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In his own words

Were going to be back here, and were going to humiliate all of these people who opposed us. Well be back here 1,000 times if necessary. I always win. Because I have the will to win, I keep going until I win. Interview with DailyMail.com, several days after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Islam at its full flourishing isnt some peaceful denomination like Methodism or religion like Buddhism; Islam is a black flag. It is an expansive, domineering ideology, and one that is directed against Europe. In this way, Islam give [sic] non-Europeans a fighting spirit and integrates them into something much greater than themselves. Interview with Europa Maxima, February 2017.

A race is genetically coherent, a race is something you can study, a race is about genes and DNA, but its not just about genes and DNA. The most important thing about it is the people and the spirit. Thats what a race is about. Speech at Texas A&M, December 2016.

Martin Luther King Jr., a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization. We must overcome!National Policy Institute column, January 2014

Immigration is a kind a proxy warand maybe a last standfor White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.National Policy Institute column, February 2014

Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence. VICE, October 2013.

When we hear any professional Latino support this or that social program, we sense in our guts that her policy proscriptions are rationalizations for nationalism. She mightsaymore immigration is good; shemeansThe Anglos are finished! Speech at the 2013 American Renaissance conference

What blocks our progress is thememethat has been carefully implanted in White peoples minds over the course of decades of programming, fromMississippi BurningtoLee Daniel's The Butlerthat any kind of positive racial feeling among Whites is inherently evil and stupid and derives solely from bigotry and resentment. And that the political and social advancement of non-Whites is inherently moral and wonderful. National Policy Institute column, September 2013

Richard Spencers clean-cut appearance conceals a radical white separatist whose goal is the establishment of a white ethno-state in North America. His writings and speeches portray this as a reasonable defense of Caucasians and Eurocentric culture. In Spencers myopic worldview, white people have been dispossessed by a combination of rising minority birth rates, immigration and government policies he abhors.

Fighting that alleged dispossession is the focus of the, until recently, tax-exempt organization he heads, the National Policy Institute (NPI). According to NPIs mission statement, it aims to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute ... will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity. NPI lost its tax-deductible status with the IRS for failing to file tax returns after 2012.

Spencer became president of NPI in 2011, following the death of its chairman, longtime white nationalist Louis R. Andrews. Concurrently, he also oversaw NPIs publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers, home of such scientifically bogus works as a 2015 reissue of Richard LynnsRace Differences in Intelligenceand screeds by other white nationalists, includingJared Taylor, editorof the racistAmerican Renaissancejournal, andSam Francis, the late editor of the white supremacistCouncil of Conservative Citizens newsletter. In 2012, Spencer launched an offshoot of Washington Summit Publishers that he calledRadix Journal, a website and biannual publication whose contributors include notorious antisemite Kevin MacDonald, a retired professor at California State University, Long Beach.

Spencer abdicated his position as editor ofRadix Journalin January 2017 to serve as the American editor of his new site AltRight.com. Launched on January 16, 2017, AltRight.com brings together several well-known white nationalist personalities including Henrik Palmgren of Red Ice, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent, andWilliam H. Regnery II, a reclusive member of the Regnery right-wing publishing dynasty that founded both NPI and the Charles Martel Society. Other leadership on the site includes Daniel Friberg, European editor, Jason Jorjani, Culture editor, and Tor Westman, technical director.

Described as a leading academic racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer takes a quasi-intellectual approach to white separatism. In an online NPI recruiting video, he employs the tone of a sociologist discussing demographics:

As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession.

Spencer acquired that academic tone while obtaining a bachelors degree from the University of Virginia and a masters degree in humanities from the University of Chicago. That tone is part of an image-conscious strategy meant to appeal to educated, middle-class whites. He dresses neatly, eschews violence and works to sound rational.

We have to look good, he told Salon.com writer Lauren Fox, because no one is going to want to join a movement that is crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid.

In 2007, after he dropped out of a Duke University Ph.D. program in modern European intellectual history, Spencer took a job as assistant editor atAmerican Conservativemagazine, where he was later fired for his radical views, according to former colleague J. Arthur Bloom. Following that, Spencer became executive editor of the paleoconservative website Takis Magazine. In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight, a supremacy-themed webzine aimed at the intellectual right wing, where he remained until joining NPI.

One of Spencers first acts after taking over NPI was to move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Whitefish, Montana, where his family has a vacation home. But if Spencer is eyeing Whitefish as a locale for his Aryan homeland, he faces significant opposition. In December 2014, the Whitefish City Council debated an anti-hate ordinance barring groups such as NPI from assembling in the community. After concerns were raised about free speech, the council ultimately settled on a resolution supporting diversity and tolerance.

Spencer spoke at that council meeting, saying the anti-hate ordinance would have granted the right to police our minds but claiming that he supported the diversity and tolerance resolution. But real diversity includes thinking differently, theFlathead Beaconquoted him as saying. Real diversity is not people of all different shapes and colors acting the same way. That is the diversity of a Coke commercial.

Real diversity and tolerance apparently go only so far, however. In an address at white supremacist Jared Taylors 2013American Renaissanceconference, Spencer called for peaceful ethnic cleansing. As an example of how this could be accomplished, he cited the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where new national boundaries were formed at the end of World War I. Today, in the public imagination, ethnic cleansing has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so), Spencer said. But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.

Spencer also has termed his mission a sort of white Zionism that would inspire whites with the dream of such a homeland just as Zionism helped spur the establishment of Israel. A white ethno-state would be anAltneuland an old, new country he said, attributing the term to Theodor Herzl, a founding father of Zionism.

Such historical comparisons show how desperate Spencer is to legitimize his agenda. After all, if white people are dispossessed, why shouldnt they get a homeland, too? The problem, of course, is that white Americans have not been dispossessed, no matter how often that claim is made by ideologues of the racist right.

But Spencer is doing his best to make it seem that they are. When the 2011 census revealed that for the first time the majority of children born in the United States are non-white, Spencer concluded that efforts to restrict immigration were meaningless going forward. Even if all immigration, legal and illegal, were miraculously halted tomorrow morning, our countrys demographic destiny would merely be delayed by a decade or two, he told theAmerican Renaissanceaudience. Put another way, we could win the immigration battle and nevertheless lose the country, and lose it completely.

Although Spencer has repeatedly denied that he is a racist, his protests amount to a semantic debate over what racist means. Racist isnt a descriptive word. Its a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, I dont like you. Racist is just a slur word, he told theFlathead Beacon. I think race is real, and I think race is important. And those two principles do not mean I want to harm someone or hate someone. But the notion that these people can be equal is not a scientific way of looking at it.

Elsewhere, he has decried what he terms an overly expansive definition of racism by Cultural Marxists. In a 2013 NPI column, he wrote:

But for most academics and policy-makers who could be referred to as Cultural Marxiststhe definition of racism is much,muchmore expansive; it encompasses culture, privilege, societal assumptions and values, and all sorts of things they deem to be expressions of power. The hetero-normative marriage, Christmas, nationalist soccer fandom can each be considered racist, in that each is an avatar of European civilization and consciousnessand thus an obstacle for multicultural globalism.

Spencer has said he would gladly accept Germans, Latins and Slavic immigrants in his proposed ethno-state ironically, groups that faced severe discrimination in late 19th-century America. These foreigners and their customs, including Catholicism, spurred the creation of Know-Nothing societies, which eventually became known as the American Party. Pseudo-scientific studies were released, such as Carl Brighams A Study of Human Intelligence (1923), that claimed that Slavs and Italians, among others, were of inferior intelligence.

But today, kielbasa is considered as American as apple pie, and these non-Anglo Saxons are embraced by Spencer because of their white skins. They have assimilated.

To Spencer, however, assimilation is a deceptive term. In his foreword to a new edition of racist eugenicist Madison Grants 1933Conquest of a Continent, Spencer wrote:

Hispanic immigrants have been assimilating downwardacross generations towards the culture and behavior of African-Americans. Indeed, one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogenous and assimilated, nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.

This applies to the European motherland as well. In a promo for NPIs 2013 Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., Spencer opined that both Europe and America are experiencing economic, moral and cultural bankruptcy under the pressure of mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the natural expression of religious and ethnic identities by non-Europeans.

Spencers efforts to reach out to European nationalists have not gone well. In October 2014, his attempt to hold an NPI conference in Budapest, Hungary, resulted in his arrest and expulsion. Dubbed the 2014 European Congress, the conference featured an array of white nationalists from both Europe and America. Among the scheduled speakers were Jared Taylor ofAmerican Renaissance, Philippe Vardon from the far-right French Bloc Identitaire movement, Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin and right-wing Hungarian extremist MP Mrton Gyngysi.

Before the conference even started, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade released a statement condemning all xenophobic and exclusionary organizations that discriminate based on religion or ethnicity. Planned reservations at the Larus Center venue were canceled. On Oct. 3, Spencer was arrested while meeting informally with other participants at a cafe that was to have been an alternate venue. He was jailed for three days, deported and banned for three years from entering all 26European countries that have abolished passport and other controls at their common borders.

Back in America, stronger free speech protections enable Spencer to hold such conferences. But even though he idealizes an American society founded by European whites, he rejects the principles of egalitarianism enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Spencer takes issue with conservatives who advocate returning America to its founding principles. Even if that did happen, the outcome would be the same, according to Spencer: One should not rewind a movie, play it again, and then be surprised when it reaches the same unhappy ending.

Should we, for instance, really be fighting for limited government or the Constitution, so that the Afro-Mestizo-Caribbean Melting Pot can enjoy the blessing of liberty and a sound currency? he asked theAmerican Renaissancegathering.

In Spencers ethno-state there would be no such problems. In aJuly 3, 2014, column in NPIsRadix Journal, he lauded Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens greatest address, in which Stephens said that Thomas Jefferson was wrong about all men being created equal.

Spencer endorsed that sentiment, saying, Ours, too, should be a declaration of difference and distance We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created unequal. In the wake of the old world, this will be our proposition.

At every NPI event there is a book fair, and NPIs publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers, also offers its white nationalist titles on its own website and through sites such as Amazon.com.

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Spencer was a vocal advocate for Donald Trump due to his signature proposal to build a wall along the United States border with Mexico and his racist statements referring to Mexicans as criminals and rapists. Following a high-profile press conference on the racist alt-right movement a term that Spencer popularized Spencer organized a press conference with Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and Peter Brimelow of VDARE, two longtime leaders in the white nationalist movement, to codify the tenets of the alt-right. Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity, Spencer told attendees. You cant understand who you are without race.

Only days after Trumps surprising victory over Hillary Clinton, the NPI held its fall conference on November 19, 2016, in Washington, D.C. In what he later described as a moment of exuberance, Spencer, flush with victory, offered the toast, Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory! to the nearly 200 attendees. He was met with a handful of stiff-armed salutes from the crowd. The gesture electrified the more radical sectors of the white supremacy movement while generating stern disappointment from some of its elder statesmen, including Jared Taylor. When asked about the incident, Taylor told Kristoffer Ronneberg: I was as shocked as anyone by all of that. The alt-right is a very broad movement. I have always known that there were at least anonymous Twitter accounts that are openly Nazi and anti-Semitic, but I did not think that Richard Spencer was that sort of person. I was shocked by these images that weve seen. The restaurant hosting the event later apologized and donated the proceeds to the Anti-Defamation League.

Following what Spencer and the alt-right came to refer to as hailgate, the media cycle fixated on trolling attacks against Tanya Gersh, a Jewish realtor living in Whitefish, Montana, who had been asked by Spencers mother to help her sell a piece of property.

The driving impetus behind the fracas appears to have been the possibility that some in the community might protest Sherry Spencers building to demonstrate their rejection of her sons ideology.

Spencer, who had recently joined into what was referred to as The First Triumvirate with Andrew Anglin ofthe Daily Stormer website and Mike Enoch ofthe Daily Shoah podcast (titles intended to evoke Nazism and the Holocaust), insisted that his mother was the subject of an extortion scheme, which Spencer categorized as a nasty shakedown of an innocent woman.

The shakedown allegation originated in a web posting purportedly authored by Sherry Spencer, Richards mother. The very next day, Anglin parroted the allegation in an article he wrote for the Daily Stormer. Over the next several months, Anglin posted a total of 30 articles urging his hundreds of thousands of readers to unleash a torrent of abusive phone calls, voicemails, emails, text messages, social media messages even Christmas cards on the Jewish realtor, her family and their associates. (In April 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against Anglin in the U.S. District Court of Montana in Missoula.)

But when Anglin threatened to bus in skinheads from the Bay Area for an armed protest against the towns small Jewish population, to be held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Spencer was forced to backpedal.

Spencer tried to play the march off as a joke and maintained that he had no control over Anglin, whom he referred to as totally wild thats not my kind of thing, though maintaining that Anglin was a rational person who wouldnt engage in physical violence.

On December 6, 2016, at the invitation of a neo-Nazi and former Texas A&M student Preston Wiginton, Spencer spoke to a ballroom of nearly 400 individuals. America, at the end of the day, Spencer told his audience, belongs to white men. Our bones are in the ground. We own it. At the end of the day America cant exist without us. We defined it. This country does belong to White people, culturally, politically, socially, everything. Following the controversy and attention generated by his appearance at Texas A&M, Spencer announced that he would be embarking on a college tour in 2017.

Read more:
Richard Bertrand Spencer | Southern Poverty Law Center

A Sky News investigation has found antisemitic, racist and white supremacist material in podcasts on one of the most popular streaming services, Spotify.

The company said it does not allow hate content on its platform.

But we found podcasts totalling several days' worth of listening promoting extreme views such as scientific racism, Holocaust denial and far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories.

And while some of the most shocking material was buried inside hours-long episodes, in some cases, explicit slurs could be found in episode titles and descriptions while album artwork displayed imagery adopted by white supremacists.

Spotify removed the content after we reported it to the streaming giant.

But many of these podcasts remain online elsewhere, including in largely unmoderated directories like Google Podcasts.

Google did not respond to our request for comment.

And experts are concerned that the "readily accessible" nature of this material could lure people towards extremism.

Content warning: this article includes references to racist, antisemitic and white supremacist language and ideas

One of the first results returned on Spotify when searching for the phrase "Kalergi Plan" directed us to a series which, at the time, had 76 episodes listed on the platform.

The so-called "Kalergi Plan" is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which alleges that Jewish elites are behind a deliberate plan to erase the white European race by promoting mass immigration.

We have chosen not to name any of the podcast series mentioned in this article to avoid publicising their content.

In one episode, the speaker explicitly promotes the Kalergi Plan.

He claims that the European elite has been "replaced" by a "new urban nobility" made up of Jewish elites.

The nine-minute monologue ends with an explicit call to violence against Jewish people.

Another episode by the same creator advances the racist and unfounded idea that white people are biologically superior to people of colour.

"There is something about [white men] that makes us privileged, its in our blood," he says.

He promotes this view, unchallenged, for 13 minutes. The monologue is littered with dehumanising language and makes comparisons that are too offensive to be included in this article.

The album artwork for the series depicts the raven flag - a symbol originally found in Norse mythology, but one that has been appropriated by some white supremacists in recent years.

We showed our findings to Maurice Mcleod of Race on the Agenda, a social research charity focusing on issues impacting ethnic minorities in the UK.

"This is incredibly dangerous," he told Sky News.

"Early this May we had the highest [monthly] number of reported incidents of antisemitism and, in the year to March, we had 115,000 reported incidents of hate crime. Now that's just what's reported, which is always only the tip of the iceberg."

"It feels like it's normalising this sort of thing if you can go on Spotify and listen to Adele, and then you can listen to this stuff right next to it." he said.

The Kalergi Plan is a variation of the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

Jacob Davey, head of research and policy of far right and hate movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said it was a belief that had been steadily increasing in popularity over the past decade.

"It's gone from what really was quite a fringe talking point among a few European extremists to the bread and butter discussion of extremists globally," he told Sky News.

But these ideas do not exist in an online vacuum, he said.

"In 2019, when an individual committed a really horrific terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, he was directly doing that in response to this theory," said Mr Davey

"And after that attack, there were a number of others throughout 2019. The spread of these ideas can really have a noticeable impact in compelling people to go on and commit atrocious violence."

This is just one of the series we came across.

Another one, hosted by US-based alt-right creators, uses racist slurs and white supremacist symbols in the episode titles and descriptions.

The hosts casually and openly promote a range of antisemitic and racist beliefs and theories, including Holocaust denial and scientific racism.

A third series from a different creator included episodes discussing what they refer to as the "beauty" of white supremacy, as well as readings of essays and books by prominent figures of the Nazi Party, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

The creator often used the episode description box on Spotify to advertise videos shared on other platforms. One link directs users to a video of a reading of what it calls "Dylann Roofs insightful manifesto".

Other episode descriptions link to a Telegram channel that has a swastika as its icon.

These three series amount to almost 150 hours of content.

In response to our findings, a Spotify spokesperson said: "Spotify prohibits content on our platform which expressly and principally advocates or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability.

"The content in question has been removed for violating our Hate Content policy."

The platform does allow users to report material that violates their content guidelines. The company also said it is developing new monitoring technology to identify material that has been flagged as hate content on some international registers.

But what is currently being done to moderate its podcasting platform beyond responding to user reports is not public knowledge.

The sheer volume of content online means that technology companies require algorithms as well as people to moderate their platforms.

And while technology capable of detecting hate speech in audio is being developed, it's not yet being widely deployed.

"One of the problems is that it takes a lot more memory to store long audio files. The other problem is that it's messy - you can have multiple speakers and fast-paced dialogue," said Hannah Kirk, AI researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and The Alan Turing Institute.

"There's also tonnes of extra linguistic cues in audio: the tone, the pitch of voice, even awkward silences or laughter. And that's a problem because we don't yet have the technology to accurately encode those kinds of extra linguistic signals," she told Sky News.

Ms Kirk said it is possible that companies like Spotify are hitting resource or technology constraints that mean they are not able to moderate their audio content at scale.

But, she said, the option is available for companies to transcribe audio content and run it through text processing models trained to detect hate, which are far more advanced.

We also found some of the same series on Google Podcasts.

Google's podcasting arm operates as a directory rather than a platform, meaning that it does not host content on its own server and instead collates podcast feeds that it automatically scrapes from the internet.

The company has received criticism before for allowing users to access extreme and misleading content on its interface. It's one of the few remaining places users can still find infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones's podcast.

We reported our findings to Google, but it did not respond. The series we flagged remains on its platform.

A spokesperson for the company previously told the New York Times that it "does not want to limit what people can find" and that it only removes content in rare circumstances.

But experts are concerned that the accessibility of extreme material on these popular platforms could lead people into becoming radicalised.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Why data journalism matters to Sky News

Read the rest here:
Antisemitism, racism and white supremacist material in podcasts on Spotify, investigation finds - Sky News

Just three galaxy brains. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Tim Heidecker/YouTube

While half-checking your phone on Thanksgiving, you may have noticed that Tim Heideckers podcast Office Hours Live was on the air, but this was not an ordinary week for the talk show. In the special episode, Heidecker moderates a meandering marathon interview with comedians Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh. Wearing a ball cap with the logo for Elon Musks SpaceX, Heidecker serves up stoner-friendly questions like, How much can the brain absorb when it comes to new information?, and Levick replies simply by listing different parts of the brain in pulse-slowing monotone. Elsewhere, Suresh describes an Unsolved Mysterieslevel news story about the discovery of one of the devils horns, a topic that all three agree the New York Times would be too scared to pursue (Follow the money, Levick murmurs knowingly). Heidecker reads ad copy for Quad Core, a pyramid-scheme-seeming lifestyle health system that you can sign up for with the discount code Fuddruckers, which may draw your eye to a neon sign for the burger chain green-screened behind him.

If this reminds you of another podcast hosted by a certain UFC commentator and former Fear Factor host, youre right. Though hes booked interviewees as relatively innocuous as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Jay Leno, Joe Rogans hands-off style draws in guests who like that he wont push back on their rsums and responses, whether alt-right figureheads like Alex Jones or conspiracy-prone tech magnates like Musk, whose 2018 weed-toking appearance is invoked by Heideckers hat. But this hangout vibe also means that many Joe Rogan Experience episodes clock in at three hours or more, which is a long time to listen to anyone shoot the shit. This dull endlessness is the starting point for the Office Hours version: Heidecker, Levick, and Sureshs stream lasted for nearly 12 hours, an amazing stunt to witness in real time. While digesting turkey or a meat alternative, you could drop into the eighth hour of the show and hear Suresh explaining that humans can be considered animals on a cellular level.

In reality, the special loops an hour-long base video, but this feeling that they could go on forever makes the episode such a compelling (and funny) satire of Rogan. As the three comedians nail the lethargic tone of the Experience, everything that they actually discuss is patently ridiculous, spun from smart-sounding but meaningless buzzwords Levick says to Heidecker at one point, Im glad you said countercurrent, because its a sea change (whatever it is). Even if everything resembles the real JRE, each flimsy metaphor makes it harder to ignore the void at the conversations center. Theres a scene from Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buuels The Phantom of Liberty with a similar atmosphere: Characters attend a dinner party where toilets surround the table instead of chairs, but no one in the film views this as unusual. Instead of a visual gag, Office Hours punch line is conceptual; the joke might be on you if youre willing to listen to three weirdos talk for 12 hours about The Rock ruling the U.S. as a benevolent monarch.

That kind of obsession with formal detail, but with one major screw loose, is Levick and Sureshs trademark as a comedy duo. Theyre best known for their 2020 viral-video spoof conservative lecturer DESTROYS sjw college student: Levick plays a writer who pedantically eviscerates an audience question from Suresh about the moral compass of his book called Mr. Mouse Goes on a Fun Little Adventure to Happy Town (Define special mouse, Levick snaps repeatedly). Levicks pompous character was inspired by reactionaries like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, but instead of mimicking anything heinous that these people might say, the video lowers the stakes to the ground. Whats left is the underlying aggression that these particular exchanges share, now hilariously displaced into a heated argument over a cartoon mouse or, in a parody of an anti-masker bystander video, the message of When Harry Met Sally. Newly-minted SNL cast member James Austin Johnson does something comparable in his Donald Trump impression videos, in which he embarks on all sorts of free-associative tangents, like how Weird Al was mean to Coolio. Since he so closely replicates the real mans bizarre speech patterns, Johnsons videos feel like staring into Trumps erratic id, which gets at something less obvious than Alec Baldwins topical caricature. These comedians are more interested in unleashing toxic energy with pitch-perfect accuracy, a better fit for an absurd political reality that cant be rationally described.

Heidecker is the perfect partner in crime for this super-dry, committed brand of satire. Across all of his series with Eric Wareheim, hes made laser-precise parodies of infomercials, sitcoms, and, for the 2013 pilot of their horror anthology Bedtime Stories (20132017), a useless aftershow in the style of Talking Bad. The closest of his projects to the Rogan takeoff might be his epically scaled The Trial of Tim Heidecker from 2017, in which his character from On Cinema at the Cinema is on trial for murder. Directed by Eric Notarnicola, The Trial is nearly five hours long and stylized exactly like a live feed of court TV, but that aesthetic only makes its core psychodrama more perverse. At its heart, On Cinema is a soap opera about the power struggles of two incompetent film critics (Heidecker and Gregg Turkington), and in The Trial, their feuds look especially pathetic when they collide with the real world. The judge, lawyers, and jury have no frame of reference for a petty argument over which Star Trek movie was set in San Francisco, but they also seem powerless to stop this bizarre lore from swallowing up the legal process. As much as Heidecker has absorbed Trumps and Alex Joness mannerisms into his QAnon-prone, alternative-medicine-hocking On Cinema character, The Trial is more focused on the total inability of conventional systems to deal with his character and, in the end, he gets away with negligent homicide for selling faulty vape pens at a terrible EDM festival.

When Office Hours drains the center of The Joe Rogan Experience, whats left behind is a soup of directionless anecdotes and lamentations about cancel culture. Suresh worries that his stand-up jokes about Einstein in antifa might attract controversy, but Levick reassures him that this hour is valid and fucking funny. This also seems to be the premise of Rogans podcast: the possibility that each guests perspective could have a kernel of validity, and listeners are free to come to their own conclusions. By following Rogans format, Heidecker, Levick, and Suresh highlight something related: JRE episodes are mainly about unchecked rambling. Topics on deck could be as banal as Rogan and Musk vaguely spitballing about the future of AI, or as potentially harmful as misinformation about ivermectin and COVID vaccines. Whatever it is, its all delivered in the same casual, conversational tone. So when Heidecker talks about the therapeutic power of crab salts crystallized DNA from decomposed crabs which, if taken in capsule form, could provide complete immunity from disease and irreparably disrupt the pharmaceutical industry its important that this idea can jump out of the shows ASMR rhythm enough to make you laugh, jolting you awake from a multi-hour galaxy-brain session. If a perfect imitation of JRE can tap into its essence, Office Hours finds three men desperate to talk, but with nothing of value to say. And if that seems laughable, then its hard to see what might make it valid.

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The Tim, Jeremy, and Rajat Experience - Vulture

Youll have to pry their puns from their cold dead hands. Tens of thousands, at least, turned up to the Kill the Bill rally last Saturday and they brought their zingers with them.

Opposite Victorias Parliament House, where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is running at the Princess Theatre, a woman is waving a placard that says shes a Prisoner of AzkaDAN. Another placard quips Once Andrews is jailed for treason hell have his own man-date every day. Its a riff on vaccine mandates and prison sex, if that wasnt clear.

Even Kill the Bill is a word play. A truck tows a professional looking billboard, seemingly advertising Quentin Tarantinos Kill Bill but with Daniel Andrews substituted in for Uma Thurman. The crowd fears this bill will put too much power in the premiers hands to crack down on their freedoms.

With girls on stilts, a bloke dressed as Moses, another with a paper bag on his head and people thrusting signs with Bible quotes, its hard to know where to begin. Who are these people?

A counter-rally organised by Campaign Against Racism and Fascism is characterising the event as far-right, labelling some of the organisers actual Nazis.

I decide one place to begin is by moseying up to those waving flags of different nations. From Croatia to Turkey to Greece to Albania, the steps of parliament look like an audience cutaway at the Eurovision Song Contest.

Alongside a trio of women in hijabs, dressed in black from head to toe, a man is holding up the flag of Lebanon. Our scriptures tell us not to take anything that will harm our body, he explains, when I ask why they are here. Even so much, were not supposed to put on a tattoo. So, imagine taking a vaccine knowing theres carcinogens in them.

A white guy approaches and points to the metal pole on which the flag flaps. Fibreglass would be better. This guy is concerned the Muslim dude will hit an overhanging tramline and electrocute himself. Thats the Australian culture, one of the Muslim women remarks. Everybody looks after each other.

Mainstream folk would say theyre not looking after each other, theyre spreading medical misinformation about Covid-19, and possibly spreading Covid-19 itself. But hold up; not so fast. Maybe the people here arethe mainstream. Later, as the march reaches Flagstaff Gardens, Im disoriented, the crowd as vast and overwhelming as a CGI army in The Lord of the Rings.

Back here on the steps of parliament, Im overcome with the spirit of the rally: puns.

What do you think of my protest chant that you can do? I ask the Muslim women. Yes to hijab, no to the jab.

Hehehe, thats a good one, one says. Im going to steal that.

I bump past a man brandishing the placard I LOVE DAN Murphys and reach a man brandishing a Romanian flag.

When you come from a communist country, you know how things operate, he says, pointing to his sister wrapped in the Romanian flag. And when you see the loss of freedom, its actually starting to affect you because it brings back memories. In Romania, there was this thing, you couldnt freely move. You had to get approval to go to visit another city. He compares this to the digital certificates we need to hold in our phones to enter shops or the pub across the street. Its the same thing!

Another man left Egypt at the age of 10. He remembers the division between Christians and Muslims. You got a Christian name, you dont get a job, they dont play with you as a kid at school. He sees the same cleavage opening between the vaccinated and unvaccinated in Melbourne. Its divide and conquer. Why would we ever do this? This doesnt make sense.

Its interesting to talk to the older generation, a young Croatian flag-bearer tells me. They say, This is worse than communism. Even in communism back then, they were able to go and see and speak with people and leave their homes. I mean, here, were locked up for almost two years.

I didnt really think about that, I admit. Older people, whove gone through some traumatic experience overseas and then they here in Melbourne and then its like, locked down again.

The hours pass, sun reddening my ears as I weave through the masses. An Aboriginal man is daubing paint on a shirtless bloke on the grass near Parliament House. He says hell put a curse on The Saturday Paper if I misrepresent things here.

I look up to a Mori flag blowing in the wind. I ask the flag-bearer why she has turned up.

Us Mori, like the Indigenous people here, their lands were stolen and their freedoms were stolen. Im trying to fight for our freedoms that our ancestors lost many years ago, and we are about to lose again.

Like with the Romanian, theres a backstory, a reason for the anxiety. The past is never the past.

But just say theyre right? I suggest. That taking the vaccination does protect us? And that will help Indigenous health?

An Aboriginal woman gripping her flag, next to a Torres Strait Islander gripping hers, has been listening. People in the past said the exact same thing. They were going to protect the Aboriginal people. And thats where I see the similarity. Its very scary. Were brought up to, you know, the land provides. We are just the caretakers of this land. We know when to go out to the bush to get our medicine.

This ventures into impossible territory for some on the left. The rule book says to defer to Indigenous knowledge of the land. I later catch a tweet that, through careful wording, complains anti-vaxxers at this rally are exploiting Indigenous matters, giving the impression these offending anti-vaxxers are white.

In fact, the Aboriginal man threatening the curse, D.T. Zellanach, is a key organiser. A couple of years back he was here protesting against the governments plan to chop down sacred trees to make way for a freeway. Next week hell be the opening speaker, spending more than an hour explaining to thousands on the grass how society will operate under his version of decolonisation. Im not suggesting Zellanach is representing everyone. Nonetheless, the crowd is sprinkled with Aboriginal flags.

I USED TO LOVE HER BUT ITS OVER NOW Mick Jagger. The flip side of this placard explains that the ABC has become another sellout organisation misrepresenting this rally as a Nazi one.

How is pro-choice alt-right? asks a young womans placard, applying the left-wing term for reproductive rights to her desire to refuse the jab. The font and art direction on her sign are nicked from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascisms material, which paints this as a far-right rally.

I had family members that were hung by the Nazis, in their village, a 20-year-old with a Greek flag tells me. My grandma hid in chicken pens so she didnt get killed. How would they like it if theyre called a Nazi? They wouldnt like it. I wouldnt call Daniel Andrews a Nazi. Id just call him a wanker.

So, there arent Nazis here? Not so fast. Up the top of Bourke Street, a bunch of placards are lying on the ground: QUI? Thats French for who? and a neo-Nazi meme. Im desperate to find who placed them, or abandoned them, here.

I dart my eyes across the crowd. Over the Jehovahs Witnesses, who are certain the vaccine mandate is a sign of the apocalypse, so its bad, but bad in a good way, because Jesus will return. Over the young man dressed as Wally of Wheres Wally fame. Weve found Wally, his sign proclaims, now wheres the truth?

I squint, spotting a QUI? held up in the distance. Distracted momentarily by the opening drumbeat of Twisted Sisters Were Not Gonna Take It blasting from the fat speakers on the steps of Parliament House, I lose sight of it again. I head in the general direction, past the old man with a laminated chart explaining how Bert Newton and Graham Kennedy were tied up in Satanism, and Bert being granted a state funeral last week proves it goes all the way to the top.

I catch up to a woman. What does that sign mean?

I just found it. I felt like I needed to pick it up. She thought it said oui yes.

Its qui who, I tell her. Far-right people must be here at the rally. Because thats theirs. Their answer to who? is its the Jews. Forced vaccinations, its the Jews.

Yuck! She drops the sign on the ground. Shit, thank you.

I spot another sign, this time 9/11 QUI?, positing that the Jews are behind the September 11 attacks. This woman picked it up from the side of the street, too, not wanting the general public to think the Kill the Bill protesters were litterbugs. No sign of the actual folk responsible for these placards.

The marchers end up at Flagstaff Gardens. No point complaining Sky News are exaggerating the numbers. Even if they are, Ive never seen anything like this. The Big Day Out crowd running into a Collingwood v Carlton crowd in the park. Is this the mainstream? A giant Info Wars flag and T-shirts featuring yellow Minions with Fuck Dan Andrews and his Minions written in puffy pen beneath?

A Labor adviser later tells me I have to keep in mind the latest Roy Morgan Poll. It puts Dan Andrews approval at 60 per cent, 10 points down from last year but still pretty great. And this high approval is largely based on his handling of the pandemic. So plenty dont agree with the enormous placard of a naked Dan Andrews spooning an inflatable doll with What happened to consent before being fucked? written across it.

I bump into an old friend so shes one of these folks? but have to abandon her when I spot them under the trees. Who?

These men and women hold up QUI? signs and they havent accidentally picked them up. Their giant banner, that stretches between trees, directs you to a website that lays out how the Jews are responsible for your misery.

Some of their QUI? placards feature a headshot, an illustration of a stereotypical looking Jew. To be fair to the neo-Nazis, Ive got to say it does kinda look like me.

One T-shirt reads: Naming is half the battle. This meme argues youre not easily allowed to say the word Jew when discussing the problems of the world. Another sign says They Know. Shut It Down. This meme, often accompanied by an Orthodox Jew on a phone, argues the Jews will shut down those who see through the matrix and realise its the Jews.

Last month, an acupuncturist I visited theorised that my tight back is caused by walking towards dangerous people when my body is telling me to walk away. I approach.

No comment, says one of the blokes. But we know, he adds.

You know what? I ask.

We just know! he squeaks, sounding like a frustrated character on Seinfeld.

I approach another guy with a QUI? sign featuring a different stereotypical looking Jew. It looks like my friend George Weinberg.

What does that mean? Qui?

Fuck off.

Everyone has brought their backstory to the rally. I ask two North African dudes why theyre chanting Hang Dan Andrews! Everyone else in the vicinity is happy leaving it at Sack Dan Andrews!

He needs to be hanged because if someone commits treason, to put this many people in danger, what does he deserve? one guy says.

Do you mean it literally or just as a joke? I ask.

You see what they did to Gaddafi? Was that a joke?

Ive brought my backstory, too. Amazingly, the venom some on the left feel towards Jewish people has led them to tell Jews to stay away from the anti-racism movement. And for Jews lets not beat around the bush, literally me to stop writing about days like these. Their gambit is to cast Jews as white and thus not the people to talk about, or fight, racism. Im meant to buy that they dont know about anti-Semitism? They know. Rather, this gambit is one more baton in their backpack, to club the Jews, to present us as a problematic race.

My irritation over this drives me to hunt out the neo-Nazis again. I let them off too easily. I am the one to confront them. At least I can try to annoy them. The crowd is slowly marching back to Parliament House.

I see one neo-Nazi hidden behind a black cloth balaclava, more restrictive than the masks hes protesting against. I point to his placard.

Hey buddy, thats the meme saying Its the Jews! I know.

Nah. Dont be anti-Semitic, mate, he sarcastically throws back. I point to the website printed on his sign: GoyimTV.

Ive been to the website!

He picks up the pace, trying to get away from me. I catch up with him.

But Im giving you a chance to name the Jew!

He makes off again. Now Im trotting after him, along the tramline.

You cant complain that no ones letting you name the Jew, I squeak. And then I give you an opportunity the name the Jew, and you wont name the Jew!

He pulls away.

Fine, but dont complain that youre not allowed to name the Jew.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper onDec 4, 2021 as "Pun times: A dispatch from the protests".

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The rest is here:
Pun times: A dispatch from the protests - The Saturday Paper

If many far-right players have been shunted aside, the ideology has not been. In recent decades, whenever far-right groups have lost in court, the movement has rebounded.

While some of the messengers have been eviscerated, the more mainstream versions of their hatemongering continue to have real currency, with broad exposure guaranteeing that the violence of the far-right fringes will unfortunately continue, said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

In seeking to prove that the violence was foreseeable, the plaintiffs highlighted how often the idea of hitting protesters with cars came up beforehand.

Samantha Froelich, who was dating two of the main organizers simultaneously in the lead-up to the rally, but who has since left the movement, testified that hitting protesters with cars was discussed at a party earlier that summer in the Fash Loft, short for fascist, the nickname for Mr. Spencers apartment in Alexandria, Va.

After the violence, Mr. Parrott, whose Traditionalist Worker Party has since disbanded, and the others celebrated. Charlottesville was a tremendous victory, he said in a post. The alt-right is not a pathetic and faceless internet fad, but a fearsome street-fighting force.

While the plaintiffs case took three weeks and 36 witnesses, the defendants rested after a day and a half, having made four broad arguments. First, they argued that while others might deplore their views, the First Amendment allowed them. Second, that they acted in self-defense. Third, that the police were to blame for not keeping the opposing sides apart. Fourth, that none of them could anticipate what Mr. Fields did because none knew him.

Continue reading here:
Charlottesville Rally Trial: Jury Finds Far-Right Conspiracy - The New York Times