time once again for community form and we are very lucky to have back with us live in the studio this morning david neiwert david neiwert is a seattle based investigative journalist and pacific northwest correspondent for  the southern poverty law center and in addition he is the author of several books including and hell followed with her crossing the dark side of the american border o what killer whales can teach us and here to talk about the issues around his forthcoming book all to america the rise of the radical right in the age of trump dave thank you very much for coming in spending time again with us this manuscript off last week for good so talk about your new book on the motivation behind that well really the book regionally started i mean i started selling this in march we certainly had no idea that donald trump would win back then but it was kind of hard to find a publisher for it because everybody thought well this book is going to come out and summer temple be a dead issue by then and that didn't work out that way for them so now it's yeah my publishers are very very happy that they picked it up basically the point is we've certainly been observing this over the past fifteen years and there was this huge backlash to his election sort of racial backlash that really never slowed down in fact it just kept getting worse and worse and worse as every year went along  this sort of increase in militia organizing increase and white nationalism increases in their ranks and that sort of thing and so you know and it's certainly manifested itself last january there in oregon at the mel who are national wildlife refuge and so seen this increase and not only that but it was very clear  those of us monitor these things by you know by january or so of twenty sixteen that that trump had it was having a really powerful effect on sort of accelerating that trend maybe because you know right wing extremists we've been pretty lucky in this country from first of its history in the right wing extremism has never really caught on because one of it sort of necessary calm ponens has been always whenever you see sort of right wing extremism rise to power in countries it's always under the banner of singular charismatic figure  the right sort of needs that because otherwise they're very highly prone to internees saying bettering and warfare and they fall apart there's always all these factions within the extremist right that not only don't get along but are you these are some of the some pleasant people on earth to begin with and you can imagine how they are with each other they're constantly being other up so they always have needed sort of a unifying figure and it just never had it and now comes along donald trump and it's you know it's very concerning so yeah that was my motive for starting to write this and obviously since i started writing it and  moved on it's it's really the trend has not changed at all it's still it's celebrating upwards we're still seeing this really increase in the ranks of reading extremists a various stripes you know patriot militiaman white nationalist white supremacist neo nazis klansman all of these groups are gaining numbers they're all gaining momentum and it's very concerning so prior to trump's involvement with the current election running on the current election had he had any connections to people in the extreme right well his yeah he had not so many connections i mean it was that he indulged her rhetoric remember he started out talking about the birth of conspiracy i mean this is he was right in with the middle of the conspiracy theorists all along right from the very start his whole candidacy was launched on the back of his prominent promotion of the idea that you know president obama was not legitimately elected because he didn't have a real birth certificate so and he's always been really in close with the sort of conspiracists element of the far right even today even through today i mean he's still very closely associated with alex jones because he believed all these conspiracy theories promoted by alex jones that this particular pizzeria was part of a child sex abuse ring in secret nefarious ring that's run right yeah so to some extent although it's what i was really trying what i'm trying to do is i mean really the thesis of the book in a lot of ways is that in the states back to my days in the ninety's covering the patriot movement  it was observed even then and i wrote about this in my ninety nine book on the militia movement that part of what they do is they sort of create this alternative universe for themselves wh around them and everything they do and everything they perceive including all the news and day's events they're all filtered through this prism of these conspiracy theories and it creates a sort of  strange sense of unreality and this attaches people from reality which also we believe really is what sort of enables the violence once you become does a test from reality then these other people aren't human they're just demons or you know minions of the evil new world order and and are disposable anyway so and this is where a lot of the violence comes from it's is so we i certainly saw this bubble forming in the militia movement in the ninety's and it just kept growing and to go away and that it really became massive after in two thousand and nine with the growth of the tea party the tea party movement essentially became this huge conduit for patriot slash militia movement idiology these constitutionalists all of this sort of really the far right stuff became really an demick to the tea party we saw wit the way the tea party folded in organizations like the oath keepers and so on and so people like that they call themselves constitutionalists but really they're right wing radicals who were taking their ideas from  and it's just been spreading so yeah part of what we certainly you know what i saw the idea of alter america was not just that so really became manifest the sort of alternative universe with the rise of the all right i mean this is sort of it's apotheosis it's alternative universe that they've created but i really wanted to wrap in clude the sort of alternative universe of the patriots and then the tea party because that was what gave birth that was really sort of in many ways the basis of the right the v c today or that was they've all merged into this gigantic alternative universe where they believe all this stuff that's just not true and it seems that the internet is a key yes platform for spreading well yeah yeah yeah the internet's really sort of plays an essential role in a lot of ways one of the things that happens on the internet as you know is you know we lose actual human contact when we're exchanging with people on the internet really kind of a simulacrum of human interaction in that we're just sort of exchanging words or really at the root of evidence just crude information right coming across wires we don't have you don't have the eye contact you don't have the voice intonation you don't have the body language you don't have the actual presence of another person to remind you that you are talking to a human being so it becomes very easy to dehumanize other people on the internet incredibly easy and that's really what happens to all of the a lot of these people is that these stop seeing other people as human beings they they're not human beings to them they're some kind of object that they've worked up in their head whatever that object is whether it's you know communist or her you know whatever the enemy the other that they fear that's that's how they see these other people so it becomes you know one of the the leading ethos is of sort of all right and the extremist right on the internet is the activity of trolling trolling is really a huge thing and intro ling is really kind of that that ultimate step of where of dehumanizing your interaction with others where you just don't really care that they what they think or that they're another person all you want to do is destroy them and humiliate them and that's the trollings and trolling is really the underlying ethos of the all right it's all about being as big a troll as you possibly can and what's more trans of recruitment for the extremist right particularly among young people they're really specifically targeting young impressionable minds and one of the ways they do it is like they do things like that they organize and they do all kinds of stuff like that you know they are all about i mean entering when the guy who runs the daily storm or his whole push is to sort of shift the overton window and h  tries to be as outrageous as he can because what he's trying to do is get people sort of accustomed to having that language be out there so that the so that when the white nationalists come along with their tweeds in their suits and say well really do we just want to have in they just want to have a nation for white people or they don't have to put up with black people that's that's then that starts sounding reasonable  to people and that's how you push the overton window that's what they're trying to do and you know that it's one of the things about the far right in america for most of its history that they are totally focused on the future they're very wary they're funny if you sit or you know racist humor to be funny but they have a lot of wit and humor going on in their stuff it's all about you know being as as you possibly can and it's really wired it's white supremacy was rewired rebranded for the twenty first century so one of the  ideas that you had emphasized in your recent article in mother jones i cannot find the title for here was mainstream to the racist right as a story the title of the story radical right i'm sorry was the idea that by trump taking these ideas and putting them up on twitter that he was mainstreaming a lot of ideas that hadn't been brought to the mainstream prior to that is that correct yeah well he was doing things he was doing a lot of what we cannot and gestures in the direction of these white nationalists like you you know their mascot is pepe the frog in he put  and so that yeah there's he's he's been retreating very suddenly and doing these sort of encouraging things what he does as much as anything is that when he's confronted about this stuff he does a sort of interesting little two step where like david duke where you go well i don't want to denounce them right off you know i and you know he'll say he'll make excuses for you know well i don't want to and then when the nothing to do with them even though these people are clearly inspired by him and one of the things that i mean look there's always been a certain number of radical right extremists who have gone on and supported mainstream politicians from time to time but i remember actually as david did support george w bush back in two thousand rather briefly but they're all huge from supporters and and so he's clearly saying things to them that appeal to what their agenda is right usually you would think that if you've got somebody  want to say something about you would think you would want to say no i these people are wrong to think that i have anything to do with inspiring them said all we've gotten from trump as the oh i just about that i mean that's that was his he he said something on sixty minutes about well i would tell them to stop and that was it that's all we've heard from him on the subject yet in the first ten days after the election we have over nine hundred  hundred hate crimes that that response the been documented by the southern poverty law center that occurred just in the first ten days after the election and a huge number of these were people you know intimidating minorities by chanting trump or yelling trump trump you know if his name trump came up all comes up all the time in these hate crimes and that was just in the first ten days i think you know we've been keeping track of it i think we've got an update coming up monday or tuesday that's going to put the number well over a thousand and you know that's just insane during a normal week in the united states you know we will have about one hundred fifty hate crimes a week is your standard rate so when it suddenly goes up to seven hundred you know something's going on the specially when you have all this very clear connection to the election in terms of the rhetoric that's being deployed and sort of the logic of these crimes why that what's motivating these crimes so and you know that through your work at the sort of poverty law center yes so because there have been some people that challenge the increase in hate crime saying that you know that's just that the mainstream media is covering that more now they're and yes there are some anti trump incidents sewn in here to there let's see i think that the count after ten days was actually eight hundred sixty seven specifically hate crimes that that the s p l see accounted in the first ten days and or incidents you know violent incidents and there were twenty three that were anti trump trump getting to be president and its response since he has become president elect i know that one of the issues that has come up is the questioning of whether to if you just if you just ignore them they will go away concept yeah well the you know the obviously the press has huge role in this you know  scandals might surround the candidates rather than policy the i believe it was not pew but one of the there was a study recently was released on media coverage of the election and they found that policy was actually for the two candidates comprise less than ten percent of all the coverage it was it was does those are you know an issue but and yeah and they in the press is still doing the same thing they're not really pressing they're not paying attention for one thing to these crimes  and certainly they're not pressing trump on this issue they're sort of letting him slide and a lot of that is that there is this me i'm in the media that's been put out by the trump people and something that that i've been dealing with and reporting on the radical right for years is this idea that well trump doesn't want to say things because he if he did that he'd just be giving them the free publicity that they want and we're better off to just ignore them and they'll go away and what i've you know what i can tell you is that from years and years of doing this that that's exactly how they thrive is by giving them a vacuum operated on that's what they prefer the silence they not only a they interpret social silence a silence from the rest of the community as approval sign that you know the and in defense of the community and so the community is actually secretly behind them and this is why it's so critical when hate crimes occur for the communities to stand up and say no this is not acceptable you do not do it you're not doing this to the community support it all of undermine the story they tell themselves justify themselves and so yeah when you let the radical right sit in this little dark corner and just crow pretty soon you've got a monster roaring in that corner they don't shrivel up and go away they do exactly opposite and i believe in your in your article in mother jones how trump took the hit groups mainstream you actually you've done a bunch of investigation into actual content from blogs and yes tweets and one of the things you included in there was from from the daily storm or quote our glorious leader and ultimate savior has gone full wink wink wink to his most aggressive supporters and quote yeah that's exactly that's exactly and that's a classic example they they certainly saw what donald trump did as a form of encouragement you know that he was he was out there they fully believe that he was actually on their side he just couldn't they you know if he would actually denunciations they were so ana diane that they would say well that's just what he had to do to make the press happy you know and i think they can sit there and justify themselves all day when trump does these sort of an a dozen vowels because it doesn't really tell them that he's disavowing them being interpreted exactly the opposite and and that's what's been happening you know these these groups clearly believe that trump is in their corner they clearly have he has clearly empowered them and they are recruiting at a rate that you know it's frightening sheen i think america really needs to be ready for the wave of what's going to follow we are talking with david neiwert he is a seattle based investigative journalist and pacific northwest correspondent for the southern poverty law center and author of the forthcoming book america the rise of the radical right in the age of trump in addition to your your books how else can people follow your work well really most of the stuff that i former volunteer former morning program producer former program director former station manager and former board of directors member and board president at crab radio crab radio used to be here in seattle at one of seven point seven f m in seattle and he is now the archivist and historian for crab dot f m website where you can find a lot of archive material from crab radio chuck thanks thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning and thank you so crabb is a and in some ways is actually i think a predecessor to the multiple stations in and organizations here in seattle would get into what branched out of crab but if you start out tell us how you got involved with the station youngster i got into playing around with radios and electronics i got interested in the idea of f m i had no idea really what it was but got a kit tuner put it together and one afternoon listening on headphones  tuning across the dial gradually made my way to the right end of it and heard this strange sound coming out of the headphones indian music this was in  indian music wasn't some by indian i'm talking about the east india people hadn't heard much in the way of sitar and sorrowed in that kind of stuff and i was fascinated in what was making this strange sound and then the voice came on and explained it to me and they sounded like no other radio announcer that i've ever  heard it was both laid back and relaxed and it was as if they were speaking to me to me directly in in the house it was a conversation  and then they said this is k r a b c at all and i was hooked and i just started listening then eventually i heard a poetry program and that poetry program cause i needed i needed a poem for school and mind you this was you know where i was i might have been in the ninth grade at that point i need to reset a poem i heard one during that program on kerry being and called them up and asked if i could get a copy of it because i couldn't find i couldn't find that poem in the library  took the bus into seattle went up to the station they made me a tape of it and told me that i could volunteer well i didn't immediately but fairly soon thereafter i did and the next thing i knew i was up there folding program and addressing program guides venture going out and doing remote remote recording of speeches and lectures and then eventually i got a third class radiotelephone license and was doing engineering board up the operating the board for another person who announced and then it just went from there so talk about the early days of crabbe how did it come about my understanding from reading your website crab founded the station there were three of them lorenzo milo was the person that filed the application for the license seattle as a second choice first choice he wanted to get a station in washington d c he was from the east coast he is from the east coast and you know washington seems to him a place that needed a station  he got turned down there and so ended up with his license in seattle but he did that sort of backtrack a little bit on him his background in radio initially was something like mine though he did it fifteen years before i i thought of it at all he grew up in florida heard a lot of radio in the self and and from the east coast as an adolescent ended up doing some programming back there on some commercial stations and then had his own dream to get his own station went to have where he met a fellow named john gallant it was the second founder john gallant is a former geneticist at the  w when learns or got his construction permit to build the station in seattle he came out here got a location oh i have to digress i got to go meet after i mean he when he had been at haverford he had volunteered at their radio station and so this is back in the mid fift so this is early college radio not the earliest of college radio i think they were actually doing something there back in the thirty's but that was before lorenzo's time after he graduated he went out to berkeley and when he was in berkeley he volunteered at cape b f a where he met i mean a lot of the pacifica people and also met the third founder of the station gary marcus and so learned so gets the construction permit sends gary marcus in to seattle to find a location for a john gallant and gary marcus and form the jack straw memorial foundation the nonprofit that is intended to manage and own k r a b in the future once it goes on the air so that's how it happened but it was intended to be a station similar to pacifica in that it would be listener supported that was blue hills concept of blue hill being the founder of pacifica his concept of how you could have a sustainable station that would be free of commercial interests and still and able to program material that other radio stations wouldn't touch everything that one could imagine except what you would hear on any other radio station and that was essentially the rule was that the programming would be selected based on that criteria if it's something you can hear somewhere else it's not going to be on carry be so there would be panel discussions lectures  interviews speeches poetry readings music from other countries all of these things essentially unedited so that the speakers would be allowed to cover their subject in this much detail with him as much as they possibly wanted to say without feeling as if it was going to be rendered down to a soundbite i mean the concept of soundbite didn't exist back in sixty three but people are used to seeing their material being edited and being  being selected much like it is today for the most sensational or provocative kinds of statements edit edited down to that and kerry b would avoid doing that but it's like all that programming would then be assembled every two or every two weeks it would be scheduled in such a way that it might seem random but it wasn't random programs i mean a a discussion about what politics in haiti might be followed by a program of haitian music i mean there would be some sort of relevance sometimes however there were there would unavoidably be programming that might be a little jarring from one to the next and for me personally that there would there was the element of surprise and this sort of jarring effect would actually accent what was coming next it's but it was all put into a program guide with the assumption and the subscribers to the station received this program guide every two weeks and that told them when they could tune in to hear the programmes they wanted to hear the assumption was that no one would want to listen all day long or for six hours or five hour earth two hours they it's they would want to hear only those programs that would be like a magazine you might subscribe to it because there are two or three or by an issue because there's two or three articles that you want but you might not want to read the whole thing and that was sort of the logic of what happened gary b and physically the station was located in well had been essentially a residential area small house up on rows about yes it was a former donut shop it was very small well maybe a little bit larger than this room i think our main studio and office was about the size of this room and then we have another room for the transmitter and then  control room that was about the size of a typical one nine hundred fifty s bathroom and the antenna was literally like right outside it was it was an old phone pole right outside so it's on the top or roosevelt so it had remarkable coverage for the area i mean there were pockets in seattle just because of all the hills in seattle where they couldn't get it but it was pretty good when it was at full power i mean when the transmitter was working on those rare occasions and that in itself is another aspect of the station is you started out with some pretty ancient equipment and and just went from there actually that ancient equipment continues that was with it was with us for a long long time no one knows it became of it the transmitter depending on l  and it showed up and it took a crab's first engineer jeremy klansmen it's like a year to get it go on and then it it took another ten years of continual maintenance and remodeling to keep it going eventually though it moved up to cougar mountain where we got we got lucky one year and the fellow that had donated w b ai to pacifica gave crab ten thousand dollars and we used that as an order to buy some property up on cougar mountain for a transmitters it still took us about ten years to actually get there but when we got there we were able to cover all of western washington from one vancouver to the other so how did you support the station well we didn't it would be an exaggeration to say that we barely supported it during the first few years theoretically it was to be a listener supported it which meant that listeners subscribed to the station like they subscribe to a newspaper except of course it's radio and you get to get it for free which most of them did but it's like we were charging in the first years it was twelve dollars for the for a subscription normal subscription nine dollars if you were a student six dollars if you pled poverty but that was the theory it took is the most subscribers we ever had that actually paid was about maybe three thousand but on average it was down between two thousand and twenty five hundred which is not was not enough to support the station he he'd make up the difference when the bills scheme do there in the first years then in sixty nine or seventy he left seattle and went off to start radio stations elsewhere and we were on our own and so it was we tried getting grants to little success  for wire and while we got some money from c p b the corporation for public broadcasting lost that eventually ran up a lot of debts and that's what and what happened to the frequency for carry b the frequency was sold to a commercial broadcaster it became  rest of the broadcasting world was doing commercial pop of one variety or another you what you told me before the show that actually crab i and kerry b but i think i've demonstrated to be ai that we beat them by a few months the first marathon just decided that they needed to raise some money because they were having trouble paying the bills lorenza was tired of reaching into his wallet so they went on their go was i think a thousand dollars and they were really excited because they raised i think it was twelve hundred but it was it was just they went on the air and they asked for money which was something that he he wrote about that he really disliked because he described it as the closest that he felt that they had come to sounding like a commercial broadcaster commercial station normally it would be a sort of once or twice a week somebody would get on there and mention well if you'd like us to see us if you'd like to see a sample copy of a program guide call us up and if you like it maybe you'll send us the money then they'd forget to give the phone number give the address or any any of that information and somebody would have to call up and tell the announcer these these are all volunteers mind you that tell the person announcing well you might want to tell them how they can contact you as callers generally are so good with offering suggestions like  that yeah so there was were there any staff positions that paid staff positions at the station or is it pretty much volunteer driven most of the programming was served as the manager program director in the first year gary marcus and i think was what was he described as the poetry director  i don't i don't really remember what their titles were but they were pretty meaningless eventually a program director was hired i think the first was nancy keith who was years later to become the founder of the founding manager of k a c r but she was the first program director so she was that was a paid staff position and then there was of eventually a station manager hired and that was at the time that lorenzo was beginning to divorce himself from the station and that was a staff position gradually over the years more staff positions were added as the funding became available sometimes they were added when the funding wasn't available in the seventy's we did something that in retrospect seems like it was kind of risky and might have been a mistake because it ended up giving us a lot more staff than we could sustain but we there was a program called the comprehensive employment training act and what it did is this was in the early seventy's mid set and make it was in the mid seventy's it was during a time of high unemployment in seattle and  other parts of the country as well what it did is it enabled enabled government agencies as well as nonprofit institutions to get to hire people and be reimbursed for the cost assuming that they were doing programs that were they were doing activities that contributed to the community and that they were learning job skills we were able to hire six people on that program when the program dried up ever we no longer had the money and that coincidentally was also at a time when  b as i said before a corporation of robert broadcasting which is one of the funding agency for the public broad public broadcasting the television and radio  they they were requiring stations to employ a sizeable number have a sizable staff in order to qualify for the  funding by attempting to meet their qualifications standards we just went further into debt it was a spiraling cycle that was very unfortunate so after crab's demise then the spin offs were k s e r and the jack straw foundation exists is out to those who are the spinoffs in that in the terms of the money that was raised from the sale but there were other stations spawned by lorenzo and jack straw jack straw also contributed to a and it was actually a repeater for kerry be back and eight hundred sixty eight so there is there's still some some of the old crab crab nebula there was at one point a network exchange just a couple minutes left for talking with chuck ranch he is a former station manager and program director at crab radio one of seven point seven f m here in seattle and he is currently  an historian for the station and you have a website crabbed dot f m that you are constantly looking for more content for yes thank you for reminding me of that i've been running on here yes it's also frequency modulator you'll see samples of carry b program in program guides and a request from me that if you know of somebody that used to be a listener or subscriber to the station i would really like to know about them and perhaps they'd like to know about the website because we're continually searching for more material that people might have saved and we'd really like to get it digitized and preserved so that people can see what radio was like back then in the days of the sixty's and seventy's it's an amazing collection of what you have so far of audio and text and brochures and it really gives you a great feel for what was going on at that station one of valuable resource it was we've digitized about three hundred seven it's a short one but it's interesting i'm a little disappointed in mike wallace but it's interesting so it's only six minutes and you can go here to i'm all right well so hopefully if some folks who are listening well either have some of your materials themselves or we'll know of someone or perhaps mention to them it's more flowing your way yes thank you all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming it's been a time of the socmen well thank you for having