Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: "Anti-Immigration, the Far Right & the Christchurch Shooter" with Investigative Journalist Joey Watson

Transcript

PREMIUM: "Anti-Immigration, the Far Right & the Christchurch Shooter" with Investigative Journalist Joey Watson · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
0:07
Here's a dangerous idea for you, a very, very dangerous idea, and I'm going to articulate
0:11
it for you in a series of steps, a series of logical steps, and you tell me where you
0:17
get off the train, you don't have to tell me, it would be weird if you just announced
0:22
it to the world as you were walking along listening to this podcast or doing the dishes
0:26
or driving or something, just think in your head, where are you getting off this train?
0:29
Step one, the rate of immigration in Western countries has been too high for a while.
0:38
Step two, some migrant communities in Western countries have failed to integrate as well
0:47
as others have.
0:49
Three, the scale and subpar integration of Muslim communities in particular has been notable
1:00
in some Western countries.
1:03
Four, there are plenty of countries which are unashamed about existing mainly for the
1:10
benefit of their own traditional ethnic group, Japan is for the Japanese, for example,
1:15
and so on.
1:17
Five, the local ethnic group in Western countries is usually, by definition, the white Christian
1:26
population.
1:28
With me so far, did you get off yet, can you see where this is headed?
1:34
Step six, the two party political system in many Western democracies does not seem very
1:40
well equipped to address the pace of immigration and the problems of integration of certain communities
1:45
because both major parties in most big countries seem to be deaf to it.
1:49
They seem to support continued immigration regardless of what people try to tell them
1:54
at the ballot box, so that leads to dysfunctional populist backwashes like Brexit and Donald
1:59
Trump, but they don't really seem to be terribly effective in changing things either.
2:05
Step seven, therefore, citizens may have a duty to take it upon themselves to defend Western
2:11
civilization if the political systems won't.
2:16
Step eight, sometimes when you're fighting for causes that are bigger than yourself,
2:22
people die, people are collateral damage in a broader mission to bring about a world
2:27
that we'll want or to protect things that we value, I think you can probably see what
2:33
we've just done.
2:34
We've literally gone from a reasonable, probably majority concern in many Western countries
2:41
about the pace and integration of migration to essentially far-right white supremacists
2:50
terrorism, and that slippery slope is not accidental, it's something that's being cultivated,
2:58
it's something that is being carefully generated, and it's something whose advocates are
3:06
very keen on going out and actually proactively pursuing in quiet ways, obviously they understand
3:11
how politically toxic it is, but there are whole networks online and in the real world
3:16
of people who are trying to ferment that kind of logical chain and expand it and recruit
3:22
in particular young white males into it.
3:25
The most notable of whom in the past decade certainly was the Christchurch shooter.
3:30
You might remember in 2019 in Christchurch in New Zealand, a 20-something white Australian,
3:38
white supremacist committed a massacre killed 51 innocent Muslims in mosques as they were
3:44
worshipping, and it was sort of deemed to be a lone wolf attack because logistically
3:50
he didn't have any support.
3:52
Today's guest is an investigative journalist, Joey Watson, who is not only spent years
3:57
pouring over the internet archives of what this bloke was talking about and who he was
4:02
talking about with on places like 4chan and 8chan, and don't worry if you don't know
4:07
what those are, we're going to go into some detail, but also Joey also flew to countries
4:12
where the shooter had visited and had actually embedded with, for example, migrant hunting
4:17
white supremacist groups.
4:19
So this idea of a sort of a lone wolf phenomenon when it comes to far right terrorism is something
4:26
that Joey thinks we really need to rethink.
4:29
Yes, there may be no logistical support, but it is not an accident that these people arrive
4:34
at the beliefs that they do, and this is particularly pressing at the moment because all across
4:37
the UK at the moment you've got protesters who are standing outside hotels where asylum
4:41
seekers are being housed, demanding that they be deported.
4:45
And I am not making a link between those people and the Christchurch shooter, but they're
4:51
a people who do make that link and they find a way of making the trail of breadcrumb
4:57
seem compelling enough that some minority of people are going to follow it and they're
5:01
going to end up there.
5:02
And we need to understand it in order to know what to do about it, I should also say
5:06
on the other side you've also got counter protesters who are holding anti-racism rallies, and as
5:12
you'll hear by getting into this a bit with Joey, I don't think that simply calling
5:16
anybody who has legitimate concerns about the pace of immigration and the integration
5:19
of certain communities.
5:20
A racist is a good way to go.
5:23
I think that actually then compounds the problem, gives it a sort of a frisson of sexiness
5:28
to be standing up for Western civilization when everyone else is just calling you a
5:31
bigot for simply seeing common sense.
5:35
And then you're off to the races.
5:37
It was only one year ago that the United Kingdom was still dealing with the fallout
5:41
of the biggest race riots.
5:44
In fact, the biggest civil unrest that they'd had in more than a decade, that was kicked
5:48
off after a mass stabbing that was wrongly pinned on a Muslim asylum seeker here in Australia
5:53
where about to have a rally, a kind of a, I don't want to call it a far right rally,
5:59
but it's like a defend Australia type rally just in the next few days.
6:03
So how do ideas like this go from the fringes into the mainstream, what is driving people
6:08
towards this kind of extremism?
6:10
Joey is here to tell us he's a fabulous producer, he's actually the winner of the same, of
6:15
the first award that I ever got, which was the best newcomer at the Australian commercial
6:20
radio awards.
6:21
He won it last year, I won it a few years ago now.
6:25
And I first met Joey when we were working together on Late Night Live, which is an institution
6:29
of Australian public radio on the ABC.
6:32
I was guest hosting and he was just a brilliant young producer and I was delighted to see that
6:38
when he left the ABC, he moved over to listener, which is a podcast network and he now produces
6:44
in depth investigative long form feature journalism for them.
6:48
His podcast is called Secrets We Keep and this series is called Lone Actor to dispute the
6:55
Lone Actor Narrative of the Price Church Shooter.
6:57
I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one the only Joey Watson.
7:04
From the 15th of March 2019, a 28 year old Australian man from Graften, live streamed
7:11
himself traveling from Dunedin to the very small city of Christchurch in the South Island
7:18
of New Zealand and live streamed himself murdering 51 people, they were at prayers during Friday
7:27
afternoon prayer and it was for a minute a kind of huge moment that woke everyone up both
7:37
in Australia and I think internationally because of the scale of it to the threat of right-wing
7:42
extremism.
7:43
It's something that we'd sort of seen compounding in the years before Christchurch all around
7:48
the world.
7:49
We had Charlottesville, for example, there was signs in Australia that right-wing groups
7:55
were getting more organized and for a moment it almost looked like, oh shit, this is the
8:00
culmination, this is what people who were observing those communities closely were warning
8:06
about but very soon after that it sort of seemed to fade from public view and partly that's
8:13
because of the way he sort of constructed his propaganda was to signal deeply to his
8:20
communities but to kind of obfuscate the true nature of his ideology to everyone else
8:25
around him and also because I think it was a sort of like convenient narrative but it
8:31
was really in terms of what it inspired within the communities that were paying attention
8:37
within neo-Nazi fascist communities all around the world.
8:39
It was a watershed and critical moment and they were paying attention very much in the
8:45
way.
8:46
He was very embedded, it wasn't even in the moments before he pulled it off, he was chatting
8:49
on, was it 8chan or whatever, I'm one of the chants about how it's time to stop talking
8:56
to get real and people were watching it as it unfold and cheering and saying you go and
9:00
I can't believe he was actually doing it and shot a huge shot in the arm to far right
9:05
extremists all over the planet.
9:07
Yeah.
9:08
And sort of as we kind of turned our heads the other way, he had created this piece of
9:12
terrorism that was theater for these communities and as he had anticipated, he'd asked people
9:18
to do that part by sharing their propaganda to carry on the mission and they did.
9:23
We saw a spate of violence directly inspired by, made in the image of Christchurch in everywhere
9:32
in the US, particularly in Europe, even in Singapore, they were tearing inspired attacks
9:38
that were thwarted in the US.
9:39
What was some of those that people would remember it would they?
9:41
So immediately after there was an attack in California on a synagogue, that guy had written,
9:49
had graffitied for talent on another place of worship, sort of been the months before.
9:55
That's the cast name.
9:56
Sorry, that's a good, that's a good name of the guy in New Zealand soon after in El Paso,
10:00
in Texas, there was a shooting, that's a border town in Texas, there was a shooting at
10:05
the supermarket there, then in Hull, Germany, a little while after that, then in Buffalo,
10:13
and these were all either, they would, you know, in some circumstances, they'd copy
10:18
paste directly from the Christchurch manifesto, they'd refer to him in their propaganda,
10:24
they'd try to live stream, like he did, which was sort of a format that he'd forged in
10:28
this space and tech companies crack down on live streaming, like were they keeping a closer
10:34
eye on it after Christchurch?
10:35
Yeah, but I mean, the tech moves quickly right and people found ways to get around that,
10:40
because he was just going straight to Facebook.
10:42
He'd gone straight to Facebook, it had gotten 200 views or something in a very small amount
10:46
of time, but the Facebook moderation system was actually an early use case of AI, implementing
10:53
AI moderation, it had underscored it, sort of accidentally, and that's something that Facebook
10:58
subsequently apologized for.
11:00
What does underscoring mean?
11:01
The way they did it was given a ranking system out of five, and if it got above 2.5,
11:06
then it was like something that needed to be watched or taken down, and it didn't, it
11:09
didn't get to that.
11:10
Oh, I see, right.
11:11
But then very, it was like maybe problematic or something.
11:12
Yeah, sure, sure.
11:13
As people were getting, it didn't get up what it was, yeah, totally, and in the meantime,
11:18
a lot of people were downloading it, and so then once it's downloaded, they can disseminate
11:22
it on whatever forums they want to, that don't have the same website, and that's a thing
11:26
I think the Crusher shows you that he had a community that would be willing to take part
11:32
in sharing this partly on, at H&M was the main one, because that's where he directly
11:36
engaged.
11:37
And in the 24 hours after the attack, for example, YouTube was reporting like a reupload
11:41
every second that we were using techniques where you change the, like, all to the pixels
11:48
in the video to get around moderation systems.
11:50
Right.
11:51
YouTube bans it internally, and then YouTube's AI basically can notice without a human being
11:58
looking at it, whether or not that video and immediately not even post it, but what you're
12:03
saying is they would moderate the video and tweak it a little bit so that the AI wouldn't
12:07
catch it and stay up for as long as it took a human being to realize that, oh, shit,
12:11
this is the same thing.
12:12
Exactly.
12:13
So they were being absolutely undated, and then that's not to mention, like, sort of less
12:16
moderated parts of the internet, whether video was flourishing and is still exists today.
12:22
Then the manifesto as well, which he'd published this 70-odd page manifesto that had been
12:27
translated already into multiple languages all around the world, within a week after
12:35
the attack.
12:36
So his direct request was, please do your part, spread my message, and that was clearly
12:42
answered by this community of really like thousands and thousands of people.
12:47
How do you feel about giving credence to manifestos like that?
12:50
You know, I've heard two schools have thought about it.
12:52
One is you want to understand what these people are thinking, and the other is these are
12:56
murderous psychopaths who are going to tell us whatever they want to tell you to ignore
12:59
the manifesto like it's a crime, and criminals are going to be criminals, and so don't
13:04
give them the glory or the intellectual seriousness of trying to analyze what they claim was their
13:08
rationale.
13:09
I think the problem is sort of the uncritical taking in of the manifesto, which is I think
13:14
is something that happened a lot in the media after miles of the attack.
13:18
What did it say, by the way?
13:19
What was the gist of it?
13:21
It sort of operated on three levels, I would say.
13:26
One is there was a whole bunch of 4chan and 8chan references, so 4chan and 8chan are
13:32
much help familiar people are with, but it's like this part of the internet and this message
13:36
boards that have been set up in the early 2000s that became the place where a lot of
13:40
memes were generated, eventually devolving into more right-wing spaces partly because
13:46
they were being hijacked by right-wing actors and that's something I sort of look into
13:49
in the podcast, but the whole idea of them is that they were basically anonymous, and
13:55
there had been an enormous amount of creativity, but also creativity to sort of negative effects.
14:01
Sometimes apolitical negative effects are like shit-posting became a big thing we just
14:05
throw out like offensive content just for the point of it being offensive, but it created
14:11
a sort of like a language within these communities, and that sort of stuff was scattered through
14:16
the manifesto, but basically memes that only these communities would have been aware of
14:21
and just to clarify the people who aren't super online, so 4chan and 8chan, they're not
14:25
on the dark web, you don't need to have some special tour browser or something to get
14:29
to them, they would look if you went to them like a Reddit thread or like almost like a
14:33
Facebook comment post, like the comments, right, and it's just people chatting in text
14:38
and images with each other, but there are places where which people went to because they
14:42
knew that there was no moderation and they could say whatever that, how I wanted.
14:45
Yeah, very, very little moderation, and it's built on anonymity, which is a kind of important
14:50
part of dispassionate functions.
14:52
Socialists haven't even understood how it works, how you can build entire ecosystem communities,
14:59
each of systems of communities where people don't even know who other people are, but apparently
15:03
it worked, and this is a sort of unique example where that did work, but part of that is
15:08
based on injoics and where you, like an in-group and an out-group, they're very much part
15:13
of an in-group in these ecosystems, and a big part of that is sort of using injoics
15:19
to signal to each other.
15:20
Right, so the first layer of the manifesto is references for his 4chan and 8chan anonymous
15:27
buddies, then it's not that he's calling them out overtly, it's that he's using the injoics
15:31
which will be a language that only they would understand.
15:33
Yeah, exactly.
15:34
So for example, he references a meme called the Navy Seal copypasta, which is some deep
15:39
4chan lore, where it's just like a guy saying that he's X Navy Seal and doing all sorts
15:46
of weird bravado that doesn't really make sense, and that's right, he talks about guerrilla
15:51
warfare, but he, instead of using guerrilla, the Spanish word, he uses the word guerrilla,
15:58
inside the animal.
15:59
Like the animal, right?
16:00
And that's a well-known 8chan.
16:02
So what an 8chan thing, it's been around since the early 2000s, its lore is sort of debated
16:06
within the 8chan community and 4chan community, but you know, and so people sort of looked
16:10
at that and thought, I might just think it's a typo, if you're not, yeah, OK, with that
16:14
culture.
16:15
Or think that this guy is completely mad and insane and has lost his marbles if you don't
16:20
know that culture, but actually no, it was a direct signal to these communities that
16:24
he is one of them.
16:25
OK, so he leaves these easter eggs in it, that's the first layer, you said there are three
16:28
layers to the manifesto.
16:30
The second layer is a sort of, I would say like a palatable level of racism that would
16:40
be designed to appeal to people who kind of have immigration anxieties and to make them
16:47
feel like this is a natural conclusion of what he, of sort of, of where his ideology has
16:54
taken him or where his lived experience has taken him.
16:57
So, for example, he says I was traveling around Europe in 2017 and I saw the natural impact
17:05
of immigration in like France, for example, and that led me to conclude like there was
17:13
no option and where being replaced and I need to carry this, carry this out, right?
17:18
This was window dressing, it was deceit, we know now because of the stuff that I found
17:23
that actually he was deeply hard and radicalized and already resolving towards violence like
17:30
years before that attack, but that was a sort of another level of deceit because it meant
17:34
that people who were coming to this stuff for the first time could just pick that up
17:38
and say, oh, he was just a reasonable guy, he was traveling around France, he saw the
17:43
effects of too much Muslim immigration.
17:46
Sure.
17:47
Or even if you say he's a monster, but then you read that, which is something that happens,
17:50
I say, God, you know, this guy is horrible as a monster, but it sort of makes it look
17:55
less organized than it actually is.
17:57
I see, right?
17:58
Yeah, which leads to the third level of the manifesto, a document that I've definitely
18:02
spent too much time with, which is he sort of splatters in things about race wars,
18:12
he's sort of like end of day's style ideology, which I think is kind of at the heart of
18:19
this radicalization trajectory in that he's trying to do an attack to create societal
18:26
discomfort, to trigger reaction, to create conflict.
18:32
So the society devolves into race war and collapses and then a new war on the nation will
18:39
be built from the ashes of it.
18:43
And that, when I actually go through his postings in the year before the attack, stuff that he
18:49
probably didn't consider as propaganda of how the message that he was trying to portray,
18:55
that is the sort of the heart of what happened in Christchurch, it's like a, at its foundations,
19:04
it's sort of like a traditionally racist ideology, but the justification towards violence
19:10
comes from this sort of pseudo religious, yeah, sort of sensibility, which is actually a
19:17
really big thing, a big part of these communities, whether they want you to believe it or not.
19:22
Yeah, interesting.
19:23
And just to clarify, when you say pseudo religious, there's a lot, the word pseudo is doing a
19:27
lot of work there in the sense that it's not an explicit, it's not explicitly about
19:31
a divine end of days or something, right?
19:34
It's just about a revolution, a race revolution, a violent race revolution.
19:38
True, but I would say that it does have a kind of religious essence to it in that it's
19:47
kind of faith-based and it's further and it's further and also in its prediction.
19:53
Like if you know what I mean, like it does sort of borrow that structure where if you're
19:57
sort of saying, oh yeah, I'm going to do this attack and then it's going to trigger
19:59
every action and then it's going to trigger the collapse of society itself and then
20:03
the end of it.
20:04
You know, it does have a kind of Armageddon style, right?
20:07
And it feels about it.
20:08
Yeah, it also, it kind of touches the, the one thing that is satisfying about fundamentalist
20:12
religion, which is a sense of inevitability and almost fatalism where like I am a soldier
20:19
in a much bigger war and the war is going to happen, whether I'm a tech partner or not.
20:23
So it's sort of everybody's responsibility to step up and have the courage to do their
20:27
almost ordained role because if everyone, if there was a Christchurch shooting every
20:32
week, then society would encounter the inevitable clash presumably that he's trying to ferment
20:39
and he regards that as being an inevitable outcome of the mixing of racism and faiths
20:44
the way that we are in multicultural countries.
20:46
Sure.
20:47
I think that's fair.
20:48
I think another way of looking at it is that the belief structure I think actually kind
20:53
of mirrors Islamist extremism, which you would say is religious, right?
20:58
Yeah.
20:59
Because, and maybe that's another way of explaining it.
21:01
It's like you kind of start with political grievances and some of those political grievances
21:07
might be, might be real, whether it be related to the American interventionism or colonialism
21:15
or whatever it might be, and then you kind of use a sort of more, let's say, misinterpretation
21:24
of religious ideology on top of that to create this kind of motivating thing about, you
21:29
know, jihad and Allah and what that might mean in that context and then how you're going
21:34
to get into heaven and all this sort of stuff, right?
21:36
I think it's actually, it's kind of mirrored in right wing extremism, at least in this
21:40
sort of trajectory.
21:41
Right.
21:42
And with like real grievances about the world, I don't know, a thousand prices cost
21:46
of living and then you sort of fall into race and then you kind of go further and further
21:53
and there are, there are texts that almost read like some of your religious texts within
21:57
these spaces that, you know, then sort of talk about the needs to trigger race, war
22:01
society or collapse and, and, and how you will become a, like, you know, become a hero
22:06
from that process.
22:07
And when you say house prices, a lot of people might not be able to make that link automatically
22:11
because it's not that logical if you haven't been in sort of investigating this stuff.
22:16
But the link would be that the plight of the, of the white working poor in Western multicultural
22:22
countries, the overcrowding of hospitals, the, you know, rapidly changing demographics
22:28
of communities, the overcrowding of schools, the, you know, all of the stresses that people
22:32
are feeling rising house prices due to competition from foreigners allegedly that this is all
22:38
attributable to high rates of immigration.
22:41
And so the most obvious and sensible solution is to protect the, the white working class
22:47
who are the bedrock and the founders of that country and exclude the immigrants.
22:51
And the only way you're going to do that is through some kind of radical action because
22:55
the elites and the, and, you know, maybe it's the Jews or whoever, the, the people who
22:59
are secretly in control are always going to be against the interests of the hard working
23:04
white men and women of the country.
23:06
Is that the, is that the tenuous link between like the terrestrial concerns that reasonable
23:11
people have and the delusion delusional, millenarian, like apocalypticism of the, of these
23:17
kind of secular?
23:18
Absolutely.
23:19
Yeah, right.
23:20
So the, the heart of really any extremist political ideology, perhaps any political ideology
23:25
at all is grievance, right, whether it be real or perceived, right?
23:28
And then so this sort of, and I, I hate to give extremist compliments, but the compliment
23:35
that I, that I definitely have seen a time and time again in this space is that they have
23:38
incredible imaginations and that they're able to use real or perceived grievance like,
23:44
like, let's say, I don't know, the cost of housing.
23:47
And then they're able to sort of singly pin that on migration, which is, you know, absolutely
23:51
not the full story.
23:52
I mean, anyone's lived experience of the housing market will tell you that when you go
23:56
to an auction in Sydney, you're being built by, you know, being beat by, you know, the white
24:01
person that's kind of got their sixth investment property.
24:04
That's just like, well, sometimes, I mean, sometimes, but you know, and we can get into
24:08
that.
24:09
I don't want to, we get into the effect of the, of taboos as well about, about fermenting
24:14
this as well, because I do think that there's, yeah, yeah, you know, I have had an experience
24:18
of being at an auction and there's a person of Asian extraction on a mobile phone and
24:21
talking to someone who's presumably overseas on a mobile phone and they're beating up massively
24:26
and I can understand that if you weren't allowed, if it was, if you were accused of being
24:30
racist every time you made the point that there's upward pressure on house prices, I mean,
24:34
this happened earlier this year.
24:35
I think when the opposition leader Peter Dutton said that Chinese overseas buyers were putting
24:41
upward pressure on housing prices and he was accused by almost everybody of that being
24:45
a racist dog whistle, which it may be in his case strategically.
24:49
But if you want to live in a society in which there isn't a kind of naughty frisson to
24:53
saying that sort of thing, then you also have to take the naughty frisson away from it,
24:57
I think, why not constantly jumping down everyone's throats and pretending that, you know,
25:01
gaslighting them about something that might be one of a number of different factors.
25:06
Sure, sure.
25:07
Yeah.
25:08
And I would like to come back to that, because that is interesting and I have kind of heard
25:10
you talk about that on the podcast a number of times and I sort of thought, ah, if I was
25:14
there, I would, I would say this and then, but maybe I just finished the, the sort of,
25:21
the sort of trajectory stuff about it, because I thought I want to justify why I complimented
25:24
extremists before.
25:25
Yeah.
25:26
Um, but okay, let's say, let's say, um, to keep it clean, like, okay, migration or migration
25:34
rates might be one part of that story, but then you can sort of singularly say it's migration
25:40
and then once you've got people sort of thinking about migration and that way and they're anxious
25:43
about migration.
25:44
Um, and this is like a real process, like sometimes it's like actually, you know, being
25:47
done of inviting people to different chats on Facebook, for example, and becoming a sort
25:51
of deeper, deeper into the ideology.
25:53
So it's like, this is a very real process.
25:55
So you get through migration, then, okay, well, then why don't we introduce the idea
25:58
of race and, okay, we just went from something that was, um, kind of real, real world observable
26:04
to something that's, um, kind of fake and made up, um, but it, but it kind of feels real
26:09
when you kind of goes from that trajectory and then, okay, well, once we're, um, once
26:12
we're in race, then, you know, we can sort of start cherry picking ideas from history
26:16
about, um, you know, what it, but it means to be white or, you know, or, you know, ideas
26:23
from ethnicity or Europe or, or greater Europe or, what, you know, whatever, I don't know.
26:28
And then, um, and then you can sort of start, you've now gone to the space of the imaginary
26:31
and then you can start introducing ideas like, uh, race wars and white sainthood and all
26:36
this sort of stuff that got it is really, um, big part of it.
26:39
Yeah.
26:41
Great.
26:41
So what's the objection to my fetishism with, uh, uh, objecting to, to booze?
26:47
Um, no, no, no, no, no, it was, it's kind of, uh, a criticism of the, of a fetishism.
26:53
Like, I, and honestly, um, I feel like, uh, you know, it's so much easier to participate,
27:00
uh, in a conversation with you, Josh, what I'm like, listening and just sort of doing
27:04
it in my head.
27:05
I'm actually here.
27:07
It's my life's not good enough, Joey.
27:09
You got to be able to do it when the mic is on, baby.
27:11
Like, okay, well, I guess I could just start like, you could say, say something kind
27:15
of vanilla, which is that like, democracy's, um, you know, can legitimately have debates
27:22
about immigration.
27:23
Um, some people will say that they've been higher immigration is better for economic
27:29
reasons, for reasons of cultural diversity.
27:32
And then other people will say, actually, no, um, we prefer lower immigration because
27:36
or, or at least a more steady rate of immigration because of reasons of, I don't know, social
27:40
cohesion or the environment or, you know, I don't know.
27:43
And then we can kind of like, uh, have those debates.
27:46
The issue is that possibly this debate more than any other is so vulnerable to being
27:53
hijacked and to devolving into make believe and hate.
28:00
Um, but don't you think it's more vulnerable to devolving if there are no reasonable
28:05
voices in the room, uh, like seeding what is reasonable about the other side's position?
28:11
Yeah, sure.
28:12
And so they're definitely discussions worth having.
28:15
But what I mean, yeah, it's, it's tricky.
28:20
And I suppose one thing that I thought about listening to you to speak about this a
28:22
few times is that like, um, the, the left, uh, has failed to, or the left, whatever that
28:31
is, let's say, let's say pro, pro immigration because I, I am wary, even though I, even
28:35
I call this, uh, podcast about right wing extremism, it's really just something so that
28:39
me and my audience can kind of understand what we're talking about.
28:41
It's like a lot of time.
28:42
I don't mean that to be oppositional to leftist, um, or every day, peaceful.
28:48
Right.
28:49
And people say, people say, what about left wing extremism?
28:51
And I'm like, what is that?
28:52
You know, why aren't you looking at left wing extremism and violence on the left?
28:55
I don't even know what exactly they're referring to here.
28:57
But, um, uh, but yeah, I think maybe part of the problem is that, yeah, the left
29:04
doesn't really, um, put forward a moving, um, case for, for immigration, um, at least
29:11
on, in my, uh, lifetime, there's never been anything hugely mobilizing.
29:16
And the, and the right, um, does, and I wonder if that's because, um, the right
29:23
boroughs on things like race that aren't real, yeah.
29:26
I mean, I think that's, I'm sure that's true.
29:30
I mean, I worry that we see territory to those malafactors on the right to the sky news
29:37
after dark and to the hysterical, sort of radio shock jocks.
29:42
And, um, you know, only remotely veiled bigots in who write columns for various
29:49
right wing newspapers when the, when we constrain the scope of conversation, and we
29:56
fail, like, I think the best way to win over the largest quorum of people to a reasonable
30:00
position is to grant as much as you can to your enemies, and I don't feel that we've been
30:05
doing a very good job of that in sort of progressively university educated circles over
30:11
the past five or 10 years, which is where my sort of constant fighting against taboos
30:15
comes from and saying like, well, let's just concede that there probably is some impact
30:20
on property prices and the burden on schools and hospitals by importing half a million
30:27
people a year.
30:29
Like, let's just concede that that is the case.
30:33
And then do what you're saying, which is provide a proactive reason why that's worth it.
30:37
I mean, I think it is worth it.
30:38
And I think we should just build lots more schools on hospitals as in as a response.
30:42
And we should grow the population quickly and be a dynamic thriving multi ethnic country.
30:48
And we should spend what we need to because they're also a net positive for the country's
30:53
economy. So it's not like we're going to run out of money on building the new schools
30:55
and hospitals and that that's the solution, not to close the borders.
31:00
But there has been a sense and maybe I've just spent too much time in particularly
31:04
cliquey sort of ABC, Guardian, kind of left wing progressive circles.
31:07
There has been a sense that to say that is to give too much ground to a racist xenophobic
31:14
point of view.
31:16
It's a very practical way of looking at it, right?
31:18
Yeah, I think yes, I'm a pragmatist.
31:20
Yeah, but how do you use that to combat like race and nation?
31:24
Well, you just draw the line.
31:25
I mean, I'm not even I'm not even sure that you have to combat.
31:30
I'm depends what you mean by race and nation.
31:33
I'm talking about like sort of the the the chest beating, the visceral chest beating
31:37
of right wing talking points on immigration.
31:40
Like this and I don't know.
31:42
This is sort of the problem that the baby comes kind of toxic.
31:45
You point out why they're wrong, right?
31:47
But when they're right, you don't pretend they're not right because you're afraid of them.
31:51
Yeah, but I don't know.
31:52
I just feel like the way yeah, and this is not a saying that whether or not these
31:56
discussions should have should happen or not.
31:59
I mean, I'm just sort of so can journalistically about what I've observed,
32:03
particularly in relation to Christchurch, but also, you know, broadly is that we kind
32:08
of see like we let's say we being people that believe that race doesn't exist
32:14
in that we can live in a and we are all battered by living in a kind of multi
32:18
a multi I think race, you know, racial, so multi ethnic multi cultural society.
32:27
The argument is sort of like well, they're saying when a race and nation and, you know,
32:32
white, white homeland and, you know, talking about ideas of being replaced,
32:37
which has become a huge talking point for right wing extremists.
32:41
And it was in in the years that leading up to Christchurch, the name of the manifesto
32:45
was the great replacement, which is not not a real thing.
32:49
Now replacement is not real in this.
32:51
It's a it's a pseudo concept.
32:53
It's not a like statistical concept is just made to sound statistical, but yeah,
33:00
but you know, and then we're saying, well, no, actually, we just build more hospitals.
33:04
I think that's a pragmatic argument.
33:05
And I don't know, maybe this is the reason that I'm actually having these thoughts
33:11
for the first time right now.
33:12
I've never had these thoughts when I've been, you know, walking around listening to the podcast.
33:15
So I hope I'm articulating them okay.
33:18
Yeah.
33:18
But like if we're saying, if they're saying, if that's the argument of the right,
33:21
and then we're saying, I know we'll build more hospitals.
33:24
Well, you're right that though, that's not a direct retort to the extreme position.
33:28
But my goal isn't necessarily to convince a jihadist out of being a jihadist
33:34
or a far right person from being out of a far right being far right.
33:39
It's to make sure that there isn't fertile ground for them to sink their roots into
33:42
in the rest of the community, right?
33:44
It's to isolate that ideology as much as possible from the everyday humdrum concerns.
33:49
So the person I'm talking to is not so much the extremist.
33:53
It's the person who's worried about hospitals and schools being overcrowded.
33:56
And I'm trying to protect them and insulate them and isolate the extremists
34:00
so that they're not susceptible to the extremist's position.
34:03
Because I can then say, well, hang on, we've already said that we should invest more in hospitals.
34:07
So, yeah, you can't come to this regular person who's living in the suburbs
34:11
and say, they don't care about the overcrowding of the schools and the hospitals.
34:14
They don't want to do anything.
34:15
There's a whole cabal who are just trying to swamp this country with migrants.
34:19
I don't think it does us any favors to say what problem and to hold our ears.
34:23
Like, I mean, if you talk to people, it reminds me a bit of the old saying that,
34:27
if the only people who talk about who are willing to secure the border are fascists,
34:33
then people will elect fascists to secure the border.
34:36
If the only people who are willing to talk about how they integrate migrant communities
34:41
are fascists, then people will elect fascists to integrate migrant communities or to boot migrants out.
34:47
If you talked to non-extremist people who voted for Trump, for example,
34:51
who are not race warriors, but who are being recruited essentially by bad actors
34:58
to facilitate horrible and cruel immigration policies right now in America,
35:03
the number one thing they say is just how delusional they feel
35:06
that the left half of the political elite were when talking about the problem.
35:12
That's the main thing that they talk about.
35:14
There was no distinction between illegal immigration.
35:17
I'm talking about the American context now.
35:18
Between illegal immigration and legal immigration,
35:21
there was no sense of being like an anti-illegal immigration xenophile
35:30
who wanted higher immigration legally, like there was no real,
35:33
there was just an objection to any enforcement as being the brutal arm of the state.
35:39
And they talk about sort of being backed into a corner of having to tolerate someone
35:43
who was at least going to do something.
35:45
That's my sense, but it may be that you have a different perspective coming
35:49
from having spent so much time in the more extreme circles
35:53
and seeing where it can go when it gets totally derailed.
35:57
But let's just talk about the sort of lone actor concept
36:00
because I think what's interesting, the real point that you're making,
36:03
we're sort of, we've sort of buried the lead here,
36:05
is that the narrative about people like the Christchurch shooter and him in particular
36:11
was that they're lone actors because they didn't have,
36:15
and technically I suppose that's true in the sense that he didn't have
36:19
logistical assistance apparently, not much of it anyway,
36:23
although we can talk about his mate in New Zealand who helped him with guns.
36:29
He wasn't a part of a coordinated terror network
36:32
who had sent someone to New Zealand to carry out an attack
36:36
the way that 9-11 was coordinated or something.
36:39
But your point, correct me if I'm wrong,
36:41
is that that doesn't make him lone in what gave rise to him.
36:44
He was embedded intellectually and ideologically
36:48
in a very coherent movement of which he happened to be a lone part
36:52
but was a thoroughly kind of networked individual.
36:55
Yes, wow, that is beautifully articulated.
36:58
I should have got you into a press release because I believe it's on tape.
37:01
Yeah, that's really...
37:04
Yeah, that is the essence of it.
37:05
He was operationally alone.
37:07
At least I didn't find any evidence to suggest that he wasn't operationally alone
37:11
and so far as the attack was self-funded.
37:16
He'd amassed weapons by himself.
37:19
His real-world contact in Dunedin where he'd lived in the two years
37:22
before the attack and prepared was primarily isolated.
37:27
It's more to say that he was part of a tapestry of interconnected extremist online communities
37:39
where he actively participated, where he forecasted what he was planning,
37:46
where he incubated his ideology up to four years before the attack.
37:52
Within those communities, I would say he was part of a kind of mass radicalization,
38:00
lots and lots of people being radicalized together and in that sense, he wasn't alone.
38:08
And I think when you sort of look, we talked briefly about the HM post that he made on the day
38:12
of the attack where he posed the manifesto and I think to the live stream and says to all of these
38:17
people who he had been in communication with in the years leading up, do your part share my
38:24
shit by sharing the message and the response was overwhelmingly positive.
38:28
He knew that the response would be overwhelmingly positive.
38:30
And so this was a radicalized community or radicalized communities interconnected communities,
38:39
which I think sort of contradicts the loan act in narrative.
38:42
So loan actor is really, and calling it loan actor is really like a provocation, especially to
38:50
Australia and Australians to sort of say, well, the way that we have come to see this as a kind
38:56
of another port Arthur situation of this kind of slightly unhinged guy who just snapped.
39:02
And now we can kind of look the other way. That's not really accurate and it doesn't serve us
39:09
to see it that way. Right. And here the analogy to jihadism I think is particularly apt
39:14
because we have had a tendency if there's a jihadist islamist extremist who commits terrorism,
39:21
it doesn't really matter if they're not affiliated with any formal terror group. We're still
39:25
quick to understand what is motivating it. Like if they were, if they were a jihadist terrorist,
39:30
we have no compunctions about saying, well, you know, they're part of an extremist ideology.
39:35
Whereas here we do have a tendency to not want to look at the connection between ideology and act.
39:40
Absolutely. And especially in those cases where so much of the jihadism in the years,
39:46
you know, during that spike in Europe and also in Australia with link cafe in 2016 and in
39:52
Berk Street, I mean so much about radicalization was also happening online. And we had
39:57
political leaders coming out after those attacks saying things like we need to look at mosques or,
40:02
you know, what are Muslim leaders doing to combat this sort of stuff? Muslim leaders had no idea
40:07
in the same way that equivalent leaders in sort of secular or even Christian Australian society
40:14
had no idea about what this stuff, these stuff that was happening online, right. But no,
40:18
it's definitely a bias and something that was never afford afforded to Muslim communities
40:29
to be detached from Islamist violence in the same way that, you know, white communities were,
40:35
or sort of Australian communities were detached from, yeah. I mean, it is hard, it's a hard
40:41
analogy to make when I think about it because there isn't actually an analog to mosques in the
40:46
context of like racist white supremacy. You would need to have some kind of like secular social group
40:56
that is an anti-immigration group that had weekly meetings, but was a non-violent anti-immigrant
41:06
like white supremacist group. When you're talking about a network, when you're talking about the
41:11
most extreme mosques, for example, it is the case that in the most extreme mosques you will have
41:17
imams preaching, they won't preach violence, but they'll preach the sinfulness of Western countries
41:25
and the dirtiness of Jews and like a whole bunch of things that if you were a non-orthodox Muslim,
41:32
you would find objectionable. So finding a link between saying that we want to make sure that all
41:38
of the mosques are on board with the multicultural Australian projects and that they're happy to be
41:42
part of a liberal democracy and that they're not spreading any Islamist ideas, the analog to that
41:47
would be what are the environments in which these people can be sort of safely racist, right,
41:54
whether and safely bigoted without veering into violence and extremism.
41:59
Yeah, thank you for picking me up on that. It was a bit of an Australian
42:02
dialogue. I think the essence of the point that I was trying to make was just that
42:07
this radicalization was happening online instead of both both scenarios.
42:12
It wasn't a real world thing. And the way that we saw it in the aftermath, the way that
42:18
the media sort of painted it was different to the way that Islamist extremism was painted,
42:26
where there was a sort of hyper focus on this must be connected to these communities or this must
42:32
be connected. Something where this guy was sort of seen as an aberration.
42:37
So I want to understand this virtual community. There's an amazing way in which the virtual online
42:42
world interfaces with the real world in Eastern Europe, where I hadn't realized that
42:50
Bosnia and Serbia was such a big deal. Like the the whole Serbian war and the genocide and
42:55
everything is like a big kind of thing for these people. And who was it? Carriage. There's this
43:04
genocide song that celebrates Carriage, which the Christchurch shooter was into. And there's a big
43:10
thing online, is that right? And there's a few reasons for that. So traditionally far-right
43:19
extremism or neo-Nazism, let's say which started to develop primarily in the US and in the 60s,
43:25
you know, once there had been 20 years of distance between from the Holocaust. It sort of focused
43:33
on Nazi Germany. And before the end of apartheid, apartheid South Africa has its two
43:44
ideals as it's two sort of utopian ways of organizing a society. The Balkans, historically,
43:51
this is Hitler's, we're for conquering in traditional Nazi imaginary, right?
44:02
But as we sort of got got to the 2000s, we kind of entered this like post this neo-neo-Nazism,
44:10
this new version of Nazism that tends to rely less on sort of Hitlerist iconography at least
44:19
publicly and sort of started to look for different models for what a society would look like. And
44:27
that's why, you know, the spectacular war, an awful and horrible war in the Balkans of the 90s,
44:33
which was at some level, I mean, it was a multifaceted and complicated conflicts as conflicts tend
44:41
to be, but at some levels was actually a religious conflict between Bosnia Muslims in Bosnia and
44:47
Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholics. And the product of that, which is a Balkanization,
44:56
you know, where you have a literal organization, right? You have a Muslim country or a country that's,
45:05
you know, in this case, in the example of Bosnia where the country's actually split into two,
45:09
Republic of Serbscares, Orthodox Serbian, you know, and then on the other side of this very scattered
45:14
and complicated border is Bosnia and Herzegovina, you know, which is, you know, supposedly,
45:20
Muslims, but it's actually pluralist in the far-right imaginary, it's Muslim. You know,
45:25
this is this sort of became an ideal. And this was pushed in a lot of different and complicated
45:30
ways. An important one was under Sprayvik who committed a massacre in an island near Oslo in 2011.
45:42
That was a white supremacist. He was a white supremacist and shot a bunch of kids
45:46
over here on a Norwegian island. Yeah, and did a bombing in Oslo as well.
45:54
Which at the time was a sort of isolated incident because once you got sort of seven or eight
45:59
years into the future, then once this sort of mass, these mass radicalizations that I
46:05
just studied started to happen, then you kind of see a spade of it, but at the time he was isolated.
46:09
But he certainly became a kind of hero for a lot of the people that would then go on to
46:15
commit attacks in the Christchurch era some eight years later. He was obsessed with the Balkans.
46:23
But then another sort of reason for the pivots to the Balkans is that it had become a huge thing
46:29
in meme culture. So I'm sort of pretty a lot out here, so hopefully this pivot isn't too confusing.
46:39
But the base sort of base community behind the Christchurch attack is the one that we keep
46:45
talking about, which is this 4chan and 8chan community that had primarily been non-political in
46:51
its origin, or maybe had been sort of libertarian if anything because of anonymous had come from
46:58
4chan. For example, the hacker collective, which was libertarian, and but had been a big part of
47:04
it, as I said earlier, had been sort of putting out offensive content through, you know, for like
47:11
to ship posting, which was, which is basically like irony. It's like this is ironic, and if you get
47:16
offended by it, then you're not, you're not part, you're just not one of us. So if I never reaction
47:20
re to boo-busting sort of anarchists almost, right? I mean, you know, they're not as buttoned up
47:27
as libertarians. They're radically libertarian in an archit way. Yeah, like not like, yeah, like
47:32
a political to libertarian sort of thing, like just sort of, you know, the demographic on 4chan,
47:37
like it was, it was at its origin meant for anime, there was a lot of like porn on there,
47:47
and gaming, and discussion of gaming. It just sounds like young boys. Yeah, like in a particular
47:51
demographic of young boys, like not jocks. Not alienated, yeah. So part of this ship posting,
47:59
to bring it back to the Balkans, is like Serbian ultra-nationalist turbo folk became a big thing
48:06
on there, which is like, like really, really racist, but it's also kind of like, like from
48:13
one perspective, like kind of funny, because it's just like weird videos of people
48:18
staying accordion in fields, you know, and, you know, worshipping, like they're ultimately
48:26
worshipping wall criminals, but sort of in its context on the internet, it sort of looks
48:30
funny to people, and in that A political environment where it's kind of offensive, and it's like,
48:34
oh, don't get upset, it's just funny and weird. Right. But then what about, how does that, sorry,
48:39
how does a 15-year-old on 4chan in like Iowa know who wrote a van carriage? Well, that's the
48:47
thing. I mean, it becomes a meme, right, that this is this is the process, right? It becomes a meme,
48:50
and then the history behind it doesn't necessarily matter very much, because it's this,
48:55
these environments are basically non-political. Okay. And Carriageage was a wall criminal in the,
49:02
on the Serbian side in the who massacred a bunch of Muslims, and that's why he gets pride of
49:10
place in this imagination. I think it was probably the content first. Okay. The content itself,
49:16
like this is, I don't think it was any sort of like mass understanding of who wrote it on Carriageage
49:21
or who put him in there in the first place. The best thing that I could glean from
49:28
what you were maybe pointing to in the podcast is that this is the, that maybe Serbia is the last time
49:34
that unashamed like racial nationalism was okay in a place. It was like, that was the gist of what
49:43
they were doing, like they were sort of, yeah. But I think we get to that, right? So,
49:48
so when these memes first start appearing, they're just offensive and obscure and, and, and,
49:54
and a bit strange. And these are transnational communities, so they borrow from all around the world,
49:58
even though by far the biggest spaces are sort of the English-speaking spaces, and so they have
50:03
significant user-based in US, Australia, Canada. Right. But they're probably some English-speaking
50:08
Serbs who are also fucking around. Sure, sure. And so it's, it's, it comes, all this stuff enters
50:14
non-politically. So do the swastikers. It's like, it's as full as swastikers. Or, you know, Pepe the
50:18
frog who was originally, you know, a sort of fun comic book that became hijacked and became a symbol
50:25
symbol of the alt-right. That's also something that was incubated on 4chan, right? And at first,
50:28
it's sort of non-political and then it kind of- Did I say it was like another, another lifetime now,
50:32
doesn't it? It seems like a really, another era. Was Pepe was either Nazi or what was the thing
50:37
about Pepe? People would just put up, it's so long, it feels like it was 15 years ago, probably was.
50:41
It became an emblem of the alt-right. Right. And the alt-right is also a big part of this story,
50:45
because the alt-right was also incubated in these spaces. So I'm sort of, I'm sort of using
50:49
the Balkans right now as to to explain like a much broader- Yeah, no, I get it. And also what are
50:56
even mean by the alt-right? Because I think I've started suspecting that the term has used
51:01
differently in the UK and Australia than it is in the US. What do you mean by it?
51:06
Well, that's a good question. I mean, I'm referring to sort of the American style pro-Trump,
51:13
where- It's a kind of near, almost a neo-Nazi or white supremacist, a kind of wing of the-
51:18
I think a typical alt-right figure would be someone like Richard Spencer.
51:21
Okay, yeah. So who is essentially a Nazi?
51:23
And particularly in, yeah, definitely, yeah, he'd see Kyle's. But in the era of,
51:30
it's that sort of bright-butt era of Trump, of pre-Trump one.
51:33
Right. Because I once got a lot of shit on Joe Rogan's show for calling. I was using
51:38
alt-right in what I think is a more common UK-Industrated parlance, just to mean an alternative branch
51:44
of the right, which is very internet-mimi and obsessed with like activist journalism and his
51:52
super anti-authoritarian and kind of anti-establishment. And I was talking about Tim Paul,
51:58
who's this dickhead as being like some alt-right monkey or something like that. And everyone was like,
52:02
he's not alt-right because he's not a white supremacist Nazi, which is not at all what I meant
52:07
by alt-right. But I just to clarify for people, you're using the term to mean. In its American version
52:12
meaning, yeah, you're racist if you're alt-right, which is not a valence that always exists.
52:18
Well, I think an actually an important thing is that it sort of overlaps with,
52:22
and I've got like three threads going at once here.
52:25
That's actually what I'm just, I'm just praying. I'm just praying that you're not
52:28
applying. Anyone is following me here, right? So this Serbian content, much like the
52:36
like swastikers, much like this or some, it's largely a political and the targets of
52:42
forechand in their trolling campaigns are kind of like offensive and mean stuff, like they do
52:47
lots of mean things, but it's like trolling. It's not politically motivated. Then what we see happen
52:53
around 2013-14 is a mass politicization on forechand. So the ideology had been sort of scattered
53:05
around. You're sort of operating and spending sometimes hours and hours of your day as a forechand
53:13
or in an environment that is where there are lots of swastikers everywhere and lots of videos
53:18
of Serbian war criminals and it's all seen as a joke. It starts to blur. It sort of starts to blur
53:28
and I think a lot of people go through this process of enculturation where the line starts to
53:34
blur between what is actually irony and what is serious ideology. A really, really important thing
53:41
moment in time here was something called gamigate, which happened in 2014 that happened on forechand
53:46
originally. It was a coordinated harassment campaign against female gamers. The ideology behind it
53:56
or the grievance behind it was that this is our kind of space as nerdy young guy as like
54:01
nerdy young unemployed guys or you know whatever living in their mum's basement. Like this is our
54:07
space and it's being hijacked by woke leftists and gamers and we need to take a try. We're trying to
54:12
soften the video games or trying to say or who were calling out misogyny or sexism in video.
54:16
Calling out misogyny sexism wanted more representation in it, made games. It's sort of it's conception
54:27
is kind of complicated but it started. I've never understood it but I think it's just it's basically
54:32
just like they were like you can take over the rest of culture with your woke bullshit but you're
54:35
not coming for our video games. The last place where we can see some titties and shoot some
54:39
shit up and I don't want to have a diversity metric on you know a diversity equity and inclusion
54:45
score on my fucking video game. Thank you. Yeah exactly. I mean it started because this a game
54:51
a name the ex-boyfriend of a game developer named Zoe Quinn had had accused her of sleeping with
55:00
game reviewers for positive reviews of games like it just complete like just and then like
55:05
bullshit and then we're not hounded and doxed and yeah demeaned online and yeah but then like a
55:12
really it became a sort of important moment in time because it was the first time a lot of
55:20
forechanners and I spoken to a lot of like forechanners throughout this process like people who
55:25
were political and non-political but a lot of people who felt like there was a moment of political
55:30
awakening for them and that was that whole event which became a really big deal for a lot of people
55:37
was largely ignored or misreported on by by elements of the media but one part of the media that
55:44
paid a lot of attention to it was Steve Vannon's bright butt who realized that there was a
55:51
sort of a lot of political potential in this space and harnessed them for the right and now you've
55:59
seen the young you've seen young people voting for Donald Trump more than Carol Harris for the
56:04
suicide in generations and this is the Genesis point or one of the Genesis points because there's
56:10
there's always more complicated like like the reasoning behind political moments is always more
56:17
complicated but this is absolutely a really important Genesis point for the all right okay
56:25
which I think we're mobilizing for Trump I think you landed the plan Joey I think I
56:29
think I somehow landed the plan we've got Rattavan Caragic and weird Serbian memes
56:36
unapologetic racial nationalism in the Balkan war we've got peppy the frog and game a
56:43
gate all feeding into this febrile kind of thing in the 2010s which becomes a sort of self-sustaining
56:50
ideology for a lot of the people who spend a lot of time on these chat boards reinforcing their
56:55
own grievances and shit posting and sharing these things yeah what's interesting to me is that
57:00
the crusher shooter goes to did he go to Serbia or did he go to he went to the like he went and
57:06
actually joined this is amazing when we talk about him being a lone actor he went and spent time
57:12
with far right extremists in their groups where they go what hunting for illegal immigrants in the
57:18
forests of like Eastern Europe I mean I spoke to a lot of people so okay so the context here is
57:26
that he'd done he'd done sort of three massive world tours and lead up to the attack this is
57:31
also really interesting because I had always assumed if he's a white supremacist he's probably
57:35
only been in white he probably isn't a very open-minded person about travel but he was traveling
57:40
through China and Central Asia he was in Kyrgyzstan when he was getting radicalized initially so it's
57:47
not like he was averse to cultural exchange no which has a lot about the disconnect between
57:53
the virtual and the real and and how mobilizing the virtual can be yeah because he was presumably
57:59
taking you know food from Kyrgyzstan is and like you know catching buses with Chinese people and
58:07
it's not like he was like oh they're full of germs get away from me instinctively he was
58:11
radicalized inside his head even as his body was taking him to strange places full of lots of
58:17
different people um complicated right yeah and then he sort of just starts to claim that it just
58:21
happened when he was in Western Europe in 2017 but actually the whole time he'd already been
58:25
fantasizing about race war race wars within a within an online community which is sort of
58:31
get a human as well if you've listened to this much of the episode then you must enjoy it
58:36
presumably unless you're just listening for massacistic reasons uh so you should listen to the
58:40
and the way you do that is by subscribing to the premium feed where you not only get to hear the
58:45
rest of this delightful conversation and trust me oh it gets better than what you just heard uh but
58:50
you also get to hear no ads zero ads and previously up until now you had to go to the old substack
58:56
to do that and follow me on substack and add one more platform to your life if you're not already
59:01
on substack uh but here's the thing we're now on apple uh premium podcast as well so with one
59:07
apple we'll just subscribe you up to the premium feed you'll be able to listen to the rest of
59:10
this conversation right now right now right now so open up your apple podcasts click the old
59:16
pay old zepsy button that's probably what it's called pay old zepsy and you click the button and then
59:21
you uh no longer have to be a free rider you can feel like you're contributing to the mission of
59:26
this show which is really what we're all here for better conversations uh a uh freer more free
59:31
wheeling attitude towards the things that we can talk about uh a way to steal man our opponents and
59:36
take the most gracious approach towards disagreement that is what you're voting for when you vote for
59:42
uncomfortable conversations by going into your apple podcasts and clicking subscribe uh i love
59:47
you if you don't do that that's fine and i'll see you the next free episode i guess take care