Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart Radio. Definitely, the high point for this movement was late to right before the Charlottesville rally. Um, they actually brought people to Charlottesville. That was part of the community is They're like, hey, we're getting together. We're gonna march with all our brothers join us in Charlottesville. So I personally saw a major increase around of just hateful messages, UM groups trying to shut down events because they didn't like that there were queer people there. Um, there was a lot of dock sing um phone threats, people trying to get other people fired from jobs. UM. The stolen Rocky Mountain fur Con database was used to ducks hundreds of people and try to get them fired for being gay or being furry. So there was a pretty big escalation I would say around the toteen time and throughout twenty seventeen, we figured out strategies to get rid of it together. Everything so down, Down, Down, Welcome back to our two part episode on the furry community and how they've dealt with the rising Nazi threat. I don't know what we'll title this yet, but that's what it's about. This is part two of the series. So if you haven't listened to part one, go back and listen to it. Otherwise most of this will be nonsense, so please do that now. The Midwest Profest chlorine gas attack was big news online for a day or two, but then it sort of faded off into the background. One of the few relatively mainstream site to cover the fall out at all was Vice in their two thousand sixteen article c s I fur Fest. It was a good piece and included valuable information from the local police and the FBI, But that's basically it in terms of long term coverage, uh, in terms of serious journalistic attention being paid to the problem of rising extremism in the furry community, try to put yourself in the shoes of some of the people in this subculture. Some of your friends were wounded or at least traumatized by a terrorist attack launched by someone who is basically a Nazi. His Nazi friends are making continued efforts to recruit young furries all around you. What do you do? Stranded well outside the main stream, the furies have had to develop their own structures of support and self defense that includes their own journalists Patch Oh fur that's his pseudonym, created dog Patch Press, a furry news website, back in two thousand fourteen, and for the last five years, it's offered daily updates on furry culture and news, with a distinct emphasis on tracking the rise of the alt furs and movements and groups like the Furry Raiders. Patches work hasn't just informed members of the furry community. His work is rigorous and insightful enough that he's been sided by Rolling Stone, The l a Times, Vice, Forbes, The Daily Dot, and Daily Costs. He's also been cited by us here at Worst You're ever because Patch is the reason we wound up at Midwest FurFest in the first place. Patch reached out to me on Twitter back in the fall of two thousand nineteen when I retweeted some post about a certain alt right grifter who we're not going to name against in this podcast's attempt to register for the Midwest FurFest. We started talking and he sent me over pages and pages of archived conversations between alt furs who are fans of that grifter discussing their plans to disrupt the convention. Patches the first person who dug up Magnus Derridian's old deleted but archived blog post about his stink bomb attack on that bank. Over the years, he's done a really impressive job of collecting and dispensing information about the Alt Fur movement and its figureheads. Well. Patch worked to keep his fellow Furies informed and get crucial information out to the general population. Activists like Dio kept their head to the ground, infiltrated fascist online spaces and gad their data. Well, for a long time, I went around and I banged the fucking pots and pans, and I'm like, I'm like, do you see this ship that's going on? UM? And nobody listened. And I also realized too that when I was infiltrated, I couldn't. They had a public space called the lobby that people anybody could enter in UM. To get out of the lobby, you had to do your interview process and stuff like that, and then you had to do other things to get higher ranks, to see other rooms UM, to get deeper in UM. So they knew the lobby was compromised, but they didn't know the rest of it was compromised. Because that stuff I had to keep quiet about, because if they knew it was compromised, they would stop talking or they would look for who it was. So I collected thousands of screenshots and I used there's a discord history history tracker UM, which we used as a bot and it dogs all of the server. So we used that. We would crawl the server a couple of times a week. Um, keep the logs and files. I've got those on my computer still record all of that. You know, I was contacting like the SPLC, you know, if I saw anything that was like a law enforcement issue. Um. You know, people talk about making bombs, people talking about you know, meetups and training groups, that kind of thing. And it's not coincidental that this all really got started in because that's also the year and the rough time of year that gamer Gate kicked off. If you're not extremely online, you probably haven't heard about gamer Gate. It was, in short, a far right reactionary movement among video game fans who were angry that feminist video game critics had started analyzing some of the troublesome gender issues in the popular games. In a lot of ways, gamer Gate was the inflection point of the modern alt right. People like Steve Bannon and that guy we're not going to mention again, jumped in to co op the movement because they saw it as a potential source of new digital activists. Gammer Gate wasn't just people getting angry about like video game critics saying stuff they didn't like. It was a harassment campaign that included hundreds of death threats against a number of different critics, um dead animals and like letters written in blood being mailed to people's doors. It got really creepy and really out of hand really fast. Gamergate was priming the pumping. Yeah, it got all these people ready. It got them organized. They realized that they could have some exert some force of power over others. They realized that they could use fear and that they could terrorize people into silence, into submission. They could get their way, and if they banded together, if there were enough of them, none of them would get caught because there were too many. So you get hate mobs like that. And they learned um and your constantly constantly seeing an evolution and adaptation where they learned what works and what doesn't. They try anything like that didn't work, or they see somebody else do something and that was very effective. They pick up the method, they move on. It took a while for any of this to percolate out into mainstream culture. Because the furry fandom is so deeply tied to the Internet, they were kind of the canary in the coal mine for all of the Nazi stuff that we're dealing with today in America. Choope was there for the start of it all, and he watched as his community mobilized itself to combat the fascist creep. I think one of the most effective ways was to uh use something like blockchain on Twitter basically and start blocking these people, um that had form groups intentionally targeting others. The alt furs, the furry raiders had specific groups to say, Hey, here's someone on Twitter we want to harass. Let's harass them constantly for this whole year, and they would docks them harass that specific person as much as possible, and they had a chat room full of two to three people to constantly harass all day long. So the blockchain on Twitter worked pretty well. Monitoring their chat rooms, of course, is something we've always had to do just to keep our events safe from that kind of abuse. All of this came to a head for the furries in around an event in Colorado called the Rocky Mountain Fury Con. Yeah, So Rocky Mountain fur Con is my local convention in Denver, And basically it had issues because they had furry raiders or all to write people on the board, and the board wanted to give priority to these all right groups to get the first booking of all the hotel rooms, and and the other people on the board couldn't get enough votes to vote these people off the board. So it ended up causing a lot of frustration among the community, like why does this alt right group get all the rooms and no one else gets the rooms? Um, And so there's a lot of I don't know, upset people around that situation. Calls erupted from within the Colorado furry contingent too. At the very least, band Nazis like Foxler from attending the event. The convention organizers released a statement that was basically the furry equivalent to President Trump's both side speech after Charlottesville. Rocky Mountain fur Coon does not support or condoned discrimination or violence in any of its forms, and is saddened by the hatred and division that has been caused by a small minority of our community on both sides of this issue. Our sources aren't lying when they say that the organizers of Rocky Mountain Fur Con had a complicated history with the far right. The nonprofit that officially managed the convention was Mid America Anthropomorphic and Art Corporation. It was headed by Kendall Emory, also known as Cahoky Learu, who, in addition to being a furry, was a sovereign citizen. Sovereign citizens are a special corner of the far right. They have bizarre and arcane beliefs about the law, and in short, believe they don't have to pay taxes or listen to cops. Law enforcement officers regularly consider them one of the most dangerous groups in the country because of all the shootouts they instigate. Kendall's sovereign citizen beliefs likely influenced his sympathy for the alt furs and furry raiders. It's also probably why Rocky Mountain Fur Con failed to pay any taxes from two thousand and eight to This was first reported as far as we can tell, on another furry news site called flav Rock. They note that Kendall slash Cohoki was forced to step down as chairman of the convention in two thousand and eight, when it was found out that he'd been convicted of criminal sexual contact with a minor back in nine. Weird how that keeps happening with these alt right guys? Huh. Anyway, so this pedophile sovereign citizen and his buddies insisted on making Rocky Mountain fur Con a say space for Nazis. This understandably riled up folks like Deo Together Everything down. From January two seventeen, Deal got on Twitter and commenting on their upcoming Rocky Mountain fur Con, tweeted, can't wait to punch Nazis. This was followed up by a response from someone named Olivia Melas, who said watching you get shot by someone defending themselves from unprovoked assault will be far more entertaining. The discussion continued until someone asked Olivia if she was really planning to bring a gun to the convention. She said, in essence, maybe, oh god, yeah, this was what threw me into the public eye. Deal reported the threat both to Twitter and to law enforcement, and this prompted a response from Kendall Emery and I thought at first it was a troll. I'm like, what the fuck is this thing? And it's like, we're gonna seize your house, and we're gonna seize your wages, and we're gonna put you in prison. You've been very bad. We know you're on Twitter, and I'm like, okay. They listed a couple other furry conventions as part of and the furry writers as other people who were harmed by my actions. I actually had to talk to like one of the other heads of another convention. I'm like, were you part of this letter? He's like, no, please never contact me again. That looks really bad for legal and like, that's fine, I'll never contact you again. Bease, don't contact me. He's like, that's great. By So I got into trouble. So the letter came to me. I google the name signed to it because I'm like, this has to be complete bullshit. Nobody would send you a sovereign citizen pants on head crazy letter with a bloody thumb print. I actually found a really fun analysis of this letter on the legal blog Lawyers in Liquor. The author analyzes the letter and calls it proof that quote some people have insanity so strong it can bleed right the funk through a first suit. Here's how he explains the red thumb print, which he thinks was ink rather than blood. To this sit the red ink and the thumb print add some special magic because it shows they are a flesh and blood person and not the corporate entity known as fur pants, McGhee or whatever the funk this guy calls himself. This whole incident wound up blowing into the mainstream media almost as much as the chlorine attack on Midwest FurFest. In February, Vice wrote an article title even Furries are Fighting Fascists. It interviewed members of Furry Antifa, a loose organization that had just started to coalesce around the resistance to people like Foxler and the alt furs. In April, Rolling Stone wrote that does the furrier community have a Nazi problem? Article, and in May The Daily Beast published Nazis are tearing the furry world apart. The police wound up investigating the threats and determining that there was some danger to the community. The hotel demanded the organizers of the con shell at an extra two dollars for off duty cops to provide security, and in the end Rocky Mountain fur Con had to shut down. Eventually, they decided they couldn't deal with it anymore. There's no way to get rid of the alt right people on the board. So they shut down the convey mention entirely. But that didn't end the fighting. Of course, Foxler and the Furry Raiders were piste now, so in the Colorado furry community organized a new Nazi free event Denver. They decided they had to funk with it our first year. The alt right group, the Furry Raiders decided, we're gonna call the hotel book all the rooms at once with a database of stolen identities from the previous convention. So they booked for of the rooms. I think it was a mounting close to sixty eight thou dollars worth of revenue lost. And we had to try to convince the hotel those were stolen identities from the last convention that they used against our convention. This was a serious crime, or at least it would have been if again, the victims and perpetrators hadn't been people who like to dress up as animals. Yeah, we actually called, uh, I don't know, the Colorado bu Or of Investigation. UH, there's a division for financial crimes. And once I told them it was a Furry Convention, they stopped returning our calls. Fixing the situation required Chip and his fellow organizers to spend dozens and dozens of hours investigating the crime for themselves. He sent us an enormous itemized folder filled with eyewitness testimony from those who had heard Foxler discussed the plan, as well as lists of all the fraudulent reservations that have been posted inside a telegram group used by the Furry Raiders. All this was necessary to convince the hotel to reverse the charges so that they could, you know, hold the event without having it booked up by fake people. They also archived conversations from within that group, including one where alt Furs discuss how to infiltrate the chat channels, where Chip and his friends planned den for oblivious to the fact that their own channel had been infiltrated. Car rights. I would just use my old forsona since I haven't been involved in fur in a long time anyway, Someone named Bluemier responds, old forsonas are actually great for this, they have established history. A little later in the thread, someone named Husky Jack and he two suggests, if anything, get connections to h Chan. Let the heat seem like it's coming from the outside. Version the channel complain that s g w's just want to shut down anyone who happens to be a little right wing, and then one of them drops in a quote from George Lincoln Rockwell, Oh good, here it is by being a national socialist with the swastika, I would also gather the only kind of people I wanted around me, the tough, dedicated idealists ready to fight for those ideals and give their lives if necessary. And even more important, I would automatically scare off the millions of blabber mouths, cowards, fools, and crackpots which infests the rest of the movement. The swastika would probably not bring me many supporters, but those who came would be men. In other chat logs, help first discussed genocide, extermination of transgender people, and a bunch of other horrible stuff we are not going to read at length. The point is that all of this documentation proves the central point di O Chip and other furry anti fascists have been making for years. These people are danger and allowing them to participate in events like Midwest FurFest is also dangerous. At least one alt for actually marched in Charlottesville alongside a small army of fascists, one of whom committed a terrorist attack by ramming his car into a crowd of anti fascists and killing a young woman. Heather Highed. Welcome Together Everything. In the very next year, two thou eighteen, Magnus Deridian, the Confederate first suitor and the presumed corpriate of the chlorine attack, showed up at Midwest Verfest. Again. He was already banned from the convention and was not supposed to be here. Um, so when he came, he was trespassing. So he shows up. He is wearing a first suit based on World War One, which is a great way of not quite not quite being a Nazi, but definitely scaring people who are already on edge. And then he's throwing Nazi salutes in me the lobby and yelling racial slurs. Security came up to him, which was when he punched one of our pregnant security workers, and she is by far one of the toughest people I've ever met, despite her being nine months pregnant at that time. Yeah, so she chases him, he runs flees the hotel, and he's running, she's running after him. The cops nabbed him. They have to take him out of first two. Well, he's not wearing anything underneath, So the hotel donates a sheet, and then you have a few hundred furries taking videos and photos of this man in a sheet getting shoved into a cop car and he spent the weekend in jail. In wider American society, the years since the bloody Charlottesville rally have been years of steady growth and regular attacks by members of the fascist right. In two thousand, nineteen eight, Chan Birth, originally by Gamergate, inspired no less than four white nationalist terrorist attacks and three nations. The Proud Boys have been allowed to work security at Trump rallies. A neo Nazi terrorists social network called The Base has started putting up flyers offering weapons, training and camaraderie to other interested fascists. But over in Furreedom, the story has been really different, and that is why we think non Furrey Americans need to pay attention to folks like Deo and Chip. They and their fellow furry anti fascists have been extremely effective at shutting the Nazis out of their community, and they did it on their own without the police and largely without the media. All it took was sustained activism and a broad commitment to keep Nazis out of their community. I think that the phrase have done the bus they can and I am proud of the way the community organized, the way everyone is aware. Um Like here, people were worried about the Proud Boys coming up. So I watched people. Nobody told them to do this, Nobody asked them to do this, but people went around and they said, Okay, what I'm gonna do is they're gonna check on my friends and make sure that all of my friends get to their hotel room every night and that they're safe. And if I walk alone at night, I'm not going to do that. I'm gonna take a buddy. We're gonna walk together. I watched people who were a little bit bigger, a little bit more well built, are like, hey, you know you're small. Are you walking a little tonight? Can I come with you? I think you're fine, but just in case, And you see that community coming together. We build each other up and we protect us. They don't just protect us, they also try to dissolve the line between us and them, going into hostility is high, Misinformation is everywhere, bad actors, global people, isolated kids looking for answers for their struggles and often finding those answers from liars. Well, the furry community doesn't necessarily focus on the radicalization. They are conscious of the radicalization pipeline and they try to stop it in its tracks. I found that personally. My belief is that inoculating people with hey, do you recognize what this is before it takes what? So if some you see your friend who posts a weird meme, you're like, do you know what that's referencing? Do you understand what you're going with? And they're like, I don't what what do you mean? I thought it was just funny, And you're like, well, actually that reference is about something else, Like that's a reference to, you know, the white genocide theory. That's a reference to the Turner Diaries. That's a reference to the unflush shooter, you know. And people go, oh, I didn't know. I thought it was just funny. My friend posted it to me, And you're like, well, you might want to be very careful about what that friend shares with you, and maybe you can help pull them from the brink. I pull you from the brink. You pull them from the braink we pull each other. There have been mixed results in the community, but some results are still good results. They look for people and provide space to discuss certain ideological pools or in some cases straight out racism, and then we moved to a better community. UM. I tried for a while too. I made a chat group and we pulled people out of these larry groups, and with mixed success, tried to I'm not life after hate, I will pipe for a living. I'm not a therapist. UM, but we tried to offer them a group where it was had some control of moderatorship. So we're like, okay, we understand that you are coming out of this toxic culture. We understand that you are not going to be okay immediately. You are going to carry this baggage and we're going to help you unpack it. So you're gonna come into this group. We're gonna decompress. You can talk about this stuff, you know, but if you throw at a racial slur, we're gonna say, hey man, why are you using that kind of languish? Does it really need to be said? You know? Why are you why are you using it are you angry? And usually it's like, yeah, man, I'm sorry, I just lost my head. I was upset, and you know, I threw it out there. It's a knee jerk reaction I have. But sometimes, and this right here is so important. For the worst year ever, it's overwhelmingly more helpful to interact with somebody in person, human to human and show them some kindness, give them an opening. Dio mentioned a kid who was in the group the Main Chat, which was led by the people directly trying to funnel people into the alt right, and she told this wonderful story that I think speaks so well to how young people men specifically, are desperate for any community and can easily get swept up and manipulated and brought into groups of hate. But how a little connection and understanding from someone who cares can change everything. Here's Deo. It's funny too. When we, for I first saw him, he was welding a lead filled mace to club me to death. And when his friend is like, hey, I gotta get him out of this um, he thinks you're gonna murder him, So I'm gonna like bring him to you, and you say hi, and then he'll realize that you're not going to murder him because he's been told by these alt right groups that you're a violent, sadist who was going to murder him on sight. So we meet and this poor kid is shaking like a leaf. He's like, oh, shoot your deal. And I'm like, hey, buddy, I saw your welding. He's like, oh, you saw the mace. I'm like, yeah, you know, I don't really want to talk about the whole mace thing, but I liked your welds. Where did you learn that? He's like, oh, I had a little class in high school. I'm like, that's a great skill. Are you doing anything with it? Are you thinking about going into the traits? Have you thought about apprenticeship? Are you thinking about college? He's like, I actually I wasn't sure. You know, my dad died a couple of years ago and I've been lost. I'm like, yeah, that happens to a lot of people. Well, if you're thinking about a trade, I'm a journeyman, and I think apprenticeship is a great way to go. You know, you don't have the college kind of debt, but I like jo Wolves, I think you have really good potential. Do you want to talk about steel. He's like, He's like, yeah, that's that's actually been really nice. So we had a nice little group check there in the lobby of the Hyatt, and he let down his guard over time. You know, we're talking about well, so I'm talking about he made himself like plate armor. Like this happened a year before our interview, and just about twelve hours before we sat down with Dio. He found me last night and he's like, I'm really glad you got me out. I still don't like you at all. I'm like, that's great. I'm so happy for you. You look healthier. He's like, yeah, I put on weight. Did you notice. I'm like, yeah, I think he got taller too. He's like eighteen now, and he's so little socially awkward. I had a couple of friends came up to me and he takes a will, sat back and he stares at the group. You know, he wants to be in on it. You know, you try to involve people like that. Like we said, they don't focus on the radicalization because they're more worried about protecting their community, but the love and compassion they have within the fandom, their own animal instincts, if you will, are still effective in reaching out and helping people who are lost something to remember. They want to be in on it, and I don't think this conversation is complete without taking time to examine what the furry fandom means to the people who are a part of it. Some of you may remember from the audio diary that we released back in December, the story of us taking a break from interviews to grab lunch at a fancy restaurant near the convention center. One of us wanted to be there, but we were tired and it was the closest option. And I remember sitting there, Robert had just been shamed by the Major d for not using the right soup spoon, and just feeling floored by the juxtaposition between this fancy restaurant and the welcoming, non judgmental community we had just spent two days with. The difference was palpable. This is from Lucky. Cons have always been kind of that um avenue of self expression for me. You know, Um, I was a closeted bisexual man and have now flourished, i'd say in discovered myself thanks to this fandom, and these cons kind of allow me to feel okay with that, you know, and I meet a lot of nice people who are also okay with me being who I am, and and that's what it means to everyone. Each person we spoke with mentioned in their own way just how the furry community allowed them to truly be themselves, to be open, to be accepted, most of them for the first time without judgment. I think the furry fandom means a lot to me. It's unlike a church. You can kind of define what it is on your own, so you can say, you know, this is what the fanom means to me. It's a personal presentation of myself, where as a religion says you have to follow these guidelines to be in our religion. And I saw it as a replacement for religion, where I could have a loving community and I could express my creativity and I could be myself in the furry fandom. Wearing one of my first suits is representing some personalities, some attitude, some type of flair that when I'm just in plain clothes while I'm on the street with my family at work, I repressed. But with my friends who are best majority of the furries, it's I can open up and be candid and very spontaneous. That last one was from Goku, who opened up to us and shared that the Free Community had quite literally saved his life. To tell you the truth, if I hadn't find this fandom, I would have killed myself when I was five years old. Between the death of his father and mother and the loss of his home, Goku was lost. He needed a reset, so he moved away from New York and discovered the Free Fandom and phil Ladelphia. That reset has been exponentially beneficial to me. Since I've joined the Fury fandom, I found individuals who have changed my life. You who have been friends since I've joined this fandom, who are like family to me. I unfortunately don't have much family left. And I say this very often when I'm with close friends, that we may not be related by blood, but for treating me as a with respect, with dignity, um by listening to my stories, and you are my family. And when someone tries to break up your family, and I will not let negative influences who are poisonous like the alt Right into a family that I love, and I will do whatever I can to prevent it. I'm not a violent individual. But I will always raise my fist, raise a bet and speak quite loud mouse. I think what Goku is expressing here is something that like we all actually need very badly deep down, which is a community of people that we would be willing to like, fight and die for. Um. I think a lot of people's problems and a lot of the problems we have the extremism in this country is that most people don't really have something like that in their lives. And that's part of what makes violent extremism so easy. It's what makes people so vulnerable to being recruited by some of these groups because they give you that the illusion of having that kind of a community. And if you don't have real caring people around you, a group that you identify with, that you feel safe with, and that you're willing to protect, you can be pushed to doing some pretty terrible things. Honestly, what I really listened to him telling us this story, it gave me chills. Over the course of this weekend, it became quite clear to all of us that between the lessons they learned protecting their subculture from the infiltration of the alt right, there's successful efforts at de radicalization and their unwavering commitment to protecting this fandom, which means so much to them. The furry community is actually a perfect example of how we can all survive the worst year ever. I love that for our first real episodes. Yeah, it was not what we expected, not at all to find, but it was overwhelmingly positive the entire time. Yea. Yeah, we kind of went into this project wanting to look at these different subcultures to see how they were weathering and honestly, how they were being warped by this this horrible thing politically that is continuing to happen in this country, and that will be so far, I'm certain the worst example of And we didn't come across a community that had been warped. We came across a community that had been like battered and attacked and and damaged in some degrees by all of this, but a community that had found a way to survive and come out on the other side stronger as a result of it, healed and forest and ready. Yeah, and that's that's where the lessons life for all of us. I actually think do said it best and I can't think of a more fitting way to end this episode. We all realize that we're on the outskirts, that we're a little bit strange, but we're strange together, and that solidarity makes us stronger. It makes us more ready for trouble, It makes us more aware, and it helps us if we need to talk to each other. You go, hey, man, I saw you post a weird meme. I don't think that's really healthy. Are you feeling all right? Are you're having a hard time. Let's talk about it, you know, come back from that brink, come back into our group. I see you're not posting a lot in the group chat, you know, or like, hey, I made you a drawing of your first sauna. You know. Look, it's us hugging. We're friends. You have friends, remember that they'll feel lost and alone. Worst Year At is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everything Everything so dum again. I tried Daniel Lovely

Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart Radio. Definitely, the high point for this movement was late to right before the Charlottesville rally. Um, they actually brought people to Charlottesville. That was part of the community is They're like, hey, we're getting together. We're gonna march with all our brothers join us in Charlottesville. So I personally saw a major increase around of just hateful messages, UM groups trying to shut down events because they didn't like that there were queer people there. Um, there was a lot of dock sing um phone threats, people trying to get other people fired from jobs. UM. The stolen Rocky Mountain fur Con database was used to ducks hundreds of people and try to get them fired for being gay or being furry. So there was a pretty big escalation I would say around the toteen time and throughout twenty seventeen, we figured out strategies to get rid of it together. Everything so down, Down, Down, Welcome back to our two part episode on the furry community and how they've dealt with the rising Nazi threat. I don't know what we'll title this yet, but that's what it's about. This is part two of the series. So if you haven't listened to part one, go back and listen to it. Otherwise most of this will be nonsense, so please do that now. The Midwest Profest chlorine gas attack was big news online for a day or two, but then it sort of faded off into the background. One of the few relatively mainstream site to cover the fall out at all was Vice in their two thousand sixteen article c s I fur Fest. It was a good piece and included valuable information from the local police and the FBI, But that's basically it in terms of long term coverage, uh, in terms of serious journalistic attention being paid to the problem of rising extremism in the furry community, try to put yourself in the shoes of some of the people in this subculture. Some of your friends were wounded or at least traumatized by a terrorist attack launched by someone who is basically a Nazi. His Nazi friends are making continued efforts to recruit young furries all around you. What do you do? Stranded well outside the main stream, the furies have had to develop their own structures of support and self defense that includes their own journalists Patch Oh fur that's his pseudonym, created dog Patch Press, a furry news website, back in two thousand fourteen, and for the last five years, it's offered daily updates on furry culture and news, with a distinct emphasis on tracking the rise of the alt furs and movements and groups like the Furry Raiders. Patches work hasn't just informed members of the furry community. His work is rigorous and insightful enough that he's been sided by Rolling Stone, The l a Times, Vice, Forbes, The Daily Dot, and Daily Costs. He's also been cited by us here at Worst You're ever because Patch is the reason we wound up at Midwest FurFest in the first place. Patch reached out to me on Twitter back in the fall of two thousand nineteen when I retweeted some post about a certain alt right grifter who we're not going to name against in this podcast's attempt to register for the Midwest FurFest. We started talking and he sent me over pages and pages of archived conversations between alt furs who are fans of that grifter discussing their plans to disrupt the convention. Patches the first person who dug up Magnus Derridian's old deleted but archived blog post about his stink bomb attack on that bank. Over the years, he's done a really impressive job of collecting and dispensing information about the Alt Fur movement and its figureheads. Well. Patch worked to keep his fellow Furies informed and get crucial information out to the general population. Activists like Dio kept their head to the ground, infiltrated fascist online spaces and gad their data. Well, for a long time, I went around and I banged the fucking pots and pans, and I'm like, I'm like, do you see this ship that's going on? UM? And nobody listened. And I also realized too that when I was infiltrated, I couldn't. They had a public space called the lobby that people anybody could enter in UM. To get out of the lobby, you had to do your interview process and stuff like that, and then you had to do other things to get higher ranks, to see other rooms UM, to get deeper in UM. So they knew the lobby was compromised, but they didn't know the rest of it was compromised. Because that stuff I had to keep quiet about, because if they knew it was compromised, they would stop talking or they would look for who it was. So I collected thousands of screenshots and I used there's a discord history history tracker UM, which we used as a bot and it dogs all of the server. So we used that. We would crawl the server a couple of times a week. Um, keep the logs and files. I've got those on my computer still record all of that. You know, I was contacting like the SPLC, you know, if I saw anything that was like a law enforcement issue. Um. You know, people talk about making bombs, people talking about you know, meetups and training groups, that kind of thing. And it's not coincidental that this all really got started in because that's also the year and the rough time of year that gamer Gate kicked off. If you're not extremely online, you probably haven't heard about gamer Gate. It was, in short, a far right reactionary movement among video game fans who were angry that feminist video game critics had started analyzing some of the troublesome gender issues in the popular games. In a lot of ways, gamer Gate was the inflection point of the modern alt right. People like Steve Bannon and that guy we're not going to mention again, jumped in to co op the movement because they saw it as a potential source of new digital activists. Gammer Gate wasn't just people getting angry about like video game critics saying stuff they didn't like. It was a harassment campaign that included hundreds of death threats against a number of different critics, um dead animals and like letters written in blood being mailed to people's doors. It got really creepy and really out of hand really fast. Gamergate was priming the pumping. Yeah, it got all these people ready. It got them organized. They realized that they could have some exert some force of power over others. They realized that they could use fear and that they could terrorize people into silence, into submission. They could get their way, and if they banded together, if there were enough of them, none of them would get caught because there were too many. So you get hate mobs like that. And they learned um and your constantly constantly seeing an evolution and adaptation where they learned what works and what doesn't. They try anything like that didn't work, or they see somebody else do something and that was very effective. They pick up the method, they move on. It took a while for any of this to percolate out into mainstream culture. Because the furry fandom is so deeply tied to the Internet, they were kind of the canary in the coal mine for all of the Nazi stuff that we're dealing with today in America. Choope was there for the start of it all, and he watched as his community mobilized itself to combat the fascist creep. I think one of the most effective ways was to uh use something like blockchain on Twitter basically and start blocking these people, um that had form groups intentionally targeting others. The alt furs, the furry raiders had specific groups to say, Hey, here's someone on Twitter we want to harass. Let's harass them constantly for this whole year, and they would docks them harass that specific person as much as possible, and they had a chat room full of two to three people to constantly harass all day long. So the blockchain on Twitter worked pretty well. Monitoring their chat rooms, of course, is something we've always had to do just to keep our events safe from that kind of abuse. All of this came to a head for the furries in around an event in Colorado called the Rocky Mountain Fury Con. Yeah, So Rocky Mountain fur Con is my local convention in Denver, And basically it had issues because they had furry raiders or all to write people on the board, and the board wanted to give priority to these all right groups to get the first booking of all the hotel rooms, and and the other people on the board couldn't get enough votes to vote these people off the board. So it ended up causing a lot of frustration among the community, like why does this alt right group get all the rooms and no one else gets the rooms? Um, And so there's a lot of I don't know, upset people around that situation. Calls erupted from within the Colorado furry contingent too. At the very least, band Nazis like Foxler from attending the event. The convention organizers released a statement that was basically the furry equivalent to President Trump's both side speech after Charlottesville. Rocky Mountain fur Coon does not support or condoned discrimination or violence in any of its forms, and is saddened by the hatred and division that has been caused by a small minority of our community on both sides of this issue. Our sources aren't lying when they say that the organizers of Rocky Mountain Fur Con had a complicated history with the far right. The nonprofit that officially managed the convention was Mid America Anthropomorphic and Art Corporation. It was headed by Kendall Emory, also known as Cahoky Learu, who, in addition to being a furry, was a sovereign citizen. Sovereign citizens are a special corner of the far right. They have bizarre and arcane beliefs about the law, and in short, believe they don't have to pay taxes or listen to cops. Law enforcement officers regularly consider them one of the most dangerous groups in the country because of all the shootouts they instigate. Kendall's sovereign citizen beliefs likely influenced his sympathy for the alt furs and furry raiders. It's also probably why Rocky Mountain Fur Con failed to pay any taxes from two thousand and eight to This was first reported as far as we can tell, on another furry news site called flav Rock. They note that Kendall slash Cohoki was forced to step down as chairman of the convention in two thousand and eight, when it was found out that he'd been convicted of criminal sexual contact with a minor back in nine. Weird how that keeps happening with these alt right guys? Huh. Anyway, so this pedophile sovereign citizen and his buddies insisted on making Rocky Mountain fur Con a say space for Nazis. This understandably riled up folks like Deo Together Everything down. From January two seventeen, Deal got on Twitter and commenting on their upcoming Rocky Mountain fur Con, tweeted, can't wait to punch Nazis. This was followed up by a response from someone named Olivia Melas, who said watching you get shot by someone defending themselves from unprovoked assault will be far more entertaining. The discussion continued until someone asked Olivia if she was really planning to bring a gun to the convention. She said, in essence, maybe, oh god, yeah, this was what threw me into the public eye. Deal reported the threat both to Twitter and to law enforcement, and this prompted a response from Kendall Emery and I thought at first it was a troll. I'm like, what the fuck is this thing? And it's like, we're gonna seize your house, and we're gonna seize your wages, and we're gonna put you in prison. You've been very bad. We know you're on Twitter, and I'm like, okay. They listed a couple other furry conventions as part of and the furry writers as other people who were harmed by my actions. I actually had to talk to like one of the other heads of another convention. I'm like, were you part of this letter? He's like, no, please never contact me again. That looks really bad for legal and like, that's fine, I'll never contact you again. Bease, don't contact me. He's like, that's great. By So I got into trouble. So the letter came to me. I google the name signed to it because I'm like, this has to be complete bullshit. Nobody would send you a sovereign citizen pants on head crazy letter with a bloody thumb print. I actually found a really fun analysis of this letter on the legal blog Lawyers in Liquor. The author analyzes the letter and calls it proof that quote some people have insanity so strong it can bleed right the funk through a first suit. Here's how he explains the red thumb print, which he thinks was ink rather than blood. To this sit the red ink and the thumb print add some special magic because it shows they are a flesh and blood person and not the corporate entity known as fur pants, McGhee or whatever the funk this guy calls himself. This whole incident wound up blowing into the mainstream media almost as much as the chlorine attack on Midwest FurFest. In February, Vice wrote an article title even Furries are Fighting Fascists. It interviewed members of Furry Antifa, a loose organization that had just started to coalesce around the resistance to people like Foxler and the alt furs. In April, Rolling Stone wrote that does the furrier community have a Nazi problem? Article, and in May The Daily Beast published Nazis are tearing the furry world apart. The police wound up investigating the threats and determining that there was some danger to the community. The hotel demanded the organizers of the con shell at an extra two dollars for off duty cops to provide security, and in the end Rocky Mountain fur Con had to shut down. Eventually, they decided they couldn't deal with it anymore. There's no way to get rid of the alt right people on the board. So they shut down the convey mention entirely. But that didn't end the fighting. Of course, Foxler and the Furry Raiders were piste now, so in the Colorado furry community organized a new Nazi free event Denver. They decided they had to funk with it our first year. The alt right group, the Furry Raiders decided, we're gonna call the hotel book all the rooms at once with a database of stolen identities from the previous convention. So they booked for of the rooms. I think it was a mounting close to sixty eight thou dollars worth of revenue lost. And we had to try to convince the hotel those were stolen identities from the last convention that they used against our convention. This was a serious crime, or at least it would have been if again, the victims and perpetrators hadn't been people who like to dress up as animals. Yeah, we actually called, uh, I don't know, the Colorado bu Or of Investigation. UH, there's a division for financial crimes. And once I told them it was a Furry Convention, they stopped returning our calls. Fixing the situation required Chip and his fellow organizers to spend dozens and dozens of hours investigating the crime for themselves. He sent us an enormous itemized folder filled with eyewitness testimony from those who had heard Foxler discussed the plan, as well as lists of all the fraudulent reservations that have been posted inside a telegram group used by the Furry Raiders. All this was necessary to convince the hotel to reverse the charges so that they could, you know, hold the event without having it booked up by fake people. They also archived conversations from within that group, including one where alt Furs discuss how to infiltrate the chat channels, where Chip and his friends planned den for oblivious to the fact that their own channel had been infiltrated. Car rights. I would just use my old forsona since I haven't been involved in fur in a long time anyway, Someone named Bluemier responds, old forsonas are actually great for this, they have established history. A little later in the thread, someone named Husky Jack and he two suggests, if anything, get connections to h Chan. Let the heat seem like it's coming from the outside. Version the channel complain that s g w's just want to shut down anyone who happens to be a little right wing, and then one of them drops in a quote from George Lincoln Rockwell, Oh good, here it is by being a national socialist with the swastika, I would also gather the only kind of people I wanted around me, the tough, dedicated idealists ready to fight for those ideals and give their lives if necessary. And even more important, I would automatically scare off the millions of blabber mouths, cowards, fools, and crackpots which infests the rest of the movement. The swastika would probably not bring me many supporters, but those who came would be men. In other chat logs, help first discussed genocide, extermination of transgender people, and a bunch of other horrible stuff we are not going to read at length. The point is that all of this documentation proves the central point di O Chip and other furry anti fascists have been making for years. These people are danger and allowing them to participate in events like Midwest FurFest is also dangerous. At least one alt for actually marched in Charlottesville alongside a small army of fascists, one of whom committed a terrorist attack by ramming his car into a crowd of anti fascists and killing a young woman. Heather Highed. Welcome Together Everything. In the very next year, two thou eighteen, Magnus Deridian, the Confederate first suitor and the presumed corpriate of the chlorine attack, showed up at Midwest Verfest. Again. He was already banned from the convention and was not supposed to be here. Um, so when he came, he was trespassing. So he shows up. He is wearing a first suit based on World War One, which is a great way of not quite not quite being a Nazi, but definitely scaring people who are already on edge. And then he's throwing Nazi salutes in me the lobby and yelling racial slurs. Security came up to him, which was when he punched one of our pregnant security workers, and she is by far one of the toughest people I've ever met, despite her being nine months pregnant at that time. Yeah, so she chases him, he runs flees the hotel, and he's running, she's running after him. The cops nabbed him. They have to take him out of first two. Well, he's not wearing anything underneath, So the hotel donates a sheet, and then you have a few hundred furries taking videos and photos of this man in a sheet getting shoved into a cop car and he spent the weekend in jail. In wider American society, the years since the bloody Charlottesville rally have been years of steady growth and regular attacks by members of the fascist right. In two thousand, nineteen eight, Chan Birth, originally by Gamergate, inspired no less than four white nationalist terrorist attacks and three nations. The Proud Boys have been allowed to work security at Trump rallies. A neo Nazi terrorists social network called The Base has started putting up flyers offering weapons, training and camaraderie to other interested fascists. But over in Furreedom, the story has been really different, and that is why we think non Furrey Americans need to pay attention to folks like Deo and Chip. They and their fellow furry anti fascists have been extremely effective at shutting the Nazis out of their community, and they did it on their own without the police and largely without the media. All it took was sustained activism and a broad commitment to keep Nazis out of their community. I think that the phrase have done the bus they can and I am proud of the way the community organized, the way everyone is aware. Um Like here, people were worried about the Proud Boys coming up. So I watched people. Nobody told them to do this, Nobody asked them to do this, but people went around and they said, Okay, what I'm gonna do is they're gonna check on my friends and make sure that all of my friends get to their hotel room every night and that they're safe. And if I walk alone at night, I'm not going to do that. I'm gonna take a buddy. We're gonna walk together. I watched people who were a little bit bigger, a little bit more well built, are like, hey, you know you're small. Are you walking a little tonight? Can I come with you? I think you're fine, but just in case, And you see that community coming together. We build each other up and we protect us. They don't just protect us, they also try to dissolve the line between us and them, going into hostility is high, Misinformation is everywhere, bad actors, global people, isolated kids looking for answers for their struggles and often finding those answers from liars. Well, the furry community doesn't necessarily focus on the radicalization. They are conscious of the radicalization pipeline and they try to stop it in its tracks. I found that personally. My belief is that inoculating people with hey, do you recognize what this is before it takes what? So if some you see your friend who posts a weird meme, you're like, do you know what that's referencing? Do you understand what you're going with? And they're like, I don't what what do you mean? I thought it was just funny, And you're like, well, actually that reference is about something else, Like that's a reference to, you know, the white genocide theory. That's a reference to the Turner Diaries. That's a reference to the unflush shooter, you know. And people go, oh, I didn't know. I thought it was just funny. My friend posted it to me, And you're like, well, you might want to be very careful about what that friend shares with you, and maybe you can help pull them from the brink. I pull you from the brink. You pull them from the braink we pull each other. There have been mixed results in the community, but some results are still good results. They look for people and provide space to discuss certain ideological pools or in some cases straight out racism, and then we moved to a better community. UM. I tried for a while too. I made a chat group and we pulled people out of these larry groups, and with mixed success, tried to I'm not life after hate, I will pipe for a living. I'm not a therapist. UM, but we tried to offer them a group where it was had some control of moderatorship. So we're like, okay, we understand that you are coming out of this toxic culture. We understand that you are not going to be okay immediately. You are going to carry this baggage and we're going to help you unpack it. So you're gonna come into this group. We're gonna decompress. You can talk about this stuff, you know, but if you throw at a racial slur, we're gonna say, hey man, why are you using that kind of languish? Does it really need to be said? You know? Why are you why are you using it are you angry? And usually it's like, yeah, man, I'm sorry, I just lost my head. I was upset, and you know, I threw it out there. It's a knee jerk reaction I have. But sometimes, and this right here is so important. For the worst year ever, it's overwhelmingly more helpful to interact with somebody in person, human to human and show them some kindness, give them an opening. Dio mentioned a kid who was in the group the Main Chat, which was led by the people directly trying to funnel people into the alt right, and she told this wonderful story that I think speaks so well to how young people men specifically, are desperate for any community and can easily get swept up and manipulated and brought into groups of hate. But how a little connection and understanding from someone who cares can change everything. Here's Deo. It's funny too. When we, for I first saw him, he was welding a lead filled mace to club me to death. And when his friend is like, hey, I gotta get him out of this um, he thinks you're gonna murder him, So I'm gonna like bring him to you, and you say hi, and then he'll realize that you're not going to murder him because he's been told by these alt right groups that you're a violent, sadist who was going to murder him on sight. So we meet and this poor kid is shaking like a leaf. He's like, oh, shoot your deal. And I'm like, hey, buddy, I saw your welding. He's like, oh, you saw the mace. I'm like, yeah, you know, I don't really want to talk about the whole mace thing, but I liked your welds. Where did you learn that? He's like, oh, I had a little class in high school. I'm like, that's a great skill. Are you doing anything with it? Are you thinking about going into the traits? Have you thought about apprenticeship? Are you thinking about college? He's like, I actually I wasn't sure. You know, my dad died a couple of years ago and I've been lost. I'm like, yeah, that happens to a lot of people. Well, if you're thinking about a trade, I'm a journeyman, and I think apprenticeship is a great way to go. You know, you don't have the college kind of debt, but I like jo Wolves, I think you have really good potential. Do you want to talk about steel. He's like, He's like, yeah, that's that's actually been really nice. So we had a nice little group check there in the lobby of the Hyatt, and he let down his guard over time. You know, we're talking about well, so I'm talking about he made himself like plate armor. Like this happened a year before our interview, and just about twelve hours before we sat down with Dio. He found me last night and he's like, I'm really glad you got me out. I still don't like you at all. I'm like, that's great. I'm so happy for you. You look healthier. He's like, yeah, I put on weight. Did you notice. I'm like, yeah, I think he got taller too. He's like eighteen now, and he's so little socially awkward. I had a couple of friends came up to me and he takes a will, sat back and he stares at the group. You know, he wants to be in on it. You know, you try to involve people like that. Like we said, they don't focus on the radicalization because they're more worried about protecting their community, but the love and compassion they have within the fandom, their own animal instincts, if you will, are still effective in reaching out and helping people who are lost something to remember. They want to be in on it, and I don't think this conversation is complete without taking time to examine what the furry fandom means to the people who are a part of it. Some of you may remember from the audio diary that we released back in December, the story of us taking a break from interviews to grab lunch at a fancy restaurant near the convention center. One of us wanted to be there, but we were tired and it was the closest option. And I remember sitting there, Robert had just been shamed by the Major d for not using the right soup spoon, and just feeling floored by the juxtaposition between this fancy restaurant and the welcoming, non judgmental community we had just spent two days with. The difference was palpable. This is from Lucky. Cons have always been kind of that um avenue of self expression for me. You know, Um, I was a closeted bisexual man and have now flourished, i'd say in discovered myself thanks to this fandom, and these cons kind of allow me to feel okay with that, you know, and I meet a lot of nice people who are also okay with me being who I am, and and that's what it means to everyone. Each person we spoke with mentioned in their own way just how the furry community allowed them to truly be themselves, to be open, to be accepted, most of them for the first time without judgment. I think the furry fandom means a lot to me. It's unlike a church. You can kind of define what it is on your own, so you can say, you know, this is what the fanom means to me. It's a personal presentation of myself, where as a religion says you have to follow these guidelines to be in our religion. And I saw it as a replacement for religion, where I could have a loving community and I could express my creativity and I could be myself in the furry fandom. Wearing one of my first suits is representing some personalities, some attitude, some type of flair that when I'm just in plain clothes while I'm on the street with my family at work, I repressed. But with my friends who are best majority of the furries, it's I can open up and be candid and very spontaneous. That last one was from Goku, who opened up to us and shared that the Free Community had quite literally saved his life. To tell you the truth, if I hadn't find this fandom, I would have killed myself when I was five years old. Between the death of his father and mother and the loss of his home, Goku was lost. He needed a reset, so he moved away from New York and discovered the Free Fandom and phil Ladelphia. That reset has been exponentially beneficial to me. Since I've joined the Fury fandom, I found individuals who have changed my life. You who have been friends since I've joined this fandom, who are like family to me. I unfortunately don't have much family left. And I say this very often when I'm with close friends, that we may not be related by blood, but for treating me as a with respect, with dignity, um by listening to my stories, and you are my family. And when someone tries to break up your family, and I will not let negative influences who are poisonous like the alt Right into a family that I love, and I will do whatever I can to prevent it. I'm not a violent individual. But I will always raise my fist, raise a bet and speak quite loud mouse. I think what Goku is expressing here is something that like we all actually need very badly deep down, which is a community of people that we would be willing to like, fight and die for. Um. I think a lot of people's problems and a lot of the problems we have the extremism in this country is that most people don't really have something like that in their lives. And that's part of what makes violent extremism so easy. It's what makes people so vulnerable to being recruited by some of these groups because they give you that the illusion of having that kind of a community. And if you don't have real caring people around you, a group that you identify with, that you feel safe with, and that you're willing to protect, you can be pushed to doing some pretty terrible things. Honestly, what I really listened to him telling us this story, it gave me chills. Over the course of this weekend, it became quite clear to all of us that between the lessons they learned protecting their subculture from the infiltration of the alt right, there's successful efforts at de radicalization and their unwavering commitment to protecting this fandom, which means so much to them. The furry community is actually a perfect example of how we can all survive the worst year ever. I love that for our first real episodes. Yeah, it was not what we expected, not at all to find, but it was overwhelmingly positive the entire time. Yea. Yeah, we kind of went into this project wanting to look at these different subcultures to see how they were weathering and honestly, how they were being warped by this this horrible thing politically that is continuing to happen in this country, and that will be so far, I'm certain the worst example of And we didn't come across a community that had been warped. We came across a community that had been like battered and attacked and and damaged in some degrees by all of this, but a community that had found a way to survive and come out on the other side stronger as a result of it, healed and forest and ready. Yeah, and that's that's where the lessons life for all of us. I actually think do said it best and I can't think of a more fitting way to end this episode. We all realize that we're on the outskirts, that we're a little bit strange, but we're strange together, and that solidarity makes us stronger. It makes us more ready for trouble, It makes us more aware, and it helps us if we need to talk to each other. You go, hey, man, I saw you post a weird meme. I don't think that's really healthy. Are you feeling all right? Are you're having a hard time. Let's talk about it, you know, come back from that brink, come back into our group. I see you're not posting a lot in the group chat, you know, or like, hey, I made you a drawing of your first sauna. You know. Look, it's us hugging. We're friends. You have friends, remember that they'll feel lost and alone. Worst Year At is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everything Everything so dum again. I tried Daniel Lovely