December 7, 2022 • 48 mins
The last few weeks online have been pretty interesting. Bridget is joined by Behind the Bastards’ Robert Evans, to talk though the whackamole of extremists popping back up online and off.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to another episode of Internet Hate Machine. I'm joined
my producers Sophie, and we are so thrilled to be
joined with the one, the only, Robert Evans behind the
Bastards of Robert. Thank you so much for being here today. Hey,
thanks for having me with all of the stuff happening
and unfolding right now. You're the person that I was like, Damn,
I really want to get Robert's take. I truly don't
(00:23):
know what the fun is going on, Like, how are
you in these in these very weird times? Well, I
don't know. You know, the thing that we're dealing with
right now that's so peculiar is there's these there's these
figures from like the shitty side of the Internet who
were kind of for years folks who did the same
(00:43):
kind of research I did. We kind of talked about
them like like radioactive material, Like we were just kind
of hoping that we could keep them underground and and
and not get into the groundwater. And then Nick Flintes
wound up hanging out on Kanye's private jet, eating any
food with him and fucking middle of nowhere Maryland, and uh,
(01:04):
and I guess that ships out of the bag now.
First of all, disrespectful to Frederick Maryland. Sorry it looked
like a terrible town. No, it is, I it is.
You know, that's sort of a good place to start.
So I have to say I'm not I was not
terribly familiar with Nick Fuentez, and I saw a lot
of reporting saying calling him a quote like right wing extremist.
(01:27):
But that almost doesn't seem totally accurate to me. Can
can you tell me a bit about his ideology? Yeah,
it's frustrating to me that he's just being called a
right wing extremist by people like I think Molly Haberman
was the person who wrote that article. But because that's
that's about as accurate as saying that like Pino Sha
had issues with democracy. Nick Flintes is a is a Nazi,
(01:52):
um And I when I say that, I don't mean
it kind of people use that sometimes as a as
a pejorative these days. I mean that in the very
literal senses. And he really likes Adolf Hitler, who believes
in the tenants of national socialism. He's a little bit
different from a mainstream Nazi, and that he's like Catholic fascist,
but he denies the Holocaust. Um. He has these, you know,
(02:13):
these kind of coy little ways of doing it where
he'll talk about like cookies and baking cookies and ovens
to try to make the point that six million people
couldn't have been killed. Like it's it's all really gross
and kind of tweet and um. And that's Nick. And
I guess that there's a couple of things about him
kind of bubbling up into the mainstream that are so weird.
(02:33):
One of them is just that he's much more extreme
than any of these all right figures. You know, these guys,
even like Milo, who's also involved in the whole Kanye thing,
they would always keep just enough plausible deniability about the
anti semitism and about the outright Nazi stuff that they
could be like, ah, the Left, look at them, they're
just trying to cancel me. They call everybody a nazi. Nick,
(02:53):
there's you can find him like videos of him just
saying like, yeah, we can't have a democracy because people
don't like the things that we like, so we have
to take over the government, instituted dictatorship and forced them
to believe the things we want them to believe. He's
a The other thing about Nick that it makes it
kind of peculiar that he's reaching into the mainstream is
(03:14):
that he's he's too gross for it. Nick is a
guy who will do stuff like burst into his like
close because he has kind of a little cult following
of young men. He'll do stuff like, you know, while
traveling with them, run a black light over their room
to see if they've been masturbating. Uh. He says that
having sex with women is the gayest thing that you
(03:36):
can do. He's probably he's probably having Yeah, there's a lot.
He lives at his mom's basement. He's such a he's
a weird little grimmlin man. He's also a very talented
propagandist and and pretty good at running a room. There
was a moment a couple of years ago that the
Knowledge Fight Guys covered where Alex Jones was like headlining
(03:58):
this rally d C this like big night of speeches. Now,
Alex is an alcoholic, and he got way too drunk
to properly m c the event and was kind of
just like flopping all over the place, and Nick took over,
uh and and and managed it pretty competently. You know. Again,
it was a room full of gropers, which are kind
of what you know, you call his followers called themselves
(04:20):
and other similar kind of fascist weirdos. But he's a
he's a talented showman, and he's also I think he's
a little too far off the map to actually go
mainstream and the way that he wants. That's clearly why
he's hanging out around Kanye, you can notice. And so
we're recording this the day after Kanya was just on
(04:42):
a guy named Tim Pools livestream show, which is a
fairly popular livestream YouTube news program. He has like ten
million followers or some ship, so there's subscribers, so he's
he's very popular. Tim was really looking forward to having
Flints and Napolis and uh and and Kanye on, because
obviously Kanye is huge. But Kanye walks off the set
(05:05):
fifteen minutes in over being very very lightly pushed back
on about anti Semitism, like so mild. It's very mild.
And it's interesting to watch what these because both of
these guys Eonopolis is his own kind of grifter, and
I kind of suspect that he and Fuintes are behind
the scenes competing rather viciously to try and control the
(05:27):
direction Kanye goes well as soon as Kanye walks off,
Melo Eleonopolis gets up and walks out after him. I'm
not even mad that you mispronounced his name, like, I'm
okay with it. There's no way to pronounce it right,
I mean it's Milo. I'm into the Melo pronunciation, to
(05:49):
be honest, I don't agree with you. But he he
gets up and he immediately goes out after Kanye UM,
And I think it's because Milos kind of going after
this whole. He wants to he's kissing ass. He just
he wants to be close to Kanye. He wants to
get all as much of that fucking money as he
possibly can, and that means be in the dude's body. Man.
(06:10):
You know, Kanye gets upset, you roll out there and
you try to make sure he's okay. Nick stays seated
and stays on message and keeps trying to talk about
the Jews because Nick sees Nick has a desire to
kind of keep steering Kanye in this direction. But Nick's
primary purpose up there is to push the things that
Nick believes, and he sees Kanye as a way to
(06:30):
Um to magnify that ship. And you can see it
very clearly in that clip the different ways in which
they're both thinking about him in this opportunity. So yeah,
that's that's what I got right now. Something that you
tweeted that I thought was really interesting was this idea
that and I'm not excusing any of Kanye West's bullfit.
It's anti Semitic and anti black and misogynists. Yeah, mental
(06:54):
health is not an excuse for any of those things.
But do you sort of see any like part of
me wonder is this to people kind of trying to
I don't want to use word take advantage of, but
steer someone who is clearly having some kind of like
mental health issue to use him for their own benefit.
All Yeah, yeah, I mean Kanye number one, we're not
(07:16):
like theorizing about a guy's mental health. Kanye has been institutionalized.
You know, he has manic cycles, He's had psychotic breaks.
This is something that Kim Kardashians talked about. And if
you just kind of look at the way he's talking
in that video, this is not like I think he's
in the middle of a psychotic break. And I think
(07:36):
that Nick and I think that Milo are both trying
to kind of push him in directions that are more
beneficial to them because they see him as easy to manipulate.
Right now, and again, as you said, this doesn't mean
like he's not racist because and then says to mean
that the racism isn't real because lots of people have
psychotic breaks and don't hang out with Milianopolis, and Nick
(07:57):
Flint does. The fact that he is racist, the fact
that he's become convinced, that he has convinced himself of
all of these anti Semitic conspiracy theories, all of that
is the reason why he's in this position. But I
also think he's not really in his right mind now,
and I part of that is because if he was,
if he was coldly and smoothly operating for the position
(08:19):
of trying to push anti Semitic politics because he was
just a racist, this is not how you do it
as Kanye West. This is not the way. This is
too uncontrolled to open and out there. He's alienating people
too quickly, there's no plausible deniability, and he's not actually
making a good case. He's getting like too agitated and angry.
Like hopping off of the tim pool thing is not
(08:42):
an action of a guy who's completely in control It's
an action of a guy who's kind of lost anyone
who will try to stop him from following his like
momentary whims and impulses, which is what I think we're
seeing in his behavior. So I don't think that you're
trying to mitigate his comicity in this by saying like, oh,
(09:02):
these are not the actions of a guy who's capable
of thinking through everything that he's doing right now either.
So what do you make of the fact that these
figures like Kanyo Best at own point was like a
largely a cultural figure. What do you make of the
fact that these extremist types are now powering around with
these cultural figures, Like does that? Does that mean anything?
Like why do you think that we're seeing that? I
(09:23):
mean we're seeing that because Kanye is Kanye has always
been a guy who was very much kind of enthralled
of his of his worst impulses. This is not the
first time we've seen him go in that direction. So
one of the things that I think we're seeing with
Kanye is this is a guy who's very prominent and
(09:44):
very wealthy and not used to being told no. Has
completely alighted the circle of people who might have moderated
his behavior at points in the past, and I think
that made him really vulnerable. And I think it's kind
of like an immune system breaking down, and there were
just these holes in the immune system. And at some
point Milo got close to him. And Milo is a
(10:08):
pretty savvy when it comes to manipulating individual people. This
guy's history, by the way, I mean, there's no way
that sends well for Kanye Unopolis. Like one of the
things he likes to do most is blackmail people who
will record them without them being aware. He's the guy
who destroyed Richard Spencer by releasing that recording of Spencer
at that that club in Dallas. He's that kind of dude,
(10:31):
and I'm sure he's doing that with Kanye, but he's
also I think trying to wrap himself around the guy,
make him into himself indispensable, be like the dude's emotional
support network, because I think he sees he's a predator.
He sees very in a very savvy way. Oh, this
guy's just gotten rid of all of the people who
were doing that for him and is alone and there's
(10:52):
a place for me. I think Nick got into it
from a different position. Wentes is a an opportunist as well,
but he's an opportunist for his message and his message
Like number one, I think he's always liked Kanye as
a as a performer. There's evidence of that. He's dressed
as a few times. So you've got both this kind
of this weird Nazi kid has always idolized Kanye and
(11:16):
his ability to get attention, and now is able to
use Kanye's ability to get attention to push this Nazi
message he's been trying to push for years. Uh So
it makes sense to me that it's happening. I don't
know that this is evidence of a broader trend in
the culture other than that because of the Internet, a
lot of famous people have been exposed to anti Semitic
and other sort of fringe fascist conspiracy theories just like
(11:40):
regular people have. And so you are seeing like there,
but these aren't the only cases of this. You are
seeing more of these people who are culturally prominent like
come out and express their belief in these very shady conspiracies.
Kanye is just again kind of lacks the self control
or the ability to moderate himself, which is why he's
(12:00):
gone so much further. Yeah, and let's talk a bit
about Milo. We we covered Milo his coordinated rasmic campaign
against actor Leslie Jones, and that episode ends with like, oh,
Milo is broke. You know, he got kicked off of Twitter,
he felt from grace, you know, lost his lost his
book deal, not speaking at Seapack. I think I saw
him like on YouTube selling like religious junk of some
(12:22):
kind in turning for Marjorie Taylor Green. Do you think
that this is like, is this Milo's comeback attaching himself
to Kanye Do you think that it's like, this is
my attempt to get back in the line, might build
bad platform back and that kind of thing. I actually
don't think he that's his plan in that way. I
think Milo he's spent a lot of time trying to
(12:43):
get back in the limelight. He's he's he's pushed a
lot in order to like just kind of keep his
name out there in any way, shape or form. But
I also think he's coming to a point where he's
had a number of cycles of being in the news
and being out of the news, and I think what
he cares about more than anything is not being poor.
(13:05):
I think Kanye is very wealthy still and also easy
to manipulate, right now, and I think Milo sees that
if he stays near him and makes himself indispensable, there's
a way that some of that money is going to
fall off, and maybe it will be enough that he
doesn't have to be as much of a shameless, grifting
piece of ship as he has been. Uh, he can
(13:26):
he can actually like live the life that this was.
He's always been in it for the money, right, Nick
believes something. It's horrible, but Nick is a believer. Milo
has always been a grifter, and I think he sees
this as his best shot at getting a big pay
day and probably writing a book about it at some point. Right, Like, again,
he's planning to betray Kanye. Not that I care about
(13:49):
Kanye getting betrayed, but that is what he's planning to do. Yeah,
And I wonder, like I remember a few weeks ago
when Kanye announced he was buying parlor, and I was
sad to see that it took a little bit of
time for that story to be reported as like he's
been buddying up with Candice Owen. Candice Owen's husband owns parlor.
Now he's buying parlor. It's not a very robust platform,
(14:11):
Like I do I do think that, like it's like
that axiom a fool in his money, you know. I
just like, this is a wealthy person who is clearly
having some issues and also espousing the kind of fucked
up ideology that speaks to these people, and so they're
all just sort of like rushing some of them are
just sort of rushing into cash in on it. I think. Yeah.
I mean, if you followed Kanye's career at all, like
(14:33):
up until now, I think had a lot of the
same people around him and add some kind of a
loyal support system, and now he just has a bunch
of weird nazi grifters around him and they're taking advantage
of the fact that he's alone. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
that's I think pretty obvious. And I again, like none
(14:58):
of this is to say that like, oh we should
feel sorry for Kanye. No, literally, literally, no one who
has struggled with mental health has ever had more resources
available to them. And I know just mean that the
money sense, Like whatever you want to say about Kim Kardashian,
she really cared about him and tried like did the
deeply embarrassing and difficult thing, which is like publicly make
(15:18):
her husband's mental health something of like popular conversation in
order to like try and get him some kind of help.
And you know, none of this. You know, he hasn't
taken any of the opportunities he's had to like deal
with this ship. So I'm not sympathetic to him, but
I do think it's important to talk to like talk
about this as what it is, rather than pretend like, oh,
(15:41):
Kanye is part of some scheme. Uh, Kanye is not
thinking any of this through. He's not really able to
at the moment. Yeah, I think you're exactly right, And
I think it's one of the reasons why conversations about
Kanye can be so difficult, because it's easy for folks
to hear like, oh, I'm excuse. I'm not holding him
accountable for his behavior, for his ideology, for the things
(16:03):
that he's saying. I think like nobody is saying that
he is not responsible for the ship that he's saying
and doing. But also opportunists and grifters are definitely taking
advantage of him and definitely trying to steer him in
a direction that will be youthful for them in some capacity.
So it's like and even talking about his anti Semitism.
I think that, like we have so far Togo and
(16:24):
conversations about black anti semitism, it's really like have a
conversation about it. I think that with Kanye it's so
clear that we're not there yet, Like we're not really
having the conversation. Yeah, I mean, and that's that parts
a little bit above my pay grade, But um, I
think the conversation of like how this he got exposed
to this stuff that's really worth having. I'm personally very
(16:48):
curious about like how long this has been going on.
As far as I'm aware, there's not really signs and
his music where he's being like covertly anti semitic. I
don't think he was accused of that, So my my
guess is that this is a thing that happened due
to his increasing isolation and you know, increased amount of
time on the internet. But I am curious, like where
(17:08):
they're friends of his at one point sending him videos
who are just a little bit less far down the
rabbit hole. Like I do want to know and think
it's a valuable question, like what is the path that
leads this guy to being willing to sit in a
room with Nick Flintes and not like getting the funk
up when Nick starts talking, right, I think that is
a worthy question. I just don't actually know the answer
(17:29):
to that right now. Yeah, same, you know, speaking about
that dinner that Nick and Kanye had with Trump, I've
seen a lot of handrying about why folks in the
GOP aren't standing up to denounce the fact that Trump
had dinner with Flintes and Kanye West. Why do you
(17:51):
think we're seeing that because Nick number one, the Republican
Party is very much like tied to the Israeli government.
They are a major funder and those like a pack
and has proven willing to like look askance at some
people who are just on the edge with their anti Semitism.
Nick is not Nick is Nick is outright is a
(18:11):
is a hitlerist. So Number one, he's he's just too
far for it. And it's one of those things I
don't believe. So this is a topic of debate, like
did Trump know who Fuintes was ahead of time? You know,
does he secretly like was he hoping this would go? Like?
I don't actually think so. I'm sure that someone had
talked to Trump a couple of times about Fuintes. I
suspect maybe he even watched a clip of the kid
(18:34):
talking about Trump when like an aid put it in
front of his face. But but Nick does not. Nick
did not up until recently, exist on like the normal Internet.
He was not like a dude a mainstream person would encounter.
And Trump is not going to be just like Trump
doesn't go find this ship on his own. People put
stuff in front of his face. And I I one thing,
(18:56):
I'm certain whether or not he had heard of Nick
before this. I don't believe that when he Kanye walked
in with Flintest behind him, Donald Trump said, oh, that's
Nick Flintes. I simply do not believe that. And I
don't believe that like Nick started in on t and
from the what we have of the conversation, it doesn't
sound like Flintes started in with a bunch of anti
(19:17):
Semitic conspiracies. He started in praising Trump, and so Trump
was like, I really like this kid, And that's the
way Trump works, right. Uh. Trump also is all about
self protection and self preservation. So I'm not surprised that,
Like and I suspect the way it went is that,
like they had this conversation, he talks with Kanye, He's like, boy,
I like this kid who's saying nice things about me,
(19:38):
And as soon as they leave, an aid walks up
and says, that's motherfucking Nazi boss, Like we like and
that that guy, that guy is a little bit like,
we don't want to be associated with that dude. And
Trump was like, oh, alright, fuck uh, And then he
issued that weird statement where he was like, Kanye didn't
say anything get racist. Also, I don't know Nick Flintes, Yeah,
normal statement to put out after you've just had a
(19:58):
nice dinner. Like nothing anti semitical was discussed. We're all
good there. I just don't understand because Marl lag is
supposed to be praised as this super secure place. Not
one motherfucker could say this is who that is before
he got in the room. Well, I mean that doesn't
mean it's not secure. Nick doesn't have any history of
(20:18):
like violence, you know, the secret services job, And nobody's
gonna say going to tell Donald who he's having a
dinner with. No, I mean that that makes sense to
me though, Like he is. Donald is also kind of
like Trump, He's increasingly pushed away a lot of the
people who used to be at his back as he's
(20:39):
gotten weirder too. So I'm not surprised by that. Um. Yeah,
I'm not really surprised by anything that happened in that meeting.
I just I think it's less a sign that like, uh,
Trump is openly embracing the Nazis in his missed and
more a sign of like, yeah, when you have like
no control over who you'll hang out with other than
that they say ice things about you, you're gonna wind
(21:01):
up talking, sitting down and eating with some Nazis. Yeah,
and Nazi your two's gonna slip in. Yeah. So speaking
of someone who is kind of trumpy or I see
as kind of trumpy, let's talk a little bit about
Elon Musk. You know, Yeah, we've got Elon Musk buying Twitter,
you know, Trump pastors social Do you see this as
extremists sort of building their own media ecosystems? And how
(21:23):
worried should we be about this in terms of like
allowing kind of I don't know, extremist ideology, and even
more than that, just sort of culti vibes, which I
know that you've written a lot about. I want to
talk about that as well. Do you see these bids
for buying their own platforms as a problem. Yeah, I
mean it's a huge problem. I do think one of
(21:44):
the things I find interesting about Elon because look, we
can all like talk about o Elon was always a grifter,
and Elon has always been There's elements of that throughout
his history. Certainly, he hasn't always been like this, and
I don't think it's that he was just like keeping
it on check and hiding his power level until he
could reveal his true beliefs. I think Twitter has been deeply,
deeply toxic for his brain. It is for everybody, but
(22:06):
I think it's damaged him. He's he's got main character
syndrome more than most people, and effectively, by buying this,
he's turned himself into the everyday main character of Twitter,
which is one of the worst things you can do
for your mental health. And it's the thing that Trump
did to himself. And I think part of why we're
seeing Ellen get more trumpy is that he's put himself
in the same environment and like a goldfish, his ego
(22:29):
is growing to a to to fit the old container.
I can't this is too early to say. Maybe I'll
get embarrassed by making this statement. But I think maybe
one reason why Trump hasn't come back to Twitter is
that after going through Twitter withdrawals when he got booted,
maybe Trump realized it was bad for him and doesn't
(22:50):
actually want to go back. I don't think that's a
zero percent chance, because I suspect it was pretty traumatic
to him. Is like suddenly having that cut off, and
maybe he's like, I don't want to get back into that,
Like I got this truth social thing. When I do
need to get something out, I could get it out,
but it doesn't suck me up like Twitter, like it's
not doesn't hit as hard as that old ship. Right,
he's on that methodon now weeding himself off of it
(23:14):
a little bit. I don't know, maybe not. Maybe he'll
get back on Twitter tomorrow, but I kind of suspect
that's what's happening. I think with somebody like Elon Musk,
who I honestly i've never met him, but I can
read and see, so I have my own opinions. Do
think that there is something about Twitter that is bad,
especially being surrounded by sycophants, by by yes men and
(23:36):
fanboys that really has you getting high on your own supply.
And people like you and me, like normal people. Yeah,
Twitter is not good for any of our brains, but
most of us, when we put our phone down, we
have somebody in our life who will call us on
our bullshit, or tell us when we're acting ridiculous, or
tell us when something that we're saying doesn't make any
sense or is really harmful. And most of us have
(23:57):
systems in our life for basic accountability, and it seems
like people like Trump and a Musk maybe don't have that.
Maybe they have insullct Like when I read these reports
about how former space X and Tesla staffers had to
spend so much time and energy kind of doing the
window dressing specifically to play Kate Musk and like saying
(24:18):
things that they knew that he would like, you know,
setting up computers so that they looked like the matrix
was happening on them, so that when Elon Musk was
in the building he would think really cool science ship
was happening, even though that was just a farce. You know. Well,
I do want to say so that that those recollections
of events come from. I believe it was originally a
tumbler post from someone who was claiming that they worked
(24:39):
at SpaceX and that this is the way everyone, this
is the way the company worked, that there was like
a lot of effort that went into kind of constraining
Elon so that he could be used for the thing
he was good at, which is pr without interrupting the workflow.
And it it all seems I want to believe it,
that we don't have any proof that that's true, right right,
this is not no one's that that dude didn't go
(25:01):
to like a jury or individual to go to a
journalist and like prove that they were there. Other people
weren't interviewed. I have found a couple other accounts of
people who also claim, and again these are just on
the internet, that they worked at SpaceX and that the
stuff he was saying sound incredible. UM, but there's no
proof of it at this moment. Now, I I would
love to if if you work for SpaceX, if you
(25:22):
if you worked in the company at this point, if
you can either confirm or deny that account, please reach
out to us, because I would love to be able
to actually do some reporting on that. Um, because I
I do want to believe it. It sounds right, but
I do want to be clear we don't actually know
whether or not that thing is real totally. I will
(25:44):
add that in the uh the lawsuit against Tesla, one
of the allegations made in that lawsuit is that when
Elon Musk toward the I don't know show rooms, that
all the employees knew that that meant to have black
and brown like staffers basically hid because Elon must didn't
want to see them. And so like that is a
much more credible allegation to people are making that in
(26:07):
a court of law, right, Like that's yeah, absolutely, so, yeah,
you're you're exactly right, Like we don't know if that is,
you know, a confirmed statement by somebody who actually worked there.
But I do think like even the Tesla example does
sort of speak to the idea that Elon Musk is
someone for whom others in his orbit have to expand
(26:27):
some energy to make happy in certain ways, and that
like that is an understood thing. If that, if that,
if those allegations in that law suitor to be believed,
it does seem to be like that is he shows up. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Well I think that, you know, I agree with you.
I think that something I've always dislikeding On Musk, but
(26:47):
I think that something has happened that has made him
more trumpy, And I think part of it is probably
how often he is embedding himself in these Twitter echo
chambers that just tell him what do you want to
hear and have fanboys and sycophans just being brilliant, brilliant,
brilliant everything he says, Well, he's he's doing. You know.
One of the things that one of the delusions that
(27:09):
Twitter allows us all to feel is the because it
it can get you, trap you in this kind of loop.
It's not quite an echo chamber, because whatever loop you're in,
whatever reality tunnel in Twitter you're in, there will be
people you hate and disagree with their but it it
traps you in this kind of like chunk of discourse
that will give you a vastly like fucked up and
(27:32):
inflated and incorrect view of like and this is again
it depends are you on like uh like tech Twitter,
you want journalist Twitter, you want black Twitter, right like,
You'll get different variants of this, but none of them
correspond directly to the real world because, for one thing,
the couple of dozen million people who use Twitter it's
not very large as a service, are all a specific
(27:55):
selected group of the kind of weirdos who are likely
to use Twitter. Not many, yeah so, but the it
warps everyone's perspective if you let it right, if you
don't use it the way it ought to be used,
which is as a way of kind of curating the
news and um a way of getting like a discrete
set of opinions, but one that does not correspond to
(28:16):
popular like throughout the you know, we had we had
a gun control measure come up in Portland recently, and
if I had listened to my uh my Twitter, you
know followers, I would have been pretty sure that it
was going to fail. But I was also paying attention
to like conversations people were having elsewhere and just kind
of information that I could pick up to be like, yeah,
this is going to be like an incredibly tight vote.
(28:38):
But it would have been really easy to do what
people do with like Trump and what people did with
Hillary Clinton, where you're like, well, everyone in my timeline
says this, so this must be the predominant opinion. And
Musk is doing like the most concentrated version of that
on himself, where he's like hosting these polls which are
deeply unscientific and very easy to manipulate the bots and
(28:59):
being like, look, twenty million people voted the voice of
the people. You know, like, no Elon, You've you've created
You've created a little machine that's entire purpose is to
skew your view of reality. Um, this is going to
have very disastrous consequences, not just on your mental health,
but on your ability to engage with the world, because
(29:22):
being able to like understand what's actually happening and how
people actually feel outside of the weird bubble of your
online friends is crucial for not going insane. That's such
a good point. And speaking of going insane, you know,
we started our conversation talking about that fucking wild ass
picture that Elon Musk posted, you know, that toy guns
(29:43):
and the four diet cokes decaffeinated diet Coke. I'm just
gonna decaffeinated, which is hard to find. That's a that's
a rare, rare drink. First, baby, shit, the cut next
to my bed, there's two real guns and like tin
more Z is then there, so like, fuck you, Ellen,
you're stealing, Like that's cultural appropriation, Robert, is it caffeinated
(30:06):
decaffeinated Zbia, This is very it's a mix I like
the decaffeinated cola Zeba actually, and I do drink that.
The coal is good, but it's a little bit too acidic.
So the decaffeinated Zevia cola is one of my fades.
Robert loves Zevia. I've never had it. Oh, it's it's
the best. I recommend picking up a couple of guns,
(30:27):
buying six to eight zva is, keeping them by your
bedside table a good time, and like a really weird
ominous glass water bottle. Yeah, and like a really really
really thick like lamp fixture. I don't know what's happening there,
but the decaffe neated diet coke is very upsetting. It
was a lot, And I guess one of the questions
(30:48):
I have for the both of you is there's a
kind of I don't know how to how to put it,
but a kind of like ship post Equality to Elon
Moss to Eat to Kanye West, where they are so
ridiculous that it's hard to take them seriously. And at
times I wonder like like is this meant to be
a joke or is it serious? Is do you think
that's an intentional tactic to kind of blur the lines
(31:10):
of I'm just sucking around and kidding or I'm this
is real and I'm serious, Like, is that is that
part of how they are moving intentionally? Do you think? Yes? Yeah,
I mean I agree, Yeah, I mean I think that well.
I think that there's a degree of intention to manipulate
the information ecosystem by taking personal control of major agents
(31:32):
of it, right, And I think it's less a matter
of like having total control and more a matter of
being able to kind of subtly push things. That's how
a guy like Bezos, who is more in control of himself,
uses it. I think it would be a mistake too.
I think it would be a mistake to credit Ellon
with having too clear of a plan here. I just
(31:52):
don't see evidence of that this all. Maybe there will,
maybe he's he's playing five d hs, but I kind
of think this is mourning sample of him having been
manipulated and broken by social media to a point of
kind of derangement than it is an example of him
having some sort of cunning plot to manipult. Now. I
do think some of the people who backed him in
(32:12):
this purchase, like the Saudis, certainly had those kind of goals,
But I don't know that. I think Elon did. Yeah.
One of the big similarities that I see to all
of these figures from Elon Kanye is this kind of
CULTI quality that's around them. I read your substat piece
(32:35):
about the cultiness of tech billionaires, which was brilliant, and
how they sort of all benefit from this kind of
myth like they are seeing something, they are onto something
that other people just cannot see. Why do you think
that we like, why are we seeing this rise of
the kind of CULTI leader type and it's just gonna
be Do you think we're going to see more of
this going forward? Yeah? I mean I think we're only
(32:58):
number one. I think you always see people become more
vulnerable to cult leaders in times like this, when there's
great instability and change is happening rapidly and it's it's
really difficult for people to get a kind of handle
on reality and to feel like they're in a stable position.
And I think the kind of cult leaders who are
(33:18):
most effective in that period are not like the ones
who are like Keith Ranieri, where they're trying to keep
a sex harem around them. It's the people who are
trying to get a large chunk of the population to
buy in with them in an alternate vision of reality.
That's what Trump has always done, and he's been very
good at it. Uh. And I think those were not
(33:40):
yet past the era of those monsters. And we may not,
like we who are around right now, may not live
to see the other side of it. This is not
a new thing in in history, you know, in during
kind of the late Classical period or the Lake Grecian
Classical period, when you had like Athens, the Athenian state
collapse and you had all of these different kind of like, uh,
(34:04):
invasions and wars and stuff kind of destroying this this
the civilization that the Greeks had built, or at least
its dominance over that part of the world. Um, you
had writers noting like at the time that these these
demagogues had become increasingly popular, these guys going in front
of these societies that had been quasi democratic and being like, look,
(34:25):
just hand over power to me. You know, I've got
this vision of the way we can fix things, and
and getting people to buy in on that vision has
always been like the tool of a demagogue. There's not
a big difference between demagogue and a cult leader. And
I think We're in a similar position, right whereas things
increasingly fall apart, more and more people are going to
(34:47):
be vulnerable to someone who is willing, who is able
to wrap them up in a vision of the world
that that may not be accurate, but is more comforting
than reality. And if enough people agree to to kind
of make a place for that in their own heart,
then you can do some pretty impressive things as a
(35:07):
cult leader. So yeah, I don't think we're past that
that world at all. Yeah, it's I mean, like I saw,
I was like getting very frustrated at a pretty clear
example of what you're talking about with regards to Musk.
Where Musk was it's almost like a Q and Nanni
vibe where he was getting and also taking a lot
of credit for combating child sexual abuse material from Twitter
(35:29):
despite like not like like that was just like a
thing that propped up like, oh, thank you for taking
action to combat this, and it's just like not a
thing that is happening. He fired the team that's in
charge of combating child sexual abuse material, like there's not
really evidence and he's done anything that actually meaningfully made
a difference with it. But in taking over, there's just
(35:49):
this alternate reality popping up that he's this big crusader
for protecting children online, which it's just not true. Yeah,
I mean we could argue he made it less safe. Yeah,
he made it less well. Twitter has purged its childlike
safety team, like the people whose job it is to
make sure that there's not content on there that's endangering children. Like,
there's like one of them left employed basically for all
(36:11):
of Asia. Like, so he's objectively made it less safe,
but you know that who cares. It'll be fine. Thankfully
we've got Apple sailing and to rescue us all here,
I guess. But it does seem like the same pattern
Bridgets pointed out several times, where it's like, let's attack
(36:33):
a brand. That's something that happens so often, and I think,
like it's I think this is such a such a
weird point. But I do think it's one of the
things that I think extremists who coordinate online are really
good at, is coordinating folks to attack a brand or
a corporation, and corporation is not really necessarily knowing how
to deal with it. It's like, oh no, we're being
(36:55):
you know, like they're not able to say, like, oh
this is a manufactured outrage campaign and we should encount
own to it or whatever. I think that folks coordinating
online are uniquely good at that kind of pressure, and
brands and corporations aren't necessarily good at with standing it
or pushing back against it. I guess I should say, Yeah,
what do you make of all the like handwringing that
(37:18):
Musk does about like free speech on Twitter? And then
you know, on the one hand, being like, we need
to protect free speech or we'll fall into tyranny. These
anti fascist researchers are all banned, Like, what do you
make of that? Well, I mean, he's he's It's what
I was saying earlier. He exists entirely within this bubble,
and it's a bubble made up of praise from strangers,
which is why, like it kind of shows you. I
(37:40):
don't know anything about Musk's present mental health state, but
I wonder about it because it definitely seems like there's
something in him that needs the approval of cat tured
uh Like, which is a prominent far right Twitter account,
like all these weirdos he's and he's always been sympathetic
to the right, you know, I just look at who
he donated to the most. You know, I'm not surprised
(38:03):
by that, but I think the way in which social
media works means that a lot of people, if you
aren't careful, you'll get drawn further and further and further
into webs of people who are kind of increasingly extreme
in their opinions. And with Musk, the way it's happening
is those people are making a concerted effort to be
really nice to him. So while everybody else's is banging
(38:25):
on him and making fun of him for being an idiot, Uh,
these folks are calling him a genius in the future
of the world, and he's he's deeply vulnerable to praise
like all narcissists. So I think that's just what's happening
is these are the people who are being nice to him,
and he's kind of taking on their view of what's
happening on Twitter, even though it does not correspond to
(38:46):
reality in any measurable way. Like what do you think
will happen? Like what do you think is at stake?
If anti fascist voices, leftist voices, you know, are all
either suspended from the platform or are just like funk this,
it's not worth it. I'm leaving like that, Like, what
do you think happens if that's the case. Well, you know,
there's a degree to which I'm worried because Twitter was always,
(39:07):
of all of the different things we've had on social media,
the very best for spreading left wing views and media.
That's why all of these weirdo things that crime think
who just got banned had Twitter platforms. It's worked pretty
well for the distribution of that kind of stuff, and
it was a good way for people to make connections
with each other. Um, there's a reason why so much
(39:29):
of the uprisings started, you know, with people seeing Twitter ship.
Not to like say that, oh it started because of Twitter,
but it started because people encountered the video of George
Floyd being murdered on fucking Twitter, and people encountered videos
of like protests and uprisings in their own city and
then went out into the street and stuff, and that
the fact that that might go away is concerning. At
(39:49):
the same time, Twitter was not just a place where
leftist ideas and like left wing thinkers were able to
spread stuff. It was a place where the left tour
itself apart every forty seventy two hours. So the fact
that it might be like, there's also going to be
benefits if it collapses. I think more than anything, there
(40:13):
will be bad things, there will be good things. There's
stuff that will be calamitous about it, there's stuff that
will be positive. At the end of the day, this
was always going to happen some way, maybe not this suddenly,
but nothing lasts forever. We've had social media sites that
were huge parts of the Internet fall into disrepair and
and obscurity before, and it will happen again. It will
(40:34):
happen to whatever replaces Twitter. You know, it will happen
to TikTok one day. This is just the thing. The
thing that the Internet does is the thing that everything does. Right,
Nothing nothing gold or even crusted in poop, can stay.
So I I I'm at a certain level. I don't
think it's I think it's reasonable to be concerned about
the way this could impact you or your community. And
(40:55):
I'm not saying people who have those concerns are being unreasonable,
but personally I'm kind of trying to have like a well,
this is just the you know, it's the way it goes.
Twitter was never gonna be around forever, and if this
is how it dies, this is how it dies, so
we'll have to figure something else out. Wow, that is
a surprisingly it's like rosy take from someone who was
like one of the least optimistic people that I know. Well,
(41:20):
you know, I have been around on the Internet a
long time, and I am a poster. I am I
it is woven deep into my blood. But I've posted
many places, UM, and I will be posting in many
places in the future, regardless of what happens to posting
on this particular platform. And I think that's true of
all the of all the great posters, of the ones
(41:40):
who are certainly greater than I, people like Drill, you know,
there they'll find a place. You know. The posters never die,
they just post in different websites. So one of my
last questions for you is, I was reading this um
interview that you did with Box about gamer Gate and
sort of online it's reamism more broadly, and on this show,
(42:02):
we really argue that there is a direct line between
online movements that are based in harassing marginalized people. We
often start those conversations with gamer Gate, but we also
talked about instances that predate and led the gamer Gate.
I argue that there's a direct line between those movements
and the rise of extremist movements today. Um, if people
had taken those movements more seriously, or people with power
had like done something to stop them, perhaps things would
(42:24):
be different. I wonder do you see those things as
linked as well? Yeah, I I guess so. My own
thinking on the matter is kind of muddled, but but
probably yeah, probably, Yeah, I like it. No, I mean,
it's I see what you mean. It's it's a that
is my through line that I am always like beating
that drum. You know, all the people that I've talked
(42:45):
to who were targets of that kind of harassment that
predated gamer Gate, they all said the same thing, like,
I don't think that if somebody would have done something
about it, then that like we could say Trump wouldn't
have been elected, or that we could say the insurrection
would have happened. They don't believe that, but they do
have this question of like, could something have been different?
Could extremists would they have less of a hold on
(43:09):
our democracy and our discourse? Would they be less legitimized,
would media no to not spend a couple of cycles
talking about how dapper they are or whatever? And amplifying
their messages in these ways, would we have been primed
to handle it differently? And so it's not. It's never
like a clear line of like, oh, it would never
have happened. It's more of a like, what things have
been a little bit different? Yeah, I mean, I think
(43:32):
if the entirety of media were not driven by what
gets the most clips or what gets the most clicks
and thus, like, if that were not the primary thing
that determined whether or not journalism is profitable, we would
be in a better place. And if if that were
not the entire thing determined what made journalism profitable, stuff
like gamer Gate wouldn't have taken off right um if
(43:54):
it were, because I think one of the things I've
come to believe there was this period of time after
gamer Gate where I was like, if only they had
paid attention to us when we were trying to warn
them about what these people are like, about the fact
that none of them are telling the truth, that they're
all lying to try and push an agenda that you
can't take them seriously or literally in any way, shape
or form. You have to take them seriously, but you
(44:15):
can't assume that they're honest. You can't. You can't engage
with them, You can't debate them, because they're liars and
they're they're entirely attempting to just sort of like get
clout by, you know, bringing their ship up. Like you
cannot engaging with them in any way other than two
like attack them is a waste of time and deeply
(44:37):
damaging the society. There was a time when I believed
we could have convinced, like, if we could have convinced
the fucking Jake Tappers of the world of that that, um,
we might have avoided a lot of terror. I don't
think it's possible for them to have avoided it, because
engaging with those people and highlighting them and putting them
up in the center of your shows is worth too
much money because it trends, because that's like that. So
(44:57):
at the end of the day, I think that the
nature of how what makes media profitable in the twenty
first century meant we were always doomed to this. I
don't think it's the way the internet works. Inherently the
internet makes this stuff easier. But at the end of
the day, the reason why these people were able to
break containment from the dark corners of the Internet where
they were harassing individual people to the point where they
(45:19):
are threatening society on a broader level. Is because it's
really profitable to hold these weirdos up in front of
the mainstream and say, look at this, Look at this,
look at this. Do you see that as a vibe
that will ever be rid of unless we completely radically
change the way that our media functions in the United Yeah,
(45:41):
So having these people in our society in anywhere near
prominence is not sustainable. Eventually, the eventually something will happen,
something violent, something disastrous. Uh, and and then they'll either
all die or be forced back underground. This has happened
a few times in history before. The question is how
(46:02):
many of us wind up going down out with them? Yeah,
there's that optimism that I'm used to from you, Robert.
That's so funny that you say that about Robert, because
I find him to be one of the most like hope.
He always finds hope in things, there's all I mean.
I I firmly believe there's always something to be hopeful about,
(46:24):
even if everything feels like shit. Yeah, I mean, like
that's that's that's like one of the things that we've
imbedded into all of our shows on cools and media,
is that there's always hope in figuring out and optimistic
approach to the to the healthscape we currently are living through. Meanwhile,
(46:46):
your shows have titles like it could Happen Here that
like titles that keep me up at night and Internet
Hate Machine. Hey, that was your idea. You came up
with that title, Robert, I did come up with that title.
I think that. I think, Uh, that's a good place
to end it us, Sophie. Is there anything that I
missed that I should mention? No, you always crush it.
(47:08):
You never miss anything. Well, thank you for all your help, Robert.
Thank you so much for being here. It has been
an honor. Thank you for having me. Where can folks,
I'm sure that I'm sure anybody listening to this is
already obsessed with your shows, But where can folks listen
to your shows? Tell us about the Bastards, etcetera. Well,
we got Behind the Bastards, which is weekly. We got
it could Happen here every day. I'm not on it
(47:29):
every day, but I'm on it a lot. I have
a book called After the Revolution you can buy at
any of the places that you can buy books, and
I also have a sub stack where I write essays
every week. You can find it at shatter zone dot
sub stack dot com, shatter zone dot sub stack dot com.
That's that's my little basically a blog. They call it
(47:50):
a newsletter whatever you can call it, whatever you want.
I don't care. And then and then by the this
is coming out next week. So on the December the eight,
Robert a Great kill Joy and myself we'll be doing
a special livestream episode of Behind the Bastards with the
Q and A. And you can get your tickets that
moment dot co, slash e TV. Yeah, motherfucker's. Oh my god,
(48:13):
I can't wait for that. I love Margaret, Margaret's the
best listen to Margaret show Who People who did cool stuff?
That's my plug. Internet Hate Machine is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
check out our website cool zone media dot com, or
find us on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(48:34):
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to another episode of Internet Hate Machine. I'm joined
my producers Sophie, and we are so thrilled to be
joined with the one, the only, Robert Evans behind the
Bastards of Robert. Thank you so much for being here today. Hey,
thanks for having me with all of the stuff happening
and unfolding right now. You're the person that I was like, Damn,
I really want to get Robert's take. I truly don't
(00:23):
know what the fun is going on, Like, how are
you in these in these very weird times? Well, I
don't know. You know, the thing that we're dealing with
right now that's so peculiar is there's these there's these
figures from like the shitty side of the Internet who
were kind of for years folks who did the same
(00:43):
kind of research I did. We kind of talked about
them like like radioactive material, Like we were just kind
of hoping that we could keep them underground and and
and not get into the groundwater. And then Nick Flintes
wound up hanging out on Kanye's private jet, eating any
food with him and fucking middle of nowhere Maryland, and uh,
(01:04):
and I guess that ships out of the bag now.
First of all, disrespectful to Frederick Maryland. Sorry it looked
like a terrible town. No, it is, I it is.
You know, that's sort of a good place to start.
So I have to say I'm not I was not
terribly familiar with Nick Fuentez, and I saw a lot
of reporting saying calling him a quote like right wing extremist.
(01:27):
But that almost doesn't seem totally accurate to me. Can
can you tell me a bit about his ideology? Yeah,
it's frustrating to me that he's just being called a
right wing extremist by people like I think Molly Haberman
was the person who wrote that article. But because that's
that's about as accurate as saying that like Pino Sha
had issues with democracy. Nick Flintes is a is a Nazi,
(01:52):
um And I when I say that, I don't mean
it kind of people use that sometimes as a as
a pejorative these days. I mean that in the very
literal senses. And he really likes Adolf Hitler, who believes
in the tenants of national socialism. He's a little bit
different from a mainstream Nazi, and that he's like Catholic fascist,
but he denies the Holocaust. Um. He has these, you know,
(02:13):
these kind of coy little ways of doing it where
he'll talk about like cookies and baking cookies and ovens
to try to make the point that six million people
couldn't have been killed. Like it's it's all really gross
and kind of tweet and um. And that's Nick. And
I guess that there's a couple of things about him
kind of bubbling up into the mainstream that are so weird.
(02:33):
One of them is just that he's much more extreme
than any of these all right figures. You know, these guys,
even like Milo, who's also involved in the whole Kanye thing,
they would always keep just enough plausible deniability about the
anti semitism and about the outright Nazi stuff that they
could be like, ah, the Left, look at them, they're
just trying to cancel me. They call everybody a nazi. Nick,
(02:53):
there's you can find him like videos of him just
saying like, yeah, we can't have a democracy because people
don't like the things that we like, so we have
to take over the government, instituted dictatorship and forced them
to believe the things we want them to believe. He's
a The other thing about Nick that it makes it
kind of peculiar that he's reaching into the mainstream is
(03:14):
that he's he's too gross for it. Nick is a
guy who will do stuff like burst into his like
close because he has kind of a little cult following
of young men. He'll do stuff like, you know, while
traveling with them, run a black light over their room
to see if they've been masturbating. Uh. He says that
having sex with women is the gayest thing that you
(03:36):
can do. He's probably he's probably having Yeah, there's a lot.
He lives at his mom's basement. He's such a he's
a weird little grimmlin man. He's also a very talented
propagandist and and pretty good at running a room. There
was a moment a couple of years ago that the
Knowledge Fight Guys covered where Alex Jones was like headlining
(03:58):
this rally d C this like big night of speeches. Now,
Alex is an alcoholic, and he got way too drunk
to properly m c the event and was kind of
just like flopping all over the place, and Nick took over,
uh and and and managed it pretty competently. You know. Again,
it was a room full of gropers, which are kind
of what you know, you call his followers called themselves
(04:20):
and other similar kind of fascist weirdos. But he's a
he's a talented showman, and he's also I think he's
a little too far off the map to actually go
mainstream and the way that he wants. That's clearly why
he's hanging out around Kanye, you can notice. And so
we're recording this the day after Kanya was just on
(04:42):
a guy named Tim Pools livestream show, which is a
fairly popular livestream YouTube news program. He has like ten
million followers or some ship, so there's subscribers, so he's
he's very popular. Tim was really looking forward to having
Flints and Napolis and uh and and Kanye on, because
obviously Kanye is huge. But Kanye walks off the set
(05:05):
fifteen minutes in over being very very lightly pushed back
on about anti Semitism, like so mild. It's very mild.
And it's interesting to watch what these because both of
these guys Eonopolis is his own kind of grifter, and
I kind of suspect that he and Fuintes are behind
the scenes competing rather viciously to try and control the
(05:27):
direction Kanye goes well as soon as Kanye walks off,
Melo Eleonopolis gets up and walks out after him. I'm
not even mad that you mispronounced his name, like, I'm
okay with it. There's no way to pronounce it right,
I mean it's Milo. I'm into the Melo pronunciation, to
(05:49):
be honest, I don't agree with you. But he he
gets up and he immediately goes out after Kanye UM,
And I think it's because Milos kind of going after
this whole. He wants to he's kissing ass. He just
he wants to be close to Kanye. He wants to
get all as much of that fucking money as he
possibly can, and that means be in the dude's body. Man.
(06:10):
You know, Kanye gets upset, you roll out there and
you try to make sure he's okay. Nick stays seated
and stays on message and keeps trying to talk about
the Jews because Nick sees Nick has a desire to
kind of keep steering Kanye in this direction. But Nick's
primary purpose up there is to push the things that
Nick believes, and he sees Kanye as a way to
(06:30):
Um to magnify that ship. And you can see it
very clearly in that clip the different ways in which
they're both thinking about him in this opportunity. So yeah,
that's that's what I got right now. Something that you
tweeted that I thought was really interesting was this idea
that and I'm not excusing any of Kanye West's bullfit.
It's anti Semitic and anti black and misogynists. Yeah, mental
(06:54):
health is not an excuse for any of those things.
But do you sort of see any like part of
me wonder is this to people kind of trying to
I don't want to use word take advantage of, but
steer someone who is clearly having some kind of like
mental health issue to use him for their own benefit.
All Yeah, yeah, I mean Kanye number one, we're not
(07:16):
like theorizing about a guy's mental health. Kanye has been institutionalized.
You know, he has manic cycles, He's had psychotic breaks.
This is something that Kim Kardashians talked about. And if
you just kind of look at the way he's talking
in that video, this is not like I think he's
in the middle of a psychotic break. And I think
(07:36):
that Nick and I think that Milo are both trying
to kind of push him in directions that are more
beneficial to them because they see him as easy to manipulate.
Right now, and again, as you said, this doesn't mean
like he's not racist because and then says to mean
that the racism isn't real because lots of people have
psychotic breaks and don't hang out with Milianopolis, and Nick
(07:57):
Flint does. The fact that he is racist, the fact
that he's become convinced, that he has convinced himself of
all of these anti Semitic conspiracy theories, all of that
is the reason why he's in this position. But I
also think he's not really in his right mind now,
and I part of that is because if he was,
if he was coldly and smoothly operating for the position
(08:19):
of trying to push anti Semitic politics because he was
just a racist, this is not how you do it
as Kanye West. This is not the way. This is
too uncontrolled to open and out there. He's alienating people
too quickly, there's no plausible deniability, and he's not actually
making a good case. He's getting like too agitated and angry.
Like hopping off of the tim pool thing is not
(08:42):
an action of a guy who's completely in control It's
an action of a guy who's kind of lost anyone
who will try to stop him from following his like
momentary whims and impulses, which is what I think we're
seeing in his behavior. So I don't think that you're
trying to mitigate his comicity in this by saying like, oh,
(09:02):
these are not the actions of a guy who's capable
of thinking through everything that he's doing right now either.
So what do you make of the fact that these
figures like Kanyo Best at own point was like a
largely a cultural figure. What do you make of the
fact that these extremist types are now powering around with
these cultural figures, Like does that? Does that mean anything?
Like why do you think that we're seeing that? I
(09:23):
mean we're seeing that because Kanye is Kanye has always
been a guy who was very much kind of enthralled
of his of his worst impulses. This is not the
first time we've seen him go in that direction. So
one of the things that I think we're seeing with
Kanye is this is a guy who's very prominent and
(09:44):
very wealthy and not used to being told no. Has
completely alighted the circle of people who might have moderated
his behavior at points in the past, and I think
that made him really vulnerable. And I think it's kind
of like an immune system breaking down, and there were
just these holes in the immune system. And at some
point Milo got close to him. And Milo is a
(10:08):
pretty savvy when it comes to manipulating individual people. This
guy's history, by the way, I mean, there's no way
that sends well for Kanye Unopolis. Like one of the
things he likes to do most is blackmail people who
will record them without them being aware. He's the guy
who destroyed Richard Spencer by releasing that recording of Spencer
at that that club in Dallas. He's that kind of dude,
(10:31):
and I'm sure he's doing that with Kanye, but he's
also I think trying to wrap himself around the guy,
make him into himself indispensable, be like the dude's emotional
support network, because I think he sees he's a predator.
He sees very in a very savvy way. Oh, this
guy's just gotten rid of all of the people who
were doing that for him and is alone and there's
(10:52):
a place for me. I think Nick got into it
from a different position. Wentes is a an opportunist as well,
but he's an opportunist for his message and his message
Like number one, I think he's always liked Kanye as
a as a performer. There's evidence of that. He's dressed
as a few times. So you've got both this kind
of this weird Nazi kid has always idolized Kanye and
(11:16):
his ability to get attention, and now is able to
use Kanye's ability to get attention to push this Nazi
message he's been trying to push for years. Uh So
it makes sense to me that it's happening. I don't
know that this is evidence of a broader trend in
the culture other than that because of the Internet, a
lot of famous people have been exposed to anti Semitic
and other sort of fringe fascist conspiracy theories just like
(11:40):
regular people have. And so you are seeing like there,
but these aren't the only cases of this. You are
seeing more of these people who are culturally prominent like
come out and express their belief in these very shady conspiracies.
Kanye is just again kind of lacks the self control
or the ability to moderate himself, which is why he's
(12:00):
gone so much further. Yeah, and let's talk a bit
about Milo. We we covered Milo his coordinated rasmic campaign
against actor Leslie Jones, and that episode ends with like, oh,
Milo is broke. You know, he got kicked off of Twitter,
he felt from grace, you know, lost his lost his
book deal, not speaking at Seapack. I think I saw
him like on YouTube selling like religious junk of some
(12:22):
kind in turning for Marjorie Taylor Green. Do you think
that this is like, is this Milo's comeback attaching himself
to Kanye Do you think that it's like, this is
my attempt to get back in the line, might build
bad platform back and that kind of thing. I actually
don't think he that's his plan in that way. I
think Milo he's spent a lot of time trying to
(12:43):
get back in the limelight. He's he's he's pushed a
lot in order to like just kind of keep his
name out there in any way, shape or form. But
I also think he's coming to a point where he's
had a number of cycles of being in the news
and being out of the news, and I think what
he cares about more than anything is not being poor.
(13:05):
I think Kanye is very wealthy still and also easy
to manipulate, right now, and I think Milo sees that
if he stays near him and makes himself indispensable, there's
a way that some of that money is going to
fall off, and maybe it will be enough that he
doesn't have to be as much of a shameless, grifting
piece of ship as he has been. Uh, he can
(13:26):
he can actually like live the life that this was.
He's always been in it for the money, right, Nick
believes something. It's horrible, but Nick is a believer. Milo
has always been a grifter, and I think he sees
this as his best shot at getting a big pay
day and probably writing a book about it at some point. Right, Like, again,
he's planning to betray Kanye. Not that I care about
(13:49):
Kanye getting betrayed, but that is what he's planning to do. Yeah,
And I wonder, like I remember a few weeks ago
when Kanye announced he was buying parlor, and I was
sad to see that it took a little bit of
time for that story to be reported as like he's
been buddying up with Candice Owen. Candice Owen's husband owns parlor.
Now he's buying parlor. It's not a very robust platform,
(14:11):
Like I do I do think that, like it's like
that axiom a fool in his money, you know. I
just like, this is a wealthy person who is clearly
having some issues and also espousing the kind of fucked
up ideology that speaks to these people, and so they're
all just sort of like rushing some of them are
just sort of rushing into cash in on it. I think. Yeah.
I mean, if you followed Kanye's career at all, like
(14:33):
up until now, I think had a lot of the
same people around him and add some kind of a
loyal support system, and now he just has a bunch
of weird nazi grifters around him and they're taking advantage
of the fact that he's alone. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
that's I think pretty obvious. And I again, like none
(14:58):
of this is to say that like, oh we should
feel sorry for Kanye. No, literally, literally, no one who
has struggled with mental health has ever had more resources
available to them. And I know just mean that the
money sense, Like whatever you want to say about Kim Kardashian,
she really cared about him and tried like did the
deeply embarrassing and difficult thing, which is like publicly make
(15:18):
her husband's mental health something of like popular conversation in
order to like try and get him some kind of help.
And you know, none of this. You know, he hasn't
taken any of the opportunities he's had to like deal
with this ship. So I'm not sympathetic to him, but
I do think it's important to talk to like talk
about this as what it is, rather than pretend like, oh,
(15:41):
Kanye is part of some scheme. Uh, Kanye is not
thinking any of this through. He's not really able to
at the moment. Yeah, I think you're exactly right, And
I think it's one of the reasons why conversations about
Kanye can be so difficult, because it's easy for folks
to hear like, oh, I'm excuse. I'm not holding him
accountable for his behavior, for his ideology, for the things
(16:03):
that he's saying. I think like nobody is saying that
he is not responsible for the ship that he's saying
and doing. But also opportunists and grifters are definitely taking
advantage of him and definitely trying to steer him in
a direction that will be youthful for them in some capacity.
So it's like and even talking about his anti Semitism.
I think that, like we have so far Togo and
(16:24):
conversations about black anti semitism, it's really like have a
conversation about it. I think that with Kanye it's so
clear that we're not there yet, Like we're not really
having the conversation. Yeah, I mean, and that's that parts
a little bit above my pay grade, But um, I
think the conversation of like how this he got exposed
to this stuff that's really worth having. I'm personally very
(16:48):
curious about like how long this has been going on.
As far as I'm aware, there's not really signs and
his music where he's being like covertly anti semitic. I
don't think he was accused of that, So my my
guess is that this is a thing that happened due
to his increasing isolation and you know, increased amount of
time on the internet. But I am curious, like where
(17:08):
they're friends of his at one point sending him videos
who are just a little bit less far down the
rabbit hole. Like I do want to know and think
it's a valuable question, like what is the path that
leads this guy to being willing to sit in a
room with Nick Flintes and not like getting the funk
up when Nick starts talking, right, I think that is
a worthy question. I just don't actually know the answer
(17:29):
to that right now. Yeah, same, you know, speaking about
that dinner that Nick and Kanye had with Trump, I've
seen a lot of handrying about why folks in the
GOP aren't standing up to denounce the fact that Trump
had dinner with Flintes and Kanye West. Why do you
(17:51):
think we're seeing that because Nick number one, the Republican
Party is very much like tied to the Israeli government.
They are a major funder and those like a pack
and has proven willing to like look askance at some
people who are just on the edge with their anti Semitism.
Nick is not Nick is Nick is outright is a
(18:11):
is a hitlerist. So Number one, he's he's just too
far for it. And it's one of those things I
don't believe. So this is a topic of debate, like
did Trump know who Fuintes was ahead of time? You know,
does he secretly like was he hoping this would go? Like?
I don't actually think so. I'm sure that someone had
talked to Trump a couple of times about Fuintes. I
suspect maybe he even watched a clip of the kid
(18:34):
talking about Trump when like an aid put it in
front of his face. But but Nick does not. Nick
did not up until recently, exist on like the normal Internet.
He was not like a dude a mainstream person would encounter.
And Trump is not going to be just like Trump
doesn't go find this ship on his own. People put
stuff in front of his face. And I I one thing,
(18:56):
I'm certain whether or not he had heard of Nick
before this. I don't believe that when he Kanye walked
in with Flintest behind him, Donald Trump said, oh, that's
Nick Flintes. I simply do not believe that. And I
don't believe that like Nick started in on t and
from the what we have of the conversation, it doesn't
sound like Flintes started in with a bunch of anti
(19:17):
Semitic conspiracies. He started in praising Trump, and so Trump
was like, I really like this kid, And that's the
way Trump works, right. Uh. Trump also is all about
self protection and self preservation. So I'm not surprised that,
Like and I suspect the way it went is that,
like they had this conversation, he talks with Kanye, He's like, boy,
I like this kid who's saying nice things about me,
(19:38):
And as soon as they leave, an aid walks up
and says, that's motherfucking Nazi boss, Like we like and
that that guy, that guy is a little bit like,
we don't want to be associated with that dude. And
Trump was like, oh, alright, fuck uh, And then he
issued that weird statement where he was like, Kanye didn't
say anything get racist. Also, I don't know Nick Flintes, Yeah,
normal statement to put out after you've just had a
(19:58):
nice dinner. Like nothing anti semitical was discussed. We're all
good there. I just don't understand because Marl lag is
supposed to be praised as this super secure place. Not
one motherfucker could say this is who that is before
he got in the room. Well, I mean that doesn't
mean it's not secure. Nick doesn't have any history of
(20:18):
like violence, you know, the secret services job, And nobody's
gonna say going to tell Donald who he's having a
dinner with. No, I mean that that makes sense to
me though, Like he is. Donald is also kind of
like Trump, He's increasingly pushed away a lot of the
people who used to be at his back as he's
(20:39):
gotten weirder too. So I'm not surprised by that. Um. Yeah,
I'm not really surprised by anything that happened in that meeting.
I just I think it's less a sign that like, uh,
Trump is openly embracing the Nazis in his missed and
more a sign of like, yeah, when you have like
no control over who you'll hang out with other than
that they say ice things about you, you're gonna wind
(21:01):
up talking, sitting down and eating with some Nazis. Yeah,
and Nazi your two's gonna slip in. Yeah. So speaking
of someone who is kind of trumpy or I see
as kind of trumpy, let's talk a little bit about
Elon Musk. You know, Yeah, we've got Elon Musk buying Twitter,
you know, Trump pastors social Do you see this as
extremists sort of building their own media ecosystems? And how
(21:23):
worried should we be about this in terms of like
allowing kind of I don't know, extremist ideology, and even
more than that, just sort of culti vibes, which I
know that you've written a lot about. I want to
talk about that as well. Do you see these bids
for buying their own platforms as a problem. Yeah, I
mean it's a huge problem. I do think one of
(21:44):
the things I find interesting about Elon because look, we
can all like talk about o Elon was always a grifter,
and Elon has always been There's elements of that throughout
his history. Certainly, he hasn't always been like this, and
I don't think it's that he was just like keeping
it on check and hiding his power level until he
could reveal his true beliefs. I think Twitter has been deeply,
deeply toxic for his brain. It is for everybody, but
(22:06):
I think it's damaged him. He's he's got main character
syndrome more than most people, and effectively, by buying this,
he's turned himself into the everyday main character of Twitter,
which is one of the worst things you can do
for your mental health. And it's the thing that Trump
did to himself. And I think part of why we're
seeing Ellen get more trumpy is that he's put himself
in the same environment and like a goldfish, his ego
(22:29):
is growing to a to to fit the old container.
I can't this is too early to say. Maybe I'll
get embarrassed by making this statement. But I think maybe
one reason why Trump hasn't come back to Twitter is
that after going through Twitter withdrawals when he got booted,
maybe Trump realized it was bad for him and doesn't
(22:50):
actually want to go back. I don't think that's a
zero percent chance, because I suspect it was pretty traumatic
to him. Is like suddenly having that cut off, and
maybe he's like, I don't want to get back into that,
Like I got this truth social thing. When I do
need to get something out, I could get it out,
but it doesn't suck me up like Twitter, like it's
not doesn't hit as hard as that old ship. Right,
he's on that methodon now weeding himself off of it
(23:14):
a little bit. I don't know, maybe not. Maybe he'll
get back on Twitter tomorrow, but I kind of suspect
that's what's happening. I think with somebody like Elon Musk,
who I honestly i've never met him, but I can
read and see, so I have my own opinions. Do
think that there is something about Twitter that is bad,
especially being surrounded by sycophants, by by yes men and
(23:36):
fanboys that really has you getting high on your own supply.
And people like you and me, like normal people. Yeah,
Twitter is not good for any of our brains, but
most of us, when we put our phone down, we
have somebody in our life who will call us on
our bullshit, or tell us when we're acting ridiculous, or
tell us when something that we're saying doesn't make any
sense or is really harmful. And most of us have
(23:57):
systems in our life for basic accountability, and it seems
like people like Trump and a Musk maybe don't have that.
Maybe they have insullct Like when I read these reports
about how former space X and Tesla staffers had to
spend so much time and energy kind of doing the
window dressing specifically to play Kate Musk and like saying
(24:18):
things that they knew that he would like, you know,
setting up computers so that they looked like the matrix
was happening on them, so that when Elon Musk was
in the building he would think really cool science ship
was happening, even though that was just a farce. You know. Well,
I do want to say so that that those recollections
of events come from. I believe it was originally a
tumbler post from someone who was claiming that they worked
(24:39):
at SpaceX and that this is the way everyone, this
is the way the company worked, that there was like
a lot of effort that went into kind of constraining
Elon so that he could be used for the thing
he was good at, which is pr without interrupting the workflow.
And it it all seems I want to believe it,
that we don't have any proof that that's true, right right,
this is not no one's that that dude didn't go
(25:01):
to like a jury or individual to go to a
journalist and like prove that they were there. Other people
weren't interviewed. I have found a couple other accounts of
people who also claim, and again these are just on
the internet, that they worked at SpaceX and that the
stuff he was saying sound incredible. UM, but there's no
proof of it at this moment. Now, I I would
love to if if you work for SpaceX, if you
(25:22):
if you worked in the company at this point, if
you can either confirm or deny that account, please reach
out to us, because I would love to be able
to actually do some reporting on that. Um, because I
I do want to believe it. It sounds right, but
I do want to be clear we don't actually know
whether or not that thing is real totally. I will
(25:44):
add that in the uh the lawsuit against Tesla, one
of the allegations made in that lawsuit is that when
Elon Musk toward the I don't know show rooms, that
all the employees knew that that meant to have black
and brown like staffers basically hid because Elon must didn't
want to see them. And so like that is a
much more credible allegation to people are making that in
(26:07):
a court of law, right, Like that's yeah, absolutely, so, yeah,
you're you're exactly right, Like we don't know if that is,
you know, a confirmed statement by somebody who actually worked there.
But I do think like even the Tesla example does
sort of speak to the idea that Elon Musk is
someone for whom others in his orbit have to expand
(26:27):
some energy to make happy in certain ways, and that
like that is an understood thing. If that, if that,
if those allegations in that law suitor to be believed,
it does seem to be like that is he shows up. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Well I think that, you know, I agree with you.
I think that something I've always dislikeding On Musk, but
(26:47):
I think that something has happened that has made him
more trumpy, And I think part of it is probably
how often he is embedding himself in these Twitter echo
chambers that just tell him what do you want to
hear and have fanboys and sycophans just being brilliant, brilliant,
brilliant everything he says, Well, he's he's doing. You know.
One of the things that one of the delusions that
(27:09):
Twitter allows us all to feel is the because it
it can get you, trap you in this kind of loop.
It's not quite an echo chamber, because whatever loop you're in,
whatever reality tunnel in Twitter you're in, there will be
people you hate and disagree with their but it it
traps you in this kind of like chunk of discourse
that will give you a vastly like fucked up and
(27:32):
inflated and incorrect view of like and this is again
it depends are you on like uh like tech Twitter,
you want journalist Twitter, you want black Twitter, right like,
You'll get different variants of this, but none of them
correspond directly to the real world because, for one thing,
the couple of dozen million people who use Twitter it's
not very large as a service, are all a specific
(27:55):
selected group of the kind of weirdos who are likely
to use Twitter. Not many, yeah so, but the it
warps everyone's perspective if you let it right, if you
don't use it the way it ought to be used,
which is as a way of kind of curating the
news and um a way of getting like a discrete
set of opinions, but one that does not correspond to
(28:16):
popular like throughout the you know, we had we had
a gun control measure come up in Portland recently, and
if I had listened to my uh my Twitter, you
know followers, I would have been pretty sure that it
was going to fail. But I was also paying attention
to like conversations people were having elsewhere and just kind
of information that I could pick up to be like, yeah,
this is going to be like an incredibly tight vote.
(28:38):
But it would have been really easy to do what
people do with like Trump and what people did with
Hillary Clinton, where you're like, well, everyone in my timeline
says this, so this must be the predominant opinion. And
Musk is doing like the most concentrated version of that
on himself, where he's like hosting these polls which are
deeply unscientific and very easy to manipulate the bots and
(28:59):
being like, look, twenty million people voted the voice of
the people. You know, like, no Elon, You've you've created
You've created a little machine that's entire purpose is to
skew your view of reality. Um, this is going to
have very disastrous consequences, not just on your mental health,
but on your ability to engage with the world, because
(29:22):
being able to like understand what's actually happening and how
people actually feel outside of the weird bubble of your
online friends is crucial for not going insane. That's such
a good point. And speaking of going insane, you know,
we started our conversation talking about that fucking wild ass
picture that Elon Musk posted, you know, that toy guns
(29:43):
and the four diet cokes decaffeinated diet Coke. I'm just
gonna decaffeinated, which is hard to find. That's a that's
a rare, rare drink. First, baby, shit, the cut next
to my bed, there's two real guns and like tin
more Z is then there, so like, fuck you, Ellen,
you're stealing, Like that's cultural appropriation, Robert, is it caffeinated
(30:06):
decaffeinated Zbia, This is very it's a mix I like
the decaffeinated cola Zeba actually, and I do drink that.
The coal is good, but it's a little bit too acidic.
So the decaffeinated Zevia cola is one of my fades.
Robert loves Zevia. I've never had it. Oh, it's it's
the best. I recommend picking up a couple of guns,
(30:27):
buying six to eight zva is, keeping them by your
bedside table a good time, and like a really weird
ominous glass water bottle. Yeah, and like a really really
really thick like lamp fixture. I don't know what's happening there,
but the decaffe neated diet coke is very upsetting. It
was a lot, And I guess one of the questions
(30:48):
I have for the both of you is there's a
kind of I don't know how to how to put it,
but a kind of like ship post Equality to Elon
Moss to Eat to Kanye West, where they are so
ridiculous that it's hard to take them seriously. And at
times I wonder like like is this meant to be
a joke or is it serious? Is do you think
that's an intentional tactic to kind of blur the lines
(31:10):
of I'm just sucking around and kidding or I'm this
is real and I'm serious, Like, is that is that
part of how they are moving intentionally? Do you think? Yes? Yeah,
I mean I agree, Yeah, I mean I think that well.
I think that there's a degree of intention to manipulate
the information ecosystem by taking personal control of major agents
(31:32):
of it, right, And I think it's less a matter
of like having total control and more a matter of
being able to kind of subtly push things. That's how
a guy like Bezos, who is more in control of himself,
uses it. I think it would be a mistake too.
I think it would be a mistake to credit Ellon
with having too clear of a plan here. I just
(31:52):
don't see evidence of that this all. Maybe there will,
maybe he's he's playing five d hs, but I kind
of think this is mourning sample of him having been
manipulated and broken by social media to a point of
kind of derangement than it is an example of him
having some sort of cunning plot to manipult. Now. I
do think some of the people who backed him in
(32:12):
this purchase, like the Saudis, certainly had those kind of goals,
But I don't know that. I think Elon did. Yeah.
One of the big similarities that I see to all
of these figures from Elon Kanye is this kind of
CULTI quality that's around them. I read your substat piece
(32:35):
about the cultiness of tech billionaires, which was brilliant, and
how they sort of all benefit from this kind of
myth like they are seeing something, they are onto something
that other people just cannot see. Why do you think
that we like, why are we seeing this rise of
the kind of CULTI leader type and it's just gonna
be Do you think we're going to see more of
this going forward? Yeah? I mean I think we're only
(32:58):
number one. I think you always see people become more
vulnerable to cult leaders in times like this, when there's
great instability and change is happening rapidly and it's it's
really difficult for people to get a kind of handle
on reality and to feel like they're in a stable position.
And I think the kind of cult leaders who are
(33:18):
most effective in that period are not like the ones
who are like Keith Ranieri, where they're trying to keep
a sex harem around them. It's the people who are
trying to get a large chunk of the population to
buy in with them in an alternate vision of reality.
That's what Trump has always done, and he's been very
good at it. Uh. And I think those were not
(33:40):
yet past the era of those monsters. And we may not,
like we who are around right now, may not live
to see the other side of it. This is not
a new thing in in history, you know, in during
kind of the late Classical period or the Lake Grecian
Classical period, when you had like Athens, the Athenian state
collapse and you had all of these different kind of like, uh,
(34:04):
invasions and wars and stuff kind of destroying this this
the civilization that the Greeks had built, or at least
its dominance over that part of the world. Um, you
had writers noting like at the time that these these
demagogues had become increasingly popular, these guys going in front
of these societies that had been quasi democratic and being like, look,
(34:25):
just hand over power to me. You know, I've got
this vision of the way we can fix things, and
and getting people to buy in on that vision has
always been like the tool of a demagogue. There's not
a big difference between demagogue and a cult leader. And
I think We're in a similar position, right whereas things
increasingly fall apart, more and more people are going to
(34:47):
be vulnerable to someone who is willing, who is able
to wrap them up in a vision of the world
that that may not be accurate, but is more comforting
than reality. And if enough people agree to to kind
of make a place for that in their own heart,
then you can do some pretty impressive things as a
(35:07):
cult leader. So yeah, I don't think we're past that
that world at all. Yeah, it's I mean, like I saw,
I was like getting very frustrated at a pretty clear
example of what you're talking about with regards to Musk.
Where Musk was it's almost like a Q and Nanni
vibe where he was getting and also taking a lot
of credit for combating child sexual abuse material from Twitter
(35:29):
despite like not like like that was just like a
thing that propped up like, oh, thank you for taking
action to combat this, and it's just like not a
thing that is happening. He fired the team that's in
charge of combating child sexual abuse material, like there's not
really evidence and he's done anything that actually meaningfully made
a difference with it. But in taking over, there's just
(35:49):
this alternate reality popping up that he's this big crusader
for protecting children online, which it's just not true. Yeah,
I mean we could argue he made it less safe. Yeah,
he made it less well. Twitter has purged its childlike
safety team, like the people whose job it is to
make sure that there's not content on there that's endangering children. Like,
there's like one of them left employed basically for all
(36:11):
of Asia. Like, so he's objectively made it less safe,
but you know that who cares. It'll be fine. Thankfully
we've got Apple sailing and to rescue us all here,
I guess. But it does seem like the same pattern
Bridgets pointed out several times, where it's like, let's attack
(36:33):
a brand. That's something that happens so often, and I think,
like it's I think this is such a such a
weird point. But I do think it's one of the
things that I think extremists who coordinate online are really
good at, is coordinating folks to attack a brand or
a corporation, and corporation is not really necessarily knowing how
to deal with it. It's like, oh no, we're being
(36:55):
you know, like they're not able to say, like, oh
this is a manufactured outrage campaign and we should encount
own to it or whatever. I think that folks coordinating
online are uniquely good at that kind of pressure, and
brands and corporations aren't necessarily good at with standing it
or pushing back against it. I guess I should say, Yeah,
what do you make of all the like handwringing that
(37:18):
Musk does about like free speech on Twitter? And then
you know, on the one hand, being like, we need
to protect free speech or we'll fall into tyranny. These
anti fascist researchers are all banned, Like, what do you
make of that? Well, I mean, he's he's It's what
I was saying earlier. He exists entirely within this bubble,
and it's a bubble made up of praise from strangers,
which is why, like it kind of shows you. I
(37:40):
don't know anything about Musk's present mental health state, but
I wonder about it because it definitely seems like there's
something in him that needs the approval of cat tured
uh Like, which is a prominent far right Twitter account,
like all these weirdos he's and he's always been sympathetic
to the right, you know, I just look at who
he donated to the most. You know, I'm not surprised
(38:03):
by that, but I think the way in which social
media works means that a lot of people, if you
aren't careful, you'll get drawn further and further and further
into webs of people who are kind of increasingly extreme
in their opinions. And with Musk, the way it's happening
is those people are making a concerted effort to be
really nice to him. So while everybody else's is banging
(38:25):
on him and making fun of him for being an idiot, Uh,
these folks are calling him a genius in the future
of the world, and he's he's deeply vulnerable to praise
like all narcissists. So I think that's just what's happening
is these are the people who are being nice to him,
and he's kind of taking on their view of what's
happening on Twitter, even though it does not correspond to
(38:46):
reality in any measurable way. Like what do you think
will happen? Like what do you think is at stake?
If anti fascist voices, leftist voices, you know, are all
either suspended from the platform or are just like funk this,
it's not worth it. I'm leaving like that, Like, what
do you think happens if that's the case. Well, you know,
there's a degree to which I'm worried because Twitter was always,
(39:07):
of all of the different things we've had on social media,
the very best for spreading left wing views and media.
That's why all of these weirdo things that crime think
who just got banned had Twitter platforms. It's worked pretty
well for the distribution of that kind of stuff, and
it was a good way for people to make connections
with each other. Um, there's a reason why so much
(39:29):
of the uprisings started, you know, with people seeing Twitter ship.
Not to like say that, oh it started because of Twitter,
but it started because people encountered the video of George
Floyd being murdered on fucking Twitter, and people encountered videos
of like protests and uprisings in their own city and
then went out into the street and stuff, and that
the fact that that might go away is concerning. At
(39:49):
the same time, Twitter was not just a place where
leftist ideas and like left wing thinkers were able to
spread stuff. It was a place where the left tour
itself apart every forty seventy two hours. So the fact
that it might be like, there's also going to be
benefits if it collapses. I think more than anything, there
(40:13):
will be bad things, there will be good things. There's
stuff that will be calamitous about it, there's stuff that
will be positive. At the end of the day, this
was always going to happen some way, maybe not this suddenly,
but nothing lasts forever. We've had social media sites that
were huge parts of the Internet fall into disrepair and
and obscurity before, and it will happen again. It will
(40:34):
happen to whatever replaces Twitter. You know, it will happen
to TikTok one day. This is just the thing. The
thing that the Internet does is the thing that everything does. Right,
Nothing nothing gold or even crusted in poop, can stay.
So I I I'm at a certain level. I don't
think it's I think it's reasonable to be concerned about
the way this could impact you or your community. And
(40:55):
I'm not saying people who have those concerns are being unreasonable,
but personally I'm kind of trying to have like a well,
this is just the you know, it's the way it goes.
Twitter was never gonna be around forever, and if this
is how it dies, this is how it dies, so
we'll have to figure something else out. Wow, that is
a surprisingly it's like rosy take from someone who was
like one of the least optimistic people that I know. Well,
(41:20):
you know, I have been around on the Internet a
long time, and I am a poster. I am I
it is woven deep into my blood. But I've posted
many places, UM, and I will be posting in many
places in the future, regardless of what happens to posting
on this particular platform. And I think that's true of
all the of all the great posters, of the ones
(41:40):
who are certainly greater than I, people like Drill, you know,
there they'll find a place. You know. The posters never die,
they just post in different websites. So one of my
last questions for you is, I was reading this um
interview that you did with Box about gamer Gate and
sort of online it's reamism more broadly, and on this show,
(42:02):
we really argue that there is a direct line between
online movements that are based in harassing marginalized people. We
often start those conversations with gamer Gate, but we also
talked about instances that predate and led the gamer Gate.
I argue that there's a direct line between those movements
and the rise of extremist movements today. Um, if people
had taken those movements more seriously, or people with power
had like done something to stop them, perhaps things would
(42:24):
be different. I wonder do you see those things as
linked as well? Yeah, I I guess so. My own
thinking on the matter is kind of muddled, but but
probably yeah, probably, Yeah, I like it. No, I mean,
it's I see what you mean. It's it's a that
is my through line that I am always like beating
that drum. You know, all the people that I've talked
(42:45):
to who were targets of that kind of harassment that
predated gamer Gate, they all said the same thing, like,
I don't think that if somebody would have done something
about it, then that like we could say Trump wouldn't
have been elected, or that we could say the insurrection
would have happened. They don't believe that, but they do
have this question of like, could something have been different?
Could extremists would they have less of a hold on
(43:09):
our democracy and our discourse? Would they be less legitimized,
would media no to not spend a couple of cycles
talking about how dapper they are or whatever? And amplifying
their messages in these ways, would we have been primed
to handle it differently? And so it's not. It's never
like a clear line of like, oh, it would never
have happened. It's more of a like, what things have
been a little bit different? Yeah, I mean, I think
(43:32):
if the entirety of media were not driven by what
gets the most clips or what gets the most clicks
and thus, like, if that were not the primary thing
that determined whether or not journalism is profitable, we would
be in a better place. And if if that were
not the entire thing determined what made journalism profitable, stuff
like gamer Gate wouldn't have taken off right um if
(43:54):
it were, because I think one of the things I've
come to believe there was this period of time after
gamer Gate where I was like, if only they had
paid attention to us when we were trying to warn
them about what these people are like, about the fact
that none of them are telling the truth, that they're
all lying to try and push an agenda that you
can't take them seriously or literally in any way, shape
or form. You have to take them seriously, but you
(44:15):
can't assume that they're honest. You can't. You can't engage
with them, You can't debate them, because they're liars and
they're they're entirely attempting to just sort of like get
clout by, you know, bringing their ship up. Like you
cannot engaging with them in any way other than two
like attack them is a waste of time and deeply
(44:37):
damaging the society. There was a time when I believed
we could have convinced, like, if we could have convinced
the fucking Jake Tappers of the world of that that, um,
we might have avoided a lot of terror. I don't
think it's possible for them to have avoided it, because
engaging with those people and highlighting them and putting them
up in the center of your shows is worth too
much money because it trends, because that's like that. So
(44:57):
at the end of the day, I think that the
nature of how what makes media profitable in the twenty
first century meant we were always doomed to this. I
don't think it's the way the internet works. Inherently the
internet makes this stuff easier. But at the end of
the day, the reason why these people were able to
break containment from the dark corners of the Internet where
they were harassing individual people to the point where they
(45:19):
are threatening society on a broader level. Is because it's
really profitable to hold these weirdos up in front of
the mainstream and say, look at this, Look at this,
look at this. Do you see that as a vibe
that will ever be rid of unless we completely radically
change the way that our media functions in the United Yeah,
(45:41):
So having these people in our society in anywhere near
prominence is not sustainable. Eventually, the eventually something will happen,
something violent, something disastrous. Uh, and and then they'll either
all die or be forced back underground. This has happened
a few times in history before. The question is how
(46:02):
many of us wind up going down out with them? Yeah,
there's that optimism that I'm used to from you, Robert.
That's so funny that you say that about Robert, because
I find him to be one of the most like hope.
He always finds hope in things, there's all I mean.
I I firmly believe there's always something to be hopeful about,
(46:24):
even if everything feels like shit. Yeah, I mean, like
that's that's that's like one of the things that we've
imbedded into all of our shows on cools and media,
is that there's always hope in figuring out and optimistic
approach to the to the healthscape we currently are living through. Meanwhile,
(46:46):
your shows have titles like it could Happen Here that
like titles that keep me up at night and Internet
Hate Machine. Hey, that was your idea. You came up
with that title, Robert, I did come up with that title.
I think that. I think, Uh, that's a good place
to end it us, Sophie. Is there anything that I
missed that I should mention? No, you always crush it.
(47:08):
You never miss anything. Well, thank you for all your help, Robert.
Thank you so much for being here. It has been
an honor. Thank you for having me. Where can folks,
I'm sure that I'm sure anybody listening to this is
already obsessed with your shows, But where can folks listen
to your shows? Tell us about the Bastards, etcetera. Well,
we got Behind the Bastards, which is weekly. We got
it could Happen here every day. I'm not on it
(47:29):
every day, but I'm on it a lot. I have
a book called After the Revolution you can buy at
any of the places that you can buy books, and
I also have a sub stack where I write essays
every week. You can find it at shatter zone dot
sub stack dot com, shatter zone dot sub stack dot com.
That's that's my little basically a blog. They call it
(47:50):
a newsletter whatever you can call it, whatever you want.
I don't care. And then and then by the this
is coming out next week. So on the December the eight,
Robert a Great kill Joy and myself we'll be doing
a special livestream episode of Behind the Bastards with the
Q and A. And you can get your tickets that
moment dot co, slash e TV. Yeah, motherfucker's. Oh my god,
(48:13):
I can't wait for that. I love Margaret, Margaret's the
best listen to Margaret show Who People who did cool stuff?
That's my plug. Internet Hate Machine is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
check out our website cool zone media dot com, or
find us on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(48:34):
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Bridget Todd
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