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Hi everyone from New York Magazine in the Box Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Today we have a conversation with Ellie Reeve and Mike Hicksenbaugh, two journalists who recently published books that document the rise of the alt-right and anti-woke parent activists respectively. Ellie is a correspondent at CNN and a former correspondent from Vice News. You might remember her from Vice News's Emmy
Winning Special on the white supremacist march in Charlottesville. Her book is titled Black Pill, How I Witness the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics. Mike is a senior reporter for NBC, the host of the Peabody
Award Winning Podcasts South Lake and the author of They Came for the Schools. Both of these books are excellent and both warrant their own interview but I wanted to speak to them together because the two movements they chronicle are in many ways two sides of
the same, fetid coin. The respectable upper middle class middle-aged suburban moms in They Came for the Schools might not seem like they have anything in common with the angry, violent incel Nazis who marched on Charlottesville but in fact both groups are at their core far right political movements that are motivated by anti-blackness and have recently shifted
focus of their hate towards trans people. Ellie and Mike and I will talk about the genesis and evolution of the alt-right and the anti-woke parent activists, the differences, similarities and parallels and what effect they'll have on the upcoming election. And our expert question today comes from someone I know really well, Katie Curric who also has been covering these issues over the many years.
Ellie and Mike thank you for being on. You both written fantastic books that document I would say the rise of hate and tolerance in most of all radicalization though they're very different books but I felt like they belonged together in a strange way and so we're going to have a talk about where things are going. Let's start by introducing the
books Ellie in Blackpill which is a great title. You write about how a subset of alienated young men who posted memes on image boards like 4chan and 8chan morphed into real life violent white supremacists explain what blackpill means and how did the radicalization take place alienated young man is not a new fresh thing for our society but how did the radicalization
happen. So most people who have encountered politics on the internet are familiar with the red pill comes from the matrix where the heroes give it if they're a blue pill or a red pill the blue pill let's live with the you know the fantasy 90s version made by
machines or the red pill takes them into the horrible but harsh reality that they are slaves to machines opens their eyes exactly this is often used as a metaphor for buying into right wing extremist politics but from that came a lot of different kinds of pills
we've seen coconut pill take off right now but the blackpill is the one that I think is most important because it's not about an idea but like a feeling and a way of giving yourself permission to do bad things it's this nihilism that society is absolutely corrupt
and hopeless and it is going to collapse and if anything you should enjoy and hasten the collapse of society because what comes after will be a new golden age and that's how people give themselves permission to take very radical action that they wouldn't have
normally done so how do you get to a black pill for the people that I interviewed it happened in online chat rooms like you start feeling that everything is terrible and you seek out information that can confirms that idea you seek out communities where people are all
posting and everyone is trying to one up each other for the most like dark and depraved analysis of where society is right now and pretty soon you don't get along with your friends anymore the people in that regular world your family they don't get it the people
who get it and get you are the people in this world and it helps seal you off from a reality where you can just go outside and touch grass life's not so bad I'd rather live now than a time before penicillin you know right but it does jump what is the jump point into
real life so with the far right activists that I followed online they started wanting to trying to affect the real world for us they did this by trolling by getting the media to repeat their in jokes unintentionally on air once that started happened then they started
to try to move into the real world they started being these brawls in between far right and leftist or anti-Trump protesters especially in California and they started they started taking videos of themselves fighting the leftists and the audience was not for the people
in say Berkeley the audience was for the internet and so they started seeing themselves like fighting it felt like they were winning like they were bringing the left to heal and so that those if those brawls started getting bigger and bigger and bigger and all that
led up to in 2017 what they called the summer of hate and the climax was supposed to be the United Right March and Charlottesville which we were there let me get to Mike the young men in Ellie's books are generally self described losers whereas the main subjects in your book
they came for the schools are upper middle class parents in South like Texas a suburb outside of Dallas for worth I guess anti woke parents they became similarly radicalized in a very different way that there was a national plot to teach white children to be ashamed with their raise and to indoctrinate them into hating their country talk about their radicalization because in a lot of ways it's not a lot different except not punching people necessarily.
Yeah right I do think there's a lot of overlap in these books that is not immediately obvious and so the the parents I document in South like Texas who were kind of service stand-ins for the conservative suburban moms who we've gone to war with their school boards in the
last few years under the banner of moms for Liberty anti critical race theory anti DEI these are parents who became convinced as a result of right wing messaging that public schools were teaching their little white children to hate themselves because they're white and
that the schools were teaching all of the black children that they are inherently victims and so this is a kind of a straw man depiction of what DEI is or what happens when kids learn about like the true history of slavery in America and so parents heard that message from
Chris Rufo on Fox News on Tucker Carlson and on their Facebook pages and started showing up at school board meetings and as that energy built in places like South Lake Texas people like Steve Bannon and Chris Rufo and Tucker Carlson and everyone on Fox News saw that
energy and kind of built the conservative political movement around school activism in recent years and as these debates in these public meetings grew more hostile you started to see people from the internet culture that you read about black build showing up at the meetings these
kind of you know Patriot front people showing up outside of drag drag story hour or or protesting outside of libraries with moms for Liberty you know moms for Liberty would not declare themselves white supremacist group but you know at times that's who's in their corner.
There's been tons of nonsense on Fox News why did this illuminate them why did this get them going on this particular topic because there's all kinds of stuff you know that they put out there why did this like the bathrooms thing the trans bathrooms things didn't really
work right why did this work well there's a there's a reason my book is set in the suburbs because suburban schools this is like this is this place that's a magnet for people all types of parents who have been convinced that that's how you're going to get your kid a great education
that's the path to the American dream and so there's a reason that every 20 years when there's a massive you know pushing to the culture war that schools are off in the front line of this because you know schools are where we teach the next generation of kids what's true and what's
right and what's good and decent what what elements for history is is worth remembering and so the these parents who are most animated about this have internalized a version of America where America is good America is a Christian nation America has been ordained by God and so when you
start teaching kids that you know for hundreds of years America did these horrible things in the name of racism that they enslaved people were enslaved because they were black you know you teach kids really what happened during Jim Crow or in some of or the reason why some of these
suburbs were created in the first place that conflicts with the image that these parents are really invested in their kids learning which is America is the greatest country in the world and has always been good and just right so Ellie the suburbs Newbrook were initially anonymous
posting on forms using made up names they love their names I noticed that talk about the the juxtaposition team being anonymous and also creating community because you're sort of cosplaying right you're sort of a character rather than the person you are and how did the
dynamic change when they started meeting in person right so part of the problem is that they are when they're chatting online they feel like they're speaking to their best friends right but they're really speaking to a fantasy they're imagination I mean if you've done online dating
you kind of understand that's right the person you're chatting with is is the projection of your fantasies it's not necessarily how the real person is once they went out and started meeting each other in person there was suddenly horrified so I had you know what a white supremacist
Chris can't well tell me wow I really shouldn't have trusted that guy Jason Kessler who organized the United right rally because I thought he was fearless but it turns out he's just clueless and doesn't understand the kind of danger that he's put himself into
but I I just wanted to say something about what Mike was saying I am also so happy to talk to you because one of the things a white nationalist told me that he thought was a problem with the alt-right which was this new sort of internet savvy version of white supremacy was that it was so
heavily influenced by insults that it was very very misogynist like this was a massive break from the old white nationalism with the hating of women like white women were a major enemy and what he said was that looking back in the past like the 60s white women had been more effective advocates
for segregation than white men had they had been much more effective because they had been arguing for these policies in the schools they've been arguing against busing and so he felt it was a real tragedy that they didn't have white women on their side on the 2010s so they wanted they
less insult more what less insult well they don't want to look like losers that's another part of it but so when they do meet in person they don't like each other that would be a negative for their movement correct well i think that's part of the reason why the alt-right started to fall
apart after charlie's failed there were massive consequences legal ones financial ones but they also realized they couldn't trust each other like they'd been all hyped up by these people they didn't actually know like they were i got into these message boards and these like internal
chatrooms where they would be like how dare you criticize our comrade for hiling Hitler when he's willing to die for us but they didn't actually know who that guy was they had no idea whether he was willing to die for them maybe he was a federal informant they had no idea or they're just
just a wimp who didn't want to die for them wanted to right tail and stuff like that might you show how the backlash to a diversity plan in South Lake not the formation of a superpack that supported far right candidates for the school board they took over the board and their success has
been replicated by conservative groups across the country and this isn't in person movement of people who do know each other even though they use social media and reinforce each other right but they also use things like mailers yard signs in person school board meetings where they
get people to speak up talk about the in person dynamic here because it's it's it's almost an opposite so what was happening in alay's book yeah and what's fascinating is the way that people in the in South Lake who've become aligned with South Lake families pack that's the political action
committee you mentioned and in other places these folks have really built their identity around these fights and around the communities that they've built in the last few years to fight these battles and so in South Lake what they did was after the school district to try to address
the types of racist incidents that were bubbling to the surface in 2017 and 2018 the midst of the night the ride and all that explain what the what the incidents were they were people chanting correct yeah this is a majority white school district that had grown more diverse and so you know the
the thing that said everything off was a group of white students in high school filming themselves chanting like a call in response chanting the n-word and after that video kind of went viral in town black parents came to a school board meeting in 2018 and parent after parent said
that do you know what happens when my kid goes to school they hear jokes about lynching they get made fun of people the kids come up and touch their hair um this whole horrible range of just explicitly racist comments to microaggressions and and so the school district had made an attempt
to address this by putting together a committee and developing a diversity plan that would include diversity training for teachers and students culturally responsive uh curriculum you know a full counting of America's racist history so kids understand why chanting the n-word for example is bad
and that's when the backlash that that plan was released in 2020 and these white conservative parents who got together a foreign political action committee really got connected with some really savvy political operatives in in north Texas and they raised a quarter million
dollars for school board elections where you normally raise five thousand dollars and and they turned the local nonpartisan election into almost a referendum on what America is and it and should be but there's an in-person dynamic that that yeah and social pressure versus an online
sort of fan base kind of these these folks were getting together at school board meetings school board meetings became kind you know what used to be this very empty room or one or two people would come forward they became like political parties like political rallies where these folks were packing
the meetings they were working they were at times it seemed to attempt to one up each other with with their comments they were they were speaking for the room but also for the camera that was live streaming this and and it wasn't just at school board meetings that these folks were
getting together they were holding rallies at churches post-COVID this this was for many people their new social life was going to war right over the school board it's a party it's a party yep vile party but it's a party nonetheless so Ellie as you touch them briefly let's talk about
about gender and age but all right is mostly young male and deeply misogynistic which apparently is a negative for them the anti well activist movement is led in many cases by women and as you noted Mike the most well-known group is moms for liberty so one here we have angry young men many
of them self-diagnosed artists with limited social skills and then we have sort of normy moms and their 30s in middle age many of them savvy professionals talk about age and gender how it affects these groups how they mobilize Ellie you first and then Mike well a lot of these guys got started
into these extremist world spite posting on a message board about how they were losers it was a message board we had to post something original and they didn't have much to talk about but how your losers this is a message board discussing your loserhood exactly their humiliations at school
you know they had a term for embarrassing some themselves in public which was to have spaghetti fall out of their pockets and what started as like pretty benign stuff escalated to more and more hateful ideas and part of it was like why is it this way why is this happening to me and the
answer they came up with was that feminism or Jews had a plot to suppress the white male identity to make themselves hate being white much as we saw with this CRT controversy um and so that organized them into like they had a cause now they had an enemy um the I mean I I it sounds absurd
to repeat it but the the basic structure of this conspiracy theory is that Jews have an instinct to suppress white racial identity so that they don't end up with another Holocaust they do this by convincing women who we have evolved to be more conformist because when warring tribes invaded
each other um they killed all the men and captured the women and the women who refused to be war brides were all killed so only conformist women passed on their genes and then they believe that people of color are easy to control right so it's this conspiracy theory to make white people hate being white and want to have interracial families so that that's their idea that's what they believe um and as absurd as it sounds with constant repetition it became very obvious to them I was listening
to his speech by a white nationalist where he talked about the shock he felt when he was hanging out with a normal friend of his who and realized that that friend believed that the Holocaust happened and he realized he had been in such a bubble that he forgot that average people believe the Holocaust happened so it's sort of a self reinforcing thing that they go with each other correct yeah the problem is someone else is getting all the women and they think they deserve the women and so they
want to reorder society in a way that they are allotted the women they deserve yeah I've seen a couple of these speeches that the strong men have to take back the women correct right but they're not particularly strong but they so desperately want to be they desperately desperately want to be
and a lot of these far right groups a big part of their organizing is working out together fighting together they want to look physically fit and when there's infighting among them it is often because of quote optics which can mean like they thought they looked chubby in their uniforms like
there's so much about these men wanting to be more attractive and wanting to attract women and not because they want to fall in love but because having a woman at their side projects social status to other men and so it talk about age and gender for your group Mike the connection is that
a persecution narrative is what's motivating both of these groups and so in the case of the people I document in my book the the moms are operating from a perspective that's very relatable for parents which is this kind of mama bear mentality I'm going there's a risk to my child my child is
threatened and I'm going to protect them and so you know for for a mom if you come to believe the narrative that public schools are have been captured by leftists part of this you know democratic conspiracy to take over education over four decades and they're they're trying to destroy America by
teaching your children these horrible things and they're by the way they're also going to convince your child to change their gender or to be gay although there's no evidence for that happening what's powerful is the belief and so these parents have come to believe these things and what's
motivating them is that maternal instinct that I'm going to do whatever I can to keep keep my kids safe and protect them and and that's also the patriotic Christian thing to do is to stop these leftist evil forces from infiltrating our society through our schools but where's the jump happened
because these are pretty competent successful well-off suburbanites right they presumably they don't have a gripe where does the gripe come from because you can see how these young men by themselves at home they don't have dates they never date they're lonely but these people aren't
like that they have lives yeah you know the suburban the suburban parents are have everything you know they they're they're they've got the great house they've got the great school what they're fighting against is losing those things they've been told and are convinced that as the curriculum changes
as these DEI plans come in as the demographics frankly continue to change that they're losing their piece of the pie and I thought it's interesting I talked with one black mother in South Lake um it was talking with her about what how her kids had suffered in the school district over the years
and we were speaking on January 6 2021 and so I was watching the monitors on MSNBC of people storming the Capitol and she was telling me this her theory for why this is all happening and her theory boil down to South Lake's getting a lot more diverse there's some really highly competent immigrant
families and those kids are all valedictorian sluditorian every year and some of the backlash is because the white kids aren't at the top anymore and then it's not just about them and she was describing like this hyper local replacement theory um as being a motivator for the school board
backlash while I'm watching on TV you know the results of the great replacement theory essentially playing out in Washington DC so I think all of these storylines are connected and it just it comes back to this belief that we're going to lose what we've earned they're coming for what we've earned
and they're going to give it away to people who don't deserve it to don't deserve it even if they deserve it so in both cases we've a group of mostly white people who are in a broad sense angry at black people and the anger gets expressed in different ways Ellie as you explain in the case of
the alt-right young men get blackpilled and that's the book style into thinking american studies corrupt and completely irredeemable and this they descend into this nihilistic hopelessness as the only solution is to blow things up and start again um and Mike they organize anti-woke movement doesn't
want to just get rid of diversity programs that's where it started they want parent schools they move to the next thing that they want to which is parent schools and publicly funded private school vouchers right yeah so one of the things I found is you know the initial CRT backlash a lot of
different groups on the right saw that as an opportunity so including you know the the you know the far right white nationalist in cell type folks all that as an opportunity to kind of move into the mainstream at the same time groups that have been pushing to restore what they say is
America's Christian origins people these people have been fighting for this for decades they saw these school fights particularly in South lake as a chance to advance the ball and so David Barton is a political activist who presents himself as a historian and if you have heard a politician say
that the separation of church and state is a myth or that that was meant as a one-way wall to keep the government out of the church not to keep the church out of the government you've heard Lauren Bober say that Marjorie Taylor Green my Johnson David Barton is the guy who has created
that narrative for 30 years he's pushed this kind of false history of America being explicitly Christian and and basically society in America was great and godly until 1960s when the Supreme Court removed prayer from school and then after that you know everything's gone downhill and so as the
C.R.T. backlash became the lead story on Fox News and a conservative media folks like David Barton and his allies saw this as a chance okay but it's not just removed DEI but it's not just push out LGBTQ content let's push in the 10 commandments let's do prayer again we've got a good Supreme
Court now so we're going to win these court battles and you see this most explicitly in Oklahoma now where the state school superintendent Ryan Walters has just pushed through to you know mandate that every classroom have a bible and that kids learn from it in public schools and the ultimate
hope is there's a two front kind of campaign it's put god into public schools and also allow parents to get public money to send their kids to private Christian school so the school voucher stuff that is at the heart of project 2025 we'll be back in a minute
I'm Pete Barara former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York second gentleman Doug M. Hoff joins me this week on my podcast stay tuned and he had some choice words for JD Vance and Donald Trump these supplicants these opportunists like JD Vance and others and it shows this is counter it's buffoonery we discuss vice president Kamala Harris's historic road to
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in my case we have a group of very empowered rich conservatives parents who want to preserve the status quo or return it to the status quo that used to be but both have similar fears and shared enemies the all right literally fought against what they perceived as antifa and members
of black lives matters movement whereas the anti woke parents are more focused on BLM in their case the fights were imaginary really no one from BLM ever heard anyone in South Lake or damage property but their imagined specters still terrifies these parents Ellie talk about antifa in the
alt rights collective consciousness it indoors even though it doesn't quite exist in the way they think it does and how do they perceive these enemies and then let's hear Mike talk about how beyond lives rent free in the anti woke parents minds continues to yeah this they're very very very
afraid of antifa in when Trump was inaugurated during Trump's inauguration Richard Spencer was standing on the street doing some broadcast interview and someone sucker punched him explain who he is Richard Spencer became the face of the alt right so the since the alt right was mostly
anonymous trolls on fortune hardly any of them would show the real face and real name but he was absolutely willing to he was part of the more older white nationalist movement but once he saw this wave building he tried to surf it and not quite successfully but so he was wearing a pepay the
frog pet lapel pen standing on a street corner during Trump's inauguration and someone ran by and punched him in the face this led to like people thought this was hilarious on twitter like finally this jerk gets what he deserves he's talking about peaceful ethnic cleansing like he's talking
about fundamentally violent things finally he's faced with some violence himself but when the alt rights saw that they're like oh god they're going to try to kill us this led to a military veteran starting to form a security group to protect Spencer because he thought Spencer would be
killed they thought they they always perceive themselves as the ones under threat the ultimate victims the truly oppressed and the reason this is important is that this is how they start justifying violence as self-defense in advance of anything happening they are start working
themselves up into thinking how evil and predatory antiviz that they'll beat people senseless with bicycle locks and so that's how they decide to start carrying weapons how they decide to have security guards because they believe the people will attack them they believe they'll be attacked
when there hasn't really happened anything happened except for the sucker punch right or some some fist fights uh in California he's signed charles filled a march in with these big shields thinking that you know violent antifascists are going to attack them and you know a one-white
national smarvel to me afterwards was like yeah we were outnumbered but in terms of the people prepared to fight we far outnumbered them because they turned out to just be you know liberals who wanted to stand up against hate right now talk about how BLM affects these anti woke parents because
they also are similarly they get very incandescent about it yeah well you know the the fear and the specter of antifa and black lives matter it was a instigating factor in all of this in South Lake you know 2020 summer of 2020 all over the country in the midst of the protest for racial
justice this viral conspiracy theory was hitting towns all over the country saying and and teeth is coming to your neighborhood to our neighborhood and they're gonna I saw this in my neighborhood outside of Houston at the time this little suburban you know subdivision called timber
like estates we didn't have sidewalks but my neighbors on my Facebook page were warning that antifa was coming on July 4th they're planning the attack for that night to to mask the gunfire under the cover of fireworks uh stack up you need to get your guns ready and loaded now um and so
in South Lake you know this again this is an effluent mostly white but more diverse diversifying community uh some young students some high school students decided to hold their own black lives matter rally that summer in you know kind of the the brit seat town center with you know it's kind
of one of these little downtowns it has an apple store and some you know movie theater and the parents in South Lake were had been whipped up into a frenzy that outside groups were going to come they were going to smash the glass and that there was one kind of locally viral twitter post that
from an account called antifa lock heart where they were they were clearly made up we had like two followers but they had warned that they said that you know they were shipping bricks in they're gonna ship bricks into town centers that there were bricks handy to chuck through the glass
and so all these parents in South Lake were all geared up the mayor of South Lake and city council members and even the school board were warning not to go we can't ensure your kids are safe and so this fear that someone from the outside is coming to change your community to hurt your
community was really revved up that summer and it was in that context that they began to the they pivoted to not this physical threat but they're not coming to take South Lake by force they're they've already here this black lives matter mentality is already in our schools it's in the
curriculum it's in this diversity plan and this is the this is our fight right and one of the reasons is because they have thought leaders as as you both have been talking about and you mentioned Richard Spencer's one of them Steve Bannon's another one but in the case of the anti woke
authors it's Chris Rufo so talk a little bit and then I would love you allay to talk about Steve Bannon's impact on this because I think he is kind of the patron saint of these guys but Chris Rufo didn't lead the parents at South Lake but he's done more than anyone
else to populate the term CRT critical race theory he's into the parental rights thing and the scaremonger around it talk about his strategy and because he seems because he's quite intelligent the way he does it I can watch his moves but talk about his strategy and how did he
manage to brand well intention attempts at promoting diversity as essentially reverse racism so successfully he's also extremely transparent he just tells yes he is which is fascinating to watch yeah so interestingly the fight over the diversity plan in South Lake was really
had taken off in the summer and into the fall of 2020 and it was in the midst of that that Chris Rufo appeared for the first time on Tucker Carlson show in that September and he went on you know this is a guy who's who had obtained documents showing that you know workers in Seattle had
these optional diversity trainings that separated people based on their race and he he saw a lot of ebrem kendi's writings and so he went on fox news and declared that the entire DEI infrastructure in the federal government that workers have to take these trainings it's all built
around this thing called critical race theory right and that was the beginning of him what he described later as creating a national brand finding a basically a scary sounding phrase that could be what conservative point to anytime they see something or dealing with race that they
don't like or makes them uncomfortable and he's also worked to create that straw man that I talked about earlier where every kid every white kid is being taught to hate themselves or that America is bad black children are being taught that their victims and it was amazing to watch how the language
that Chris Rufo brought to Tucker Carlson show that then was quickly picked up by Donald Trump in the weeks after suddenly was being repeated at every school board meeting in South Lake for the rest of the fight there the parents did adopt that language and that framing and it's in a way
intensified what was already a really intense fight because now the framing was the this isn't just a diversity plan that has gone too far it's not some well-intentioned neighbors who I disagree with it's oh this is part of a bigger left wing plot critical race theory is this thing they've
been trying to embed into our lives and into our schools for two decades and oh we caught them we caught them before they could do it here in South Lake and so it turned your neighbor not into like oh I disagree with you politically it's oh you're you're part you're like a foot soldier in this
bigger bigger movement that's out to hurt my community so so Ellie when you talk about this what are the parallels because they're more crude the groups you talk about they're more the they're more fantastical some of their theories some of their ideas but it's not unlike each other can you talk
about the parallels between because they're not reading Chris Rufo these guys you're talking about or are they well they are now I mean one of one of the most fascinating things to me are the the guys who they got sued for organizing Charlottesville they had to look at all this evidence of all the
things they had done and they were chase it they admitted as much Richard Spencer doesn't even call himself a white nationalist anymore let's call himself just a jerk well on bumble he called himself a moderate okay I assume you didn't not dating him but go last we spoke he was trying to
build a religion that would compete with and ultimately destroyed Christianity built around the God Apollo so you know okay but so they look at the Chris Rufo guys they find this more menacing they think in their words normy conservatives are actually more radical in their tactics than
the alt-right was and they are afraid that they might win in bringing down American democracy but Steve Bannon was one of the first to understand the power of this kind of participatory conspiracy theory movement the way these guys could we're always trying to want each other with better memes
he talked in 2015 2016 about how these you can bring these guys in through gamer gate this controversy over women in the video games industry I was right there exactly and you can introduce them to conservatism when he was running bright barred Milo Unopolis worked there he wrote this pretty definitive guide to the alt-right that was very much apologetic for them and it also made the case that the full-on Hitler-Hierling swastika folks were just ironic it also quoted Curtis
Yarvin a blogger in the Peter Teal orbit J.D. Mance is a fan exactly so explain who Yarvin is because he's really quite along with Deni the rest of them I Yarvin once wrote on the pseudonym Minceus Moldberg he's this leader of the neo-reactionary movement the idea that
in order to make the change that we really want to see we need to have a dictatorship in America Caesarism he once wrote that while he was not a white nationalist he was not exactly allergic to the stuff and that his main problem with or his problem with white nationalism is how it activated
the left it created an overwhelming backlash that ultimately hurt the cause of right-wing advocates so they're not quite subtle enough another they're not subtle enough and I do think that there are far right people who learned from the alt-right that you need to be more subtle
the alt-right itself even developed a term hide your power level which meant when you spoke publicly you needed to conceal just how racist you really were until you gained enough power to do something about it and then the racism comes out they can't help themselves it's like Donald
Trump but interestingly both the alt-right and the anti-white parents have also switched their focus to gender and sexuality that's the new motivating force it seems like they're motivated by anti-LGBQ ideology especially against trans kids that's their wedge into it might talk a little bit
about this and then Ellie because it started to become something this idea of family and children about a year into the anti-CRT backlash that he helped create Chris Rufo told the New York Times that well this issues around sexuality and gender there's a lot more sentiment built up around that
probably than even the race issue and again very transparent that was part the beginning of this pivot and the reason that's even more effective is it's one thing to say oh they're teaching my kid about this history of racism or that you know white people are oppressors it's much more personal
when you convince parents that the teachers the librarians the books that my kids are reading they're working to make my kid gay or their pedophiles or groomers right yeah and they're can the trying to convince him but my kid to change their gender and these people are grooming them
which is you know this term that just took off online where anytime there was a book that depicted an LGBTQ character and if you supported having that in a school even if it's a graphic novel aimed at you know fifth graders that doesn't even have a kiss in it that you support grooming kids
you're a pedophile and I actually was on the receiving end of this from just reporting on it some parents in Katie Texas because I had spoken to an LGBTQ teenager for a story they threatened to report me to the police as an and report that I was you know had solicited a
minor and you know what it's a really it's a really effective tactic because I work in journal we work in journalism right we're used to nasty messages and it doesn't get under our skin but something about this threat from these moms really hit me I'm a dad and it's like
you're gonna tell the police that I'm a pedophile even though I knew it was nonsense it had me thinking do I want to keep pursuing this you know this is this is what why do I prep with this shit no it can be effective I've been called the pedophile groom or a hundred times well think
about how a librarian a school librarian or a teacher receive that message or not used to get in those messages and so it's very effective at silencing these ideas at pushing the pushing books out of school and getting teachers just a self-sensor or quit and so in some ways they're they're
winning they can win this fight without even winning elections just by in kind of making making people nervous yeah making them afraid Ellie is that the case with the with your in cell group the idea around gender and sexuality yes that's the center of everything it's all about breeding
and talk about that you know because let me just say Elon Musk talks about breeding and pedophiles almost continually right well the first person who ever the first time I ever heard of drag queen story hour was in 2017 when a teenage fascist troll sent me a screenshot of one
so that stuff was circulating on four channel long before it showed up on Fox News which is a pattern we say repeating yes it goes up and down the stack essentially all of these racist conspiracy theories at their heart the it is about sex and children the idea that we are being
outnumbered we are being replaced we are being taught white people are being taught not to have children in order to suppress their numbers and and I mean like just fear that they are being castrated is is so present I you know a year after Charlottesville I was in this really like dirty
cluttered apartment belonging to Chris Cantwell he'd been in house under house arrest in Virginia for almost a year it was a very depressing place he was struggling with alcoholism but he like looked at me and said you know I matter like I matter more than most people ever will I want to
matter I want to have children it's just the the the idea that one real man masculinity is being erased and that that is a way to stop white people from having kids is the absolute animating motivation we'll be back in a minute
so let's get let's get a contemporary politics because I think one of the issues is it's actually jumped into real politics right now we have JD Vance talking about this I got into it with him on Twitter over over procreation he kept saying liberals don't believe in the future
they don't have children and I kept saying I have doubled the children you have so what's wrong with you like can you not have children is it you have an issue with your procreation I just was trying to bother him but one of the things that that they talk about and as much as you joke about
this childless cat woman thing which is funny on its face it's a real thing right and and Donald Trump and JD Vance and many others are taking advantage of this and Donald Trump who is one of the greatest roles in history I think attacks trans people because he's I talk about
transgender everyone goes crazy talk a little bit out it jumping into this mainstream way first how do you look at what's going on with JD Vance because everyone's again joking about it but it's not it's real that he really does think this about children uh well I was so fascinated people
were so shocked by this childless cat lady comment because 2016 2017 I was called that hundreds and hundreds of times by these little outright trolls like I mean that's their go-to joke and I was recently talking to my father-in-law's friends you know these folks in their 70s and they were so
shocked by that they're like people say that to you online that's horrible no one should ever say that to you and I'm in my own bubble where this has become normal right right do you indeed have a cat just asking no I'm allergic to cats I mean that's like I'm crazy like I can be in high three times yeah right okay why is that why we talk about why that is this idea because it's not just I they won't have sex with me is that their childless cat ladies it's I don't even get that they believe
that women have been fools because we're we're brains are not so good because we're girls they believe women have been fooled by feminism into believing that careers will give them satisfaction that they should not that they should have promiscuous sex with many many partners but they should never settle down because children are not rewarding and so that women are denying their own natural instincts until it's too late and they're barren and so all they can do is feed their cats and make other
people's lives miserable I mean all the things that he said to me it's JD Van to himself who has also been stuck in a bubble where that comment I mean when he said it he didn't have a look on his face like he thought it was being like provocative right like he just rattled that off like this was
a normal thing to say and it and makes me wonder if he is living in a world where that's a completely normal commentary and he's lost sight of the rest of reality yeah that's strange or perhaps he's most ambitious fucker and history and that's what's going on but Ali vice president Harris obviously
is now likely to be the democratic nominee a black woman will that lead to increased interest in extremist groups both online and person or will it give their ideas more salience or is she beating them like a drum right now well long before Joe Biden stepped on a white nationalist
nut parrot told me how afraid he was of vice president Harris that Joe Biden was the last of his generation the last old school politician who was moderate and would try to hold together this fragile coalition but he saw Harris as someone out to punish white people for for the sins of
the past so for all this talk of white guilt it is often the white nationalist who have it the most and they have said to me explicitly that they are afraid when people of color are in power they will do to white people what white people did to them a few decades ago so that that is
driving their fear and is this animating your these groups that you're monitoring right now her her ascension what has been far more motivating for them more animating for them that was October 7th because they felt that there is no criticism of Israel from the right and so into
that void they were able to offer their voices and many white nationalist accounts were able to grow their followings on X by a huge amount because they were the ones willing to drive an anti-Semitic message they were thrilled that Elon interacted with the hashtag band the ADL
so Nick Fuentez the white nationalist holocaust skeptic who died with Donald Trump was thrilled when Elon was sort of said you know this is true of a great replacement theory tweet he's like this is the richest man on earth and he is he is saying exactly what we said in Charlottesville which is Jews
will not replace us and if you look at that chant and then you look at the republican party six years later have I moved closer to the republicans or have they moved closer to me and he obviously thought the answer was they have moved closer to him that's interesting she's not driving them
crazy anyway oh just give it time give it time yeah yeah Mike the same thing what started as anti-CRT that became the anti-trans anti-Holik BTQ in schools has now coalesced under this umbrella of anti-dei yeah and it's so interesting how how much more explicit the messaging is you
know before during the anti-CRT movement you'd routinely hear parents quoting MLK talking about how we don't want to see color parental rights right I don't my kids should be taught not to see color and and now with the anti-dei kind of rhetoric it's much more I do see color and it is the
real racism is hiring black people for positions because I can't trust that they're actually qualified so you can see that kind of it's not a dog whistle anymore you know it's it's very kind of explicit so to declare you know Charlie Kirk talking about how I can't trust that if I see a black
pilot on my airplane that he's qualified because this idea that Michielang was also it boils down to this idea that and then I that I I heard even from the beginning of my reporting on this which is that on the one hand they think everyone's equal and everyone has a fair shot at regardless
of their race in our society but when you confront some of these folks with statistics showing that you know for example the the black family median income is is way blower than white families and you ask them that is that systemic racism dysracism exists they say no that everyone is treated
equally based on merit and so but when you really drill into that idea there's there's only really two options either there's systemic racism or structural racism that leads to that inequity or you think black people are not as capable lesser than yes right and so you're seeing that play out
in this DEI commentary that anytime so you just you know come was a DEI vice president or president and the idea is that while she's black therefore she must have been picked only for her race and inherent in that is this idea that there are there no are there no qualified black people
yeah they are they are presenting that so every episode we ask an expert for question we've got a good one today let's hear it hi everyone this is Katie Kirk I'm a journalist co-founder of Katie Kirk Media and host of the podcast next question and like you I was covering the so-called Unite
the right rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017 it was appalling to see them walk across the lawn of my alma mater the University of Virginia chanting Jews will not replace us as well as the violence that broke out the next day so my question is since the organizers were found liable
for the violence that broke out in Charlottesville did that have any impact on these organized groups and have they changed their mo since that event as a result early why don't you take this one uh yes the short answer is yes uh so most of the people who are um found liable at that trial
backed out of white nationalist organizing is where these were devastating consequences for them they were forced to look at their messages their internal communications with each other and see how crazy it had gotten how foolish they were how glib they were about violence um they are forced
to confront are they gonna have to spend the rest of their life paying off this debt um so met high back met parrot uh Richard Spencer they've backed off from in iRL organizing the ones who went on they again like it's about being more subtle instead of doing these really alienating things
like wearing swastikas or doing the nazi salute they wrapped themselves in the american flag so patriot front which was founded by a guy who had founded a group that was in Charlottesville they wear red white and blue they showed up recently in national marched on the street
they have these shields that are almost like a comic book style superhero shield red white and blue they're they are trying to make the implicit case that being proud of america means white nationalism they're trying to conflate the meaning of those two things right or get
rid of the word white national exactly replace it with patriotism correct right nico entesca's movement america first right they're trying so they they've tried to reposition themselves as defending the greatness of america rather than this like weird sort of nazi fetishes which of course america
first was supported by the nazis but um back in the day but is that working from your perspective i i i think those guys they're usefulness you know they were sort of a patsey there are many conservatives who are willing to use some of the tactics the internet tactics
so organizing tactics um the way of talking about de and crt they've figured out all that stuff that was good the word that was popular and gotten rid of all the weird creepy like the in-cell stuff the misogyny you know again they they realize the women can be very effective advocates for these
ideas so there's it's self-defeating to alienate them and that said though mic this jadey vance thing is hitting a lot of people including republican women they don't like the way he's talking about women which is hateful so how effective are they being to collaborate and become more i guess i
hate to use the term whitewash essentially from your perspective is that what these groups are doing or they become involved in because it's working and winning power locally so in 2021 when the school board fights were really popping off steve banan went on his war room podcast and declared that the path to saving america is going to run through the school boards and what what he meant was ralf reed it said this previously said i'd rather have a thousand school board members in one
president and no school board member what banan was saying was what he meant was that we're going to win back the suburbs we're gonna win back these disaffected white suburban voters by fighting crt and these book bans we're gonna we're gonna win them back because moderate conservative white
women who don't like Donald trump like this stuff um and he that just has not proven out um mom's liberty is losing in all kinds of communities and what's what's really happened what they've succeeded at doing by by making these local school board into parts and fights they've they've
taken kind of the ugliest divisions of our national politics and culture wars and and push those down into local nonpartisan races and so if you're in a suburb like south lake that was trump plus 30 the mom's for liberty south lake families pack conservative people are gonna win seats on the
board and if you're in a blue or purpleous district mom's for liberty is losing those races because there's a lot of moderate conservatives those those white women voters actually don't want people messing around with their schools they don't want this stuff they don't they want there was a group
outside of austin in the uh suburb of round rock a group of progressive and moderate conservative mostly white parents banded together to fight back against the conservative takeover their slogan was make school boards boring again and they won by double digits and i think you're seeing that
message coalesce and the national level with you know governor walls is you know these guys are weird but it's not elect people it seems to be the the message that maybe resonates with these suburban moms as well that let's just get back to just stop fighting about this stuff so Ellie what
is the two more questions what is the tactics of the proud boys the oath keepers at three percenters they are fielding candidates for in school board elections but what has been the most effective thing and where have they sort of lost a step uh making the bad guy gay people and trans people
is much more effective than racism it just is you see so the proud boys you know after gen 6 they like a former proud boys told me he was afraid of being part of this group anymore because he thought he would get drawn up on reco charges or something like that they're afraid that they're
um through the because tant candidates declared the materiose group um that they will be spied on so the national group is broken apart instead you see them protesting uh drag queen story hours or in drag shows so i i what you i what you see going forward is more of a focus on sex
and less on race and it's working from your perspective or not yeah well better than i'll give you an example i interviewed this guy who under a trump store in southwestern virginia filled with Confederate flags and he introduced me to his friend who was a black woman who owned her own
trump store like people who might even have some bigoted beliefs don't want to think of themselves as racist they don't want to think of America as racist and so this like very hard edged racist advocacy is very off-putting to people again like kirtis yavin whatever his motivations i do
think he was onto something with his observation some 15 years ago which is that white nationalism motivates a massive backlash from the normal people because they don't that's not the world that they want to live in right exactly so how do you look at this group is it on the runner is it
just regrouping and and then mike same thing with the the moms from liberty and those those groups well one of the things i write about in the book is decades long fight between the mainstream conservative movement and the far right the trying the far right trying to get in and being pushed back
right so this is a struggle that goes on and it will continue to go on i don't know what's going to happen all i've ever been good at predicting is when uh when i see a lot of people who are not connected with each other all excited around one event so that happened with charlotte's fill that
happened with january six just diverse you know people who never knew each other were all wanted to go to these events so in the fall like mike i've done some reporting on school boards and i went to florida where mom's for liberty has been very successful in getting these last past to help them
band books and there was a massive turnout of people who were opposed to them like and not just you know a stereotypical like in PR listening liberal or something like people of all striped working class parents people who had blended families they thought they're like one guy said to me listen i
wasn't the kind of guy who would wave a pride flag okay but these guys are going too far banning books is cheap going too far trying to make these rules about how we talk about slavery is going too far and so that is what i've seen i've seen a very big backlash to these far right movements
and the gains that they've made in infiltrating the mainstream and mike i don't think mom's for liberty is going away even they've lost a number of races but this as i mentioned earlier a lot of people have built their identities around waging these fights but there's a subset of
of these parents and these groups that i've been really watching and it's you know ties back Christian nationalism there there are influential faith leaders pastors apostles prophets whatever you want to call them who have been preaching to large audiences uh including via charlie kirk's
program that america is engaged in a spiritual war between forces of good and evil they they point to the school stuff and the trans stuff is evidence of that and that we're in the end times cherry fall well be it's retread cherry fall yeah well it's it's beyond that where god has chosen us
as the rapture generation um and in order to pave the way for the return of jesus we need to rally around and support down trump in november and that rhetoric was that type of rhetoric is was partially motivating for what we saw in january 6th and i think that language that you know this
idea that it's good for seval and the the folks push an lgbtq and trans are the evil their their comela is uh being guided by a demon one that one of these guys lance guana has said recently um and i think that is setting the table for something i don't know what um but people are
yeah because there's nowhere to go some people believe this the the the reality is people believe that we're in a struggle not just to save america but they they frame it as like an existential will good will god win in the end and we need to get trump in the white house to do that
yeah i've heard it from i've heard it at one point my one of my relatives we've done the rapture and my brother made a bumper sticker for her that said when the rapture comes can i have your stuff she didn't she put it on so no isn't that good no she didn't like it um thank you so much for both you
and these both books are really important reads um for for all of us i think thanks on with carousel swisher is produced by christian caster rassel cateriochum jolly mires megan bernie and gabriela biello special thanks to shina azaki cake galagher cake furby and
calon lynch our engineers are Fernando aruda and rick quan our theme music is by track academics if you're already following the show you're getting coconut piled if not you have to listen to charlie kirk's podcast on endless loop go wherever you listen to podcasts search for on with carousel swisher and hit follow thanks for listening to on with carousel swisher from new york magazine the box media podcast network and us we'll be back on monday with more