Behind the Bastards - Ben Shapiro's Terrible Book: The Saga Continues

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to continue reading Ben Shapiro's terrible novel. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's increasingly emotionally shattered from the collapse of civilization and constant exposure to violence?

My... Hi, this is Robert Evans. I didn't like it, but at least it was true. So we've started, we've started the show now? Yeah, we know how to start this. At the beginning of the episode. Chris, you could edit out that part where I said I cry all the time and just start with Robert's intro. Also listeners, I cry all the time.

Good stuff. This is really bad. I was gonna say it's a really good start. Oh, thanks, Katie. It's vulnerable, it's honest, it's raw, it's relatable. I could go on, someone interrupts me. It's a bit sartonic, you gotta go edge to it, a little bite to your vulnerability. It feels like we started recording before we were ready, if I'm being honest.

We did, but that's the first rule of broadcasting is to never be prepared or ready or competent, ever. Check, check, and check. So this is Behind the Bastards. It's normally a podcast about the worst people in all of history. But sometimes we like to have a little bit of fun, and this is gonna be a fun one, because we're diving back into Ben Shapiro's just unfathomably poorly written fiction novel, True Allegiance. This will be episode three of a failure of prose. I wish that our listeners could see the beatific smile that spread across Robert's face as he was talking about the fun we will have today.

We need this. It's nice to see some joy through the screen. That smile is me thinking about the time Ben Shapiro wrote in a character that was the captain of the high school football team, and no one knew his name. No one knew his name. No one knew his name. I mean, how could you? How could you know the star football player's name? Look at the back of his jersey.

I don't know. Surely not that. Keep it? Nothing like that. Oh, God in heaven. So you may want to watch the first, listen to the first couple of episodes. It's a podcast, Robert. Your podcast was, just as a reminder.

That's good to know. I forget regularly because of all of the repeated exposure to police munitions. I know. Leah, when we left off, there was a fun moment where the character that Ben wrote in as the governor of Texas, whose name is Bubba. Bubba, right? Yeah. Yeah. And he was talking to the character who is clearly based on Ben Shapiro's own wife, who was the wife of the character that Ben wants to be, who was the bear of a man combat general, Brett Hawthorne.

Anyway, Ellen, his wife and the governor were having a conversation about how bad it is to be a governor that the federal government refuses to support during a massive emergency that requires the mobilization of all resources. And yeah, we were enjoying the irony of that, of how Ben actually landed when such a thing happened for real. And now we're going to move on to the next chapter, which is a chapter about Soledad, who, if you remember, is our, she's that rancher who's supposed to be Clive and Bundy. Yes, yes, yes. But like 50 and Hispanic and a lady. Yeah, really turning that stereotype on its heels. Yeah. He can't call her racist if he writes in a Hispanic character.

Absolutely not. Then it's not racist. Exactly. Feminist, non-racist Ben Shapiro. Yes. That's, he's got it. Wait, what chapter are we on now? Shit, it's like seven or eight.

Okay, okay. Something like that. Yeah. We're several chapters in. Too many chapters in. Too many. More than one. More chapters than this book should have had because it should never have been written.

It should have stayed in Ben Shapiro's little head when he needed to feel like a big man, he could think about the fake combat general that he invented to make himself feel tall. Yeah. Yeah. And the short terrorists. And the short little, the terrorists who are all short. Yes. Yes. Good people are tall.

Terrorists are short except for bad black people who are all also very large. That is the world that Ben Shapiro has created. That is the. Those are the rules. That is the cosmology of the moral universe in Ben Shapiro's head. Sounds complicated, but really it's quite simple. Yeah. When you laid out.

Yeah. Really simple rules. Yeah. Okay. So it starts with Soledad waking up to a knock on her door at two in the morning and, you know, there's a Bundy type standoff going on at her ranch because she's not paying taxes. Because the taxes and all the evil government stuff makes it impossible for her ranch to actually work. And anyway, there's this bunch of motorcycle gangsters and militia people calling themselves Soledad soldiers and they're all hanging out and guarding her house from the feds. But they're starting to like.

Not soldier dads? Oh, that would have been it. That would have been it. Ben. Ben. Ben. All right. It's fine.

Yeah. So, yeah, they've cut off her power and yeah, it's a bad situation for Soledad. She says, oh, did we get a little bit of talk about the some right wing media folks here? Yeah. Even the occasional big media spread didn't seem to lift her too much anymore. She felt like the whole game was rigged. She was either hero or villain. She was always the story.

Never Emilio and Juan. It was always Chris Matthews on the nightly news calling her a traitor or Michael Savage calling her a freedom fighter. It was always one or the other. Yeah, I imagine Chris Matthews would declare he didn't call Clavin Bundy a traitor. Who does he think Chris Matthews is? He's getting confused. Rampaging leftist Chris Matthews. Is Ben Shapiro suggesting that like there needs to be more nuance in how people are described?

I think so. He calls so many people pure evil every day. Yeah, well, and she's saying, you know, Soledad's angry. Emilio and Juan, if you remember, she had to lay off her best worker and he moved to Los Angeles where his son was immediately killed in a gang. That's right. Instantly. Well, yeah, that's how it works. Yeah, because Ben Shapiro understands the chunk of the city literally 30 to 45 minutes away from where he lives.

It's nuanced, you guys. An hour and a half in traffic. Yeah. Fucking great. Ben, awesome. Right what you know. Right what you know. The chunk of the city you live in that you have never, ever in your entire life visited because it scares you very much to think about.

Right, like, the rule, because the rule, right what you know. OK, well, I don't know any black people's names, so I can't name this. I can't name the start of the fire. So I'm just going to say that no one knows his name. Right, what you know, not being able to call the black people in my life by their names because I never bothered to learn them. I do know that. I will write about that. Fucking Ben.

Awesome. So Soledad's, you know, in this standoff with the government and every day, like the kind of militia that's that's arrayed to defend her peels away a little bit, you know, because people can't can't hang out all the time, but the SWAT team stays there. And eventually, as things start to dwindle, she gets a knock on the door in the early morning and, quote, a SWAT officer stood there, his gun down by his side. When she opened the screen door, he sidled in without permission, holding his right arm out, palm facing her, signaling for her to keep quiet. He shut the door stealthily behind him. Oh, I love, yeah, because SWAT teams, they got all that stealth door closing training. Like unreal, like just from like the reality of it, like, OK, no, no, he didn't. But also like, what a poorly written sentence.

It's a terrible, it's a terrible sentence. So I mean, it's good for like 10th grade. Yeah, it's, it's. Yeah. Yeah. If this was a 10th grader, I would say what a precocious 10th grader who, you know, needs someone to sit down with him and tell him how to write well. But he's got he's got the he's got the spunk. You know, he's got the spunk.

He's got the desire. He's got it down on the pages. Half the battle. The other half of the battle was knowing when not to publish something. Still fighting that battle every day. Ben Ben's lost that battle for a while. I'm dying to know what he what he's there for. Well, he puts his he places his weapon gently on the dining room table.

When he took off his helmet, she noticed his bright blue eyes. They stood out more because they were they stood out more because they were red rimmed, whether from lack of sleep or from crying. She couldn't tell the man stood no more than five foot 10. Well built Caucasian, a thatch of must brown hair stood neatly on end. He moved forward quickly and grabbed her by the arm. She could feel his powerful grip through her thick thick row. Why would you do that? That's a weird.

That's not how you. OK, you need to get out of here. He growled now. He growled. He growled quietly. He growled quietly and gently just like a bear. She pushed his hand off her arm. She pushed his hand off her arm stood up to her full five foot two.

Ben is just obsessed with people's heights. I'm not going anywhere. Wait, wait, wait. Did he just say five foot two? He sure did. Wait, wait. Who's five foot two? Who cares?

What? I thought it was five foot 10 and well built. He's five foot 10. She's five foot two. Oh, OK. So we know that there's like a sizable difference between them. That's why it's important. Great story, Ben.

Like she's been a character in this book already. Why is like this? Like after multiple appearances, by the way, she's five two. Yeah. What a bad writer. What a bad writer. So she's like, I'm not going to go anywhere. And he's like, I don't think you understand, Miss Ramirez.

They're coming for you tonight. So this is the this is the good SWAT team guy, the decent, the decent cop who's like, I've got to warn her the, the, the, the the feds are coming in to murder this, this brave patriot. She looked at the SWAT member puzzled. Why are you helping me? My cookies can't be that good. He laughed softly.

Maybe they are a pause or maybe I'm just sick of watching people get pushed around. Whatever it is, you need to get out of here tonight. Good. I thought that was masterful. Yeah. So we learn his name is Aiden Foster. What a strong name.

And she tells, she, she tells Aiden, you ready to be a trader? Aiden, he shrugged. She walked over to one of the cabinets, opened it, took out a jar. Well, we might as well split a cookie on that. God damn it. Oh my God. I fucking hate Ben Shapira so much.

Oh, such bad writing. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. We might as well share a cookie. Oh, God damn it, Ben. It's, yeah. So, okay, they, they, they, they do the cookie bit for a little while.

They do the cookie bit for a little while. They have some like some really natural interactions, like human beings do. Oh Jesus. So they're, they're, they're attempted escape seems like a horrible idea immediately. She loads some stuff up in a backpack and, and heads out with this SWAT team guy.

And one of his team members like sees that they're doing this. And so Aiden throws a smoke grenade and then starts firing wildly is how Ben describes it. Oh my God. Too high to hit anyone. He heard at least two men curse and scatter in the distance. He could see the lights of the choppers flash on. He dropped, by the way, we've just switched to Aiden Foster's

viewpoint from Soledad's viewpoint because Ben does that in the middle of chapters that are supposed to be viewpoint chapters from characters because he's a good writer. Does he? Okay. My gosh. Okay. Does he at least, at least is it like there's a page break and

there's some asterisk. No, it's really jarring and weird and badly done. Literally like the next paragraph is just now we're in Aiden's point of view. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it feels. Yeah.

That's definitely how it feels because we can't be, it's an action time, right? They're having a gunfight and we can't, we can't be in a woman's perspective during a gunfight. Of course not. Yeah. So that's so awkward and weird. That sounds like something that he made me, maybe didn't even

notice he was doing probably for the exact reason that you just said, like his subconscious kicks in and he immediately changes the perspective. Right. It's like, well, surely she can't describe it. Yeah. And it's okay. I hope I find it, well, I guess I find it disappointing that when

he said that he was shooting too high for it to hit anything, that he didn't say how many feet and inches it was. Yeah. Yeah. No, of course not. That would have been, that would have been good to know. We always need to know. Is that higher than everybody?

Come on. Consistent. It is cool that one of Solida or, yeah, somebody yells at the cops, go to hell you fascist assholes. That's fun. Okay. Yeah. So a big, you know, and now a fight starts with her militia and

all the cops and Aiden Foster tries to get her, you know, tells her, ma'am, I recommend we get out of here is sniper bullets zing around them. We get another moment where we learn again, yet again, that Ben does not understand anything about firearms because he refers to the rounds being shot at them as heavy caliber 7.62 millimeter rounds, which I assume means he's referring to like 762 by 51 NATO, which is essentially 308, which is a

sizable bullet, but is also legally a handgun round. So that's fun. Take your word for it. Yeah, what an idiot. I was going to say that, but yeah, it's, it's silly. It's just, it's well, he's also the guy who, whenever guns are brought up as libs don't understand guns. They don't even know what they mean when they talk about it.

Well, Ben, I mean, it's not a heavy caliber. It's, it's a, it's a normal caliber. It's like a full-size rifle caliber, but it's, it's anyway, whatever, fucking. I'm splitting hairs now, but I know it matters to Ben. That he be seen as understanding guns. It matters to him that you know that he's wrong about this. Yes.

Yes. Yes, I did. It does. So, okay. Yeah, do you have a plan? She yelled at Foster above the ear splitting wine of the bullets. Hell no, he said, but I'll bet they do.

In the distance, the cavalry was coming. Soledad soldiers, at least a dozen bearded gun toting men on their steel horses, riding directly towards the swat lines. She could see it in the distance. Pickets hog charge, comparing them to Confederate cavalry. That's good. That's fun.

Yeah. The good guys here. My, my head's going to fucking explode. Oh boy. No, no, no. So the swat formed up and turned to face them. Guns at the ready, which is when the chopper began to groan.

It sputtered, crackled, and then dropped to the ground. What? Right at the swat lines. It spiraled out of control. Scattered in the swat. What happened? I don't know because Ben is a terrible fucking writer. Wait, so the helicopter crashed?

Yeah, it sure does. Did the horses make it nervous? Yeah. It kills all the swat guys. They're crying for their mothers. Ben writes that in. Soledad's horrified as they burned to death. Wait, what?

This is so weird. What? They get out of there because the chopper randomly falls out of the sky and kills all the swat team members? No, no. I think what happens is Aiden Foster, the swat team member who just couldn't see her get killed, shot the helicopter out of the air and killed his own men.

Wait, so he switches the narrative to talk from Aiden's point of view, but cannot describe Aiden doing that to the helicopter. No, of course not. Okay. No, we're left to piece that together after it gets shot out of the sky. Because if he didn't do that and if it was Soledad describing

the thing, it would make sense that she doesn't know what's happening. Oh, no, the helicopter fell out of the sky. And then she looks back and she sees him with smoke curling out of the barrel of his rifle and tears in his eyes. But no, because Ben is, again, very bad at writing. Well, I think what's clear to me, I'm probably going to probably, I'm sure I've said this at other times, he's just

so clearly writing something that he wants to have made into a movie. Absolutely. He's not even thinking about this as a book. He's like, oh, this will look tight. Yeah, no, it's embarrassing. The hardest thing when you're writing fiction like this is maintaining an understanding of space, of geography, of where

things are and making it clear to the reader where things are, especially in an action scene like that. It's hard to do. And Ben doesn't even really try. Like we have no idea, as these bikers are rushing towards these swat lines, we have no clear idea where the swat lines are, what they look like, you know, are their fortifications, what direction are these guys coming from?

Where were they before that allows them to be like charging at the SWAT team? Like no attempt is made to make that clear. Just like no attempt is made to let us know what has actually happened to the helicopter because Ben is a terrible writer. Yeah, or why nobody knows that kid's name. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's all like weird, like his idea of what tropes are. They're not even like tropes necessarily. He's like, oh, and then he says like they do like a cookie bit, right? Yeah. Because people do the cookie stuff. Yeah. I do want to see this movie though.

Yep, yep. So yeah, Aiden Foster bodily picked her up and put her on a motorcycle behind one of the militiamen. She clung to his leather jacket as he twisted again. Wait a minute. Where did he get a leather jacket? I thought he was a SWAT guy. What?

Yeah. Okay. So basically what happens is there's a gunfight going on now. A bunch of the SWAT guys are dead and now the militiamen are having a gunfight with the surviving SWAT guys. And Aiden Foster, you know, it puts her on the back of a motorcycle to be spirited away to safety. And just to give you an idea of how badly this paragraph is

written, we start first sentence of the paragraph. Foster bodily picked her up and put her on a motorcycle behind one of the militiamen. She clung to his leather jacket as he twisted the throttle and peeled out, spinning it like. Oh, so it's a militiamen's leather jacket. It's a militiamen who is the second he in this after we start by talking about it.

That's a really bad sentence. Oh. Oh, wow. That was so unclear. It's just really, really written. Yeah. Because he's a bad writer. He's a terrible, terrible writer.

Oh, when you said bodily, is it bodily like B-O-D-I-L-Y or like bodily? Is that even a word? Like B-O-D-I-L-Y. Yeah. Yeah. He bodily picked her up as if there's another way to pick someone up.

How else would you pick someone up but bodily? Like 30% of the words you're using. Could you pick, maybe you just pick them up by the ankle and lift their whole body, but just by the ankle. And so then you're angrily picking them up. I don't know. Handily used his hands to bodily pick her up with, against gravity's will.

God. God damn it, Ben Shapiro. You are horrible at the thing that clearly matters more to you than anything else. Than anything else. Yeah. Oh, good God. Yeah.

So the last paragraph of this terrible chapter. Don't look back. Soledad whispered to herself. Don't look back, but she did just long enough to see in the distance, some of the flaming men go out, leaving nothing but smoking chars of flesh is horrible sentence. Horrible sentence. But she did comma just long enough to see comma in the

distance, comma, some of the flaming men go out comma, leaving nothing but smoking chars of flesh. You made up that many comments. You made up that punctuation. I fucking did not. That is how Ben, that is Ben Shapiro constructing a sentence. I don't think he has an editor.

If he's only, like he, he writes sentences as if he's only heard of grammar by it being like described to him by a witch doctor around a fucking fire. Like it's, he obviously doesn't have an editor. You like read, you like read a Chuck Pollock book and he's like, wow, all of Chuck sentences are like three words long and they're all these periods. Oh my God.

Hey, do you want to know who does have, have an editor this podcast and it's time to do an ad break. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first

birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Every time we do one of these Ben Shapiro episodes, I'm nervous at the start that I'll just be like reading

you guys a chapter and nothing entertaining will happen. And every time I am immediately reminded, no, Ben is just bad enough that this will never not be fun to do. Absolutely, 100%. There's always some sort of a treasure buried in here. I'm not even buried, just sitting on the surface waiting. No, it's just on the surface.

It's like you're trying to clean a pool with one of those little scoopers, but it's just like, oh, there's gold everywhere. So our next chapter, everyone's going to be excited about this. We're back with Levon, our gang leader, whose friends with obviously an Al Sharpton insertion, and who, if you'll remember last time, paid a black child to get murdered by a cop, because that's the only way such a situation could ever occur.

That's why it happens. Good God. Ben Shapiro. Ah, just the like... The nature of his racism is so much more offensive to me, and obviously I'm a white guy, but it's so much more offensive to me than like an actual straight up clans member,

because at least that guy really knows he's a racist, whereas Ben Shapiro is certain that he is doing the opposite of racism while being shockingly racist. It's so, it's so fascinating and frustrating to watch every sentence. It's like, how do you not... I mean, you know he knows. At some level, he knows, yeah. Levon felt the air around him crackle with energy.

It was something he had felt before, just before a fight. The switch that went off in the brain that notched the senses higher and made them more sensitive than... Oh my God. Making a number of things clear. I'm sorry, senses and sensitive can't be right there in the same sentence. No. Also, he said before twice within like five words.

He absolutely did. It's a terrible sentence and also clear evidence that Ben has never in his life been in a fight. Yeah. Oh God, okay. So here, the switch that went off in the brain that notched the senses higher made them more sensitive. Next sentence, the adrenaline flowing through the veins. That's the whole sentence.

The adrenaline flowing through the veins. Not a sentence, Ben. It's just the narrator in Fight Club doing his little like half sentences because like that's the style we're doing. God. Yeah. The feeling that you'd burst from the inside out if the fight didn't commence and right quick.

God. Making it sound very animalistic, isn't he? How is he so bad at everything? I wanted to write all books. God damn it. He's so bad at everything. He can't do anything. It's just remarkable.

Yeah. What the fuck? Okay. So this felt like those fights multiplied exponentially. That's because Levon knew he wasn't alone this time. No, that's all right. Multiplied exponentially. Okay.

Multiplied exponentially. Yes. It's so dense. Like there's so many layers to the shittiness of this. Right. I don't want to like parse every single like five word phrase, but my God. But by God, we have to. We just have.

That's because Levon knew that he wasn't alone this time. It wasn't him taking on some gang rival or him debating some white Republican club sucker at the U. Yeah. This is going to be flames and blood and struggle and power. This was going to be death and mayhem and hope and glory. This was going to be fucking big. All Levon needed was the Q. He discussed the Q ahead of time with the Reverend.

It would come on television during a press conference. Big Jim planned to hold with the mayor in the aftermath of the Kendrick Malone killing. I hate this. It's bad. It's real bad. Yeah. The killing of another young innocent black man at the hands of the racist white establishment. The police targeting a kid, an unarmed kid for God's sake.

Just because he happened to be black and happened to be out at night at the wrong time. The shooting had worked out precisely according to the plan. Levon had one of his boys give little Kendrick a $20 bill to go and harass the cop. Kendrick, of course, thought it was just a piece of good clean fun. Messing with white cops was a rare joy. Made you feel like more of a man. And with all the big boys telling him how he'd be a boss in the neighborhood if he baited the cop, he'd been enthusiastic.

He probably looked forward to coming home and telling his buddies how he told that cracker-ass pig to go to hell. Stared right at him and cursed him to his face, made the pig back down. Kendrick knew he was supposed to go for his toy gun. They told him it would be a joke that the cop wouldn't do anything, that the cop would push he out. Of course, Levon knew better. No cop could sit still when somebody went for the waistband. Police procedure dictated what happened next. Ben, you almost got something there.

You almost realized something there. He got a little too close and then backed away from it. Maybe a system in which the only possible response to a child pulling out a toy gun is murder has some problems. What I hate about this is that he is not aware of it. He's getting so close and he thinks it's okay for a cop to pull out their gun in this situation. It's essentially what he's saying. We're tricking the cops into pulling their guns. No, they did it.

They did the thing that they should do. No, it's just like the conspiracy aspect of this is just so bizarre and weirdly insulting. A competent writer trying to have something similar happen. Have a black gang leader who attempts to use this as the cue to spark an uprising. You could just have them try to make use of a normal police killing. Just have it happen. Just have the thing happen that happens all the time. Have it be just a normal tragedy that then a person takes advantage of?

Right. That's closer to how Ben views everything anyway. So why manufacture this weird, everybody's, ah, there's a conspiracy. Ben is such a bad writer that he can't even effectively advance his own bullshit narratives because of his incompetence. That would be baseline interesting in terms of art or a novel. They're using this thing to do this thing. I disagree with this, but this other thing is bad. There's an actual conflict there. You could have a black special forces veteran turned gang leader who has developed this deep hatred for the American empire

to having his friends die and the PTSD he's accrued and he's trained in actually setting up an insurgency. Then there's a murder by a police officer of a black kid and he uses it as an opportunity to set something into motion that will destroy this empire. Then you have an interesting character and you have an interesting situation and you can actually have a story. Right. People are engaged in like actually struggle with because like some sort of like gray area and like the morality and ethics and conflict with each other. But he's just like, well, what if like he's just going to go fuck, he's evil. What if he's evil and he pays the people to die? Fade the boy to die. Because an eight or nine year old black boy living in the inner city wouldn't know that pulling a toy gun on a cop would very easily lead to his death.

Wouldn't know the thing that literally every black boy in the entire nation knows. Literally happened, like didn't this come out in like 2016? Yes, yes it did, Cody. Like it's, oh my God. It's amazing. So and of course, because everything has to be ridiculously contrived, Levan didn't just set up the boy encountering the cop. He destroyed all of the other cameras, but one in the neighborhood that had the right angle for the shot he wanted to have played on a nightly TV. One angle, one tape, one million replays on nightly news.

The headline writers couldn't help themselves. Eight year old unarmed black boy shot dead by a white cop, blared the free press. Murderer screamed at the headline on the New York Daily News. Yes. Ben knows how headlines is written. Well, the phrase one million replays on the nightly news isn't a thing. Those words don't go together. You know, Cody, it's absolutely not a thing. That's not how the nightly news works.

One million replays on nightly news is not a sentence. But I think what we're all getting is that literally the only thing that Ben Shapiro understands is being Ben Shapiro, a boy who was plucked out by right wing billionaires to write nonsense on the Internet when he was a child. And only understands writing right wing nonsense for the Internet and getting paid millions of dollars. Yes. Right. It was it's that in the combination of wanting to be like a TV writer and not doing that. And because he's bad at it, he's bad at everything. I just thought of all of his like super fan boys that have read his books and they're like, have you read Shapiro's book? It's so good.

I'm going to be I don't I don't think a single person has had that experience. I don't think Ben Shapiro fans could possibly enjoy this fucking book. It's it's so bad. Yeah. So yeah. And then Robert hastily read the words with his eyes. Occularly. Occularly.

He looked at the CNN headline the case the entire day and the next one as well over on MSNBC. The talking heads could barely conceal their excitement on Fox News. A few anchors urged caution while others talked of the legacy of racist policing across the country. The president obviously has to get involved in this. And he tells Americans the time has come for a great racial conversation in this country. Too many black boys have been murdered merely for the color of their skin. This must end, which is obviously a bad thing to do. Clearly.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the president Obama doesn't know that the kid was paid money to die. So no, of course not. It's not his fault. So yeah, leave on is now waiting outside the Coleman a young municipal center named after the former mayor of the city, a man who'd been a racial pro in his own right. Don't know what that means. What?

Don't know what a racial pro is. You didn't abbreviate that on your end. That's it's written. No, that's how that's written in the fucking book. Oh boy, howdy. Good. Good God. What does it mean?

So leave on says old Coleman's going to make one more sacrifice in the name of racial justice. If all goes according to plan. Yeah. Boy, howdy. So they're in front of the spirit of the spirit of Detroit statue, which leave on describes as looking like a constipated Nordic man. Yeah. Behind leave on stood a solid 3000 of his fellow Detroiters, mostly young black men leave on had sent out his boys to round up the crowd and they did an easy time of it after the media coverage facing the crowd protecting the statue and a platform set up just before it stood about 100 cops leave on noticed a particular lack of weapons.

He smiled to himself. Ben really understands how cops work. Yeah. The unarmed cops showing up to this event. Yeah. Yeah. I was just last night 200 people surrounded or not surrounded hung out outside of Portland police union headquarters. And yeah, they they they had a ton of weapons and use them on us because that's what cops do to crowd.

Yes. Yes. I don't know the first thing I thought when you said you reference calling his boys. I mean just Ben's never had boys to call. No. That's so bad. He wishes he has a group of boys he could call. He would love to.

He would love to. But unfortunately, Ben Shapiro is incapable of doing anything but writing garbage for the Internet. Ben's boys are Dennis Prager. That's who he that's who Ben's calling up. Yeah. So. Yeah. So leave on smiles when he notices how unarmed the cops are.

There's media all over the place interviewing the odd protester here. Yeah. The crowd's going to beat up a lot of people, including weight. Did he when live when live on when he smiled, did it say he smiled quite happily? Lippily. Lip. He lip words. He smiled mouthily.

Yeah. Smiled his lips. Yeah, so he says that a couple of reporters are getting caught in the melee is just how it's going to have to be. If they were too well behaved, the media would dismiss them. A bit of blood got them hot under the collar. A bit of blood made the story hot. The way the media worked, the only way they'd pay attention was if somebody did something extreme,

then they defend the action. Blame it on the overriding anger at an unfair society. I have to diagram the sentence out. This is a sentence. Please. You lost me a little. I am reading a sentence to you. One sentence.

Right. Sometimes it's like, is this one sentence? Yeah. Yeah. The way the media worked, comma, the only way they'd pay attention was if somebody did something extreme, dash, and then they defend the action, comma, blame it on overriding anger at an unfair society. Period.

Okay. Thank you for doing that. Oh my God. That's a sentence that Ben wrote. Yeah. Thinking that's a sentence. This is a real illuminating look into how he views the current moment in time. He's a bad editor for a living.

He's a bad editor. He's just a lucky person. Oh my God. Who paid for this book to be written down and then sold? Incredible. Yeah. So, Levon had his men ringing the edges of the crowd, ready to prevent any non-approved persons from getting too close to the media members.

No footage of fools, he'd promised the reverent, and he intended to keep his word. Tonight, Levon intended to be the face on the news. Already, he'd done his best Malcolm X impression. Early Malcolm, not that late stage, Islam means peace, pussy shit for the networks. If we don't get what we want, he said, if we don't get justice for Kendrick, the city is going to burn. We've been burning silently for too long. Our poverty burns beneath the surface.

Our ignorance burns beneath the surface. What? We've been left for dead in this city, just like black boys have been left for dead all over this country. What are you reading? And this country must pay a price if there is no justice. Ben Shapiro. Oh my God.

Yeah. Sorry I couldn't hear you. Oh God. Okay. I know. The very next sentence. I knew it was going to get worse. So, the last thing that Levon says, and we're just left to assume he's talking to the media

now, because Ben doesn't actually make that clear here. But we can put that together. By context close. Yeah. Yeah. So, that sentence is, and this country must pay a price if there is no justice. Levon sentence. Next paragraph.

The sexy blonde with the short skirt seemed turned on at that point. First, we're hearing of her. Breathily. What? The sexy blonde? What? Yeah. Breathily, she asked.

I hate it. I hate it. Ben. Oh, you're so bad at writing. And what will justice look like? So he threw in a line, that's just the next sentence. So he threw in a line just for good measure. Justice will be done when people like you live in the mud you've made for us.

Only then can we lift each other up. Her eyelashes fluttered. That shit was magic, Levon knew. He'd learned it at the university, too. White co-eds majoring in journalism were a cinch. Just drag them off their civilized perch and let them experience life outside their self-proclaimed white privilege. And they let you know that you'd be doing them a favor.

This is so fucking insane. It's horrifying. Yeah. It's a cycle on. You can't even begin to unpack how bad that is. The writing. Yeah. Awful.

What it says about him. Awful. Every other sentence in this is so fascinating on so many levels and like, I just want to give it to like, like, is his wife read this? Like, do people in his life know like his wife? His wife didn't read this. His soul. No, she definitely didn't.

She's a doctor. Yeah. She doesn't have time. Yeah. Exactly. I think it's very clear that Ben's editor didn't have time to read this. No. No.

He's got other stuff to do. Yeah. We are the first people to read this. So the mayor shows up at the Nordic Man statue to address the crowd. Wait. Sorry. Real quick. You're saying it's his part of the chapter, right?

It's not his chapter because. It's his chapter. It's his chapter. It is. Okay. So it's not a bouncy thing. It might. It might be a paragraph.

It's a paragraph. This is a Ben Shapiro book. Yeah. So we meet the mayor. Mayor comes up. He got his job after the last guy went to jail for being corrupt. Yeah. Yeah.

Now he wiped his pasty white forehead with a handkerchief. He adjusted his glasses. He looked down at his notes. I his voice broke. I have just met with area leaders as well as civil rights leaders across the country. Why is the mayor meeting with them across the anyway? And I can say to all of you that our investigation will be full and fair and that just as well will be done. What justice, Levon shouted at the top of his lungs? The shout rang out

like a gun report in the cold night air. Justice will be done," the mare continued. Officer Ricky O'Sullivan has been suspended from duty pending a full investigation. This deeply troubling incident has stirred the conscience of Americans from border to border. But I promise you, justice will not rest until the tragedy of Kendrick Malone. What justice, what justice, Levon was chanting now at the top of his lungs? A few scattered voices joined in. Mare Burns momentarily flustered, clutched at the pages of his prepared remarks. The voices grew, pounding, angry, steady. What justice, what justice, what justice. Trying

to be heard over the chant, also terrible chant. Trying to be heard over the chant, the mare continued now. Reverend Crawford began nodding softly. Until the tragedy of Kendrick Malone has answered for with truth, we must uncover all the facts. Burns suddenly stumbled backwards as a rock struck him in the scalp, almost in slow motion, his arm, yes. Scalp was a weird choice. Hit him in the head. Hit him in the head. Yeah, in a scalp. No, in a scalp. In a scalp.

Almost in slow motion, his arms stretched for air, circling in a nearly comic pinwheel. He teetered on his heels for just a moment. So he almost did a few things. He almost did a number of things. Yeah, so he falls. And Ben lets us know that he has a large butt and he falls on it. And then, yeah, a bunch of people, the whole crowd starts throwing shit. Molotov cocktails start being tossed, sail over the, yeah, smash into the statue and get on the cops. People get lit on fire. The cops shoot tear gas everywhere. Yeah, now we have a big old riot.

This is not the first time he's described people being burned alive. Yeah. It's the thing he thinks about a lot, clearly, people, a bunch of people are burning alive at the end of that. Yeah, it's the most violent thing he can imagine, because he hasn't ever seen violence. Right. He's like, it's got to go wild. They're on fire. Yeah. So, yeah, things start to go crazy. Random gunshots in the crowd. Media members jabbering madly into their microphones, ducking, playing war correspondent. And then Reverend

Jim Crawford standing tall and proud in his immaculately tailored suit. So, the fucking Al Sharpton guy gets up and yells at everybody to stop. And the street, the whole street goes quiet and the riot stops. And that's apparently the moment that Levon engineered was starting a riot that would then be stopped instantly by this reverend, because everybody at the riot knew to take this one man's cue to stop rioting when they started rioting, because that's the way riots work. That's how things work. Ben has been to riots, guys. He understands crowd psychology. He went to college.

He did go to a college. He did attend. You know who else went to college? Ads? Uh... Yep, the products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. We have returned.

Oh, good God. We have returned, uh, returnally. Yeah. That was wonderful. We returned mentally. They have come back. They're in Tehran, Iran. America has fallen.

The transformation from Dar al-Harb to Dar al-Islam has begun. Muhammad watched, transfixed. Is this the fucking emperor? Already? Sorry, go ahead. Okay. Ibrahim Hashami's eyes glowed brightly as they always did when he was excited. What?

It's literally just describing emperor Palpatine, what? Glowing yellow, his sneaky eyes. It was a peculiar quality that attracted many of his followers. They saw in that glow a fiery hope, warm and consuming, hope for a better world. The teacher, they said, brought hope. That's good, Ben. He brought hope. They brought a fiery hope.

The teacher brought hope. Thank you for telling us that three times a different way. Oh my God. Wait, read that again. Yeah. I thought you were repeating yourself. No, no, no. They saw in that glow a fiery hope, warm and consuming, new sentence, hope for a new world,

new sentence, the teacher, they said, brought hope. Oh, oh, that last one really made me, oh, Aya. It's bad. You know, he's probably like, this is good. This is good. You insert as many hopes as possible. You have to really, that's good writing. People love it when you repeat the same very basic point, repeat three times in the space

of two sentences. That second one wasn't like egregious, like, okay, you're like being repetitive and it's not great, but it's not like, it didn't, you know, Ben, Ben is a scholar of literature. And I think, you know, he, he is a big fan. You all know that, that, that famous Ernest Hemingway short story for sale, baby shoes never worn it because the baby's dead. The baby didn't get a chance to wear the shoes. The baby never wore the shoes that were bought for it.

That one. Yeah. Yeah. The perfect story. Brevity is the soul of, I don't know, talking too much or whatever. Okay. So here's, I assume, I assume this is the teacher talking, Ben just jumps right into the quotations and we're kind of left to figure out that it's the teacher talking, but he didn't say

the teacher. Anyway, it's bad writing again, today's attack has ensured that the crippled and weakened infidel giant that was the United States will never rise again. That's one sentence. The emptiness and degradation of that perverse country has been wiped away and the glorious reign of Allah has begun. Another sentence. Those that rejected Allah followed vanities and Allah has destroyed them.

Today, America has seen that those who reject Allah and hinder men from the path of Allah, their deeds will Allah when render astray. God damn it, Ben, that's a sentence. Today, America has seen that those who reject Allah and hinder men from the path of Allah, dash, their deeds will Allah render astray. That's a sentence, Ben. Oh, no. Yeah.

Is it though? Is it a sentence? It is not. A sentence, Katie. Thank you for asking. Unreal. What do these fucking people have to do with this? Hey, Ben, here's the thing that you might do as a writer, writing about, you know, an

Islamic extremist emir preaching, listen to a single speech by one of these guys of which there are thousands on the internet to understand how they actually talk, or just take from one of them. Take from a real speech. Right, just literally. Yeah. Ultraman a little bit. Sometimes that, like, writers can do that, Ben, but no, he's got a pretty good handle

on how Islamic extremists talk. Yes. Okay, so, yeah, this goes on for a little while. Oh, my God. A drop of sweat rolled down Ashami's craggy face and embedded itself in his scraggly beard. Ashami had lost weight in his three years in the mountains of Torah Bora, but he was finally putting it back on now that he was ensconced in his complex in Tehran. The government had granted it to him out of gratitude for his prior efforts against the

great Satan, with a yearly stipend that enabled him to live comfortably, which is funny because of the whole Iran was fighting against Islam, anyway, whatever, whatever, whatever. The actual history of Iran and Afghanistan does not matter at all because Ben doesn't know it. There are so many things that have been offensive in these few brief chapters, and this is just so offensive to be writing about something that he knows nothing about. Not a single solitary goddamn thing about. It's so grotesque.

Yeah. No funny jokes here. Just yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, he does some he does some evil Muslim talking and well, actually, we just we just continue to describe his his fucking room and shit and it's it's bad. I just can't stand the the adjectives.

I can't know. They're horrible. They're horrible. The the watery sweat dripped down his craggy face and it was scraggly beard in his pointed chin. Just like just whatever it doesn't matter. Who cares? Yeah.

Ashami pointed at the camera. Muhammad, his youngest recruit, an attractive boy of 17, struggling to grow a scraggly beard. Only way Ben knows how to describe a Muslim beard. Have you seen any of these guys? They're not scraggly beards. They have really fucking big beards, Ben. It's kind of the thing. Oh, my God.

Also, like he really wanted to grow a scraggly beard. That's the goal. No. He's a fucking little kid. He wants to grow a beard. Any beard. Yeah. And he's he's an Islamic extremist, which means he wants one of those big full beards

that they put like fucking orange dye in because that's what they fucking do. There's a million pictures of these guys. scraggly is it something he would the kid would think. Yeah. It's what Ben thinks of their beards. Yeah, because because a full beard is something Ben considers manly and is probably angry that he cannot grow himself. And so Islamic extremists have to have scraggly beards like the ones that Ben grows.

That's my theory. That's it. Well, like, I mean, it's that a lot of it comes down to that one tweet of his right there. Israelis like to build stuff. Arabs like to live in sewage and bomb crap. He thinks they all live in dirt. So they look like dirt and they have scraggly beards because that means they're they live

in dirt. They can't even get beards. Right. Beards. Right. They're like fire. Yeah. Like God.

It's it's amazing. Okay. So he's talks to Mohammed about how they're going to the weapons we got from the infidels in Iraq will be deployed, which I think is Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which you if you remember will imply. So these are these are Sunni extremists who were in Afghanistan, presumably with al Qaeda and are now in Shia Iran, which did, to be fair, happen a few times, but it was never a particularly comfortable arrangement for anybody involved.

And they have are getting access to through kind of an unclear provenance, the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had spirited out of Iraq and into I think it was either Iran or Syria, none of it makes any sense to anyone who like has even the vaguest level of understanding of Middle Eastern politics. But this is what's happening. Great. Yeah. Awesome.

Great. I mean, awful, awful. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I like if Iran is on board with this sort of thing, they have chemical weapons. Like you don't have to have Saddam's, but whatever, you have to have Saddam have had the weapons because then it justifies the war in Iraq. Sure.

They've been lost. Here we go. Yeah. Mohammed bit his lip. A shami saw it. I see that you are worried. He said, do not fear. Does not the car on his lip through a scraggly beard.

Does not the car on say those who have said our Lord is a law and then remained on our right course. The angels will descend upon them saying, do not fear and do not grieve, but receive good tidings of paradise. Again, so offensive. Not a super relevant quote, Ben. Just like picking something. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, it's like literally a quote saying like, yeah, if you're on the right course, God will make you feel good about it. But not a particularly, I don't know. It's not the kind of thing that you would quote to somebody in a moment like this. I don't think. But I think it just demonstrates him not caring enough to do real research. No, he Googled a single passage from the Quran that he felt like was vaguely appropriate

and threw it in there. So yeah, do, do, do the sound of the afternoon, wasn't wafted into the room. He took a deep breath and then pulled a disposable cell phone and dialed a man's voice answered at the other end. He spoke with a thick Russian accent. Yes. He said, yes, and a thick Russian accent tomorrow, as Shami said, then hung up abruptly. That's their conversation.

He turned to Mohammed, go Mohammed and Allah will go with you. As Mohammed left a shami note on his prayer rug. When he got up, he turned to the door and smiled there standing before him was a large American man in a military uniform. He wore a blindfold. Welcome, General Hawthorne. Shami said, yeah, we're back to bread Hawthorne, well, no, actually, we're back to we're back to Mohammed because he's sitting some tea at a cafe now.

Classy cafe. Yeah. Of course. I would like to just point out just another tip to Ben. You didn't need to say he pulled out a disposable cell phone and then the conversation. You say he pulled out a cell phone, you have the conversation happen and then you see him throw the cell phone away. Yeah.

Yeah. Crush it underfoot or something. That's a good note. It's a good note. Indicate to us the reader that maybe he hands it off to a without being expository. Yeah. You could have it even if you want this guy to be really cool. You can just hold the phone out and like an underling knows to take it and destroy it

immediately because like that's just the operation this guy has going up. But yeah, Ben's bad at writing. So let's get to this next part. Ben glanced nervously around cafe Naderi as he sipped his Nana tea. It was a classy joint and everyone wore a suit. It was a business cafe located in the lower level of a hotel. It wasn't the kind of place that would kick up any sort of fuss in a Western city. But in Tehran, it was a rarity.

Ben doesn't know a goddamn thing about this part of the world. I've been to Iran. I've been to places that are much poorer than Iran in the Middle East and they have a fuck lit of cafes like that. You know why? Because it's a huge fucking part of culture in the Middle East to sit at cafes and drink motherfucking tea. It's an enormous thing.

They do it all the time. They have tons of them. They're all over the fucking place. But no, this is one of the only nice cafes in Tehran, a city that prides itself on its fucking tea. Anyway, fucking fucking bitch. No, no. I don't think you understand, Robert, they live in dirt.

They live in dirt. Yeah, they live in dirt and filth. Clearly, you're mistaken, Robert. Maybe the people with the scraggly beards go to wherever you're talking about, but this is a real fancy place. Yeah, it's the last non-Islamic cafe in the city. It brags about that. The last non-Islamic cafe in Tehran.

It's the last one. The last one. The last one. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, they do it. He's having some sort of meeting there with some guy named Andre. I'm guessing that's the Russian.

It also had the benefit of maintaining a solidly anti-regime reputation. Not a great thing. So what do you think Iran is, Ben? Is it so oppressive that this is the only non-Islamic cafe, or is it open enough that you can have a solidly anti-regime cafe exist in the city and it be fine? Yeah. Exactly. Intellectuals and writers hung out in packs and talked treason.

What do you think? Ben, goddammit, be consistent about your wrongness about a place. I don't like, goddammit, yeah. He got that from watching Hamilton. Okay, this is fucking amazing. Intellectuals and writers hung out in packs and talked treason. For that reason, regime informers populated the place. It was the last location Western intelligence agencies would watch.

The last location they were going to watch is this cafe filled with people talking treason against the Iranian regime. That's the last place they're going to watch. What do you think, how, god, everything is so wrong about his conception of the fucking world. Oh, just like reality and like how, like not even, because it's not even like having specific knowledge about the region, although that's clearly a problem. Bafflingly wrong.

Yeah. If you say this thing, regardless of where it is, and then you say this other thing, they contradict each other intrinsically. You think the CIA, like you think, okay, so let's imagine. Let's imagine in Ben's world, the undercover CIA operatives who exist in Tehran talking about where they should spend their resources scoping out. Hey, there's this famous anti-regime cafe, the only non-Islamic cafe in the city. Lots of treasonous intellectuals go there.

Probably not worth our time, right? We should be there. No, no, no. They're better places. They're better places. Yeah, that tracks. That tracks. Yeah.

Also, again. That sounds like being spice. It's just unimportant, just don't use the word reason two words after you use the word treason. Yeah. Yeah, also bad. God damn it, Ben. So yeah, they're they're they're meeting this cafe because nobody's nobody's going to

suspect. Yeah. Who would bother? Treasonous people gather is where terrorists will gather. Yeah. Muhammad had complete faith in Ashami. Ashami was the man who had taught him the emptiness of secularism, the beauty of belief. He was a master strategist who had launched several substantial attacks on targets ranging

from embassies to hotels to restaurants in America, Europe and Israel. He is with Allah and I am with him, Muhammad thought. I also enjoy that it's like country, continent, country is where this guy's attacks have been. We don't need to specify it. You don't say something like he was the master strategist behind the Paris bombing of 2011 or the nightclub attack in Spain that claimed 31 lives. We don't because why would you write like a writer? Yeah.

Yeah. So this kid's kids waiting for this Russian. He's got a satchel. Yeah. What is the satchel like, though? Like what? It's got a shaving kit that he bought just to avoid suspicion for some reason, but he'd also tossed it immediately.

I don't know why Ben is telling us all this. OK, so he's got a bunch of money. He doesn't know why either. Yeah. This guy, this Russian guy's late. They're having a trying to have a meeting, but this Russian guy's fucking late. Oh, oh, God, OK, here we go. Had Andre been followed by the Americans, had he been taking it out of play by the Israelis?

What if every minute he stayed here, the Zionists were drawing closer. He had heard the stories about the Jewish devils, about how they had blown the heads up of nuclear scientists with their headrest bombs, about how their computer specialists had stifled the Iranian nuclear program. If they knew what he was planning, the sons of pigs and monkeys would surely take him out of play using out of play again twice in a paragraph, too. That's fun. So.

So that's a phrase that they use a lot to culturally. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So. OK. I guess this guy comes in. Eventually.

Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do.

Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Dun.

Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun.

Dun. Dun. No. Dun. Dun. No. Dun. Dun.

Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun. when talking to an Iranian you're like talking to an Iraqi and you're like oh yeah like the villain from true lies or something like that would actually work because they've all seen

every American action movie fucking imaginable but yeah um bad example point bad example he's Swedish what are you talking about yeah yeah I unreal uh yeah nonsense it's not often I get to eat well in this country oh boy yeah so the the Russian says yeah you can't can't eat well in Iran a country that famously has no cuisine um god he has such a fucking low opinion it's unbelievable yeah what god yeah uh okay so uh they go outside and you tail the cab you know a bunch of just bullshit stuff that Ben is trying to make it seem like an exciting spy thing but is actually incredibly boring oh and then the chapter ends with nothing uh nothing happening nothing happening other than this guy giving him a suitcase that's the whole thing the kid gets a suitcase from

this Russian that's the whole chapter that's the whole challenge wow yeah that's just him nervous getting me excited to go to the next chapter yeah no one burnt alive in this chapter what the unreal so we have I'm very excited guys we have just now entered having finished finished that chapter we have now entered part two collapse oh my goodness oh yeah oh yeah wait a second what wait a second this is what we're entering part two where we have just entered part two Cody from like a storytelling perspective uh another word for that the term might be like act two yeah so uh what you're saying is act one ends with a briefcase being delivered yeah yeah and a and a that boy heading to the airport with the briefcase yeah that's a cliffhanger and random insults about

Iranian cuisine which is fantastic by the way um anyway crossing that threshold into adventure deeply frustrating also part one is before part two is collapse uh great words to choose oh my god two and a half episodes have been us getting through before and now chapter one one after collapse is and you're all going to be excited for this bread Hawthorne oh fuck yeah finally fuck yeah we're back to bread are we doing that today or is that going to be next I feel like we've got a if we've got the time we've got to roll through a little bit a little bit of bread H be right he's our protagonist um yeah and because Ben is such a good writer um yeah he's been he's been like teasing it's like pretty soon we're gonna get a second chapter

with our main character I bet he'll bite the empty magazine of his gun again tomorrow the word hung in the air for a moment spoken in Arabic not meant for his ears Brett was sure of that oh god all three separate sentences he couldn't see a thing dash the blindfold over his eyes prevented him from seeing the room but the next words confirmed Brett's worst fears he recognized the voice god that's a bad sentence what bad that's really poorly put together but the next words confirmed Brett's worst fears semicolon he recognized the voice oh fucking horrible oh that's so bad don't you're mentioned they like bring the words but it's the voice that the thing that and oh yeah oh god damn it oh how can you be this bad at writing yeah how can you be

this bad at writing it's like really like literally your job obviously bad like it's not even like you read like sometimes you read a book like well that's mediocre that's nothing special this is just bad it's one thing like it's like it's one thing to write a book and it'd be like oh well yeah you know the story structure was kind of a mess the character development wasn't super fluid like you know that's just a thing it's hard to write books anyone who's going who tries is going to try to write fiction you're gonna have books where it's like okay yeah you know your character development wasn't great or like you know the pacing wasn't you know was was off here off here but like this is just the very basic technical facts of how he writes sentences are so bad

yeah it's like this bizarre like disjointed like so like nothing matches up subjects don't match up and like yeah unclear like it's like vaguely clear like what the intention is but if you take a second like well that doesn't make any sense right if if a if a junior high if I were teaching like a creative writing class for junior high school kids and someone turned this in I would I would have a converse I would have to sit down with them and talk about yeah right I was gonna say like it's not like it's not like a shame thing but it's like this actually okay we're gonna so like there's some some structural things that need to be altered here about the way you write if I if I weren't worried about like embarrassing the student in front of the other

students I'd be like this is actually a good example of a sentence we should look at and like what is wrong with this sentence and you know why isn't this doing the job this sentence needs to do every sentence needs to do a job let's look at why this one isn't functioning yeah yeah and you can kind of do that with every other sentence you can do that with every single sentence in this book yeah welcome general Hawthorne said Ibrahim Hashami in a clipped accent what is a clip to exit what what is a clip to exit what's a racial throw yeah Brett's captors forced him to his knees he felt them hits god damn it sentence one Brett's captors forced him to his knees period sentence two he felt them hit stone what his captors

his god damn god that is oh man then he felt a sweaty hand remove the blindfold that was a sentence and that was a sentence that's a sentence I know a great sentence but a functional sentence yeah before him stood the world's most well-known terrorists since Osama bin Laden period smiling that's the next sentence after that is just wait oh my god put the Palinuk down like that's all I can think about when he does yeah I'm like I think if Chuck Palinuk listened to this episode like he would he would he would he would feel compelled to correct some things in the world yeah like these were verbs bud yeah yeah I hope you weren't too mistreated on your journey here Hashami said turning

his back to him we wouldn't want a famous war hero victimized by how did you put it in your interviews barbarians Brett kept his mouth shut he knew how this would go and he knew that the taunting presaged something far more frightening instead of listening to Hashami's monologue Brett quietly scanned the room for tools anything he could use he almost didn't notice when Hashami turned back around thrust his face just inches from his own god damn it that's a bad sentence he almost didn't notice when Hashami turned back around comma thrust his face just inches from his own jeez Christ Brett could smell oh no yeah okay Brett could smell his breath the faint vestiges of chelo Koresh still on it general Hawthorne Hashami said I know you and

that you are a resourceful man I also know that your country is a paper tiger and that your president is a weakling weaklings watches the world burns around them thinking they are safe because they have a mirror and they are lost in the reflection but the fuck is that shit that's fucking nonsense man that is that is fucking nonsense which one of you just snorted so adorably I think I think this chapter might kill Cody I don't know that he's gonna make it out of this I just said Katie a text and I was like I think this is the happiest I've seen Cody and Robert in like a month I know yeah this is really cleansing my soul a bit so hard to have a profound thought and like articulate it in an artful way I love you guys so much this is so

great this is why your country will lose finally Brett spoke America doesn't lose we just convince ourselves not to win you're the ones who will lose we don't have to tape beheadings to frighten people into joining us quite a pair a lot of things being expressed there man oh my god Hashami to Brett surprise laughed up roriously clapped his hands in delight that was one sentence Hashami to Brett surprise Hashami comma to Brett surprise comma laughed up roriously comma clapped his hands in delight period fucking hell oh you Americans you don't understand at all you're delightfully out of touch I mean delightfully until you stop start dropping incendiaries on our children you spend your lives fat and happy eating at McDonald's imagining yourself superior

because you have clean shopping malls and manicured front lawns if you've ever been to a shopping mall in this part of the anyway but while you sleep while you watch your reality television your children abandoned you Americans and your food and your your streets you Americans have streets and we don't yeah yeah yeah yeah your children abandon you no matter how many patriot missiles you send against this yada yada yada you see we offer something you do not a reason to die we need not frighten anyone you do the frightening because you see people are not frightened to die or to be killed down deep down deep they are afraid of dying without that death meaning anything they are afraid that they will die and that a life of playing xbox and watching your American

movies and eating your American food and worshiping themselves will end in the ground and their lives forgotten and of course they are right their lives are meaningless Brett scoffed and yours I suppose are meaningful slaughtering women and children a shami grabbed Brett by his face squeezing his jaw until it hurt Brent Brett clenched his teeth and stared into his eyes oh my god Ben it's a lot of just Brett Brett clenched clenched his teeth as referring to Brett's teeth and stared into his eyes referring to a shami god damn it bit yeah okay thank you damn like it's sort of like it washes over you and you're like well surely it'll make sense fine but like ah we will do anything for a law that is our strength and your weakness Brett whispered there you're wrong you don't know me

and you don't know my countrymen we live for something we live to kill bastards like you we live to kill that yeah that's what makes america great is murdering strangers in the desert yeah Ben gets it I mean for some people yeah I guess it is no he's nailing it like it's just amazing here he's like yeah this is the way it is and it's actually good actually yeah because the guy the bad guy is saying like you live for nothing like by killing you we live for something and Brett says that's not true we live for killing you and that's it's so good oh god it's like like and again he can't he will never be able to realize what he just did in the hands of like a minimally competent author you could have this be trying to say something where it's like oh both of these men

are the same kind of man who feel like you are and yeah don't see it yeah mirror a paragraph earlier yeah like you're you're already evoking this idea but he doesn't even know that he's doing it yeah yeah you have like things are complicated I want like yeah a minimally competent writer not even a good writer like no no yeah just a writer who had like a second thought yeah yeah a single additional like just like and that thought would be like what if I wanted to try to make this mildly interesting just like the bare minimum of an interesting scene oh god I like it yeah good so the the shami sends general Hawthorne away turns to his goons and has him taken to a cell and like threw a crack in the window Brett sees a tower um and it lets him know exactly where he is

in Tehran um because of a map that he'd seen briefly earlier I recognize the dirty tower from my dirty map that I got the filthy filthy tower the scum tower next to the dirty mall the scum tower at mud street god damn it uh they came for him in the middle of the night the better to keep him off balance he'd been trained for such techniques but too long ago to matter and he'd awoken groggy head pounding nauseated by the casual beating handed out to him by one of a shami's lackeys quite a sentence there Ben um no marks to the face of course they're wanted they wanted their victims looking fresh and clean before they sawed off their heads but the big bearded kid had worked his torso over pretty well and ground the bones of his arm against one another to boot

Youssef he'd heard one of the others call him he wouldn't forget that anytime soon every time Youssef had balled up his fist and driven it into his midsection Brett had again every time Youssef balled up his fist Youssef's fist and driven it into his midsection Brett's midsection like god damn it's so frustrating to like try to also like I love we we make sure they're they're they're nice and clean to remind us of what we hate yeah Ben a man who's clearly watched again a single video of one of these executions like uh they'd taken his uniform from him forced him into an orange jumpsuit the uniform of their victims when he'd gone to the bucket that served as a toilet he'd noticed his urine had turned red like Ali he thought to himself after the thriller but Ali

had survived that talking about fucking Muhammad Ali I guess pissing blood okay I don't it hasn't been established that Brett's a big Muhammad Ali fan I don't think that's just coming out of nowhere but okay this is the literary device that's happening mm-hmm yeah because Ben's a litterer yeah so uh Brett's plan is not to survive he'd formed a plan after seeing the azadi tower gauging the distance from it realizing that uh the map that he got earlier had I don't know so he's I don't I don't really follow Ben's plan here um but it seems like uh he he he blinked a message to the boys and intelligence when he did his video and he's hoping that uh Jesus Christ um he hoped that the boys and intelligence picked up on the message that he'd be sending so he's oh he's planning

to as he's being executed blink out the coordinates uh of where the this terrorists headquarters are and Tehran so that it can be bombed yeah based off he's like I see the I see the tower I know where I am therefore I know where I am in relation I memorized in my head what the geographical coordinates are and I can now blink them yes yes I I love I love stories yes he just hoped that the boys and intelligence picked up on the message he'd be sending and he prayed that the film editor or whatever cave dweller familiar with windows movie maker they'd be using for this particular production yes didn't chop up the film too badly fucking hell Ben like whatever whatever fucking dirty ms paint fucking like god oh god uh so yeah the joke that the terrorist joke is to kick him

away if you can drag him in a hallway all out of your hole and download adobe premiere whatever stink pit living hell monster to edit this oh god um so they they tell brett that he's going to be in a movie now and brett muttered through gritted teeth fuck you and your mother use have smiled brett smiled back also your goat he added god damn it ben um the door at the end of the hallway swung open waiting before with a green flag sat ishami his face bared normally in these videos brett knew the terrorists like to swatch their faces and black scarves to prevent identification for the jihad video of a major american general ishami wanted to take personal credit yusuf and his buddy deposited brett next to ishami on his knees general said ishami looking down at brett

i hope your accommodations were not too primitive i must say you look somewhat the worst for where no said brett glancing at yusuf nothing i couldn't handle ah ever the tough american well the good news is that your suffering will not last much longer yours either i bet said brett but i will not suffer ishami said placidly remember i serve a law and no matter what happens he will be with me i only hope he's with all the different pieces of you after we nail your ass with the hellfire missile any plans i don't know about general brett smiled back maybe maybe not you'll find out soon enough uh yeah they get down to the business of of killing brett hawthorne oh boy testicles come up here let's see what's happening here um let me be perfectly clear you will cooperate if you

say anything we don't wish you to say i will personally cut off your testicles if you do anything we do not wish you to do i will cut off your testicles and then i will slash your throat after letting you bleed brett granted testicles twice in one paragraph yeah yeah yeah because this guy's big into cutting testicles off of people um he could have said them like this is this is one of those situations where like he could have used the nonspecific like second time i cut them off like it's right simple stuff so uh they they film it and i guess they're not killing him um yeah so that's nice um they take him back to his cell uh and so yeah uh he gets down on his knees he does something he hasn't done for years he gets down on his knees and prays um hell yeah

jesus uh dear lord he whispered to the darkness thick with the stench of feces and urine oppressive with the smell of sweat you know i haven't all stuff that he's saying yeah yeah that's just brett hawthorne has been shitting so much in his cell that he can't stand it i love i can't okay yeah so it's good it's good smell the smell of shit and piss is overwhelming absolutely overwhelming but then what does he say the second time brett's been in there for a day by the way oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah oh like i can't i just can't read with all my piles of days worth of piss and shit but like then the second thing he says is like the oppressive sweat wait you're worried about the sweat you mentioned the piss and the shit but like the sweat is the thing that is really oppressive

that's the stench okay so brett hawthorne starts to pray i know i haven't spoken with you for a while but i need you now i may never forgive you for what you did to my ellen why you took our baby from us they say you have a logic all your own and i reckon that's the case since i sure as hell can't understand you were the things you do i know i've tried to do the right thing as i see it and i haven't broken too many of the lessons i learned in sunday school and you know better than anybody that i've never been one for prayer i always thought that some people treat you like a gumball machine like if they pray just the right way and say just the right things that you'll give them what they want and then when this whole world is about something bigger than what any of us want

it's about what you want and i do hope that i've done at least a few things the way you want them really kind of get my head around this here is like you're an asshole god you do bad things uh also it's dumb when people pray to you about their own personal stuff because clearly what matters is what you the guy that i've just said i don't understand why you're so mean once i don't know but that said that's my issues with christianity yeah favor i mean again it's just like he's just like typing so he can like i'll i'll get to a profound thought surely yeah i'm just gonna say now i'm not praying for myself i'm praying for ellen because after all this she's gonna be a lone lord and i just wanted to be happy you took her children away from her maybe i took myself

away from her but whoever it worked out now she'll be on our own please let her find someone else please let her be happy for once in her life please let my sweetheart go on with her life let her understand what i've done and why i've done it this is thank you lord in advance amen Brett closed his eyes and dropped into an uneasy sleep and that is the end of the chapter wow thank god oh god damn so horrible so unpleasant unbelievable not shocking kept going i i'm eating prayer bread my painful painful pros i don't think i've ever been it put in such physical pain as a result of the writing that somebody has that i have read yeah yeah and briefly for a second there i i kid you not my brain went robert why are you doing this to us that's the only reasonable

feeling when you read ben Shapiro's work for even a moment god i was fun though we had fun we did we had a good time we love books don't we feel we've got so much more of this book left to look forward to we have a barely an act to amount of it uh i can't wait to enjoy what collapses yeah and then part three maybe there's a part four even you know if we're lucky yeah yeah i think we're we're gonna have to i we're gonna have to go through all this this entire book yeah we are committed now you're right that we do have to we're gonna have to go through it readily readily go through this book readily i'm going to have to absorb more of it with my ears i and i feel i feel i feel fundamentally changed as a human being um you know i was i was feeling

kind of broken down from all of the uh relentless uh uh police violence uh getting maced in the face directly last night uh wasn't super fun um it's been it's been it's been tough and i feel rejuvenated in a way that i didn't know was possible um it looks like life has been breathed back into you does you've got that glow that yellow glow in your eye that you get you know only comes from trying to diagram a sentence and figure out what the fuck been Shapiro meant when he was writing it so uh do you guys want to plug your plug good bulls yeah check out our show together worst you ever and check out and check out uh kody katie's podcast even more news yeah i've got it on most fridays right right katie fridays yep that's right fridays

and our youtube show comes out sometimes sometimes it's called some more news um we've got a patreon you google our names we're on the internet twitter wise patreon more like yay treon yeah and that was really good you can you can you guys can follow katie and kody on the twitter and instagram at dark dr mr kody and at katie stole you can follow this podcast that bastard's pod on twitter and instagram you can follow robert at i write okay we have a t public store where we have a new uh what is it what is the new the new the new uh merch we have robert what did we get it to say oh uh it's uh it's a it's a face mask that says fda guaranteed to prevent all diseases um so that is it is a legal guarantee that the fda will back

a hundred percent um and if they don't it's amazing they can attack me in my mountaintop compound with fire bombs from the sky and uh that's amazing you can also get it as a shirt or a mug or a whatever they sell on that website so if you uh get the shirt and you go to like the grocery store and you can't come in here without a mask like we'll look at my fucking shirt it's fda approved could i have this with if it weren't fda approved no they would raid the mountaintop compound of whoever produced this and burn 70 something children to death in his basement he's getting very alex jones um anyways that's the episode that is the episode wash your hands alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're

diving into an fbi investigation of the 2020 protests it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to csi on trial on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts did you know lance bass is a russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well i ought to know because i'm lance bass and i'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the soviet union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts