And so maybe the better question than what I had planned was, do you think that there was a turning point where broadly the left started to claim this as their own victory?

Yeah, they do it all the time.

And it's – you know what? I got to be really careful because I keep seeing people talk about the left and liberals, and I don't think they're the same thing.

I don't think they're the same people.

Some of them use the same spaces, but the sort of like hardcore leftist shit posters who love to be dark, woke, or not PC or whatever – Some of whom I consider my friends or at least like peers.

They love to kind of swoop in and do this thing.

These are the kind of thoughts I have when I realize I've been staring at like systems and networks for too long because I start to see sort of like how like information travels and I start to feel kind of crazy.

They didn't have the infrastructure and also it becomes like trying to explain something deeply online to a mass populace where things start to fall apart versus being able to say they're illegal here and they're criminals is a much simpler messaging.

Huh

... and especially Google.

Maybe you used AOL or Yahoo in the '90s.

But most of your life has been determined by Google sending people to your website and you doing or not doing certain things to get those people to look at your website, or if you don't have a website, all of the websites you visit are being influenced by this virtuous cycle.

So this is true for recipes.

This is true for, um, even people posting on Reddit.

They're all doing it with the hopes of being seen.

Well, do you have a final thought you wanna leave us with?

Mm-hmm.

And sort of be like, "Okay, here, here's what the reality of this is." So, like, uh, uh, you know, um, in Send Help, it's like, okay, they work in a corporation, they're gonna go on a trip, and now they're on this island.

Horror begins.

And then you also have to kind of make people care about the characters that are probably all going to die, because if you don't, you kind of end up in a situation where, like, it doesn't really matter.And an easy way to make you care about the characters is by watching them in the normal, and then watching them react to the abnormal.

And Backrooms, I think, is, you know, so overstuffed with ideas that it doesn't really f- land the flip.

I think the strongest part of the movie is when it goes full blender CGI in the second act, and we can talk about sort of-

Mm-mm.

So it's a YouTube series that was created in the 2000s that started as, it was really interesting, it's like found footage of like these kids are trying to make a movie, they're uploading like v- videos to YouTube.

It included, uh, these wonderful lines, "The age-old problem with working at the racism factory, they eventually make a new racism that includes you." What are you talking about?

Well, [laughs] it was sort of a pithy way to describe what I think is happening to Ben Shapiro right now, which is that he's found himself on the wrong side of a far-right vibe shift that's happening.

So the question of, you know, should American conservatives support Israel, I think, has quickly become the deciding factor in, you know, uh, canonizing the new wave of, of MAGA or even post-MAGA conservatism in, in America.

There's a lot of creators on one side who say we should not be involved with Israel.

They say that largely for anti-Semitic purposes, but also because they're xenophobic and isolationist.

But they, they sort of know that this is a, a red line that they can, they can go across, and Ben Shapiro cannot follow them there-

[laughs]

No, I think that's exactly right.

Yeah.

When Facebook arrives and becomes a major player in digital media around 2011, 2012 with the shift to mobile and Facebook Instant articles and all the rest that comes later, you get people like Steve Bannon who take over Breitbart.com and they turn Breitbart into a juggernaut.

Yeah.

And immediately, there are a few other Breitbart-esque sites that pop up.

So you get Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller, and you get Eddie Munster-looking-ass Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire.

And then you get sort of... increasingly niche versions of this.

So Gateway Pundit was another one that was very big at the time.

I don't know if that's too cynical.

Mm-hmm.

And then those videos link to an account called HOC TalesWhich doesn't have an Instagram, but do- there is a YouTube channel called HOC Tales, which i- is, yeah, it's, it's African folktales and village mysteries brought to life with shocking twists, and they're AI-generated videos.

There's like, you know, half dozen of them.

And the only sort of context I can ha- I have here is, like, there was an AI-generated video that I wanna say went viral in December on Instagram, which was, like, a cartoon of, like, a preacher that was, like, doing a sermon about... [laughs] How do I describe this? It was a cartoon of a preacher talking about, like, uh, like, finding out that, like, their mistress got pregnant as he was doing a sermon.

That's the cartoon, but it was set to a Nigerian Afro pop song that was AI-generated by a comedian.

Is nothing sacred? [laughs]

I'll leave, I'll leave that one for everybody, but yeah, so, so Bonsai Kittens was fake, and yeah, the idea was you could put a kitten in a jar and it would grow into the shape of the jar.

But, uh, the kids who made it at MIT were really not prepared for how viral this would go on early internet.

Talk us through this.

[chuckles] So this is Stephanie Feldman, the national policy director for Biden's 2020 campaign, and she wrote a thread ab- basically off the back of the headquarters Kamala announcement, you know, ask- uh, talking about, like, how do you measure, you know, how content persuades and mobilizes people? And this is an example she writes, um, of something the 2020 team for Biden wanted to do.

She writes, "Here's my f- my favorite example of something the Biden 2020 digital team wanted to tweet out from the Biden campaign account.

I vetoed it because it's such an outrageously unserious reaction to a serious moment and not Biden brand.

Lots of digital people were upset with me," and it's a- it's the ASCII cartoon text bunny with a sign meme, and it says, "Justice for George Floyd," in the sign.

... like, how would you solidify this for, like, the most normal person?

The answer to your first question is, like, actually very frustrating, because I think the most common thing I've seen is, like, a very, very, very oversimplified and, like, way more far-reaching sort of summary of what's in there.

Because a lot of people who are, like, not reading these or reading sort of any responsible reporting about them, and so I've seen people be like, "Bitcoin was invented by Jeffrey Epstein." We have no proof that Bitcoin was invented by Jeffrey Epstein.

So I've been following the-

the-...

the connection between the right-wing media ecosystem, which these days also encompasses random influencers on X and YouTube channels and podcasters and all the rest, and, uh, activity on the ground from the federal government, which sounds totally bizarre and insane, but is happening.

We're living in a world where the, uh, federal government accounts on X are, quote, "posting libs of TikTok" and basing their operations on what they're seeing online.

So I thought, okay, what's happening in Minnesota is probably the most aggressive action we've seen from the Trump administration like this.

So, uh, after the murder of Renee Nicole Good, my podcast producer, Grant Irving, and I flew out immediately, and we were there through the first weekend of unrest following her murder.

And yeah, we did see up close a pretty chummy relationship between the right-wing media and ICE, and, and I, I, I feel like I have a much better understanding now of how these two worlds are intersecting and interacting with each other.

For now.

Explain what you meant.

The way the internet is structured and- and what people view on the internet and how, in particular, automated algorithms, like the ones that power TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, influence people.

We know that there's a connection to their behavior and how they see the world.

We also know that around 2014, the right wing became very interested in building a vast digital media network to counter what they saw as liberal bias in the mainstream media.

So this is the beginning of the Breitbart News, Facebook explosion.

You start to see the rise of organizations like Turning Point USA embracing podcasts and YouTube.

And now, you know, without question, the conservative media is larger than the non-conservative media and they've also successfully hijacked popular culture.

Twitch to deplatform in light of many things he's said over the years.

2019.

2019.

And he says to the camera, "Subscribe to PewDiePie," the YouTuber who was having, like, a sub, like a subscriber war with another channel at the time.

And I remember myself, some other reporters I know, my editor at the time, we all looked at it and we just thought, "Oh, okay." Like, this is, there's, something has shifted here.

And then, yeah, if you look across the timeline, there's a couple other, uh, you know, spree shooters around the world that start to mess with, uh, you know, memes and, and sort of, uh, drenching what they're doing in internet irony.

It has most recently become a very common tactic, uh, among shooters that are believed to be connected to this decentralized network called the Calm Network, or sometimes it's called 764.

They are effectively group chats that find vulnerable young people, groom them, convince them to carry out, you know, different types of crime, or at the top level of this, mass shootings.

oxygen.It's a pretty effective strategy.

It's, uh, a bit of what they would call cringe humor.

humor.The other bullets recovered by law enforcement include a reference to the satirically fascist video game, Helldivers II.

You basically play as fascists in space.

And the message, "Hey fascists, catch," with the arrows written on it references the most powerful bomb attack in the game.

So, the idea was you play those buttons, you throw the bomb, it's a, it's a massive explosion.

The other bullet, uh, referenced by law enforcement, uh, is, uh, the Italian folk song, Bella Ciao.

It is, uh, common among anti-fascists and leftist communities, but it's also a popular fixture in pop culture.

How has Charlie Kirk's murder been viewed online, broadly speaking?

Yeah.

This idea ...

And in fact it's almost sort of like the next step.

It's, it's like if, if you're so angry at the world and not getting laid that you're gonna hurt people, uh, and then that doesn't work-... then, like, you're gonna go, like, even further.

So it's, it's, it's a total, uh, rejection of any kind of help, any kind of structure, any kind of ideology, which in itself is of ideology.

And then you get all kinds of weird meta conversations about it.

But it, it's very linked to incel stuff.

Right.

In those early days though, not everyone was sold on Facebook.

I was resistant ...

Hmm.

No, I wasn't resistant to it.

I was curious about it, and I actually wanna set the stage here with, like, a, this incredible study that I try to plug every time I talk about this era, 'cause I think it's, like, very important for understanding, like, kinda why Facebook won and Myspace didn't.

So, uh, your listeners can, can kind of, like, google this.

I'm not gonna try to, like, get the title right.

Change the name of your company even"?

Yeah.

I mean, there's a section of New York now that has...

I had one of the worst burgers of my entire life at a chicken joint I went to that I had to wait two hours in line for, and it was, like, a donut chicken burger, and it was awful, but, like, everyone in there was only eating it to film it to put it on Instagram.

And so, you know, if you think of Dubai as, like, a giant shopping mall, sort of like the nexus of all late stage capitalism, she's just trying, like, viral stunt food in her car.... and then going viral on TikTok for it.

If you wanna go very high level with this, the fact that you're watching this beautiful, very skinny woman eat gigantic desserts, that is aspirational.

You know, i- it's this idea that, like, all video on the internet as a form of pornography, uh, because, like, algorithmic platforms have reduced it to that.

Honestly, nothing would make me happier.

Yeah.

This- this thing, like, understands me in a way that very few do"?

Yeah, I mean, look, I'll- I- I'll just- I'll just say.

So like, um, the- the- the- the sort of trigger for all of this was just, like, a- a relationship that I really- I really liked ended in a way that I didn't- (laughs) I did not like.

And so I spent many weeks sort of feeding it all of my relationship history, animized obviously, but, you know, sort of talking about different experiences and events and sort of just- and- and just sort of just writing out, like, my memories of, you know, how I got to here, right?I, I don't remember exactly how I figured out it could do this.

It may have even offered.

But it started to s- to sort of analyze the macro data in there that I...

Refining the macro data, if you will, of, of what I was giving it in ways that were really helpful.

... putting his love letters into ChatGPT too many times.

Wow, the Tumblr deep cut.

Yeah.

No, but, but that's it.

Like, my podcast, Panic World, is doing an episode this week about the show Adolescence, so we're, we're talking about kind of similar topics.

And in that episode I was talking about how, you know, my dad is 40 years older than me, so when I grew up, like, when, as a little boy, like, learning what being a man would be eventually, some of that stuff was good and some of that stuff was 40 years out of date for, like, a world that no longer existed by the time that I was 18 or 19.

And a lot of the early men's rights stuff I was covering and reporting on in the early 2010s was focusing on that, which was like the world that the boomer men had promised the millennial men was gone, so what do we do? And a normal, not psychotic person would be like, "Well, I guess I have to adapt." But it's much more seductive and it's much easier to listen to a bunch of, like, violent men on the internet say, "Actually, no."They have to return what we were promised.

That is a through line that goes all the way to Andrew Tate now.

Say more.

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Hello the internet and welcome to this episode of The Weekly Zeitgeist.

Uh, these are some of our favorite segments from this week, all edited together into one, uh, non-stop infotainment laughstravaganza.

Uh, yeah.

So without further ado, here is The Weekly Zeitgeist.

Uh, please welcome to the microphone the very talented Ryan Broderick.

Hello.

I also don't have a song, but I will sing something for your listeners-

Listen now to Question Everything, part of the NPR Podcast Network.

I think a lot of the skeleton key of the modern conservative movement in America boils down to, like, incel theory or Gamergate or whatever you wanna call it.

But it's this idea that, like, there are a bunch of useless men on the internet, and conservatives have realized they can weaponize them by, like, enraging them and, and sending them after their enemies.

And now, like, that dynamic has flipped in a weird way, where they've clearly internalized that they have a bunch of loo- like, useless, lonely men on their side, so now they're like, "We should put them in factories, actually." [laughs] Like, "We should get these freaks out of here." And so you see these guys all day long, and now, like, because Fox News picks it up, like, that's the pipeline, they're saying to men, like, "Don't worry about your 401[k].

You can make socks in a factory in 15 years." [upbeat music]

I'll let you explain.

Happy to help.

So yeah, it's a video from last summer do...

Quick lesson, yeah.

...

but I, I, I, I k- I kind of sympathize sort of with, like, especially, like, the average conservative voter who is now sort of, like, realizing that, like, they elected, like, a, a demented old man who now has, like, absolute power and, like, they're never gonna admit it probably, but, like, this is why you (laughs) don't do this.

Like, this is, this is also not new.

Like, authoritarians do weird economic shit all the time.

Right.

So, like, you know, uh, I- i- if you, if you really can't, like, wrap your head around this, just, like, just, you know, imagine, like, a moment two or three weeks from now when, like, you don't actually in your mind know what things cost anymore and, like, the chaos that that's gonna be.

And, like, and as you said, even if we come through this and we're still in a democracy or we go back to some sort of, quote unquote, "normal democracy," that stuff doesn't go away.