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Online Extremism - A Case Study concerning Action Zealandia
30 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M review two recent papers concerning Aotearoa's white supremacist/nationalist group, Action Zealandia, which look at why violent rhetoric online does not necessarily lead to violent acts offline.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Humorous Start: The Dangers of Reading?
00:00:00
Speaker
Right, it's official. You've given me cancer. Huzzah, I mean what? Cancer, the big C, the tumis and tumour, the cells that will not die. I have it. You've given it to me. And how did I do that? I might remind you I am in China.
00:00:16
Speaker
Fire the eyes, the gateway to the soul, the oculus! That's how you did it, you magnificent bastard. I see. Well, you see. We all see. We all see for ice same. Anyway, I'm still not getting it. Reading! Reading, man, reading! I've told you a million times I don't read, because it gives you cancer, and you've made me read two weeks in a row.
00:00:36
Speaker
It'll be three CERN. What? We'll get onto that in a moment. So I gave you cancer by forcing you to read. Yes. And how is this cancer shown itself? What are the symptoms? Tiredness, cantankerousness and inability to sleep. No wanting to go to work. No wanting to get up in the morning. My eyesight is shocking. All signs of advanced reading based cancer.
00:00:58
Speaker
Or I'll put it to you old age. Plus being a parent and too much Mountain Dew. You take that back, I will not stand for that. How dare you slam the dew. Apologies, I will refrain from talking about highly caffeinated drinks in future. Drinks which are statistically worse than smoking for your long term health. You're suggesting my cancer is drink based?
00:01:19
Speaker
Where do you think Mountain Dew comes from? Mountains, obviously. Yes, Josh. Mountains. Mountains of academic journal articles crushed by machines until such time liquefy, creating the perfect toxic broom. Good lord. Yes. Yes. You've been thinking more like you've been drinking. Yeah, I don't wonder how you're going to be in the Scrooge.
Introduction of Hosts and Locations
00:01:48
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dentus. No mai hari mai, and welcome to the podcast's guide to the conspiracy called Josh Edison Toko Inua Ko Em Dentus Ia. Things are nice in Auckland. How's Shu Hai, China? Still very hot. Still very, very hot. And I've been for a black ride today because I had a perishable good day to pick up.
00:02:16
Speaker
Well, you got some exercise and that's what matters. It's true. I did. And I do. I do matter. You're quite right. I matter. We all do. Unless we belong to certain white supremacist organizations, perhaps. Well, precisely.
Maori Language Week and Nationalist Reactions
00:02:34
Speaker
Yes, no. So it is it is Maori Language Week here in Aotearoa and appropriately
00:02:42
Speaker
Sort of. We're talking about something standing in New Zealand, but kind of the opposite because it's people who would take a very dim view of Maori Language Week, I would imagine. Yes, you would imagine correctly the people we're talking about. Well, I mean, they're white nationalists, they're white supremacists, they're segregationists.
00:03:01
Speaker
They don't want any of their Maori in their communities, but they live in a place where Maori are indigenous.
Infiltration of White Supremacist Groups
00:03:09
Speaker
Yes, so we mentioned a little while ago, I can't remember when this first came out, that there was a, what would you call it, a study, a case study of sorts, where an academic infiltrated
00:03:23
Speaker
essentially the local white supremacist group actions of India and they have now published two papers about what their about sort of extremist groups in general using actions of India
00:03:38
Speaker
as a case study, and we're going to talk about those papers today. Yes, we'll be looking at two papers. One is explaining the gap between online violence extremism and offline inaction among far-right groups, a study of action zalandia from 2019 to 21, which is my remit, whilst Josh is going to be looking at how online interaction radicalises, while group involvement restrains, a case study of action zalandia from 2019 to 2021.
Analyzing Online vs. Offline Extremism
00:04:06
Speaker
both by Chris Wilson and James Halpin. I'm not sure which of them is the one who infiltrated actions with India, but it is. I believe it was James. They do, yes. So as we will see, there's a lot of crossover between the two papers. They're covering the same ground, just putting emphasis on different points. I suppose we should do things properly and like play a chime or a sting or some sort of soundboardy thing and then get into it properly. Indeed.
00:04:40
Speaker
Right, so I guess we can skip over some of the... We can take it as read, basically, that they both start with kind of an introduction to the literature on online extremism and a bit of an intro to Action Zealandia, but we'll then get into it later.
00:04:57
Speaker
They also both go through the, they have a section, which I'm assuming is fairly standard for things like this on the ethical considerations. Forecasters, yes. You basically have to front first.
00:05:13
Speaker
we went through the right process to do these things. Now, we'll need to talk about exactly what they did with respect to ethics approval here, because there's something very interesting about the kind of study they did. But yes, I mean, basically, they both they both start the same way, in that they have to say a literature review. And then from those introductions, they pick out the things in the literature, which they think is salient for their particular investigation.
00:05:41
Speaker
So the paper that I looked at explaining the gap, they're basically interested in two rival theories, or at least not necessarily rival, two potentially competing or complementary theories about online versus offline extremism, which is one, violent rhetoric is cathartic, so it fulfills a psychological need. So these people get together and they talk about stuff
00:06:08
Speaker
and the violent rhetoric that they express in their online communities allows them to form bonds and also allows them to release rage and anger to fulfill the psychological need. But then the rival theory is, and I'm quoting here from the paper, leaders of extremist groups often seek to avoid violence because it would be counterproductive to their goals of survival, recruitment and establishing a mass white nationalist movement.
00:06:38
Speaker
So they're going, well look, on one level you kind of need your group members to engage in rhetoric because it's cathartic and it brings people together. At the same time, if your members are seen to engage in violent rhetoric, it's counterproductive for the aims of the movement. So how does a group like actionslandia square that circle?
00:07:01
Speaker
And so these are both theories to explain the gap between very extreme rhetoric online, and yet for the most part, a lack of such extreme action. Yeah, because that's an interesting thing about action Zalandia. If you study the rhetoric they engage in with their podcast, which we've talked about on this podcast in the panel, so we talked with Byron Clark,
00:07:26
Speaker
and you look at their telegram messages, the things they did on Discord in the early days, their early Reddit threads. It's very violent, it's very misogynistic, it's very racist, but Action Zalandia itself doesn't seem to have engaged in extremist action as a group. While some members may have done some terrible things, the group itself has tried to avoid engaging in violent action. They've always presented themselves as being
00:07:55
Speaker
a young man's health club trying to make young men better through, you know, bodybuilding, cutting down trees and cleaning beaches. And so there is this kind of curious question here. Why are they so violent in their rhetoric and yet not particularly violent in their outward behavior? So should we should we go through the papers one at a time or sort of mash them up? Maybe, maybe, maybe we should try going through one at a time. Both papers are
00:08:24
Speaker
fairly similar, so I will probably cut out some of the examples I would talk about because they actually appear in the second paper you're looking at. So I'll try to gloss through the paper as quickly as possible, but one thing which is common to both papers
00:08:40
Speaker
is the discussion of the methodology and the ethical considerations.
Ethical Challenges in Extremist Research
00:08:43
Speaker
As you point out, most papers of this type need to state that they got ethics approval to engage in a case study looking at actual human beings, whether or not you think that white nationalists actually qualify as actual human beings, which is by the by something I'm not entirely convinced of myself. But assuming that white nationalists could be human, if you're going to engage in research work on human beings, you need ethics approval.
00:09:09
Speaker
Due to things like, say, the Unfortunate Experiment or the Togusky Syphilis experiments in the United States we talked about in a previous episode, when you start experimenting on human beings, you need to make sure there are the right controls in there so you're not abusing those human beings. But one thing they note is that the author
00:09:29
Speaker
never out of themselves as engaging in a study of Action Zelandia members to the members of Action Zelandia and this historically has been taken as a bad thing. If you're doing an anthropological or sociological study of a community it is expected that the researcher will tell people I am engaging in a study of you so that you're not
00:09:54
Speaker
you're not borrowing on people's time, you're not misleading people with respect to a whole bunch of things, you're being honest and open with them. The problem with studying extremists is that A, if you out yourself as a researcher, they're probably going to talk to you differently than actually how they would normally interact, and B,
00:10:17
Speaker
at the very least they're probably going to troll you, or at the very most they're probably going to engage in fairly deleterious harm to your person. So they note in their ethical consideration sections in both papers that they didn't out themselves as researchers whilst engaging in the study, and this is now an accepted way of studying extremist groups in
00:10:42
Speaker
given those problems of both they'll behave differently if they think they're being investigated. So they'll probably downplay their rhetoric and be there is a serious chance of harm to the researcher if they out themselves was doing that research as well. Yes. So they I mean, the issue of consent, I guess, comes in a lot when it's when we're talking about ethical considerations. And as they sort of say, getting consent wasn't really going to be possible without
00:11:12
Speaker
completely harming the integrity of the study. So they were given ethical approval. One of the conditions was that they make sure, anytime they talk about any particular members of actions of India, it's always just member A or member B, everything's anonymized. And so the fact that the people involved remain anonymous in these papers
00:11:34
Speaker
I think was a condition on them getting ethical approval for the study, but ethical approval they did get, and so they commenced these, was it 18 months undercover? Yes, yeah, one and a half years. One thing which is interesting, and I know I say a lot of things interesting, but I maintain this thing. There's lots of things that are interesting.
00:11:58
Speaker
One thing which is interesting is that the author admits that to get into actions alandia, they had to agree with several white nationalist statements as part of an interview process. So there was some degree of deception going in. To get in, they had to act and appear to be a white nationalist. Also, the author notes, and I'm quoting here, the participant author was aware of his positionality within the group
00:12:28
Speaker
and the potential to influence the discussion or activities of the group. To avoid this, he followed and observed the group
00:12:36
Speaker
rather than proposing activities or topics of discussion himself. So there was also the awareness that you could engage in a bit of entrapment here by infiltrating the group and go, oh, there's certain races you don't like, would you like to speak into my lapel and tell me exactly what you think of those people? Or, oh, there's a dairy down the road with an ethnic person in it for
00:13:01
Speaker
Why don't we just wander down there and cause some trouble? The author was aware that that kind of activity, that kind of entrapment, would contaminate the work. And so he went out of his way to ensure he was always observing and never influencing, or at least trying to minimize his footsteps within the organization.
00:13:21
Speaker
Another one interesting point, they say the author did not give his real name, like when being interviewed for Johnny DeGroote, did not give his real name, although this aligned with group practice, no members used real names. Yeah, and actually we'll be talking about that in the bonus episode to a certain extent, because one of the members whose pseudonym is within the group Zane,
00:13:42
Speaker
I will be running as Councillor for a council. I mean, we talked about this last week in the bonus episode. There's more to say this week as well. Stay tuned. So your paper then, once they've got through this preamble, where do they take it?
Action Zealandia's Shift Post-Christchurch
00:13:58
Speaker
Well, in the section entitled Violent Rhetoric and the Avoidance of Extremis Violence, the disjuncture between violent online rhetoric and offline action, and as a philosopher, I'd say, really appreciate these nice long section titles here. These people could have an absolute time doing philosophy.
00:14:16
Speaker
They note that normally we take it that people say more extreme things online than they would ever express in person. I've got a few quotes here. The threshold for expressing moral outrage and by extension hate, anger, prejudice, and contempt is much lower than it is offline. So people are more inclined to engage in outrageous speech acts in online communities
00:14:45
Speaker
than they are when they're talking with people face to face.
00:14:49
Speaker
The business model of much social media and the nature of online interaction encourages users to choose extreme statements and positions over more moderate and nuanced views. The quest for shares, likes and engagement provides an almost habitual or addictive incentive to move to the polls of a particular debate. So the fact that social media is about upvoting or downvoting comments, liking or
00:15:16
Speaker
retweeting or quote tweeting means that people end up saying extreme things with respect to their social media years which once again may not reflect how they would actually talk with people. So the members of extremist groups use violent talk often in the confines of various free spaces such as homes, parties and online forums as a key part of the process of building and sustaining a collective group identity.
00:15:45
Speaker
So once again in their own private spaces they engage in a kind of retro which they just don't tend to engage with when they're talking with everyday normal people outside their groups. And they also note that most of the moral outrage, as you put moral outrage here in scare quotes, concerns the usual suspects. Does it turn the usual suspects around before Casablanca?
00:16:11
Speaker
Or is that one of those things that was invented by a movie language? It wouldn't surprise me, I don't know for sure. Sorry, in this context, are the usual suspects the people who white supremacists blame stuff on? Yeah, so yeah, so it's either they're not blaming the film, the usual suspects.
00:16:30
Speaker
Because I wasn't sure if we were talking about the usual suspects in this context for Twitter and Facebook as being the people who enable this stuff, but yes. Although basically blaming any film that stars Kevin Spacey for the deleterious state of the world is probably a good idea these days. Well these days, yes.
00:16:48
Speaker
So this is still speaking in general terms at this point, is it? Yes, and then they start moving on to the discussion of Action Zelandia. So to quote, there's a large discrepancy between members' discourse online, that's the members of Action Zelandia, and the way they act offline.
00:17:04
Speaker
members regularly engage in explicit, violent, and abusive online discourse as a way of demonstrating their commitment to the white nationalist cause, policing the opinions of newcomers and members, and building a sense of collective identity. For most, if not all members, this extremist interaction online is enough and reduces any impulse for offline violent action, indeed, much offline action at all.
00:17:31
Speaker
The group's leadership has also come to see mass casualty violence as counterproductive to its broader goals. The group has faced growing pressure from anti-fascist activists and police after a series of arrests and investigations, motivating the group's leaders to direct members to avoid discussing violence and to focus more on the construction of a white nationalist community. Yeah, there's talk, and we'll see this in the other paper as well, there's talk of how they want to move into more of a
00:17:59
Speaker
I guess a political goal, they want to influence society. There's also, I'm not sure if it comes up in this paper, it was mentioned in the other one, they have this idea that you see in certain communities that are storms of ruin, that trouble's coming. There's going to be some sort of collapse of society or race war or something like that.
00:18:25
Speaker
And so they don't need to be doing anything too inflammatory. They can just sit back and wait for it to happen and be ready for when the day comes.
00:18:36
Speaker
Yes, and actually the other thing to note here, so people outside of Aotearoa may not be aware that the government of New Zealand has recently relaxed almost every single COVID-19 piece of legislation other than requiring masks in risk homes and medical establishment.
00:18:56
Speaker
Now, there's a group back home called Voices for Freedom, which emerged during the pandemic as a kind of resistance political movement against mass mandates, vaccine mandates and the like. All those mandates have now been rescinded and it now seems that Voices for Freedom, rather than disappearing, having seen their goal established, all the mandates are gone.
00:19:19
Speaker
And they're going, oh, no, no, there are other political activities we need to engage in. And so you see this kind of thing of, you know, we just need to influence the politics. We started off as a single issue movement, but we want to establish ourselves as a rival political force.
00:19:37
Speaker
which means we're going to have views outside of what established us in order to try and maintain our actual anti-government sentiment as a kind of political centre. Political centre is the wrong term there, but you get what I meant. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, so where are we at then? So we're still just... Well, now we have the N-cell hypothesis, because one thing which the author notes
00:20:05
Speaker
is he went to a whole bunch of the actual offline activities. And so they write, we propose an additional explanation for the avoidance of mass casualty violence by the group. We demonstrate that face-to-face interaction can have several effects which work to temper the path to violence. Online, people often appear heroic, edgy and inspiring.
00:20:28
Speaker
But compared to their heroic online avatars, many young white nationalists are awkward, disorganized, and uninspiring in real life. Once users have met offline, their previous online anonymity often no longer applies, leading to a reduction in radicalism.
00:20:45
Speaker
At the same time, involvement in physical meetings and activities can act as a release valve for extremist sentiment. Such meetings not only provide a sense of friendship, a key reason for many joining the group, but participants also feel they are doing something for the cause. For many, we argue, this reduces any impulse for violence which might emerge from engagement and isolated online discourse. Meeting offline can act as an outlet after the pressure cooker environment of online extremism.
00:21:14
Speaker
Yes, and that quote also is pretty much word for word in the other paper. That was the money quote, I think, that was getting copied around a bit when this paper first went online, the whole
00:21:28
Speaker
online people often appear more heroic blah blah blah compared to their heroic online avatars many young white nationalists are awkward disorganized and uninspiring in real life so there's a lot of oh oh really so these people who act like like like like god saviours of the white race online are actually a bit pathetic and useless in real life who would have thought of course as we shall see as we will see that they are nevertheless not without worrisome actions and and danger
00:21:58
Speaker
But a bit of schadenfreude going around in this paper and the reactions to it. Now one thing which is fascinating is the way in which the author talks about how the members self-identify because typically if you look at the external comms coming out of groups like actions landia, Wagas Christi, the dominion movement and the like, they say oh no we're
00:22:25
Speaker
We're not white nationalists, we're not white supremacists, we're definitely not Nazis. We're just people who are proud of our country and feel that we shouldn't be ashamed of being white. We're all about looking after beaches and being physically strong and oiling ourselves up like Spartans, but we're definitely not Nazis or fascists. No, no, that's a term that other people use for us. But as the authors note, members self-identify as Nazis, fascists, nationalists, and white supremacists.
00:22:53
Speaker
The leaders and members of Actionslandia see the group as part of a transnational white nationalist movement and model their dress, propaganda and activities on those of the Nordic resistant movement, Patriot Front and other groups. Members are heavily influenced by a wide range of foreign media, both mainstream as well as underground, and consume extreme white nationalist and neo-Nazi content.
00:23:17
Speaker
readers, sorry, members read and discuss far-right texts such as Eterna Diaries, Siege, and Mine Come. And of course this is all internal, they're not presenting, so outwardly they're still, oh yes we're... Oh yes, outwardly we're just healthy young men doing healthy young men things and being proud of being white. And inwardly they're going, what's wrong with being a Nazi? I mean really, what's wrong with being a Nazi?
00:23:45
Speaker
to which point I say World War II. World War II, I think, is quite a point against them, yeah. Now, the paper that I read talks about a sort of change in rhetoric and especially a change in outward appearance.
00:24:04
Speaker
Do they go through that in this one as well? They do to a certain extent, but I think we'll leave that for your particular paper. Otherwise, it's going to be, and we just talked about that, and we just talked about that, and we just talked about that. So another thing which came out of this is it seems actions of India is more interested in actually what's going on overseas, and they are what's happening back home.
European Far-Right Alignment
00:24:30
Speaker
and indeed some of the scuttle part about actions land here is that the leadership is actually more interested in kind of getting in bed with European fascist movements because they may well think that's not really going to take off in Aotearoa. It might not even take off in Australia but we're seeing huge inroads of the far right and the extreme right in Europe so if they can get on board with those groups overseas then that's going to be great for them.
00:25:00
Speaker
They also venerate the terror, so they refer to him as a saint. And at one stage, one of the members even talked about establishing independent cells of three to five men, each to attack a leftist building and people. The cells were to constitute a new group called Southern Order,
00:25:24
Speaker
and the organizer described the group not as a terrorist group but as an aggressive underground group that would do street fighting and flash demos. It would have been a group who'd been publicly known as Nazis. I'd be looking for people who are willing to take a hit for their beliefs. Who cares if people know you're a Nazi? Now I think this member B is one who I will be mentioning as well. They ended up expelling
00:25:49
Speaker
a couple of their members, kind of for this sort of stuff, I think, because they didn't want
00:25:55
Speaker
They didn't want to be drawing the wrong sort of attention. They didn't want heat. Well, also they would expel members if those members were under active investigation by the police. And then when they stopped being investigated by the police would often let those members back up. Yes. And I think a good way to get yourself investigated by the police is to start making noises about how we'd actually like to start attacking people and street fighting.
00:26:21
Speaker
But the upshot of this was due to the fact that people were not just talking about these activities behind closed doors, they were talking about them online in environments where other people could see them, which is precisely why Member B got reported to the police. He didn't say this in a closed chat room, he said this in an open online space.
00:26:44
Speaker
that led to police investigating them, it led to the public identifying the group as being Nazis, and so in April of 2020 a code of conduct was drawn up for the members of actionslandia, which included a specific section for chat room behavior
00:27:02
Speaker
and among other restrictions they wrote, the threats of violence against anyone are never to be distributed. This is explicitly forbidden and will result in an appropriate punishment. Distribution of propaganda from organisations such as the Ottumwaffen Division, the base of national action, etc. is banned inside and outside of action Zelandia chat rooms.
00:27:25
Speaker
Not because they disagree with them, but because they know that they could get them into trouble. Yeah, it was bad PR. So where do we, in terms of, hang on, let me go back to the top. The point that this paper is trying to prove is why there is a gap between the extreme online behavior and the much milder offline behavior.
00:27:55
Speaker
So how do they tie that all together? Well, basically they point out that the leadership became increasingly aware that the online violent rhetoric
00:28:09
Speaker
couldn't be constrained to just chat rooms they had complete control over. This information was leaking. And it was presumably leaking because the author was probably not the only person who'd infiltrated the group. There's at least one other researcher who has infiltrated actions land here.
00:28:27
Speaker
to the point where it's actually quite possible a sizable chunk of their membership are people who got into the group to try to expose them. So this information kept on coming out, which led to the leadership going, look, we can't have this kind of behavior going on in online spaces.
00:28:46
Speaker
And so because of that, it's led to the leadership basically shutting down violent rhetoric wherever they can see it in order to make the group at least seem somewhat palpable. And so they conclude, we recognize that these dynamics are heavily influenced by the political and social context of New Zealand and may only apply to white nationalist groups in similar contexts elsewhere. So that's their caveat.
00:29:12
Speaker
What they've discovered about the actions of Action Zelandia and this disjunct between violent rhetoric within the group and an outward appearance which doesn't appear to be that violent at all, may only occur in this one case study. Or if it occurs in Aotearoa, it might not be extensible to other polities or groups of similar size or action elsewhere.
00:29:38
Speaker
And I think that was missing in a lot of the initial media discourse. People were ignoring the fact that the authors are very conditional about their findings. This is just one case study we really can't generalise from that.
00:29:51
Speaker
We are also not arguing that actions of land here in groups like it are of no threat to society. As we have shown, many members discuss and support the use of violence against minorities, women or leftists, even if they do not commit it themselves. And while they may not engage in mass casualty terrorism,
00:30:09
Speaker
The presence of groups can have an influence on those prone to doing so. Group propaganda seeks to disseminate white nationalist ideas and hatred to a much wider audience, which includes individuals disposed to acting violently. In some cases, groups such as actionslandia may even hope to provoke isolated individuals to mass casualty violence, particularly if it causes polarization and instability
00:30:33
Speaker
and a swell of support for nationalist organizations. Individuals on the periphery of the group who perceive themselves as ignored and excluded may also become frustrated and turn to extremist violence as a way of proving themselves. Because influential members of the group encourage restraint does not necessarily mean all members will conform or that these norms will not change in the future.
00:30:56
Speaker
The group may later decide that the time is right for violence. The fact that strategic calculations are more important than moral objections to preventing violence allows for future change in this calculus. And increased factionalisation within the group
00:31:11
Speaker
might drive extremist outbidding and violent. So yes, the fact that there is this clear gap between the online rhetoric and the offline actions doesn't necessarily mean that everything's fine and that there is no danger here, which is more or less going to be the conclusion of the paper that I looked at.
00:31:37
Speaker
So once again, the second paper is how online interaction radicalizes while group involvement restrains, a case study of actions in India from 2019 to 2021. So here they're less putting forward a theory
00:31:52
Speaker
to explain a commonly observed phenomenon, they're presenting what they've seen, which as they note, kind of goes against what people had thought in the past. So they say, this is the abstract for the paper, scholars have long seen radicalization as a predominantly group-based phenomenon occurring largely through real world, in-person interaction.
00:32:19
Speaker
By contrast, the internet is seen as playing an only limited facilitating role in radicalising people to violence. However, a series of attacks by far-right extremists over the past decade has demonstrated that this perspective is less accurate than it once was. Almost none of these terrorists were members of extremist groups and had only engaged with other extremists on the internet.
00:32:40
Speaker
In this article, we examine the relative importance of face-to-face group interaction and physically isolated internet-based radicalization in driving individuals towards extremist violence. We do so through a detailed case study of Action Zealandia, New Zealand's leading ideological white nationalist group. The study is based on 18 months of infiltration of the group by one of the authors from 2019 to 2021.
00:33:00
Speaker
When interacting online, members often adapt highly extremist personas, in some cases threatening mass violence. By contrast, face-to-face interaction and group membership push the group away from extremist violence. This was true to several factors, police pressure and lack of opportunity for the movement to grow, and the often uninspiring nature of offline interaction. So yes, so this is the thing they're going to say, this is what they observed, that maybe in the past it would be people
00:33:27
Speaker
people meeting face-to-face and hyping each other up or inspiring each other to perform violent actions, but these days the people who are performing the actions tend to be isolated in quote-unquote real life and have all their interaction with like-minded people online, whereas when we see people who do actually get together in real life, we can sort of see things happening
00:33:54
Speaker
that causes them to be much much less extreme. So after once again as we said we have the this paper also has the
00:34:03
Speaker
the discussion of the ethics and the ethical approval for the study and has a bit at the start about sort of the formation of actions and Zelandia or what have you. And it starts also with the sort of literary review type thing where they talk about what people have said in a section called comparing online and offline interaction.
00:34:25
Speaker
So as I said in the intro, they say, scholars have long assumed that the process of radicalization most readily occurs through face-to-face interaction with extremist groups. So this is sort of the conventional wisdom, but that's not what we're seeing so much these days. They say, yet this understanding of the relative importance of offline groups and isolated interaction on the internet does not match the past decade of far-right violent extremism.
00:34:47
Speaker
terrorism. One thing they note in this paper is that even compared to 10 years ago, teenagers are online twice as much as they used to be. So I think it used to be 22 hours a week 10 years ago, 44 hours a week.
00:35:02
Speaker
as of now, and they point out this increase in online use means that people are just seeing a lot more of this rhetoric. As I noted on Twitter this morning when I was looking at my YouTube recommendations this morning,
00:35:20
Speaker
I always been recommended a lot of videos which were videos about the outrageous nature of colorblind casting in the Rings of Power or the fact that an African-American actor is playing Ariel in the Little Mermaid reboot. I was tempted to watch one of these videos because I wanted to see how bad the arguments were
00:35:44
Speaker
But I just knew if I did that, the algorithm would go, oh, also, you like this stuff. We're going to show more. But the fact that the algorithm is trying to push this stuff on me
00:35:54
Speaker
if you then think of people who might have slightly less control over what they want to watch. So it's been a little less time thinking, is this a good idea given what the algorithm does? You can see how spending more time online may well lead to seeing a lot more extremist content than people think they should be. So yes, they say, in their vein, they say, well, previous assertions that face-to-face interaction was far more important.
00:36:24
Speaker
that the internet and radicalizing individuals to violence were likely correct, the nature of the online environment has changed dramatically over recent years. The contemporary internet retains its utility for recruitment and the dissemination of propaganda, but has a range of new characteristics which enhance and accelerate the radicalization process. And so as you say, part of that is simply that people are just spending a hell of a lot more time online. The rise of video communication, the rise of chats,
00:36:54
Speaker
your discords and your gabs and your telegrams and various other messaging places. The technology has changed.
00:37:02
Speaker
And that's changing the radicalization dynamic. So continuing to talk about what people have said in the past, they say, as Jared Brockman and Alex Levine have contended, a key component of the radicalization process is the impulse to reconcile one's online and offline personas. The gap between online participation and real world action is a source of discontent and pain, quoting those two.
00:37:26
Speaker
As a result, they write, a select few users will try to live up to their virtual extremist and pro-violent selves in the real world. In other words, we're talking about your mass shooters and what have you. Others won't take action on themselves, but will chide others for inauthenticity and a failure to act in real life, raising pressure on some individuals.
00:37:45
Speaker
And then they get into the stuff that we just talked about a minute ago, that in contrast, meeting people face to face can be kind of deflating because compared to their online personas, their real life.
00:37:57
Speaker
they are what was the quote, awkward, disorganized and uninspiring in real life. Yes and I think we'll see later on in this paper there is some very uninspiring things that happened when people finally got to meet up in the forest. Yes, yes it is. And then so they talk about of course there are these other factors that you mentioned before.
Impact of Police Monitoring
00:38:20
Speaker
Terrorist acts lead to negative attention, lead to public condemnation of these groups once they become aware of them.
00:38:27
Speaker
and in-person groups are a lot easier to be monitored by the police, by law enforcement. So extreme action. There's this weird thing that white nationalist group seem to think that the actors of Se and Des Breivik or the terrorists are going to immediately lead to the race war. That basically white people are just sitting at their desk
00:38:52
Speaker
etching to kill people of color, and so that when the one event occurs, everyone is going to go grab their gun or their pitchfork, and they're going to go out and murdering. And those groups end up being really quite deflated when it turns out that this doesn't happen. Largely what you see is moral indignation, as the Prime Minister of New Zealand said at the time, this is not us.
00:39:22
Speaker
And yet those groups, they just assume that there's going to be an acceleration on violence based upon these one-off events. So then this paper then goes on to talk about actions landia, how it formed, what it stands for. We sort of all know that. Points out they mostly recruit through word of mouth and recommendations.
00:39:43
Speaker
points out that once the public became aware of them, I think they tried to create a new public image as an identarian rather than extremist movement. So again, yes, we're all about just having a jolly good time. We're about pride in Western culture. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with being proud of where you come from is there.
00:40:07
Speaker
and that sort of business. One slightly worrying thing, I think you mentioned this before, they say the old white is right and that's okay. I think you're fair to this before, they say a sizeable proportion of actions landier's membership is comprised of former and one case serving
00:40:23
Speaker
Armed Forces personnel. The former leader and six members of Action's Alandia were previously in the Armed Forces, and the group believed one member to still be serving at the time of writing. In this regard, Action's Alandia are similar to far-right groups overseas, while Action's Alandia form a solid estate- You believe that's the one who's being investigated?
00:40:40
Speaker
Yes, former soldiers say that the army attracts nationalists. They make the best soldiers because they're the most motivated nationalists are everywhere in the army, which is disturbing and not just because they use the word comprised improperly. Nationalists are everywhere in the army. It's a bit of a tidbit here, just kind of a throwaway point because it isn't actually related directly to the point of this article.
00:41:06
Speaker
But it is something that you kind of feel like you have to mention. Yeah. Yep. So then we get into the guts of it. Then we get into the section online extremism and offline empathy. So they say online in the chat room applications, elements, discord and other platforms. The members of actions land here behave and talk like most other far right white nationalist groups.
00:41:25
Speaker
And a bit later, it is in these spaces that members provoke and incite each other to increasingly extreme racist, misogynistic, and hostile statements. The more radical the post has acted online, the more status within the group they achieved. So they observe very misogynistic, very homophobic, very racist, no big surprise there, pretty much what you'd expect.
00:41:45
Speaker
And so here is what I was referring to before, the fact that things changed a little bit. They say, yet from mid to late 2020, these threats and the apparent escalation towards extremist violence tailed off, and the group has so far not engaged in extremist violence. This de-escalation was driven by several phenomena related to the internal dynamics and external visibility of actions in India as a group.
00:42:10
Speaker
Police investigations and arrests of several members following these online threats created a fear of legal consequences for the leaders and other members. As reports of these violent threats became public, the group faced widespread media attention and public condemnation. The group was an easy target, continuing to maintain a high level of visibility from a website, podcast and social media accounts and from its offline propaganda activities.
00:42:32
Speaker
This visibility and the nature of the group made it an obvious target for justified public anger at white nationalism after the Christchurch attacks. So being a group in real life, an identifiable group, made it much more of a target than anonymous people on the internet.
00:42:49
Speaker
And so there was this real worry that, sort of referring back to what you talked about before, the reasons why they'd set up a code of conduct and so on, there's this worry that, among the groups, that, you know, all it would take is one of us to do something stupid and really, you know, and get the police to crack down on us and it could destroy the whole movement. So we need to be a bit careful, we need to be a bit strategic about what we do, otherwise we end up threatening the group. And of course, if you're a lone person on the internet, that's not a concern. So I think this is where they're sort of saying that being a group
00:43:19
Speaker
that
Moderation in Real-Life Interactions
00:43:20
Speaker
has an in-person component and that is, you know, localised to one country at least, makes the... ramps down the rhetoric, at least externally, and makes people be a lot more careful and a lot less extreme. Don't miss if they almost...
00:43:40
Speaker
recognize they live in a society they almost they almost realize it the interesting thing from the previous paper was that they said look you can't distribute the stuff online or offline and i think as we noted there that's in part because they were concerned that not every single member was actually working for them they were concerned that there are leaks about what we're doing getting out some of the people online
00:44:09
Speaker
may not actually be in agreement with us. So then they start to talk about what they observed in some of these actual real life in-person meetings, which is when the schadenfreude ramps up again a little bit, I think.
00:44:26
Speaker
They say, as the group began to meet again in mid-2020 after a COVID-related lockdown, members were unfit, ill-disciplined, and would often not attend physical activities. Many scheduled events were often highly disorganised, many such as paintballing on the anniversary of the childish, childish... Actually, I'm going to stick with that. Actually, I was supposed to be Christchurch terrorist attacks, but I kind of stand with my original misreading there. Yeah, the childish terrorist attacks is great.
00:44:54
Speaker
Anyway, paper listing on the anniversary of these attacks, charming in and of itself, and bush walks were cancelled because of a lack of commitment. Several members became frustrated at the hypocrisy and lack of commitment on the part of others for their failure to participate in events, or for engaging in the degeneracy the group ostensibly abhorred. When Action Zealandia organised a party... People were turning up to meetings, hungover, and then not meant to drink.
00:45:19
Speaker
There was drug use going on that was against the code of conduct for young men who join actions land here. They had to do pure of mind and pure of body. And presumably a lot of them had spent a bunch of time sitting on their sofas watching TV and chatting on the internet during lockdown rather than, you know, spending the entire time doing press-ups and burpees and drinking power shakes like you and I did, I'm sure.
00:45:45
Speaker
Josh, out of curiosity, where was the last time you did a burpee? I've never really done the sort of exercise that involved burpees. Done a lot of press-ups. Not really many burpees, I have to say.
00:45:59
Speaker
Anyway, I think the last time I did a burpee was in Form 3. Yeah, it's probably high school, I think. Anyway, they say, when Action Zalandia organised a boxing event with the small and now largely inactive Walkus Christi in a forest in the central North Island, this presented a prime opportunity to develop the group. The event was intended to build group cohesion, work on self-improvement after lockdown, and to practice fighting for any future clash with anti-fascist forces.
00:46:26
Speaker
One of the authors fought in the event. However, as a display of martial prowess, the event was highly disappointing and hasn't been repeated. Most members were unfit and poor fighters. The member who had discussed establishing the street fighting group Southern Order lost his bout to a junior member. After initially engaging an online discussion of the event, the Auckland chapter leader stopped checking his messages and did not travel to the event.
00:46:49
Speaker
Regardless of the impressiveness of the event, a boxing tournament was more intended to create a paramilitary style organization rather than a terrorist cell.
00:46:58
Speaker
So again, it was the face-to-face meeting, apart from being uninspiring and deflating, was not the sort of thing that wasn't people getting together to plan bombing buildings and attacking mosques. It was the plan to get together and become the proud boys, essentially, I think, to take to the streets and intimidate and be prepared to back it up with violence if it came to that.
00:47:27
Speaker
And yet it turned out that they were not particularly impressive in person. No. Yes, and indeed they continue. The deflating character of many events thereby reduced the fervour that had been generated by online extremist rhetoric and disrupted the process of radicalisation. At the same time, occasional face-to-face meetings gave many members both a friendship group and a sense that they were part of a movement for which they had done their part. We contend this reduced any drive towards extremist violence.
00:47:55
Speaker
These dynamics are big, actions of India to position itself as the seed of a mass nationalist movement rather than a terrorist group. Instead of planning a large scale attack in the manner of Christchurch 2019, the group instead hoped to project, quote, good optics, which would allow greater recruitment and create a larger, more influential white nationalist movement. When he sought to widen the Overton window of extremist rhetoric in New Zealand, like similar groups elsewhere, actions of India sought to educate white New Zealanders on the threats to the white race,
00:48:25
Speaker
Moving away from discussing violence, members instead discuss the creation of a, quote, whites-only, high-functioning and crime-free commune in rural New Zealand. Good luck with that. Some members talk excitedly of the group as a fascist street fighting force in the manner of the Nazi brownshirts or the Proud Boys and other militant groups overseas. Members have also discussed infiltrating or influencing political parties. So yes, they see themselves as a movement. They're not a terrorist organization.
00:48:50
Speaker
And we'll be talking about the influencing politics in the bonus episode. We will, certainly. Now, they just as a final point, they have a section, a comparison with the Fourth Reich. Now, the Fourth Reich, as you'll probably get from their name, is a neo-Nazi organization.
00:49:10
Speaker
But they're quite different from actions in India. They formed in prison. And the Fourth Reich was basically just a criminal gang. They didn't have an agenda. They weren't really nationalists at all. They were just using this sort of neo-Nazi imagery.
00:49:28
Speaker
But when it came to it, we're just a gang. And that meant that they were, these people that they met in prison, they were criminals at the time, they've gone on to commit a lot of criminal, violent and other criminal acts.
00:49:46
Speaker
But this is because that's what they're about. They're a gang. They say, as it says, the violence of members was never seen as an impediment to the group. Indeed, violence was central to the group's reputation and criminal standing. So they sort of gave this as a point of contrast. This is a different kind of thing to what we're talking about.
00:50:05
Speaker
a group where you see a lot more real-life violence is one that isn't worried about the sort of things that a group like actions in India is worried about. Now this section I did feel felt like reviewer B said but you haven't mentioned another Nazi group that operates in Altoro in the past the fourth right can you say something about that and they're going
00:50:36
Speaker
It's a criminal gang. It has a name, which of course...
00:50:42
Speaker
marks out it as being kind of nutty yes but really it's kind of not they're just using a name and engaging in violence so it did feel like they were satisfying a reviewer it didn't seem like it was something that if you took it out of the article the article would lose anything not really no no it's an interesting point of difference but doesn't actually affect the the points that they're making really
00:51:06
Speaker
And so that brings them to their conclusion. So they basically recap what they've said before, and then finish off by saying, even if extremist groups such as Action Zalandia do not pursue violence themselves, they still pose a grave threat to society. Their open discussion of white nationalism and the threat to the white race and more closed discussion of violence against minorities, journalists, women and academics promotes digital harm and can motivate violent action by others on the periphery of or outside the group.
00:51:35
Speaker
Groups such as actions Alandi often fantasise about taking advantage of any future ethnic conflict or societal breakdown, and the group's decision to refrain from violence may change in the future as group political and social conditions change. Yet for the reasons presented in this article, groups sometimes present a different threat to society, to that posed by isolated individuals radicalising online.
00:51:57
Speaker
While the latter is now the most common pathway to mass casualty terrorism, groups sometimes have grander and more long term
Conclusion: Rhetoric's Threat to Democracy
00:52:03
Speaker
goals. It is their impact on democracy, their intimidation of minorities and effect on intergroup relations where their greatest impact lies. So again, they're not saying there's no danger here. They're just sort of saying it's a different kind of concern than mass shootings and what have you, which as they say tend to come out of people who aren't actually
00:52:26
Speaker
members of these groups who aren't meeting face to face to talk about their bullshit, frankly. So there we go. As you'll have gathered, the two papers are very similar. They're both based on the same case study, but they're making different points with the data they've gathered.
00:52:46
Speaker
any particular surprises there? Not particularly. I mean, it's one of those things where I felt I knew a lot of those coming years. And I suppose there's the danger because it does seem to confirm my pre-existing suspicions about the way these groups work. And there's a worry there that this is just reinforcing my own natural prejudices about online groups, online activism and the like.
00:53:11
Speaker
I do like how they go at great lengths in both papers to go look, even if action's land here is not a good example of a group leading to outward, vilest acts, they are so engaging in rhetoric and that rhetoric has the ability to change hearts and minds.
00:53:35
Speaker
And I think that's something we need to be cognizant of, because that's also the worry about certain types of conspiracy theories. It doesn't really matter how many people believe unwarranted conspiracy theories. What matters is who is expressing them.
00:53:54
Speaker
because sometimes it's the who's expressing them that then licenses the kind of behaviors that come out of those things. As we've talked about in the past, it seems like belief in conspiracy theories is generally going down, but it does also seem as if there are certain people who are more open to express their conspiracy theories now who weren't expressing those theories openly 10 or 20 years ago.
00:54:19
Speaker
So the rhetoric really does matter here, and I like how they focus on that at the end. This case study tells us something about a particular group. It doesn't tell us about the danger that the rhetoric proposes. That's another matter entirely.
00:54:38
Speaker
I was interested about the, came up more in your paper than mine, the idea of the violent rhetoric being cathartic.
00:54:50
Speaker
and fulfilling a psychological need, and this idea that it's a release valve. So that's why they don't go on to do worse things. Because I've heard in other contexts, I've heard there's always a bit of tension there. There's one argument that, yeah, they get it out of their system. And so that means they don't go on to do bad things. But then the other side of it is,
00:55:13
Speaker
or is it that by doing it like this they're not just getting out of their system, they're normalizing it within their own heads and that could make them actually more likely to do that sort of thing down the track. You always hear this argument, I mean I've heard it when it comes to discussions of sort of pedophile
00:55:33
Speaker
fillier sort of context where people, you'll sort of hear stories of a person, you know, visiting a sex worker and wanting them to dress up like a schoolgirl or something. And the one person says, no, that's horrible and gross. And another person says, well, better that than he goes and finds a real schoolgirl. But then the argument to that is, or
00:55:54
Speaker
it reinforces the idea in his head that having sex with a schoolgirl is actually an okay sort of thing. So I never quite know what to think when people say no. Indulging in these very unsavory sorts of things can be a positive way of getting it out of their system when there is also the argument that maybe it is actually just strengthening feelings, which could be a bigger problem down the track. But I'm not an expert in any of these sorts of things, so I don't know. I'm reminded of
00:56:23
Speaker
a kind of case study from 20 years ago, so there was a problem in some left-wing activist circles two decades ago back home, where
00:56:34
Speaker
had come a tendency to make ironic Jewish jokes. So the idea being, you know, we all know there isn't an elaborate right-wing conspiracy being led by the Jewish people with their space lasers and the like. So people would just make jokes, oh you know, probably the Jews are responsible for why the coffee maker isn't working this morning. And these jokes became so commonplace that people were just making
00:57:00
Speaker
crypto anti-Semitic jokes all the time, but they're doing it ironically and that was fine. And then someone pointed out the case of, you're making those jokes constantly now. It's gone from being a one-off edgy joke in bad taste to now the entire workplace is just filled with Jewish jokes, Jewish jokes, Jewish jokes.
00:57:22
Speaker
and kind of normalize that discourse. It actually just meant that antisemitism was creeping into everyday conversations in those groups. So yeah, the catharsis thing is interesting. It would be
00:57:37
Speaker
probably worth our while to see if there's any literature on whether this kind of cathartic thing actually does what these authors are claiming here, a release valve, or whether it actually ends up being a kind of reinforcing mechanism. It goes, oh, so
00:57:56
Speaker
I'm allowed to say, kill all X in this group. Oh, so what else can I say? Positive associations. Anyway, that's a side point entirely. So yeah, interesting to read. Again, as you say, I also get a little suspicious any time I read something that confirms what I'd already believed all along. But, you know, they were there. They were reporting what they saw.
00:58:26
Speaker
And I'm definitely not infiltrating a white supremacist group. I mean, I will take the word for it. I've had enough time infiltrating the group of conspiracy theory theorists who believe that actually it's rational to believe conspiracy theories as I weave my dastardly plot to undo them piece by piece with my constant publications showing that particular particular particularism is true. It's a very long game, Josh. It's a very long game. But you said too much.
00:58:56
Speaker
So in fact, we should probably stop saying things, but then go and say other different things in our Patreon bonus episode. So as you have intimated, we'll be talking a little bit more about a local body candidate who may not be entirely on the level. Stuff that's going on at Patreon, but a bit of good old fashioned satanic panic and an update on... Back in Vogue.
00:59:23
Speaker
Did it ever really go away one way or another it feels like unfortunately no unfortunately no so Unless you have any final thoughts. I think we can call this episode to a close
00:59:37
Speaker
I gave up thinking years ago. Yeah, probably for the best. Righto. Well, then in that case, thank you for being a patron. If you're one of our patrons, thank you for listening all the way to the end. If you're not, I'm just going to go ahead and say goodbye. And I'm going to say there's a spin off to the Golden Girls called the Golden Palace. And frankly, that's fascinating. The podcast guide to the conspiracy stars, Josh Addison and myself.
01:00:05
Speaker
Associate Professor, M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, keep watching the skis.