ICE Is Turning Real Conflict Into Viral Content

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, host Charlie Warzel speaks with the reporter Ryan Broderick about how the internet’s fragmentation of attention and facts has bled into real-world political violence in Minneapolis this month. From the viral spread of a right-wing video about day-care fraud in Minnesota to the aggressive ICE activity in the region that followed, the episode charts how online content routinely shapes government action and public perception. Broderick, who spent days in Minneapolis after the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, describes what he saw on the ground: how protesters and law enforcement are behaving differently this time around, especially with regard to filming and digital organizing. The conversation explores a novel and concerning feedback loop where what happens online spurs real-world interventions, which then generate more content for audiences elsewhere, compounding division and uncertainty about what’s true. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Tired of rage scrolling through AI slop and clickbait just to get a handle on today's news? Meet Inpress, the algorithm-free news app that makes it fun and rewarding to stay informed. Track your media literacy and rediscover reality. Download today at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescek and Anna Rappam, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:49Charlie Warzel?

  Even going back to Renee Good, the idea that there was an ICE agent that was filming while involved in this life or death, supposedly for him, situation, right? You're claiming that, but at the same time, you're using your phone to document this.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  I've never had a law enforcement agent pull up their, like, assumedly, personal smartphone and film me. Like, I've never seen that. To have them just, like, have a gun in one hand and a phone in the other blew my mind. I just have to wonder, like, where is that content going? Where are those photos and videos going?

• 1:28Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel. Welcome to Galaxy Brain. Around 2015, I started to do a lot of reporting on the ways that the internet was causing a societal rupture, right? It's possible, I think, that for Americans and maybe for everybody, that there's never been a true shared reality, that we have always been living, in some respect, in filter bubbles of our own making, even before the internet. But as the world really came online, and as our politics and our culture were uploaded

• 2:08Charlie Warzel?

  to these social networks that are essentially built for viral advertising, that the shreds of our modern culture were consumed by a constellation of content, right? Much of it algorithmically fed to us. And that something changed in that moment. I wrote back in 2017 that it felt like that was the first year, in the first year of the Trump presidency, where it just became obvious that Americans were effectively living in two universes, and each one was propped up by their own information ecosystems. Around that time, too, I was also writing a lot about the ways that technology would continue to blur and make it harder to understand what was real and what wasn't real.

• 2:53Charlie Warzel?

  In 2018, I wrote this piece where I spoke to a number of researchers, including a man named Aviv Ovadia, and he specifically warned of this infocalypse, is what he called it, an information apocalypse. Basically, a future where AI tools and craven, hyper partisan actors on this algorithmic internet that's completely fragmented and fractured and tech powered would allow anyone to cast aspersions on any event or anything or any fact. People could just fake anything, and they argued that would eventually create this realm where, to borrow a phrase from the researcher Peter Pomerantsev, "nothing is true and everything is possible."

• 3:34Charlie Warzel?

  People, they said, would be radicalized, they'd be overwhelmed, they'd be hopelessly divided, and they'd be sad. But mostly, it would get to this state where, when you can't figure out what's true, when everything is just this information war, that eventually you just start to tune out, right? And this was all pre-pandemic. It felt very plausible, but degenerative AI tools weren't out yet. They were pretty crude, they were pretty bad. So there was this feeling that it was plausible, but it still felt so futuristic.

• 4:08Charlie Warzel?

  But today, it kind of feels like we're living in that future.

• 4:13Charlie Warzel?

  Just in January, just this month, it feels to me, as someone who's covered this for a long time, that we are living in a pretty straightforward depiction of what the worst-case post-truth information apocalypse scenario was of the people who were warning about it in the late 2010s. I mean, if you just think about this month, you have X and Grok and this major platform generating and distributing this AI non-consensual sexual abuse material and having it viralized and weaponized to intimidate and harass minors and women. You have a terminally online government and you have the officials marshaling the resources

• 4:54Charlie Warzel?

  of the military in service of propaganda to perform for this imagined audience online. And that's all happened with the US's military invasion and capture of Maduro and all the content that has been posted alongside it. You have a YouTuber named Nick Shirley, who at the end of last year, posted this video online alleging daycare fraud in Minnesota involving the state's Somali population. That video exploded online and eventually led to a chain of events that led to the Trump administration deploying a higher level of enforcement of ICE on mosques to the Twin Cities. This, of course, culminated in an increased amount of raids and ICE agents in the street

• 5:36Charlie Warzel?

  in Minneapolis and ultimately in the tragic confrontation where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in her car. This, of course, was captured on video and that video quickly spread online with people analyzing it from multiple angles. There have been tons of protests in the ensuing weeks. So much of that has been captured online. Protesters filming ICE, ICE agents filming protesters. Incredible amounts of content on social networks of people being abducted or arrested or having tear gas deployed on them. It is this situation where it feels like there's this battle being fought through everyone's

• 6:21Charlie Warzel?

  phone. It feels a bit like a hinge point and it feels like there is a...

• 6:30Charlie Warzel?

  Despite all of the political issues happening here, that there is a technological issue, that there is a, that this is all a bit of a culmination of things that I've been following for a really long time. Somebody else who's been following that, in some cases alongside me, is Ryan Broderick. Ryan Broderick writes the Garbage Day newsletter and is the host of the Panic World podcast. Ryan and I worked together at BuzzFeed during the 2010s for quite a while, covering the ways that the internet changes how we behave politically and the way that it can impact some of these political movements. Ryan was someone who

• 7:11Charlie Warzel?

  BuzzFeed sent to cover all kinds of online and offline protests around the world. He's been to 22 countries, reported from six continents, and he's been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections. Ryan recently came back from observing all the protesting in Minneapolis, and he joins me today to talk about what happened in Minnesota, what is happening, and the ways in which all of this can be linked and not linked to an extremely online society. He joins me. But first, a quick break.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Think social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech, alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Raffman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 9:05Charlie Warzel?

  All right, Ryan Broderick, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. Congrats on becoming a podcaster. I'm really sorry that happened to you.

• 9:16Charlie Warzel?

  I know. It's everything I ever wanted to just be mocked on YouTube and across multi-platforms. It's lovely to.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  It's about discovering new audiences that hate you. That's what modern life is.

• 9:28Charlie Warzel?

  That's what we're doing. Oh, man. Well, I appreciate it. I want to talk to you about your reporting. You went to Minneapolis just a few days after a ICE agent killed Renee Good, and you were there for protests around the city and around the federal building. I want to start with, just tell me what it was like to be on the ground in Minneapolis for those few days.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  It's very surreal. I've definitely come back with a profoundly different take on the seriousness, I would say, of the Trump administration. I think you and I have been having essentially one conversation for a decade, which is like, how seriously should we be taking this stuff? You know, is this just like internet chatter, or is this a real existential threat to American democracy? And now that I've kind of seen the whole hyperobject, you know, from internet content down to what is effectively like an occupation of an American city, I think we need to take it very seriously. I'm pretty freaked out.

• 10:32Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah. So give me a sense of, you know, because you were kind of there in the beginning of this. I mean, things are still going on. There's still people protesting. There's, you know, this is not like a finished movement in terms of the raids in the Twin Cities, but. Since you were there in the beginning, tell me how you you saw it evolve in terms of, you know, the both the protesters and and ISIS participation there.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we saw the news come across social that Renee Nicole Good had been killed in Minneapolis. And my producer Grant and I, we work on our show Panic World together. So we started talking to our partners on our podcast, which is Courier News. And I was like, look, I think this is this is big. We should do this. And so we went, well, basically, we were there 24 hours after she was killed. And we spent the weekend there. And, you know, if we had had the money and the resources, I'd still be there. I think it is like still unfolding and developing. But the point of our trip was not, you know, to, and I keep stressing this in everywhere I talk about this, like, our point was not to, like, re-report what people in Minnesota are already covering.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  They have a great local news scene, but there are specific questions that I think people like you and I ask of events like this that local news doesn't have the bandwidth or even the interest in asking. Or, you know, and so it was really useful for me to just, I don't follow the action for four or five days and see how this community is using technology, how they're responding to technology, how the internet is shaping the events on the ground. And I think we did that, but I think this is going to become just sort of like one of those like long political quagmires that like happens during Trump administrations, like it's just going to drag out.

• 12:26Charlie Warzel?

  So give me a sense of the level of onlineness of these protests. Give me a sense of that, that how the tech is shaping it. I think for the first part of the question is a lot of modern protest movements are very online organized, you know, via social networks and different apps and things like that. This one seems to be based off of the reporting I saw a little bit. You read that a little bit differently.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so I was trying to think back of like, what was the last, what was the last protest I went to? And I went to a few during 2020, but like the last sort of movement like this that I saw close was the Hong Kong Democracy Movement in 2019. And I was there for what would eventually be, you know, I think no one knew at the time, but it was the last time they protest before China really cracked down. And that was totally online. Like, I watched a completely silent crowd moving in perfect organization.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Using Telegram, which I really like freaky, like these Gen Z kids had figured out like how to use these messaging apps in a way that I'd never seen before. Minnesota is not that like it is not like there's a hashtag and we're all like spray painting around the city and we're wearing Guy Fawkes masks and shit. No, none of that. It is people who are, if they're using apps, they're using Signal. They're using a walkie talkie app. There, I think there's a couple that they're using to organize like ICE monitoring and they're finding out about protests and demonstrations by just going to them. Like, like we, we interviewed countless people who are like, yeah, like I was on my way back from work and I saw this and I'm mad. So I came by like, and we talked to people who've never been to a protest before in their lives. Like,

• 14:08Speaker 03

  you know, we're talking like middle aged people who are like, I don't have any real political thoughts and this is insane and I'm going to come out and I'm going to, I'm going to protest. So it was very different. And to compare that to the other side, which is like extremely online, was a total inversion of, of everything I've seen in my career. Like it really stopped me in my tracks.

• 14:31Charlie Warzel?

  Well, let's talk a little bit about that because something striking that I saw in your reporting, just like coming across on, on social media as you were like sharing in the moment.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  You didn't read the, you didn't read the post?

• 14:41Charlie Warzel?

  Well, I always read the post.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  You just read, you just read the Blue Sky post. I see. I know. I get it. Yeah.

• 14:46Charlie Warzel?

  I mean, you think I'm going to pay for a subscription? I mean, come on.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 14:50Charlie Warzel?

  Uh, something that I saw though, was you, you were videoing a couple of what seemed to be like content creators, like stepping out of ICE vehicles or at least government or unmarked government looking vehicles, filming and then like popping back and not like, not addressing themselves. What did you see in terms of creators, influencers who were sort of either deployed by or administration adjacent or supported by the administration in some, you know, in some facet?

• 15:21Speaker 03

  So the specific incident you're talking about with the guy who jumps out of the ICE vehicle, basically this woman gets arrested by ICE because she punches their window as they drive by, like didn't damage the window or whatever, if anyone cares. But like, uh, they jump out of the cars that, you know, pull up and they just tackle her to the ground. And then right behind them coming out of the same car was a guy in. Playing clothes, like a, like a nice suit, you know, like sunglasses and he's smiling and he's filming the whole thing. And I am screaming at him like, who are you? Like, why aren't you in uniform? Who are you with? Where's that video going? I later find out that it's a Fox News correspondent that was on a ride along with ICE. But there was also just like a ton of other right wing networks that are around, like the Daily Wire was filming people and OAN and News Nation and all the baddies.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  There were also a group of YouTubers, live streamers, content creators that were running around the city like harassing people. And they had a much less official connection to ICE, but obviously like whenever they would rile up the crowd, the ICE agents would come out and protect them from the crowd. And that culminated in last weekend with the leader of that group, Jake Lang, a January 6th insurrectionist. He tried to burn a Quran on the steps of the Minneapolis State, uh, he tried to burn a Quran on the steps of the Minneapolis City Hall and uh, got his ass beat. And so it's, that to me is like much more connected to what we've already seen in Trump administrations, like

• 16:46Speaker 03

  the roving gangs of content creators that are just like, you know, trying to antagonize leftists and make them look violent on stream. But the fact that ICE was so brutal to the protesters and while also basically running defense for these content creators, they, they, they weren't trying to hide it in the way that like, I think, you know, police forces were in the, in the 2020 protests.

• 17:13Charlie Warzel?

  Well, let's talk a little bit about what you saw from ICE agents because there is this element, and I want to get into it in a second, of this content creation spectacle. But in terms of, you know, you saying you came back from this, and it's very obviously understandable why you would feel this way. Like I'm freaked out about this and the seriousness of what's happening there and what the administration's doing. But can you just describe for me and for people, you know, who may not be mainlining this stuff on their phones? Like what you were seeing from ICE that was so disturbing or the way that they were, you know, treating protesters?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  They don't even seem to understand like why they're trying to control the crowd like they don't really, there's not, it's not like, I've dealt with, you know, antagonistic police forces in protests before, and there's a rhythm to it. There's sort of like an assumption that like, if you do this, they won't really hassle you and, and you know, we can get into the weeds of like, how that breaks down as protests become more extreme, but like, there's like protocols. ICE does not have that. They don't really care. They will scream at you, they'll yell at you, they'll kind of break kayfabe. They are also filming you. They are like very intent on filming you with their cell phones and with telescopic lenses that they have guys

• 18:36Speaker 03

  like parked behind them in cars like filming through the window.

• 18:39Charlie Warzel?

  And that feels very different, right?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  I've never, I've never seen that.

• 18:43Charlie Warzel?

  Like, e- even going back to Renee Good, the idea that there was an ICE agent that was whole, like, filming while involved in this, you know, life or death, you know, supposedly for him situation, right? You're claiming that, but at the same time, you're using your phone to, to, to document this. That feels very unique. That feels like a very different form of, you know, enforcement tactics.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've, I've never seen it. I've, I've, I've never had a law enforcement agent pull up their pers- like, assumedly personal smartphone and film me. Like, I, I, I've never seen that. And, like, I mean, obviously, like, there are agencies that do surveillance on protest movements and it happens, but to have them just like, have a gun in one hand and a phone in the other blew my mind. I, um, and I just have to wonder like, where, where's that content going? Like, where, where are those photos and videos going? The, the fact that these guys are just taking photos of people and either uploading them to some kind of database or sharing them with each other, like, my, you know, my mind sort of

• 19:52Speaker 03

  goes to, okay, then what? So, right, these guys, let's say they have dozens of photos and videos of random people in Minneapolis on their phones, like, are they sending them to each other, being like, keep an eye out for this person and like, beat their ass if you see them? Like, like, I don't know, we will eventually, at some kind of trial perhaps, find out like, what these guys are doing on, like, you know, on back channel, but it, it sort of adds to the idea that these guys are like, I don't know, like, like, content creators first and a Gestapo second or something. It just, it very surreal, very dystopian.

• 20:24Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, and, and the non-professionalization of all of it, right? There is a piece, I believe it was last week, could have been the week before, where a reporter applied for, writing for Slate, applied to work for ICE, had a military background, but certainly was like, somebody who had been hypercritical of the Trump administration and immigration policy enforcement policies, and ICE in general, and still got hired in the idea of being like, the threshold is so low. Did it add to the anxiety, knowing that you're dealing with a sort of improvised force? Like, not, not only that the guys are out there filming, it seems like they want to be creating some content, but also just like, this idea that, again, the standards of, of training might be totally different.

• 21:09Charlie Warzel?

  Like, did that add to the sense of unease in terms of the protesters and the people who are around?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, you can't really predict what they're gonna do. I, I remember on, like, the Saturday we were there, there's this massive protest in Minneapolis, you know, thousand, 5,000 people. Many of them immigrants, like, many of them with immigrant rights groups and stuff. And, you know, we're going through these little side streets in Minneapolis, and I just kept thinking, like, what is stopping Trump from saying on Truth Social, "Hey, like, get him." And Greg Bavino and everybody, like, cordoning off two sides of the street and just kettling everybody. I got, we've, you know, that, that can happen, like, the, the, the, the sort of,

• 21:55Speaker 03

  the, the general unease of the whole thing is that, like, you're not dealing with a accountable, a rational, a identifiable law enforcement group. You're dealing with guys in masks that are filming you, that don't really have any kind of protocol. And don't really seem to care about anything other than quotas. Like I, I, I read that they're, they're supposed to be getting like 3,000 arrests a day. And the other thing is like when they do detain you, you know, in a normal situation, a reporter gets detained at a protest, you might get thrown in jail for like a few hours, maybe, maybe the weekend, you might miss filing your story. And then, you know, you go home with the ICE detention facilities, like they might just

• 22:35Speaker 03

  put you somewhere. And so if you're a reporter and you're trying to cover this, they've already made filming their activities a possible crime, according to what is MPSM seven, they, if you film their activity, they can charge you with terrorism, they can, they can charge you with obstruction. And there's really no oversight for what they're doing. So the risks are just a lot higher than any sort of protest movement I've ever seen.

• 23:02Charlie Warzel?

  And I believe, what is it? Is it NSPM seven, right? National Security Presidential Memorandum seven?

• 23:09Speaker 03

  NSPM seven, yeah.

• 23:10Charlie Warzel?

  Is basically an executive order that is meant to dismantle left wing terrorism and basically allowing the government to qualify people as domestic terrorists or domestic terrorist organizations, which allows for different standard of prosecution. And yeah, so that adding to, adding to all that confusion and chaos. So you, you, you, you know, you saw this, you, you wrote, we are all content for ICE. It's very clear that, you know, the Department of Homeland Security has, has basically transformed immigration arrests into this visual propaganda online. It's very clear

• 23:52Charlie Warzel?

  that, that there is, there is a strategy here. There is a lot of pressure from the administration to have ICE, you know, really active in terms of a, a media campaign. What purpose do you think it is serving them to do that?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  I think everyone is trying to answer this question.

• 24:11Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  And this might be a unfulfilling answer, but I think there's a couple of things happening simultaneously. I think one, I think the Trump administration is full of like genuinely xenophobic ideologues that want blood and soil nationalism and they love this stuff. I think that Trump is a creature of the media and he sort of understands that everything has to have a media component to it. And we've seen that like, I don't think that he's playing four dimensional chess, but I think he understands like everything he does have to, has to have some kind of news cycle attached to, to feel like it matters for him.

• 24:45Charlie Warzel?

  Well, I'll just say on, on January 20th, which is Tuesday of this week, Donald Trump posts on Truth Social, like, we need more photos of people who were arresting in Minneapolis. We need more documentation of just how bad they are. Like, it's very clear that, while he's not playing four dimensional chess that we know of, he is, as you said, just like hyper aware of the, the idea that like this needs to be fed. People need to have this, this raw meat of like, our nation is under siege in order to continue to support and to justify.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Right. And I think the last part of this is, I think it is safe to assume that the Trump administration is inside of their own filter bubble. I think this is happening across culture en masse. And I think based on the reports I've seen coming out of like sort of the inner circle, you know, if you want to, if you want to believe them, they were surprised that people were pissed about this. And I, and I have to, you know, I don't think Trump is actually particularly online. I've never thought that. I'm like, I don't think he knows what a, what a 4chan is. But I do think that he has surrounded himself with podcasters and posters. And I think that those people are super tapped into X. And, and you know, we, you know, we haven't actually talked about this dimension of what's

• 26:03Speaker 03

  happening in Minneapolis yet, but I think it's important context. So ICE has been in the state for months. All of this ratchets up after the YouTube documentary by the right wing influencer Nick Shirley. Nick Shirley's documentary alleges fraud at daycares in Minnesota. All of it had been reported before. It was even being investigated by the FBI already. Like they, like, we've known about this. But the right wingers who had never heard of this because they don't read real newspapers and don't have accurate information pipelines were incensed. So that to me points in the direction of that these people genuinely do not know things. And you can say it's by design. You can say it's because they're all stupid. You can say it's because they're addicted to the internet. It could be a combination of the three, but that does inform their

• 26:47Speaker 03

  behavior. And we've seen this all year that, you know, all of last year, they are, the administration is doing things because they see them online.

• 26:55Charlie Warzel?

  Right. And also, I think too, there's the other side of this, and you wrote about this. Can't believe this was also in January, when the United States invaded Venezuela. But, you know, the idea of a, of a content first administration, but something you wrote, I'm gonna quote you to yourself here, which is always fun, I know. You said, "Politics and political violence is now something performed first and foremost for an online audience. It almost doesn't matter what happens I R L if it makes noise online." And I think that, you know, it's not just what you're saying, which is that there is this filter

• 27:35Charlie Warzel?

  bubble. There's this idea that like, this is acceptable, right? Like, like their whatever Overton window, or whatever you want to call it, like that, that this is fine. We can do this. People won't be mad if we act in this particular way. But there's also the idea of that imagined audience that, you know, maybe someone sees on, on, on X or some other place or whatever. But it's this idea of like, like, almost like one upsmanship, right? It's like, okay, you, you do this video of what's happening in Minneapolis supposedly, you know, with daycares and Somali refugees. And we're gonna like, basically perform fan

• 28:14Charlie Warzel?

  service, right? By sending a paramilitary force into that town. It seems like that level of the performance is really, really important here.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, once again, for people who are not like mainlining this stuff all day, and they're sort of thinking like, okay, Trump too, it's a little more in your face. It's got like a fresh new attitude, but it's like, basically, it's, you know, it's the same idea. And there's like a core loop.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Has changed. Trump won. He wakes up in the morning. He watches Fox and Friends. He performs the day. He then finds out the next morning how Fox and Friends has like digested what he's done and he just keeps going, right? So everything's kind of performed for this like TV channel that is then sort of synthesizing what he's doing and then influencing what he's doing. So the difference, though, between that loop and this one is that the internet is inherently a two-way street. So it's not just what was sort of downstream in the first administration, like the internet lights up because Trump does something, because Trump saw it on TV, and then TV lights up and then TV, like the role of TV in that equation kind of, kind of organized things in a way. There was like a rhythm to, there's a much more sort of reliable

• 29:26Speaker 03

  rhythm to it. This is way more chaotic because like Nick Shirley, he's making a video based off of what he's already seeing on the internet. It then goes back into the internet, which then influences what's happening in reality, which then influences what's happening on the internet. And, and I was sort of trying to figure out like, okay, when did this, this new loop start in earnest? And I, and I think I have it, which is the playbook, the test drive for all of this was Springfield, Ohio, and the conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in the park. Yeah. That whole thing, though, is a perfect illustration of what is now happening everywhere all at once. And it's happened, and I've even seen examples of it like happening in Venezuela, happening in Greenland, like it's this roving

• 30:11Speaker 03

  kind of like internet content machine that like just sort of lands where you live and then turns everything that's happening to you into this completely inexplicable content cycle that, you know, for people on the ground makes no sense because it's not really meant for them. And, and it, and it comes with conspiracy theories and viral videos and, and racist memes and AI imagery and paramilitary violence. Like it's all kind of part of the same thing.

• 30:39Charlie Warzel?

  It's, it's really interesting to, to think of it as, as like a, almost like a storm system that like develops outside, right? And just like comes to your, it comes to your, comes to your town. I, I have had trouble trying to get a sense of who this is like helping, who this is hurting, right? Cause on one hand, you have. All of this documented evidence of like what is essentially a paramilitary force drawing guns, you know, in public places on people, deploying tear gas and pepper balls and all kinds of, you know, chemical sprays on citizens, arresting people on whims, intimidating people, mocking them. And there's obviously like, of course, the, the video of an ICE

• 31:20Charlie Warzel?

  agent shooting a woman in broad daylight. And that all adds up, I think, in the eyes of, of, of people watching online or wherever. That, that is doing something, right, to, to, to people and how they view the country, their country. And then at the same time, these protests can also, as, as we're noting, give the administration a little bit of, of what it wants, right? It gives them content in order to depict these cities as war zones. And do you get a sense if this is like serving ISIS propaganda needs effectively right now? Or if this is in some ways just like information that is radicalizing people to get them to, you know, wake up to the political reality in the United States? Where do you see that

• 32:05Charlie Warzel?

  balance? Or like where that's coming out at the moment?

• 32:11Speaker 03

  That's like the million dollar question, I think. I mean,

• 32:13Charlie Warzel?

  Right. That's all we ask here on Galaxy, you know, the million dollar questions.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thank you for asking me the most complicated question of our time. Um, I think, I, I think there's a couple of ways to think about it. And they are, this is, this is always my cop out. But I do think in this case, like, if American monoculture ever did truly exist, like, like if, you know, we like to imagine it did, you know, pre-Facebook, but like, maybe it didn't. Maybe like the, the TV and movies made it feel like it existed. And we could all sort of believe in that. But, but let's, let's, let's assume, let's assume things are different. I think there are vastly different realities happening simultaneously in America.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  So there are people who are just not going outside and they are consuming all of this online and they are being radicalized either for or against it. And that's like one camp. And then there are the people that it's happening to directly. The ones I talk to are just like the most average Americans you could possibly imagine. And they're like, this is insanity. And now I have to like, do, I have to like, go to the federal building and blow whistles every day because these people won't leave me alone. And, and I've, I've met those people and they are just like the most normal people you could imagine. And they are incensed, they're furious. And then I think that there are a lot of Americans who just really do not believe that this could happen to them.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  And those realities like don't really line up anymore because we're not all looking at the same feed of information. We're all, we're not all looking at the same screen. And it adds to the chaos. It adds to the unpredictability of all this because there might be, I mean, there, there are a lot of like, non-white immigrant grippers that sit online all day talking about how they love Nick Fuentes and think the Holocaust didn't happen. What happens when ICE breaks down one of their doors, right? Like there are, there are a lot of these keyboard warrior types who like, do not imagine this could ever happen to their town. And, and if it does happen in their town, it's going to happen to the people who deserve it in their town.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  And yet, time and time again for the last year, we've seen stories come out being like, I didn't think they'd take the good immigrant in my town that I liked, you know? And so I, I don't think the average American really is prepared for the severity of, of what's hap- like, of when it happens to them. And it is in, I think, the Trump administration's best interest to flood the zone with images of this stuff because it does make it feel abstract. The average person watches and cares until it no longer looks like it could happen to you. And I think that does serve Trump's interests. If Minneapolis looks like a completely unrecognizable war zone, that's great. It just means that the person watching goes, that doesn't look like my backyard. So like, I should be fine.

• 35:05Charlie Warzel?

  And like, you know, I was, I was just, I was really struck in your guys' reporting for Panic World, which, which came out in a video podcast form as well, which people should go watch. That, you know, some of the people you interviewed were like, and, and this has been documented elsewhere as well.

• 35:25Charlie Warzel?

  Like the most Minnesota nice, you know, like just sort of like, oh yeah, like I, you know, I, I, I just came from, you know, my shift at school or whatever, you know, it's like, when you see that and you feel that there is this, this way of just being like, I, I think it brings the sort of like pair, it's a, it's a great contrasted, you know, image with the paramilitary force. It's like anyone who's like drawing guns on this person. Like we've lost, we've totally lost the plot, right? Like not, it's not that it's justified when it happens to people who don't, you know, maybe look like you, but just this idea of it's a strong visual image for people who are watching at home is, is what I mean.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  I think it's also like a self perpetuating machine because, you know, I forget who made this point. Maybe it was Wired, I think, I think it was Wired last week, this week, they're all blending together, but they're basically like.

• 36:19Charlie Warzel?

  January.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. They're basically like, there's no reason for the Proud Boys to exist anymore because ICE exists.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  And so if you're running, I mean, Trumpism doesn't really have like an ideological center. But if you had to try to define it, you'd say like, okay, it's like grievance based. And then if you open up a paramilitary force that requires what 47 days of training to join, and they're not even going to like check if you're a Slate reporter or not. Like you can just go and hurt other people. And so in a sense, it almost like, it almost makes logical sense that this would be the next step for Trumpism. Because you can't sustain that like othering of Americans long-term without some way to like get people to sign up and do it. So it's almost like we have to create this paramilitary force and we have to start paying people to do this.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Because if we don't like, that energy could dissipate or they might just find out that like, maybe we're not also different after all.

• 37:18Charlie Warzel?

  This was something that I was thinking about in a different way, and it is a bit of a tangent. But I've, as you have, been writing about, you know, MAGA influencers and stuff like screeching online about civil war since like 2017 or whatever. Right? Like people who are just like, this is gonna lead to some kind of, you know, massive crack up type thing. And then so many people that I've talked to who are actually, you know, experts in this type of stuff and in conflicts are like, you know, part of the reason why terms like civil war are like so unhelpful is because it's incredibly difficult to imagine in certain places, especially a country as big as the United States, giving structure to a conflict like that. Right? Like this idea that's like so much of it is would

• 38:02Charlie Warzel?

  just be like weird infighting or, or, or, you know, acts of sort of almost seemingly random terrorism or whatnot. Right? And the thing that I have found so interesting and scary about the way that the Trump administration is not only using ICE, but the way that they are marketing it. Right? This idea of all of this propaganda that's very clearly aimed at like white nationalists, you know, defend the homeland type of stuff. The, the reason why I find that so bracing in the moment is that it feels like, and this is sort of, I think what you're saying, that it's giving structure to a conflict. Right? It is just sort of like a repository for if you feel

• 38:43Charlie Warzel?

  this way about your country being under attack or invasion, or you've been radicalized by some of these platforms to the point where, you know, posting just isn't doing it for you anymore. Here's a place to go. Right? Sign up. And it becomes less of like, you can see if, you know, in a, in a sort of like speculative way, this becoming a repository for a very specific type of person and a force that actually does resemble what some of these militia like organizations were. Right? Except in this case, it has government funding and, and the, you know,

• 39:22Charlie Warzel?

  according to both JD Vance and Stephen Miller, like absolute immunity for your actions. And, and that, that is, that feels like it is a completely different or like a turn of the screw on this concern about infighting in this country.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And they're.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  If we take the reports at face value that morale is very bad inside of ICE, I do wonder how they deal with that. Like, you know, like you, I'm always sort of saying like, "Okay, like, what's next? Is this working? Is this not working?" And if we say that, okay, those reports are correct, like ICE agents are miserable. They join ICE, they're all revved up on white nationalist Facebook content, and then they hit the streets and everyone's like, "Get the fuck out of my city. Like, I hate you." I mean, I heard the heckling in Minneapolis, and they found out a bunch of their names, and they just kept chanting like, "So-and-so, quit your job. So-and-so, quit your job." And like, these people are becoming pariahs. So, that to me is like, "Oh, like, your filter bubble has lied to you. You've joined this

• 40:28Speaker 03

  federal agency for like student loan forgiveness," or whatever it is, "and now you're in the middle of Minnesota, wearing shoes in the middle of January, and everyone's screaming that they hate you, and spitting at you and stuff." You might quit. And that's like, a hopeful version. And then there's like, the scarier version, which is like, what does the Trump administration do with that? Because we are dealing with like, lots and lots of people who are getting revved up on stuff they're seeing online, who maybe would have joined a militia and like, LARPed Confederate soldiers in the backyard for the next five years. But now they're like, out with guns, and they're like, trying to struggle with like, the cognitive dissonance of the world online and the world in real life are not the same. You know, what

• 41:07Speaker 03

  does that do to a paramilitary force like ICE? Like, what is the next step? And I assume you're right, which is like, they just start dehumanizing us further and further with internet content.

• 41:23Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, giving, as you're giving the hopeful version, I'm like, well, this just absolutely totally rhymes with everything that we have covered over the last, you know, whatever decade on the internet, where it's like, "Yeah, there is this version in which everyone's sort of like, 'Okay, that was a fever dream.'" Like, whoa, like, the cognitive dissonance hits, and you say, "Okay, yeah, man, I was just totally wrong. Like, this is awful. This is a terrible way to live." Or, what tends to happen online, and again, doesn't always happen in the real world, because there is more friction there, is this idea of doubling down, right? Well, why declare being wrong when I could just simply make up a reality, or make up something?

• 42:08Charlie Warzel?

  Right, exactly. I want to ask you to try to put some of this into some context, and I'm going to do the wonderful thing where I quote you again. But I went back and I read a story. We both used to work at BuzzFeed News. You wrote this back in late 2018. I think it was after Bolsonaro won in Brazil, and I believe that you were there on the ground. But I'm going to read this. You said, quote, "I have followed that dark revolution of internet culture ever since. I have had the privilege or deeply strange curse to chase the growth of global political warfare around the world. In the last four years, I've been to 22 countries, six continents, been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections. I was in

• 42:50Charlie Warzel?

  London for the UK's nervous breakdown of a Brexit, in Barcelona for Catalonia's failed attempts at a secession from Spain, in Sweden as neo-Nazis tried to march on the country's largest book fair, and now I'm in Brazil. But this era of being surprised at what the internet can and will do to us is ending. The damage is done. I am trying to come to terms with the fact that I'll probably spend the rest of my career covering the consequences." I have a few questions here. And the first is, do you still feel like you can draw a straight line between all this that was there and all that has come after from COVID to George Floyd to January 6th to Trump 2 to Minneapolis now? Did you feel like there's a straight line here, or did it break off and shift in different directions?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  With the benefit of hindsight, I think the attitude in 2018 to say this is all because of internet platforms is a little simplistic. And I think it's a little ahistorical. Looking at the whole picture, or at least the picture up to now, it seems clear that the sort of post-Cold War geopolitical order, this kind of neoliberal end of history idea, was deeply alienating and frustrating for people. The concept that we are all kind of done, and we're just going to get incrementally better in progressive ways, maybe we'll have a Republican

• 44:15Speaker 03

  come in and kind of calm things down, and then we'll go back and forth. And that idea was extremely frustrating to people. And when social media appeared, it allowed people to communicate without arbiters for the first time. So you start to see things like...

• 44:34Speaker 03

  The Ron Paul presidential campaign in 2008, which I've gone back to several times because I think it's such a fascinating sort of like prototype of everything since Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, the very, very first Black Lives Matter stuff. And what I think you and I and other people doing this work, we're not really totally getting because of the nature of the way we cover it, which is not a problem. It's just that like, no one can see the whole picture, is that like, the technology wasn't creating, the technology didn't really create pathways that weren't there. What it did was allow us to see them. And so, and it's why I said earlier in the episode that, you know, I don't know if monoculture was as monolithic as we assume it was pre-internet.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  It could just be that we didn't know. And so, I think there is a straight line from, let's say, the launch of message boards in the 90s to now, and Facebook and everything else along the way. But it's not like Facebook conjured up some kind of political environment that wasn't there. It's that like, it gave people like Duterte, like Modi, like Bolsonaro, like Trump, like Le Pen, gotta catch them all. All these people, it gave them the ability to speak to an audience that was already alienated and already angry and already bored. And that dovetailed perfectly with the way internet technology has developed in that

• 46:03Speaker 03

  same timeframe. So, you know, now we're at a point where they are essentially the same thing. What is good for the internet is good for your populist, far-right movement. And I think that will sound right, five, five more years from now. I think, yeah, I don't know.

• 46:21Charlie Warzel?

  Ryan, I thank you for, for your reporting on this, for being in the, the pain, the emotional pain cave, the internet brain damage thunderdome with me for all these years. And, and thanks, thanks for all your insights on this, man.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescek and Anna Raffman, Executive Director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:47Charlie Warzel?

  That's it for us. Thank you again to my guest, Ryan Broderick. If you liked what you saw here today, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. And if you want to support this work, the work of myself and all of my colleagues at The Atlantic, you can do so and support the publication by subscribing at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 48:23Charlie Warzel?

  This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Claudina Bade. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme music is by Rob Smersiak. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.