Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 108

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

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at. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation Call zone media. every day this week. There's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed. Thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America is tasting now is something insignificant to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked, and no one hears and no one heeds. Those words written by Osama bin Laden in October 7th, Those words written by Osama bin Laden in October 7th, 2001, were part of his first statement issued after the 9-11 attacks. You might notice a few things about that.

One is, of course, the glorying over the deaths of several thousand people. And another is that when it comes to his analysis of the cultural and psychological impact of 9-11 on the United States, he was more or less right. This Is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and nothing better embodies the slow, sometimes rapid, collapse of the United States as our reaction to 9-11 and our continuing responses to it. And so today I've got in the studio, we don't actually have a studio, I've got Mia, I've got James, and I've got Garrison. And we're going to talk about something you've probably encountered,

which is that a letter to America written by Osama bin Laden, which is a different piece from the one I started this reading, but written along broadly similar lines, has started to go viral on TikTok. And if you've seen the reactions to it, it's a mix of a bunch of younger people on TikTok reading this letter for the first time, where Bin Laden explains why he believed 9-11 to

be justified and going, wow, he has a point. Some of them saying stuff that's more unhinged than that, even. And then you've got this chorus of responses from both kind of centrist, you know, media figures, cultural commentators, pundits, and of course, right wing shitheads who are all making this out to be the left loves Osama bin Laden. We're going to get into kind of where the truth lies in this and also what is in the letter to America. But yeah, welcome. Welcome to the pod, everyone. Thanks, Robert. Horrible to be here. How did you all hear about this new fun trend on the internet?

I returned from spending my evening volunteering at the border in Hukumba to find a dearth of messages about an Osama bin Laden letter or the speech that you just read that I've assigned for probably a decade to undergraduates without anyone losing their mind. And yeah, extremely confusing vibes for me. Yeah, yeah.

The first time I heard about it was the first post that I saw was it was only about a million views. It wasn't even that viral, which I guess might be true because TikTok is nuts. But yeah, I think it, I don't know.

Like I first ran into it on Twitter and I think by the time it hit Twitter, everyone was just sort of in about 18 directions, completely losing their minds, which is just what that site is now. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean,

probably a couple of videos of people dying just seems to pop up every time. Yeah. It's discussed on Twitter now. I think that's an accurate description of kind of the fallout to it. As we're writing that or as we're recording this, most of these original TikTok videos, people seem to be reading off of the Guardian's copy of Letter to America, which was, I guess, the most easy to Google prior to, I think it was just the easiest to Google when this all started rolling. The Guardian took that down because they didn't want people reading it outside of the context of the article it's in. This was a horrible mistake. I have found a number of comments being like, this is them.

They're trying to stop you from reading bin Laden's words. We're all going to be on a watch list. They can't arrest all of us. You can still access the letter to America. Also, the sentiment that you can't arrest all of us suggests that many of these people were not alive in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 in 2001. Which is certainly true. They will fucking try. They did try.

Just to be very clear, you can still read this whole letter to yourself and so can everyone else. It's on Wikisource. If you just Google Bin Laden letter to America, it will bring up the Wikipedia page that talks about this letter and its context. And that will also give you a link somewhere at the bottom to the Wikisource that's just the unedited translation of the letter to the American people. So it is not like the Guardian's move was bad because of they call it the Streisand principle, right? That if you like try to hide something from people on the Internet, it just it just makes the problem worse. You never do what the Guardian did.

It's very dumb. Yeah, it was extraordinary. Of course. Yeah. Why are we expecting? Yeah. Yeah. Actions. Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, they could have blamed trans people.

I'm surprised we didn't get one of those in there. Everyone's been trying to pivot very quickly to this. So obviously, you know, like James, my opinions on this are kind of complex. On one hand, I am not an Osama bin Laden fan. He was a bad person. He was a bad person. He was a terrible person. And he did a lot of damage, not just to the United States. That said, I've also long been an advocate for like, he's probably going to go down as one of the most effective and intelligent military strategic minds of the 21st century. The September 11th attacks worked in large part, right? Because of how we reacted, because of the amount of money that we spent, the amount of people that we killed, the amount of anger that we engendered against the West, and the amount of damage that we did

to our own society. A lot of the fallout that we're seeing and all these, you know, right-wing street gangs and shit, a lot of it traces back to fallout from the wars that were started by the Bush administration after September 11th. And that was part of the stated goal, right? That was one of the things he was looking to provoke a reaction. So I'm both like, glad, hopefully some people are going to come away from this with a more nuanced understanding of the guy. And when I say nuanced, I don't mean in a moral sense, because it's bad to kill thousands of random people. But in the sense of like, oh, this was not, I think I need to play something for you guys. Because like, as a 9-11, like I was like nine or 10 when it happened. So I remember it all very well. And I remember the reaction to it. And I remember the propaganda we encountered. And there's this thing that you will find written about fascists pretty regularly, which is that

they both need an all-powerful enemy, but they also need an enemy that's fundamentally free of virtue. And intelligence and skill are virtues. So both in the wake of 9-11, you got this sort of Al-Qaeda and larger sort of Islamist movements were considered this nefarious force, as they are now in the wake of the attacks by Hamas, right? This nefarious force that is capable of infiltrating the US border and seeking terrorist cells into the United States to hit anybody. And at the same time, they're like primitive idiots who are bigots against – who are, they hate women and all this stuff. Right. Like you can't you can't see them as capable or intelligent because then that would that would be to give them a virtue that you reserve for yourself.

Anyway, I think a good example of that is this parody song by John Valby that I encountered in a Napster download when I was a child. And I did not. It's open Laden. Is this Bin Laden? Did not. It's O Bin Laden. Oh, it's the other one. Okay. Yeah. This one's bad, folks. You're going to hear something offensive.

I'm playing it now because number one, I think it's something people should remember or know, but also because we're about to play these TikTok responses to this Bin Laden video and read some comments of people who are very taken by it. laden video and read some comments of people who are very taken by it and i want to set up what the pre-existing image of bin laden was and our culture kind of prior to this reappraisal of him um because i think that is important um but this is unhinged so and and it's pretty offensive so just be aware people i'm about to play it now can't wait oh yeah no you're gonna have all right can you see the the giant confederate so this is from a john valby album i think it was called real woman do play in mud puddles i don't know maybe not that may just be a random image i did not check but there's like describe this

there's the general lee as a mudding truck with a giant confederate flag behind it and then with the confederate flag like colors the text real women do play in mud puddles then it says southern girl southern girl on the on the windshield of the truck yeah yeah so i'm gonna start playing this song i'm not gonna play all of it but this should set up for you kind of what the acceptable discourse on bin lad Laden was right after 9-11. So, had you guys heard that before? No. Unfortunately. Yeah.

No, wow. Yeah. This is the part of America that I missed growing up abroad and will never fully understand. Now, we freezed about 30 seconds into that minute and 30 second song, but it was like playing random clips of art to go along with the music. And the one we paused on was Homer Simpson with an American flag behind him outlined in red with a pistol in his hands

aimed at a bug-eyed Osama bin Laden. So great nuanced discourse here. So many memories. Like, I don't know what it was. People loved that like bug-eyed bin Laden thing. This is like, like everyone. I don't know why. No, I think I know.

I'm pretty sure I know why, which is that. So one of the most popular pieces of like media media popular media in response to the 9-11 attacks was an episode of south park that came out literally like a week or two after the attacks which basically up until fairly recently tv was always made on a significant delay so there were no shows on air that could pivot to comment on something really quickly the west wing managed to of, but it was like a dog shit episode. But the South Park guys really pivoted and they put out this episode that was basically like a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Cartman as Bugs Bunny and Osama bin Laden as Elmer Fudd. Right. And there were a bunch of like scenes of him, like bug eyes bugging out when like shit would happen. And it was it was weird because like the I think the most people who watched it, including myself, took it in the same manner of that song as like, yeah, fuck these guys. These like, you know, in ways that were pretty bigoted. There was also like the episode opened with an extended bit of kids in Afghanistan with everything around them and all the adults getting murdered by U.S. airplanes for no seeming reason, which was like part of the anyway, whatever. I think one of the like what we're seeing in some of like why young people are reacting to this letter by bin Laden so strongly is they've never really gotten to appraise the guy objectively.

strongly is they've never really gotten to appraise the guy objectively. And I, I'm not saying that that's happening across the board now, but I don't think the reactions are nearly as unreasonable as they're being painted. Yeah. He kind of existed as an avatar of evil and like with zero nuance or complexity, just like a satanic sort of totem in American culture,

which is why I've always assigned it just like i think it it behooves us to understand not yeah i i agree entirely so i went through and i looked at some of the tiktoks being made about this and first off um tiktok does seem to have taken some action to try to stop this i don't think it's going to work either but like when i typed in letter to america recently um the text i got on tick tock was this phrase may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines promoting a safe positive experience is tick tock's top priority yeah yeah yeah yeah um you can still find by like typing in bin laden but it's it's not as much is findable right now so worth noting one of the first things i came across that was

interesting is like so there's this trend on tick tock if you're not a tick talker findable right now. So worth noting. One of the first things I came across that was interesting is like, so there's this trend on TikTok, if you're not a TikToker. One sec, I'm going to play. What do these people do on TikTok? There's a lot of AI videos where either the text will be read by AI with like images and video clips on screen, or there's some creepy instances of people just generating AI faces, sometimes of like actual murderers and criminals to talk about the shit they did. It's really weird.

But one of the top videos I found on this from about a little less than a day ago is just the entire text of Bin Laden's letter to America being read by an AI. And it sounds weird. I'm gonna just let everyone get a listen to this in the name of allah the most gracious the most merciful permission to fight against disbelievers is given to those believers who are fought against because they have been wronged and surely

allah is able to give them believers victory i think it misses some of the some of the stirring context of the original no but you get the responses of this and like one of my favorite ones that I've got on the screen is Chikas Fressa saying y'all are gonna hate me but he kinda ate and then the first response is no crumbs which Garrison as our Gen Z

consultant that means like I agree basically you know it's hard to say as our Gen Z consultant. That means like I agree, basically. You know, it's hard to say. Oh, you're 21 now. You're out of touch. Their first feeling old moment captured live. Yeah, I think that means he like ate everything and there's like no crumbs left.

Yeah, no. Oh, okay. That's good. Very literal. Yeah no oh okay that's that's good very literal yeah i i think i think that's what it means but again this is this is very very particular kind of culture we're still really here we're on the bleeding edge yeah yeah the last the comment following that is bizarre trump isn't a good person either the gay people have nothing to do with me this does not say vote for trump i think you can't read see i i this is you know it's it's and that's the op responding to no crumbs so i don't know what's missing here it's really it's really hard to tell um yeah i think these people may be uh a parallel reality. I don't think really anyone who's participating in this trend is very intelligent or has very good media literacy or has really looked into like American imperialism very much.

No. But we will get to that in a second. Yeah, so the next comment is so much truth coming out this season. And then I appreciated this from Walker. He lost me at the end, he being bin Laden, with the religiously charged homophobia, but that left out, he was right about everything else, justified and well said.

The voice of reason. The voice of reason. Yeah, well, but also- Also now, we'll get through it. There's a few more problems with the letter than that yeah I'm sorry doing

doing like you're doing 9-11 but with a pride flag is perfect and I have no notes yeah you can't you can't remove those

things from the rest of the letter and the action because they actually do create a complete whole you can't actually pick and choose little parts that you want

it's it's like trying to pick and choose parts of QAnon. You're like, well, actually, there are rich people who are pedophiles. You're like, well, yes, but you can't like, you can't. That's not giving QAnon the benefit here. These are totally different things. And the thing that I think people should be doing, just so we're clear on my stance here, is seeing bin Laden as an incisive and intelligent actor who had a significant degree of understanding of this country and its culture. And the terrible things that he did were as effective as they were because he understood things about us that we should understand about us, right?

about us that we should understand about us, right? Otherwise, you are not going to be able to successfully act within this culture to improve things and reduce harms. You need to understand why what he did worked as well as it did. And you need to understand what he knew about us, because it's pretty useful stuff to understand. That is different from saying that what he, like, you don't have to view it as the truth, right? Because it's, it's, it's not like the truth in any moral sense, but it's the truth in that. Like if you,

if you read some of Hitler's writings on democracy, Hitler accurately understood the vulnerabilities of a democratic system and how to exploit them. You should understand that you're not saying, wow, he was spitting truth. You're just saying, yeah, well,

some people are Robert. That is a problem. Yeah. Some people in fact saying, wow, he was spitting truth. You're just saying, yeah, well, some people are, Robert. That is a problem. Yeah. Some people, in fact, are. Do you know who else is spitting truth, Robert? Our advertisers? Yes. That is right.

Are we sponsored by the new print edition of Mein Kampf at this point? No, we are sponsored by Al-Baghdadi. He's still alive, folks. Pouring one out for that. I don't know. Here's the ads. Okay, so we're back. I'm going to play another one of these Zoomer Bin Laden loving videos for you.

No, you're not. No, I'm not. Lots of these videos have also been taken down recently. Oh, yeah. They trimmed that thing. They weren't globalists. Wow. I thought this one was interesting because it was someone who was really pro-Bin Laden being like,

yeah, he was completely right about everything. What a genius. I love him. But all of the comments were people being like, that's fucking kind of crazy to say, bro. Yeah, let's take a step back. Yeah. The thing this reminds me of is this is a phenomenon I've run into with American Maoists. Yeah.

We're like, OK, they'll read Mao. They'll read Mao saying something that is, you know, perfectly reasonable. Like you should not talk about something unless you've researched it first. Yeah. Now, any normal person has heard this when they were like two. But these people apparently have never heard this and they run into it through

Mao and they're like, holy shit, Mao is like the greatest living theorist. What a brilliant thinker. You guys need Bin Laden to tell you the US sucks? Really? Yes, people do because they get history education in high school their his

their education of 9-11 was the video i started this episode which is true it's like we failed as a country like just completely no i'd seriously like i like a fucking like horse that i will whip till it's dead is that in 2016, there was this huge thing about we need to teach history properly and media literacy, right? After Donald Trump got elected because a lot of people didn't know what the fuck was going on. And then we just stopped and everyone was like, nah, fuck it, why not? We'll just keep doing STEM, STEM, STEM. undergraduates often like intro courses for years, it's become very clear that we are completely failing in the United States to educate people or equip them with any understanding of American history. And so they just get propaganda. This is a big part of why I focus on crypto so much,

because James, that is exactly where crypto comes from is we learned a lot of STEM shit, but we never learned any humanities or anything. So you get people saying stuff like, well, the underlying technology behind crypto is so impressive. And it's like, no, you can't point to a single useful piece of work it's ever done. You just find it impressive because there's a lot of complex math problems. And that's what you value. Yes, because that is the yardstick of academic achievement or intelligence. Yeah.

Anyway, speaking of people who are less intelligent than a yardstick, it's not exactly what you said, James. But I also wanted to play, here's a right-wing influencer who's collected a bunch of these videos. I hadn't run into this guy before, but oh no, did they drop him too? Are they just purging everything? TikTok has been removing almost all of the videos associated with this trend. You can find

the compilations on Twitter are really some of the only ways that these videos are still alive. This was a right-wing guy making fun of it, but man, that's interesting because this was like, I found this five minutes ago. It's really hard to talk about this without it being

an insane right wing thing. But Tik TOK is really Americans only encounter with the way the Chinese style censorship works, which is they take a giant hammer and they just like hit things with it. Yeah. As opposed to like, it's not,

it's not like targeted. It's like, like we found everyone who said the word bin Laden and we banned it. Right. Everything associated with the trend. Yeah, you know, and this is the way that censorship stuff tends to work in China because it's kind of easy to do and it covers your ass.

And so now Americans are like experiencing this. I'm sorry. I'm just enjoying seeing what Roberts have suggested for other TikToks you might like. Thank goodness for the shower's top shelf products. Yeah. Hashtag hair talk. Yep.

I'm a big fan of hair. I think it's because of this person, Earth Mother. Earth Mother. Earth Mother. Earth Mother, basically. Yeah. Who actually, I brought her up specifically because she was an example of like, the way this is getting portrayed in kind of like,

particularly like Twitter and more mainstream sort of descriptions of it is like all of these Gen Zers are full throat for Osama. They've all gone crazy. And you can certainly find no shortage of those videos. I found a bunch of other videos

that are more critical. It is difficult for me to tell what the preponderance of it is because there's not, no one's basing what they're saying on a sentiment analysis. They're basing it on what their timelines forwarded them based on their passion. When they typed letter to America or whatever into Twitter or into a

tick tock. But like I ran into this lady's video and like, so not plenty of these are, and I found others like this plenty of these are like a little more critical but not but still yeah i'll just play it hey guys just coming on here to remind y'all that osama bin laden is still a bad person crazy that i'm even having to get on here and say this because like hello obviously but i've been seeing a lot of people you know say that they read osama bin laden's letter to America. And I've read the letter.

And I understand that a lot of people are getting educated and kind of like deconstructing the propaganda that they've grown up in living in America. But that does not mean that we should mystify these terrible people. Hitler also criticized the West and questioned the West and like how we operated over here. Osama Bin Laden's doing the same thing. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong on what they're saying, but it doesn't take away the fact that they're sexist,

fascist, racist dictators. Yeah, I like this lady. That's a good video. Yeah, I think she kind of hits on one point that I've, I've seen in some of the other, like for lack of a better term, provost,

I'm a bit loud and tick tock video. Provin lot and tick tock. Yes, of course. People have been saying how like, yeah, well, like people have been talking about how like,

they're like finally like seeing past us propaganda. They're deconstructing the lies that media has told them. And this kind of gets at something that we see a lot in kind of in like cult spaces, is that you rarely ever just completely disengage from some form of propaganda. You jump to a different form of propaganda. Right?

It's like reading this letter, you're not getting like disillusioned from US propaganda. You're now buying into someone form of propaganda. Right? It's like reading this letter, you're not getting disillusioned from US propaganda. You're now buying into someone else's propaganda. The Letter to America is a completely other version of conspiracy riddled propaganda

that was put out for a political purpose. And to try to engage with it in good faith is not the way to approach that text. Yes. And I think this is a big part of this problem is how people's education has worked the past few years because they should have learned all of the various motivations and geopolitical

factors that led to the 9-11 attacks. And instead, having Osama bin Laden be characterized as this like cartoonish evil that hates America for freedom and hates America as a nation for its freedom. Yes, that is propaganda. And if that's all you've had your whole life and you're now seeing this other side, this is definitely mind-blowing. But you can look into why these things happen

without just falling for someone else's extremist propaganda like like yeah you can you can get into the actual reasons for why this happened how how u.s imperialism has caused the geopolitical situation coming out of the 90s like it's it's lots of people have already done this reading there's just there's just plenty of people online who have not looked into this because they have life they're doing whatever like right they've not everyone is like us and spends all of our time reading, like, political extremist literature. Yeah, not all of us have strong opinions

on the different eras of bin Laden writing. Yeah. It's like Taylor Swift in that sense. Yeah, yeah. I think there's another, there's a thing that's also important here too, which is I think you see this a lot in Americans, which is that Americans will have this moment where they realize that they've

been being lied to by the American media. And then the thing this convinces them of is that everyone else is telling the truth. Yes. And it's like, no, like every country is doing propaganda all of their media is doing propaganda like you can't just sort of ping pong from one like country's sort of media

propaganda to another countries because they're all doing it and the stuff that they're saying also isn't true you You have to actually like, you have to actually try to work out the sort of reality of history. You can't just rely on reading like some other, like some other propagandist version of events. But this comes down to like a lack of basic understanding of how we do history, which I think is not anyone's fault. It's because we don't teach it very well at all in schools.

But the lack of understanding of the difference between primary and secondary sources, right? And people want to get straight to the source. So they'll go and read one historical primary source without the adequate secondary context and suddenly be like, oh shit. And yeah, it turned into a Maoist or apparently a member of Al-Qaeda.

This is why journalists do a lot of gathering what they can in the moment from a scene, from interviews and stuff. But academics, there's always going to be, if it's a good academic... I'm reading a great book right now on trust in unstable societies, societies racked by war. So it's the concept of... It's written by a Gazan. And it's about like how concepts of public trust fluctuate during conflicts. And he's looking at Lebanon. He's

looking at Syria. He's looking at Iraq. He's looking at Palestine. It's very interesting. But like he's not just interviewing people. There's like a set of basically an algorithm that he runs his different interviews and like the overall sentiments expressed in them through in order to try and determine like, here is the aggregate of like, what I found is a reaction to this question from like the people that I surveyed. It's the same kind of stuff that you do in a survey to attempt to add a little bit more rigor than just saying, well, I talked to 10 people and most of them said this. So clearly this is a trend, right? Which journalists are often guilty of and also just goes absent in part because of that. Twitter goes wild with this kind of shit.

Just like, well, I looked through and I listened to 20 videos and most of them, the kids loved Bin Laden. So the kids must love Bin Laden now, which I don't think is entirely fair. But I wanted to, I think it's probably a good time for us to go through the letter to America and talk about what is actually in this thing, right? Because you might as well know what's in it. It's a good thing to read. Again, you can find it on Wikisource. Yeah, so it starts with him kind of providing just some kind of Quranic justifications for the concept of fighting against an aggressor,

fighting against someone who is actively attacking you, which is more essentially how he positions the relationship between the US and the Muslim world. And he has a big thing that comes up over and over in this piece is him talking about how the caliphate is being sort of squashed and stopped from existing in the form that it should exist by this kind of constant both attacks on not just Arab democracy, but on like sovereign Arab states, as well as like support by the US for – he complains a lot about corrupt rulers in the Muslim world. And he is talking about not just guys like Saddam, but largely the saudi royal family is a big part of it um he talks a lot about uh iran and basically the uh so so that's kind of like a bit where a lot of his like grievances start um he does bring up and one of the videos james that you posted earlier was like an Israeli man responding to this and basically characterizing in a very inaccurate form, saying like, there's no facts in this letter. Like he doesn't like say anything true.

Yeah, where are his footnotes? Yeah, he's just angry at Israel and Palestine, right? He's just angry at like at that. And he does bring up Palestine multiple times. There's lines like the blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenge. That's a significant part of his case. But he also lists a lot of other areas, right? It is not just what's happening. It's not just what Israel is doing in Palestine that he's talking about. There's lines like you attacked us in Somalia. You supported

the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon. And he brings all of those up several times. He also, he does drop some facts in here. One of the more salient lines is, you have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every year. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3,000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet set down. And that's not an inaccurate thing to be, that's not an inaccurate statement or a thing to not be angry about. Now, that's not the full context of it, right?

Because there is a bunch of stuff that is in here that is like bin Laden culture warshit that absolutely is not reasonable or a reason to bomb people. There's a point in the letter where he's like, what do we want from you, the Americans? What do we, Al-Qaeda, the people who have attacked you? He's speaking kind of broadly for the Ummah here. What are we asking from you? And the first thing is that we are calling you to Islam, which I don't think is likely to happen. The second thing is we are calling on you to stop your oppression, lies and immorality and debauchery that is spread among you. We call for you to be a

people of manners, principles, honor and purity to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and trading with interest. We call all of you that this, that you might be freed from what you have already been caught up in, that you might be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation. And you may recognize that as a pretty insane reason to kill 3,000 people. There's gambling! I think a big part of the framing of this entire thing is like, people are taking this as being like, oh, look at all these justified reasons because the U.S. was was complicit and active in mass violence in the Middle East.

But like he's not actually critiquing violence or political violence because he is pro political violence. He is like that. He what what he is critiquing is Western degeneracy. Like that is that is his actual thing. The first ask is to is to convert over to a fascistic version of his religion.

Yeah. Like that's the primary thing. This isn't about like U.S. imperialism in terms of what his end project is. And he's also, when he's angry about violence, it is specifically violence against Muslims, right?

Because again, bin Laden is fine with doing violence to, and having the state potentially do violence to non-Muslims in his ideal state. He also, we read, he is very right when he says that the United States is complicit in the deaths of over a million Iraqis because of our sanctions. This is in the pre-invasion period. One of the worst crimes this country has been complicit in within our lifetimes.

Absolutely a fucking nightmare. He devotes as much time to that as he does to this next paragraph I'm going to read you, which is another one of his grievances. Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office? After that, you did not even bring him to account, other than that he made a mistake, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down

in history and be remembered by nations? He's like, it's fucked up that you killed a million people. The worst thing you did was let your president get a blowjob. Yeah. That is part of this letter. And that's a crazy person thing to think.

Yeah. Like, that's just him being an asshole. Because not really a problem, right? There's personal problems, right? But on the scale of, like, American crimes, the fact that bin Laden or force Clinton out of office, not really on the list. Yeah. Does not really make the cut. Yeah. There is a long list and that does not make it. Yeah. Then, of course, he's got he also spends actually more time on the sex trade than he does on what the U.S. did to Iraq.

You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this under the name of art, entertainment, tourism, and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it. And because of all this, you have been described in history

as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man that you brought AIDS as a satanic American invention. Yeah, it's a very basic reactionary screen it's like yes yes you could do the same thing with like sections of hitler speeches talking about like working conditions and factories right you could take little sections put them on tiktok make it make it be read by an ai voice they'll be like oh wow this is

a really good critique of capitalism yeah. And you're missing the entire point of what Hitler's actual political project is. This is the exact same thing. It is. It is exact. This is the thing reactionaries do. This is like, they will take a few of these points

talking about imperialism, talking about capitalism, and then wrap it in a fascistic package. That is their entire political goal it's it's the entire way they recruit it's how they spread their propaganda it's how they get people to believe conspiracy theories yeah yeah and we american people especially will be incredibly vulnerable to it because they'll look at the critiques which which are in some cases reasonable right or some he's not wrong about every critique he has but the the fact that

he is valuing the murder through starvation of a million or more people yeah with bill clinton getting the blow job is is some is not something you should miss in your interpretation of the validity of his points yeah this is not a this is not a guy you need to agree with. No. Under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Osama bin Laden. Once again, drill. It's certainly a weird one.

The reaction to it has been equally weird and equally misleading. And the reaction to the reaction. It shouldn't be that fucking hard for us to be like America shouldn't have three sanctions, killed millions of children and done a bunch of war crimes all over the world. Osama bin Laden, bad dude. We can take that middle path. I do want to get into a little more before we finish our talking about this.

Some of the lines that I think are really igniting some of these people who are now pro-Bin Laden TikTokers, because it makes sense to me that there are bits of this that really grab people. And I'm going to read a couple of them. One of them is this line here. The freedom of democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only. As for the West of the world, you impose on them your monstrous, destructive policies and governments, which you call the American friends. You prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic Party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them.

A new lesson from the American book of democracy. And like, yeah, there's some valid stuff in that paragraph, right? book of democracy. And like, yeah, there's some valid stuff in that paragraph, right? There's some points he's making there that people who have started to get people who have just gotten out of their parents' bubble

and who are starting to become aware of the world and history and the U.S.'s place in it, I see why especially if they encounter stuff like that out of context, they will find that intriguing because that's a fairly lucid and reasonable sentiment of a horrible thing that this country has been involved in. There's a couple-

It's also nothing that hasn't been said better by other people. You can find it being said well ahead of bin Laden saying it by people who did not kill thousands. I want to sort of, you know, maybe this is too late in the video in this episode for anyone to still be listening to this but i want to sort of make an appeal to people who are discovering anti-colonialism for the first time yeah sort

of in the wake of this and in the wake of israel committing a genocide and the thing that's there's something very important to understand about anti-colonialism which is that anti-colonialism is not a single coherent set of politics no there are many many different types of anti-colonial politics and those different versions of anti-colonialism wind up with completely different politics and this is something you know internationally there's a very important distinction to be made between left and right wing anti-colonialisms yeah in the u.s i mean we don't have this right like this this is this is the sort of the problem with Americans encountering this for the first time is we don't have left and right wing anti-colonialism because the US is the

world's premier colonial power. But in a lot of parts of the world, there is right wing anti-colonialism. And the core difference here is there are people who hate colonialism because of their sort of deep and abiding principled opposition to oppression and exploitation. And there are people who hate colonialism because their empire lost a war and they want to go back to being an empire again. Yeah. people take up often has a lot to do with their class position and their, you know, their, their sort of like ethnic racial or position in, in the preexisting society's hierarchy. And that's something very important about bin Laden that you can't get from either of the American nationalists. They hate us for our freedom shit.

And you also can't get from bin Laden's own description of his motivation. Yeah. And the thing that's important here, right. Is that, you know osama bin laden is not some palestinian kid who picked up an ak after the israelis murdered his family osama bin laden is one of the heirs to the saudi bin laden group and this is a second i need to stop we need to stop for a little bit and talk about the differences between american and saudi

capitalism because they don't they're not structured the same way yeah um and one of the one of the sort of big differences here is that the saudi bin laden group isn't like it's not like a company right it's a conglomerate and what this means is that you know is that bin laden's family the like the the people who own the bin laden group which is founded by his dad they don't own one company. They own 500 companies. The American equivalent to who bin Laden is, is like, it's imagine if one of Jeff Bezos' kids went to like a church,

like an Orthodox Church of Ukraine seminary school and then got his dad to like go, like pay for him to go do war tourism in Ukraine and then got a group together to like fly a plane to the kremlin yeah it became like a weird like trad cast nazi extremist that would be kind of cool it would be funny but like but that's the thing like he's not like bin laden is not a sort of moral authority on like islamic resistance to american imperialism he's a rich fail son who had this combination of like regurgitated Saeed Qutb and

a bunch of his dad's money and money from Pakistani intelligence. And that allowed him to do everything that he did. That's the thing that allowed him and not that kid in Gaza who picked up an AK. That's the thing that allowed him to declare war in the US.

And I want to read his account of what he actually thinks happened to the u.s this is this is this is from that same uh this this is from that same letter you are the nation that permits usury which has been forbidden by all religions yet you build your economy and investments on usury as a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken over your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media

and now control all aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense. Precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against. So I want to like, like think for it. I want people to sort of stop

and like, look at what he's actually saying here. His argument for why the U S is an imperialist power is that it is controlled by Jews who control the economy and the media and has enslaved the rest of the U S to do their will. And this is, and I cannot emphasize this enough word for word, a Nazi.

Yes. Analysis of what happened to the U S and this is, this is what right-wing anti-colonialism is, right? You look at the sort of horrors of colonialism go, oh, this is bad. And then when someone asks you, okay, why is this happening? You unload this utterly half-assed pile of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories instead of an analysis of capitalism.

He thinks the source of American imperialism and capitalism is interest bearing loans yeah this is nonsense that's what he means whenever he talks about usury which like by the way is a heads up every Muslim country that I am aware of has banks that

do what is effective and they do what is effectively usury it's just okay so if you know anything about like orthodox Judaism right you are not supposed to do anything on the Sabbath. And so some people do keep that. You're not even supposed to turn on a light, right? Like one of the old ways this was expressed is like you would light candles the night before the Sabbath so that you could have some burning on the Sabbath. Today, there are ways around it that are like, you get lights that are scheduled to go

on and off at certain hours. And it's always, it's kind of funny. There's a lot of jokes about this. You get from like Jewish comedians being like, do you think God is like tricked by your rules lawyering and stuff? But there are banks in the Muslim world that are the banking equivalent of that, where what they're doing isn't technically taking interest but like it works out to be the same thing for them they've just yeah they're just getting around anyway i think that's an important piece of context it's like the catholic church deciding that uh like fish and chicken aren't meat so you can eat them right right right yeah where it's like really guys you think god is like oh yeah no i never meant for those things to be meat

the omnipotent god it's like damn, they got me with that chicken shit. That ain't a cow. God seeing it. Yeah, I do actually, you have to credit Chick-fil-A for being closed on Sunday a little, I guess. But I love the idea of God going to watch a Catholic congregation go to breakfast and get their fucking chicken sandwiches and going, ah, you crafty bastards. Got me again, guys. I didn't think you'd eat those guys. They're so gross.

That is kind of how the Catholic God works. That's not that far removed. Yeah, he's like set up a little Sudoku for you. He's just thrilled that you're getting it. Like when the hamster has to press a button to get its food yeah yeah yeah but i want to i want to bring it back to bin laden for a second because i think part of what's going on here is something that isn't i don't know but bin laden is a product of of his specific, right? And his specific context is that he grew up

in one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. And, you know, I guess this is the thing I should actually mention. I'm being slightly unfair to the Taliban when I talk about them having loans because the Taliban are from a different school of Islamic jurisprudence than

Al-Qaeda is, even though they kind of work together sometimes. But, like, you know, but the but the thing like the sort of wahhabi school that like bin laden is from right like he's the reason he has a right-wing anti-colonial critique is he's absorbed this sort of like social mores and he's absorbed you know the the like the the like involved in the slave trade level of anti-blackness that you get from the sauds like from you know like the the he's absorbed their anti-semitism he's absorbed all of these things and this is what he sort of like has constructed as the reason you know and filtered through his sort of cobbling together of like different sort of like like of like saeed kudap

and of sort of like different sort of islam like of like Saeed Qutb and of sort of like different sort of Islamic thinkers. Like this is what he's assembled together. And it's this thing that it's not a stable, coherent critique of the U S it's, it's, it's, it's this,

like, it's all of his sort of like weird prejudices and hangups, like grafted onto anti-colonialism and being able to tell the difference between someone who is a genuine anti-colonialist and someone who is doing this stuff or like who wants their empire back or who is like you know like pissed off that gay people exist like that that is something that is genuinely very important and it's something that's made enormously harder to do by the way that by the American education system

by the way people are raised to think about media yeah this is the Bin Laden rant we can always stand to do more Bin Laden rants maybe I'll do another episode on them on bastards one of these days but yeah I

good stuff. I do want to kind of close by reading another bit from OBL, our friend of the pod. This one's from 2004, October 29th. Look at the different ways the current president of the United States, the former and possibly future president of the United States are talking about dealing with problems like Islamic extremism, because I think bin Laden's words here are pretty salient. And this comes from a comment he made. It wound up airing on Al Jazeera, criticizing George Bush ahead of the 2004 election. Your security is not in the hands of Democratic candidate John Kerry or President George Bush

or Al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings. They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed, and thievery. sons of kings. They have a lot of pride,

arrogance, greed, and thievery. And again, not wrong, not wrong about most Muslim majority nations and not wrong about most Western nations.

And it's a good analysis of the Bushes too because the Bushes were friends with the Bin Laden family. Yes, yes. They are, and they are also

as close as the U.S. has to royalty. As is Trump. Maybe the Kennedys. Maybe the Kennedys. Maybe the Kennedys. But another presidential candidate, Mia. Complete with the insane inbred guy who's losing his mind.

Yes. Anyway, anyone else got anything? No, I'm just baffled. Yeah. Well, I'm happy. I'm having a good time. You know, get on TikTok. let people know that uh you love terrorism um yeah it can't go wrong for you yeah alternatively get on twitter or wherever youtube and film an angry video in your car about how all of gen z unironically loves osama bin

laden and supports the mass killing of civilians. Do either. Those seem to be the two primary things people are doing right now. So get out and join the herd, everybody. It's fun. What a great place. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show,

which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show, ears edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews, and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show, ears edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a Wonderful Life is one of the most popular movies ever, but it has more to offer you than you ever thought.

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It's your boy, the Kid Mero, the human durag, flappy, you know what I mean? The plantain supernova, you feel me? The god himself, your favorite Dominican uncle. And I'm back. The greatest blog of all time, Victory Light, is now the greatest podcast of all time. And I got some friends with me. Victory Light is

a fountain, so get your cup ready because it's about to run over. You can listen to Victory Light on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts at. Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is now happening here. I could have done something with ear, but we'll do that next time. Just forget that I said that. And welcome Mia to the program. Mia, how are you doing today? Not bad, not bad. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, yeah. We're going to be talking about a subject that's near and dear to all of our hearts, by which I mean the Roman Empire, with a guest who is near and dear to our hearts, Mike Duncan. Mike, how are you doing?

Hello. Thank you for having me. It is wonderful to have you. Mike, you're a podcaster. You are kind of like the history podcaster as far as a lot of folks are concerned including uh uh me um and you also you've had some interesting interactions online with people as regards the roman empire recently yeah well anytime the roman empire shows up on the cultural radar i am tagged into it by roughly 10 000 people yeah then i come in and I do my bits or, or if, you know, if, if something comes through, you know, it gets shared at me, you know, not shared with me, but shared at me. And then, um, and then I take a look at it and I get aggravated

and then, you know, fire off a few salvos and retreat, um, back out of the social media ecosystem, which is kind of the strategy these days. Yeah. Yeah. We, we all have to like fight like an insurgent when it comes to that sort of thing. Cause the,

the alternative is to just get constantly stuck in this escalating world of beats with strangers on the internet who are making money off of the beef. Yeah. But if, but yeah, but there's, there are certain things that will get me to come out of my little hibernation, which I think we're about to talk about.

Yeah. Yeah, Mia, do you want to take it away? Yeah, so one of the things that's been happening recently is that, so on October 25th, the Republicans finally, after an enormous amount of time, finally managed to elect a Speaker of the House, and they picked this fairly unknown rep named Mike Johnson, who's this guy from Louisiana.

And they picked him effectively because nobody knew who he was. Yeah. And so they picked this guy and they're like, OK. And Mike Johnson gets elected. And immediately everyone starts trying to figure out who this guy is. And they very quickly realize this guy is just a absolute incredible christian fundamentalist weirdo he he doesn't have a bank account yeah which is like wild that's classic fundamentalism too that's some of that old school stuff yeah i see it

it's really silly i mean he's really sort of like he's like he's he's really a blast in the past with christian fundamentalists i mean he he he he was a lawyer that represented like a bunch of young earth creationist museums he's really going into that old school stuff and one of the other things that some people dug up is a a podcast interview where he is talking about how gay people caused the fall of rome so mike duncan i I want to ask you the question that I think all of our listeners are wondering. Can we as queer people take responsibility? Can we take any credit for the fall of Rome or are we stealing Visigoth valor if we do that? You're stealing valor here.

But I do agree that several of the gays in my life are like, don't take this from us. It's one of our proudest accomplishments. We brought down the Roman Empire. And I was like, but unfortunately, it's just it's not the case. It's not even close to the case. It's, you know, you could you could draw random words out of a hat and produce a sentence that was literally nonsensical. hat and produce a sentence that was literally nonsensical. And that would be a better read of the end of the Roman empire than saying gay people or homosexuality, like, because it's all wrapped up in this sort of like, it was decadence that caused the fall of the Roman empire. They were

too like, you know, they were just too licentious and they just throw up some, some vocabulary words. And it just, it just doesn't land at all um it doesn't land on the specifics it doesn't land on the general it doesn't land chronologically it doesn't land in any way shape or form it's just something they've decided is true and repeat to each other and that's the whole that's the long and short of it yeah yeah i think there's some interesting stuff there too of like the stuff people talk about when they when they like I remember I was reading someone like writing about this and they started talking about Nero and I was like do you know like in what century the Roman Empire like collapsed like

why are you talking about Nero I I don't know it seems like there's this real I don't know it seems like you know the the fall of Rome is one of these things That's become central to a lot of very weird Right wing politics I remember like a few years ago The big thing was like the Rome was The fall of Rome was caused by immigration Yeah and that's very current as well Yeah

And so I don't know what is it about Like Rome with these people The fall of Rome these people are like so drawn to In a way that causes them not To think about what actually happened at all. I mean, well, I mean, just to go back a second, it's like Rome in general in their heads is not a sort of temporally dependent series of events that unfolded over a thousand years. It's just this kind of like one eternal place that's like a pastiche in their mind. So like Nero can exist alongside Attila, can exist alongside, you know, Scipio Africanus and all of these people and events like just sort of are near

each other in time, the same way that they believe that like, you know, dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the earth. It's that kind of same thing. And so if they think about somebody like Caligula or Nero running these courts of decadence, it doesn't click to them that this is in the first century and that the Roman Empire doesn't fall for 400 years, 500 years, and then the East keeps going for another thousand years. That's a huge part of it. It is interesting to me. You kind of made the statement there about in these guys' heads, Rome being this kind of eternal, like continuing thing. And that's interesting to me because that conception of Rome goes back so far. I mean, very famously, like when Russia became

like an organized political entity, there was this widespread attitude that it was the third Rome, right? That still plays into a lot of Russian imperial politics to this day. So it is kind of fascinating how far that idea goes back. Like it says something about the success of Roman propaganda, that it still has this place in so many people's minds? Yeah. And I mean, it has a place in my mind. I don't think about it daily. Yeah. So do I. So do many of us. And I don't think that the crime here is thinking about the fall of the roman empire um or the trend or as you know we would more properly call it the transition from late antiquity to the early medieval period which is you know unfolded and that didn't have a cataclysm and you shouldn't necessarily be thought of as um

as an inherently negative thing etc etc etc um but organizing your worldview around utterly historically illiterate version of the Roman Empire that is really just a vehicle for your own special bigotry, that's where they're really running afoul of me and my temper. Yeah. And there's a lot that's really interesting about how they sort of choose to interpret like the causes of the fall. I think probably the least sensible argument they have is this idea that it had something to do with like degeneracy. Yeah, exactly. You can find Romans in like the middle republic period saying the same thing, that we've become too degenerate, too lazy because of all of the slaves automating the ruling classes, tasks. Romans are not like the Romans of our forefathers and stuff anymore.

And the empire continued, or the Republic, and then the empire still had centuries in the tank at that. Yeah. Very, very famously, the Romans started complaining about how it's not like the good old days, uh, roundabout the second century BC, which is like 300 years before they hit what we all acknowledge to be the peak of Roman civilization. And this is like this is when cato the elder gets into it and the big thing that those guys were griping about at the time and there are there are little you know little connections here just doesn't none of it shapes up is that what cato the elder and people like him were complaining about way back in the second

century was this is when the romans come in contact with the greeks and there was there was a kind of like a split between traditional Latin Roman-ness and then this like new Eastern Greaseness, which like they've got new ideas and like they sounds like they have sex with each other all the time, you know, they don't care if they're men or women. And so that's what they were pushing back against. And so that kind of language does this is where it kind of distills over the centuries and then over the millennia into this idea that the Roman Empire collapsed and was ruined by this kind of degeneracy without being able to really define what degeneracy means or how it could possibly impact the long-term health of a large empire. Yeah. You know, or the fact that very bluntly, right, when you're saying this in 186 BC, you can't say that contact with Greek ideas brought the Roman Empire down. You just can't because it just didn't get crushed by this.

It didn't fall apart. Yeah. just didn't get crushed by this. It didn't fall apart. Yeah. I mean, my, when I,

if I have to make an argument as to like what thing that I can connect to modernity, kill the modern empire. I tend to claim that it's the concept of a reboot, right? Because no sooner that did Augustus have Virgil reboot the story of the Trojan war, then the inevitable path to the collapse of the Roman empire began, right?

The real, the real sign that we're heading the Roman Empire began, right? There it is. The real sign that we're heading towards collapse is all these movie reboots. Okay, great. Well, the rule is whatever your modern preoccupation is, that's what you use to explain the fall of the Roman Empire. So of course, I have my preoccupations, and that's what I say caused the fall of the Roman Empire, which is that the Roman Empire, in fact, never fell. And we're all living in a hologram. And we know this because if a woman visits me and brings me groceries and she's wearing a Jesus fish necklace, it can pop into my brain and I can know that we're living in a fantasy world. We're still in the Roman Empire.

The empire never ended, folks. Yeah, yeah. Every politician is still Cato. Yeah. I mean, look, you could also tell this because it's like in the same way that everything tastes like chicken, they haven't invented a new moral panic in 2000 years.

So pretty clearly, we're just recycling through exactly the same content over and over again. It it does all of the the kind of similarities you can find or at least seeming similarities you can find between stuff that that different Roman politicians were complaining about, you know, 2000 years ago and stuff that's in our media today, I think does suggest part of why it's almost impossible to not keep bringing Rome up, which is that there are, and I think it's a mix of there are some legitimate similarities between our cultures and also our concept of Rome, which is often ahistorical, but is based on generations of misconceptions, makes it seem even closer. Yeah. And we are a post-Roman society. And they are our forebearers, whether we like it or not. Like any civilization that exists today that went through the Mediterranean world, you know, it had a Roman period and the

Romans made a strong imprint on all of us in terms of like our laws and how we think about money and how we think about family relationships. Like all of these things are, you know, we're living in a post Roman world and that's why it's important to, to study the Roman empire as an entity, but do it with some degree of rigor rather than just using it as a prop in the culture wars. Yeah. That the culture wars yeah that was a great

that was a great point i just made and so yeah no that was absolutely brought the conversation to a complete standstill as everybody just chewed on this nugget of wisdom that i had brought to the table i do kind of think it behooves people part of why it's valuable to do things like listen to the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan is that you're – this – Rome isn't going to stop being brought up by these people in increasingly unhinged and inaccurate ways. And it's just like it's helpful to have an actual understanding of who the Spartans were and what they did and did not do for the sake of these arguments. It's helpful to have a meaningful understanding of the Roman Empire. And I'm kind of wondering, when you come into misconceptions about Rome, what are some of the top ones on your list that your brain just forces you to go in and correct? Well, I mean, this is a big one, because this one I feel like is deeply homophobic and principally used to attack the queer community rather than anything else. And just to give your

listeners some specifics here, it's like sexuality in the Roman world was very different than it was today. And there weren't even the kind know, the kind of binary conceptions of gender, sexual relations that we have today. A lot of these things are very modern inventions. I'm sure a lot of people know this. But we can also point very specifically to like, you know, Hadrian, who is broadly considered and cited to be one of the greatest of the emperors who lived at the height of the golden age was gay like that's like that's a full stop thing and so it's just like there's no compatibility between these two ideas or really any way if you if you ask them to take this argument more than 25 words deep they're not going to have a way to explain how it is that somebody engaged in gay sex in the 400s could have possibly been the reason why the Goths won a certain battle or why Attila the Hun

was able to do what he did. All of it is just complete and utter ahistorical nonsense. And so I consider it my duty as some kind of voice of authority on Roman history to not let people get away with this. The last, the last time I saw this pop up was actually Ben Carson, which is a little bit of a blast from the past at this point. But he, he, he wrote a book at one point where he dropped this stuff in there and,

and the way they always couch it too, it's like, as we all know, you know, it was homosexuality that really led to the degeneracy of the lady i'm so sick of you people um but the other the other big one that really grinds my gears that really emerged this this was not a preconception that i had going into doing the history of rome but something that i came away um from after doing it and studying you know the year by year history of the empire is that this notion

that like sort of the Romans were this like, like a, like a, like a nationality that then went forth and conquered the Mediterranean, that Romans were Romans as like an ethnic stock thing. And that it was when these other ethnicities started sort of pressing at the empire's borders, or as we said a little bit earlier, that it was immigration, right, that destroys the Roman empire, that there was this kind of like pure noble Roman thing that is essentially functioning as the white person in the ancient world. Like this is how we're connecting these things. The British did this, the French did this, Americans now do this today, that like the Romans are our stand-in as sort of the white people and the white people are civilized and all of these other

mongrel races are uncivilized and they were either civilized by the Romans or they were killed by the Romans or enslaved by the Romans. But this is all for the good because the Romans themselves were like this superior stock of DNA somehow. And really, when you go through the empire, the history of the Roman Empire, you find that there is that kind of conservative strain inside of like the patrician class and inside of the senatorial class that they're like, we want this to be a closely held thing. Like the original Republic was a closely held oligarchy of Latin families who lived on the Palatine Hill, and that's what they wanted for themselves. And so when other people tried to push into the Republic, they

tried to resist it. And so that is a running conflict that happens in Roman history. But any time that that tendency is overcome, and a second prevailing force that says like, actually, Roman-ness is just an idea. Roman-ness is just a set of beliefs and practices and sort of daily habits of was a time that Romans didn't think that people from what is today like Florence or Milan were not Italian or not Roman. Yeah, yeah. They were not considered Roman until the very late stages of the Republic. I mean, I wrote a book about the later stages of the Republic and the social wars when this gets wrapped up. After hundreds of years of being treated as second class citizens, there was a civil war that nearly destroyed the republic before Caesar even came along. That was resolved by giving citizenship to the Italians East, that these people who the Romans encounter, and yes, do conquer because it's a very violent world of conquest and mutual conquest, that

Romans in Gaul were as much Romans as Romans in Rome. And anytime I find Roman leaders resisting that idea, I find the empire starting to falter and commit missteps. And anytime they're like, nah, let's just throw it open. If you're good, if you're dedicated, if you're loyal, you can be a part of this project that we have. Then I find the Romans doing very, very well. And I'm about to start, not to just monologue here, but I'm about to start working on another book that is about the crisis of the third century. And by this time, we have emperors who are coming from North Africa. We have emperors who are tagged as being Arabian. We have the set of emperors who really help Rome

emerge from this thing that is called the crisis of the third century when the empire very nearly collapsed in the mid 200s is a bunch of guys from Illyria, which is today the Balkans. I mean, we're talking about guys who are coming from Serbia and Croatia, or the emperors who are continuing the Roman legacy and keeping the empire intact. So this notion that Rome wasn't a multicultural empire or that the arrival of new peoples was somehow bad for them is just disproven over and over and over again by the realities of Roman history. So that's the other one. This immigration caused the fall of the Roman Empire is just flat out incorrect. One of the arguments that I've heard sort of against that, and I want to

ask how true this is, but one of the things that i hear people sort of responding to this with is this argument that like part of what causes like the sack of rome is that the romans get into one of these xenophobic streaks and they don't want to sort of try to absorb the visigoths okay so that that is that's that's a that's essentially my position yeah yeah i was just going to bring up um a guy who a historian uh who has to come up anytime you talk about the way the right likes to use the image of Rome, particularly the collapse of Rome. Victor Davis Hanson. I come from a very conservative family and he wrote a book not all that long ago. No, actually, it was 2010. Sorry, that's still like five years ago to me, but it's not five years ago. It's much further away called Why Did Rome Fall and Why Does It Matter Now?

And there's a quote I found from a little article he wrote plugging it that I want to bring up here so we can chew over. In short, what ruined Rome in the West? Lots of things, but clearly the pernicious effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or the creation of actual commensurate wealth and the resulting debits, inflation, debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more vulnerable western empire far less margin when the barbarians arrived it's all bullshit i know it's nonsense it's so it's so it's so frustrating because this culture of dependence that can i swear on this podcast

oh absa fucking lutely for sure fucking these motherfuckers um the this entitled this entitlement thing that they have because they don't like welfare because they're pricks, you know? And, you know, Victor Davis Hanson, you know, this is a guy who wrote a book called like Mexifornia, which is like, yeah, absolutely. This is where it comes from the nineties where he's like, he's like, California is going to be destroyed by all these Hispanic people. Like it's just loathsome shit that he writes um anyway uh this culture of entitlement right like oh it was just bread and circuses and like the empire had to give all this money to like how many like okay great the roman rome the city was like a million people yeah right and there

were a couple of large urban hubs that did have like grain doles because you needed to be able to feed the people in these cities and this is you, you know, smart policy by the emperors. It's actually not bad on a humanitarian level. Um, and then they also threw games because this is what people do. Rich people throw parties to make themselves love. Like this is a very, this happens today. This happens all the time. This happened during the medieval period happens all the time. Um, the number of people who are like benefiting from this like imperial largesse who have this like entitlement mentality is such a fraction such a fraction of the total number of people who live in this empire where we're talking about 60 65 million people maybe maybe give or take a little bit not that many people were on the dole in rome uh it was usually just the male head

of the household got some grain it was like it was um it was a little bit of supplemental in it's basically the equivalent of like supplemental income it was absolutely not just they're rolling out uh uh banquets for these people every single day, nor is it the case that that entitlement of Romans living in Rome in the 200s AD or something is like the reason why they couldn't sustain their border defenses, right? This is the same arguments we get when it's like, you know, we can't afford social security because the, you know, the national endowment for the sciences paid somebody $250,000 to look into the beekeeping habits. People just don't have a way to compare a million dollars to a billion dollars to a trillion dollars because it's just a lot of money in our heads.

So none of that is true. None of that is true. It's fascinating to me, especially when you hear like, this is like really popular amongst the Joe Rogan set. This idea that like, oh, you know, when an empire's at the end, that's when you get all the bread and circuses

to distract people. And so when the empire, like the Roman Empire, the entire period during which it was expanding like wildfire was doing nothing but throwing giant fucking parties in the capital. That's all they did. That's all they did. You couldn't be in politics

without going broke throwing parties. Like that was the, that's why a lot of the conquest happened is because you have to throw these parties when you were earlier up on the on the curse of Sonorum. And then you would have to, like, go conquer someplace to pay for it. Yep. And that was why, actually, when you get right down to it, you know, one of my, you know, side opinions is that if you were a provincial inside of these conquests, you know, conquered lands, life was much better under the empire than it was under the republic, because there actually was some tightening and normalization of the bureaucratic regime

under the empire, like after Augustus comes along, rather than what was going on in the republic, which is every single year, a province was getting a new governor who was there to extract as much money for himself as possible because he had taken out tons and tons of loans to throw the biggest games that he possibly could to build the biggest act to build the biggest thing now when you get into the later empire like are there financial difficulties of course right you don't get the kind of monument building and even aqueduct building and infrastructure projects you get in the later empire but like there are larger economic and structural reasons why they were suffering financial difficulties at the end of the empire that have nothing to do with these couple of grain doles that were going to a few major urban areas

most of the population is rural subsistent peasants like those people were not feeling entitled to shit which which i think is really funny because if you look at like, I am very confident if you actually did the math, the U.S. spends more money agricultural subsidies every year than like than the Romans did like on the entire grain dole. I mean, there's almost no way that's not true. Like, yeah, we I mean, in part, not just like because who knows what the Romans would have done with a higher level of technology just wasn't possible to do that kind of thing outside of the major urban hubs. Like you can't. You can't. You couldn't do it. That's the thing.

Yeah. This is the same thing where you get into like when people like to slip in the whole like, oh, there was lead in the in the in the pipes. And like there was lead in the pipes. And, you know, maybe some of the leadership was a bit over lead exposed, like who knows, like maybe, maybe, maybe, but like the vast majority of the population is not living in downtown Rome where this might be a problem or in, you know, one of the other, you know, regional capitals. That's just not where any of this is taking place. of this is taking place. Well, people love to talk about stuff like that. It is like, you know, the fact that one of their major sweeteners included a lot of lead is always like interesting to bring up. But the thing that, I mean, and this is also pure speculation, but that I always wonder more about, not just with Rome, but with like most postmodern societies and even like early

modern societies is like, what about like mild head injuries? Because we know so much more now about how a bunch of little head injuries can permanently alter your behavior. And like, like that's the big thing when I think about, when I think about like the world war one generation is you've got millions of men who wind up becoming very influential in politics who are under artillery barrages and who are, there's almost no way they're not walking away with some kind of CTE based on what we know now about what being near artillery does to your brain. You know, what does that do to, yeah. The ancient world was full of trauma. Yeah, yeah, of course. And that's a real thing. All of these guys were deeply, deeply traumatized. But like one of the other points about the whole like bread dole thing is this gets back to this is sneaky backdoor racism because the argument is that Rome was great when it was the Romans doing it.

Like these actual like Latins who were coming from the environs of Rome in particular, and that it all started to go bad once non-Romans were in charge of things because the Romans themselves had decayed into this like, oh, well, we just want our bread and circuses and we're not going to join the legions. We'll just have Germans do our fighting for us or Goths do our fighting for us, which that is simply sneaky backdoor racism because it's a way of saying that the reason why the Roman Empire was successful was because of this small population group and once they go away other groups these mongrel races will never be able to uh live up to or sustain civilization in the way that romans did the pure romans did um and so that's also a big reason why we need to push back on these things is because the roman empire was not just sustained but thrived and expanded by people who were not Romans.

And the idea that their civilization required this little tiny speck of a DNA spark to keep it going is just – this is the kind of person who finishes writing that book and then immediately turns their attention to modern California politics and says the big problem here is Hispanics. Yeah. Which is also not true, by the way, in case I need to clear that up. No, no. The big problem with California politics is California politicians. Right. It's not Latinos. It's certainly not Latinos.

You know, I wanted to kind of circle back around to the sort of degeneracy stuff, because I think there's an interesting through line there too, with not just sort of modern politics, but the politics of the period of the original rise of fascism. Because you look at these arguments and they're like, well, okay, it was like cultural decadence. And then they start talking about degeneracy and how homosexuality was this degenerate thing that brought down the empire. And you go back and you read the Nazis, and they are also absolutely obsessed with this notion of degenerate art and cultural degeneracy as this force that's this internal force of subverting the empire. like reason to be reason to be interested in a better way about Rome was also the way that like the original Italian fascists are. I mean,

like the word fascism is like derived, you know, like from, from Roman symbol symbols. Right. And like, you know, this is like Mussolini's entire thing is about turning the Mediterranean to

the Roman lake, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the, the fascist is great not to get, you know, not to derail your point.

Keep talking. Just going to cut that line out of the podcast. Mike Duncan says fascism is great. The fascist is great. It's a great symbol. Go, go like a lot of people don't actually even notice this.

Maybe they do at this point. This is no longer a fun fact, but you go, you go to the link. No. Well, I mean, not just Congress,

but go to Lincoln Memorial. Look at the Lincoln Memorial. What are his hands resting on to a couple of fascists? It just is because you know what? A bundle of sticks is stronger together. And that is a symbol of solidarity. And it is a symbol of group action being superior to individual attempts to do anything. And that the one,

the one bow is going to break, but all of them together is good. Like none of this is like inherently bad.'s just a bunch of um fascists claimed it for their own yeah well and my memory of this is that i'm pretty sure there was a group of people who were like calling themselves fascists like in in early like late 1800s early 1900s italy who weren't fascists, who were like basically left-wingers. And then like, well, sorry, not the Nazis. Well, I don't know if you know this, but Nazis are actually socialists.

They're national socialists. And so a lot of people think that they're right-wing, but actually they're left-wing. And that's what it is. Hitler was an Oberlin grad. This is where we cue my 30-minute digression about stressorism. Oh God.

But I think to, I think to the point that you were trying to make or that you were making there though, is that they were, you know, the Nazis did. And then we hear this repeated today that like that degeneracy is like a thing that is a force,

like a physical force that can maybe even be measured. And if you don't have enough of it, or if you have too much of it, then your society is going to start to break apart or decay. Like, it's just an idea. That's it. It's just sort of a way of thinking about something or a way of describing something. It's not actually a really real thing that is out there in the world. Like, if you have a society that suddenly can't grow grain and you have a famine, that's a real thing that will actually affect your society and bring it down. If you have this other thing that is just like moral degeneracy, this is just like you listing things you don't like and saying that this is the reason why things are falling apart because degeneracy

can be anything to anybody. But really, people smoking cigarettes at four o'clock in the morning because they've been up all night doing drugs, that's what kids do. People are always going to do this. This is always on the backgrounds and margins of any society. And rich people, they've always partied. They always will party. Those kinds of things, you can't really then say like, oh, well, we've accumulated too much degeneracy now or society is going to start to break apart. And this, you know, the things that we see today in terms of our own sort of faltering democratic republic, this is not because of degeneracy. This isn't because the kids are doing too many drugs or like we legalize gay marriage. Like

that's not, that's not why any of this is happening it's happening for other reasons it's happening because of greed it's happening uh because of uh sociopathic indifference to other people's lives those are the things that actually matter um not whether you stayed up all night uh drinking and partying no no it's yeah it's, it's the, like, I tend to think like talking about the Latifundia is a lot more relevant to talking about like what happened to the elites under Rome and what's happened in our own society than, than bringing up like the parties and shit. Like it's this, the centralization of wealth and power in a tinier and tinier number of men was responsible for a number of the problems that Rome encountered as it aged.

And they don't want to have that conversation. No. So they want us to have this other conversation, which flatters their bigotry. Well, and this, I think, comes back to the thing you were, you know, the joke you're making about like all these, these are all the same people who are like, oh, well, theis were socialists it's like yeah you know like the point of like these arguments is so that you don't go back into the historical record and realize how much all the things you're saying are wrong and how much they're making precisely the same arguments that you know the nazis were making or that all of these sort of like you know all all of the sort of

past people who broadly is acknowledged did a bunch of terrible stuff had the same opinions that they do. Mm hmm. Yeah, well, I I don't know. I think that's what I've got to talk about today. I mean, this is like we could go on to the way in which like Sparta gets remembered and stuff and the cultural like right wing. But I think that's kind of moving sort of far afield. Although there's similarities, right? There's always this idea that like at this certain point when everybody looked the same, like that's when this historic empire was at their best. And when, you know, degeneracy got entered into it, when immigrants got entered into it, that's when it historic empire was at their best and when you know uh degeneracy got

entered into it when immigrants got entered into it that's when it sort of fell apart um i i guess some of that's mixed in with sort of like frank miller as opposed to any sort of real history but that's always the case right i think a lot of yeah i mean and frank miller's working in a tradition that is very standard you know know, the, you know, the kind of racist orientalizing of, you know, of anybody from the East. Like, that was all current. Like, you know, the Romans had those ideas. I mean, we get the word, like, one of the points that I'm going to make probably in my book is, like, so the word barbarian just means non-Greek. Like, that's it.

Because the Greeks had a, you know, a very sort of self- means non-Greek, like that's it because the Greeks had a, you know, a very sort of self-centered view of the world as we all do. But that meant that the Romans are barbarians, you know, and that word is coined and we're thinking about who the Romans are, like they were the civilized ones. And then, and then there are all these barbarians who are bad, but like from the Greek perspective the romans were as barbaric as you know the scythians were um and you know probably and certainly less civilized than the persians were when the roms when the romans first appeared on the scene in greece they were like who are these are just a bunch of guys who are obsessed with war and they have no culture they have no

ideas of their own they just march around in squares and kill people like that's that was their interpretation of of what the Romans were originally, which is not a terrible interpretation of early Roman history. But yeah, this sort of dividing between civilized peoples and barbaric peoples is something that then has been around for thousands of years. And we're still doing today. Like everything that we're seeing, you know, and I look at Israel and Palestine, there's a lot of this mapping of civilized versus uncivilized people onto this conflict that I see is, is rooted in a lot in these sort of Western traditions that informed 19th century racist ideas about how things, you know, about how societies organize themselves, all of which needs to be deconstructed and thrown away. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. I always love it when people try to bring up like these sort of racial theories within the context of the Roman empire who had absolutely nothing that would be considered like a modern understanding of whiteness or race like was was completely absent no they they all had they all had group identity no yeah they were chauvinists but yeah yeah different era yeah exactly right it was there's us and then there's everybody else yeah um and you know the the romans differentiated a little bit between like there were egyptians and you

know they they were kind of you know they were they were, they were curious about how the, how the Jews worked because the Jews were very old civilization. And so the Romans kind of took special note of that and they really admired the Greeks. And so there are these like, sort of like groupings that they all understood, but it's all just sort of that very self-centered you know, if you go through anthropological history of any group of people, their word for themselves is just the word for person. We find this a lot. And the Romans were that way too, but not in this way, not sitting down and making hierarchies of who can do what and who should be on top and who should be on bottom. Because if you're a traditional ancient

chauvinist, you're like, well, my people should be on top. And that is you're a traditional ancient chauvinist you're like well my people should be on top and that you know is self-explanatory and then we will we will fight for that but it's not because of yeah these these racial hierarchies yeah um well i think that's about all i had to get into mia you have anything else you wanted to sort of touch on today um i i think i think we've about we think we've about covered it well we got it we've established that it's wrong to think that gays made the roman empire fall no no um although you can yeah i there's a million more things to say about that um but but yeah I think we've hit on the basics. Mike, you are a podcaster. Your Revolutions podcast is one of the best things on the internet. You are also an author of a whole bunch of books, The Storm Before the Storm, which is about a lot of the stuff we've been talking

about today. Hero of Two Worlds, The History of Rome. Yeah. Mike, you have anything else you want to plug? Well, I am just about, as I said earlier, about to start working on a third book, which will be The Crisis of the Third Century. So if anybody out there who's listening to this has been like, I wonder if Mike's ever going to write a book about the crisis of the third century. I will, and I am.

Excellent. Well, thank you for being on the show, Mike. And yeah, listeners, until next time, if somebody brings up the Roman Empire in an attempt to attack various special interests in our modern political system, buy a Gladius. You know, that still works the same way it did in the past. Just start swinging a Gladius. Remember, it's got a blade on both sides. So you got to be you got to be careful when you swing a Gladius. Easy to satire, satire, legally not actionable. Satire.

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Shereen. And today, as usual, I have a very serious topic to talk about. Today I wanted to talk about corn. Yes, corn the food. I think corn gets a really bad rap these days. A starchy carb. Oh no! High fructose corn syrup. Get away from me! But like actually that shit is not good for you so do eat it in moderation if at all. But corn itself shouldn't that shit is not good for you, so do eat it in moderation, if at all. But corn itself shouldn't be made into a death syrup in the first place. Corn isn't supposed to be eaten this way. It's meant to be eaten just as it is, or rather how it has come to be because of human intervention, which is delicious. I am obsessed with corn. My entire family is obsessed with corn. Corn, boiled sweet corn in particular, is one of the most popular street foods in the Middle East and Syria. Street vendors have handfuls, dozens of corn cobs boiling in these giant cauldrons at the side of

the road, and the smell is intoxicating. Every time my family and I were in Syria, my uncle would stop by a vendor and grab bags full of corn for us. Like, it was right after getting picked up from the airport, our first stop, always. Then we'd usually put the corn in the biggest pot my grandmother had and boil them fresh. And again, the smell, you guys, it would fill up the entire apartment and it smelled so good. The corn would be steaming hot and we'd move the couch in the living room in order to make room for the table that we can all eat on and gather around and we would devour the corn. We would go to town. And in my thoughts about corn that I have quite often I started wondering about

how exactly did corn become a street food because it's a street food in many cultures elote is one that comes to mind that is the most popular I believe but I wanted to know why and how how did it become so popular as street food that's's what I wanted to find out. And I did, kind of. I ended up learning a lot about the history of corn and how exactly it ended up being in practically everything we eat. And that was fascinating to me. So maybe you'll find it fascinating too. Today, corn is one of the world's most important crops. That is not news. Obviously, we eat corn and it can also be turned into flour and syrup. It's fed to livestock, it's transformed into ethanol, and it can even be used to make plastic.

More than 1 billion tons of corn are produced around the globe every year, and corn yields more than 6% of all food calories for humans. Which is a big percent, even though 6 is a small number. Let's talk about the history of corn. Corn as we know it today would not exist if it weren't for the humans that cultivated and developed it. It is a human invention, a plant that does not exist naturally in the wild. It can only survive if planted and protected by humans. Relatable. Scientists believe that people living in central Mexico developed corn about 10,000 years ago. Apparently, civilization got off to a slow start in Mexico, lagging about 5,000 years behind civilization in what historians call the, quote, fertile crescent of the Middle East.

Hugh Itlis, a University of Wisconsin professor of botany, thinks this delay can be blamed on the differences in plants. He said the New World civilization developed slowly because the basic food crop first cultivated in Mexico was corn. He said the process of deriving corn from wild plants was maybe 50 times more complex than the development of wheat and other crops in the Middle East. Itlis said agriculture in the Old World started 10,000 years ago with the sowing of wild plant seeds. With time, farmers selected grains with seed pods that didn't shatter as easily and that could be easily gathered and stored. And humans got plenty of lessons from animals too. He said the early old world farmers probably learned from golden hamsters and other little seed-gathering mammals

that lived in the area, and they learned this way to hoard seeds over the winter. What's kind of fucked up about that, though, is that Ittlis said these humans may have even dug out some of the hamster seed stashes and taken those seeds from the hamsters. Rude. But in comparison, the New World farmers did not have it so easy. There were no plants well-suited to agriculture and no seed-hoarding mammals to learn from. The only potential grain the New World people had to work with was an unpromising mutant plant derived from the plant called teosinte. It took 5, 6, maybe 7,000 years for this plant to evolve into an integrated food-producing plant. Teosinte is a wild grass, and it looked very different from our corn today.

The kernels were small, and they were not placed together like the kernels we see on a modern ear of corn. Honestly, I found it kind of unsettling and disturbing, if you wanted to look that up. To each their own. And surprisingly, the original Teosinte plant can still be found today, but only in one three-acre area of the Jalisco region of Mexico. Itlas said the plant is absolutely useless. Teosinte seeds have a steel-hard outer covering, and these seeds were virtually inedible except when they were green. Also, the Teosinte plant only had six or twelve kernels on each tiny ear. Itlas said that the first step in the development of corn as we know it today involved a, quote,

catastrophic sexual transmutation, his words, that converted the tip of some male tassels into the uniquely monstrous many-ranked ears, also his words, that are now the edible female ears of corn. I did not know I've been eating female corn this whole time, but this is what researching a podcast can do. After this complex transformation, farmers then had to select mutant teosinte plants that were more edible and easier to cultivate. These changes were much more complex than the changes that made old-world plants useful. Modern agriculture continues to tinker with corn and teosinte. Itlis said that plant breeders today are crossing the two plants together to derive per 5,000 years, for contemporary humans to make a better corn plant this time. From Mexico, corn spread north into the southwestern United States, and then south down the coast to Peru.

In Mexico, squash cultivation began 10,000 years ago, but corn had to wait for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its wild ancestor, Teosinte. While corn-like plants derived from Teosinte appear to have been cultivated at least 9,000 years ago, the first directly dated corn cob dates to only around 5,500 years ago. As corn reached North America, it cultivated sunflowers, and this is also when potato started growing in the Andes region of South America. About a thousand years ago, as indigenous people migrated north to the eastern woodlands of present-day North America, they brought corn with them. So when Europeans like Columbus, friend of the show, made contact with people living in North and South America, corn was a major part of the diet of most native people.

When Columbus quote-unquote discovered or just like bumped into America, he also discovered corn for his people because up to this time, people living in Europe did not know anything about corn. because up to this time, people living in Europe did not know anything about corn. In 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with apparently a pocket full of corn seeds, among other things. He learned a lot during his travels to the New World. He killed indigenous people and stole their land, etc. But being exposed to this new grain he was unfamiliar with seemed promising agriculturally for Europe. It was unfamiliar. It was delicious. It was, as Columbus romanticized at the time, quote, affixed by nature in a wondrous manner and in form and size like garden peas. And it could,

to Korn's credit, if Europeans learned to farm it properly, help feed a lot of people. if Europeans learned to farm it properly, helped feed a lot of people. The only problem was that Columbus had left behind a fairly important bit of information about said corn. He didn't take back the knowledge of how to process it. Betty Fussell is the author of, quote, The Story of Corn, which chronicles corn's several thousand year history. She says it might sound innocuous, but the history of corn probably changed the course of humanity. According to her, the old world is a wheat culture. Do you know what else is a wheat culture? Ads. And we're back. Okay, so over the next few hundred years, most of Europe grew to misunderstand corn rather than embrace it. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, corn endured a different fate. It thrived and

eventually found its way into the very center of the American diet. Until the 1800s, corn was eaten mostly by the poor. It was a cheap and prolific crop, consumed by farmers and fed to prisoners, and used also as a commodity. As Michael Pollan wrote in his 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma, corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted on during their passage to America. But then came the Industrial Revolution, and with it, three essential technologies that helped corn thrive from being just the grain for poor people to being the grain for all people, consumed by everyone. The first invention was an iron plow, which allowed farmers to sow deep into the soil on much larger scales.

The Midwest was planted with corn on a commercial basis precisely because of the iron plow, which, although it seems pretty simple, was a revolutionary tool. Two other advancements had an equally large effect, even though they touched corn production more tangentially. equally large effect, even though they touched corn production more tangentially. Fussell said that, quote, one of the most important boons for corn might have been that the commercial farms in the Midwest grew up at the same time as the canneries and railroads. Until then, corn was mainly distributed locally, but trains helped move the grain far beyond just county limits, and along with the advent of canning, it meant that corn could keep for much longer. This allowed farmers to grow corn and other crops with hundreds of thousands of mouths in mind. In the coming decades, the amount of land dedicated to corn grew incredibly quickly, but it wouldn't be for

another 50 years until corn actually made its way to the center of the American diet. Corn is what Fussell calls a genetic monster because it's highly adaptable and easily manipulated, and there is perhaps no better example of its mutant-like qualities than what happened shortly after the turn of the 20th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists discovered a way to boost corn production to a level that was previously unthinkable. They bred hybrid strains that had larger ears and could be grown closer together, which allowed farmers to produce a lot more corn without needing more land. This discovery, along with the introduction of new industrial

fertilizers and more efficient farm tools like tractors, led to a huge increase of corn output. Paul Roberts wrote in his 2009 book The End of Food that in the following decades the number of bushels of corn per acre doubled and then it continued to rise each year. Corn yields have risen ever since then, with only brief interruptions due to sporadic droughts. But these interruptions are easily countered with further engineered corn. Advancements in farming technology and science paved the way for corn's ascent into the American food system. But the main reason that corn has made its way into just about everything we eat and every food that Americans eat today

is that, above all, it is inexpensive. Corn has and always will be cheap because it grows everywhere in the world. The most incredible thing about the corn grown in America today is how little of it we actually eat. This does not include people like me and my family, who are obsessed with corn and eat it regularly, and also Sophie, who I know shares this corn obsession. But less than 10% of the corn used in the United States is directly ingested by humans. The bulk is either turned into ethanol for use as fuel or fed to the hundreds of millions of animals that we subject to the factory system. Corn is fed to cows, chickens, pigs, and even fish! I had no idea. Apparently fish are given these little pellets that are largely made of corn, so it's everywhere. The relative cheapness

of corn and general usefulness of it as a form of energy, both for living animals and living more generally, have proved important enough that the government subsidizes its production to the tune of some 4.5 billion dollars each year. The result is perpetuation of ambitious growing goals. Farmers, realizing the more efficient they are the more money they will get grow more and more corn the more corn there is the lower its price and the greater the incentive is to use it in as many ways as possible i want to talk now about the different varieties of corn but first do you know what else has variety? All the ways you can spend your money. Like these. Let's talk about the different varieties of corn. There are many types,

but the most commonly eaten forms can be divided into three general categories. The first is sweet corn. Sweet corn is what Americans usually eat when they eat corn on the cob or when they throw corn on the cob or when they throw corn on the grill at a barbecue that you didn't want to go to. And this sweet corn accounts for only about 1% of the corn grown in America. Then there is flint corn. Flint corn has a soft center and harder outer shell, which most people know as popcorn. It became popular in the 1960s after Jiffy Pop, which cooked the kernels in aluminum foil on the stovetop, was introduced, and its popularity rose further in the 1970s and 1980s, shortly after the introduction of the

microwave. Today, much like sweet corn, flint corn accounts for a steady but comparatively insignificant portion of the u.s corn crop and then there's dent corn aka field corn the most important kind of corn when it comes to production of it not when it comes to me eating it because i cannot do that but dent corn accounts for the vast majority of corn grown in America today, as well as the vast majority of the corn Americans eat, just not on purpose. It's in most of the beverages we drink, surprise surprise, because of high fructose corn syrup. And this is derived from flint corn and is the most commonly used commercial sweetener, aka death syrup. It's in most animals people eat because it's fed to

most animals that are raised for slaughter. It's even in our cheese because many cows are fed corn instead of being able to graze on grass. All of this makes corn virtually inseparable from the American diet. Betty Fussell says that people have this kind of nostalgic understanding of corn. They think of corn on the cob and popcorn. But the truth is that field corn is what we are really talking about when we talk about the dominance of corn in the United States. It's in almost every product in the supermarket today. That's no exaggeration. But obviously, corn cannot be contained. American-style processed food, which almost always relies on corn, has been popularized in countries all around the world. Let's go back to Mexico, the birthplace of corn as we know it. How exactly did corn become such

a popular street food? Mexican food is quite often literally built upon the tortilla, which is a lot of the times made of corn. The tortilla is a vehicle by which the country's most popular foods are eaten. Enchiladas, quesadillas, tacos, tamales, I can list food forever. Although wheat flour has grown in popularity here in the United States, which is actually the technical home of the burrito apparently, in Mexico, it's all about the corn. Mexico City is frequently praised as one of the most significant cities on earth in terms of street food. Street food is referred to as antojitos in Spanish, which means little cravings, which I find very cute. Street dishes count corn as a near-universal ingredient.

And sometimes, of course, it doesn't have to be processed to achieve its highest potential. Elote is perhaps the most recognized example, which is, for those not in the know, a full ear of corn that is grilled and slathered with a variety of toppings like butter, chili powder, or tahini, mayonnaise, and cotija cheese, among many other things. The final product, elote, is served on a stick, providing an easy means for mobile consumption. Another common corn street food is esquites, a Mexican sweet corn salad. Although its true origin is not known, according to Nahuatl stories, Esquitas are credited by being created by a god, a deity, with a name I cannot say or pronounce, but it is long and looks cool, but I won't try to say it.

But this god is also credited with creating Mexican corn jelly. Corn. It's from the gods. Literally. jelly. Corn. It's from the gods. Literally. As for me, there isn't some magical history of corn in the Middle East. I looked. I searched. I tried to find something. And I couldn't find one. No magical, mystical history of my beloved corn. Like most things I have questions about, I asked my mom. And my mom said that when it's in season, street vendors sell corn. Like most things I have questions about, I asked my mom. And my mom said that when it's in season, street vendors sell corn. That's it. The same goes for other street foods that are popular in the Middle East, which you might find interesting, which is cactus fruit or the prickly pear. But no, corn is magical, but it's only magical to me. And just because it's magical to me doesn't mean it is actually magical.

And through researching for this episode, I have learned that. So what I'm saying is this episode has shattered my naive childhood dreams about a magic land of corn. But a job's a job and someone has to do it. So that's it. Goodbye. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes

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