January 15, 2020 • 44 mins
Katy, Robert, and Cody went to Midwest FurFest. They left with a tale of a Nazi terrorist attack, and a useful guide to surviving the worst year ever, together.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart Radio. So,
is there like a gas league or is there we
don't know what it is that people vomiting blood. It
smells like it smells like chlorina. Yeah, a whole lot
of chlora in the hotel. So on the day of
Clorina attack, I was at the rave or the dances
(00:23):
on the bottom floor of the hotel. On the day
of the attack, I was it was a normal day.
Everybody's having a lot of fun, everybody's very busy. It
was roughly after a quarter after eleven at night, and
I was, um, I had a friend over. We had pizza,
and we're fooling around and you know, just relaxing usual
(00:45):
confine And as we're getting dressed, the fire alarm was pulled.
So we thought someone was just doing the prank. We
weren't thinking about it too seriously. So on the night
of the chlorine attack at Midwest Fair Fest, uh, we
just saw a whole bunch of fire trucks, ambulances and
(01:05):
all of a sudden, like we're here in alarms, We're
seeing fire trucks where everybody is pouring out of the
hyatt and they are in the cold and the snow
there's like, you know, they're shivering. Blick. Minutes went by
and we hear a lot of commotion and pandemonium, and
(01:27):
they had staff members that were coming around to tell
us that we needed to evacuate, and you know, there
was a lot of extended alarms, and we figured, all right,
this is a serious situation. And we all walk outside
and we have literally no idea what's going on. There's
like a fire trucks out there, a thousand people people
walking out in kink gear. That was hilarious, but it
was it was complete chaos, and no one knew what
(01:50):
was happening. In December of two nineteen, Katie Stole, Cody Johnston,
and me Robert Evans headed to Midwest FurFest, the world's
largest furry convention, the most direct. Okay, hold on real quick, Robert,
I think that we should just take a quick beat
to explain for our listeners what furies are and what
Midwest for Fest is. Cody, do you have that definition
(02:11):
that you pulled up earlier? I do, great, let me
have it. The furry fandom is a subculture interested in
anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics. Examples of
anthropomorphic attributes include exhibiting human intelligence and facial expressions, speaking,
walking on two legs, and wearing clothes. The term furry
fandom is also used to refer to the community of
(02:31):
people who gather on the internet and at furry conventions. Right,
thank you, But I thought that we shouldn't just share
that because it's pretty clinical, and at least for me,
my experience at the Midwest FurFest was anything but clinical.
Midwest FurFest being the annual furry convention that we attended
along with fourteen thousand other people back in December. Yeah,
(02:54):
it's a delightful community, so welcoming, and I think one
thing that a lot of people assume instantly is that,
like furies, it's a kink thing, right, Yeah, it's a
sex thing for um, And that's really not true. I
honestly didn't get any of that here. I mean, I've
commented about this with both of you guys, But walking
(03:14):
in I was just astounded by all the love. I mean,
you can't turn a corner without seeing people giving each
other really loving, amazing hugs, the kind of hug that's like,
I'm just so glad you're alive and you're here. And
I love you. You know, it's it's a thoroughly positive place.
And there definitely is, like I don't want to pretend
it's not a thing, like there is like a kink
(03:34):
dimension of it. There was like in the big area
where they sold all of the different sort of furry products,
there was a cord and off room that you had
to show your idea to get in. Um that was
like this is where we do the kink stuff. Um,
this is where we like sell the kink products. But
it's you know, it's a it's a large minority, but
it's a minority of like the reason people go to
that sort of thing, like it's it's not what it's about.
(03:57):
And we will get into this later on in part
two of this series. But the main thing that I think,
at least from the people that we spoke with, the
main thing that that brings them here is the feeling
of acceptance that whoever they are, they feel free to
express that here and that they might not necessarily be
able to in their normal life, and that this place
(04:19):
has helped them find out who they really are. And
and so I think that's the really beautiful thing to
keep in mind. It was beautiful uh, And it had
nothing to do with why we decided to go to
Midwest FurFest, because the most direct reason that we went
there was because Miloianapolis, former writer with Breitbart dot com
UH currently disgraced over a pedophilia scandal and sort of
(04:41):
right wing firebrand, had recently made the news for registering
for the convention and then getting immediately banned from it.
He and his friends had promised to infiltrate the event,
and there were rumors that the Proud Boys would be
in tow and rumors that like anti fascist Furries would
find up fighting with them, so we figured we'd better
show up. That's right, we did. But even outside of that,
what we were really more interested in learning about was
(05:03):
something that had happened at Midwest for Fest years ago back.
A clorine gas attack had been carried out against the convention,
hospitalizing several people and leading to intense debate as to
whether or not what had happened was an accident or
a terrorist attack. The thing is, it was never really
confirmed that it was like, you know, like some sort
of outside stores you did this, Like I honestly think
it was just another person in this community just being
(05:24):
really stupid. Honestly, I really can't say, because I really
don't know. It could have been malicious and intentional, It
could have been an accident. And as we were evacuating, um,
people were texting, tweeting, I mean, everybody's going nuts, you know,
is this some cleaning accident? Is it something from the pool?
And people are like, well, there's no pool in this hotel.
(05:46):
It can't be the pool. And so they were like, well,
maybe someone's cleaning the carpets, and and eventually it turned
out no, no one was cleaning the carpets. Whoever was
responsible for the tech may have been acting as a maverick,
you know, whether they have something against the fury fandom,
whether they don't they don't like the more open leftist
(06:07):
culture that we have here in the furry fandom, or
if it was someone who was just trying to get attention.
But the more we dug into it, the clearer it
became that what happened in was no accident. It was
a terrorist attack, one that originated from inside the furry fandom.
The chief suspect is a fellow generally referred to as
the Confederate fur Suitor or Magnus Stride in. Magnus runs
(06:28):
a custom first suit company and has a bit of
a history of what you might call trolling the libs.
The year after the chlorine attack, he started wearing a
first suit with a gigantic Confederate flag on it during
furry gatherings. But even before that he was notorious. Magnus
Stridian has a long track record of many decades of
running in with the police, including smoke bombing a bank
(06:52):
um which he's been in and out of trouble, and
he's known in the furry communities for causing trouble as well.
He's just one of those people that tends to cause
Some people call it dramas, some people just call it
trouble um. He came last year and got frog marched
(07:16):
away in his tidy Whitey's um after punching a pregnant woman.
We'll talk more about this in Part two. What's important
right now is that in two thousand fourteen, Magnus had
a reputation as an aggressive troll in a history of
legal troubles. He was staying at the Hyatt on the
tenth floor, so apparently there were a bunch of furry
(07:38):
riders staying at the Hiatt on the tenth floor, which yeah,
but again don't know. Keep all of that in mind
as we continue this story. Now, if you heard about
the chlorine attack on Midwest for a Fest at all,
it was probably through a series of breathless headlines like
suspected gas attack at Furry convention puts nineteen in a
(07:59):
hospital from Kotaku or Midwest for Fest disrupted by chlorine
gas attack from People magazine. Since the identity of the
culprit was unclear, the coverage never went beyond window gazing.
As the months and years went on, the attack faded
from the public eye outside the furry community. A far
right neo fascist movement nurtured on the Internet gradually leaked
(08:20):
out into the broader American public, and is, interestingly enough,
the year the FBI finally opened their investigation into the
attack on the Midwest for Fest about two years. It
took about two years for me to see any action
from a law enforcement agency. When we decided to go
(08:40):
to Midwest for Fest, our goal was to put out
a quick episode of Worst Year Ever the very next week.
But the more people we talked to, the more it
became clear that the story here was deeper than the
tale of a single unsolved terrorist attack, and it was
certainly deeper than Milo's lame attempts at trolling. What we
found at Midwest for Fest was the story of a
community threatened by the same forces of violent extremism that
(09:02):
have been increasingly tearing into the heart of American society
since and how they came together to fight those forces.
People we met at fur Fest furnished us with hours
of interviews and dozens upon dozens of pages of archived
chat logs and videos detailing an internal battle that's been
raging in the fandom for half a decade or more.
We're here today to deliver you that story because what
the furry community learned in those years contains lessons that
(09:24):
all of us, everywhere we'll need to learn if we're
going to survive the worst year ever. Well together, everything do.
Let's start by meeting some of the people we spoke
(09:45):
with over the income. They all had different experiences with
and opinions on what was going down in their community.
First was Brenda. Hi, my name is Brenda Banks. Um,
I've been involved with this community for I guess eleven
years now. Um. I'm a dry queen and I dance
entertained and such. The fairy aspect of this is not
as important to me as other people, but I'm still
here to have one and their friend Lucky. I'm lucky
(10:08):
person as a tiger, Siberian tiger, and I've been in
this fanom for almost three years now. Then there was Goku.
I go by Goku. I've been in the fandom for
nearly eight years. From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I had a nervous breakdown.
I couldn't handle my life in New York, and very
randomly I found a website about anthropomorphic culture and I
(10:31):
started doing some deep, deep research about it and realized
that this is something that I want to be part
of my life. Chip I found the furry fandom well
after I created a character. So I created an animal
avatar version of myself because I kind of thought cartoons
and animal people were more appealing than the rest of humanity,
(10:55):
because I kind of had a dark outlook on the
human condition and I was like, well, maybe I just
don't want to be humid at all. And of course deal,
so my online handle is doo Taz Devil, and I
kicked the hornet's nest and everything kind of rolled from there.
(11:18):
But before we move on, we should address the Unopolis
in the room, or rather the Unopolis who wasn't in
the room, because Milo or any of his you know,
minions or cohorts, whatever word you want to use, um,
I don't think they're going to be very successful because
while there are some fraries who may identify with Milo
and like that he's a positive person or influence, I'd
(11:41):
say there's an overwhelming number of people who at the
very least are not fond of his rhetoric or what
he stands for, and any attempts of him trying to
sabotage what we're doing by having a good time and
enjoying our weekend is not going to go along very well.
And despite his noble goal of according to a post
of his on telegram quote you have to destroy the
(12:04):
ship they love end of quote, he never showed up
because he wasn't going to get the reaction or attention
he's so desperately craved and knew he probably wouldn't even
get in. So for the final word on Milo, here
are Brenda and Lucky. Milo was such a laughing stock
at this point, like if he ever listened to us
for some reason, I'm trying to be jerking off to
the fact that we're talking about like, I'm sure he'd
(12:24):
love and revel in the fact that we're talking about him,
and so we'll never mention him again for this entire episode.
Well together, Everything down, down, down. The real story, as
far as we're concerned, started a little left midnight on
(12:45):
December seventh, two fourteen, when a person or persons unknown
carried out a chlorine gas attack on the denizens of
the Hyatt Regency Hotel during Midwest for a fest. Five
minutes went by, and we hear a lot of motion
and pandemonium. I was higher, i believe, on the ninth
floor that year of this hotel, and they had staff
(13:08):
members that were coming around to tell us that we
needed to evacuate, and you know, there was a lot
of extended alarms, and we figured, all right, this is
a serious situation. So I get as many of my
clothes on as i I possibly can in a rush,
and we all meet down at the parking area of
the hotel. A lot of people are just you know,
(13:29):
what's going on? Is it is this just the prank?
As they were serious issue, and we see hundreds and
then soon to be thousands of people just like coming
out who were at the dances, who are having dinner
at the bar, in the hotel rooms, just relaxing, and
it's an absolute mess. So we're waiting, and we're waiting
(13:50):
as we see the fire trucks come to the police officers,
and we really have no idea of what's going on.
It was a bitterly cold night, very windy, about degrees.
Just remember just like huddling up, lit up a cigarette,
and for about forty five minutes or so, we were
outside and the police started show up in the news
crews starting to report about what had happened. Given the
(14:12):
fact that this was a literal chemical weapons attack on
a group of civilians on American soil, you might have
expected the media to treat it with some gravity. If so,
then you're forgetting the fact that the victims of this
chemical weapons attack were wearing fursuits, which clearly rendered them
as undeserving of sympathy in the eyes of Mika Prazynski
in the cast of MSNBC's Morning Joe. The Chicago Tribune,
(14:34):
nineteen people were hospitalized at a furry convention in Illinois
after what's being called an intentional lake of couring fury.
Did I get that? Okay? Set the hotel guests along
with convention attendees into the cold night, many still dressed
in their furry furry. We just told Mika what the
(14:57):
convention was about. She's it's kept everybody warm the hotel.
Where are you going? Damnated? Hey? Guests came back at
four am? What you're hearing? At the end, there is
Joe Scarborough and Mica laughing so hard that they can't talk.
Mica actually breaks down with giggles and runs off stage.
This is again over an intentional chemical weapon attack that
(15:18):
hospitalized nineteen Americans. Remembering a lot of the news stories
that were running on local television, it was a lot
of fodder. Like I don't think anyone was taking it seriously,
because even in the mid twenty teens, I think fury
was something that was very overlooked, and they weren't, you know,
when the mainstream media was talking about it, they don't
(15:39):
know how to discuss this um. Some of them were
neutral in their tone and just described that, you know,
a convention like an anime or comic convention. You know,
there was a disruption of a major magnitude because of
someone trying to um, you know, using improvised explosive or
meth cooking or what have you. And I remember it
(15:59):
was one of the national news channels who was covering
what happened uh that night, and the reporters, which is laughing.
I don't know why, you know, whether it was the
fact that they couldn't grasp the idea of such a subculture,
or that you know, something like this had happened. I
don't know. It was a bunch of hogwash. I didn't
really care for it. The hosts of Morning Joe weren't
(16:22):
the only ones who found this all very funny. Here's
CBS this Morning. The Chicago Tribune says nineteen people were
hospitalized at a convention celebrating furry animals. A chlorine leak
at a hotel in Chicago suburb forced the evacuation of
thousands of people Sunday. They were attending Midwest for Fest.
Many were dressed as animals. A powdered form of chlorine
(16:44):
gas was left in the stairwell on the ninth floor.
Even in the relatively good coverage like this story from
w k RCTV Local twelve in Chicago, you can hear
the anchor just barely managing to hold back a snide comment.
This was at the High and Agency o Hair, where
people gathered for an annual Furriese convention. Okay, now, contrast
(17:05):
all that with this actual audio from the night of
the attack. I have. Are you taking the stairs? Or
there's gas? Shouldn't we take cocaine? One more? All right?
(17:36):
Go get so? Is there like a gas leak or
is there We don't know what the fun it is
that people vomiting blood. It smells like it smells like chlorina. Yeah, honestly,
listening to that makes me feel very emotional. Yeah yeah,
(17:58):
And this is y'all's first time listening into that media.
I found it as we were like putting together the
script for this, and it really um makes it clear
what happened. Like it's easy when you you you kind
of are just like looking at the coverage of an
event like this to forget what something like that actually
sounds like sounded like at the time, And it's it's
horrifying and just the terror and the panic that you
can hear and they don't know if they're supposed to
(18:19):
go down the stairs or take the elevator and the
stairs are where the attack was, right. Yeah, that's something
that we're about to get to. One of the people
that we spoke with had a friend who evacuated through
the stairwell and caused severe long term health problems. You know.
It was it was on the tenth floor, and I
(18:41):
had a front staying on the tone floor. And of
course at that time we didn't know. I found out later. Um,
she had gone outside of her room and it was
on the tenth floor in the stair wall. That I
think it was an accident, maybe perhaps or not. I
can't say. I don't think anybody really knows. Um. Maybe
(19:03):
the offense to good luck. They're not telling me. Um.
But she got there, there were the alarms, and she
went into the stairwell to try and escape, and wrong
stairwell Clarine sinks, so she's going down. She's getting worse,
and she burned her lungs pretty badly. Um. She at
(19:28):
that time was a self employed artist and didn't have
health insurance. The ambulances were there, she refused to go
on the ambulance and get seen because she was worried
about the healthcare costs that she could not afford. And
she struggled for almost a year afterwards with the effects
(19:51):
of that. Well, a few reporters took it seriously right away.
The attack on Midwest Verfest was at least immediately treated
as a serious crime by law enforcement. VICE reporting from
two thousand sixteen confirmed that the Rosemont Police Department opened
an investigation on December eight and closed it on July
twenty nine, fifteen, without having identified a culprit. Rosemont's records
(20:12):
obtained by VICE showed that the FBI did email the
department its report on the attack, but it doesn't seem
like they had any clear of an idea about who
was at fault. Chip, a furry, a filmmaker, and an
activist wound up being approached by the Bureau to help
in their investigation two years later, in two thousand sixteen.
I learned some things about this after the convention, mainly
(20:34):
because I'm in Colorado, around the same area that a
group called the Furry Raiders exists. So in Colorado, this
Furry Raiders group is known for being inclusive of racists,
and inclusive of pedophiles, and inclusive of zoo files. And
(20:55):
there's sort of a group no one wants to be around.
They're very all right, UM, and they're famous for wearing
Nazi esque arm bands. And so because I was near there,
I got contacted by the police and the FBI saying, hey,
we have a suspect in your area. Can you tell
(21:17):
us anything about him? And UM, so he apparently, UM
was a suspect even though he didn't go to fur Fest.
His name is Foxler. Foxler didn't go to FurFest. He's
actually never been to Convention. The reason he's a suspect
is because he was encouraging attacks on events. Um. He
(21:41):
liked getting convention shut down. He liked harassing people, he
liked causing problems, and he has a group dedicated to
harassment and somewhat stick stochastic terrorism. So he likes to
cause problems, hurt people, threatened them with guns, call them
(22:01):
during the night and say better keep your doors locked
or I'll come in your house and kill you. And
he does all this for I guess attention and the
fact that nobody likes racist. We're going to have to
digress here because the story of Foxler is something that
takes some unpacking. He gained a measure of national prominence
back in when Rolling Stone put a picture of him
(22:22):
in his first suit at the top of a big
article called does the furry community have a Nazi Problem?
The name Foxler is most presume a furified version of Hitler.
Foxler is somebody who so he swears he's not a Nazi,
but he loves to dress up in Nazi paraphernalia, which
makes so much sense. He swaps out the swastika for
(22:44):
a paw print, so that makes it okay, and then
he stands for a lot of nazi Ish values. Walsa
claim he's not a Nazi, of course, because he's not.
He's not a Nazi, But then he's also been convicted
of pedophilia and has a history of doing unspeakable things
to animals. So we generally do not like this man.
(23:05):
Nobody likes him. He's been escorted out of conventions because
he is just such disgusting human felth He's a figurehead
for the al right of the fandom all furies you
know UM and glorifies Hitler, advocates for white ethno state.
You know that that type of person also thinks that
his dog is his girlfriend. Foxler. Foxler is the leader
(23:28):
of the Furry Raiders UM, which is a group he
created that's based off of the old Second Life group
called the Furzy, which were Nazi furries. Um. He took
a lot of their imagery, including an arm band, and
made it his own. He's posted a lot of very
(23:51):
racist things online, a lot of comments like that, some
very strange journal posts that imply that he's having sexual
relationships dogs and perhaps kids. Um. But he's also a
terrible writer, so you know, it's vague. Who knows. I'm suspicious,
(24:14):
but you know, uh, I can't say anything for sure
because that would definitely be like defamation. Please don't ever
see me. We can't verify though, wanting to fuck dogs
thing beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the insinuations
of child molestation are no longer theoretical. In April, Lee
Miller Foxler's real name, was arrested for enticement of a child.
(24:37):
Foxler does deny being a Nazi. He claims the name
is a portmanteau of fox and his last name Miller.
Hears him explaining why he tried to join a neo
Nazi organization for totally non Nazi reasons, and I decided
to actually get involved with some neo Nazi groups to
see how they were, Like, you know, I can't judge
(25:00):
people right away. You gotta go in there and get
your hands dirty while your paws dirty. And you know,
I signed up for the little form online paid membership
and they wanted me to show that I was faithful
(25:26):
to um Nazism. I feel like we should take a
second here to explain how this guy looks, particularly his
eyes creepy. It's so creepy, like the first suit is
built for him. It's like an amazing example in a
lot of ways, Like it's creepy as hell, his first suit,
but it's an amazing example of how these suits can
(25:48):
capture the personality of a person, because you see, like
the madness in this person's eyes and the fake eyes
of his costume. It's it's something else. Yeah, And the
way he carries himself and communicates and uses that it's
very easy. It's a very creepy, lifeless fur suit. Now.
Foxer claims that when the Nazis found out he was
mixed race and the fury, they refused to let him in.
(26:10):
But that story, if true, shouldn't be taken as a
sign that the far right has no interest in recruiting furries.
The furry fandom actually started dealing with the rise of
the alt right years before mainstream society. So there's for
a couple of years we've been noticing an encroachment of
far right wing groups that have been trying to recruit
(26:32):
within the furry fandom. And to a degree that can
be because fury is largely white, largely male, and largely
very young. Also, I hate to say it, but often socially, um,
those social skills are underdeveloped, sometimes bullied as kids. They're
(26:56):
looking further home, and you know, you couple that with
economic hardships, um, cultural shifts, problems, and they are looking
for answers. They're looking for what makes sense. And white
(27:16):
nationalists see this as easy prey because they come along
and they say, I have the answer, I have the solution.
You're one of us. You're very special. You've always been special.
The people who built bridges, the people who span nations,
conquered the world, those are your people, those are your things.
(27:37):
You're no longer a shlubby, little white dude and a
sad little basement. You are a great white race. And
for some people, unfortunately, that's very, very addictive. All furs
are people who are generally all right, and they form
several factions. One of them is the furry Ters, one
(28:01):
of them is all Furry, another one is called Civil Furies.
But they're all just groups that like to say racial slurs,
and they usually hate lgbt s in some form, or
they say their LGBT and they hate the LGBT community.
But it's typical all right people who happen to be furies,
(28:21):
and generally they're shunned by the entire Fury fandom because
no one wants to be around that kind of negativity
and hate. Now, in the I don't know what to
call it, mainstream world, default world, anti fascist groups like
Eugene Antifa here in Oregon have taken to infiltrating and
doxing major neo Nazi organizations and militias. Dio basically does
(28:42):
the same work within the furry fandom. She sees it
as a form of community self defense. I infiltrated the
group to kind of keep an eye on them. And
you know, when you get into the group, you had
to passive voice interview, you have to call in so
they would give you clearance for further channel else and
then they had here systems where you would earn your
(29:04):
way up by doing things for the higher ups, by
recruiting more members, by posting more, by being more active. Um.
They had a list of videos that you were supposed
to watch so that you would be more aware. A
lot of these videos are what you'd expect from Nazis,
(29:26):
documentaries about how the Holocaust didn't happen and Hitler was
a cool dude, etcetera. But since they were recruiting furies,
they tailored their propaganda to that demographic. They take Disney songs,
and they take Disney movies, animated Disney movies, which are
already really appealing to furies, and they changed the lyrics
(29:47):
to unfortunately very catchy, horrible white nationalist things. And yeah,
I remember watching one of those videos and being like,
oh my god, this is m unfortunately very well done propaganda.
Here's the circle of life from the Lion King, but racist.
(30:09):
Of course, you should feel proud to be white. Our
race has achieved many great things. M h. As you
(30:30):
go through life, you'll see you're expected to be scared
and ashamed, wide identity, suppressed, culturally disposest, and always blamed.
(30:51):
But study his story and you'll very quickly see ours
filled the world with blood, medicine, industry, rule of lah
hand liberty. We are more than we are are we
(31:13):
are white. So that was a thing. I mean grouse,
I mean just like finding out new ways to recruit kids,
I mean creative fun. I hated it then and I
hate it now. Well together, everything down, down, down now.
(31:38):
Some of the Alt fur movement was organic, because there's
nothing about being into anthropomorphic animals that meets you can't
also be international socialism. But Do argues that a number
of non furry white nationalists and fascists saw the fandom
as a good recruiting ground simply because firies tended to
be young, male, white and disaffected. And then this group
was like, furries are right ground. Nobody's going after these guys.
(32:03):
We'll go after these guys. You know they're degenerates now,
but we'll clean them up, polish him up, get him
out of furry, move them to the right, and all's
of all of the world. We actually have a recording
from one of these Nazis, the guy who created the
first Alt furry group online, explaining all of this in
his own words. Thanks to Dio for doing the digging
necessary to find this, um Jim. When I started the
(32:25):
free HQ server, which is the old server that we
used to have, I made it specifically UH an alt
right furry server, and that was back at the time
they all right was different from what it is today.
But I made it an altright server, altright furry server,
with the idea that we could organize and then benefit
(32:55):
from the synergies of some of the outside cultural forces UH,
such as four Chan or you know, various other things
pole and and and various other things that are you know,
the pepe A crowd, various other things that are oftentimes
associated with the alt right. A furry subculture is a
huge subculture, and it is it is a successful subculture,
(33:20):
and it is a growing subculture because as as mainstream
culture gets more and more rotten and falls apart and
more and more young people are frustrated and looking for
answers and not finding it in the mainstream pop cultures
that that that we know of, they go off looking
(33:40):
in subcultures. They go off looking for their tribe, and
many of them have found their way to the to
the to the free subculture. Um I saw. I saw
a couple of I don't exactly remember where, so you
just have to take my word for it. I saw
a couple of surveys. The surveys said that um furries
(34:01):
were like white or something like that, mostly young, mostly
between four, about white um. And you know, my understanding
about the furry subculture is it's about mail. That's a
(34:22):
pretty disaffected group of people right now. That's a pretty
disenfranchise that you bring in those demographics, and that's a
very disenfranchised group of people in the West right now.
So these are the people most of the furries we
talked to suspect we're behind the chlorine gas attack on
Midwest for Fest and at first we thought that was
where this whole struggle for the soul of the fandom
(34:44):
had really kicked off. But then we talked to Chip.
The purpose of the interview was to discuss his experience
helping the FBI investigate the attack. But like d O,
Chip has dedicated a huge amount of his time to
defending his community from fascist infestation, and he told us
that the whole story of Nazi furs went way back,
way further. Early on in the fandom, there was a
(35:08):
few people incredibly frustrated with LGBT s in the fandom
um or people who are vegan, or people who were
obviously bad like zoo files. They hated all kinds of things,
so they hated bad things and they hated reasonable things
like LGBT s. Um. It was all started by someone
(35:31):
named squee Rat who goes by Iron Spike now, and
squee Rat wrote a manifesto about how these people should
be ashamed of their kinks, need to be ashamed of
being weird or awkward or different, and it attracted a
group of people who formed the burn Furs Now. This
(35:53):
was all Chip mentioned of the Burned Furs and squee Rat,
but he also said the word manifesto which really picked
up our ears. We love us a manifestos here on
worst your ever loves in quotes we hate them, but
we had to check it out. Sque rats manifesto called
this sordid little business begins. I remember when being a
pervert was a bad thing, off to a great start.
(36:14):
If you were warped, you tried to hide it, and
good for you if you did. If you were going
to polish your rod to autopsy photos or bugger as
Shetland pony, you did it. In the privacy of your
own sick, sad home. No one else, especially not in me,
had to know, and that was great. The best part
was if you decided to crawl out on the roof
and inform the neighborhood via midnight and megaphone that being
urinated on got you hot, you would be told, in
(36:36):
no one's certain terms how very diseased you were. Most
people I know don't have too much trouble distinguishing between
a lifestyle choice and a warning sign yep. In many
parts of the world, the idea of making love to
andy Panda is still regarded as somewhat misguided. Most parts,
that is, except furry fandom. I don't know what the
hell happened here. Live and let live as an excellent
(36:58):
tree hugging philosophy, but it doesn't do much when the
ones you refuse to kill are dragging you down with them.
If you like animal based stories, cartoon, or art, you're
a furry and like it or not, fury means pervert.
This didn't come out of nowhere either. Now this sets
the tone, and we don't need to read too much
more of it. The rest is a list of general
(37:18):
grievances regarding the furry community and what constitutes a real furry.
The manifesto condemns a variety of things, starting at understandably
beast reality, but curiously it quickly gets away from that
and covers those who treat fury like lifestyle, pretend to
be werewolves, spirit animals, veganism, and furies who allegedly wish
they were animals. This attracted people who were tired of
(37:40):
articles and media stories of furries discussing sexual practices and
aspects of the lifestyle, conflating them with the entire fandom.
The manifesto complains, to me and a lot of other people,
furry simply means a fondness for animal human combinations and arts, movies, books, whatever.
If you're biased towards Redwall novel to have a soft
(38:00):
spot for anime cack rolls, or can't drag yourself away
from the secretive nim chances are excellent that you're at
least slightly fur inclined. That's pretty cool by me. The
simple definition is probably what started fur a fandom in
the first place, but you would not believe some of
the bagges The term furry has taken on, so Squee
and others who share these concerns eventually formed the aforementioned
(38:20):
Burned Furs called that because, according to Squee, it represented
quote furs who have spoken up against fandom perversion and
been burned at the stake for it end quote. As
the burn First said in their mission statement, anthropomorphics, fandom
is being overrun by sexually dysfunctional, socially stunted, and creatively
bankrupt hacks and pervs. This slow transition is interesting because
(38:42):
we see this in a lot of far right recruitment.
In these subcultures and fandoms, the zero went on something
everyone agrees as bad, like bestiality or pedophilia, but then
they conflated with other behaviors that they just don't like,
slipping the group further and further into general intolerance. Certain
Burned First members were intolerant of homosexuality, Christian furs, obscure fetishes,
and erotica. This is notable because many of the group's
(39:03):
members were also creators of erotica. This is again a
semi regular occurrence in far right circles, where they decried
degenerate behavior while also participating in it, which is why
it wasn't surprising when Chip told us it attracted a
group of people who formed the burn Furs, and they
were generally far right groups. Some of them were neo Nazis.
(39:25):
And the crazy part is those burn Furs from are
part of these Furry Raiders now they all right, And
one of the leaders, Foxler, of the Furry Raiders was
a burn Fur at the time. Holy unsurprising, but this
illustrates something the furry community has always had to deal with,
intolerance and bigotry within their community. The burn Furs were
(39:48):
only a thing for about three years. During their time,
others in the community formed an opposition group, Freezing Furs.
Other opposition groups were Non Aligned Furs and Furry Peace,
which promoted general inclusion. So the f you have always
had conflict, but they've also always been diligent and steadfast
and expelling zoophiles and pedophiles and keeping hate as far
away from their community as possible for decades all by themselves,
(40:11):
while the media and society at large dismissed their whole fandom.
As Lucky explains, you know, um, I think it's a
really drastic difference when you're looking at something like or
comparing to something like the anime community, you know, I mean,
you can go on anime Twitter for a day and
you can find you know, pedophiles, zoo files, Nazis, a
(40:34):
lot of Nazis behind anime profile pictures. I mean you'll
find them in pretty much every walk of life in
and every post on Twitter really that involves politics. UM,
and the furry fandom I feel has way less of
a problem with it because the behavior really isn't tolerated. Um.
(40:56):
You know, people speak to cancel culture or whatever, but
it's it's just holding people to a standard, you know,
and um, I think the community does a really good
job with that. Before we go, we need to tie
up a loose end. At this point, we know the
Furry Raiders were staying on the tenth floor of the
Hiatt on the night of the attack. We also know
(41:16):
that Foxler was not there. What we didn't know, however,
is that Foxler and the Confederate first Suitor worked together.
This is Chip describing what the FBI came to talk
to him about. They wanted to know about a particular
person Foxler was working with, who did go to MFF,
who worked at a water park, who was arrested for
(41:39):
creating a stink bomb in a bank, and he had
chlorine in his car at one point during the convention. Yeah,
that's not something you normally bring to a party. Chip
wouldn't say this person's name out loud, but if you
were called. The top of the episode, we played a
clip of d O describing Magnus Deridian a k a.
(41:59):
The Confederate First Suitor, the man who had previously been
arrested for using a stink bomb, and who also stayed
on the tenth floor of the highatt that night. You
start to piece it together. This line of reasoning seemed
even more likely once we looked into Magnus's background. In
two thousand four, he was arrested and charged with terroristic threats,
recklessly endangering another person, and disorderly conduct. The charges stemmed
(42:20):
from an altercation at a bank that ended with him
throwing what he described as stink bombs he bought on eBay.
In an old blog post, Magnus makes it seem like
this was just a simple prank that the police took
way too seriously, But in his own blog entry on
the attacks, Magnus admits that a pregnant woman was hospitalized
due to his supposedly harmless stink bomb. Has Matt Team
(42:42):
had to be deployed to the bank. In the end,
he was only sentenced for disorderly contact, not terroristic threats,
but he still spent eight months in jail. So you
have a guy with a history of deploying dangerous chemicals
in crowded areas when he gets piste off on the
same floor of the convention as the chlorine gas attack.
They know that there is a matching roll of tape
(43:04):
in this guy's apartment, and there's chlorine that was found
in his car. They know all of this, but they
can't seem to get enough information or evidence to convict.
I guess, and so if they can't convict, they're not
going to move forward. Between the shall we say, unsatisfying
(43:25):
response from law enforcement and the downright insulting response from
the mainstream media to the FurFest attack, the furry community
found itself kind of alone in confronting an increasingly dangerous
far right movement that wouldn't hit the national stage for
three more years at the deadly Charlottesville rally. The raft
of support and living on the ragged fringe of popular culture,
the Furies had to develop their own tactics of community
(43:47):
support and self defense. So in Part two of this
series will explore the strategies the Furies developed to defend
their community from rising white supremacist threats. Their struggle was
ignored by the mainstream media for years, but there are
lessons in it for all of us here now. As
crazy as it may sound, the things the furry community
learned since provide an incredible roadmap for how all of
(44:09):
us might just manage to survive the worst year ever.
Play us out us, Everything so dumb, Everything so dumb.
It's again. I tried Daniel Lovely
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart Radio. So,
is there like a gas league or is there we
don't know what it is that people vomiting blood. It
smells like it smells like chlorina. Yeah, a whole lot
of chlora in the hotel. So on the day of
Clorina attack, I was at the rave or the dances
(00:23):
on the bottom floor of the hotel. On the day
of the attack, I was it was a normal day.
Everybody's having a lot of fun, everybody's very busy. It
was roughly after a quarter after eleven at night, and
I was, um, I had a friend over. We had pizza,
and we're fooling around and you know, just relaxing usual
(00:45):
confine And as we're getting dressed, the fire alarm was pulled.
So we thought someone was just doing the prank. We
weren't thinking about it too seriously. So on the night
of the chlorine attack at Midwest Fair Fest, uh, we
just saw a whole bunch of fire trucks, ambulances and
(01:05):
all of a sudden, like we're here in alarms, We're
seeing fire trucks where everybody is pouring out of the
hyatt and they are in the cold and the snow
there's like, you know, they're shivering. Blick. Minutes went by
and we hear a lot of commotion and pandemonium, and
(01:27):
they had staff members that were coming around to tell
us that we needed to evacuate, and you know, there
was a lot of extended alarms, and we figured, all right,
this is a serious situation. And we all walk outside
and we have literally no idea what's going on. There's
like a fire trucks out there, a thousand people people
walking out in kink gear. That was hilarious, but it
was it was complete chaos, and no one knew what
(01:50):
was happening. In December of two nineteen, Katie Stole, Cody Johnston,
and me Robert Evans headed to Midwest FurFest, the world's
largest furry convention, the most direct. Okay, hold on real quick, Robert,
I think that we should just take a quick beat
to explain for our listeners what furies are and what
Midwest for Fest is. Cody, do you have that definition
(02:11):
that you pulled up earlier? I do, great, let me
have it. The furry fandom is a subculture interested in
anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics. Examples of
anthropomorphic attributes include exhibiting human intelligence and facial expressions, speaking,
walking on two legs, and wearing clothes. The term furry
fandom is also used to refer to the community of
(02:31):
people who gather on the internet and at furry conventions. Right,
thank you, But I thought that we shouldn't just share
that because it's pretty clinical, and at least for me,
my experience at the Midwest FurFest was anything but clinical.
Midwest FurFest being the annual furry convention that we attended
along with fourteen thousand other people back in December. Yeah,
(02:54):
it's a delightful community, so welcoming, and I think one
thing that a lot of people assume instantly is that,
like furies, it's a kink thing, right, Yeah, it's a
sex thing for um, And that's really not true. I
honestly didn't get any of that here. I mean, I've
commented about this with both of you guys, But walking
(03:14):
in I was just astounded by all the love. I mean,
you can't turn a corner without seeing people giving each
other really loving, amazing hugs, the kind of hug that's like,
I'm just so glad you're alive and you're here. And
I love you. You know, it's it's a thoroughly positive place.
And there definitely is, like I don't want to pretend
it's not a thing, like there is like a kink
(03:34):
dimension of it. There was like in the big area
where they sold all of the different sort of furry products,
there was a cord and off room that you had
to show your idea to get in. Um that was
like this is where we do the kink stuff. Um,
this is where we like sell the kink products. But
it's you know, it's a it's a large minority, but
it's a minority of like the reason people go to
that sort of thing, like it's it's not what it's about.
(03:57):
And we will get into this later on in part
two of this series. But the main thing that I think,
at least from the people that we spoke with, the
main thing that that brings them here is the feeling
of acceptance that whoever they are, they feel free to
express that here and that they might not necessarily be
able to in their normal life, and that this place
(04:19):
has helped them find out who they really are. And
and so I think that's the really beautiful thing to
keep in mind. It was beautiful uh, And it had
nothing to do with why we decided to go to
Midwest FurFest, because the most direct reason that we went
there was because Miloianapolis, former writer with Breitbart dot com
UH currently disgraced over a pedophilia scandal and sort of
(04:41):
right wing firebrand, had recently made the news for registering
for the convention and then getting immediately banned from it.
He and his friends had promised to infiltrate the event,
and there were rumors that the Proud Boys would be
in tow and rumors that like anti fascist Furries would
find up fighting with them, so we figured we'd better
show up. That's right, we did. But even outside of that,
what we were really more interested in learning about was
(05:03):
something that had happened at Midwest for Fest years ago back.
A clorine gas attack had been carried out against the convention,
hospitalizing several people and leading to intense debate as to
whether or not what had happened was an accident or
a terrorist attack. The thing is, it was never really
confirmed that it was like, you know, like some sort
of outside stores you did this, Like I honestly think
it was just another person in this community just being
(05:24):
really stupid. Honestly, I really can't say, because I really
don't know. It could have been malicious and intentional, It
could have been an accident. And as we were evacuating, um,
people were texting, tweeting, I mean, everybody's going nuts, you know,
is this some cleaning accident? Is it something from the pool?
And people are like, well, there's no pool in this hotel.
(05:46):
It can't be the pool. And so they were like, well,
maybe someone's cleaning the carpets, and and eventually it turned
out no, no one was cleaning the carpets. Whoever was
responsible for the tech may have been acting as a maverick,
you know, whether they have something against the fury fandom,
whether they don't they don't like the more open leftist
(06:07):
culture that we have here in the furry fandom, or
if it was someone who was just trying to get attention.
But the more we dug into it, the clearer it
became that what happened in was no accident. It was
a terrorist attack, one that originated from inside the furry fandom.
The chief suspect is a fellow generally referred to as
the Confederate fur Suitor or Magnus Stride in. Magnus runs
(06:28):
a custom first suit company and has a bit of
a history of what you might call trolling the libs.
The year after the chlorine attack, he started wearing a
first suit with a gigantic Confederate flag on it during
furry gatherings. But even before that he was notorious. Magnus
Stridian has a long track record of many decades of
running in with the police, including smoke bombing a bank
(06:52):
um which he's been in and out of trouble, and
he's known in the furry communities for causing trouble as well.
He's just one of those people that tends to cause
Some people call it dramas, some people just call it
trouble um. He came last year and got frog marched
(07:16):
away in his tidy Whitey's um after punching a pregnant woman.
We'll talk more about this in Part two. What's important
right now is that in two thousand fourteen, Magnus had
a reputation as an aggressive troll in a history of
legal troubles. He was staying at the Hyatt on the
tenth floor, so apparently there were a bunch of furry
(07:38):
riders staying at the Hiatt on the tenth floor, which yeah,
but again don't know. Keep all of that in mind
as we continue this story. Now, if you heard about
the chlorine attack on Midwest for a Fest at all,
it was probably through a series of breathless headlines like
suspected gas attack at Furry convention puts nineteen in a
(07:59):
hospital from Kotaku or Midwest for Fest disrupted by chlorine
gas attack from People magazine. Since the identity of the
culprit was unclear, the coverage never went beyond window gazing.
As the months and years went on, the attack faded
from the public eye outside the furry community. A far
right neo fascist movement nurtured on the Internet gradually leaked
(08:20):
out into the broader American public, and is, interestingly enough,
the year the FBI finally opened their investigation into the
attack on the Midwest for Fest about two years. It
took about two years for me to see any action
from a law enforcement agency. When we decided to go
(08:40):
to Midwest for Fest, our goal was to put out
a quick episode of Worst Year Ever the very next week.
But the more people we talked to, the more it
became clear that the story here was deeper than the
tale of a single unsolved terrorist attack, and it was
certainly deeper than Milo's lame attempts at trolling. What we
found at Midwest for Fest was the story of a
community threatened by the same forces of violent extremism that
(09:02):
have been increasingly tearing into the heart of American society
since and how they came together to fight those forces.
People we met at fur Fest furnished us with hours
of interviews and dozens upon dozens of pages of archived
chat logs and videos detailing an internal battle that's been
raging in the fandom for half a decade or more.
We're here today to deliver you that story because what
the furry community learned in those years contains lessons that
(09:24):
all of us, everywhere we'll need to learn if we're
going to survive the worst year ever. Well together, everything do.
Let's start by meeting some of the people we spoke
(09:45):
with over the income. They all had different experiences with
and opinions on what was going down in their community.
First was Brenda. Hi, my name is Brenda Banks. Um,
I've been involved with this community for I guess eleven
years now. Um. I'm a dry queen and I dance
entertained and such. The fairy aspect of this is not
as important to me as other people, but I'm still
here to have one and their friend Lucky. I'm lucky
(10:08):
person as a tiger, Siberian tiger, and I've been in
this fanom for almost three years now. Then there was Goku.
I go by Goku. I've been in the fandom for
nearly eight years. From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I had a nervous breakdown.
I couldn't handle my life in New York, and very
randomly I found a website about anthropomorphic culture and I
(10:31):
started doing some deep, deep research about it and realized
that this is something that I want to be part
of my life. Chip I found the furry fandom well
after I created a character. So I created an animal
avatar version of myself because I kind of thought cartoons
and animal people were more appealing than the rest of humanity,
(10:55):
because I kind of had a dark outlook on the
human condition and I was like, well, maybe I just
don't want to be humid at all. And of course deal,
so my online handle is doo Taz Devil, and I
kicked the hornet's nest and everything kind of rolled from there.
(11:18):
But before we move on, we should address the Unopolis
in the room, or rather the Unopolis who wasn't in
the room, because Milo or any of his you know,
minions or cohorts, whatever word you want to use, um,
I don't think they're going to be very successful because
while there are some fraries who may identify with Milo
and like that he's a positive person or influence, I'd
(11:41):
say there's an overwhelming number of people who at the
very least are not fond of his rhetoric or what
he stands for, and any attempts of him trying to
sabotage what we're doing by having a good time and
enjoying our weekend is not going to go along very well.
And despite his noble goal of according to a post
of his on telegram quote you have to destroy the
(12:04):
ship they love end of quote, he never showed up
because he wasn't going to get the reaction or attention
he's so desperately craved and knew he probably wouldn't even
get in. So for the final word on Milo, here
are Brenda and Lucky. Milo was such a laughing stock
at this point, like if he ever listened to us
for some reason, I'm trying to be jerking off to
the fact that we're talking about like, I'm sure he'd
(12:24):
love and revel in the fact that we're talking about him,
and so we'll never mention him again for this entire episode.
Well together, Everything down, down, down. The real story, as
far as we're concerned, started a little left midnight on
(12:45):
December seventh, two fourteen, when a person or persons unknown
carried out a chlorine gas attack on the denizens of
the Hyatt Regency Hotel during Midwest for a fest. Five
minutes went by, and we hear a lot of motion
and pandemonium. I was higher, i believe, on the ninth
floor that year of this hotel, and they had staff
(13:08):
members that were coming around to tell us that we
needed to evacuate, and you know, there was a lot
of extended alarms, and we figured, all right, this is
a serious situation. So I get as many of my
clothes on as i I possibly can in a rush,
and we all meet down at the parking area of
the hotel. A lot of people are just you know,
(13:29):
what's going on? Is it is this just the prank?
As they were serious issue, and we see hundreds and
then soon to be thousands of people just like coming
out who were at the dances, who are having dinner
at the bar, in the hotel rooms, just relaxing, and
it's an absolute mess. So we're waiting, and we're waiting
(13:50):
as we see the fire trucks come to the police officers,
and we really have no idea of what's going on.
It was a bitterly cold night, very windy, about degrees.
Just remember just like huddling up, lit up a cigarette,
and for about forty five minutes or so, we were
outside and the police started show up in the news
crews starting to report about what had happened. Given the
(14:12):
fact that this was a literal chemical weapons attack on
a group of civilians on American soil, you might have
expected the media to treat it with some gravity. If so,
then you're forgetting the fact that the victims of this
chemical weapons attack were wearing fursuits, which clearly rendered them
as undeserving of sympathy in the eyes of Mika Prazynski
in the cast of MSNBC's Morning Joe. The Chicago Tribune,
(14:34):
nineteen people were hospitalized at a furry convention in Illinois
after what's being called an intentional lake of couring fury.
Did I get that? Okay? Set the hotel guests along
with convention attendees into the cold night, many still dressed
in their furry furry. We just told Mika what the
(14:57):
convention was about. She's it's kept everybody warm the hotel.
Where are you going? Damnated? Hey? Guests came back at
four am? What you're hearing? At the end, there is
Joe Scarborough and Mica laughing so hard that they can't talk.
Mica actually breaks down with giggles and runs off stage.
This is again over an intentional chemical weapon attack that
(15:18):
hospitalized nineteen Americans. Remembering a lot of the news stories
that were running on local television, it was a lot
of fodder. Like I don't think anyone was taking it seriously,
because even in the mid twenty teens, I think fury
was something that was very overlooked, and they weren't, you know,
when the mainstream media was talking about it, they don't
(15:39):
know how to discuss this um. Some of them were
neutral in their tone and just described that, you know,
a convention like an anime or comic convention. You know,
there was a disruption of a major magnitude because of
someone trying to um, you know, using improvised explosive or
meth cooking or what have you. And I remember it
(15:59):
was one of the national news channels who was covering
what happened uh that night, and the reporters, which is laughing.
I don't know why, you know, whether it was the
fact that they couldn't grasp the idea of such a subculture,
or that you know, something like this had happened. I
don't know. It was a bunch of hogwash. I didn't
really care for it. The hosts of Morning Joe weren't
(16:22):
the only ones who found this all very funny. Here's
CBS this Morning. The Chicago Tribune says nineteen people were
hospitalized at a convention celebrating furry animals. A chlorine leak
at a hotel in Chicago suburb forced the evacuation of
thousands of people Sunday. They were attending Midwest for Fest.
Many were dressed as animals. A powdered form of chlorine
(16:44):
gas was left in the stairwell on the ninth floor.
Even in the relatively good coverage like this story from
w k RCTV Local twelve in Chicago, you can hear
the anchor just barely managing to hold back a snide comment.
This was at the High and Agency o Hair, where
people gathered for an annual Furriese convention. Okay, now, contrast
(17:05):
all that with this actual audio from the night of
the attack. I have. Are you taking the stairs? Or
there's gas? Shouldn't we take cocaine? One more? All right?
(17:36):
Go get so? Is there like a gas leak or
is there We don't know what the fun it is
that people vomiting blood. It smells like it smells like chlorina. Yeah, honestly,
listening to that makes me feel very emotional. Yeah yeah,
(17:58):
And this is y'all's first time listening into that media.
I found it as we were like putting together the
script for this, and it really um makes it clear
what happened. Like it's easy when you you you kind
of are just like looking at the coverage of an
event like this to forget what something like that actually
sounds like sounded like at the time, And it's it's
horrifying and just the terror and the panic that you
can hear and they don't know if they're supposed to
(18:19):
go down the stairs or take the elevator and the
stairs are where the attack was, right. Yeah, that's something
that we're about to get to. One of the people
that we spoke with had a friend who evacuated through
the stairwell and caused severe long term health problems. You know.
It was it was on the tenth floor, and I
(18:41):
had a front staying on the tone floor. And of
course at that time we didn't know. I found out later. Um,
she had gone outside of her room and it was
on the tenth floor in the stair wall. That I
think it was an accident, maybe perhaps or not. I
can't say. I don't think anybody really knows. Um. Maybe
(19:03):
the offense to good luck. They're not telling me. Um.
But she got there, there were the alarms, and she
went into the stairwell to try and escape, and wrong
stairwell Clarine sinks, so she's going down. She's getting worse,
and she burned her lungs pretty badly. Um. She at
(19:28):
that time was a self employed artist and didn't have
health insurance. The ambulances were there, she refused to go
on the ambulance and get seen because she was worried
about the healthcare costs that she could not afford. And
she struggled for almost a year afterwards with the effects
(19:51):
of that. Well, a few reporters took it seriously right away.
The attack on Midwest Verfest was at least immediately treated
as a serious crime by law enforcement. VICE reporting from
two thousand sixteen confirmed that the Rosemont Police Department opened
an investigation on December eight and closed it on July
twenty nine, fifteen, without having identified a culprit. Rosemont's records
(20:12):
obtained by VICE showed that the FBI did email the
department its report on the attack, but it doesn't seem
like they had any clear of an idea about who
was at fault. Chip, a furry, a filmmaker, and an
activist wound up being approached by the Bureau to help
in their investigation two years later, in two thousand sixteen.
I learned some things about this after the convention, mainly
(20:34):
because I'm in Colorado, around the same area that a
group called the Furry Raiders exists. So in Colorado, this
Furry Raiders group is known for being inclusive of racists,
and inclusive of pedophiles, and inclusive of zoo files. And
(20:55):
there's sort of a group no one wants to be around.
They're very all right, UM, and they're famous for wearing
Nazi esque arm bands. And so because I was near there,
I got contacted by the police and the FBI saying, hey,
we have a suspect in your area. Can you tell
(21:17):
us anything about him? And UM, so he apparently, UM
was a suspect even though he didn't go to fur Fest.
His name is Foxler. Foxler didn't go to FurFest. He's
actually never been to Convention. The reason he's a suspect
is because he was encouraging attacks on events. Um. He
(21:41):
liked getting convention shut down. He liked harassing people, he
liked causing problems, and he has a group dedicated to
harassment and somewhat stick stochastic terrorism. So he likes to
cause problems, hurt people, threatened them with guns, call them
(22:01):
during the night and say better keep your doors locked
or I'll come in your house and kill you. And
he does all this for I guess attention and the
fact that nobody likes racist. We're going to have to
digress here because the story of Foxler is something that
takes some unpacking. He gained a measure of national prominence
back in when Rolling Stone put a picture of him
(22:22):
in his first suit at the top of a big
article called does the furry community have a Nazi Problem?
The name Foxler is most presume a furified version of Hitler.
Foxler is somebody who so he swears he's not a Nazi,
but he loves to dress up in Nazi paraphernalia, which
makes so much sense. He swaps out the swastika for
(22:44):
a paw print, so that makes it okay, and then
he stands for a lot of nazi Ish values. Walsa
claim he's not a Nazi, of course, because he's not.
He's not a Nazi, But then he's also been convicted
of pedophilia and has a history of doing unspeakable things
to animals. So we generally do not like this man.
(23:05):
Nobody likes him. He's been escorted out of conventions because
he is just such disgusting human felth He's a figurehead
for the al right of the fandom all furies you
know UM and glorifies Hitler, advocates for white ethno state.
You know that that type of person also thinks that
his dog is his girlfriend. Foxler. Foxler is the leader
(23:28):
of the Furry Raiders UM, which is a group he
created that's based off of the old Second Life group
called the Furzy, which were Nazi furries. Um. He took
a lot of their imagery, including an arm band, and
made it his own. He's posted a lot of very
(23:51):
racist things online, a lot of comments like that, some
very strange journal posts that imply that he's having sexual
relationships dogs and perhaps kids. Um. But he's also a
terrible writer, so you know, it's vague. Who knows. I'm suspicious,
(24:14):
but you know, uh, I can't say anything for sure
because that would definitely be like defamation. Please don't ever
see me. We can't verify though, wanting to fuck dogs
thing beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the insinuations
of child molestation are no longer theoretical. In April, Lee
Miller Foxler's real name, was arrested for enticement of a child.
(24:37):
Foxler does deny being a Nazi. He claims the name
is a portmanteau of fox and his last name Miller.
Hears him explaining why he tried to join a neo
Nazi organization for totally non Nazi reasons, and I decided
to actually get involved with some neo Nazi groups to
see how they were, Like, you know, I can't judge
(25:00):
people right away. You gotta go in there and get
your hands dirty while your paws dirty. And you know,
I signed up for the little form online paid membership
and they wanted me to show that I was faithful
(25:26):
to um Nazism. I feel like we should take a
second here to explain how this guy looks, particularly his
eyes creepy. It's so creepy, like the first suit is
built for him. It's like an amazing example in a
lot of ways, Like it's creepy as hell, his first suit,
but it's an amazing example of how these suits can
(25:48):
capture the personality of a person, because you see, like
the madness in this person's eyes and the fake eyes
of his costume. It's it's something else. Yeah, And the
way he carries himself and communicates and uses that it's
very easy. It's a very creepy, lifeless fur suit. Now.
Foxer claims that when the Nazis found out he was
mixed race and the fury, they refused to let him in.
(26:10):
But that story, if true, shouldn't be taken as a
sign that the far right has no interest in recruiting furries.
The furry fandom actually started dealing with the rise of
the alt right years before mainstream society. So there's for
a couple of years we've been noticing an encroachment of
far right wing groups that have been trying to recruit
(26:32):
within the furry fandom. And to a degree that can
be because fury is largely white, largely male, and largely
very young. Also, I hate to say it, but often socially, um,
those social skills are underdeveloped, sometimes bullied as kids. They're
(26:56):
looking further home, and you know, you couple that with
economic hardships, um, cultural shifts, problems, and they are looking
for answers. They're looking for what makes sense. And white
(27:16):
nationalists see this as easy prey because they come along
and they say, I have the answer, I have the solution.
You're one of us. You're very special. You've always been special.
The people who built bridges, the people who span nations,
conquered the world, those are your people, those are your things.
(27:37):
You're no longer a shlubby, little white dude and a
sad little basement. You are a great white race. And
for some people, unfortunately, that's very, very addictive. All furs
are people who are generally all right, and they form
several factions. One of them is the furry Ters, one
(28:01):
of them is all Furry, another one is called Civil Furies.
But they're all just groups that like to say racial slurs,
and they usually hate lgbt s in some form, or
they say their LGBT and they hate the LGBT community.
But it's typical all right people who happen to be furies,
(28:21):
and generally they're shunned by the entire Fury fandom because
no one wants to be around that kind of negativity
and hate. Now, in the I don't know what to
call it, mainstream world, default world, anti fascist groups like
Eugene Antifa here in Oregon have taken to infiltrating and
doxing major neo Nazi organizations and militias. Dio basically does
(28:42):
the same work within the furry fandom. She sees it
as a form of community self defense. I infiltrated the
group to kind of keep an eye on them. And
you know, when you get into the group, you had
to passive voice interview, you have to call in so
they would give you clearance for further channel else and
then they had here systems where you would earn your
(29:04):
way up by doing things for the higher ups, by
recruiting more members, by posting more, by being more active. Um.
They had a list of videos that you were supposed
to watch so that you would be more aware. A
lot of these videos are what you'd expect from Nazis,
(29:26):
documentaries about how the Holocaust didn't happen and Hitler was
a cool dude, etcetera. But since they were recruiting furies,
they tailored their propaganda to that demographic. They take Disney songs,
and they take Disney movies, animated Disney movies, which are
already really appealing to furies, and they changed the lyrics
(29:47):
to unfortunately very catchy, horrible white nationalist things. And yeah,
I remember watching one of those videos and being like,
oh my god, this is m unfortunately very well done propaganda.
Here's the circle of life from the Lion King, but racist.
(30:09):
Of course, you should feel proud to be white. Our
race has achieved many great things. M h. As you
(30:30):
go through life, you'll see you're expected to be scared
and ashamed, wide identity, suppressed, culturally disposest, and always blamed.
(30:51):
But study his story and you'll very quickly see ours
filled the world with blood, medicine, industry, rule of lah
hand liberty. We are more than we are are we
(31:13):
are white. So that was a thing. I mean grouse,
I mean just like finding out new ways to recruit kids,
I mean creative fun. I hated it then and I
hate it now. Well together, everything down, down, down now.
(31:38):
Some of the Alt fur movement was organic, because there's
nothing about being into anthropomorphic animals that meets you can't
also be international socialism. But Do argues that a number
of non furry white nationalists and fascists saw the fandom
as a good recruiting ground simply because firies tended to
be young, male, white and disaffected. And then this group
was like, furries are right ground. Nobody's going after these guys.
(32:03):
We'll go after these guys. You know they're degenerates now,
but we'll clean them up, polish him up, get him
out of furry, move them to the right, and all's
of all of the world. We actually have a recording
from one of these Nazis, the guy who created the
first Alt furry group online, explaining all of this in
his own words. Thanks to Dio for doing the digging
necessary to find this, um Jim. When I started the
(32:25):
free HQ server, which is the old server that we
used to have, I made it specifically UH an alt
right furry server, and that was back at the time
they all right was different from what it is today.
But I made it an altright server, altright furry server,
with the idea that we could organize and then benefit
(32:55):
from the synergies of some of the outside cultural forces UH,
such as four Chan or you know, various other things
pole and and and various other things that are you know,
the pepe A crowd, various other things that are oftentimes
associated with the alt right. A furry subculture is a
huge subculture, and it is it is a successful subculture,
(33:20):
and it is a growing subculture because as as mainstream
culture gets more and more rotten and falls apart and
more and more young people are frustrated and looking for
answers and not finding it in the mainstream pop cultures
that that that we know of, they go off looking
(33:40):
in subcultures. They go off looking for their tribe, and
many of them have found their way to the to
the to the free subculture. Um I saw. I saw
a couple of I don't exactly remember where, so you
just have to take my word for it. I saw
a couple of surveys. The surveys said that um furries
(34:01):
were like white or something like that, mostly young, mostly
between four, about white um. And you know, my understanding
about the furry subculture is it's about mail. That's a
(34:22):
pretty disaffected group of people right now. That's a pretty
disenfranchise that you bring in those demographics, and that's a
very disenfranchised group of people in the West right now.
So these are the people most of the furries we
talked to suspect we're behind the chlorine gas attack on
Midwest for Fest and at first we thought that was
where this whole struggle for the soul of the fandom
(34:44):
had really kicked off. But then we talked to Chip.
The purpose of the interview was to discuss his experience
helping the FBI investigate the attack. But like d O,
Chip has dedicated a huge amount of his time to
defending his community from fascist infestation, and he told us
that the whole story of Nazi furs went way back,
way further. Early on in the fandom, there was a
(35:08):
few people incredibly frustrated with LGBT s in the fandom
um or people who are vegan, or people who were
obviously bad like zoo files. They hated all kinds of things,
so they hated bad things and they hated reasonable things
like LGBT s. Um. It was all started by someone
(35:31):
named squee Rat who goes by Iron Spike now, and
squee Rat wrote a manifesto about how these people should
be ashamed of their kinks, need to be ashamed of
being weird or awkward or different, and it attracted a
group of people who formed the burn Furs Now. This
(35:53):
was all Chip mentioned of the Burned Furs and squee Rat,
but he also said the word manifesto which really picked
up our ears. We love us a manifestos here on
worst your ever loves in quotes we hate them, but
we had to check it out. Sque rats manifesto called
this sordid little business begins. I remember when being a
pervert was a bad thing, off to a great start.
(36:14):
If you were warped, you tried to hide it, and
good for you if you did. If you were going
to polish your rod to autopsy photos or bugger as
Shetland pony, you did it. In the privacy of your
own sick, sad home. No one else, especially not in me,
had to know, and that was great. The best part
was if you decided to crawl out on the roof
and inform the neighborhood via midnight and megaphone that being
urinated on got you hot, you would be told, in
(36:36):
no one's certain terms how very diseased you were. Most
people I know don't have too much trouble distinguishing between
a lifestyle choice and a warning sign yep. In many
parts of the world, the idea of making love to
andy Panda is still regarded as somewhat misguided. Most parts,
that is, except furry fandom. I don't know what the
hell happened here. Live and let live as an excellent
(36:58):
tree hugging philosophy, but it doesn't do much when the
ones you refuse to kill are dragging you down with them.
If you like animal based stories, cartoon, or art, you're
a furry and like it or not, fury means pervert.
This didn't come out of nowhere either. Now this sets
the tone, and we don't need to read too much
more of it. The rest is a list of general
(37:18):
grievances regarding the furry community and what constitutes a real furry.
The manifesto condemns a variety of things, starting at understandably
beast reality, but curiously it quickly gets away from that
and covers those who treat fury like lifestyle, pretend to
be werewolves, spirit animals, veganism, and furies who allegedly wish
they were animals. This attracted people who were tired of
(37:40):
articles and media stories of furries discussing sexual practices and
aspects of the lifestyle, conflating them with the entire fandom.
The manifesto complains, to me and a lot of other people,
furry simply means a fondness for animal human combinations and arts, movies, books, whatever.
If you're biased towards Redwall novel to have a soft
(38:00):
spot for anime cack rolls, or can't drag yourself away
from the secretive nim chances are excellent that you're at
least slightly fur inclined. That's pretty cool by me. The
simple definition is probably what started fur a fandom in
the first place, but you would not believe some of
the bagges The term furry has taken on, so Squee
and others who share these concerns eventually formed the aforementioned
(38:20):
Burned Furs called that because, according to Squee, it represented
quote furs who have spoken up against fandom perversion and
been burned at the stake for it end quote. As
the burn First said in their mission statement, anthropomorphics, fandom
is being overrun by sexually dysfunctional, socially stunted, and creatively
bankrupt hacks and pervs. This slow transition is interesting because
(38:42):
we see this in a lot of far right recruitment.
In these subcultures and fandoms, the zero went on something
everyone agrees as bad, like bestiality or pedophilia, but then
they conflated with other behaviors that they just don't like,
slipping the group further and further into general intolerance. Certain
Burned First members were intolerant of homosexuality, Christian furs, obscure fetishes,
and erotica. This is notable because many of the group's
(39:03):
members were also creators of erotica. This is again a
semi regular occurrence in far right circles, where they decried
degenerate behavior while also participating in it, which is why
it wasn't surprising when Chip told us it attracted a
group of people who formed the burn Furs, and they
were generally far right groups. Some of them were neo Nazis.
(39:25):
And the crazy part is those burn Furs from are
part of these Furry Raiders now they all right, And
one of the leaders, Foxler, of the Furry Raiders was
a burn Fur at the time. Holy unsurprising, but this
illustrates something the furry community has always had to deal with,
intolerance and bigotry within their community. The burn Furs were
(39:48):
only a thing for about three years. During their time,
others in the community formed an opposition group, Freezing Furs.
Other opposition groups were Non Aligned Furs and Furry Peace,
which promoted general inclusion. So the f you have always
had conflict, but they've also always been diligent and steadfast
and expelling zoophiles and pedophiles and keeping hate as far
away from their community as possible for decades all by themselves,
(40:11):
while the media and society at large dismissed their whole fandom.
As Lucky explains, you know, um, I think it's a
really drastic difference when you're looking at something like or
comparing to something like the anime community, you know, I mean,
you can go on anime Twitter for a day and
you can find you know, pedophiles, zoo files, Nazis, a
(40:34):
lot of Nazis behind anime profile pictures. I mean you'll
find them in pretty much every walk of life in
and every post on Twitter really that involves politics. UM,
and the furry fandom I feel has way less of
a problem with it because the behavior really isn't tolerated. Um.
(40:56):
You know, people speak to cancel culture or whatever, but
it's it's just holding people to a standard, you know,
and um, I think the community does a really good
job with that. Before we go, we need to tie
up a loose end. At this point, we know the
Furry Raiders were staying on the tenth floor of the
Hiatt on the night of the attack. We also know
(41:16):
that Foxler was not there. What we didn't know, however,
is that Foxler and the Confederate first Suitor worked together.
This is Chip describing what the FBI came to talk
to him about. They wanted to know about a particular
person Foxler was working with, who did go to MFF,
who worked at a water park, who was arrested for
(41:39):
creating a stink bomb in a bank, and he had
chlorine in his car at one point during the convention. Yeah,
that's not something you normally bring to a party. Chip
wouldn't say this person's name out loud, but if you
were called. The top of the episode, we played a
clip of d O describing Magnus Deridian a k a.
(41:59):
The Confederate First Suitor, the man who had previously been
arrested for using a stink bomb, and who also stayed
on the tenth floor of the highatt that night. You
start to piece it together. This line of reasoning seemed
even more likely once we looked into Magnus's background. In
two thousand four, he was arrested and charged with terroristic threats,
recklessly endangering another person, and disorderly conduct. The charges stemmed
(42:20):
from an altercation at a bank that ended with him
throwing what he described as stink bombs he bought on eBay.
In an old blog post, Magnus makes it seem like
this was just a simple prank that the police took
way too seriously, But in his own blog entry on
the attacks, Magnus admits that a pregnant woman was hospitalized
due to his supposedly harmless stink bomb. Has Matt Team
(42:42):
had to be deployed to the bank. In the end,
he was only sentenced for disorderly contact, not terroristic threats,
but he still spent eight months in jail. So you
have a guy with a history of deploying dangerous chemicals
in crowded areas when he gets piste off on the
same floor of the convention as the chlorine gas attack.
They know that there is a matching roll of tape
(43:04):
in this guy's apartment, and there's chlorine that was found
in his car. They know all of this, but they
can't seem to get enough information or evidence to convict.
I guess, and so if they can't convict, they're not
going to move forward. Between the shall we say, unsatisfying
(43:25):
response from law enforcement and the downright insulting response from
the mainstream media to the FurFest attack, the furry community
found itself kind of alone in confronting an increasingly dangerous
far right movement that wouldn't hit the national stage for
three more years at the deadly Charlottesville rally. The raft
of support and living on the ragged fringe of popular culture,
the Furies had to develop their own tactics of community
(43:47):
support and self defense. So in Part two of this
series will explore the strategies the Furies developed to defend
their community from rising white supremacist threats. Their struggle was
ignored by the mainstream media for years, but there are
lessons in it for all of us here now. As
crazy as it may sound, the things the furry community
learned since provide an incredible roadmap for how all of
(44:09):
us might just manage to survive the worst year ever.
Play us out us, Everything so dumb, Everything so dumb.
It's again. I tried Daniel Lovely
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