What I found out over the years
is that you can speak against the far right
and they’ll generally ignore you
because there aren’t too many people who really like the far right.
But when you start naming them
and when you start giving details about them, their ears perk up.
And when you get identified by the far right,
death threats are sure to follow.
I ended up being surrounded by a group of Proud Boys,
who were trying to goad me into getting in a fight with them,
which was very tense.
What’s your real name, Spencer Sunshine?
I’ve been the object of a morphing conspiracy theory.
They had decided that I was the Jewish ideological leader of Antifa.
Then pictures had been coming out of this guy named QAnon Shaman.
-Freedom! -Freedom!
And I had gotten a screenshot that somebody sent me
of a fellow named Lin Wood,
who was claiming that the QAnon Shaman was actually me.
[Super_Users]
[Falsely Accused: The Victim of Far Right Conspiracy Theories]
So my name’s Spencer Sunshine.
I’ve been the object of a morphing conspiracy theory for about a decade,
alleging that I am variously the international leader of Antifa
and more recently that I’m the QAnon Shaman.
So I’m a monitor of the United States’ far right.
We do a lot of eavesdropping on far-right media.
So you read people’s websites, get involved in their social media,
see what they're all talking about.
Usually do this by creating a fake persona.
And then this way, you essentially become a member of their movement
and you listen to the chatter and what their discussions are
and what they're planning.
I’d given a talk to a group called Rose City Antifa about anti-Semitism
and left-wing movements.
There had been a local progressive organizer who had,
through contact with far-right groups,
got involved in Holocaust denial.
One was an anti-abortion activist who had done a bombing.
So this started upsetting the anti-fascists
who are part of the progressive scene,
and they were in a campaign to try to run this fellow
and some other anti-Semites out.
On their invitation,
I gave a talk in 2010 about this matter,
and this is what attracted the attention of neo-Nazis.
One fellow in particular was very anti-Semitic.
Because I gave a talk about anti-Semitism
and part of my family’s Jewish,
they decided I was the Jewish ideological leader of Antifa.
And that's the start of the conspiracy theory.
It was coming directly off of classic anti-Semitic tropes.
They were very consistent in identifying me as being Jewish.
Jews will not replace us!
So, at Charlottesville on August 12, 2017,
it was the biggest fascist-led rally in the United States
probably since the 1970s.
Up to a thousand people came to the rally.
There was a counter-protest that was about the same size.
There was open fighting between the fascists and the anti-fascists.
And at one point, as the march went up a narrow street,
a car driven by one of the fascist activists at high speed
drove directly into the crowd.
He ended up killing one person and injuring about three others.
What happened after Charlottesville?
You know, with this new wave of neo-Nazis
and other white nationalists,
who at the time had a lot of inertia behind them
and were becoming more and more violent,
started to fixate on me.
And that's when the death threats started to pile in.
I got messages like, “I have a bullet for you.”
And you make a complaint to Facebook, and they’ll be like,
“Well, we don’t see a problem
with this message coming out of the blue to you.”
That’s really the one time that I got quite nervous.
I had seen people on these discussion boards.
One of them be like, “Oh, I know that guy,
he lives in my neighborhood.”
So, you know, I had good reason to think that people
had an idea where I lived.
And clearly by the comments,
they would have liked to inflict harm on me.
So about a month after Charlottesville,
I had taken an assignment to cover the Mother of All Rallies.
It was a sort of far-right rally in Washington, D.C.
A person there, who I later found out was a far-right conspiracy theorist,
he saw me in the crowd.
He started chanting that I was Antifa
and yelling and following me around and yelling this.
You put my name in a speech
and then two weeks later
I get attacked by a bunch of people
trained in an Antifa base.
Your name...
Antifa base trained these two morons
that attacked me.
I ended up being surrounded by a group of Proud Boys,
who were trying to goad me into getting into a fight with them,
which was very tense.
And then afterwards, this conspiracy theorist put a video out of it
claiming that I was there undercover to go dox far-right activists.
And this was kind of funny.
But if I was the international leader of Antifa
why would I go do the grunt work myself?
But, you know, conspiracy theories are just a story
that they’re trying to work around into a new format.
So in this case, I had originally been identified as
a specifically Jewish leader of Antifa
that was coming to do damage to far-right nationalist movements.
And as the conspiracy theory evolved over the years,
the Jewish part went away.
But I was still the Antifa leader who was still trying to manipulate
or in a devious way hurt far-right movements.
Now, before the Capitol takeover,
there was this claim, which had gone around several times,
that Antifa was going to go disguised as Trump supporters.
According to a tweet a week after the elections,
Antifa from Antifa’s hometown of Portland, Oregon,
will be mixing in with the crowd of Trump supporters
who will assemble in Washington, D.C.,
around the national Capitol on January 6th.
The Antifa folks, however,
will be dressed just like the Trump supporters to try to blend in.
And in this way, the Trumpists can claim that anything violent
or illegal that happens is actually Antifa in disguise, right?
So I had been following the demonstration on Twitter
and was following several accounts
of people who were there on the ground.
And as it sort of wound down,
and pictures had been coming out of this guy named QAnon Shaman,
who was this fellow in a horn helmet and furs and face paint,
and carrying a spear.
He is a fairly well-known figure to people.
He always comes in costume.
-Freedom! -Freedom!
I had gotten a screenshot that somebody sent me
of a fellow named Lin Wood,
who was claiming that the QAnon Shaman was actually me.
And this is the first time that I became aware
that something might be wrong.
So the first thing I saw was that Lin Wood
had almost a million Twitter followers.
And I was like, “Oh, ****!
This is not just some crackpot with, like, 80 followers.”
And the second thing is I learned who Lin Wood was fairly quickly.
He had been one of the lawyers who was doing the Kraken lawsuits.
These were the state-level lawsuits to try to claim that
the Democrats had rigged the election in each state.
Apparently he had a reputation of making outlandish claims
and slanders against various people.
So at that point, I started to get very concerned
because I knew that this was going to go downhill very quickly.
The post ended up getting tens of thousands of shares.
I started getting death threats, as I knew I would,
and this stuff went on for a few days.
The QAnon Shaman, whose name is Jake Angeli,
went on the thread and got really angry at Lin Wood
because he was an actual believer in the Q conspiracy theory
and he was being thrown under the bus by Wood for unknown reasons.
I think maybe Wood thought he was a bad face of the Capitol takeover.
And the screenshot of both Wood’s tweet and his response
ended up on a know your meme website.
Previously, all these rumors about
me being the international leader of Antifa or whatever
were limited to very small circles.
There had already been this far-right conspiratorial talking point
that really all the violence in the Capitol was Antifa,
and then I became the face of it.
But this conspiracy theory itself was repeated even that night
when the joint session reconvened of both the Senate and the House.
A Republican House member repeated this conspiracy theory on the floor,
claiming that it was Antifa that had caused the violence at the takeover.
Some of the people who breached the Capitol today
were not Trump supporters.
They were masquerading as Trump supporters,
and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa.
This had been a new level of popularity
for these conspiracy theories.
In the future, I am a little nervous that,
especially because of the level that the conspiracy theory reached,
that it’s going to be picked up about me again.
And it’s been increasing in size almost every time.
So, yeah, I’d really rather not be denounced by a Senator this time.
You know, the more time that the conspiracy theorists
have spent targeting me, it’s almost good
because all the things that I’m being accused of, I’m not doing,
and it takes the attention off of other people.
So in a sense, I’ve actually let this roll on
because as long as they focus on me,
they’re not going to be focusing on the people
who are really taking the most active measures against the far right.