Red Ice TV - The Terrifying Trad-Wellness Pipeline Towards White Extremism

00:00:00.000 They're always very worried that we have people that are kind of bridging out, right?

00:00:05.240 That they just don't talk about like what's happening to our people, right?

00:00:10.260 Or our race or what's happening to our countries.

00:00:13.420 They're worried that people are developing a wholesome kind of approach to many different subjects.

00:00:20.340 From health to outdoors issues to, you know, traditional values and stuff like that.

00:00:27.400 And then kind of tying that together with essentially their ethnic interest.

00:00:34.000 So the Atlantic, wonderful outlet.

00:00:36.260 The crunchy to alt-right pipeline.

00:00:38.940 Those living on the fringe of the left and the right share more in common than you might think.

00:00:44.600 By Kathleen Bellew.

00:00:46.720 And there you have your KKK picture right there with an old woman pickling something. 0.72

00:00:51.400 On Twitter and TikTok over the past few weeks, scores of users have become alarmed.

00:00:57.400 About the uncomfortable coziness between the natural food and body community and white power and militant right online spaces. 0.66

00:01:08.380 The crunchy to alt-right pipeline.

00:01:12.100 Crunchy, coined as a pop culture reference to granola, has come to refer to as a wide variety of cultural practices.

00:01:17.840 Including avoiding additives and food dyes.

00:01:22.700 Oy vey.

00:01:23.800 Declining or spacing out childhood vaccinations beyond what pediatricians recommend.

00:01:29.320 What do you mean?

00:01:29.840 Brought to you by Pfizer.

00:01:31.880 You mean that?

00:01:32.820 Pediatrician-sponsored pharmaceutical pipeline industrial complex?

00:01:36.960 Yeah.

00:01:37.500 And more extreme actions in pursuit of health.

00:01:41.220 Independence and purity.

00:01:42.800 These are now dangerous, just as free speech is a major problem for these people.

00:01:49.380 Anybody who wants to live a natural lifestyle, anybody who wants to be outside of the hamster wheel of this modern health scape, is now a big problem.

00:02:01.420 Back to the land living and alternative medicine are hallmarks of crunch.

00:02:05.600 Much of this subculture is benign, a declaration of anti-modernism or slow living.

00:02:11.720 But this largely white cultural space shares some preoccupations with right-wing organizations, which have used it for recruitment.

00:02:20.300 In the 1970s and 80s, women in the emergent white power movement, which gathered Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, skinheads, Christian identity members, tack resistors, and other militant right activists, deployed what we would now call crunchy issues as part of a wider articulation of cultural identity. 0.86

00:02:43.900 It's very dangerous, folks.

00:02:45.280 These bits of crunchiness include organic farming, a microbiotic diet, or macrobiotic diet, neo-paganism, anti-fluoridation, and traditional midwifery.

00:03:00.240 Run for the hills, folks.

00:03:02.740 The naturalists are coming.

00:03:05.840 And they have the white supremacists with them.

00:03:08.880 All of these are often thought of as leftists or hippie issues.

00:03:13.480 But they appeared regularly in the robust outpouring of women's publications in the white power movement. 0.80

00:03:21.820 The surprise at the crunchy to alt-right pipeline or at the closeness between the radical right and the radical left reveals a problem with common ideas about left, right, and center in American politics.

00:03:35.600 The Archive of the White Power Movement, a vivid repository of letters, newspapers, personal correspondences, images, FBI files, news reports, and court records collected across decades suggests that the reality is much more complex.

00:03:56.200 Where is this?

00:03:56.940 The Archive of the White Power Movement? 0.87

00:03:59.380 Left and right not only grew close to each other in the 70s and 80s, but they sometimes shared much more with each other than with the political center.

00:04:15.220 And this is this, you know, I'm not going to argue, oh, the right and left doesn't exist and stuff.

00:04:18.520 And of course they do, but it also, it's constantly the fear that you actually would have people transcend the circus and the right-left political spectrum to actually begin cooperate.

00:04:31.660 And it's virtually impossible to, you know, for right-wingers, I think, to work together with leftists overall, at least in these new factions of the left.

00:04:41.780 But maybe a traditional left, yeah, you could potentially do that, right?

00:04:44.600 But the point is that they're terrified.

00:04:48.640 I think they will start to demonize any so-called fringe that doesn't matter where it positions itself on this kind of political spectrum.

00:04:57.800 As long as it's not, like, approved, sanctioned, mainstream ideology and views, it will be demonized at some point.

00:05:06.680 But they fear that there actually will be just normal, regular people coming together and actually fighting the establishment, fighting the elite, pushing back against, you know, those who actually do hold the power in doing this to us.

00:05:18.820 And I'm not saying, like, there'll be this, oh, there'll be some kumbaya movement with Antifa's one day.

00:05:24.500 Obviously that's not realistic, it's never going to happen anyway.

00:05:26.760 But the center thing, you know, democracy and official stuff and blah, blah, blah, that's the most important thing.

00:05:33.660 In the 1980s, for instance, white supremacist compounds and hippie communes could exist in the same rural communities.

00:05:41.600 Consider, and here's interesting, consider Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, the home of the white separatist compound Aryan nations. 0.71

00:05:50.320 Coeur d'Alene also attract other survivalists and people who want a distance from the state as well as environmentally inclined leftists attracted to the scenic lakes and mountains.

00:06:04.300 You see what's happening here?

00:06:06.600 Agenda 2030.

00:06:09.040 You have an unacceptable attraction to natural beauty.

00:06:15.640 We're becoming suspicious of you.

00:06:20.320 Scholars have spent ample time on other alliances between neighbors in this period, such as the way the white power movement radicalized its rural neighbors affected by the farm crisis of the 1970s.

00:06:31.780 Yeah, as soon as they, you know, screw up and do a bunch of bad stuff, people become skeptical and they move, you know, to other solutions.

00:06:41.260 They look at other people and they say, well, they make a good point, these guys over here.

00:06:44.880 Maybe they would mismanage us.

00:06:47.860 Maybe they don't want us dead and want our kids to be like mutants, you know what I mean?

00:06:54.580 It's a big problem, very dangerous.

00:06:56.400 Beginning in the 70s, the alternative lifestyle publication Mother Earth News ran articles on organic gardening and other issues championed by the left.

00:07:06.380 Though the publication itself was not an organ of the white power movement, TM, and indeed often espoused leftist positions, in at least one high-profile case, white power activists use its classifieds section to find one another.

00:07:23.940 Should be against the law for people with the wrong opinions to use the classified sections of papers.

00:07:30.840 Robert Matthews, the leader of the white power terrorist group The Order, met his first wife through the magazine's personal advertisements.

00:07:40.200 Matthews would lead The Order on a spree of racist and anti-Semitic assassinations, robberies, and infrastructure attacks that in many ways lay the foundation for the violent strategies used by white powder and militant right activists today.

00:07:56.340 His wife, Debbie Matthews, had a movement career of her own that lasted long after her husband's death at the hands of pursuing federal agents and traded on his martyrdom.

00:08:09.160 Yeah, did they kill him or something, I assume?

00:08:12.260 Unless it was a gay op and it was actually organic, 100%, it wasn't like a feds or something. 0.89

00:08:17.060 Usually what happens is they just kill them, right?

00:08:21.660 They take them out.

00:08:22.600 The Matthews family lived in Metalline Falls, Washington, and commuted to nearby Hayden Lake, Idaho.

00:08:29.240 In addition to the Aryan Nations compound, Hayden Lake and nearby Coeur d'Alene hosted teepee-dwelling hippie communities, alternative lifestyle followers, northwestern outdoorsmen, fundamentalist Mormons, and survivalist unaffiliated or loosely affiliated with white supremacy.

00:08:48.020 Do you see, again, do you see what's happening here?

00:08:50.740 Where basically, if there's any kind of cross-ideological, whatever political factions pollination that's occurring,

00:09:02.660 or just have normal people that might be interested in different things that just talk to each other and just agree on common sense issues,

00:09:09.360 you're going to notice that more and more and more of that is going to be a massive problem for these fanatics, such as this author in The Atlantic.

00:09:20.340 Issues common to these groups accorded with ideas of purity and interest in survivalism and a deep distrust of the government.

00:09:29.320 Yeah, why in the world would someone be distrustful of the authorities?

00:09:33.320 To be sure, the meaning of each of these issues would have been different to activists of different political persuasions.

00:09:39.360 even in the same communities.

00:09:41.200 Homeschooling, for instance, could be used in the white power movement, TM, and as a part of an intentional community or cult on the left.

00:09:49.960 Midwifery might be powered by anti-feminism and strict gender divides on the right, or by women's liberation and ideas of empowerment on the left. 0.99

00:09:58.960 Another part of the Venn diagram is anti-fluoridation.

00:10:02.700 Anti-fluoridation, the movement to oppose the government's addition of fluoride to drinking water to reduce dental decay.

00:10:14.540 Oh, yes, yes, that's right.

00:10:16.000 The argument that a couple of kids are having too much soda pop, so we have to poison the entire water supply with this totally safe and not harmful chemical in order to save everybody's teeth.

00:10:28.400 Yeah, that makes total sense.

00:10:30.540 This cause was taken up from an individual rights perspective by libertarians who argued that public infrastructure needs should not outweigh public's ability to make decisions about their own dental health.

00:10:41.480 Yeah, that's very radical right there.

00:10:44.400 It was also treated by members of the right-wing John Birch Society as a communist conspiracy to undermine American public health.

00:10:52.360 This alliance between anti-communist and libertarians is well documented in the history of American conservatism, and one can easily imagine how these two concerns could also be translated to social conservatives and survivalist evangelicals.

00:11:08.180 Alexandra Mina Stern's 2005 book, Eugenic Nation, documents the intersection between eugenics, hereditarianism, and other forms of white supremacist pseudoscience on the one hand, and environmentalism in general, and the Sierra Club particularly on the other.

00:11:25.220 But such work has largely focused on the early 20th century, and it leaves out a main thread that connected the left and the right in the 1980s and 90s, the idea of a looming apocalypse.

00:11:37.640 White power TM activists worried that fluoride would make people docile, such that revolution against the state and race war would be harder to accomplish.

00:11:48.200 Is this, is this, I want to read that, the archive, the white supremacy archive, what did she call it again?

00:11:53.840 Is that really true, or is that just them making it up?

00:11:56.740 The crunchy to ultra-right pipeline brings up another problem, one that is very real and dangerous.

00:12:02.320 The attempts of the white power movement and the militant right to find recruits.

00:12:07.900 That's right, they should not be able to communicate to other people, or share their ideas in any kind of capacity.

00:12:13.340 Yet another factor shaping what's going on here is opportunism.

00:12:16.780 Oh, why, because the people in charge are largely failing, so people come in and say,

00:12:23.200 hey, these guys are completely insane, and they can't do anything right, maybe it's time for something different.

00:12:31.520 White power, trademark TM, is built around the movement's ability to understand where our mainstream culture is vulnerable, 0.95

00:12:39.020 and to use those vulnerabilities for its own purpose.

00:12:41.580 Yeah, maybe you shouldn't, call me crazy, but maybe you shouldn't try to diddle the kids.

00:12:47.440 Maybe that's a good tip to start.

00:12:50.000 Now, I don't want them to succeed, so don't get me wrong, don't interrupt when your enemy is making a mistake, as I say,

00:12:54.620 but I'm just saying, there's so many crazy things that mainstream culture has done over the last few decades,

00:13:01.480 that it's only natural for people to be like, alright, I want no part of this shit, okay, like, I'm out.

00:13:06.800 The point is, these people do not want you to be able to leave.

00:13:12.760 That's what's so weird and frightening with this, right?

00:13:14.980 They just want you, like, completely dependent and a slave to their methods, to their system.

00:13:21.000 The pipeline is real.

00:13:23.160 Individual people are indeed being recruited into the militant right.

00:13:27.360 Some of them make this journey through crunchy online spaces into white power content,

00:13:32.960 as the sociologist Cynthia Miller Idris has documented in Hate in the Homeland.

00:13:39.920 Some magnificent book she's written.

00:13:42.780 But the crunchy to alt-right pipeline conversation gives us a chance to see something crucial

00:13:48.580 that is often lost in depictions of right-wing formations.

00:13:53.000 The white power movement, TM, is not just men marching in the streets. 0.69

00:13:56.960 It's also, and here it is, right, it's also women sharing cultural materials through social networks. 1.00

00:14:06.280 That this is a problem now, folks.

00:14:08.240 That this, we cannot, this cannot stand.

00:14:12.100 How do we stop women sharing cultural materials on social media sites? 1.00

00:14:17.640 Women and the cultural materials upon which they exert their most intense influence 1.00

00:14:23.240 are where we can see that this is a social movement.

00:14:27.380 So if you come across crunchy content that clicks through to trad wives, for instance,

00:14:32.720 women who appear to simply be canning and making their own cleaning supplies, 1.00

00:14:37.340 but who embrace trad, parentheses here, traditional aesthetics,

00:14:42.640 as part of a broader white power ideology,

00:14:45.800 and quickly move you along to more radical content,

00:14:49.140 you're encouraging both a fluidity of belief and opportunism.

00:14:53.960 Many people who advocate for crunchy issues expressed horror and surprise at the pipeline conversation

00:15:00.060 because they felt manipulated.

00:15:02.200 And yes, this is manipulation.

00:15:04.580 It's direct recruitment.

00:15:06.320 So this is, this is going to be, they were going to push for this to be outlawed.

00:15:10.400 If you, if you use somehow something in the real world to your advantage

00:15:15.500 to convince someone, I guess, or at least share your material and information

00:15:19.540 in such a way that it makes sense to them,

00:15:21.680 that is going to be a big problem that needs to be stopped in one way or another, right?

00:15:26.060 And let's not be confused about the endgame.

00:15:28.680 White power activists, TM, then and now envision an all-white ethnostate or world 0.85

00:15:35.280 achieved through profound violence,

00:15:37.920 and no macrobiotic diet or apple cider vinegar remedy can ameliorate the message.

00:15:43.900 Oh, yeah, yeah, incredible stuff.

00:15:46.200 That's the Atlantic, folks.

00:15:47.720 Heads up, point, again, they've made these points a little bit in the past.

00:15:51.040 It's not that it's completely brand new,

00:15:52.720 but if it's true what they're building around, you know, misinformation

00:15:55.400 and like things you should or should not be able to share on social media or stuff like that,

00:16:01.300 see a push in this direction or see a push for that to like block some of this

00:16:05.140 or kind of a built-in by default suspicion if you're like somehow think it's better to do things naturally

00:16:13.800 as opposed to, I don't know, with like with the help of like big pharma

00:16:17.100 or a slew of toxic sludge pushed by the state, I guess.

00:16:21.340 I mean, if you think about it, you have the whole system of like, you know, chemical castration

00:16:26.600 or the transsexual, the transgender craziness that they're pushing. 1.00

00:16:30.800 None of that is really, you can't really do that without, you know, the mainstream,

00:16:35.460 you know, big, big pharma industry, essentially.

00:16:37.560 They know that they're in charge and therefore whatever happens in the mainstream culture,

00:16:41.120 they have to be there and back that up, essentially.

00:16:42.940 The Atlantic, of course, is a perfect example of why they fail, of just how out of touch they are

00:16:47.360 and this snooty looking down your nose attitudes that they have towards like, you know,

00:16:52.940 just normal people and the concerns that they have runs deep throughout the entire media.

00:16:58.400 Washington Post, which is, you know, I guess they're second to only the Atlantic

00:17:03.500 or you could argue that maybe the Washington Post is number one and then it's the Atlantic,

00:17:07.020 but apparently they have lost 500,000 subscribers in the past year.

00:17:12.440 Announcement here recently, a layoff meeting, I guess.

00:17:14.700 The meeting didn't go very well.

00:17:17.360 I'm not going to turn the town hall into a grievance session.

00:17:20.400 It's not a grievance session.

00:17:21.560 It's a question.

00:17:22.420 It's a question.

00:17:23.700 I'm sorry.

00:17:24.660 Brandi, you talked about positions getting eliminated.

00:17:27.220 What are you going to do to protect people's jobs?

00:17:29.260 Are they going to be treated like the magazine staffers were?

00:17:32.180 We'll have more information as we move forward.

00:17:35.080 Thank you very much.

00:17:35.860 How will the position be decided?

00:17:37.940 A tragedy.

00:17:39.340 You seem to be disrespected.

00:17:43.400 Washington Post.

00:17:44.380 Oh, well, very sad.

00:17:45.640 Very sad indeed.

00:17:46.340 Thank you for watching.

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00:18:04.680 See you on the other side.

00:18:05.920 Are you laughing at me?

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Red Ice TV - December 21, 2022

The Terrifying Trad-Wellness Pipeline Towards White Extremism

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