Behind the Bastards - Ben Shapiro's Unreadable Book is Still the Best Thing About 2020

Episode Date: September 3, 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 in 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. That's how we start the podcast. Are you already recording? I'm not recording as you were screaming. That's the beauty of being a professional. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome. No, I don't like it. I'm not doing it. No one else is Robert Evans because nobody else gets to introduce my show atonally and wordlessly.

We have started then. We have started, yes. The show has begun. Hi, everybody. Hi, everyone. Hello, America and parts of Canada. And the UK. New Zealand. No, we don't let them on here. Yes, we do. Well, I love you guys. There are some real strict geotags that disseminate this show.

Australia, I'm keeping my eye on you. If you're good. On the list. Shady motherfuckers is what I think. Hello, America, accept the Celtics fans in Boston. I don't say hi to you. This has been quite the introduction. It's the last day of August as we record this. And August is a month. We did it kind of maybe. I mean, we'll see the missiles could all start firing anytime in the next several hours.

Yeah, we got nine hours left. Yeah, we got like nine hours. Sit in it. But I did say, I don't know, I started saying a few months back that August was going to be a really fucking horrible month. And it's been a really fucking horrible month. As I like, like this Saturday, like two days ago, I guess, less than two days ago, a guy got shot dead in the streets of Portland. That that was not good.

It looks like people are going to be escalating a series of heavily armed rallies between left-wing and right-wing demonstrators that are likely to degenerate in the gunfight. So September might be even worse, probably is going to be. So that's good. I'm really tired of you being right, Robert. Too much time until November. So, folks, when things like this happen, and when I say things like this, I mean the complete collapse of democratic society into an authoritarian blood-soaked nightmare.

When things like this happen, we hear it behind the bastards, no of only one way to try to keep people's spirits up, try to maintain, you know, that fighting spirit that we're all going to need to get through this. And that way is, of course, reading excerpts from Ben Shapiro's unbelievably terrible novel, True Allegiance. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. His beautiful prose, gosh, describe it correctly, my goodness. Did I introduce the show, or Katie and Cody, or did I just start shouting atonally? No, I told you, I can do it.

Okay, what is this show, Sophie? This show is Behind the Bastards, and it's hosted by you, Robert Evans. That seems right. I am your executive producer, Sophie Lichterman. All scanning so far. Anderson is our CEO. Okay. And then we're joined today by Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston of Some More News,

Even More News, Worst Your Ever, and just Epicness. That's good, okay. Well done, that was great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. On the horse, everyone has boarded the horse. On the horse, folks. I thought you were going to say the horse was in the back, and I got really scared that you knew a pop culture reference.

The horse in a bag? No, I don't know any of that. What I do know is that we just finished, we just finished when we last left off, and I recommend, there's been like, what now, three episodes of this beforehand. I believe so. And we're just skimming Ben's novel and reading chunks of it because it's very funny. The last chapter was Brett Hawthorne, combat general and prisoner of terrorist man in the city of Tehran, Iran, which, yeah.

Attacked by short terrorists. Yeah, attacked by the bear of a man, kidnapped by short terrorists. So, yeah, Brett Hawthorne, kidnapped by terrorists, he just had gotten thrown into the cell after having his big meeting with the bad terrorist guy, the evil terrorist, drifted off to sleep thinking of his wife, Ellen, or the TV show, Ellen. That's unclear at this point. It's unclear. I choose, I mean, I'm praying for Ellen too, Brett. We all are.

Okay, so the next chapter is a President Prescott chapter, which is, again, Barack Obama but white. Yes. Barack Obama but white and mixed with a little bit of FDR. And Hitler. And Hitler, like that's not forget the other parts. Okay, what were you asking, Katie? I was going to say, did we decide like a prototype for him, like a, like a Kevin Costner? I don't know if that's.

You know, it seems like Ben is patterning the president in this off of the kind of person who has not gotten elected ever in Democratic politics, but Republicans believe is like, yeah, he's like the fantasy Republican Democratic president, right? He's like a little bit of Bill Clinton, mixed in with a little bit of Hitler. That's what we get with President Prescott. President Prescott always felt a surge of power through his body when he's set in the situation room. This is where they had made all their biggest decisions. It's where Kennedy read teletype during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's where President Barack Obama had set watching SEAL Team Six take out Osama bin Laden.

And this is where Prescott knew he'd be sitting at the head of the table while American Special Operations troops dispatched Ibrahim Ishami. It is kind of unclear in this up until now. I think this is the first Barack Obama reference we get. Yeah, I pray these for Barack Obama. What the timing has been of like American history and Ben Shapiro's alternate timeline. He's a very important question. Is this just the president right after Obama? Yeah, I think this is the guy.

This is like what if a random Democrat who was also Hitler got elected instead of Trump? I mean, you could make a case that that is Trump in some capacities, but... Yeah, except for Trump, I don't think he's ever been awed by the weight of a historical... No, no. Because he's not really capable of feeling the emotion of awe. But anyway, yeah, so the intelligence figured out General Hawthorne's signal. If you remember, he was like being, he was on one of those terrorist videos and he'd like blinked the coordinates of where he was. Heck yeah, he did.

Yeah, that's good. So, yeah, Hawthorne had spoken the pre-written message from Ishami just as Ishami had written it, prompting a national debate on whether Hawthorne should have complied with the propaganda requirements of the world's leading terrorist. But intelligence kept the fact that Hawthorne hadn't complied under their hat. Well, the rest of the world had watched Hawthorne's mouth, intelligence had watched his eyes. Which is very funny to me because like, every time anything vaguely, like... That's vaguely a mystery occurs that involves like a video clip that's, you know, anytime something like that goes viral, whether it's a murder or whatever, the entire internet sets to trying to solve it.

And if this guy had been blinking in Morse code while delivering, like, there's a 0% chance that everything he had been saying wouldn't have already been like decoded by 17 year olds. For sure. Like, 4chan would have figured it out. My favorite order would have figured it out. Was that one sentence that you just read? But intelligence kept the fact that Hawthorne hadn't complied under the... Oh, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's a few sentences.

That's a cop. Good improvement, Ben. He had a copy editor for this chapter. Yeah, he must have. So yeah, Ben talks about how Hawthorne had taken the trick of blinking in Morse code from a Vietnam era POW who'd blinked out torture, which is maybe a little bit easier than blinking out the coordinates Airstrike now and then geographical coordinates. But yeah, it's very funny. And also just that they would know, like, that that would be what the government would instantly agree.

Ah, yes, this captured person has called for an Airstrike on the capital of a sovereign nation. That's got to be what we do. Yes, surely. Well, not only do we know that that's what he's calling for, we're going to do it. Yeah, we're going to launch... Well, Ben does note the message prompted a full scale debate inside the White House. It raised too many questions. First, was Hawthorne's location correct?

How would he know where he was, given that prisoners were typically blindfolded and kept in windowless rooms before their executions? If Hawthorne was wrong about the location and a heavily populated area of Tehran, the United States could end up with a blood of dozens on its hands and an international mess almost impossible to clean up. They could blame it all on Iranian nuclear weapons, but after Iraq, the public wouldn't be buying. That's not the reason... Yeah. That's not the reason not to kill dozens of innocent people, that the public might not buy it. Right.

I guess it is. Yeah, maybe we can't get away with killing the civilians. Although, to be fair, he has written articles about how he doesn't care about civilian casualties. He sure did. So this isn't very surprising. You know, it just occurs to me, Cody, because that article he wrote about how he thinks it's... He thought it was stupid whenever people complained about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and it's fine to kill civilians in Afghanistan. He was 17 when he wrote that article.

He was. He was. There's probably a pretty good essay to be written by someone smarter than me about Ben Shapiro, age 17, urging the nation to mass murder strangers in Afghanistan and Kyle Rittenhouse, age 17, taking his AR-15 across state lines illegally to shoot strangers in another city. Probably something there. Something going on there, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Second, even if Hawthorne was right, could the American aircraft breach Iranian airspace to take out a Shami? A strike in a populated area would require too much pinpoint accuracy for a missile.

Military aircraft would have to be utilized. Such an attack would surely have grave ramifications for international politics, including ongoing nuclear negotiations with the Iranian... Yeah, I think you're not going to keep negotiating with them if you bomb their capital right there. I do suspect that would have an impact. Well, it's logic and reason. It's logic and reason. Yeah. This is also incredibly boring.

It is really boring. It's basic stuff like, oh, they might shoot the plane down and that would be a problem. He's tried to portray this dude as this feckless and wildly responsible president, but then everything he's going through in his head is like, yes, these are all things you'd have to consider if you were going to bomb the capital of Iran. Like, what are we spending our time on here? Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. And then he has this thought go through the heads of this presumably progressive Democratic candidate.

The Israelis were sitting around waiting to strike Iran's nuclear facilities. With the Americans taking action on Iranian soil, they could take advantage of the situation to double up with a brief bombing campaign, sinking any possibility of a nuclear deal. It's like, I don't know, just very, very... Boring. Boring. Yeah, boring. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not like, he's not doing like a very legitimate like thought process. No. But also it's boring. Like, I don't need any of this. I don't need to hear this internal debate. Or if you're going to write a scene where they talk about these things and you have characters giving you viewpoints and then arguing, like, show me two more long paragraphs where he just goes back and forth about like, this would be a good foreign policy triumph.

And people won't call me a coward, but you know, we could also just do it later. It's, again, like you said, have people converse. Reveal things about the characters of the individuals in this administration by how they react and discuss the different possibilities. Chances are everyone would have a different viewpoint and then I would learn something about each one of them based on their viewpoint. Yeah. Yeah. Do the thing, like watch a single episode. I normally wouldn't say this, but watch a single episode of the West Wing,

but you should know that has characters that argue about like what to do and do that instead of this. Yeah. That would be my advice for this. Yeah, I never thought, like, watch the West Wing would be like great advice, but just watch the West Wing. Well, he wants to write television, so he should know that dialogue is an option. He does. And it is. It's one of the best options.

Yeah. You could have dialogue in this moment. Yeah. Ugh. Yeah, it's very, it just keeps on going. In fact, Prescott had been leaning in the direction of leaving things be, but two factors had decided him on action. First, Prescott wanted a taste of glory.

Just Prescott. Prescott. Prescott. Like, Ben, write a book. Write a book. Yeah. Like have him be a character that does things. Don't just like tell us.

Yeah. Have him like, like Prescott like proposes to do that. And then one of the characters says like, you just want, you just want it for the glory or like what? Like obviously not that exactly because that's bad. But like have people challenge him or something. And then he explains why they're wrong or he waivers because maybe they're right or something. Or he has to ignore good advice and you like see him make a choice to like, yeah. Yeah.

No, instead. That sounds like a lot more work. Yeah. Or he could write an essay. Yeah. A really long, boring essay about it, like all the options. And it turns out the president decides to bomb a sovereign nation because that would make it difficult for Congress to turn him down about his, his work freedom program. The everybody gets a job program that he wants to ram through.

Yes. Is that what they settle on? Yeah. Congress famously is a huge fan of the United States randomly bombing the capitals of sovereign nations. And so you get whatever you want as president if you are like, hey guys, I just bombed Iran for no good reason. What Ben is doing here is showing us a stunning understanding of our government and how it works. What he's doing is showing us a stunt. Like he's just showing us a window into what he thinks the government should operate like what he thinks people should do in order to get what they want.

Yes. That's what I actually meant. Yeah. That really is what's going on here. So the president who again only cares about his like signature piece of social welfare legislation. That's clearly meant to frame him as a Nazi because the work freedom program are bite mocked fry. You know what I'm saying. Yeah.

He already had his. So while he's like getting his final briefings for the bombing of the capital of a sovereign nation, he's day dreaming about the work freedom program and he writes a slogan on his hand. This is what Ben calls a slogan. Protecting America from those who would harm it abroad and at home. That's a lot for a hand. That is a lot for a hand and a lot for a slogan. That's a lot for a slogan. It's that Simpsons giant hand character.

I'm tired of all these jokes on my giant hand. If Trump had hired Ben to run his campaign, it would be making America a country that used to be better, better than it is currently because it's not good enough right now. Would be good for us. Yeah. Comma America. Put that on a fucking hat. Second, some right wing bloggers had caught on to Hawthorne signal. Mostly they were kooky survived caught on to Hawthorne.

So a bunch of right wing bloggers had found out that he was OK. So Ben does include the internet cracking the code. That's good. That's good. I got to be fair. Talking about kooky right wing bloggers. So that's good too. Yeah.

Mostly they were the kooky survivalist types, the kind of folks who posted conspiracy theories on message boards. But the CIA informed Prescott that such information once you get out could jeopardize any sort of attack. So that's that. OK, I'll give Ben credit for that one. That was been that was been understanding a reality of the world around him and then using it to predict something in a fictional scenario. Good job. He did that. All right.

So that's good. Good sentence. Ben. Yeah. Already some of those nuts on Fox News had been making oblique references to the rumors. Be nice to like hear what that was. Like how do you make an oblique reference to people online believing that a U.S. general is calling for airstrikes on Tehran using Morse code blinking? Like how do you like how do you slyly reference that?

I guess I'd like to know. Yeah. Right. Like that's another thing where like show me that. Yeah. Yeah. Show me show me these things instead of just telling me them in the least interesting way possible. So yada, yada, yada, we talk about how he decides not to do an airstrike and the CIA has its own thing that they tell him to do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So yeah. Now he's in the situation room. We're back around to where we were at the start of this chapter. He's sort of explained. He didn't really. Yeah. It's just wait. So like we're it's still we're still in the situation room and nothing really happened.

They've just described like. They've just explained why we're here. Okay. As opposed to weeks of debate or days of debate, you know, had ended with like, you know, he knew that it was time for action. You know, sometimes you just can't listen to other people's arguments. You have to make it because also like you like it just in terms of like storytelling. That's it. That's the chapter that you write.

Right. Like you'd like here's why they have a chapter. Yeah. About the debate. Like it's here all the things that are happening on television. Here's the debate. The cryptographer or whoever who figures it out and informs the government and then you have like the meeting and like, now this is again, if President Prescott and his administration are characters, if there's characters in here that we like we can engage with and be interested by even if they're the bad guys, or if they're incompetent, if they're characters, but they're not characters.

No, they're um, yeah, they're they're just like they're forbidden to. Yeah, they're little wax sculptures. Little action figures for him to play with. Yeah, they're little action figures. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. So he sends in, I guess, a wet work team to go get this guy out somehow.

Yeah, the CIA. Okay. So that's great. So he's told that the CIA success odds are less than 25%, but he sends in a CIA team anyway. I bet they're successful. Thanks. Let's see here. Now the CIA operatives dressed in local garb set a quick burning charge on the outside of the ironwork door.

It flared brightly, but the alleyway, but in the alleyway, there was nobody to see it. One of the operatives gently nubs the door open with its foot for him spread a dark hallway. No lights came in order. Check, whispered one of the men. They crept down the hallway visibility no greater than 10 feet ahead to the sides ran door after. Yeah, okay. So it's been trying to write an action scene. The guy identifies himself as police.

Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Just a bunch of guys doing a doing a boring special forces type raid thing. Yeah, I don't need to. So the team the team finds Brett and he's blinking wildly. Well, kind of. Yeah. So the correct cement tore into the souls of Brett's feet gashing them. But Brett hardly felt it.

He hadn't moved this fast since high school football. Get the fuck out of here. He screamed at the Americans standing 20 yards above him on the stairs. They know you're here. Get out. He heard the sound of a couple of safeties being switched off and then he saw the guns pointed directly at him. Run you morons. He shouted.

The operatives were blocking the stairs standing there idiotically. Then again, he had time to think he was covered with blood from head to toe. He didn't have time to explain the blood. However, he didn't have time to explain the bodies of Yusef and his fellow fuck. So we don't get any explanation as to he's killed a bunch of people. Brett has and I guess freed himself. I think what is happening? We haven't had another chapter of him.

So this is just, yeah, they're just letting us know that like without, yeah. He's already been working to get out. Oh, here we go. The next page or two is him explaining. Again, he's doing this thing where like he's trying to, he'll have an action scene and then it'll spend two pages explaining all the things that happened before that action scene that he was just at. And he keeps doing it this way instead of just telling a story. I hate when people do that. Not just because Ben Shapiro does it, but I hate in general scripts or stories and stuff where you're like, you have to stop and be like, did I miss something?

I don't like that. I don't like it. Yeah, because he wanted, he didn't, he didn't want to like write a complicated scene where like this team breaks in and Brett has to like free himself like as they're sort of coming in and like clearing the building and it's tense. So instead, like he has them just greet him, Brett's already freed himself, they meet him having freed himself and he warns them that it's a trap. And then we go back for two pages and explain how he freed himself before this all happened so that we can return to the present. Unbelievable. And if you're okay, so if you're going to do that, fine, don't go back and explain it. Just keep moving forward.

Yeah. Like if you want to do the thing where like, oh, he was already breaking out and that's okay. Move on. Yeah. Into the last chapter on a night where like, and then, you know, Brett began to, you know, saw away at like his cuffs or something, like as the guard walked away or something. And then like, oh, and then we see him, he's freed himself. Clearly, this was set up before, I don't need you to go back two pages and disrupt the flow of the narrative to explain it all in detail. In boring detail.

Very boring detail of him killing these two Pakistani teenagers or Iranian teenagers. Yeah. Also, just the phrase, standing there idiotically, just right. And they were just standing there. Sure. He can infer that they shouldn't be standing there like that. You don't need to tell us that they're being idiotic about it. Yeah.

Yeah. And also, I should note here that Brett Hawthorne stabs the teenage boy guarding him through the eye when he is on the ground. Where'd he get a knife? Oh, I don't know. It happens. I'm not going to read through this whole fight, but he stabs a teenage boy to death in the eye. That's important for Ben to have happen. What?

Robert, you know who won't stab a teenage boy in the eye? Your mom? In America's current political climate, I can imagine almost anyone stabbing a teenage boy in the eye in the right circumstances, actually. Whoa. That's fair. Way to make it real. Yeah, well. That's fair.

Politics. But it's time for an ad break, not politics, Robert. It is time for 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 Aronson, 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. 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 heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio 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 and 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 iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Oh my God. I, for one, am excited about the next chapter, which is going to come after this.

So yeah, we also, during the president's chapter, we went back to, so we cut to the CIA team freeing him. Like that was it. So we start with the perspective of the president. We move to the perspective of the CIA team and we immediately go from that to the perspective of Brett Hawthorne, which is how we end the episode without any sort of like, clear break. It's bad. It's horrible, right? If you're going to divide your chapters up into characters, sorry. Do the thing that you set up the book to do. And you don't have to do that. But if you say you're going to do that, you have to keep doing that.

Otherwise it's very confusing and awkward. Yeah, so I, okay, but we, no, we do get back to, we do get out of, so Brett tells the operatives to run. Run, you morons. He shouted when the operatives finally recognized General Brett Hawthorne dressed in an orange jumpsuit and covered with blood. They turned and ran. They just run like he tells them to run. And these trained CIA operatives just run. Yeah, they smashed their way down the hallway.

No time for discretion now. No time for discretion. You're the, as the, they smashed their way down the hallway as the basement exploded, rocking the ground beneath them. Two of them fell. Brett vaulted them, yelling at them to get up, grabbing one by, good God, what a sentence. Wait, what? Two of the men fell, semi-colon.

Brett vaulted them, comma, yelling at them to get up, comma, grabbing one by his bulletproof vest and virtually throwing him down the hallway with his good hand, period. What is that? That might be the worst sentence yet. That might be the worst sentence yet. I don't know. How do you virtually throw someone? I don't know, but I'd like to find out, because there's a lot of people I'd like to virtually throw.

Yeah. I am very upset about that sentence. Ben has no idea how to use the active or passive voice. So the very next sentence is, civilians' heads popped out into the hallway as the explosion registered semi-colon. Pop out. They popped out. They popped out. They popped out.

They popped their heads out, Ben, maybe. Brett looked over his shoulder to see them engulfed in the flame that poured down the hallway like water through a flooding pipeline. You know, maybe there's another piece of secret Ben Shapiro understanding in the fact that the civilians don't take an action. Their heads just pop out and then they die, but it's not their action. Their heads just pop out into the hallway, whereas Brett gets to have a direct action. He looks over his shoulder because he is a human being. They pop out their heads, Ben. Everyone else is just an NPC.

They pop out their heads. Yeah, they just pop out their heads. Their heads pop out. No, they don't pop out their heads, Cody. Oh, no. Their heads pop out. Yeah. Yeah.

I just can't. Yes. A blast of heat rocketed him through the door at the end of the hallway. The other operatives sprinted ahead. One man behind him screamed inhumanly as the fire caught him. Brett turned back, pushed the man down into the dust, smelling his sizzling flesh as he tried to put out the flames. The man screams finally stopped as he fell unconscious. One of the other operatives grabbed the burning man by one arm.

Brett grabbed the other. Together they ran down the alleyway into the darkness. And then we're back into the situation room. Because this is the president's chapter, after all. Yes, this is. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs turns back to the president and says, they knew we were coming, Mr. President. They knew we were coming. What do you mean?

Prescott asked. You were just watching. The explosion. And then how do you think our guys got out of there so easily afterwards? The Iranians must have known Hashami was there. They've been housing him. They just didn't want to fight us directly. That's all.

They were expecting Hashami's thugs to take our guys out. And when that didn't happen, they backed off. A lot of conclusions to draw chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff based on a chaotic video. Seems like it's your job to not do that, but. Seems like it. Ben needs to inform the audience very directly of what just happened rather than. Yeah, because he's not sure that his prose is clear. Yeah, you gotta clarify a bunch.

Yeah. So, but of course the president thinks the general silly for being disturbed by this and tells him to just take the night off because they rescued Brett Hawthorne. So everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. The people are stabbed and burned. Everything's fine.

So this is Ellen's chapter starts in Austin, Texas. She's obviously happy that her husband is coming home. Yeah. He's on his way back. Oh, okay. And Prescott, the president has just called her to tell her that her husband's coming home. She notes that he expected praise from her and she had to dutifully give it to him. Just kind of just given where we are.

Yeah, because he's like Barack Obama. He's a Barack Obama. Such a little manny. Yeah, he requires the praise. Yeah. Yeah. So she's very happy that her husband's coming home. She hasn't seen him for a year.

She's not doing a big old victory lap. Yada, yada, yada. It wasn't enough for the president to make political hay off of her husband's rescue after abandoning him in Afghanistan. And now he turned Brett's homecoming into a case for widespread troop withdrawals. She should have figured that would have been the next shoe to drop. Really a deep understanding of America that like that's how this country works. Yeah. You got to love that Ben is so disconnected from the basic reality of the things that he gets angry about,

that he thinks the Democrats have ever supported troop withdrawal in any meaningful way from Afghanistan as opposed to what happened under Barack Obama, the guy who was president not all that long ago, whose record in Afghanistan you can read about. The guy he's lampooning. The guy he's trying to make a point about. Yes, who massively surged US troop presence in Afghanistan for years. Yeah.

Cool. I, yeah, take your word for it, Ben. Yeah, good work, Ben. Yeah, so Prescott talks. Yeah, we're just going through her being disgusted that Prescott wants to take, bring American troops home from other countries. And again, like this is all just like, I, and I don't have the book in front of me. Thank God. But I imagine that what you're reading right now is just Ben describing her thoughts and feelings generally,

like over a vague sense of time. Along with describing what the president is doing. And like, I don't know. Like write a scene, write a fucking scene, Ben. Yes. Write the conversation between them. You know, write her, write her sitting and watching TV with her family around her, and they all react differently,

and that gives her something to actually interact with as a person, and we can see her mental state too. Write in the phone call between them. Yeah, maybe write her watching television when news is announced. Yeah, she's watching it with like her mom and her dad or aunt or cousins or whatever. And like some of them are like, oh, that's such a nice thing for the president to say. And she gets angry and she snaps at them and screams at them and reveals her feelings. And also the fact that she's on the fucking razor's edge.

And then you have a character. Like a scene. Like a scene with characters. Like a scene and a thing that people might want to read. Robert, I think you should write a book. I wrote a book and it's bad, which is why I didn't publish it. There you go. Yes.

But like it's just like, it's like so much of this reads like him summarizing what he wants to happen. It's his summary of a book. Robert, are you think your book was bad? The one that I read? Yeah. That was bad? Okay. Well, this is not the topic of discussion for it.

Haha, I read something nobody else did. It is good. I feel special. I feel special. It's not the topic of discussion now. The topic of discussion. Phenomenal writer, Robert Evans, continue. Is Ben Shapiro's terrible book.

You also have a published book that everybody should buy instead of... I do have a published nonfiction book, but it's very different. Nonfiction and fiction are completely different. It's phenomenal. You all should buy it. Yeah. But so... Big fan.

Yeah. Bubba gives Ellen the morning off because her husband's getting back from Afghanistan, which doesn't seem like a lot of time to give her off. What? How generous. Yeah. Just the morning, they won't even let them have a nooner. Yeah.

I might give her... You know what? If I'm the boss, you might get a weekend for that. Yeah. Take a four-day. Have breakfast with your husband. Your husband was kidnapped and tortured in Iran. Take a three-day, you know?

Just a couple of you. Go down to Galveston, catch a flesh-eating virus. It's the only thing to do in Galveston. Monday, though. You're back in this seat. Or I swear to God, I will fire you and your family will starve on this. And you're going to actually have to stay late on Monday to make up for the time that you took off. Yeah.

I'm going to need like a couple of double shifts Monday. Let's say Monday through Thursday next week to make up for the weekend. Yeah. There we go. I think we figured it out. Mm-hmm. The phone rang. Ellen hastily checked her bedside clock.

It read 7.56 a.m. She'd overslept. She'd taken a sleeping pill to calm herself down after the president's speech. She'd given it Monday. Yadda, yadda, yadda. They determined it. The determinedly cheery ring continued. She leaned over, picked up.

Ellen Hawthorne, she said groggily into the phone. It's me, baby. We get it. You're tired. Yeah. It's me, baby. Involuntarily, tears sprang to her eyes. She hearingly listened.

We just say tears sprang to her eyes. What is the other option here, Ben? She forced tears to her eyes during his phone call at 7.56 in the morning. Whatever. Oh, God, you're all right, Brett. We don't have time, baby. I'm here. I'm fine.

I can't tell you where I am right now for security reasons. We're not in an American airspace yet, but I need you to call Bill. She immediately snapped to attention. Brett didn't need the loving wife right now. He needed the partner. She'd put on that hat so many times. It sprang to her without delay. What's going on?

I need you to conference in Bill. He'll know. Why can't you call him directly? I can't explain. I'm your only call? They're monitoring it? You got it. You're a general who gets kidnapped and tortured in Iran.

Like somebody who gets arrested by the cops. You get one phone call. Yep. Yep. Also, I just like in such a short paragraph, so many times he indicated that she was acting hastily and immediately snapping to attention very quickly. Like, yeah, that's the phrase we get. It doesn't matter.

So the bill that they're talking about is some general named Bill Collier that we haven't met before, I don't believe. But yeah. So again, her husband uses his first and only phone call presumably to have his wife call another man to deal with problems for him, which I do funny. Sweet. Bill, this is Ellen. I've got Brett on the other line.

I need to conference you in. Do it, which is again, now this is the stuff, Ben. You don't need to write out. You can just say she added him to the conversation. She clicked the thing on her smartphone. We don't need to hear her conference in this other guy into the conversation. Right. Yeah.

The most unnecessary dialogue juxtaposed with no dialogue that we desperately want. Yes. So there's some stupid movie greetings between this old grizzled general who I think is the mentor to Brett and Brett. Oh, yeah. Bill, I need you to get your boys on something. I need them to find a known associate of a shammies. Name's Muhammad.

I need you. I need your boys to find a guy. He has the most common name on planet Earth. Did you find John yet? I don't know what you're talking about, bud. I don't have his last name. His name is Joe. Well, why don't you give me something tougher to do, like find a specific Mexican named Juan.

He's coming here to the United States. He's about five foot nine, 140, skinny, maybe 17 years old. Another 17 year old. You just stabbed one to death, Ben. What is wrong with you? I want to know what happened when he was 17. He was 17. Yeah.

It is weird. I don't like it. Skinny, maybe 17 years old. Blue eyes, angular face, sharp big nose. Get your boys on it. Not much time. So we're looking for a big nose boy named Muhammad. I can't.

Get me all the Mohammed's with all the noses you can find. Give me every nose you see. Oh, God. Then he hangs up. That's all the info he gets on. Okay. He could have said I love you to his wife. No, no.

He's still on the line with Ellen. Oh, okay. They just, this was a conference call. Right. He wants General Brett Hawthorne to only have one phone call for story reasons that are unclear as of yet, but he also needs him to talk to multiple people. So we're doing this awkward bullshit. Sure.

I just thought when he hung up, you meant Brett Hawthorne hung up. All right. He's still on the line. I think he also wants Ellen and Brett to be like a badass patriot team, but the only thing he can think of her to do is to act as the center of a three-way phone call. So that's worth noting. It's some Star Trek 1960 bullshit, right? Right.

Before, you know, anyway, I'm sure Ben thinks it's a big deal. Are you okay, honey? Ellen asked after she knew Collier had clicked off the line. She could hear him sigh audibly. If she could hear him sigh, Ben, by definition, it was audibly. That's so few. Okay. You could.

She could hear him sigh. There's the sentence. You could. Okay. I don't know, sweetheart. He sighed. Yeah. He sighed.

He sighed. He sighed. So many ways to cut words out of this. Yeah. That don't help. Yeah. I don't know, sweetheart. It's like they say Brevity is the soul of like you got to use the words, right?

Yeah. Brevity is the soul of all the words, Colin, the words that you got to use. You got to use them so that people understand what you're saying, the words that is, the words that you use brevetarily. I love that. That Shakespeare quote. Yep. Yep.

All right. So he, she hears him sigh audibly. All right. She hears him sigh audibly. I don't know, sweetheart. I don't know what I'm doing here, why I'm doing it, what they did to my guys in Afghanistan. I know, sweetheart. I know.

That's not a conversation. Ellen, I wasn't supposed to live. That wasn't the message I gave. I blinked air strike, not tactical mission, not rescue air strike. Are you bummed that they used a surgical method that rescued you and didn't kill dozens of people? Also like a shami was gone. The bad guy was gone.

The air strike would not have. Okay. Like also he's, he's like mad. He's like, I shouldn't be alive. I said air strike. You would have wanted him to bomb Tehran. You escaped. You did the escaping.

Yeah. Yeah. You were also like. You stabbed that 17 year old boy to death. Right. Like if you saved those CIA agents. Unbelievable. Yes.

But sweetheart, you're alive. You're coming home. I know you feel guilty. I know you never meant to leave your men behind, but you alive is better than you dead. Me alive isn't better than a shami dead. He was there, Ellen. He was there. I gave him the location.

I knew they'd have time to take the shot, but there's no explanation as to why because they like film and edit a video and then put it out and he's a terrorist, whatever. But press got damn him. Didn't have the balls. He just didn't. And now a shami's out there planning. He's smart, Ellen. Smart as hell.

And he steps ahead of us. We were lucky to get out of there alive. If it hadn't been for a stupid thug named Yusuf, we'd all be a 17 year old thug. We'd all be dead. And press got wouldn't have an international incident. Would have an incident international incident on his hand anyway. Dead Americans and their body parts spread all over Tehran. Damn the man.

Damn him. And like the, the reason to hate this president is that he didn't do an airstrike. He didn't immediately jump to an airstrike based on a man blinking. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So, so she's happy that her husband's coming home. Oh, God, I have to read this part, even though I think it might actually kill me to say,

Oh, no. Like, I don't know that I'm going to live through this. She found tears in her eyes again, her man's, her strong, unwavering man. Go ready to die. That's not a sentence. Not a sentence, Ben, but you're coming home, sweetheart. You're coming home on the other end of the phone. She could hear her husband exhale.

You're right. He said slowly, I'm coming home. Take a bullet for you, babe. She said, take a bullet for you, sweetheart. The line kicked, clicked dead. What? Yeah. That's how they end all their phone calls.

I know. I know. It makes, it's the worst thing I've ever seen on paper. With authority, I can say this, with conviction, if I made it this far, I would slam the book down here. If I made it this far. You would enough. No, but.

Oof. Yeah. I've read just straight up Nazi propaganda that was less pain inducing in its prose than that sentence. Like, Jesus, it's a real slog, Ben. Yeah. We have to take another break, don't we? Yeah.

Yeah. In case you're listening, I am comparing this unfavorably to the Turner Diaries. Yeah. Don't worry. He's also written articles that read like the Turner Diaries, too. He sure has. Yeah. Oof.

Oof. But you know what doesn't read like the Turner Diaries? The products and services that support this podcast. 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, 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 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 and 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 are back. We are back in reading Ben Shapiro's. Roll, roll, roll book. I don't know. I do want to think, let's take a moment before we dive back into the story to think about the fact that Herman Cain died from COVID-19 after attending a Trump rally and now the people who run the social media accounts he used to tweet from when he was alive are tweeting that it's not a real virus and that's pretty great.

That's a hard pivot, but I'm here for it. Yeah, it's wild. Not that convincing, but it is art. It is art. It says literally everything that matters about the time we're in right now. No one even really cares. It's not something people give a shit about. It's gone. It's said and done and gone. It's one of those stories that takes my already full cup a little bit over the edge in such a way that you're like, I'm mad about it. I have to let it spill. I have to let it roll down the side of this container and evaporate. That was a little bit of a poetic metaphor.

A poetic for a poetic for. Let's get back to this bad. I did enjoy that, Katie. Let's let's let's let's get back to that. I keep yawning and it's not because of you guys. Oh, no, it's because I didn't sleep well. No, it's the book. Are we still in the Ellen chapter? Is it like God? Yeah, we're a I think we're a yep. We are still okay. Yeah, because they're still on the phone or like they just hung up. They just hung up the cutest way possible soups and orbs. And then and then the next paragraph just lets us know that Bill Collier got a call

from his wife a minute and 29 seconds later and he let it go to voicemail because he was tracking down the man named Mohammed. How does Ellen and then we're back to I don't know that paragraph just happens with no understanding of like how we're aware of that how our anyway it just is there and then we're back to Ellen in a separate like he's writing spark notes for his book. It's a bit like that. Unbelievable. Yeah, the first phone call Ellen received came from Bubba, which it didn't. She told her to turn on the television. When she did, she saw the George Washington Bridge tilting in low motion. Oh, so there's been a terrorist attack on

the bridge. Yeah. So wow. And this just is all one paragraph that the George Washington Bridge has been blown up and the president's vowed to take care of the perpetrators. One single paragraph. And then he's mobilizing National Guard troops to go to New York City. One paragraph. We learn all of that information after. Yeah, just but then standing. If I'm reading this book, I'm skipping a lot of paragraphs. So I might have skipped that one. Yeah. Yeah. Then you'd go right to then she heard a knock at her door. Then being after realizing that another 9-11 had just occurred and the president had already reacted to it and the National

Guard had been mobilized. Then she heard a knock at her door. When she opened it, Bubba was standing there. His face looked gaunt. Ashen. She ushered him into the living room where he settled his bulk into her leather couch. I get a call from Prescott. He wants our boys out here. They're ASAP. I know. I saw it on the news. I won't send them, Ellen. She shuddered involuntarily. You know by law that you have to. The National Guard can be mobilized by the president once a national emergency has been declared. Under Posseco Matatus, that isn't totally clear, but this ain't about law anymore. It hasn't been for a long time.

We pull our troops off that border and I'll have more dead ranchers on my hands. More children floating in that river. I don't have the stomach for that. I do believe there might be enough National Guardsmen to both clean up from a bridge being bombed in New York and to do whatever bullshit they're doing on the border. We kind of have a lot of them. Is the whole National Guard on the border? Just all of them, huh? Every hand. Yeah. Unbelievable. Not perfectly believable. I misspoke. Very believable. Yeah. So it's the governor of Texas is not sending his state's National Guard to help New York because

they're needed at the border. Okay. That makes more sense. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Use other people. Yeah. They're the only thing standing between us and a full-scale invasion. The invasion is in slow is slow motion. Invasion? Yeah. The invasion. Yeah. And the response to that is the invasion is slow motion. That situation in New York isn't. Which I guess has just been doing some straight up fucking white supremacist shit right there. Wow. Yeah. It does. Slow motion invasion. They're going to infect us. Yeah. That's good. She glances at the television. The rescue crew was pulling another body from the water. A young

girl wearing a Disneyland sweatshirt. It was footage Ellen knew from 9-11 that they'd only show today during live coverage. Then the psychiatrist would explain to the network brecht Jesus. Yeah. What's going on? That's a bad sentence. Help me out. So Ellen is guilt ridden because she cares about what's happening in New York City and she watched 9-11 happen in person, I think. And she's horrified that her boss isn't going to send troops to help with the explosion that just happened in New York. And so she turns back to the TV and I'm going to read the sentence here. The rescue crew was pulling another body

from the water dash a young girl wearing a Disneyland sweatshirt. Period. It was footage comma Ellen knew from 9-11 comma that they'd only show today comma during live coverage dash. Then the psychiatrist would explain to the network brass that showing such images was triggering comma and the fit pictures would disappear to spare the sensitivities of the American viewer. It's not good. God, that's a sentence. That is. How did she know also what? She knew I'm 9-11 because in 9-11 they showed horrible bloody footage and then they stopped showing horrible bloody footage all the time. News agencies show things

that are not footage from 9-11 of dead people and that's bad. Might be a really dumb question of mine. But did people end up in the river in 9-11? Um, I don't think so. I don't know. I don't think the river was a big part of 9-11. This is I mean, it's just like I don't know. Yeah, it's badly locked on. The whole thing is the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think I know what he's saying, but not because of his writing. That's fine. We don't need to understand it. Let's give it like it's like the 9 like 9-11 happened. They showed footage and that was damaging psychologically and and and she knows that. And so when she sees

this new footage of this new terrorist attack, it makes her think like, oh, they shouldn't be showing this footage, right? Is that what he's saying? I think that she's saying that there's footage from 9-11 of somebody being pulled from a river and they're playing. No, that's not. She's just saying that the footage from 9-11 that was very gory didn't get played enough after 9-11 because psychiatrists explain that that's triggering and they wanted to spare people sensitivities. And the idea is that, no, we should always be aware of how bloody 9-11 was and never stop showing people horrible footage from it. That's

that's what is happening there. That's what shouldn't have had to think about this sentence so much anyway. It's a bad sentence, which is why I'm trying to figure it out. Yeah, so at the end of this, Bubba's like, you know, look, I'm not gonna send the National Guard and Ellen's like, what's the president gonna do if you turn him down and Bubba's like, well, he's not gonna send the National Guard after me because they're all in New York. And that's basically where this ends. So next is a chapter. So we have learned nothing about Ellen. Very little. Except that she's a pretty cool wife. I don't know. Everything in that chapter that

happened just happened to Ellen. I said, cool wife. She made no decisions. How many chapters are there left? Enough for a few more episodes. That's for darn sure. We're about, we're about to be, we're about like 40% of the way through part two collapse. And I don't know what this book's about. Part three of the book is the end of the beginning. I don't know either, Katie. Oh, he went with the end of the beginning, didn't he? Yeah, yeah. Ben wanted to write this into a series, but then it was unreadable. But then it was bad. Yeah, it was a horrible book. Don't call your shot like that, buddy. No, don't call your shot like that, buddy. So

Soledad chapter, she's in Mino, North Dakota now from South Southern California, which is quite a trek. They're not close, not close places to one another. Yeah, they made their way to the farm gradually. They made their way to the farm gradually. At first, there were only a few friends and family of the militia members and a glomeration of survivalists and nuts. I don't belong here, Soledad thought. Then she realized that they were here because of her. Mino, North Dakota, lay near the banks of the Surus River, a mid-sized town of 40,000 just south of the Canadian border. It was truly the middle of nowhere, Soledad thought.

They'd move north, then north, then north some more out of the populated areas. Outward would take a lot of manpower to track them down. They'd nearly been tracked down in California. The authorities still thought they were there, having originally believed mistakenly that they'd been burned during the fire at the ranch. By the time investigators caught on to the fact that they were still alive, they were in Idaho. Every few days, they moved until they reached Mino. In Mino, Aiden had allies and friends. His parents had come from there before moving south and he still had a pack of relatives. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. So this is, again, we're just going to tell you, summarize an exciting journey across the country while being tracked by federal agencies in a couple of paragraphs, because we don't have time to... Who cares, he's also... Fuck this shit. Yeah. Why would we want scenes in a book? You should just write blah, blah, blah, etc, etc. Yeah, yeah, we just wound up there. So, okay, they're hunkering down with Aiden's family, along with a bunch of an undetermined number of bikers and survivalists and militia members. Are these going to be the guys that decoded Brett's message? Probably, right? We're probably going to learn that. Yeah, they've

got a plan. They start recruiting people, local boys who didn't want to be sent. Oh boy. Yeah. They're all 17. Yeah, yeah. People who didn't want to get called up to the National Guard, but I guess legally we're supposed to get called up and instead join a militia, which I believe is treason. I suspect you can... That's at least like modest treason. Yeah. Mild treason. Mild treason. So, yeah, she starts recruiting people and building a base in North Dakota and builds eventually a small force of nearly 40. Soledad knows all of them. She had a gift for connecting with people. It was the same gift that made her the staple of

the evening news coverage, and she was truly interested in all them. It flattered most of them. All of them were grateful for a place to go. Again, we just hear this. We don't meet any of these people, obviously. Yeah, yeah. We're reading a constant montage. Yeah, yeah. He's riding a great epic. We don't have time for the nitty-gritty or for pleasantries. Yep, so we learn about her little posse. They started to run short on money. Yada, yada. Yeah, it's pretty boring stuff. We're just hearing about how she's... I was just going to say this is so boring. How Aidan goes to a bar after buying groceries to sit and watch the news sometimes. God, I'm so

glad I know that detail. Yeah, great. So, he learns... I know nothing about this person from that. So, and again, Ben uses this detail of this. Aidan's the secret service man who shot down the helicopter. Okay, right, right, right. So, he goes to a bar after buying groceries to have a beer and watch TV and catch up on the news coverage because they don't have any internet access or television where they're all hiding out. And this is mainly an opportunity for Ben to spend several more paragraphs talking about the foreign policy impacts of the raid on Tehran and Ibrahim Hashami's attack and all of

that stuff. And his victory speech is a terror. So, it's all just more like news dumping shit as opposed to... I mean, I guess this is a little bit of something, right? This is actually an improvement for Ben. I'll give him that. Because normally, Ben just tells us where a character is, spends several pages talking about things that just happened that we don't see off-screen, and then moves on to the narrative. And in this case, he's attempted to weave this info dump, which we get every chapter, one of these info dumps. He's attempted to weave it into the narrative. Because at least here, Aidan's sitting at a bar, getting

angrier, and he shatters the bottle in his hand, cutting it because he's so angry at the news. This at least does build something of a character and shows him it's a little bit better than just giving a dump of things that happened. Yes. Yeah, it illustrates a viewpoint and like an emotion and a reaction from a character. It is still a montage, though. Yeah, it is still a montage. And then Aidan's flipping channels after breaking the beer and cutting his hand. And he comes across MSNBC, covering the streets of Detroit, and our friend, Levon. You remember Levon, the crack dealer who's friends with...

Oh boy, do I. Whatever. Yeah. This could get out of control, the reporter said, a hopeful gleam unmistakably shining in his eye. This morning, a leader of the uprising, one Levon Williams, posted a list of demands on the website of the Fight Against Injustice and Racism movement. That's what they're calling the fair movement. Here's what we know about Levon Williams. He's a graduate of the University of Michigan with a degree in African-American studies, no police record, model citizen by all accounts, owns a barbership on Eight Mile Road. According to public interviews he's done,

he came back to the community in an effort to bring prosperity home. The shooting of Kendrick Malone, so yeah, we just have this other character who hasn't had any direct connection to Detroit, learning about the things happening with one of the other characters in Detroit through the news at a bar, because that's how you write a thrilling novel. So now we're just playing an interview with one of the other characters that a character who has not met that character is watching on TV in a completely different location that has nothing to do with great incredible writing. Wait, whose chapter is

this? This is Soledad's chapter also. That's what I thought. We've moved on to someone completely different listening to an extended interview with someone else completely different, because this is a well-written book. Pages go by and we're talking about Levon's theories for how the police force should be redone. It's just amazing. Soledad's sitting on the porch of a cabin, we're back to her. She's sipping tea, an old, a grizzled old recruit named Ezekiel Pope, who's black and comes from Los Angeles, comes up to talk to her. I'm sure he's got some wisdom here. Yeah, he was a

Lieutenant Colonel and he'd been culled into his superior's office just after the New York attack, told to round up his men and get ready to ship out to New York. For some reason he'd come to Soledad instead. Again, there's another dude committing some treason to go hang out in North Dakota with an unclear goal. Again, for some reason he did this. Talk about it. Just have her show me. Yeah, have him explain why he's doing it. She's having a long dark tea time of the soul, because she's brought all these people out here and everything's getting worse and she doesn't know what to do.

This guy says, you know I followed you for this reason. Here's what happened to me. I decided wherever you were gonna go, that's where I was gonna go to. Then she knows she has the confidence to do the thing that's necessary next, or whatever. And we, the reader, understand and are slightly more engaged with what's going on. Yeah. But instead, it's made very clear by Ben that Soledad actually has no controller agency in this situation. Aden said he hadn't given reason for deserting, but he said that Ezekiel was trustworthy. Soledad had no option but to trust Aden's

judgment. Ezekiel looked over the snow falling silently into itself. He wore heavy work gloves on his hand and an M4 slung over his shoulder. A maroon scarf around his neck. Soledad gestured at the gun. What's that for? We're gearing up. Gearing up for what? Well, you tell us. After all, you're the terrorist mama. That's what we're calling you now, you know. Ever since the escape, she felt sick to her. So they're just like picking up guns for no reason and saying like, okay, we're all gonna go do something. You have to tell us what. Like, but it's not up to you to tell us to get armed in the first place. We're just all gonna

get armed and then tell you it's time to figure out something random to do. I don't know. None of this makes any sense. This isn't how people act. Yeah. That's how they act in bread and breads. Ben's brain. Yeah. I hate this book. Yeah. So this guy tells her that the best defense is a good offense and when your force is small, concentrate it and hit them while they're weak and she asks who are they and he says the same people who shut down your farm, the people who attacked you, which are back in California and they're in North Dakota. And he tells her that they have to move or die now. And it's very unclear as to who he wants her

to shoot or why or who they could shoot that would improve their situation or how it would be related to her farm being destroyed in South in Southern California. But but that's where this ends. Yeah, is him saying we've got to move or die and we have to hurt the people who hurt you or thousands of miles away. It's great chapter, Ben. It is a great chapter. And you know what? I think it's about time that we call this one day at the beach. Yeah, I think so. Our next chapter is a leave on chapter. I'm sure that's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to that. I'm excited now. We'll get back to this. Don't worry, friends.

By the time we get to this next, it might just be a full on civil war like the one Ben perfectly predicted here. And once what a nice escape. This is Ben. It is a nice escape. It's a nice escape into a world of people being very wrong. Yeah. On purpose, seemingly. Yeah. Katie, Cody, would you like to plug your pluggables? Oh, you know it. More than anything. You guys can check out our other stuff over at some more news, which Cody hosts tonight produce. We have a podcast called even more news. And we also co host worst year ever with Robert. We sure do. Cody give some. Yeah, we got a patreon.com slash some more

news. You can follow me on the social medias. Dr. Mr. Cody and Katie Stoll at Katie Stoll. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the things. Robert is I write okay on Twitter. We have social media at bastards pod on Twitter and Instagram. We have a tea public store. And this book is draining. Yeah, I don't have energy. I feel like this could be everything. But I think it's it's also one day. It's fucking Monday on the unnecessarily long month of August. So long. All right, podcast over. Yeah, wear a mask. Wash your hands by the end of the beginning. 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 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get a podcast. 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts 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 in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.