Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah. A quick message before we get to the podcast. This week, we saw a corporate media outlet cave to the Trump administration. Public radio, in case you need reminding, is independent media. We at OTM wear that as a badge of honor because it means that we don't answer to corporate bigwigs. We answer to you, our listeners. Right now, with the loss of federal funding, we need your help more than ever.

Today, we're kicking off a super exciting challenge. If we can get 500 On the Media listeners to step up and support OTM with a donation by the end of October, we will unlock $15,000 from George Hanby, a retired seventh-grade world geography teacher who listens to the show from his home in Italy. That extra $15,000, along with your support, will do so much to help us make the show for you each week.

To sweeten the deal, we'll send you the official On the Media hat when you make a donation of $12 a month. It's a light blue hat, and it has the On the Media logo emblazoned on the front. If you're ever out and about in Brooklyn, you might see me wearing mine. It's super easy to donate. Just go to onthemedia.org/donate, and please help us out right now. Thanks, and enjoy the show.

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Brooke Gladstone: Looks like Jimmy Kimmel Live! is dead.

Brian Stelter: It's an Occam's razor situation. It's exactly what it looks like.

Brooke Gladstone: Like a splash of government intimidation mixed with a dollop of media consolidation. A toxic brew.

Brian Stelter: Nexstar has all of this pending business before the government. Tegna also does. There's another big station owner called Sinclair that also has business pending before the government.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also this week, navigating our era of extremely online political violence.

Ryan Broderick: Charlie Kirk's murder was orchestrated in front of a crowd already filming him with their phones, who immediately uploaded that footage to the internet. Social platforms are now being manipulated and just average users. We are all, in a sense, part of this event.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone, so here's what happened in a nutshell. Far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk was murdered on a Utah campus. Before we knew anything about the killer, Donald Trump, who'd long deployed lawsuits and now has president regulatory agencies to conquer or crush cultural or research or educational institutions, and especially journalism, leapt at the chance to escalate his scorched-earth campaign, and it happened fast. Just last week, Jimmy Kimmel was at the Emmys sharing the thunderous ovation for Stephen Colbert, whose show was recently given an end date. Now, he's canned for seemingly the same reasons, Trumpian intimidation and media consolidation. It wasn't about Kirk or Kimmel. It never was.

President Donald Trump: When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that's all they do.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump in a press gaggle on Air Force One.

President Donald Trump: When you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They're licensed. They're not allowed to do that.

Congressman Jamie Raskin: This is really taking us back to the days of King George, where it was a crime to insult the President.

Brooke Gladstone: Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin.

Congressman Jamie Raskin: That was a crime in Great Britain to insult the dignity of the king because the king was seen to have the authority of God behind him, so it was an insult of God.

News clip: We saw the dismissal of a very well-known chat show host in America last night, Mr. Kimmel. Is free speech more under attack in Britain or America?

Brooke Gladstone: Trump in a press conference during this week's state visit to the UK.

President Donald Trump: Well, Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else, and he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk. Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad ratings, and they should have fired him a long time ago. You can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent.

Jon Stewart: We have a little something called the First Amendment, and let me tell you how it works.

Brooke Gladstone: The Daily Show's Jon Stewart took the host chair on Thursday in mock terror to explain.

Jon Stewart: There's something called a talent-o-meter.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: It's a completely scientific instrument that is kept on the President's desk. It tells the President when a performer's TQ, talent quotient-

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: -measured mostly by niceness to the President, goes below a certain level. At which point, the FCC must be notified to threaten the acquisition prospects for billion-dollar mergers of network affiliates. These affiliates are then asked to give ultimatums to the even larger megacorporation that controls the flow of state-approved content, or the FCC can just choose to threaten those licenses directly. It's basic science.

[laughter]

President Donald Trump: They give me only bad publicity or press. They're getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr.

Brooke Gladstone: You see? He's not doing it. It's up to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Some Washington types sport a flag pin on their lapels. Carr's pin is an image of Trump. Now, Carr is currently vanquishing all the evil broadcasters with the power of regulation. Have corporations ever been regulated into submission so brazenly? As Carr told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson.

Brendan Carr: Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

Brooke Gladstone: It's been so easy to get these huge corporations to fold. They believe that to survive, they need to expand. They need the FCC to approve current and future mergers, so they need Brendan Carr to waive the FCC's own rules preventing media corporations from owning too many outlets. Why such rules? Because of the real fear that too much ownership and too few hands will reduce an already limited range of perspectives to a very few, or even just one. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.

Senator Chris Murphy: This is a moment for the country to mobilize.

Brooke Gladstone: But how?

Senator Chris Murphy: This is a moment for all of us to be out on the streets protesting, because if you don't raise your voices right now about the assault on free speech, there may be no democracy to save a year from now.

Brooke Gladstone: It's so enervating, all of these apocalyptic declarations of doom. The President ran on American carnage, and that was when the country was doing pretty well.

Maria Ressa: It feels like Americans are like deer in headlights.

Jon Stewart: Yes, I feel that way.

Brooke Gladstone: Maria Ressa, Jon Stewart's guest Thursday, won a Nobel Prize fighting for truth when the Philippines fell into fascism.

Maria Ressa: If you don't move and protect the rights you have, you lose them. It's so much harder to reclaim them.

Brooke Gladstone: She said she warned Silicon Valley that algorithms that leveraged fear and hate for profit would give fascism wings, that it was tested in the Philippines. They didn't listen, or they didn't care. Now, it's here, so what to do? For those who care, it requires precious time and muscle. It's very hard. Yes, it is all about money, but you don't have to have it to beat it.

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Micah Loewinger: It turns out that the MAGA movement is really into cancel culture. Credit where credit is due. They're pretty good at it.

News clip: Social media posts and messages around the murder of Charlie Kirk are being spotlighted by a doxxing website created by some conservative activists.

News clip: A controversy brewing at the University of Miami.

News clip: A scientist connected to the school has been fired after posting about Charlie Kirk's death.

News clip: That student-teacher, removed from her position, reportedly left a now-deleted comment under a post covering Kirk's death that read, "This made me giggle."

News clip: The Framingham superintendent confirms an employee is on leave after a video circulating online of someone seemingly celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.

Matt Walsh: There is a fundamental difference between the cancel culture that the left engages in and the "canceling" that the right is doing in the wake of Charlie's assassination and the left's celebration of it.

Micah Loewinger: Daily Wire host Matt Walsh this week.

Matt Walsh: The difference is that the left will cancel you for saying objectively true, good, and normal things. To the extent that the right cancels you, it'll be for saying objectively abhorrent, perverse, and sick things. This distinction matters.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, there were no consequences for the abhorrent, perverse, and sick things discussed on Fox & Friends last weekend when the conversation turned to homeless people who commit violent crimes.

Lawrence Jones: You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you, or you decide that you're going to be locked up in jail. That's the way it has to be now.

Brian Kilmeade: Or involuntary lethal injection or something. Just kill them.

Micah Loewinger: That last voice was Brian Kilmeade, who apologized and was back on the air the very next day.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi: There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.

Micah Loewinger: Attorney General Pam Bondi speaking this week on a podcast hosted by former press secretary for Mike Pence, Katie Miller.

Katie Miller: Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people so we show them that some action is better than no action?

US Attorney General Pam Bondi: We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

Micah Loewinger: Steven Crowder, Megyn Kelly, Brit Hume, Matt Walsh, and many other right-wing media figures took to X to protest these comments, pointing out rightfully that arresting people for hate speech is a textbook First Amendment no-no. Tucker Carlson didn't like it either.

Tucker Carlson: You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we're seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. Trust me, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that ever. There never will be because if they can tell you what to say, they're telling you what to think, there is nothing they can't do to you.

Micah Loewinger: Huh, that's quite a principled stand from a guy who spent years whipping up "great replacement" paranoia and spreading conspiracy theories about January 6th nightly on cable. Even if hate speech is a red line, Pam Bondi quickly walked it back. The administration has carefully outlined a much broader mandate to target them. The press, random social media users, college professors, liberals, whoever they are, they are responsible.

Clay Travis: They couldn't out-debate Charlie Kirk, and so they tried to kill him.

Eric Trump: They tried to do it to my father in Butler. They tried to do it to him on a golf course. Now, they did it to Charlie.

Stephen Miller: They know what they're doing. Our universities, in many cases, have become incubators for extremism.

Micah Loewinger: That's White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, who's threatened to target liberal nonprofits like the Ford Foundation and George Soros's Open Society Foundations. Here he is speaking on a special episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, guest-hosted by JD Vance on Monday.

Stephen Miller: With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

Micah Loewinger: The justification for all of this, the central lie, is one we heard from the vice president himself.

Vice President JD Vance: While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-left.

Micah Loewinger: As Vance knows, there are no statistics measuring political lunacy, but study after study have found that political violence and is far more likely to come from right-wing actors, including a study published in 2024 by our own government, which was quietly removed from the Department of Justice's website this week.

Lily Mason: Starting after 9/11, there are essentially two main sources of domestic terrorism in the United States. The number two source is Islamic terrorism. The number one is far-right terrorism.

Micah Loewinger: Lily Mason is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and the co-author of the book, Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. I asked her what her research can tell us about this moment.

Lily Mason: I try to be very careful declaring a trend. It is important to remember that while these things are very well-covered, they are still in a country of 300 million people. Pretty rare. Even if you just look back to the 1960s, we had higher levels of assassinations, for example, and quite a lot more societal unrest. The difference between the 1960s and now is that in the 1960s, it wasn't the two parties fighting each other.

We had a diverse political coalition that put together the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Both Republicans and Democrats were on both sides. While there was political violence in the 1960s, it didn't map perfectly onto the divide between Democrats and Republicans. Today, while I think there's still lower violence than there was in the 1960s, the violence that does occur is happening along partisan lines.

Micah Loewinger: How do attitudes towards political violence compare between Democrats and Republicans?

Lily Mason: In our 2022 book, and, actually, we are still collecting data on this, we measured two things related to violence. The first one is actually a concept we call "moral disengagement," which is just the vilifying and dehumanizing attitudes towards the other side that can lead to mass violence. Because if you vilify and dehumanize people on the other side, it's easier to hurt them without feeling like you're doing something morally wrong.

Those numbers are actually, I think, worryingly high. Both Democrats and Republicans, we ask whether they think that the other party is a threat to the United States. About 80%, at this point, of Democrats and Republicans think the other party is a threat. We ask whether they agree that people in the other party are not just wrong for politics, they're downright evil. We see 40% to 50%, depending on the political context, agreeing with that.

Then the dehumanization question is something we borrowed from places that are studying other countries. They don't deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals. I thought that would be pretty low. Actually, we've seen up to 30% of Democrats and Republicans agreeing with even the dehumanization statement. Then we also ask questions explicitly about political violence. The most common question we ask is, "To what extent is it acceptable to use violence to achieve your political goals?"

In fact, basically, 80% to 90% of Democrats and Republicans tend to say, "Never. It's never acceptable." Overwhelming majorities of Americans reject explicit violence. If we ask them a follow-up question, which is, "What if the other side starts it first?" then we see both Democrats and Republicans jumping up to 40%, 50%, even last summer, 60% of Democrats and Republicans said, "Well, if they start it first, then it might be okay."

Micah Loewinger: Oh, that's dark. Is it that the people who are committing these types of attacks are themselves motivated by a kind of partisan identity?

Lily Mason: That's a really good question because often we really don't know. It's important to remember that the people who commit these attacks, who murder other people, are not stable individuals. Most of the time, they're young men. When a political figure is attacked, we don't know whether it's because of their politics or because they're famous. There's plenty of volatile young men out there. There's plenty of access to guns. This country has a violence problem, and we have a political problem. Those circles sometimes overlap, but it's hard to know always whether we're in the overlap part of a Venn diagram or just in one or the other circle.

Micah Loewinger: How do you square the fact that the responses to these surveys among either side seem very similar, but the rhetoric among Republican politicians, just using the Charlie Kirk assassination as an example, has been more extreme in the last week, suggesting there's some kind of civil war or that some kind of ambiguous evil left is responsible for the death of their beloved media figure?

Lily Mason: I haven't measured these attitudes in the last week, so I don't know currently what they are.

Micah Loewinger: Fair.

Lily Mason: In fact, we see some of these attitudes change in response to events. Around both of the first two impeachments of Donald Trump, we saw big spikes in approval of violence among Republicans. It's possible that these attitudes are changing right now. While the prevalence of these attitudes is relatively evenly distributed across Democrats and Republicans, there is documented more right-wing violence than left-wing violence.

I think the difference there is the rhetoric of the leaders. What they're saying is the left does more violence, which is not empirically correct. The majority of documented domestic terrorism is from the right. What we see from Donald Trump is a lot of rhetoric that either implicitly or explicitly encourages violence from his supporters. What we see from Democrats, for example, in the last week is just a lot of people saying, "Never, never, never, never be violent."

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: This is horrific. The assassination of Charlie Kirk risks an uncorking of political chaos and violence that we cannot risk in America.

Congressman Jamie Raskin: We should be rejecting gun violence and political violence in all of their forms.

Congresswoman Debbie Dingell: I cried when he found out he died, so all of us have got to work together and de-escalate the hate and the rhetoric in this country.

Micah Loewinger: You've written about the so-called "boiling pot theory" that explains the role that political leaders play in inflaming violence. Can you just break it down?

Lily Mason: Yes, so none of us likes to think that we're vulnerable to influence from other people, but we all are. Leaders have the ability to either move us back away from the edge or encourage us to keep going further with violence. When we have what feels like something really growing and simmering and violence becoming more popular in the electorate, they can actually turn down the heat. They can say, "This isn't the way that we're going to behave. I don't want any of my supporters to behave this way. I'm going to disavow anybody who advocates violence."

I have experiments where we've just had people read a quote from either Joe Biden or Donald Trump that says something like that, disavowing violence. The people that read a quote like that are just much less approving of violence than people who read nothing. There's a lot of influence that leaders are able to use, and their followers really, really do listen. It absolutely depends on the rhetoric that they are using. Not only can they make things better, but they can also make it worse. I'm actually at a conference right now in Austria on what is happening in the US, so the world is wondering what's going on.

Micah Loewinger: That's fascinating. What are they saying about what they're watching?

Lily Mason: Most of them, when they were introducing themselves, said, "I really hope my American friends here can help me understand what's happening in the United States. I don't understand it, and it feels terrible." They're saying like, "I sound like a crazy person when I try to explain this to my friends and family, because they think that I'm just like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but I'm just describing what's on the headlines of the newspapers coming out of the US."

Micah Loewinger: Lily, thanks so much.

Lily Mason: Thank you for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Lily Mason is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and the co-author of the book, Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, in today's internet culture, memes aren't always what they seem.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Let's hear that Jimmy Kimmel clip one more time.

Jimmy Kimmel: With the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Micah Loewinger: At the time Kimmel recorded that monologue, some corners of the left-wing internet had concluded that Robinson was likely a Groyper, a super online white nationalist. Popular Substack writer and historian Heather Cox Richardson, who has 2.6 million readers, seemed to endorse that theory last weekend, writing that Robinson "appears to have embraced the far-right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical." I was skeptical of this story from the get-go, but I wanted to hear about it from someone who studies internet culture for a living, so I called up Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter, to talk through the evidence.

Ryan Broderick: The Groypers are a Christofascist, extremely isolationist offshoot of the MAGA movement. They're a fan base of the livestreamer Nicholas Fuentes. They saw Kirk as a moderate, someone who was blocking a more extreme version of white nationalism from influencing the Trump administration. They don't like Israel. They don't think that we should have anything to do with global politics in any way. The reason why it was believed that Robinson may be connected to that movement was because of the use of memes inscribed on the bullets. Groypers are younger. They are much more fluent in online references. That is why there was this consensus, particularly on Bluesky, that Robinson may be a Groyper.

Micah Loewinger: Also circulating on Bluesky, there were pictures of Robinson dug up in the immediate moments after he had been identified by law enforcement, taken by his family members, a Halloween costume of him dressed up as Trump wearing green face paint, a picture of him crouching, wearing Adidas tracksuit that some people theorized was yet more evidence that he was nodding to his fellow Groypers online.

Ryan Broderick: That's right. I had written at the time, trying to explain to people that, yes, some of these memes that he may have dressed up as for Halloween have far-right connotations, particularly for older people. If you are 22 years old, teenager in the first Trump administration, those were just cultural references. It seems just as likely to me that Robinson was someone who just enjoyed internet culture, was fascinated by memes.

The impulse, particularly from the mainstream media, to paint all memes as either being on the right or the left is not really accurate to reality. You can open up TikTok right now, pick any random viral video, and you'll find young people talking like incels because they think it's funny, talking like Donald Trump because they think it's funny. There are layers of irony to a lot of this stuff that don't conform to the simple political spectrum of internet culture that, particularly, the mainstream media and I suppose law enforcement as well just decided was the case for everyone five, 10 years ago.

Micah Loewinger: Let's just tick through some of those memes on the bullet casings because it really wasn't clear, as information was trickling out, how much meaning was supposed to be derived from these memes, right?

Ryan Broderick: Exactly. The bullet that reportedly struck Charlie Kirk and killed him had written on it, "Notices, bulge, OwO, what's this?" Some variation of that. It's a reference to a bit of cringe humor that started as furry roleplay. Furries are a subculture. People who dress up in animal costumes. It doesn't mean that Robinson is a furry. It's been shared forever. It's just this piece of viral ephemera.

The other three bullets recovered by law enforcement, one of them read, "Hey, fascist, catch," with the arrow combination for triggering a bomb in the video game Helldivers 2. Helldivers 2, you play as effectively like a fascist army in space. There's all kinds of discourse in that community about how much you should lean into the fascist aesthetic of the video game versus how much of it is satire.

Micah Loewinger: It's also just one of the most popular games right now.

Ryan Broderick: Yes, it's hugely popular. The next bullet had on it written, "O bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao," a reference to an Italian anti-fascist folk song, but it's also a popular piece of pop culture right now. It was in Money Heist. It was in the video game Far Cry 6. Then the last one, which I think points to the whole thing being a troll, which has been backed up most recently by Discord chat logs released by law enforcement from Robinson. The last bullet read, "If you're reading this, you're gay. LMAO." In the Discord chat logs belonging to Robinson, he basically admits, "It would be funny if Fox News read these bullets on air."

Micah Loewinger: He said he would have a stroke if he saw it.

Ryan Broderick: Exactly. There has been a growing trend of spree shooters and extremists writing messages on bullets before they carry out violent attacks. There's also been an increase in the use of memes to telegraph and window-dress political violence, going all the way back to Christchurch in 2019.

Micah Loewinger: That's when the killer said, "Subscribe to PewDiePie"?

Ryan Broderick: Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: Which was just a big "F you" to everyone, I guess.

Ryan Broderick: Yes, it's a troll, which I think points to the larger thing here, which is that mass violence, school shootings, particularly in America, have been going on for so long that someone like Tyler Robinson, who's 22 years old, has only ever known a world, not only with them as a feature, but also the media reaction, the law enforcement reaction. They know what's going to happen after they do something like this. They know that there will be a race to uncover their social media. There will be a race to figure out why they did it. They know that there are opportunities there to mess with people, to troll people. It's like they know how this works.

Micah Loewinger: [sighs] It's hard to hear that because then you can't help but think to yourself as a journalist, "Well, I'm just being manipulated by a killer."

Ryan Broderick: You are, without question. In fact, the way that Charlie Kirk's murder was orchestrated in front of a crowd of people who are already filming him with their phones, who immediately uploaded that footage to the internet, it's not just journalists that are being manipulated. Social platforms are now being manipulated and just average users. We are all part of this event. It's extremely Meta.

Micah Loewinger: Now that we know more about Robinson, we don't know a ton, but we know more, how would you describe this person's politics?

Ryan Broderick: Going off of what his friends told the reporter, Ken Klippenstein, going off of the Discord chat logs that were released by law enforcement, off of the Facebook pictures that people found on his mom's Facebook page, I feel fairly confident saying that this was a person who was not exactly a deep political thinker. It was someone who seems to be learning about politics as we speak, like currently. Someone from a fairly right-wing household, someone who was beginning to question that.

It reminds me a lot of Luigi Mangione. The idea being that he was going to have some sort of great revolutionary writing that would be unearthed. Then, when people dug into it, they realized that his politics were completely incoherent, other than just a general anger at the health insurance industry. I feel fairly safe in saying that this is similar. This is someone who saw an opportunity that aligned with some of the things that they were thinking about and took that opportunity.

Micah Loewinger: We have seen, particularly this administration and the right-wing online media, focus on the fact that Robinson had a trans roommate.

Ryan Broderick: I'm not saying that he didn't have a motivation. It's more just that I don't get the sense that it was very well-thought-out. I don't get the sense that he is a grand revolutionary figure so much as someone who appears to have a close relationship with a trans person and was upset at Charlie Kirk for spreading anti-trans rhetoric. Robinson's trans roommate is the only reason we know anything about Robinson's personal life. They've been extremely forthcoming with law enforcement.

Micah Loewinger: I do want to ask you about something you said on your podcast last weekend. You referred to today's social internet as a radicalization engine. Explain what you meant.

Ryan Broderick: The way the internet is structured and what people view on the internet and how, in particular, automated algorithms like the ones that power TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube influence people. We know that there's a connection to their behavior and how they see the world. We also know that around 2014, the right wing became very interested in building a vast digital media network to counter what they saw as liberal bias in the mainstream media. This is the beginning of the Breitbart News Facebook explosion.

You start to see the rise of organizations like Turning Point USA, embracing podcasts and YouTube. Now, without question, the conservative media is larger than the non-conservative media. They have also successfully hijacked popular culture. Someone like Robinson, when they're 17 years old, is dressing up as Pepe the Frog, and they're not really thinking about it because that's just another part of pop culture. You have random TikTok users that are using terms like "sigma male" and "looksmaxxing," not realizing that they were made popular by incels in manifestos that they wrote before they carried out spree shootings.

If you are a young person right now, this is the water that you swim in. If you're the parent of a young person right now, there is almost nothing you can do to minimize their exposure to these ideas. Now, they might just see them and pass them by and move on with their lives, but there is a very extreme contingent of people who start to pull on those threads. It takes them further down rabbit holes that are then enforced by these unthinking algorithms that recommend more and more extreme content to them as a way to keep them on these platforms.

Micah Loewinger: I guess what I'm struggling with is, how do we talk about this problem that you're identifying without fueling the panic about the internet that so often, at least in our country, seems to lead to more censorship? On Wednesday, for instance, Representative James Comer announced that the CEOs of Discord, Twitch, Steam, and Reddit would all be called to testify before Congress in light of Kirk's killing to answer questions about radicalization.

Ryan Broderick: Those apps in particular are all part of what I would call the gaming world. There's a real desire, knowing what we now know about Robinson, to explain his radicalization. The right is very, very focused on saying, "Okay. Well, maybe it was the trans' partner, or maybe it was the fact that he was a gamer, or the fact that he was using Discord." There's also a massive community of leftist streamers on Twitch that I'm sure the Trump administration would love to throttle or suppress, particularly people like Hasan Piker.

Micah Loewinger: This is the socialist Twitch streamer, who Elon Musk, among others, have been calling for Twitch to deplatform in light of many things he said over the years.

Ryan Broderick: Yes, there's that part of it. To answer your question, how do we talk about this stuff without inspiring more censorship, a larger mass panic about the internet? What I would point to is that we already did it, in fact. If you look at 2013, 2014, ISIS was effectively removed from the internet. Other, let's say, memetic social diseases, eating disorders, were really, really clamped down on by major platforms. Child sexual abuse material, non-consensual sexual abuse material, all these issues that we've known spread in unmoderated platforms.

We did, for a brief moment, clamp down on it, and then we stopped. When I talk about moderation, I don't mean that it's the same as censorship. There are things that are innate to the way people use the internet that we know get worse when you don't moderate the internet. At certain points throughout the internet's history, it has been a fairly moderated and safer place to be. 20 years ago, you weren't even able to put your credit card information into a website. Now, you can. We can do these things, but you have to approach them in a very specific way. That way does not involve the government.

Micah Loewinger: It almost feels tone-deaf to engage in techno-utopianism discussions on the radio, given where our politics are at currently, but what's the solution?

Ryan Broderick: One thing that has just never been done throughout the last 15 years is anti-monopoly, antitrust legislation for tech companies. There is a line of thinking that I tend to subscribe to, which is that this is all a matter of scale, that there actually doesn't need to be a social platform or website that has all of humanity on it simultaneously. You can't properly moderate a site that has more members than the Catholic Church. You can't do it, which is just to say there's maybe an argument that social platforms should have some kind of limit to their size. Whether that is the limit to the size of the company or the limit to the size of the users, but that is something that has never been attempted.

Micah Loewinger: Break them up.

Ryan Broderick: Just break them up because all of the problems of the current internet existed before social media. There were neo-Nazi websites dating back all the way to the '90s. There were conspiracy theorists like Infowars that had their blogs and their websites and their online TV shows. Because of scale, no one really cared.

Micah Loewinger: Ryan, thanks for coming on the show.

Ryan Broderick: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Ryan Broderick is a tech journalist, host of the podcast Panic World, and author of the newsletter Garbage Day.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, what to do when people who think you're corrupting their kids come after you locked and loaded.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. A public college in Florida has commissioned a statue of Charlie Kirk for the campus.

Governor Ron DeSantis: This assassin, he didn't like what Charlie Kirk was saying, and so he wanted to silence him through violence. He killed him for it. I think it's appropriate what New College is--

Brooke Gladstone: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday said such a memorial was right and proper because the Charlie Kirk he knew was-

Governor Ron DeSantis: -bringing conservative principles to college campuses. That's basically like the lion's den for political debate, right?

Brooke Gladstone: DeSantis and Kirk were longtime comrades in the so-called culture wars. In the fight against "liberal capture," they boosted conservative agendas in schools, universities, museums, and libraries. A new documentary, The Librarians, follows a group of public servants whose libraries had been targeted by activist groups like Moms for Liberty all across the country, from Florida-

Julie Miller: I wrote an email back and just asked, "Could you please provide us with the reason why each of these books is being removed?" I was removed from my library for asking questions.

Brooke Gladstone: -to Texas-

Documentary clip: We were going to pull books off the shelves. It's the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sexuality in books.

Brooke Gladstone: -to New Jersey-

Martha Hickson: I see the kid emerge from the stacks holding Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. 24 hours later, that student's mother was standing in front of the Board of Education and calling me a pornographer, pedophile, and groomer of children.

Brooke Gladstone: -to Louisiana.

Amanda Jones: In our parish, we have the highest concentration of KKK, Aryan Nation, those type of groups.

Brooke Gladstone: Amanda Jones is a school librarian in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. In 2021, she was named the School Library Journal's School Librarian of the Year, one of the profession's highest honors. In 2022, she found herself in the crosshairs of book-banning activists after she spoke up at her public library board meeting.

Amanda Jones: I talked about how libraries already have policies and procedures that, if anyone doesn't like a book in a library, whether it's school or public, there are processes in place.

Brooke Gladstone: After the meeting, two men Amanda didn't know created memes about her that circulated all over the internet and were read by family and friends.

Amanda Jones: One meme said that I advocate the teaching of anal sex to 11-year-olds. The other meme was a picture of me that had a circle that looked like a target around my face. That post identified me as a school librarian and where I worked, and insisted that I give pornography and erotica to six-year-olds. They circulated all over the state that weekend. Then by the next week, it was all over the country.

Brooke Gladstone: It was excruciating.

Amanda Jones: That first weekend, I cried to the point my eyes swelled shut. I couldn't see for a day. [chuckles] I didn't know that was possible. I eventually had to take a leave of absence from work for debilitating panic attacks that I had never had before. I had a little pity party for a few days, but then I woke up that third or fourth day with just a burning rage at people that I had stood up for that were saying these awful things about me. I decided to stick up for myself and fight back.

Brooke Gladstone: How did you do that?

Amanda Jones: I filed a defamation lawsuit against these two men. It is still ongoing today. It's been three years. Then they turned around and said I was filing the lawsuit to keep sexually explicit books in the children's section of the library, which is not what the lawsuit is about. That's still what they say. It's still what is on one of the men's GoFundMes. Just lies.

Brooke Gladstone: What's at stake here?

Amanda Jones: Lives are at stake. Children's lives. People tell me I'm exaggerating. It's hyperbolic. It's not. I've taught for 25 years. I've taught thousands of students, and I have had many, many students who have grown up and taken their own lives. Over two dozen. I stopped counting at around 20 because it was too heartbreaking. They generally fall into two categories. They're either veterans that served our country and weren't given resources when they returned, or they're members of the LGBTQ community.

Almost every single former student that I know of that has taken their own life fall into one of those two categories. To me, both of those reasons are preventable. I do raise money every year for disabled American veterans, but I thought that what I could do for maybe mitigating some of this in our community would be to make sure that kids are represented in the books in our public library and our school library, and make sure they can see themselves and feel seen and heard and represented.

Brooke Gladstone: Students have spoken to you about what certain books have meant to them over the years.

Amanda Jones: Oh, yes. I teach middle school, so they're not the most talkative, forthcoming bunch, but a lot of former students, yes, in their 20s and 30s. One student, right after this happened, wrote me and said, "I was thinking of taking my life, and you gave me a book that made me feel like there was other people like me. I decided to live for one more day." That's powerful.

One of my former students was substituting in our school. She stopped by the library to come talk to me. She hadn't been in our school library in 10 years. She walked around. Within minutes, she said, "Ms. Jones, this library's changed so much. I see books with people that look like me. I see brown characters on the covers of these books. I never saw that when I went to the school." I want to preface. I was not the librarian at that time. [chuckles] It made me tear up.

Brooke Gladstone: You've mentioned kids' safety. How about yours?

Amanda Jones: Well, I generally feel unsafe most of the time. [chuckles]

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me why. Describe what you've encountered.

Amanda Jones: Getting a death threat, saying that they know where you live and work, will change you forever. It was the work part that got me. My fear is that someone will come after me and that, in the process, children will be harmed. I don't think I could ever live with myself if that happened. I know it wouldn't be my fault, but I think about that almost daily.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about guns.

Amanda Jones: When I go to library board meetings, I have to travel through very rural areas, wooded areas, and I'm by myself a lot of these times. I'm scared they're going to follow me home. I'm going to be on this stretch of road where no one's around. Yes, I carry a weapon. I do sleep with a shotgun under my bed because I have a teenager that I want to protect if someone breaks into my home.

I don't go out in my community. I've been called a groomer and a pedophile in public. People are going to slap me or whatever. I don't grocery shop. I can't even take my daughter out in my community. We went prom shopping at a local boutique, and we had to leave because people were whispering, and then she started crying. I just don't go out in my community anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: The documentary shows the connection between all of these movements to ban books or censor them or move them across the country from where you live in Louisiana to Texas to Florida, even New Jersey. We learned that some of the people behind these campaigns have connections to the Christian nationalist movement. Among them, Dan and Farris Wilks, billionaire oil tycoons who've donated lots of money to politicians and conservative media outlets. Here's a clip of Farris from the documentary.

Farris Wilks: A male-on-male, or female-on-female, is against nature. This lifestyle is a predatorial lifestyle in that they need your children as straight people having kids to fulfill their sexual habits. They want your children.

Brooke Gladstone: There's also a company, Patriot Mobile, that's been financing these book-censoring groups. Here's a clip from one of their meetings.

Patriot Mobile Member: God takes what the devil meant to harm us, and He turns it into good. He blesses us with it. Every time we're attacked in Patriot Mobile, our sales just go through the roof. We increase our sales. What does increasing our sales mean? It means we can give more money back to organizations like Moms for Liberty.

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Brooke Gladstone: How have you seen that play out in your town, in your state?

Amanda Jones: They're apparently not worshiping the same God I am. [chuckles] That's not Christianity. I created an organization called Livingston Parish Library Alliance. We've been tracking campaign donations. We have noticed that when politicians specifically speak out about the library and insist there's sexually explicit materials or whatever, we've noticed an uptick in donations. They play on people's fears that there's these evildoers coming after your children.

Brooke Gladstone: Where are those donations coming from?

Amanda Jones: It's a dark money, nonprofit, extremist group. They don't live or work in my community that have entered my community working with local politicians to create this fear so these politicians can get votes, power, and money. The lady that originally, on our library board, started all of this nonsense, who is now on our parish governing because we're parishes and not counties in Louisiana, it catapulted her into a higher elected position. Her husband formed a pack, and the Koch brothers have donated over $60,000 to their pack. It's all money and power.

Brooke Gladstone: In the first public meeting where you spoke out, there were out-of-town activists trying to get books moved. In your community, how big a role generally do out-of-town activists play?

Amanda Jones: The American Library Association, they put out a State of the Libraries report every year. Last year, they reported that I think it was 72% of book challenges, and all of these things that are happening are from political focus groups. There's a pastor from Texas that travels all over the country to talk about the porn in the libraries where he doesn't live.

There's a man that's filed thousands of challenges in Florida schools. He doesn't have a child in those schools. That's not an organic concern. I don't fault a parent for filing a legitimate challenge against a book. These people, they're not reading these books. They're finding lists online, and they're just filling out these challenges. They're just trying to cause chaos, and so distrust in our library systems.

Brooke Gladstone: There was some reporting a couple of years back that Moms for Liberty's influence was waning. They'd run a number of candidates for school boards who lost. Do you see this movement dying down at all?

Amanda Jones: It depends on where you're at in the country, because these are such local fights. In areas like Texas and Florida, where it started, it's been going on a lot longer, we're starting to see the pendulum switch back to normalcy. There's also been lawsuits won in those states.

Brooke Gladstone: Lawsuits against?

Amanda Jones: School systems that are banning books. There's been some pretty large lawsuits in Florida. Penguin Random House has been fighting the fight. Several authors, Peter Parnell, Justin Richardson, George M. Johnson, have been fighting back against book bans and winning in court. That's helping states like Florida. Then you've got states like Arkansas that were a little slower to start the book-banning movement. They're just getting into the heat of it right now. You've got states like Missouri that was a little behind Texas and Florida. Their lawsuits haven't gone through the court system. Some states are swinging back, and some are just getting started.

Brooke Gladstone: You've also said that the problem starts at the top, that it's dependent on who's president.

Amanda Jones: I wrote an article for Time last year that said the presidency was going to determine the fate of libraries, and I was right. Because the minute Donald Trump got into office, he fired the Librarian of Congress and almost completely gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the national organization that helps all of the libraries in the United States.

I know Louisiana, just the libraries alone get $2.7 million to help run our state library. Our state library helps all of the rural parishes in Louisiana that can't afford some of the things, like we're talking Wi-Fi in areas that don't have internet service access. We're talking helping people print. We're talking ESL classes and career advice and law help, and all of these resources that people sometimes realize that libraries do. We're going to lose those because of our president.

Brooke Gladstone: Is the $2.7 million on the chopping block?

Amanda Jones: It's gone in the Big Beautiful Bill that they passed. Yes, they cut funding. We're trying to get it back. When I say "we," I mean librarians and residents all across the United States. We're trying to write our congressional leaders and ask for them to put the money back into museums and libraries, but we'll see how it goes. I don't know.

Brooke Gladstone: Amanda, I want you to sit back here for a second and see if you can remember the moment when you decided you wanted to be a librarian.

Amanda Jones: Oh, I remember it exactly. I don't like to give her credit for it. When I was in college, I had lost that love of reading. I watched The Rosie O'Donnell Show while I was waiting for class one day. She had on this up-and-coming author, J.K. Rowling. Rosie O'Donnell just kept talking on and on about these Harry Potter books. I went and checked out the first three, read them in their entirety twice that week. That day that I finished reading the whole series for the second time, I went and got special permission as an undergrad to start taking library science classes as an undergrad.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Why? You could have just become a reader again.

Amanda Jones: I just love reading so much, and I realize that not every kid does. Not every kid is going to be a reader, but I can try to show them the right book. Once they become readers, it opens them up to a whole new world, especially in areas like mine where people don't have a lot of money. They're not going to be able to travel the world, but they can adventure through books. They can learn and they can grow. Books do save lives, and books do make us more empathetic, kind human beings. We could use a lot more of that in this world.

Brooke Gladstone: You're going on tour, and you said you're still scared. That hasn't gone away.

Amanda Jones: No, it hasn't. I often request security at events, but I'm starting to feel like maybe it doesn't matter how much security you have. If someone wants to come after you, they're going to come after you, and so that's very scary.

Brooke Gladstone: Amanda Jones is a school librarian in Louisiana and the author of That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America. Amanda, thank you very much.

Amanda Jones: Thank you for having me.

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Brooke Gladstone: The documentary, The Librarians, is available to see at Film Forum in New York City, starting on October 3rd, and will be rolling out in theaters across the country.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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