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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Pascual and with me as always is Ben and Celestia. Hey guys.

Celestia Ward: Howdy.

BR: Hey There!

0:00:30
PR: So this week we’re going to be treading into a very controversial event and there’s a lot of debate over what the motivations were and everything. And I think this is going to be a really good test in putting on your skeptical hats and really going into an episode and listening and taking what we put forth to heart. And hopefully you guys will come out of this with maybe a new understanding of the situation or maybe already are with us on this. But Ben has done a lot of research on this topic and that is the Omar Mateen Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida a few years back.

0:01:22
CW: Almost exactly two years back, yeah.

0:01:25
PR: Two years back, yeah. That’s a…

0:01:27
BR: A few years ago in the fall.

0:01:28
PR: And that was one of the worst shootings in the US up to that point, I believe. Yeah. Until it was surpassed by the Las Vegas shooter. But before we get into that, let’s start it on a little bit of a lighter note and see what we’re skeptical of this week.

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0:01:49
CW: Well, this week, I am skeptical of something that Facebook fan of the show, Kevin Stewart, brought to our attention last week or a couple weeks ago after the episode with your friend Kyle Konquial of Bad Wolves. I made a comment about John Tesh and he posted some delightful little snippets of back in the 1990s, John Tesh’s concerts were being picketed by a group claiming that he was an alien. They had a name, the National Anti-Tesh Action Society, and they sounded like they were trying to be very serious, claiming he was an extraterrestrial bent on world domination or something, and he was a danger to the Earth.

0:02:44
BR: Let me just say that this, on the face of it, this sounds a bit like one of those Joey Skaggs pranks, one of the real, the merry pranksters, the Abbie Hoffman type that you saw in the 60s and 70s. But I know more, I don’t know more about it.

0:03:01
CW: Your instincts are not entirely off there. It was reported very much with a wink and a nod by everybody. And John Tesch himself even acknowledged the group and was like, hey, whatever floats your boat, guys. You know, and reading further on it, you know, it’s hard to get absolute confirmation of this, but it appears that it was really just a promotional gimmick from a group known as the Mog Stunt Team, which is a punk-inspired rock group that had put out a song that involved lyrics saying, John Tesh is an alien on their 1990s, on their 1997 CD, King of the Retards. Very politically correct title there.

PR: Okay.

0:03:48
CW: So it was all a performance artist type stunt, apparently, which was just a fun little rabbit hole to go down. It’s, it was kind of nostalgic to see all those clips from Entertainment Tonight and see the character that Howard Stern once called Blonde Frankenstein, six foot six John Tesh with his bizarre little music stylings.

PR: That’s a fair observation.

CW: Yeah, but speaking of somebody who is not a performance artist, but sometimes claims he is, we’re going to talk a little bit about Alex Jones too.

BR: Oh, good old, uh, good old Jones.

CW: Yes, and I should have, for my…

PR: Real friend of the skeptic community.

CW: Yes, for my, just to keep in character here, all my notes that I wrote about this, I put in all caps.

BR: Oh, good.

CW: Yeah, I can read them really angrily.

PR: Make sure to just yell the rest of this segment.

CW: Alex Jones is being sued, again, by lots of people.

PR: And gay frogs.

0:04:54
CW: And we’re thrilled about it.

BR: You know, it’s one of those things where you can see a movement and you can support it like yeah, you know, there’s something a little sketchy about John Tesh. But not necessarily looking too closely at who exactly is promoting this. I’m thinking in part of the group that was very much into Go Topless Day, there’s a huge going topless movement, which many people were very much fans of, both men and women, turned out to be part of the Raelians. That’s one of their gimmicks to bring people in is to, hey everybody, I think everybody should go topless, men and women. By the way, would you like some literature on our cult?

0:05:40
CW: Well, that’s a bait and switch.

0:05:44
PR: I don’t know if that bait is all that great though. I mean, you just go to Europe and you get it without the added weight of religion.

0:05:51
CW: Or burning man, yeah.

0:05:52
PR: Yeah, sure.

0:05:53
CW: You know, I had a similar feeling one time when I was driving out, I think on I-15 to LA a while back, and they had this series of billboards, as they do along any long highway, and it just kind of started out with like, religion is lying to you. And that piqued my interest. I was like, I wonder who put up that billboard. And that went on and on and on. And after about four or five billboards, kind of, you know, saying, think for yourself and religion is bad and Christianity is a lie and blah, blah, blah. It had a picture of a little alien ship and it said, Raylians.org. And I was like, oh, I’ve gone from bad to worse.

BR: Not as much fun as the other campaign, but whatever.

0:06:43
CW: Alex Jones, as as listeners may remember, you know, last month at the end of episode 54 back in April. We talked about school shooting conspiracies and we had late breaking news that three of the three of the parents, one pair of people and one single parent of Sandy Hook victims of the elementary school kids that died in Sandy Hook back in 2012 were suing Alex Jones for defamation, as well as his parent company and a couple of other people. And lo and behold, that has started a bit of a wave. Just this past week, we’ve had it announced that four more families have joined with their own lawsuits against Alex Jones, as well as people who work for Alex Jones and have made videos for him and the parent companies of their shows. And that is that is really good news. And we’re hoping that They’ll have a leg to stand on. Now, this also joins a lawsuit that was filed back in March by Brennan Gilmore. He’s not involved in the Sandy Hook massacre, but he was the bystander who filmed and uploaded a video of that car that plowed into protesters in Charlottesville. And immediately upon doing that, his name was all over right-wing websites and sites like InfoWars claiming he was a misinformation agent and all sorts of other things and that he was working for George Soros and this and that. And so he’s got his defamation lawsuit that joins these six parents, six families now that are suing Alex Jones. A New Republic article that has just come out says that, quote, in the most recent lawsuit filed last week, some of the families described Jones as, quote, the chief amplifier for a group that has worked in concert to create and propagate loathsome false narratives about the Sandy Hook shooting and its victims and promote their harassment and abuse, unquote. Now that sounds pretty on the mark to me. There is a pretty high bar for defamation. It protects journalists who are just offering criticism or simply making errors. In order to prevail with a defamation lawsuit, a wrong party must prove that the publisher distributed negative material with quote, actual malice. And they have to have made the statement that was, they have to have made the statement with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false. Do you guys think that we have a chance of seeing Alex Jones taken down by that standard?

0:09:21
BR: I suspect yes. The laws vary from state to state. I’m not sure exactly where they’re filing from or what the jurisdiction is going to be. But I don’t think it’s going to be a slam dunk either way. He’s not going to get a dismissal if it’s not going to be a slam dunk in terms of him finding liability. But I think he’s in trouble.

0:09:42
BR: I’m hoping he’s in trouble.

0:09:44
PR: For me, and I have a little bit of an ace in my pocket with the fact that I listen to Andrew Torres quite a bit, and he’s mentioned this because he kind of broke it down. of, um, they, they can be really hard to prove in a, in a way that doesn’t step on the first amendment one way or another, except that when a person with a very big public platform speaks about a person with very little way to, to respond to it, that definitely tilts the scale quite a bit. So, uh, meaning like if he were to say something like he does about like Hillary Clinton all the time, like if she were to go after him, it would be probably, it probably wouldn’t lead to much unless she could prove that it did some kind of damage. But when a, when an independent kind of general civilian who, who doesn’t necessarily want the public to know who they are or know what’s going on, when someone like Alex Jones makes crazy statements about a person and starts accusing him of things and they start getting doxed and their life is actually greatly affected by this lie, that is certainly a good grounds to take one of these cases to court. I do think he’s going to be in a bit of trouble over this again, though. It’s hard to say how far you know how far it’ll go because Jones obviously has a lawyer that’s probably competent and knows how to help him walk the line between all his nonsense and and getting in enough trouble to end his career so I don’t know.

BR: I’d like to be a fly on the wall just just just watching the interaction between Jones and his lawyer like okay now you need to calmly what I don’t know pedophiles! Alex we need some coffee for Alex decaf please.

0:11:50
CW: I’m curious to see if these are even going to get to court because I’m looking at what’s happened before this is not the first time Jones has been threatened with legal action or even had legal action taken against him. And in previous times, he has completely backtracked. He was sued about a year ago by the founder of Chobani Yogurt, back in April 2017.

0:12:14
BR: We talked about it on the show.

0:12:15
CW: Yeah, and that lawsuit was dropped after Alex flipped, by the way, that’s my favorite Chobani product, the Chobani Flips, they’re delicious. Anyway, like he completely did an about face and apologized, saying he regretted characterizing the yogurt company and the townspeople of Twin Falls, Idaho, which kind of sounds like he was admitting that he did indeed mischaracterize them. That sounds like that to me. Right.

PR: Yeah.

0:12:42
CW: Yeah. Jones also immediately recanted his conspiracy mongering about Pizzagate, wherein you recall that mundane conversations over email were kind of parsed out as being coded messages about sexual abuse of young children, which led to 28-year-old Edgar Welsh to bust in and shoot up Comet Pizza, thinking he could save these fictional child victims. Yeah, so it seems like Jones is aware of the fact that if there’s actual proven damage, like a shot up pizza joint or financial damages to a yogurt conglomerate, he stands a good chance of being legally harmed by this. So I don’t know if, I don’t know what he’s going to be saying about these lawsuits from people who are just essentially normal citizens that have been wronged by him. It’s not the power of a major corporation or the rule of law. It’s just normal people. Now, Jones has responded to these lawsuits so far by saying, without a hint of irony, that these lawsuits are in fact defamation against him and spreading misinformation about him. Which is, I guess, kind of the adult version of, eh, I’m not that, you’re that. So we’ll see what happens. I mean, a lot of skeptical communities and really people of all stripes are following this kind of hoping, hoping, hoping that it puts a dent in the whole conspiracy mongering of these very particular online sites and radio shows. And unfortunately, or possibly fortunately, because if you look at it, one of the legs that these lawsuits stand on is that like the lawsuits allege that a reasonable person would understand Jones’s statements to mean that the shootings were fake and the deaths were fabricated. In other words, not that he’s just a wacky performance artist or engaged in some kind of parody, but that he’s being serious about this and that it’s a serious platform. And unfortunately, over the past five, ten years, the platform has taken on an air of credibility as our nation’s president has gone on there and been interviewed and given him high high praise and politically people are listening to Alex Jones, which they weren’t, but some of them are.

0:15:20
BR: I have a question. This is not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious. Is one of Alex Jones’ notable followers Roseanne Barr?

0:15:30
CW: You know, I don’t know. The news just recently broke about her tweets ending her ABC show.

0:15:36
BR: Well, I had, again, I’m not playing dumb. I, I, I’d, I’d heard a couple passing. I don’t know whether they were being facetious or not, but I had heard a couple of passing comments that she’s, she’s repeating things that either she heard on Jones’s show or were certainly of that ilk.

PR: Yeah, she does. She does retweet InfoWars from time to time. Uh, so, so we could do an episode on Roseanne Barr. She’s just a treasure trove of…

0:16:06
CW: Do we have to?

0:16:07
PR: Yeah, maybe not. But, and, uh, let me start by saying that I really did like the show Roseanne back in the eighties and nineties, and I had a pretty good opinion of her, but as in the last few years, uh, she has become very strange and she’s just, she’s made this big flip. She used to say she was a socialist and she said she was Jewish and she had all these like, I mean she went through all these phases and then all of a sudden out of nowhere she’s like super alt-right and she’s like retweeting Trump and she’s retweeting InfoWars and she’s super into conspiracy theory and unfortunately, normally that wouldn’t bother me. Roseanne Barr, you know, five years ago, big deal. She’s, you know, has been comedian who has weird opinions like, you know, many of them do. But now she’s, yeah, but you know, she’s the new Roseanne show was actually, or currently is, like one of the top shows in the U.S. right now, and ratings wise. And so it’s a pretty, I mean, a pretty crazy thing to see ABC cancel the entire show over this. And not to say that they’re wrong for doing it. I actually think that they have every right to do that. But it’s pretty wild to see, you know, just how far she’s gone into that direction. And yes, she does appear to drink the Jones Kool-Aid.

0:17:39
CW: Well, yeah, I’m doing a quick search as you guys, after Ben asked that, I went ahead and hit the Googles. And just what I’m getting from a quick scan tells me that it seems like Alex Jones has got a crush on her. He has immediately asked her to come on InfoWars and be interviewed after ABC has canceled her show. And she retweets him a lot, and he’s saying that, well, George Soros admits Roseanne Barr was right to call him a Nazi. And, yeah, I’m sure that’s completely legit. So, yeah, there seems to be a lot of back and forth between Alex Jones and Roseanne Barr just from a quick look search.

0:18:24
BR: That Jones fellow seems to enjoy being sued.

0:18:26
PR: Oh, he does. Well, yeah, it’s kind of like the Westboro Baptist Church He just he he knows that it in his in his little corner of the universe Being sued just proves him right to some weird extent. You know and that it’s they always want to play martyr And so I don’t think he’s scared of it I mean, I think he likes to be able to be like these people are coming after me and blah blah blah.

0:18:51
BR: He may be scared, but after he saw you, after other people take possession of his houses.

0:18:56
CW: Yeah, that would be nice, yeah.

0:18:58
PR: I’d like to make a side note, the man, this is something that blew my mind, maybe it’s not going to blow everyone else’s mind, but the man is only 44 years old.

CW: Oh, that’s frightening.

0:19:07
PR: Isn’t that, like, that guy is, that’s not old, but he, I mean, he does not look like a 44 year old. He looks like a 65 year old guy who can take care of himself.

0:19:17
CW: He looks at least 10 or 15 years older than 44. And it’s, oh yeah. Well, his blood pressure has got to be fairly high.

0:19:26
PR: Yeah, I’m sure it is. I’ve seen enough of, of those clips of him bust in the jugular over of the chemicals, turning the frogs gay or whatever he said and yeah.

0:19:39
CW: Well, we’ll see what happens we will sit and watch and and and who knows this episode It will take a little while for this episode to actually be out. We’re recording a little earlier this week so who knows listeners you might be ahead of the game. There may have been massive developments in the past week.

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0:20:13
BR: All right, so this week I wanted to touch base on a tragedy that happened almost two years ago. And as Pascual mentioned at the top of the show, it’s the Pulse nightclub shooting that happened on June 12, 2016. It was at the time the worst mass shooting in modern American history. Unfortunately, it was not long afterwards was supplanted by the Vegas shooter, Steven Paddock. But certainly at the time it was and remains shocking. For those who don’t remember the story, I’ll just sort of briefly outline it. So it happened after 2 o’clock in the morning on June 12th. A man named Omar Mateen opened fire at Pulse, which is a crowded nightclub in Orlando that is popular with the gay community, LGBT community. He got past a security guard and he used a rifle and a handgun to shoot up the nightclub. He was basically shooting indiscriminately, taking hostages. About 45 minutes into the attack, he called a radio station and began talking to them, a local news station, identified himself and talked about why he was doing it and what was going on. And then the police hostage negotiators arrived shortly thereafter. Eventually he barricaded himself in the women’s bathroom and by 5:20 that morning, he was dead. He was shot eight times by police. 49 people died, scars emotional and physical on more than 50 more. And it just, certainly the Orlando community and the American community and frankly the worldwide community, this was to its core, just shocking and it was just unbelievable to see this unfolding.

0:21:54
CW: Yes, we all remember, but yeah, it’s good to have a refresher on the details so that listeners can understand what we’re talking about here and why we’re gonna treat it with as much respect as it deserves, which is to say, we don’t take any of this lightly. We aren’t just throwing comments around like we would about new age Reiki treatments or something. Skepticism should be applied to every aspect of life, even those things we regard ourselves as sacred cows.

0:22:23
BR: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s always been my personal philosophy is I’m probably best known for applying skepticism to chupacabras and ghosts and urban legends and crop circles and things like that. But as we’ve talked about on the show, skepticism and critical thinking applies to everything, or at least it should. Any political claims, any journalist claims, no matter what it is, if someone’s giving you information and you intend to act on it or it might influence you in some way, I think you have an obligation to try and parse through it and find out if it’s true or not.

0:22:57
PR: Most definitely.

0:22:58
CW: All right, well, the very big question people tend to have immediately when something like the Pulse shooting or the Paddock shooting in Las Vegas happened is, why did they do it? Why, you know, almost eclipsing the how or when or where question, when you have the information that there is a mass shooting, any type of violence like that, people always want to know why. It’s human nature to just want to know what caused the person to do this. And even with Paddock in Vegas, we have no statement from him, he just did it and then shot himself. And I remember that was an immediate question with the Pulse nightclub, although many people didn’t bother asking it because it seemed like there was a pretty obvious answer.

0:23:48
BR: Yeah, it seemed self-evident. And I just want to sort of broaden the scope for a sec to talk about the why question, because it really is fundamental to these acts. You know, the other things, you know, who, what, where, and when, those are all pretty quickly established by competent reporters. The why is always the most difficult to establish. And our assumptions about it are especially susceptible to cognitive errors and biases. You know, because, well, we think, well, he had a bad childhood. Or he, you know, a week earlier he broke up with his girlfriend or she has mental problems or whatever it is. There is a natural tendency to imbue these actions with sort of the motivations that we want to ascribe to it, right? Or we think are most plausible or sort of fits our agenda. And of course that is one of the best known logical fallacies among skeptic is post hoc ergo proctor hoc, you know, after this, therefore, because of it. The human mind is incredibly adept at finding links between something that happens, something that happened later, and sometimes those links are accurate and sometimes they’re not.

0:25:02
CW: I see this in action every time there’s something tragic happening. On my Facebook feed, there’s a handful of people I can usually predict will come out with a rant against the way children are being raised today and violent video games and various other pet causes that people tend to sort of throw out for examination whenever there’s somebody who has done some violent act in the public eye.

0:25:30
BR: Yeah, yeah. And we see this all the time. And that’s one of the interesting things about these attacks is you find people, and I don’t necessarily mean this disparagingly, but you have people who come at it from all different angles, right? And so you have the gun rights people who say, well, this is clearly a failure of gun control. Or people say, no, no, this is a problem dealing with mental health facilities. And people say, no, it’s the culture. It’s turning away from God. Everybody has their own sort of pet angles into these things. And that’s fine, except of course that it doesn’t necessarily correspond to what actually happened. And that’s why I wanted to take a closer look at the motivations behind Omar Mateen, both real and reputed.

0:26:20
CW: Now, with this particular case, I should probably let listeners know that Ben did a lot of research into this and he presented me with an early form of an article he was writing about it. I’ve seen a lot of skeptic articles. I’ve read a lot of skeptical books. I’m pretty comfortable with skepticism. I started reading his article and I was like, I’m not sure about this, Ben. It made me uncomfortable to examine. It made me think, this is not a hill I want to die on. It was obviously homophobia that caused this this mass tragedy. I mean, it was a gay club. How could it not be? And I found myself really kind of averse to digging into or accepting some of the material that Ben was showing me in this article, because nobody wants to deny that homophobia exists. Nobody wants to deny that it’s a problem. And if you chip away at this one large supposed instance of it, I don’t want to take the red pill. I don’t want to go down that path. But if you examine things bit by bit, it’s a worthwhile exercise regardless of what it is.

0:27:33
BR: Well, I think so. I mean, you know, I was first I was I first became interested in the story when I was reading a Washington Post article that was talking about the Mateen shooting and this was this is I think nine months or a year after after the shooting it was questioning some of the some of the things that I had been hearing about Mateen and I said well hold on here if this is true, then what about these other things and so you know I I’m approaching it the way I approach any number of things. It’s just I want to know what the truth is. The main two theories, as I’m sure you and the audience knows, is that it was either an anti-gay homophobia crime or terrorism or both. And those were sort of the two main that were bandied about. And but there was something, something wasn’t quite right. Something wasn’t wasn’t gelling between the sort of rumors and speculation and the facts that I was saying, I want to be clear, the critical thinking approach that I took in this is no different than the approach I take examining anything else. I have no dog in the fight. I’m personally not invested in whether Mateen was driven by anti-gay bias or terrorism bias or both. My interest is in trying to parse out what people thought, why they thought it, and is it true? One thing I often found when you’re researching these topics is that it’s important to understand what happened because in order to correctly address social problems, whether it’s homophobia, terrorism, or whatever else, you have to correctly understand them. And this is something that often gets lost. Well, you know, what does it matter if it’s A or B? Well it matters if you want to try and stop A or B or both.

0:29:14
CW: Yeah.

0:29:15
BR: It matters what the motivation was because understanding what happened can help us prevent it from happening again. And in terms of why the attack happened, you could argue, well, what does it really matter? You had all these people dead. It was a tragedy. That’s all true. But why the attack happened certainly matters to America, the gay community and the FBI, as well as the friends and family and relatives of the loved ones of the victims. It does matter.

0:29:41
CW: It matters on a number of levels, some of which we can get into later, but in this particular case, I started noticing that in the public view, in what I was reading on social media, in the layperson’s adaptation, it was clearly a hate crime. It was clearly based on homophobia. And then the experts had different things to say. And a core tenet of skepticism is, you know, trusting a community of experts. I mean, if you take other topics, it could be climate scientists and climate change or doctors and whether or not vaccinations work. Often in skeptical topics, you have a group of people who are like, no, no, no, it’s this and it feels right and the experts don’t know what they’re talking about. I have a feeling about this is clearly this. And then you have the experts showing how they came to their conclusion, but lay people not really willing to listen. And we fight against that as skeptics and it’s hard for me to apply that to this. the average lay person’s feeling was, this is a hate crime. But the experts had something different to say.

0:30:55
PR: Most definitely. And I think that a big thing is that, as a skeptic, I’ve really looked into exactly what a hate crime is and how they go about prosecuting and investigating. And what I’ve found is that, number one, hate crimes are very, very difficult to prosecute because a competent lawyer, even if a hate crime did occur, usually can frame it in a way that makes it really difficult to make a clear case for. The other thing is that a hate crime is a very, I mean, it’s a very serious thing. And when something is being investigated as a possible hate crime, no stone is left unturned. I mean, any case that involves a bunch of murders, you know, obviously they’re going to be very thorough, but hate crime requires that certain things be met. And, you know, it requires that a perpetrator targets a victim or multiple victims because of their membership or perceived membership in a certain social group or race or religion or gender identity, physical appearance, nationality. And the thing about it is that this has to be very clear cut. And you can’t just say, well, because he killed a bunch of gay people or because he committed the crime in a gay club, it is automatically a hate crime. It has to go a lot deeper than that because in order to make a legal case for it, you have to know that he specifically wanted to target and as we’ll find out as we we get into this episode that that may not be so clear-cut and the reason that the official story in the official investigation concluded that it wasn’t because of that is is not because they’re they’re trying to you know wash over the fact that gay people were killed and that it happened in a nightclub, but because the evidence does not suggest that it was motivated specifically because of the group of people that were affected by this attack.

0:33:02
CW: Well, the number one piece of evidence that people point to, and when I say people, I don’t mean people investigating as FBI agents, I mean people investigating from their laptop computers on Facebook, the number one piece of evidence that people point to is it was a gay club, the location, location, location, location.

0:33:22
PR: Sure, sure.

0:33:23
CW: But there’s more to it than just that.

0:33:26
BR: There is, and I’ve written about this in the past, that there’s a tendency for the general public to assume that the location that an attack takes place must somehow be linked to the reason for it. And I’ve seen this in many cases. I remember when I was researching the case of James Holmes, the guy that shot up the theater in Aurora, Colorado, for my book Bad Clowns, in fact. There’s a section on him. The belief was that he had shot up the theater as the Joker, and that he was motivated by the DC Comics villain, the Joker, and it had some connection to the film. And this is, even to this day, this is widely believed, and you see this in many places. But when I researched it, it turns out that in fact, there’s no connection whatsoever between James Holmes and the Joker, or even the Batman film. During his trial, in his journals and everything else, that never even came up. He actually chose it because he wanted a place of mass carnage and in fact there’s some indication that he chose that particular screening because it was less likely there were going to be children there because it was a late night screening. So James Holmes chose that location irrespective of whether a Batman film was playing. I think it was the Dark Knight Rises. And so there was no connection, even though in the public’s mind, it was well, of course, why would he show up a Batman premiere? It must have something to do with Batman. Not necessarily.

CW: Yeah, I was disappointed to see people jump to that conclusion because the Joker has green hair, not red hair. He had dyed his hair this creepy orange red, not green. If you’re into cosplay, that’s like a very basic mistake to make.

0:35:17
BR: So not only a serial killer, mass murder is also bad atcosplay.

CW: If that were true, yes.

BR: If that were true. Another example that I remember was there was a guy that shot up a screening of an Amy Schumer film called Trainwreck. I think his name was Hauser if I remember correct.

PR: Yeah.

BR: And the same thing happened where people said, well why did this guy shoot up this Amy Schumer film? Did he hate Amy Schumer? Was it, there was speculation that he was a misogynist and hated women or something. And it’s just all these assumptions that there must be some deeper significance to why he chose that particular screening. And as with the James Holmes case, in the end, after the investigation came out, there was no clear motivation. In fact, he fired indiscriminately into the audience. He, if I remember correctly, actually shot as many men as women. So he didn’t pick that audience because it was primarily women. But so again, there’s this natural tendency, this sort of knee jerk reaction. Well, why would it happen there? Another example was the attack on Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England. On May 22nd, a bomb exploded in the arena, and some people on social media were saying that it was because Ariana Grande represented Western decadence, and that they were trying to get back at her Western mores and values.

0:36:41
CW: I remember that, yeah, the outfits she wears while performing, and the strong female performing music for other young, strong females.

0:36:51
BR: Exactly. And so there was all this speculation right afterwards saying that, well, there’s clearly link here. But soon afterwards, in fact, I interviewed an expert on terrorism who was highly doubtful there was any connection between Ariana Grande’s persona or songs and the bombing attack. He pointed out that the reason that that was chosen was because it would assure mass casualties. Easy access, lots of people, easy to get in and out. All the evidence shows that the Grande concert was planned and guided not because of any retaliation against Grande’s music or lyrics or sexuality, but because they wanted to assure maximum carnage and attention.

0:37:34
CW: Now I can think right off the bat of two reasons why that’s good to know. If I were an Ariana Grande fan who wanted to attend future concerts, it would relieve me quite greatly to know that she was not targeted herself. I’m sure she herself is relieved to know that she was not targeted with a jihad against her specifically, that she was going to have to worry about for every concert she ever had, but rather But rather that she should, and all venues, should bump up security and be on guard for the fact that terrorists look for venues that have large groups of people concentrated in a small area with easy access. specifically because of who she is, would give a false sense of security to people who aren’t Ariana Grande. Like for instance, a country-western show. Right, right. That would, obviously, the Las Vegas example there.

BR: That’s a perfect example, right? I mean, Steven Paddock, who shot up the country and western audience, I mean, there’s no indication whatsoever that Paddock chose to kill people at that venue because he hated country music, or he had a beef with the musicians who were playing at that time, or any connection whatsoever to who he actually killed. It was a crime of opportunity and high profile and assuring mass casualties, not any connection to the reason the people were there.

0:39:06
CW: Well, see, and in Paddock’s case, there was some information, I’d have to look this up again to give you specifics, but I remember hearing that he had also made another trip a few months earlier and was considering considering targeting the Electric Daisy Carnival instead which EDC is a huge event here with a completely different demographic than a country Western Festival it’s young people wearing rave clothing and waving glow sticks around and doing a lot of drugs in the desert, all of them ages 18 through 30, rather than the older, much more conservative crowd you would find at a country western show. But the fact that he targeted two very different groups of people indicated that what type of people they were didn’t matter to him. He just wanted easy access to a concentration of people that he could take aim at.

0:39:59
BR: And of course, to bring this back to Omar Mateen, as we mentioned before, I mean, to a lot of people, the fact that he shot up a nightclub that was popular with gay and to be clear, Pulse was not exclusively a gay nightclub. It was it was largely popular with gays in the LGBT community, but it wasn’t exclusively a gay nightclub. It was just.

0:40:19
CW: Yeah, I don’t I don’t think an exclusively gay nightclub exists because I’ve danced at so many of them.

0:40:24
BR: But in in many people’s minds, it was like, well, what else could it be? I mean, why?

0:40:30
CW: Slam dunk, yeah.

0:40:31
BR: If you just want to kill people, why would you go to a gay nightclub in Orlando? Obviously, the victims were intended. Information came out about a year and a half after the shooting that cast a sort of different light on what exactly his motivations were for choosing the Pulse nightclub. There’s an article in the New York Times that says, quote, on the night of the shooting, Mr. Mateen first went to Disney Springs, where he’d been a few days earlier with his wife. He then went into the local House of Blues club and bought a t-shirt. Assistant US Attorney Mandolfo said, but apparently was deterred by heavy police presence from mounting any attack there. Mateen then got into his rented van, the prosecutor said, and used Google to search for nightclubs in downtown Orlando. The first one that came up was named Eve. The second was Pulse. An Associated Press story offered even more details. It said Mateen, quote, intended to attack Disney World’s shopping and entertainment complex by hiding a gun in a stroller, but became spooked by police and instead chose the gay club as his target. In fact, Mateen and his wife had visited Disney in the days before the attack, according to one of her statements to federal authorities. The target of that terrorist attack was not the Pulse nightclub. The target of the attack was Disney. In fact, one of the the assistant DA’s showed a video of Disney Springs complex that captured Mateen walking near the House of Blues in the hours before the Pulse attack. In it, he looks behind him at police officers standing nearby. He had to choose a new target, she said. Now, these details came out during the trial of Mateen’s widow. These details weren’t available until about nine months after the shooting and after many people had already sort of latched on to the assumption that he had specifically gone directly to Pulse to commit the crime.

0:42:23
CW: And it is hard to get that out of the public’s mindset when it’s had that long to anchor itself.

0:42:29
BR: Yeah, absolutely.

0:42:31
CW: Well, one thing I’ve also seen happen is a bit of what I would call in other circumstances special pleading in that, have you heard it said that, oh well, Disney is a very pro-gay company, so he had it on the list as being sympathetic with the homosexual agenda, as it were.

0:42:49
BR: Well, I mean, it’s certainly true that Disney, like many corporations, supports gay rights. And I mean, it’s true to that extent. But the location he targeted has no specific connection to the LGBT community. The main thing it offers is large crowds and maximum carnage. And if you also look at where Mateen worked at the time, which was a security firm and Disney World, those wouldn’t really be viable options for for where to attack number one a security firm is going to have you know armed armed guards And it’ll be small and Disney World has Lots of security and as a security professional he’d be able to assess that fairly well Exactly and so what you find is the research on terrorist targets reveals that they often attack places They’re familiar with not necessarily places that have some particular significance or symbolism. And again, we talked about this in the case of Hauser and Holmes and the others. Again, the idea that the terrorists attack the White House or the Statue of Liberty or some place with high symbolism, sure, they might try and do that, but those places are heavily guarded and it’s not likely to be successful. Terrorists typically, therefore, choose softer targets, places with crowds, little or no security, and easy public access. You think, for example, the Boston Marathon bombers. It couldn’t be easier. You have huge crowds, easy access to anybody. No metal detectors, etc., etc.

0:44:10
CW: Well, you had mentioned that terrorist experts say that they’re familiar with. One thing that came out pretty early was that Mateen himself had frequented the Pulse nightclub. He’d been there for quite a few evenings just to dance and have fun, I guess. That led to the theory that he was actually gay himself and was a self-hating homosexual and was targeting that community out of a sense of shame that he had about himself.

0:44:53
BR: Well, that was certainly a popular explanation, and of course, in some ways, it’s one of those explanations that it makes sense no matter how you read it, right? So if you assume that he was heterosexual, then you could say, well, you know, he hated gays because of a culture of toxic masculinity and rampant homophobia. If you say he’s gay, well, then it’s just because he himself is gay and he hates gays. So really, whatever your assumptions are, there’s no wrong answer to that. It’s sort of circular logic because no matter which, which details you choose to believe, you can find some evidence for them. And this is another example of something that I had widely heard. But when I began digging into it and trying to figure out, well, what’s the basis for this? I quickly realized that there was really, it was most just rumors, speculation. And so actually what you find is that despite widespread rumors, there’s no evidence that he was, that Omar Mateen was gay. He was married twice. He had a three-year-old son. In fact, there’s information that Omar Mateen liked to date older women and he was actually cheating on his wife and going on online dating sites looking for women.

0:46:03
CW: So he did have a secret love life, it just did not involve men.

0:46:08
BR: Yes, that seems to be the case. And I’ll just quote briefly from a Washington Post piece here. It says, The FBI has found no evidence so far that Omar Mateen chose the popular establishment because of its gay clientele, U.S. law enforcement officials said. While there can be no denying the significant impact on the gay community, the investigation hasn’t revealed he targeted Pulse because it was a gay club. There is thus far no evidence that Mateen was gay or that his attack was motivated by homophobia. This assessment is based on interviews and an examination of his computer and other electronic media. Mateen’s wife didn’t think he was gay. The FBI has been unable to verify that Mateen used gay dating apps and instead has found evidence that he was cheating on his wife with other women. Visuals said there’s nothing to suggest he attempted to cover up his tracks by deleting files. They also said he did not make gay slurs during the shooting spree inside the club based on witnesses. So as you can see, sort of the widespread default assumption that he was motivated by anti-gay sentiment sort of begins to show some cracks in it. Again, so there, there’s no real, there’s no real evidence that he himself was gay. In fact, there’s, there’s some evidence there’s significant evidence he wasn’t gay. But more interestingly, it turns out that according to many news reports, Mateen had many gay friends and he showed no animosity towards them or the LGBT community at large. And I saw this over and over again. I must’ve read a couple dozen articles from the Washington Post and elsewhere. I’ll just read from the Washington Post. There’s a quote here. Mateen hung out at a mall with an openly gay former classmate, Samuel King, and many of King’s gay friends. He had to know we were gay, but I never got any sense of homophobia or aggression from him, King said. And then a Reuters article reported that King, who had known Mateen for five years, said that he, quote, did not appear to be anti-homosexual and was quoted as saying that, what is shocking to me is the majority of the staff at Ruby Tuesday’s when I worked there were gay. He clearly was not anti-gay, at least not back then. He didn’t show any hatred to any of us. And so I’m reading these interviews with gay friends of Omar Mateen, all of whom were saying, yeah, I was gay. He knew I was gay. We hung out. We were friends. He never he never made any anti-gay slurs, etc. And I kept I kept researching. Well, surely, I mean, everyone’s saying he hated gay. This is motivated by homophobia. And I kept sorting through these newspaper stories and quotes and interviewees for somebody who knew Mateen, who said that he had acted in some homophobic way, and I couldn’t find any. What’s interesting to me is that it’s not as if a whole bunch of other people were interviewed saying, no, I knew Mateen, and he called me this, or he called me that, and he mentioned hating gays. So there’s no contradiction here. All the people that I have seen who have been interviewed about Mateen’s alleged homophobia have uniformly said he didn’t hate gays. It’s not even like three people said yes, two people said no. All of them that I’ve been able to find have said that he wasn’t homophobic at all. And when you look at the adjectives used to describe Mateen, unstable, agitated, troubled, loner, angry, homophobic is not among them. I have yet to see an interview by anybody who actually knew him prior to the shooting that described any sort of homophobia or hatred towards gays, with the exception of his father.

0:49:52
CW: Ah, okay. Because I was hoping you’d get to his father. That’s what I, that’s one thing I remember hearing about right away. Some statement by his father claiming that Omar Mateen had witnessed two men kissing and it freaked him out or something and that came out pretty closely to the actual shooting itself. So it was in the public it was in the public mindset and circulated everywhere with a lot of the early articles and news stories.

0:50:16
BR: Absolutely. So what you find is that in this case as far as I can tell that the two or three main things that people latched on to in terms of why it was obviously a homophobic attack. Number one was, again, the location, right? It’s a gay nightclub. What more do you need? Why else would he have attacked there? The second thing was an interview by Sadiq Mateen, who’s Omar’s father. And this made international news, and this was sort of the nail in the coffin for anybody that had any doubts that there was a homophobic aspect to it, this pretty much dispelled all the doubts. It was an interview with NBC News shortly after the shooting and he’s quoted, he said, we were in downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music and he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry, Sadiq told NBC. They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said look at that in front of my son. They’re doing that. So again this it’s it’s pretty crystal clear I mean if you it’s like well he’s describing what happened and it fits perfectly with the narrative that that that normal Omar Mateen hated gays. But it’s actually unclear exactly what he said it was there was one interview again with with NBC News and CNN offered a sort of a slightly different take on he said that that his son had a reaction and the whole sighting was surprising to him he didn’t really clarify further what sort of reaction it was although presumably was a negative one because in Muslim countries displays of affection even among heterosexual couples are sort of frowned upon but and they certainly would be among gays. But what happened was that after Sadiq Mateen’s comments went viral. They’re all over the place and just it was just that was it. I mean, they’re all of the Gawker had a headline saying now we have seen the epitome of anti-gay hatred. One of many headlines that were like, there you go. This is in case anyone had any doubts as to why Omar Mateen killed four damn people, the gay nightclub pulse, this is fine. But almost immediately Mateen retracted it. And this is a little detail that often gets lost. Mateen held an in-depth interview at his home to clarify his comments. He said that the Pulse nightclub was not, in fact, a reaction to his son kissing two men, as he had said, but instead that it was an act of political and religious terrorism. And Mateen himself explicitly said this. In a June 13 story titled, Orlando Shooter’s Dad Says Mateen Wasn’t Prompted by Ben kissing. The reporter noted that quote, in a sharp departure from his earlier statements that Omar Mateen Sunday shooting rampage at a gay Orlando nightclub was prompted by anger over the sight of two men kissing. Mateen father this morning said he now believes his son’s attack was an act of terrorism. Sadiq Mateen made his comments to reporters in his Portland St. Lucie home this morning at times putting his hand over his heart as he spoke. Remorseful and shaken, Mateen said, what my son did was an act of a terrorist.” So there’s some questions going on here. I have no reason to assume that Sadiq Mateen was trying to salvage his son’s reputation. At this point, the entire world knew exactly what he had done. And in fact, Sadiq Mateen being Muslim, if he did in fact harbor anti-gay sentiments and wanted to curry favor with hardline radicals, for example, people in ISIS, would likely have said yes. He did. He killed those damn heathen gays. But he didn’t. He said the opposite. And keep in mind that in the case of Sadiq Mateen, English is not his first language. And there’s actually been some question about his mental capacity and whether he’s delusional. I’ve seen him described as delusional in several news accounts. Of course, by this time, both social media and news media continue to frame the incident as a hate crime. The idea that two kissing men sparked the mass murders at the Pulse nightclub was firmly established in the public’s mind. And from that point on, it was intractable. Nothing anybody was going to say was going to change anyone’s mind about it.

0:54:30
CW: Well, have you looked into the angle where if he was motivated by ISIS, ISIS itself has come out very much against homosexuality. They follow a type of radical Islam where – it’s not in the Koran, but specifically in the Hadith, which is an account of sayings from the Prophet Muhammad, there is a passage indicating that gay men should be thrown from a high building, and then if they are not dead when they hit the ground, they should be stoned to death. Again, when this all first happened, it didn’t seem like that much of a leap that he could be motivated by political leanings toward ISIS, coupled with the idea that that gays should all be killed.

0:55:16
BR: Well, that’s certainly one of the one of the theories that was floated, right, is that even if Mateen himself wasn’t homophobic, that he was doing it on behalf of ISIS. And in fact, that’s what the FBI determined. The final report has not been released. I called the FBI and I was told somewhat curtly that I would not be getting the final report and it was not ready yet. But earlier news reports referenced the file. And unlike Steven Paddock, who, as we mentioned, his motivation was unclear. I mean, he didn’t leave any manifestos exactly saying why he’d done it. But in the case of Omar Mateen, he was crystal clear about why he was committing the attack. There’s no question at all in terms of what he told people. As I mentioned, 45 minutes into the siege, he was on the news, he was talking with reporters on the local news station. He also repeated the same things to police negotiators. So it’s not as if he did this and then he was killed before he could tell anybody why he was doing it. He told people repeatedly why he was doing it. He referred to himself as an Islamic soldier during 911 calls. And when asked his name, he replied, My name is, I pledge allegiance to Abu al-Baghdadi, may God protect him, on behalf of the Islamic State. According to a summary released by the FBI, Mateen told the negotiator to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq, and this is why he was, quote, out there right now. When Mateen was asked during the shooting by a police negotiator to explain what was going on, he replied, What’s going on is I feel the pain of the people getting killed in Syria and Iraq. Further evidence of his motivations can be found in the terrorist he specifically cites as inspirations for the shooting. He said, quote, My homeboy Tamerlan Sarnev did his thing on the Boston Marathon. Okay, now it’s my turn. So again, he’s explicitly citing the Boston bombers as an example of what he’s following. And keep in mind, the Boston Bombers did not choose their targets because of their sexual orientation. They chose their targets because there was a crowd that was going to assure maximum carnage on the streets of Boston.

0:57:31
CW: So he was pretty clear about wanting to claim credit and get his message out there for why he was doing this and in all the statements he made he never once mentioned and I’m killing these homosexual infidels or some kind of indication that the crowd being a primarily gay crowd had anything to do with it.

BR: Not once. In fact he was asked if any specific event triggered his attack in the Pulse nightclub and Mateen was crystal clear. He said, quote, yo, the airstrike that killed Abu Wahib a few weeks ago, that’s what triggered it, okay? He was referring to a May 6th, 2016 airstrike in the Western Anbar province of Iraq, which targeted and killed Wahib, who was an Islamic State terrorist and a former member of Al-Qaeda.

0:58:19
CW: So strictly political and military leanings here.

0:58:23
BR: Yes. I mean, it could not be any clearer. I mean he he he says repeatedly over and over again Exactly why he’s doing this his answer is always the same He’s doing it because of military action by Americans at no point did he say anything about? homosexuality being wrong or gays or any slurs anything like that and then keep in mind that there’s no reason to second-guess his own statements about his motivations. At this removal meeting, he’s been dead two years, people can speculate all they want, but there’s no reason for him to lie about why he was committing such a horrific act.

0:58:58
CW: Terrorists, terrorists in general, I mean you’ve read a lot about terrorist studies here. In general, they want their message out there, they don’t try to conceal it, right?

BR: Absolutely. He’s doing exactly what terrorists do, which is saying, I’m doing this as a reaction to a perceived grievance. You know, you’re bombing Iraq, you’re killing ISIS fighters, stop it, or I’ll kill these people and I want you to stop. People who commit political acts such as terrorism are not shy about explaining their motivations. As you said, that’s the whole point. They want people to know exactly why they’re doing this.

0:59:39
CW: Yeah, they go to great lengths to get on the news and be heard about it, right?

0:59:43
BR: Absolutely. And, you know, and Mateen had plenty of opportunity before, during, and after the shooting, for example, if he left a manifesto or an email to somebody, to explain why he was killing people. And the fact that he didn’t once mention homosexuality or hatred of gays is really revealing, I think.

1:00:01
CW: This is making me wonder if he made a terrible terrorist handbook blunder by picking the Pulse nightclub, because if he wanted his message out there, it certainly didn’t get out there. Instead, he’s remembered as a homophobic, possibly closeted gay man who went on a rampage motivated by hate, not by any political means.

1:00:23
BR: Yeah, I think that’s actually one of the the ironies about this is that had he lived Mateen might have been astonished and dismayed how his actions have been misinterpreted especially given how clearly and explicitly he stated his motivations. Shortly after the the shooting there was lots of talk about how the the Pulse massacre was an attack on love. Particularly gay love, so one of the most popular slogans that came out of the Pulse nightclub shooting was the phrase, love wins. And love wins was put on posters and t-shirts and hats. And it was a common phrase. And it was sort of like, love is going to rise above this. And it’s a beautiful sentiment. And I get it. And it helped the community heal. That’s wonderful. But keep in mind that the shooting was not triggered by a lack of love or empathy for the gay community. In fact, you know, under different circumstances, Mateen himself might have joined in the chorus calling for love to triumph. Because he acted, he said, and certainly we have no reason to doubt it, on behalf of the defenseless. He said, quote, I feel the pain of the people being killed in Syria, in Iraq. Like many zealots, he thought he was doing good. He was trying to raise the public’s awareness and basically shock Americans into demanding that they stop bombing innocent people in Syria and Iraq. Now, obviously, that didn’t happen and that was not going to happen, but that was, by all indications, that was his motivation.

1:02:01
CW: It would be nice if other potential terrorists saw how his message failed to get out there and would maybe think twice about resorting to violence to get their message out.

BR: You would think so.

CW: That would be nice if that happened.

1:02:17
BR: So one question that you asked was about the Islamic State, because again you could argue that even though there’s no real evidence that Matin himself was homophobic or even gay, that again he was he was doing it on behalf of ISIS and he said as much. And ISIS, even if he himself wasn’t anti-gay, that ISIS is. It’s true that fundamentalist Muslims including the Islamic State have at times attacked the gay community, but it’s the fact is that the Islamic State, they typically don’t target gay communities in bombings or mass casualty attacks, such as the Pulse nightclub. So what you find is that ISIS and lone actors acting on their behalf typically commit terrorism in response to a specific real or perceived grievance, right? In fact, as I mentioned, Mateen cited the death of one particular man as being the reason he was doing this. It’s far less common for terrorism to be committed out of a sort of general religious principle. So for example, Islam prohibits alcohol consumption, but ISIS doesn’t make a practice of targeting breweries or bars. It’s just not… they disapprove of drinking alcohol, but they don’t go out of the way to, well, we demand that other people not drink alcohol. Same thing with, you know, Muslims disapprove of eating pork, but fundamentals don’t stage massacres at hog farms or pork processing plants.

1:03:46
CW: It almost seems counterintuitive because you’d think it would be killing two birds with one stone to make a political statement and also take out a group of people that are doing something that your branch of religion disapproves of, but you’re getting this information from people who have made their whole career out of studying how terrorists do what they do.

1:04:09
BR: Yes. I interviewed several experts on terrorism. I interviewed people at the Counter-Extremism Project and several textbooks on terrorists. And it’s true that many Muslims, like many fundamentalist Christians, I should add, oppose homosexuality due to real or inferred prohibitions against them. But the fact is that ISIS is not known for targeting gay nightclubs or gay organizations or the LGBT community in general. So it’s true that the organization on behalf of whom Mateen said he was acting had targeted individual gays at times, there were few if any pulse light attacks on large numbers of gays at places where they meet or congregate. As it turns out, there’s no precedent for any ISIS-inspired mass shootings or terrorist attacks on the gay community. I contacted the Counter Extremism Project and talked to their spokesman, Steve Cohen, and I asked him, is this something that ISIS does? And he said that the Pulse nightclub shooting was the only ISIS-inspired attack in the US that involved gay people. So if indeed, Matino’s motivated to attack gays on behalf of ISIS, despite him not mentioning it, this was the only time it’s ever happened in terms of a massacre of this size.

1:05:33
CW: Yeah, which doesn’t disprove it. As you’re fond of saying, it’s possible. But just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s the most probable explanation.

1:05:45
BR: And sort of confusing the issue is that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. So people say, well, see, there you go. Mateen shot at this gay nightclub. ISIS said, hey, that’s our that’s our boy. You know, he’s acting on our behalf. But the fact is that ISIS assumes responsibility for all sorts of attacks that it has no real connection to. That’s just what they do. Any time that someone commits an act of terrorism that’s ostensibly targeting Westerners, they say yes, they claim responsibility for it.

1:06:17
CW: Well, yeah, they encourage lone wolves. There’s no official playbook. If you want to mention ISIS while you do something horrendous, they’re happy to take credit for it.

1:06:27
BR: That’s exactly right, and when I looked into it, apparently the connection between Mateen and ISIS was pretty tenuous. There were not strong links between him being radicalized by ISIS figures, whatever else, I mean he he certainly talked about, you know, doing this because of the attacks on the Islamic State, but it’s not as if there’s any evidence that Matin was working closely with ISIS in choosing targets for example. In fact, there’s no evidence of that whatsoever.

1:06:54
CW: So Ben, who does the Islamic State tend to attack?

1:06:58
BR: Well, the victims of most Muslim terrorists are Muslims, by far. This is something that often gets overlooked when people are talking about Muslim terrorists. But you can look at other terrorist attacks in 2017 conducted on behalf of the Islamic State. And in all these other cases, it’s against Muslims. It’s against fellow Muslims. For example, there was an attack on an ice cream shop in Baghdad. And it was an attack because of Western decadence or because Islam prohibits ice cream or anything. It was because there were a lot of people who were going to be victims of this attack. One of the books I consulted is a book titled The Anatomy of Terrorism by David E. Long, who is the former deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. And he writes that, quote, in most instances, the victims are not the real target of the terrorist attack, but merely innocent bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since the victim is seldom the ultimate target, the link between terrorist tactics and terrorist victims is often pure caprice.

1:08:03
CW: That leads back into the, just as you were mentioning with the location choice, it’s all about being a crime of convenience. You bomb or you shoot up where you can easily get into and where there’s the most people. And since many of these ISIS extremists are in Muslim countries, they have access to places where many Muslims congregate.

1:08:26
BR: Absolutely. I mean, there’s just, it’s all the evidence points to the choice by Mateen of the Pulse nightclub as not having any real connection to gays or the gay community, but simply a place where he could assure to kill a lot of people. It wasn’t the House of Blues. It wasn’t Times Square. It wasn’t Disney World. It was the second nightclub that came up in a Google search.

1:08:52
PR: So it’s obvious why the homophobia angle became an issue from the beginning. It was obviously very widespread in the media and everything. But what made it so that that became the overall narrative? And what made it so difficult to play that down once more information was coming out?

1:09:14
BR: There’s actually a couple reasons. One of them was a political reason and that is that people were justifiably concerned about what the the right wing and then then presentive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would say about it. There’s some interesting nuances in terms of why exactly the the homophobia angle was was latched on to, other than, of course, as we said, the sort of the superficially obvious ones. And I read a quote by psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University. The left is very worried about homophobia, but it’s also very worried about Islamophobia. So there’s going to be some real cognitive dissonance on the left as people talk about a Muslim killing gay people. And I think that’s exactly right. You had people who were concerned that Trump was going to politicize the issue and of course he did. In a June 12, 2016 speech, he referred to the Orlando shooting as the worst terror strike on our soil since September 11, the worst mass shooting in our country’s history. And he then proceeded to call for immigration reform, of course, because that’s apparently that there’s some connection there. But this is one aspect to is if you’re trying to choose between homophobia and a terrorist attack, neither one of those is particularly palatable to certainly to liberals because you don’t want it to be either one. But the more palatable of the two, certainly for many people, was to call it homophobia. And so in the news media who just framed it as a self-evident attack. And I’ll quote briefly Max Fisher of the New York Times. He says, For gay rights advocates who yearn for recognition of the scope of their persecution, Mr. Matin’s targeting of a gay club during Gay Pride Month is paramount. By shoehorning these attacks into familiar narratives gun violence homophobia jihadism. We can make sense of them even more it allows us to validate our pre-existing world view of belief whose truth. We feel has gone unacknowledged so there’s this this sort of superficial ambiguity in the motivations for the the pulse nightclub shooting and You have people on either side that are latching on to it and using it for their own agendas But you you quickly found that people were latching right onto it. And so, for example, Moona Mary, a writer for Teen Vogue, stated that, quote, the Orlando shooting is proof that American culture fuels homophobia. And she asserted that, more than anything, Omar was the product of American culture. The rage he held in his heart for gay people, and perhaps for himself, is the same rage fueling street harassment of visibly queer and gender nonconforming people on the Brooklyn blocks I walk every day. It stems from a violent, misogynistic appraisal of desire in bodies in which certain formations are acceptable under patriarchy and others are met with violence. Orlando is unfortunately an extreme extension of that violence and should serve as a wake-up call to the dangers of homophobia, transphobia, and toxic masculinity.

1:12:24
CW: See, I’m torn as to how useful wake-up calls are. I worked the LA Pride event shortly after the Orlando shooting in West Hollywood, and this is like the week after the nightclub shooting. And there was actually a copycat that they caught outside the gates of Pride weekend there. And I was inside having a great time eating ice cream and drawing fabulous people. And there was this fellow who felt empowered by the anti-gay message, supposedly driven forth by Omar Mateen, who decided he was going to make a big splash in the news and bomb a gay pride event as well. I wonder if that would have been going on, because if the narrative about Omar Mateen being motivated by homophobia had been in the news as much as it was, because many times copycats are motivated purely by, oh, I want to get in the news, too, and yeah, I hate gays, too. I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that. And it was unnerving, to say the least, to be on site for all that when it happened. And I can also say this has caused me great cognitive dissonance, because on some level you feel like knocking down the evidence that Omar Mateen was motivated by homophobic tendencies is almost a slap in the face of the LGBTQ community. And that’s not something I or any of us want to do. It’s making the same kind of mistake as other people do in skeptic arenas when it comes to conflating one instance with all. Oh, you’re taking an issue with this particular statistic or this specific case? Well, oh, if you don’t believe in this, if you don’t believe in the moon landing hoax, then that means you just believe the government always tells you the truth. No, no, I don’t believe that. You think science is always right? You think doctors never get it wrong? No, of course I don’t. I’m talking about a specific case. The fact that the Pulse nightclub shooting was not motivated by homophobia, by the evidence we have now, it was most likely purely political, does not mean that homophobia does not exist. Of course it obviously exists. Of course it’s something to be concerned about. It’s something to fight. It’s something to measure It’s something to hope we progress away from But it’s yeah, it’s very confounding to have wrong information out there.

1:15:01
BR: Well, that’s exactly right, and that was one of the reasons why there was blowback because that was one things I looked at was a hold on here I mean when when you sort of break it down and you realize that, in fact, there is no good evidence that Mateen was gay, and even if there was, there’s no good evidence that he hated gays or was homophobic. When you sort of look at it, like, well, why was this so angrily denounced when people were ascribing terrorist motivations? And again, one reason I mentioned earlier was that people like Donald Trump were ascribing terrorist motivations. And so if you’re liberal, then you you don’t want you don’t want to be in that camp. And, you know, a broken clock is right twice a day. At least, the non-digital ones.

1:15:48
CW: I do often start to question my sanity if I agree with Trump on nearly anything.

BR: Well, this, you know, once in several years. But no, but this is this is part of what happened was that activists bristled at the suggestion that it was anything other than a homophobic attack. For example, there was a British columnist named Owen Jones, who was a writer for The Guardian, and he appeared in a Sky News live interview on June 13th to discuss the attack. And Jones, he was being interviewed by the host, Mark Longhurst, and Jones was getting frustrated. In fact, he actually stormed off the stage live on the set because Longhurst kept suggesting that in fact it was the evidence seems to suggest it was a terrorist attack and Jones was just flabbergasted and insulted that Longhurst would would not just accept that it was obviously a homophobic attack and There was a as an article by uh tim teeman a senior editor of the daily beast who also had no patience for anyone challenging the prevailing view of of uh, Mateen’s motivations. He said quote what needs to be repeated over and over again and interrogated, is that the largest mass shooting in american history was attack on gay people LGBT people politicians and lawmakers must say that confront that call it by his terrible rightful name. And what you find in Tiemann’s response and Jones’ response and also what the Teen Vogue writer, Mona Mera, wrote before, what you find is there’s this sense that even questioning whether it was in fact an attack specifically targeting gay people was sort of beyond, it was taboo. It was, how dare you even wonder if that’s the case? And, you know, I think that’s a problem. I mean, you know, I think that the myth that shooting was motivated by hatred of gays may itself be damaging to the extent that it unnecessarily fuels fear in the gay community.

1:17:55
CW: I can understand that. I disagree with it, but I can understand it. It’s that tendency to cast skeptics as unfeeling. Like, oh, if you know, and in this case, it’s the closest I can come to really kind of being in that camp. Whereas with other skeptical topics, I’m totally not in that camp. When you have people who say, oh, if you’re telling me that vaccinations don’t harm children, then you’re unfeeling and you don’t care about these children that are harmed or you’re turning a blind eye to all the people who have been poisoned from GMO dangers. And in cases like that where it’s much more clear cut, it’s like, oh, no, skeptics aren’t doing any harm. We’re showing you the truth here. But when it comes to something, whether or not it’s homophobia, in this case, it feels very taboo.

1:18:46
BR: Well, one thing that happened here, and to be fair, Tim Tiemann and Owen Jones and Moonamir and others, in fact, the majority of them, they were basically putting out hot takes. They were rushing to comment soon after the shooting occurred. Rumors were still circulating. As we know, investigations take time, especially something as complex and as involved as a terrorist shooting, which is at the time the worst massacre in modern American history. You’re not going to get clear answers as to motivation or anything else in the days and weeks after. You’re just not going to. A thorough investigation by the FBI and other law enforcement authorities can take months or years. To be fair to some of the earliest commenters, they were basically sort of operating in the confusion and chaos of the first days and weeks after the attack before any real investigation had been done. But still, I mean, there’s a real journalistic lapse here. It’s one thing to, again, there’s breaking news, everyone wants to have their comment on it, they want us to have the latest speculation on it, but at the end of the day, we need to look at what the experts say, and Celestia, you mentioned this earlier, right? That’s a basic critical thinking, skeptical thing, right? What do the experts say? Talk to terrorist experts. Talk to the FBI, right? In this particular case, I have to say that unlike Trump, I have full faith in the FBI’s ability to investigate.

1:20:22
CW: Yeah, yeah.

1:20:23
BR:  The FBI has so far not found any evidence that the Omar Mateen shooting was was rooted in homophobia. I have no reason to doubt that. I have no reason to think that there’s any cover-up. I assume that they’re well-meaning, hard-working men and women who are doing their best to actually figure out what the cause was. And the place they start, of course, is Mateen’s repeated self-descriptions of why he was doing it, which were crystal clear.

1:20:56
CW: Yeah, as I’ve been ruminating on this over months now, since reading your initial article, I’ve come to some different conclusions about how I feel about it. And yeah, I’m going to talk about feelings. You can’t stop me. It’s important to remember that you can still mourn for a community and recognize that that community was clearly harmed. Lives were lost. You know, people’s lives were ruined in the LGBTQ community in Orlando. And that’s something we should memorialize and acknowledge. That’s not in question, nor is it in question that we should all respond with compassion to that community over this. There’s an interim memorial that’s up already, a wall of remembrance with messages of love and hope. And a friend who lives in Orlando posted a live feed as she walked through it, and it was beautiful, and it’s touching, and it moved me. And it’s important that such tributes exist and that they are protected from any vandalism that might be motivated by hate, which does absolutely exist. But the fact that the massacre itself had a different motivation doesn’t really take away from their loss, from the loss of that community. And thinking of that community, this is a community with huge amounts of stress already on it. They’re dealing with family rejection, with religiously motivated persecution. They have an ongoing fight for equal treatment in everything from marriage to purchasing baked goods. The fear of yet another danger that terrorists might specifically target them with mass violence only serves to add another layer to the stress and fear they already have. And yeah, one can argue that classifying the Orlando shooting as a hate crime, you know, would manipulate some statistics and possibly help grant some more funding and attention to that community’s needs. But is that worth adding this other existential threat to the shoulders of LGBTQ youth who already have enough to deal with? If it’s true, then I’d say yes. But if all the evidence is pointing to the fact that they weren’t specifically targeted for being homosexuals, then that’s something I’d want to be very open about to my gay son or my gay daughter or anybody else who’s dealing with the stresses of being in that minority community.

1:23:26
BR: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I mean the fact that the attack very likely was not, after all, motivated by homophobia should provide comfort to the community. It means that this monster, this terrorist, he didn’t kill people because they were gay. He didn’t harbor burning hatred for homosexuals or for loving each other. That wasn’t his motivation. Now, that doesn’t make his motivation right, but it just means that the reason for it wasn’t hatred of who they are which should be comforting in its way. I mean the fact is that gay Americans have little or nothing to fear from Isis or Muslims in general.

CW: Or that they at least have the same amounts to fear as any other citizen walking the streets.

BR: Which is virtually none. It’s seriously the fact is the average American has little or nothing to fear from Muslim terrorists or Muslims in general and that is even more true for the the American gay community and so you know blaming Muslims for violence against the gay community only reinforces negative stereotypes about that marginalized community. It doesn’t do it it doesn’t do us any good. The fact that there’s no evidence that the Orlando shooting was motivated by hatred of homosexuals in the community, as you say, it obviously doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. All it means is that in this particular case, this particular shooter was not, as far as we can tell from any evidence, motivated by hatred of gays. I find that comforting. I mean, I do, and maybe other people won’t, but I think that the fact that someone didn’t intentionally go out to kill nearly 50 or hundreds of gays is a good thing.

1:25:16
CW: Well, yeah, like I said, just like the group of people that would attend an Ariana Grande concert, I would find it comforting to know that because of who I am or because of what community I’m in, I don’t have to worry about a particular jihad after my group. People have enough to worry about without ascribing extra layers of danger to everything that is out there. Sometimes people are just people and sometimes they become targets just because they’re people.

1:25:48
BR: Or they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. And again, when you look at the evidence and you look at the motivations and you look at is there evidence that he was gay? No. Is there evidence he hated gays? No. Okay, well then why? Well, again, he said exactly why. There were political motivations, terrorist motivations. That’s still horrible and tragic, but it means that the victims of terrorism at the Pulse nightclub, like those at the Boston bombing, like those in 9-11, they weren’t hated for who they are or what they represented. They weren’t hated. They weren’t hated at all. The people that killed them didn’t know them. They were a means to an end, which is horrible, but it means that I guess, you know, this is going to sound weird, but if I were killed, I would rather be killed in an attack that I knew wasn’t targeting me specifically for who I am or what I had done or my sexuality.

1:26:55
CW: It’s a tricky thing to conceptualize. I remember what somebody once said about their friend who died in an avalanche. He was more comforted knowing that his friend had perished just as a random result of snowflakes coming together at the wrong time in the wrong place, rather than feeling like the universe or God or somebody targeted him. It seems almost like an act of God, I’m smiting you with this avalanche. But thinking of it as just, he was out there, wrong time, wrong place. Too much snow, too much snow, and he died. Political motivations and geopolitical warfare is something that is so large and random to me. It is almost like a snowstorm and I you know a friend who dies from violence resulting from that I certainly would be slightly comforted knowing it was a random geopolitical act then being targeted for who they are and who they love.

BR: Yeah, I agree. I think that you know, you have to follow the evidence wherever it leads. That’s the essence of journalism, skepticism, and critical thinking. It’s like a constellation of ambiguous data points. You can pick and choose whatever you like to fit a given narrative. If you want to consider it to be an attack on gays or a result of the patriarchy or terrorism, what have you, you can find data to fit that, except that upon closer inspection, some of the information, some of the data points are wrong. So then you omit those and you see what answer best fits the remaining evidence. It’s easy, especially in times of tragedy and stress, to view the world in binary terms, good versus bad, love versus hate, good versus evil, things like that. But life is more complex than that, and sometimes we oversimplify at the expense of understanding.

1:28:51
CW: And only through understanding can we make things better eventually.

1:28:54
BR: Yeah, if you don’t understand what happened, if you misunderstand what happened at the Pulse nightclub on that terrible night, then how can you expect to prevent it from happening again?

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1:29:14
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1:29:41
PR: So that about does it for this week. Thank you for being patient and sitting with us through this entire discussion. It’s a tricky topic, it’s very controversial, and people may be prone to a lot of cognitive dissonance or just general, you know, you get those gut feelings of this is icky, I don’t know if we can conclude this comfortably, you know, and it’s tough. And, you know, I definitely understand, so I appreciate everyone bearing with us on this. I hope you were able to get some good, maybe new perspective on this, or at least we could help you understand the whole situation a little better. I have to apologize. My voice has been kind of a little rough tonight, so that’s why you haven’t heard me too much.

1:30:46
CW: Yeah, Pascual, you just didn’t want to weigh in because you want all the hate mail to come to me and Ben for this week.

1:30:52
PR: Yeah. Of course, now I’m going to get hate mail for not sticking up for the SJWs. I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll see where it goes.

1:31:01
CW: Well, yeah. I had a real knee-jerk reaction to my first forays into this topic, but it’s good to sort of bear with your skeptical principles and go where they lead you regardless of whether or not it’s a sacred cow. So thanks listeners for your patience on this.

1:31:18
BR: And let me just add one other quick thing, which is that I think that it’s exactly those topics that might make us uncomfortable or we might need to think twice about that we do need to examine more closely. I mean, it’s easy to sort of not really care one way or the other about Bigfoot or UFOs or some other pseudoscience, but there are very real issues that affect us in our culture and our society that we need to be able to sort of take a closer look at and not shy away from.

1:31:48
PR: Yeah, yeah.

1:31:49
CW: Hear, hear. So, Pascual, what are we looking at for next week? Hopefully something lighter.

1:31:55
PR: Yeah, we’re going to be switching gears a little bit next week, and we are going to be talking about something that’s a little near and dear to me, which is movie and TV myths. I think mostly movie myths. And we’re going to be talking about just some of the interesting urban legends and myths that have sort of sprung up around movies. And it’s a really fun topic, and I think people are really going to enjoy this episode.

1:32:24
I’ve got a few favorites I can’t wait to discuss.

1:32:29
Awesome. Well, until next week, we’ll see ya.

1:32:32
Bye-bye. Take care.

1:32:34
Squaring Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC. Copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriekback. Additional music by Memory, Guitar’d and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celestia Ward. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pasquale Romero at Acronis Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange

1:33:01
and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Acronis Creative, Center for Inquiry, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Acronis Creative, Center for Inquiry,

1:33:06
our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo