This story was updated 12/3/19 with comment from Spotify and Podbean.
In a warm, Southern drawl, Frederick C. Blackburn described the exquisite North Carolina fall foliage and an agricultural award that his father won posthumously. In another breath, the podcaster shared anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, with nods to the myth of QAnon and Red Ice, a Swedish white nationalist show that was removed from YouTube twice.
In the same October episode of his show, Blackbird9s Breakfast Club, Blackburn falsely claimed that Charlotte, the largest city in his home state of North Carolina, is “completely controlled by Jewish banking money.”
“It is a completely lost city. It is a non-white city,” he said of Charlotte, which is 50 percent white, according to the U.S. Census. “Whites have no power in that city any more. It is, you know, basically Jewish shadow power and … a lot of them carpetbaggers that got pushed in by just electioneering and election fraud.”
Blackburn’s show is one of about 40 white nationalist, white supremacist and anti-Semitic podcasts that Big If True identified across 13 platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and YouTube. The shows were either previously flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center or Anti-Defamation League, two organizations that track hate groups, or were confirmed by listening to hours of audio.
Big If True’s list doesn’t include every podcast that spreads racist propaganda and other hate speech. But the shows’ presence on mainstream audio platforms underscores the role that tech companies play in amplifying extremist ideology. Player.fm, for instance, has a page compiling the “best alt right podcasts.” (The term “alt-right” is a euphemism for white nationalism.)
These shows are proven outlets for racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT views, but organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center believe they serve another purpose – to radicalize.
“You really see them let their hair down and speak frankly about their beliefs and say just stunningly vile things that they’ve learned to not put down in print, because it’s a little bit easier to hold them accountable for that,” said Howard Graves, senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Podcasts are crucial for indoctrination.”
In recent years, white nationalist podcasts have scored interviews with mainstream Republican politicians. During the 2016 Republican National Convention, The Political Cesspool’s white nationalist host, James Edwards, interviewed four congressmen, including Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma). Donald Trump Jr., Jason Kessler, who organized the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017, and David Duke, a former grand wizard for the Ku Klux Klan, also appeared on the show.
Many hosts and guests who appear on hate speech podcasts use pseudonyms. During the last year, several were unmasked by members of their own groups as a result of infighting.
Last month, an anonymous individual revealed the identity of Kingsborough Community College professor Joshua Dietz, who had used the name Josh Neal to co-host The McSpencer Group with white nationalist Richard Spencer. Dietz also hosted his own show, No Apologies, which included guests like Duke and anti-Semite Patrick Little.
Some of the shows reviewed by Big If True use overtly hostile speech and are littered with racist, anti-Semitic and gay slurs. Others avoid such terms, opting for a restrained, academic tone.
Many use a broad mix of history, philosophy and cherry-picked conspiracy theories to back up myths of white superiority.
And many of the shows are quite lengthy, clocking in at two to three hours, making it difficult and time-consuming for people who track hate speech to keep up with what happens on the shows.
Under “no obligation to monitor”: How podcast platforms handle racist and anti-Semitic shows
Big If True requested comment from the 13 audio platforms we found carry hate speech podcasts. We asked for information on their policies regarding hate speech and whether or not the shows were appropriate for their platform. Only Google, Libsyn and Stitcher responded before publication on Monday.
A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube and Google Podcasts, said the company would review the shows flagged by Big If True.
In a statement, Stitcher said the company “uses the criteria in our terms of service to review content that is flagged for potentially violating our guidelines. If we determine content violates our terms of service, we notify the owner of the content and remove it from our platform.”
However, Stitcher’s terms of service doesn’t mention racist content. The policy includes provisions for removing content for copyright violations and also says the company “may, but (has) no obligation to, remove content that we determine in our sole discretion to be unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable.”
Six of the platforms that carry white nationalist podcasts, including Podbean, already have policies barring racist language. A spokesperson for Podbean said Tuesday that the service doesn’t host the podcasts we identified, which are nonetheless available through the service.
Like Stitcher, Apple Podcasts and Spotify have policies that bar offensive content but don’t mention racist material specifically.
Spotify’s user agreement says that the company “has no obligation to monitor, review or edit user content.” However, Spotify spokesman Grey Munford said on Tuesday the platform is “constantly reviewing content and removing any deemed offensive, abusive, defamatory, pornographic, threatening, obscene or advocating or inciting violence.”
“That said, one of our goals when it comes to potentially offensive content is not to take steps that might publicize or promote that content or its removal,” Munford added.
Player.fm’s policy says that it doesn’t monitor content on the platform.
The terms of service for two others – Libsyn and Player.fm – don’t include policies against racist or otherwise offensive content.
Libsyn’s terms of service acknowledges that users “may encounter material that (they) may deem to be offensive, indecent or objectionable,” and that content “may or may not be identified as having explicit material.”
“Nevertheless,” the policy says, “you agree to use the service at your sole risk and Libsyn shall have no liability to you for material that may be found to be offensive, indecent or objectionable.”
Even if a hate speech podcast is banned from one network, producers can upload their show to more than a dozen hosting sites as back-up or upload audio directly to a website.
The rise of podcasts – and podcast networks for hate speech
The popularity and volume of podcasts has exploded during the last decade, as technology catches up with consumers’ desire for on-call, niche audio. According to a survey this year from Edison Research and Triton Digital, 51 percent of those 12 and older said they had listened to a podcast at some point in their lives.
With a growing, audio-hungry audience, podcast networks like Gimlet Media, which Spotify bought this year, and Earwolf have emerged as a way to centralize distribution, cross-promote and monetize multiple shows under a single brand.
There are similar networks for hate speech podcasts.
Under the pseudonym Mike Enoch, Mike Peinovich launched The Right Stuff (TRS) in 2014, and the network went on to produce some of the most popular far-right podcasts out there, The Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation. “Shoah” is a Hebrew term for the Holocaust, and “fash” is a reference to fascism.
The Right Stuff rebranded The Daily Shoah as TDS, pronounced “tedious,” after increased scrutiny on the organization and Peinovich, who helped plan the Unite the Right rally.
The Right Stuff also inspired an offshoot called Identity Dixie, a podcast network that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a neo-Confederate propaganda group. Identity Dixie and its flagship show, Rebel Yell, broke from The Right Stuff when Peinovich was outed as being married to a Jewish woman.
“If they have been successful enough they can actually have this offshoot that has life outside TRS, … I think that really gets to the size and scope of this thing,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Graves said. “They have been incredibly effective at leveraging their podcasts to get people on board with the program, but more importantly, sending them money.”
The Right Stuff has 15 active podcasts in its network, including several that are behind a paywall and others that are uploaded directly to the site, rather than a podcasting platform. Identity Dixie has five current podcasts. Shows on the networks appear on Apple Podcasts, Libsyn and other mainstream podcasting services.
Hate speech podcasts have a penchant for conspiracy theories and misinformation that reinforce their views. One common theme is white genocide, the white supremacist falsehood that their race faces extinction due to factors like immigration, racial integration and declining white populations and identity.
Conspiracy theories give racist views a shareable narrative and sometimes play a role in drawing people into extremist circles.
Myth of the 20th Century, a podcast on the Identity Dixie network, regularly amplifies conspiracy theories. In an episode from September, the hosts suggested the government goes into people’s homes and moves around furniture to mess with them; that Chinese Americans have an armed militia that openly carries firearms in Sacramento, California; and that the deep state controls the media. In the same episode, the hosts said they’d recently hit 10,000 subscribers.
Patrick Casey, Gavin McInnes and others with white nationalist ties keep spots on mainstream platforms
Last month, Soundcloud deleted a new podcast from Patrick Casey, the president of white nationalist organization American Identity Movement, a rebranded version of Identity Evropa.
The first episode of the show, called Restoring Order, includes a conversation with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, whose show, America First, was removed from Apple Podcasts in November. That episode of Restoring Order and others are available on Apple Podcasts.
On the third episode of Restoring Order, which also appears on Spotify and Player.fm, Casey said that the American Identity Movement is “opposed to anti-whiteness,” supports white identity and calls for immigration restrictions.
Although Fuentes’ show was removed from Apple Podcasts, America First remains on Spotify, Luminary, iHeartRadio and YouTube, where he has more than 70,000 subscribers.
Fuentes has used the show to deny the Holocaust, support segregation and spout other racist rhetoric. In an episode after the El Paso mass shooting, which left 22 dead, he said: “I think the easiest way for Mexicans not to get shot and killed in Walmart is for them to not fucking be here, OK?”
“Maybe get the fuck out,” he shouted later in the episode. “Right? Maybe get out. Go back over the border.”
According to investigators, the El Paso shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, intended to target Mexicans in his attack. In a manifesto posted before the massacre, he cited “the great replacement,” a white genocide conspiracy theory alleging that immigrants and people of color are replacing white people.
Other prominent hate speech advocates, like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, have homes on Apple Podcasts and other mainstream platforms.
On McInnes’ show, Get Off My Lawn, the host rails against women and journalists while sharing anecdotes of his less-than-edgy adventures in drinking mass amounts of alcohol. In an episode from last month, the 49-year-old host recounted drunkenly wetting the bed twice in one week.
In that episode, which contains overtly anti-Muslim and misogynist language, McInnes described an encounter with Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer at a courthouse during the trial for political operative Roger Stone. Sommer covers the right and has previously covered McInnes and the Proud Boys.
McInnes said he asked Sommer why the reporter wasn’t trying to fight Islamic or black Hebrew Israelite hate groups instead, dismissing the idea that white nationalism is an issue.
“We know what this is really about ultimately,” McInnes said on his show. “All these guys fighting Nazis don’t really care about hate. They care about masculinity and they resent masculinity, so they purport to be about preventing fascism, but to them, fascism is the guy who wedgied them in high school. … Obviously, if they were concerned about hate, they would investigate Islam. They’d investigate bona fide white power groups. They don’t.”
Last year, Proud Boys members attacked activists who were protesting a speech by McInnes at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York. McInnes later separated from the Proud Boys, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group.
In a video announcing his decision, McInnes rejected notions that Proud Boys is an extremist group with white nationalist ties.
Last year, MicInnes was slated to host a version of his podcast on BlazeTV, which ended the partnership just a week after it started. He is banned from YouTube for copyright infringement, but a video version of his podcast that appears on freespeech.tv is regularly uploaded to the platform.
McInnes is also banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and PayPal. Aside from Apple Podcasts, his show is available on Spotify, Luminary and other platforms.
Many hate speech podcasts are also virulently anti-LGBT. E. Michael Jones, the founder of an anti-Semitic magazine called Culture Wars, has a podcast of the same name that appears on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Podbean.
During an episode of Matty’s Modern Life, a podcast hosted by the editor of Australian alt-right publication XYZ, Jones claimed without evidence that immigrants from Mexico drive down American wages and that Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg can’t represent the United States as chief of state because he’s gay. Homosexuality, Jones said, is a disorder, a form of narcissism and a cancer.
He criticized rainbow flags that appear on the University of Notre Dame campus, claiming the flags are a sign of “a conquered territory.”
“It’s occupied by this homosexual cabal, and they are the ones who call the shots,” Jones said.
Radicalization and hope for deradicalization
Podcasts are just one branch of new technologies that enable networks to form around extremist ideologies.
University of Maryland psychology professor Arie W. Kruglanski, who studies extremist movements, said technology like social media allows hate groups to reach a broader audience than was possible in the past.
Kruglanski co-wrote “The Three Pillars of Radicalization,” which says that aside from a network and a narrative that identifies alleged enemies, radicalization requires something else – a need for significance.
“They feel left behind,” Kruglanski said of Neo-Nazi and white supremacist group members. “They feel endangered. They’re white, and being white, in many cases, is the only thing that makes them significant, because the country originally was white-oriented, and now there are all these immigrants and ethnic minorities that are getting to be more powerful.”
For white supremacists, immigrants and people of color “endangered the one thing that they have, which is their whiteness,” Kruglanski said.
It’s possible for people to abandon extremist groups. Infighting and violence among members causes people to leave, Kruglanski said, and relationships with people outside the group can draw them away from white supremacist organizations. Age also is a factor.
“To be an extremist, you need to entertain a kind of motivational imbalance where one thing is so important that you’re ready to sacrifice other things on the altar of that one thing,” Kruglanski said. “As you grow older, other concerns – family, professional things, having a stable life – become more and more important, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this single-minded, motivational imbalance that young people are capable of.”
Correction: A previous version of this story said that the FBI considers the Proud Boys to have white nationalist ties. The FBI included the organization in a briefing to local law enforcement on regional threats in Oregon, but the agency doesn’t classify the group as an extremist group with white nationalist views.
Contact Big If True editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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