Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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 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. What grows in the forest, our imagination, and our family bonds? The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you at discovertheforest.org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad council. I'm Tanya Sam, host of the Money Moves podcast powered by Greenwood. This daily podcast will help give you the keys to the kingdom of financial stability, wealth, and abundance. With celebrity guests like Rick Ross, Amanda Seals, Angela Yee, Roland Martin, JB Smooth, and Terrell Owens, tune in to learn how to turn liabilities into assets and make your money move. Subscribe to the Money Moves podcast powered by Greenwood on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And make sure you leave a review. We're so excited

to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart podcasts and Hello Sunshine. Repealing back the layers around why society makes it so easy to guard men's time like it's diamonds and treat women's time like it's infinite, like sand. And so whether you're partnered with or without children or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you, for people of all family structures. So take this time out with us to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim your time. Listen to Time Out, a fair play podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one

convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. You crack open a Dr. Pepper. You know it'll only make you more thirsty in the long run, but you need some liquid in your mouth and you're saving your remaining 15 gallons for a quick shower. The U-Haul is finally almost packed up. You may be able to make it down to San Francisco in time. Living in Redwood Valley has been nice the last few years. It's a beautiful place, but in August of 2022, the drought became too much. Late last year, California's new far-right governor lifted all water restrictions on farmers.

This sparked a new statewide race to use what water was available before it ran out. Lake Mendocino was already low at the beginning of the year, and for the first time in your memory, it is now completely empty. San Francisco isn't doing great either, but it's much better off than where you live. The Russian River watershed relies almost entirely on rainfall and is isolated from state and federal aqueducts. After the governor lifted water restrictions, new almond and pot farms started sucking up groundwater, and by the end of the summer, they'd started pumping from the river to feed their thirsty crops. By mid-July, your town implemented a 25-gallon limit per person per day. That's about as much water as you go through during a five-minute shower. The first

thing you sacrificed was your garden, then you stopped flushing after you peed. These tweaks added up, though, and without water, the lifestyle you'd loved just stopped being possible. Your brother in San Francisco offered to let you move in with him. You weren't a fan of the big city, but at least you'd be able to shower again. And so you find yourself sipping an empty soda can and loading up your last few boxes into the U-Haul. You give your brother a quick call, saying you're all packed up and about to head out. He sounds worried and mentions something about his school letting new teachers go due to budget cuts. You can't really afford to think about that now. You just need to leave. Since you're all sweaty from loading the U-Haul the last

few days, you decide to hop into the shower one last time. You knew it wouldn't last long, but you still seemed surprised when the water turned off after what felt like only two minutes. You quickly dry off and grab some clean clothes from your backpack and throw your damp towel into the passenger seat of the truck. You say goodbye to your home of 10 years and to your old succulent plants. And begin the three-hour drive down to San Francisco. Water scarcity is a problem you're probably already familiar with, especially if you live in the Southwest. California has dealt with particularly brutal droughts over the last 20 years, and the Golden State's water problems could be about to get much, much worse. Because in just

a few days, California might find itself helmed by a far-right governor with a near religious hatred of water conservation. Electoral politics are not generally a big focus on this show, but what's going on in the state of California could have serious implications for many people, including those outside the West Coast. The ongoing recall campaign against Governor Gavin Newsom started out in June of 2020 with Republican politicians and activists unhappy with Newsom's handling of the pandemic. Newsom's opposition to President Trump's crackdown on undocumented immigrants also played a role. This is actually the fifth recall attempt against Newsom since he took office in 2019, but it's the first one to gain traction. It's fueled in part by Newsom's own

hypocrisy and hubris. On November 6, 2020, the recall effort gained court approval for a signature gathering extension. And later that night, Governor Newsom went to a birthday party for a Sacramento lobbyist and friend at French Laundry, a pricey Napa Valley restaurant. Soon after, photos surfaced of Newsom mingling maskless at the packed restaurant. He faced heavy criticism and apologized, but the damage was done. Republicans latched onto this as an opportunity to finally push the recall effort through. The recall petition, which had only 55,588 signatures on the day of the dinner, had nearly half a million a month after the November 6 incident. California's recall process is probably the least democratic one in the United States. Gathering signatures to

authorize a recall election is a pretty standard thing, but California has among the lowest signature requirements and states that allow for the recall of an official. Most states require that the recall campaign must gather signatures equal to 25% of the votes cast in the last election. California requires just 12% for executive officials. The LA Times notes, quote, That might have been a high bar in 1911 when the population was scattered across the 770-mile length of the state, but is it too low in 2021 when petitions for ballot measures are gathered en masse by paid staff and parking lots? And that's not the only questionable aspect of California's recall process. On recall election day, voters will face two questions on the ballot.

First, yes or no on whether to recall Governor Gavin Newsom from office. Second, and this one is technically optional. If so, who among the 46 candidates do you want to take his place? The first question is decided by a simple majority, just like other ballot measures. But when it comes to the second question, the percentage requirements change. The replacement candidate doesn't need more than 50% to win. So if more than 50% of the voters say yes on the recall question, Governor Newsom must step down even if he has more overall support than any other individual challenger on the ballot. The replacement question is determined by who gets the most votes among the challengers on the ballot, which Newsom cannot be on. So 49.9% of the voters can back

Mr. Newsom and he can still lose to someone who is supported by only, say, 20% of the electorate, or even a smaller fraction. For other California elections, including special elections triggered by the death or resignation of an official, a candidate cannot win without the support of a majority of voters. If a candidate doesn't win over 50% outright, then the top two compete in a runoff election, not the case for California's recall process. Organizers of the recall campaign submitted 2.1 million signatures by the March 17th filing deadline. 1,719,900 signatures were ultimately determined to have been valid, which was enough to trigger the recall. The deadline for casting your vote is September 14th. If the recall succeeds, the new governor

would be in office for the remainder of Mr. Newsom's term through January 2nd, 2023. And that leaves a lot of time for executive fuckery, especially considering the new frontrunner. Far right radio talk show host and frequent Fox guest Larry Elder has emerged as the likely candidate to replace Newsom in the event the recall goes through. Elder, who was 69, jumped into the race relatively late in the game during mid-July. At that time, it was more of a toss-up between Republican candidates Kevin Falconer, a former San Diego mayor and businessman John Cox, who lost badly to Newsom in the 2018 gubernatorial election. Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, and former athlete in media personality Caitlyn Jenner, polled less well. But as Larry Elder entered the race, he almost

immediately became the frontrunner in polls and raised lots of money from small donors. In the three weeks after he announced his campaign, he raised nearly $4.5 million, according to fundraising disclosures. That's more than every other Republican challenger, sans multimillionaire businessman John Cox, who's largely funding his own campaign. Elder has been a central figurehead of the right-wing radio talk show scene since the 90s, but has always been hesitant to run for public office, deeming the state of California ungovernable due to its liberal supermajority. But after talking with his friend and mentor, Dennis Prager, of the neo-fascist propaganda outlet PragerU, he figured it might be worth a shot and has expressed desire to use

the emergency powers of the governor to push the state rightwards. Elder was born in Los Angeles, but moved to Cleveland to attend law school and opened his own firm in 1980. Elder's career began as a bit of an accident. He'd been invited on a Cleveland station as a guest. He did so well on air that, when the regular host went on vacation the following week, the program director asked Elder to fill in. Soon enough, Elder had his own weekly time slot on the Cleveland station. In the early 90s, a guest host from Los Angeles, Dennis Prager, visited Cleveland. Elder quickly impressed Prager with his on-air wit and talent, coupled with the uniqueness of a black man openly expressing extreme conservative views. Prager persuaded his home station, KABC in Los Angeles,

to give Elder a shot. Quoting the LA Times, Elder returned to his hometown in 1994, two years after the civil unrest following the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King and in the midst of the O.J. Simpson murder case. The program director at Rival KFI, David G. Hall, felt KABC made a creative move, bringing on this guy from South Central who swung the other way on race. Almost from the beginning, the self-proclaimed Sage from South Central whipped up a furor. He mixed sound bites from representative Maxine Waters with a recording of a barking dog. He said, blacks exaggerate the significance of racism, while women did the same in regards to sexism. For nearly four years, Elder has slapped many members of his own race in the face on radio,

belittling them as winers or losers, holding himself up as a model of African American excellence. He's become a darling of white listeners who seem to almost gush when they telephone him on KABC talk radio. They are astonished to find a black man who not only isn't going to chastise them, but who also often agreed with them, a black man who declared that race was no longer a significant factor in American society. Elder also doesn't believe that racial profiling exists. This is despite telling the Times editorial board that police pulled him over between 75 and 100 times the first year he had his driver's license. Elder's regressive, provocative content angered many Angelenos and black citizens of California led a boycott of advertisers on the

show. It worked, and by the late 90s the show had begun losing millions in ad revenue. But thanks to syndication, changing networks, podcasts, and TV appearances, Elder has been able to remain a central figure of the right-wing content sphere. He most recently starred in a video series for far-right propaganda organization in literal cult, The Epoch Times. According to Elder's campaign, the central recall issues he is focusing on are rampant crime, rising homelessness, out-of-control costs of living, water shortages, disastrous wildfires, rolling brownouts, and repressive COVID restrictions. For this show, we'll be focusing on the last three as they relate to the rapidly shifting and hostile climate. For the past 30 years, Elder has been a classic

conservative climate denier. He had a whole section of his website devoted to debunking the Gore Bull warming myth. In a CNN interview prior to the 2008 election, Elder called global warming a false myth while disparaging and making fun of both John McCain and George W. Bush for discussing global warming as a serious issue. However, more recently, Elder has shifted his rhetoric around the climate. In an interview last month, he expressed belief that some warming is taking place, but by using old, soft, denialist talking points. Climate is always changing. Of course, the climate is changing. The question is, what do we do about it? Do we deal with the effects of it? Or do we force-feed a renewables-based economy down the throats of people, jacking up the

price of energy, a disproportionate pain for poor people? But of course, there's climate change, and the climate is getting warmer and maybe about a degree or so in the last several years, and it will likely continue. He adds, what I don't believe in is climate change alarmism. He also said that he was not sure whether climate change is making wildfires worse. Quote, fires have gotten worse because the failure of this governor to engage in sensible fire suppression. Elder also blames California's rising housing costs on environmental extremists that jack up the cost of housing so that developers have to wait and wait and get sued over and over again so that finally when the home is built, it's way more expensive than otherwise it would

be without these environmental rules and regulations. Despite the slight backpedaling on climate for better media optics, his potential policies on the topic are just as horrendous as one might assume. In a recent video news conference, Elder declared that he would end the war on oil and gas and the attack on the logging industry while also reducing regulation on fracking and stopping California's growing efforts to expand wind and solar power, which he calls not very efficient. Elder did not mention climate change during his news conference. Water scarcity will be an increasingly severe concern for California in the coming years. Drought is already a major political talking point among voters and politicians,

and it creates another rift between city folk and rural farmers. Farmers are having a harder time growing crops and feel threatened by water rationing. They're frustrated by the thought that the Democrats running cities will always prioritize pumping extra water into population dense areas. Meanwhile, people in cities are concerned that will be forced to cut back on personal water use as almond farmers suck up tons of water to feed their droops. Just building more dams and water catchment systems or aquifers may seem like a solution, and if done properly some of those things might help, but they can't make up for a lack of rainfall and snowmelt. Relying on river water has its own problems. Pulling too much from fresh water that

flows through rivers allows for extra salt water to intrude from the bay and ocean. Salinity in the water negatively impacts local ecosystems and dirties what is supposed to be a freshwater source. Drought is simultaneously pushing migratory fish species like Chinook salmon and steelhead trout closer to the brink of extinction. Large numbers of fish are dying off because the rivers they rely on as spawning habitats are too warm or too low. Anxiety around water, droughts, and crops are among the issues driving some people to vote yes on the recall. A poll conducted last July by the Public Policy Institute of California found that residents cited drought and water supply as their top environmental concern, with about 25% calling

it their chief concern, which makes it poll well above the related problems of wildfires, air pollution, and climate change. Republican politicians have been using anxiety around drought to drum up support for the recall by blaming the current situation on Newsom. The original recall petition against Newsom from early in 2020 warned that the governor, quote, seeks to impose additional burdens on our state, including rationing our water use. Last April, Governor Newsom did declare a drought emergency in two northwest California counties. The order allowed state officials to restrict the amount of water diverted from the Russian river and authorized the relocation of fish stranded in drying puddles. The local county government

asked residents to use no more than 50 gallons per day per person. But Newsom himself hasn't mandated water rationing for individual consumers, though he has asked Californians to voluntarily cut consumption by 15% and has suggested that statewide restrictions could be on the table if conditions worsened heading into the fall. Newsom and the Department of Water Resources as a whole do have ideas in mind for tackling this issue. Last year, Newsom authorized an $11 billion dollar water infrastructure project, building a single 30-mile tunnel under the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta. The project, which has been discussed for years, is being pushed forward in hopes that it will protect the Delta's existing wetland ecosystem and supply enough fresh clean

water to be diverted south for the rest of the state. But the tunnel concept has faced opposition, both locally and from conservation-minded folks. Some residents in the Delta region see it as just a water grab to meet the demands of southern California and the agriculture industry, while the needs of those up north are being ignored. Ecologically focused critics say it could still increase salinity in the Delta and result in notable harm for the ecosystem. Newsom has more recently discussed other action and legislation to help mitigate the continued drought, quoting the San Francisco Chronicle. In July, the governor signed a state budget that includes $5.1 billion over four years for new water infrastructure and drought preparation

projects, including money to repair delivery canals, help farmers irrigate crops more efficiently, and start water recycling projects. Still, Newsom's recent actions have done little to quell anger among many farmers who say the state's failure to plan for another major drought just a few years after it exited the last one has put them on the brink of ruin. Ernest Buddy Mendes, a lifelong farmer in Fresno County and Republican County supervisor, said he was forced to let hundreds of acres where he used to grow cotton and wheat dry up this year after his allotment of river water was slashed to zero. He's relying on groundwater pumped from wells to keep his grove of almond trees alive. Mendes said he hasn't decided

whom to support as a replacement candidate in the recall, just that he will vote hell yeah to remove Newsom. Let's face it, Newsom, dam is a four-letter word, Mendes said. We haven't done anything in 20 years about building storage. California already does have one of the most extensive dam systems in the country, with nearly 1,500 reservoirs. Building new on-riffer dams would cost billions of dollars if such efforts even survive legal challenges, which are all but guaranteed amid the struggle to save endangered fish species. There are not many areas left that would make sense or be sustainable to build a new large reservoir. One other, more cost-effective solution could be to store more water collected during wet years and underground aquifers.

One of the solutions to this problem is the same as the solution to a number of other climate-related problems, which is that we simply have to cut the amount of resources we're consuming, whether that means reducing our energy use or cutting down on wasteful water use. You can only build so many dams. The trend of California farmers growing thirstier crops has made an existing problem much worse. Today, the state produces three times as many acres of almonds as it did 25 years ago. With California most likely entering a third straight year of disappointing rainfall and snowmelt, anxiety around drought and increased severity of water restrictions won't get any better. And if the La Nina weather pattern hits the west coast as it's poised to, that would mean

the western U.S. will have a drier and hotter winter than average. Last August, water regulators made an unprecedented move to begin cracking down on water use in the sprawling Sacramento River and San Joaquin River water sheds. Ordering 4,500 farmers, water districts, and other landowners, including the city of San Francisco, to stop drawing water from the basins of the river or face penalties of up to $10,000 a day. The city has enough water in its reservoirs to meet demand for at least a couple of years, and stored water is not affected by the state restrictions. Water agencies also can seek an exemption from curtailments of human health or safety or compromised. This does hit rural areas and agriculture the hardest because most cities have alternative

supplies and stored water to tap into. Looking to attract voters, Larry Elder and other Republican challengers to Newsom have made it a recurring point to say that farmers should not have to endure such cuts. But they don't really give any perspective solutions to prevent rationing when water levels at reservoirs. 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 was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass 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 Podcasts, 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 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? 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Or as lakes and wells are all plummeting. Larry Elders said drought is not inevitable and said he supports building more reservoirs and dams to store runoff. But he has also voiced support for permitting desalination projects. Desalination devastates ocean life, costs much more than other alternatives, and uses tons of energy. Also soon it will be made obsolete by increasing focus on water recycling. Explaining desalination quickly, ocean water is collected and run through pipes to remove the largest solids and then pumped through reverse osmosis filters to remove salt, while fish and other creatures die upon being sucked in or just from the force of the water flow. In a report studying a desalination plant in the early 2000s, it was found that on average over a

five-year period, 19.4 billion larvae were caught up at intakes and about 2.7 million fish, along with marine mammals and sea turtles, were killed by intake equipment. For every gallon of drinking water, desalination leaves another gallon of salty brine behind. The plants then just mix that with two parts ocean water before pumping it back into the ocean. These measures can negatively impact the environment for this generation and generations to come. This type of resource extractive thinking reflects how we got into the problem in the first place. Battling over water allotments will only get us so far when dealing with lackluster rainfall. What can help is permaculture programs to help farmers learn ways to irrigate more effectively and cultivate healthier soils

that retain water. Moving away from water-heavy crops like almonds and towards more sustainable and moisture-efficient crops must also be done if we want to stave off the worst effects. Putting Larry Elder in office won't make it rain, but it will put the state at least another year further behind on taking the kind of action necessary to ensure California remains habitable. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledges in death and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know. We talk to the legends of business sports and entertainment about how they got their start and most importantly how they make their money. Ernie Elysia is a

college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game, unclear as to how the stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Ernie Elysia Podcast is available now. Listen to Ernie Elysia on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. They know what happened on camera obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 90210 superfan and radio host Sissony sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce,

reflect and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting, Donna Martin graduates. You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Though it wasn't all bad. I'm gonna be real if you take. I like you. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm Tig Torres and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on Season 1 of the Hit Murder Mystery Podcast, Lethal Lit, a Tig Torres mystery, out now and then tune in for

all new thrills in Season 2, dropping weekly starting February 9th. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Lethal Lit on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The last few months in San Francisco have been, honestly, better than you expected. Still hot and dry, but now that you're in fall, the heat has become manageable. In the Bay Area, at least. Staying with your brother has been actually really nice. The first few showers felt like luxury. Recently, he's had less of a good time. He found out he was getting laid off right before the school year started. He told me over 15,000 other teachers have been fired as a part of the governor's new reform schools program. The teacher's union is fighting it, but your brother

isn't too optimistic regarding the outcome. He's been looking for new work, and meanwhile, you've gotten a shitty retail job to help with bills, while you decide on what hospitals you want to apply to. You don't really miss your old EMS job in Redwood Valley. When you finally do get back into medical care, you'd really prefer something in a hospital or clinic setting, as opposed to the extra stress inherent in emergency services. The one chance you have had to use your medical skills since moving was during the fires last September and October. Back up north, they got really bad, and hundreds of thousands of people evacuated down south. Some old activist friends of yours from college made their own fire relief slash mutual aid set up

to give out clothes and food and to help people displaced by the fires. You haven't talked much with your old college buddies in the past few years, but upon hearing of the relief effort, you happily offered up your skills to help with minor medical issues in a small medic tent they set up. It was the first time you've helped with anything related to protests organizing since you moved up to Redwood Valley 10 years ago. It was oddly refreshing. Politics hasn't been a major part of your life since college, but speaking of politics, midterms are finally this month. The past year has felt like it stretched on forever. Your brother and his union buddies have been doing canvassing for a few progressive city council candidates that might actually get a

shot at getting in. You haven't had time to adjust to San Francisco's local political scene, and honestly, you're not sure if you really care to. You have been keeping half an eye on the big state electoral races, though, which feels kind of weird. You know there's no way the Republican governor will get reelected, not here in California. One thing that has gotten you worried is the weekly anti-election fraud rallies that have been happening in LA ever since October. The governor, surrounded by state troopers, has made it down himself a few times to drum up support from his fan base. And after the rallies, roving gangs of far-right extremists have gone around randomly attacking homeless encampments. You heard that just last week after a Sunday rally,

three people had to be rushed to the emergency room. It's now just a week before Election Day. You're on the bus home from your job at the vintage clothing store when you receive a message on signal from one of your old college mutual aid buddies you met up with again during the fire relief effort. The message reads, hey, are you free on Election Day? You hadn't really thought about the day itself. You respond, maybe, nothing really planned yet. Your friend replies with a fat wall of text. My affinity group and I are heading down to LA on Tuesday. There's a big Stop the Steel type rally happening, and word is, lots of proud boys are going to show up. Comrades in LA have put out some calls for support, so my crew is going to go down and probably bring

some medical stuff. If you want to come, we got an extra seat in the van. The thought of driving down to Los Angeles to deal with proud boys doesn't excite you, especially on an already stressful day. You think about it for a few minutes. Images of the people maimed during and after the recent rallies floods your mind. Your buddies know more about organizing and protests than you do, but you have more medical training. You decide you'll do it. You reply, I'll come with, and pack some extra iFACs and tourniquets. Among the issues Republican recall challengers have raised to attack Newsom, force mismanagement has leaned large among the recent complaints. This type of thing

harkens back to Trump's old habit of blaming the governor and not raking enough leaves for California's fiery plight. On a larger scale, this can be seen as part of an effort to push all the blame of wildfires off of oil gas and our transformation of the climate, and onto a simple lack of fire prevention measures. This narrative of course makes the fossil fuel industry more happy. The thing is, all of these things are contributing factors for California's wildfire problem. Climate change caused hotter temperatures and droughts makes fires easier to catch and spread, and inadequate force management plus above ground power lines do the same. Just because there are bad faith attacks on Newsom doesn't mean there

aren't actual failures he's made as governor, especially in relation to the forests. An investigation from CAP Radio and California MPR published last June found out Newsom had grossly misrepresented and flat out lied about his promises of new wildfire prevention efforts. Elements of the piece were of course used by Larry Elder in the right to push for support of the recall, but the article itself is a very fine piece of journalism. Back when Newsom first took office in January of 2019, one of the first things he did was sign an executive order overhauling how California handles wildfire prevention and forest management. The measures included removal of hazardous dead trees, vegetation clearing, creation of fuel breaks and community

defensible spaces, and creation of ingress and egress corridors. In January 2020, a year after Newsom's initial announcement, the governor's office claimed in a press release that under the executive order's priority projects, 90,000 acres got treated with these fire prevention measures. But according to data obtained by CAP Radio and MPR, the actual number of acres treated by these priority projects was only 11,399, just 13% of the number Newsom boasted about. Quoting the piece by CAP Radio, quote, data shows Cal Fire's fuel reduction output dropped by half in 2020 to levels below Governor Jerry Brown's final year in office. At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire's wildfire prevention

budget. In 2020, 4.3 million acres burned, the most in California's recorded history. That was more than double the previous record set in 2018 when the campfire destroyed the town of Paradise, ultimately killing 85 people. A decade ago, Cal Fire was trading a paltry 17,000 acres annually. That number has steadily climbed, though Newsom misrepresented the number of acres treated in his priority projects, the overall amount of wildfire mitigation work carried out by Cal Fire spiked in his first year of office to 64,000 acres. But in 2020, fuel reduction totals plummeted to less than 32,000 acres, a roughly 50% drop, unquote. Multiple factors contributed to 2020's subpar fire prevention and reduction efforts. In 2019, the year with the largest number of acres

treated in recent history, the state budget allotted for $355 million for wildfire prevention and resource management. But after the COVID-19 pandemic hit California in early 2020, Newsom cut the budget by 40%, down to $203 million. On top of the budget cuts, the fires themselves made prevention work more challenging. 2020's wildfire season started out early, which resulted in less time to do prescribed burns and thinnings because the same teams that are tasked with prevention and fuel reduction often also service firefighters once the fires break out. As of May 2021, Cal Fire has treated over 23,000 acres throughout the year. This puts California on a trajectory better than last year's total, but not as high as the 60,000

plus acres treated in 2019. Newsom has been trying to make up for his missteps and gross exaggerations. Quoting the Capradia report again, quote, Newsom is trying to play catch up with the state enjoying an unexpected surplus. Newsom proposed $2 billion in spending on wildfires and emergency preparedness, with $1.2 billion going towards wildfire resiliency in the upcoming budget. Experts say the increase in prevention spending could help the state get closer to a less dangerous wildfire season over time, but they also expressed concern over whether the state will sustain that commitment for years to come, unquote. Revelations about Newsom's and Cal Fire's lies and lackluster force management were quickly jumped on by Larry Elder and other

Republican challengers as an easy way to attack Newsom and to move the conversation about wildfires away from climate change. Elder has said he has, quote, unquote, no idea why more prevention and reduction measures aren't being done. And when he becomes governor, he'll be, quote, implementing these commonsensical kinds of plans so that we can reduce the severity of these fires, unquote. Elder has given no concrete plans on what measures he'll be shooting to implement or any indication on how much money will be directed to prevent or fight fires. On another budget, Elder has said that the more recent spending on wind and solar power has left, quote, less money for removing trees and putting power lines underground,

the kind of things that would make these fires less intense, unquote. And he promises to drastically cut spending on renewables while also investing more in oil and gas. To be clear, Newsom's upcoming budget contains billions for both fire prevention slash fuel reduction and renewable energy such as wind and solar. Whoever ends up governing California is not only in charge of local politics, like governors and other states. What happens in California affects people across the country and even globally, whether that's wildfire smoke traveling across continents or changes to supply chains and industry rippling across the world. California is, after all, the world's fifth largest economy. There are also political ramifications that could affect the states as a whole if

Elder gets an office. The Senate is currently a 50-50 split between Republicans and Democrats, with Vice President Kamala Harris getting the tie-breaking vote. One of California senators is 88-year-old Diane Feinstein, the oldest active senator. If she dies in office or has to step down due to medical reasons before her term is over, the governor of California gets to appoint her replacement. If Elder appoints a Republican, then the Senate will be back under GOP control, and given his connections to the far-right media sphere, the list of potentials that Elder could appoint is frightening. This is by no means inevitable, even if Elder gets into office. If he does, Feinstein does have the brief opportunity to step down and put a replacement in

before the new governor is sworn into office. However, Feinstein has said she has no plans of doing so. Reports of her declining health have become only more common in recent years, but like many politicians and judges, she is not keen on stepping aside even to possibly help prevent a disastrous outcome. Changes in the Senate are not required for horrible outcomes in the wake of an even brief Elder governorship. His anti-vax sentiments and plan to open up the state and remove basically all COVID restrictions will result in hospitals being pushed to max capacity. Elder has said he has plans to appoint education officials similar to former Secretary Betsy DeVos and judicial appointees like conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Elder

has stated his intention of declaring states of emergency and using executive orders to push through otherwise unpopular legislation. He has discussed plans to declare an education emergency in order to fire upwards of 21,000 quote-unquote bad teachers. Elder blames teacher unions for quote, protecting bad teachers. And in a recent interview stated quote, someone told me that between 5% and 7% of public school teachers need to be fired. An emergency declaration would give the power to get rid of bad teachers faster than the system allows. Once you did that, automatically education would improve overnight unquote. Now Elder has not specified who had advised him on teacher terminations or how he plans to weed

out the so-called bad teachers out of the 300,000 in the school system. He's also touted plans to declare a homeless emergency, but his solutions have nothing to do with actually helping homeless people. His homeless emergency declaration would allow him to suspend the California Environmental Quality Act, the law requiring environmental review of building projects. Elder's stated goal is to unleash developers and contractors without environmental regulation, which he claims quote, treats developers and contractors like criminals unquote, and allows building projects to get suspended indefinitely, ultimately raising the cost of housing, in his opinion. One of the more frightening aspects of Larry Elder is his close ties to many

far-right propagandists. He's done work for PragerU, Epic Times, and has been a guest on Fox News at least 220 times in the past five years. In the last episode we discussed his friendship with Dennis Prager. Also Dave Rubin just recently campaigned for Elder at a recent rally, and a month and a half ago Elder was on Candace Owen's show discussing how the descendants of slave owners deserve reparations for having their property, i.e. black people, stolen from them when the slaves were freed. Those are his words, not mine. What's probably most concerning is Elder's connection to Stephen Miller. In fact, we wouldn't have Stephen Miller if it were not for Larry Elder. Back in the late 90s, a conservative student from Santa Monica High School would call into Larry

Elder's show to rant about his school's liberal culture. Reportedly, the student would go around demanding staff and fellow students regularly recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He railed against condom giveaways and called Spanish language announcements quote, a crutch preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own unquote. Young Californians calling into Elder's show and agreeing with him wasn't very common, and Elder aided up. He loved talking with the student so much that he let the kid on basically any time he wanted a platform to rant and rave. You know where this is going. That student was Stephen Miller. According to Miller, he appeared on Elder's show 69 times throughout his time in high school and university and calls

Elder quote, the one true guide I've always had unquote. Miller's appearances on Elder's radio show made him a recognizable figure in the larger conservative media world, helping him connect with Steve Bannon and eventually President Trump. By extension, Elder was Stephen Miller's on ramp to the White House. In an email to Miller in 2016, Elder told him quote, I hope to live to see the day when you become president. When media has brought up his friendship with Stephen Miller, Elder tries very quickly to change the subject. When pushed on the topic in a recent interview, Elder shot back with quote, why would you bring up Stephen Miller? I'm just wondering what the agenda here is. What's the point? Am I somehow what, a Nazi, a fascist unquote? I think that says

enough. The reason we haven't discussed the other candidates in the recall election is because at this point, if Newsom is recalled, it's absolutely certain that Elder will be the one to succeed him. He has a 20 point lead ahead other challengers, but that lead is still only a tiny fraction of the total electorate, which demonstrates the part of the problem in California's recall process. There are other Republican challengers with concerning pasts and beliefs, lots of anti-mask, anti-trans, anti-vax, total disbelief and climate change, people spouting QAnon originated conspiracy claims, advocating the lie that the presidential election was stolen, and there's even a Democrat challenger that plans to use the National Guard

to round up all homeless people and put them in concentration camps. But Elder himself shares a lot of those views and uses the fact that he's black as a shield for criticism against his racist and nationalist policies and ideas. We haven't even mentioned that last month, Elder's ex-fiancé came out and said that Elder was extremely abusive and had threatened her with a loaded gun. In early August, polls were showing pretty much neck and neck for the first question on the ballot, yes or no on the recall itself. A survey USA pulled from that time even had 40% of respondents vote no on the recall and 51% vote yes to remove Newsom. Throughout August and September, results started to flip the other direction as ads against the recall hit the airwaves and internet.

The latest survey USA pull has 54% voting no on the recall and 41% voting yes. Other polls hover around the same 10-15 point lead for Newsom staying in office. Now, with polls not going the way Elder and the GOP would like, we're starting to see a new yet familiar narrative being prepared. On my website, electElder.com, we have a voter integrity project. We have lawyers all set up already to go to file lawsuits in a timely fashion. The reason the lawsuits did not work in the 2020 election, we know what happened there is because the lawsuits were filed too late and many of them were dismissed on procedural grounds. Courts don't like to overturn an election, so when you hear of anything suspicious, we've heard a lot of things that have been

suspicious so far, go to electElder.com, we're going to sick our lawyers on them, file lawsuits right away, they're going to cheat, we know that, but I'll tell you what, so many people are angry about the crime, about the homelessness, about the way he shut down this state, about the fact that one third of all small businesses, many of them are owned by black and brown and Asian American people that they care about, about the declining quality of schools, about the fact that people are leaving, rolling brownouts, lack of water, so many people are angry, the number of people that are going to vote to recall this man is going to be so overwhelming so that even when they cheat, they're still going to lose. That's Larry Elder saying that if he doesn't win, that means the

election must have been stolen. Fox News has been promoting the same idea the past month. All of it is in the vein of the Stop the Steel movement post the 2020 presidential election, culminating with the attempted insurrection on January 6th. Here's Elder again on Fox News in early September. But you're right, I am concerned about voter fraud, and that's why I'm asking people to go to electElder.com, that's my website. We have a voter integrity project set up with a bunch of lawyers ready to file lawsuits if anybody sees anything suspicious. Big 2020 election fraud conspiracy proponent and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was one of the first people to chime in to stoke disinformation about the recall election. And I think this may

well be the most rigged statewide election we've seen probably at least a half century. 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 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 happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys 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 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. 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. People should look carefully at this, because there's pretty good evidence that if Newsom is in a straight, honest count, he probably has a good chance of losing. But if they can stuff every ballot box in California, and they can cheat in every way possible. And of course, this type of propaganda has made it

onto the most watched cable news show on air, Tucker Carlson. California does not get the credit it deserves for the corruption that's endemic there. It's a one-party state and they act like it. And you've got to have concerns about whether this recall election will be free and fair. Are you concerned? Well, of course I'm concerned, Tucker. I'm involved in election integrity efforts throughout the United States, and I'm also a member of the Republican National Committee. So we have a team of lawyers that is ready to deploy throughout the state here, and we are monitoring things. Every single day, just a couple of hours ago, I filed a lawsuit to intervene in a challenge to the constitutionality of the recall statute, because frankly, I don't trust the Secretary

of State or the Attorney General, who are both appointed by the governor to defend him in this regard. And so we are going to be jumping on every potential opportunity to do that and fight back against the Democrats. Of course, they are playing fast and loose. We've seen some very alarming scenes of 300 ballots bundled together in the car of a person with a gun and some drugs, and so we are definitely looking into all of these issues. But, Tucker, ultimately it's going to come down to how much do people want to change in California? And I can tell you, even living in my latte sipping, avocado toast, eating, you know, Lulu lemon-wearing neighborhood in San Francisco, people are fed up with the crime, the drugs, the homelessness, the intermittent

electricity, and everything else that is wrong with California. So people want to change here. It's just not working. And this really is a test of whether our system works. I mean, can people get better leadership? That's kind of the question. Will there be election observers on the scene so the rest of us can know this was fair? Well, 100%. The problem in California is that the voting doesn't just take place on election day like it would in a normal place. It's taking place now on a rolling basis through mail-in voting. It's 100% mail-in ballots this time around. And it is going to take place for 30 days after the election if it's close because they have 30 days to count the vote. That's 60 days of voting. And,

of course, a lot of shenanigans can occur and ballots can disappear. So we are going to be observing it very closely and demanding accountability and filing lawsuits wherever we need to to hold the Democrats accountable because we cannot trust them. Yeah, I hope so. People want to believe the system works, that it's real, that they have power, that their vote matters. So I appreciate what you're doing. Harmony Till and thank you. A lot of what's said in that last clip is either extremely misrepresented or just flat out lies. Those 300 ballots found in a car were actually part of a larger mail theft thing not related to the election at all. Voters have received new ballots. And for this election, just like the last

one, Californians have the option to vote in person to mail in ballots or deliver them in a drop box. The deadline to drop off, mail, or place your vote is September 14th. Counting cannot start till the 14th, either. And like every election, there will be observers throughout the entire counting process. Obviously, this isn't the first time conservative media has hyped up election fraud, the last presidential election being the biggest instance to date. But what is concerning here is that they're setting up a template to use for all future elections whenever Republicans lose. Here's a Fox clip from September 7th. The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud. So as they say, stay woke,

pay attention to the voter fraud going on in California, because it's going to have big consequences not only for that state, but for upcoming elections. It's safe to assume that Stop the Steel-esque strategies will be used almost every time a Republican loses in an election going forward. We've seen exactly what this type of rhetoric and propaganda leads to, and it ends in blood. There were multiple attacks on state capitals during the Stop the Steel rallies prior to January 6th. In some places, like Salem, Oregon, they succeeded in getting inside the capital. Even if Newsom gets to stay in office, there will still be many problems. Election conspiracies and the possibility of violence like January 6th just being one. We haven't wanted to righteously defend

Newsom here. He's a politician and inept in many ways. He deserves plenty of criticism, especially on the issues of climate change. But the criticism levied at Newsom from the likes of Elter and the GOP are based on bigotry, nationalism, and climate denial. Newsom should be our punching bag, not theirs. I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activists on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Adidina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast

Time Out, a production of iHeart Podcast and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this Time Out with us. Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halbert, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts. We controlled absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure

out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There has got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool-bidgin. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to Deep Cover on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Greetings and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I am a researcher and writer on the podcast team. Today, we have a roundtable discussion with a group of researchers who look

into extremism and political violence, usually stemming from far-right propagandists and people in that kind of whole sphere. We have a discussion relating to climate change and all these other things that I was able to record with these fine people. It's split up into two sections, so part one is coming out today, part two is coming out tomorrow. I highly recommend you listen to both, maybe even back-to-back at some point because it does really give a nice, rounded-out view of what we were talking about. Without further ado, here is my discussion with, I don't know, well, not a dozen, but a large amount of terrorism researchers as we are all in the woods as you will soon find out.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the daily show. I am Garrison Davis, and I am recording in an undisclosed location in the woods. Me and a few internet colleagues are all hiding from the world for a week to reset our poisoned brains, but I am going to slightly re-poison us here for about an hour to have a discussion about climate change and terrorism because we have a group of people here who are all, well, research the bad thing online a lot, so I am going to try to take advantage of having this unique group of people all in one location to have this nice discussion for you guys, but yeah, specifically, we want to talk about how we, how each of us as an, you know, quote-unquote expert in certain fields

see climate change impacting extremism and terrorism in the next few decades. And yes, we are recording in the forest, so if you hear sounds like we're in the forest, that's because we are. You guys already know me, or you probably do, but we're going to go around a circle, probably starting on my left, introducing the people, and yeah, just give a brief bio, however detailed you want to get into. Okay. My name is Matt Taylor. I'm a journalist and researcher focusing on cults, conspiracy theories, and extremism, and today is my birthday. Happy birthday, Matt, in the past. My name is Theo. I am a journalist and researcher as well. I mostly focus on the American militia movement and paramilitary groups.

I'm Toothpick, I'm with Theo, Matt, Emmy, and Big Newhouse who isn't here on terrorism back. That's a podcast, by the way. Self-plug. My research and reporting focuses mainly on conspiracy theories and where that overlaps with political extremism and the focus on connections between U.S. and Europe, especially Germany. I'm Peter Smith. I'm a journalist with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and the host of the Unusual Show podcast. I'm Lily, and I focus on extremism and counterterrorism and data analysis. And I'm Emmy. I do digital propaganda and rhetoric. That is our little crew. Yeah, let's see. What the first thing we want to talk about, I'm guessing, is how we see

the podcast is more about smaller local collapses. There's not going to be one big collapse. We're going to see small things start to fall apart. And how we see small things fall apart. What do we see filling in those gaps? Specifically, I think this will tie into the militia movement a lot in a lot of ways. So yeah, you guys can start sprouting off your knowledge. Yeah, so what are the things that I've been thinking of and following? I don't know if this has made as much of an impact in U.S. media. But in the last month, parts of Germany and the Netherlands experienced really bad flooding that literally wiped out some villages and some towns. And one of the things that we've seen in Germany is far-right groups. There isn't

really a militia movement because of the laws there, but far-right groups rushing in and collecting aid and going for photo ops in those catastrophe areas. And what that does make me think of, and maybe Theo can talk more about this, is we've seen similar stuff in the U.S. with the militia movement marking themselves as emergency preparedness or marking themselves in that way and positioning themselves where when the government is unable to respond that these groups are able to come in and also using that for their messaging and for their rhetoric. Yeah, so I mean that is something that you see in the U.S. The basic example, Garrison and I talked about this earlier, but during the wildfires in Oregon last year, you saw checkpoints being

established by militia groups, whether already formed militia groups or kind of impromptu armed bands. And you also see that as like a big marketing thing. I know a lot of the Virginia-based militias that I follow went out to Tennessee two, one or two years ago when the tornadoes happened. Yeah, I was going to mention that. Yeah, they did a bunch of kind of aid and photo ops. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm just not to dox myself, but I'm from Nashville and then beginning of 2020 in March right before the coronavirus. Someone just dropped a toy gun. Great job guys. Yeah, so in the beginning of March of last year, right before COVID hit Nashville, we had a huge tornado go through Nashville itself and wipe out like two different neighborhoods and then a rural town right outside

of Nashville. But you saw a lot of like, so the community comes together and this really nice display of mutual aid to do all the cleanup basically before any official crews can get there. But with that, you also saw like these far right groups coming in for photo ops and it just, it normalizes their presence in heavily impacted areas. And it was not, not ideal. Yeah, a lot of the American militia movement, especially the modern kind of post 2008, 3% or strain of it is predicated on this idea of a complete breakdown of order or a loss of civil order. However, you conceive of that. And these like climate disasters that are going to hit areas are going to kind of provide a self fulfilling prophecy for these people to step in

and say like, Oh, no, you need some sort of armed force. You need some sort of group of people to keep order and to keep law in whatever way they conceive of that. I do think it's interesting you guys talking about kind of like the photo op thing that they do because when the wildfires happened in Oregon, all of the actual like relief work was done by anti fascists. Like, people in Portland, we set up, you know, these, these massive camps to help, you know, all these like, you know, much more conservative people who had to evacuate their, evacuate their homes. And they were all getting fed and all like their clothes and stuff were coming from anti fascists. And the, all the right did was do the arm checkpoints thing financially that like in the

south where there's less anti fascists, like, you know, compared to the general compared to like Portland, right? How some of those groups actually do do some of the relief effort. And that that's definitely not the case up here in the in the West Coast. Oh, yeah. I mean, last year, I remember a few county level militias that I follow in Virginia were like seriously doing relief work. Like they were gathering food, they were taking out places affected by flooding in North Carolina, by tornadoes in Tennessee. It's not, I wouldn't go so far as to call it mutual aid because it lacks the kind of ideological framework for that, but they are providing some sort of infrastructure. I think mutual aid for their guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With less of like the

theory side of mutual aid, but like, and I'm sure there's someone else who can speak more on this, but like, from my perspective, growing up in a super weird church, I see this in interacting, they see this like combining with local churches a lot as well. I'm not sure there's anyone else here who could say something more intelligently than me about how like religion will combine with these, like, the kind of militia efforts. Well, I was like, eco, eco extremists, like on the far right, on the very French far right can start to like be very esoteric about their, you know, belief in climate change. And they start to sort of frame it as like a reason for the collapse that we need collapse or attacking infrastructure, like

for the purpose of somehow saving the planet, even though it's really not going to get anywhere. We really need it. We have to do a lot of our own work on the planet. We can't just destroy everything and see if it works. Yeah, we can definitely bring up accelerationists and accelerationism as an overarching thing that is, you know, not just, not to be like horseshoe theory about it, but accelerationism pops up in a whole lot of areas, including areas at the left where it becomes very unuseful. And that can lead to like a lot of wasted time and some destructive tendencies. I mean, I think that point kind of also provides an interesting through line between more mainstream militias and like the really esoteric brands of eco fascism or ecologically based extremism

is that like they're both very influenced by like colonial schools of thought. Like eco fascism and all that is kind of predicated on this idea of like terra nullis. Like there is this perfect, empty, wild land that we can have. Manifest destiny. Exactly. And like so much of the ideas of order and like peacekeeping that you find within more mainstream militia movements come from this exact same type of thinking where it's like a colonial order that you need to keep. Yeah, I know there's a lot of people on the left who are in like the kind of like, you know, green, green, like eco socialist or like green anarchist kind of strains. We get very frustrated when people talk about eco fascism, which I can understand because no one really

means the same thing when they talk about it. Sometimes they just mean any like, any like quote unquote terrorism that has like, has like environmental purpose. Some people, you know, when they think of eco fascism, they think of like overpopulation. I mean, there's a lot of different things they mean, mean by it. But I know we've all had talks, but like what we personally view is like eco fascism, because it's not just eco extremism. Like eco extremism does not equal fascism. Like there is there's a whole bunch of eco extremists who are very anti fascist. And there is some who kind of bridged the gap, you know, like like ideas has some more fascist tendencies. But I would not accurately call them fascist based on the type of stuff they do the

type of writing they do, they do not have they do not check all of the boxes. But then then we do have people who I would accurately describe as eco fascists who have done who've done, you know, mass shootings who have a lot of eco who have eco fascist stuff, either in the writing that they like or their own manifestos, they bring up enough points is like, Yeah, you kind of fall into this broad category. Does someone here want to give their personal definition of eco fascism? This isn't this not necessarily exactly what we use for the pod. But I just I'm interested to hear there's a lot of people with various backgrounds, everyone has their own specialized knowledge. What kind of when people say that what what do you kind of put into that category?

People believe in like this organic law and like natural order and they believe that like there is a natural hierarchy ingrained in everything. And they think that generally, like if we return to like some kind of primitive society or like, you know, they'll assume that like everything has its own structure and that there's going to be people who rise to the top, people who just, you know, don't belong in that kind of society, it's going to be really damaging for like the elderly for disabled people. And they just sort of see it as like survival of the fittest. I think that's like a much more eco fascist point of view rather than like a more green anarchist point of view where things would sort of even out rather than become a hierarchal

yeah yeah I think hierarchy is an important part of that and how we you know there is like a lot of green anarchists who are focusing on like making their own medication for for you know people with diabetes and stuff and that's kind of stuff that is like really interesting to look at and stuff that we should absolutely pursue because we'll become less reliant on supply chains and we don't really see eco fascists doing that. We do not see them focusing on making medication for people. Oh no. Maybe I can kind of set some people up to say more stuff if I say this real quickly but one of the things that I always or that is a red flag for me is is just you know bringing in this very traditional discussions of gender roles and and relating that to the environment

yeah of our rhetoric. Can you give an example? I mean I don't I we don't need to say names of specific like writers or people but there's definitely a way in which to like describe like the gender roles. Sure yeah. Stop playing with the toy gun oh my god um just just like establishing and it is kind it can be kind of like an older left thing too but establishing you know ecological discussions within framework of traditional gender roles um and kind of like what is expected of people based on their sex. Yeah this is this is this is the dark side of Cottagecore. Yes. I mean you want to get in here? Oh boy yeah. Every likes Cottagecore. I love Cottagecore. I like parts of Cottagecore does not want to intersects with a certain state of politics. Oh

right well like queer Cottagecore is extremely cute. Sure until until yeah well until you're not queer and listen yeah. Sometimes they still are. Now here's the thing when we're when we're dealing with like traditional gender role stuff it's a really like slippery slope into more aggressive strains of thought. Yeah. So when we're when we're talking about the idea of of the class. Stop playing with the toy gun. I will throw you out of this. I will throw you out of this podcast. I don't want that. We will turn this we will turn this podcast. Turn this podcast. It's Matt's birthday you asked. Toothpick apologizes. Yeah okay. Have fun editing. Continue editing. Yeah rip to the editor I wouldn't know what that's like. All this stays in. So good. So when they're talking about the class and they

want you know they think the the rod of modernity will be gone society will be ended they can they can you know rebuild from the ground up smaller communities and uh they can they can build the society they want which is largely ethno nationalist yeah it's not great uh the the idea that there will be this this super traditional family structure you're gonna have your your uh this combined uh strong warrior also homesteading man and your uh cool trad life yeah uh who never ages above 30 in this society like it just doesn't age about 25. I'm being generous here assuming that at least like some of these people have a little bit of like pre-planning but they don't they don't um and they they step on each other a lot right because they have this this whole plan for this uh this

society free of industry um and they can't stop posting about it on the internet which is pretty funny it's really funny right like they're not they're not good at it yeah they're like way too addicted to posting to like actually commit to like the true no off the grid trad life at least at least 10k was off the grid we don't got a hand it you got ahead we don't got a hand it you got a head you do you want to know circumstances and got pause divided on how much we got a hand at the 10k the official stance of terrorism bad as the terrorism is bad why don't we just bring them on it is kind of a concern when they do end up when they stop posting i mean yeah it's a concern when they're posting but it's kind of more concerning you would rather than just keep posting sometimes

yeah yeah it's the same as like looking at a kid that wants to be a firefighter or something like they're just talking they're not gonna do it but you see some of them doing it and when they're doing the thing a lifestyle influencer version of fascism yeah do you think that it's going to affect kind of like laws about living off grid and laws about like for normal people who just want to get the fuck out i actually just read something about this there is some guy who'd been living off grid in pennsylvania for like 30 years and i don't remember the details of this and we don't have internet out here old guy yeah it was an old guy burn this house down yeah he's in jail now he's probably going to be in jail for the rest of his life and i think part of whether it comes

from left or the right as people kind of start to try to build resiliency within communities for disasters that are coming and start to seek ways of living that do not rely on supply chains and do not rely on the state the state will strike back against that as a consolidation of power because the more that people move away from it whether on the left or right the less power the state has i mean i think utilizing counterterrorism is an excuse to do so yeah because they're giving reasons and it's not it's not going to get enforced equally i'm sure the government's gonna gonna focus on certain people doing this and be slightly more okay with other people doing it well well yeah what's so i would like to talk about canada a little bit because specifically

climate change affecting canada is going to be very it's going to be slightly different in most of it compared to the states because i've been i've been having my my waist deep in climate science books for most of 2021 um and canada is going to probably see economic boosts um and they're probably the state's probably just going to get actually get actually stronger because of how the same thing with russia uh both canada and russia are going to get more economically powerful under climate change because of how much more crops are going to get moved up how give me your thoughts again because canada is my backup plan as soon as talk gets too spicy in the states i'm i'm taking my canadian passport and hiding in the woods um how how

what's your thoughts on that yeah it's interesting to hear you guys talk about american militia culture because we we definitely are rhetoric and propaganda that we see in canada it gets borrowed a lot the talking points from the states like the the concepts but what we don't have are these strong organized militia groups we had three percenters for a while um and who still exist but they were they were big about being off-grid like they were the ones who weren't posting for a long time um and it seems like as much as all these people are still around they've largely deflated doubt because canada's made some some efforts to call them terrorists right right very recently we designated them as a terrorist organization yeah um which doesn't carry a

criminal charge but if you if you do something involved with them you send them money like there is there are consequences of that legal enhancements okay um but our our kind of militia culture focuses on the illegitimacy of the state that canada's founded it's very kind of subsit uh type rhetoric but that canada's establishment it's its rules and especially with all the public health measures it's this growing uh this growing kind of tide of thought in both the prairies and largely out west i grew up in Saskatchewan um most of my family's in alberto i know when i look at when i because i keep a soft eye on some canadian hate groups just because i'm canadian most of them pop up around alberto um where do you see this stuff kind of like happening like do you see any

of this on the east coast if so is it smaller or is this mostly all like a west coast canada thing well that like that conspiratorial thought we've seen kind of across the country like on the east coast you know just recently we had people setting up their own version of checkpoints um as like a protest against the uh the public health measures okay and like the whole eastern part of canada is in its own bubble yes right now um but yeah you had this like conspiracy based movement forming these actual checkpoints and then the main part of it though is probably going to be out west okay that is where these ideas are the most popular or the most popular that makes sense where mainstream politicians are moving towards you know amplify these type of talking points yeah is do you see that

like is that is that a most alberta thing it's a mostly like prairies alberta like the farmland the interesting part is that when you talk about groups is like in canada groups are an urban phenomenon for the most part okay most of our organization takes place around the city centers and that is very different from the states where the states it's usually the usually the opposite in some there's there's always exceptions of too many when people live but generally we see it as more as more of a rural thing which is organized where these cities are more like liberal and that's right the anti fascist groups are based um but it's kind of these like these little ideological pockets that exist all over and certainly that sentiment is probably shared but the need to mobilize seems to mostly

focus on the urban centers and then we'd never have our groups they're not providing any kind of age yeah that's just or even checkpoints like that's beyond these like very recent protest movements you know there has been you know more forest fires around bc around you know western alberta how do you see the government's responses types of things right now and canada's in a in a particular situation with the liberals having minority control you know the canadian parliamentary systems probably confusing to let americans if they don't understand it already um but yeah how what do you what do you see on on that front they know you know just in true both true don't bite and talk the talk around like pipelines and stuff but then do the complete opposite um how do you kind of see

this kind of stuff working right now for for like on the on the climate side of things well yeah our reaction to the firefighters or it's a reaction to the wildfires um i mean the government response has always looked down on like it's always looked at poorly um but none of these people are taking this as an opportunity to kind of change minds kind of do pr um there's much less reaction to it most like the west also there's this incredible feeling of alienation because of the way that our government is set up yeah they have substantially less or they have substantially less voting power yeah the same way the states how you know there's like there's like southern states or states in the midwest you feel like they don't really have any power politically same thing for almost the

entire east entire west coast of canada everything from like manitoba to alberta and parts of bc you know everyone is very frustrated at at at the at the federales um and how they really don't have control for what's happening it'll be like yeah people on the east coast are controlling for what what our what our pipelines or what our minds are doing and that does not fair to our workers because yeah it is it does suck when you know a mind closes and then everyone in a small town is out of business like the part the part right between canada all might be standing around them you know used to be you know bustling small towns that are basically all all now ghost towns because stuffed clothes people have to leave to either like 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 erenson 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 was like a lot of guns he's a shark and not in the good bad ass way and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get to the heaven listen to alphabet boys on the i heart

radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast i'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync 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 sergue kreklev 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 i heart 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 i

heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts calgary edmonton regina don't laugh um so you know all these specific things you know we see pockets of this we see pockets we see pockets of this in like the midwestern estates definitely i know it also is like like manifest destination because like there's a lot of that there are a lot of it started with people kind of moving outward to try and gain more land and make their borders um larger and like live further out to like try and uh and up to more territory um and with the the like canadian big surgeon like indigenous rights and the big focus and shift to like sort of give them land back or something i'm not exactly clear on what the canadian stances on that

what oh just like i mean we have a big movement from indigenous populations to they seem very like they kind of like well i there's so many different bands and tribes and different types of nations um like we have unseated territory and the dynamics with which the government is supposed to deal with and has agreed to deal with and actually does deal with them is all vastly different um but yeah that that idea of this focus on these particular issues like indigenous issues um even our attempts to you know have a greener economy you know for a place that for a long time and still is an extraction economy yes um how does that like affect the the oil company with health care more like extreme as far right groups who want to move out that way um for the purpose

of organizing and you also have the indigenous focus within the liberal government so like how do those two groups do you think like interact uh like the general conception is that the portion for indigenous rights especially on the farther right is is for the disenfranchisement of white europeans like it is um and then yeah you do have this western exodus where we have very popular figures who are moving further west because they're these stronger ideas of sovereignty i forget what exactly it was polling but when the western exit or the exit was started you know there was a significant amount of popular yeah or at least like not strong support but like existing support there was there was a there was a large amount of support yeah absolutely it'll

be interesting to see what happens though talking about collapse like you know in these small towns in like cloister communities um you know they already feel cut off from the government and not represented and then if you have a breakdown of infrastructure you know that'll create like what would even happen in the first place if they're not helping us exactly which is which is true which is like a real thing to think about but their solutions are wildly different than the actual solutions to help people right and we've already seen how this plays out in the past as well with um you know places where uh the infrastructure starts to break down and then people who have weapons kind of become the authority just based on the fact that they have more power yeah

yeah so one of the things that i follow is a lot of kind of like the more let's characterize it as boomer s conspiracy theories especially with anti vax anti public health measures type thing and one of the things that that that really is noticeable to me is how much more sovereign citizen stuff is creeping up into those areas um and especially you know they're they're two really big examples of you know if there's an anti vax protest in your city it's probably one of these two networks that both come from europe um that i'm not going to name right now um and those two networks also you know love to organize over the messaging app telegram um and telegram is tell me if i'm stepping in at me telegram is where you know so much of this ideology this far right

ideology is able to cross mix and co-mingle yeah um you know i we we talked about telegram enough in the pod okay cool but people are familiar you haven't stepped in it yet keep going uh yeah like adjacent adjacent to stepping you know but it's fine it's yeah so so i mean my my biggest frame you're gonna talk about this a lot is is telegram as kind of this technological embodiment of the cultic milieu um because there is so like basically no enforcement close to no enforcement on telegram and so you know these these more malicious actors know that and they know that they can find an audience who is interested in you know opposing the mainstream conspiratorial thought in these kind of like boomer tell boomers on telegram and conspiracy groups

and there are you know malicious actors playing to go in and win these people over and you know a lot of these malicious actors are younger people who don't have those resources but they know that they can win over these people who do have resources who own land who have savings to kind of like fund that movement if yeah oh i was just gonna say i do think that the cultic milieu is like a really important heuristic for these kind of collapse scenarios because the question of what happens when kind of infrastructure and any sort of political guidance falls away is governed a lot by that and like this idea that there's there are these ideas floating around in our society and once people have nothing else to turn to these malicious actors will bring this stuff

in and uh yeah to put it simply then we're pretty fucked yeah telegram also has recently started to have to crack down on people and um because of that you have this really interesting dichotomy of people who are saying like this means like get ready get prepared go off grid get guns and you also have on the other end people who are saying you know create alt-type platforms and like create um more like self-encryption and like i don't know i'm trying not to step in right now yeah yeah no i'm with me but to be able to uh to speak more like peer to peer um resources and that wraps up part one of the terrorism roundtable discussion thanks so much for listening you can find us at happen here pod and cools on media on all of the socials you can find me at

hungry bowtie and you can follow a decent amount of the researchers on their podcast at terrorism bad the podcast i think i think it's just at terrorism bad anyway thanks for listening to part one part two drops tomorrow stay tuned this is rock sand gay host of the rock sand gay agenda the bad feminist podcast of your dreams now what is the rock sand gay agenda you might ask well it's a podcast where i'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind and that could be anything every week i will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say we're going to talk about feminism race writing and books and art food pop culture and yes politics i started show with a recommendation really i'm just going to share with you a movie or a book

or maybe some music or a comedy set something that i really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well listen to the luminary original podcast the rock sand gay agenda the bad feminist podcast of your dreams every Tuesday on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts give us your attention we need everything you got fast waiting on reparations we beat the endless podcast tune in every thursday politics and wordplay we fight for the people because they got us in the worst way from the hill to brazil bombay to can't get from the left on clave to what the neocons say every thursday cop the heady conversation and break us off with some break as we're waiting on reparations listen to waiting on reparations on the i heart

radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about and we're here to change that i'm april denwitte host of the new podcast navigating adoption presented by adopt us kids each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts visit adopt us kids dot org slash podcast or subscribe to navigating adoption presented by adopt us kids brought to you by the u.s department of health and human services administration for children and families and the ad council welcome to it could happen here i'm garrison davis this is part two of our terrorism roundtable discussion if you haven't listened to part one already i would recommend you

scroll back listen to the previous episode and then continue on from here so you have kind of context to what exactly we're talking about anyway this is part two of our discussion in the woods i hope you enjoy something that was talked about earlier this year after january sixth was like should the government ban telegram right that was the thing and there's a lot of a lot of arguments are like no absolutely not and there's does anyone want to speak on that because you know because like if i want to talk about the government's response to these things you know that's a very governmenty thing to do be like oh people are organizing this platform get rid of the platform problem gone and that's not how that works uh... does that mean you want to talk about a little bit

sure um... yeah so they're getting rid of the platform doesn't necessarily help especially when it's something that is important such as like you know encrypted communication which is something that more people than just nazis need yes um and that resource should not be cut off and there's also kind of a bad precedent to be set if the if the government is deciding which of the speech it needs to have complete access to i don't love that um the other thing is that if we nuke telegram right they don't disappear they form networks they're still there and then they have to do more things in person right they're still there they're just harder they're harder and they're harder to track people are absolutely correct

when they say de-platforming works because it works for the platform and a lot of people just want that a lot of people just don't want to see nazi shit and they're fine with you know de-platform and they say this works and they have data to back up that it does work but it works for the platform but the people still exist well yeah still boosting their own shit and when they bring up building their own all tech platforms you know it only works to get there early yeah yeah yeah and there is elements that yeah de-platform is a wider thing can work especially for like in-person stuff but yeah for the sort of thing you're mentioning yes it is definitely uh not not that kind of dry you know and telegram is really interesting because it is

kind of this middle space between social media and just a messaging app yeah and the thing about it too is that anybody can look at these you know the public channels yes so without without saying anything in the chat so people could be kind of completely invisible nobody like nobody knows that they're there they're watching the stuff and they're still getting the same messaging they're still getting the same dates for protests they're still like organizing but they can be uh sort of just subscribe to a channel and you don't even need to be subscribed you can just know the name just looking into getting that flow of information without ever having like formal organizing so to speak and so it's really hard to say that like you know

these people plan this because there's a lot of plausible deniability that anybody was involved there's so much easy hybrid linking between groups and channels and everything so it's so easy for someone to move between ideology and to go from kind of like the base-level shit into the much deeper stuff extremely quick very quick yeah extremely quick well that's like that's my design that's good for them about telegram is that you have all of the people that are uh vulnerable to let's say new ideas in one place yeah that's the big thing you get right recruitment exactly if you're trying to plan a collapse you're gonna need a lot more people than the numbers that the people who want a collapse actually have so the easiest way to kind of

move things along is to insert inserting their ideas and their discourses and kind of altering the vibe of certain digital environments manually until they have what we can kindly call cannon fodder yeah or even starting their own and saying like you know this is a MAGA platform and it's actually just you know a bunch of a bunch of accelerationists who made it we definitely made it to recruit them yeah we definitely saw attempts of this was like QAnon of people who are way more accelerationists trying to use QAnon people as cannon fodder extremely successful wasn't just attempts and they did it and QAnon people died well you're I mean that and then also you've got like a like the idea of the boogaloo right that's been co-opted yes try to appeal to leftists and

I mean there's a really good article by left coast right watch that goes into one of those chats and they're basically like yeah really try to push these ideas of really try to push talking points like Black Lives Matter and all this we want to get these protesters on our side and then you also have some blatant like white supremacist groups who are also using the boogaloo and how much of that too is like how much of that is sort of real genuine like I am not racist I believe in Black Lives Matter like I want to be part of this even though I'm a boogaloo or like how much of it also is kind of reminiscent of what we were talking about yesterday and I also don't want to step in it but like with you know the idea of from Manson of like Helter Skelter and

like yeah causing that race where it's like they what they would do is like try and frame Black people for it and say like this was you know yeah exactly yeah I mean like how much of it is saying like this is Black Lives Matter and they want people to see that after they do the boogaloo group that showed up in Portland in January in July of 2020 when the partisan feds were happening you know they showed up and were all like yeah we're here to support Black Lives Matter and stand against the federal government and stuff and they had some very suspicious patches that it took me it took me about a year to figure out what they were and it's like this accelerationist like it ties into a whole bunch of like eco fascist propaganda stuff yeah and yeah so like

they're saying these things well they have these very obscure patches and yeah this is an important reason why we'd need people who are not very smart like I will say Jimmy Dorr who puts these who gives these people platforms are some of the worst and are going to cause a lot of problems because they have no idea what they're doing or they know what they're doing and they're just bad yeah and like that boogaloo thing kind of serves a twofold purpose in that you can bring people who self-identify as leftists into the movement but you also have a really good scapegoat for like actual action like that was a big thing that we saw in Minneapolis when things first popped off and like precinct was getting burned down and suddenly people on the internet

start losing their minds about the umbrella guy umbrella guy at the auto at the auto and there was a guy who was indicted he was a boogaloo boy who was indicted for um like headline said burning down the precinct he fired a weapon he fired a gun on like near the wall exactly and so that at the same time takes away agency from left-wing movements and the state's able to be like look see it's just it's okay to crack down on them because they're all you know wild white supremacists exactly just from any autonomous movement that forms with the people in a community that isn't that we wouldn't necessarily refer to as leftists it's just pissed off people I mean that's what we saw in every single you know every every city

every big city yeah the young kids who are fucking pissed off that are gonna go smash it and it's like saying all of this is people from outside of the town or it's like I know outside agitators yeah yeah it's a tale as old as time like outside agitators been used since before this is a very old state talking point yeah were you gonna say that um yeah I was gonna say also uh I mean it's somewhat related to that we're talking about using like you and on this cannon fodder yeah and it also ties into the sobsite conversation we were having so my research I special or not specialize I focus on uh Christian identity the white supremacist ideology and how specifically how it's grown since the 90s until now through like the internet and all that fun stuff

this whole point they've been pushing lately is to like they're this with Christian identity the whole thing is they are preparing for the apocalypse which they call the tribulations and they see modern ci folks see the boogaloo as like the tribulation that's coming so what they're trying to do is go off grid and really try to like establish this new land or like to protect their kids and everything from like pollution and all that shit but also to be away from the collapse and be able to survive it and then while they're doing all that like prepping homesteads and like compounds and stuff they're also like pushing like election fraud conspiracies and all that on like you and on in the maggot crowd not because they believe it not because it yeah right

they don't believe it they know it's bullshit but they can use it to accelerate collapse just like january's yeah exactly like i mean when i mean there are groups when uh joe biden won the presidency or won the election whatever uh some groups being like yeah really try to push this theory of this conspiracy about election fraud even if you even if you don't believe in it just push it because that helps our cause and that's that's something to be really mindful of to forget where else i was going with that well yeah a lot of them don't mean what they say they'll say things that'll push other people to do something yeah that they don't necessarily want to do and that's a lot of a lot of like during january six so much excitement because they could see

that the q noncrow are actually mobilizing yeah and so they said to them like to themselves like you know get them get them mobilizing for the white race get them mobilizing for you know our cause and they've really successfully been able to infiltrate that and be able to get some people on board with some of it yeah just based on using their rhetoric yeah i know i talked about this on our podcast but you could see it like i reported on january 6th in person and like you could watch it happen someone with a skull mask on or a proud boy or an oath keeper would literally come back from the police line grab a group of people yell something at them about q and on or the storms upon us and throw them up to that riot line they're telling us did a really good yeah we did a really

good visual investigation of how those extremist scoops used mega people and q and on people as their foot soldiers qa a folk qa a didn't really get break down on their jay's episode on an anonymous podcast yeah yeah but it's also uh with i mean not to link everything to christian identity which i have a tendency to do but it's it's very ideologically similar to q and on like from a christianity point of view like q and on is like so close to the edge of christian identity it's very scary actually i talked about it on uh jake hammerhands q clearance podcast but it there's also like not only trying to accelerate things through them but also trying to recruit them through these like very very similar talking points about like the synagogue of satan and all that saying that

christian identity is an entry point for some of them some of them bring it up as an entry point into further like accelerationist nazi shit but like they will start with christian identity because they think that it's more packageable to people who already believe in q and on well yeah exactly i mean like will was saying these there's a lot of this comes from these kind of boomer conspiracies and anti-vax groups and you're not going to be able to get uh you know memon pat pat into like wotanism or something like that well if you try hard enough you can ensure but like christianity is something that's palatable it's something that's normal to them and as you can kind of slowly tweak it through q and on you can get them to this much more extreme

yeah i'll talk about christian identity i think we should like maybe matt you could define it christian identity it's this uh radical offshoot of christianity that sees all white people as the true israelites from the bible um and they also think jewish people are all literally uh the spawn of satan there's this really dumb theory they came up with and like kind of rewrote the whole bible off of called uh can i name it is that okay okay uh dual seedline theory where they say like the story if you know about uh like adam and eve and all that uh they had kane and abel kane and abel yeah right so they see um kane was the offspring of eve and the devil and he is literally the spawn of satan and then he intermingled with all these races that were there before adam and eve and created this

demonic race and it's really really fucking dumb uh but it's still here it is it's been here for a hot minute and it's probably going to keep going it's going to get worse calling it now it's going to get worse uh it's going to get worse yeah but uh and the whole thing is they essentially like worship like a nazi jesus they see jesus only uh was really only talking to the white race and that christianity and like god only is able to be perceived by the white race and before you start laughing at these people because yes it does sound very silly keep in mind that these are extremely dangerous like yeah i mean you had like right this is the one problem with q anon when liberals just start laughing about how crazy it is and then they're so surprised at january 6th we're like no no

like it's yeah like they're actually dangerous yeah i mean christianity because he's been mentioned in a lot yeah and he's christian and he's been mentioned in various manifestos linked to yeah actually yeah that has formed very like co-organized groups like i mean historically a big part of like with christian identity with a lot of these kind of like a lot of them based their like whole historical context of like arianism on this rewriting of history based on um a fake study that was done in nazi germany about uh where some proto-indoeuropean languages came from and so they believe that like white people came from an area that's you know you could generally say it's sort of near the black sea um and that it's based on this like strange idea that like sanskrit is not the oldest

language but like are you pointing the gun at me because i'm stepping in you're you're getting real close the historical context i think it actually is useful and i think that's not where yeah there there is actual yeah they really tried to push this they made um a lot of fake studies that you could spend a lot of time researching this and believe that it's true um because there's just so much written about it and i think this is like a tactic that they really tend to do with historical revisionism a lot is just crank out essay after essay even if it's wrong even if it's totally like based on false data or just it doesn't matter they don't care they just write about it and that they think that like having more written about it makes it more legitimate and if that's

what we are talking have been talking about this this whole time we've been not recording is there's just an overflow of content that is so easy to access you know not necessarily from the specific groups they're talking about just from the further right in general oh yeah um they just overflow the content it's like always the top shit on facebook to give an idea of how pervasive even that idea of like where indoeuropean languages came from like when i still went to college i took the religions of south asia course and we had to spend like multiple days where a professor went through these myths about like what was the the arian invasion uh which like was there are arian people that that is a thing historically iranians yes they're not white people but like

going through a definition of white people sure but then it's based on language they think of arianism as like referring to a linguistic pattern yeah but like in a university course we still had to go through and like debunk these myths because they've gotten so pervasive within culture yeah and another thing i want to say is that kind of these more entry-level conspiracy ideas it is hard to overemphasize how small the space is between the entry-level stuff and the much harder stuff it can happen extremely quickly extremely fast you know i'll give i'll give an example i went to you know i was reporting on um an anti-vax protest and they went straight into talking about new world order and and project locks lockstep and and the rock trials and the

builder burgers and like the saboteens and david ikes shit just me and this is this was the middle of the day in like a metropolitan area with a bunch of boomers and trump hats who are getting this like hard core shit pumped at them or you uh we shall sell it a lot with the national bombing to like immediately it was like oh it was actually an attack on dominion and also it was uh orchestrated by the roth's childs to destroy evidence of voter for i forgot that that was a whole yeah and then also there was a whole like there was a bunch of stuff that came up later as a big conspiracy that was actually a missile strike i had to talk my grandpa down from that really yeah i didn't know i didn't know there was a video that circulated for a while about then i had to get into a conversation

with my grandpa but at the time was super isolated because of covid and that's a whole yeah that's a whole other problem um yeah and i had to like talk him down and show him like no here's uh here's a video from somebody i knew who was like somewhat in the area and saw the explosion and though that like in there was not a missile anywhere near tessie yeah one of the data studies that i've done is um and worked on is using big pool and small pool discord servers of far right extremists um far right militia groups and um very very like acceleration as a skull mass type networks um and looking at the big pools and small pools and seeing the at mentions between them yeah yeah um and there was not one person who was more than three nodes away

from anybody else so you it's very it can't be overstated how close people are from entry to very very very extreme uh types of uh goals yeah and and ideology explicit ideologies that explicitly push violence and you know another point i want to bring up is um like you know there's been much said about q non it isn't going away it's just not called q non anymore um with with these anti-vax mobilizations those mobilizations and groups aren't going away they're just gonna continue to shift and evolve their focus and the networks stay the networks they've designed it that way so i sometimes i find the normie stuff first sometimes i find the crazy stuff first but i mean not even that long ago i i came across a particular social media profile that was

explicitly calling for ax of terror and attempting to organize ax of terror and displaying ax of terror which is like an immediate problem that needs to be dealt with however they had multiple alternate accounts that you follow that path and on their other accounts they're sharing like tucker carlson stuff yeah like things that your grandparents are going to watch right like and that is done on purpose to try to like siphon people out of um more quote unquote mainstream versions of like conspiratorial thinking directly into like you should start exploding things and even even more even more let's say left of center conspiracy thinking ties into this yeah it does and it's not you know conspiracy theories are not solely a thing of the right which which

pissed me off to no end that's sorry no i just want to back you up on that like i think there's this maybe this like implicit idea that the left is immune to conspiracy theories when it very much is not sure it's at all roosh yeah um yeah i'm just not i just wanted to emphasize that point yeah that idea though of like never being that far from the serious stuff is something that's really really observable even beyond like a data level i i used to like consult with local newsrooms on how to report on things and one of the big points i always tried to drill in was like if you fuck this up and you frame this the wrong way it will have consequences and if this is stepping in it too much we can cut this but like the um dylan roof dylan roof started his journey

to radicalization by reading about trayvon martin in local news websites and local newspapers and then googling black on white crime and his first result the first shit that comes up yeah was many people around the class but the same exact thing exactly and like it does not it did not take long for him to go from i am reading local news articles that are framed this specific way to i am killing people yep that's not normal of course like a lot of people are not going to be reading local news and then suddenly start to think this way but like there is a concerted effort by some very specific people who would like to make that pathway easier yeah it's stochastic terrorism yeah it's well interesting because we don't we can't like define it really as terrorism

what are they doing they're really just yeah they're just saying things they're just encouraging people to do things and like they're not like they're not doing anything wrong we can't really call it terrorism yeah the most dangerous people in this game are usually not the ones doing the shooting yes people behind the scenes trying to go on these paths looking for people who are willing and then so they see somebody reading local news maybe and then they want to make that pathway easier for it to go from local news to dylan roof like because that's not a normal jump but they really want to find people who are looking at local news like that and then say to them like well okay you look at this now look at that trying to tie this back to climate change how do you see

do you see a similar pathway instead of instead of someone googling you know black white crime like googling stuff about collapse and and and like modern modern civilization oh yeah eric striker i don't know eric striker has been on about this and i think that he's a i mean i mean relatively like middle point that people get to like fairly like average people do listen to things like eric striker yeah he's a very like entry-level explicit nazi yeah yeah and another thing he cut me off if we don't want to go in this direction but you know one of the biggest places where we see young people getting into conspiracy theories is tick tock it is tick tock yeah that's right all right tick tock tick tock cut that cut that cut that we're not we're not

cutting that that is that is within the branches of the pod yeah i mean the biggest entry point but i've seen for a lot of things remains crisis yeah and the thing is this our upcoming climate scenario is going to give people an easier jumping on point well yeah that's so i mean we were talking about how like the the mythology of like black and white crime and all this stuff they they're trying to create a situation that you know with the urgency that justifies fascism which on its own is unjustifiable and ridiculous but when there's a crisis right climate change is the existential threat that they've been trying to artificially create and they no longer have to they now get to skip a lot of steps and save a lot of energy by just pointing at the fact that everything is

literally on fire and that like that that makes it so much quicker state we have to do something we have all the guns now would be a great time to join it on our power this kid this this is our vimar era hyperinflation type shit yeah i mean this is like when you're when you can't get food from the grocery store anymore because of supply chain problems or when everything around you is on fire you don't need like a great you don't need a great replacement theory no you don't need anything you don't need to say that the Rothschilds are behind it you you haven't just need to wait you have you have enough things that you experience yourself and it's much scarier when you can't because i can't like i'm like how do we how do we stop yeah i can't fuck how do we

debunk that it's harder the world is literally on fire it's it's a problem and something needs to be done about it i don't like your solution but something needs to happen so what do you think on this path and this is going to get a whole lot more speculative like what can we do to make people falling down those pathways less often like like what is it with the doom or shit yes yes that is that that's one of the things that we're trying to do on the pot is make sure that people do not fall fall down the the doomer pathway because yeah this that that does get people along down this path is logical like against like like against most types of extremism eco extremism it makes more logical like you look at it and you say we need a radical change

right now and that's correct um it's just the way that they go about it is very very different and that's why like you know eco fascism is very different it's its own type of eco extremism and there's green anarchy that's a very different type of eco extremism like these are all different parts of something that almost has the same goals but wants to go about them very very very differently and it's so easy to just look around and see how everything's on fire and think like the government's doing nothing about it the government starts doing something about it and then suddenly it's the state's too big we're in communism you know so they all have like different goals and it's very conflicting on how to how to deal with it and like even the very different

tactics between green anarchy and you know i'm like fascistic extremism they also will get two different end goals right like you know like you're you're you're your basic imprim wants a very different life than your you know very you know very uh stepping in it to build a fascist right a collapse can only benefit the right it can't a collapse can only benefit yeah the people who already have power who already able-bodied who already uh stocked up on guns who already like yeah that does frustrate me with their being anarchists who are like rooting for the collapse because yeah you're not gonna win like you're not just gonna get you pushed behind a fence somewhere or put on the wall yeah well they've got very strict ideas of which people count as human

and the goal of majority of fascist movements is to you know purge the ranks of the people they see as lesser and they have the week they have they have very precise ideas about who they plan on letting survive the collapse so let's let's i think it's time to start talking about and tell me if i'm taking this in the long direction you know what the fucking somebody who's listening to this yeah yeah um recycle no stop recycling it's all getting shorter showers it's all getting buried in the organ for us talk to Joe Biden just vote vote it away vote it out yeah let me look at you like start local find a local group find a local group find a local direct action group investigate that group and see who is behind it but find start locally it has to start

at the local level because when should i'm gonna say i'm gonna say if the collapse comes or like or they know not the collapse but like a local local collapses there's any disasters yeah confused disasters are going to affect at the local level no talk to your talk to your fucking neighbors neighbors talk to your family like you try to get your family on these paths that lead to helping your neighbors instead of you know making friends with the church militia before you buy a gun learn how to fucking garden yes yeah but buying a gun and that sort of thing is is good it's good to know how to use firearms basic emergency preparedness yes but learn learn how to put on a tourniquet learn how to feed yourself learn yes learn how to grow some fucking food learn how to cook that

fucking food get an i-fact all that comes before like you get to be a follow-up character yep oh yeah oh yeah an individual first aid kit you can buy them online buy them online you can buy them in gun stores you can buy you can buy them in like some pawn shops yeah i like north american rescue or north river rescue i'm sure we'll talk would i text more in the pot yeah well there look there are two big things one we all have a moral obligation to consistently counter the black pill doomers shit everything is coming to an end like it doesn't have to that's optional like we we things are going to get bad but there's degrees of there's degrees of bad we can stop it from being you don't need civilization right we don't need civilization to end like that can be done step two we also have

an obligation to counter the individualist stuff and and and focus our efforts more towards towards community and relationships that is so so important because every idiot that's going to buy a gun and have a bunker not only it's not going to make it but it's going to screw the rest of us like this has to be a communal effort and on the civilization thing like we do need the civilization to change like we need human society as we lay out we have has a lot of problems i understand people's critiques of human civilization but we also still need a society but yeah we need we need places that you know people are going to gather and people you know provide the things that we have um i noticed that that can be a loaded word on certain political circles so i'm not you know we're not

getting into like a civilization theory and that kind of anything yeah i was gonna say i would argue any ideology or ideas just the boogaloo that uh kind of hypes up a collapse is generally one you should stay away from anything that makes the collapse sound like a makes it makes it sound sexy it does personal glory as i think it's important to remember like if there was some massive civil conflict that happened i think the people who would suffer the most are the non-combatants as we will talk about anything to deal with it yeah yeah as we will talk about in our coming episode of terrorism bad um we'll do plugs at the end hold put the gun back in your pants hold yourself together i was talking about historical precedent earlier about um things we've seen in

the past with collapses and how people with guns and people who with training end up being the ones who gain power um something that like i was specifically reading about that was um like the rwandan genocide yeah if you know it was just the what three months where most of the tutsi people were wiped out um there are conflicting numbers so i'm not gonna specifically say any but um you know the more recently like this year earlier this year um was only when rwanda admitted what it was that it was a genocide and um the people the armed forces were the ones who became like the the leaders and they were backed by the government good thing that can't happen in america yeah yeah and uh it's like it can't happen here though no it cannot we are we are immune

to this in our spot of the world called it will not happen here the other thing is look at where you get your information from seriously no matter who you are take a long hard look at who you get your information even if you're on the left 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 erenson 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 with like a lot of guns he's a shark and not in the good bad ass way and 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 podcast i'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync 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 sergey 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 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 especially especially on the left you know if you want to hear about something that's happening in an area look at the people who are actually on the ground reporting that people don't just rely on like news aggregators especially on twitter yeah there's been a lot of bad very bad faith news aggregators on twitter who are posing as leftists this has been a huge problem in 2020 even leftists who just don't do that or just

or just do a very bad job people who call themselves like counter extremism there's counter terrorism researchers and they are really talking about antifa they say that they are counter extremism researchers and they pose that way and they look sometimes like they could be sometimes like they think not they're not but like you know very varying degrees of like legitimacy but like they focus only on like the left-wing stuff they don't think yeah they don't see what the actual it has to be this idea of like keeping it balanced right like not making it just like a far right issue which i would argue i think a lot of other people would that this kind of stuff is more concerning it is not only a far right issue and there is like merit definitely to looking at

sure left acceleration yeah absolutely which is not for the record like left accelerationism is not talking about anti-fascist but um that's really not time to get into it but i mean left accelerationism will be will be its own episode but what what some people do posing as um you know people who have credibility and are able to um kind of sway opinion they are not really doing what they say they're doing they're really just trying to shift the narrative from of of racially motivated violent extremism which is a big obviously issue to being like blm is racially motivated violent extremism and they want to push that narrative further and further i think and let's let's let's kind of probably start to like uh wrap up and say our final thoughts on you know this whole this whole

topic um i know we didn't we didn't we did not we did we did not get to talk about like eco defense very much anyone has any final thoughts on that and how they see it kind of growing and how they see the state's response to it um that might be worth briefly mentioning but yeah let's kind of let's kind of go around in a circle and give kind of everyone's you know final thoughts on the on the subjects um i think collapse is is bad and i think that uh well i mean that's my main my main thing but anything that's uh appealing to you in on like an ecological level that's collapse related to something you should be very wary of and i think you should be very wary of like generally everything i feel like that's kind of like a butcher yeah be be careful about everything yeah um yeah i guess

in my opinion the idea of total collapse is very misleading because it's easy and disasters don't work like that you're not going to suddenly reset one day um everything is going to suck and you're going to need to fight for whatever semblance of a society that you want to see in the world talk to your fucking neighbors it's kind of people in your city in your neighborhood there are people doing good shit in whatever city town you live in most likely if not you can start it look at your local mutual aid network look at the people who are taking action around and get involved seriously you know it could be going out into a park saturday mornings and just like giving out food and talking to the people who are most affected talk to people seriously i mean everyone's a person you need to

talk to touch grass talk to people yeah if you need like the most basic thing to start on any sort of mutual aid work try to find a food not bombs chapter in your area yeah they're well organized they're easy to join if you don't have to put on block and fight a cop it's yeah it's a good entry point and get and it's great it's great training for disaster relief yes if you have money and you want to help seriously just give cash to unhoused people on the street give money give money to people give money directly to people yep uh my last thoughts are just that i think the idea of collapse or rather actual collapse themselves environmental or otherwise will always be something to rally behind like it is always a an entry point as well as a motivator from from all for all sides from

all sides um but it's like when these things become very silent like was mentioned before when they're outside of your door that's when you know that's when like the ideology kind of hits the pavement like what is actually going to play out what is actually going to happen and how that's going to affect people it's very real so building community you know building connections um and just understanding you know who is in your community it's probably one of the most important things uh yeah the idea of collapse is a uh romantic and ridiculous notion uh come up with people who are like really into like apocalyptic thinking and the version of themselves where they get to be the main character so first and foremost take care of each other there are a

lot of people out there who want to manipulate you and want to change the way you think about things and they really really want you to buy in to the end times and you don't have to because you're smarter than that yeah it's it's not hopeless we really have to move away from hierarchical thinking our society really incentivizes hierarchical thinking like you're saying too thick like we um we really need to just be focusing on people like if things people because you know somebody doesn't have to you know earn you know respect and earn humanity for some reason we try and make it seem like that but people are people um people are in different circumstances because of usually because of just the way that the world is and um yeah you

need to just you need to organize locally you need to help your own people and stay away from the internet shit don't stop posting don't stop posting as i'm as stop posting even though i will keep doing it because i'm because i'm the good poster um who wants who wants to plug the pod which pod you are proud of follow at terrorism bad uh we're on um that's our that's our what is the pot like what what what do you what do you know yeah we go through um portrayals of terrorism and extremism and and conspiracies and conspiracies in popular media and we look at it from the perspective of people who study this and say did this succeed in portraying these things or did it as it more often does cause problems completely fail and cause

us all personal problems become propaganda yes did you make terror propaganda or did you make good media about terror that is a thin line me such a thin line i've made a career out of it that is the that is the thin terror line yeah um do you want to plug your fantastic group yeah absolutely i'm with uh you can read anything i write at anti hate dot ca and we do just general reporting on uh far right extremism in canada as well as infiltration podcast oh and i also host a podcast called the unusual show yeah uh if you want to keep up to date on extremism in canada their group is one is probably the best one around right now in my opinion um and yeah and large and you you do you do very good work you keep your eye on my home country where my family lives so thank you for that

um and i'm very happy to to be talking with you guys in the beautiful woods where we have no cell service we can't post um and that's good and we're going to continue doing that and stop using this microphone so goodbye um yeah and uh terrorism that the podcast with that that wraps up the terrorism roundtable forest discussion episodes thanks for listening to all of us rant about our specific weird niche focuses and uh hopefully trying to have it within the useful context of climate change you can follow me at hungry bow tie you can follow the the podcast uh happen here pod and coolzone media on uh twitter and i believe instagram you can follow some of the researchers i interviewed um on their podcast at terrorism bad so that wraps up this discussion thanks for

listening see you later in the podcasting verse the pod verse okay goodbye here's to the great american settlers the millions of you who settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and uh you just kind of fell into it and you know it's like totally fine just another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself of course there is something else you could do if you got something to say you could oh i don't know start a podcast with speaker from my heart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love and maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating bosses you quit and walk off into the sunset hey i'm no settler i'm an explorer speaker dot com that's a sbr eak er hustle on over

today hello and welcome to our show i'm zoe dachanel and i'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates hannah simone and lamorn morris to recap our hit television series new girl join us every monday on the welcome to our show podcast where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite new girl episodes reveal the truth behind the legendary game true american and discuss how the show got made with the writers guest stars and directors who made the show so special fans have been begging us to do a new girl recap for years and we finally made a podcast where we answer all your burning questions like is there really a bear in every episode of new girl plus each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this at the end when he says you got some schmidt

on your face i feel like i pitched that joke i believe that i feel like i did i'm not a thousand percent i want to say that was i tossed that one out listen to the welcome to our show podcast on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts what's a problem my me i'm a problem welcome it could happen here the show where i'm a problem i'm on vacation legally you're not on vacation allegedly legally but okay inshallah i'm drunk uh garrison you're in charge now figure it out garrison garrison hi it's well it could happen here today we are uh talking with somebody if you've listened to the past two episodes you should actually know uh thio who is a journalist and researcher and we are going to be uh discussing

plans for an upcoming rally in washington dc that's has a lot of that seems good yeah this is uh this is a bad thing's never happened when yeah what happened rally in dc what happened last time what happened last time you did this i don't i historically only pay attention to things that happen after may and before december uh huh so i'm unaware of anything bad ever happening at dc well something bad stuff happened there you want to you want to last last time i got i got a little spicy um okay you say spicy but it's not like they tried to overthrow the government murder elected leaders right that is what they actually having too much fun yeah they got these boys they were just proud of their boys a little carried away building all of the

building that big uh hanging contraption whatever it's called the gallows garrison the gallows yeah anyway we're talking about a theo do you want to do want to introduce yourself yeah hey guys i'm theo um idealist and a researcher uh i'm based out of virginia allegedly allegedly um i end up covering a lot of events in dc because of that and yeah that's my plans for this weekend yeah do you want to do you want to give us like an overview of what rallies in dc have been like the past let's say like the past year um oh boy do i yeah let's just for background yeah so like pretty much immediately post election as the whole kind of stopped the steel thing got kicked into gear um november 14th there was a rally in dc um and then there was one december 12th

and then there is finally one as most people are probably aware on january 6th um january 6th you know obviously got the bulk of the media coverage um but november 14th and especially december 12th were uh very violent situations in general um proud boys uh general chuds uh a bunch of oath keepers yeah three percenters a bunch of people's confused memos and pat paps showed up would kind of wander around the city yeah yeah they did yeah um pretty pretty fucked up i i know some people who were there when they did and it's uh i don't know it's sad like i uh super dark yeah i think i was there with the people that you know yeah oh good yeah so you i mean that it's just it's so fucking um i don't know the extent of the disinformation right it's hard when you're

talking about this to like express a lot of sympathy for some of these people and i'm not sympathetic towards their aims i'm not trying to do the new york times like let's talk to the trump voter on the street but like a lot of them are just like they're fucking dumb people who bought into some bullshit and it it destroyed them and their relationships with their families and in some cases cost them their lives and like you don't have to sympathize with them to be like yeah that's bleak of shit you know yeah and i think you see that with the dc rallies really more so than like of portland proud boy event for example that is not at all a gathering of like the masses that's that's a specific group of pieces of shit yeah yeah and like you'd have absolutely like units of

proud boys or oath keepers we had three percenters and local virginia militias and they'd kind of be wandering around but during the day itself you'd normally see uh like speakers alex jones was there um got to meet him that was fun um oh good oh that's always a treasure meeting alex no alex he's a great guy show him a meeting alex it was really fun he's his neck it's hard to exaggerate how he is just as red in person he's so red and as a guy who's good at strangling seems like he would be hard to strangle oh nearly impossible yeah like that's so big it's such like it's like a fucking train car like it's ridiculous how big that man's neck is look yeah most people aren't hard to strangle alex jones would be that's not praising him that's just being honest great so

during the day there would be speakers you know alex jones and you kind of see people split up into whatever their specific brand of fuckery is there's like groups of nerdy looking groipers um there were some trad cats wearing robes those guys were fun god damn it but yeah a lot of it's you know confused like boomers on facebook and kind of to robert's point like i i normally didn't go you know wearing press credentials because i value knives being outside of me and not inside of yeah it's it's good to not get stabbed most people appreciate that yeah yeah it's one of my favorite things and so i'd get to like talking to these people especially the older ones because i take the metro into the city and they are i mean they're just confused old people who've gotten

in over their heads but yeah and like the sun would set and that's when the proud boys would really start uh getting into shit uh november 14th they stabbed i don't know if i'm remembering this correctly so feel free to fact check me but i believe it was two people on the 14th they cracked a girl's skull and then on december 12th uh they stabbed one other person and jeremy bertino got belayed on the street he sure did he sure did and the fucking da elected not to prosecute because that was the clearest case of self-defense i have ever seen in my life um yeah so like like the dude literally tried to flee three times he drew his knife after by the third time he was blinded by having a shirt pulled and assaulted by a group he had no other choice yeah yeah he did

exactly what you're supposed to do in that situation and he repeatedly tried to flee and what he did and he stabbed him other fucker and you can't i can't he did nothing wrong in my in my opinion the da's opinion yeah yeah we're all probably better off for it but yeah there's this kind of established uh there was this established sort of cycle of show up a bunch of weird republican politicians that you've never heard of before give speeches uh you go and kind of wander around and then the proud boys come out and they fuck around uh and sometimes other groups too like uh january the night before january 6th there were people from nsc 131 who were hanging out trying to cause trouble getting in altercations all their normal shit

and uh so yeah there's this kind of like general mix of groups uh january 6th shifted the paradigm on that a lot and i think that's the big thing for this weekend is we don't really know what it's gonna look like yeah can you talk about kind of what has kind of the event promotion looked like from the right like what have they what messages have they been putting out to promote this event with so yeah a lot of like the bigger groups have been fairly explicitly saying like don't go go officially uh unofficially is a bit of a different story and fairness it's worth noting that prior to um the the united rally in charlottesville the proud boys were saying don't go and an awful lot of their most violent members were at united the right in charlottesville you

know it some some of this is a plausible deniability game yeah so like the official proud boys telegram channel was like oh this is i mean in different words but we're pretty much like this is a honeypot this is a trap this is an op don't go um but also like we've seen activity that really suggests otherwise yeah um whether it's like smaller more local groups saying that they want to go or uh streamers and journalists using the word lightly to uh who have pretty close relationships with these groups uh hiring extra stringers for the weekend or looking like they're preparing to report on something big yeah the kind of the i know we've talked a little bit um online and with some of our colleagues and there's definitely a a mixed a mixed a mixed opinion

on how big the event's gonna be and who's all gonna be there and what kind of their goal is which makes kind of everything all the more tense because you know it's almost easier to when we know what it's gonna be like we like we have a good grasp of what's gonna happen and this we're not really sure um do you do you know has there been any kind of response from like local dc officials like like law enforcement or anything about what they're gonna do at this uh gathering so i did see capital police is planning to put the fence back up um probably a good idea yeah yeah which like we'll cover the capital but there's also a problem with the fence going up which is the back of the fence goes right up to the end of the black lives matter plaza in dc which has been used as kind of a

rallying point for uh antifascist activists and when that fences up it's just it's a funnel the so it goes like uh this isn't a visual medium there's a street uh and that's where black lives matter plaza is and there's only two exits and both those exits lead to hotels that proud boys and chuds love to stay in so what happens almost without fail is people go and hang out in the plaza you know chuds come down the streets police form a line and it's pretty much a pre-made kettle right so that's like not good uh it's good for the capital but it's not good for the people that'll be on the ground yeah because we there also as is most of these events um there's been some organizing locally and even you know uh antifascist from around kind of the

country trying to like put out advice and feelers on like what to do for the specific gathering um and i know there's been there's been a decent amount of you know there's there's always like debate and conflict of around how much to show up where to show up you know how pro-act people should be um but because this is the first big rally since j6 i feel like there's a lot of people feel it's much more important and like people have like you know there's there's like a heightened sense around the specific thing um do you know like how many people are kind of roughly planning to show up uh on like the antifascist side it's really hard to tell um dc antifascist actions i've seen you know a couple dozen people in block uh towards close to 100 i would um from what i've

heard the kind of main counter demo that's happening is uh definitely less radical and is kind of trying to establish sort of a community space thing uh so i would say i don't know expect around 40 to 50 like people who are there to throw hands yeah and a lot more people who are just kind of there i mean it's it's this uh it's this thing we saw i was i was in dc for united rite two you know the second rally and it it didn't turn into much of a thing you know i think because of the the preparation the expectation and i i guess i'm interested in if you think i'm wrong on this but my current expectation is that maybe that might be the most likely outcome because because of the degree of the unexpected event already occurred and was awful i'm not expecting

anyone will be given free leash you know yeah i could definitely see that sort of unite the right to scenario playing out especially because it is very similar like there was this massive shocking event that kind of yeah uh hit the whole nation's attention yeah and so then people will i think the only big difference is like in the aftermath of unite the right you kind of saw at times a misguided media focus but still a media focus on anti-fascist activists as playing a yeah unique role when you didn't have that for january six and i think that's that's really one of my bigger worries is less so kind of clashes between chuds and uh anti-fascists which is still i mean you know that's always a thing that may happen but also like you have to think

these chuds that are coming when they look at dc police they see someone they see the people who killed ashley babbitt when the dc police look at these chuds they're the people who beat someone beat one of their co-workers to death and you know like there's capital police not same as dc metro police but like in the minds of both these groups that doesn't really matter and i i worry about the tension there i like i don't care if they mace each other you know if the proud boys and cops mace each other then that's a great day for me but if it escalates further and you know we're seeing that more and more the past what's it the past two kind of major right-wing rallies in the pacific northwest have had shots fired yep yep yep one it had every every recent p and w protest

has involved gunfire yeah and like the the one the august 22nd one had i i guess i guess you could call it a legitimate a very brief exchange yeah yeah a casual gunfight i mean the the start of it was not legitimate the right winger who fired was not legitimate um but the the two people on the left who responded were doing so in self-defense now right what happened a couple of weeks later from the video that's come out was not self-defense it was a guy shooting at somebody pursuing them from like 50 feet back you know it was not legally what you would call self-defense for certain yeah and that kind of the precedent that that's set uh which i i think it's happened few enough times that we can't really say that it's it's the norm or anything like that but it's still it's an

escalation it's yeah something that is did like if that if that had happened in 2017 when you know the right happened like that would have been unprecedented it's very frightening you know and it it should be it doesn't matter what you think about the morality of shooting tiny you know or whatever exchanges of fire becoming more common is a threat to everybody and it is something that should concern everybody yeah i mean it reminds me a lot of and this was kind of the impetus of the first season of it could happen here but like the early days of something like the syrian civil war where it went from protests to to exchanges of gunfire to you know what it is now yeah do you think dc specific gun laws

will make gunfire in dc a little bit less likely do you think or i know like still like the police always have that capacity if they feel you know if they choose to but more specific on like the right between people i don't know it's like you know boobs are going to show up or whatever or what kind of talk do you see around firearms so yeah kind of just from experience i think my worry with dc's gun laws is only one side will be armed uh every every time that chuds come to dc i mean they are obviously carrying i mean every single one of them is print is printing you can tell that they have firearms on them they don't really try to hide it and and none of them have ever i mean i guess apart from tario getting arrested for

illegal magazines like none of them have really faced any consequences for that and the general fear among people on the left is well even if i do come and i carry for self-defense if i get arrested for something unrelated that'll enhance whatever charges i get yeah no it's sketchy and it's um i don't i'm not convinced in the situation dc is in specifically that showing up with a fucking firearm is is the right call you know i'm not in this business to lecture people but i'm not convinced that's going to help in the pacific northwest we've seen situations where people with weapons as on the 22nd defended themselves and others and we've seen situations in which people on the web with weapons on the left escalated things so it's not

a it's never a zero sum game you know it's not it's not a simple issue right again is a neutral tool you know yeah and i don't want to like i don't want it to come off like i'm encouraging you know every person in block to show up with a long gun good lord no no absolutely because that would be be a fucking disaster most likely but also like i i don't like the idea of you know looking at a line of proud boys or something and knowing every single one of these people has a gun and i do not that's yeah absolutely an imbalance of force that i don't like when thing if things do escalate yeah no that's completely reasonable in my opinion but yeah i mean i think the big thing is just there's so many unknowns uh you know we've never really there's not much of a historical

precedent for group tries to overthrow the government group shows back up in dc months later or elements of the same kind of ideology and yeah yeah we just don't know i mean even like i think the unite the right to example is similar but also like markedly different enough that i don't know if it's an all-encompassing tool for like this is what it's gonna look like yeah is there any like specific players that you know is gonna show up or or have like said that they're gonna show up so one that i kind of worry about is um oh i'm gonna get fucking tweets for this god damn it um so there's a group in virginia that you may have heard of uh blm 757 oh god these guys no yeah i know who you're talking about yeah uh they are based out of the

virginia beach area and they are the biggest pain in the ass ever um they work with they claim to be a black lives matter organization uh the local black lives matter organizations have to announce them they work with boogaloo boys they were very tight with mike dunne before he uh snitched and dropped off the face of the earth snitched on people yeah um and then yeah they they come and i don't like the idea of them coming to a town that is not familiar with them because like they come to richmond for example and people are like oh there's blm 757 we don't fuck with them but they come you know they come to a town or groups like this like uh nfac the not not fucking around coalition tried to come to dc and i these groups that are gonna be armed are gonna want to escalate and are gonna kind

of try to slide in to like a counter demo or stick around like the more left-leaning parts of the crowd and then could very quickly escalate things uh so they're one that i'm worried about some local virginia militia movement players have been chatting about it i haven't seen really that much in the way of like definitive statements that they're gonna go um and those guys don't really worry me they're a bunch of nerds who like to play dress up in the woods mostly but yeah it's again it's just like these kind of unknowns yeah so just like not knowing who's gonna show up and what they're gonna do and where they'll be and yeah yeah like and this was a thing definitely it reminds me a lot of the first stop the steel rally where we had more concrete uh group

saying we're gonna be there there's a lot more chatter about it on social media but it was still kind of like i don't know like what range of the sort of right wing ideological spectrum will be here like i know you know q and on your q and on uncle will be there but like for example on november 14 uh jason kessler was there the organizer of unite the right i literally bumped into jason kessler oh god like i was walking and my shoulder hit him and i looked up and i was like oh sorry dude and then i just kind of stopped and i was like oh shit i recognize you yeah you're that famous piece of shit yeah but yeah so like it's kind of that same thing where we don't we really just don't don't have that much intel and it seems like you know people with access to more streams of information

than us like the feds have been saying for i guess a couple months now like we're monitoring this situation we're like preparing to stop another january 6 which take it with a grain of salt it is the feds but also like part of me a lot of the worry i get from this is people that i know know more than i do reacting to it like chud streamers hiring stringers feds saying like announcing months before that it's a situation that they're preparing for a lot of people are very interested in what's going to happen i think people are definitely preparing for a lot of different different outcomes and that makes any kind of resistance to it hard because you don't know if you're over if you're over preparing under preparing you don't know if you'll have what you'll

if your preparations are too aggressive or not aggressive enough yeah yeah and always trying to like you know feel it out once you're there is more scary because once you're there in person a lot of communications break down between other you know other activists so that's what happened in like the last big rally in portland is people try to you know change up plans once they got to the spot and it kind of made everything a lot a lot more challenging because it's hard to a lot of a lot of people in block don't have their phone on them it's just it's hard to get rye it's you know any kind of any kind of impromptu organizing at the site it's always going to be way more challenging than trying to figure this stuff out at home and yeah that's just kind of i don't know

it's it i think i think the united rite two background is useful for like a big event after you know a previous event that had a lot of coverage and had a lot of talk about it because it had you know a disastrous outcome and then i think looking at you know looking at november 14th and december 10th um are also it are also kind of valuable indicators uh has there been any have you seen anything around the grippers or like any of the fuentes crew showing up to this or there are they trying to just are they are they trying to like keep good optics i guess i as far as i've seen they're mostly trying to keep good optics around us um that makes they also they also kind of fall into the category of like people i'm not super worried about

like some of them yeah but in like a street fight situation in a street fight less so i i'm not worried about a groeper yeah like the the most violent encounter i've ever had with a groeper was one that was probably five feet tall following me around and calling me a soy boy for 30 minutes yeah what i'm more concerned about is is groeper is kind of following the in-sale terrorism tradition of you know skinny of skinny white guys getting access to weapons and then then doing something uh they're not any man with a gun is dangerous yeah yeah and they're not gonna be true yeah yeah here finish what you were saying garrison yeah i'm just saying like you know all of all of the grippers i've seen they're not going to beat me in a fist fight because

they're all even even more not even more lengthy than i was gonna say because you're fast as shit but yeah and and that and that's yeah yeah i think that's kind of another thing that's that's you know it's always a possibility of these things like i i always say like the worst possible outcome is someone someone starts shooting like a firefight is always the worst way this could go but with the sort of optics surrounding this i think there's definitely space for more extreme people uh specifically more accelerationist minded people to try to start something to try to cause some shit i mean uh like i said i'm in virginia i think of the richmond gun rally uh in or lobby day in what was that 2019 20 beginning of 2020 i forget all time

is a flat circle to me now but um the members of the base that were intercepted on their way to richmond uh i think about that situation and how other people and other groups uh that we will not talk about on pod could see an opportunity here yeah and i think that's i think that's more likely happening in somewhere like dc than it is in portland right because in portland we have a pretty good grip on who shows up and why they show up on the east coast the south um northeast southeast they have a lot more groups with interests with you know obscure ideologies that are more i think more prone to those types of to those types of like um more insurgent attacks and i think people are on the west coast yeah and i think another thing that kind of amplifies that

is like you said like portland has kind of an established infrastructure of chud fuckery sure do it you know i mean i i'm on the other side of the country and i know the familiar faces of portland bullshit and we we do have that to an extent but dc brings people from all across the country uh i was meeting people on the metro from everywhere from tennessee to kansas to california and when people are coming in from such a broad range of places there's a lot more uncertainty yeah well i'm not sure and anything else you want to mention about kind of what you expect at this rally and any i don't know general advice has since you've been at the past three versions yeah so i mean if you're in the dc area or you're nearby and you're

comfortable with it and physically able to do so i show up um the one thing that we do know for sure about these events is that the more bodies we have the less likely it is for people to be able to pray on someone walking home from work or a houseless person just trying to sleep yeah the more bodies that we have the better it is um if you are either unable to come or you don't feel comfortable coming i know that there will be jail support mutual aid efforts uh and garrison i can send you to some links to local dc orgs if you want to throw it in the show notes sure um yeah just and if you're gonna go be prepared have have a buddy uh block up bring uh bring an ifac and get ready to party yeah i think what one of the things you mentioned is like more numbers helps in the

case of it's less likely there'll be like roaming attacks because that's what we've seen at a lot of these rallies is that sometimes they don't ever like actually cause trouble at where people are you know like where the where the people are they wait until people are walking away or going back to their car or if there's no one like that they just find some random person on the street you know we saw a lot of that in dc uh of of proud boys just finding kind of people in the area that they thought looked like antifa quote unquote and then just attacking them um so you know the the less scattered people are um the less likely you'll get kind of those roaming attacks yeah i think i mean it's it's it's always hard to speculate on an event on an event that hasn't happened yet but um i believe

by the time by the time this airs it'll be happening tomorrow so uh saturday thio do want to plug anything uh yeah you can find me on twitter um at theohanson theo with a zero uh listen to my podcast uh terrorism bad uh we look through portrayals of terrorism and extremism and popular media see how it holds up to the real world um trying to think of anything else i'll be there on saturday i'll be live tweeting the event uh if i'm not live tweeting yeah good luck with that dead or otherwise incapacitated or i don't have cell service one of the cell service is always horrible at these things oh it's awful yeah it's a constant problem yeah yeah they they were blocking signals on january 6 on the capital lawn and when i stepped off i had like 13 texts from all my

friends that were like hey text me if you're still alive it's really hard to tell what's going on you know when you're when you're like whether or not it's like a cell signal problem or if it's somebody like targeting you in particular it's frustrating yeah all right well thank you see you thank you for giving us the rundown on saturday's activities um i hope you don't get shot thank you i hope i do not as well that's my general feeling towards anyone who shows up on on you know on the 18th in dc i hope you don't get shot do your best yeah and if you do get shot know what to do about it well yeah have a have a have an ifax have a turn i get a minute you know have some cell locks yeah that's ideal but not getting shot is better so yes you cannot number one try not to get shot

yeah thanks for having me on guys thanks nice to meet you robert and sophie nice to meet you you can uh follow us at happen here pod on twitter and instagram and at coolzone media for all the things and we'll be back on monday hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening raffi is the voice of some of the

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the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smithley butler was all that stood between the u.s and fascism i'm ben bullet i'm alex french and i'm smithley butler join us for this sorted tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows 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

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