What drew you into that space?

I've always been fascinated by conflict.

I came into it sort of as like a military history nerd, someone who was interested in that.

But really what kind of like broke me into like a significant role in media was I just happened to be paying attention to these weird little corners of the Internet right as like the alt-right erupted.

And, you know, 8chan, 4chan kind of like became major things in terms of like people were carrying out attacks and stuff based on that.

You know, having been radicalized in these little fascist corners of the Internet.

And I just kind of been watching them for a couple of years.

Tucker Carlson?

Yeah

...

there fairly, very, fairly rapidly, books went from expensive luxury objects to something that, like, any asshole could pick up on, and there was a massive market in selling books to any asshole, right? And so suddenly you got a lot of- As soon as the opportunity exists, you have these people whose, you know, are kind of sailing in to meet it, and in the opening minutes of that era, like, a lot of really intru- influential stuff gets laid down.

Like, that, there's a, there's a reason why so much of that stuff sti- tends to stick with us, including the fact that a lot of what comes after it is always sort of derivative of, of some of the original works.

So I, I, it makes sense to me.

I think, like, technology has a lot to do with why you see these, like, seeming waves, and like, well, why did all of these ideas come around the same time? Well, because maybe they were all e- enabled by the same technological breakthrough-

Mm-hmm

... newspapers and stuff in everybody's house, and you could actually, like, distribute the stuff cheaply.

Any larger takeaways, uh, Robert Evans? I mean, I think my takeaway from Iran-Contra is my same, honestly, very similar to my takeaway with Watergate, um, and to a number of like presidential scandals that we've had over the last 50 or so years, which is that

thatWhen you like repeatedly make it clear that there aren't consequences for law breaking at this level in American politics, that if the president says it or does it, it can't be a crime.

And if the president orders people to do it, or if people are working towards the, you know, what the president told them he wanted and they commit crimes, then that's okay.

And that there's accepted ways to smooth over that and ensure that people don't face punishment for what they did.

That's why we're where we are today.

Like all this just begets greater and greater levels of corruption and greater senses of impunity by these actors who already just kind of by default, by the fact that they're working in the West Wing, they're working for the president, have a, a degree of legal immunity, right? That, that is conferred to them just by the fact that like, that's how, you know, we do things in, in our system of government.

And when you take away any chance at any level of law breaking, getting them in trouble, it leads inevitably to further reaches and to further crimes and to worse crimes.

I love it."

[laughs]

Um, you know, my, my old, uh, colleagues at Bellingcat continue to do great work.

Um, you know, The New York Times', uh, Visual Investigations Desk has done some really impressive open source, uh, reporting on conflicts, I mean, over, a- all over the world over the last, like, several years.

I, I find myself really interested in BBC Africa Eye, which is their kind of open source covering, like, particularly, like, war crimes in places like Cameroon.

So there's a lot of really interesting nuts and bolts work being done by folks who are, are willing to do things like spend hundreds of hours combing through, like, footage that w- we know is a war crime, but we don't know what militia was responsible or where it was done, and like laboriously matching, like you can kind of see a mountain in the background, and so they'll just spend weeks going through Google Maps, and they're like, "It's this mountain, and because of where it is in the frame of this shot, we can, like, now locate this exact point geographically, and we know that these militant groups were active." Like, that's really impressive work to me.

Mm-hmm

... very end of the 19th century, where you had a lot of the same language.

Oh, the, the Czarist Russia is this inherently, you know, i, like, destructive spreading, uh, uh, force that we have to counter as the British Empire, or they'll be right in our backyard.

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Betr picks, sports just got better.

Yeah.

So h- one of his early jobs before he gets off to Oregon, I think after he murders this guy with a Looney Tunes trap, is, uh, he's a lawyer, and some of his, probably his most prominent clients were Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, and all of Joseph Smith's, you know, apostles or whatever, all of his friends, 'cause they were on trial for kinda sort of fomenting a frontier war that had, had broken out in and around Missouri.

And so he, he is these guys' lawyer, and his main achievement as a lawyer seems to be getting the venue changed that the court case was being held in, and this venue change allowed Joseph Smith and all of his guys to escape and run away.

Uh, and, and yeah, so that, th- that's his career as a lawyer before he, he gets on that first big wagon train to Oregon for the great migration and whatnot.

Mm

... um, and to stop any more from settling.

And that was too racist for 1850s California, so he lost on that.

And he wound up actually, like, in 1851, quitting being the governor over this, because he tried a couple of times to get California to ban Black people, and they just wouldn't do it.