The New Power of Far-Right Influencers

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1:54By creating an open, interoperable infrastructure, Outshift by Cisco is enabling agents and humans to share intent, context, and reasoning. The cognitive evolution for agents is here. Explore the Internet of Cognition at outshift.com. That's outshift.com. Hey, Leah. How are you doing? Hey, Mike. How's it going? It's going all right. Thanks for filling in for Lauren this week. And you're on London time, no less. I am thrilled to be here, though, in Kingsland territory. In fact, both you and our colleague, the one and only David Gilbert, are joining us from across the pond today. David, how are you doing?

2:35I'm good, Mike. Thanks for having me today. I'm not in London, though. Just to be clear, I'm still here in Ireland. And proud of it. Indeed. Well, David, we had to have you on the show today because last week you reported a story that was pretty unorthodox and to say the least, scary. Can you tell us about it? Sure. The story was about Professor Mark Bray, who's a professor of history at Rutgers University, and he's probably best known because he wrote a book eight years ago now about Antifa. And while they have been out of the news for a while, over the course of the last month or so, they've been back in the news and he has become the target of threats from far-right influencers, ultimately going down to the fact that he got death threats against him.

3:23His family's home address was posted online. He got email address saying he's being watched and other threats saying he's going to be killed in front of his students. So he ultimately had to leave the country because of these threats. And I think what this really shows is just how powerful far-right influencers online have become, especially in the second Trump administration, where they effectively are being used as attack dogs by the administration to target the people who Trump and his allies feel are criticizing them and what they're doing.

4:04This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we're talking about the latest chapter in Antifa versus the far right, at least the way that that's been manufactured online. Last month, President Trump issued an executive order aiming to designate Antifa as a, quote, domestic terrorist organization, even though in reality, it's not a coalition at all. And since then, conservative activists and far-right influencers have intensified their already heated backlash to figures they deem to be Antifa members. The targeting of Rutgers history professor Mark Bray is just among the latest developments.

4:42So we'll dive into his story, how the role of far-right influencers in U.S. politics has expanded exponentially, and what the role of tech companies is in all of this. I'm Michael Kalori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. I'm Leah Feiger, Senior Politics Editor. And I'm David Gilbert, a reporter covering extremism and disinformation here at Word. So, David, you were just telling us about Professor Bray's experience of being targeted by the far right online. Let's take a step back and understand why and how he was targeted in the first place. What happened that led to this latest wave of harassment?

5:19I suppose he has known that he's been a target of the far right for almost a decade now. He published a book called Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook back in 2017, which is a history of the anti-fascist movement. But a lot of people who didn't read the book decided, saw the headline or saw the title of the book and decided that this was someone who is promoting Antifa as some sort of organization that would fight back against the far right. And so he was painted as someone who was anti-Trump from the beginning and was therefore, you know, someone that they should be targeting. And so it was made worse, I guess, by the fact that when he published his book, he donated half the profits from the book to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, which is kind of this group that supports anti-fascist activists around the world.

6:10That led to him being placed on something called the Professor Watchlist, which is organized by Turning Point USA, the conservative activist group, which was co-founded by Charlie Kirk. Professor Watchlist is something where they posted the names of dozens of professors across the U.S. who they believed were teaching anti-Trump rhetoric, I guess is how you could describe it, to students in universities. Woke ideology is another way that they describe it. And as a result, most of these professors received death threats, including Professor Bray at the time. But they didn't really rise to the level of the more recent threats he's received.

6:50And so kind of people moved on. Then again in 2020, when the protests erupted in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and they were blamed on Antifa again, he came into the headlines because he was called on as an expert on Antifa to talk about that. And therefore he received criticism again. But over the course of the last five years, while Antifa has been up and down in terms of its news coverage, he said he hasn't really been attacked or threatened that much. That all changed last month when President Trump signed an executive order which sought to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

7:27So in the wake of that executive order being signed, a lot of far right influencers immediately went back to Professor Bray and started posting again about him, about how he was the person who has kind of incited this. And they called him a leader in the organization because of him donating the money to the anti-fascist organization. They called him a financier of Antifa. So he became the kind of figurehead that people attacked as a result of Trump's executive order. Then on October 2nd, the Turning Point USA chapter on Rutgers campus decided to launch a petition calling for Professor Bray to be fired.

8:06Fox News picked up this petition, even though it had less than 100 signatures at the time, and boosted the story. And again, far-right protesters picked up on this. And again, Professor Bray got more death threats. And each time he got these death threats, they were becoming more and more specific, more and more threatening. Last weekend, he got an email, which he shared with Wired, and we were able to review it, showing that the person had sent his home address so they knew exactly where he lived and saying that he was being monitored. He decided with his partner that they and their two kids would leave the country because they felt that their lives were in danger.

8:43You can understand why he felt his life was in danger, because some of the threats that we reviewed had messages like, I'll kill you in front of your students, or your violent rhetoric is under investigation. These messages very clearly were designed to scare him, and it obviously worked. That's chilling. He's a professor at Rutgers, so he has students who probably read his books and understand what he's teaching. What was their reaction, and what was the reaction of the university? Yeah, I spoke to one of his students who posted his email to his students on Reddit, and they were saying that they were really disappointed that he was leaving because they found his classes to be engaging and informative.

9:26And, you know, they had lots of debate and he never pushed his specific political viewpoint on anyone. And there was lots of similar comments in that Reddit thread. Professor Bray said that the university had so far been very supportive of him. He had spoken to officials throughout the last couple of weeks and they had kind of talked about changing his classroom location so that people wouldn't know where the classes were actually taking place as a safety precaution. His union also came out in support from the American Association of University Professors. They condemned the Turning Point USA petition, and they said that silencing professors or silencing academics like this is something that happens in authoritarian regimes and should not be allowed to happen in the U.S.

10:13So did he and his family eventually make it out of the country? They did, eventually. He tried last week to leave on Wednesday. He had booked a ticket and he had checked in his bags. He had gone through security. They had looked at his passport and he got to his gate. And for some reason, his reservation had disappeared. He could not get on the flight. United Airlines have not given an explanation why this happened or how this happened, despite me asking them multiple times. They just told me that they weren't going to comment on it anymore. And so he had to go to a hotel. He rebooked his flights for the following day.

10:51And luckily, the following day, he was able to get through, even though he was checked at security. This time, he was searched. he finally got through and he got on the flight to Spain and he's currently in Spain now with his family. So we should say again, and you point this out in your reporting, as you always have, that Antifa is not an organization at all, but it's a broad ideology that's shaped by anti-fascist activists around the world over a number of years. But that hasn't stopped the Trump administration from labeling it as a, quote, domestic terrorist organization. And in fact, about a week ago, there was a roundtable hosted at the White House to discuss Antifa.

11:28The White House published a video afterwards. And if you watch the video, you can see and hear top administration officials like Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, who's the director of the FBI, weighing in on the issue. Antifa beats journalists. Antifa attacks our police stations. They attack our courthouses. They dox our law enforcement officers. No more. They are a terrorist group and we are coming after them. They are an organized, systemic, international criminal enterprise. And what the FBI is going to do is trace the money, follow the funds, and find every single person that was involved in funding the riots and the violent acts of criminality that they are perpetrating on our street.

12:13I just love stuff like that, don't you? An organized, international, systemic organization. It makes it sound like we're in a Marvel movie. Like, this is not real life. There's such a wild disconnect between what the administration is putting out about Antifa terrorists and what things are in real life, which is obviously best encapsulated by Professor Bray. But it's kind of magnificent, honestly, like the very influencers that have made the administration scared of, quote unquote, Antifa are now making these influencers the arbiters of truth on all of this. I mean, David, we talked about this last week, right?

12:54It was a hall of fame of folks who were actually at the panel. Take us through some of them. Yeah, it was. And what was really interesting was I was doing my due diligence in my reporting for this because Professor Bray had said that one particular influencer after he had posted about it, he got a direct death threat, you know, minutes later from someone. It was Jack Sobiek, a far right influencer and conspiracy theorist. And he was at the White House roundtable as I was messaging him to get a comment for my piece. And he responded to me and he just said, you know, yes, I stand by what I said.

13:30He called him a domestic terrorist professor. He was at the White House roundtable. So was Andy. No, another far right influencer who has had many interactions with what he labels as Antifa over the years and continuously has claimed that he has been attacked by Antifa without ever really producing evidence of who he's talking about or the attacks himself. Both of them were at this roundtable of a kind of, I'm not sure how to describe it. It was kind of a who's who of people who are willing to say anything or do anything that the administration wants them to say in relation to Antifa. What's kind of incredible about that is it wasn't just influencers.

14:10Trump was the headliner. So it was like DHS Secretary Chrissy Noem. Like these are real people who are hanging out now in person in the White House with shit posters. Yeah. And I think it's just illustrative of how much power they currently hold in shaping the narrative of conservative politics. Absolutely. It's truly incredible that this actually happened in real life in 2025, because it is quite astonishing to see the level of power that the administration is giving these people, because all these people have huge followings online. And so their followers are now seeing them in the White House with Trump, with Kristi Noem and saying, oh, well, these guys must be telling us the truth because they're being, you know, endorsed by the Trump administration.

14:57So we talked through some of them. Who are the other well-known far-right influencers that we should know about, whether they were at the White House dinner or not? That is such a big question, Mike. How many hours do you have, David? I feel like, poor thing, you have spent years immersed in the pond, the swamp, the whatever this is. Yeah, it's really hard because there's definitely, there's factions even within the far right. You know, you have major figures, let's say, for example, like Tucker Carlson, who has a huge following. He used to be on Fox News and now has gone out on his own. So he has name recognition.

15:34He has a huge audience on X and lots of people listen to him. Similarly, Steve Bannon has, you know, a long history of talking about this. But I think where it's most interesting for us is, well, I hate to call Steve Bannon kind of establishment media or influence or whatever you want to call him. And in this world, he is. He's a known entity to an extent. And he has kind of been there for a long time. And we kind of know what he's going to say. But the people who are at this roundtable and many, many others, there's dozens of these guys and girls who are traveling around the country, who are filming interactions with protesters, following ICE, conducting raids across the country.

16:19And these people up until recently would have been kind of unknown. And yet now they are in the White House talking to Trump, talking to Kristi Noem. They are getting access to officials and access to the actual raids, the actual protests that are happening that no one else is getting. And that's mind blowing to kind of see who these people are and the amount of power that they're being given. I think it's really helpful in some ways to divide these folks into categories. right we had an article earlier this year and and we've been referring to them in this way for a while we have the podcasters and the streamers your joe rogan's the schultz like andrew schultz paul brothers aiden ross etc who like are either kind of circling the maga world or are very much in it like publishing their interviews with vance and trump and whomever they can convince to sit in a studio for longer than two hours and then you go into like the meme pages the dc drano the raging Americans, the whatever Elon Musk is retweeting on X with like a, hmm, interesting heart sign.

17:27Wow is my favorite. Wow. Wow is a really good one. Yeah. And then you have, you know, the sub stackers kind of also in like the podcast category, Jessica Reed Krause, House and Habit, et cetera. And then this is like maybe the most important one is the organizers, the people who are so involved in Republican ideology at the moment that not only are they helping shape it by pumping it out to their followers, but they're actually cherry picking the folks that are going to be able to shape it along with them. C.J. Pearson jumps to mind. We've talked about him many times on Wired.com's politics section as a conservative creator who's really young, who has massive inroads of the Republican National Committee and just happens to be everywhere, knows everyone.

18:10And like David said, these different mechanisms have actually enabled folks to be on the ground in a way we just haven't seen before. This is so organized. I think it's really easy to look at the Trump administration and look at his true social posts and go like, this is nuts. This is all over the place. No, this is organized. This is coordinated. And it's unbelievable to watch. Yeah, and I think one of the things to point out as well is that a lot, if not most, of the people at that Antifa roundtable had links to Turning Point USA. Really important point. It just goes to show just how powerful that organization is.

18:52And even in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, I think you can make a case that Turning Point USA is now even more powerful than it was prior to September 10th when he was assassinated, because he has become this kind of martyr figure. And there are so many people now vying to kind of take over his mantle and, you know, saying they're going to continue to bring the organization forward. And I think the Trump administration has used or historically over the course of the last few years has used Turning Point USA as a vital cog in its machine to to get organized. And what Leah said was exactly right, is that this is incredibly organized.

19:33Trump is the figurehead, but he's not doing any of the organizing. But the people underneath him, they know exactly what they're doing. And they are shaping the narrative through the use of these far right influencers. And the speed with which the content is coming out from all of these figures is incredible. Well, it's really a question of like, are they hyping up their base or is now their influencer base hyping up them? You know, David's been covering this for a really long time, specifically on the far right of it all and the extremism of it all. McKenna Kelly, another senior writer at Wired on the politics team, she's been covering political influencers writ large.

20:11And she had a piece last week that I just want to point to, those titled Trump Wants to Take Over Cities. Influencers are giving him the fuel to do it. And she gets at the dichotomy here that is so revealing. The idea that in this particular instance, the administration, Trump, he needs that footage to say that Democrat-led cities, blue cities like Chicago and Portland are just absolute hellscapes. He needs that visual proof. He needs the influencers to give him that documentation that violence has just like entirely destroyed everything and everyone. And these influencers are supplying it in real time because, like David said earlier, they're getting access to these like behind the scenes.

20:51They're right behind the National Guard. They're on the ground with ICE. They are with DHS Secretary Noem as she is parachuting into wherever. These influencer embeds are, they're expected now. I think that's the part that like continues to get me to their absolute fixtures of their media strategy. And they've become a content mill. And it's really tough to say what the chicken or egg here is now. Is there video of Gnome standing in front of like a fake burning building or what have you? Like what's actually causing the request for boots on the ground? Or are they finding that footage because of that request?

21:28Yeah. OK, we need to take a quick break and then we'll come right back.

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22:11Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today we're talking about why a Rutgers professor had to flee from the U.S. with his family after far-right influencers targeted him. Leah and David, we just touched upon how some of these voices on the far-right have grown in their role and their influence in the past year. But there's also the role and the influence of the tech companies that run these social platforms. So my question is, to what extent do they hold any responsibility to make sure that somebody like Mark Bray doesn't need to leave the country for safety reasons after being threatened with violence on their platforms?

22:44When you talk about responsibility in tech companies, I have a hard time kind of bringing the two together because... I was wondering what you were going to say on that. This is something I've covered for over a decade now. And for years, it was mostly Facebook and its failure to moderate, especially outside of English language markets, where it just abdicated all responsibility. And I was thinking, OK, well, you know what it does in Western markets, it will eventually roll out in non-English markets. But what happened instead is what was happening in countries like Ethiopia, Myanmar, has actually come into the U.S., where now it's just gone completely hands off here in the U.S.

23:26as well, and in Ireland and in the U.K. and everywhere else, basically. Every other social media company has followed suit, gone hands off and said, we're not going to bother moderating pretty much anything. Aside from copyright material, which they are still very quick to take down, and child sexual abuse material, which they are still mostly still pretty quick to take down, everything else is kind of up for grabs. While Facebook and Instagram still aren't as bad as X in terms of the kind of hate speech that's on there, there's just so much disinformation and dangerous information on there that it's effectively a kind of a wild west and anything goes there.

24:05And so while, yes, they bear responsibility, it's something they don't really care about anymore. They've shown that repeatedly because they just they haven't done anything to address the situation in a long time. I mean, these companies, if we're talking meta in particular, laid off all of their content moderation people. Oh, it feels like eons ago. The thing that like really gets me is they've laid off all of these content moderation folks, election safety folks, what have you. And when we publish an article, like, for example, our article a little bit ago about how far-right extremist militias are organizing on Facebook, shout out to you, Metta.

24:44I get angry calls from their folks there all the time who are like, no, no, we're looking into this. How dare you say that's on here? And I'm like, I'm looking at it right now. There's this real disconnect, I think, between what the companies believe that they're doing and believe that they haven't abdicated and like what they're trying to communicate to the public versus what's actually happening. I mean, the amount of medical disinformation alone, David, that you are covering constantly when it comes to vaccines, even recently. Yeah, we wrote a story about the drug lucovarin that the Trump administration announced as they didn't announce it as a cure for autism.

25:23but the way they framed it, that's how a lot of people interpreted it. Or like a cure for autistic symptoms. A cure for autistic symptoms, exactly. And what they did is they announced this, but they then failed to give any information about, you know, whatever dosage you should be giving to your children or how you should actually get it or whether a doctor should prescribe it or in what cases. And as a result of that lack of information, this Facebook group that I was monitoring exploded in size. There was 60 ,000, 65 ,000 members on it. And it was filled with like just chaos and anger and confusion and conspiracy theories and people spamming it to sell supplements that weren't exactly the drug that people were looking for.

26:07And we posted a story about it and Facebook complained about the fact that we mentioned this Facebook group and nothing else. And I think they just don't get it that there is all this information on their platform. and there's so much of it that is incredibly dangerous, especially when it comes to vaccines and medical information and children. I am in so many of these groups for my work because I have to be, and it's terrifying and so heartbreaking to read the posts from these parents who are clearly looking for any answer. And the answer, unfortunately, a lot of time that they get is just misinformation, disinformation that is potentially even more dangerous for their children.