Elliot Williams
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
or ran their stuff 20 or 30 years ago.
But you're not seeing that.
What you're seeing is the looting, which is a crime.
But that's what, going back to that moment in 1977 media, that's what they've chosen to focus on.
And it just makes people angrier.
hardens their views, it makes them more bigoted, it makes them more angry, and it makes vigilante shootings like the one Bernie gets engaged in more likely and more common.
So it's really a look at, it's taking one moment in America and broadening it to why are we so obsessed with vigilantes and this guy, this white guy today.
And, you know, the one thing I would add to that, and I talk about this toward the end of the book, Five Bullets, it's not just the media, what is the media, right?
It's not just newspapers anymore, but it's the algorithms now that only feed you like-minded things.
that like to your point actually is radicalizing people.
And the example I use in the last chapter in the conclusion of Five Bullets is what if Kyle Rittenhouse, remember him from Black Lives Matter protests in 2021, I believe 2020, crosses from Illinois to Wisconsin, grabs an AK or a big gun and shoots a couple of people and kills them, right?
What if Kyle Rittenhouse didn't have an Instagram feed or TikTok feed or Twitter feed constantly feeding him images of Kenosha, Wisconsin burning?
What if he wasn't in an echo chamber, as many people are, of, you know, this Black Lives Matter and Antifa are taking the city down and, oh, my God, we're going to lose Kenosha.
You have to get there, right?
He might have been supportive or, you know,
he might have been anti-BLM or supportive of, you know, the, whatever.
But I don't know if he crosses state lines and brings a gun and starts shooting people.
It's just, that's the algorithm.
We are all slaves to what tech companies are sort of, you know,
It makes us hungrier when we see things that we agree with and sort of make us madder.