Meet The Community Activist Taking Trump's Threats Of A Coup Very Seriously
"I think unless we're ready to launch that kind of mass protest in a sustained way, we're going to be looking at very real fascism."
Welcome to Extra Garbage Day! Every other week, I’ll be dropping a bonus Thursday issue just for paying subscribers. To start, these will be Q&As with interesting people I’ve been dying to interview. Let me know what you think.
A few weeks ago, I came across screenshots of a Twitter thread activist and extremism researcher Gwen Snyder had written in 2019. I’ve been a fan of Snyder’s work for a few years now, but seeing her thread a year later, I was stuck by how succinctly she mapped out how digital right-wing media indoctrinates readers and pulls them into more extreme online spaces.
Not only are Snyder’s observations about how Facebook’s algorithms pull users deeper and deeper into darker and more violent communities have only been proven more correct over time, but her focus on Ben Shapiro, in particular, I thought was particularly sharp. Especially when you consider that Shapiro’s website, The Daily Wire, was the top publisher on Facebook last month.
I’ll confess that when Snyder and I spoke a few weeks ago, her very serious talk about Trump staging a coup still felt abstract to me. I, of course, knew that Trump has an almost infinite capacity for grift and disruption and cruelty, but I still felt optimistic. I still felt as if That Sort Of Thing Can’t Happen Here. Reading the news this morning, I no longer think that’s true.
So if you’re like me, trying to wrap your head around the president’s increasingly serious threats of dismantling this country’s transfer of power — one of the last pieces of our democracy that hasn’t been tarnished by his administration — then I hope you’ll read my interview with Snyder below. It’s bit longer than previous ones I’ve done for Garbage Day, but only because of how crucial I think it is. We talk about the drastic political shift that’s happened in this country over the last four years, dissect exactly how a decade of digital white male arrogance led to both a sicker internet and a sicker country, and talk about what exactly we can do if Trump refuses to leave office. It has been slightly edited for pacing.
First, for those who might not know your work. Can you tell me a bit about your background?
I'm a former labor organizer and current community organizer and had started doing direct action response to pathways in Philadelphia and throughout that became more deeply engaged in research on the far right, in general, and specifically groups in Philly who were doing racist far-right organizing and the accelerationist terrorists who hang out on Telegram.
And how did you get involved in this sort of thing? I feel like for a lot of people they don't really totally understand what draws people to do this sort of work because it's so intense.
I've been a community organizer my entire adult life. The Proud Boys had organized a rally back in November 2018 in Philly and it was really appalling to me that this was happening. And I was talking to some of my friends about showing up for a counter protest. One of my Black friends said, "yeah, I'm not coming out for that. I don't feel safe." And it just really hit me at that point that the folks that I'd been organizing with and break bread with don't feel safe in their own city because a dozen nazis feel emboldened enough to rally in downtown Philly.
So that's when I started taking photos of some of [the Proud Boys] and started putting faces to names and figured out I was really good at it. So I really started doing the work of organizing against the Nazis in Philly and also making sure they were identified to people in our community of who they were. And that was all happening before the wave of 8chan-related terror and I started writing about 8chan, as well. And that's how I started researching the much more extreme Telegram community.
I feel like you might be a good person to ask this because in my own travels I've been trying to get people to connect these dots. I grew up in the outer-Boston punk DIY music scene and there were always skinheads and nazis around and then there was this weird moment in the late-00s where 4chan was becoming more and more prevalent and this edgelord humor was becoming interesting for young men. And they were going through a process we now know is radicalization. But to me it's interesting that there's this thread where the more technologically advanced these movements get, there's still this early clash in subcultures where it's happening there first and then becomes a larger phenomenon. Like we could have fixed this five or 10 years ago.
I don't know if we could have solved it five or six years ago. I think there are a couple pivotal moments for the online far right that we didn't understand until relatively recently. Which were Occupy and Gamergate.
With Occupy, that was one of the first moments where that 4chan gamer culture, that had really become enamored with doing a lot of online stuff, anonymous pranks, like the capital-A Anonymous hacker group, actually showed up in person for something. What we saw there were a lot of these white guys who had been online and came in and thought they were going to be the messiah of Occupy and were just deeply resentful and angry in a lot of cases that they weren't immediately hailed as saviors of the Left, or whatever. And so there was this deep reactionaryism. And it drove a lot of that 4chan backlash. This “oh, we're going to be revolutionaries” and they came out and expected everybody to so excited and it didn't happen and they decided “fuck these people, fuck people of color, fuck women, they rejected us.”
And then there was Gamergate where you had Bannon really weaponizing what was originally mass-misogynist trolling. But really connecting to Richard Spencer and online troll culture and taking that politics of online resentment — white guy resentment — and coalescing it into a real life moment. But I don't think when we're looking at the online alt-right and the brownshirts stuff that came around with it that there's a clear subcultural path. Unless you count 4chan as a subculture, then yes. I was very organized in the music scene in Philly at that point and none of this feels like it came out of real-life offline subcultures. It really came from folks who wanted that sense of subculture that didn't have the skills or access to find it in real life. And when they tried, came in with so much arrogance, that they got rejected and went into reactionary mode.
Wow, I think you're exactly right. I think you're dead on. I was at Occupy in the very last days and it's so clear looking back at it now. What I wanted to ask about this thread you posted in 2019 about Ben Shapiro's role in all of this. Do you think that this has changed in the year since. Do you think he's become more prominent or more effective? Where do you think he exists in the ecosystem now?
I'm not a Ben Shapiro expert. Most of my Ben Shapiro knowledge comes from having seen his shit in far-right spaces and how it gets shared. I'm not a Ben Shapiro scholar. I think when Trump was first coming on to the national stage as a politician that people realized they had to take seriously, Bannon was really doing a lot of this work trying to create an online ecosystem. It's not a system that is in and of itself radicalizing, but he created space for other pieces of the puzzle he was putting together for people to enter into and radicalize. I think Ben Shapiro was one of the few people in creating that pool who were ready to be radicalized. Like the Fox News folks weren't quite ready to be radicalized. There wasn't a bridge between them and the more far-right stuff. And Ben Shapiro by himself is not that bridge, but Ben Shapiro introduces ideas and thoughts and arguments that create space for the people who can build the bridge between those groups and the more extreme far right.
It's almost as if he's the first step. Like him and the Jordan Peterson-tier, the classic Liberal tier, the debate me guys are your first step into that world.
Ben Shapiro appeals to more to people who want to be snide about shit and helped create a sense of pseudo-intellectual arrogance that makes folks more susceptible. People who think they are smart are more prone to radicalization and conspiracy theories than your average person because they think they're too smart to get tricked. And I think Ben Shapiro helped convince people that they were too smart to get tricked.
Also, to go back to your earlier question, he's institutionalized more now, but he's also less useful in that way now just because the culture of the Republican Party and the American Right as a whole has shifted so far in the direction of outright fascism that there's almost not as much need for a Ben Shapiro figure to normalize it anymore. So I think he's less relevant than he was in that sense than he was a year ago, but that has a lot less to do with him.
Yeah, his whole schtick feels so old fashioned now and I wonder if the younger post-4chan Gen Z kids who have only known this look at him like he's kind of a joke. The “W.A.P.” whole thing made him feel like a fuddy-duddy and it doesn't feel like he's on the breaking edge of this stuff anymore.
Yeah, and I'm not sure he ever did. It always felt like older folks liked Ben Shapiro. Not like the much older Fox News audience, but people who would read Breitbart. Like Gen X right-wing people found Ben Shapiro really useful. Ben Shapiro's target audience is not people his age.
So I love asking people this question because I think it's both terrifying and useful. Where do you see this whole thing going? We're a month away from the election. I feel like there's this belief that if Trump loses we're all good and we can all go back to normal, but that doesn't seem true in anyway. So I guess where do you see the next year of this going. If Trump loses I feel like it'll get worse right?
The absolute best case scenario right now is Trump stages a coup and fails. If Biden gets elected — which if you look at the electoral college numbers — might not be the sure thing that a lot of Democrats are convincing themselves it is. But there's this meme of a very excited dog in a playpen and it takes about 10 seconds for the dog to walk off and take the playpen with him. He's still in that square, but heads off into the distance. Someone used that meme to describe how liberals tend to think that Trump is going to be contained. That the playpen is the constitution.
I think because we've lived in a country that's been relatively stable for some time, we don't really understand that laws are social constructs and if we stop deciding that it's important that they get upheld, that they just stop being upheld.
There's this mass fantasy that if Biden wins he'll be fine. I don't think there's an understanding of how exactly how good Republicans are at stealing elections and how much that's accelerating. Even if Biden manages to pull off a majority in the electoral college, Trump has spent his whole life stalling in court courses. Trump is just going to refuse to leave. If there's not mass protests and sustained mass protests, it's a coup that will stand. From what I hear from a lot of people who study fascism as a historical movement, things go downhill very, very quickly from there. I think if you look at what Trump is doing about Kenosha. The Federal crackdown in Portland. Trump is actively making sure he has brownshirts and feds to make sure he can brutally suppress the kind of mass protests that would stop that kind of coup. And I think unless we're ready to launch that kind of mass protest in a sustained way, we're going to be looking at very real fascism.
My last question for you. You spend a lot of time looking at these online spaces and looking at how people network within them. What's your best advice for someone who knows someone who's being pulled into these spaces and sharing these memes and watching these videos?
I think the only way you can intervene in that situation is you can sit down with them and you speak from a place of shared values. And you remind them. You say, "Uncle Bob, one of the things that I've respected about you so much forever is that you're so committed to truth and honesty and here's how what you're sharing right now really makes me confused about how your behavior is aligning with your values." And speak from a place of where you actually believe there are still shared values with that person and work from there. Because if you talk down to them or you accuse them they'll shut down.
But if those conversations don't work, you have to ask yourself specifically if you come from a place of privilege, are you willing to stand up to that person and confront them in a way that may end the relationship. It's a very difficult place to get to and be with loved ones but it's also a conversation a lot of us need to be having. We have to understand that this really is life or death, that there are people who are dying, that there are more people who will die if this really becomes our dominate political culture permanently.
Thank you for supporting Garbage Day. It’s been a really exciting putting together these interviews. Your subscriptions have made this newsletter become bigger than I ever could have imagined.
If you’ve been forwarded this email, welcome! Definitely make sure you check out previous Extra Garbage Days like my interview with extremism researcher Sarah H (@nezumi_ningen on Twitter) and my interview with YouTube musician Skatune Network, and my interview with Their.Tube developer Tomo Kihara.
Oh, and here’s the dog GIF that Snyder was talking about.
***Typos in this email aren’t on purpose, but sometimes they happen***