Fear with Byron Clark

Today our guest Byron Clark, an independent researcher and author on New Zealand’s far-right extremist movements. His book, Fear, helps us shows some of the ideological underpinnings of influencers and groups in the lead-up to the Occupation of Parliament in 2022. Byron uses his insight as a Pakeha man, the target demographic of these far-right groups, to help us, understand, untangle, and confront the ideologies and theories that support these movements. I have a lot of respect fo Byron, not just as a researcher, but as a human because he is far from a keyboard warrior, he has paid a personal price for his research. By speaking out he has become the target of intimidation, harassment, and threats from the very groups he studies. And yet, he continues to speak up and speak out.

Resources
Fear:  New Zealand's Hostile Underworld of Extremists by Byron Clark
https://www.harpercollins.co.nz/9781775542308/fear/

Byron's Newsletter, Feijoa Dispatch, is a collection of his work and writing. https://www.feijoadispatch.nz/

Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand, Edited by
Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley

The definition of the Great Replacement Theory was in the chapter Identitarianism  and the Alt-Right: A New Phase of Alt-Right Politics in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Paul Spoonley and Paul Morris, pg. 308.

Transcript

Unsettling Extremism Episode 7- Fear with Byron Clark

* This transcript is machine generated with light editing

Byron  00:05

How I structured the book, really was, it builds up to the occupation of Parliament grounds by looking at, you know, who are the who are the individuals who are influential towards that, who are the groups who were involved, what are the ideas? Where are they coming from? How'd they get here? And that's helped people understand that, yeah, the parliament protests didn't just come out of nowhere. It wasn't this totally spontaneous thing. And it happened because there'd been influences and organizers kind of working for already, probably over a year at that point for many of them,

Avery Smith  00:45

Kia ora. I'm Dr Avery Smith, and welcome to unsettling extremism, a podcast by He Whenua Taurikura Today. Our guest is Byron Clark, an independent researcher and author on New Zealand's far right extremist movements. His book fear New Zealand's hostile world of extremists, traces some of these influences and groups in the lead up to the occupation of parliament in 2022 Byron uses his insight as a Pakeha man, the target demographic of some of these groups, to help us understand, untangle and confront these movements. I have a lot of respect for Byron, not just as a researcher, but as a person. He has paid a personal price for this research by speaking out. He has become the target of intimidation, harassment and threats from the very groups that he studies, and yet he continues to speak up and speak out. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Byron. Welcome Byron. What were you like as a kid? Tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up?

Byron  01:49

I grew up here in Christchurch. As a kid, I someone who read a lot. I did. I did actually think when I was a kid that I'd like to be an author when I grew up, but that kind of as I got a bit older, seemed less realistic, and I had a real MAC with computers, so I kind of ended up in an it, but then was doing various other other things alongside that, and the other parts of my life. And did get, did later get an opportunity to write a book, which was my book fear New Zealand's hostile underworld of extremists that came out last year? Were

Avery Smith  02:20

you? Were you a studious kid? Like, did you like school?

Byron  02:24

I wouldn't say I liked school that much, but yeah, I was somewhat studious. Yeah, certainly, someone who read a lot, I think. And yeah, and also, when had access to computers from an early age, which helped me and what later became for my future career, both the IT side of things, and the research that I do, which is so much of the online world that, you know, I feel like I'm not a total outsider to that world, because I've kind of been using the internet since, since about 1997 so when I was, yeah, about 10 years old. So,

Avery Smith  02:57

so you grew up on the internet?

Byron  02:59

Yeah, very much. So, I mean, the late 90s, there wasn't a lot to do on the internet for a kid, but by the time we got to the 2000s and it was becoming more, sort of more widespread, yeah, I spent a lot of time on there, and friends from school were, you know, similar kind of interests. And we did a did a bit of, like, making our own, like, websites and that sort of thing. And all of us sort of thought, oh, we should go, we should, like, have careers and it, which at that time, was seen as this really exciting thing. So yeah, so I did go on study it after, after high school. But I was also, like, involved in political activism and things, and that led to me thinking, I'll go, I'll go to university as well. And I studied History and Sociology at Canterbury, yeah. And I think the main thing, that main thing I've done with, with that, other than the book, with was that education is that I end from 2012 to 2014 I recorded an old history of the Occupy movement in Christchurch. So the sort of local offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, yeah, yeah, involved in that. And when it was ending, I was thinking, gosh, if somebody doesn't talk to all these people who are involved, then there won't be any, there won't be much of a recorded history of this. So I spent, spent about a year or so, like interviewing people, and then another year getting them transcribed. And I did a I did a short run of of a book, just a self published book with the with the interviews, which I don't really think of as my first book, because I, I didn't, I didn't write it, I just recorded it. But so I had that, I had that background before I before I wrote a book quite a few years later, I guess. Yeah,

Avery Smith  04:50

no, I mean, that's, that's really important work, right? Because you're looking at social movements, and especially you're sort of looking at how social movements, um. Move across different countries, right, and international borders, and the way, the way that that works, and so I would imagine that would be really relevant still to the work that you're doing now.

Byron  05:09

I mean, yeah, definitely. Um, I guess maybe the first sort of example of a movement going really global thanks to the internet was probably the kind of alter globalization movement. And like the late 90s, early 2000s but then I think with Occupy, and the things that led into occupy, like the Arab Spring and then the Indignados in southern Europe, all of that was spreading very much thanks to thanks to the internet, and also thanks to social media. And so we saw, arguably, quite positive use of the internet and social media during that times of around 2011 and then later we saw, you know, the more negative side of how ideas and political movements can spread worldwide through social media,

Avery Smith  05:56

Indeed, indeed. And so what is it about? Like, the far right and, you know, conspiracy theories and disinformation. How did you get into that field? Like, how did you get into researching that?

Byron  06:10

I started kind of keeping a bit of an eye on it, probably around, say, 20, 2015 just seeing what was happening kind of overseas, particularly with Gamergate, this very sort of organized and coordinated Harassment campaign of mostly a woman involved in either the video game industry or media around that, like reviewing video games and and started to see This section of society made up of very angry young men who felt felt that they were the victims of some sort of injustice because of changes that were happening in society, like around feminism, but also, I think, economic changes as well. It was a lot of men of my generation, people who sort of came of age after that 2008 financial crisis and were feeling somewhat economically marginalized, and that it very much retreated into like this world of video games, and then got incredibly angry when they felt that feminists were encroaching on that, even though what was actually happening was that games were starting to be looked at critically the same way We look at all other media, like books and movies and art. And then what sort of happened with that as well is that that movement got kind of co-opted into a new reactionary political movement. And so you can find kind of some of the roots of what was for a few years at least, called the alt right. You can find that there in Gamergate, so I was watching that happen, and then the rise of the alt right over the next couple of years, both in North America and in Europe. Because, of course, we start to see the rise of Donald Trump and the States, but also in various far right parties in Europe as well. And I thought, well, this can't just be happening overseas. There's got to be things happening here as well. And so I started just following kind of Facebook pages and YouTube channels, which at that time were still reasonably small, but certainly some of the some of the same kind of hateful ideas that we were seeing overseas were were being expressed here and were reaching an audience of probably a few 1000 people in total. And then I became kind of more active in talking about this and opposing, opposing this after the mosque shooting happened here in Christchurch, which really, really demonstrated that, yeah, this isn't just an overseas thing where that's definitely reached here in a very, very violent way. And unfortunately, after, after that event, some of the sort of influences in this country actually grew their audience like we had one youtuber who was visited by police after the shooting, likely because he'd had a video from four weeks earlier, where, in the description, he'd asked people to get out, do their bit and save their country from Islamization, and that was for a video recorded in Christchurch Cathedral Square, so not far from where the shooting began, chilling, yeah, and so that led to him being visited by police, but then when he made a video about how he was visited by police, that still went viral, and he picked up a whole lot of new followers and became even more influential. And then, then we had the COVID pandemic, and we started to really see the growth of conspiracy theories around the virus, but also around the vaccine. And we saw what's the lockdown? When they happen, people spending a lot more time online, being a lot more isolated from their sort of offline social networks and going more down these rabbit holes into conspiracy theory. And something I observed was the sort of cross pollination of these different conspiracy theories. So people who in 2019 were talking about the great replacement. Now, suddenly they were also talking about, you know, the COVID vaccine, and likewise, people who people who had come in through kind of more anti vaccine conspiracy theories. Now, suddenly, were also talking about the great replacement.

Avery Smith  10:35

The great replacement theory is a far right white supremacist and increasingly mainstream political ideology that claims to explain how white people are being quote unquote replaced. I'm reading from Paul spoonley and Paul Morris's chapter in the book histories of hate. For this definition, a core ideological concern is the quote unquote great replacement, and specifically the belief that a mix of pro abortion and pro LGBTQ i plus laws had lowered birth rates of native Europeans and pro migration policies have allowed minorities to engage in a strategic mass breeding. The theory really is a smorgasbord of hate, from attacking feminism to LGBTQIA plus rights, overt, racism, anti semitism, Yeah, guess who's orchestrating the replacement and yes, Islamophobia. It's a lethal theory used as a justification for mass shootings and played a prominent role in the Christchurch shooters manifesto. Yeah. That was such an interesting that was such an interesting thing to notice, right? Is exactly what you're saying. Is how it started to cross pollinate, because you heard like, these yoga moms who was really into, like, natural health and no fluoride or whatever. And then they're in this group, and it gets sort of like you said, cross pollinated, and now they're talking about far, right, maybe anti trans, whatever. Naomi

Byron  12:02

Klein had a really good way of putting it in her recent book doppelganger, where she described this kind of new movement as being an alliance of the far right and the far out. So it was sort of all these ideas that a few years ago, I think, would actually be probably more associated with the political left, like, I think anti vaccine ideas often came out of a came out of a viewpoint where you're critical of the pharmaceutical industry and and that sort of thing. And, but China, a lot of that, yeah, a lot of that alternative health and well being stuff during the pandemic started to merge with, yeah, some of those, those more far right ideas. And we see, saw that in a number of countries. And like we saw that in Canada, which we're no McLean, is and watch, and the country was, I think, largely writing about in doppelganger, when you had the convoy of truckers protesting that you needed to be vaccinated to be able to cross the US Canada border. And we saw the presence of the far right there. And then that inspired the convoy that happened here, which ended up in an occupation of Parliament grounds. And it was that same sort of coalition that was the far right groups, but also the Yeah, kind of alternative health and wellness types, all kind of coming together and in one physical space and occupying it for three weeks. And I think we probably saw that cross pollination there, just as we had online, because now they're all meeting in person, and they're eating together and cooking together and linking arms against the police Barrow case here, there. And I think it's even though, I think maybe that was the height of this movement, those sort of connections probably have remained since.

Avery Smith  13:52

So obviously, this was inspired by international events. Obviously, there's the through line with some the ideologies. What was the unique New Zealand flavor of, you know, that convoy like, how is it different from the convoys? Maybe, you know, in Canada, like you were talking about,

Byron  14:09

I mean, I think, well, before the differences, a similarity with Canada was that Canada and New Zealand, at the time, both had kind of center left governments with quite popular politicians who are seen as being quite liberal and often seen as being more left wing, perhaps than they than they were. And that was a stark contrast to like Trump and the US, or even though he was no longer in power at that point, or like Orban and in Hungary, or even sort of Boris Johnson in the UK. And so there was some similarity there with New Zealand and Canada being seen as not kind of all. That same path as some other countries, and there being quite a quite an angry backlash against Trudeau and against Ardern, some differences, though, I think were kind of the weaving in of some more unique New Zealand concerns and imagery and the in the convoy and occupation here. So there was a lot of like Anzac imagery was used to sort of bring in that kind of nationalist myth making around the Anzacs, and sort of tie that in with this sort of so called Freedom Movement, some of the some of the opposition to, like vaccine mandates, and then to lead to a growth in the number of people getting interested in or adhering to sort of sovereign citizen ideology, the idea that there's, there's ways to get out of following laws, if You don't want to, if you use the right phrases and things and in this may have happened in Canada as well, although I'm not aware of it happening in Canada, but certainly in Australia and in New Zealand. I think that that blended a little bit with maybe a fringe of kind of movements for Indigenous sovereignty. Because when you're talking about declarations of sovereignty, and you're a colonized part of a colonized group, that carries a lot more weight than if you're you know someone who's descended from settlers who've just decided to adopt sovereign citizen ideas, which a lot of which don't really, don't really work here, like there was a lot of talk of allodial title, which existed in Britain but never, never came here with British colonization. And a lot of the other ideas come from, like historical us, law around their constitution and things and don't work here either. But by giving it, giving it that flavor, where they're saying, Oh, it's, you know, it's indigenous sovereignty, that that kind of was used a bit here in Australia as well, but perhaps not so much overseas,

Avery Smith  17:05

yeah, yeah, that's great. Thanks for that. Tell us a little bit about your book, fear. So that was published about a year and a half ago. Is that right?

Byron  17:15

Yeah, it came out a year and a half ago. I initially, when I went after the shooting happened, and I thought, well, I need to communicate the stuff I'm researching to reach a bigger audience. Because it was just kind of reaching my own sort of small social network, because I talk about things, and I thought, thought the best way to do that would be with a YouTube channel, because at the time, there was kind of a, don't know if you'd call it a movement, but there was, there was a thing known as bread tube, which, in the name, comes from Peter Kropotkin, conquest of bread. And it was these largely left leaning, quite educated people who had decided to make videos that would make some of the knowledge that they had, from a more formal education to the more accessible to to a wider range of people who maybe hadn't had the benefit of going to university and learning those things. But it was different from just uploading lectures to YouTube, because it was people, so mostly people, but younger than me, so younger millennials who kind of knew the kind of visual language of YouTube and things. And I was quite inspired by that. And so I started making, making YouTube videos about New Zealand's far right. And after a while, I was doing so much research that I started thinking this, this really could be a book. There's enough material out here to write a whole book. And so I just had my Twitter bio that I'm currently writing a book about the far right. And I'd done very little at that point because I was juggling, like the YouTube channel and other things. But then I was approached by a publisher who had been looking for someone on this to write on this topic, because they could see how significant it was becoming, and realized that there would be an audience for this kind of book. So they want something out for the and for the first anniversary of the parliament occupation. So I had only six months to deliver the manuscript.

19:17

My goodness, that's a lot of work. It's a lot while working

Byron  19:21

full time as well. So I used like all my annual leave, and spent a lot of weekends at the library, riding away on my laptop and thankfully, since I'd already kind of been doing the research, I kind of knew, knew about what the chapters were going to be and what was going to write, and where, where there were gaps. I needed to do more research. So I managed to get it together, and, yeah, in that six months, and how I structured the book really was. It builds up to the occupation of Parliament grounds by looking at. Yes, you know who are the who are the individuals who are influential towards that, who are the groups who are involved? What are the ideas? Where are they coming from? How they get here? And I the, I've got quite a good response to the book from people who've read it, and I think that it's helped people understand that, yeah, the parliament protest didn't just come out of nowhere. It wasn't this totally spontaneous thing. It had happened because there'd been influences and organizers kind of working for already, probably over a year at that point, for many of them,

Avery Smith  20:34

sure, yeah, I read your book, and I would say that it's really well done Byron. And what I appreciate about it. Because, you know, a lot of it in, like, in this space, I'm so used to reading, like, heavy academic jargony stuff about the far right and extremism and all that. But you the way you talk about it, it's just so easy to understand and it, you know, it's, like, really practical and, like, here's, here's, what's going on in the day to day.

Byron  21:00

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I I really wanted to write something that would reach a reach a wide audience and be quite accessible. I did get told early on by the publisher to be a bit less academic, because when I started writing, most of the writing I'd done had been back when I was at university and I think I still thinking like, well, this is how you if you're writing something very factual, and you want it to be believed and really, really show that you've done, done the research, you write it this way. But they were, they wanted a more, a more kind of first person style where, like, I talked about, sort of my own experiences and kind of how things make me, made me feel, which was a bit different, but, but I'd said when I was talking with him about the books, that I kind of would have to do a bit of that anyway, because, because I'd already been doing the YouTube channel and become sort of reasonably well known by some of these people on the far right, I kind of become a part of the story anyway. And I couldn't just, I couldn't do this kind of detached observer, sort of writing about the far right? It would have to be, have to be a bit more first person, and a bit more

Avery Smith  22:10

you're part of the story now, right, right, yeah. I mean, they made you part of the story.

22:14

That made me part of the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Avery Smith  22:18

I was gonna say it's so nice being able to talk to you. I mean, I followed you on Twitter for a while, and I've read your book, and you know I'm like, well, in some some circles, you're famous, and then in some circles you're infamous. And you know what I mean? So no, but it's lovely. It's lovely to be able to to talk to you one on one today. So your book, as you were saying before, it talks about some of the main players and some of the organizations in New Zealand that have far right extremist links, yet there are still people here in New Zealand that find it hard to accept that such organizations exist here. Why do you think that is?

Byron  23:01

Yeah, I think, I think people want to believe that we're different from the rest of the world. And the, you know, see us as being kind of, I guess, more enlightened and more progressive than the US or some of these European countries, which has never really been the case, I'd say, like in the book, I have a couple of chapters I think of as, like the history chapters, because they, rather than just covering the last few years, they go back a bit further and look at some of the origins of things. And so I talk about, you know, how the white New Zealand policy existed for most of the 20th century, and how, you know, colonization was kind of an inherent sort of white supremacist quality to it, because the people colonizing these islands thought that the Indigenous population would die out through contact with a supposedly superior race. And I also look at the way that Rhodesia and apart like South Africa, were seen by people in New Zealand for most of the time those countries existed. And I think you can, you look at that history, and you can see that this sort of ideology is very much woven throughout our history. And it's not just something that's going to be imported via social media or the internet, it's, it's something that they has got roots here. And I think we, we perhaps don't like to think much about that history, and we'd like to highlight things like, you know, the anti apartheid movement was so big here, and was saying to someone on Twitter just recently, because someone that I think was a politician, said, you know, New Zealand was united against apartheid during the Springbok tour. And they said, well, they weren't really, because if we were united against apartheid, they wouldn't have been the Springbok tour, who would have been part of the global sporting boycott. And we kind of forget, we forget that there's been, yeah, a long history of believing that the white race is superior to others and really it was only in in the mid seven. 90s that the white New Zealand policy ended. So that's sort of within, within living memory for a lot of people,

25:07

and not that long ago, folks, yeah. And so

Byron  25:10

we so when, when we get people talking about things like this great replacement conspiracy theory, I think that they get a bit of an audience for that, because wasn't that long ago that, you know, that our immigration policy was very much structured to ensure that white people would be a majority. And now, now there's and that's kind of seen as, you know, the natural way of things, and that taking in more immigrants from the majority of the world is seen as, you know, that's seen as the kind of politically radical thing to do. So the some of these far right figures will be trying to portray themselves as like, you know, reasonable and kind of and some of them even identify as like, centrists. They say, I'm not right. I'm not far right. I'm, you know, I'm a centrist and, and certainly for a lot of New Zealand's history, supporting policies that would prevent non white people from immigrating here was kind of the centrist position. But things have changed since then, and and some people, evidently, are not happy with those changes and would rather go back to how things were in the past. Oh, yeah, 100%

Avery Smith  26:25

you know, it makes me think of last year, I wrote an article about the history of the KKK in Aotearoa, because there was this, I don't know if you remember, there was this incident at Kamai. There was a quiz night, and somebody dressed up in like, KKK robes. And I, as an American, I was like, What is this? Why is this here? Like this does not make sense to me, you know, but I really appreciate what you were saying is that, you know, it's not, it's not necessarily that it's imported. It was already here. Those ideas already came, and so it's already fertile for those ideas to take hold here. Because if it wasn't, it would have just been out outright rejected, right? But, but with a history of like you're saying, like colonialism and, you know, structural racism, if you're talking about the white New Zealand policy and the way that that was, like, literally written in to the law, right? It's just, it's just really interesting take. So, yeah, no thanks for highlighting that. Yeah,

Byron  27:33

I guess that's my sort of historian background coming in there. Yeah, yeah, as well as the more kind of journalistic stuff, like but I think, yeah, I think connecting what's happening now to that, that history of colonization and of institutional racism is really important for kind of understanding the situation that we're in with, with the far right today, indeed,

Avery Smith  27:53

all right, so, so we're getting into some of the isms. One of the things that stood out to me, really strongly after reading your book, is how strongly linked notions of masculinity are to the far right groups that are that are in New Zealand today. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you've noticed around that. Yeah,

Byron  28:17

I mean, it's definitely something I picked up on. So it probably comes through. But as a theme, a theme in the book, like certainly with GamerGate at the beginning, these were young men who, it would probably be fair to say, were somewhat economically marginalized, like they weren't going to have those same symbols of kind of masculine success that previous generations were able to have so they wouldn't necessarily be able to achieve home ownership, and certainly not a like a partner who could stay at home and take care of kids. I mean, most, most families in New Zealand will need two incomes to raise kids, and even then, probably struggle a bit and rather than blaming sort of the economic changes that have taken place, because over the last, say, 40 years, if we think of neoliberalism, they put their blame in, largely in feminism, but also In the also in, I guess, the growing, growing advancement of like, the rights of like migrants and migrant workers, who sometimes seen, as, you know, taking jobs or that sort of thing. But very, very much in feminism, they felt like the reason that I can't have that very kind of, I guess, traditional masculine success is because of feminism and and, like I was saying earlier, a lot of them had kind of recruit, retreated into these virtual worlds of video games and then got so angry that, like they felt feminism was coming into this last sort of masculine space, yeah,

Avery Smith  29:56

the last bastion of toxic masculinity,

Byron  30:02

yeah, so I think, I think a lot of, a lot of young well, and at that time, sort of 10 years ago, young men now, now, I guess any of them still have more middle aged men, but you know, young men getting involved in GamerGate because of that. And then, you know, coming, coming from the anti feminism first, and then then the kind of more, like, anti, you know, anti immigrant, and this was xenophobic views and stuff perhaps coming in the mixed up in there, all of it, yeah, but I mean it, I see it come through with, with a lot of these conspiracy theories, like the advancement of like LGBT rights, particularly trans rights, get sort of blended in with ideas about the great replacement. I see this idea that men in the West are being emasculated and becoming more feminine, you know, through not just people who become transgender, but even people who seem to be supportive of these kind of different, different ways of doing gender, and these different ways of doing sexuality and I see people say that, you know, we're not going to the men of the West are going to be too emasculated to stop the invasion of, you know, men from Muslim countries or from other countries and that often ties in with some very long standing anxieties about, you know, men of color coming in and taking sort of white women who are supposedly the, you know, the right of white men. So, so I see these kind of anxieties around masculinity and around the emasculation as being a pretty significant part of the far right today. Yeah, and

Avery Smith  31:49

like you were saying, I was just reading the book, there's a big emphasis on being fit right, on working out and having big muscles, but also in this other way of these ideas around, like being chased in this way, and like not masturbating to, you know, remain virile and, you know, masculine. So, yeah, interesting,

Byron  32:12

interesting kind of thing to look into. But as I say in the book, a lot of this kind of originates in this conspiracy theory that the pornography industry is, you know, controlled by by Jewish people who are trying to, you know, deprive white men of their vitality or whatever, and, and it's all, I mean, it sounds so ridiculous, but I guess people, people in those spaces can start believing, start believing this stuff, if they're down that rabbit hole and open to some of that more conspiratorial thinking. And then, yeah, and then they can end up in situations where, like, the there was a short lived far right group here where, you know, they had to work out at the gym and they would flog each other as punishment for masturbating. It's all, it's all quite bizarre. That

Avery Smith  33:02

sounds a little bit homoerotic in a way, if I'm going to be honest. Yeah, I mean,

Byron  33:10

and they had some, and I didn't save any, any of them at the time, but they did have, like, some videos of of their like, workout sessions and the flogging kind of up on their Facebook page. And, yeah, in a different context, it could seem a bit homoerotic. Yeah,

Avery Smith  33:27

anyways, but we digress. It was just very interesting to me, the way that that that came up, and how, like, one of the put downs was to call people soy boys or call Western men. I

Byron  33:40

think that's, I don't see quite as much of that anymore, but yeah, there was this, this whole idea that, you know, consuming soy was emasculating and

Avery Smith  33:48

and it kind of gonna give you, it was gonna give you breasts or something, yeah.

Byron  33:53

And later on, there was, like, after I wrote the book, I started to see these ideas about seed oils being bad. We shouldn't have seed oils. And then, and you see the sort of ideas around lots of stuff around diet, like, you know, veganism, vegetarianism is seen as being a kind of, like emasculating or not in line with the West. And then you've got people like Jordan Peterson, who, who eats an all beef diet. I

34:23

I was gonna say real men eat meat. Yeah, yeah. It's become this, yeah, or this, this

Byron  34:29

idea that's been folded into it. All this, all this sort of very kind of retrograde ideas around masculinity, around you'll eat, you'll eat the right foods, and you'll exercise right and you won't masturbate. Yeah, it's all, all kind of being been put into this bundle there of what, you know, what a, what a good western man should be to prevent the downfall of the West.

Avery Smith  34:53

Exactly, exactly I wanted to ask you a little bit about your personal experience. You know? As an author who has been writing and been critical of you know these, some of these extremist groups, and I know you know, you've shared some of your story, you've written about it, but you were subjected to some online harassment by some members of the organizations that you profiled, and unfortunately, the harassment that you faced did not stay online. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about that.

Byron  35:23

Yeah, so it started pretty soon after, like I did, my first YouTube video that got probably discovered by some of that crowd within days, and I'd start to get, yeah, a few not just negative comments, but some threats as well. At that time, most of the threats I was getting, I didn't take very seriously, because it's very easy to send someone a threat over the internet, especially when you do it anonymously. And often they do word in a way that would not be necessarily legally actionable. Anyway, it was only kind of clear from the context that what they were with threats, but things over time did sort of escalate. I was I was followed home from an event I was at, and didn't know at the time that had happened, but was kind of half expected, because a far right group had sort of threatened to gate crash this event that I was going to but yeah, I was followed home by at least one of them, and then my the address of where I was staying at the time was going to share with that whole movement. And I started to get, like, printouts from some of their Facebook pages left on the letterbox as a kind of way of intimidating me by showing they knew where I lived, and as things sort of progressed further, I then had somehow they found out where I worked. I don't know quite how that happened, because I've deliberately avoided, like, having LinkedIn or anything like that, where it would be publicly listed, but found out where I worked, and one of them turned up at my office, gave a fake name and came in with his camera, filming me, which is a tactic that really has been pioneered by Tommy Robinson in the UK as a way of intimidating critics. And then there after that, and that led to kind of further harassment following. Following that event. And yeah, they've been, they've been times like when the book came out, I did get out of Christchurch for for a couple of weeks, just in case, because we were we heard some rumors on telegram of what they were calling a book. They hit like trying to assassinate me on the day the book was released, which probably, probably not serious. But the thing is, you can never know what's serious and what's people showing bravado. I've had a little bit of success with the harmful digital communications act as a way to get court orders to prevent some of that online harassment. I'm in the process of trying to get a restraining order under the harassment act for one other quite well known white supremacist down here, that one, I'm not even quite as much luck with. It's much more of an involved process. I think, I think harassment laws are a bit out of date, really, because I've said, said before, we don't have a we don't have a framework in legislation for kind of a post GamerGate world. The harassment act is, is sort of from like a pre Internet era where it might be, you know people who know each other in person, who have had some sort of falling out and one started harassing the other, whereas what we're seeing now is these kind of more coordinated mass harassment campaigns. And with the harassment act, you can only really go after one person at a time for harassment, and one individual's harassment might not actually be that significant, but if it's them, and you know that there are hundreds of YouTube followers, or even just a small portion of that, that can then be be quite significant. And the people who are the influence influences in this space are often quite careful never to kind of cross that line themselves because they know, they know that, you know, they know where they can how far they can go, and they know that their followers will take it that one step further. Yeah, so we don't really have the kind of legislation that might protect people from that, like the incitement and harassment. I mean, it's there a bit in the harmful Digital Communications Act, but not in the harassment act, so I think there's, there's a need for some reform in that area and also, we don't really have legislation against stalking in this country, which a lot of people are surprised about, right? Yeah, and we might hopefully get something a. Um, at least discussed in parliament next year, there's talk of some legislation around stalking. I think it's largely going to be around sort of the sort of gendered violence which most stalking probably is. But I think there probably needs to be perhaps something in there as well about the kind of situation that myself has been in, and others who have taken on the far right, who have found themselves sort of victims of these sort of massive harassment campaigns, which can involve stalking as part of them, along with online staff and along with, you know, targeting other people you know, or targeting an employer and that sort of thing. No, 100%

Avery Smith  40:39

that's something that we have at He Whenua Taurikura are very aware about. And, you know, we're just really concerned about the way this kind of behavior from the right impacts our ability to do this kind of research right. Because there's a there's a certain amount of personal risk that you put yourself in when you decide that you're going to do research on on the far right. And, you know, I know people, I mean, I'll just say that for this podcast. I know there's people who I wanted to interview, and they're like, yeah, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go and, you know, do this publicly, because it's just going to create, you know, create more problems for me, so

Byron  41:26

and it has that, that chilling effect as well of other people who might be interested in doing the research or and certainly, a lot of journalists have been harassed and threatened and that, in turn, will shape sort of what kind of journalism they do, what stories they write about, because they might just think, am I, is this story important enough that I'm willing to take the risk of what will happen afterwards and where I might have to, you know, get, get on the police Rapid Response List, and maybe get more home security and all of that and all that sort of stuff people, and it might be in some cases, it's just like, well, like, that's just not worth it for the story, which means often those stories don't get, don't get told in the media, because people journalists are, you know, fairly Not, not wanting to take the risk of telling those stories.

Avery Smith  42:17

Sure, sure. 100% Well, I'm sorry that that all has happened to you. It's, it's really terrible to have somebody like show up to your work and try to intimidate you, and so I'm really sorry that that's happened. And I really hope that, you know, we were able to get some laws that are more fit for purpose, you know, the internet and bullying and all this, you know, cyber intimidation and harassment has evolved, and we need laws that can, that can deal with that absolutely. Yeah. So what's up for you next? Yeah, so

Byron  42:52

I'm actually doing some study now in the field of like media and communications, to look very specifically at like, how this new alternative media is pushing the strategy of trying to normalize more sort of far right ideas and conspiracy theories and get them into the public discussion and, yeah, grow, grow their influence that way, rather than trying to grow like An organization, but try and just change, change the culture, change the way people think, and have some success that way. And I think that's possibly what we're going to see more of in the future, rather than, rather than the more kind of extreme individuals we'll see. You see this, and it'll be, in some ways, a bit harder to harder to counter, because rather than talking about talking about some, you know, nasty people, will be talking about the influence of some really bad ideas, sure, but be very easy to be accused of, like just a political bias or partisanship, if, if you're talking about The influence that these ideas are having in mainstream politics, rather than just being on the fringes. And

Avery Smith  44:04

well, I mean, you bring up a good point, because the current situation of media in New Zealand, and you know, the closures of, you know, several date funded or reputable news outlets is leaving a vacuum for this kind of information to get the credibility that perhaps it wouldn't have had, you know, in the past. And so it's really concerning when you see sort of the way that these events are are coming together. I think, I mean, I think you're right. I think that it's something that we should absolutely be aware of going forward, yeah, definitely, you were saying something else. You were doing something about climate change, right? Yeah.

Byron  44:46

So at the moment, I've been looking at the dialog on reality juke radio, but I hope to for a thesis, look at another show on there called greenwashed, which is there i. A kind of environmentalism and climate focused show, and it's hosted by a four former federated farmers president and a district councilor in Southland who was elected to that position with the backing of voices for freedom. And they have a lot of content that sort of questions the established science on climate change, and particularly around sort of issues like methane emissions and so forth. And I see climate conspiracy as a real area that that kind of disinfo space is moving into as we get further away from the height of the pandemic and a lot of the same sorts of conspiracies that were out there about COVID are now being said about climate change. So during COVID, during COVID, there were, I think there were sort of three, three ideas. One was that the pandemic was fake and it was put out there by some sort of global elites to try and remake society in their own interests. Another conspiracy was that it was real, but it was manufactured by those same elites, again, to restructure society in their own interest. And the more I guess, moderate conspiracy was that, no, it was a real virus. It wasn't manufactured, but the elites are taking advantage of it to further their own interests. And we see pretty much those exact things with climate change. So the more moderate ones will say, Yes, well, yes, climate change is happening, but global elites are taking advantage of it to remake the world in their own interest. And then the more extreme ones will say, No, it's not real. It's all a hoax. And the more fringe ones will say, Oh, it is real, but it's manufactured through weather manipulation and the bill. The common factor in all of these is the idea that there's a small group of elites who are trying to remake our global society, and they're using climate change as a way to do that, just as they supposedly use the the COVID pandemic. So I think it, it's created an easy, easy pivot for a lot of that same disinfo that was around there with COVID to Now pivot to climate change.

Avery Smith  47:14

Sure. Yeah, you know something you as you were talking I was just thinking about something else that you brought up in your book, is the way that sort of rural communities in New Zealand play an important part in, you know, sort of the way that these ideas are transferred. Yeah,

47:33

yeah, because

Byron  47:36

counter spin media really, really tried to target rural communities and and they, they did an interview with a group called agriculture Action Group, which is no no longer operating, but they were, they were sort of spreading these, these anti climate change, well, not anti climate change, but climate change denial narratives in rural communities with sort of series of public meetings and kind of smaller smaller towns and things that maybe those of us who live in the big cities weren't very aware of, but the message that they had there were would resonate with some people, because there are people in rural communities who feel that climate change is being used to change, change their lifestyles and also impact on them economically. And they worry about, you know what, what various regulations on emissions and things might mean for their livelihoods and their income? And I think that, yeah, there's a section of the conspiratorial disinfo movement that's seen that as a sector of society that they can, they can talk to, and they can reach for some of these ideas. And I think, yeah, while the agriculture action group isn't around anymore, I think green washed is sort of targeting that same audience.

Avery Smith  48:57

Sure, yeah, it's you can kind of see, like the through lines and kind of like the lineage of the way that sort of these ideas are taking hold. So interesting, so interesting. So I have one last question for you. What can we do to resist the fear that extremism seems to feed off of?

Byron  49:16

Yeah, I think there's a lot of valuable things people can do that don't immediately look like sort of counter extremism. But a lot of the fear that extremism is using is this fear of social change. You know, we've talked a bit about like, the fear of like, the influence of feminism. There's the fear of immigration, the fear of demographic change, the fear of, you know, social changes around gender and sexuality. And I think that any. Any work that people are doing to kind of reduce the fear around things, whether this is, whether it's advocacy for migrants or refugees or the LGBT community, anything that kind of makes wider society less fearful of these groups of people is going to mean that there's less of a less of a fear for kind of the far right to tap into and grow you know, if they, if people, if people know, you know LGBT people and have and are aware of them and know that they're not part of a plot to emasculate the West, then you know, it's harder for harder for the far right to fear monger like that, whereas I think they rely a lot on people not knowing a lot about that community and only hearing The sort of disinformation that's put out there, and that's, and that's just one example. I mean, you can do similar things for like Muslim community and how people, people may not know a lot about Islam or Muslim and what they like. And that was something that happened after the mosque attacks, was that a lot of the Muslim communities here became more visible, and also made a real effort to kind of educate people about, well, this is who we are. This is what we believe. This is what we do. And I think things like that make it harder for the far right to gain ground. I think people, if they've got friends and family who are LGBT or who are Muslim or from a refugee background, they're less likely to buy into that fear, because they'll know that these these people aren't something that we should fear, because

Avery Smith  51:50

it humanizes them, essentially, right? Because this all kind of feeds off of a dehumanization of people, right? Exactly. They're so different, they're so dangerous, they're going to wreck everything. So by having, I mean, from what you were saying, I was just getting this, from what you were saying, is connection and like, sort of, like, rehumanization of these different groups of people that are being targeted by far right ideologies. Well, thank you so much for coming in today, while coming in, thank you so much for being on zoom with me today.

52:21

You're welcome. No, this

Avery Smith  52:23

was a great this was a great conversation Byron. I really, I really had a great time talking to you and getting to hear more about your work. No, it's been wonderful. 

Thanks for listening to unsettling extremism. If you haven't already read Byron's book fear New Zealand's hostile underworld of extremists, where he goes into more detail about the groups we talked about here today, we also talked about what we can do to make ourselves less susceptible to the fear that extremism thrives on. I hope that you will take one step, even if it's a small one, in educating yourself and other people about groups that you have been encouraged to fear, like and subscribe to unsettling extremism on your preferred podcast platform so you never miss an episode. Ma tew a! See you next time!