- A gunman with an automatic weapon has opened
fire on a mosque in central Christchurch
- This can only be described as a terrorist
attack
- In the most extraordinary fashion he live
streamed. Uh, what we believe was his attack
in the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch church.
It seems it was filmed with some sort of Gopro
head mounted or body mounted camera. The footage
showed him firing indiscriminately at men,
women and children from close range
-He changed
Magazines 7 times
On March 15th after ending his Facebook livestream,
a gunman opened fire on two different mosques
in Christchurch, New Zealand.
- The total number of people have died in this
horrendous event are 49.
- Ultimately killing more than 50 people making this attack. The deadliest in New Zealand's recent history.
He wrote a 74 page manifesto
in which he describes why he's doing what he's doing.
And in that manifesto, a few things
become clear
He's a white nationalist who believe that Australia and New Zealand should
remain white
who saw the immigration of Muslims as a threat.
He believed in white genocide,
which argues that through race mixing and
immigration, white people will eventually
become extinct.
And he makes several references to Youtubers,
right wing speakers and other
voices that are popular in social media.
Before he embarked on his killing spree, he said
"Remeber Lads, Subscribe to PewDiepIe".
While I don't personally believe that Pewdiepie
is responsible for this terrorist incident
and many of the things that in the manifesto
can be boiled down to shit posting,
The incident got me thinking about how white supremacy has been rebranded and an age of social media
and it reminded me of a conversation that
I had at Youtube  HQ.
[ Music ]
I'm 28 years old and I've been a youtuber
since I was 15 years old.
I started making videos in my bedroom where I'd come to speak about how frustrating my day was.
"I'm tired of continuously trying to maintain"
I called it a Vee log, but I was later told that most people refer to it as a vlog.
Youtube was a home for me, a place for me to freely express
myself in ways that I didn't totally feel
comfortable in real life.
I documented my pursuit of education. And then later my transition started after I was accepted to the college of my dreams
I cultivated a small yet dedicated
following, but I never really wanted to be a youtuber.
-I don't feel like dealing with
the bullshit that goes on in the comments.
I get enough of it privately. I don't feel
like dealing with it publicly
I wouldn't say I really became one until after
Trayvon Martin was killed. And the reaction
to his death revealed to me that's some of
the people I considered. Friends didn't truly
have a positive view of black people as a
whole, but saw me as one of the good ones.
So this inspired me to shift my content from
discussions with my personal life, to my newfound
passion for social justice.
I wanted to express how I felt about what was happening in the world
while also educating people where I
could.
This content became popular because at the time I was one of very few people creating content like it
And of course in that process I was introduced to another side of Youtube.
A, side of the web where people instead of challenging racism,
frequently made excuses
for it.
And this is where I discovered that there is actually quite a prevalent presence
of content that was
at least sympathetic to white supremacy
and at most actually advocating
for white nationalism.
I've seen youtube change in the over decade
that I've been here. It used to be where we
post cat videos, but today we've seen the
rise of influencer culture and for some posting
videos online. Yeah. Is there a career
While some of these people make a living telling jokes or unboxing the newest gadgets,
others make money propagating hate.
Upon discovering this, I dismissed it
White supremacy is obviously
a bad idea that wouldn't hold up, but when
I looked into these channels, I saw that some
of them were quite popular and many of them
were able to make hundreds of thousands of
dollars through crowdfunding sites like Patreon.
I wondered why that was. Why are people from
different parts of the world using the same
language when they discuss white genocide
and supremacy?
Why are these doing so well and why do  so many people listen to them?
But in order to figure that out, I had to dive into white supremacy as an ideology
and try to understand why something that seems
to me so terrible can seem so attractive and
entertaining to others.
Well figure that out,
I had to go across the pond and back to around
the time when I started my youtube channel
in the early 2000s
In the early eighties
British fascist activists, John Tyndall established
a far right wing political party called
the British National Party.
Tyndall had a long history of organizing neo Nazi groups
in the fifties and sixties and had made several
attempts at getting a seat in the House of
Commons and the European Parliament to no success
-And Nationalism will come to the floor, Nationalism
will come to Victory in this country. And
we will build again a country that is great, strong, proud, free and white!
-Your policy is to send them home -
To send them home where possible or at least to resettle
them if there's not an the immediate home
availible to resettle them somewhere in the world.
- You see, so to so many immigrants,
this is home.
- Well it may be, but um....
That is not what is regarded by the majority
of the population.
-You talk of compensation. But what happens when money fails to persuade
the family to go...
- We have made it perfectly clear that
uh, this is going to be something obligatory, it has
to be.
Most of the BNP actions where street rallies
and marches that promoted the idea that only
white people should have access to British
citizenship and warning of the impending white
genocide where the white race would eventually
be out bread and effectively replaced by of color immigrants
Tyndall and the BNP have launched the dry
for new recruits to the is a prime target
is young white working class man. They look
for them around Scotland football grounds.
-The propaganda of movements like the BNP
is very seductive indeed. Um, you go up to
some kid on the football terrace who's got
no job, uh, perhaps the government have been
kind enough to put them on some scheme where he learns to cut grass or something like that for two years.
Um, and um, the BNP offering
instant solutions.
You see, a typical approach is:
"Any of your family ever been in the army, mate?"
Which the youngster is likely to reply.
"Yes.
My father and my grandfather. Yes"
And he fought for this country. For you
and the
government is giving it away. The government is giving it away...
To a load of bloody Ni****,
Asians, wogs, chinese, god knows what!
Your father fought for it for you,
It's being stolen from you by traitors!
Have you got the bottle of, you
got the guts to fight for it back?
It's your country!
And you see, an approach like that has everything
a boy and not position needs.
The Ku Klux Klan, The League of St. Andrews,  European Neo Nazis, the British National Party
These small and disparate groups and the extreme right.
I have one common connection
A hatred of the Jewish People.
- We hope to convince the British
people were the Holocaust is a lie.
And that this lie of the Holocaust has generated enormous race hate for the German people and for
any right wing nationalists like our selves
The Holocaust has definitely been over thrown by the works of the revisionist historians.
There is absolutely no doubt about it.
Remove the Jew, you remove the problem.
Pure, unadulterated Nazism. Pure and unadulterated.
They are Nazis and in private, John Tyndall
has admitted as much to me.
The BNP was a blatantly neo Nazi group complete
with Hitler references, so it would be an
understatement to say that they had a branding issue
That all changed When Nick Griffin took Tyndall's place in 1999.
Walking into a political party that had failed several times to secure seats in parliament,
Griffin was a breath
of fresh air with new ideas.
He wanted to modernize the movement and make it more digestible to the British public.
He started to rebrand the BNP's message to focus on immigration, the incompatibility of certain racial groups
with white people and the dangers of Islam.
- Whether it's called immigration, asylum
or manage migration. It's now a third world
flood which is wrecking this country.
After the BNP's Neo Nazi reputation had sullied
their image. Griffin would stress that they
were not a racist movement, but were simply
a movement responding to anti white racism.
He focused on white working class people who
were unsatisfied with the Labor Party and
felt that immigrants were taking their jobs.
Regularly, the BNP carried out community service in mostly white working class areas while wearing the BNP's logo
This slowly but surely started to change the public perception of the BNP.
- The BNP obviously polled 16% of the vote
in Barnsley. What'd you think about that?
-Ah, fine actually
-You think is a good thing
that the BNP, I've got a representative in Europe?
-Yes.
I voted BNP
-Did you, could Because the BNP scored very highly they scored 16% in Barnsley and what, what do you think's behind that?
-People are just fed up with the same ole same I think so they try wanted to try something else.
Under Griffin's leadership, the BNP gained
two seats in parliament with one going to himself
and by the time he was ousted from
the bop in 2009 they had won over 50 seats in local government
White nationalism wasn't
restraints of Britain and white nationalists
around the world started to see Griffin as
a political genius.
He had taken white supremacy and made it so digestible and positioned. It is so reasonable that it started to gain traction
In the April of the year 2000 he
met with a group of white nationalists from Texas.
At this meeting he stressed his methods
of selling white nationalism.
There's a difference between selling out your
ideas, and selling ideas.
And British National Party isn't about selling out these ideas
.
Which are your ideas too
, but we are determined now to sell them.
And that means basically
to use the sellable words, as I say
, freedom, security, identity, democracy, and
nobody can criticize them
Nobody can come at you attack you on those ideas. They are salable.
Perhaps one day, once by being rater more subtle than we've got ourselves in a position where we control the British broadcasting media
Then perhaps one day the British people
might change their mind. And say yes, every last one must go.
Perhaps they will one day.
But if you hold it out as your sole lane to start with, you're going to get absolutely
nowhere
So instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity
The ultimate goal in? An all white ethno state,
how do they get there?
By putting a more presentable face onto white nationalism and softening
their message.
Sitting right next to him during this talk was former grand wizard of the KKK,
David Duke
It's no shock that methods that worked in the UK would also be translated to the United States
On October 27 2016 motherJones published an article titled Meet the Dapper White Nationalists riding the Trump wave.
The article profiled Richard Spencer, who created the term Alt-right, a movement about white identity
The article makes several
references to Spencer's usage of meme, such
as pepe the frog as useful tools in spreading
his white nationalist message. The article
also gives you a look into what white nationalists
movements look like today. Spencer believes
in an idealic future where the main criteria
for citizenship would be whiteness. Whiteness
is loosely defined by him, but it would for
sure exclude most Hispanics, blacks, Asians,
Muslims, and Jewish people.
-Why? Why did Jews need a safe space? state,
Do you want a safe space do you-
-Do I want a white ethno a state I can't live in? No
- Why would you be against that?
-Well, let me see. There was
a slavery that was a kind....
- So there for we can't have an ethno state?
- There was apartheid and that didn't work out so well
-it didn't work out well for us.
-It didn't work out well for anybody a very, very bad idea and I'm
- Africans have
benefited from their experience with white supremacy.
He's hopeful that non white people will agree
to return to the land of their ancestors as
in his view that would be the best for everyone.
This interview was conducted before the election,
but Richard Spencer was incredibly excited
at the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president.
-Donald Trump came along and I feel like my
movement and my ideology, we can be a kind
of vanguard for a presidential candidate that
his, his Arrow is pointing in our direction.
In fact, He argued that if Trump did win,
it would be in part because of the alt right's
effective usage of memes
- The idea that Hitler has a monopoly on identity
for white people is just simply ridiculous.
A month later after Trump won the presidency,
while at a conference in Washington, a video
was taken at him screaming,
- hail, Trump,
hail our people, hail victory
- to an audience of men doing a Nazi salute
After that, he
did a series of interviews for various news
outlets discussing how a Trump win is a win
for the alt right and a win for white nationalism at large,
and many of them complimented the
way that he dressed.
-Are these shoes a little too casual?
- I don't think so.
When most of us think of a white supremacist, we
think about an obnoxious skinhead or a hooded
KKK member burning a cross on our front yards.
But Richard Spencer dresses like a church
boy. He's well spoken, he's charismatic, and
to some people he's good looking.
Spencer was solidified as a figure we're speaking to with ideas that were worthy of being spread.
To me, this confused me because despite his
church boy looks, his rhetoric is inherently
dehumanizing to myself and other people of
color.
Spencer dreams of a future where people of color just pick up and go back to lands
that are completely foreign to them
so that he can secure a white ethno state in America.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that
this is unlikely to happen, and if it does,
it's unlikely to happen without violence.
To me, his ideas are bad and his goals are
hurtful, but one of our founding principles
in this country is our right to freedom of
speech
Spencer's existence started a debate about whether or not we should give people like him a platform,
especially because at the time the media was so fixated on him.
In the August of 2017 a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee was going to be torn
down in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Upon receiving this news, Jason Kessler, a
white supremacist, activist and member of
the alt right, organized the unite the right
rally. After a year of protesting the statue's removal.
Richard Spencer was a featured speaker.
This rally would be the alt right's first big event.
The movement had mostly functioned
online, so a lot of people could easily dismiss
it as a movement for basement dwelling white
men who were angry at the world. Knowing this,
the Daily Stormer, an incredibly popular blog
among white supremacist published the post all
but begging the attendees to look presentable,
hip, sexy and dangerous. In The blog post,
Andrew Anglin advises the men attending the
event to not wear anything that could possibly
resemble the uniform of previous white nationalist
movements. While the blog was flanked with
examples of how well dressed Nazis were
he stressed that Nazi paraphernalia had, as
he said, too much baggage. It even tells them
to go to the gym and to wear fitted pants
and t shirts, not skinny jeans or belly shirts
because that would be too feminine and we
don't want that. They were as they have in
the past trying to rebrand what white supremacy
looks like and even heavily advised that the
movement should have a new uniform
At the rally, most of them wore beige, Khakis and Polos
that were fitted. For the most part,
- We're honoring the founding fathers who
were white, were honoring all of the great
white men who are being smeared and defamed
and torn down.
- The interesting thing about this rally was
that while they tried to hide their racism
under the guise of free speech and the uniforms,
they didn't really do a great job. They couldn't
really hide the violence and vitriol behind
what they believed in.
Through the crowd you heard:
"You will not replace us!"
And a variation of that phrase
"Jews Will Not replace us"
, obviously referring to the concept
of white genocide where white countries are
outbred and replace by those who they deem
as nonwhite.
"One People, one nation, end immigration"
A white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of protestors killinga woman named Heather Hayer and injuring several other people
Jason Kessler's initial response
to an audience during a news conference about
the incident was,
- I would like to condemn any of the violence
that happened yesterday. i disavow anything
that led to folks getting hurt.
But a few days later on Twitter, he stayed
at that Heather hair was a fat, disgusting
communist who deserved to die because communists
have killed over 94 million people and her
death was just payback.
He would delete the tweet the next morning and blame it on Ambien, Xanax, and alcohol.
Ultimately, the Unite,
the right rally did not make white nationalists
look good and Richard Spencer and other white
supremacists distanced themselves from Kessler.
When Kessler was organizing the 2018 unite
the right rally, he distanced himself from
Spencer because to him the alt right had become
synonymous with neo Nazism. And that isn't
who he says he is.
When I first met Spencer, he made my skin
crawl. He was just a creepy individual. Everything
that he said was stilted, like he was not
being, uh, completely forthcoming about what
he was saying. Right. He had a poster of Adolf
Hitler on his wall. Um, at the time I was
thinking all this neo Nazi stuff in that was
popping up on 4chan was more ironic, more
for shock humor. Uh, later on I would come
to find out that that is not the case and
that's part of why we had so many problems
that unite the right. Because the, uh, the
neo Nazi contingent was not a bug, it was
a feature and that's directly due to the influence
of people like Spencer, who I think are taking
legitimate populous anger by white people
about the discrimination and replacement policies
against them right now. And he's diverting
it into this neo Nazi garbage that every white
person in the country is going to turn against.
-Is your message for today that white supremacy
should be the main message here?
No, I'm not a white supremacist,
No, it's that white people should have the same treatment
as any other groups. We should be able to
stand up for ourselves. We're becoming a minority
in the United States and Europe by 2050. I
think there's a lot of anti white discrimination
in this country that is not being faced. And
people have to walk on egg shells because
other groups have, uh, organizations like
the Naacp or the Adl that will stand up for
black people or Jewish people if they are
being harassed because of their race. But
white people don't have that and we don't
end because of that. I feel like there's unequal
treatment.
Similarly, Richard Spencer denies that he
has a white supremacist, but instead calls
himself an identitarian with race being the
foundation of his identity.
Porchlight March, the Nazis were the only
ones to ever do that. -I'm talking about you
screaming Nazi slogans in Charlottesville.
- But first off, I don't, I don't go around
screaming slogans at, at, at anything. And
the slogan is actually, uh, you will not replace us.
-Right. And I also heard Jews will not
replace us .
- You might've heard of that. You were, you there?
 - Yeah 
- I'm sure some
people a shouted that. So what?
And see these sorts of semantics are part
of the rebranding of white supremacy. Remember
Nick Griffin reframe the BNPs historically
neo Nazi platform as not racist, but simply
critical of immigration and concern for the
state of white people. This pivot is important
in selling the message that their concerns
are valid in the same way that wearing a Nazi
uniform would be too obvious saying outright
that they want all white ethno state would
seem to racist and most people at least in
theory accept that racism is a bad thing and
they wouldn't want to co sign it, but they
might be open to hearing story after story
of how certain non white immigrant groups
are dangerous and should be prevented from
coming into the country. Kessler and Spencer
may disagree with each other and identify
themselves differently, but they both still
dream of a society without people of color.
They still believe that non white people immigrating
into America will lead to white genocide.
They still believe that immigrants, especially
when they're Muslim, are incompatible with
white people and shouldn't share space. The
unite the right rally did a great job at demonstrating
how white nationalists want to be seen and
how they truly feel. They carefully tried to
curate a presentable version of their message
and it didn't work. Several different white
supremacist groups with different ideologies,
but largely the same goals came together with
different approaches. This also shows that
their ideologies are intertwined, whether
they're a proud neo Nazi or church boys concerned
about the future of the white race. Remember
David Duke, the former KKK leader at American
politician who was sitting next to Nick Griffin
while he spoke about the longterm goals of
the rebranding of white nationalism? Well,
he was also at the rally and he had this to
say about it.
- What does today represent? Your camera's
right here. What does today represents? -
- This represents the a turning point for the people.
We are determined to take our country back. We're going to
fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's
what we believe him. That's what we voted
for Donald Trump because he said he's going
to take our country back. That's what they
gotta do.
Remember that one of Griffin's longterm goals
was getting white nationalism to the point
where it was legitimized by the government
and slowly but surely the goals of white nationalism
can be reached. And that's the thing people
can debate about whether or not Trump is a
racist, but either way, the racist seem to
think that he's on their side.
Some of the things that he's saying are issues
that we've been tackling for years now. When
we talk about globalism, we talk about America
first as these sort of thing is bringing back
American jobs. These are things that that
he's hitting on. So it's, it's put a lot of
our, uh, nationalism, sort of becoming a mainstream
and white nationalists at large believe that
even if they have slight disagreements with
Trump, ultimately he's working towards their
goals. And this has caused some people to
become embolden, especially as Trump minimizes
their impact and refuses to alienate them.
Back to Pewdiepie. When he heard that his
name was mentioned in a terrorist attack,
he quickly moved to disavow the terrorist
and his actions. But people began to
point out that Pewdiepie had previously done
things many people would consider we're dog
whistles to white supremacists. And they also
pointed out that he was currently following
several people that many consider to be the
gateways to white nationalism.
Kit O'connel took a screenshot of those people and posted it with the caption. Here are some of the
Nazi scum. Pewdiepie was following until recently.
Why is he following them? Because Pewdie is
a f**** Nazi, I don't want to dismiss O'connell's
point here that many of the people on that
list flirt with white nationalism and some
of them I'd say Nazi-ism.
However, I think that dismissing them all
his Nazis and Pewdiepie by extension as one
over looks the reason why people often follow this
particular group of people. I know that it
sounds like splitting hairs, but I think part
of understanding how white nationalism has
been rebranded is understanding how white
nationalists target people who don't yet hold
white nationalist views. As I pointed out
earlier, the BNP focused most of their energy
towards recruiting men who were young working
class and felt as though there was currently
no position for them in society. And this
tactic started long before the Internet would
become a haven for young men who felt exactly
that way. Young men in that position frequently
desire some sort of guidance and when you're
that lonely it's sometimes easier to find
that online. Youtube user, Faraday speaks
recently published a video discussing how
he went from being a fairly progressive person
to falling down the alt right rabbit hole
through some of the people that Pewdiepie
used to follow.
I fell down the alt right rabbit hole. One
thing that was always true for me throughout
high school and when I was younger was I was
always much a very liberal person. Fast forward
to my graduation and I go to college. I come
from a poor rural background and I thought
that I was going to get myself out of this
situation, you know, get an engineering degree,
go, you know, get to know environmentalism,
maybe solar panels or something. And I was
going to change the world and accomplish all
my dreams and get away from all these like
it's funny looking back, conservative type
of a society that I felt was too regimented
and wanted to control me. But when I went
to college, that's not what happened. I got
depressed. Um, and there weren't a lot of
people like me there and I got in with the
wrong crowds and I just, I got depressed,
I got lost.
I was looking for the wrong kinds of validation
and I ended up flunking out. I became very
depressed upon returning home. My friends
had all left. I was alone. I didn't have a
good relationship with my family. I would
stay in my room and I would just surf the
web all day and I went back to youtube. You
know, something that was comforting for me
when I was in high school going through, you
know, these types of experiences take this
type of frustration. And what I was looking
for was I was looking for a way to fix myself.
Eventually, as I was looking through all these
videos, this little video is Youtuber popped
up in my sidebar. It was Stefan Molyneux.
Stefan resonated with me because Stefan had
shared the same experiences that I had shared.
Stefan, he had a traumatic childhood, he had
issues with his mother, he had issues with
the rest of his family, had issues with the
society around, and he was angry with society
around him that it never stepped in and did
anything to help him.
And these were all things that I've felt that
rings so true to me. And then he taught, you
know, he, he started talking about how he
was able to get out of it. He blamed a lot
of his situation on liberalism. He was charming
and intelligent and he had different message
with it, with content that having different
format than I was used to and, and I just,
I wanted so hard to believe that this person
who was like me was able to fix themselves.
I, in my mind, I set him up as an authority
figure as I watched more of his content. I
mean, you know, for the first couple months
it was just self help stuff. But then I started
to notice that he had all these other videos
about politics and social commentary and you
know, he would talk about like the relationships
between men and women and he would talk about,
you know, the state and behind it he always
had the veneer of like he was a renaissance
man, calls himself a philosopher.
And that is trying,  bringing the objective truth
to the world. And his philosophy was called
objectivism. And I was young and naive when
he would feed me this information about history
and about, you know, what he saw as scientific
facts and his theories in the social commentaries
because of the benefits that I'd gotten from
him and the pain that he had relieved from
me. I built, I assumed, I assumed he was honest.
Slowly over time, I started to that a lot
of those ideas that he had about society and
about politics, on top of that he had, he
had guests on his show. And so when he would
bring a guest on, they would have their own
little pet issue that they would want to talk
about Islam, feminism, all types of things.
I thought, well, Stef's vetted these people
and he talks to positively with them in the
video and he agrees with them.
And so I would set them up as an authority
figure and then I would start, I would go
to their youtube channel and I would
start consuming their content. By the way,
Stef's , ideas. This was 2014 when I found
him. His ideas were a lot more mild. And so
I got introduced to people like Crowder and
Shapiro and I, you know, once I started listening
to them, I started believing into a lot of
the conservative principles. And then from
there I got introduced to people like Lauren
southern and Kevin Mckenna. And then finally
by the end of it, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm
listening to Jared Taylor talk about racial
differences and it, it all had this sense
that it was all connected and they had clear
outgroups on who the enemy was and who was
reliable. You know, the left, the liberals,
the Communists, you know, there was always
this conspiracy at the gates that the left
is trying to take us down and it seems a plausible
because the left does seem to have domination
on things like Hollywood and a lot of the
culture.
And so the, you know, these conservatives,
they would play it off like they were victims.
Like their free speech was being taken and
their values were being destroyed. And I bought
into that rhetoric. I started out as a libertarian
mind you when I watched Stefan's content.
Before that I was a liberal. But then as I
listen to Stefan had picked up libertarian
ideas, what would happen was I would get to
a point where, you know, I wanted to libertarianism
cause I wanted a free society. But then I
realized that, well, we can't have a free
society if there isn't social cohesion and
there isn't a strong structure to bind us
together. And so I would start... i slowly
found myself turning into a conservative.
I started out as a libertarian and then because
I thought that we needed a social cohesion,
I became a conservative.
And then from there I thought that the conservatives
weren't going far enough, you know, we call
them cucks, and, and I started to believe
that we needed strong borders and we needed
a national identity and we needed to raise
the birth rates. Um, and, and to me it wasn't
necessarily white birth rates. I saw it more
as like we need a more intelligent people
having children. As I started to learn more
as I listened to people like Jared Taylor
or you know, Molyneux started putting out
a lot more race content. Talking about race,
race and Iq, talking about the bell curve.
Um, and you know, they use this term called
race realism. And the idea is that there's
differences in the races depending on where
they evolved in the world. They're immutable,
you know, they're tied to biology. I bought
into that and because of that I started to
see society as a product of this co, you know,
the, the, the combination between culture
and race and race being so important because
it's tied to Iq. I bought more and more into
it.
I went further down the funnel and at the
point where I landed, I wouldn't call it full
alt right and I didn't go that far, but I
did entertain ideas and especially during
the Trump era about a strong leader and a
unified party. And you know, we had to expel
the invaders, which I saw as like Muslims
and, and Marxists. And we had to expel the
traders, which, you know, once again were
like the communists and, and then in anybody
that was promoting degeneracy within our culture,
I just kept falling deeper and deeper into
this and it appealed to me because it made
me feel a sense of belonging, it made me feel
a sense of, of progressing forward both progressing
for an and preserving what we have.
There are many dangers in the way that white
nationalism has been rebranded. But one of
the biggest ones is that it doesn't seem like
white nationalism. It's very rarely presented
to you as someone trying to sell you a luxury
condo on the ethno state. You have to be convinced
and it's hard to convince someone who was
raised in a diverse society that diversity
is the reason for all of their problems. Another
danger is that it's been rebranded in a way
where it can be denied. Remember Nick Griffin
said
There's a difference between selling out your
ideas, and selling ideas. And British National
Party isn't about selling out these ideas.
Which are your ideas too, but we are determined
now to sell them. And that means basically
to use the salable words, as I say, freedom,
security, identity, democracy, nobody can
criticize them. Nobody can come at you and
attack you on those ideas. They are salable.
Perhaps one day, once by being rater more
subtle than we've got ourselves in a position
where we control the British broadcasting
media. Then perhaps one day the British people
might change their mind. And say yes, every
last one must go.
It's strategic. It's intentional. Plausible
deniability is part of why these ideas can
grow and spread. And they know this. Most
of the people on that list don't produce content
that is blatantly white nationalist, but they
often create content that feeds into its ideologies.
And while they're all different, and some
of them even disagree with each other, they
often work in Congress. Frequently people
are drawn in with things that are innocuous.
Initially, young men may be drawn to Jordan
Peterson because he seems like a father figure
that gives sagely advice. However, as you
follow him, you hear more and more about things
like birth rates, immigration levels, and
the proper role of women in society under
a man. He'll collaborate and interact with
people who flirt closer and closer to white
nationalism. And people who may have been
following him for sagely advice are now introduced
to people with more severe ideologies.
So while Jordan Peterson on his own, may not
believe in the alt right as a movement, as
someone who is against identity politics,
even for white people following him frequently
leads you to following people with more blatantly
white nationalist views who also discuss
birth rates, immigration, and the proper role
of a woman in society. So these different
speakers connect through similar criticisms
and while they may have slightly different
ideas from each other, frequently their audience
is the same. And that audience is also part
of PewDiePie's audience. So what now is Pewdiepie a nazi? I don't think so. I do, however,
believe that he's incredibly useful to
those who want to spread white nationalism.
And he's being courted by those who know that
his platform is probably the most effective
at doing this. Think about it. White nationalists
had been fighting for decades to mainstream
their ideology.
In a world where everyone seems tethered to
the Internet. Having the support of the most
subscribed to person on youtube means a lot,
not only to those talking heads, but to Pewdiepie's
followers. While someone like Ben Shapiro
isn't a white nationalist, he and Spencer
have similar ideas about immigration and how
Muslims are incompatible with American culture.
Pewdiepie also mentioned Ben Shapiro several
times and Shapiro has even hosted a segment
on his channel from what I can tell, Pewdiepie Thanks. Ben Shapiro is a meme and doesn't
really take him seriously or anything. He
says, seriously, however, maybe that's not
how it's being seen by his audience. People
who both support Shapiro and think that he's
ridiculous and meme worthy might see as existence
on Pewdiepie's channel as support. It has
the benefit of not alienating people who support
some of the more damaging things that he says
while also maintaining his audience who laughs
at him.
Pewdiepie tries to be apolitical so he doesn't
criticize Shapiro, but while Shapiro may post
something meme worthy, he is at his core very
political. While Pewdiepie has said that he
doesn't support hate or hate groups, he hasn't
done it in a way that would actively alienate
the white nationalists who follow him. Situations
like this have always confused me because
while sure you can't really control your followers,
you can make it clear that you disagree with
their ideologies. You can make it clear that
you don't want the support of people who hold
certain beliefs, but doing that will potentially
mean losing money and I get that. Like I said,
I didn't always want for this to be my job,
but now it is and whenever you make a bold
stance, especially one that goes against the
status quo, you often experience a huge loss.
While I've tried to be apolitical, I've recognized
that living functioning and succeeding as
a black transgender woman is incredibly political.
My mere existence is the fodder for political
discourse and debate. My experiences minimized
and the ongoing conversations about whether
or not I should have access to civil rights.
I have made the decision to stand up for what's
right, even though it often comes at a great
loss. That's a decision I've made for what
I believe is the greater good, but it's one,
many won't make. It's my content that got
me invited to the youtube headquarters in
2017 where I met with various teams and got
the chance to sit down and ask the CEO of
Youtube what she's doing about this intentional
rebranding of white nationalism and how it
had the capacity to radicalize people towards
terrorism. And the answer I got was both expected
and incredibly depressing.
