC like left you advising when they did he afree your money to debate him. I wish. I mean, you know, he is the kind of person that has to pay money to

get a woman to talk to him. And so Jason Kessler used to write for yeah, the Daily collar the same site he did, and he got to write about the first Charlotte skill rally for them, which now and and and in all fairness, the Daily Callers editor at the time, Paul Connor, said that the story he wrote

was factually accurate and plainly stated what happened. And when I say he plainly or when Paul Connor says he plainly stated what happened, what he means is that Kessler said that the torch lit march was visually striking and then conspicuously quoted a black person who praised the marchers as being good people. Um, so that's that's that's a factually accurate and plainly stated version of the events of

that march. Um. But they didn't note the fact that he had organized the rally, which you should do as a journalist. If you organize a rally and then report on it could be considered one you're certainly supposed to let people know. Seems like it might be one ethics man. Yeah, yeah, and if you're if you're a fascist organizer, you should probably let people know that too before you report on a fascist gathering, and don't mention any of the fascism um,

which he did not. Uh Now. Also, in fairness to the Daily collar they pulled Kessler's articles and ended their relationship with him. Once it became very clear to the entire world that Jason Kessler was a Nazi fascist. Yeah, because he was an open Nazi instead of just a

wink wink nod nod Nazi. And that's we'll be getting into the wink wink not not part a couple of points in this, But that is an important thing is that like these guys, their whole goal is to get the rest of the right on board with them and essentially pull moderate conservatives further to the right. And there's

a substantial amount of evidence that that's worked. I mean, Laura Ingram just got on Fox News and made comments about how like an immigration is changing the nature nature of the country and we're losing our culture and stuff, was like and we didn't vote for this, yes, which actually did so. Um a little bit back to some history.

Right after that march that Jason Kessler covered in The Daily Caller UH next month, in June of two seventeen, Kessler started a Facebook group to try to plan the Unite the Right rally UM and he started going around online and in person to a variety of different fascist activist groups. He made contact with Richard Spencer, Matthew Heinbach of the Traditional Workers Party the League of the South. He also became a member of the Proud Boys, which is a group funded and founded by vice co founder

Gavin McGinnis. Uh Now, Jason Kessler's goal seemed to have been to make himself a bridge between the disparate rings of wings of the alt right. He basically wanted to be like the central spoke in the Nazi wheel. That's kind of how he was trying to set himself up as and that was the goal of the Unite the Right rally. It was a heady time to be a fascist, hm.

It was a heady time to be a fascist activist because Donald Trump had just gotten elected, the alt right was in the news, and these guys kind of figured, well, now is the time for us to tip our hands and to get into politics and just see where the waters are. So they were hoping that Unite the Right would be like a coming out party for the political far far far fascist right of the Nazis. Exactly. It was the Nazi Debutante Ball, and of course it was

an incredibly bloody ship show. Um. Yeah, that's what nazis. That's the only thing Nazis do. Um. And at the time it was widely seen as a disaster for the white national movement, or that that was that's debatable. It was definitely a disaster, a disaster for Kessler who got dropped from the Daily Wire and disavowed as a proud boy when he became, you know, famous for being a racist. Uh. There was a court case levied against him, which is

still in process. Signs versus Kessler. Uh. It's basically alleges that Kessler and other organizers including Richard Spencer and Matthew Hinbach had been part of quote, a direct conspiracy to

commit violence. Um. Now, they obviously claim this was a peaceful rally was just for political purposes, but the things that they set online and discord and on Twitter, um, even in the open, sort of bellayed that The anti com official Twitter, like right before Charlottesville tweeted a picture of Hitler and several leading Nazis in an open topped car and the text on the image read, get in, loser,

We're invading Charlottesville. Yeah. It seems like a pretty clear Yeah Hitler in a in a truck, Yeah, with a bunch of Nazis around him, Like he's not He's definitely not going anywhere for like, they're not going shopping, yeah, refling. Yeah, Hitler didn't go places to not be violent. Yeah. So one of the saving graces of the modern fascist movement, at least from the perspective of the rest of us and were fascists, is that they kind of lack in

self control. Um, they're obsessed with violence and racism, and they have trouble hiding it. Well, that doesn't stop them from trying. Um, they have a focus on what they call entryism, which is basically trying to find ways to get normal right wingers on board with their extreme ideas. So that yeah, red pilling is another term you'll here used for it. Um. And there's the like, there's a one of the discord channels leaked to unicorn Riot was a hashtag belt tag Beltway Bigots, which is a chat

room for d C and Virginia based bigots. Uh. Here's a quote from Unicorn Riots sort of summing up those conversations. Local Charlottesville Unite the Right organizer Jaslyn Kesler Jason Kesler repeatedly post and Beltway Bigots about his intention at various events to try and provoke anti fascists into a violent confrontation that could be spun as an attack against regular conservatives. So that's their goal with these marches. Um, and here's

a direct quote from Kessler himself. We're going to be triggering anti fat to protest and force the Alt Light's hand just where your Maga hats and blend in his proud boys. It'll be fun. So their stated goal is to blend in as more moderate conservatives so that if there are fights with anti Fat it looks to mainstream conservatives like basically radical communists are ganging up on normal conservatives.

The dual purpose of putting the Alt Light in a situation where they're suddenly in violence and then it creates that US versus them exactly. M yeah. And it also makes it easier for the fascists to go out and march in public. Yeah yeah. Here's a quote from an user in one of these channels who said, I love LARPing as a normal Trump bro, not even kidding. It allows me to feel kind of normal rather than a revolutionary.

Of course, I never deny being a white nationalist, which again they'll admit white nationalism because they think they can get away with that right now, which I guess maybe they can. Uh. Here's another quote from Kessler in the planning. Bring your Maga hats if you've got them. If Anti fall Fox with us, it'll look like average Trump supporters

and Alt Light are under attack. Um So. On July eleven, seventeen, Jason Kessler went to a Charlottesville town hall to talk about Unite the Right and make it clear he was not associated with the loyal white Knights of the ku Klux Klan who just toasted a rally in Charlottesville. He said, I didn't want them here. As a note, he's going to be marching with the KKK today. Uh. He's clearly

no longer disavowing them. Um But on June, in a private discord chat, eleven days after he disavowed the KKK, Jason Kessler said this, the Confederate flag is the best optics because it's beloved by legions of Southerners who are on the doorsteps of becoming just like us. If we can move them beyond heritage not hate. So again, like

the they know they can't. They know marching with swastika's is a bad idea, but they figure if I march with a Confederate flag, then I can get people who maybe aren't full on Nazis, but who you know, are proud of their Confederate heritage for some reason on board with my Nazis. I think he's underestimating Southern manners. What do you mean, Ah, the heritage and I hate people

don't like fighting. Well, I mean that's optimistic then I hope so like not all of them, but definitely there's a there's definitely a manners system in place that the ugly fighting offense well, and that's they do. They do talk a lot about how they should represent themselves and how they should sort of present themselves to the public. Like there's a lot of focus on not dressing like soldiers, which they were early on, not wearing like military body

arm or not wearing camouflage. A lot of people focus on like, we're white polo shirts dressed nicely because then you will look like a nice, polite member of society.

And again it's all about in treatism. It's because after after Charlottesville last year, I was campaigning with for Northam in Roanoke, and I had a lot of people who have been moderate Republicans were like, well, that was just really ugly so we're going to vote Democrat for governor this time around because we don't want this kind of

thing happening again. And it was the the optics of provoking violence and bad manners, if you will, So that was that was getting them to distance themselves from it. Do you find that those glowing or not maybe not glowing those sort of New York Times trend pieces about you know, look at this nasty with this nicely tailored suit and like this trendy haircut. Do those sort of aid them in this, in this quest for better optics. Yes,

that's very important to them. So there were there were In addition to all these discord chats, there was a Facebook chat, very long one that went over the course of a couple of weeks that was also leaked by Unicorn Riot and it it was the planning for this rally they were going to in and it they talk about their frustration with getting mainstream media outlets to talk to them, like a lot of these guys, and none of them mentioned having connections to Info Wars, but they're

clearly interested in getting respectable news outlets to cover their beliefs um which I think it's like the NPR recently interviewed Jason Kesler uh and essentially let him talk for like three minutes about the stuff that he believes, which is exactly what he wants, and what the New York Times gave them was exactly what. Yeah, they want people who uh, they want respectable coverage. They do want to

be a mainstream political party. Um. You'll hear regularly conversations where they're basically saying, the police are not on our side yet, Um, we have to be careful until we're in control, you know. Like it's it's this understanding that if they play nice enough long enough, they think they can gain functional political power. Um. So yeah, well this has been the rights conservative rights strategy for the last

thirty years. I mean, if you look at the origins of the Moral Majority and the Auburn Avenue theology, people, you get when you have people who want to create a theocracy out of America. They want to take on mainstream UM avenues and like take it on step by step and get themselves legitimized and accepted into those worlds. And and honestly a lot of them are just straight

up stealing from and Tonio Graham. She's theories of like seven spheres of cultural influence and like we have to uh treated like trench warfare, and we're gonna we're gonna take over this media. We're gonna take over this, We're gonna go over the church. We're gonna take over this

and like slowly gain ground. And I think what these guys are trying to do is essentially, because you're talking more like the sort of Christian right, hard right conservatives, I think these guys are trying to hijack that essentially, yeah print yeah, um. And there's a big question within these groups about how openly racist to be. That's like a real subject of debate among racists is like how

clear can we make it that we're fascists? Um? Like I found a brainstorming threat in the anti com channel where they were trying to figure out like a logo for their organization, and one of them suggested a design that included little swastikas, and a person responded, people will

compare us to that then enormis know like Nazis. Other users agree, One said, for sure, we ought to steer away from anything that can be interpreted as Nazi symbolism because that's going to be exactly what they are looking for. Another person said, have to hide the power level. Uh, you can't red pill normies by shoving in their face. That's a really common phrase, hide the hide the power level. What does that mean? It's a reference to dragon ball Z.

Because these guys are giant fucking nerds. I say, this is a giant fucking nerd. But yeah, it's a reference to dragon ball Z containing their hidden You know this is not even my final form. Yeah right, And that's and again this is this is taking a play out of the Christian rights playbook that's been over the less thirty years. Just like the cool youth pastor who walks kids and yeah, like, hey, if you come to the if you come to youth group, we're gonna watch movies

and play Halo. We're gonnam everybody, and then we're gonna like it's turn up the heat and boil the frogs in the water. And then before you know it, you're protesting out that an abortionent clic or something insane like that. Well, and when we get on the subject of especially like the nerdy language these guys use, that brings this to another topic that's really intriusting to me, which is the gamification of street violence and protest, which is really big

among the far right circle. So a lot of these people, like I have some recorded chats that I found on eight Chan from like is early like two or three weeks after the election, where people were lamenting like the end of the election, and like, well, I ever feel as important as I felt when I was like making these memes that were spreading and like felt like I

was taking part in this culture movement. Well yeah, but that's that those those kids and that energy is exactly what these movements are trying to co opt, and they've done it in a variety of different ways. Um. The Proud Boys are probably which is again that group found about Gavin McGinnis had probably done the best job of this. By the way, he got banned from Twitter. He sure did get banned from Twitter to bay they're the Proud Boys.

Whole organizational structure UM is based in part around whether or not you've been in a violent fight. Uh So to get be a first degree Proud Boy or whatever, you have to declare online via YouTube or something that you're a proud boy and a Western chauvinist and you believe in the super to see of Western culture, YadA, YadA, YadA. Then you have to promise not to masturbate, which is key. You don't want you to want to get rid of

your virile energy. Yes, you want to contain that can have sex, Yes they can, and they can masturbate if a woman is in the room who is consenting that you specify that, But they cannot masturbate just for their own pleasure. It is I can imagine your shitty ideology having a masturbation class. It's the right wing circles of Christianity. Yeah, not even kidding. And I was like, oh no, that

sounds that sounds pretty. And then after you've declared your Western chauvinism and promise not to masturbate, basically the best way to get i think fourth degree or whatever is you have to either be arrested for the cause or be involved in a serious fight. Uh. And they they pretend that like that's not what they want, like that this is a consolation for having been involved in something so horrible. Uh. You Also, the only way to progress in ranks is to be involved in street actions that

get violent, and so it's it is gamifying. It's like giving you a little achievement it's like now you've been in a street fight, you move up a level, you get to yeah, giving you cookies for violence, yea and their extremist groups. I should note have been using video games and video game imagery for quite some time. There's an isis made mod for Grand Theft Auto where you

like blow up American soldiers. During the start of the Ukrainian Civil War, there was this famous propaganda video I Russian Occupier that went viral and it was a mashup of a pro Russian rant and recruiting video with graphics that made it look like the opening to a Call of Duty game. Um, so this is not this is

not like a new thing. And the like I said, like the Lion of Europe video that the guy mentioned is red pilling him had a shipload of video game imagery in it because they are trying to make you feel like the protagonist of one of these games. Well, and one of the problems here too is um and you see this with Muslim Radical Station um where YouTube doesn't really have any locks in terms of content, and so the suggested play next Auto feature will get people

down rabbit holes. Which is why, like, if you have kids and you just let them sit on the iPad

and like watch YouTube videos. They'll eventually get into like really sketchy territory because there will be like, um, like parody videos made of common kids shows that will just AutoPlay and it will eventually be like really graphic, horrific sexual content and with like Telly Tubby's sucking each other and like Pepper Pig getting yeah, and and and and it's all because it's said on AutoPlay, and just like the associative algorithm will just send you down a really

dark rabbit hole really fast. Hey, we're going to continue our talk about Nazis and eventually actually go out and yell at some of them and then tell you what that was like. But first, here's some ads. Um Okay, So we were talking about sort of like how silly a lot of the imagery around these these guys are. Did you you'll see that picture of the green Keck Warrior from the Portland protests. That was what I was referring to. Yeah, third third rate in Ninja Turtle, Yeah,

third rate in Ninja Turtle. But this is part of the reason that they dress like this is because they think it's it's less threatening and it's less overtly like violent than wearing again body armor that makes you look like a militia man. He looks like your your local LARPing suburban dad. Yeah, and he is. In fact, if you look at his pants, I guarantee you he got those from his LARPing days or whatever, like those are those are fantasy LARPing pants that he got them run. Yeah,

guarantee you. I guarantee you. He has recently had a conversation in which he explained just how many pounds of pressure it takes to break a human neck. Oh yeah,

only ten, right, Yeah, it's like ten pounds. It's like, that's not how it works then, So I don't want to get too deep in the wood some weird internet culture, but his you can see the words keck written on his shield in a stylized form, which is obviously that entered the Internet because it was how like gamers in Korea would type out l O L and it sort of became a part of Internet culture, and then four Chan turned it into doing it from doing it to the lolls to doing it for the kex or whatever,

and then this morphed into the idea of Kekistan, a fake country that was mostly a joke, but also not quite. Uh, Kakistan, You and not everybody who talks about Kakistan or whatever is a far right nationalist. But Kakistan has a flag. You will see these flags at protests regularly. Maybe not today, but you saw it in Portland, you saw it in Berkeley. Uh. And that flag looks like this, right, we'll have the pictures up on our website behind the bastards dot com.

That is a green version of the Nazi naval flag. So this is well known around the iconomists in the center Keck. It's like it's like done to look like a palindrome. Yeah, it's the The flag of Kakistan, so to speak, is exactly the same with just the colors inverted as the naval battle flag for the Third Reich. Um. So this gets into what I was saying about how a lot of the outright fascist activists are frustrated with some of the people on the alt right or the

alt light as they call them. Um. I found one chat in a discord channel where someone said the Kakistan meme has gotten too dumb to be useful. It doesn't trigger anyone. Now you'd be surprised at how many people flying the flags don't even know it's a variation on the Kriegsmrine flag. And then there's a lot of debate because some people will say, well, know, the fact that like the that flag is out there is good and like on the whole, I think that this this thing

is like positive optics for us. So they're they're very much undecided about this. But it's interesting how I think most of the people that you would see carrying that flag would tell you they're not Nazis. I'm not a fascist, but they are carrying a flag that's a rip off of a Nazi flag. Understand that, I think a lot of them do. I think some of them don't, because it's gotten obscure enough and it's spread enough around the internet that some people who would never consider themselves Nazis

still use that flag. But that is where it started. I was curious, do you think that that's what they want? They want this to become as a popular symbol where mainstream not Nazis, you know, have like fly it without really knowing what it means. So I think what they want is it makes it easier for them to convert these kids later if these people are already used to being out in the street, they're already hanging out when they're at protest around Nazis and they're flying this flag,

it's like you're one step closer. They want to normalize it so that it can become a dog whistle when they want to activate it. Yes, Kistan recruiting ground exactly, and it's it's all about like they recognize and they don't like how small they are. There's somewhere between two and four hundred Nazi activists, maybe less than two hundred expected today, but that's just because these people are out racists.

UM groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer who were again at the Portland and Berkeley protests, they are better at hiding their fascism and better at hide their racism, and I think as a result, they're a lot more dangerous UM. But they're like the Quekistan stuff is part of like it's it's a recruiting tool. And there are a lot of conversations in the discord about like trying to harden up these kids, trying to like give them classes on how to deal with the police and train

them to fight. The Proud Boys initiation is you have to get punched by a bunch of other proud boys until you can name five breakfast cereals. And the stated goal is too Yeah, it's really dumb. If you find videos on it, it's the saddest thing in the world because none of these kids, they don't they don't know how to punch. Really, look it up if you want to laugh. But their stated goal for it is they want to train these kids how to focus while they're

stressed out and in pain. M Marine Corps three months. I don't think getting punched in a circle name and breakfast cereal will Actually I don't think so either. But I also think that they're on the path to figuring out how to get better at this. And they're not just punching each other in a circle. They are showing up to protest where these kids are getting into fights and where they are game experience and functioning that way. Um. Now, in terms of like actual talk about terrorism, um, it's

fairly mild on the discord channels. They know that there's chances of being caught. But I have noticed that over the last couple of months that they were talking in the time after Charlottesville, they got more open about talking about things like explosives. So I found one conversation in August two where some guy was talking about legal explosives and people immediately shut it down and told him that he was just like making them a magnet for the Feds.

But then a few weeks later, after Charlottesville, in the same server, another user offered access to a library of a hundred and thirty seven PDFs on how to manufacture explosives and received no pushback. Uh. Now this did make the news once the chats got leaked and it got the anti com server taken down. Um, but it's interesting to me that in the weeks and months after Charlottesville, people got more and more comfortable among the fascist right

with talking about explosives and terrors. Are they do they use the word terrorism? Do they? Are they weird that that's what they're doing? I think so, because in December nineteen, two seventeen, several members of the Traditional Workers Party Discord got into a conversation about how they would have carried out a Dylan Roof style mass shooting at a black church without being caught. And yeah, I've got the whole conversation here. One guy said, I would have parked a

mile away. Another guy said same, uh, and ride a bike to the location. Another guy says, I would have mapped out all the CCTV cameras first on a recon op then planned parking Accordingly, another guy said that too. I follow the same m O when I go to a rally. The other guy said, me too. Man, So they were basically talking about what they would have done to have carried out that massacre and then gotten away

with it. We were talking about this last night. Do you think that a lot of these people are former veterans? Do you think they actually have any combat experience some of them. I'm not completely sure whether there are a significant number of veterans involved, and I'm sure there are some, or if the people using a lot of this jargon and stuff because they use a lot of of military

style tactics. They talk about X fill points or X filtration, how to get out um, they talk about high value targets, they refer to them as h vt s, And the thing is that's very jargoning, and I'm not completely clear if there's actually veteran in their writing their orders, because

it's not quite structured the right way. But it's also the use of jargon that you find among people who are like military adjacent and want to feel really tough, like their dad was a marine or a cop or something, and they're like they'll be talking about like h vt s because it makes them feel like they're badass girling. Yeah,

I'm really not sure. It could be just a veteran, but like a veteran who had a job like mine where they worked a six to six death job and want to feel like they were a badass, or they you know, they could just be one of these like military fan fanboy knots. They're like larbers. They are Nazis, but like they're LARPing military doing tactics and stuff. They don't think they could actually hack it in the military, but they want the all of the prestige and fund

or they think they can. They think they could hack it in the military, or if they were in the military and in a job like mind where they didn't see action, they think they could hack it as a grunt, but they've never they've never been tested. There are, however, some of them who have been uh, some of them who are combat veterans, although that's not the norm. Um and In fact, it's more common around groups like the

oath keepers and the three percenters, those militias which they hate. Um. But the idea is that only three percent of Americans would be ready to like defend their country and defend the constitution. And it's supposedly a group of veterans who stand ready to defend free speech and whatnot. Though they do have some of the same problems the Proud Boys do of having people in their organization who are like, I would have joined the military, but pt was hard. Yeah,

And they also get infiltrated by fascists and stuff. But in general they're treated with contempt by the fascists because they call them oath cuts um. Because they will do stuff like stand around Anti five protests and try to build a wall between them and the police, and they probably masturbate it, so that that that means they're right out in terms of protecting Western culture. How much like messy kind of petty in fighting and drama is there in this huge amount of a lot of patty high

schoolers in a lot of ways. And they one of the things that is again makes them easier to fight is that they have no sense of in group loyalty whatsoever. When Unite the Right was a disaster and someone died and there was a lot of blood, they abandoned Jason Kessler like that, like he has become very marginalized and insulted and mocked. And the same thing happened with Matthew Heinbach when he got arrested for beating up his father in law after having an affair with his father in

law's wife. Uh, he was made fun of and mocked and pretty much dropped by the community. Loyalty, no loyalty for their heroes. And I should note that conversation we're going through with these guys were talking about how to carry out a Dylan Roof style shooting on a a

black church. One of the two members in that goes in discord by the name a Hopstorm foer Pepe Hopstorm Fear was a Nazi like an S. S. Rank It means essentially like Stormtroop leader Um Hopstrom fuer Peppe was also the guy who started Anti com that group that was supposedly nonpartisan and non political and contained people of all political persuasions. He was the guy talking about how to carry out and get away with an attack on a black Church. Uh, and here's a picture of him.

He's a baby. He's a baby. Oh my god. We will not be posting the picture of him because I don't want to docks this guy because I'm not acent share it's him. But there is a Trump stamp on the side of his computer tower, and he looks like the guy. These are these are the these are the guys that you could really use just because their egos are so fragile to be like, well, you could be the great leader and then cause a lot of discord

and like keep things disorganized because they're all fighting each other. Yeah, and also like it's hard to say, it's probably like the conversation they're saying Karen talking about how they'd get away with an attack. I'm going to guess this guy is never going to do anything. But like, this kid looks like he's maybe eighteen. He's got no hair on his face, he looks like a little baby. He looks

like all the mass murders I've ever seen. That's what's scary, because there is this guy does look like exactly the kind of person in age group, and there's nothing stopping him from getting an a R fifteen like the what's the ven diagram overlap with in cells and these guys they do not Like none of these guys identify as in cells that I have found, um, And there's not a lot of talk about them here because the in cells are for one thing. Um, A lot of in

cells are not white. They are like like Elliott Roger wasn't a white kid. Um. He was obsessed with wanting to be and look white because he thought that those were the guys who get all the girls. And you'll run into that along the in cell community. But I think these guys would generally view those people as degenerates. Um, although they do share some of the same goals. I think in sales also masturbate a lot, so they couldn't

be proud boys. Yeah. So anti com the leader of this baby faced Nazis was a member of that claimed not to be a political group that included yet he looks like a half baked puppy. These guys got kicked off of Discord after Charlottesville in September in part because of like the bomb stuff that was being shared on their discord chat um. But from February to September seventeen, their members posted more than nine messages, and they were a prominent part of the first Unite the Right rally.

Their Twitter account is still active. They don't seem to be doing a lot right now. Um, but I do think the basic ideas behind this group have sort of been funneled into the activism of the Proud Boys and groups like Patriot Prayer. Um, they've just done a better job of hiding the racism. But it's important to know that, Like, there's a lot of movement between all these groups. So when Anti Com got shut down, all of the Anti com guys started talking in the traditional Workers Party discord.

And you know, while Patriot Prayer and like Gavin McInnis of the Boys said don't attend the first Unite the Right rally, ordered is people not to posted a big article saying we're not part of the alt right, we don't associate with the alt right. A ton of Proud Boys showed up at Charlotteessville the last time. They might be there this time. The guy who's the leader of their quote Militant Order and the Proud Boys the Fraternal Order of All Knights, which Kevin McInnis says has nothing

to do with the alt right. A lot of them were there at Charlottesville. So it's again they say, we have no affiliation with these groups, and the leaders will disavow them, but you look at what their people do, and the bad guys just not be the lamest version of themselves for twenty seconds, like we were in the dumbest timeline. We're in the dumbest timeline. And what sucks is that like being the lamest version of the bad guys might work. Yeah, that's that's why this is the

dumbest time. The third would never have these guys because they have no dignity. And then that and the fact that that makes them more dangerous is really stupid. Yeah, but because it makes the police are more likely to be sympathetic with them, um, and because moderates are more likely to be sympathetic with them because they look yeah, yeah, they look like kicked little puppies rather than like fucking

ryanhard Hydrick marching down the street or whatever. And it's I think that you could make a I mean it would probably a whole other, big pile of research and a whole up or maybe even like a whole other podcast, but you could talk about how you said a lot of these guys identified as former Democrats who voted whoever and then and they were a lot of these guys were probably pretty centrist as it were, like because they just they were centrist and they hated like a lot

of them will talk about how they didn't like banks and they didn't like uh, capitalism or whatever. But it's because they think the Jews are behind it. And so they started out being more moderate and then they realized that there was this whole ideology Taylor built to people who were paranoid about all that ship. Um, So they just found their people. Basically, they found their people. It took them a little while, um, but the election really gave them an opportunity to get out in public with

this ship. The first Unite the Right rally, as they said, was meant to be like a political coming out party for the fascist right. Uh. It seems to have been their high water marks so far. But there's disturbing trends that they're winning, both in terms of like the further right tilt that you've seen among a lot of conservative commentators and stuff like the MPR talking to Jason Kessler because they let him talk about his theories on like you know, the data says this about these are all

the most intelligent races. And one of the things Kessler did that they'll usually do. They'll never say white people are the most intelligent race, because they say they're not white supremacist. Let's say Ashkenazi Jews are the smartest, and then it's Asians, and then it's white people and then everybody else comes on. But that that gives them again they can couch it in science. They can say I'm not a white supremacist. I'm yeah, well, well it's never

any good science. It's like phrenology. But like they'll be like, facts don't have feelings. Well they're not acts. But because you said the phrase facts and not feelings, now we're

debating on your terms. Yeah, And they'll talk about like i Q tests and stuff and ignore the fact that like, well, no, actually, you can give someone a twenty minute coaching session that raises their i Q score by twenty points, which proves that the i Q is not a measure of intelligence, but as a measure of your ability to Yeah, that's been like debunked, like twenty years ago, constantly debunked. It's like it's like it's one of intelligence. Yeah, the past.

It was like how polygraph is still used in stuff, but like our average person is like, oh, yeah, the polygraphs are not that accurate. The government still polygraphs people. You can. Yeah, it's frustrating, bad science, but it gives them camouflage. And it's all about camouflage. And that's part of why the Nazis were going to be seeing today. I don't think are the most dangerous ones because they're

just not disciplined enough to camouflage. Well, Gavin McGinnis has done a better job of camouflaging, although he still got banned from Twitter. The Patriot prayer guy is Joey Gibson or better do it is? It's I mean, it's really hard and for a white guy. Ye. Speaking of Bason Kessler and speaking of Twitter, here's what he said less than a week after the first Unite the Right rally

on Twitter. He essentially said that Heather Hayer was a horrible, disgusting communist quote communists if killed ninety four million, looks like it was payback time now. His tweet ignited a firestorm of condemnation. And this is the ship that I think NPR should have brought up. They shouldn't have said. What do you believe they should have said? After Charlottesville? You said this, what is your plan for the current rally?

I'm frustrated at the bad journalism of just letting this guy talk about his ship, because this is not the kind of thing. Even other fascists weren't willing to stand up for him. Richard Spencer, after this tweet, came out disavowed him and said I will no longer associate with Jason Kessler, and no one should. Hayer's death was deeply saddening. Payback is a morally reprehensible idea because she was a

white woman, but also because these guys are scared. They don't want to be seen as culpable to a death. Because Spencer's part of the lawsuit against the organizers of Unite the Right, so he's scared too. Yeah. Um, they're all scared. Take much more bad press after getting punched in the face on television, Yes, and we will be.

We'll get into the Nazi punching debate, and a little bit here I want to read a quote from Matt Novak of Gismoto, who discuss described sort of the general fallout from Jason Kessler tweeting the Heather Higher deserve to die because communism quote. Some so called alright activists said that Kesler is a secret Barack Obama supporter and even wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Basically the worst things you can say in the white supper Mrs community about other

neo Nazis. Others said that Heather Hair herself was some kind of government agent. Um, so that's again like these it's this is one of the saving graces that we have is that these guys have not gotten good at keeping one unified line, which the original Nazis were fucking great at. Everybody stuck to Hitler, and everybody stuck to the same story. For his part, Kessler posted a tweet the next day saying I was hacked last night. I

apologized for the tweets sent out from my account last night. Um, yeah, at least I didn't blame Ambion. Well he did, so he makes everyone racist. It's a little He deleted that tweet very shortly after, and then put up another one saying at two part tweet saying I repudiate the heinous tweet that was sent from my account last night. I've been under a crushing amount of stress and death threats. I'm taking Ambien zan X and I had been drinking

last night. Sometimes I wake up having done strange things I don't remember. So you called it to him? No, no, not just Roseanne, but there were there were even jokes among the Nazis about his comment in Roseanne's comment and about like maybe we should all just say we're on ambient. Ha wow, pre advertising for Ambien though, yeah, Ambien donal in turns racism cover. I guess whatever the competitor of Ambient is should really at least our drug doesn't make

you a Nazi. Whiskey helps you sleep and doesn't make you a Nazi having trouble sleeping. Try Alcoholism doesn't leave to Nazism. They are sometimes correlated. The Nazism came first, so again after Unite the Right one point oh, a lot of the groups that were involved in planning and collapsed. The Traditional Workers Party fell apart back in March when Heimbach was arrested for assaulted David Parrott, the husband of his mistress and spokesperson for the TPP and also his

father in law. This is yeah, this is his stepmom messy ship Like this is like Shakespeare level of yeah, and just like, come on, guys, don't plan to your own stereotypes of being like incestuous and weird. And they this was that doesn't lead to weird ship at all, doesn't Yeah, And there was a lot of the Nazis sort of recognized this at the time. I found one user who summed up a lot of people's opinions when he said, seems like if we had higher standards, the

whole ship show with Heinbach wouldn't have happened. What did I say earlier about dignity, Maybe if you hadn't been Nazis, that would have been part of it. Um. So, yeah, a lot of these groups have fallen apart. Vanguard America went to the ground and split up into new groups and including Patriot Front, the t WB collapse, Anti com collapse, But all of the people are still there. It's not worthwhile to focus too much on the names of most

of these groups. Like right now, Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys are kind of the most ascendant in like the far right, the fascist right, street violence groups, but I'm sure they will collapse, but the people will still be there. And one yeah, yeah, they move very freely

within these groups. It's frustrating um, which gets me into the matter of how their tactics have evolved, because this is what does concern me, because as ridiculous as these people are, they have hit upon some good tactics for getting away with the ship that they do. UM. At that Portland protest, I want to read you a quote from a Frontline PBS correspondent who described Patriot Front and

how they presented themselves at Portland. I would say that it was perhaps a fascist rally in Portland, but not a white supremacist rally, and that's sort of a new wrinkle in the fire right movement. So the groups that were in Portland, they wanted you to know, hey, look, we're not racist, and many of them have had leaders who were people of color. But they also said, hey,

we're really into fascist characters like Pinochet. The first guy I met had a huge shirt on that said Pinochet did nothing wrong, and other people had shirts on that would say things like right wing death squad. And so these people are what it would call multicultural, multi ethnic fascist groups that laud characters like Pinochet, and that just

happened to be like nineties seven point eight percent white. Yeah, Yeah, it just happened to be the vast majority of white and they happened to have been caught online send which a racist ship. Yeah, almost all dudes. I have a question about one of these gripts is prayer in their name? Yeah? They do. They purport to be Christians, Yes, and they were saying that they were praying like they were having

a prayer rally in Portland. So do they're have their churches like just barred them, given like withdrawn their membership, or given them any kind of church discipline. They're not evangelical, come out and just about Trump during all his mania. Yeah, I haven't heard of it. I wouldn't expect it. I'm just curious that there's been any any internal rejection of them from Christian community. I am sure there have been churches that have rejected them, particularly in Portland, but these

guys are not affiliated with a particular church. They just claimed to be a group of patriotic anti communist activists. So that's again, that's the new camouflage the far right has and the people were going to be seeing today are people who will say they're white nationalists. Most of the movement has moved away from that and say white nationalism isn't a selling point, let's call ourselves anti communists.

Well that yeah, So we're going to get more into the strategies with police that these people have evolved, and the wisdom of whether or not it's a good idea

to punch and nazi. But first, ads, so, I want to talk a little bit more about again how connected these groups are, because one of the things that they are doing to try and protect themselves and save their movement is to claim, like Patriot prayerbal claim, we have nothing to do with Jason Kessler, we have nothing to do with the Traditional Workers Party, we have nothing to do with Charlottesville or any of those people, even though

Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, has been photographed and found talking with a shipload of people who were at the first Unite the Right rally. UM. It's also worth noting that like Pinochet was the dictator of Chile and one of the things he did he had a lot of communists and quote unquote communists executed and including

a lot of people thrown from helicopters. UM. Now, among the Patriot Prayer people, you saw a number of shirts with like flaming people from helicopters on them and with like pinocheted nothing wrong on them and right wing death squads and stuff. Because Pinochet had right wing death squads to kill communists, so they are willing to hearken back

to that. And even a year or so before these guys were very active, the Pinochet of session was obvious on the far right, like in the In the chats from these various groups, I found more than a dozen references to throw in communists out of helicopters, mostly on anti comm which I think is kind of an intellectual precursor in a lot of ways to how Patriot Prayer is marketing themselves right now. Um. And there were also numerous references to right wing death squads uh and to Pinochet.

So again, these groups will all try to say we're different from the fascists who marched in Charlottesville. We're different, but they're not different. They talk about the same things. They have a lot of the same members in common. Well, this is this is like the conservative Christian thing because they're all decentralized and they have so many splinter groups, but they all believe the same stuff that they're able to disavow each other and still promote the same ideas. Yes,

and they are again. One of the things that's really frustrating is that a lot of the journalists covering these people do not do their due diligence. So they'll talk to Gavin Mechanics about the Proud Boys and he will say, you know, we're not a violent group. We don't start fights, but we will finish them. The violence you see in the media is us defending ourselves from lunatics who want

us dead for no discernible reason. But if you actually do a little bit of digging, you can find other quotes from Gavin again Us, including this one from a right wing Canadian website called The Rebel quote. We're the only ones fighting these guys, and it's fun when they go low, go lower, Mason back, throw bricks at their heads. Let's destroy them. We've been doing it for a while now,

and I gotta say it's really invigorating. Well, my question is what role do you think the media should be playing, Like, like, how can you report on these people correctly? I I mean, okay, so there's no way to say this without sounding like a little bit narcissistic, but I Like, what I am trying to do in my reporting on them is I'm i am not trying to report on their beliefs. I'm not trying to read out quotes about here's what they

believe about the world. I'm gonna read you like a page of statistics about what they think about i q s and races, because that would bring the debate to their terms. Yes, what is important to talk about is what these people believe, what they say, and what they do in the streets, because you can't just ignore them because they are out there. They all marching and they are hurting people. If you're going to cover them, you

have to do your legwork. You can't just say, Gavin mcginnison, the Proud Boys deny any involvement with a violent group and say that they're not you know, they're a multi racial group or whatnot. You have to look at the quotes from these guys where they say incredibly racist shit. Uh, Like there's a you can even find it on their website. So in that article Gavin wrote called we are not all Right, he had a quote where he said there are no racial requirements to be in the Proud Boys.

There are no special rules for black proud boys. But then he said this overrides anything previously published about black proud boys, which means that at some point he had special rules if you were going to be black and a proud boy. It takes very cursory research to find out all of the back chatter sort of and all of the times where these guys contradict each other and where they are clearly racist. But you have to do

that research otherwise you're just letting them present themselves. So you have to zoom out a little bit further than you would do for a specific event based reporting and look at the like the context of the entire worldview and the conversation that's come beforehand. And you need to pay journalists more so that they have time to do

that research. Yes, you need a journalist who will go at them kind of in the style referred to as kind of like bulldogging, like, um, just keep hitting them with things like on this day, on at this time, on this website, you said this, what do you have to say for yourself? And then like as they're trying to spin it away when they try to pivot, go for another one. Well, on this day, on this session, like have your ammunition high school debate side have have

the receipts, make them answer you. Well, it is basic debate tactics. If you make them answer you, they're losing. Yeah, exactly, Like That's that's what you have to do. You don't come to them and say, well, like NPR did, tell me what you believe, you come and say you tweeted this about Heather Hair. Are you still saying it was

ambient like you said? Because again, we have thousands of things that Jason Kessler posted in these quotes, including an enormous amount of really racist ship, which I'm not going to read out here, but just type in racial layers into the search database that unicorn Right has provided for these guys quotes, and you will find them talking about racist ship. It is not hard. It's very easy to

as in specific racist. You type in any slur, you'll find a bunch of conversations um or you just type in his name he was mad dimension on the form. So if you type that into the search thing that unicorn right provides, you can find everything he said, and you can find plenty of evidence that Jason Kessler is as racist as someone helped me with a with a the day is long. Oh there we go. Okay, okay, we we are in the South. So as NBR done

a counter counterbalancing interview too. If they gave him three minutes a fare time, did they give someone else three minutes a fair time? That should have that No, but they did during the same day kind of equate Black Lives Matter as like the opposite of these guys in a way that basically implied that the Black Lives Matter is as extreme as these guys and just being like, hey, we'd like to stop being shot. That'd be fantastic. Yeah, No, Black Lives Matter is nowhere near as radical as Malcolm

X's followers or anything. They're very very well. Even Malcolm X wasn't that radical, Like it shouldn't be radical to just say we don't want to be shot anymore. It's not that complicated, but it is. So there's a lot of false equivocation happening. And that's exactly the point of a group like anti comm and I what I think is their mental descendants Patriot Prayer, because their goal their and their goal is to say Anti fall is not

an organization. There's no national Antifa. There are different cities and whatnot. But everyone should be anti fascist. It's not like and if you I started interviewing anti fascist activists before, like right before the election and a little bit after, and this was back before anti fall was a word most people knew. And there were a few dozen of these people really who were active around the world outside of a place like the UK where it was common,

it was not. It's it's not an organization that exists to further in ideology. It is grassroots organizations that have started because there's Nazis marching, and what the Nazis are trying to do is say no, no, no, no no. These people are communist activists and so we're not fascist activists were anti communists. They're essentially trying to turn around. They're trying to make themselves look reactionary against a group

that doesn't have a coherent ideology. And is it self reactionary, yes, And they're doing that in order to gain the sympathy of the police and moderate conservatives um, because that is what worked in Germany in the nineteen thirties. That's why Hitler came to power in large degree, because the German Centrists and German conservatives and we go over this on

our episode about the non Nazi bastards behind Hitler. So I won't labor the point too long, but I will say everybody should read True Believer because it gets into all of this and it's a real short book and the death of democracy. Um, but these guys. One of the points that these guys are not ignorant about the history of the Nazi Party. They have also done their reading on how Hitler rose to power, and they know what works. They have the pook, they have the playbook,

and it's worked once before. So I think actually at this point, I do want to kind of go around the table and get sort of your expectations of everybody for how this protest is going to go today, because probably in about an hour or so from now, will be face to face with the members of the fascist parties in the United States who are willing to call themselves white nationalists or fascists. So what do you expect, And let's start with Nick. I expect that they want

us to start ship. I expect that they will be as inflammatory as possible. They're gonna say things, They're gonna try to like make eye contact, They're gonna try to like draw us in. I will be interested to see what they chant because, like one of the things that made the march in Charlotte's feel so startling to people with some of the like legitimately scary things they were chanting. Like just hearing the audio of those people chanting like

blood and soiled blood and so like that scared people. Yeah. Like, and I mean that one sounds lamer so, but like I think that they're going to try to do stuff like that. Second one, like the Jews will not replace or whatever. They're gonna try to be like as specifically insulting as possible to try to get someone to snap.

And you when we lad a phone conversation prior to coming out here, you talked to me about something that those chances made you remember from your time in the Marine Corps, right, they So I will refer to the to the boot camp process in the Marine Corps brainwashing, which not everybody likes because it's an ugly word, but it is what it is. It's real, it's exactly, it

is exactly what it is in the Marine Corps. What one of the things that's intended in boot camp is just basically what they want is the military has no use for just a regular human personality with all of its chaos and disorder. So what they do is they strip out your personality through a lot of psychological crap, and then they build a new personality that values order and authoritarianism, and then your old personality, depending on how

strong you your personality was to begin with, it grows back. Um, some people it doesn't grow back. And those are the guys that like have a high end tight for the next forty years and like treat their kids like their kids are at boot camp and you know, like I had a gun any like that way, there was like a a platoon like a dinner or something, and his kids were standing at attention by the wall like that kind of creepy ship. Those guys, their personality never grew back.

The rest of us, our personalities grew back, and after a few years the brainwashing starts to wear off, but you still have the basic frame of a very orderly, authoritarian marine. Um, if you put a bunch of veterans in the room and give them basic constructions on how to do a task none of them have ever done before, you will find a lot of times they still complete the task faster and more efficiently than a group of civilians who have gone through it once before and so

connect to the chance the chanting um. One of the ways that you get people to sync up together is if you can make them say the same thing at the same time over and over again. It makes people feel like a group. We are heard creatures. If you make us all chant one to three four, I Love the Marine Corps over and over again, you begin to believe the things you're saying and be feel like a big piece of biological evidence for that. With like parasynthetic responses.

In terms of meditating with a group and chanting together, your body does get into the same kind of rhythm

and breathing pattern. It's call and response and um. The chanting blood and soil, Blood and soil isn't really that different from you know, going on a run and then the person calling Cadence sings something that everyone knows how to respond, and they all respond and it makes you I mean, people make fun of calling Cadence and stuff in the Marine Corps, but there's no doubt that it makes you feel like part of the team, and it's a part of you see it in the military, you

see it in pep rallies in school where everybody's chanting there whatever their team slogans are, and it works, It really works. It's a psychological tool. So they will probably try to do things like that, and one of the ways to defeat that is either to make it hard for them to focus, and frankly, white people aren't great at rhythm, so another thing to do is to chant over them and chant things that do the opposite what they're trying to do, scare them. Like a chance that

I would like to hear out there. I don't know if anybody could get it going with a chance I would like to hear out there is we are many, they are a few, because one of the things they're very afraid of is that being outnumbered and having a thousand black people being like, there's a lot more of us in there our view here, we'll break that feeling of like well, a lot of the old the old resistance chants from like the sixties have that kind of

mindset like that we will overcome song like that. That's the same kind of you know, because we both come from that like church conservative background, singing together in church, exact same thing. I don't know, you want to talk about your expectations for today. I'm not really sure what to expect. It depends on the numbers. But I do agree with Nick here that they really want to be seen as the victims, and so they will try to provoke things that will make it look like they're the

victim and sent um. It's just schoolyard bullying tactics. That's kind of what I'm anticipating, and the point is to not let them get a rise out of us. I'm not expecting that much. Like I think it's going to be a hundred of the guys the first wave fashion. Yeah, I think it's going to be like very sunburned white people who like don't look scary at all. Like, I don't think it's going to be as intimidating. Is maybe they are hoping to because they're not open carrying this time, correct? Yeah?

I think Yeah. I think a city like DC, it's a very black city. It's a city where you know, you don't fuck the people from d C. I think that all of the nonsense that you see in other places, Um, I don't think any of that ship is going to fly here. Yeah. I was really happy to hear it was going to be in DC because d C is used to protests and mass movements, and the police here

are equipped to de escalate things definitely. Like during Occupy I was, you know, I want to occupy New York are a couple you know out on the West coast. DC was by far the most well managed in terms of police interactions. Because this is DC. There's a protest of some kind every weekend. The police. You know, I'm the big champion of the police, but the police when it comes to you know, big rallies and stuff, like,

they know what they're doing. And so I think that if it was any other city, I would be worried. I will be concerned. I will be maybe even scared. I just think in d C, like this is my home. Like I just know that we we don't put up with that ship. And I would, you know, I would. I would love to see some of these guys like on the Metro with your average DC Metro ridership. I thought that was really cute that they wanted their own private metro cars and they thought that that that that

would fly here. Yeah. I don't know what, you know what it was unions? Yeah, no, yeah, the the union, the Metro Union was like, hell no, let's go back a little and explain that, because there was rumors about a week or so ago. I think that the DC Metro would essentially be giving three train cars to the to the protesters, to clansmen essentially and and Nazi activists to sort of privately take them in and out of

where they were going to march. And then the the Metro Union was like, we will go on strike the whole weekend, which like, they never go on straight. They'll put up with anything. So if that's their limit, pretty good. And again, the first target of the Nazis in Germany was the trade unions, the first target before the Jews, before anybody. Uh yeah, so wait, what are you expecting.

I'm expecting about a hundred and fifty to two hundred Nazis and activists and uh my worst case scenario expectation is that the police will be jumpy, which again I agree with Bridget that's not as likely in d C as it was in Portland. The worst case scenarios, you know, the police start firing tear gas and rubber bullets into

the crowd. Um, I expect if there's violence it will either be so I've read all the planning chats for these guys, and Kessler like one of the things he says over and over and is that if this gets violent, we're done as a movement. So Jason Kessler does not want today to be violent, but other members of his group talked regularly about hoping to get in fights with anti flaw and hoping they have an excuse to be violent at this rally. They want to get there. They

move up a degree. Although these guys aren't Proud Boys, although some of them might be, but they they're not. The Proud Boys are not openly allowed to attend this event um, but they still put a lot of cash a and being involved in fights. Um. So if there's violence, it's possible it'll start with the anti fascist activists just getting too hot under the collar. There's also a bunch of wild cards among these guys, um. Which does bring me to someone I want to bring up in terms

of what scares me potentially about this rally. Does anybody know about Vassilios Pistoles. He is a guy who showed up to unite the right one and I think he marched with the traditional workers party that don't off the top of my head. But he was a member of a group called adam Waffen, which is the German word for atomic weapons. And adam Waffen is a fairly small group, but one of the more they like. There's multiple murders

associated with Adam. Often they've killed a number of people and attempted, yeah in the US and attempted to carry out terrorist attacks. Uh. Now, Vassilos Pistoles was one of the most violent people at the first Unite the Right rally. There's at least three videos of him very clearly committing assault um like beating people with sticks. I think one person went up in the hospital because of the violence

he did. Uh. He was found at the time through the work of an activist who I'm not going to name on this it doesn't hide her involvement, but I don't want to add any harassment. But but an activist who was at Charlottesville and attacked at Charlottesville exposed this guy. He was an active duty United States Marine and it took a surprising length of time for the core to separate this guy. And he's not the only member of

the United States Armed Forces. One study that I found suggests that about one quarter of all active duty U S soldiers have met a white nationalist while on duty. Like in the military, I actually met a like literally car carrying member of the KKK when I was in the Marine Corps. Um a guy was in my office and he was like part of one of the other platoons, and he tried to tell me that it was just

a local community organization, it wasn't about racism anymore. Um. So I told him that racism is a primitive caveman idea, and then he was an idiot for being one because I was trying to get him to fight me in my office. Since if there's a thing that I could have gotten away with when I was in the Marine Corps would have been beating the ship out of a KKK member as a black guy in my office, Like I could have been like, sir, it was a Nazi. What the fund did you want me? Like? Yeah, that's

all we're gonna have for today. We're about to go. As we've record this, we're probably about the thirty or forty five minutes at from from reaching the protest location. So we're gonna go do that. And then the next yeah, we gotta grab some Dorito's, protest Doritos and protest water, and then we're gonna go March. And so the next episode that drops on Thursday will will be us talking about that um and we'll we'll also talk a little bit about the history of punching Nazis and how well

it tends to work historically. Not that any of us are planning to punch Nazis, but it is a subject of debate to punch. All of us know how to punch. And this is the city where Richard Spencer was punched during the inauguration. So if everybody, basically every guy at every radical house party I went to after that was like, hey, baby, that was me. I've got a hundred of guys who

conclaimed with the puncher. Okay, Well, for a look into the history of punching Nazis and whether or not that's a good idea, because it's very much debatable, and for our after rally experiences. You will have to check it on Thursday when we were recording all of that, or when we will be daring all of that. We're already recording it. Time is a flat circle. It's a relative concept. I'm Robert Evans. This has been behind the Bastards. You can find us online at www dot behind the bastards

dot com. You can find us on Twitter at Instagram at Bastards pod, and you can find me on Twitter at I Right. Okay, see you guys soon. H h h h