Does canceling a far-right podcaster work? That depends.
It certainly has some personal and financial repercussions. Scott Siverts, owner and co-host of far-right podcast The Berm Pit, lost his job as a bar manager at Mario’s Saloon after disparaging comments about Black and Jewish people he made on the podcast hit social media and local news in March, causing outrage. Siverts tells Pittsburgh City Paper that he’d worked for the local chain for 16 years and had been close with the saloons’ owners. Those friendships, he says, are now over.
“One of the owners, I was in his wedding. We were long-term friends, and they really just cut ties with me completely,” Siverts says. To avoid a wrongful termination lawsuit and get him off the books, Siverts says he and the bar’s ownership negotiated a payout for work already performed. Reached for comment, a representative of Mario’s confirmed Siverts’ main points and expressed anger over his comments on The Berm Pit and the impact they had had on the business.
But Siverts’ ideological commitments remain unchanged.
He and Berm Pit co-host Matt Wakulik doubled down on their show in May after the story broke, saying they would “get worse.” Both have continued to pay lip service to fascism online. Wakulik has called for violence against elected officials, and The Berm Pit’sofficial X feed, which Siverts appears to manage and is listed as based in Sewickley Hills, features a litany of posts and reshares that amplify racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories and glorify Adolf Hitler.
On Jul. 13, the account posted, “Okay fine. I support Israel’s right to exist and the jews don’t control anything. Can I have my PayPal and YouTube account back now?” @TheBermPit also reshared a meme on Sep. 6 contrasting a photo of U.S. President Donald Trump in Israel with an illustration of him in SS garb beneath a U.S. flag defaced with a swastika. Above, the caption reads “How it could’ve been.”
“We are deeply concerned that Scott Siverts continues to use public platforms to spread antisemitic and extremist rhetoric,” Laura Cherner, director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s community relations council, told City Paper in a statement. “Pittsburgh knows all too well the harm words can cause when they are used to normalize hate and encourage violence. The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh will continue working with our community, our partners and law enforcement to ensure that Pittsburgh is safe and a place where hate is not tolerated.”
As recently as Aug. 22, Siverts appeared on Holocaust denier Stew Peters’ podcast — Siverts says the appearance fell on his birthday. During the appearance, Siverts, after calling the Tree of Life shooting “supposedly one of the most heinous terror attacks on the Jewish Community ever,” said that “[The Berm Pit’s] talking points were apparently in the manifesto of the shooter.” Peters also appeared to use an antisemitic slur in the same episode.
An appearance on Peters’ show helped drive the initial stories about Siverts in the spring. Siverts told Peters in August that he and his family members had been “doxxed” following his appearance there and on a Rumble livestream — the FBI got involved, he tells CP — but downplayed the loss of his job, as he has done on The Berm Pit and elsewhere.
On the first Berm Pit episode after Siverts’ “cancelation” that aired May 17 (the “get worse” episode), Siverts sarcastically thanked his “detractors” for a “paid vacation.” The video was removed from YouTube but remains live on rightwing platform Rumble. On an Aug. 25 episode of Deep Shallow Dive, a rightwing podcast with the tagline “Calling a Spade a Spade,” Siverts also said the chain had continued paying him even after he was “canceled.”
And that wasn’t the end of his employment elsewhere: “I worked at two other bars at that time that did not fire me, didn’t let me go, even with all the media outrage and everything,” Siverts tells CP.
Meanwhile, recent Berm Pit X posts and podcast episodes have openly discussed “using the second amendment and overthrowing this current anti-American oligarchy” and decried Homeland Security’s provision of security to Jewish houses of worship at a time of sharply rising antisemitism. @TheBermPit has also shared posts related to recent controversy around the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, including posts by an account urging “White People” to “remove” “any mercy you have in your hearts for these [Black] people” that has 3,200 likes on X. Wakulik has called Republican politicians including Ted Cruz “traitors,” lampooned Martin Luther King Jr. and Holocaust victims, photoshopped himself seated next to Hitler, and expressed interest in insurrectionist violence on Berm Pit episodes and his X account. Wakulik previously mounted a failed write-in bid for sheriff in 2021 and was barred from a VFW event this summer for being affiliated with a rightwing militia.
The long-term future of the podcast remains unclear. Wakulik is undergoing treatment for cancer and has raised some $20,000 via a crowdfunding platform toward his recovery. Siverts tells CP he has plans to sell The Berm Pit to “two Marines at Camp Pendleton” (Siverts is himself a former Marine).
“The sale is pending,” he says. “I still have to fill out a lot of paperwork and legal documents to get the name transferred, and also all the social media accounts.” Siverts says he plans to wipe everything on The Berm Pit’s social media to allow the potential new owners to focus more on life in the Marines instead of politics.
“My wife begged me to stop everything, which I pretty much did,” Siverts says. “I did a few interviews, and I’ve been reached out to by a lot of bigger names. Obviously, Stew Peters is a bigger name, but Alex Jones asked me to come on.” Siverts says he declined. He plans to focus his own future podcasting efforts on MMA fighting, though The Berm Pit’s X account, and Wakulik, have continued to post and share far-right content in recent days.
“I went through some reputational destruction, and I’m not complaining. I brought it on myself,” Siverts says. “I’m not playing the world’s smallest violin here.”
Some episodes of The Berm Pit remain freely available on Spotify. The podcast has just under 20,000 followers on Instagram. The episode of the Stew Peters Show featuring Siverts has over 3,000 views on Rumble.
