Brooke Gladstone: Micah, I love our listeners.

Micah Loewinger: Me too. We asked 500 of you to support OTM by becoming sustaining members so that we could unlock a very generous $15,000 matching grant from George Hanby, a retired school teacher. We did that, and then some. We ultimately got 750 of you to step up. Thank you so much.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, we have one last goal, the last one until Christmas. Only a small percentage of you guys actually do donate to keep our show running because I get it. We're always there. That said, you all know by now that WNYC has lost its federal funding, like $3 million. We're asking 250 more of the faithful, I mean you, to quickly step up and send some support. Really doesn't matter how much by the end of the month because every little bit helps.

Micah Loewinger: If you give $12 a month or more, we'll send you an On the Media hat. It's blue, and it's got the On the Media logo in orange right on the front. I think it's pretty cool. I wear mine all the time. To get your own, all you got to do is go to onthemedia.org/donate. Thanks for your support, everyone. Enjoy the show.

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Micah Loewinger: Several men have been dubbed "the shadow president" by the media, but one is the shadowiest of them all.

Russell Vought: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.

President Donald Trump: They call him Darth Vader. I call him a fine man.

Andy Kroll: He talks in terms of winning for the future of Western civilization.

Micah Loewinger: Russell Vought, director of the OMB and Donald Trump's own Sith Lord. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Also, on this week's show, the racist messages revealed when a young Republican online chat was leaked bore the fingerprints of a certain right-wing influencer.

Ben Lorber: Nick Fuentes has always described himself as a tugboat, someone who is further rightward than the GOP establishment. His goal is to drag the whole thing kicking and screaming more in his direction.

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

[music]

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

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. As we enter the fourth week of the government shutdown, nobody's blinking. 12 votes on short-term Republican bills to reopen the government have hit the Senate floor. None garnered enough support from Democrats who say they'll only vote for a package that includes extended Affordable Care Act subsidies and reverses GOP Medicaid cuts, so we wait. Few noticed back on October 10th, when the head of a lesser-known arm of the administration tweeted, "The RIFs have begun." The author was Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. RIF stands for Reduction in Force, as in layoffs.

News clip: In an unprecedented move, the White House has begun firing more than 4,000 federal workers from a variety of agencies, workers that President Trump referred to as "Democrat-oriented." Budget Director Russ Vought is also making permanent cuts to government programs it doesn't support.

President Donald Trump: We have Darth Vader. You know Darth Vader, right?

Brooke Gladstone: Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump: They call him Darth Vader. I call him a fine man.

Brooke Gladstone: In a White House cast of camera-hogging characters, Vought's public persona is less Grim Reaper and more like ensemble player, middle-aged bureaucrat number three. This week, ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll bestowed an even splashier title on the nondescript office head, "shadow president."

Andy Kroll: The sources that I interviewed for this story work across the federal government and who deal with OMB in some cases on a day-to-day basis. That's how they described him to me.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump has been plagued by what people regard as shadow presidents. Elon Musk was a shadow president. Trump's Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, still dubbed as shadow president. They've had extraordinary influence, but Vought is the shadow of shadows?

Andy Kroll: OMB normally acts almost like a loving but diligent parent to the many agencies that make up the executive branch. It apportions, to use the technical term, money that Congress has already approved to these different agencies so that the federal government can run. That is what OMB looks like in normal times. What it looks like now is a place where Donald Trump's ideological agenda, in some cases, his overtly political agenda, is being enacted. Russ Vought has found this place to basically put a kink in the hose of the federal government to exert the President's will.

Brooke Gladstone: Give me just an example or two.

Andy Kroll: The National Institutes of Health. Earlier this summer, the Office of Management and Budget froze more than $10 billion that was going toward outside medical research, the kind of cutting-edge research that this country is known for that saves lives, that develops new treatments. OMB froze that money, said that it was "reviewing the money to ensure that it aligned with administration priorities in alignment with a MAGA agenda."

Brooke Gladstone: There is amazing amount of plain speaking in this administration about what its intentions are now. There's no dog whistling.

Andy Kroll: No, there's not. Russ Vought, I think, is a great example of that.

Brooke Gladstone: He's 49 years old, looks a little older, trim, graying beard. He gives off these tidy and meticulous vibes. That's the surface.

Andy Kroll: He originally hails from the Northeast. His father was a Marine who went on to be a union electrician. His mother was a public educator, and then later founded a private Christian school. It's very clear that his family were very devout and that they believed in taking that faith into the public sphere. I think the mom's decision to help open this school and to really promote an idea of education steeped in things like creationism, or the notion that if we aren't fundamentally a Christian country, we will descend into apathy and sin and sickness. It's a really key part of understanding him because he really brings together today both the "slash government at all costs" mentality, but also a Christian nationalist worldview.

Brooke Gladstone: Vought moves to DC right after college in 1999 and landed a mailroom job in the office of Texas Senator Phil Gramm. Combative libertarian or, as some said, the most hated man in America.

Andy Kroll: Phil Gramm is this iconoclastic, singular character in the Senate. Someone for whom basically every program that required federal spending was an example of overreach or overspending, profligate behavior by the United States Congress. He wanted to rein it in. Vought went on to say that his time working for Gramm laid the conservative foundation for the rest of his career. Just to give you a flavor, people would come to Phil Gramm, and they would say, "You want to cut this program that helps the poor? You want to cut this program that helps new mothers? Don't you have a heart, Senator Gramm?"

He would say in response, "Well, of course, I do. I keep it in a jar on my desk." In the beginning, Vought looks like the quintessential college grad who's interested in politics, gets an internship, and begins to slowly climb the ranks through Congress, working for different members. Eventually, he gets pretty darn close to the top of the political power structure in the Republican Party. Instead of sticking with it, he decides that the Republican Party is betraying its principles. It has drifted from what it was meant to be. He grows disillusioned and ultimately leaves a really influential job on Capitol Hill to work in activism.

Brooke Gladstone: He landed at Heritage Action, an offshoot of The Heritage Foundation. It's kind of aggressive and spiky. Describe how he did there.

Andy Kroll: Heritage Action launched in 2010. In this very fraught moment in American politics, the Affordable Care Act has recently been passed. This Tea Party movement is brewing to push back on what conservatives see as this massive government overreach. Heritage Action becomes the brawling, spiky, is a great way to put it, affiliate of The Heritage Foundation. Russ Vought goes there and basically becomes the chief antagonist, the most persistent tormentor of all of these members of Congress that he used to work for or work in support of when he was on the Hill.

To take one example, in the 2010 elections, he designs this attack ad against a senior United States senator, Bob Corker of Tennessee. That puts Corker's face on a mailer next to three other people that a Republican doesn't want to be seen with. Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It's this kind of tactic that absolutely infuriates Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. They are irate. Russ Vought is loving it because he believes he has found a way to pressure Republicans to actually act, in his view, the way Republicans should.

Brooke Gladstone: Then he gets on Trump's radar.

Andy Kroll: With Vought, there are a couple of key things here to understand. One is that when he was marinating in the teachings and the wisdom of Phil Gramm, he studied the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, knew what that agency could do, and he dreamed of working there because he had come to see it as the kind of place where you could enact the massive spending cuts, that you could rein in government in a way that you couldn't from Capitol Hill.

Brooke Gladstone: That office isn't supposed to control the money constitutionally. It is appropriated by Congress. Aren't there some suits about that?

Andy Kroll: There are some suits about that. Your analysis is in line with what the law says, what legal experts, conservatives, including the late Antonin Scalia, the late William Rehnquist, have said about the President's power or not to freeze funding that Congress has appropriated, but that is not what Russ Vought believes.

Brooke Gladstone: He has this long history of frustration with his own party, but nothing compared to the downright horror with which he regards the Democrats. You quote him saying last year, "The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of government apparatus." That would be the deep state. In the second term, he took that apparatus over and used it to-

Andy Kroll: -to shrink the government, fire employees en masse, freeze hundreds of billions of dollars, about $410 billion, according to Democrats on the appropriations committee.

Brooke Gladstone: You got to wonder, Vought didn't agree to an interview with you, nor answer the questions you sent him, but why is a guy who claims to have been raised on the idea of slashing spending, gleefully slashing jobs, such a big spender?

News clip: The Department of Homeland Security announcing today that it's going to buy two Gulfstream jets for more than $170 million.

News clip: President Trump is now considering doubling his promised bailout to Argentina to $40 billion. The move is now drawing criticism from both sides of the aisle.

News clip: The President's so-called Big Beautiful Bill aims to cut taxes by more than $3 trillion. The CBO said today that the tax cut would result in an increase of the deficit by $2.4 trillion.

Brooke Gladstone: If Vought is really a budget hawk, how does he square those line items?

Andy Kroll: By fudging the math in the case of the One Big Beautiful Bill or, in some cases, just not remarking on new gilded ballrooms or private jets for the DHS secretary. He couches all of this discussion about cutting government, cutting jobs, cutting spending as trying to eliminate the "woke element" in government, to rein in "weaponized agencies."

Brooke Gladstone: Part of this is tactical on Vought's part, right? He gets to do what he wants to do if he doesn't complain about what Trump wants to do.

Andy Kroll: It's no accident that Vought is one of the very few people who served all four years of the first Trump administration, spent four years between the presidencies, working in service of the President, and being very close in the inner circle. Then now, he has come back. He knows what to say, what not to say, to have the trust of Donald Trump, which is a difficult thing to do. Vought also has a long-term view. This is a project of his that has been in the works for decades, long predating Donald Trump.

In 2023, Steve Bannon and Russ Vought are on stage together. Bannon makes this comment that Trump is a very imperfect instrument, but he's an instrument of the Lord. In 2024, in a speech that we obtained that hadn't been reported, Vought goes even further. He says that Trump is this singular historic figure, someone unlike any other president in American history, put on this earth to defeat the deep state, to end this supposedly corrupt government that we have found ourselves in, and that that is nothing more than a gift of God.

Brooke Gladstone: He believes that? You believe he believes that?

Andy Kroll: I absolutely believe that he believes that, yes. In one recording we obtained, Vought said that Republicans need to learn to love shutdowns because shutdowns are the way we save the country. That's the way he talks. He talks in terms of winning for the future of Western civilization. He views these kinds of fights, this shutdown that we're in right now, for instance, as existential battles for the survival of the United States of America. Then, of course, that makes you think, "What won't this person do in a position of power?

Brooke Gladstone: Here's another tape of Vought. It's in a private speech in 2023.

Russell Vought: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.

Andy Kroll: As he put it in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the people who work in the bureaucracy "hate the American people." Now, that's just such an inflammatory, unfair comment when you know the kinds of people who work for the federal government. They're not doing it to get rich. They're not doing it to be famous. These people are public servants who serve our country in mostly invisible ways, but keep our country strong and healthy and running.

Brooke Gladstone: What's the end game here as we white-knuckle ourselves through one of Vought's reported happy times? A government shutdown. It'll end. If he really is shadow president, what are his priorities for the next three years?

Andy Kroll: One of the big things to watch is, what is the high court going to say about unilaterally dissolving government unions and mass-firing employees who-- Supposedly, you have workplace protections. What is the Supreme Court going to say about the OMB unilaterally freezing hundreds of billions of dollars that Congress appropriated by law? Article 1, power of the purse.

Vought has thrown a wrench or, as one person in our story put it, dropped a grenade into this system. That, to me, is the big question hanging over all of this right now. I don't think it's a guarantee that this conservative super majority marches in lockstep with the administration, but I certainly don't think it's a guarantee that they rule against Russ Vought in the White House either.

Brooke Gladstone: Like Stephen Miller, Vought wants a blanket opinion that makes the presidency more powerful than it's ever been. It seems short-sighted. It isn't always going to be their lot in power.

Andy Kroll: I have had the same thought many times. Where I come down is in two places. One is, again, Vought in these private speeches he gave that I obtained the recordings of. He talked about the 2024 election as akin to the 1860s, as akin to a Civil War moment.

Brooke Gladstone: Not the only one who thinks that.

Andy Kroll: No, he's not. That's right. Those were the stakes as he saw them. Then I also think that talking to people in government, talking to smart folks who observe government, the Trump administration can do so much damage in these four years, can traumatize so many federal workers, can throw such chaos into the federal bureaucracy that even a supercharged presidency under a Democrat can't rebuild.

Brooke Gladstone: I think federal workers were traumatized, but there are many glimmerings of shaking off the funk and maybe uniting with each other and with other opposition forces. I don't know. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Andy Kroll: No, I think that's absolutely right. I talked with probably getting north of a hundred at this point, federal workers, current fired folks who are in job limbo. I think, one, they believe that knowing explicitly what Vought has set out to do as it relates to them does give them some agency, because they see that this is explicitly what he's trying to do.

Brooke Gladstone: Not a byproduct.

Andy Kroll: Not a bug, a feature, [chuckles] and also that there is solidarity among them, that they do have a voice, and that voice can be powerful when they find each other. People don't necessarily interact when you're at CFPB and you're at CDC, the Fed, you're at the EPA, but people are finding each other now, and it's slow. I hear that more and more people comparing notes, people comparing strategies.

I would not be surprised to see from collectives of federal workers speaking out to defend their jobs, defend their colleagues, defend this idea that the civil service workforce serves the American taxpayer to try to make this country work better, make people healthier, make roads safer, and make this democracy function. That has been a heartening sign in this reporting.

Brooke Gladstone: Andy, thank you very much.

Andy Kroll: Thanks, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Andy Kroll is a reporter at ProPublica covering justice and the rule of law.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[MUSIC - Meridian String Quartet: Life on Mars?]

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

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

News clip: We're going to turn now to some breaking news on one of President Trump's most controversial nominees, Paul Ingrassia, who is tapped to lead the Office of Special Counsel, announcing he is withdrawing his name from consideration after allegations of racism surfaced--

News clip: In one message, Ingrassia allegedly texted that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be tossed into the seventh circle of hell, where it belongs. In another, Ingrassia, in a back-and-forth, allegedly wrote, "I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time. I will admit it."

Micah Loewinger: Those messages were shared with Politico mere days after the news organization reported on a different group chat, a much bigger one featuring young Republican leaders from several states.

News clip: These are full-grown adults, 18 to 40 years old. Over the course of these seven months, they referred to Black people as monkeys or the watermelon people.

News clip: Offering praise for Hitler and Nazis with jokes about slavery, rape, and gas chambers.

Nick Fuentes: None of these guys were Groypers. I don't know these guys, but they're influenced by the Groypers. Everybody's influenced by Groypers under the age of 30.

Micah Loewinger: That last voice is Nick Fuentes, the Gen Z, neo-Nazi influencer who, along with his followers, the Groypers, have contributed to the normalization of this type of rhetoric among right-wing men and boys.

Nick Fuentes: Groypers are all over the government, and everyone knows that. There's Groypers in every department, every agency, okay?

Micah Loewinger: Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, has been tracking Nick Fuentes and his movement since 2019. He's not convinced that Fuentes is quite as powerful as he claims to be, but says that the Young Republicans' leaked chat is evidence of how quickly norms are shifting in the GOP.

Ben Lorber: These are not just basement dwellers who are online all day. These are people who want to shape the policy that is going to be leading the conservative movement of the next generation. This is a glimpse into the country that they want to build in their image.

Micah Loewinger: Even if those young Republicans in the chat weren't necessarily themselves Groypers, they were influenced by that larger ecosystem. For instance, one of the Young Republicans made this bizarre comment about how sex is gay, and then another one replied that rape is epic, which is a kind of incel speak that we've heard from Nick Fuentes for years.

Nick Fuentes: People calling me gay because I've never had a girlfriend. I think if anything, if anything, it makes me less gay. If we're really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual because, honestly, having sex with women is gay, and having sex with men is gay. Really, it's all gay. If you want to know the truth, the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel.

Micah Loewinger: Do you want to just break that down?

Ben Lorber: Yes. [chuckles] Nick's fan base has really become inseparable from incel culture, which is short for involuntarily celibate, an extremely misogynist online movement of disaffected young men who have a lot of anger and alienation. People like Nick Fuentes take it in an incel direction of, "Let's avoid women entirely and build a superior group of men."

Micah Loewinger: I want to sketch out how we got here. He first stepped into the public eye as a freshman at Boston University in 2017, when he started streaming his show, America First, from his dorm room. In August 2017, he attended the Unite the Right rally, the white supremacist event in Charlottesville. He subsequently dropped out of college after getting a bunch of death threats.

He was fired from Right Side Broadcasting, which is a media company to that point, which had been broadcasting his show. Then he goes independent. He starts filming in his parents' basement. Over the years on his show, he seems to be hot and cold with the GOP establishment. Sometimes he's railing against it. Sometimes he's cozying up. What would you say is his ultimate goal?

Ben Lorber: Nick Fuentes has always described himself as a tugboat. He sees himself as someone who is further rightward than the GOP establishment. His goal is to drag the whole thing kicking and screaming more in his direction. He wants the conservative movement to reflect an exclusionary Christian nationalist vision where American society is run by right-wing Christian men. He wants to ban most LGBTQ expression and identity from public life. He has praised fascist dictators, Franco in Spain. He went through a long phase of praising Adolf Hitler. He has seen the radicalization on the right in recent years with the rise of Donald Trump and says, "This is a good start, but we have to go even further."

Micah Loewinger: In 2019, he launched the first of his so-called Groyper wars, where he directed his followers to antagonize Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA speakers both at events and online.

Ben Lorber: Yes, so he was telling many of his followers who were in college to go to Charlie Kirk events or other TP USA events and to get in line during the Q&A and ask questions like, "Why don't we support an end to all immigration?" or "Why does the US give billions of dollars every year to Israel?" or "Why do we allow LGBTQ people to have leadership in the conservative movement?" These views, or most of them anyway, are standard fare in today's conservative movement of 2025. In 2019, they were quite radical. MAGA leaders like Charlie Kirk were not prepared to go that far. He was really able to position his Groypers as emblematic of the new wave of Gen Z conservatives who were asking tough questions.

Micah Loewinger: We've seen him turn against Trump and the GOP establishment many times.

Nick Fuentes: Trumpism was a cult. That was the moment when I realized liberals are right.

Micah Loewinger: There's one clip where he says--

Nick Fuentes: This administration today just made it so that airlines don't have to refund you for canceling your flights. They're not giving away anything. Like if anything, the Democrats give stuff away. Think about it. Biden forgave student loans. Biden took medical debt off your credit score. That helped me. You know when Trump has ever helped my life? Zero times ever. Never gotten anything.

Ben Lorber: At the end of the day, he's operating in a crowded field of right-wing influencers who are all trying to distinguish themselves. He has to find ways to stay edgy to keep up his brand as an outsider at a time when the MAGA movement has moved so far rightward that many of his ideas over the years have been adopted. People like him have their eyes on the future. Trump is not going to live forever. Nick Fuentes, his criticisms are a way to position himself as more radical and more on the edge and more in the vanguard of whatever comes next after Trump.

Micah Loewinger: Fuentes's appeal has waxed and waned, but it was really October 7th in particular and Elon Musk's purchase of X and subsequent reinstatement of Fuentes's X account that supercharged his online fame. Is that fair to say?

Ben Lorber: Yes, that's a great way to put it. Before Elon Musk purchased Twitter, extreme Groyper rhetoric was mostly not allowed on the platform. It was mostly on Gab or 4chan or Telegram. Once Elon Musk opened the floodgates, Nick Fuentes's accounts had been reinstated. Thousands of Groypers made new accounts. The platform really became awash with even more hardline anti-Semitic and white nationalist content.

Once Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones were let back in after October 7th, they were able to capitalize on widespread outrage that evolved over Israel's relentless annihilation of Gaza and to turn it in an even more anti-Semitic direction by spreading memes about how the US support of Israel was due to a Jewish conspiracy. Nick's influence grew. His Twitter account gained hundreds of thousands of followers in the two years now since October 7th. He's invited onto larger conservative platforms. His voice is more welcomed, thanks in part to people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who, while they aren't as radical as Nick, have also been spreading anti-Semitism laced in with critiques of Israel.

Micah Loewinger: Owens and Fuentes filmed a podcast together in which she played back to him clips of things that he said, which ended in a public meltdown between the two. Later in the summer, Tucker Carlson called Fuentes this weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago, saying that he's really talented, like legit, but is also clearly part of a campaign to discredit non-crazy, right-wing voices. To which Fuentes clapped back, accusing Carlson of being this trust fund elite.

Nick Fuentes: He's lonely. He's weird. He lives in a basement. I'm sorry. Did you guys forget that that's your target audience that you're trying to pander to? I am that person. I am a spokesman for the disaffected white man because I am one, and you two are not.

Micah Loewinger: Is this all just petty attempts to discredit each other and boost their own bottom lines, or are these fault lines among these right-wing influencers significant?

Ben Lorber: It's both/and. Fuentes does represent the most hardline anti-Semitic, neo-fascist version of this America First movement. By comparison, people like Tucker Carlson, if you can even believe it, they have one foot in less radical direction. A little closer to the establishment camp.

Micah Loewinger: As you've said, he's had the carpet rolled out for him by a number of prominent, less extreme right-wing podcast hosts. People like Glenn Greenwald, the Nelk Boys on their Kick livestream, on the show Raw Talk. One thing that he seems to do when he goes on these types of podcasts is he will moderate his speech a little bit. Here's what he said to Glenn Greenwald earlier this month.

Nick Fuentes: As I get older, I feel like an obligation to be more responsible in that way. I think that I have become a lot more mature. I have to say, though, I just find a lot of things funny. I can't help it if other people don't see the sense of humor.

Ben Lorber: Nick Fuentes's season opening, if he can present himself as reformed and more wise and if he can say, "Oh, I was just making jokes for the last 10 years. All my Holocaust jokes, my praise of Hitler, that was this edgy humor. I'm a shock jock," he's trying to capitalize on this moment in the spotlight and put himself further into the mainstream. The fact that that's even thinkable for him is a barometer of just how far we've come. I would also caution, though, it doesn't mean that he has become some all-powerful influencer on the right. I think he's having a moment to call it some sort of generational run, as his supporters say, is a bit overplayed.

Micah Loewinger: He has claimed that there are Groypers in every department of the government. In light of reporting from Politico, that doesn't seem so far-fetched, but you don't buy it?

Ben Lorber: Yes, no, I don't buy it. He's been saying this for years. I think there was a time in 2020 or 2021 when he did have of contacts in the conservative movement. I think he's burned most of those bridges. I think a lot of suit-and-tie conservatives now who've gone and gotten jobs in the Trump administration, they don't take him seriously. They view him as too far out there. This isn't to say that today's suit-and-tie conservatives are more moderate. They agree with 85% of Nick Fuentes's views. They just don't view him as a serious conservative operative.

Micah Loewinger: Point taken. Paul Ingrassia, the man who was nominated by Trump to lead the Office of Special Counsel, who subsequently lost the nomination after Politico reported text messages of him describing his so-called Nazi streak. Paul Ingrassia does have connections with Fuentes, right?

Ben Lorber: Yes. Paul Ingrassia has been documented to have attended at least one Nick Fuentes rally. He has expressed support for him on his blog. Paul Ingrassia's nomination was just denied. I do think that outright support for Nick Fuentes is one step too far, even for today's MAGA movement. Fuentes might want it that way. Nick Fuentes is happy to be one step outside of the mainstream, but getting his ideas out there.

Micah Loewinger: Shifting the Overton window, even if only a few meet him there. This has sparked a really interesting debate among prominent conservatives since those two Politico stories about Nazi comments from Paul Ingrassia and the Young Republicans. A debate about whether this type of discourse needs to be actively policed. You have people like the vice president of the United States, JD Vance, trying to completely ignore it, saying, "Who cares about a dumb chat room? Those are just kids." Obviously, they're not just kids. A lot of these were 30-something-year-olds who work in the GOP. Then you have people like Ben Shapiro, who played footsie with the fringes of his party but is put off by all the explicit anti-Semitism. Here he is speaking on a recent podcast with Matt Walsh.

Ben Shapiro: I think that there are things that get said on the right that are really, really, really ugly, and pretending those away doesn't make them go away. To pretend that it has not infiltrated a lot of very important spaces, I think, is whistling past the graveyard. Now, again, that's not about the political--

Micah Loewinger: Do you think that people like Shapiro and some other prominent conservatives who have denounced this stuff are coming to realize that they might be losing control of parts of their base?

Ben Lorber: I think that is happening. Ever since the Biden years, MAGA influencers have tried to hold by this position they call "no enemies on the right." The emphasis is to not police their own ranks. They view that as doing the left's work for them. That just creates an opening for more radical, outright fascists to gain entrance into the conservative conversation. To be honest, I think progressives could learn something from that. The old guard leaders of the Democratic Party, they are very hostile to new energy.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, but what energy and who? This week, we also learned that Graham Platner, a Democratic US Senate candidate from Maine, had a prominent Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, which, of course, followed a CNN report that revealed Platner had made racist and homophobic comments on Reddit. You have some in the party saying, "There's just not room for this type of bigotry," even if Platner has apologized.

Meanwhile, you have the kind of Bernie Sanders response, which is, "I still support the guy," and to extrapolate, like, "How can we beat the right if we are not allowing people who can speak to the white male voters that we've lost if we can't allow a candidate to exist in our party if he's truly a changed man?" Is no Nazis allowed not itself a good rule, whether we're talking about the right or the left?

Ben Lorber: Yes, of course. To be clear, when I said we can learn something, I do not mean allowing for more bigoted views in any form. I meant allowing for more insurgent, progressive energy that is more reflective of the need for millions of Americans to win a living wage, or for young people to have their college loans forgiven. We often see old guard leaders who are very resistant to allowing people like that into the conversation.

Micah Loewinger: I don't mean to draw a false equivalency here by bringing up Graham Platner. He's just one candidate who seems to want to distance himself from the Nazis. He got the tattoo covered. Meanwhile, Fuentes and the like are proudly praising Hitler as they try to infiltrate the Republican Party. You wrote a whole book last year about anti-Semitism. The fact that there's just so much Nazi symbolism in the news right now, is it just a coincidence, or do you think this says something about this moment in our politics?

Ben Lorber: In my book, we talk about how anti-Semitism is one ideology at the core of rising white Christian nationalism in this country. The very first day of this new administration, Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk flashing what he later claimed was not a Nazi salute. The right has long claimed that figures like George Soros represent a Jewish conspiracy behind Black Lives Matter and non-white immigration. This kind of anti-Semitism has always been implicit, at least in MAGA politics. People like Nick Fuentes have been at the vanguard of trying to make it explicit.

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

Ben Lorber: Thanks so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Ben Lorber is the co-author of the book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[MUSIC - Michael Andrews: Cellar Door]

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

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

News clip: Stanford University's independent student newspaper is filing a lawsuit against two Trump administration officials, claiming some of its writers in the US on student visas have "self-censored" to avoid being targeted for deportation.

News clip: The Stanford Daily argues the Trump administration is using a section of federal immigration law to target and deport pro-Palestinian activists.

News clip: Claiming that it's received a number of requests from lawfully present non-citizens to have their names, quotes, or photos removed from articles that many international students have stopped speaking to the paper's journalists altogether.

Micah Loewinger: Over 50 student media groups across the country have recently signed an amicus brief in support of The Stanford Daily's lawsuit. Many of whom say they've also seen a chilling effect on their campuses.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Of course, we signed onto this brief, challenging the constitutionality of that. It is a huge overstep of the First Amendment and strips these people who are here legally of their ability to express themselves.

Micah Loewinger: This is Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, a junior at University of Texas at Dallas. He says that student media are also facing pressure from school leaders. Back in June, I profiled Gregorio after he and his student newspaper found themselves at war with the UT Dallas administration in 2024.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: I had never gone into university with the plan of becoming a journalist.

Micah Loewinger: His student journalism career began the first day of his freshman year when he picked up a copy of The Mercury, the campus newspaper.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: It was this investigative exposé on the front page talking about a cat torturer, who worked in one of the departments at the university. This man had been torturing the cats of his partner at the time as some form of psychological abuse. That, to me, stood out that we had student journalists who were going out of their way to find something like this and put together a really good piece. That, to me, was like, "Oh, okay, I could do something like that on campus."

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio began spending his free time at The Mercury, first as a reporter, then a news editor, and by the end of his freshman year, spring 2024, editor-in-chief. A wildly rapid rise for a first-year student.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: May 1st was my first day as editor-in-chief, and it was also the first day UTD had an encampment.

[crowd protests]

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: By this point, we'd already seen over 80 other encampments form across the United States, so we had an understanding of like, "Oh, this is generally how it happens."

News clip: We started to very suddenly see law enforcement amass.

News clip: Police, SWAT, heavily armed. They have baton--

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Over 60 police officers, all in riot gear, some of them holding batons, some of them holding rifles. They had a vehicle that had a mounted tear gas launcher on top. We spotted sniper rifles posted on top of the student union building, facing off against peaceful students who were, at that point, eating food after having finished a prayer in their peaceful encampment.

News clip:: This encampment being broken up by police.

News clip: We saw them tossing tents over.

News clip: This person right here, he's screaming. He's being taken away.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We thought that's insane. We have just seen the most violent event in campus history. We took some time to just discuss what we were going to do with this.

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio and his team at The Mercury began work on a special edition of the paper devoted to explaining what and how this had all transpired, featuring a timeline of events, various editorials, and some new reporting featuring interviews with some of the 21 who had been arrested that day.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Thousands of people, alumni, faculty, students have all signed petitions, saying that they are furious with what has happened. We reached out repeatedly to various departments of the university. Every time we asked, "Why was this done?" we weren't even graced with a PR response of just like, "We're doing what's best for the university." It was just full silence.

Micah Loewinger: On May 20th, they began handing out their special issue.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: The front page of the special issue was this big, dramatic juxtaposition photo at the very top of the front page. On one side, you have all of the students waving their flags. On the other side, you have police and riot gear coming in against the students.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. In the middle of the cover, we see in big bold letters, "Students speak, admin silences."

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Yes, and then underneath that, we have the words, "Welcome to UTD," because we're going to be giving this out at freshman orientations. Underneath the fold, we had a scatter of blood spots. People were injured that day. People were also raising hands, covered in blood that we had photos of. It just says, "For more information, contact President Benson," the president of UTD at the time. Then we put his email and contact information that are provided by the school.

Micah Loewinger: You designed this cover in this special issue with the express intent of handing it out at orientation?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: You had to have known that this was going to provoke the administration. It's a big, fat FU to them. No?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We fully expected that they would be upset with it. We spoke to the Student Press Law Center in advance. We spoke to members of the Society of Professional Journalists to make sure everything is legally checked. We've done everything we ought to be doing as journalists.

Micah Loewinger: How did the school ultimately respond to it?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: They demoted our advisor two days after the issue was published. He told me that my head was next on the chopping block based off of the conversation he was at because the school was very upset with how they were portrayed.

Micah Loewinger: A day later, Gregorio and some of the other editors from The Mercury were called into a meeting with Jenni Huffenberger, the senior director of marketing for the Student Affairs Department at UT Dallas.

Jenni Huffenberger: The latest issue obviously has gotten the attention of administration.

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio secretly taped this meeting and has since shared the audio with OTM.

Jenni Huffenberger: I need you guys to understand that the approach on this issue was incredibly flawed. What I see here is wall-to-wall activism, and that really is journalistic malpractice. There's opinion that is just saturating this content.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We asked her what was journalistic malpractice, and she did not elaborate.

Mike Hiestand: Journalism malpractices come at way too far. It was nothing like that.

Micah Loewinger: Mike Hiestand from the Student Press Law Center, one of the organizations that reviewed The Mercury special issue before it went out.

Mike Hiestand: I think the students were frustrated, and I think they were simply voicing their frustration in that of their classmates. That's what journalism sometimes is.

Micah Loewinger: Jenni Huffenberger did not respond to multiple requests for comment. After the meeting, the school hired a new advisor for The Mercury, a woman named Lydia Lum. The students were initially optimistic after they saw her résumé because she'd worked in journalism for over 20 years. By the end of the summer, Gregorio was back in the hot seat.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: She tells us that unless we start doing prior review, unless we start giving her access to all of our material and letting her into every single one of our meetings, we wouldn't be allowed to travel to conferences anymore because she wouldn't be able to make a proper business decision about that. In that meeting, I told Lydia that so long as I was editor-in-chief, we would not be doing prior review or any other form of censorship.

Mike Hiestand: Gregorio was absolutely right to say that this is not something that we are going to tolerate.

Micah Loewinger: Mike Hiestand from the Student Press Law Center.

Mike Hiestand: At least within public colleges in America, not only is it unusual, it's illegal. We've got clear case law in the books that says that school officials do not have the right to insist on reading an approving copy before it's printed. That's the job of the editors.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We did agree with her that we would do more meetings with her. After our pitch meeting with staff, we would talk to her about every single pitch and what our general thoughts for it were so that she was up-to-date on what the actual articles were. She said that was okay, but given that we were all fired a few weeks later, I guess it wasn't okay.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, so this is how it went down. First, Gregorio was informed that the school planned to remove him as editor-in-chief. When we requested an interview from UT Dallas, the university sent us a statement saying, "For clarification, the former editor was not removed for editorial content, but because he violated student media bylaws." In a memo written by Lydia Lum that she said justified your removal, she accused you of holding multiple student jobs in addition to running the newspaper. You were a PA, a peer advisor, in university housing, which is a role that provided monthly pay and free student housing. Is it true that you had two on-campus jobs at the same time?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: I had two roles, but we had also double-checked with Jenni if that was permissible because the specific prohibition is you can't have two employee positions at UTD just because they don't want to pay you like health care or compensation in any way by going over a 20-hour limit. However, Mercury editor-in-chief, housing peer advisor, neither of them are classified as official employee positions, and they're instead classified as stipend positions.

Micah Loewinger: Lydia Lum declined our interview request. Shortly after his hearing, Gregorio was fired. The Mercury staff voted to strike in protest.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: They had an opinion piece, which was just, "This is the stance of The Mercury's entire team," and we're not going to write for The Mercury unless we are spoken to by the school, unless an effort is made to engage with us.

Micah Loewinger: Did the administration respond to the strike?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: They suspended all of The Mercury email accounts on day one of the strike. We come to the conclusion that like, "If they're not going to engage with us in good faith, we'll just make our own newspaper."

Micah Loewinger: In late September 2024, the former Mercury team launched a nonprofit newspaper and website called The Retrograde. Get it? Mercury, retrograde? They raised around $7,000 to get their printing and business operations off the ground. An average issue costs a bit more than $1,000 all in. The UT Dallas student government passed a measure, recognizing The Retrograde as the official paper on campus. Gregorio and some of his team attended the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association convention. He says he and other student journalists in the state are working in a flaming cauldron of chaos.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: It was just like talking to people in the trenches of World War I. I spoke to people from the University of Houston student newspaper. They had just had their student government fully dissolved. We spoke to students from smaller universities across the state, community colleges who have their own newspapers. Those students talk about how their advisor gets actively intimidated by the university, saying, "Hey, we're a small school. If we have to make budget cuts, you might be up next if your coverage is negative of us." These students just fully don't cover protests that happen on their campuses. They don't cover ICE raids that happen on their campuses out of fear that they won't have a newspaper. We're in a cauldron because we're being boiled alive.

Micah Loewinger: Why then, given the obstacles that have been placed in your way, do you continue to do this work? Why do you think that student journalism at UT Dallas and beyond is worth all the trouble?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: I think it's worth all the trouble because someone has to do it. Because once you stop doing journalism, people can just act with impunity. That, in my opinion, is the biggest dispute I have with the UTD administration. They want to act with impunity. If people are seeing headlines where it's like, "UTD mass arrest, 21 people." If there are photos of just the brutality of that day out on the internet, it doesn't make the school look good. If it were up to them, we wouldn't be here.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez is a junior at the University of Texas at Dallas. He's still working at The Retrograde and is still very much involved in speaking about the rights of student journalists.

[music]

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 and Sam Baer. 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.

[music]

 

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