Speaker 1: Before we get into it, be advised that this series
Speaker 1: contains bad language and references to violence. January six, among
Speaker 1: the thronging crowds of MAGA supporters, a short man with
Speaker 1: dark hair and bright blue sunglasses approaches the US Capital.
Speaker 1: He's holding his smartphone out in front of him, talking
Speaker 1: to it as he walks. What's up, everyone, Let's flip
Speaker 1: and go. It is cold as motherfucker out here. How's
Speaker 1: it going? Happy Happy day. The guy is a well
Speaker 1: known live streamer. He goes by the name Baked Alaska.
Speaker 1: Like all streamers, he makes his living by winning subscriptions
Speaker 1: and tips from his online audience, whose comments cascade down
Speaker 1: the screen of his phone as he walks. You can
Speaker 1: hear him hauling out his fans at the start, like
Speaker 1: every streamer does. Yo, what's up, brilliant genius, Jimmy Salami,
Speaker 1: Nicholas Sic Droeper, I'm good, I'm good, come on in.
Speaker 1: But Baked Alaska isn't just another streamer. He's a far
Speaker 1: right prankster and agitator who's been arrested many, many times
Speaker 1: for the things he's done on stream. In fact, as
Speaker 1: he comes into the Capital, he's on parole from macing
Speaker 1: someone in the eyes just last month December. Simply by
Speaker 1: being in d C. He's breaking the terms of his release,
Speaker 1: But he doesn't care. For a far right streamer like
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska, the stop the Steel Rally is too lucrative
Speaker 1: an opportunity to miss. In the next half an hour,
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska will be inside the US capital streaming the
Speaker 1: siege in real time. Forgot over ten thousand people lives.
Speaker 1: Let's go first. He's giddy with excitement. Those ten thousand
Speaker 1: viewers are hitting the light button, sending cash and buying
Speaker 1: monthly subs. Thank you for the monthly sub Hell yeah.
Speaker 1: In return, Baked Alaska provides the content they crave. We
Speaker 1: had a fraudulent election, and we are all here. Everyone
Speaker 1: Here's a patriot and a hero for their attention and
Speaker 1: their money. Baked Alaska will do whatever they want. If
Speaker 1: they ask him to get in the face of a
Speaker 1: cop and full riot gear and cause a scene, He'll
Speaker 1: do it. Fucking Odieza, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you
Speaker 1: you Cresa Sht. Wh'll go on a rampage, bursting into
Speaker 1: a senator's office and picking up the phone. Hey, let's
Speaker 1: call Trump, Let's call Trump. Yes, an other rioter thinks
Speaker 1: it's a bad idea, but Baked Alaska is made of
Speaker 1: stronger stuff. No, just say we love him. We love you, bro, No,
Speaker 1: he'll be happy. What do you mean we're fighting for Trump?
Speaker 1: I guess Trump wasn't home, so Baked Alaska makes do
Speaker 1: with a pretend call to the Senate. He U, Yes,
Speaker 1: we have a fraudulent election. I would like to report.
Speaker 1: His screen lights up with approving comments and tips from
Speaker 1: his fans eagerly watching at home. Yeah, we need to
Speaker 1: get our boy Donald J. Trump into office. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: can we do that real quick? Oh yeah, oh, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. Let's go. Let's go for Baked Alaska and
Speaker 1: streamers like him. The Capitol riot on January six wasn't
Speaker 1: just an ideological crusade. It was a cash cow. The
Speaker 1: A d L claims he made two thousand dollars just
Speaker 1: from entering those congressional offices. Yea, thank you for the host.
Speaker 1: Thank you for all the new followers. Let's get that
Speaker 1: follow bum. I appreciate you guys. Thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: I love you. The assault on the US Capitol is
Speaker 1: probably the best documented mass crime and history. Every second
Speaker 1: of the day was filmed and photographed from a dozen angles,
Speaker 1: by police body cams, by media cruise look at this Nex,
Speaker 1: protesters Heart inside Statue Ory Hall, and by streamers like
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska. We got over ten tho people watching. Let's
Speaker 1: go at first glance, a fringe online personality like Baked
Speaker 1: Alaska doesn't seem like he's worth much attention. He's kind
Speaker 1: of a political clown, a grifter, chasing clicks, willing to
Speaker 1: debase himself in any way for the love of strangers.
Speaker 1: Let's go and drop yes. But it pains me to
Speaker 1: tell you Baked Alaska matters. His assent to far right
Speaker 1: stardom was a flashing light on the cultural dashboard, but
Speaker 1: it was a warning that most people, including myself, chose
Speaker 1: to ignore. So I'm going to look back at a
Speaker 1: time when characters like Baked Alaska started to emerge online,
Speaker 1: because if we'd paid attention to Yahoo's like him five
Speaker 1: years ago, then maybe, just maybe, things would have turned
Speaker 1: out differently. From the teams A Cool Zone, Media, I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, and novel This is the Assault on America
Speaker 1: Episode four, The Canary in the Coal Line. Baked Alaska
Speaker 1: was born Anthem Gionet on November sixteenth nineteen seven. His
Speaker 1: parents were devout pillars of the community type Christians who
Speaker 1: still do a ton of charity work in poor parts
Speaker 1: of Russia. In fact, five of young Anthem's siblings were
Speaker 1: adopted by his parents on their trips abroad. After a
Speaker 1: sheltered upbringing in rural Alaska, Janet moved to Los Angeles
Speaker 1: in the two thousands to study film and marketing. He
Speaker 1: got involved in the music business and seems to have
Speaker 1: decided that the name Anthem didn't fit anymore. He rebranded
Speaker 1: himself Baked Alaska, presumably because he was a guy from
Speaker 1: Alaska who liked to get baked. Maybe there was something
Speaker 1: about taking a new identity in a new city hundreds
Speaker 1: of miles away from his devout upbringing that unlocked a
Speaker 1: wildness in Anthem. Whatever the reason, he soon got a
Speaker 1: reputation as a live wire character, always ready to pull
Speaker 1: stuff for the lolls. The thing to say was do
Speaker 1: it for the vine, and he had sort of come
Speaker 1: to prominence as like somebody who would do anything for
Speaker 1: the vine. That's Ben Smith. Ben was the editor in
Speaker 1: chief of the website BuzzFeed back in the two thousand tens.
Speaker 1: Back then, BuzzFeed was just starting out and growing like mad.
Speaker 1: Ben hired Baked Alaska for his viral video skills, which
Speaker 1: he honed on his incredibly dumb Vine account. I'm sorry, mom,
Speaker 1: I never would to school, but guess what I got?
Speaker 1: Four point three g p A. You remember Vine or
Speaker 1: maybe you don't. It was a short form video platform
Speaker 1: that was big for a year or two and like
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen. The thing people used to say back
Speaker 1: then was do it for the Vine. Whatever it was,
Speaker 1: Gionette would do it. One of the things he'd like
Speaker 1: to do for the Vine was to go into like
Speaker 1: a m like a convenience store and buy a gallon
Speaker 1: of milk and pour it over his head. Damn Thursty.
Speaker 1: This was exactly the kind of zany and harmless content
Speaker 1: that made BuzzFeed such a powerhouse in the two thousand tens.
Speaker 1: Baked was a natural fit at the company. It was
Speaker 1: sort of a team full of people who had kind
Speaker 1: of a lot of them had kind of misfits in
Speaker 1: whatever media or environment they'd been in, you know, very
Speaker 1: diverse group. His closest friends were like a trans guy
Speaker 1: and a black woman and who sometimes I think talked
Speaker 1: among themselves about their sense of feeling like they were
Speaker 1: really different from other people in the media business. At
Speaker 1: the time, BuzzFeed was essentially a platform hacking outfit. Their
Speaker 1: whole game was figuring out how to grab people's attention
Speaker 1: on platforms like Facebook and Twitter using listicles, click bait headlines,
Speaker 1: and infectiously share able videos. Baked fit right in. He
Speaker 1: had a front row seat to Buzzfeeds rise, learning from
Speaker 1: the methods they pioneered. His job was pretty straightforward. He
Speaker 1: wasn't so much making content as he was repackaging videos
Speaker 1: for Twitter in particular, in other platforms, sort of re
Speaker 1: editing stuff. And you know, these are often kind of sweet, silly,
Speaker 1: fun videos, you know, along the lines of like Americans
Speaker 1: try Mexican snacks for the first time. Mexican chips ten
Speaker 1: times better than American chips. Mexicans try American snacks, it
Speaker 1: smells like a little bit. Things like that. You might
Speaker 1: remember that video where two people put rubber bands around
Speaker 1: a watermelon and they keep doing it until the thing explodes.
Speaker 1: That was a viral BuzzFeed video. There's a sort of
Speaker 1: a genre video. Easy to produce. Its fun and silly
Speaker 1: did well on YouTube, which was our bread and Better
Speaker 1: then Baked. Alaska was someone with a natural sense of
Speaker 1: what people would watch and what they'd share soon. He
Speaker 1: wasn't just editing the videos, he was starring in them.
Speaker 1: We'll up fifteen minutes ago. I'm hungover. Let's get my
Speaker 1: ears pierced. Here's one called guys get their ears pierced.
Speaker 1: For the first time. I kind of feel like there's
Speaker 1: two kinds of people in the world. He sounds soft spoken,
Speaker 1: almost shy, a million miles from the tough guy swearing
Speaker 1: at cops on January six. I think it can look
Speaker 1: really good on some people, and then other people just
Speaker 1: look like douche bags. So I don't know how it's
Speaker 1: going to turn out for me. You know, as folks
Speaker 1: remember him, he was sensitive, He took offense. He was
Speaker 1: kind of like worried about his image, worried about what
Speaker 1: people saw about him, kind of like full of machismo
Speaker 1: but also kind of touchy. And they were kind of
Speaker 1: odd things once they were online to see. I think
Speaker 1: it was the prices right at that sort of company
Speaker 1: retreat or like you know, outing, they all want to
Speaker 1: go see the prices, right, and so of somebody who
Speaker 1: was helping organize the event, came up through the line
Speaker 1: to take everybody's identification and write down their names, and
Speaker 1: he just sort of ghosted, like he just sort of
Speaker 1: vanished because he didn't want to give his real name,
Speaker 1: which struck people as of eccentric. Another eccentric side to
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska was his music. Remember before he started at BuzzFeed,
Speaker 1: he was making waves in the l A music scene.
Speaker 1: He styled himself as a kind of Alaskan hillbilly white rapper.
Speaker 1: I was just like, Okay, this guy's cool as hell.
Speaker 1: That's to Mario SB, a musician and artist based in
Speaker 1: l A. De Mario first heard about Baked back in
Speaker 1: the two thousand tens. Some of De Mario's music buddies
Speaker 1: told him about a viral video guy who was doing
Speaker 1: music and then shooting and editing his own videos. De
Speaker 1: Mario was impressed. This kid was in machineo like there
Speaker 1: was no beating him. At that point, De Mario and
Speaker 1: Baked met through common friends and started writing together. He
Speaker 1: started playing Mario Kart pretty much hit it off. What's
Speaker 1: that happened? Competition was just growing, man, So I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, let's hang out, bro Let's hang out. Here's
Speaker 1: one of Bate's songs from the time. It's called loose Trapping,
Speaker 1: Got another one, Knuckle Doesn't Move, Trapping Me Doesn't and
Speaker 1: What's Happening. It's definitely different singing in the rain. Now.
Speaker 1: Baked even had some success. He got into a beef
Speaker 1: with a rapper called Riff Raff, who was well known
Speaker 1: at the time because James Franco stole his look for
Speaker 1: a film called spring Breakers, right Bright, it's all pretty
Speaker 1: weird spring Break Forever. Yeah, for a while things seem
Speaker 1: to be going well, but Baked had a problem hold
Speaker 1: up that sense of tive y that Ben Smith had
Speaker 1: noticed about him at BuzzFeed. Well, that was a lot
Speaker 1: harder for Baked to deal with in the rap game.
Speaker 1: The way to Mario describes it, Baked was a sweet
Speaker 1: guy who couldn't handle negative comments under his videos. People
Speaker 1: would either hates you, you know, put in the comments
Speaker 1: like your waging stuff and like he would actually take
Speaker 1: that ship to heart. He just wasn't the type of
Speaker 1: person to have like super tough skin. He would just
Speaker 1: let people just ravish his emotions. You know, it really suck.
Speaker 1: De Mario says there were times he had to talk
Speaker 1: Baked out of quitting music, even out of suicide. It
Speaker 1: was as if Baked just had to be liked and
Speaker 1: his audience as a rapper wasn't giving him what he needed.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand fifteen, Anthem Gionette a k a.
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska found a community who would show love to
Speaker 1: almost anyone, unbelievable, as long as you showed them love first.
Speaker 1: We are going to make our country grade again, and
Speaker 1: we are going through. Yeah, we are going to He
Speaker 1: jumped on the Maga train. Honestly, he wasn't really talking
Speaker 1: about much politics before the whole Trump thing. I don't
Speaker 1: really hear much. But after that he just started being
Speaker 1: a whole different animal. Got t feed, Faked Alaska, gave
Speaker 1: up his Bernie bro libertarian persona, and threw himself into
Speaker 1: Trump World. He began a new career as a streamer,
Speaker 1: building on all the skills he'd learned at BuzzFeed. He
Speaker 1: kept up the music, it just changed a bit. He
Speaker 1: now made tracks like Maga, Anthem America and ironically enough,
Speaker 1: we love our Cops. We love our cops a lot, buntsman,
Speaker 1: we love a military. You're none of This endeared him
Speaker 1: to the l a rap scene, and De Mario and
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska drifted apart. When they had their last contact
Speaker 1: in two thousand sixteen, Baked had already built a sizeable
Speaker 1: audience of subscribers. He brought me in one time and
Speaker 1: he was doing a live on YouTube, and after a
Speaker 1: while being there, kind of like took it as like, Damn,
Speaker 1: are you here to make fun of me now? Because
Speaker 1: most of it, most of his audience, like predominantly were
Speaker 1: either Trump supporters or just racist motherfucker's that were making
Speaker 1: like memes of me and on his reddit. And he
Speaker 1: actually just had me coming here and just play the
Speaker 1: monkey with the banana, you know what I mean. And
Speaker 1: I was like, Damn, so this is the crowd that
Speaker 1: you have now and you're laughing about it? Holy sh
Speaker 1: it right for sure? Man. I see when Baked Alaska,
Speaker 1: through his close friend a black man, to the racist
Speaker 1: online mobs watching his stream, it was a statement he
Speaker 1: was going all in with the far right influencer gig,
Speaker 1: no matter the personal cost. I was done. After that,
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm not even gonna say anything to you, bro,
Speaker 1: but I can't sit there and support it. It's basically
Speaker 1: called him out a race the n where with the
Speaker 1: hard arm. You know what I mean? I can't do that.
Speaker 1: Ship Man to Mario was out, I can't do it. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska's Twitter output was getting so extreme that he
Speaker 1: was booted off the platform. The final offense was posting
Speaker 1: a picture of a Jewish conservative commentator photoshopped inside a
Speaker 1: gas chamber. Judging by his reaction in this nine hour stream,
Speaker 1: the band stung. How How am I going to get
Speaker 1: my account back? How am I gonna get my freaking
Speaker 1: account back? My account, two hundred thousand followers was just
Speaker 1: partminently suspended for no freaking reason. Freaking too true to form.
Speaker 1: Baked soon released his Feelings as a new song. I
Speaker 1: guess Mark Zuckerberg didn't want Baked to write a song
Speaker 1: about him being super gay. Because Baked maintained his presence
Speaker 1: on Facebook. He would pull stunts like the old days
Speaker 1: at BuzzFeed, but his new tricks weren't so innocent. They
Speaker 1: might involve harassing people on the street. We got to
Speaker 1: preserve the white reds brown abusing clerks and stores and restaurants.
Speaker 1: You need some more calories, don't you look at those roles?
Speaker 1: Holy fuck? How about fuck you? Out or spraying Mason
Speaker 1: to somebody's eyes if his subscribers demanded it. The sensitive
Speaker 1: guy who was so spun out by negative feedback online
Speaker 1: that he considered taking his own life had now become
Speaker 1: an I r L bully and menace simply because his
Speaker 1: online audience loved it. To give him some credit, Baked
Speaker 1: Alaska was a pioneer. He successfully married far right ideology
Speaker 1: with the zany viral stunts he learned at BuzzFeed, where
Speaker 1: he used to work for Ben Smith. When you look
Speaker 1: at what he's going on to do, since what do
Speaker 1: you think what skills I guess do you think he
Speaker 1: took away from his time at BuzzFeed? I mean, I
Speaker 1: think the reason we hired him and what he sort
Speaker 1: of perfected at BuzzFeed was this sense of what's gonna work,
Speaker 1: what's gonna go viral, what's what? What do people want?
Speaker 1: And how do you sort of feed it back to them?
Speaker 1: And I do think that we're in this environment where
Speaker 1: you really have no compass at all, You can get
Speaker 1: pulled just more toward essentially kind of optimizing yourself into
Speaker 1: being a Nazi. The Nazis are basically pacificists compared to us,
Speaker 1: As baked online presence became more dangerous, he started attending
Speaker 1: alleys and hanging out with the type of guys who
Speaker 1: throw Hitler salutes instead of fist bumps. You will not
Speaker 1: replace us. In August two thousand seventeen, he attended the
Speaker 1: notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlotte's Belle. Here he
Speaker 1: is chanting at that rally white We're proud to be
Speaker 1: white victory. This was just hours after a white supremacist
Speaker 1: terrorist attack that killed Heather Higher, a thirty one year
Speaker 1: old anti fascist protester. Baked's former friend Da Mario sp
Speaker 1: was dumbfounded. This is Baked the last that I met before, Like,
Speaker 1: damn bikes. Don't you have black friends? Like is it
Speaker 1: for the cloud? Which we're all thinking, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, like all these old buddies, like says says myself, Like, dude,
Speaker 1: you just went nuts and you just basically want to
Speaker 1: get famous by this. We'll never know what's an anthem, Gionna.
Speaker 1: It's heart whether his path from shy media guide to
Speaker 1: snarling neo nazi was a bid for fame or a
Speaker 1: reflection of his true beliefs. Sometimes it's hard to tell
Speaker 1: how committed any of these people are to the views
Speaker 1: that they express because there's a lot of money slashing
Speaker 1: around in this space. We met Luke O'Brien an episode two.
Speaker 1: He's an investigative reporter who focuses on bad actors on
Speaker 1: the right. If you gain, you know, a big enough
Speaker 1: following on social media, and the way to do that
Speaker 1: is often to say extremely outrageous and inflammatory things, well
Speaker 1: then money is going to come your way back. In
Speaker 1: our second episode, Luke was talking about Ali Alexander, the
Speaker 1: man behind the Stop to Steal disinformation campaign. Baked Alaska
Speaker 1: has none of Alexander's strategic sense or his organizing experience,
Speaker 1: but they were both willing to say the unsayable and
Speaker 1: to keep pushing and pushing into anti democratic territory. I've
Speaker 1: had many conversations with with far extremists who have told me, hey,
Speaker 1: it's all just a troll, it's just a big game, right.
Speaker 1: But once you have been spending oh, twelve to fourteen
Speaker 1: hours a day larking as an extreme MR and neo
Speaker 1: Nazi online and you've done that for you know, many years,
Speaker 1: well that's just what you are at that point. And
Speaker 1: so I think that's what we've seen with a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys, is that, Hey, I'm I I see
Speaker 1: an angle here I can play. There's a bit of
Speaker 1: a grift that's going on, and they start pushing it
Speaker 1: and pushing it further and further, and it has to
Speaker 1: get more extreme by nature, and eventually you are basically
Speaker 1: advocating for violent insurrection in the United States to overthrow
Speaker 1: our democracy. But you're making money off of it. So hey,
Speaker 1: why would you stop? Thank you? Thank you for all
Speaker 1: the new followers. Get that follow up, and I appreciate
Speaker 1: you guys, Thank you for being baked. Alaska never did stop.
Speaker 1: He followed the likes in the online engagement wherever they
Speaker 1: took him from hillbilly rapper trip to racist maga streamer.
Speaker 1: We got to preserve the white rasbro. In January, he
Speaker 1: rode the algorithm right into the US Capital, unleashed the cracking.
Speaker 1: Let's go has the cracking Ben unleashed? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: so Ben Smith was watching that day unfold, just like
Speaker 1: the rest of us. So Ben, how much of his
Speaker 1: live stream during the attack did you watch? I watched
Speaker 1: a lot of it. What's going through your head while
Speaker 1: you're watching this? You know? Having more of a connection
Speaker 1: or at least a different connection to this guy than
Speaker 1: a lot of people who might just be dipping in.
Speaker 1: You know, just made me think back through this whole
Speaker 1: era in which social media, you know, demolished the gatekeepers,
Speaker 1: and we were very much part of that. And I
Speaker 1: think I think people overrated the gatekeepers. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I basically think this did a lot of good, But
Speaker 1: I also had a pretty utopian point of view on
Speaker 1: and dismissed people like him, makes these little like mistakes
Speaker 1: and errors and marginal screw ups around the edges, not
Speaker 1: as anything that was really central or important. And I
Speaker 1: think you look back and you think, oh, maybe that
Speaker 1: maybe he was the most important person, Like maybe this
Speaker 1: was the real thing that was happening, and the fun, celebratory,
Speaker 1: diverse videos were not the things that wound up, you know,
Speaker 1: driving people to storm the capitol. It was this guy.
Speaker 1: Would you say, people like Baked Alaska, are you leaning
Speaker 1: more towards these people are kind of like oddball political
Speaker 1: Charlatan's marginalized figures, or that they're kind of a canary
Speaker 1: in the coal mine. Culturally, I in retrospect think that
Speaker 1: these folks were the canary in the coal mine, when
Speaker 1: at the time we thought they were just kind of
Speaker 1: marginal weirdos who were going to be swept aside by history.
Speaker 1: By the time of the Capital Riot, Baked Alaska had
Speaker 1: been deep platformed by YouTube, PayPal, Twitter, and Venmo, among others.
Speaker 1: Almost every other platform followed suit. After his live stream
Speaker 1: on January six, the guy who craved online engagement, who
Speaker 1: had optimized his entire life for clicks, was booted offline.
Speaker 1: Then the FBI came for him. On Saturday, January sixte
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska was arrested at his home in Houston, largely
Speaker 1: thanks to the evidence from his own live stream. It's
Speaker 1: hard to say what must have been worse for him,
Speaker 1: losing his accounts or losing his freedom. Whatever the case,
Speaker 1: Anthem Jeanette a k a. Baked Alaska went dark, but
Speaker 1: not for long. In early May, a gaming platform called
Speaker 1: trovoh let Baked Alaska back into his streaming account. For
Speaker 1: someone who online as Baked Alaska, four months had been
Speaker 1: a long time, it's safe to say he was happy
Speaker 1: to be back. Yaw yaw, yeah, sure enough. He right
Speaker 1: back to his old ways. We're live, we're live out here,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna have We're gonna have fun. Straight minutes
Speaker 1: after beginning his first stream back what are you guys
Speaker 1: doing out here, he accosted three middle aged Hispanic women
Speaker 1: waiting at a bus stop. Who are you? Who are you?
Speaker 1: Are you illegal immigrants? Not long after that, he gets
Speaker 1: in the face of a black bouncer outside of members
Speaker 1: only club. Can I tell you a joke? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: let me tell you a joke. Black lives don't matter?
Speaker 1: And so it goes. But after all this, at the
Speaker 1: end of the road, Baked Alaska's old buddy to Mario
Speaker 1: SB is still trying to make sense of what happened
Speaker 1: to the man he called a friend, Like, what drove
Speaker 1: you to do this? Bro? Like Trump's not in office
Speaker 1: anymore now, now what you're stuck looking like an idiot?
Speaker 1: You lost people thout actually going the bath for you, dude?
Speaker 1: You know that's it. So here's where I make a
Speaker 1: little confession. Baked Alaska and I came up as creators
Speaker 1: and almost the same place at the same time. While
Speaker 1: he was making viral videos for BuzzFeed, I was creating
Speaker 1: viral listicles for cracked dot com, the website that helped
Speaker 1: pioneer that particular form of content. I was never as
Speaker 1: much on the video side of things, but during the
Speaker 1: George Floyd protests in Portland, I was briefly the most
Speaker 1: popular live streamer in the city. In my case, I
Speaker 1: never took donations, and I stopped streaming once it became
Speaker 1: clear that law enforcement was using live stream footage for
Speaker 1: intelligence to help crack down on the demonstration. I was
Speaker 1: also afraid of winding up in the same situation Baked
Speaker 1: Alaska found himself in deliberately manipulating events for the sake
Speaker 1: of content. That's not a position any good journalist wants
Speaker 1: to be in. Over the last few years, I found
Speaker 1: myself in the dual positions of being a content creator,
Speaker 1: someone who consciously develops and builds a fan base through
Speaker 1: new media, and also being a researcher who analyzes how
Speaker 1: creators like Baked Alaska influence and radicalize their fans. It's
Speaker 1: become clear to me that this sort of radicalization is
Speaker 1: not a one way street. Baked Alaska used his talent
Speaker 1: in making viral videos to push fringe ideas about white
Speaker 1: genocide and Jewish conspiracies, but the fawning reactions of his
Speaker 1: most hardcore fans also pushed him to create more extreme content,
Speaker 1: which pushed him even further down the rabbit hole. I
Speaker 1: don't like influencer as a job title, but those of
Speaker 1: us who make podcasts and YouTube videos and livestream content
Speaker 1: do have a profound influence on the people who consume
Speaker 1: our stuff. Our society is an increasingly isolated one. In
Speaker 1: Americans said they had ten or more close friends. Today
Speaker 1: only thirteen percent say the same. This gaping law of
Speaker 1: loneliness at the center of American culture has opened millions
Speaker 1: of people up to being influenced in profoundly disturbing ways.
Speaker 1: When anthem Geonette marched on the Capitol, he wasn't just
Speaker 1: offering his fans a chance to watch him. He was
Speaker 1: giving them the opportunity to influence history and his own life,
Speaker 1: and in those ways, to feel more connected to the
Speaker 1: world themselves. At least ten thousand people took him up
Speaker 1: on the offer and cheered on his assault on democracy itself,
Speaker 1: And who knows, maybe they'll get the chance to do
Speaker 1: it all again sometime soon. In the next episode, the
Speaker 1: virus enters the main frame. The Big Lie is ushered
Speaker 1: into the Senate Chamber by a ruthlessly ambitious young senator,
Speaker 1: one will do anything to get ahead, even at the
Speaker 1: cost of democracy itself. I have heard from people like
Speaker 1: I've never heard before, and somebody has got to take
Speaker 1: their concerns seriously and speak up. And that's what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do. Join me in episode five, The Inside Man