Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 118

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

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coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I miss herding. I said, what? Salt and pepper. Listen to season two of McCartney, A Life in Lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Nancy Grace here, host of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Every day on Crime Stories, we shine a light on missing people, especially children, seeking justice for victims of violent crime. Crime Stories is the only daily podcast

bringing listeners the latest breaking crime and justice news every day is a mission, another chance to help crime victims and bring criminals to justice. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Call Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And you know, folks, season one of this, if you listened way back in 2019, we focused a lot on my fears about a massive coming civil conflict in the United States, you know, along the lines of a civil war, but sort of based around my experiences

and civil conflicts in Ukraine and Iraq and Syria, a number of other parts of the world prior to 2020. And one of the reasons I bring this up right now is because, you know, what I experienced with the fighting in ISIS in Iraq was kind big armies in gray and blue marching at each other, we're willing to kind of to contend with. And when I was starting that reporting over there, you know, taking my first trips to Iraq, one of the first things that I did was watch every ISIS beheading video and some of the al-Qaeda in Iraq beheading videos prior to that, not as a voyeuristic thing, but because I felt like if I was going to take myself and another person into that situation, the responsible thing to do was make myself very informed of what the stakes were.

And I'm bringing this all up, not because we're talking about the Middle East today, because we are talking about a beheading video, probably the first beheading video directly tied to the U.S US culture war that I can I can name. And I'm going to throw to Garrison Davis now. All right. So last week, I believe most of this went down on January 30th, a 32 year old man named Justin Mone shot his father in the head with a handgun. He bought the day previously and then used a kitchen knife and machete to allegedly again this is all a quote-unquote allegedly

allegedly allegedly alleged by him in the video that he recorded yes cut off his father's head in a bathtub he put it in a pot and then recorded a video which he posted publicly onto YouTube. It was about 15 minutes long titled, Mones Militia, Call to Arms for American Patriots, where he ranted about a number of things and mostly called for the killing of federal employees. He fled. I think he went a slightly upstate towards a National Guard training camp and then was arrested a few hours later after his mother found the severed head and body of her husband in the house that

they all lived in together. This is one of the most bizarre acts of extremist violence that I've come across in terms of like the amount of research I've done into this. And I think it kind of points at this trend of extremist acts of violence done by people who have a lot of content on the internet. Not just like posting manifestos, but like are positioning themselves as some form of like alternative content creator. This guy had a lot of music, had a lot of self-published books. In lieu of leaving like a complete single manifesto, we get these just years of writing

and like artistic creations that now live on archive.org as gun of ghosts of this guy's presence. And I think what's interesting about that is that shift between and I think the Christchurch shooter is probably like the KT boundary of this particular evolutionary shift from like the norm would be that you would produce a specific manifesto as an act like a political act as part of whatever of active violence you carried on the goal was both to inspire other people to act and to you you know, partly just to frame yourself as something besides a lone maniac. And I think one of

the things that's really interesting about this shift to an increasing number of these people representing what they're doing in fiction in some way or in some other kind of creative endeavor is that it sort of mirrors the idea that like in our culture, the thing that people most want to be is some sort of like influencer content creator. Like that's the top desired job among like a lot of Gen Z kids. And it's also just increasingly like the thing that people creatively want to see themselves as. And so, like, I think this fits into this trend of violence that is foreshadowed by someone, not by a work of like political thought, you know, which you may not want to think of a manifesto as that, but that is what it is, but is preceded instead by art. Yeah. So I think I'll talk about a few kind of semi-similar or at least other cases that have some curious linkages

probably close to the end of the episode, but I have some writing here prepared about about the beheading video itself and then a few other kind of random random stuff about the art that he's made and Robert will probably fill in some some useful gaps because Robert acquired a very special piece of literature recently. So the night that this went down, as soon as I found out this guy had written not just a book but multiple books, I was like, well, I kind of want to read these and I know they're going to get pulled by tomorrow and Amazon will probably Amazon can just take back the Kindle books that you buy from them.

So I ordered a hard copy of the book that seemed like the most meaningful to him. It's called the second Messiah King of Earth by Justin Moan. It is distressingly thick like 450 pages or so. It is so much book and And the weird thing about it, I've read through a chunk of it and we will be getting to some of it. It's not badly written. And I wanna be clear, I'm not saying that like, he's a good writer in the commercial sense

or that he's a good writer in that like, he's a skilled artist. I'm saying that like, it's clear writing. You're always sure what he's trying to say when he depicts events is happening. Those events are crazy, but like he's they're clearly depicted, which is interesting to me. And yeah, we will be hearing about more of that in part two, but I have learned a decent amount about him from this book, The Second Messiah, King of Earth.

So let's get into that 15 minute video. He starts by holding up what is alleged to be his father's head inside a plastic bag. He holds it up for a few seconds and then starts talking. Now, my initial reaction to this video is just how unremarkable most of this rant is. There's like calling for killing federal employees, which is like the one thing that makes it special. A lot of people do that. But also, you can hear so many of the sentiments that he talks about from Fox News contributors, from popular right wing podcast hosts,

and even sitting politicians. They also talk about how, quote, America is rotting from the inside out as far left woke mobs, rampage our once prosperous cities, turning them into lawless zones. Unquote. Yeah. You used that term a lot. Lawless zones. That's a key that there's that term probably comes up like about 10 times across this whole video. And I want to I think we need to start before we get further into this with the elephant in the room, which is like a lot and what a lot of

people have said about this guy. well, this man was mentally ill. And that is absolutely the case. You know, I add the disclaimer, whenever we talk about mental illness and mass shootings, people who are mentally ill, people who are schizophrenic are not more likely to do this kind of violence than anybody else. But that said, when they do it, they're also not necessarily less responsible. And what I mean by that is a person can be mentally ill and engage in a shooting. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to what they are or another

act of violence. That doesn't mean you don't pay attention to why they're saying they did it. The fact that this guy is clearly, I believe, schizophrenic does not mean that his reasons for doing this are immaterial because most people who have whatever mental illness this guy did have do not cut their dad's head off. So the fact that he is justifying it with this very boilerplate set of right-wing culture war grievances is meaningful.

And it's meaningful because absent that influence in his life, perhaps he either doesn't carry out an act of violence or it's at least a very different looking one. And so I think that is important to just get out to upfront. He certainly had years of experiencing paranoia, some conspiratorial thinking, but specifically the ire directed towards his own conception of the federal government and how it is leading to societal decay is what sparked this act of violence and is why he called for copycat killings. So, Yes. Inside this rant, Justin Mohn talks about taxes, inflation, and an economy that no longer

serves American citizens. He mentions how the traitorous Biden regime is sending over American troops to fight in a doomed war in the Russian winter, leaving America defenseless against a, quote, fifth column army of illegal immigrants invading our southern border to strike Americans on our own soil, unquote. That's that. That's another term he uses a lot. Fifth column. Yeah. Price is at like four or five times. And that's that's a very old term. That's a term that you would hear in a lot of John Birch materials from like the middle of the last century, you know? So, Moan identified himself as, quote, the commander of America's National Network of

Militias, also known as Moan's militia, which seems to be mostly a delusion. He had no no known connections to actual militias in his state or any other states. This seemed to be an idea that he got into his own head. He then ordered all, quote, militias and his state or any other states, this seemed to be an idea that he got into his own head. He then ordered all, quote, militias and patriots across the country to, quote, hunt down and murder every federal employee on site, and to siege all courthouses, FBI, IRS, and federal law enforcement offices, to kill and capture all Border Patrol, U.S. Marshals, federal agents, and judges, and, quote, Federal agents and judges and quote torture them for information and publicly execute them for betraying the country unquote. He

had this really he had this line that stuck out to me. I didn't copy. This is a long video. I did not copy every single thing he said. He also this is this is one line he included. Earn your place in heaven by sending a traitor to hell early with just the cold, like very like emotionless way he said that kind of stuck with me. Yes. And that is not a belief that you have to go to a guy experiencing a mental health crisis to find you. You can hear shades of this all over fucking Twitter, among other places. You can hear this if you listen to certain right-wingers give public comment, like in your local city council. Like it's not... So, Moan asked that police, veterans, and National Guard

join the fight, or else cities like Philadelphia will turn into lawless zones like Portland and San Francisco. He also asked local militias to be his own personal security force so that federal employees do not try to arrest him. Yeah. He said that state governments should be left alone unless they intervene in his revolution. Quote, the federal government is the enemy. Then Moan declared that, quote, Joe Biden is no longer in power. I am now officially the acting president under martial law, unquote. He ordered military generals to not deploy US troops against US militias

and instead join their fight to defend the Constitution. It would be fun if the Constitution worked that way. If like they put that in back in 1787, like, oh, yeah. And if, you know, if Marshall Law is declared, he's not around yet, but there's going to be this guy, Justin Mote. He's a charge. So this is one thing that I'm still slightly confused on. Well, there's a few things that are obviously confusing. Yeah, it seems confusing.

But Mote offered a $1 million bounty on a number of high-level federal US employees and $100,000 for every federal judge and even doxxed one in Pennsylvania. He claimed to currently have $10 million to exhaust on these bounties. And I that is not that's just so not true. Yes, definitely not. Man constantly complains about how he's in a poor financial situation as a result of a number of factors. He does not have $10 million. Now, he ordered all non-military federal employees to resign before ending up like his father.

Now, his father was an employee at the US Army Corps of Engineers for most 20 years. He resigned, I think, like last year or a few years back. It's interesting, he called for specifically non-military federal employees to resign. He was very pro-military. I'm not sure if his father working for the US Army Corps of Engineers, how exactly that fits in to his ideology here, but we're not laying out a clear line of thinking, obviously. It is just slightly off topic, but it's never not fascinating to me how strong the feeling of emotional attachment to the US military is. Like that even this guy would be like, this guy who is so clearly deranged and violent about this kind of thing would be like,

but they're the exception. Like there's obviously still basically good. It's just interesting to me. What else is interesting to me, Garrison, is where our money comes from. And you know where our money comes from? The Federal Reserve. Yes, actually. We are sponsored entirely, entirely by the Federal Reserve. So please, I mean, literally anything you do will, I guess, help the Federal Reserve. So please, I mean literally anything you do will I guess help the Federal

Reserve. So go exist in capitalism. And we're back. Speaking of another federal agency, one agency that Moan addressed directly was calling for the postal service to suspend all services split from the federal government or else he will not be able to offer protection. Jesus Christ. No.

That's negotiating with the postal service. That's very funny. I mean, this is serious, but that is kind of funny. This guy isn't a Nazi. He's not a Nazi. No, no, no is serious, but that is kind of funny. This guy isn't a Nazi. He's not a Nazi. No, no, no, definitely not. He is an extremist. He is a conservative extremist.

He does repeatedly in his book, by the way, also talk about like racism being bad. Like that is like very much a consistent through line. But some of this like Kill Your Local Postman type stuff certainly reflects a strain of extremist neo-nazi thinking that particularly James Mason's stuff from the 80s. Yes. So he also said, quote,

if the media spreads lies about this revolution, I authorize the targeting of news stations, their owners and employees, general kind of conservative anti-news, anti-journalist rhetoric. Quote, the hunting, capturing, and killing of America's federal employees will not stop until Americans' demands are met and the network of America's traitors is wiped out." Now, some of these demands that he called for includes closing the borders,

mass deportation of immigrants that have entered under the Biden regime, ceasing all human trafficking of children and sex slaves, which is obviously already illegal, cancelling all public debt, and end to the Federal Reserve, restore Congress's right to print interest-free money, Right to print interest free money And ceasing all of the quote woke and gender ideology propaganda in the school Sun quote Great, we have a weird mix of like very like libertarian stuff like the Federal Reserve Interest free money and then other more popular conservative stuff around like the border and then this thing about woke and gender ideology. Yeah, there's even a little like Nessara, Jessara stuff in there too about like the whole, like, allow the government to print interest free money again. Like, that's,

it's interesting that that's mixed into Meito as well. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a curious collection of political thought. Now, traders to the country included not just federal employees, but also, quote, bribed members of the deep state, labor racketeers of the prison industrial complex, and globalist leaders of assorted industries, unquote. Now, there's a lot to unpack there. Bribed members of the deep state,

I think doesn't need any explanation. But Moan had this idea that labor unions were working with corporations to make straight white males have a hard time to find jobs so that they would always be unemployed. And unemployment leads to people being arrested and sent to prison as a way to fund the court system. So this is what he means by labor racketeers of the prison industrial complex. It's that labor unions are colluding with the government

and businesses to keep certain sects of the population unemployed to fill up prisons. Now, in terms of globalist leaders of assorted industries, he specifically was talking about big tech companies that commit tax evasion. He claimed that he used to work for Microsoft and witnessed massive tax evasion. I have not looked used to work for Microsoft and witnessed massive tax evasion. I have not looked into that.

I do not believe he worked for Microsoft. They definitely do. Like they all do. It's not, I don't think they break the law because they have whole departments of people who are there to make sure that at least they're not breaking the law enough that it will matter, but like whatever.

I mean, again, some of this does, some of all grievances like this come from real things like the corporations like Microsoft that are tremendously wealthy do not pay their fair share and in fact do a great deal to allied their tax burden. He's just like, yeah, it's it's one of the frustrating things about this is how all of this actual malfeasance feeds into these delusions and feeds into the conspiratorial narratives of the people that take advantage of people like Justin. Yep. He said that martial law will continue as long as Americans support him and until America is secured enough to hold a legitimate election, and that Moon would authorize police and military to use any force necessary to take back America's cities from, quote, fifth column extremist organizations such as the LGBT community, the BLM movement, and terrorist organizations like Antifa, unquote.

This is where he went on a whole Antifa rant, saying, Antifa is a part of the federal government's systematic top-down, globalist and communist takeover of America. Moan stressed the importance of capturing alive, quote, one of the key players involved in this treason, or else they will never be able to discover the entire network of evil, unquote. So Moan blamed Antifa, BLM, and the LGBTQ community for stoking a division to create a race war and religious war. It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to hold, to hold the justification of your, your accusing people of stoking division as you're holding up the severed head of your father. Like there's just that a complete disconnect here.

Quote, the government has disallowed any peaceful solution. Violence is the only solution to the federal government's treason and the actions of their fifth column terrorist organizations like Antifa. This is an ideological and spiritual war." Unquote. Very similar in some ways to what McVeigh was saying, right?

Like, this is the only way to communicate with the government. It's the only language that they understand. Yeah. Yeah. And then lastly, he kind of closes this video with a further look into some of his own like political delusions. He said that before the 2020 elections, electors and campaign contributors from both parties said that they saw Justin Mone as the best candidate for the president of America. He's 32 years old. He was like 28 back in 2020. Quote, I could have

been the first unanimously elected president, but I was betrayed by the FBI, federal courts, and my own family because there are people that believe I am the messiah, which goes against the government's satanic communist ideology. Quick note, if all of those groups didn't want you to be president, how would you have been elected unanimously? Or would the FBI have been like, well now that he's on the ballot, we gotta vote for the guy? So after saying there are many people that believe I am the Messiah, he then said, quote,

I would never compare myself to Jesus Christ, unquote, which is not true. He has many times. Yeah, he sure has. Most notably in the title of his book, The Second Messiah, King of Earth, by Justin Moan. Although that is about his self-insert character who he says lives a life identical to his named Buster Moon. Buster Moon. And then I will do the last little bit about this video. Quote, if there is a federal employee in your family, make it your New Year's resolution to kill them in order to protect your own children. Oh boy. And then, Moan followed that by quoting from Matthew 1021.

This is a verse in the New Testament. Brothers and sisters will betray one another and have each other put to death. Parents will betray their own children and children will turn against their parents and have them killed." It's interesting, because I've heard that cited before. And usually it was in older conspiracies of the New World Order.

And yeah, that's what they believed the evil anti-Christ Ewan regime was going to do to them. It's fun to hear someone be like, that's what we have to kill the families of the people who are. I don't think that's what he's actually saying. He's saying, like he's talking about how he has felt betrayed by his own family and by the government.

Oh, got you. Okay, that makes sense. This points to like this massive disconnect in his own head. Wow. This is the betrayal he's talking about. He is, he is using this verse as a reference to like the end times, but he's saying like, this is the betrayal that we're seeing. And in response, now we have to do this. So on, I'm going to quote from ABC News here.

So the US Marshall service investigated moan in August of 2023 after he allegedly made a threat against a US district court judge. The case was closed that same month. He was reported to police pretty frequently for this bizarre behavior in his own neighborhood like sitting on manhole covers and staring at houses for hours on end. Now, Mone has held conspiratorial and anti-government views for at least seven years and attempted

to recruit people to join his Moan's militia on Reddit and Discord, though no one seemed to join. And then at least one Discord server threw him out because of his repeated recruitment attempts. And after fleeing home, after he posted that video, he drove more than 100 miles north and broke into the Pennsylvania National Guard base with a gun and then was arrested after he was tracked there on his cell phone. There is a song that Justin wrote about three years ago about being arrested after being tracked on his cell phone after doing violence against his family.

You think he would have like not had a cell phone on him given that he was aware of that as a risk But I don't know if he was really thinking large like yeah If you watch the video like he like he thinks National Guard's gonna like join him. Yeah, he's not he's not thinking about it that way So yeah, I believe Moan has published at this point nine books I'm gonna read from his his Amazon about page books. I'm going to read from his Amazon About page. Justin Mone is the author of seven books, now nine, and a musician of three albums and one single. His life story is unbelievable, and there may not be enough words to describe him. But one may begin to understand his complexity and experiences through his art. He only wishes to bring positive change to the world. Now, I will talk about some of those other books

after we take a quick ad break here and learn about some important messages from our sponsors. Yeah. So, Justin Mone's bibliography. Here we go. So I think Robert has one of his books, The Second Messiah, King of Earth. Yeah. There is many other books he's published, including a startling number, a book called The Pink, a book called Poems I Wrote While Stoned, a collection of poems. They will burn this book, The Punishing, America's Coming Bloody Revolution, The Kingdom of Darkness, Dark Ages of the Future,

a collection of short stories. And finally, The Revolution Leaders Survival Guide, how schools, workplaces, and social norms kill the genius inside us all. Not bad at titling, you know. So pretty effective, good for SEO. I'm on board. Let's start with that last book here, The Revolution Leader's Survival Guide.

It targets the, quote, constraints against education, creativity, and human progress throughout history, unquote. And the book is mostly about Mone's own inability to find a high-paying enough job after college. This is a reoccurring trend in a lot of his books, including I believe the one that Robert has. Moan complains about student loans, how America's education system is faulty, and talks about being bullied in school as a kid. I'm going to quote from the book's description, the author views the world on the brink of either a golden age of world peace and space colonization, or instead a second dark age of global wars and depopulation within the next couple of decades,

if not sooner. Included within the book is a transcript of a letter Justin Moan wrote to Donald Trump, warning that if America does not go under some great changes, Moan himself will have to lead a peaceful revolution. In another book titled The Kingdom of Darkness, published on May 13, 2020, it's a novel about Satan and fallen angels becoming, quote, trapped inside Earth's lowliest creatures after being banished from heaven. He has a whole bunch of other, like, sci-fi type books like aliens, space exploration,

a weird collection of genre. In a pamphlet he self-published on Amazon in August of 2020, titled America's Coming Bloody Revolution. The small book contains two chapters, one titled Why a Violent Revolution is Inevitable, and a second titled, How Revolution Can Be Successful. Mone wrote, quote, Americans will have to weigh what is worse, allowing themselves to lose freedom and independence, or killing their own family members, teachers, workers, bosses, judges, elected leaders, and other older generations." This is where we get a lot of like predictive writing around what he's going to be doing. Moan described older generations as, quote,

traitors who wish to take away the freedom and independence that comes with America, democracy, and free market capitalism. Which leads me then to the book that Robert has, The Second Messiah, which was published in January of 2020. It's about a man named Buster Moon who moves from Ohio to Colorado and, quote, painfully learns the dark secret of Colorado from everything containing Satanic cults, the Democratic Party and the Cold War. Now, we will get more into this book specifically in a later episode. I'm going to read a little bit from the back cover. The only thing more absurd than this fiction book is the fact that it's loosely based on

the life of author and musician Justin Mone, who's four years staying in Colorado, caused multiple lawsuits, changed the possible outcome of the 2020 US presidential election by exposing three presidential candidates as corrupt, which forced them to drop out of the race. We have more of these like presidential delusions that that he was talking about at the end of his beheading video here. And in terms of how this mirrors, like I said, we'll learn more about this book later, but I will talk now some about his actual personal life, which will then become slightly reflected in the book, like going to Colorado Springs. He graduated from Penn State with a business management degree and sued the federal government

multiple times for letting him take out student loans that he was forced to pay back. The most recent case was last year, where he sued for $10 million because despite getting a degree with the loans, he was unable to, quote, find a satisfactory job as an over-educated white man to repay the loan, claiming that he was a victim of affirmative action and reverse discrimination, unquote. In a previously dismissed lawsuit against the Department of Education, he alleged that they neglectfully and fraudulently induced him to borrow money to pay for his education without sufficiently warning him of the possibility that he would face a difficult job market and could be unable to pay back his student loan.

So, Moan did move to Colorado, just like Buster Moon, about 10 years ago, eventually getting a job at Progressive Insurance, but was fired in 2017 for kicking down a door and, quote, breaking the company's code of conduct. Moan then sued Progressive in 2019 for not receiving promotions because he was a man. In his violent revolution pamphlet, Moan claims that he was a victim of discrimination from quote, being a top performing, overeducated and overqualified male employee, unquote. And in that same pamphlet, Moan wrote that his educational employment and legal issues are evident that there is quote, no peaceful solution for the youth to escape debt-based enslavement unemployment and ultimately

imprisonment He compared his experience to quote the Soviet Union's feared gulag prison labor system and in which entire states and countries were essentially turned into concentration camps Mone wrote that educators and parents who quote knowingly lie brainwash and dumb down their youth wrote that educators and parents who, quote, knowingly lie, brainwash and dumb down their youth, unquote, must be killed to prevent the spread of, quote, globalized communism and corporate agendas. This is where we have an interesting combination of like anti-communism fears, but also anti-corporatism that you see in some sects of like libertarian conservatism.

You sure do. He claims that communism is like a virus and that America must treat it like a virus. Quote, the only logical way to do so is for every American born in 1991 or later to kill anyone born before 1991. Well, now he's cooking. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, I'm back on board. I'm back on board. You know, this could work.

So it just so happens that that was the year that he was born. Yeah. Yeah. Logical, logical point to divide it on. I'd respected more if he'd been born earlier, you know, but. So I already mentioned some of his music. It had similar predictive elements of he was doing art in almost like in practice of what he was then going to later do in person in terms of caring about violence, as well as just evident of kind of delusional and paranoid thinking. He has a song about being gang stocked. He has a song about, I think,

like a girlfriend who broke up with him. He has songs talking about how it's okay to kill communists and how we're overall seeing a decline in American society. So that is most of what I have to say about Justin Mone. I could certainly say a whole lot more. Now, on top of my research onto him himself, I also wanted to look at the sort of online chatter that neo-Nazis and other extremists were saying.

And I put together a large catalog of telegram conversations about Justin Mone, watching the spread of certain conspiracy theories around this incident, and just to see what their overall take was. I will paraphrase my 80-page research document here by saying, it seems most Nazis and other white supremacists or far-right extremists thought that the Justin Mone incident was quote, fake and gay, unquote. Okay. They, they keep up with these, these thought fluensers.

Really glad that we're getting some of their side. Many other far right extremists took this to be a Psyop. Sure. They thought it was an attempt to push forward this anti militia bill that's being talked about as well as distract from the crisis at the southern border. Certain white supremacists were upset that he used the phrase to Judeo Christian values because they are anti-Semitic and Justin Mone did not seem to be consciously anti-Semitic.

Yeah. And we had, we had these conspiracy theories travel everywhere from standard kind of neo-nazi telegram accounts to like more conservative boomer mega type stuff as well, mostly picking up on like the on the on the anti-militia angle how this is probably a PSYOP from the deep state to push forward this anti-militia bill. Some people thought they were very clever in realizing this was a sci-off because they thought Justin Moan was 33 years old and there's this conspiracy theory around the number 33 in a lot of these circles. The conspiracy is around how the number 33 is used a lot in like mass shooting

incidents. Now it's not, this is just pattern recognition, but also Moan isn't 33, he's 32, so great, great work there. And there's specifically one telegram channel that found a prop head, I believe on Etsy. Yeah, like a prop severed head, yeah. We started seeing this spread all over Twitter, conservative news sites, how this has to be fake because look, we found the fake head they used, which is quite simply not the severed head that Justin Moan's holding up in the video. I don't think it's really much useful else to say about these conspiracy theories, but, uh, yeah, they certainly were kind of laughing along at some of like the gangstalkery elements, thinking, you know, some people obviously thought

he was based and cool for actually doing some of the ideological things that these Nazis believe in. Others thought it was, it's just fun to make fun of a guy. So they decided it was a Psyop. Yeah, that is that is most of what I had to say about Justin Moan. Well, this has been quite an inspiring journey. We are going to have more to say about Justin and finally get into his his book, The Second Messiah, King of Earth, which is in a way

become my Bible. I think I may keep this in my Apocalypse Go bag so I can do like a book of Eli with this thing if the world ends. Oh, God. Just be wandering alone across the wasteland telling everybody about this man's book. I guess finally the last thing I'll say is that this reminds me of two recent incidents. We had one mass shooting done by a Nazi in Denver, Colorado, and he previously wrote and made short films depicting the murder that he would then do.

We also had the Highland Park shooting on July 4th a few years back, who the person who did that created a lot of music online in this very like I would say the Highland Park music was much more in like the skit to wave genre of extremist content. I think the stuff the stuff that Justin Mone is producing is honestly more like the stuff that skits away is like parodying. The like Justin Mones was a lot more like sincere, less, less ironic. Yeah, it was it was it was just like taken at face value. These two incidents I was reminded of just because of how much those acts of violence were predated by artistic expressions

of the later thing that they would end up doing. And in Moan's case, it's exactly the same. He has written about killing family members. He's written about the exact way he would be arrested and tracked down. Writing that goes back like four or five years This is there's so many people online who have the exact who are in this same scenario who are putting out this type of writing No, no, it's where they are Moanhead like five listeners on Spotify these people are unknown and

Every once in a while one of them decides that writing about it isn't enough and they actually do it in the real world and it's just this it just it just this interesting trend of these people like almost like hyperstitishing these own acts of violence by making art that predates it almost in some form of like preparation. Yeah, yeah. And we talked about hyperstition as a concept a bit in last weeks behind the bastards. about hyperstition as a concept a bit in last weeks behind the bastards, but it is a term for essentially the methods and ways by which things that are fictional become real. And it can be kind of as esoteric as the idea of like preparing the way for a godlike AI by like spreading belief in

that sort of thing, or it can be as direct like as this, as somebody envisioning the acts they're going to carry out in fiction and then carrying out those acts for real. Like it on an individual level, what you're doing when you're doing this is you're kind of you are preparing yourself mentally for the thing that you're going to do. And when I would sort of lecture and talk about what to how to know something is like a real threat versus somebody saying shit on the internet, because that's obviously that's a real problem when we talk about this. There's a huge quantity of people saying stuff that could be them presaging like an act of violence. And you simply can't go after everything. And one of the key things for me always is,

what are, have they gone and done anything in the real world? So for example, if a guy has like been going out and like egging homeless people or like lighting their shit on fire and is also talking about murdering homeless people, well, that's probably a guy who's going to do something, right? Because he's actively going out in the real world and taking steps.

He's prepping himself. And I think this kind of work, when somebody's written a whole novel about their murder fantasies, obviously that's not a thing you can arrest or convict on, but like, nor should it be. But that is somebody who is doing more than bullshitting online. That's somebody who has a fixation that they clearly can't get over and those do sometimes lead to violence. And so, yeah, I think I think it's really valid to look at this as not just a couple of incidents that are troubling, but as evidence of a troubling trend.

Yeah. All right. Well, that does it for us today. Yeah. All right. Please do not earn your place in heaven by sending a traitor to hell early. It does not work out very well. No, earn your place in heaven.

I don't actually have a joke to finish this episode with. Don't don't commit murder. Bye. John 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 the second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon and Time, is back for another round. We have more insightful conversations between myself, Paul Muldoon and Paul McCartney about his life and career. We had a big bear of a land, it's called Maladins, with our loathe and I was coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I miss her. I said, what? So I drew that one. This season we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs. Yesterday, Band on the Run, Hey Jude, and McCartney's favourite song in his entire catalogue,

Here, There and Everywhere. Listen to season two of McCartney, A Life in his entire catalogue, Here, There, and Everywhere. Listen to season 2 of McCartney, A Life in Lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Grace. Justice. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Oh, welcome back to Podcast Man, Sad Bad People, the podcast about bad people that make the podcast man sad. I'm the podcast man, Robert Evans, and my co-host today is our friend, Garrison Davis. Garrison, how are you doing?

Good. I thought it was one of my better intros. That was unfortunately quite good for a topic about its absolutely deranged shit. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously this is part two of our series on Justin Mone, the author of our first politically motivated video. Author first. Because he just is a first author.

Better known for his other work. Yeah. I think people should know that when you make that joke, as you did the other week on Behind the Bastards 2, you are referring to a mathematics paper that cites the unabombers. Other published mathematics theories is like better known for his other work, Mailing Bombs to People. Oh, pretty funny. Yeah. And like the unabomber, Justin Moan is deeply accomplished accomplished as an all he's written more books than I have

Well, I Yes, that is true. I'm not sure if you want to be writing the types of books that Justin is but yeah No, but but he did write them and you get credit for that. Sure. Sure. So this was as you stated last episode published in 2020 and I Need to start with the cover of this thing because it's it's something else. We see it's not a good cover. No, it is taken. He appears to have taken it or someone else took it from of him very close up at a rest stop. And this is relevant because rest stops play a critical, critical role in some of his beliefs

about the world and some of his theories about things that have happened to us. Yes, rest stops are happening places for Justin Moan. Okay. He is looking behind him. He's like slightly disheveled. He's got like his shirt open weirdly down like a button further than most people. Yeah, I'm getting some like gangstalking vibes here. Yeah, it's very much a game.

And we'll explain gangstocking in a second. But the pictures him, he's like looking behind his shoulder. There's like two big lights behind him in the distance in this photo, clearly taken at a rest stop. And then there are like cartoon text bubbles over his shoulder next to the lights that say, get his picture. Hey, there he is. And then like cartoon action bubbles that say snap, snap,

that I think are supposed to represent people taking photos. They'll take you pictures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This, as soon as I saw this, I had the same reaction you had, which is like, oh, this is some gangstalking shit. And if you're not aware of gangstalking,

gangstalking is kind of an ER web 2.0 conspiratorial belief system. I don't know if the conspiracy theory is even really the right way to frame it. Gangs talking is people who have, I think these are generally people with schizophrenia and one of the things that you can experience with schizophrenia is both this kind of overwhelming sense of paranoia and also the stereotypical hearing voices, right? And some people become convinced that they are being followed. You know, this is something that has happened probably as long as it has

existed that they are being like tracked that they are people they're listening in on their thoughts, you hear variations of it. With the internet and digital communities, a chunk of people experiencing this started forming communities online. And I don't know the exact, I don't know if anyone has sort of like sketched out how this happened in time, but the belief they ended up at is that certain people are what are called targeted individuals within the community. And those people are being stalked at all times

by large numbers of generally government spies. Now, when I say government spies, they are not envisioning like a James Bond type operator. They believe these are the regular people in the street around them, like people in their neighborhood, their neighbors are all spies and are all stalking them all the time. And you can watch hours of videos. These people will often film six, eight hours of their life at a stretch.

And you can see them just like angrily shouting at their window at like some dude walking past their house or whatever like a car be like see that blue car just passed three times and that wouldn't happen if this wasn't like that. And it's so one of the things that like we one of the reasons that gangstalking is kind of interesting and valuable to study if you're interested in like how we got to our present moment of like reality collapse in the United States is that this is an example of kind of interesting and valuable to study if you're interested in how we got to our present moment of reality collapse in the United States is that this is an example of feelings that have been associated with certain mental illnesses. I'm not going to say it's just schizophrenia,

but certain mental illnesses bring about severe bouts of paranoia and a feeling that you are being stalked, right, or people are listening in on your thoughts or whatever, because of the way digital communities work, a number of people experiencing this were able to not just get together and share their experiences, but convince each other that they were not the result of anomalous and are in fact the result of a conspiracy and they have now built a mythos around that conspiracy. And it has led to killings before. People have killed folks they believed were stalking them over gangstalking delusions. It's been happening for years.

So, yeah, that was the first thing that occurred to me when I saw this cover. And you can find other art that Moan put out where it's like real pictures of him and then fake art of like ghostly figures stalking him with cameras and stuff. Yeah, a few months before he released his book, he put out a song on Spotify called The Justin's Stockers, which is about being gangstocked. Yeah. Yeah. And again, gangstocking is not a political conspiracy theory. Other than that, you have to believe the government's evil.

But don't we all, right? So it's very accessible. There's certain gangstocking people who think they're like the the Freemasons are stalking me or like the Illuminati is talking. It's like random stuff like that. Antifa, you know? Sure, yeah. Shit gets grafted on as a result of politics, but it did not inherently start as something

that was like a political thing. Just kind of out of this very exfilesy because the 90s is really when this starts to form, I think late 90s. And it's spread like wildfire on like early internet culture. People weren't able to like convince each other or like have have their already like like a small delusion be strengthened and grown stronger by other people in this community, all kind of encouraging each other.

And I think it's relevant to that it's kind of a web 2.0, early web 2.0 phenomenon, because I don't think you get the same thing. And I'm not going to say that what you would get would be any healthier, but from the social media, because the way most social media works is everyone's kind of in a big pit together. And this was really the result of a kind of community that was closed to outsiders that wasn't really being watched by people who weren't drawn to it, building a culture and people like really, it takes a lot of time for that to happen. Obviously, YouTube is also a big place where this is grown. But I think after it had its roots established, that was a bit of a digression.

But I think it is kind of necessary because this is definitely that is definitely where Justin comes out of, you know, like that is very clear to me. All of this is kind of rooted fundamentally in gangstocking. I think that's like the the foundational keystone belief in what has become his conspiratorial milieu. So into the book itself, the first page after the page that lets us all know Kindle Direct

Publishing is responsible for this thing. Says God. Kindle Direct Publishing. Thanks, Amazon. The best place to find all of the wild extremist books you could otherwise never, never make. They've really done us all a solid. This book is dedicated to those who know who the real enemy is and can still laugh even in the worst situations.

Hope. I don't know what I hope. That describes me. Yeah, that's great. So there are 10 chapters in this thing. They are long chapters. Chapter one is 32 pages. Oh, wow. Chapter two is almost 60 pages.

Jesus. Chapter three is like another 60 pages, like 50 pages for five. Yeah, these are like long, long chapters. And yeah, it's about 450 pages. Wow. So chapter one opens. And I'm just going to read you actually a decent little chunk here. So it starts with like him talking to his parents.

But why leave Buster? You're a hometown hero, Mrs. Moon said. Mrs. Moon in her late 50s paced back and forth on the hardwood floor of the living room. Yeah, Buster, you're popular. You were at the top of your class in high school. You were a star athlete. You could end up mayor of this town someday. Why don't you stay around here where everyone knows you and see what happens? You'll have to start a new elsewhere, Mr. Moon said. And obviously Buster Moon is the actual Justin Moon

we're talking about his parents. When we talk about Mr. Moon, this is his dad who he murdered and beheaded. Just keep that in mind. Mr. Moon in his early 60s sat on a couch in the living room watching television. A black and white episode of the Twilight Zone was on. The sound on the TV was muted. That's the point.

I want to start anew. I want to meet new people or at least not associate with the people I grew up with and went to school with my whole life. They're all going nowhere in town and they'll take me down with them. And we get a little more of that where like he's talking about why he wants, he's not happy here, there's no future for him. What's interesting to me is why he depicts, and we don't know that this is accurate to his experience with his parents, but also I don't necessarily think it is not. What he depicts his parents is saying is he shouldn't do this because it's dangerous.

Leaving home is dangerous. You can't be safe on your own in a new place or in the city, and you will inevitably get murdered or have something horrible happen. He puts these words in his dad's mouth, right? After he like, first his mom tells him like, you're gonna die if you move out. And then he puts this in his dad's mouth.

Yeah, you're going to get kidnapped, addicted to heroin, and sold into a sex trafficking ring. Then five years from now, we'll find pictures of you bound and gagged on some Russian website where you're up for sale. So that's his dad and then his mom adds, why do you think your older siblings stayed within Ohio when they moved out?

It's dangerous out of state without your family. So maybe that's just him putting words in their mouth, but like, I have heard stuff like that from people that is not an uncommon thing to express, especially among conservative families. Cities are dangerous. People are getting human trafficked all the time. It's not safe to be out on your own. And those are some things he talked about in his beheading video. And I know that after he had to move back home from Colorado after losing his job, he did move back in with his parents in Pennsylvania. He does have an older sister that just ran him other things.

I know what his actual personal life and how that could maybe tie in, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then a little bit later, as this argument goes on, there is a note where his mom's like, maybe it would be for the best if we took you to a psychiatrist's buster. You don't seem to be thinking straight. Interesting.

Unclear to me if they did, but I think that does kind of suggest that was a thing his parents suggested often. And then his dad says, yeah, you're talking crazy buster. If someone doesn't mug you when you step out of the car, you'll end up running out of money and being homeless. And then you'll get put in prison for panhandling, trespassing or stealing food and ending up making prison love to bubba the butcher.

And that has the feeling of something that he heard before, that's pretty specific. Like that sounds like something somebody was told and is kind of repeating here. You know, I don't know that, but that is very much the feel it has. And there's a couple other bits where it's like, I could see this being something you heard

from your very conservative family, or else wise, picked up in the media. Cause there's another point where his dad is like, you'll be all alone and they know exactly how much money you have. It's all digital. You can't beat the system. You can't beat dot, dot,

dot, and then in italics, the machine. Mrs. Moon shot a white-eyed glance at Mr. Moon. Huh? What do you mean, Buster said? Mr. Moon shook his head. Oh, nothing. You'll have to find out for yourself. And then at this point, a cow screams. That's how he describes the cow as screaming. And then their dog bark barks and they all run outside It's clear that something has gone wrong and mr. Moon says oh hell not again those cult fucking commie bastards He grabs a shotgun and there they find the Exanguinated and skinned corpse of the family cow outside in the yard Because they're at like a farm in Ohio. Yeah, yeah, they're at like a family farm

Because they're at like a farm in Ohio, I believe. Yeah, they're at like a family farm. So he thinks at first that this hide is a carpet. Then Buster realized the carpet had black and white spots like a cow and was hide material. The cow had been completely exsanguinated. As the livestock industry would call an animal drained of blood, the cow's eyes were missing. The bones were strewn in a perfect circle around the cow hide in an almost ritualistic or ceremonial manner, with a skull at the top of the circle will 12 would be on a clock about the same time it was then there was

not one drop of blood near the scene. Huh. Now, when I brought up X files earlier, that's kind of why because that's X files stuff. That's a very X files opening. Yeah. The Twilight Zone was playing on the TV in the room in the scene. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is all obviously by the way, if you listen to a lot of or read a lot of like, particularly kind of turn of the last century UFO stuff, a lot of it focuses on animals being exsanguinated, right? Cows killed in these like weird fashions. Now he is talking about a ritual murder. And also the timing doesn't work out because they hear the cow run outside and it's been completely skinned. But I think what's important is like, you get an idea of like, this didn't come into his mind unbidden, right? The term exsanguinated as referred to a cow's corpse did not come into his mind unbidden. That's evidence of like the kind of media diet he had, right? Sure. I mean, he was born in 1991. That's like, that's prime growing up with the X-Files. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I'm not that much older than him.

And that was definitely a big part of my childhood. Yeah. But you know what could be a big part of your childhood retroactively? The products that can make your life better. That's right. That's right. Garrison, time is a flat circle.

And that means that if you buy products that advertise on our show today, anything bad that happened in your childhood can be healed. So, here's the ad. Ah, we're back and we're reading from the second Messiah, King of Earth, by our friend Justin Mone. So, it opened with what I would describe probably as, it's probably some kind of satanic ritual, I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah, we get a little more about what his dad thinks here,

because the next thing, but his dad starts crying and Buster tries to comfort him. And his dad says, a cow that waits nearly a ton, well, look, the spelling's not perfect. A cow that weighs nearly a ton gets completely drained of blood and its bones and organs are taken out perfectly without one drop of blood being spilled. And it all happens right here, in the middle of this field, in less than an hour, maybe even in just a couple of minutes.

It's the fifth cow this has happened to this season, and Betsy was my best cow. We just won't be able to make a profit this year. Oh my gosh. He starts to cry and then he says, don't tell your mother I told you this, but you're right to leave this place and go far away. There's nothing for you here. And in fact, there's nothing for anyone here. So at this point, Buster's like, hey, don't say that, Dad.

You know, we've still got a farm. It'll be okay. And as Dad says, oh Buster, soon you will learn. If you move out west on your own, there is an evil in this world, which has found its way into this country, into every country. It is an ugly evil. Nearly all is an evil in this world, which has found its way into this country, into every country. It is an ugly evil.

Nearly all the family farms in this state and plenty of other states have seen the same trend in the past 20 years or so. A trend none of us have seen before. Unexplainable tragedies, livestock gets mutilated or disappears, crops get infested with bugs or disease, and then all of a sudden the farm is taking a financial loss.

The farm shrinks and eventually the family goes bankrupt Or their land is bought out by a big corporation more farmers have committed suicide in the past decade than any other profession And I can't blame them Now that ties into some very real and very powerful conspiracy theories That this a lot of this ties into like Bill Gates stuff, you know the idea He has bought up a bunch of farmland and among conspiratorial sex, he has bought all the farmland and China's buying all of it,

or China and Bill Gates are buying it together. And they want to, because they want to control the food supply and take out the ability of Americans to feed themselves. Like this is something he picked up from right wing media. This is not an invention of his for this book. This is probably something he was either raised to believe or came to believe fairly early in life

because of what other people around him were saying. This is common stuff. He has put a twist on it, but this is not coming out of nowhere. So after this, he basically tries to talk his dad into like, hey, can't you call the FBI or the police or surveil them to catch whoever's doing this? And his dad says, other farmers have tried.

They just lose all their money faster. And the police and the FBI have investigated, but how could they stop something like this from happening out of nowhere? I've sold more than half the acres of the Moon Family Farm over the past three years alone and we can still barely stay afloat. There's no fighting it.

It's too secretive. It's too constant. It's too well orchestrated. It's just too evil. But why is this happening? Why is the government letting America's farms get unfairly taken over? Well, as my father once told me, if you want to take over a country, you have to gain control of their food supply. Remember, my father was an immigrant from Germany and he fled the Nazis with your grandmother, who was a Jew to come to America. He used to always say, there are the Germans, there are the Russians, and then there are the Germans from Russia, and they all came to America for the same reason. Land. And this is that is Justin's family history, which is also why some Nazis on Telegram did

not like him. Yeah, he's very much not a Nazi. And at the same time, there's elements of like what he's saying here that like, yeah, the Germans from Russia that moved here, very much John Birch stuff that like a fifth column of communists from Europe have moved here and are trying to change this country. So the conversation ends, he goes to sleep, he wakes up the next morning to like leave his family forever to start a new life out west. And he starts by going out to the farm taking out his pipe and his last bit of marijuana. A few green buds that he he says to himself perfectly calculated.

And then he smokes his last bowl of marijuana which. I'm sure he did regularly and certainly did not help his Justin moan did have a medical marijuana card that he had to give up on January 29th to go Procure the handgun that he would then later use one day later to kill his father Yeah, I guess good that he had to give up his medical marijuana card first. Yeah, that's certainly people say Yeah, yeah, really stopped the problem. So he says goodbye to his parents and he gets on the road, right? They seem he actually does not describe his dad as being very mean in this. He's pretty sympathetic in the book But interesting. Yeah, which is interesting But you know a few years went by between this one and between him killing his father

So why when I brought up earlier that highway rest stops are a major part of this book That's because of what comes next. So he crosses from Ohio into Indiana and he sees a rest area approaching. Mm, got a piss and wouldn't mind a snack, Buster said. He pulls off the highway, he gets into a parking lot and he describes most of the men and women wore overalls, flannel shirts and straw hats,

walking in and out of the building to and from the parking lot. A few people stood off to the sides of the building in parking lot in a grass area. A few men were urinating outside near the trees. An old man was squatting at the tree line taking a shit. I've never been to I've been to a lot of rest drops. I've actually not seen that happening at a rest stop. But this is to set up something that's happening at the rest stop,

which he learns about when he goes into the bathroom. And it turns out to be a bad decision because as soon as he stands at the urinal, he hears someone behind him saying, oh yeah, that's real nice. Just look at that. You want to try it? Another voice whispered, Buster eyed with one eyebrow and raised towards the stall on his left. Four legs stood in the stall. And then he hears people snorting drugs and a bit of white powder falls to the floor and a guy falls down and then is like, oh, shit, that's good. How much for an ounce? I think they're selling. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be fentanyl or cocaine or something like that. And then they realize he's listening

to them do cocaine or whatever in the rest stop bathroom. Hold on a sec. I think someone's in here listening to us. The other person whispered, should we kill him? The first person whispered at which point he flees. Okay. Yeah. It's a quick escalation. This is like such a like to take into a humorous degree, but such a like, oh, what, what the Fox news viewing set thinks about like everything outside of their suburbs.

Justin did not grow up in Ohio. He grew up in Pennsylvania. I think his family lived about an hour north of Philadelphia. So he grew up in a very suburban area outside of a big city. And that all kind of graphs on to this. Yeah, it makes sense. Now there's an interesting bit here when he's outside of,

I guess they decided not to chase him out of the bathroom, but he's still walking around the rest stop. we get a little like gangstalking bit here. People stared at Buster and kept glancing at him and he wondered why he didn't look or dress too differently and he was barely out of Ohio. Then he realized everyone was with someone else. Nobody else was alone except him. And like that's a delusion. That's the kind of delusion that leads to gangstank is number one, there I guarantee you there were other alone people that every rest stop he ever went to. But also like people don't pay attention to that sort of thing. That is a voice in his head telling him to hyper focus on this.

So he gets freaked out by this. He describes himself having a panic attack, right? He describes like having a panic attack about the fact that he's alone out here. Now it seemed as though more people were glancing at him, even talking about him, as if they sensed his feeling of vulnerability emanating from his chest like shark smelling fresh blood. So he finishes eating and he gets back on the highway and he drives for a bit more until he crosses, he passes Indiana and gets into Illinois And then we have another rest stop scene. This is like he spends a lot of time on rest stops.

And this is I'm going to need your occult knowledge here, Garrison. So you can let me know if he gets this stuff right. So is he's like walking through the rest stop area. He sees that like there's a poster on the wall that says this cabin was once an outpost for trading with the Native Americans used during the Civil War to store guns and ammunition. Then he walks to another glass casing on the adjacent wall and he reads the poster inside. Considered haunted by locals after pagan witches lived in the cabin who were later burned at the stake for witchcraft abandoned for over 100 years before being restored as a rest area. short as a rest area. So he, he's, that's to set the scene.

And then he goes like, gets himself some food or something. And as he's looking outside at the surrounding forest, he sees a hundred yards into the forest, there are tiki torches lit. And it's four or one PM in the afternoon. What the fuck do they have torches lit in the forest for? If it's not going to be dark for another two hours,

Buster said. So he walks in and he sees a few individuals dressed like vagabonds dancing slowly in circles around the fire with their arms spread out waving in the air. Buster quietly climbed through some bushes to get a quiet closer look. There were two men and a woman all in dirty torn robes dancing within a circle of lit candles and tiki torches. One male and female danced inside the circle chanting and murmuring words which Buster

couldn't make out. The other male was kneeling on the ground inside the circle, carving up pumpkin, a picture lay in front of him in a bed of flowers. Please, spirits of nature and beyond, accept this pumpkin carving and our sacrifices on this day of Samhain in remembrance of our deceased loved ones. Please ease their passage into the other world." Okay. How's that sounding so far, Garrison? Is that real? Is this supposed to be around Halloween? Is this supposed to be...

It's unclear, but based on the fact that it day ends at 6 p.m. probably yes. Oh, yeah. OK. Well, yeah, I mean, dancing around a fire is certainly sure, certainly fire. Rest stop. Sure. All right. Well, let's get to the let's get to them finishing the ritual. So next, a woman screams the magic words. I Don't know looked it up couldn't find anything that does not sound familiar to me either But yeah, yeah So she screams and then another female emerged from behind a tree with a donkey by a leash in one hand and a stick carrying a Decorated horses skull on the other the horse's skull had red ornaments in its eye sockets

and a sheet draping over its head. She danced into the center of the circle of candles with the others. The man who was kneeling picked up a long, curved sword from the ground and stood up. Let the sacrifice of this ass please the spirits of nature. The man yelled. Yeah.

Well, you know, this is probably a little bit more intense than your average Wiccan sawan ritual, but sure. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. An ass... That's a unique sacrifice story. Usually it's like a cow or a chicken or something, but I appreciate that. So he raises the sword above his head. No buster yelled. He haw the donkey whine. The donkey got scared and jerked away just as the man swung the sword. Sleush! Bloods spurted upwards and outwards.

Ah! The female yelled. The female fell to her knees and the donkey ran away from the forest. Her severed arm still her holding onto the leash. The female raised her bleeding stump. You idiot! You cut off my arm! She said. Well the donkey got scared, the man said. Now what are we going to eat? The woman said. The three others glanced at each other, then looked at the woman on the ground with one arm.

No, don't even think about it, she said. The man holding the sword raised high above his head again. Ah, she screamed. Ah, Buster screamed. The woman held her remaining arm up just as the man swung down the sword. The sword cut her hand in half from top to bottom between the middle finger and ring finger, slicing all the way down her forearm. Now, that's not where I expected this passage to go, but it gets better because they all realize busters there at this point and give up on their plans to eat this woman who they have now hacked

at twice, and instead she and all of them start charging Buster. And he describes it as, they all turned directly towards Buster and began running towards him, even the woman with one arm, which was divided in half like a lobster claw ran towards Buster, her arm flapping in halves as she sprinted towards him. That is some interesting writing. Yeah, that's that. That's I didn't call that coming. I love that. Yeah, she got lobster-ified. Yeah, that's a very eventful saw when. Yeah. I don't think that actually happened to Buster. I don't think that I don't believe on Justin's move from Pennsylvania to Colorado. He stumbled across a pagan ritual where they dismembered

a woman and gave her a lobster claw. I do suspect that maybe he saw someone walking their dog near a rest stop and filled in the rest. That is certainly possible. Speaking of dog shit, you know what's not dog shit? These ads? Uh-huh, that's right. These ads. Aren't we sponsored by like the state of Ohio or ads? Uh-huh. That's right. These ads.

Aren't we sponsored by like the state of Ohio or something? Oh yeah. Then in that case, we probably should just move on. We are back and having a really good time learning some more about our old friend Justin Moan. So Garrison, at this point, he flees from the Wiccanists and their de-handed friend and he gets back on the road again. Doesn't seem to call the police over this, But I guess they probably were in on it too. What could the police have done about people dismembering a woman directly

next to a crowded highway rest stop? So he decides he gets to St. Louis. He needs to find a place to eat. He finds a cheap Italian restaurant and he parallel parked at the curb. Buster walked inside the restaurant and to the counter. A small man stood beside the counter with a thick Italian accent. I make a good pie for you like you find on the east coast, yeah? No west coast!

And then he uses a slur for gay people stuff. Okay? No. Good. Thank you, Buster said. You ain't a slur, are you? The man said. No, sir, Buster said. You ain't a slur, are you? The man said. No, sir, Buster said.

You sure you don't want some pineapples on this with no red sauce, all white, and a cheesy stuffed crust, huh? And then he calls him a slur again. No, just very stereotypical, but also bigoted Italian chef character here. You know, I actually ate at an Italian restaurant in St. Louis last year. Yeah. I was not accosted for being gay, but that's good. That's good. Did your guy have a comedic Italian accent? No, I think I was being served by a lesbian actually.

Okay, well, that's probably why. That's probably why. Yeah. So Buster tells him that he just wants a plain pizza and the pizza man is willing to serve him, but he does use the slur again. At this point, two men barged into the restaurant wearing long black P-coats, black pants and shoes and black fedoras. I already paid my dues. Base, base. Here we go. This is this is what I was signing up for. This is rest stops are fine. This is what I wanted.

Yeah. I already paid my dues, boys. The man behind the counter said the man behind the counter spun pizza dough in one hand. Look, Tony, un paso con pizza. One man said the other man in the fedora laughs. The old fool thinks we're here to collect dues. So what the hell do you want a fucking pizza for? And he just keeps using that.

He can't. he cannot mention pizza That dropping a slur. I am I'll tell you what I'm not sympathetic towards this Italian man's plight Both men in fedoras laughed hysterically and turned towards Buster They lifted their P codes and revealed Thompson submachine guns Those are so much more expensive than modern crime guns. Why are they spending $3300? In St. Louis? Yeah.

Why? Oh, this is... Oh, it's good stuff. Like, in Chicago, maybe. In St. Louis, come on. Sure, sure. Of course, Chicago. Come on. St. Louis. Let's so real here. The men never explain why they're killing this guy.

But as Buster's eyes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no They each empty 100 bullets towards the man behind the counter. Jesus Christ. Then they turn to leaf. You saw nothing kid, nothing. Got it, the man said. I didn't see shit, Buster said. Oh my God. So the bigoted pizza man has been shot full of holes and honestly, I'm fine. Buster just leaves and goes back to his car. He finds a d- What a fascinating thing to include in the story.

Like, I... It's... He's making a lot of choices here. I wish I could ask him about some of his process. Like, why did the pizza man have to be a stereotypically Italian? Why did the gangsters have to carry a gun that has been outdated for nearly a hundred years? Anyway, he goes to a cheap Asian restaurant next. And again, parallel parks at the curve. He really wants us to know that he can parallel park. This is something he's made a point of several times.

Interesting. Oh, no, Garrison, I'm not excited to try to read you this next line. A small man stood behind the counter with a thick Chinese accent. No, no, no, no. You can do Italian. I am not going to try this. What's important, you know, is that he says the same thing as the Italian man. I make it racistly, but he says,

I'll make you good food like you get on the East Coast, no West Coast. And then he also uses the same slur. And then he asks several more times about it and repeatedly calls him a slur Okay, I don't understand why they are both the same person but the same two men in long black p-coats fedoras come in and Then they shoot this guy repeatedly. Huh? Yeah. Yeah, this that's actually more interesting that this whole instinct gets repeated just with slightly different like cultural backing. It is it is compelling, right? And again, the guys are like you saw nothing, but then they're like, oh, hey, aren't you the same kid from the other restaurant?

Where we just machine gunned a man and Buster showing admirable bravery here says yeah, what's going on? I'm just trying to find something to eat. And the mafia man very nicely explains, Oi kid, every restaurant in St. Louis is owned by the same gang. That's why they all say the same script when you walk in. But we're taking over their racket and we're taking over the restaurant business in St. Louis. So that's why both the Chinese man and the Italian man said the same things as they have a script. Oh, wow.

Huh. Yeah, that's compelling. That is compelling. Yeah. So Buster stops at a gas station to get a premade tuna sandwich, which to be honest, seems like the decision to make after going through a show of these. Yeah. So he winds up driving again through the countryside. He approaches Columbia in between St. Louis and Kansas City. And he asks a guy if he can use a public restroom.

Yes, sir, just take this here key, witches, so you can get in the door. The man held a key up towards Buster. Huh, huh, huh, huh. The man laughed. Odd up towards Buster. Ha ha ha, the man laughed. Odd way to write laughter. Not how laughter sounds. Buster walked up to the man and took the key. Thanks, Buster said. Well say, mister, you're not from around here,

is ya, I don't recognize you, the man said. No, I'm just passing through, Buster said. You making your way to Kansas City? Yes, sir. Well you better be careful. There are bandits on that bridge that goes over the Missouri River sometimes at night. Now, that's not true, but also I did run into bandits on my

okay, okay, on my road trip through, uh, through Kansas. Okay, okay. It's been a couple of years for me. Yeah. St. Louis. Yeah. No, it was, it was intense. So Buster's like, that's great.

I'm going to use the bathroom anyway. And the man says, I'll be watching you. And so Buster says, OK, maybe I won't go. And then the man yells, I was going to suck your dick. So I think we've gotten a good picture of what's going on with this guy. I'm not really sure why he it's interesting. Like even the absurdity does have kind of its roots and you can see some of these,

this like everybody is programmed like saying a same script or whatever. Like that's why these interactions seem weird to me is that like this isn't real people talking to me. These are people reading from a script. It's all, you can kind of tie it all back to some of the delusional thinking. I want to cities are these like lawless zones? Yes. Yes, there's bandits on the road and people just getting machine gunned in their, in their restaurants. Yeah. So this book

ends one of the last chapters about this is the FBI and the CIA electrocuting buster and asking him questions. They're making him, specifically they want him to tell them their sins, right? Because he's the second Messiah. Because he's the second Messiah. So one of them asked, and they seem to know everything about his entire life, right? Which is again, kind of ties back to the delusions. So one of them's like, what about the time you were drunk

and threw a punch at a guy who wasn't looking during a group fight in college? Not really sure what a group fight in college is, but we can move right past that. What about all the cigarettes you've smoked, and acid you've taken, and mushrooms, and ecstasy, and all the other drugs you did? I only did them a couple of times.

It's not like I'm an addict. Still serious damage to the body and putting your life at risk. CIA is very concerned about his overall health. Yeah, the CIA famously, on the edge about using psychedelics. Yeah, so this goes on for a while, and then the CIA agent leaves, The CIA famously on the edge about using second allies. Yeah. So this goes on for a while and then the CIA agent leaves and FBI agents put him into a black SUV and drive him to Andrew's Air Force Base.

The FBI agents wheeled Buster onto an Air Force One and Air Force One jet. Also Air Force is one word and got on board with him. Then the jet took off. By the time the jet landed in Moscow, Russia, Buster no longer shook constantly, but every once in a while he had a full body jerk. The FBI agents wheeled him off the plane. Two Russian FSB agents waited on the bottom of the ramp. The FBI agents nodded to the FSB agents who nodded back. Then the FBI agents got back on board the jet.

The FSB agents wheeled Buster to a black rectangular SUV and put him inside. Then they drove to the Kremlin. Buster sat in a wheelchair in the Kremlin. He was motionless, stared off into the distance at nothing, and as jaw hung, suddenly his entire body jerked, then he went back to being still. The president of Russia walked up to Buster. King Moon, there is an uprising for more food in several parts of Southeast Asia! The president of Russia said.

Gah-ha! Buster chuckled. But do you recommend Zigg Global Communist Confederation due to your majesty? The President of Russia said. G'oh, hehehe, Buster chuckled. Buster stared off into the distance, so. Genocide, the President of Russia said. Yeah, hehehe, I love that. Buster smiled.

The President of Russia turned around to face representatives from countries all over the world. Kills them all, orders directly from the king of Earth, the president of Russia said. Fighters, jets and bombers from the United Global Force of China, Russia, America and Europe flew over Southeast Asia dropping bombs on every country, destroying every main city, burning forests and villages, and killing hundreds of millions of people. And that's how the book ends. So I am fascinated about this middle chunk. Yeah, yeah, so am I.

Where he goes to Colorado and uncovers a satanic conspiracy involving the Democratic Party. But that end bit kind of got me thinking about, there was all of these like, all these like artistic things he was doing that was almost preparing himself to do an act of violence against a family member. But as much as that was the future he was building for himself, you also mentioned that he was being transported around by the FBI. And like, I wonder how much that was a part of the future he was building for himself. Like, now that he's arrested at a National Guard base, he's now being taken from place to place by government officials. He's constantly now surrounded

by feds. Like he has, he has built the reality for himself that now he is actually always watched by the government because he's been arrested for doing these things. Like he has created this fantasy world that he can now live in forever. Yeah. Whether he goes to trial, he's probably gonna... If his defense is smart, they'll do some sort of insanity defense. He'll be sent to a psychiatric place. Like he is now always going to be watched. He is being moved around by government agents. Like he is living the thing that he was writing about.

And I find that that that second half of like him being caught, him being caught also a compelling thing that he was preparing himself for. Yeah, and he expresses repeatedly variations of like, because the FBI and the CIA are constantly in this book and also like constantly just like people coming into his life around him. Which again, is part of this delusion, but also you can see how a lot of these common right wing tropes about like everything is infiltrated by the feds, January 6th with the federal op and stuff, how this is also gonna feed into the delusions of a guy like this, right?

Like he's very much, this is very much ripped from the headlines and that you can see how things he was encountering and like conspiracy culture and popular media grafted themselves onto the delusions that he had. Yeah. You can also see I turned randomly to a page I haven't gotten to yet in this book, 260. And the first line I saw in the middle of the page is, let's fucking kill them and then eat them a midget in a wheelchair held holding an RPG.

So there's quite a lot in this book. All right. Well, well then. I don't know what the line of good taste and is like, I think it's, I don't think we'll keep going back to this. I felt justified and like, well, I want to know what's in this thing once it seems kind of bad to keep doing that with this guy who murdered people's book. But man, there's a this thing once. It seems kind of bad to keep doing that with this guy who murdered people's book, but man, there's a lot in here. No, and there is a use in understanding

how these people think and unpacking the sorts of large swaths of content that people that are doing these mass acts of violence or very targeted acts of violence have been leaving online. Cause it allows you to actually get a better look at overarching patterns. Specifically his songs for me are very, very evident of that. Like they're very similar to a lot of stuff.

You were reading the book. Like he has the song about him being tracked on his phone is called They Came for Justin Mone. They found him all alone. They tracked tracked on his phone is called They Came For Justin Mone. Yeah. They found him all alone. They tracked him on his phone. He talks about the student loans that he couldn't pay off. The payments made him groan. Money controlled his life.

They wanted him to die. Just like all of just all this stuff. Yeah. They said he was God. They came for Justin Mone. Yeah. He said he was God. They came for Justin Mone. Yeah. Anyway, well, it's it's it's it's not to like laugh at him necessarily. No, it's it's about actually understanding this.

And yes, this is all fucked up. So a part of a coping mechanism is kind of laughing at some of the more ridiculous elements, but it is it is an attempt to actually understand this growing trend in American culture. Yeah. Because you can't just like... And this is the thing that the right often wants to do with this is like, well, this is just a mental illness problem. And like, no, it's not.

Like you have to understand... It's American culture. Yeah. What's going into people's heads, even if they also have, you know, are mentally ill, what's going into their heads, what they believe about the world influences how they act on those delusions and the nature of those delusions. This is what happens to your brain when it entirely becomes corrupted by the culture of war.

Like this is now taken over his entire method of thinking. This is the only way you can see the world. And there's people who are paid to get people to be like this. Like this is this is people's whole job is to get more and more people to only think in these terms. And this is one of the results of that of that effort by elements of the American right. Yeah. Anyway, it's bad. That'll be a good book to explain to a young child in 50 years. Why? Why is this on your bookshelf? Well, let me tell you about a man named Justin Mote.

If I ever have a kid, Garrison, this will be the first book they read. No, that's not that's probably a bad idea. Yeah. Well, let's let's be done. Let's let's go away. Goodbye. John Stuart 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 the second term we can all get behind.

Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon, and Time, is back for another round. We have more insightful conversations between myself, Paul Muldoon, and Paul McCartney about his life and career. We had a big bearer of the land, it was called Mal Evans, with our logo. And he was coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I miss her. I said, what? So I should pass her. This season we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs.

Yesterday, Band on the Run, Hey Jude, and McCartney's favorite song in his entire catalogue, Here, There, and Everywhere. Listen to season two of McCartney, A Life in Lyrics, on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daily Podcast bringing listeners the latest breaking crime and justice news every day is a mission. Another chance to help crime victims and bring criminals to justice. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here, your favorite daily podcast about the steady dissolution of society as we know it. I'm your guest host, Molly Conger, joined once again by our friend Garrison.

Hello. Happy to look at the abyss once again. Yeah, try not to ruin your day too bad today. So Garrison, today I want to talk to you about some terrible guys that I know you're already pretty familiar with, the Goiom Defense League. The GDL. The GDL. They're sort of a loose network of neo-Nazi trolls best known for their anti-Semitic

fliers, headed up by a failed rapper named John Minodeo, who calls himself Handsome Truth. Handsome Truth. Handsome Truth. Handsome Truth. So there's this sort of core cast of characters in Minodeo's orbit that shows up in person, mostly in Florida and Georgia, but the group's real strength is online. They have this decentralized network

of thousands of followers nationwide who are encouraged to download and print the anti-Semitic flyers and distribute them in their area. It's not a new model, right? Like the Klan has been doing this for decades and National Alliance was big into this in the early aughts. But that's what they do, right? They're in the news every few weeks, you know, your local news, wherever it is that you live, you know, somebody left these racist flyers on everyone's front lawn. And I know you and I have talked about doing an episode in the future about the sort of counterproductive responses to these

in-person demonstrations, the firing and the banner drops. There's a new law in Florida and a proposed law in Georgia that are sort of allegedly aimed at countering anti-Semitism, but are going to have some sort of counterproductive knock-on effects. And I hope we can get to that at a later date. But today, I want to talk to you about a little project some GDL members have going on the side called the City Council Death Squad. Are they going around and killing city council members? Because that is kind of what it sounds like. It does sound like that's kind of that's the energy here. They haven't done that yet. Yes.

But Garrison, how would you feel if I told you a former juggalo calling himself Scotty Big Balls is trying to... No. Trying to destroy the thing I love most, which is civic engagement in municipal government? I have such complicated feelings on juggalos. Oh, God. No, I want to be clear. I'm not slandering the juggalo community here, right?

Like Mr. Big Balls got his Hatchet Man tattoo covered up with a big snake holding a gun a couple of years ago. So he's no longer, God, there's a cool name for their community. He's no longer a part of the Juggalo community. I don't think the Juggalos would abide this kind of behavior. Generally not. They are kind of semi-cool.

No, I've heard chicken hunting. I don't think they abide. No, I just heard chicken hunting. I don't I don't think they abide. No, I just by happenstance, you know, the ICP is not my cup of tea. No, no shade. It's not my cup of tea. But I did see them perform at the Lincoln Memorial a couple of years ago, and it was the most polite crowd I've ever experienced at a live music event. So hats off to the juggalos. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now, if you're a city council meeting

enthusiast like myself, you may already be aware of the rash of racist zoom bombings disrupting meetings around the country over the last nine months or so. Remote participation in meetings became nearly ubiquitous during the pandemic and the opportunity to make a public comment without having to devote an entire evening to sitting in an uncomfortable chair at city hall has made civic engagement more accessible for all kinds of people, right? Not just because of contagion, but remote participation benefits everybody, like parents who are managing a bedtime routine by the time the public hearing opens at 8 p.m. or people who don't work at 9 to 5 or people without reliable transportation. So it's been a boon for local democracy, but it's also created a unique opportunity for people who want to ruin that.

So last year, Scotty Bigbaughles, Mr. Bigbaughles, the online pseudonym for a self-described Nazi named Harley Ray Patero Jr. started a group he calls the City Council Death Squad. The group organizes online to find government meetings, mainly city and county council meetings all over the country, that allow public comment via Zoom. Then he coordinates those members to sign up for speaking slots, crowding out actual community members who are trying to speak on, you know, like actual matters of local concern. And when the members of the group get through, the calls follow a couple of predictable paths. Sometimes the caller just starts screaming slurs, right? It's just as soon as they connect, it's just

screaming the n word over and over and over and over again until someone can hit the button to cut it off. Sometimes they do what they call the slow roll where they start off trying to sound like a real caller. You know, they'll say like, you know, I have concerns about zoning in my neighborhood or I, you know or I think we should pay the police more. And then it veers abruptly into some kind of bizarre anti-submitted conspiracy theory about crime or 9-11, or advocating for public lynchings. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where they, it's like, spend a few minutes eating up the city council time and then just curtail it with some unhinged ramble. Right. And then yell the slurs. Yeah, yes, yes. and then just curtail it with some unhinged ramble. Right, and then yell the slurs. Yeah, yes, yes. Another favorite of the group is a call format where they pretend to be gay or Jewish themselves and then ascribe to themselves various traits

associated with bigoted stereotypes of the group. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. John Minodeo has participated a few times himself and he loves this one. He pretends to be a gay Jewish person named Tammy and then says some pretty outrageous things. Sure, I bet.

The callers give themselves inside joke names like Rudy Hess or Sadie N. Word, which when you say it out loud sounds like, say the N. Word. So it's like a Seymour Butts kind of thing. It's like Bart calling most tavern, except it's Nazis. Wow, very, very clever on the cutting edge of comedy. Yeah. Or they'll name themselves after a mass shooter like Dylan Roof or Anders Bravik.

Or, you know, sometimes it's like a deep cut, like a more obscure killer whose name might not arouse suspicion right off the bat. Like Jim Adkisson a man who shot eight people at a Unitarian Church in Knoxville in 2008 During a children's production of the musical Annie because he was angry about the church's liberal teachings So, you know, that's good jokes Yeah, this is all like kind of like old like old school kind of Chan humor

It's it's not even that popular anymore because it's kind of just out of vogue. You're kind of you you're kind of outing yourself as like a bit of like a not an actual boomer but like it's become a boomer-fied this type of humor. It's not really a this sort of thing that younger more hip neo-nazis are into. They have moved on. They have other horizons of bad jokes. So ruining everybody's good time by shouting a racial slur is hardly an innovation, but this particular operation has a discernible origin point. In May of 2023, Patero, that's Mr. Big Balls, if you've forgotten already, and three friends showed up in person to a Sacramento City Council meeting to show their support for Ryan Massano. If you're from the Sacramento area, you probably know him.

Massano, a former proud boy with several failed runs for office under his belt, already had a long history of being disruptive in public meetings. In 2018, he was removed from chambers during a Vallejo City Council meeting after saying the city was, quote, infested with homosexuals and refusing to be called to order by the mayor. The meeting of the same body in 2022, he was picked up and carried out after refusing to end his remarks at the end of his time. So in 2023, he's attending every meeting of the Sacramento City Council.

This has been going on for almost two months. He shows up, he gets up, he makes his homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic remarks. But he's keeping with the rules of the meeting and they're letting him make his statements. But people aren't happy about it. So activists are starting to show up to the meetings. People are showing up with banners, people are booing him. People are showing up to counter this. And so he puts out a call for backup. So at this point, the Patero shows up with two masked associates and a man named Jeffrey Perrine, who like Massano was a proud boy with a failed school board run to his name. At that time in 2023, Perrine had recently been arrested outside the home of a youth pastor

after publicly calling for others to join him in going to the pastor's home during a school board meeting that had to be adjourned because of Perrine's disruptive behavior. So we're seeing a pattern emerging here, right? Like, at this point, we've got two proud boys who keep getting kicked out of meetings and failing to run for school board. These are people who are seeing the value in kicking up some kind of disturbance at a meeting. Yeah.

And this was like during a time where school board meeting disruptions were very popular. There was a lot of far-right influencers trying to convince their followers to run for school boards. This was kind of a very particular cultural moment in like 2022-2023. So they show up to this meeting to support Masano, and it doesn't go well. One of the guys throws a Hitler salute, people react angrily, there's a bit of a scuffle, it devolves, and the council ends up going into recess and clearing the chambers entirely. Everybody has to leave. You just can't be in here, too much yelling, everybody's mad.

Nobody gets arrested, but everybody has to leave. And the council ended up continuing the meeting without the public's presence. So I think there was a hearing that night on an ordinance involving homelessness that people had showed up to speak on and they weren't allowed to do that now. Council continues their business, but nobody can be there. And Paterra's alliance with Massano didn't last. They actually butted heads almost immediately over optics. Massano preferred to make his long-winded speeches that, at least in his mind, were more palatable

to the listener and might more effectively spread his message and potentially red pill the listeners. He was actually angry that Patero's troll forward tactic of just shouting slurs and obscenities was actually resulting in avenues for public comment being closed off. In September of 2023, he wrote, either out of ignorance or deliberate sabotage, the GDL has no idea what they're doing. So he was mad, right? Because he was doing this thing where every week he was showing up and making his comment.

And because of the different strategy of disruption, that was getting harder for him. Masano, for his part, continues his one-man battle against the Sacramento City Council. He's still doing that. Okay. He's a lone wolf out there in Sacramento. But Patero saw the potential in trolling on a larger scale.

Okay. Almost immediately he branched out. Over the next few months, it developed into an organized trolling machine, targeting meetings across the country, covering at least 17 states from Alaska to Maine, Idaho, Wyoming, Georgia, Virginia, they're all over the place, often hitting the same city repeatedly and in some cases showing up in person with flyers or banners either before or after the zoom bombing. After targeting meetings in the city of Walnut Creek, California, the group hung a racist banner in the area. Counselor Kevin Wilk commented on the

banner in the press and the following weekk commented on the banner in the press, and the following week, the meeting was hit again, with members specifically addressing Wilk, the locality's first Jewish city councillor, asking him how he liked it. In a later stream, Patero laughed about that personalised follow-up, saying, that pissed him off, so I had to rub it in. After targeting the city of Wooster, Massachusetts, the group didn't just flyer. They mailed homophobic materials to the homes of several counselors, including Tu Nguyen, the state's first openly non-binary elected official.

And it isn't even just regular city council meetings. Some of the targeted meetings are incredibly boring governmental bodies like the Morristown, New Jersey Board of Zoning Appeals. Oh, wow. When Patero posted a clip of their racist calls into that meeting, a group member posted the board chairs home address and the replies. They've also and this doesn't even fit the pattern. I think they just got the bug, but they've posted several

completion videos of the group disrupting a meetings. All right. that's interesting. I think I just got into the idea of making praying phone calls so they target addiction support groups often geared towards members of the LGBTQ community. Okay, all right. Yeah. Just doing like homophobic attacks on people who are trying to get sober. Huh. They're just like finding any, any meeting they can and just spamming this thing. I don't know that they have other hobbies. Yes.

This seems like a lot of time between keeping up on zoning board meetings and whatever local AA call in there is. It seems, seems to be a bit, uh, childish and time consuming. Right. I mean, this is, it takes a lot of time of time and Patero is pretty clear about that. You know, he runs these online spaces where he's organizing, he's, you know, making lists of meetings that they should check out. He's complaining about how, you know, sometimes you have to wait for hours

while they're just doing like regular government stuff. You have to just like wait for it to be your turn to yell the n word. It's time consuming. Do you know what isn't time consuming? Ha! Ha! I'm spending your hard earned cash on the products and services that support this show.

That's right. We make it fast, easy and reliable by listening to these products and services. The End Okay, we are back talking about the Goiom Defense League, the GDL. So we were just discussing how they were spending a lot of time disrupting a lot of meetings with their little call-in campaign. Right, and it's tempting to dismiss this behavior as always just trolling, right?

They're just trolls. Sure, it's like..., this is so juvenile. How bad can it be? It's just people calling in. Right. But this has real world consequences. And they know that they revel in the reactions to their behavior. They're fully aware of and celebrate the destruction that it leaves in its wake. When the city of Portland suspended virtual public comment, commenters in the group called it a big effing win. When there's other media coverage of cities who have limited or even ended public comment altogether, the headlines are posted triumphantly in the group, often captured only with lol. Comments like the calls will continue until the Jews leave and shut it down for the win

and never let them regroup or rest, no comfort given. Literary replies to posts about city after city, seeding ground to this harassment. So it's not just causing little inconveniences. It is actually shutting down city's ability to hold a public comment and for the public to actually speak on issues that are affecting them and their city. Right. So there have been meetings that, you know, when this occurs, the meeting itself, that particular meeting just ends. Everyone just leaves because they can't continue. Or you know, the meeting does continue, but they stop taking public comment or they change

their policies and procedures to limit public comment moving forward. So this is having real effects that are, you know, living on in these cities even after they've moved on. Group members suggest using burner phones and fake number generators to avoid being caught or blocked. Patero has written online that he's been, quote, banned on multiple devices, but I have some tactics to prevent them from stopping me. Patero noted on a recent stream that the ADL's estimate of over 130 disruptions is short-changing them, insisting they've done at least three times that many,

sometimes hitting dozens of meetings per week. And they're not just doing it, right? It's not just the act of doing it that is the thrill to them. They then cut the clips and then post them online for everyone to enjoy. They're cutting promos and making highlight reels of their favorite moments.

There are compilations grouped by genre of hate, right? There's videos combining all the best moments of homophobia, all the best moments of anti-seminatism. There are these promo videos set to that sort of ugly, electronic, fast wave music that they all love so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The promo videos have titles like, this is our meeting now, or we're jacking your shit.

So these are being shared on like, like Bichu and Odyssey and Telegram, I'm guessing? Yeah, they're, you know, GDL, they're on every platform that's open to people like them, right? Okay. And following that GDL model, right, they're posting these videos and getting money. They're accepting donations to continue doing this. And then on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, they targeted a planning commission

in Crescent City, California, entitled the video CCDS goes Kristallnacht on Crescent City. Right, so it's just a joke, right? They're not really doing Kristallnacht, but they're using the language of this sort of genocidal violence. And it's like monetized. They're like making money off of it.

They are making those donos as they say it. After a recent ADL article about the operation, Patero posted, fuck the ADL. We'll give those caselers something to Kovetch about in 2024. And his wife Haley reposted that adding, you think he's playing? He lives for this.

They don't work. They really do live for this. I mean, yeah, it does sound like this is like the most important thing happening in their life, which is one quite sad that also shows that they have a lot of time to dedicate to pulling off stuff like this. Time that they should be dedicating to parenting, honestly. Well, I don't know if you want them around their kids. Honestly, the more time they spend away from their children is probably better. God damn. During his new bombing in October, an official in Sausalito, California, voiced support for

just cutting off the calls over objections from other members of council that this could get them sued, saying he would, quote, take the lawsuit if these people can even get organized enough to sue us. And while the group has made no progress on actually filing any legal action there or anywhere else, they haven't forgotten it. Just last week, the group expressed an interest in seeking some kind of retribution for that comment saying they may need a little visit. And the group is raising money to start traveling to meetings in person.

A fundraiser on the platform of choice for right-wing extremists, GiveSendGo, has already raised $1,000 in donations to fund travel and lodging for the group members to travel to city council meetings for in-person disruptions. On their weekly live streams, viewers can donate directly in the stream. On the stream, Patero thanks viewers for donations, often in the amount of $14.88. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Oh yeah, they live for the memes. Reminding them that every donation goes directly

towards funding their IRL activism, getting them offline and into real life, traveling around the country to engage in racial harassment in person. He also says the donations fund a side project called Postcard Waffen. The Nazi name- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, And this is the nickname they've given to the work of mailing hateful materials directly

to the homes of the elected officials who preside over the meetings they disrupt. This seems like a sort of targeted harassment kind of campaign. Sure, targeted harassment, intimidation. There's some with the other like mentions, you know, it's like veiled threats. These types of neo-Nazis are not averse to actually doing violence on people. So, yeah, there's like an implicit threat implied with this sort of rhetoric and activity. And because of the decentralized nature of the GDL, and I think this is something we can talk about in a later episode about kind of what they're up to these days, is they don't have communication with or control over all of the people who are consuming this

content. So they may not plan to follow up with these people in a manner that would be criminal, but they're encouraging people to think that that's an option and that sure has ramifications. Sure. So this isn't just annoying prank calls. It's an organized effort to ruin local democracy, to make meetings unproductive and unbearable, to intimidate and humiliate local government employees and elected officials, to make your city council chambers an intimidating and uncomfortable place for you, closing off that avenue for you to address and engage with your local government, and to take away options for actually engaging with local government by forcing cities to limit public comment. And we can't seed that ground to that. Oh, man, that is, I mean, I know there's just been so many instances with city council

meetings and various other kind of these big public forums, especially school bar meetings, where like they are, they are like discussing extremely important stuff around like trans people and forming policies that that that impact people. And I know a lot of people do do actually end up going out to these and talking about their experiences and why proposed laws or ordinances would be so harmful. And just removing that option, whether or not you believe in the electoral process TM, removing that option from people to actually speak on their own experiences does have like real, real consequences. Even if you're not a big believer in it being a meaningful political action to engage with your local government, I think we can all agree that it's not okay for Nazis to make

it unsafe for anyone to do that. Yeah. You know who won't seed ground to the Nazis trying to take over your local school board? The products and services that support this podcast? I hope so. It depends. Capitalism is quite strong, but we'll. So this is this is kind of depressing. Molly, what? What is to be done? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So unfortunately, a lot of the obvious solutions here are bad ones, right? The response that a lot of cities have had is that, well, they're just going

to eliminate remote public comment altogether. You just can't participate remotely anymore. Which hurts people who are disabled, hurts people who have tough things with scheduling, parents, people who work at certain hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like most people can't spend six hours sitting at City Hall on a Monday night. Most people can. And so having remote participation was really, it opened up local democracy to people with all kinds of life situations, right?

And that's like, that's what happened here in my own city of Charlottesville. CCDS targeted us last October and in response, the mayor eliminated remote participation in all meetings. We didn't get to revisit that, that's just how it works now. So they've moved on, but now my entire city of over 50,000 people lives with the consequences of that action. We're left with a less accessible local democracy. They'd rather prevent anyone from calling in than have to deal with deciding whether they can do anything about it when someone abuses that process. And there's some really basic steps that cities can take right off the bat, without

even overthinking it or getting into the legal complications of the First Amendment. Cities like Linwood, Washington responded to their CCDS soon bombing by adding a few basic layers of security to their virtual meetings, like requiring commenters to sign up the day before. So this group is organized in a private telegram chat. And so like one person gets into a meeting and just drops the link into the chat. And so everyone just clicks that link. But if you make it so everyone has to have a unique sign in link that they signed up for with a real email address the day prior, that makes a little bit harder to coordinate a dog pile. Sure.

You know, it isn't hard to make a fake or temporary email address to sign up to get the link. But if sometimes just adding one extra step is discouraging enough that they'll pick somebody else this week. But this behavior is escalating, right? And making it a little bit harder to get into the Zoom isn't going to solve the problem. It's going to keep happening, and you can only make a public meeting so secure without actually locking out the public. Elected officials are, understandably,

concerned about the legal ramifications of dealing with these kinds of calls. With some exceptions, they can't prevent someone from speaking based only on the content of the speech. I actually found a 2006 letter, I guess in 2006, the LA city council asked their city attorney, I don't, I need to do a little research on what was going on in 2006 in LA,

but the LA city council asked the city attorney, can we make a rule that people can't say racial slurs in here? Which seems like an okay rule, Like, I don't know. The answer was no. Legally, you can't limit speech based on its content, right? Because these are public forums put on by the government. I mean, it's what's called a designated public forum, but we don't... They can't limit speech based on its content, right? Okay. But what they can do is have rules of decorum.

Yeah. And their city attorney pulled some language directly from a Ninth Circuit Court opinion that's in California, so it's a federal court of appeals that covers that part of California, white versus city of Norwalk. And that decision upheld the city ordinance that authorized the legislative body to remove individuals who uttered, quote, personal, impertinent, slanderous, or profane remarks if the remarks disrupted, disturbed, or otherwise impeded the conduct of the meeting. So it's not just that your remarks were nasty, it's that your behavior was disruptive. The way

that these remarks were delivered was interfering with the conduct of the meeting. So the meeting is disrupted because counsel is prevented from accomplishing its business in a reasonably efficient manner. The court further wrote, indeed, such conduct may interfere with the rights of other speakers. And that's what's happening here, right? That these disruptions are not only not your right. You don't have a right to disrupt the meeting.

But that behavior also fundamentally infringes on everyone else's rights to have the meeting. It keeps the meeting from being conducted and it's interfering with the conduct of the government's business. So if they open a public forum, anyone can speak in the public forum and you can't cut them off because of the content of their speech. But that doesn't mean there's no legal way to put limits on public comment. If the rule is content-neutral and serves a legitimate government interest, the government can impose some restrictions on your speech, right?

Like requiring a permit for a parade is a limit on speech or saying you can't yell in a courtroom is a limit on your speech, but it's not a violation of your First Amendment rights to say you can't disrupt a trial. But more importantly, and the risk of getting too boring, right? Like a meeting is not a sidewalk. There is some, this is not just any public place where you're speaking, this is a meeting where business is being conducted. There's legitimate and compelling government interest in the ability to conduct

the meeting. And so the rules that they can make in this space can vary state by state. Some states do or don't allow you to limit speakers to residents or they can or can't limit the topics that are germane. So it's going to vary a little bit, but the courts have repeatedly upheld, not just in the Norwalk case, the ability of a council to adopt a content neutral rule and use that rule to cut off or remove speakers who are disruptive. And honestly, I have to say, I think any city attorney worth his salt knows this. This is day one stuff. If your whole job, well, not your whole job, but your job on Monday nights, whenever the meeting is, is to provide legal advice to a city council on how they're conducting their business, you know this, because disruptive behavior during a meeting isn't

some brand new phenomenon. But it's kind of remarkable. What can I watch? Like a hundred clips of this happening, right? And over and over and over again, you see these city attorneys saying, like, Oh, we're powerless here. We're powerless here. We don't want to get sued. There's nothing we can do. And that's not true. And they know that. Yeah. I mean, I've seen people get escorted out of chambers for being disruptive in city council meetings before. Like I think it happens relatively frequently. It's not like an uncommon, brand new occurrence.

All right. I mean, I've seen that discretion applied appropriately and fascistically, right? Like absolutely. It happens, but over and over and over again, in these situations, you see these city attorneys, these city councils saying like, I guess we just have to let them do it. A commenter in one of the Sacramento meetings from last summer actually pointed out that, you know, she was saying to her city council, you had no hesitation removing black members of the public from this room when they were angry that your cops murdered Stefan Clark. So why are you so

nervous about infringing on the free speech rights of literal Nazis, like someone who's just in here screaming the N word? Why is that worthy of more breathing room? And something, you know, as a resident of the city of Charlottesville, who watches our local government pretty carefully, something we found over and over again here is that if fear of litigation is your starting point for making decisions on how to govern, you're going to make cowardly, dangerous, stupid decisions every time.

And you're probably going to get sued anyway. So make the choice to protect people. Get good legal advice. Sure, consult with your city attorney, consult the case law. Don't be reckless. But if you're faced with the opportunity to make a decision that protects people, a decision that serves the public good, a decision that aligns with the values you claim to hold, but might result in someone filing a lawsuit against you that they're not going to win

anyway, don't err on the side of shielding yourself from nuisance litigation at the expense of the public. Don't don't just look at us in shrug. Your hands are not tied here. And if you're not comfortable making that kind of decision, get off the dais. I mean, I'm not a city attorney, but that would be my advice, right? And so again, I think the bottom line here is that we can't seed this ground. The end result here can't be, well, local government just isn't a place where we can safely and meaningfully engage with elected officials on the issues that matter, matter. That can't be the answer here. Don't wait until this is happening where you live to react to this. It could happen here. It is happening in a lot of places. If you're inclined to do so, show up, engage, speak your mind on local issues. Don't wait for your city hall to become a battle

ground to show up to counter-right wing influence. don't just react to reactionaries. Stake out that ground now. That's our space, right? Make it clear that people are engaged and that they insist on their right to engage so that your city council can't say, well, people aren't really making public comments. Anyway, we just won't have it. And let me make sure that they know that you will not accept the death of local democracy at the hands of some weasley paradox of tolerance bullshit about letting Nazis dominate our spaces. I know there's been other people who've been talking about and pointing out these instances of GDL, Zoom bombing and shutting down these meetings. But there certainly has been less

discussion of this being a deliberate tactic that GDL is doing specifically to actually shut down the democratic process. It has been so focused on just the trolling and the spreading of Semitic rhetoric, which are big problems. But I think there's been a little bit less of a focus on actually looking at this as a deliberate tactic being employed to remove people's ability to engage democratically in the city or school board or wherever they live. And I think viewing it as a deliberate tactic like that, like you've been talking about, both gets like a better look at how these neo-Nazis are trying to organize, but it's a more holistic approach towards why this is happening, and it can allow you to look at this as more of a tactical decision, less of just random trolling slurs, XD, which it can be reduced to, which

is at the very least an incomplete way of looking at this phenomenon, if not just kind of wholly inaccurate. I mean, I don't want to give them too much credit, right? Like, they didn't have a brainstorming session where they were thinking about ways to contribute to the death of democracy. I think this is just sort of a phenomenon that occurred as a result of their actions that they then saw and appreciated, right? So it's not that they don't understand it, but I don't think they intended it from the outset. But at this point, it's hard to deny that that is something they're doing on purpose. And it's just been an interesting trend with the GDL specifically, especially considering the legislation trying to crack down on political firing, which we might talk about at a later date.

But yeah, it's been interesting watching the GDLs as political force that, yes, is annoying and bad in the rhetoric they spread, but also they've had this interesting ability to just either affect legislation or shut down people's ability to engage with politics in their local area in a few notable ways. So... It's important to sort of sit for a minute before you react to people like this, right?

Like you were talking about that legislation that's going to end up infringing on a lot of people's political speech, right? Like you can't just react to the troll. You have to sort of think about the context in which this is occurring and make a reasonable choice about how to react so you don't end up giving them what they want, basically. Right? Because they they love the attention. They love the attention. Every time they do this, it ends up on the local news. People are talking about it.

People are repeating their message and you don't need to give them that. Well, thank you, Molly, for for putting this together. This has been very enlightening, if slightly upsetting, but that is kind of the entire bit we do here. I suppose. Yeah, that's sort of the show, huh? Where can people find your work online? You can find me on Twitter.

I will never call it ex. Socialist dog mom. And in keeping with the spirit of this episode, most of what I use my Twitter account for is live tweeting my local city government meetings. I've been doing that for God seven years now. So this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart. I love engaging with municipal government.

Fantastic. Yeah, I've attended more city council meetings the last year than I have ever before in my life. And it has certainly been an experience. A lot of wacky, wacky and unusual things happen in city council meetings. Thank you, Garrison, so much for joining me today. And hopefully we can bring the listeners something even worse someday soon. Yeah, yeah.

Stay tuned for more breaking Gollum Defense League news. Fucking dark. John Stuart is back in the host chair at the Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on the Daily Show. 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 the second term we can all get behind. Listen to the Daily Show, Ears Edition on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon and Time is

back for another round. We have more insightful conversations between myself, Paul Muldoon and Paul McCartney about his life and career. We had a big bear of a man, who was called Mal Evans, who was our loadie. And he was coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I miss her then. I said, what? So I drew pepper. This season we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs. Yesterday, Band on the Run, Hey Jude, and McCartney's favorite song in his entire catalogue,

here, there, and everywhere. Listen to season two of McCartney, A Life in Lyrics, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Nancy Grace here, host of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, this is It Could Happen Here and I'm your guest host, Matt Leib. I'd say most of you probably know me from Robert and Sophie's podcast Behind the Bastards, which, you know, I've become kind of notorious for the time that I used a Jar Jar Binks soundboard during a series about Dr. Mangala.

Yeah, I don't have that soundboard with me today, sorry. Fewer of you might know me from Having the world's only Sopranos slash the Wire rewatch podcast, Pod Yourself a Gun. But the fewest of you might know me from my brand new podcast, Bad Hasbara, the world's most moral podcast in which me and some of my other anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jewish friends and our other friends and our other guests, guests who you know, you've maybe heard like Shireen here. We have casual conversations about Israeli propaganda and Israeli propagandists.

For some of you, this might be your first time hearing the word Hezbollah. And that's why the homies at Cool Zone Media invited me here today. So this episode is all about Hezbollah, aka Israel's public relations and propaganda machine. And I am thrilled to be joined by my friend and one-time cat sitter, Shireen Eunice. Hi, Shireen. Hi, Matt. What an intro. Yeah, I'm excited to learn more about this actually. Also excited

to know how you properly say hasbara because I don't know how to say it right. Hasbara. Yeah, it's hasbara. Yeah, that's I mean listen. It's the sound and the. Yeah, the ra, you know, with the throat. Hasbara. You heard it here first. end with the throat has, bah, ah. You heard it here first. Yes, you heard it here first. I'm not the greatest at doing, you know,

Israeli accents or whatnot. So throughout this podcast, I'm probably gonna be butchering a lot of Hebrew words. And, you know, just, you're just gonna have to deal with it. Yeah, and that's totally fine. That's just part of the game. I've just been announced every name I've ever said

on this show, so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you should hear me trying to pronounce Arabic names. Like, I can't do it. I can help if that ever happens. I attempt. Yes, that would, if there's any of that happen in this episode, please.

But before we get into talking about Has-Borah, I want to start with a quick story. Shereen, are you familiar with the birthright trip? Yes, I am. It was one of those things where I was very excited to one day do the birthright trip. And I didn't really even question, I knew like, you know, it was a little bit, you know, they were trying to whine and dine me to go there and, you know, maybe move or whatnot. But I didn't know how much they wanted me to move there

until I went. So for me, my birthright trip is kind of why I'm here today talking about Hezbara. It's why I started a friggin podcast about it. It's, it's when I first started clocking, uh, Israeli propaganda. So I went in, uh, January 2012. If you don't know birthright, it's pretty much a two week, all expenses paid trip for

young Jews from all over the world to go to the Holy Land, reconnect with their Jewish roots, float in the Dead Sea. It is a, it is a propaganda tour of a apartheid state. And you know, I'm not going to get too much into the history of birthright, you know, and all the like far right wing funders like Sheldon Adelson and stuff. There's like not enough time for that. But I'm mentioning it because it was the first time I saw how Hasbara was more than just propaganda and how in my opinion that more closely resembles like indoctrination. And the organizers at birthright did like a masterful job of this. Like I went on a trip of American Jews who were like me.

Like they were like secular from mixed or like intermarried families, non-Barmitzfoud. It was all like other mat-lib type Jews, like ethnic Jews, right? And I realized this, I think it was like day two of the trip, one of the Israeli tour guides literally gave us a bar mitzvah, like all at the same time, we had a group bar mitzvah. Yeah. And they did it by saying like, okay, you're now bar mitzvah. It just means you're a man now. Everyone here is a man now choose an Israeli name. And that, which was like for me, I remember feeling a little, you know, I was like, wait, I, there's supposed to be a theme party and fucking like, a DJ.

My dad's supposed to, yeah, DJ, my dad's going to buy me a car or lease me like a Honda. Like I thought it was more than that. Uh, at the very least I thought I would have to like memorize a Torah portion, but no, you just go to Israel and, uh, you know, a tour guide does it for you. So like it really works though. Like you really, you, you go there being like, you know, I'm a European Jew and you leave there and you're like, I invented falafel. So the Hasbara highlight of the trip for me was this like mega, like birthright mega event.

It was in Jerusalem and a huge arena in which they had like Israeli speakers, donors, speakers, donors, rappers. And there was like a, there were rappers at one point who just started rapping about things that they claim Israel invented, like iPhone computer chips and like the cherry tomato, which was, you know, like you, and by the way, a not insubstantial amount of the trip was spent telling us about how Israel invented the cherry tomato. Like we went to places like farms and stuff where they showed us this drip irrigation.

Multiple people were just like, man, we invented the cherry tomato here. Can you believe it? And I was like, this seems like a lot of effort for just this one particular thing, which may or may not be true. But, um, but yeah, so, uh, the headliner of the mega event of that night, the cherry tomato on top, if you will, No, was a speech by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu. Straight up, the Prime Minister of Israel was the headline speaker of this birthright event and an arena filled with like 20,000 teens and like early 20-somethings, which

was kind of like amazing like, you know Listen, here's the thing. I knew Benjamin Netanyahu. I like I knew enough about Israeli politics to know that like he was a Fucking right winger and bad, but like I have to admit even I you know as a 26 year old who kind of was starting to get like woke on Palestine, you know so to speak like even I was like kind of like well This is I'm a little charmed a little honored to see the Prime Minister here He took time out of his busy schedule of doing crimes probably to address us And you know, I actually found the speech of that night.

I actually have some clips from it that I wanna play. That is incredible, that's great. So yeah, he was like casual, he was off the cuff. They wrote a speech for me, I'm not gonna read it. Like, he even did a little bit of crowd work. Anyone here named Rachel? So that right there is what we in the Jewish community call Rachel profiling.

That's when you just are in front of a group of Jews and you ask who's named Rachel. Shout out to Rachel Blumenthal for telling me that joke in college. It was it was like a crash course in Hezbar. Like he told us we were from Israel at one point. You all come from great countries, great countries. But you all come from here. All of you, that's your birthright.

He was telling us that like, you know, once again, it was everything they invented phone, you know, the cell phone ships, blah, blah, blah. He was telling us to make aliyah to Israel, which means to, you know, move to return to come back. You know, essentially what he was vying for was like, move to Israel and start a family. It's very like sex based, like the way it works. The big thing I took away was him telling us that he wanted us to go back home

and tell people the truth about Israel. But the most important battle that we have to fight is the battle for the truth and All of you can become ambassadors for the truth and ambassadors for Israel and of course, you know he then Proceeded to tell us what the truth about Israel was go back to respective countries and Tell the truth about Israel the only way to fight allies who tell the truth about Israel. The only way to fight allies is to tell the truth. Tell them about a country where people are free, free to initiate, free to work, free to speak.

It's a country where you can criticize the Prime Minister, although he never makes mistakes. This is a country in which Arabs have full rights, something they've been denied in all the vast lands around us. And a woman in this country can sit anywhere she wants. That's our position. This is a free country. So him going up there telling me that what he wants from me is to go back home and be an ambassador for Israel and tell the truth about Israel. It was the first time I realized that he was giving me a job to do. And this is a job that I think a lot of Jewish people who may be listening to this podcast

can relate to. The job of telling the truth about Israel and the job of, you know, stopping the slander that is out there about Israel in the media and in on the internet and press and all that stuff. And it was the first time I realized that like, oh, part of the Hezbollah isn't just, you know, some government thing. It's like my job. My job is to, is to tell the truth. And he said something in that clip, the only way to fight allies with the truth.

And so I am going to follow his advice. That's what I'm going to do, Shireen. I'm going to tell people the truth about Israel. And I think, I think it's time to do it. So let's get into it. Let's talk about the truth. Let's get into talking about Hezbollah. Uh, what is it?

What is it? And so loosely, Hezbollah. What is it? What is it? And so loosely, Hezbollah is a modern Hebrew word derived from the word lasbier, meaning to explain or explanation. I say loosely because it's kind of a made-up word. So you know, a lot of words in modern Hebrew are sort of made-up words. Remember, Hebrew is like an ancient liturgical language, and modern Hebrew was created by like Jewish linguist nerds who wanted to revive the language to be a spoken one.

And that's how you got modern Hebrew, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with reviving a dead language, but because of that, a lot of the words in modern Hebrew are kind of inventions. So according to Mosaic magazine, Hezbara is strictly a 20th century ism. You won't find it in Eliezer Ben Yehuda's monumental complete dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew, whose second volume in which He Hasbara appears only as the first word of Hasbara Panim was published in 1902. So it's not something that you see in kind of like the original beginnings of you know the creation of modern Hebrew. Like colloquially,

Hasbara like refers to like media, PR, branding, mud slinging. It's kind of a sort of catch all term for general propaganda used to create a narrative based on Israeli government talking points meant for a foreign, usually American, or just generally Western audience. People who deal in Hezbara are called Hezbarists or Hezbaristas, which is fun.

That's true? Hasbarista? Yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, Hasbarista, I think, gives it a little bit more flair. You know, kind of imagine someone kind of like making you coffee, but instead of coffee, they make you lies. A lie tae? Nope, I'm not going to do that.

Sorry. A lie tae. I like it. No. I wish I never was born. Okay. Oh, well, so there's all sorts of like, has bars. Like some of them, uh, have like official positions within the Israeli government, such as the head of the IDF spokespersons unit, Daniel Higari, who you might remember as the guy, uh, from that video taken at the, you know,

the children's hospital, you know, in Gaza. And he's like pointing at what he thought was a list of his Israeli hostages, but was like literally just a calendar, didn't have any names. It was just, he was pointing at days of the week thinking they were names, because that's what a calendar has. And also, it's so fucking weird that they can't read Arabic. Like you're in the Middle East. You are the spokesperson. I think something interesting about how Hebrew was revived as well is that a lot of words were taken from Arabic.

A lot of words are very similar to Arabic. So it's like even more funny that they would, they can't even read the language that they kind of took a lot of words from. But I'm saying that like, yeah, in Israel, it's almost like the appropriation was just part of the process of the cleansing, you know, just like stealing something, saying it's ours, and then not even being able to identify an Arabic word that you yourself say. Um, but so, uh, yeah. So there's him, then there's like, uh, everyone, if you've been on Twitter, you've seen a lot of Elon Levy who, uh, he's, um, his official title is the official Israeli government spokesperson. And that's through, uh, the, basically the office of the prime minister. He's a British guy.

We like, he raises his eyebrows. It's like the meme, you know, like minister. He's a British guy. We like he raises his eyebrows. It's like the meme, you know, like he goes like home. That's what he's famous for. Then there's a lot of these like non governmental like Israeli civil society, his bar organizations like stand with us or like a pack the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Anti-Defamation League, Christians United for Israel, the Israel On Campus Coalition. I mean, there are tons of them, tons of them. And then of course, there's people who are just in it for the love of the game, like celebrities, artists, you know, actors, you know, who make like, Israel public advocacy part of their thing. It's a fascinating world filled with ghouls and goblins. So the word Hezbara itself, interestingly,

is Hezbara. So early Zionists had no problem calling their PR campaigns and like their branding for Jewish state and Palestine propaganda. They would say, we got to do propaganda because in the early 20th century, the term was generally considered to be neutral. Like people said, they were doing propaganda when they were doing propaganda. Once the word became a pejorative, they created the word hasbara, which is a nicer sounding word with more neutral connotations. And although it's now used as a pejorative by critics of Israel and me and stuff, the word is still used to this day in Israel. It is still a fairly neutral sounding word. There are Hezbara workshops sponsored by Israel.

They have Hezbara Fellowships. That's the name of the fellowship. Like you can get merch that says, has bar a fellowship on it. Well, and the reason is because it doesn't translate. The word isn't translated to propaganda. It just means to explain, which is, you know, seems innocent enough. Yeah, it's not about pro doing propaganda. It's not about they don't call themselves liars.

They're not saying I'm going to lie. They say they're merely just explaining. I'm going to lie, they say they're merely just explaining. And I found this speech from the Middle East policy council that goes into depth about what Hezbar is beyond just like propaganda. Quote, Hezbar links information warfare to the strategic efforts of the state to bolster the unity of the home front, ensure the support of allies, disrupt efforts to organize hostile coalitions, determine the way issues are defined by the media, the intelligentsia, the social

networks, establish parameters of politically correct discourse, delegitimize both critics and their arguments, and shape the common understanding and interpretation of the results of international negotiations. So behind this term is a large, well-funded information warfare apparatus dedicated to shaping Israeli discourse in the media and the government and academic institutions everywhere. And they use all of the tools in their toolbox to silence criticism of Israel and what they can't silence, they soften. Sometimes it's through coordinated letter writing campaigns, sometimes it's harassment, sometimes it's doxing, you know, people have been doxed.

So before I continue, I want to address that uncomfortable feeling you had when I talked about, uh, like Israel and the media, I want to say that is, I, that is not to say that Israel or the Israel lobby or Zionists quote, control the media. All right. So they do not. That's why Hasbara exists. You know, that's why the Israel lobby exists.

If they controlled the media, they wouldn't have groups like Camera, for example, constantly day in and day out harassing the New York Times and CNN and PBS to get them to talk about Israel correctly. So it's important when people hear these criticisms of Israel that they don't try to see them as like otherizing Israel or like, you know, a lot of people they get uncomfortable because a lot of these things will match old anti-semitic tropes, but it's important to remember that these

Lobbying groups exist in Israel. They exist in the gun lobby, in the big oil lobby. This is not unique to Israel. The unique thing about it is how willing the American public is and the West, in general, is to letting themselves be lied to. That's why I'm interested in it. But let's talk about camera real quick, because this is a recent thing that happened. Some news happened recently about the New York Times and their connection to camera. This is from a recent article in The Intercept. The Committee for Accuracy and Middle East

Reporting and Analysis or CAMRA was founded in 1982 in response to what it claims was anti-Israel bias in the Washington Post reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Since its inception, CAMRA has successfully lobbied for hundreds of corrections in major media outlets seeking to streamline a pro-Israel line in news reports and editorials of a smear journalist whose work it disagrees with and launch boycott campaigns against news organizations, it believes are not responding with enough deference to its requests.

So the way this group operates is that they go through any and every article about Israel, looking for sentences, looking for terms, definitions, anything they disagree with and lobby for corrections to be issued. Camera doesn't do this quietly. They openly brag about it on their website. Like recently, Camera successfully lobbied the New York Times to issue a correction,

removing the word occupation from an article, and they wrote this on their website, quote, the mask slipped for the New York Times reporters, cum Hamas stenographers this week when they absolutely neglected to down Hamas's preferred language before passing off the terror organization's talking points as original reporting. Take notice of the framing of the New York Times and their mask slipping and their reporters as being stenographers for Hamas. This is like quite the accusation given that the New York Times has and continues to have

coverage describe this bias in favor of Israel. Like according to an intercept analysis, it was found that in the first six weeks of the war, New York Times consistently delegitimized Palestinian deaths and cultivated a gross imbalance in coverage to pro-Israeli sources and voices. So the exact opposite of what camera is claiming is the truth here. You know, this is actually a famous Hezbarra tactic. It is the I Am Rubber, You Are Glue tactic. And it's really something to see it in action. Like, I don't know, Shireen, if you've seen how often you've

like read some pro-Israeli voices, you know, Hezbarra's online and heard them say stuff that you're like, I know for a fact the exact opposite of this thing is true. You know what I mean? Yeah. Every, every accusation is a confession. I've, I, it feels like that is true all the time when it comes to the stuff.

And also the intercept article is very good. I'll put it in the description for those one to read the whole thing. I'm glad you mentioned that. Cause I didn't know that much about camera until I read that article. And I was just like, what? Like I knew that that was a thing that was done. Like they would change words.

Recently the New York Times was like a decline of death or life, like they used the word decline to describe. To describe what was happening in Gaza. They decided the article's headline was gonna be like, deaths actually declining in Gaza. Exactly. And like the standard ones are always there, like blast or conflict or whatever it is.

Those are unfortunately so normal now, but to see it all laid out by the intercept is really, I'm really glad I did that article. So it will be in the description and I'm glad you mentioned it. But it does go back to the idea that every accusation is a confession. I think that's something to remember every time you see a headline. It's true and it's something that, you know, it's almost become a cliche online because you've, I've seen it so many times, people saying that. And I think it's important to remember that this is sort of the tactic of Hasbara.

Like what makes Hasbara particularly notable and like often hilarious is that it doesn't merely just spin narratives, but it inverts them to essentially make like an alternate reality. It's not just that Hasbara is information warfare. Hasbara is straight up info wars, like Alex Jones level shit. The same way Alex Jones will run the same like fantastical paranoid thread

to every major news events that happens in order to reinforce his worldview and prove that he's right and everyone else is wrong. You know, like, that's Israel does this, but with like far more money and far greater success. And it kind of makes sense why they're successful at it. Like, Alex Jones, Info Wars shit, like praise on white Christian paranoia that like the blacks are trying to take away our guns so they can make our children trans or whatever. Like total fantasy and insane shit that you have to be like already far right wing to believe. While like Israeli Info Wars praise on a much more

grounded in reality paranoia that of antisemitism.-Semitism is real, it's historical, it's evil, it's pervasive, it's pernicious. Like this kind of paranoia makes sense. And not just for Jews, but like for anyone of conscience, anyone who has empathy, you know, like that they understand anti-Semitism is bad and needs to be fought. And that makes Hezboah very effective. You know,

people want to support Israel because people want to support the Jewish people and they want to fight anti-Semitism. And when the IDF dismantles a children's hospital and says we had to do it to stop Hamas, look, here's a list of hostages. People want to believe them. It's like molder from the X files, like I want to believe, which is the same impulse as Alex Jones' believers, essentially. Like you don't want Sandy Hook to be a possibility. You want it to be a conspiracy to take your guns away. You want those children to be secretly actors pretending to be dead. So like when Israel says we aren't killing children,

we're killing Hamas, people want to believe that. And yeah, it's like- As much as I hate that you compared Fox Mulder to the, like you dragged him into this and I'll get over it, but- I won't forget it. I'm sorry to, you know, to bring him into this conversation, but you know, I'm just saying Mulder, if he wants to believe that

stuff, what else does he want to believe? You just hope, you really hope and pray that he's not going to fall for the Hezbollah, but he might. You never know. You really don't. And that's like, you know, it's, Hezbollah is effective because it gives you something like a nice, legitimate sounding explanation for why Israel needed to do something that you might usually think is bad. Like that's how it's worked for decades. In the same way that Hezbollah serves to explain things

for you to basically take the Israeli government at its word, that's kind of how it works. It gives you a believable explanation and not only sounds like kind of real, but it conforms to your personal beliefs and Yeah, but speaking of personal beliefs If there's one thing Let's see if I can do this if there's one thing I'd love to believe in it's commerce

And so Yes, I mean listen people people have to make money somehow. So it looks like we have some products and services that we have to sell. And yeah, when they sell you these products and services, please believe them when they say how good they are. And we are back. So we were talking about Hezbara and how, you know, the explanations conform to your personal beliefs. The interesting thing about Hezbara is that they have different types of Hezbollah for

a wide range of personal beliefs. It's not one-size-fits-all. It depends on who you are. There's a conservative version and there's a liberal version. Like Israel has been very successful and their ability to brand themselves as both a liberal democracy and a outpost for Western values fighting the Muslim hordes. Usually, these strategies have been pretty separated, right? You can't claim... You can't do them at the same time. It'll sound weird. It's like, Israel is the only

gay-friendly, climate-conscious, feminist democracy, and that's why we got to do genocide. That doesn't sound right. You tell the city-dwelling liberal elites about the gay stuff, you tell the conservative Christians about the Western civilization stuff. That's kind of how it works. The basic conservative Hezbollah doesn't actually interest me all that much because it's, I don't know, they don't have to work that hard at getting conservatives to be okay with killing Muslims. You know, it's like

Muslims, Arabs, you know, they're fully willing to, you don't even have to like couch it in something. No, that's just what happens to us. That's fine. Right. And it's interesting too, because like this idea of, of, you know, being a Western outpost, an outpost for Western values is not like, that is very much falling into the, almost the whiteness thing of Europeans where you kind of like,

cause Jews, like European anti-Semitism wasn't about how Jews had Western values. It was about how Jews represented this other, this, this thing that, you know, they don't, they didn't share values. There were some weird other thing. And, uh, you know, this was not the, uh, the charge of anti-Semitism in Europe and now with like Israeli propaganda towards you know that's aimed towards conservative Westerners they're like no no we're the most Western like we're so Western that we're gonna be the ones who are on the front lines stopping the

evil you know Arab hordes and yeah but it's like the, that's interesting, you know, in some aspects, but it's the liberal stuff, Shireen. Liberal Hezbara is where the lies get so wild. And like that's the stuff that I grew up with, you know? Yeah. No, it really, the pink washing in particular is like, it's just there, they're so egregious It really, like pink washing in particular is like,

it's just they're so egregious in their use of using like the gay struggle for their own agenda. It's really, really gross. Yeah, and it's weird at how effective it is or how effective it has been for so long because it is something that I think it's kind of like the first stop on the has baritory, you know, when you are hearing someone kind of like talking about why we need to stand with Israel, they will start right there with the, you know, the pro gay rights stuff. Yeah. And it's

like, the reason I find it interesting is like, Israel's so effectively been able to like, brand itself as representing and supporting all these positive liberal traits. Well, while a lot of it is just not true. Like for example, liberals are pro LGBT rights, right? You know, they are, they love gays, they love gay rights, and that's a good thing, of course. And yet gay marriage is illegal in Israel. It is illegal. It's also mixed-faith marriages are also illegal in Israel.

They will recognize those marriages, but they will not perform them. You cannot get gay married. You cannot get interfaith married in Israel. If they are performed abroad, then they will recognize them. That's kind of the loophole. Also, by the way, Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza, who marry an Israeli citizen, cannot then get Israeli citizenship through that marriage. You also can't get Israeli citizenship if you marry an Israeli and you are from a, quote,

enemy state. Read Arab, if you want to know what the enemy states are, they mean Arabs. So, you know, I don't know, liberals should hate that. They should look at that and be like, well, I don't like that. You'd think, right? Another example, like liberals love democracy and they hate racism. Yet, believe believe Israel when they say they are a democracy because they'll be like, we have 20% Arab Muslim population,

you know, 2 million and all with the right to vote. Meanwhile, they're like ignoring the 5.3 million Palestinians who are currently living in the West Bank and Gaza under military control by Israel. Like this is a situation was which has explicitly been called apartheid by most major human rights organizations. You got, you know, human rights watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights, and even including human rights orgs in Israel, Yesh Din and Beth Selim, they have all called this an apartheid state. And apartheid, to be clear, is racist. And I'm against it.

Yes. And I think most liberals would say they're against it. Don't you think, Shereen? Like, it helps something? You would hope so. You would hope so. That's kind of like part of the thing with the liberal. You're like, I don't like bad people, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it's once again, it's this thing where we're willing to be like, oh, they say they're a democracy and therefore I believe it. And I think it's, you know, you have to remember that like, Israel's got like a caveat for all of this stuff. It's, it's usually they'll say, you know, their credentials are touted with this, like in the Middle East, the, the most gay friendly in the Middle East

or the only democracy in the Middle East. But like, once again, that kind of only serves to implicitly condemn those enemy states, you know, filled with Arabs as being racist and backwards and homophobic and anti-democratic and therefore unworthy of liberal sympathies. So it's, you know, liberals will look at it and they'll go like, well, I mean, compared to Iraq and, you know, they, of course, forgetting why the Middle East is the way the Middle East is, you know, they will, there's a complete like vacuum, like everything exists in a vacuum when it comes to American imperialism. So you don't, you just want to believe that Arabs are backwards people rather than looking at any kind of like Western imperial, imperial complicity. But also like reinforcing this like racist backwards stereotype also like dehumanizes Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians to such a degree where people can't overlook genocide

now. You know, like it's all part of that. It's all part of that. Yes. They're different. They're not like us. They don't like gay people They don't women stand up or whatever the fuck it is. It's just like it's it really is infuriating because you wonder like

How can this happen? It's because of little stuff like this That's not very little when it's all together and it just reinforces this like barbaric trope and then people just go on their Go about their lives being okay with And then people just go about their lives being okay with genocide because to them these people are human anymore. Right, 100%. You look at this as part of a pattern of the de-legitimization of the Arab being in a way. It's like all of this is a pattern of like what are things we can say about Arabs in order to make them so far from us that you just don't care if they live or die or more so you you're more willing to believe that the people who are like us, the Israelis are the ones telling the truth, that they're, you know, they're the ones who have the empathy. They're the ones who, you know, let women, you know, sit wherever they want, whatever the fuck that

meant from BB's speech. But like, you know, they're more like me. Arabs, I don't know them. And I guess, you know, if they say they're bad, they're bad. You know, it's just part of it. And I think what pisses me off about it is the liberal willingness to believe it. And I think it's like, I don't know, it's fascinating to me because especially right now in the last, you know, four months or so of this brutal incursion into Gaza, it's like so clearly illustrates why people on the left fucking hate liberals. You know, they're just so easy to manipulate if you know the right words, you know?

Like if it were any other group, if it were any other group instead of Jewish nationalists, like if it were Christian nationalists, they'd be like clearly condemning it, clearly. Like liberals have such a facile identity and race essentialism that they either excuse the crimes committed by the Jewish state because Israel asked them to do it, and they want to be like good allies or whatever, or they ignore them because, well, it's not my place to say I'm not Jewish. I feel like

they're just so squishy. It kind of reveals the modern American liberal for what they are, which is like a tiny baby whose self perception is at the root of their ideology, right? And it's just, it's important to remember that Europeans doing atrocities to indigenous populations has always come with the gift wrapping of these savages. Don't share our values. It's always been like that. So when you see an Israeli soldier flying a pride flag in the rubble of a raised Palestinian city, like just remember that's not liberation.

That is regular ass by the book colonialism. Same shit. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. I mean, I still am loving the description of an American liberal as a tiny baby. They are, they're little babies. They're little tiny babies.

They can only hold like one sort of political critique in their mind at once. And if they choose this kind of like identity essentialism, then it's so much easier to just kind of go like, hey, you know, I don't really think it's my place to talk about this right now. It's cowardly.

It's always not fucking convenient. Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's cowardly and like in retrospect, they're probably gonna change their story about what their stance was like, you know what I mean? And it's just, it's really infuri like in retrospect, they're probably gonna change their story about what their stance was like, you know what I mean? And it's just, it's really infuriating. And I think it is important to remember that what you're watching Israel do

and what it has done for the past 75 years, over 75 years is just colonialism. And it was described that way since the beginning, but that was really, thank you for explaining all of that, Matt. Yeah. And you know, there will be more in part two. We'll get down to some of these myths. We'll get down to the way in which as Barra kind of works to invert narratives to a degree that, you know, are almost so shocking that you have trouble believing the historical truth

and are more comfortable believing the ahistorical fiction. But, but Shereen, what do we do now? Plugs or what do I say? Commercial break. That's the end of part one. You did a great job. Thank you. That's, listen, I've never guest hosted a thing here

on Cool Zone Media, but I'm very happy to. And if you like, you know, me, obviously, you know, listen to Badass Barra, the world's most moral podcast. If you like me and my wife, we're going to be at the Sacramento Punchline March 17th at 7pm. That's a Sunday. We're headlining together. I mean, you know, co-headlining. So I'll go up, she'll go up. But it's really good. It's a really good show. We did it in San Francisco.

It was so much fun. Please come out to it. March 17th, that's Sunday, March 17th, Sacramento punchline. Come see Matt Leib, Francesca Fiorintini. Where can people follow you? Just in case you don't know.

They should. If you don't know, at Matt Leib on Twitter, at Matt Leib jokes on Instagram. And yeah, check me out. And I'll, I'll post all the dates and stuff over there and all the podcasts over there too. Awesome. Oh yeah. Great job.

Okay. Goodbye. Bye. John Stuart 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 Stuart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is the second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever

you get your podcasts. One of the best shows of the year, according to Apple, Amazon and Time, is back for another round. We have more insightful conversations between myself, Paul Muldoon and Paul McCartney about his life and career. We had a big bearable end, we had to call Mal Evans, he was on the road and he was coming back on the plane. And he said, will you pass the salt and pepper? And I miss her, then. I said, what? So I just did.

This season, we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs. Yesterday, Band on the Run, Hey Jude, and McCartney's favorite song in his entire catalog, Here, There, and Everywhere. Listen to season 2 of McCartney, A Life in Lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Nancy Grace here, host of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

Every day on Crime Stories, we shine a light on missing people, especially children, seeking justice for victims of violent crime. Crime Stories is the only daily podcast bringing listeners the latest breaking crime and justice news. Every day is a mission, another chance to help crime victims and bring criminals to justice. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the I Heart Radio Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I am your guest host, Matt Leib, back again with Shireen Younes.

What's up, Shireen? Nothing. This is this is this nays. What's up, Shireen? Nothing. This is the sub. Yeah, this is what's up. No, happy to be back. Hopefully you guys listened to part one already of Mets' really cool little series we got going on here. But if you haven't, listen to that first,

and then we're continuing this Hasbara train. This Hasbara journey. Yeah, this Hasbara train stops for no man. Yeah. So this is part two of this series about Hezbara. Once again, Hezbara is basically just means to explain and we're talking about Israeli propaganda and beyond, not just propaganda, but so much more. So we're going to talk a little bit about the myths about Israel that have kind of like gained a foothold in Western public consciousness to a degree that it's like not just a foothold, but it's just kind of things that we commonly think are facts. Um, so if like, if you grew up in Zionism,

which is like, if you don't know, that's a political ideology that birthed the state of Israel. You have probably heard a lot of your teachers, your rabbis, your friends, your family, your Israeli friends, your Israeli family, talking about how it's your responsibility to explain Israel to the people. And growing up, you don't actually know that what you're doing is propaganda.

Like you think you're just, you know, that you know more than most people, because everyone else is getting their information from anti-Semites, you know? You think like you've got the real scoop and that most people are just, you know, born ignorant and biased against Jews. And you don't have to be Jewish to have been exposed to his bar. Chances are that if you grew up in the West, you probably hold several views about Israel that are the result of decades-long PR campaigns. So what I'm going to do now is a lightning round of mythbusting.

This is just like real quick getting into some of the, I don't know, some of the most pervasive things that I think each one could be an entire episode. But, you know, listen, this is your guy's podcast. This isn't my podcast. I can't just take it away from you. So I'm just gonna do a light a lightning round with you. Are you ready, Shireen? Oh, board ready. Let's do it. Okay. Israel is not a land without a people for a people without land. Okay. There were people there. I don't know if you know that Palestinians were there and 750,000 were expelled in 1948. This whole conflict has not been going on for hundreds of years.

It is very, very modern and it has nothing to do with an ancient religious rivalry. So when someone says, oh, they've been killing each other for thousands of years. No, no, not even a little. No, that is not a thing. Israel quote, lives in a tough neighborhood and it must act tough to survive. That is just regular ass racism and Orientalism, the idea that they just, you know, you have to be tough. You know, I mean, listen, a tough neighborhood is very much that is translated for an American, a white American audience. You know what I mean? What is a tough neighborhood?

It's one with a lot of people of color. Here's another one. There are plenty of Arab states. Why can't they just go there? Again, this is a weird racist dehumanizing thing to tell someone whose house you just bulldozed. Like, you know, whenever you see them like doing a big zoom out, where they go like, there's only one Jewish state and there's all these Arab states, you know, it's like, no, no, no, personal, what happened here? Don't, you know, it's like you guy had house army took house Moved him to other area. That is wrong period. You can't just say go to another Arab country. That's That's just racism. Here's another one It's too complicated. No, it is not

switch switch the rolls in your. Use your brain for a second. Switch the roles of Jews and Palestinians in your head, and you'll have an easier time condemning the side that has powerful government and army, whose crimes include genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and religious slash racist settler terrorism. That is not complicated.

If it were the Jews who lived in Gaza getting bombed mercilessly, you would not have a problem saying what was happening was genocide. You just wouldn't. Just do that in your head. All right, here's another one. Zionism is an indigenous rights movement.

No, it's fucking not. It's not. It is a settler indigenous rights movement. No, it's fucking not It's not it is a settler colonialist movement That is something that was made explicitly clear by the creators of modern Zionism They not only talked about like settling and colonizing Palestine, but they referred to the Arab occupants there as the indigenous population They they, they, God, it just pisses me off. And also the indigenous argument is like, wait, I just hate it in general, when people go back and forth about who is indigenous there, because it's so academic.

It's like, it's dehumanizing and it obfuscates the whole thing. Because once again, it is just Palestinians being like, I want to be able to vote. I want to have my house back. I literally have the key to my house. And yes, many of them literally still have the keys to their house. All right? There's so many. There's so many goddamn myths and propaganda that I just, that I started a podcast about

it. That's, that's, that's why. But like much of the stuff that you take for granted as fact is not only a historic, but like wildly so. Like the IDF outnumbered the Arab states, armies during the war 48. That is literally, they say the opposite in the, you know, 1948 story of the creation of Israel. It's like UN created Israel, all the Arab states attacked. That is not actually what happened.

We're not just that all the Arab states attack, but that Israel and the IDF overcame this gigantic horde of Arab armies. The Arab armies that were in this fight are far fewer than had been reported. They say it's like seven. It was more like four and only three of them, only one of them had any sort of modern military capabilities. The rest were not really armies. And also, they outnumbered. the IDF outnumbered these armies. In 1967, here's another one. Israel attacked first in 1967.

It was a preemptive strike, like famously. And yet, once again, the narrative around the 1967, Six-Day War is that Israel minding its own business and then Egypt along with the other. The evil Arabs. Yeah. Evil Arabs attacked the Israeli army struck first. That is a fact that they talk about. And there's it's also very, very much disputed as to whether or not the Egyptian army was going to attack at all. But you know, there's no room for that narrative because it, you know,

fucks up the glorious story of what became the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Another one, Ehud Barak absolutely did not offer the Palestinians estate during Oslo. He did not, nor did he offer 96% of the West Bank. And no, Israel did not invent the fucking cherry tomato. Wait, they did it? No, they did not. There was a Haaretz article about it where they're like, no, we didn't.

Why do we keep saying this? We didn't do this. Oh my God, that's so funny. No, I mean, so many of these talking points are some of the main arguments that Zionists will use to be like, well, they rejected this and this is what happened here. And it's just like, these are all incorrect.

You just should be like regurgitating Hasbara. Right, and it's because that Hasbara has been so widely repeated and so often that it just kind of sinks in. And Houd Barak did not offer them a state in terms of what you would consider the definition of a state to be, you know, and that is autonomy, that is sovereignty. They were not offering them sovereignty. They weren't offering 96% of the land.

They had taken such a large percentage of it. And what they were offering was an even smaller percentage of what they had already taken. And the thing they were offering, again, not a state, not a state, not a sovereign, autonomous state. But, you know, this is things people are willing to believe. And that's just, that's the whole thing. And again, I prefer to say it's the I am rubber, you are glue tactic, but you know, it's the same shit. You know, Hisbara likes to invert the victim and the victimizer. And the reason is simple. They know that the West is much more willing to believe that Jews are the victims and Arabs are oppress simple. They know that the West is much more willing to believe

that Jews are the victims and Arabs are oppressors. You know, it's just, it's playing on Western guilt and complicity in Europe during the Holocaust. And it's playing on kind of liberal sympathies in general. And honestly, it's playing on, well, who do you know if you're in the West? If you're in the West, you know some Jews, maybe. You don't know Arabs. The Arabs you do know are on TV doing bad, you know?

And that is one of the reasons for the effectiveness of it. And in terms of like the inversion of everything, like I think my favorite example is the map. So like Israel will often point to a map of the entire MENA region, like Middle East, North Africa. And they'll highlight all of the Arab countries in green and Israel in blue to show that like, oh Israel just a tiny, it's just a tiny strip

of land. It's a small bean, you know, surrounded by big green Arab monsters that want to kill Israel. Like that Hezbollah map will like often include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in green as well. And it's a way to frame the West Bank and Gaza as not just being like this, you know, particular thing, they will be like, no, these are part of the giant, invading Arab green monster. Because what they're trying to do is show the power imbalance is being completely inverted from the reality here, you know, and anyone, anyone who knows, you know, or anyone who's like, watch the news, knows that it's ridiculously false to claim that Israel is somehow the less powerful agent here, you know, like you don't have to have a

PhD to plainly see the disproportionate power imbalance. Like, there's Israel, a modern, well-armed military, cutting-edge technology, backing and funding of the world's most powerful state, most powerful superpower, the United States. And then there is Hamas. That doesn't make Hamas the good guys or whatever. I'm saying it's just a clear indication of the power imbalance. You know, there is a clear power imbalance. And I think like to what you were saying, the last hundred plus days have made it perfectly clear that for all the talk of like the Arab states supporting Palestinians, like it's clear Israel could literally genocide Palestinians in broad daylight in the Arab states would do nothing

There is no giant Arab green monster that is protecting the Palestinian like the Palestinians only Arab comrades right now are the Houthis in Yemen and has Bulla in Lebanon both of which are non Government militant organizations. They are not like it is not the state of Yemen who is supporting the Palestinians. It's not the state of Lebanon. It is these militant states within states, pretty much. And yeah, so it's like you have to remember when Israel claims we're just a small state the size of New Jersey, in a tough neighborhood, trying to make, you know, the West Bank and Gaza look like the spear's tip of an Arab invasion, you have to remember that's not the case. The truth of it is, is like, you want to talk about how small Israel is? Look how small the Gaza

strip is. And that, you know, alone to like look at that picture, to know they are surrounded, that alone, to look at that picture, to know they are surrounded, and to see that there's no way out. That I think changes the narrative for people, and it's a narrative that the Israelis don't like to show. They don't like to show the West Bank. In terms of how it is cut into cantons that are basically everything is surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military. They took the best agricultural lands for themselves.

You know what I mean? Yes. Like they really, and also I think talking about seeing the Gaza on a map, it's really infuriating to me because I feel like in the last couple of months, more people have seen what Gaza looks like on a map than ever before, and we see how fucking small it is. It's described as being five miles at one point from the sea to the whatever, and it's still not enough for people.

It's to the wall, literally to the wall. But even seeing how minuscule it is, is still not enough for people to be like, oh, 30,000 people dying in this little strip of land, we should think about that. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, no, it is, it is, my point is basically to dispel the idea that like, the idea that like the Hezbollah has been Israel small therefore deserves support and people standing with it because small because small because baby puppy because a little little you know please help and that visual is just such a, it's such a gross lie.

And you know, anything to make the Palestinians, you know, seem bigger than they are is helpful for Israel. And that's why they do it. You know, this is a way to invert the victim and the victimizer. And it's clear as day. Other things that are clear as day, these products and services that we're going to be selling. So stick around.

Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. We'll be're back. Again, people in the West, by and large, prefer the Israeli explanation. They're fine living in this alternate reality. And, you know, people believe it for like a variety of reasons. Some people, because they were raised to believe it. Some people because they just want to believe it. But I think mostly most people in the West just don't really care enough about like Palestinians to like look into it. Like they're, you know, they're just it's one of many news stories to I think a lot of people.

It's easy to put it in a box. And to be honest, you know, like, wouldn't that be nice to be able to compartmentalize? Like it would for me, shit, it would make me way less stressed if I could just not care. And that's not to like call out anyone who doesn't care, because I do think that it is absolutely human and valid to have some things that you just don't have emotional capacity to care about. I think my issue is not whether or not people are like, you know, supporting Palestine on their social media or whatnot. My issue is whether or not they're just going to allow themselves to be manipulated and then end up

defending the indefensible because of it. Like if you're not going to say nothing, don't do Hezbara. That's my feeling about it. But yeah, you know, people want to put it in the box. Beyond that, I think there's also no incentive for a lot of people to believe in it. In fact, to even question who are the victims and the victimizers and the whole Israeli, Palestine, quote unquote, conflict, like it brings up a dark twisted irony that most people don't even want to entertain.

People don't want to think about that stuff. And it also, people worry about whether or not they're going to get in trouble. And that brings me to another part of this speech I found from the Middle East Policy Council about Huzbara. Quote, it also seeks to actively inculcate cannons of political correctness in domestic and foreign media and audiences that will promote self-censorship by them. It strives thereby to decrease the willingness of audiences to consider information linked to politically unacceptable viewpoints, individuals, and groups, and to inhibit the circulation of

adverse information and social networks. It focuses on limiting the receptivity of audiences to information. So, Hezbar is fucking Orwellian. That is, I think, one of the things that interests me about it a lot is how Orwellian it is. You know, it goes beyond mere branding when the Israeli government and pro-Israel institutions so effectively mold the parameters of what is and isn't politically correct, not just in their own country, but in other countries in the West. Think about the self-censorship that you, the listener, do around this issue. Think about the times you wanted to say something, but didn't because you didn't know the exact right way to say it, you know, like how to put it. And like think about the times that you were reading something critical of Israel by someone you trust and agree with. And one sentence or one word or one turn of phrase triggered you into questioning, not just the validity of the thing you were reading,

but the nature of the person who wrote it. Think about your reaction to me saying these things about Israel and about how you felt when Shireen made a lot of these points on some other episode of this podcast. Think about why that changes things for you. And like there was a time where I was also uncomfortable and like I would only feel comfortable hearing criticism and doing criticism of Israel in the presence of other Jews. Like it had to be in a private all Jewish Facebook group Facebook group or in person or through text messages. Like I was so suspicious of the secret motives

of non-Jewish people criticizing Israel, right? Like someone could literally say something that I 100% agreed with, something that I myself had said and then I would still get this icky feeling from them saying it, like, yeah, but why are they saying it? Like why do you care? Like that is probably, as far as greatest success, to relegate the issue of Palestinian human and civil rights to a niche subject that is best talked about in private and only by Jews.

So, I mean, Shireen, I know that like for you, you've got, you get shit for this. You know? I do. Yeah. I feel like I'm done qualifying in my real life, especially and also just like in work. I'm done qualifying whether or not something I say is or is not whatever because if I'm even intertating the idea that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic, that's like feeding the fire. I don't want to even bring that into, I don't want to

associate the religion and the state of Israel. And I feel like the more we have those disclaimers, the more it's conflated. And I've definitely, I mean, I've had a lot of anti-Zionist Jewish people on this show almost to like show people that like, listen to these people with actual experience. Yes. And that's not to, it's not to, you know, say you shouldn't.

None of this is me saying like, hey, you shouldn't listen to anti-Zionist Jews or whatnot, or just like, you know, like, or you shouldn't be discerning about who you're getting your information for. Cause yeah, there are Nazis who are, you know, the wrap themselves in the guise of being anti-Israel or like, you know, anti-occupation or whatnot,

none of this is putting down anyone for being discerning or being careful, but it's to say that like, Hesbara has quite an effect on even the most conscious of people, like making Zionism and Judaism synonymous and like practically indistinguishable is like one of his bars, like greatest achievements, presenting Jewish support of Israel as monolithic, save for like a few cranks, you know, who are the exception that prove the rule, you know, like non-Jews don't want to criticize Israel because they don't want to upset their Jewish friends or they don't want to be labeled an anti-Semite.

You know, it's like, you know, after the large public outcry about Israel's brutal response to the homosterous attacks of October 7th, there was a big push among Hezbollah to frame all Jews of the world as feeling abandoned by the left and abandoned by their friends. You had people like Brett Gelman. Oh my God. From Stranger Things. Walking dumpster.

I hate him so much. Oh my God. Fucking woolly-willy over here going on Instagram being like, hey, fake woke former friends and like he gave a speech at the like stand with Israel March. That was something like the Jews don't need you like presenting the you know the idea of people criticizing Israel or like not wanting at the very least not wanting the complete obliteration of Palestinians and Gaza, framing that as like, oh, well, all the Jews want that. You know, like his whole thing of being like,

the Jews don't need you as if he and Israel represented all Jews, like presenting the Jews of the world as a monolith, as if non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews don't even exist, as if we all felt this way. Like, you don't wanna hate Jews, do you? Of course, if you don't, then you gotta let Israel do whatever the hell it wants, you know?

I think what really bothers me about him, I mean, everything bothers me about him, but like people like him, they'll sometimes preface what they're saying with, hey, I care about Palestinians, and then continue on their whatever tirade, their Zionist bullshit. And it's like, it's just, it really boggles my mind

because I think he thinks he's a good person. I really think that he believes he's a good person when really he's just a piece of shit that does not see a huge group of people as human beings. Yes, does not see people as human. And this is something that you, I think, that anyone who's like a self-described liberal or leftist or whatever would be able to easily recognize in any other situation, but it's just, it's clouded in this particular situation because of this conflation, because you are willing to believe that Jews are sort of a monolithically agree with Israel.

They may be a little bit like liberal Zionists or whatnot, but mostly they all love Israel. That is not true. And it's a way of like, more so it feeds into the continuing conflation. It feeds into this Hezbollah that Israel represents all Jews. And I am telling you right now it doesn't. I don't think I'm telling anyone

something they don't already know. Like I think people know Zionism is not Judaism. I think many times on this podcast, trust me. Yeah. Yeah. At this point, you should know. If you don't know that by now, please. Yes.

Learn it now. But like, you know, Jews both inside and outside of Israel have a diverse range of views about the Israeli government. That's not to say that Jews in Israel do not, for the most part, support the government, at least support the project of Zionism. But that is to me, that's to be expected. It's to be expected that it's like fucking 9-11, you know, I, I, it'd be weird to not expect the kind of racist jingoism that, that you saw like after 9-11, you know, in fucking America.

And I feel like that was the majority of people was that kind of like, like seething anti-Arab hatred. And I'm not excusing it, but what I'm saying is that Jews have a diverse range of views inside and outside of Israel. And a lot of it includes wanting a ceasefire. And that's why you see it in these Jewish organizations that are trying to end the occupation. They are openly critiquing Israel, that are calling Zionism racism. You see it and you see it because they, because we're honestly trying to change this narrative. We're trying to stop people from believing this lie

that the Jewish people are synonymous with the state of Israel. Yeah. And I think that's why Jewish, I mean, I've said this many times as well, but Jewish and Tzaiyanists are like a very integral part of the movement to liberate Palestine because it's again, it's not a Palestinian issue. It's not a Muslim issue. It's not it's a very human issue. It's a human.

About people not being fucking genocided. Yes. Another thing that's pretty clear is how good the products are that we sell here at Coolzone. So let's stick around, listen to these ads, and we'll be right back. And we're back. So I want to say to everyone listening, I understand that the impulse to treat the subject of Israel with more caution and care is rooted in respect for the Jewish people and a desire to stand firmly against anti-Semitism. And that is a good thing.

I encourage that 100% you respecting Jewish people and wanting to stand firmly against anti-Semitism, wanting to fight it with every fiber of your being. You are correct in feeling that way. And I want to encourage it. And I also need you to understand that it's for that very reason that I urge people to speak out about Israel, because I believe Israel and there has

bars, mouthpieces, and the project of political Zionism are inherently anti-Semitic. And not in like the semantic sense where it's like Arabs are also Semites. That's an argument I've heard. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about anti-Jewish, specifically anti-Jewish. They actively work to create fear amongst diaspora Jews, make us distrust our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, our fellow Jews even. They tell us that, you know, they tell Jews that unless they support Israel, they are

not real Jews, you know, or they are self-hating Jews. They use our past traumas against us. They retraumatize us and manipulate us like it's classic abuser shit. It is, it is abuse. It's, it's cult shit too. And, uh, they even deal in Nazi revisionism. And it's, it's so important to point this out because you see the way that they, uh, the Israeli government uses the Nazi, you know, accusation in order to do a genocide.

I mean, you see constantly, you know, in the last three, four months, videos from the IDF showing, you know, an iPad they found in a teen girl's bedroom, and you know, they open it up and there's a, the wallpaper of the iPad is Hitler's face. And you look at that and you're they open it up and there's the wallpaper of the iPad is Hitler's face and you look at that and you're supposed to go oh my god I can't believe that and you forget to question what the fuck an Israeli soldier is doing in a 17 year old girl's bedroom why is it blown up and why is he going through her stuff like that? You stop

looking at what is actually happening and you start looking at what the hasbarists want you to look at. They want you to see the Hitler thing and go like, oh man, this is a whole society of little Hitlers. And I look at and I, you know, I look at that and I, I see the way they cynically use that while at the same time, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing this line claiming that the Holocaust was essentially the Palestinians idea. I mean, this is something that, uh, that has been gaining more and more traction in like sort of this new Israel-Palestine, like a historical narrative that's been pushed

about like, you know, the Mufti and Hitler meeting up together and being like, have you ever thought about killing the Jews? And Hitler was like, I never thought about that before. That's so smart. Wow, thank you, Palestinians. Like total bullshit, totally revising, like trying to do fucking like, I don't know, apologia for literally Hitler is anti-Semitic.

I don't care how you slice it, it is. And and that's something that the Israeli government deals in. They deal in anti-Semitism all the time. I mean, essentially Israel tells the world that Jews are a third column, loyal to Israel first and foremost, and tells Jews that our home isn't our home. They say this to us and, you know, that due to our traditions and our blood, you know, we are just merely guests in any other place. This is like an old racist worldview from a previous century filled with blood and soil fascism, you know, and like for me,

like growing up in a mixed secular family where I'm culturally Jewish, I'm ethnically Jewish, but I'm a blood Jew, essentially. And as the very fact of me having Jewish blood was used by fascists to murder us during the Holocaust, now under Israel's law of return, that very same Jewish blood is being used by fascists as a passport to allow me to move to Israel and displace an entire Palestinian family if I choose to. Like, you know, being religiously Jewish doesn't have anything to do with my ability to do this, and my blood is my passport to do apartheid. That's why I choose to talk about this stuff. You know, if you're going to use my blood to make me complicit in crimes, the crimes of your state, then I'm going to have something to fucking say about it.

You know, so my final piece of Hasbara has to do with something that has been said over and over again by countless scientists, including the current president of these United States of America, Joe Biden. Folks, were there no Israel, there wouldn't be a Jew in the world who was safe? The idea that the state of Israel alone can keep the Jewish people safe is an insane piece of as-barra. It is a total utter anti-Semitic bullshit. A Jewish state does not and cannot keep Jewish people safe. Tying the fate of the Jewish state to the Jewish people

is a recipe for fucking disaster. The Jewish people are a nation that has lasted thousands of years, nations meaning like a people with a common origin, history, language, culture, customs, and religion, and or religion, you know, it can be any of those things. And for a long, long time, we were one of many stateless nations that existed. And that's not to say that, you know, Israel shouldn't exist or whatever, but more importantly, what I'm saying is that Jews should exist, whether they happen to be located anywhere, wherever they are, Jews should exist. The existence of the state of Israel to me

is not the question. And that is not what Israel claims to do. They claim to ensure the existence of the Jewish people, but they do not. All they do is try to bolster the existence of their state. And it should not be common thought that the existence of Israel and the existence of Jews are the same thing. As I can personally think of nothing more dangerous for any people than to tie their entire survival to something as impermanent as a fucking state. And that is the truth about Israel. So, you know, all this to say that I'm a, I guess I'm an anarchist now. There's one thing that, you know, getting into the whole Israel Palestine thing will do to you. It turns you very quickly into someone who believes the existence of states is the problem.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's me. That's how I feel about stuff. I'm so glad you did this series for us. Where can people hear you do the same thing, but what by yourself with other people? You can, you can hear me do, you know, these talking about Israel and stuff on my new podcast, Bad Has Barra, the world's most moral podcast. It's a comedy podcast about the hilarious Israeli propaganda that I find, that our listeners find, and I have on my friends like Shireen, I had you on, I had Anna on, I had all sorts of great anti-Zionist Jews

and some really amazing Palestinian guests, or at least by the time this comes out, I assume those episodes will have come out. I don't know when those are coming out, but anyways, I've only been doing the podcast for a month and it's been a lot of fun. It's been cathartic and it's been hard and it's definitely been,

caused some stress in my life because, you know, looking for this content, you have to dig through a lot of really horrific shit. So yeah, check out Bad Asmara or, you know, check me out, Met League Jokes on Instagram and go to a Sacramento punchline March 17th, Sunday, 7pm. Me and my wife, my wife, Francesca Fiorentini, we're going to be co-headlining there. So get your tickets now, link in the notes. Yay. No, thank you so much. I really enjoy your podcast, the most moral podcast I would say in the world. podcast, the most moral podcast, I would say, in the world. For sure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this. And I promise you that

the show, the Badass Bar Show, is funny. I swear to God, it's funny. You'll enjoy it. It's very cathartic. You're correct in that. It's very cathartic to just like event with your friends and people that think the same things as you, especially if you're surrounded by someone or people that are kind of purposely ignorant or whatever you know. So yeah, I appreciate it. When you're surrounded by people who don't want to either don't want to engage with this at all or are mad at you for even partially engaging with it. It's nice to find the people that you know and love and like to joke

around with and be like, we're, we're not crazy, right? Exactly. And then we go, yeah, we're not. And then we have a good time. Exactly. Yeah, check that out. And thank you. And thank you to everyone at Cool Zone Media. Yay. Yeah, go follow Matt. Go see Matt. Follow me. And his, my crush, his wife, don't tell her. And yeah, they're really doing the work. And I really appreciate both of you guys just being really outspoken always. Oh, thank you.

And so, yeah, follow their lead. Keep talking about Palestine. There's still a fucking genocide happening and That's the episode. All right. Bye everyone. Bye for Palestine Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe It could happen here is a production of coolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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