Rachels work has covered a period of topics and she has reported extensively on the activity of the altright and their supporters. Rachel will be saying a few words about the Southern Poverty Law Center before we launch into the discussion for tonight. Please welcome rachel to the strand bookstore. [applause] hello, everybody. As he said my name is rachel and im an Investigative Reporter with the Southern Poverty Law Center and i want to thank all of you coming out here in sporting what we do at the center. I want to take a minute to tell you some of the specifics. We do three things. Seeking justice, fighting hate, teaching tolerance. The first and the third of those things weve got lawyers and legal staff that are much more talented than myself that do litigation on civil rights work all of the south and the rest of the country. Teaching tolerance staff introduces materials for educators so that they can promote diversity and inclusion in the classroom. What i do and what dave does is on the fighting hate site. You may be familiar with our hate map. We monitor and track hate groups and extremists across the united states. What we call extremists would be defined as any group that has a belief or practices that is maligns a class or people. We go across the spectrum of any kind of germination that you can imagine thats based on those. And so, you know, the reason why i think daves book is relevant in one of the reasons why i think some of you guys might be coming out here tonight is i think for a lot of people the whole trump phenomenon felt like it was coming out of the blue. Oh my god, all this hate bubbling up and where did it come from. What dave does so wellin his book is trace how that is not an anomaly and not a sudden flash of lightning and braces woke up and it was an ongoing pattern that you can trace back to our countrys history and throughout the hate movement and thats why the work we do at the Southern Poverty Law Center in the intelligence project is so important. We can find those patterns and when all these questions arise we can say no and we do about this. One of the things nick might have mentioned is that i cover for of the other areas hate is what is known as the altright and night specifically interested in it for a couple of reasons. Probably the biggest reason is my age. These people are contemporary the mind and in my generation and i recognize them and i know the tactics they are using and i see them conjuring up their own brand of hate that is distinct from that of our parents generation and dave actually has a passage here where he defined the all right that i think is extremely accurate. A place for human decency and ethics are considered antiquarian jokes and empathy is only an invitation to assault. Those are the kind of things that were facing right now and i see it all the time when i monitor them. I really appreciate all your support helping us track these folks and make sure they are not just a next media phenomenon. They are serious and they do a lot of damage. Its just as destructive. Some ways you can get involved is to donate to the center and for the intelligence project specifically i would say the biggest thing is to follow our blog and subscribe to our magazine and share it. Richard spencer doesnt go on to cnn and become a white activist because people know who he is and he can share with us journalist and get the world out there because we have more information on these people than anyone else out there. Thank you guys. It is time for dave. [applause] thank you, rachel. Tonight we are excited to host awardwinning investigative journalist david. Hes worked at newspapers and at msnbc as a writer, producer or he earns the National Press club award for distinguished online journalism. His edited the Political Blog crooks and liars and is currently a computing writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center blog, hate watch. His own blog run a akayed ullah recognition and awards for best series and named its annual award after david. Hes written several books, one of which from the 2014 International Latino book award for general nonfiction. Joining david in conversation tonight is joe, editor at large of the Investigative Fund and the man responsible for inviting david to contribute his work at the Investigative Fund news. Joe has studied and written about the all right extensively as well. Amongst several published books are big life, the hunting of the president. His essays also appeared in scores of periodicals including a new republic, the guardian, in the New York Times, to name a few. Please join me in welcoming david and joe to the strand. [applause] good evening. Thanks for coming everyone. Yes, thank you. We will get right into it. Im joe and why did you write this book, Dave Petrarca ive known dave a long time and we were bloggers together back in the day and not in the same blog, i worked for salon and dave was doing his own brilliant blog and thats when we met in the blogging heyday. I know hes been working on this kind of Political Research since back then. He knows as much about this as anyone in the country and so why this book now . To tell you the truth i didnt and certainly did not plan to write this book. [laughter] my last book on the far right really had did terribly at the box office and i followed it up partly because it was a difficult book to write with a book about killer whales because i had been environmental reporter for years when i got into writing about the far right i first started writing about them as this anti environmental backlash story of the northwest and so i did this and it was a hard book to write because of a harrowing story. When i was done writing it i said i need to do Something Different so i wrote the book about killer whales that i had been wanting to write for long time. And it was fun. Unlike writing books about hate groups in hate crimes. It was fun to go out and tell it and talk to people about the coolest animals on the planet. It sold really well so i was like, okay, my next book i will write a book about humpback whales. [laughter] that is what i wanted to do. And i was assembling the notes and talking to scientists and getting it ready all the fall at 15 but i was watching and i was working for [inaudible] and doing this work and watching what was going on with not just trump but what was going on in the ground with the far right groups in the way they were gathering steam in organizing and we were seeing this new phenomenon called the all right gathering traction and gaining steam and we needed to watch this and by that spring it was obvious by spring of 2016, january, february is obviously had a very serious problem on our hands. Partly because trump was being successful, not just at gaining votes but also at providing a banner under which the struggling extremists could rally in organized and feel inspired. So, yeah, i decided well, i dont want to go probably do those stories again but. All this time you are working on the piece for us that took years to do. Yeah, five years. I worked with the Investigative Fund and we had to find dave to do a analysis for us of domestic terrorism because it had occurred to me that there was a lot more domestic terrorism by the far right than by any other group including islamic terrorists. But i asked dave to go into that and it took a while but he did so during the soul. You are going through that and that mustve had an effect on you this book, as well yeah, sure, part of what we are swimming upstream against we write this material is the resistance to acknowledge the reality on the ground which includes the reality that domestic terrorism occurs twice as often by extremists in by islam us and the pool of potential domestic terrorists out there who are right extremists is just vastly larger, usually larger than what you get when you see from the islamists. Its something that gerald johnson, to permit a plant security analyst, former analyst who helped me with the database together and he was the guy that authored that 2009 memo that there is a huge storm media storm saying that veterans are being recruited and fox news and anyway darrell would point out to me that this is part of what he was seeing them as well, that the numbers, sheer numbers, of right wing extremist out there and we can them in the hundreds of thousands and radical islamists are probably in the thousands. Really a significant difference just in the potential pool of extremists out there and it makes sense for Law Enforcement to take them seriously and to deal with it in an adequate basis but what were seeing is this ridiculous bias where rightwing extremists are being investigated at all by anyone but the fbi. The fbi is a pretty good job of staying on top of them when you need to fight the rest of the Law Enforcement agencies in this country really fall down on the job. Do think that is because of the way this issue is covered in the National Media . Is because theres a reluctance on the part of i have noticed this but part of mainstream National Media organizations to name this and describe it and describe the breadth of it . Yeah, a lot of that has to do that. You know this joke and i worked in newsrooms for years and years and one of the things thats been happening in the 90s was that if you did this kind of work it obviously i was having difficulty getting my editors to permit because they were running scared about being accused of liberal media bias. The toxicity that that claims the literal bolt media bias p. M. Affecting newsrooms in the 1990s so badly that by the end of the decade i left the newsroom altogether. So that means youre a liberal. Yeah, or if you talk about your nazis then its liberal media bias and you know i grew up in a republican in idaho sounds like okay, really . Obviously, im not in anymore. [laughter] where does the title come from . Which is alt america . I dont like calling them that because ive banned the altright except when someone else is saying it because i just think its a synonym for neonazi and so tell me why im wrong and i want to call them nazis when they are not these s let me first explain the concept here and then well get into that because thats sort of a separate subject. But in important one. So, alt america grew out of the realization that i had really covered militias in the 1990s and they created this alternative universe themselves to live in. Its a physiological bubble that let them live alongside the daytoday life but really their daily lives and worldviews are totally different universe and of course i saw this in the 90s with the militias talking about new world order and is bill clinton part of the various plot to enslave all mankind and so on and so forth. And it never went away. That bubble never died and that the Patriot Movement and it never went away. It shifted gears to become this entity that 911 is really in the conspiracy theories but that was where the bubble moved to and it didnt really capture or entail the mainstream conservative until the election of barack obama or really barack obama candidacy first started seeing it and then once you selected it really took off and the Tea Party Movement which followed obamas election was this thing set up by corporations and Grassroots Movement but within months of that Movement Starting up this was a project i did for the Investigative Fund i was seeing the wholesale movement of ideology taking over and that will movement is a within a year i was going to these tea Party Gatherings in montana and idaho and places like that and there wasnt a difference between those gatherings in the militia gatherings that i was see in the 90s. They were selling the same books and touting the same conspiracy theories and they were talking the same talk. It was just like the same so i was like this is what is happening and it is now mainstream and this used to be a Fringe Movement in the Tea Party Really enabled the mainstream in a huge way. First, when trump came along in 2011 adopting the conspiracies theories in the hall once he became the candidates in the 2015 that it really became started taking off and then the rise of the alt right movement supplemented this in a powerful way so that it became the Patriot Movement was distinct from the alt right and theres a lot of weight over but theres a different movement but they all operate and live in that same czar alternative universe where obama was a muslim and hillary was a part of part of the pedophilia conspiracy so on and so forth. Thats what alt america is, an alternative universe created for themselves. It does play off the term physics which is i understand the objection to the altright and joe you can talk about this more. Its meant to sound innocent and normal but thats not what they are so their description of themselves is meant to be anodyne and they want to slip under the reindeer in a way with swastikas and all the other paraphernalia that would be objectionable to most people if they understood that is what it was. Thats one of the things i wanted to ask you was how do the richer dispensers and the various elements that was kind of old, old altright in their ideology, far, far right and reflect some strains that have existed for a long time in this country in like the American Nazi Party and other elements of the Vanguard Party itself. How do they suddenly rise up in the midst of all of this . What were they doing trump . Well, the traditional neonazis and white supremacist, the clan, the nativists, they really they had been relegated to the flinched for a long time and certainly successfully and so honestly a lot of the time for most of the last 2030 years its a lot of dealing with these crotchety old haters who youre just waiting for them to keel over and maybe the movement would go away. Little i literally true. The leading neonazi in the country is dead and yet his thing went away, his Liberty Lobby doesnt exist anymore but the holocaust revisionists in the other sort of nazi leaning outfits ideologies that help to foster still around and explain how that happened. Part of this had to do with the internet. Previously for the internet came along these people were spread out geographically and had a difficult time getting together and certainly a difficult time spinning ideology and the internet from close barriers down so that they could reach out to each other instantly across the country and organize frequently but what also happened was weve been doing with the less years the altright is not your grandfathers clan. They are really night and day difference between the crotchety old backwards looking old far right movements that we are accustomed to and they were always looking back and the altright is very different and it rose out of the internet and mostly it has its origins in [inaudible] gate and a misogynist culture that surrounds [inaudible] gate and it became his huge opportunity. You might need to explain that. You do that in the book but let everyone know. This is a controversy that happened within the video gaming world around 2013 that was all about the ability of game designers, feminist game designers, to come up with ideas and structures for video games other than your mail shoot them up games, right . And the video gaming community, the mail who live in their parents basement rose up in righteous anger against these feminists and started harassing them in their homes and attacking them and there was a really powerful antifeminist proponent to this that they started it off with these conspiracy there is including one that was really invented by White Nationalists in the cultural marxism and you probably heard the term trust me if you hear the term culturalism marks its something you should know is that it was basically an invention of the White Nationalist movement to describe things they dont like about america. Yes, explaining Political Correctness and multiculturalism. And feminism yes, and feminism. So it became internet forums like credit and in the video game chat rooms these White Nationalists really began successfully gaming the recruits on this misogynist ellen element of the community and becoming part of the gaining traction for the White NationalistPolice System and so pretty soon you saw all this forums this pollution of racist ideology gaining huge numbers of hits and very large audience and thats how the altright started. One of the things it does this movement uses social media in very clever ways and they use humor and its not humor that i think any of us in this room would actually much of the above because its transgressive and ugly racist, bigoted humor but the kind of humor that would appeal to a 14 yearold boy who likes humor. Beavis and butthead type. That really is their recruitment that young, white males between 16 and 30 in their very successful at recording them. Especially because they happen to be suburban and welleducated a lot of them come from very economic stable and very rich background and all of these have the white men who are under siege and culture is under siege and they are standing up against it. That is interesting what you said about their economic circumstances because of course theres been a big discussion in our country everybody was upset about the fact that trump is president is trying to figure out why theres been a debate about this and is as much of of economic anxieties or racial anxieties or just plain racism or what in clearly all those elements play some part in the election but in this subset of the altright for the neonazi right, as i prefer to call it, thats not the case. Richard spencer, princeton, is very welloff.