Wanted to ask you about the based on your your your knowledge, your background, your clinical experience, what what is the psychology of this mob violence?

When I see it, it it it like I, I.

Don't even recognize some of these.

They seem, they seem animalistic, is what I mean.

No, they're worse than animals.

They're worse than animals because animals.

They just kill to eat, you know, human beings.

They have A twist in them that makes them far worse than animals when they really get going.

Well, I think it's, I think you really want to know what I think.

I think it's revenge against God for the crime of being.

That's really what I think.

It's Cain and Cain and Abel.

It's like, oh, Abel's your, Abel's your guy.

God, how would I take him out in the field and beat him to death?

How do you feel about that?

All my sacrifices went on rewarded.

Yeah.

It's like, yeah, that's what it is at the bottom of the hell of things.

Welcome back to Posting Through IT on Mike Hayden.

I'm Jared Holt.

And with us for the whole episode, the entire thing, is a personal friend of both of ours, Chris Mathias.

Chris is a reporter and author and now expert Antifa thanks to his forthcoming book in February to Catch a fascist.

He's also the coach, long time coach I would say in my fantasy Football League anti fascist play action.

Chris, say hello, please.

Hey, really good to be here.

I'm excited to talk about fantasy football.

How is anti fascist play action doing this year?

I, we were talking before we started recording.

Like I, I'm also in this fantasy Football League.

My fantasy team name is the Epstein fumbles.

But but yeah, I just log in like every Tuesday or Wednesday and click the optimize lineup button.

I, I don't know about football, but you're, you're more of a football guy, right?

I like to think I am, but every year when I joined this league, I remember I'd actually know nothing about football and I do the same thing and optimize every week.

But you know, anti fascist play action is undefeated right now.

Three and OH tied for first place in the league, so.

Well, that's that's exciting.

They're not going to be that way much longer if the Trump administration gets its way.

Yes, but the team is worried about this executive order.

For the for the cross section of of extremist heads and and football heads, my team is Devon 8 Chan.

So we've just got one shout out this week of one of our members who just uses the screen name E upgraded to the executive club tier E.

If you're listening, that means you get to recommend us a topic to cover on the show and sponsor a parody ad.

A link to Patreon is down in the description.

We've been really excited by just how many people have signed up.

I mean it's.

Been a busy couple weeks actually, which is really awesome.

I mean, it's really kind of blown me away, honestly.

I, I mean, I, I have modest standards, I guess, but I, I feel so flattered and, and validated that what we're doing here matters.

And hopefully this episode is going to continue in that tradition.

So we're here to talk about Antifa.

Antifa.

The reason we're talking about it today is because the Trump administration, in the wake of of Charlie Kirk's killing, has essentially declared war on anti fascism in the US.

On September 22nd, there was a executive order titled Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization.

And here's a little bit from that executive order.

This is how they describe anti fascism.

Antifa is a militaristic anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.

It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide To accomplish these goals.

This campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of federal law through arm standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers in routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activist.

Antifa recruits, trains, and radicalizes young Americans to engage in this violence and suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members, blah blah.

This too long.

I'm going to stop reading here.

You guys get the gist.

The White House also put out a statement to accompany this called.

That one was titled President Trump Isn't Backing on Down from Crushing Radical left Violence, in case there were any doubts that he was backing down.

I like that because it's, it's got this sort of like, it's just like, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm totally not backing down.

It almost feels like he's completely checked out and they're like, trust me, he's got this.

I didn't do fucking shit.

A lot of the things that they do seem to be in response.

They're very online, the Trump administration, right.

And a lot of things they do seem to be in response to some of the things people say on X.

And like one big meme on X from the radical right is this thing that says nothing ever happens.

I don't know if you've ever seen that.

Whatever.

Yeah, they'll just nothing ever happens.

Hashtag nothing ever happens.

They'll put it over like the they'll superimpose that over pictures.

And it's just this idea that, you know, their, their, their fascist ambitions are never really quite fulfilled by this kind of grifting mega whatever.

Yeah, so this statement they put out assuring us Trump is not, he's not backing down from this.

Stop saying that.

Who said that?

I didn't say that.

You said that.

It's pretty insane, man.

It reads like it could be an anti no thread on X it it this is meant to accompany the executive order.

The body of it really kind of seems meant to justify the executive order.

It lists out all these different incidents that they claim are examples of radicals, left wing violence.

There's some obvious stuff in here that I might agree with.

For example, a 2019 attack on a ICE facility in Tacoma, WA.

Sure.

Yeah, the the person who did that described himself that way.

He was an anarchist as far as I know.

But most of what they describe here as radical left, antifa or whatever is really just kind of vaguely anarchist.

And we'll talk with you, Chris, later about this.

Like, there's certainly overlaps in these flavors, but it's not really, it's not really the same, right?

These are kind of distinct ideas, right?

And and then the last thing that we'll talk about that the White House put out was a strategy.

This came out on September 25th, I believe this is the plan, right?

So you got this executive order, you got this statement, and now you've got the strategy.

This was a memo that Trump sent to the Secretary of the Treasury and the IRS commissioner, and what it asked them to do is identify and disrupt.

That is the language they use, the financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence.

I should note here that the only political violence, the only domestic terrorism it mentions in this memo is left wing.

So, so this is kind of, I think the first really solid, clear signal of like, what they plan to do about it.

Certainly I don't think it would surprise anybody if there are people inside the FBI, you know, huddled around tables over the weekend trying to figure out how they're going to respond to this.

But the first signal of what is coming down the Pike is that Department of Justice, the IRS, the Treasury, are taking a look specifically at entities with money.

So one of the ones The New York Times reported this that they're going to look at is Open Society's foundation.

And they're doing this kind of backwards too.

They're saying surely Open Society's Foundation, which is the giant sort of money source on the left that is associated with George Soros, right?

They're saying, all right, this is who we want find us something to get, which is very backwards ideal of pursuing justice, right?

They're not finding the crimes and seeing who's responsible.

They're finding who they want to be responsible and searching for crimes.

So this first move really seems aimed at undercutting the nonprofit status, the financial security, etcetera of left wing donors.

Famously anarchist.

Open Societies Foundation.

Yeah, George Soros, black bloc militant, who can forget the time he punched Richard Spencer in the face?

Chris, you've been, you know, keeping a close eye on this.

You've got the book coming out next year that's all about anti fascism.

I got to say I, I I don't think you could have planned the release of your book any better.

It is it is grim situation, but did did you ever expect this to happen?

You know, I, I just know from talking to Mike, writing a book, the process between, you know, when you turn your final draft in and it goes to publication is so long.

I feel like if I wrote a book, I would be constantly worried that like it would be outdated by the time it hit the shelves.

But I'm just curious your thought on what's happening given that you spend so much time looking into this.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's absolutely wild.

It's in a weird way, though the book does kind of predict this a little bit.

Like it's the I end up interviewing a lot of anti fascists who by 2024 when Trump is re elected, are kind of going further underground because they're kind of fearing exactly this, like a resuscitated anti antifa panic and like one that has, you know, is harsher than the previous panics.

And I think that's, you know, essentially what we're seeing.

Yeah.

I mean, I in a way I wish the book was a little less relevant, but no, I think it's by the especially by February, you know, who knows where this will have gone.

Well, I think when we were first talking both of us about our books, it was during, it may have been during the Biden years, right.

Yeah.

Wouldn't it have been?

So I mean, this is a huge change, right?

It's, I mean it's like a, a massive change and it's it, it seems like, you know, the stock certainly went up considerably.

I think people are going to want to read.

It more important than ever and it was already important something about these executive orders.

I saw Spencer Sunshine fantastic, I mean top of top of the world researcher.

We're going to have to have him on some time.

But he noticed that the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank is criticizing the Trump administration over these executive orders.

So I, this doesn't seem too popular.

I I think anybody who bothers to know what they are talking about knows that this sort of panic against antifa is sort of a smokescreen for other things that really have to do more with politically persecuting critics of this administration or their political opponents, real and perceived.

If you've gotten any sense in terms of, you know, what's the vibe check on this?

I if you go on XI mean you can see people salivating over this.

People like Andy know or like just licking the boot and being like, please, Sir, please, I antifa punched me in the head and my brain split in half.

I I would love to help you, but I just don't know that this is going to be received well.

I don't know I I'm just speculating here I guess, but.

Yeah, I mean, I I can't really get the temperature just yet.

I mean, like all of our old friends from previous anti antifa panics are pretty stoked and you know, Owen Lanahan who we can talk about later, I haven't seen what Pizza Kate Jack has said about it yet.

I think Sternovich is pretty excited.

Just like previous panics about antifa, you know, it's always about creating a pretext to go after whomever they deem antifa.

And I think we'll get on to this, but obviously MAGA on the far right has an incredibly expansive definition of who constitutes Antifa compared to the pretty vanishingly small amount of activists in America who kind of identify as Antifa and are doing that work.

You know, I'm really excited to have you on to kind of explore where this panic came from.

You know, why did people start freaking out about Antifa so many years ago to get us up to this point?

But the last thing that I want to talk about before we dive in, there is a study from CSIS that has been making the rounds.

It got covered in the Atlantic, NBC News.

I was quoted in an NBC News story.

I I did not say a lot of nice things about this study, but the quotes they picked out from me are pretty tame.

Have you seen this?

What what it is is, and some listeners might recognize that once I start talking about it is a study that they say, you know, the results of show that there is a surge in left wing terrorism in recent years and a decline in right wing terrorism.

Have you seen this?

Yeah, I I saw the Atlantic headline getting shared around a lot.

I think I said on our, our last premium episode, Jared, we, we did a question and answer and we talked to someone asked us about, you know, where, where terrorism is going and things like that.

I, I don't think we can discount the possibility that left wing terrorism is really growing and, and, and might grow.

And I, but the, the reason for it is because there's a complete, in my opinion, a complete vacuum of leadership from the liberal left to the, you know, the whole spectrum really.

There's just like a complete vacuum of leadership.

People are feeling like elections don't matter.

They're worried about their, their right to vote being taken away.

And it's in the, in the near future.

And that filters down to people who may be, have a propensity of violence in the 1st place.

So we can't totally discount it because of that.

I I agree.

And I think it is on the tips of everyone's tongue that, you know, things are just kind of getting more militant across the spectrum.

As for this specific study, Jared, I think you've taken a closer look.

But my impression from far away is that it's one of those things where it's like the way the NYPD talks about like the murder rate on the subway where like, they'll say it's risen like 500%.

But that was from, you know, 1 murder to five murders in a year.

Is is that what's happening here?

Yeah, yeah.

I, I thought, you know, some of our listeners might have seen this.

I, I think a lot of us feel it in the air.

Like you said, Chris, things are just getting more militant across the board.

There has seemed to be more violence kind of bringing out of the excesses of the left movement in this country.

But as you also said, the baseline was zero or close to 0.

So even a handful of incidents feels like something's changing, right, Even if it's statistically like a fluke.

And it's too early to know if this is going to be a trend or if this is just some moment specifically has happened and and this has happened.

But here's what I told ABC about this study.

Be patient with me folks.

I'm going to get research nerdy.

This This is why they pay me the medium bucks.

So the problem with this study is its methodology.

And the issue with this methodology is 1, their definitions of left wing and right wing violence and the fact that it leans on the old school framework of terrorism, which has an extremely high bar and should have a high bar for what is included.

And to be defined as terrorism, an act has to be committed with the explicit goal of effecting some kind of political change or having some kind of political result.

So a whole lot of violence that we see happening that that we think of as political violence, things like school shootings committed by teenagers that have extreme racist and hateful ideas.

A lot of those, in fact, most of those would probably not reach the bar of terrorism.

If somebody's loaded up on racist ideas and goes out and attacks a bunch of migrants but doesn't do so with the illusion that they're going to change the world or they think that, but they never stated that anywhere, well, then it's not terrorism, right?

So already the window, even if the study is done perfectly, is so tight that it, it really is just a, a very narrow, narrow sliver of the picture of the threats that we face today.

The other thing is methodology aside, I had some issues with how things are coded.

It seemed that this is my take here, that a lot of right wing incidents that I looked up because I just Googled some things, you know, just Googled Nazi attack, white supremacist attack.

After I saw this and thought, surely there can't be one attack that's happened this year.

A lot of these, I think they afforded benefit of the doubt to right wing attackers.

You know, where they're like, well, the exact motivation isn't totally clear and they didn't afford that to left wing attackers.

So one of the ones they put in here is Luigi Mangione shooting the CEO of United Healthcare.

His political views, his exact political views are still really not clear.

The state of New York tried to get a terrorism charge on Luigi and they failed, right?

So why is that being counted as left wing terrorism?

And from what I can tell, they did that because of the target choice, right?

So there's, they're making assumptions about these left wing attackers that I don't think they're making at an equal rate for potential inclusion of right wing attackers.

The very last thing I'll say before I bore everybody with this nerd ship A lot of mainstream media outlets are just happy to regurgitate this stuff without calling somebody like me.

And having them explain what the issues of a study like this might be.

And then even when I did to NBC, you know, it's what they used from my interview with them, you know, I don't think really captured the entirety of what I said to them.

But it reminds me a little bit of 2020 when I feel like a lot of analysts and journalists were attributing, like, Boogaloo Boy stuff to the left just because they would occasionally, like, turn up at a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

For people who don't know, the boogaloo boys were, I mean essentially like far right libertarian, is that the way you would describe them?

They were like, you know what, what your your liberal aunt would call gun nuts.

Yeah, exactly.

I, I think they're like kind of acceleration is the gun nuts often, you know, had connections to like white nationalist movements, but occasionally would make these overtures where they would pretend like they had a shared purpose with Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

And people just fell for that hook and sinker without really digging into like their actual ideology.

I don't know.

And also, like in 2020, I think it was also CSIS that did the study that, you know, in the previous 25 years, Antifa had killed no one and that the far right had killed like 304 hundred people.

Generally they put out good stuff like like it's, it's solid enough.

So I was pretty surprised to see this from them, especially from the analysts that that wrote this.

It it's really, I don't know if it was rushed or what, but yeah, point is, I just wanted to explain why people should hit pause before they they swallow that study too fast.

Well, maybe that's where the clicks are right now.

But yeah, if you're talking about alternative media, I want to remind people that posting through it is the most trusted name in news.

And we are going to just quickly interview Chris Matthias here very briefly about his book.

And then we're going to get to the fun stuff, which is talking about sort of the history of Antifa in the Magamind, like how they how did they get here?

Where if they're so obsessed with us, you know, or at least obsessed with the left in general.

Now I'm hearing in my head Mike Cernovich going, you know, instead of saying gorilla mind saying keep your mind just relined just.

Relax.

It's OK, Just relax.

And we're back.

Mike Cernovich danger of oh, hey, Shawna, I think Chris, like, why don't you just tell us for for starters, like what is Antifa in general?

Like I I think about like there's this old thing about Casey Stengel when he first got the Mets, like in 1962, it was like a bunch of scrubs.

And then supposedly his first speech was like, gentlemen, this is a baseball, right?

Like just starting from scratch.

What what, what is what, what is Antifa?

What is it?

I think the interesting thing and I think why MAG has been able to make Antifa to such a boogeyman is because no one really knows what the fuck it is included.

Often times including like people in the Antifa movement.

It's like tough to define for the most part.

And the way I kind of define it in the book is like this.

It's a decentralized and largely underground subculture of leftists.

You know, they variously identify as anarchist, socialist and communist who are dedicated to combating the far right.

And, you know, they basically believe that fascists sometimes need to be confronted in the streets and that can mean violently.

They believe that fascists should have no platform to speak or organize.

And they believe.

That interjected, but as far as I know that's not true of everyone because there are a lot of people who are who consider themselves anti fascist who also are against violence.

So I think this would be the the distinction I, I would I would draw the distinction between I would basically say antifa for the most part is militant anti fascism, which distinguishes it from liberal anti fascism, which is often nonviolent and believes in the power of the state and law enforcement to combat fascism.

I think that is kind of, for me, the defining element of what makes antifa Antifa is like A at least a understanding that militancy can work sometimes.

That isn't to say that there isn't disagreement among anti fascists about when violence should be used.

In fact, those discussions can be very tedious.

The I think what also confuses the discussion and the definition around antifa is that it can simultaneously refer to groups that self identify that way.

And there are like, you know, multiple groups around the country that identify that way.

But also just kind of refers to a tradition of like a set of tactics and practices in America and in Europe against combating the far right and in America specifically, like, you know, this modern iteration of Antifa can kind of be traced back to the 80s and 90s with the with groups like the baldies and with anti racist action, you know, which are these kind of young militant punks who are basically trying to chase Nazis out of the punk scene.

And they do that successfully.

So they're obsessed, obviously with the violence, right?

And you know, any kind of footage of people going crazy, like smashing a Bank of America window or whatever.

I don't even know if that's anti fascist or if it's just left wing, you know, chaos.

But they're obsessed with that.

It seems to me though, from from having, you know, had sources who were, you know, consider themselves Antifa and things like that.

There's also a lot of just kind of boring stuff like documentation and am I not, am I not, am I missing that 'cause it seems like there's much more of that in real life than any of that.

So almost like just research without being paid ID ING people right big.

Thing yeah.

So this is this is basically the crux of my book, which is that, you know, the Antifa and the public imagination is just these militant radicals that are punching people.

But like, like Nazi punching constitutes like a fraction of percentage of the work that Antifa does.

And the vast majority of the work they do is kind of, like you said, can be kind of boring research, like really tedious research.

And you know, my book To Catch Fascist is essentially about that research and the fact that over the last 10 years, Antifa has docs or unmasked identified thousands of synonymous and secret white supremacists who often times were in real positions of power, be they police officers or pastors or politicians.

And a lot of that work, you know, I said it can be boring, which it certainly can.

But a lot of that work is also kind of exciting because it involves espionage and and spying.

And a good part of my book follows a anti fascist activist that goes undercover into a Nazi group into Patriot Front for about 5 or 6 months and then fucks up their shit and essentially gets a lot of their internal messages and ends up doxing, you know, maybe 80 members of patriot front.

So essentially the book follows different anti fascist spies who infiltrate these groups, end up stealing all their messages and then kind of dismantling these groups.

So like when we think about after the and we'll get to this, I'm sure, but you know, a lot of groups were destroyed by doxing over the last 10 years and specifically a lot of groups that were in Charlottesville in 2017.

And then a lot like a group like Identity Europa, which was kind of 100 members of Identity Europa were, were identified because an anti fascist got into their chats and downloaded their chats.

And then these anti fascist researchers from across the country were able to mine those chats for clues to reveal all of these white supremacist real offline identities.

So, you know, that is kind of the crux of to catch fascist.

I've been pitching it as like an anti fascist spy thriller.

It's great.

By the way, I just want to interject.

I've had the privilege of getting a preview of it.

It's it's great.

Now I'm just, and obviously I'm biased, I'm your friend, but.

Thanks Mike, it's a great book.

Wait, I want to.

I want to.

I want to just wedge something in here actually quickly because you mentioned doxing.

When you say that, I think you're referring to the colloquial use of the word doxing, right?

Because doxing in sort of a criminal or pseudo criminal.

I don't know how it like the laws on every in every state usually refers to like posting somebody's private information with the purpose of harming them.

Right.

So I've been docs for sure.

Like I remember getting docs on 8 Chan, Infinity Chan, whatever it was, and it's definitely not like, Hey, I've I've uncovered some nice information for you to reach about Michael Hayden.

But like you're talking about like the guy goes by the name, like I don't know, peanut butter or something, right, I don't know.

Is his his code word online.

And then you're like, I know who peanut butter is and you post his ID and his job may be and like where where he's based, you know, that sort of thing, but not necessarily always the full amount of information phone number thing.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

So I think all three of us have probably been docs before.

I think, I think, I think V Dare even did a series called Doxing the Doctors.

Doctors, I think actually we're the.

Three people in it.

What about the reunion squad?

But at any rate, yeah, I'm I'm glad you made that distinction because typically I think people when they hear doxing, they think of posting someone's private information as a way of inviting harassment.

When I say doxing in the anti fascist context, I'm referring to unmasking previously pseudonymous white supremacists.

So people people that are hiding behind pseudonyms and avatars online to be white supremacists and to spread white supremacist propaganda.

It's the way I describe it in the book is essentially the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off a Klansman.

And or for example, I think in the 80s and 90s, what a lot of punks that were fighting Nazis in their communities did, would put Flyers up in their neighborhoods on telephone poles that said meet your local Nazi.

And it would be like a local Skinhead that they identified and they they want to warn people about.

So that is kind of just the modern, the digital equivalent of of that.

So what I'm hearing is that Antifa is a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

You've got the militant Antifa that these are the people on the street dressed in all black.

You have like nerd core Antifa, which is, which is a lot of like researchers and, and, you know, people that probably make great journalists.

If, if publications, you know, we're still into, into the far right beat.

And then you've got like, I just, I just remember, I think we both covered this rally and this might have been the first time I actually met you in person, Chris, when we covered that rally in Portland.

I, I just remember talking to like grandmothers who were like, I have a gay granddaughter.

I'm Antifa and I'm like, huh, OK, these are not people who are like unloading bear Mace into the Proud Boys, you know?

So it's, it's, I, I think that's kind of the, the issue with these executive orders, right, is that Antifa is like, how do you know if somebody is Antifa?

It's like, how do you know if somebody is vegan?

Well, they'll tell you quickly.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's such a, it's such a hard thing to pin down.

And, you know, I'm glad you brought up the kind of grandmas in Portland because, you know, a lot of the like anti fascist researchers I talked to for this book who, you know, will use the symbols for Antifa, you know, the three arrows and the two flags and, and all this stuff.

You know, they're like soccer moms and, and and like, and rednecks and, and, and there are like the punks and of course, but you know, some of these people are in their 60s.

Some of these people are young, as young as 18 or 19, and like, the demographics are actually kind of all over the place and I think would be surprising to a lot of people.

So yeah.

So that's what Antifa is, actually.

Yeah.

How does MAGA imagine Antifa?

Because I think I, I would like you to kind of paint that out for us first and and then we'll get into explaining how that came to be.

Man, we could talk about this for hours but.

Well, we're about to, you know, at least at least one hour somewhere.

Somewhere between one and two hours.

For sure.

Yeah.

So in the MAGA imagination, Antifa are these incredibly militaristic, highly regimented, like hidden army of like black clad radicals that are roaming the streets working around every corner.

They're going to punch you for being Christian.

They're going to try to turn your kid trans.

They're, you know, basically the most extreme kind of fever dream idea of the left.

There's a lot of distance between those two things, so I think we should spin back the clock and figure out how we got there.

OK, so remember a world before Trump, there was also a world where we weren't talking about Antifa.

I think that's an important distinction to make here, in part because anti fascism arose against the threat of what many perceived to be a fascist threat.

I think that's pretty reasonable, right?

That's often often gets lost in the right wing narrative.

But.

Otherwise it would just be anti, yeah.

Trump gives his first kind of talks about the wall and he starts talking about Mexican people and a lot of it is coming from Ann Coulter's book.

And people like, hold on, this guy's a fascist, right?

He sounds like Mussolini or something like that when he would do his rallies back then.

I don't know if anybody remembers these, but that was the first time I ever saw anti fascist banners or signs, right?

And then there were some people who would go outside the thing and kind of stomp on cars and there was disruption outside of these events.

And that was kind of like the very beginnings of it.

And I would imagine that's the first time the kind of people who start later started to hype Antifa as a boogeyman first.

Got the idea of it.

We're just sort of like, wait a minute, we like this Trump guy.

This is a problem for us.

We cannot have people out there talking about Trump in this manner.

One of the biggest ones and and it's going down brings up brings us up a lot.

We've had them on the show, 2016 people call it the Battle of Sacramento.

Does anybody remember this one?

Yeah, at Berkeley, right, the school.

No, no no in Sacramento, CA.

Yeah, yeah.

Where like 10 people get stabbed, Yeah.

It was out in front of the Sacramento State House and yeah, there were 10 stabbings.

Traditionalist Worker Party, if anybody remembers them, were involved in this no longer.

Yeah.

It's a real, it's a real throwback.

This was Matthew Heimbach, who was.

How would you describe Matthew Heimbach, Chris?

He's a bearded Nazi from Ohio who cheated who slept with his brothers girlfriend.

Was that the great?

So that was the that was the end undoing of tradition.

That was the that was the undoing.

But yeah, he's the the head of the traditionalist Workers Party, which kind of tried to do this like third positionism thing where they like appropriated the language of the left and talked about like white the white working class and white civil rights and shit.

But it was just like a straight up like Nazi that like attended cross burnings and shit down South and like organized Charlottesville and so on.

Yeah, a goon squad.

A goon.

Squad.

Racist Jelly Bean.

Yeah.

So that was a big one because there was there was a lot of violence involved there.

I'm skipping over some other ones.

A lot of them happened in the Pacific Northwest and California.

But there were there were these clashes started to form in response to, you know, outspoken fascists in support of Trump being out on the streets.

Then there's J20 and this was this was like, probably, you know, the biggest thing so far in terms of forming Antifa in the mind of the media, Forming Antifa in the mind of people on social media for a number of reasons.

You have people on the streets or somebody set fire to a limousine.

If you recall their clashes with police.

Somebody smashed out the windows of a Bank of America.

I had people putting like Waka Flocka Flame music in front of images of people smashing things and sending it to me.

People were excited because they were really pissed off about Trump and Trump taking power, and they felt like the system had failed them.

But something else happened there, Jared.

I think the is the most viral thing that is seared into a lot of people's minds from the J20 protest.

You know, that happened during the first Trump inauguration was a image clip of Richard Spencer, you know, at the time the star child of the alt right, just getting his clock cleaned.

You know, he's he's getting interviewed in a suit with the little Pepe the Frog pin.

And then somebody in a black hoodie just clocks him right in the head.

I think it's, I think it's an elbow to his like face or cheek, yeah.

It really rung his bell.

You could just tell that he was like, he was like, where the hell am I?

He's extremely dazed after that.

Yeah.

And this, this was so viral, right?

I mean, does everybody remember that?

People were making it into like, they were, they were, you know, doing it like song with the hedgehog with like, rings would fall out with the hit.

Like, I mean, there was just like every possible meme imaginable.

But the other thing that would that came out of it.

And again, this isn't talking about building up Antifa in the imagination of the American public.

Were all this dialogue about Is it OK to punch a Nazi?

Yeah.

Remember that.

Oh my God, it was the obsession of every major newspapers op-ed page.

Yeah, there was.

There was like a million pieces.

And like every journalist who had resentment for Richard Spencer, the time had to just kind of keep their mouths shut because, you know, I mean, obviously you can't be out there.

Oh, yeah, you should punch him.

But like, there were there was this instinct, I think among many, many people just that they were angry.

They didn't like the fact that these white supremacists had kind of just felt like they could take over Washington, DC without any kind of consequences.

So that was like a really big one because they're also, among other things, really, really embarrassed the alt right or the radical right.

I mean, they were really, I mean, it was not a, it was not great for them.

Then we get into the, this, the, the, the first waves of Antifa disinfo, which I know, Chris, you have some stories about this as well, but I just want to introduce it by saying you got guys like Microchip, who is it?

Like just had a disinfo performer online who's associates with a lot of radical right figures.

His identity is known.

We should probably cover him in more detail on another podcast, but also a little guy named Jack Pozobic, who at the time was kind of the understudy to Mike Sternovich.

He was not a very big figure.

Now he's he's a huge figure in Magalan.

Now he's become like a, a massive celebrity despite having absolutely no charisma, no discernible charisma whatsoever.

But Jack was kind of just like he, he presented himself as a sort of military guy, right?

Serious American military guy, and he would present things like as news that were essentially just disinfo.

Yeah, I mean, Jack's thing was, and I, I still regret not writing a piece about it at the time.

It would be hard to do because 4 Chan, like, you know, deletes itself after a certain time period.

But I would be monitoring 4 Chan and I would see like threads get posted and then a few minutes later Jack would just post whatever the thread said and be like intelligence says that Hillary Rodham Clinton is stole a plane and flew it to Georgia, the country.

And it's like, Oh yeah, I remember that thread.

Yeah, I saw that 5 minutes ago.

Breaking news, Jack, you know, but it but it ended up like like there was no dumb bullshit that Jack would not post.

He didn't check anything and he, as we covered in The Who the hell is Jack Pacific episode, lied about his credentials, overplayed the ones that he does have to be like.

And you can trust me because I'm a, you know, former Navy intelligence, former, former firmer CBS News or whatever.

Yeah.

Firmer CBS News he had in his bio forever.

And then and then of course, hey, let let's not let Jack Dorsey off the hook because Twitter, of course, verified his account and turned him into an actual guy in the eyes of many people, despite the fact that he had, you know, credentials that were extraordinarily flimsy.

And that's the nicest thing I can say about his credentials.

But like, one example of some of the disinfo that they would publish around this time was this thing called Destroy hate.

And destroy hate was supposedly an Antifa.

It was it was supposedly an Antifa campaign where they were going around on Memorial Day and graffitiing the graves of World War Two soldiers at a sort of anti military rate.

It was supposed to make them look crazy ridiculous, right?

So fake antifa accounts would crop up and then they would be like, oh, destroy hate.

We're going to destroy them.

You know, we're going to we're going to show these like World War 2, these dead World War Two soldiers, like, you know, who's boss on right or whatever.

And then people like Jack would be like unbelievable, right?

And I can quote, tweet it with like whoever else is in his DM who's doing this, these antifa fake.

Accounts Yeah, it it'd be like we we have to take action against Beverly Hills Antifa.

Right Beverly Hills Antifa.

Which, I'm sorry, just pump the brakes.

I'm sorry, Beverly Hills Antifa.

Yeah, there was a Mar a Lago Antifa, but there was, there were, there were some that that seemed that really there there, there were some that were more plausible.

That was a, you know, Salt Lake City Antifa, Detroit Antifa, right?

And these were accounts that trolls would make in order to try to discredit leftist or discredit anti the anti Trump movement, which at the time was very powerful.

Trump was was not, you know, he was not a super popular figure in 2017.

He's not the kind of he didn't command the same level of respect on the right that he does now, I think.

And that is only come over time.

And so this was a real attempt to discredit that.

But you've seen Chris, you've seen in my opinion a much funnier and even funnier than Beverly Hills Antifa.

You have seen a much funnier example of fake Antifa bullshit.

Yeah, I mean, it was kind of my one of the first far right rallies I covered.

I'm from Gettysburg, PA of course you know, side of the bloodiest battle on American soil.

And in June 2017, there was a fake rumor going around on Facebook claiming that Antifa was coming to Gettysburg to to to the battlefield to piss on Confederate grace.

So about 100 neo Confederates, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Klansmen, assorted MAGA people turn up to the battlefield.

But of course I know as someone from Gettysburg, there are no Confederate marked Confederate graves in Gettysburg.

Seems like something someone should have googled.

Yes, so like if Antifa is coming to Gettysburg to piss on Confederate graves, they won't have anywhere to piss.

But, you know, so me and my reporting partner at the time, Andy Campbell, shout out, Andy, go to cover this rally.

And it's, you know, it's kind of a farce.

They pledge allegiance to the Confederacy.

They sing the national anthem.

Don't really see that that might contradict me.

And Andy still have this running joke where we'll be at a party and we'll just scream freedom because that's what a lot of the guys they were doing.

But they were, you know, essentially they're on piss patrol looking out for Antifa.

And when Andy and I actually arrived at the rally, it was so funny because there was these armed militia dudes in full camo carrying long guns, staring out of binoculars across the battlefield looking for Antifa.

Looking for piss specifically.

Looking for?

Looking for.

Looking for the glimmer of that yellow stream?

Looking for a black figure and a yellow stream.

But of course, you know, Antifa doesn't show up.

It it rains for a bit, it's really hot and.

It cleans up the pitch.

I love that it's all so hot and it's.

It's so hot so.

Sweaty in Gettysburg in the summer.

Like it's just so.

Humid too, yeah.

And so at any rate, the funniest part and kind of the perfect coda to the day is that a one neo Confederate demonstrator, someone who's there to protect the battlefield from this Antifa scourge, is carrying a Confederate flag in his in a flag holster on his belt.

And I think when he puts the flag back into his flag holster, it bumps his gun holster, which then fires his pistol into his leg.

And freedom isn't free.

Yeah, freedom.

Isn't free.

Yeah, people who know that.

Yeah, so the the only blood spilled that day was a literally self-inflicted gunshot.

I need, I need someone to make me a fan Cam using Beyoncé's freedom to like, I'm just like a sudden like beer bellied neo Confederates shooting themselves in the leg.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like there there's like a look like he had some funny quote when he was being taken into the ambulance.

I think at any rate that I can't remember, but yeah.

So at any rate, that was kind of my first introduction into the anti Antifa panic and how occasionally, sometimes it could be really funny.

It's not what I mean, nothing happened later that summer, right?

It was, it was totally cool.

The Antifa story went away.

No, not really.

For people who are unfamiliar with the whole Charlottesville saga, it actually started in May, if people remember that, right?

Like so the run up was actually there was a first rally in May where they walked around the statue and they felt pretty good about it.

These are like, all right, guys led by Richard Spencer, a lot of white nationalists in the crowd like the Mike Penovich, those type of guys.

And they marched around and they kind of make a big thing of the statue that they're going to take down and they get hyped on it and they decide this was AW for them.

But like, let's push it.

Let's we're doing well.

Let's keep the expansion going.

And they decide to make this really big event in Charlottesville in August.

And I know you covered that really closely.

I covered it from from New York and and ABC and from the, you know, from The Newsroom there.

But yeah, tell me about that in the in the context of Antifa, what Antifa did and also the way it was perceived.

You know, it's interesting, in the lead up to Charlottesville too, as people kind of call it, Antifa actually had a spy in the Charlottesville planning server where they were documenting in real time the kind of like bloodlust and murderous intent of the people that were coming to Charlottesville.

And it's quite horrifying.

And, you know, antifa tried to warn the city of Charlottesville, the government, of what these Nazis coming to town wanted to do, that they wanted to kill people.

And then, of course, the city government doesn't really listen.

And what's these Nazis have a permit?

And we all know kind of sadly, what happens next.

Obviously the day in Charlottesville, there's all this viral footage throughout the day of this horrible violence occurring on like pitched battles in the streets.

DeAndre Harris is beat in a parking garage by 5 white supremacists with like flagpoles and stuff.

And DeAndre is black.

Yeah, sorry, DeAndre is black actually like and and a story there is that.

I was actually there for that and started to run towards DeAndre, but as soon as I started to run, a Nazi would start swinging around a pistol and it was I all of a sudden I was staring down the barrel of a pistol.

So I ducked by by the time I got up, DeAndre was stumbling away.

But at any rate, you know, shortly after that, James Alex Fields drives his Dodge Challenger into a group of anti fascist demonstrators, injuries dozens of people and kills Heather Heyer After in the in the wake of Charlottesville, which kind of shocks not only the country but the whole world, you know, this footage is going everywhere.

The far right in America feels a little bit on the defensive and they have to do something.

It was an international story.

I mean, that's people forget that.

I mean, it was like, you know, all over Europe, I mean Asia, people were, people were fascinated by what they were seeing because it was so it just didn't look like America.

Yeah, yeah.

The far right had spent, you know, all this time and effort supporting the Trump campaign.

The alt right moniker had been picked up all over the place.

And, you know, this was their big, you know, flagship event.

It was going to be the big event.

This the biggest white supremacist gathering of a generation.

And when they all got together, the the world was disgusted and horrified.

Yeah.

So I think it's also important to note here that two days after the rally, Trump gives his infamous very fine people remark that, you know, he says that there are very fine people on both sides of this demonstration, essentially indicating that some of these Nazis are very fine people that were there to defend a statue, which was bullshit.

There is a prominent pro Trump troll named Microchip who, you know, decides that it's time to go on the offensive and, you know, kind of blame a lot of the violence on Antifa.

And what he does is he starts a petition to the White House that ends up getting 300 / 300,000 signatures to designate Antifa domestic terror group.

And of course, you know, as we've already discussed a little bit, there is no domestic terror designation in the US.

You can't designate domestic Group A terror group.

So he knows that the petition itself is bullshit, but like that's not the point of it.

And he gives this kind of remarkable interview.

Like when I, I went back and read it, I was like, Oh my God, he like really spelled it all out.

He did not hide it at all.

And he basically tells political the point of this petition is to quote it was to bring our broken side together after Charlottesville and prop up Antifa as a punching bag.

So the narrative changed from I hate myself because we have neo Nazis on our side to I really hate antifa.

Let's get along and tackle the terrorists and and then he says you can call it an extreme form of what about ISM, which I think is actually like a really succinct.

They're just telling you what they're doing.

And I was pointing that also as this was happening, Antifa is enjoying a bit of stardom also in part because of, of, of the genuine outpouring of grief and sympathy over Heather Hare in the sense that like, well, that, you know, I think a lot of very norm normy liberal, well, even centrist people were like, hey, I mean, these people are standing up for what's decent and good in this country.

So I mean, the need to do that is really strong.

And I would just want to say also our our RIP Heather hair.

It is day and forever.

Yeah.

So some stuff happens in the immediate aftermath of of Charlesville to to put it mildly.

I think it's I think it's fair to say that the alt right movement starts to fall apart immediately after, although we don't see it right away.

Yeah.

A few things happened when there anybody remember the Vegas shooting?

That was one of the one of the first like crazy things that was like there was like I mean it was like 60 people or something like that.

This guy killed from horrible in the country music and because the majority of the people were white, there were a lot of people floating that that was an antifa event related event right when I was like the IE the disinfo was getting a lot sharper and more accurate right.

I remember Yvette Falacra.

I don't know if anyone remember her.

She was from the from the I think they're mostly in California.

I grew by any means necessary or bam, she was a middle school teacher who had gotten into conflicts with these guys.

And that's I just make a note of that one just because it was the first pressure campaign I recall to try to get someone fired for being Antifa.

So that was I just, I mentioned that because because now, now look where we are.

But yeah, it was like a big, it was a big thing at that time.

And then there's my favorite story on this list.

Although there's so many unusual ones, I think we were all here for it.

How many?

How many all like the the Antifa Civil War that was supposed to take place on November 4th, 2017.

I was hoping we would talk about this, yeah.

We would, I made my bread and butter at Newsweek reporting, reporting on this thing because we, we would have these click demands at Newsweek.

And every time I would do a story about the disinfo around the Antifa civil war, the interest in it was so high that I would just get like a million clicks.

It was just I, I was so I was like, shit, I'll do a new story every week about this.

But yeah, this was something that started from a flyer from a group called Refuse Fascism, which is kind of like obscure, like nothing group.

And they were just like, yeah, there's, I don't know what the the flyer said, but I'm going to assume it said something like we're going to war on November 4th.

There was just like to get a bunch of people to rally or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, That group ended up Kid Aid.

I I wouldn't call him like totally obscure.

I think that group has grown a little bit like I.

Think, I think, I think they have to a little bit and.

It's like a revolutionary communist.

Party it's, it's the Revcom party and it's like Bhavakian and like this.

Yeah.

And so this is this is like a real this is this.

I don't want to get into in the weeds but basically like you know, most like anti fascist antifa folks that I talked to.

Do not fuck with Revcom and Bhavakian.

It's a build.

It's a bit cultish to my.

Understanding it's a call.

It's like the refuse fascism shit you see everywhere at like orange signs with black lettering at like every rally.

But anyway.

Wait, that's that's a revcom thing?

Yeah.

I think so, yeah.

Shitting me.

That's the origins come from Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They sort of like they wanted to repackage and rebrand in the Trump era and they kind of.

Anyway, the point is that this is not, these are not like major players on the left.

These are not people who get tons of donations or there's much interest, but basically somebody digs this up on 4 Chan and on Twitter and like wherever else and it starts to build with this idea of Antifa is going to war with the.

They're probably still nursing the bad footage of Richard Spencer getting punched, the bad footage from Charlottesville and all this stuff.

And then they're really worried about war, I guess, or either that or they want to make one happen.

And they start to like hype it, hype it, hype it.

And then eventually it goes to Alex Jones and he starts making these announcements that are essentially like, well, now it's in.

We're here, We're here now.

Antifa, Civil war, November 4th.

I hope all my patriots are praying.

I hope everybody's ready, right?

He gives heat.

I love your Alex Jens.

Thank you.

He, he starts to make these announcements and then it becomes so friggin huge that they're just talking about it non-stop.

And it leads to was it Lucian Wintrich I believe, who posts a thing in in Gateway Pundit?

It and it centers on this tweet.

It was a Crank T Nelson tweet I.

Believe Yeah, it was a parody tweet.

Yeah, yeah.

And and and it's this parody tweet says can't wait for November 4th when millions of Antifa super soldiers will behead all white parents and small business owners in the town square.

So Gateway Pundit and I think it was Lucian picks up this clearly joke tweet making fun of conservatives who are like Antifa's waging a civil war.

They're going to come kill us all and runs it straight.

It's just like, beware, November 4th, your town square.

It's so good.

It's so good.

I mean, and yeah, I mean, it's just they had this this idea in their head that like, ninjas were going to come in through the windows and start killing people, right?

They're going to start killing grandmothers for being white or whatever.

And then, of course, on the day of the event, there were like 30 people milling around with a bunch of far right guys ogling them.

And yeah, that was it.

You know, I mean, that was that was basically it.

Yeah.

So the, the, the, the, the phrase, if you've ever heard the phrase Antifa super soldier, it comes from that age.

So you like, you know, so it's like.

Which, incidentally, is the name of a chapter in my book.

Yeah, perfect.

That's perfect.

It's perfect.

It's like the the old thing for like, you know, it's like a red, red diaper baby.

Like I'm raising my child to be, you know, as a red diaper baby.

It's like, no, I'm raising my my son to be an antique sister.

OK.

All right.

So, so around this time, you know, kind of really started in 2017.

You start to see more clashes popping up, specifically in the Pacific Northwest.

The Pacific Northwest has a very rich history of anti fascist organizing and some of that starts to crop up as the Trump administration is under way.

The Pacific Northwest coincidentally also has a pretty rich history of weird far right shit.

So it starts to become the site of St.

clashes.

The ones that I think most people remember are the ones between anti fascists and proud boys and and the mix of other far right militias and and weird Christian groups and stuff that like would show up and demonstrate with them.

Talk to us about that period, Chris.

Because I, I feel like what we've got until things really start churning here in a bigger way is like the occasional clash of like there's some event and anti fascia show up and brace hell for the event.

You've got that and paired with Facebook misinformation swindling boomers into thinking you know, the the Antifa is coming to destroy their, you know, freshly manicured lawn or something.

Right.

What's happening the Pacific Northwest?

How does it kind of shape the the panic as it would develop?

So I think specifically is here is when Portland really enters the the spotlight.

Basically you have the emergence of groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.

Patriot Prayer is a little hard to describe.

It's like a, it's a far right group that like is kind of Christian.

It's led by this guy Joey Gibson.

It is a real partner group to the Proud Boys and it's based in Vancouver, WA, which is across the border from Portland.

And what these groups end up doing is that and, and kind of far right people from all over the Northwest end up often converging on Portland to like they say, like liberate Portland from it's like awful progressive leadership.

They hold these like, quote, free speech rallies in Portland.

They begin to, to hold these rallies, which is always just a pretext for hoping to get into street fights.

And of course, like, you know, anti fascist do turn up to confront them and chase them off the streets and 'cause they, you know, from the anti anti fascist perspective, they do kind of pose an immediate threat.

Like these guys are violent and they are associating with straight up Nazis a lot of times.

But it kind of becomes a, a cycle like it they'll be clashes at one rally and that will be the justification to hold another rally.

I remember once actually in Portland, I saw like one of the far right dudes with like a army helmet on and he had written all the like battles he had been on on his helmet.

So like he had Battle of Berkeley like written on his helmet, for example.

We're talking about guys that, you know, are allegedly there to do free speech and support Trump, but they're turning up in like full fucking body armor.

They're carrying bear Mace, all this stuff.

I just wanted to quickly interject also, so you know, as 20/17/2018 rolls around, there are, you know, there's more bad news for the radical right in the form of these mass shootings, right?

And that starts around 2018.

If you recall the tree of life terror attack, which was just cut and try talk about.

We were talking about ideology earlier.

I mean, it's cut and dry.

The guy was on Gab, believed in the great great replacement theory.

He thought Jews were causing it and he went out and murdered 11 Jewish people who were, you know, setting up for services.

Really grim type thing.

And at the same time the the MAGA world was also trying to wage a campaign about these caravans coming through and and so forth and it didn't really do as well as they wanted.

And I really think that this period of time where where Trumpism became associated with violence and racism.

Well, it was always associated with racism, to be fair.

But, you know, just this became associated with these things.

They leaned harder and harder on the Antifa boogeyman.

And it was in that sort of atmosphere that a very unassuming fella named named Andy, no.

Shout out Andy, if you're listening, I'm.

Sure, he's listening.

What's up, Andy?

Starts to make waves.

He's in the sort of, you know, those, those, those kind of clashes around Pacific Northwest that would that you just mentioned.

He's always kind of there and he's always doing kind of, I guess you would call it citizen journalism, right, where he's sort of filming.

And he's always trying to make the leftist or the people on the side against the white supremacist look bad.

And to be fair, whenever you film a crowd of people in a protest, you are going to find somebody who's going to look bad.

So there's always fodder and people start to really, really, really hate this guy.

Well.

Something else that he does that people are taking specific issue with him is like he'll film himself walking around these protests and then you know, he'll come across a table where people are signing up for an e-mail list or something and he'll point the camera down.

And now you've got a bunch of names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and his followers who are there because they're they want to see anti antifa content would really rain hell and threaten and harass you don't anybody who was on these streams.

Does a really good flag Jared, because he he really does.

It's not, you know, journal.

Oh, I'm going to really document this.

It's almost like feeding information to the radical right.

It feels like it at least it certainly feels like it to those of us who are watching it online.

And he's starting to really piss people off.

In the Pacific Northwest.

You have this very strange alliance between Andy, who is Asian and openly gay and groups that are anti immigrant, right, xenophobic and and vehemently anti LGBTQ, right?

Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer.

I don't know.

There were all these different groups that were were mingling in those days and a lot of tension I recall kind of built for throughout 2018 and 2019 before in June of 2019.

Well, what happened exactly?

He was at an event and then there was all this talk about people going to throw milkshakes on him, I believe, online, things like that.

And then I remember being in the group, a group DM or chat or whatever it was with you, I'm sure Jared.

Chris.

Was that the one that Jared and I started like way back in 2017?

Yeah.

I think it might have been, yeah.

Yeah, that was the one I just remembered.

There's a whole bunch of of of people who cover this material all in that thing.

And of course, Andy did his usual thing where he kind of pretends he's this huge victim.

And he was like, oh, you know, look what they did.

They threw a milkshake on me.

And I remember tweeting something like it.

You know, it looked like bird shit.

It was like a bunch of like, white goo on his backpack or something.

And we're all making fun of it.

And then all of a sudden, what happened?

Some people also, you know, started physically punching Andy and they roughed him up pretty bad.

And that is where Andy really pivots and is now not, you know, he goes from being this, you know, look at me, I'm, I'm on the ground behind the scenes exposing the radical left to being like the radical left.

So crazy they tried to kill a journalist.

And he even gets on fucking CNN for this shit, right?

He claims that these punches to the head I I believe, I think he claimed he got a brain hemorrhage.

He did, yeah, Yeah.

It looked, it looked, I mean, he looked, they looked like they rang his bell pretty good, I mean.

He got, he got hit pretty good, yeah.

Can I can I give a quick background about where Andy no came from?

Let's do it.

That's all you hear, baby.

OK.

I think it's kind of important context, which is that, you know, he's a Portland State student, graduate student, I think studying journalism, but he works for the student newspaper.

And he, he ends up getting in this big scandal that gets national attention because he posts a video of a Muslim student speaking on campus.

But he, like, omits a lot of context and cuts it in a way that makes it sound like this Muslim student saying something really extreme.

And the, like, Society for the SPJ, like the Society for Professional Journalists, the student newspaper, like, accuses him of violating that code of ethics and kind of kicks him off the newspaper.

This becomes like a story in right wing media.

He's like, claims he's silenced for telling the truth.

And then he writes this kind of batshit article for the Wall Street Journal claiming that London has been taken over by Muslims.

And then, you know, just kind of becomes this figure and, you know, before the rally where he's kind of punched and attacked.

In the months leading up to that, he had followed along and tagged along with Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys as they approach a bar in Portland called Cider Riot, which is like an anti fascist hangout.

Yeah, this is like a big, this is a big thing, an anti fascist lore.

Yeah, exactly.

And unbeknownst to Andy, there is an anti fascist that is undercover in Patriot Prayer at the time and he's filming and as Andy knows, tagging along with Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys as they're approaching this bar, Andy know can be seen laughing along with them as they're preparing to attack this bar and talking about, I think like what weapons they're going to use and and so on and so forth.

Of course, in the ensuing skirmishes, Andy takes all this footage that's really dramatic and makes it look like this whole battle that ends up happening was instigated by Antifa, which it did was not.

And and like, and by the way, like some anti fascists got really fucked up in that in that skirmish, like, oh, I think I believe a woman like broke her spine and and like this.

It's it's really good documentation.

Eventually when this anti fascist spies footage comes out and shows and he really kind of in cahoots with patriot Prayer not being really.

Which he's to be religious to put it out there.

He's denied that he's clean.

Of course.

He's, I mean, but, but anybody who's watched him for a very long time can make up their own.

Totally.

About it because he certainly is like that.

So, yeah, he gets that was great context.

And he he he really makes his injury the kind of centerpiece of his identity becomes like, you know, everything he does after that is really based around I was beaten and I was given a brain bleed and I had a brain injury.

And he's always just like my brain injury, like this way he constantly brings things up.

And there was this one tweet that he had where he said that he was walking along and, and, and all of a sudden he dropped his fruit and the brain injury robbed him of the ability to hold his food.

I mean, these were things that I think a lot of people kind of raised an eyebrow to, but nevertheless, it makes him into this kind of guru about Antifa.

And of course his, as you, as you correctly alluded to, his, you know, his idea of Antifa is completely biased and focused on the idea of just promoting the, the stereotype or the, the caricature.

I guess you would say that Trumpers want to hear.

Yeah, yeah.

The the way conservative media treats him after this, it's almost as if like by getting punched in the head, like by an anti fascist, all kinds of like anti fascist knowledge transferred to Andy.

He ends up writing this book about Antifa that is like almost entirely impassive voice and and very loose with the facts.

I saw him speak one time at the Heritage Foundation, which that was a trip.

And he just, he double s down so hard, so hard.

He starts going to rallies less and less and it really becomes like an aggregator.

So he aggregates other people's clips and and I should also say this kind of sets off a wave of people that try to replicate the Andy no model.

After that.

Suddenly, you know, by the time 2020 runs around, you've got people from the Daily Caller and you know, all kinds of right wing publications that they're sending out into protest to basically do the Andy no thing of filming protesters and try to make them look bad.

And also independent people who want to be the next Andy.

No, there's like a whole bunch of people who kind of spring up.

I can keep track of all of them.

To be honestly, it's like a it's just like a peanut gallery of randos.

Last thing I have to say about Andy now is that at some point he inexplicably developed a British accent.

So.

This.

Was a brain injury.

So this is a real point of contention.

He claims that it's from his time in London, right?

I think growing up but.

OK.

But I think it's.

But it wasn't there, and then it came back.

And then it came back, yeah.

My my favorite Andy bit I got as if we're going to talk, we we need to do an entire who the hell is of Andy?

No, and like, obviously, obviously we have to at some point.

I mean, he's just, he's he.

And you should.

I mean, Hannah wrote a great piece on.

Yeah, she did.

Like, yeah, the only problem is we'd have like 12 people who want to be on that one.

But the there's there's one clip somebody had of him where he's drinking tea on an interview and like like he wants to give the image of like if him is like this, this delicate tea sipper.

But it appears to be that the cup is empty where she's got a little English tea set thing and he's like, yes, and and tea.

And it's like it looks like he's holding an empty cup as a proper.

Anyway, whatever, whatever.

Can I say 11 more thing last thing of?

Course.

And which I think is important for the context of this past week, which is that after he's punched, he becomes this cause celeb, right?

And he's on Fox News all the time.

And it's shortly after that that in July of 2019, Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy in the Senate introduced a resolution to designate Antifa domestic terror orc.

That's like when this kind of thing really gains traction again.

Thank you for getting us back on track.

I would have been talking about the team yet but for.

Another two hours.

Of course, yeah.

But the the resolution cites what happened to Andy No.

And then to bring it back full circle again, you know, Proud Boys in Patriot Prayer then decide to hold a rally in honor of Andy No called the end domestic terror rally in Portland.

It's another really big rally in August of 2019, and the morning of the rally, Trump tweets out a message of support.

And he tweets.

Major consideration is being given to naming Antifa an organization of terror.

Portland is being watched very closely.

Well, he's been talking about it for a long time.

So yes, a bunch of things happen.

I'm going to, I'm going to cut through some stuff quickly here.

One of them is in July of 2019.

There's that William Van Spronson incident where he's killed after fire bombing and ICE detention center in Tacoma.

Then in August of 2019, the Dayton shooter.

Now it's important.

Actually, I just need to do 1 little reverse on this, which is, you know, it's the day before there was a white supremacist terror attack in El Paso, TX in which two dozen people were targeted for being Latino and killed by a very young man.

And you know, it was fall great replacement stuff.

And then the next day there was another shooting, a mass shooting at Dayton.

And this mass shooting in Dayton I believe was family related or something like that.

Is that the?

Moment, I think that's what investigators definitely.

Determined.

That it that it was that it was like a personal.

Well, I think if I remember correctly, he had was someone that kind of been fantasizing about a mass shooting for a long time, but not exact, explicitly ideological, yeah.

Well, look, he had he, he, he happened to be a, a fan of, of, of left liberal people online.

And he retweeted Jared Holt once.

And Jared knows that this was quickly turned into a whole circus where was like, oh, Jared Holt inspired the Dayton shooter.

Ridiculous.

Defamatory.

Yeah.

This guy was like kind of a lefty shit poster, I guess, and retweeted some post I did criticizing a local news segment about, I think it was cops pulling people over to give them like, free coupons for a drink at the gas station or something and being like, damn, isn't this so sweet?

I'm like pulling people over randomly.

No, it's not.

I don't want a fucking beverage from the cops.

I want them to leave me alone.

And like this is and I called it like Copic Ganda or something.

So obviously, you know, Andy sees that and it's like Jared Holt is directly.

Implicated.

In in the Dayton shooting.

Yeah, in the Dayton shooting.

Well.

And, and eventually so like, I think I actually cut this from the book, but had it in an earlier draft, but I didn't.

I forgot that like the FBI in a report a couple years later said the shooter was not quote aligned with to any specific ideological group, but a young man who fantasized about mass shootings, serial killings and murder suicide for at least a decade after a struggle with multiple mental health stressors.

Well, that doesn't stop Andy from making a big deal of it, but also doesn't stop Jack Pozobic from making a thing of it, who later wrote a book called like Antifa and did a bunch of like very low rent documentaries, really cringe documentaries.

But yeah, I mean, Jack, Jack had the Dayton shooter on the on the book jacket of his Antifa book.

So that, yeah, this is a little bit, this becomes a bit bit of disinfo you're seeing you're I, I think if listeners are picking up on anything, there is a lot of disinfo here.

So there is a whole thing we go through, which is this whole Antifa journalist thing, which came from Owen Lenihan or really remembers that shit.

Where, where I, I think, I think, I think there's like a rank he, he did some sort of thing where it was like based upon Twitter or whatever the most Antifa journalists like based upon, you know, whatever study he did of Twitter.

And, and I was really disappointed to finish second to you.

I believe you were #1 and I was #2.

And then they hate Luke O'Brien so much he didn't come up on the on the list.

I guess he doesn't follow it, didn't follow enough Antifa accounts or whatever by their methodology.

But like.

But we must mention that Luke O'Brien is unethical and is clearly is clearly motivated by Antifa.

But like, we won't talk too much about ourselves.

I just want to point out that this was something we all dealt with.

Jared, I know you wrote a bit about it.

I think you debunked it at some point.

I wrote a piece for Columbia Journalism Review that they threw a fucking fit over and it cost.

I guess Owen Lenihan had somehow finagled his way and got lined up to get like an actual think tank job and lost his job.

Because it was so bad.

Like they pulled the offer because they're like whoa, what the fuck?

For for for people who don't know like the full deal, Owen Lenihan was a guy is a guy.

He still exists.

He's in Ireland for some reason.

He's obsessed with our politics just like all these other like Ian Miles Chong and all these other people who are just like they're super online and just obsessed with American politics.

And he used to play a character called Prague Dad, progressive Dad, who is a sort of a satirical character.

At one point he took some very embarrassing photos of himself with I guess was supposed to be menstrual blood in his crotch where he was supposed to say like dads bleed too or I don't remember what the thing it was very cringe and embarrassing.

I know Luke has many times screenshot.

Him and sent it.

Back to him over and over again.

Be like, is this you Sir?

But yeah, that's who he was.

And then all of a sudden he tried to rebrand himself as an anti antifa expert.

Yeah, and in between those periods, right, he like who, who was the biggest fan of Prague Dad?

Like the where it got pick up was like in the Daily Stormer crowd.

Like it was like neo Nazis who thought this was funny.

So he's like in all these group chats with neo Nazis who are saying horrific racist shit.

And like, later he would claim, like, well, I was just there, you know, like, as a researcher observing what?

It's bullshit, dude.

These were his friends, OK?

And like, this was the circles he ran in.

And then all of a sudden he's like, I am an expert on extremism.

So I'm going to Fast forward to 2020, and yeah, there's a lot here.

I know, Chris, you're going to have some stuff to say.

Yeah.

I just want to quickly note that these Black Lives Matter events and also the riots that took place that was also involved some anarchists these like that.

We talked about it many times on posting through it, but it just has like it really captivates the the the mega imagination.

I think it really scares the shit out of Mega.

I can't believe that was five years ago now.

But like, that was like a revolutionary summer.

Like I remember like I could not walk three blocks that summer in Brooklyn without running into a demonstration for for for a minute there.

Like there were cop cars set on fire, like pretty regularly.

It was.

It was massive.

I think like the New York Times eventually called it one of the biggest demonstration movement in history, in American history.

Like millions of people took part.

There were there were also Black Lives Matter events.

And this is very important, I think in towns all over the country, little towns, right?

And it, you know, I won't go off on my book, but there is there, there is there is a part that takes place in Berkeley Springs, WV.

And there was like that was on the map.

And that's a town with like 800 people in it.

I mean, it's got, you know, 809 hundred there were it, it was just all over the country.

There were a little, you know, towns and the counter to this, and I'm sure you know, you, you'll have some thoughts about this, Chris, Is that it?

At least in Berkeley Springs and I'm sure as elsewhere, they, they actually had for, for a Black Lives Matter event that had a few dozen people at it, 400 armed.

Yeah.

Right wing guys showed up in August of that summer because they believed that there were anarchists being bussed in from out of town, that they thought that their town was going to kind of, you know, erupt into Portland.

Yeah, and I think this is a really important thing to bring up, which is that in 2020, the anti Antifa panic is kind of repackaged as like an outside agitators narrative on steroids.

So essentially as a way of like delegitimizing this mass movement for black lives, which is really remarkable, the right decides to blame the violence and the demonstrations on these like anarchist radicals and and Antifa, which of course is just completely false.

Like because these demonstrations were a organic mass uprising against police murders of of black people.

So the distraction that they're, you know, they try to blame it on Antifa and like, sure, Antifa groups are taking part, but it's like a vanishingly small number of the whole demonstration.

But like you brought up, Mike, again, this is, you know, like we've seen before in Gettysburg and other places, these fake rumors of Antifa are a pretext for these mass mobilizations of the far right, especially in the Northwest, which will I mean, like in Idaho, there are armed occupations by the far right by militias in Sandpoint, ID and in Coeur d'Alene that are kind of really scary.

Like where there are armed militiamen carrying are like long guns walking around town for a week at a time.

And in Oregon and Washington State, you see these far right militias starting to make checkpoints on the road to ask people about their political beliefs when they're driving through because there is a narrative that Antifa is starting wildfires across the West.

There is another story where a there is a bus or a trailer of a family on vacation and the dad is black and he's driving through.

It's actually the town where they shot Twin Peaks.

I'm blanking on the the name right now but.

And he gets out at like a convenience store and all the sudden is surrounded by these militia dudes who are asking him if he's antifa and he tries to calmly explain that he's not.

It's like.

The Civil War movie or whatever.

Yeah, no, totally.

And he ends up, you know, him and his family try to go camping and they end up getting getting followed and chased by these armed militiamen and eventually have to like, abandoned their vacation, like the daughter thinks they're about to die.

But like this is like how out of control the anti antifa panic gets in 2020.

Like one more quick example is Martin Giugino in Buffalo who if you guys remember was a very old man who attended a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

He's literally like the only demonstrator left in this city square in Buffalo when riot cops approach.

And he is a non violent protester.

He's part of the Catholic Worker movement.

He is a very devout Catholic man.

He actually turned up to the rally to he wanted to kneel with police officers and pray with them.

That's why he turned up.

And he approaches the riot cops as they're coming forward and they knock him over.

He falls over and cracks his skull.

And it's like you can hear it in the video.

You can hear a skull crack.

And this video goes super viral, obviously, because it's kind of becomes representative of how brutal the police are being that summer.

And in the next day, own one American News Network starts publishing this crazy shit, calling him Antifa and saying that like, you know, had this radical history.

And within a short time after that, Trump tweets that this guy, this old man, Catholic, peaceful, nonviolent is Antifa.

And I think it demonstrates exactly how the definition of who is Antifa is really starting to grow.

That's insane and adding to it at the same time we're going to get we're we're this is we're kind of meshing together some stuff that happened in the spring, summer of 2020 here.

This info continues and gets hot and heavy.

Jack Pozobic tweets out and it got widely shared that he had a source or whatever that said that there were bombs planted behind the Korean War memorial.

This was because there were a lot of anti Trump protests there there, there's been reporting, I think will summer did a story or something like that that said that there was that this was not true.

And then in order to try to validate Jack's claim, Ian Miles Chong spoke up and said like, no, I've I I've verified this.

It's like, Oh, well, thank God that Ian Miles Chong.

We won't, we won't give to Ian Miles Chong here, but just thank God Ian Miles Chong.

Have you guys done an?

Episode about him What happened?

Have you done an episode about him?

But we we need to but so.

There's too many people, not enough time.

Yeah, so, so in this atmosphere, there's a fire at St.

John's Church, which is the closest major church to the White House.

People are really worked up.

They are gassing protesters outside the White House.

There are officers on horseback, I believe, chasing people down.

And in that whirlwind, Trump makes his first kind of declaration publicly on Twitter that Antifa is a terror org.

Right.

Yeah.

So this is kind of the second time I guess he's he's done this.

And I think this is where we really see how this anti Antifa panic is working is that it becomes also not only a pretext for the state and for police to crack down on these demonstrations.

But also I would argue, I think Trump is signaling to his supporters and to vigilantes and to far right groups that it's kind of open season on Antifa and you should be showing up to oppose these demonstrations by the end of 2020.

There's a lot of evidence of the far right often in with the blessing of law enforcement in certain communities, like we talked about attacking Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

One last 2020 point before we start skipping ahead in time.

Things are going to speed up here towards the end, but there is this extrajudicial shooting, I don't know how to put it, of Michael Ranholm.

And.

Towards the end of of summer 2020, there are these clashes between Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys and Antifa, right, that are happening almost every weekend.

I remember at monitoring at that time, I'm sure Jared, you were doing it, Chris, you were doing it.

We just, you know, just being online, you were, you were aware on the weekends it was going to get hot and then something would happen.

They would come in with their trucks and their flags.

It was election season, etcetera.

And then this self-described Antifa anarchist Michael Rainhall pulls out a gun and shoots a member of Patriot Prayer and you could see it on the video.

It's what appears to to happen there.

And he kind of briefly goes into hiding and there's a lot of call for justice and Trump demands retribution.

And all we know about this is that I guess a big cluster of US marshals goes out to wherever he is actually believe.

Earlier in the day, he even interviewed a vice, Michael Randall or, or or around the same time, which helped, I think tip off his location.

And they shoot him to death.

And by all accounts, his gun was still in his back pocket at the time he was shot.

Yeah, the New York Times said like a visual investigation, and we still don't know much about what happened, but their investigation did kind of conclude, well, what the police said happened isn't what happened, right?

But what?

But what happened?

We're not sure.

I, I think it's also important, I think to note that Trump after this happened at a rally, said we sent in the US Marshals, took 15 minutes, it was over 15 minutes, it was over.

We got them.

They knew who he was.

They didn't want to arrest him.

And 15 minutes that ended.

So it's like.

Basically, he's talking like he killed Osama bin Laden.

Yes, exactly.

Like he is kind of explicitly saying that this was without a doubt an extrajudicial killing, like by his death swap.

So it's election time at the end of 2020.

After this doesn't go so good for Trump, he loses.

We see the Antifa stuff spiral again around the Stop the Steel movement.

Every Stop the Steel Movement event is scared of counter demonstrators.

There's three big Stop the Steel events in DC.

Everybody knows about the Capital riot, but there was one in November that was called I think that one was the Million Mega March.

Yeah, there's one in December that was might have also been a mega March, but it's a Stop the Steal event at this point.

And then there's the one in January on January 6th.

At those first two events they attract so many far right figures.

You've got Proud Boys, militia folks, whatever, all showing up to participate in this stuff and there's an anti fascist contention that is counter protesting them at night.

On both occasions it leads to some skirmishes in the street.

I believe that December 1 actually ended up I, I think some people went to the hospital.

It got it got pretty nasty at both of these events or, or I guess at all of these events really, Trump flew over in the helicopter or drove his motorcade past, you know, kind of endorsed these events.

So by the time the Capitol riot shows up, a kind of underappreciated element, I think of what was happening before they stormed the Capitol, was that all this firepower, all of it like this call to arms.

The reason so many far right groups were on the ground in DC for the Capitol riot was this idea that Antifa was going to like kill them all at the protest and they had to like they were going to defend against Antifa.

And then when it became clear that like Mike Pence was not down with the plan to be like, well, technically, but I, I don't certify the election, when it became clear Mike Pence like wasn't really willing to do that, then all that attention like turned to the capital and anti fascist didn't really demonstrate on January 6th.

It was clear like early on it was going to get nasty.

So it was like these guys had all this pent up energy, all these weapons and went to the capital, right.

And then once they did raid the capital, who did they blame?

Chris.

Thanks so much for asking, Jared.

They blamed Antifa and and it's a it's really remarkable.

I remember, like I did a story for HuffPost in the weeks after J6 where I, like, identified probably like 60, like lawmakers that were at the rally and some of whom had charged, you know, stormed the capital.

And I took, I made sure to do a tally of how many of them blamed Antifa afterwards.

And I think about half of them did.

I'm like, it's like, it's actually wild to look back and think about how many conspiracies were swirling around about antifa after January 6th because you know, in the in, it's not like it is now where January 6th is like this event that is celebrated on the right in the the weeks immediately after a storm in the capital, the right was on the defensive again because everyone was shocked.

So they needed they reached for their go to boogeyman once again and they reached for Antifa and they kind of served its purpose for a minute.

You know, like there's all this, all this like this deep, like revisionist history of January 6th is emerges where there's all these conspiracy theories, including on Tucker Carlson that are talking about anti fascist provocateurs, agent provocateurs that were there stirring up the the rally.

There's like kind of conflicting conspiracy theories.

They're simultaneously blaming Antifa and blaming the FBI for like stirring up the violence of January 6th.

And then, of course, you know, as, as the years go on, I don't want to get too far ahead, but they start to blame Antifa less and less.

And it turns out was January 6th good.

Do we want to take credit for that?

And that's, that's what they do.

They, they're, they're not, they're not ashamed of it anymore.

They, they want to take credit for it.

And Tifa was not involved anymore.

I just want to also very quickly interject because we're we're we're going long here, but I think our listeners, if, if you're into this already, you're going to stick for the whole thing.

But Jack Pozobic was among the people who was very instrumental in kind of assigning Antifa blame to the violence that happened there.

He had a tweet that was basically along the lines of like, oh, I saw this guy.

He was in Patriot gear.

And then when he got inside, he, he turned, you know, he took his clothes off and then we're all black or something, right?

Like it was just he didn't say the word Antifa, but he was he was leading his audience to where they wanted to go.

You know, if I had a tinfoil hat, I would wonder if people coordinated in advance.

I mean, obviously Jack was a big promoter of the stop to steal stuff.

You know, I mean, how many of these influencers were saying like, hey, maybe we should, you know, we we, we should get some of the stuff going at the time because it was timed really as it was happening.

But it's also possible that he had a strike.

You know, he was struck with the, you know, a thought and decided to do it.

But it was not just him.

There were a few other people.

And the most important thing, again, I bring up Jack Dorsey, is that the Antifa narrative became huge because it trended #1 on Twitter in terms of news as this was happening.

So because these guys were tweeting about Antifa doing it, it people started to believe it.

And then basically a third of of Trump's base actually believed Antifa did the thing for the for the first few months.

Of it was, it was more, it was more than that.

It was 60%.

OK.

Like like six weeks after January, 660% of Trump supporters believe the riot was a mostly Antifa inspired attack.

Yeah, OK.

I mean, eventually they moved on and decided it was it was the feds actually.

I need to step in here and just point something out.

Sometimes they got a slow.

Give me a little space here, OK, If you go back to the beginning of this podcast or.

Whatever.

Nobody knows what Antifa is, right?

Nobody's really thinking about Antifa.

There's no Antifa organization underlying like, you know, in our, you know, underground, in the nothing.

And now, in a matter of what?

How many?

Years.

Six years, I guess.

Six years.

Six years.

You got 60% of Trump's base thinking that the Antifa did January 6th before they were, before they had to reverse course and be like, no, actually, wait, no, this just in.

It was good.

It was January.

This wasn't good.

Yeah, it.

It was like Antifa did it to make us look bad.

Wait, no, it was good.

We like it.

Wait.

No, the feds did it.

Wait.

But we still like.

It.

But it's it's so mixed up, man.

To cover this beat, you really have become an amateur expert in sort of mass psychology, you know, because there's like so many weird delusions where you're just sort of like, wait, what's what's happening, Right.

It's like you try to, you try to explain this to somebody who's just a casual observer of the news and they don't understand how it's even, they're just like, well, they're crazy, you know?

But it's not actually that as you see here, there's been a very determined effort from propagandists close to Trump, people with, with really fascistic ambitions to create a story, right, that runs cover for the heinous things that they do.

Yeah.

I mean, I just wanted to stop and say that because it's kind of nuts actually.

No, I mean, and no, of course.

And it's like also like, I mean in a really fucked up way, it's impressive.

Like they like, they, they like they took something that no one knew anything about and like, literally the entire country knows that word now and it's and they built this narrative that got so much traction.

But yeah, anyway.

Sure.

I mean, I mean, it'll it'll give you cred in some circles too, because it's so infamous for somebody like, oh, I heard he's Antifa.

That's cool.

I like that, you know, Right, sure.

I mean, so it's not just it's not just a boogeyman.

It's like they've made it into this thing when in reality is just like, I don't like fascism.

And also the name of that guy who calls himself Captain Popeye.

He's actually an accountant who lives in, you know.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So, so by around like mid 2021, like as the Biden administration starts rocking and rolling, you start to hear about Antifa a lot less, and I mean a lot less like so much less that Andy Noah, I'm pretty sure moves to London or something.

Sure does.

Like he gets out of here.

He's he pivots to, you know, making his grift just pure race baiting, crime clips and.

Shit.

No, no, wait a second.

It's in taking other people's clips, right?

He's sort.

Of like he doesn't even do anything.

Antifa has done a thing, according to whatever Kate Bittencourt.

I don't know what the hell their names are.

I can't keep track of these people, but yeah, like, so just like taking other people's footage.

It it fades out during the Biden administration for most of it, it seems like the Antifa grift.

It's pretty much over for a little bit.

Any theories, guys?

How did it lose steam?

You know, Antifa super soldier Joe Biden is in the White House and they just give up and they're like, well, we lost the war.

You know what?

Why do we think that faded out?

I mean, it was so, it was so potent for so long.

Yeah, the state started to the state started to try to prosecute the case of, you know, how did the fascism happen, right?

There was a January 6th committee and a bunch of stuff like that.

And there were a bunch of arrests and things like that.

And it's sort of in the same way that right now you don't see as much many Proud Boys actions.

As I said on the premium episode, a lot of the people who would be in the Proud Boys are just signing up for ICE now, right?

I mean, you know, the state kind of, I think took over to some degree.

I don't know what you think, Chris.

No, I mean, I, I think, I think that's right.

I think after January 6th, the far right kind of went to ground like they were scared about being prosecuted and stuff.

So they needed the Antifa boogeyman a little less because they weren't going on the streets anyway.

And like the far right was in a bit of disarray.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Is that, is that what you think, Jared?

I know.

I, I mean, I think it's probably 100 different contributing factors, right?

But, but I also think a huge part of it is the fact that right wing media went from being on defense in the Trump years.

Like the Antifa pogeyman is, is defense, right?

It's very, it very much resembles offense.

It really has fucked people's lives up.

But but the utility in right wing media is that it deflects and distracts from uncomfortable realities about MAGA.

Now that MAGA is pivoted and it it's just attacking the Biden administration and Democrats, it's less useful.

Also, a lot of the left wing energy went towards the pro Palestine protests and and you know, of course, you know, a genocide takes center stage, you know, for, for, for that type of activism.

And then similarly, those the people who participated at those demonstrations, they became targeted not just by the right, but also by Democrats, quite frankly.

And that sort of changed the conversation quite a bit.

So, yeah, although it's become sort of a dead time, it's important to know that in the election season, obviously, things are really heightened because Trump is coming back and people are kind of in disbelief throughout the entire time that he's actually going to win.

I can't believe it.

But the polls all show that he's going to win.

And then we have two attempts on his life, which I'm sure people will try to ascribe to Antifa in making this argument that everybody to the left of Chuck Schumer needs to be arrested.

But there's no evidence that these guys were actually antifa in any way.

We certainly don't know what was going on with the guy in Pennsylvania, in Butler, PA.

I still haven't figured out what his deal was or what his motivation was.

I think his father was like a big Trump supporter.

Again, he didn't leave behind very much.

And then the the other guy who tried to shoot him and I think it's a GG.

Yeah, at A at a golf course, he like hid in the bushes or something and Secret Service found him, I guess.

He was really into Ukraine or something.

It's gonna really, really difficult for them to try to spin that as being black bloc Antifa, but I'm sure they're going to try, right?

It's certainly because the target was Trump can be portrayed as left wing violence.

Although once again, the one in Butler, PA.

I really still don't know.

I just had no idea.

But yeah, then there's a lot of protests start in 2025.

There's a lot of them.

And they're also not very sexy for the the far right guys because there's a lot of grandmas protesting Tesla stations, right?

And things like that.

They're also fire bombings of Tesla charging stations and, like, actual destruction of property.

Yeah.

So we don't know that's antifa or not Antifa or really just animosity for Elon Musk and who recently, of course, had done a Roman salute and had helped release the Ghostbusters lock on all the Nazi accounts on Twitter.

So there's a lot of reason why people didn't like him.

But again, these are things that are happening there.

People are making them into a bigger deal over there.

And then we have a lot of stuff starts to happen again this summer, right?

And in LA, there are these spontaneous protests against ICE.

I should point out actually before that, that ICE is doing some very bad things to kind of trigger this anger.

Yeah, so, so you've got, you've got protests against ice.

People are vandalizing ICE, you know, getting confrontations with officers, you know, some, some tense scenes.

Like you said, Mike, these, you know, these protest movements are going on.

And occasionally you're getting these instances where things go a little bit further and and get a little bit more confrontational at the same time.

Again, MAGA is this all this immigration stuff they're doing is not polling well.

It's not popular.

They thought it was going to make them the heroes.

People aren't really digging it.

They are talking about invading cities with the military.

That's not popular.

The Epstein files is a huge fucking disaster.

That's embarrassing.

Basically like the Trump administration is flailing, cracking down.

Things are starting to feel palpably more fascist in this country.

Well, then in September, Tyler Robinson, allegedly, you know, the main suspect, GAX, Charlie Kirk, while he's speaking at a university event in Utah.

It's very graphic.

It's recorded on video.

And, you know, there's these bubblings of Antifa panic.

I remember people like Andy.

No, right.

Like trying to, you know, smear pro Palestine protesters by trying to like link them to antifa.

I don't know if that really ever caught on.

But like he was trying to do that.

People were trying to do that.

And then, you know, when Charlie Kirk dies, Antifa panic, full force, full send, you know, these developments that took years previously, you know, between Antifa disinformation and Trump declaring this a national security emergency or whatever happens in the span of a few hours.

And it's just full tilt all the way.

And we have these executive orders now that we're seeing, you know.

I just want to add for Chris's Chris can weigh in.

There were these markings apparently on Tyler Robinson's bullets, right?

And then the first thought was, oh, these are Antifa first.

There was also, they were, they're trans markings, right?

Because that's, they're, they're so bigoted, they can't imagine anything beyond that.

But there was like, oh, these What markings did they think they were seeing?

So right, So one of the bullets said Bella Chow, which is a song that Italian anti fascist repurpose into like an anti fascist anthem in World War 2.

And like since then and since then has become like an anti fascist anthem across the world.

There were I believe on one of the other bullets, the three arrows, but then there was also a series of other arrows after them.

And so basically like what?

And yet another bullet said, hey, fascist catch, which was really close to the title of my book, which is weird.

So initially there was like all those things could be out of context, construed as maybe anti fascist or antifa.

But what some good reporting that came out afterwards kind of revealed was that this is actually from a pretty niche video game culture and that there were references to that culture.

Is that your guys kind of understanding of it too?

Yeah, I think, I think the hey, fascist catch and the arrows were actually on the same bullet and the arrow was like from Hell Divers 2, which is, you know, it's just I haven't played the game.

I don't I'm not a gamer, but like what I read is that that's how you call in an air strike.

And it's like a meme among people that play the game.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think Bella Chow was a reference to another video game or maybe the same video game like it was, even though like they're.

I'm not sure but he's basically shit posting on bullets though you know?

You know, just just to, you know, just to entertain this, you know, he may not be Antifa in the sense that he's an anti fascist activist who's been doing this for a while, but using that language or whatever it's, you know, not inconceivable that he believed Charlie Kirk was a fascist and shot him, right.

I mean, it's, it's possible that he took the language of the game and applied it for that reason.

So we don't know that.

But I mean, yeah, I mean, I do think there are a lot of disaffected people in this country who feel helpless, as I was saying before, who are now, you know, you, you, you got somebody who is not particularly stable or who may be cut off from more reasonable voices and has no leadership, and they are more likely to do something like this in general.

Obviously the Charlie Kirk assassination was horrifically glory and so many people saw it and it was really visceral and it was just a basically a snuff film.

Yeah, it was awful, Yeah.

Yeah, it was just awful.

It was like, I mean, it was just a really scary looking video.

It's like not something I ever want to see again.

And I am sure that for Magga, this whole story about Antifa really came to a head there, because it really did, almost for the first time, really prove the case that they had been trying to make for many years.

Yeah, I think I think that's absolutely right.

I think like, let me put it this way, I think Andy, you know, was pretty stoked about what was on those bullets and the kind of traction he could use this anti antifa narrative.

He could bring it back.

And it really has kind of provided the pretext for what MAGA has wanted to do for so long, which was really crackdown on the opposition and crackdown on the left.

And I think like, you know, we've talked in this episode about all these anti Antifa panics before over the last however many years, 10 years, this feels like the real escalation.

Like this is the kind of what they've been building towards with the Antifa boogeyman.

And like, you know, as genuinely funny as the Antifa boogeyman has can be, and like, as we've discussed in this episode, I guess ridiculous and absurd as it is, like the developments of this past week are genuinely scary.

I think like the three of us have been labeled Antifa by folks and we have seen the kind of harassment that that can invite the the list of Antifa journalists that we were all on got repackaged into a neo Nazi kill list that we were on.

I looked at Twitter this morning.

So I was curious and I saw that our old friend Owen Lanahan was calling for me to be charged as a domestic terrorist.

And this is like how they will deploy this narrative full throttle from here on out.

I, I've seen a lot of chatter on, you know, police guy, where, wherever kind of comparing this to like a Reichstag fire moment.

And, you know, maybe there is a parallel to be drawn there.

This is a an event that they are trying to use as a pretext to fill out their their fantasies.

There was this event that happened, you know, a few days ago where this guy tried to shoot at people in an ICE detention center.

It's getting a little bit less traction because very sadly, ICE detainees were were killed in this.

I still haven't figured out everything about this guy's motive or what was going on.

I I mean, certainly it was called Antifa before anything had come out because of course that's what they're going to do now with almost everything we think about.

Also, Luigi Bangiano, we did, we kind of skipped over in this.

He has, Jared pointed out, you know, a lot of his apparent ideology appears to be right wing, right?

But all that stuff is going to be sort of tied together right now, I think, into a narrative about left wing violence and used by these propagandas to try to put their opposition in prison.

Yeah.

And you know, it's, it's weird how like the Charlie Kirk shooting like a the fact that he was being asked about mass shootings when it happened and he was being asked about transgender mass shooters when it happened, which is kind of, I think like the anti trans panic crosses over with the anti Antifa panic a lot of times.

Yeah, they have a name for it.

Trantifa.

Trantifa Yeah, yeah.

And also that this happened on the same day that there is a mass shooting at a school in Colorado.

And the shooter appears to have been well versed in white supremacist online culture.

And that's something that's almost a routine at this point that we almost forgot.

And like, Yeah.

And then what happened in the ICE facility in Dallas this week?

I think we're also contending with the fact that a lot of shooters ideology are not good is not going to be readily apparent and it's going to be muddled and not always explicitly ideological, which creates a situation where a lot of bad faith actors can go in and blame the left, even though it's not.

So I don't know, it's, it's a scary times, I guess.

A scary time, but also we've seen how ham fisted this administration really is in carrying out almost anything.

And I think like if your principles are good, if your heart isn't like, I'll tell you one thing about violence.

I don't even own a gun, people.

I don't own a gun.

I've never shot anybody.

I've never gone to a gun range.

And I'm not saying that if you do that, you're what I'm just saying like all I can do is is be myself, right?

I'm a writer and that's all I am.

I'm also an anti fascist and I'm, you know, I've been outspoken about that.

I, I, I inherited the title of this podcast.

Although, Jared, I think when you were, when you were naming it originally, I helped workshop it with you over text.

But I, you know, I've, I've come to view it as, you know, I mean, look at what's happening in this country.

Like it's a it, it is really an authoritarian right wing authoritarian takeover of the United States.

And I view the title as just sort of we're posting through it, right?

We're posting through this together and so I think the only thing you can really do is hold on to your principles.

It's not bad to be anti fascist.

You should call out fascism.

It's no way to live.

Yeah.

I I also consider myself an anti fascist, not a militant black Block St.

protester.

I've never done anything like that in my life.

I'm too much of a baby.

I'm a sweet, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a sweet boy.

I'm also a writer and I'm a podcaster.

And yeah, yeah.

I mean, if they want to come for us, they're, they're going to have to come get us, you know, because, because, because we're not going to shut up and we're not going to do what, you know, unfortunately, a lot of like organizations and, and people in this space that, you know, having their nonprofit status pooled or whatever is it, you know, could kill them business, business wise.

You know, I think we're going to see a lot of places, a lot of media outlets or whatever kind of soften up to try to stay out of the targets here.

But I just can't shut up.

It's not my style.

So we're going to keep doing this.

I was through it.

Absolutely.

I just want to say that I, I hope when they, you know, if they take me away, that the Fox News, Chiron says, quotes Peter Brimelow and says Communist enforcer Michael Edison Hayden.

So I was like, I'm going to take any of their titles.

That's the one I like best.

I think I'm I'm I should have pitched my publisher on this, but I've kept a doc Google document of like what all these people have called me and I wanted to do like one of those anti quote things on the like anti blurb sections on my book where like I'm called like a notorious communist Dr.

when Gavin McGinnis calls me and Tisa like that should be on the book.

Absolutely.

Well, Chris, thanks for joining us this week.

Hopefully listeners understand a little bit more where this anti Antifa panic came from.

It's got by today's standards and news and information or whatever.

I feels like a long history, but we're really only talking like 10 years here.

I know something.

So much we left out too.

That's.

The other thing, it's just so.

Many.

Somebody in the audience is going to remember some weird antifa disinfo campaign.

I'm like, Yep, that too.

That too.

There were so many.

Yeah, but but I'm just remembering something you said of like this went from being something no one had heard about and 10 years later, this administration is now declaring it the gravest threat to domestic national security.

It is just really, really surreal.

But thanks for joining us.

I'm really looking forward to your book when it comes out next year.

Where can people follow you?

Where can people pre-order the book?

Yeah, thanks.

Not the guy, the guys.

This was great.

It was felt like we just caught up on 10 years of knowing each other.

But yeah, basically you can find me at Let's Go Mathias on Blue Sky and Twitter X.

And I'm writing occasionally now for The Guardian and MSNBC Zeteo.

And you can pre-order my book wherever you pre-order books, including on simonandschuster.com.

It's called To catch a Fascist the fight to expose the radical rape.

And if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple, you can also find us on Patreon.

All right, we'll see you guys next week, and for our Patreon subscribers, we'll see you Thursday.

Bye everybody.

Bye.

Thanks so much guys.

My house, Pay Ali, walk by myself.

We're smiling sanctions in a family portrait by the trophies on my shelf.

I want to live like everyone else.

Pay Ali, walk by.

My life is easy when you're be out at fun.

You fucking pay you.

The fuck you Life is empty when you're wild.

That's what they tell you.

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Life's not fair, but it's nearly overtime.

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