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An interview with Byron C. Clark (@byroncclark) about Kerry Bolton and Action Zealandia
32 Plays4 years ago
This week's episode features Aotearoa-based Breadtuber Byron C. Clark chatting with M about the alt-right, white supremacism, Action Zealandia, and one Kerry Bolton.
See Byron's YouTube work here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Lossenelin
and check him out on Twitter: https://twitter.com/byroncclark
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
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Transcript
Introduction and New Format
00:00:00
Speaker
Right, time to record another exciting instalment of the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. You didn't send me any notes, I'm assuming this episode's elistical? Gotta love elistical! Hello? Sorry, didn't you get my message? You're actually not needed for this episode. Is it true?
00:00:17
Speaker
Have you betrayed us? Us? Have you betrayed me? Sorry, are you quoting Blake Severn at me? That's not important. What do you mean I'm not needed? Well, we have an interview this week. I thought you'd just take the week off. But I'm here and I demand you make use of me. Well, I guess you could- Pew! Pew! Pew! What? I'm shooting you, just like Avon did. Any final words?
00:00:43
Speaker
Yes, these intros are getting further and further away from being about conspiracy theories these days. Roll the theme!
COVID-19 Lockdown in Auckland Discussion
00:01:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. Em Denteth and for us right now at least it's going to be a nice quick record because this week Em's already done the heavy lifting for me and gone and recorded an interview, a full proper interview with another person who isn't me. So I'm all we really need to do is record a bit at the start but at the end
00:01:35
Speaker
Bob your uncle and Fanny is your aunt and actually I actually did have an uncle Bob and a great aunt Fanny so frankly that saying was actually about me the entire time. I had an uncle oh I still have an uncle David big fan of moonlighting. I absolutely love that reference and I suspect a lot of people are going
00:01:58
Speaker
What? We know. We know. We know. We know. I suppose, of course, we should mention that even if you're not in New Zealand, you may well be aware that Auckland, at least, is locked down once again. We've had a handful of cases of community transmission that we're not 100% certain where they came from. Well, I think that the Deputy Prime Minister seems to have been reliably told by a journalist they come from the border.
00:02:23
Speaker
not from the government not from scientists working with the government the deputy prime minister is saying oh no they're clearly from the border how do i know a journalist told me which speaks to the quality of our policy from time to time but at any rate yes i mean that
00:02:43
Speaker
That has put a crimp on your plans, but at least you're not locked. Well, I suppose you're level two, aren't you? Which means you can still go out and do stuff. I'm here in Auckland at level three, where we're not supposed to go out unless we really need to. And they're telling us to wear masks now.
00:02:58
Speaker
And the thing is, everything could change tomorrow night because half past five on Friday, New Zealand Standard Time, the government will be making an announcement as to what's happening both with Auckland and the rest of the country. And I think everyone at the stage is expecting that Auckland's three days of level three lockdown will probably be extended. The question will be given that the
00:03:25
Speaker
people with COVID-19 have travelled throughout the country, there might be an extension of the level three lockdown to other parts of the country as well. We won't know until Friday at 5.30. Indeed. Yes, I mean, I don't like initially it was, there's been community transmission again, so lockdown for three days, but I don't think anyone thought it could be just the three days either.
00:03:50
Speaker
there is we've identified the cases and we need to wait till they're sorted out to be sure or we haven't identified all the cases and then we definitely need to wait until we've tracked everything down. So yeah it'll be interesting to see that as you say what happens to the rest of the country. I mean as far as I've heard there's
00:04:11
Speaker
Rotorua is the furthest they've got from Auckland. It's been known that infected people have got from Auckland, so that's still the top half of the North Island. So maybe here, maybe it will expand further south, or who knows, basically. We're all just playing the wait and see game. And by the time you're listening to this, you might know. But we don't, so got to leave it at that for now.
00:04:33
Speaker
And once again, as we keep reiterating, you might be listening to this after the fall of human civilization. Exactly. Because we might be the only cultural
Interview with Byron Clark
00:04:41
Speaker
artifact left from the human species. At this point, you'll be going, what is this Auckland you speak of? And what is COVID-19?
00:04:51
Speaker
Mmm. Uh, Auckland's a city. Biggest one in New Zealand. COVID-19 is a disease. Nasty. Don't like COVID-19. But Josh, again, the problem with that explanation, aliens listening to this podcast will have no understanding of the English language, so you've just produced sounds that they don't understand. They might think that this is a popular form of music on this planet.
00:05:12
Speaker
Hmm, they might be alien viruses. Maybe they think we're the bad guys. I don't know. Probably best not to speculate now. So this interview, I was going to say, talk us through what's going to be in it. But having listened to the interview, you do a fairly good job in the interview itself of introducing things and, and setting up who it is you're going to be talking about and what and how and why. But just briefly, you're going to be talking to a lovely fellow by the name of Byron Clark. How did this interview come about?
Exploring Action Zalandia and Kerry Bolton
00:05:42
Speaker
So when I found out that Action Zelandia, one of our far-right, alt-right white supremacist groups, had a podcast in which they had interviewed notable fascist intellectual of the country, Kerry Bolton, I mentioned on Twitter that I'd probably need to listen to it, at which point some individuals from the organisation Paparoa
00:06:03
Speaker
which has been very instrumental in basically replying to the white supremacist message after the Christchurch shootings of March last year, although they have a much longer history of dealing with anti-racism and the like. They got in contact with some information about the interview as a kind of background if I wanted it.
00:06:25
Speaker
At which point I said it'd be great to actually interview someone from your organization to talk through the Kerry Bolton stuff. Now, Paparoa is a largely anonymous collective, understandably so, because as they're fighting racism, they don't really want to be targeted by the racists, because as we've seen overseas, racists do tend to get ever so slightly violent, and by violent, I mean engage in shootings in mosques, like we saw in March of last year.
00:06:53
Speaker
So initially they would go well we can get someone to talk with you but they'll need to be anonymous and will anonymize their voice and then they mentioned that actually Byron was actually quite happy to talk with me. Now this was convenient because I actually had already planned to talk with him about this interview because as you'll find in the interview with Byron
00:07:16
Speaker
He has been doing a lot of good work looking at right-wing activity on YouTube, because he might the right kind of person to talk about this anyway. So basically everything came together.
00:07:28
Speaker
Well, there you go. Well, it's not bad about the bush anymore then. Shall we just give these lovely listeners a taste of your interviewing skills? Indeed. And a little peek behind the curtain here, you're now going to listen to about 55 minutes of an interview with Byron Clark.
00:07:47
Speaker
And then Josh is going to pretend he's just listened to it in real time and give us feedback. But actually what's going to happen is I'm going to give a little clap to mark where the edits going to be. And then Josh is going to launch in almost immediately into his commentary upon it, because that is the magic of editing.
00:08:06
Speaker
Mmm... Glamour, you might say. Indeed. So we're going to play Sting, and then for you, time will pass. But for us, no time will pass at all.
00:08:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to an interview, which we're going to go in a slightly different direction with today's show, and that we're going to be talking about Kerry Bolton, Action Zalandia, and a podcast featuring both Kerry Bolton and Action Zalandia. Now, I'm actually going to be talking with not my normal co-host, Josh, but with Byron Clark, who's the country's leading breadtuber,
00:08:47
Speaker
And Jonathan Frakes in personator, hello Byron, welcome to the show. Hello, I should say there are a couple of New Zealand based bedtubers who are more popular than me so perhaps they are the one.
00:08:59
Speaker
I was going to ask, how are things working out in the hierarchy of bread tube? Is there a kind of fight to the death thing? Do you have to work out a way of who's going to dominate the other? Is it a kind of friendly thing? I mean, what's going on with bread tube in this country? It's pretty friendly. There's about three of us in this country and then a few people in Australia who we can sometimes collaborate with a bit as well. And then there was
00:09:27
Speaker
plenty of Red Tube drama, but that's more the Americans and the British way we stay out of that. We're here to talk about the alt-right, particularly a group called Action Zalandia. Who or what is Action Zalandia?
00:09:42
Speaker
So actions Alandia, a small and quite secretive white supremacist group, they emerged around July of last year. They have a bit of a lineage from the Dominion movement and earlier sort of alt-right group that
00:10:00
Speaker
went on an indefinite hiatus on the afternoon of the Christchurch shooting. Almost, I think, within an hour of the shooting happening, they had pulled down their social media and announced they were going on hiatus. And we haven't heard from them again, really, but we know, in part, from this podcast that we're discussing, that actions at Landia came out of some of the members who were involved in that to try and reform
00:10:25
Speaker
a couple of months after that event. Now you refer to Axon Zelandia as a white supremacist group. Do you want to go into what kind of political ideology Axon Zelandia espouse? I would call them a fascist group. I don't know if they use the word fascist to describe themselves, but they're certainly happy to cite various fascist thinkers and activists positively.
00:10:52
Speaker
and espouse what I'd probably describe as a sort of third-positionist fascism. They sometimes can sound, perhaps to casual observers, a bit left-wing in their critiques of capitalism, neoliberalism, and consumerism, but they posit a very kind of traditionalist and a worldview that hearkens back to a sort of imagined European past,
00:11:22
Speaker
And when I say white supremacist, they again probably wouldn't describe themselves as such. They might say identitarian, which is a word that these far-right groups, particularly in Europe, have adopted to say they're about European identity and preserving European identity and in the face of globalism and so forth. Some of the things they have
00:11:52
Speaker
said though particularly when they think they're just among their own on places like 4chan.
00:11:57
Speaker
You see some of that classic sort of anti-Semitism and so forth that you'd expect from a fascist or neo-Nazi type group. I suppose we should point out for listeners of the show that the kind of third position or third positionism is very much a European rebranding of fascism after the Second World War, which is slightly different from the direction that fascism went when it went underground in the States after World War II.
00:12:23
Speaker
And so you kind of get a position there, which is, as you point out, is kind of about the development of white ethnostates, which in Europe,
00:12:33
Speaker
And I'm going to use legitimate here in a kind of weird way. There's more of a legitimate call for their given European nations, at least in Western Europe, being predominantly white nations. So the idea of these white nationalists going, we want to reclaim our homelands, which was something which was quite difficult for fascists to do in the US because white people are a colonizing power.
00:12:58
Speaker
So it's kind of interesting to have a kind of third positionist movement occurring in Aotearoa, New Zealand, given that we are a colonially white power, not an ethnically white location, unless of course you're willing to endorse certain Celtic New Zealand theses that maybe the white person was here first. And of course Kerry Bolton, who we're going to be talking about, was one of the first people to espouse those theories.
00:13:25
Speaker
although he seems to really want to distance himself from that these days. Now there's another interesting part of the actions of landia, political ideology, which you say because there's kind of mix of conservatism and some kind of weird left-wing ideas from say the middle of the 20th century, there's quite an environmentalist focused actions of landia, isn't there?
00:13:52
Speaker
There is. I think they probably identify a bit with the eco-fascist ideology, which is a thing that's emerging. And of course, that was the term that the Christ shooter identified himself with. And that, I think, has its roots a little bit in some ideas from 20th century fascism and Nazism.
00:14:20
Speaker
in terms of like protecting the, you know, the whole the blood and soil kind of idea. So a different kind of environmentalism than what you'd get from mainstream green parties. One that's very much about protecting your homeland for your race or your ethnic group. And they also, they seem to have moved on from a bit now, but early on, they were posting pictures themselves doing like
00:14:49
Speaker
cleaning up rubbish in public parks and things, which was something the British National Party did as a kind of propaganda exercise to show that they were there caring about the community's local environment and things. They seem to have given up on that, though I haven't seen much of them doing that lately.
00:15:06
Speaker
No, although maybe some of that's due to the whole COVID-19 lockdown. Quite possibly. Not being able to get out and about to go down to the beach. Quite possible, yes. It might be they'd like to be cleaning up the beaches. It's just that this pesky plannedemic that's going on is stopping them at this particular point in time. True. Now we've mentioned Kerry Bolton. Who is Kerry Bolton? So Kerry Bolton is
00:15:32
Speaker
probably New Zealand's most famous fascist and that he has been around more than 40 years now and was involved in, I think he tried to set up a group with the fascist union in the early days and then was involved in the national front for a while. We'll go later left that in the 1990s he was trying to marry sort of fascist ideas with
00:15:57
Speaker
some odd occult ideas starting the order of the left-hand path. I think he's abandoned all that now. So he's known a bit here as a fascist figure, I think possibly one of the only New Zealand fascists to have a Wikipedia article. But he's also somewhat known internationally in fascist circles for the various books that he's written and so forth. He claims to have a doctorate, doesn't he?
00:16:23
Speaker
i think he does claim that yes although there is there are questions as to whether he actually has this doctrine i know he was doing work in a phd program somewhere in the south island in the early 2000s and i believe he submitted the work
00:16:38
Speaker
and it was passed through, but then there were questions about the supervision of the work given the quality of the published document, which then led to a whole bunch of issues around the awarding of that PhD. So one of those things where the university in question doesn't want to talk about it, which makes it quite difficult to actually fisk any of the information about whether Kerry Bolson has a legitimate PhD or not. But he certainly does trade on the idea of being Dr. Kerry Bolson.
00:17:07
Speaker
I have a bit of a history with Kerry Bolton years ago. He wrote a three-part series for countercurrents called New Zealand Academia Studies in Corruption, of which I got to be listed in the first entry.
00:17:26
Speaker
on the notion that my PhD can't be particularly good because it was short and only used secondary sources to which I would argue a succinct PhD is not a bad PhD and in philosophy when you're dealing with theory
00:17:41
Speaker
it is mostly going to be secondary sources talking about ideas, rather than fisking those ideas directly. I'm here to guide people to how to think about conspiracy theories, not to tell them whether particular conspiracy theories are good or bad. And then a few years ago, I
00:18:00
Speaker
I uncovered a bit of a mystery in an institute I was working at at the time, in that I was given a book by a visiting scholar by the name of Dimitri Machopoulos. I'm fairly sure I've just mangled his Greek last name, although as the story develops, you'll realize why I don't particularly care. And this book is called Home is Odyssey Beyond the Myth, which is a academic treatise about how
00:18:29
Speaker
The Odyssey is actually a coded reference to the ancient Greeks going to North America.
00:18:37
Speaker
So I was given this book because of my interest in the whole Celtic New Zealand stuff on the notion that, oh, you'll find it interesting. We've now got a Greek scholar who's claiming the same thing about ancient Greece and North America. So I flicked through the book to see what the references were and discovered that the English translation had been reviewed by none other than Kerry Bolton.
00:19:02
Speaker
So then I went, oh, I should probably see what else Bolton and Dimitri have actually worked upon. And so I discovered that they co-founded a journal, ab eterno, which translates to since always, where Dimitri was the editor and Bolton was the publisher because the journal was published locally down here.
00:19:23
Speaker
although some sources online actually indicate that Bolton was not just the publisher, he was the co-editor as well. And because the journal had an ISSN number, that meant I knew it had to have been lodged in the National Library, and so I was able to find issues of it online. And it's...
00:19:45
Speaker
It's got some absolute gems in it, including a piece by Dimitri called Absolute Evil and the Absolute Silly, the main guild of European decline, which basically goes on to say that Hitler was a really, really good Christian and that
00:20:00
Speaker
Basically, he's been mislabeled by people over time if only we actually understood what he was doing, which is standing up against the Jews. We would realise that Hitler had a view of positive Christianity to give to the world, which has been sadly left to one side because of some conspiracy.
00:20:20
Speaker
So I thought that was quite interesting. And the whole thing about this journal with its very anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi message, I think kind of speaks to the fact that Bolton does have a fairly disturbing history, which I think is one of those things where it becomes a bit almost a pun, except it's really not, which he's trying to whitewash at this particular point in time.
00:20:47
Speaker
So yes, so Bolton and Action Zelandia got together to do a podcast recently. Yes, which wasn't, I think it wasn't wholly surprising. He for a while had been commenting on articles on their website and I think maybe it even sort of guest-written one article there. And I think he sees himself as something of a mentor figure for these
00:21:12
Speaker
young men who have formed their little fascist youth group, which he seems to have quite a positive opinion of because unlike the National Front, which was always always had more of a street fighting skinhead kind of element, these this new group does seem at least a few of their members seem to actually be interested in the kind of ideas around fascism and what you might call intellectual fascism rather than just
00:21:42
Speaker
you know, beating up migrants or things like the National Front used to do in the 90s and 2000s. They're more looking at fascist theory and thinkers and things. And so I think that he's been very attracted to the group because of that and them to him for the same sort
Understanding the 'Great Replacement' Theory
00:22:03
Speaker
of reason. So what did you think of the quality of the discussion? Did it make you want to go alt-right? Well, no, it didn't. It didn't make me want to go alt-right.
00:22:12
Speaker
I think the worry with this sort of thing is that for some young men, it may make them want to go alt right. I think a group like Action Zealandia attracts a
00:22:30
Speaker
a certain type of young man that probably wouldn't have got involved in if they were alive two decades earlier and young, wouldn't have got involved in a group like the National Front that were out there, you know, drinking and fighting and so on. It's those sort of young men who get very into the idea of
00:22:52
Speaker
being somewhat counter-cultural and maybe discovering some sort of hidden knowledge, I think a lot of the people that this sort of fascist theory and things appeals to are men who in
00:23:07
Speaker
in different circumstances might instead become really into Gnosticism or read too much Terrence McKenna or become a cultist or whatever. And instead they might get into this whole body of work of fascist theory that Kerry Bolton is a big contributor to and
00:23:32
Speaker
actions Elendia promotes, and so forth. So they talk about a fair number of topics in their hour-long conversation, one of which is, of course, that terrible coded term, the Great Replacement.
00:23:50
Speaker
which of course is unfortunately the name of a particular manifesto associated with the shootings down in Christchurch. And Bolton tries to claim that the Great Replacement as a theory isn't false because even the UN talks about the notion of replacement migration. So let's talk a little bit about that. What is the Great Replacement thesis? So the Great Replacement, probably the
00:24:18
Speaker
The key author behind the work is Ronard Camus, who wrote a book of that title, although there have been others who have promoted quite similar theories like Douglas Murray, who published the book The Strange Death of Europe.
00:24:35
Speaker
And then there are various others promoting the idea. Some of the more explicitly white supremacist types will use the term white genocide rather than great replacement and claim that actually white people are experiencing some kind of a genocide because white majority countries are having mass migration forced upon them from non-white countries.
00:25:05
Speaker
This is, and what some of them will say is that this is a deliberate plot and depending on who it is, it's either the UN behind it or it's, you know, that favourite enemy of the far right, it's the Jews behind it or what have you. Now with the UN talking about replacement migration, that is something you can search the UN website and find. What they're talking about there really is replacing the workforce rather than replacing the population.
00:25:36
Speaker
most of Europe has an aging population and over the next few decades will require people to migrate from other countries to be part of the workforce as the as the older generation retires. But it's a real stretch to say there's some kind of sinister motive behind that to replace white people or or breed out whiteness as if that were really a thing anyway. I mean it's
00:26:05
Speaker
And the idea of whiteness is something that the definition shifts over time and space, who gets to be white and who isn't.
00:26:15
Speaker
Yes, and it does seem to be a sleight of hand that Bolton engages in by going, look, we talk about the Great Replacement. The UN talks about replacement migration. They've both got the word replacement in them, and they're both referring to population change. So really, one is just an acceptable version of how we can talk about the other. But of course, the whole thing about the Great Replacement thesis is it's meant to be engineered from the top.
00:26:42
Speaker
There are people in power who are trying to replace white people around the globe and reduce their power in the supposed polities that they own or have property over. Well, the whole point of replacement migration is discussion of the thing which is happening due to globalism
00:27:01
Speaker
the way borders work and the way that capital flow works are such that people will move from one country to another in order for more opportunity or money at which point that's not the result of an agenda or a plan
00:27:17
Speaker
that's just a particular system cranking through particular motions which produces a result which if you think there's an agenda suddenly looks like the great replacement but if you don't think there's an agenda go no actually that's just how globalism works in a global society hmm exactly
00:27:36
Speaker
And I think this actually goes in quite nicely with the way that Bolton is quite annoyed by the idea that the intellectual left won't properly engage people like him on the, I'm going to put in scare quotes here, intellectual rights don't necessarily want to actually accord to Bolton the position of being an intellectual, but I certainly recognise that within the alt-right community, he is one of the intellectuals they put forward as being an exemplar of how they think about things.
00:28:06
Speaker
And so he's trying to claim that we won't engage properly with his kind of ideas. Do you think that's actually true? Well, it could be argued that we're engaging with those ideas right now. We are looking at the idea he's promoting and I would say critiquing it and fact checking it. And if that's what he means by engagement, then we're certainly doing it.
00:28:35
Speaker
I think the ideas don't get engaged with a lot because they are quite fringe, although I think more engagement is happening as ideas like that start to move from the fringe and edge a little bit closer to the mainstream, which I think we have seen over the past few years. And because of that, people are being sort of forced to engage it rather than just dismiss it.
00:29:03
Speaker
And I think one other aspect that he's probably thinking about is, why don't I get invited onto the radio or TV to expound upon my ideas? If such mediocre thinkers as your Ben Shapiro's and your Jordan Peterson get play, and I, speaking of the voice of Kerry Bolton here, think I'm a much better intellectual of this particular type of tradition than they are,
00:29:27
Speaker
Why am I not being engaged with? There must be some kind of plot to stop me from being able to express my ideas in public fora. So yeah, there is something very interesting about that, which is either a case of not recognising that there is engagement, because when I was listening to him say that on the podcast case of, well, maybe one of the reasons why you're not being engaged with is that people engaged with this back in the 60s.
00:29:56
Speaker
So actually a lot of the concerns you're putting forward are actually fairly old ideas from just after World War II. They were in fact engaged with at that time and people pointed out that they are hollow. And the fact that you haven't moved on and the rest of the world has done means it looks as if people don't want to engage with you, but people are going, I thought we'd already solved that issue 40 or in this case actually 80 years ago.
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, the ideas that are being espoused by Bolton and by actions in India, it feels very much like, no, we've had this discussion, we've talked about it all we can, and the fascist position is wrong, and we're moving on from that now. And these groups are just trying to
00:30:48
Speaker
edge their way back into the mainstream discourse and expand the Overton window, that political science idea of that there's a window of acceptable discourse at any given time. And I think for quite a long time now, fascist ideas have been outside of that window and the window has expanded to include them again, largely because we've had very unregulated social media and YouTube in particular
Impact of Social Media on Right-Wing Extremism
00:31:18
Speaker
with the algorithms that will autoplay similar content if you watch something about, say for example you watch a Jordan Peterson video, it would then take you to a Stefan Molyneux video and then you might end up
00:31:38
Speaker
on someone even more extreme than Stefan Molyneux. Now that's a little bit dated because Molyneux now has been de-blackformed from YouTube and I think they've tweaked their algorithm a bit now to avoid that because that was happening but certainly for a few years there
00:31:55
Speaker
social media, particularly YouTube and Facebook, allowed a lot of ideas that weren't getting discussed on the radio or on television to get in front of people in a way that they hadn't for probably a few decades.
00:32:09
Speaker
It's a good reason why I don't watch much conspiracy content on YouTube these days and mostly watch people doing restorations of computers from the 1980s because that algorithm, that algorithm was not doing me any good whatsoever.
00:32:26
Speaker
So do you think that part of what Bolton is doing within interviews like this is trying to kind of build his brand with a younger generation of fascist, whilst also possibly whitewashing? And I know that's a weird way to put things. We're talking about white supremacism, his fascist history. Yeah, I mean, it certainly certainly appears that way that he is trying to
00:32:55
Speaker
become something of an intellectual figure for these young men who, and like I sort of alluded to earlier, it's a particular type of young men who like the idea of getting into some kind of esoteric knowledge and being into young intellectuals
00:33:14
Speaker
the same type of men who get really into, you know, Jordan Peterson and Stephen Molyneux and so on. Kerry Bolton, I think, perhaps is hoping to become that kind of a figure, maybe on a smaller scale, even if it's just for New Zealand young men who may already be thinking of themselves as fascists. I think he would be hard pressed to reinvent himself as a
00:33:38
Speaker
philosopher, like Stephen Molyneux calls himself, I think his fascist history is too long and extensive to be able to do that. But yeah, to an extent, he is whitewashing it a bit in that interview. And maybe that represents a bit of an attempt to try and mainstream himself a little bit more as well.
00:34:00
Speaker
He does have history of removing his history from the internet. You may be aware that many years ago Scott Hamilton had a discussion about Kerry Bolton on national radio. Bolton basically sued national radio for defamation.
00:34:19
Speaker
One of the tactics he used to succeed in that initial defamation hearing actually ended up being reversed, was basically removing a whole bunch of the references Scott had made reference to online, so that when people went to investigate the honest true opinion defense that Scott was putting forward, they'd go, well, but there aren't any references there because those references had just disappeared overnight.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I mean, that's what's interesting about the app eternal stuff. There's very little reference to that online anymore, you have to be making quite specific searches to find any reference to it, which does indicate that there may well be a program constantly on Kerry Bolton's part to just scrub the bits of this history
00:35:10
Speaker
online which he can get access to. So it's harder to actually make claims about him. Now let's actually move on to talking a little bit about the hosts of the podcast. So the podcast we listened to was hosted by Gilbert Frederick and Hector, members of Action Zelandia. Was it me? Or was there a lot of crypto and sometimes just outright anti-Semitism in that interview?
00:35:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I definitely picked up on that. Things like referring to Taika Waititi with his other surname Taika Waititi Cohen to emphasize his Jewishness, for example. I think they weren't doing that to they weren't doing that to show that he was a good person to direct Jojo Rabbit because of that heritage. I think they were doing that to
00:36:08
Speaker
you know, in the minds of their listeners, link him to a kind of Jewish elite in Hollywood. A bit of a dog whistle, but one that I think a lot of people can hear if you're familiar with anti-Semitism on the far right.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yes, and I mean, they kept on talking about Jewish funders that Jewish funders this, they wanted to talk about the Jewish funding of the American Revolution, the supposed Jewish funding of the Holocaust, the Jewish influence in the communist revolution. And actually, I found that bit interesting
00:36:41
Speaker
And that Bolton actually at that point goes, no, no, no, we don't need to focus so much about the Jewish influencers. There were lots of people trying to reap reward from the end of the tsarish regime, which made me think that even he was going at that point. No, you're using that word too often. We're meant to use that quietly. We're not meant to be overt. Yeah, you're saying the quiet part loud.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, so it did actually seem to be quite a lot. I was waiting to say a lot. There was there was some pushback by Bolton, who I think is more interested in securing a legacy, and not it being easy for people like us to then go, so why did they talk about the Jews so often in such a short amount of time? And I mean, there was also some interesting, interesting sexism and anti LGBTQI stuff as well, wasn't there?
00:37:35
Speaker
Yes, yeah. I've noticed, I've noticed a lot of that among not just the more kind of extreme wing of the far right, like actions Elendia, but even the more, I guess you might say far right adjacent conservatism, like the the new Conservative Party and people around around that. And I think a lot of it is particularly for for
00:38:02
Speaker
outright fascist like actions Elendia, this idea of deviance and degeneracy, people degenerating from their ideal of what the white race should be and so forth. And I think the fact that actions Elendia is
00:38:22
Speaker
describes things like homosexuality as a mental illness and so on. It's very much playing into those sort of fascist ideas around sexuality and degeneracy and so forth. Because they won't accept any woman into the organisation, will they? No, they are just a men's youth group. You must be under 35, you must be white.
00:38:50
Speaker
on 4chan, when they sort of launched themselves there, there was some discussion as to, you know, could you be mixed race? And could you have one non-white grandparent or whatever? And at that point, the person purporting to be a representative of action in Zealandia, and I see no reason to doubt that that person was a representative of action in Zealandia. They sort of say, no, you must be ethnically pure.
00:39:17
Speaker
And they won't allow disabled people or even overweight people to join because they have very much an idea of the ideal body which is again one of these sort of fascist ideas that ties into the whole idea of around degeneracy if you're gay or transgender or so forth. Because they had a big old rant about the feminine part of the brain which stops people from being able to support them.
00:39:47
Speaker
which is, yeah, complete pseudoscience, of course. Yes, which is kind of what I find fascinating about their constant talk about the trans agenda, in that they've got really, really weird biological views of human nature, which
00:40:07
Speaker
kind of takes them into fairly weird spaces, so they seem to think that the transgender and the transhumanist agenda are one and the same, which seems to be another case of the replacement migration, great replacement thesis. They use the same word, ipsofacto, they must be the same idea.
00:40:27
Speaker
And so they've basically got this idea that there's a transhumanist agenda being put forward by our elites to make us all into cyborgs, which to my mind actually sounds pretty cool and not particularly disturbing. I think Alex Jones espoused the same theory, I think.
00:40:44
Speaker
Yes, I mean, it does seem to be this movement amongst people on particular elements of the right to say, look, they just want to make us into cyborgs, they want to make us into evil machines, put magnets in our hands. That's my terrible Alex Jones impression there. And it's kind of fascinating because they seem to put it forward as being an example of something that the left wants.
00:41:08
Speaker
And yet, most of the people I know on the left, their first response to they want to put machines in our head will be to go, yeah, but what about the privacy concerns? I mean, surely if we've got robotic eyes, surely Apple or Google is going to be tapping that data for all kinds of online purposes, that actually sounds pretty, pretty awful. We need we need a lot of safeguards in place before you can just start putting cyborg implants in my face.
00:41:39
Speaker
So yeah, I find that to be really quite interesting. And then the people who are sort of advocating transhumanism and whatnot seem to be the sort of eccentric teak moguls, the, you know, Elon Musk's of the world and people like that. But I guess for a group like actions at Landia, they sort of conflate the elites with
00:42:05
Speaker
with the left in some ways, because they see the left as being the foot soldiers of the elites, and that's where they can sound almost anti-capitalists talking about, I don't think they really use the term ruling class as such, but they will talk about elites, which is a useful word because a listener who has already predisposed anti-Semitism can substitute Jews in for that. So they'll talk about elites, but then rather than talking about
00:42:32
Speaker
class conflict or something like that the left might talk about they will they will see the the left is
00:42:41
Speaker
you know, carrying out the will of those elites and to the point where you'll even see all this talk of, you know, billionaires like George Soros funding Black Lives Matter and so on. Yes, I mean, this also seems to be another case of them mistaking part of words for pure meaning, the notion of people like Elon Musk, who are quite obviously libertarian.
00:43:03
Speaker
Well, libertarian sounds awful lot like liberal, so liberals and libertarians must be one and the same, even though actually some of the biggest pushback against libertarianism in say the US, for example, comes from the liberal divide because libertarians seem to be much more aligned with right-wing talking points than they are with left-wing ones.
00:43:28
Speaker
Although I suppose for a third positionist they can kind of go, we navigate those murky waters in a completely different way. So were there any parts of the podcast where actually that's a good idea or that's plausible? Nothing, nothing really jumped out at me like that, no.
00:43:48
Speaker
Did you have anything like that? Well, I mean, I was quite fascinated by the discussion of monetary policy, not to say that I thought, yes, that's a good idea. So unfortunately, the notions they're putting forward tend to come from the social credit playbook. And social credit has a fairly disastrous history, particularly with respect anti-Semitic banking conspiracies in the background. But at the same time,
00:44:13
Speaker
I can see that if someone doesn't know the history of social credit, but hears that an idea was put forward by the Labour Party as a particular point in time, he might go, actually, that seems vaguely plausible in the same respect that this afternoon on Twitter, we saw some very
00:44:34
Speaker
interesting takes to National's new idea that your warrant of fitness needs to have your insurance details put upon it. And there were lots of people on the left going, actually, that seems like a great idea. And then people pointing out, so you want to kind of have a kind of badge system where it's quite obvious a poor person's driving a car. That doesn't seem like a particularly good idea when you actually start thinking about it.
00:45:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, were there any other bits and bobs from the podcast that you found particularly interesting that we should maybe also shine a light upon? I did think it was interesting that Kerry Bolton made the point. He said that really, truly sort of fascist politics had only begun with
00:45:24
Speaker
with action Zealandia or the Dominion movement, considering that, you know, it's obviously had a much longer involvement in fascism than most of these young men have been alive, or probably all of them actually, given the age of the group, which I guess is part of that whitewashing of his own history. Yeah, there was actually, I mean, it was actually interesting because I couldn't quite work out whether he was trying to curry favour with them.
00:45:54
Speaker
or whether he's going, you know, my long history of trying to set up a successful fascist movement in this country has been actually a long history of failure. You people have come along and you seem to, I mean, it's probably a bit early to judge their success given that they're a relatively young group, but they still certainly seem to have been able to
00:46:18
Speaker
to brand themselves and appear online with fairly consistent messaging without falling into the tired trope of skinhead does something stupid, entire movement is kicked to the curb because of it.
00:46:35
Speaker
Because they did send you a big discussion there about one of the problems that fascists have had in this country, like the National Front and the Dominion Movement, is you will get the bad skinhead who does something stupid in public, and then that allows the public to then go, oh, these people are bad.
00:46:55
Speaker
Now, of course, these people actually are bad. So actually a stupid member of the organization shining a light on the organization is in fact a good thing. But of course, it's bad PR if you're a member of that organization, and you don't want to be shown up by an idiot.
00:47:11
Speaker
I actually found that to be quite interesting from another perspective which is essentially the hosts are going look those bad skinheads are not representative of fascists generally so we shouldn't be associated with the bad activities of a few
00:47:30
Speaker
they're of course quite happy to then to take either misquotes or strange examples of activity on the left and then go and that proves the left is degenerate to the core so there's a interesting double standard with respect to what they're allowed to get away with versus what the left is not allowed to get to get away with in the same way certainly yes
00:47:56
Speaker
So yeah, I thought that was a particularly galling example of wanting to play both sides. I mean, I was thinking more along the lines of they keep on talking about this transhuman cyborg agenda, which no one ever seems to actually believe. But they said we found one person who said something online once, ipso facto, everybody wants this now.
00:48:20
Speaker
I do want the cyborg parts, but that's more a function of age than anything else. Bits of my body are wearing out and I kind of need replacement parts. I need a robotic liver. That's what I really need these days. Indeed. One thing that that brings up, I guess, is the attempts to really see themselves and be seen as a
00:48:47
Speaker
he's a more clean cut sort of fascist group and nothing like those skinheads of the past, is that some of the rare media coverage that's been given to actions in India has been in one case when one of their members was arrested in relation to a threat to Al-Nur Mosque just coming up to the one year anniversary of the shooting.
00:49:13
Speaker
that young man had been in the news earlier, but not associated with actions at that point, when on the day of the shooting, he was drunkenly... He insisted he wasn't celebrating, but he was on the streets of Dunedin, sort of yelling out like the Muslims and so forth, and was in the papers for being arrested then, and then about a year later, arrested in relation to this threat. There's also another man associated with actions at Landia, who...
00:49:43
Speaker
is facing an active duty soldier who was facing court martial at the moment for I think the charges is something like providing like distributing information that could jeopardize national security or something to that effect so as much as they'd like to not be seen as
00:50:03
Speaker
you know, a sort of thuggish criminal element. The few members that we're hearing about almost seems to be something much worse when that does come out.
00:50:16
Speaker
that never gets sort of mentioned in their podcasts. And they claim when something like this happens, they say, oh, that person has violated our terms of membership where you don't do anything illegal and they're no longer a member, which is very easy for them to say when none of them reveal their identities until
00:50:38
Speaker
one of them is arrested and we then learn of their identity in the case of the young man with the threat from the mosque and less so in the case of the soldier who still has name suppression yes there is something quite interesting about the we are all law abiding figures until such time it gets revealed that we're not at which point oh no but they were never a proper member of action so land here
00:51:00
Speaker
I mean, in critical thinking terms is often called the true Scotsman fallacy or the representational fallacy, the idea that, oh, no, someone who does that isn't a proper member of our organisation. And maybe from a PR perspective, that's the move they've got to make, given that other white supremacist outfits in this country, like the National Front,
00:51:26
Speaker
have a deplorable history of bad action by members all the time. I think that's one of the things that Kerry Bolton is trying to divorce himself from, which is his role in the National Front, which of course was then led by Carl Chapman for quite some time. It was basically just a bunch of skinheads who would occasionally hold very unsuccessful marches through the streets of Christchurch. Yeah, they would hold marches that were
00:51:54
Speaker
at times somewhat sizable because they would get all their members from around the country to come to one location and do them. They did a few outside Wellington as well, outside Parliament I should say, in Wellington.
00:52:08
Speaker
Many of these, particularly around 2004, they were met with counter demonstrations that very much dwarfed their numbers. And I think eventually they stopped doing the ones in Wellington as pressure was put on accommodation providers to not allow their members to stay there. And so they stopped going to Wellington. And for a while, we're still doing them in Christchurch. But after time, that sort of petered out. Which is nice.
00:52:37
Speaker
I mean, it was always a point of national pride that we tended to have a counter demonstration larger than the actual white supremacists themselves. It turns out that maybe our population is slightly better than the nihilists, among us, would like to believe. Yes. So have you got anything to promote? Oh, well, I guess I should promote my YouTube channel.
Byron Clark's YouTube Channel and Content
00:53:03
Speaker
Tell us all about your amazing YouTube career.
00:53:07
Speaker
So, I started making YouTube videos not long after the Christchurch shooting. I'd been following the alt-right a little bit before that event, kind of starting with, I guess, when Gamergate happened and then watching the alt-right, realized that, hey, here's a group of extremely online angry young men
00:53:36
Speaker
who can be brought into the fold and made into part of our movement. I mean, the first website to give positive coverage to Game of Gate was Breitbart with Marla Yiannopoulos as their sort of tech editor, and then watched sort of over the following years, you know, the election of Donald Trump, and then the Unite the Right rally,
00:54:05
Speaker
And then by 2019, you know, the events in Christchurch. And after that, people who sort of followed me on social media and knew that I followed the alt-right a bit were
00:54:18
Speaker
looking to me for information. I thought, well, what's the best way I can get some of this information out there in an easily consumable form? And I'd been watching a few of the sort of BreadTube-style video essayists for a while by that point. I thought, I'll do video essayists because it might reach more people than writing articles on a blog or something like that. And so the first one I did was looking at
00:54:45
Speaker
the UN Migration Compact and the conspiracy theories around that that was started by identity groups in Europe, particularly Generation Identity in Austria, which the group that the Christchurch shooter had donated to. And I looked at how that had spread into New Zealand and through social media and talkback radio had gone from a kind of far right fringe to being adopted as policy by ACT and national
00:55:15
Speaker
who then, in the case of National, very quickly scrubbed it from their website on the day of the shooting there. So I looked at that as a case study of how far-right ideas can get into the mainstream. I think I've done some more since then. I did a three-part series I called Stories New Zealand's Far-Righters Telling, where I looked at
00:55:39
Speaker
Again, sort of conspiracy theories that had emerged after the shooting, like the idea that the shooter wasn't actually far right, which you'd see being pushed by people who are uncomfortable with the fact that a lot of the things the shooter believed are what they believed and so they want to portray him as actually a Muslim convert or actually someone on the left or they
00:56:05
Speaker
piggyback on this eco-fascist term that a lot of people might not know the definition of and say I was a radical environmentalist we associate that with the left therefore left not right and so forth and I've also done one where I looked at the far right sort of misappropriation of Viking history which was a fun excuse to dress as a Viking and I think as we mentioned at the start my most recent one is
00:56:32
Speaker
uh fact checking a a local sort of far right youtuber which i've done in a sort of stylistic parody of uh 90s shows like beyond belief and unsolved mysteries and and so forth how's the response to the most recent video being um mixed it's always mixed um because
00:56:54
Speaker
a pretty substantial portion of my audience are people on the far right or at least people inclined to that way of thinking. It's interesting because I can see on YouTube where the referrals are coming from and I can always tell like what's the website that the far right are using at the moment because after the main social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube
00:57:22
Speaker
I think for the first one it was then 8chan was the other big referrer when that was still around and then that disappeared so the next one it was 4chan where they'd gone back. This latest one after Facebook, Reddit and Twitter the next biggest referrer is Telegram so I know that the video is getting shared around.
00:57:41
Speaker
these right-wing telegram channels, and people are watching it from there. So I get a fair bit of negative feedback, but I get plenty of positive feedback as well. Because you even got downvotes on the video before it went live. Yeah, well all the videos now, I do a premiere, so a few people can watch it once as it launches, and so I've got the link up.
00:58:03
Speaker
And immediately there'll be some people go in and downvote the video and say, well, you don't even know what the video is yet. You only have a title and a thumbnail.
00:58:14
Speaker
So yeah, you can never really trust, on any political content, I think, on the internet, you can't really trust up and down votes. Similar with book reviews of a very controversial book. You can't really trust all those one-star reviews, this being people who have read it and had a negative opinion of it. And it's the same on YouTube. Although that said, I tend to have a reasonably good ratio that's in favor of upvotes.
00:58:44
Speaker
By the time a few people have seen it anyway. That's good to hear because yes, the algorithm can be quite cruel otherwise. So what are you planning on doing next? What am I planning on doing next? I've got a few ideas in the pipeline. Not all of them necessarily about the far right. I do occasionally branch out to some different things. One I did that wasn't about the far right was about
00:59:13
Speaker
Australia's offshore detention policies. And I think it's somewhat related because it's still about issues of borders and migration and so forth. But it wasn't directly about the far right. And unfortunately, it wasn't as popular, I think, because it didn't get it, perhaps just because it didn't get their far right audience that my critiques of them do. But I am planning what will probably be a multi-part series that I'm calling sexual anxieties of the far right.
00:59:40
Speaker
which I'm going to do as a parody of the kind of sex education videos you might watch in intermediate school. So I'm hoping that that will be popular or if not popular, at least not controversial enough to be pulled down by YouTube because I'm going to be talking about sexuality and also talking about fascism, possibly with some quotes from Hitler. And I think that's going to run some risks on YouTube, but I'll see how it goes.
01:00:10
Speaker
Yes. Given the state of social media at the moment, it's actually quite hard to predict what's going to be the next litmus test for videos or social media, especially given the way that machine learning and machine intelligence is doing a lot of the curation in the first place. It's quite easy to become a false positive.
01:00:39
Speaker
Definitely. And there are a couple of things from the last video I did where some of the intro, it includes sort of small clips that are sliding by back and forth. And a lot of them are just pulled from old public domain, sci-fi and horror movies. And I found one about a Nazi time machine. I said, oh, well, I've got to put the Nazi time machine in there. But I
01:01:03
Speaker
crop the video in such a way that there's only two thirds of a swastika because the machine learning will see a swastika and remove it. So it's very low resolution and very quick, but there's an RT time machine in there. And also one of the video clips from the YouTuber who I am fact checking, I noticed was removed from YouTube and that's probably because
01:01:28
Speaker
he claims in that video that COVID-19 is a hoax so there's actually a slight distortion of the audio when he says hoax just to make sure that it doesn't automatically get pulled based on having the phrase COVID-19 is a hoax that's something I wanted to avoid putting in the video because while any human watching can tell that I am critiquing that machine maybe would not
01:01:52
Speaker
Yes, I think therein lies the danger of our machine learning culture. Context is often, often king. And it turns out that context is one thing we're not very good at training machines to recognize. Although now, now, now I feel the need to hunt down this Nazi time machine film. I think it was called the yesterday machine. Let me look that up.
01:02:19
Speaker
Wait, that does vaguely ring a bell. So this is a 1963 film that is today machine, yes. Yes, I don't think I've ever seen it. I think I've heard of it. I have a thing for time travel films. I'm very much looking forward to the third Bill and Ted film when it comes out. Oh yes, I'm looking forward to it.
01:02:41
Speaker
end of this month it actually might be the only good thing 2020 is going to give us this year. Quite possibly. I mean the end of the year at this stage looks like it's going to be a disaster with that American election where it's not particularly clear that President Trump is actually going to accept any result that doesn't accord with his gut feel about what the American people really want. So the fact that we're getting a few Keanu Reeves films this year because I think they've finished filming
01:03:10
Speaker
the most recent John Wick film, but the Matrix they haven't finished doing yet. There are some Keanu Reeves highlights, which will at least make the end of the year more tolerable than it's been thus far. Yes. Well, thank you very much. This has been a rather elucidating discussion about actions of Landia and Kerry Bolton, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Okay.
01:03:41
Speaker
So Josh, you've just listened to that interview in real time. Yes, I have wink. Do you have a follow up for that? Okay. So you're going to say something with you to lead me into that. No, no, you said, see, I'd already said, what did you think of it? But you'd launched in with the wink unless you didn't actually hear me ask a question. So then I let Pinterest pause, hoping that you'd then launch into
01:04:05
Speaker
Well, you know, when Doris and I first met in the Primrose Path back in June, but no, instead you were confused. So tell me, Josh, what do you think?
01:04:17
Speaker
It was a jolly interesting listen, really. I was interested, obviously, because I don't pay any attention to these sorts of people online, I was interested to hear about their reactions to the Christchurch shootings and about the various things that disappeared almost instantly in the No True Scotsman-y. Well, he wasn't a real proper one-of-us sort of thing.
01:04:47
Speaker
And yes, I wasn't aware of your history with Mr Bolton as well. Bit of intrigue there. I actually thought I'd told you that, so... You probably had, but it was probably a while ago. The full extent of that story, I'm actually not at liberty to disclose, because it would embarrass certain individuals if I said exactly when and where it occurred.
01:05:07
Speaker
But yes, the Dimitri, and I'm going to mispronounce his name again, but once again I don't care because he's a Nazi, Mykopolis, Mykollopolis. It's M-I-C-H-A-L-P-O-U-L-O-S. Sounds like Mykollopolis. Yeah, Mykollopolis.
01:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, that was a very interesting time. And I have to assume that he knew who I was, because he probably mentioned the people he was around to Kerry Bolton and correspondence. And so I just assume that Bolton said, yeah, don't talk to that one. They're a wrong one. Hmm. There you go. So does this, um...
01:05:48
Speaker
I guess one thing I had was where to from there. I assume Byron's going to carry on doing his YouTube videos, which you should go and have a look at, by the way, if you have not already. Does this affect any of the things you've been looking at?
01:06:05
Speaker
in terms of the Christ yet shooting that you've looked into or any of the other sort of conspiratorial kinds of things. I mean I have been keeping an eye on what Action Zelandia does and I have been noticing that they've been using the services of Kerry Bolton for quite some time so he wrote a piece for their website, he's appeared on the podcast. If you go and listen to the podcast, which I wouldn't recommend,
01:06:30
Speaker
They do threaten to bring him back for subsequent episodes, so there probably is going to be more content to talk about. We'll probably hear more from Byron at some particular point. We were talking after the interview ended about the build-up to the election and the way that conspiracy theories are being espoused by both minor and major parties in the build-up to the election, which may or may not be in September, given that this Covid crisis may
01:06:56
Speaker
delay the election date by several weeks or a few months. So we'll probably hear about him again in future when we start looking at what the right is doing with respect to trying to change the government.
01:07:10
Speaker
Well, there you go. Probably should wrap it up there then, for although mere moments have passed for us, our audience has spent 55 odd minutes listening to the interview, so maybe we should give them their time back. Although before we go, we should point out that
01:07:26
Speaker
our good patrons get even more, before we're just about to go and record a bonus episode, which talks about, as you said, some of the conspiratorial talk that's already popping up around the election here in New Zealand, and just a bit of the old QAnon-y, Covid-y business that just seems to be everywhere now. Can't avoid the stuff. Unfortunately, it does appear to be everywhere, and I really wish it would stop.
01:07:58
Speaker
But it shows no sign of that, and neither do we, quite frankly. So we'll let you go now, but we'll be back. Same time, I assume, in about a week, as is our want. But until then, I will say goodbye. And I will say get to the rescue chopper.
01:08:23
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
01:09:24
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.