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16. Strange People on the Hill ft. Michael Edison Hayden
87 Plays12 days ago
Sarah and Helen are joined by reporter on the far right Michael Edison Hayden to discuss his new book Strange People on the Hill, about what happened when far right propaganda outlet VDARE bought a castle overlooking a small West Virginia town.
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Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Sarah. And this is Helen. This is our first interview episode. We're very excited to bring on Michael Edison Hayden. He's a journalist reporting on the far right, who has written for pretty much every outlet you can think of.
00:00:12
Speaker
And until recently, he was a senior investigative reporter with the Southern Poverty Law Center. With Jared Holt, he co-hosts one of my favorite podcasts, Posting Through It. He recently wrote a book, Strange People on the Hill.
00:00:25
Speaker
We really enjoyed the book. We recommend it. And we leapt at the chance to interview him about it.
Community Engagement and Support
00:00:30
Speaker
Really interesting book. I think the conversation was super interesting. Before we get into that, we have some new subscribers to thank. So thank you to Gretchen. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, Sophie. Thank you so much.
00:00:40
Speaker
And thank you, Andreas. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Become a subscriber. You can visit our Patreon at patreon.com slash odm symposium and subscribe for $5 a month. You get early access to episodes and you get bonus episodes. We're going to continue to make when we can. You can also visit our website at odm symposium.com and all listeners are welcome to join our discord. You'll find an invite link in the description.
00:01:04
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Well, do it live. Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Well, do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
00:01:24
Speaker
Do it live! listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. And you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:37
Speaker
some level of masochism.
Book Discussion: 'Strange People on the Hill'
00:01:41
Speaker
Hi, we're so happy to have you here, Michael Hayden, to talk about your new book. Hi, Thane. Really nice to meet you, Helen and Sarah.
00:01:49
Speaker
So this book is a pretty personal chronicle of your time in this West Virginia town, Berkeley Springs, and of the aftermath of your visiting there and of your dealing with the white supremacy and far-right movement. So maybe you could start off by just talking a little bit about what happened in Berkeley Springs that initiated the story that this book tells.
00:02:18
Speaker
Well, I would like you to imagine a town, a a small town in West Virginia that's surrounded by hills on all sides. And unlike most of West Virginia, it relies on the tourist dollars of liberals.
00:02:36
Speaker
It is the place where George Washington dipped his ass in bath. They have these hot springs there. And he has a lot of, yes he has property there. So it's got this historical feel.
00:02:48
Speaker
During the 19th century, it was a place where people would go to do all kinds of bawdy things, horny things, all kinds of things like that. And it was a place for where where rich people could kind of get away and and and do something wild in like the early,
00:03:01
Speaker
19th century. And then it started to become, I would say, less traveled by, but it still invited a lot of tourists and tourist dollars. A lot of gay couples used to come to Berkeley Springs during the eighties.
00:03:15
Speaker
And now they mostly make their money from people who want to go hiking or do a bike ride or something. from Baltimore, maybe Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, to a lesser extent, New York.
00:03:28
Speaker
So that's the town. There's about 700 to 1,000 people in it, depending on where you look at the lines of the town. And there's this beautiful castle. a beautiful 19th century castle. Gorgeous.
00:03:43
Speaker
ah You know, it was built by this guy for a much younger generation. Girl, i just said i guess she was a girl. She was like 17 when he started with her.
00:03:53
Speaker
It was sort of like a gift, like the Taj Mahal. like I'm going to make you a castle. You'll like that. That's that's one way you'll I'll get you to fall in love with me. I'll make you a castle. Like, what girl wouldn't want a castle? It is to Berkeley Springs, basically.
00:04:06
Speaker
like the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, and, you know, Citi Field or whatever, all at once. It's like everything that you could possibly want in Berkeley Springs. It's such a small place. That castle overlooks the entire town.
V-Dare's Impact on Berkeley Springs
00:04:18
Speaker
And then one day, a group, and an SPLC-designated white nationalist group called V-Dare, bought the castle. And the also huge age gap couple a wife, who is, you know much younger, her name is Lydia Brimlow, and she...
00:04:35
Speaker
found the castle on Zillow, of all places, and decided that this might be a good headquarters for Vidar to kind of inhabit. So they raised the money through some...
00:04:47
Speaker
donors, we don't have their names, they're kind of secretive, these people, and purchased the castle. And that put this town, which is, as I mentioned, reliant on liberal tourist dollars, in a position where they had a an SPLC-designated white nationalist group hanging above their heads.
00:05:07
Speaker
There's really something about these groups that are funded by shadowy billionaires and castles. Like, I remember something similar happened with the Center for Effective Altruism. They bought a castle and eventually they had to sell it. It comes up all the time. They get really mad. They're like, okay, first off, it's actually a palatial abbey.
00:05:25
Speaker
And second, it wasn't us. It was actually our parent group that has the exact same name. And they had kind of the same reasoning, like this will be an effective tool for the movement. The idea of a cat castle is very seductive for people like this because they want to have...
00:05:43
Speaker
Ideas that they know the majority of the population find abhorrent, but they don't really want to face any consequences for it. And I really think that that, I mean, first of all, that drives almost all of the tension in this book, but also it drives a lot of the tension we we have in the country now around MAGA. It's just, it's like wait a minute, I want to be like that. i want I don't want to be restrained. I want to be free to be ah as much of a piece of a shit as I can. Like, if I want to do that, like, I'm going to do it. and and But hey, wait a second, I don't want to face any repercussions for this.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, one thing we actually noticed reading it is they themselves reject the term white nationalist and, you know, say you have a quote from Peter Brimelow in here that he says, you know, white supremacists and a white nationalists are devil words.
00:06:30
Speaker
And it's interesting looking at some MAGA figures today, like a lot of people in the, you know, in the Trump administration now or are people working in the White House follow like Nick Fuentes and someone like Nick Fuentes is openly like, yeah, I'm a white nationalist. And so it's interesting that these guys are still in this camp of holding these views maybe you know ah certainly different in in a bunch of ways than fuentes but they still hold on to this like not wanting to be designated as white nationalists and i'm wondering if you have thoughts about why they are sort of still not taking that step or where they object to that term
00:07:06
Speaker
You know, the the main feature of Videre and the thing that makes them so important as as a you know ah ah part of our history and and this sort of second wave, this you know post-Civil War uprising of the Confederacy that we're going through right now um is really important.
00:07:25
Speaker
And the players are actually important. You know, we need to know who they are. it's a really dark time. I mean, I need to make sure this doesn't happen again once we're out of it. um Touch wood. ah The VDR helps take the great replacement conspiracy theory or or or rather the great replacement narrative, I think, is more accurate to put it than conspiracy theory. Just like this this narrative like we do we do know for a fact that there's ah you know, the demographics are changing in this country.
00:07:53
Speaker
Richard Spencer, the white nationalist, will tell you if you ask him about it that there's no way, there's just no way to preserve a white majority in the United States. Even if you stop ah you know doing these awful raids on undocumented people, even if you um i mean if even well even if you continue to carry them out, I should say, even if they are able to curb ah you know undocumented people from entering the country, they're able to so like slow that simply by scaring people.
00:08:23
Speaker
um The demographics are going to change anyway, simply because people have babies. Right. And it's and it's just headed in that direction. So yeah, it is interesting that they're so afraid to to really mention it. I think if you if you ask Peter Brimlow, um hey, would you prefer to live in a country that's only white people? He'd be like, absolutely, right? I mean, he's literally said things exactly like that, where it's just like, I do prefer to live around whites, right?
00:08:50
Speaker
He may just um say that, well, I don't want to go through all that violence. I don't want to do, you know, that may be his argument to say that he's not a white nationalist. But the impact that he's had on this country, the profound impact he's had in mainstreaming that great replacement narrative is so big, it's so powerful, so much bigger than he is or his organization. It's had ah it's had so many reverberations. And he did it from the margins. And he, he during the George W. Bush years, when it was, ah you know, the thing to do for a Republican politician to speak Spanish,
00:09:24
Speaker
on the campaign trail and to try to recruit Latino voters. that you know Bush was very effective at that in 2004, for example. Brimlow was always there on the sidelines saying that this is not the way to go. This is not it. This is wrong. You need to be doubling down on white people. You need to do that. And and and at the same time pushing this narrative that whites are going to be destroyed in their home country as as the ultimate energizer for the white base of the of the of the Republican Party. That moving of the great replacement into mainstream culture is so much more important, I think, than anything to do with whether he's a white nationalist or whether this is a white nationalist movement
Community Response to V-Dare's Presence
00:10:02
Speaker
or not. He calls it a dissident right movement. I'll call it whatever he wants. But both he and i are in perfect agreement that his biggest legacy –
00:10:11
Speaker
Getting random Republicans getting Tucker Carlson on Fox News getting people to parrot this great replacement thing and it's the source of so much anxiety and paranoia in the country. Yeah, our episode before this was on the camp of the Saints and we closed by talking about how it has become mainstreamed and just such an ordinary part of the rhetoric around immigration and race in the US that it almost feels like fundamental to the conversation. you know It's like getting to the point where fish can't can't perceive the water around them.
00:10:49
Speaker
In the book, it's mentioned that Peter Brimlow and Vidair were giving out copies of Camp of the Saints as Christmas gifts for some of their subscribers. So when Vidair buys this castle, there's a very mixed reaction among the people who are down there being literally looked down on.
00:11:10
Speaker
And I wonder if you could sort of describe the fault lines that you saw develop. So at the time that they ah called me into town, I was working for Southern Poverty Law Center.
00:11:25
Speaker
And there was a lot of leadership turnover around that time, which meant that some of the folks that were in the intelligence project, which is the division that handles all the radical rights stuff, we were kind of making our own decisions. I describe it as being like children parenting each other.
00:11:42
Speaker
So we were union workers. My my editor, Rachel Yannick, and I, there was no director of the intelligence intelligence project at that time. i think the the managing editor was recently fired or let go. And this guy, Paul Johanson, he contacts...
00:11:57
Speaker
The Southern Poverty Law Center, he's a donor and he says like, hey, we got this problem. There's this SPLC designated group that's on a hill. A lot of people here are really scared that our businesses are going to be decimated because they really rely on tourist dollars. And now the most famous thing in town the castle is occupied by their new most famous residents who happen to really resemble Count Dracula in the eyes of the culture, right? And there's a lot of headlines about them for people to Google and decide that they can go to another town instead for their weekend, right? Particularly like, let's say you're a lesbian couple from like Washington, DC. It's like, hey, let's not go biking here. There's a white nationalist group that owns a castle, right? It's really bad for business.
00:12:37
Speaker
you know Without as as much supervision as we we typically had, Rachel was like, these people want us there. Why don't you go write an article and while you're there, just brief them on what Vidair is because that's what he seems to want to do.
00:12:49
Speaker
I mention this also because you know my story at s SPLC is a big part of the book as well. And what came after that and the time after the pandemic was a really interesting horrible time for the organization that's still going on, and that they really started curtail a lot of the work that they were doing. So I mention that because I'm not sure I ever would have gone to Berkeley Springs if it would not be the exact right timing. And when I went there, I came to go speak to what I was told would be business owners from the town about to tell them about, know, who Vidaire was, who Peter Brimlow was, you know, what was going on.
00:13:25
Speaker
And I kind of like didn't really prepare much for it. And, you know, I as a spokesperson, I, you know, yeah I would just throw me on the on media and again I would just start bullshitting about whatever, you know, whatever terror attack. I'd be able to just whip out some crap and talk about it without much prep.
00:13:39
Speaker
But without being, you know, very prepped, I came in there and I was really struck by how serious and how sad these people were. I mean, they were just they look gutted because it's not just like, oh, there's a big white nationalist group in town. What do we do? i mean, that would be bad enough. But also like, yeah, I mean, like I ah my business is on like a very slim margin as it is.
00:14:03
Speaker
You know, I run a coffee shop in the case of the Johansson family. um i run a so store that does like kind of like magic things or whatever. I mean, these stores don't have like huge margins of to make money. they They get people, some cyclists come in, and you know, on the weekend. They make a few bucks here and there.
00:14:21
Speaker
they were They just look so sad and they look so scared. And then, you know, the i I briefed them as best as I could. And then Trey Johansson was, you know, came to me and she was like, that's the the the wife of Paul.
00:14:35
Speaker
And she was like, you you know, please don't forget us. Like, keep you know, do something if you can, anything you can. i was like, all right, i I won't forget you. It really moved me. And, um you know, essentially that's what spurs a lot of the action for me is I found ways in time to come back over and over again. I got kind of caught up in their fight.
00:14:54
Speaker
When they first start doing activism to raise awareness about VDARE, one thing that's not in the book that I learned about after it. is they were they were privately lobbying the New York Attorney General's office, which I did not know and I wish I had in the book.
00:15:10
Speaker
And we see now that that actually was very effective activism on their part. But at the beginning, there wasn't much pushback from the people who were angry about this. They didn't hear much about it.
00:15:21
Speaker
It's partly because the Brimlos took a while to actually settle in at the castle. But once they did settle into town, they would start the Brimlos start coming into church, and they started to meet people and things started to split along traditional ideological lines.
00:15:36
Speaker
When I say that, I mean, not everybody in the town may be a white nationalist or be willing to, you know, want to rub shoulders with an s SPLC designated white nationalist. and And not all everybody would be necessarily motivated by this great replacement narrative, but it's sort of a friend of my friend type thing. You know, these people are pro-Trump. I'm pro-Trump. And these people...
00:15:58
Speaker
who are protesting them are the type of people who are putting pride flags outside and I don't like that. There's a lot of stuff that happens in this book, among them a Black Lives Matter rally, which is made minuscule by this show of armed force that pops up because of social media responses.
00:16:20
Speaker
There's these lines of men with guns. There's one guy who you profile in the book who gets arrested because he's making terrorist threats on social media before the rally, and he gets marched like through the line of men with guns. And at points like that, it becomes very difficult for me to distinguish between the movement, as you call it, and just the sort of like ambient white supremacy that animates a lot of people around the town. I was wondering, like, if you draw a distinction there and if you do, like, what is it?
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's a good question. yeah And they talk about Peter Brimlow as as being a sort of suit and tie white nationalist is like the way you would people would describe him. Again, he doesn't describe himself that way, but that's the way his critics describe him.
00:17:10
Speaker
And he's the type of guy who would, you know, he he he gave like a speech, I think, in, I think it was a September 2016 with like Jared Taylor, who's another race science focused guy who's, you know, a close brother of his in the movement, so to speak.
00:17:26
Speaker
And Richard Spencer at the height of his variety. And it was sort of like a, you know, pray hey, these are the intellectual ideas of the alt-right and we'd like you to take us seriously, that type of thing. You know, try to really present their work in ah in an almost an academic way. like These are our intellectuals.
00:17:41
Speaker
um It is a great juxtaposition, and particularly the that him you know sort of being up on the hill in the castle, looking down on the town, because you see it through that through through the character that you mentioned there.
00:17:55
Speaker
that he is himself, you know, a self-described redneck. And he's involved at the sort of Facebook meme level. Facebook is less the terrain of that now. Now it would be X. But he was, you know, basically on there saying, like, if I see Antifa, going to kill him. bo swear to God, like this type of thing. And the reason why i say it's like so great, that the the the juxtaposition, the built-in symbolism, is like Peter Brimelow is doing his activism, his sort of rich boy activism for years. And the people who are being moved are the sort of soldiers who are responding to Fox News or whatever. You you know, on the street level, you talk about the Proud Boys or groups like that who are now so unimportant, largely because they can just join ICE or whatever. But are also guys like this, like who's just like, you know, in these Facebook groups now cheering for mass deportations, cheering for leftists to be killed, like like we saw in Minneapolis. im Just on there just being like, yeah, but you know, if it was me, I would have blown his head off. Like, you know, this type of rhetoric. It is important to remember that, like, the movement are the activists who are changing this country in
Conservative Narratives and Community Challenges
00:19:04
Speaker
profound ways. And the country has changed. This country has changed dramatically over the last 10 years since Trump took power for the first time. And he's essentially been around for three terms because the Biden year was years were so weakened and so just overshadowed completely by Trump, Trump's name, Trump's crimes, Trump's celebrity, his dark celebrity. You know, so much has changed over over this time. And it's the change, the instigators of that change are people like Peter Brimlow and the people who are suffering in some cases are folks like the, you know, like this guy winds up in prison over making threats on Facebook. I mean, he, at one point I think talks about, you know, he says like, ah you know, this country betrayed me and all this stuff.
00:19:48
Speaker
I mean, think that's an important part of the book. And because, know, It helps show show that it's like it's not so much that these leftists' lives were overturned, these liberals and and whatever in the town, or that the the trans character faces bigotry or anything like that. It's it's important to understand that also these people on the right who are caught up in this culture war that they may have started or even that they are the ones perpetuating more, their lives are getting destroyed too.
00:20:18
Speaker
one thing that I want to kind of circle back to a little bit that I think is interesting here, especially as we talk about this distinction between like the movement. And again, I guess we should clarify a little bit. Like you, you talk a little bit about calling this group, the movement, because there is exactly this,
00:20:33
Speaker
disagreement between, you know, the Brimelos, how to describe themselves and and how, you know, without getting bogged down into questions of like white nationalist or not, just talking about the movement. Is Megyn Kelly base enough to be part, you know?
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah. In some way, what we're describing is a, you know, professional class distinction here, right? Peter Brimelow is the suit and tie white nationalist is a lot more funding. But also there's this like story of just they found this castle on Zillow and then they raised money somehow.
00:21:05
Speaker
There is this pocket of money that they have access to that a lot of the other people in the town certainly do not, right, and are are in fact motivated by having very slim margins on their stores. You know, it's interesting actually hearing that they were involved in petitioning the attorney general because the sort of the narrative we get in the book, it almost seems like there's this resistance in the town, but that the sort of main...
00:21:25
Speaker
story from the point of view of the brimelows has to do with just raising the money for this castle and then getting you know repeatedly subpoenaed by the attorney general and fighting this legal battle that has a huge material force in bringing them down and the fact that the town had something to do with lobbying the attorney general to do that I think complicates this narrative a little bit but I'm curious about how you see the role of sort of the role of just the wealthy being able to come in and and steamroll over this town as as a part of this story You know, I'm glad to answer that because I felt often when I was at s SPLC hamstrung in my ability to describe, you know, s SPLC
SPLC's Internal Challenges
00:22:05
Speaker
designated hate groups. Like, you know, it's not, as it's not super, really you know, important to me whether in real, you know, outside of SPLC, whether I could, you know, whether VDR is a white nationalist group or not. Like to me, it's just like, these are the things they say and this is the things that they believe.
00:22:19
Speaker
But I think it is important to make it you know a distinction that I was not able to make over there because you're so focused. You would talk about money for sure. it's We would do follow the money reporting all the time. You don't want to undermine the hate and make the hate less important.
00:22:33
Speaker
But actually money is a driver for so much of this stuff. And in the case of the Brimelow, it's like, yeah, OK, for sure they're racist. like I have no problem saying that the beater Lydia Brimelow, have i've formed a very educated opinion about that by many times speaking with them. reading their work and dealing with, they are deeply racist people Can you say which bone specifically is racist though? I mean, if you can't, yeah I'm not sure we're allowed to say that. ah What is motivating them? Is it truly to build a white nation?
00:23:05
Speaker
i guess some, some clowns like really think that, and they think they can actually do it. There's like a lot of local jokers and stuff dressed up in their things. Yeah. But in the case of the Brimlos, it is a way, it is a way, you know, they have a high-minded idea about it, but the reality is they're really trying to protect their own wealth and status.
00:23:23
Speaker
And Peter Brimlos was a journalist for Forbes, right? He was a financial journalist throughout the ninety s He began to write for right-wing publications, and then he hit a lane that started to pick up for him. And, you know, it's something I can identify with for sure. Like my career started to pick up when I started to write about the radical right. You know, there's a feedback loop with your audience. People wanted to hear me, you know, see at the beginning when I first started to do it. They wanted more of that from me, and so I'm trying to meet a demand. He wrote an essay right when he became an American citizen, ironically, that was the first of his things um talking about the dangers of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act in the 1960s, which um still obsesses him today.
00:24:07
Speaker
And then he became more and more, ah you know, tunneled down that path. The people who are donating to him. I don't know if I necessarily believe that they envision at the end of this road a white nation, some sort of white utopia. don't know, like, know, Toontown, you know, from Roger Rabbit, but with whites. I don't know if there's kind of like imagining like a golden path and they're like dancing around being white, listening to Steely Dan or whatever. I like Steely Dan, by the way. It's okay. But like my point is I try to pick a white
00:24:43
Speaker
coded band You know, I think it's I think it's it's much more cynical than that. I really think it is to create conditions in the country where, you know, the underclass of non whites is like fully blocked in right where they don't have any path to.
00:24:59
Speaker
get closer and get access to their power and their status. You know, they're willing to scramble the minds of the kind of chuds who are driving around in their lawnmower that are mentioned in this thing, real ah West Virginia type conservatives. They're they're they're willing to sacrifice their their lives and the and and and to drive division throughout the country in order to get, to be on the right side of this fascist divide, to put you know boundaries in the country, fascist boundaries in the country that keep undesirables from obtaining the type of wealth and status that they have to getting anywhere near their castle.
00:25:36
Speaker
So the movement is supported by this donor class, that the left-wing opposition like just doesn't have. Your work at the Southern Poverty Law Center was hampered by sort of like the internal chaos of the organization, but also by you know just like a lack of money to do things and a lack of resources.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah. Well, they the s SPLC does have $800 million dollars in some sort of offshore account. it's um So they they're actually blessed with a lot of money.
00:26:09
Speaker
So I want to make sure that everybody knows that. um But, you know, yes, the type of people who will take it, you know, SPLC is a very big organization that has been raising money in aggressive ways since 1971.
00:26:22
Speaker
Right. They're like they really know how to raise money and they go for it and they get it from individuals more than anything else. And for people who. really are concerned about racism, concerned about fascism, concerned about anti-Semitism. These are the things that drive people. Supporters of LGBTQ rights, et cetera. But yeah, a fly-by-night content-creating thing can be embraced by some billionaire, right? There are all these rumors unconfirmed. I'm not saying that this is necessarily true, but that Peter Thiel has taken interest in this clavicular guy. And whether that's true or not, it does not matter, actually, because I'll use an example. We all know, we've all heard the stories about Peter Thiel kind of involving himself at the cultural level, experimenting with all types of stuff. We've seen all the accusations. Oh, Red Scare got money from Peter Thiel. I don't know what's real or what's not there, but I do know that Peter Thiel, these rumors have come from a place that he is experimenting with trying to tweak the culture in certain directions.
Wealth Influence on Cultural Narratives
00:27:23
Speaker
Using his prodigious wealth is like, you can go very far, right? You give people, listen, if you give somebody $200,000,
00:27:31
Speaker
in a year to make content. They'll walk around with like a dog bone in their mouth, you know, like, yip, yip, yip, in this country where so many people don't have healthcare, care so many people are are desperate. The job market is is getting chewed up by AI. I mean, you can really control people. In the case of Vidair, mean, what were you really investing in if you were an extraordinarily rich person? I think, you know, you were mostly trying to penetrate the culture and move it in a place that further benefits your status and wealth. One key thing that happens in the book, you know, Vida starts to collapse as the book goes on, largely under the weight of the New York Attorney General's office's investigation into them.
00:28:16
Speaker
At the time that they're falling apart, Trump is trump is taking the stage at R&C. There's you know Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan. and It's really a true embarrassment um if you're an American to see these people you know just on stage doing their thing.
00:28:31
Speaker
And then you see all these people, including like I saw on TV, I'll never forget, an old woman in a wheelchair holding signs that say mass deportation now.
00:28:43
Speaker
That's what you are investing in if you're a very rich person, right? You are investing in this this fascist project. You wanted to get – that's the only reason to invest in Vidaire, pushing this idea into the mainstream. And he had so many different administration officials to which he was – Larry Kudlow was connected to Peter Brimlow. Julia Hahn, who was a ah big figure in the first administration in the comms office. And of course, Stephen Miller, who invited Peter Brimlow to speak at Duke University once. And and to Katie McHugh, shared links from VDARE about temporary protective status for refugees. That is, i think, what the rich are investing in when they invest in these type of these type of groups. Yeah. Let me swerve back to the Southern Poverty Law Center for a second.
00:29:29
Speaker
I certainly got the impression from the book that they were engaged in moderating their message and in moderating your activity to appeal to big donors.
00:29:42
Speaker
I don't know if it's necessarily big donors as much as they're just scared, I think, more than anything else. We need perspective to kind of look from a distance at what this era is. I feel confident that in this book, I really believe in this book, I believe that it'll really show with time more than anything else exactly the way things were now, which is ah you know that fascism is really bearing down on people and bearing down on everyone. In the case of the SPLC, I think they were so scared ah like of the litigiousness and the aggression of MAGA.
00:30:16
Speaker
That they started to rather than trying to shield donors necessarily, that they became very conservative and they started to spend their money primarily on just keeping us happy like we' we're in a like fake workplace almost. I mean, one example from there is in 2022.
00:30:36
Speaker
It was the midterms and SPLC's messages like, oh, democracy. It wasn't democracy dies in darkness, but, you know, whatever. Don't forget to vote. Every vote counts. Whatever cliched bullshit that we were pumping at people. And they took the editorial team and they took us to a wine hotel, right?
00:30:57
Speaker
a luxury wine hotel in Atlanta on a retreat with no agenda. And we had people in the staff saying, I mean, Jason Wilson, who's with the Guardian now, I remember him viscerally saying like, Hey, we need to report on what's happening. This is a, you know, it's a midterm, right? I had to vote, vote by mail or whatever.
00:31:15
Speaker
And I'd never had to do that before because, ah you know, that was the thing. The message of the outside is like, Oh, the fascism is bearing down on us, but at the same time, don't do anything about it. um This did not fly with the many very talented and brilliant people i worked with there. I mean, they were like some of the most brilliant people, motivated, passionate people I've ever met before.
00:31:37
Speaker
And um they a lot of them wanted me to become a steward. I mean, I also got the idea and started to like it, largely because I was a spokesperson and I was connected with so many of the people in management. And what you're sort of referring to there about what happens is like they start retaliating against me like in ah in a pretty crazy way at the beginning of 2023, which if you've never experienced like workplace retaliation for being a steward before, it sucks. It's like so bad.
00:32:05
Speaker
i mean, like you'd be better off getting shingles than experiencing this. It sucks. It's like, you know, it's like – I can't i can't describe it. It's, like you know, intensely psychological and like, essentially, they don't let you feel like you have a minute's piece. I was called into like one investigation or after another, etc, e etc. And then, you know, this culminated in Me getting disciplined over Gaza, which is what you're you're alluding to there. but so My mother is Arab. She's got Palestinian and Egyptian heritage. And I was obviously in a bad place after experience retaliation for the whole year.
00:32:46
Speaker
you know, I had signed a petition for writers that called Israel an apartheid state and asked for, you know, a ceasefire. It's very early on in the process. So if you recall at that time, it was a little bit more taboo to do so, but we were permitted in our contract.
00:33:02
Speaker
And then right wing publication wrote about it and they started to discipline me over it and they did not discipline Hannah. who Hannah Gase, who is um a wonderful person, great reporter.
00:33:14
Speaker
Hannah's got Jewish heritage and I have Arab heritage. And the fact that they did that, it's question of like, did they really discriminate against me? Or were they, I mean, they literally did in the Title VII definition of discrimination.
00:33:29
Speaker
But like did they know what they were doing were they so like geeked up on the idea of retaliating over the union stuff? I think it's a combination of both. I think they they already were quite aggressive towards me and saw this as an opportunity.
00:33:43
Speaker
But then there's also a degree of unconscious racial bias that plays where you see the the you know the the article written by a Zionist about me was in Washington washington Free Beacon, I think it's called.
00:33:58
Speaker
and ah instead of me, they use a picture of Hamas, like a guy from Hamas, and he's got like a fucking awesome looking rocket launcher and like, He's got like masks and shit on and like, yeah, he looks like Cobra from G.I. Joe. So they looked at that and they're like, yes, that's the fucking union steward. That's the piece of shit. That fucking guy with the rocket launcher.
00:34:16
Speaker
Terrible, terrible chapter. One of many terrible chapters for the SPLC, but horrible for me. i mean, i I wound up in like in a psych ward for for three weeks and then I got a very, I got a pretty decent settlement out of it because they so obviously broke the law for me.
00:34:33
Speaker
So there's these two metaphors in the book that kind of like plug into each other. There's the sense of the town and the state of the town reflecting the larger society and the changes happening in it. And there's also this sense of you experiencing all kinds of trauma and fracturing and sense of alienation from your many years of reporting on the far right and the harassment and like threats and that sort of thing that has come at you.
00:35:08
Speaker
And that is kind of reflected in what happens with the townspeople. There's a sense that a train that has already hit you is kind of coming toward them. Yeah. Nobody fares well in this book, but I hope people find the humor in it. It's not only depression, depressing stuff. I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot of parts that are really funny. And I think if you get caught up in the shock of the, oh, my God, they're white nationalists or this or that, I think it's a mistake. I think you can, you know, you have to stand back and have a few laughs with it, too. But yeah, it's it's everybody has a really tough go.
00:35:41
Speaker
And when I saw trey Johansson at the coffee shop, but we met on April 12th, you know, right the week of the book came out, a whole bunch of people from town I signed copies for. And then Trey cried and you know gave me a big hug and all this stuff.
00:35:56
Speaker
And she's also told me, incidentally, that that people have come into the coffee shop and be like, hey, I read the book. I just wanted to meet you, which is so cool. I thought that was awesome Yeah, everybody in the town went through something. i think when I came back to see everybody again, i feel like the people were a little bit lighter. like They felt a little bit like we had they had we'd have been through something traumatic altogether.
00:36:17
Speaker
I think the stuff that was going on with me and the SPLC, you know, I've had a few people who seem to not get it. It's like, well, I wanted the book to be just about the town or something like that. But you have to understand, like I was in Berkeley Springs right before I went to the hospital. like So all that stuff happened while I was in Berkeley Springs. And then when I came back, I came after I came to the hospital, I came back and Trey took care of me.
00:36:38
Speaker
It's like some of the people in the town became much closer friends to me. These were people to whom I could confess things about about my mental health or this or that, and they would tell me about their things. I mean, this was – it really evolved.
00:36:51
Speaker
from being, oh, I'm the expert and I'm here to help you and and that sort of thing to them actually taking care of me in many ways. And I think that that is how everybody is is is intertwined. When Trey told me all everything about um her being bisexual and I talked about me and with with that. And it's like, you know, I mean, those type of things ah all came out. I think all those conversations came out largely because of this this crisis, I think, that impacts the entire country, but in a more exaggerated way, that this town, because of because of the dynamics of it. I want to second your description of the book as funny. I hope I haven't given the listener the impression it's dour. I laughed out loud several times reading it. That's awesome. No, you're not doing that. I'm doing it because I like out of defensiveness because I've I've gotten some like positive feedback or something like this is so so this is so disturbing. And I'm like, oh, really? OK.
00:37:50
Speaker
ah um I'm not saying it's not, but I but I realized that like sometimes, you know, some these things that I take for granted because I've been in this material for so long, like. You know, talking about the great replacement scares the shit out of some people like it scares the shit out of white people specifically because, you know, which is a big also a big driver in the group. Yeah, like you're a fairly liberal white person. You don't even want to entertain this thing or the fact that it hits too close to home because you're thinking about other white people feeling this way. And it and it's it's it all all of a sudden everything being in the country becomes very claustrophobic.
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely really liked the parts about sort of the union organizing and then facing this retaliation. i thought it was really interesting because actually i was involved in union organizing at the UCs when I was in grad school and part of like the grad student union. And I was also in the position of being sort of voluntold into being a steward of the campus. I mean, it was a very different sort of set of union politics. There was sort of like we we were were ah we were a local in the UAW. And right around that time, there was a huge corruption scandal the UAW the president of the UAW got like arrested. And so there was like a whole other complicated story that it was is sort of different. But it's interesting to see like the the union weakening tactics that like the UCs were taking and that, you know, seeing the rest of the country and always talking about the UCs as this like communist organization. and meanwhile, like we're directly fighting their, their anti union, their anti union tendencies. It's it's a really real phenomenon that I think people don't really understand. I think that the stigma of unionization or just union activism is that like that's when people get – that they're like, oh, you're now you're that now you're a real communist. Yeah. Because you're – because, I mean, it doesn't matter if union organizing is not necessarily communist, although it can be. You are taking action directly at Capitol, right? Like you're taking it directly you're you're taking it directly to – so it's very you know very easy. ah This is this not a neg on Hassan Piker or somebody like that. But it's like very easy if you're kind of –
00:39:44
Speaker
You know, you're trying to like influence culture from the left and you're talking about all kinds of left leftist things like you're saying this person, this politician's good, this one's bad. I like the left one. And like, I like socialism and I like this and, you know, I want radical politics.
00:39:59
Speaker
you know, gender or politics or like that, you know, all those things. As soon as you start organizing against, organizing against money, basically, that is, that that, that is another level of stigma. That is like, you, you don't get, it's not like necessarily you are a communist necessarily, but that is the fear of communism in the average person. Yeah. And there's so much just like propaganda, like old Hollywood movies of like the, the, the corrupt union worker, right? Like people are thinking about like on the waterfront or whatever. And like, you know, they have this vision of union workers as this, You know, the union boss is this this figure of corruption. so I thought it was interesting to see. Or violence. Yeah.
00:40:33
Speaker
Right. Yeah. It's scary. But I think building off of sort of what we're talking about, we noticed also this theme throughout the book at various levels of people trying to combat this movement, really not knowing they're what to do, being just extremely unsure. Like, first, we got the scene of ah of Trey learning about the the castle and people in the town starting to realize like, oh, some somebody's writing his article about this guy who bought this castle.
00:41:02
Speaker
It seems like he might be a white supremacist. And they're wondering like, oh, is this because we didn't reject strongly enough when, you know, the Klan was meeting or was giving out flyers? and it turns out and actually, no, that has nothing to do with it. um But, you know, should we have responded to that more?
00:41:18
Speaker
Or, you know, how do we respond to this? Do we protest? do we come together as business leaders, right? This sort of real sense of unsureness. I mean, there's the scene of you being sold like, oh, you should go talk to this town and a little bit of like, well, what do I say to them, right? Like, what do what are we there to do? um And then throughout the book, like there's all these moments of like, do we stand up to do this? Or, you know, that's going to leave us open to litigation in this way? Or is this going to be too extreme? Or how do we do, you know, and I think I'm curious throughout the book, like, what, how, to how's your sense of like, how to respond to, to this moment changed? Or like, what do you think you've learned in this, in this book? Or like, what?
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah, how, do what what should we actually do about this? Like, how is that? How's your perspective on that changed? i I look back on what the people in town in Berkeley Springs did. And it was a wild collection of people.
00:42:06
Speaker
There's a lot of people that, you know, there's Lisa Marie, who is a trans woman who lives halfway between Berkeley Springs and a place called Paw Paw in the middle of the...
00:42:16
Speaker
literally in the middle of the the hollers. Like, you know, you know you couldn't even find, it's like going to the Batcave or whatever to find her place. She's living the life, man. She's growing weird mushrooms in the woods. It's, yeah it's so cool. Yeah, no, she's very cool. She she like open carries in town. i always felt like I let her like, you know, was like, she's in charge when she was with me. I was like, well, you know, I'm safe with Lisa. But like she's an interesting, she's an unusual character compared to, let's say, um Trey Johansson, who is much more of like a conventional liberal type person and a business owner and.
00:42:52
Speaker
And that sort of thing. And then there's these sort of like boomer types who are, um you know, really fighting like the type of political battle that they remember from the 60s and seventy s and stuff like that. And it's like a weird collection of people that didn't always get along with one another.
00:43:10
Speaker
And they have falling outs throughout. But they exhibited a tremendous amount of relentlessness. If you think about the prospects of trying to get rid of a nonprofit that purchased a castle legally in a private way, the the main thing you had over Vidair is the fact that they were a nonprofit and had nonprofit status, and that opened them up to some legal maneuvers from the New York Attorney General's office.
00:43:42
Speaker
But aside from that, they bought the castle. but That was their office. Okay. And what can you even really do about that? You can't kick somebody out of their office. And, you know, there's a question remains of whether they were ever living inside the castle at the beginning or whether they they do it occasionally now. They have denied that completely. The impression I got at the beginning of it was that their family was trying to get, I mean, they literally took all these pictures with the keys in front of the castle like it was their new home. So, you know, that opened them up to a lot of accusations of self-enrichment. But yeah, how do you get rid of ah a privately owned,
00:44:18
Speaker
thing like this. It's almost impossible. like what What do you even do? The thing here is that they they just didn't stop. They just kept kept trying things. And they could be embarrassed, and then they would stop and they'd try again. They used to do these things that were like, the VDR...
00:44:37
Speaker
Castle would host a conference for people in the movement and kind of ship people to and from the inn in town and, you know, meet in private and people would give speeches and stuff about...
00:44:54
Speaker
whatever. I mean, the dangers of Antifa and like the dangers of nonwhite immigration, whatever speeches they would give. And in the middle of town in the park, right near where the, the bath where George Washington placed his bare ass, they they would have like these like immigration history day.
00:45:12
Speaker
to try to offset it. And there'd be like seven people, seven people standing around a gazebo with different cookies from around the world. Like, it's like, oh, these are like ah Czechoslovakian, you know, old recipe for the, you know, for whatever area, right? These are Bosnian cookies. I don't know, whatever. It's like, you know, some kind of immigration themed thing.
00:45:36
Speaker
I mean, there was nobody there. And it's not that these things were totally unaffected. But the most important thing is that they just that was one day. And then the next day they would try something else.
00:45:50
Speaker
And contacting me for me to produce articles that were presumably, I'm sure, read by the New York Attorney General's office, because that was some of the first reporting that came out of it. Sending tips to the New York Attorney attorney General's office, those proved to be more effective things than others. But they didn't really stop. They did things all the time. and They held meetings. They they tried things.
00:46:11
Speaker
And i think the lesson that we can all take away from this is that when we are faced with a crisis of some kind, and we are all faced with a crisis in this country right now because, you know, the the fascism is really, really heating up.
00:46:29
Speaker
Just keep going, I think. Keep trying things. Don't stop. Like if you think about, you know, Terminator. What's her name? What was what's the Terminator name? What's the mother's name? Sarah Connor. Sarah Connor.
00:46:41
Speaker
Yeah, man. Sarah Connor is like beg, borrow, steal. She should do whatever she can to get that thing. you know and And I think that that's really the attitude that you need to embrace it when faced with crisis. It is a survival mode. And if you are opposed to fascism, you have the right thing in your heart.
00:46:58
Speaker
you know doesn't it mean doesn't necessarily mean you go about it the right way, but you see something that is truly unequivocally wrong and corrupt and you want to stop it. Just try everything.
00:47:10
Speaker
That's what I would say. Just try everything because you don't know what's going to be the thing that's going to help. Circling back to Lisa Marie, so she's the trans woman you met in town, and to us she's a very familiar sort of character. She doesn't have much of a filter, she's very passionate about social justice issues. And we perceived her as someone who was kind of radicalized by this reality that being a trans person kind of cuts off certain pathways of respectability and therefore certain forms of like being willing to accommodate others, you know, like Lisa Marie at one point.
00:47:55
Speaker
She's in church and the Brimlos are there as well. And she has this brief but dramatic encounter with the Brimlos. And she takes the opportunity by the hand. And i don't know, I don't want to spoil it, but, um you know, she she she makes a scene, which, you know, I was cheering for and Also, she ends up a little bit ostracized from her ideological allies in town. Like there's there's definitely a sense that the connections are frayed there. And i was wondering if like our perception lines up with yours and what you think about that.
00:48:36
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing I would say is that she's a really special person and I really care about her a lot. Like she's tough and doesn't need me to feel bad for her, but she does have a way about her that is familiar to me. You know, it's like a, you know, I have trans friends, so it's not like, you know, this is a new experience hanging out with her. But, you know, in a place like Morgan County, West Virginia,
00:49:02
Speaker
where people where the bigotry is built in in such a profound way. Yeah, she sometimes reacts very quickly when feeling slighted and stuff like that, but she's ah she's accustomed to being treated with disrespect by people.
00:49:15
Speaker
you know I think ah that leads her to be more passionate and also to be sometimes you know more aggressive. She was, when Peter came here, and I think this cannot be underrated, there was a lot of really soft touch issues responses to Peter, where it's just like, we are stand against this. We are against this. i mean, I'm not not knocking it, you know?
00:49:35
Speaker
But just like, we're against this. We don't want, this is not our, these are not our values type thing. And then she's like like on Twitter and quote tweeting and, you know, in his replies, like every day being like, you're a Nazi, you're a fascist, you're this, nobody wants you here. And saying all these like local Appalachian slang type things to, you know, ah you're not from here and you're a fucking...
00:50:01
Speaker
You know, washed up Englishman from Connecticut, get your ass out of, ah you know, get your ass out of West Virginia. You know, I think that her passion, as you as you mentioned, her her passion to get rid of him was is like really stands out in the book.
00:50:19
Speaker
as being something that disrupts Peter. i mean, they can't stand her. And they became very, very up so obsessed with her. And they became obsessed with the fact that I was spending time with her.
00:50:31
Speaker
And at one point they called one of her friends like a trans goblin or something, which was like, I think that that was during the interview with Tucker Carlson that Lydia did. Yeah. That was not Lisa. They were talking about, they're talking about, you know, some trans friend she had in town or something like that.
00:50:46
Speaker
um And they they just picked up on some message or something, probably some joke about being a trans goblin or something and took it literally or on purpose to try to make them look bad. Yeah, I mean, you know, when Lydia got onto Tucker Carlson's show, really fascinating thing happened. This is pretty soon after I was i got out of the hospital.
00:51:09
Speaker
She spends the first 20 minutes to Tucker kind of talking about um the New York Attorney General's office and what she's going through and how they need to raise money and they didn't want to keep VDR going and blah, blah, blah. And then the second half of it is only about me and Lisa Marie. And it really shows you the degree to which whatever social conditions of being a trans woman in that area and whatever is just natural that comes out of her, that what she was doing really bothered the shit out of them.
00:51:39
Speaker
Like, you know, they were really scared shitless of her. And I think that it wasn't, I don't think it's an accident at all that they brought her up so many times and her friends, uh, because they seem much less scared of, of the people in town who are, you know, saying like, Hey, no, has, has no home here. I should note also that during that interview that Lydia Brimlow said to Tucker in reference to the pride flags out in front of Fairfax Coffeehouse
00:52:08
Speaker
that fish with ah lots of colors are more likely to be poisonous. Yeah, it was definitely notable. the i mean, I think you did a good job showing sort of in the town leading up to these events that there are already these sorts of fault lines. It's notable that there are sort of so many Confederate flags around that go basically unremarked upon. And then sort of the pride flag in the coffee shop is already the center of...
00:52:33
Speaker
conflict, right? Like a kid comes in and is like a prank, just like tears it down. And they're kind of like, why did you do this? And he's like, oh, I just thought it'd be funny. But it gives you this sense that like, there are these divisions, you end up getting this sense from a lot of the people in the town that their primary goal is sort of let's turn the temperature down. And let's sort of bring things back to the way so we can all be comfortable with each other. And I think that that was another thing we noticed sort of in this context with Lisa Marie maybe getting a little ostracized because some of the other people in the town, like they don't want just this level of over conflict. And you even see some of the people who you know maybe you don't think of themselves as a white nationalist or don't think of themselves as allied with Peter being like, well, you know he was polite to me or the Brimelos were polite to me. And I think this really stood out to me later in the book. There's like the scene where Paul orchestrates this meeting. like We're going unite people. Let's talk about how to unite some of these divisions in the town.
00:53:19
Speaker
And you get like these two stories of... One person saying, you know, I'm really worried that my liberal friends are going to stop talking to me if I say I vote for Trump. And then somebody else saying, I'm really worried because none of my black friends feel safe visiting town. It's a big difference. And, you know, it strikes the reader like these are very different things. And and so approaching this is how do we how do we come together in this division feels like a little bit empty in this moment. Right. Isn't it funny, though? It's, you know, one reason I fought to keep ah the word white nationalism out of the subhead. I didn't have a choice on the subhead. be perfectly honest with you, I would have preferred something else. The the ah the point is that it's funny that a book that is, assang you know, about a group that is famous for racism, most of the divisions, really the layered divisions in town that really erupt around sex and sexuality, which is so weird because it's not like a very sexy book. You know, which is funny because when i when I was a playwright, that's all I used to write about was sex. But it is interesting because, you know, in the divisions that exist between Trey Johansson and and her name and their neighbor, Charlie Curia, that happened. It's you know, the accusations are really over the pride flag and then like they just get driven apart through that. And then, you know, Trey is bisexual and.
00:54:36
Speaker
uh you know and of course she you know being bisexual myself i can say like there are different layers of this like you know she has a cis partner it's not like exactly you know it's not it's not it's great that she's out with it and it's great that like you know it's it's great that it's in the town and then it filters into the way she she operates or her shop and all that stuff but like she's able she she's able to be like a total normie in town for that you know it's not like too crazy for anyone at least her liberal friends. And then, you know, they have this issue with Lisa Marie, which I don't think it was like, you know, i don't think it was like transphobic necessarily, but there may be, you know, but Lisa Marie definitely picked up on something that there was no, they were not fully comfortable with her. And she felt a tremendous amount of frustration about that. And then she was perceived by them as a threat. That was a story that she told me. And there's just like a lot of that. I mean, it was like the, the, another example of that is when i go into the castle and I ultimately I meet Peter and, and Lydia and we have a conversation, the a the, the, the accusation that they make is that I accosted their daughter, right? Like I try to like, you know, do something to their daughter, of course they're always trying to like call all their enemies pedophiles, which is of course ironic. Yeah.
00:55:47
Speaker
Given everything we know about everything. But um yeah, I mean, again, it's all threats of sex and sexuality. oh It's like, oh, this person might do something to somebody because of their sexuality. I find that really interesting.
00:55:59
Speaker
i don't know if that's the exact answer to your question, because but it started with about Lisa Marie and um the Johanssons. And it made me think of that because... um It is, you know, it's a real factor. it's It's part of it has to do with the divisions in general that are around around politics and everything. And then, you know, the most primal thing is sex and sexuality. And that is sometimes the most the the volatile thing that creates a separation between people.
00:56:24
Speaker
There's actually there's two Black Lives Matter rallies or events in the book, right? and there's an earlier one towards the beginning. And then later on, there's this event in town that causes somebody to say, hey, we need to have another one of these Black Lives Matter events.
00:56:36
Speaker
That one is the one that gets this big show of force sort of counter protesting it. But there's also this fear from the liberals that, oh, they're seeing how these, you know, what's happening in this, you know, it's the summer of 2020. And with all sorts of the response to George Floyd and George Floyd's murder, like all over the country, there's this fear of, oh, we don't want to be seen or lumped in with the riots that are happening in in other places. And I'm wondering how much this like, was it a fear of being too radical, restricting what this resistance looked like? I'm interested in and how that dynamic played out in the town or how you perceive that.
00:57:11
Speaker
That part of it is something best understood by right-wing narratives. Because what you had in the first Black Lives Matter event that happened in town, there was a guy in town who who might as well be conservative. you know he but He might be considered conservative, in fact, in ah you know if he was in Brooklyn or something like that. But he's a... um He's a guy who worked in solar, you know, like the sort of solar company. or Just to a kid grew up in town. he had ah very positive things to say about Berkeley Springs Police Department and Morgan County Sheriff's Department. He's not in my town. Our town is not like them. So he really wanted to show that the town was okay and to reinstall some some belief in the police. That was not the only thing. But also he wanted to say that, like, Black Lives Matter, right? I said a slightly more conservative take than you would imagine elsewhere.
00:58:06
Speaker
has this great thing. It's a beginning of June. There are like 60 people there. He gives a little talk. You know, people are excited. They hand out flowers to one another. and it was a huge success. It was reported about in the local paper, which says something because the local paper is pathetically conservative about publishing anything. They don't want to create any kind of controversy, et cetera. So after that, from June until August, there is this campaign that happens across the country.
00:58:34
Speaker
to demonize the Black Lives Matter protests. Now, to be fair, it was not only the right-wing narrative. There were also riots. There's also property damage. These things were on there are you know happening all over. There's footage of these things happening, being recorded, being sent all over to rile right-wing people up. oh It's not like they didn't have anything to work with. right There were people looting stores, doing all kinds of things that around this time.
00:58:59
Speaker
But that sustained effort between June of 2020 and August of 2020 is a lesson that I think is important for us to look at.
00:59:12
Speaker
If you think about the midterms coming up and you think about the 2028 election, this is something that they do. If you are making ground um in a sort of populist left campaign of some kind,
00:59:25
Speaker
they will find a way to spread fear about it. And they'll use the avenues that they have in order to do it. Fox News is still the biggest one. I would say that from 2020 to now, Fox News has become less important, still it's the most important, but still the less important, still getting the narratives from there. But x is becoming more and more important so in terms of shaping narratives.
00:59:47
Speaker
And they just did a sustained narrative ah that the Black Lives Matter event was, you know, protests were racist. They were anti-white. This came from VDR. It came from American Renaissance, the same places that I said these rich people are donating to. They are the ones out there shaping messaging for people to pick up on Fox and other places. And I think what happens is that people get, they get scared, right? Liberals start to feel that,
01:00:13
Speaker
Fear. All of a sudden you start telling people, hey, this this is what and this literally in the book. There's a coffee shop. The the coffee shop is main thing in town, Paul and Trey's place. They start saying, hey, there's a whole bunch of Antifa and presumably looking like ninjas living in the basement of Fairfax Coffeehouse, ready to come out and, you know, enact harm on the people of Morgan County, West Virginia. well What do you even say to that? If you're if you're like a kind of, um you know, ah a peace and love hippie, you're which is a lot of these a lot of these older people and in Berkeley Springs, you're in a weird place like you're all of a sudden you're talking about, you know, a basement full of Antifa.
01:00:56
Speaker
you know, super soldiers that don't exist and you're trying to defend that, create even if you know you're dealing with imbeciles, even if and you know you're dealing with bullshit, it still becomes very scary because of these stories. And and when if you're ever dealing with somebody who's like, you know, on drugs and doesn't know where they are and their arms are flailing and they're like, that is that's something, you know, in in many ways, that's what, the right wing narrative machine turns people into. They become, they don't even know what they're saying half the time. And we see that with like the, you know, some of the anger around Anthony Fauci, I'm sure, which happened around the same time.
01:01:34
Speaker
sure plenty of things you know criticisms of anthony fauci are legitimate i mean i it's not my wheelhouse knowing everything that happened with him but i do know ah ah just randomly he became if it felt like this this scapegoat for everything everybody who were going around and covid and became a way to direct attention from these health requirements and back to the things that rich people care about which was getting businesses open you know and stopping this covid bullshit Right. The narrative machine goes and that creates the paranoia, if that makes sense.
01:02:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think actually that all part was also really interesting to read because I think even though it was recently, it's sort of hard to remember in a way. what living through 2020 felt like. Like it was such a strange moment in the U.S. It was it was a lot of work there, yeah.
01:02:24
Speaker
There's a good documentary that kind of covers it and also the Antifa super soldiers. It's called Eddington. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's not, I saw that film. and It's not totally irrelevant to this conversation. it's actually pretty well lines up with the book.
01:02:41
Speaker
ah yeah Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, I had to go, it was actually the most amount of work I put into the book, I wrote all those sections during 2024. And then I was catching up to the contemporary time. And things moved very fast for me writing wise towards the end because everything was, was more more fresh with the exception of the fact that I did have some trauma related memory issues when I got out of the hospital.
01:03:05
Speaker
But the beginning of that was the most difficult thing because I had to like piece together what it was like during the pandemic and And I never really wanted to write about that time because it was so gray and awful. The only thing I remember about it is I got like a Nintendo, Super Nintendo Mini, and it had um Earthbound on it. And i i played Earthbound for like... hours and hours on end during the pandemic because you know we couldn't leave anywhere in Queens. um So I didn't really want to think about the pandemic, but it was useful as I was doing it to think about that time, not just in a vacuum like, oh, that was COVID, but the role that it played in creating the conditions at the end of the book, which is when Trump takes power.
01:03:49
Speaker
That was something um i've I felt that emphasis very clearly after having reported it out. You know, there's this interesting moment where you talk about V-Dare is constantly saying in a lot of the reporting, like, oh, we're in a civil war. We're in a cold civil war. There's also they use the phrase like national divorce.
01:04:09
Speaker
And you sort of talk about this impulse that we have to say, like, well, I'm not in a civil war, right? Like I'm not fighting a civil war, but then sort of the dawning realization of like, okay, what does that actually mean? It means I'm not conceiving of myself as like at war with all these people around me, but i but up on the other side, in order to properly kind of respond to this moment, we have to realize that actually,
01:04:30
Speaker
Those people really do think they're in a cold civil war. And so we're kind of trapped because we don't want to be saying like, the same kinds of okay, gloves are off, like every everything is permitted, like, let's go to war. But at the same time, we have to realize like the stakes of what's actually happening. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and how you're feeling around that has has changed.
01:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, i think I think the first subhead or the ah you know subtitle I had for the book was Dispatch from America's Cold Civil War, which is the phrase that Vidar uses, which is a lot more poetic and nice, but I guess doesn't mark it in the same way. So whatever. let them I got to keep my title. So that's one important thing. But yeah, it is a dispatch from America's Cold Civil War. We don't get to choose whether we're in a civil war.
01:05:12
Speaker
We don't get to choose that because if somebody else is at war with you, you're at war. It's like Iran would be like, hey, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. You ever see I Think You Should Leave when the like the little buff boys competition yeah and they bring up the boss and he's like I don't want to That's that's that's Iran. Like, my God. know, you didn't get the choice, right? Like, they're just like, it's your turn, buddy. Like, you're the scapegoat of MAGA for the spring season.
01:05:42
Speaker
You know we don't choose whether we are at a civil war. We don't get to, like, choose because other people have decided for us, right? They've decided they're at civil war with us.
01:05:53
Speaker
They have taken our actions and decided that these are warlike actions and then they're meant to be a war. So the only thing you can do ethically at that point is in in fighting back is do whatever you can, but also you have the responsibility, a much more responsibility than they do, of trying not to escalate it wherever possible.
01:06:12
Speaker
So defend yourself, but don't escalate. you know That's the only thing you can really do, I think, to to some degree. And I think that the theme became much more relevant to me. And this is something that I would have liked to be, you know it's death for books come out in January, but like you know had it come out in January, I would have spent more time talking about the executions of Renee Goode and Alex Preddy, which seem far away from the action of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, until you remember the degree to which leftists are demonized throughout the book by the right and in this cartoonish way, just a, a you know, like a soft stochastic terrorism that is constantly beating in the background in which that finally culminates in
01:06:58
Speaker
people shooting American citizens and the government saying it doesn't matter. you know It doesn't matter. we don't you know they they They don't count. They don't count. These are not people that count. you know So so for that made it very real for me, I think, that you know that felt very much like a cold part of a cold civil war. i don't think it's I think it's impossible to deny that the folks who have been calling it this, as as I mentioned, brindla Brimlow's prodigious influence on the right and therefore our culture,
01:07:28
Speaker
You know, they set up that world. They set up that world that we live in now, where in which people are executed on the street. This would have been unheard of. I'm 47 years old. It's unheard of when I was a kid. Something like this. There are a lot of fucking problems. Don't get me wrong. I mean, there was a lot of problems in the United States.
01:07:42
Speaker
But this is different. This is different. There would have been there would have been such horror. You know, there would have been... Republicans would have felt guilty. They would have they would have said, we we can't... You know, this this is, this this is ah you know, gone too far. and People forget...
01:07:57
Speaker
the The degree in which the the role Republicans played and in unseating Nixon. and This is like, we're in a different place now. ah tribalism and the aggression is very strong. It's going to take a lot of, it's going to be a very painful, let's put this way, however goes, to undo that if we're even able to.
01:08:15
Speaker
You didn't obviously, sure timing reasons, talk more about the murder of Renee Good, but you also mentioned in the book, kind of the moment of what felt like a sea change around like the Unite the Right rally and Heather Heyer being killed and sort of the response to that. i mean, very different sort of event in a lot of ways, but kind of a similar sense of like, so this is this is really an escalation of this movement in mainstream American politics. I think the major events that have shaped this time Other than obviously
01:08:49
Speaker
other than obviously everything and Trump announcing his run. and you know I mean, there's ah new things happen every day. But Charlottesville was a huge one. January 6th is a very big one.
01:09:01
Speaker
you know and then And then the next one is October 7th and the aftermath of October 7th. These things have – these events helped – were big bumps in propelling us towards the environment that we're living in right now. um And you see those changes kind of happening in the book over that time. January 6th happens very quickly. I don't spend a lot of time on it. I just talk about how people in January 6th related to the castle. there were some you know They apparently hosted some people who participated in it. According to them.
01:09:36
Speaker
But like those events, it was that they to me, those are things where there were these underlying divisions in the country. um There was all this tension around MAGA and and and each one of those were were a huge hit that kind of further destabilized things to where they are now.
01:09:55
Speaker
I think at this point, the thing that and kind of stresses me out the most about all this is not so much the oncoming train, which I've been aware of to some degree or for quite a long time.
01:10:09
Speaker
It's the kind of lack of reaction from our elite classes and our institutions. The other day, I was watching Tucker's interview with the New York Times, Tucker Carlson's.
01:10:25
Speaker
And they tried to pin him on his alliance with Nick Fuentes. And it wasn't going great. The interviewer wasn't, you know, super aggressive. But like there were points that that could have been made there. Like she could have like, I don't know, whatever pinning him means. Like, I feel like she could have gotten somewhere with it.
01:10:48
Speaker
And he pulled out an argument that was essentially like, you know, how can you say that Nick Fuentes is worse than the genocide that we just saw? And she completely folded.
01:11:00
Speaker
She just had no response. yeah Because there's this so sclerotic nature to the thinking of our institutions. like They're completely committed to the validity of the status quo and to its moral rightness or at least like justifiability. And isn't it awful that and that a racist like Tucker Carlson...
01:11:23
Speaker
ah can you know score points by acknowledging a genocide that a lot of elites won't do. um and And sort of, you know, he's he's a very smart business person. i You know, I talked about this on my podcast that I co-host with Jared Holt. um We just did a thing about the Daily Wire and how they're dying out, you know, slowly.
01:11:46
Speaker
And, you know, you look at Tucker and Megyn Kelly, they're very savvy, right? they They are able to punch into the Daily Wire and other organizations base with ah on a much cheaper budget.
01:12:01
Speaker
And they do it by, you know, zigging where they're zagging and saying things, you know, I mean, these are you're very cynical people, right? So I'm sure Tucker is to a degree ah aware that the genocide is bad and and maybe in his heart feels something, you know, I'm not going to deny that possible.
01:12:20
Speaker
um But the reality is, well, you don't think so? I'm a little doubtful. I mean, yeah. Okay. I mean, I can't say with certainty. I don't, I don't know what's in his heart. I don't want to deny that it's possible that he's felt something about, I mean, it is truly horrific. Maybe he, you know, but it is a very cynical, I think more than anything, ploy in order to,
01:12:44
Speaker
you wedge into an audience that is demanding someone say something about this, right? There are people who want to expose the corruption of Israel. And there are anti-Semites who feel that way. And then there are people who are not anti-Semitic who feel that way. And Tucker's even getting leftists to pay attention to it, you know, which is bad that they're listening to him. And he's doing it because he's filling a vacuum that our, you know, are liberal...
01:13:07
Speaker
class will not really even talk about still. We had, ah I see, um you know, they're still platforming the ADL everywhere. And, you know, they're a big thing they're saying, that oh, well, anti-Semitic incidents went down this time because the Trump administration has been so good on speech and and campus, right?
01:13:27
Speaker
I mean, the The problem that happened in 2016 when President Trump, or should i say then-candidate Trump, like took advantage of the anger against corrupt, empty elites in the country, Steve Bannon's messaging at the end being like the the the thing that I think really drove it more than anything,
01:13:52
Speaker
when you think about When you think about something like that, right, these people on the right, fascists essentially, have been taking advantage of liberal elite corruption or incompetence for the last 10 years over and over again. And I'm sure the Tucker thing is another example of it.
01:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, I guess kind of just tying together a couple of things that we're talking about then. You know, it seems like, okay, there's this
01:14:21
Speaker
sort of need to actually realize what the stakes are, that there is this cold civil war being waged by the right wing.
01:14:32
Speaker
and And so it makes it sort of frustrating to sort of have that realization and then see this depiction of people who it seems like their big motivation is, you know, I want i want to turn the temperature back down. I want to have sort of friendly relationships my relationships with my neighbors.
01:14:50
Speaker
And that's kind of their orienting political goal for a lot of the, I mean, even liberal, it seems in the town. And also, you know, we see this across the country. And so I'm curious what your thoughts are on like, you know, it really seems like there's more of an effort to bridge this gap between the factions that are putting up pride flat, you know, I don't know the Johannes exactly, but The factions that are resisting this with the people who are sort of, oh, you know, don't you see the similarity between the pride flag and the swastika because they're both symbols, right? Like the guy actually makes this comparison. yeah
01:15:23
Speaker
Yes, he does. And he is sort of still included in this community that they're trying to knit together. Whereas, you know, the the scary leftists are kind of being, you know, we we still need to say, okay, we're not going to go that far. We're not going to say anything about defunding police or anything like this.
Engaging with Diverse Political Perspectives
01:15:39
Speaker
And it just seems like that coalition that is ostracizing sort of anything further left is It's hard to see that from our from my perspective, at least like meeting the moment. And I'm wondering what you think, like if if you see that as an issue or or what you think should be done about that or or as you know, someone who is covering these stories, like what what can be done about that kind of problem?
01:16:01
Speaker
Well, I guess they the main question is, like, can. MAGA people be reached? Can we reach these people at all? Right. And that's a scary thing. um You know, oh, we want to take the temperature down. And I would like that, too. And i I personally don't like living this way. I don't like it. You know, I have a neighbor who's like took out all these political signs that were MAGA related.
01:16:26
Speaker
And, you know, I saw them there and I'm like, oh and now I know what he thinks. Right. Like it it was a terrible thing. It's terrible to feel that way because as soon as you do that, you're on defense. but When you see people associate with MAGA, you know they don't like you, right? And that you know for me, for many reasons, not just that I'm from an immigrant family, but I'm also perceived Antifa. There's all these things, right? They don't like that. They don't like you. It's terrible to live that way.
01:16:53
Speaker
And how do you even crack into it? I think it's important to remember that Some of these people may want the same things as we do, but they're living in a bubble that is where that conditions them to see our world as something horrible. And I think, for example, like Maha for right as as as something right.
01:17:15
Speaker
But these people are against like Monsanto, right? they They have the same. They have the same. you know mentality of granola mom in California in the 90s, around Monsanto and and and food poisoning and stuff. This is like a left-wing issue that they were talking about for the most part. They are really concerned about you know additives and foods and these type these are true. you know I do think with some of these people that are part of Trump's coalition, there are dead-eyed fascists
01:17:47
Speaker
who would want to kill us no matter what, and we're going to have to live in a country with people like that no matter what. And then there are people who've kind of latched onto Trumpism that I think you can actually speak to. i i think Maha is a good example of that. It's not that like we we go soft on that and not we would point out that RFK Jr. is unequivocally the most disgusting man in the United States like in every way, physically. He's just like a creature. i don't even know where this guy came from. and You know, i do know where he came from makes it even worse. um The point is that like, yeah, he's bad.
01:18:23
Speaker
um Trump is bad. But some of these people, i think, want some of the same things that we do. And there are a lot of people who have been you know, you can Felford again award or whatever. They've been stunned by the way prices have gone up and things about affordability and stuff like that, because they thought Trump was going to help them but ah on a common sense pocketbook level.
01:18:46
Speaker
So those type of people who may pride themselves personally about not being racist, like, oh, I'm a Trump supporter, you know, not being racist. Okay, yeah, like you may say in your head, that's not possible. ah But like, let's take it at face value for a second and say like, hey, what if we start, you know, what if we put policies together that change your mind, that lower the priority of this, some of this stuff? Yeah.
01:19:10
Speaker
And even if if you take it in an anarchist perspective and you're not worried about policy, but just in the way, you know, people are treated and stuff like that, make it clear that like on this side of the line, you know, there are people taking care of one another that care about one another. And you're setting an example that way through all kinds of direct actions, many of them peaceful, hopefully. Yeah, I mean, I think that there are ways to absolutely send the message to some of these Trump supporters that there's another world possible. And as for everybody who's like a really hardcore fascist, um don't let them in when it becomes unpopular again. You have to be very clear that like if you're a true, if you are truly an aggressor, that there's no place for you in a better version of this country, whatever
Political Advocacy and Shifts
01:19:58
Speaker
it might be. there was This is just reminding me that back in my like organizing grad school days, we had this like bizarre meeting where people were arguing that we should, in our sort of cops off campus coalition group, someone proposed like we should try to organize with the fraternity brothers because they're also anti-cops. And we were kind of like, that doesn't...
01:20:19
Speaker
That's a bizarre theory of political power to have. That's an interesting one. But I guess, you know, part of my question is, right, like, how do we how do we move forward, given the number of people who are MAGA? But also, I mean, as leftists or, you know, in my from my perspective, like a lot of the policies that I think will change people's lives are things like, I mean, directly targeting police budgets.
01:20:42
Speaker
dismantling ICE, all sorts of things that just even liberals are so propagandized into thinking are these like scary world ending positions. And so there's one question which is like, how do we reach MAGA?
01:20:56
Speaker
And there's another question which is like, How do we reach center and center-right Democrats who, you know, they They're worse. Like, it feels like, okay, you know, I don't have—you know, me personally, I don't have a perfect policy plan, but there's like these issues that just feel untouchable. And I mean, and a lot of them are about organizing against money, but those are really the people that I still feel I don't know how to reach out to.
01:21:22
Speaker
Well, I should say, you know, I remember I was talking about being relentless and, you know, and against your target. It's become very mainstream to talk about disbanding ICE now.
01:21:34
Speaker
And actually, i think it has actually made its way into the center of the Democratic Party. And that's an example of just not flinching on something that is just an unequivocal moral situation. Be like, no, no, we can't do this. This is not good. There's no good version of this agency.
01:21:51
Speaker
You know, picking the arguments that where you can't bend on. Right. That's one of them. And not bending to bigotry. and not bending to, um you know, just a fascist push around an agency like that. I mean, yeah, somebody who's going to win 2028 for the Democratic side has got to be somebody who opposes ICE, who wants to get rid of ICE and dismantle it.
01:22:16
Speaker
I think just sticking to these, you know, just just not flinching on it and and using the leverage that we have. talk about you know stuff around Gaza, I mean, i don't think i think it's a non-starter for any candidate at this point to support giving money to Israel. Like, you know, and like they...
01:22:35
Speaker
paying for this, the you know, the Israeli military is, you know, it's death up there. mean, people are not going to allow it to happen, I think. um So keeping the pressure on things like that, and i think it'll make a huge difference. i think it'll make a huge difference with the Democratic Party, for one thing. And as for the people in MAGA, there's there's two ways to look at this. I think in one way you can look at, like,
01:22:59
Speaker
They have such a dramatic hold on people through social media now, and there are all these tech billionaires who are trying to ensure that that's possible. and then there's Fox News, and you just can't overcome that 30% of the population will always be lockstep with whatever dictator figure they try to mount over there, be it J.D. Vance or someone else, Rubio. That's one way of looking at it.
01:23:21
Speaker
There's another way of looking at it, which is, i don't know if you're familiar with this documentary they did with with some of the anti-immigration voices on PBS back in the first term. And it was like Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, a bunch of people talked in that.
01:23:36
Speaker
Ann Coulter said that when trump yeah when when Trump joined in the race and started talking about basically from her book, Adios America, it was like picking a thousand dollar bill off the ground.
01:23:47
Speaker
for for for people like her, you know, people who are vehemently anti-immigrant and, you know, what what what I would describe as the racist right. Picking a $1,000 bill off the ground. All of a sudden you have this guy who's undeniably gifted at holding people's attention. It's his best. He's a carnival barker. He's the like of the greatest carnival barker in the history of the country and Trump.
01:24:07
Speaker
And he's willing to promote your racist bullshit. And I say this is the other way of looking at it. In 2015, they knew what they were supposed to do long term for the Republican project.
01:24:19
Speaker
What they were supposed to do was like elect Jeb Bush and let him speak Spanish on the campaign trail and create it. Right. That's what they that's what they do to they need to get to make inroads. They're saying our demo. We cannot be white. We can't be a white party. We're going to die out.
01:24:34
Speaker
That's the direction. That's why that's where the party bigwigs tried to direct everybody towards Rubio and every everyone. Anyone but Trump, if you recall, they just were like, please don't do this. This is death for the party.
01:24:45
Speaker
I think another way of looking this is, yeah, they have this MAGA thing. It looks unbreakable right now. But consider the possibility that almost all of this is Trump and his celebrity and his ability to captivate people and hold their attention and and how difficult it would be to find someone else who's dropping a thousand dollar bill on the ground. It is in advance. I'll tell you that. I don't think so, at least.
01:25:07
Speaker
He really, you know, he doesn't he just doesn't, you know, he just doesn't that he doesn't have that it factor. He's a nerd. So consider the possibility that the Republican Party made a very wrong turn very hard at an accelerated rate at around 2016 and Trump.
01:25:26
Speaker
that without trump um there may be an opportunity through organizing and activism to ultimately completely disrupt the Republican Party altogether. And if you look at like figures like Nick Fuentes, why is Nick Fuentes out there saying I'm a Democrat now? What did he say? I think he said the other day, he said, I'm ah ah i'm a a moderate anti-woke Democrat.
01:25:49
Speaker
is what he said, is is is is his political policy now. Because, you know, he wants to hurt the Trump administration, and he was so tickled by the fact that some Democratic lawmakers wanted to expose Israel's nuclear program.
01:26:05
Speaker
The point is that people like this can see, to a degree, the writing on the wall in the sense that the Republican Party may be ah heading off a cliff here. that This split between um the sort of phylo-Semitic and anti-Semitic wings of the Republican Party. And I don't think there's any in between. Right. It's either like Zionism forever or it's not like we like Jews in a normal way.
01:26:30
Speaker
ah Or, yeah, I have Jewish friends. No, it's not like that. It's like some sort of death wish thing in the Middle East that these Zionist Christians are about. And then there's this anti-Semitic wing.
01:26:42
Speaker
And I think that it's that we should consider the possibility that things can happen. you know Things can happen in a hurry. I think it's it's it's it's not inconceivable to me to imagine that much way much of the way Vidir was there one day and they were gone the next day, that this MAGA coalition could completely implode.
01:27:03
Speaker
Yeah. We will soon find out if things like Orban's ah you know election, if that's ah you know ah a a sign of things to come, much like the way Brexit was in 2016.
01:27:15
Speaker
But I think we can hold out the possibility that some of these people are going to be needing our help with AI taking everybody's jobs, this, that, and the other thing.
Conclusion and Future Collaborations
01:27:23
Speaker
It's possible that this spell could break at some point. we should wrap up Yeah, sorry. um You did invite a lot of talking here, so I did it.
01:27:38
Speaker
No, it's great. um Oh, I mean, I could honestly, I could like stay here for ages. Well, I don't know in the podcast business myself. I don't know if they're going to stay too much longer if we keep going. So.
01:27:52
Speaker
yeah we Yeah, our episodes tend to run a little wrong long. um But yeah, no, I think we covered a lot of lot of interesting stuff. I think, yeah, I don't think I have anything else to really draw out.
01:28:08
Speaker
All right. Cool. Yeah, let's let's sort of outro it. Okay, I think we'll wrap up there. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. It was so cool to meet you guys. Well, a reminder, the name of your book is Strange People on the Hill, and you co-host Posting Through it with Jared Holt, which is one of my favorite podcasts. Oh, wow. Cool. Well, you know, maybe we should we we should have you two on for something that that suits you. That would be really cool. Yeah, we'd love to.
01:28:34
Speaker
Really, really, really nice to meet you. Yeah, yeah, you too. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
01:28:54
Speaker
Is Trump to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:29:11
Speaker
some level of masochism.
01:29:15
Speaker
Three, two, oh, oh, before you go, there's only like two rules the podcast, so you gotta be epic and you gotta be a liberal. As long as you got that, you're all set. Okay, I'll be, ah i'll be well that's not hard for me. The vibe is kind of like Brooklyn Dad Defiant, that kind of thing.
01:29:34
Speaker
that's All right, it's perfect for me.