If you’ve been young and on the internet long enough, you’ve probably heard of Red Scare. Hosted Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, the program started in 2018 in the post-Trump, Patreon-fueled podcast boom that birthed Chapo Trap House and Cum Town (now known as the Adam Friedland Show). I will admit that I ended up listening to those other two over Red Scare, but that was just personal preference. Regardless of my difference in taste with Red Scare, I always appreciated their general vibe, influence and politics. Most people probably first heard of the show after Dasha’s legendary “Sailor Socialist” street interview from Info Wars, in which she used her signature vocal fry and uncaring attitude to school the right wing correspondent.
Because of their association with Chapo and radical left wing politics in general, I always had a certain amount of respect for the two of them. They seemed articulate, prescient, and used the casual style of their podcast to actually push interesting points of view in a way that didn’t feel preachy. They had left wing people like Slavoj Zizek and Tusli Gabbard on the show to further bolster the credibility and make leftism a little more fun and easily digestible, although I’m sure that wasn’t “the goal”.
The X-factor that always seemed to give the show just the right amount of sting was their edginess. They’d employ crude humor and posture towards controversial points of view to make people angry, but again, never fully endorsed that side of things. All of that is well and good, the issue is that they continued to push and push until they ended up on the other side of the line they were toeing.
Let’s just compile a quick list of some post-2020 guests these two had on their show. We have Info Wars founder Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Curtis Yarvin, Ann Coulter and Bronze Age Pervert. All of these people run in the same right wing circles that Sailor Socialist Dasha would’ve nonchalantly scoffed off years ago. Now, they are proudly in those circles. Let me make one thing perfectly clear, interviewing or even being at the same function as some right wing people is not inherently wrong. It’s this bullshit notion that these two girls are still leftists, because they are on the right wing without a question. If you listen to the Alex Jones interview, you’ll notice that it’s less of a challenging back and forth with the man that caused hell for the victims of Sandy Hook and their families, and more of a “aww poor Alex, you’ve been treated so unfairly :(“ cuddle sesh. They are letting these, to be frank, right wing pieces of shit into their home like vampires, rehabilitating their image for what purpose? Did Hasan Piker make communism too mainstream and now the far right is the only edgy space?
The most irrefutable example of platforming evil in my opinion was the Roger Stone live event. Roger Stone is the fixer for right wing presidents. Nixon, Reagan, W. Bush and Trump all had this man on their team, with many saying that he is the reason all four of them were in office. According to Wikipedia, his M.O. is literally “attack attack attack, never defend” and “admit nothing, deny nothing, and launch a counter-attack”. Kinda sounds the Red Scare offense method, more on that later. Former guests like him, Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon are in my opinion are the main driving factors of our country’s current polarization. To have him behind the bar of this venue acting all chummy, candid and affable when he’s literally shaped the course of history in favor of what I consider to be a demonic bad faith right wing vision is just in such poor taste. Trying to read the Daily Beast article on the event was such a headache that I had to stop after a few minutes. To summarize, it seemed like a room full of old Republicans who were there in an effort to horseshoe stupid Red Scare leftist listeners over to the right. And the event was hosted by NYYRC (New York Young Republicans Club) which was been called out by the Southern Poverty Law Center as white supremacist. More than anything, it seemed like yet another performative posturing from the Red Scare girls that was not outwardly ideological enough to call out. Classic.
I can spend an entire day doing red string connections between Peter Theil, Curtis Yarvin, the incel basement “venue” known as Sovereign House, “The De Vere Ball”, right wing crypto and how this all connects to Red Scare. There is this kind of nebulous fog that pervades Twitter threads and in-person discourse at NYC events that they receive Theil money and are given talking points by right wing think tanks as a result. I honestly haven’t seen a smoking gun on this, so I am not going to dive into that right now. All I know is these two always happen to be in the center of all these conversations and to me that doesn’t seem coincidental.
The “culture” they create just always happens to revolve around sickly looking, pseudo-religious, pseudo-intellectual white people who wouldn’t say half the things they say if there was a single person of color in the room. Like when Anna and Dasha hosted Elena Velez’s fashion event last year, and couldn’t help but make constant references to how they couldn’t talk about race. What the fuck does that have anything to do with fashion? All the talent and creativity that enters the Red Scare orbit is sucked of all goodness and left as an earth toned husk that nobody outside of a 10-block radius in NYC wants anything to do with. What they’ve done to Elena Velez’s brand in my opinion is totally fucking disgraceful. Like the before and after is shocking.
Maybe the *alleged* “Theil bucks” don’t adequately explain the current popularity of the show, but what does is their patented technique of offending and retreating. Some may call this cry bullying, but I think the acronym “DARVO” perfectly encapsulates their step-by-step method of annoying everyone and then soothing it over.
Let me demonstrate the process step-by-step using their horrific optics and opinions around the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The cycle starts with the offensive statement in question. In this case, it started after October 7th when Southern Israel was attacked by Hamas soldiers. Immediately, the girls took a pro-Zionist stance on their show, “I am a Zionist” said Dasha. Following this is a crappy Applebee’s appetizer sampler tray of all the Zionist talking points.
[These are not all direct quotes but the context is all there]
Why can’t Israel have a country, there wasn’t a country there before? How are they genociding them if there’s more Palestinians living there then when they started attacking them? What’s so wrong with Israel having an ethnostate, when other races have ethnostates? To not stand with Israel is to stand for death. There has been a bunch of wars over there that Israel has won. When you win a war, you get some land. Why can’t the neighboring countries absorb the fleeing families?
You get the gist, their show now goes beyond just flirting with these points of view and instead just embodies them. Speed up nine months and we get this gem that of course Dasha said was taken out of context.
Here, we see her setting up an Islamic stereotype for target practice at a shooting range. There are no Palestinian signifiers here, but she has to understand that after 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, that is the association people will make. But of course because she’s a soulless bad faith hack, we get the first “D” in the DARVO technique and that is deny.
The scoffing nature of the tweet itself fulfills the “A” in DARVO which stands for attack, essentially asking the other party “why are you so obsessed with this?” And finally we get the “RVO”, reverse victim offender with the “very insensitive to conflate the two”. It’s a jokey, but still slightly accusatory statement that flips the tables. You, the offended, assumed this was a Palestinian? That’s kind of racist, can you even read Arabic? I’ll give you a spoiler, any and all Red Scare provocation follows this exact method. Nobody is shocked by it anymore Dasha and Anna. Please go away.
Ok I’m done. I know that no one even listens to their goofy ass show anymore but I wanted to just summarize why I think no one with even an ounce of creativity should associate with them. If any of your friends want to say their show is still harmless or just edgy fun or whatever, send them this article.