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Welcome back to the Lincoln project. I'm your host, Reed Gailan. Today, I'm joined by Juliet Jeskey, the author of the decoding Fox News newsletter. In decoding Fox News, Juliet watches all of the Fox News so you don't have to.

And exposes all the disinformation and misleading stories along the way. In addition to her newsletter, she is a research associate at the Tone Night Center for News Integrity at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York. Today, she's coming to us from Brooklyn. Juliet, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

Okay, so I have to say off the bat that I'd like to know how you're upright given the fact that you watch Fox News on a almost continual basis. That in and of itself seems to be a pretty amazing thing. But before we get into what you do on a daily basis, take this a little bit back into how you even came to a decision that this is how you want to spend your waking hours.

I started stumbled into being a journalist or a researcher on accident. I knew somebody who got radicalized and was a guest on the Gavin McKinney show.

Gavin McKinney's founder of the proud board. Yes. And what that ended up turning into is my friends were like, can you keep an eye on this person? And I said, sure.

So I lost interest in that person pretty much instantly and then got focused on Gavin was like, no one's paying attention to this. This is bad. This is really bad. And it ended up capturing and analyzing, cutting up and slicing up and giving out clips of all 407 episodes of the Gavin McKinney show.

And at the time I was an anonymous researcher, I didn't get paid. I just did it because I hated the group. And that's sort of why I was drawn to do this as a living. That's when I decided to go to grad school and and I'm Jen exer. So I was a non traditional student.

Hey, me too. So it definitely was a leap of faith. And then basically my capstone was on, which is like a thesis, which was on Tucker Carlson, one American news network and Nick Fuentes and Jeff Jarvis, who's at my graduate school really loved my capstone.

And he was one that came up with the idea to do this. He's like, do you want to watch Fox? And I'm like, no, and I don't. It was funny in grad school that it was considered a skill. If you could stomach right wing media.

As I said, it's not only the stomach, it does have a certain brain melting quality. But again, I'm superbly impressed that you're able to break through. But I want before we get to because we could talk for seven or eight hours just based on the people and the things in the groups you just named. Talk to me a little bit about this person that was radicalized.

And someone you knew prior to their being radicalized, did you see the process? What was their path to it? The person was already right wing brought up in a right wing family, although lived in New York City. So that's already kind of a little weird. And I think I can't even look into this person's mind, but I suspect they thought they would get fame and glory and followers and attention.

Because this is 2016 when the alt right was big and huge and people were making or they thought they were making careers out of it. I suspect that that's probably what happened.

And a lot of people have. I mean, there has been plenty of ready money for these types of personalities to go out. You mentioned Fuente's Dan Bange, you know, who I once helped run for the United States Senate.

And I think that really is a moderate Democrat in Maryland, right in 2010, you know, Tim pool, like, you know, the funny thing is like you see Tim pool when he had Fuente's and Kanye Weston.

And the thing that struck me was not the insanity of it, although that was something interesting was like, did you see how high tech his setup was? He had a massive studio with seats and microphones and everything else.

Like, look, I have a beautiful home and I'm happy to do it from my office, Juliet. Don't get me wrong, right? But somebody's clearly bankrolling these people. And so your friends or your colleagues are acquaintances say, keep an eye on this person. What does that mean exactly?

Well, the performer was going on Gavin McInnes show and trashing other people by name. Like this person was a performer nightlife in New York. And the other performers were terrified that probably we're going to show up at shows that they would get aroused. A lot of them were LGBTQ.

So there was this sense of fear and there's a lot of panic in 2016 about the alt right. And the problem is a lot of people don't realize we're founded in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York.

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