Inside the Far-right Podcast Ecosystem

[Nevilledog]

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Part 1: Building a Network of Hate

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/09/29/inside-far-right-podcast-ecosystem-part-1-building-network-hate


In August 2014, a band of four then-pseudonymous contributors to the white nationalist blog The Right Stuff (TRS) gathered for what the site’s founder would deem an “experiment”: The onetime racist blog founded by Mike “Enoch” Peinovich had decided to pivot to audio. Over the course of the next hour, the four men lambasted immigrants, libertarian women, and ethnic and racial minorities.

TRS dubbed this hour-or-so roundtable, which featured racist banter and commentary on the news, “The Daily Shoah.” The name was an antisemitic riff on the popular news and comedy show “The Daily Show,” though “The Daily Shoah’s” co-hosts saw themselves as following more in the footsteps of the “edgy shock comedy” a la “The Howard Stern Show” or “Opie and Anthony” than Comedy Central’s popular satirical news program. (Later, hosts leaned on this comparison in an effort to pass off their descriptions of, say, torturing Black children with large-gauge IV catheters as detached, irony-drenched humor.) In the end, Peinovich’s self-described “experiment” proved to be a success, and as the listenership of “The Daily Shoah” grew, so did the podcast offerings on TRS’s website. The network advocated for white supremacist ideals in a way that was digestible and appealing to a generation of budding extremists who had grown up either with or alongside the internet.

Today, “The Daily Shoah” is just one among dozens of noteworthy podcasts produced by far-right extremists. Yet, even as the medium has expanded and become more varied within recent years among the far right, mirroring its own growing popularity in mainstream society, the role of podcasts in the world of far-right extremism has been largely understudied.

This four-part report examines the origin and growth of the far-right podcast ecosystem, exposing the individuals and groups that used this technology to create and expand their networks of hate. To show how far-right extremists used podcasts for networking, to build their individual brands, and to spread propaganda nationally and internationally, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) analyzed thousands of data points from 15 years of podcast recordings. This research reveals how such extremists as Richard B. Spencer leveraged podcasts to popularize the “alt-right” movement as well as how podcasts provided on-the-ground organizers a platform for planning the violence and mayhem of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. Furthermore, this analysis demonstrates how extremists used podcasts to cultivate their own financially lucrative video and livestreaming landscape, which is now dominated by such sites as YouTube, Twitch and DLive.

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Part 2: Richard Spencer's Origins in the Podcast Network

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/09/29/inside-far-right-podcast-ecosystem-part-2-richard-spencers-origins-podcast-network

Part 3: The Rise and Fall of ‘The Daily Shoah’

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/09/29/inside-far-right-podcast-ecosystem-part-3-rise-and-fall-daily-shoah

Part 4: Far-Right Podcasting, Past and Present

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/09/29/inside-far-right-podcast-ecosystem-part-4-far-right-podcasting-past-and-present