Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 36

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Oh, it could happen here. And by goodness, it continues to. I'm Robert Evans. Sophie, my producer, just noted to me that we should probably introduce Shareen Laniunis

since you've recently joined the team and have been on several episodes. And we just kind of rolled with it. Shareen, what are you? Who are you? Where are you? When are you? Those are a lot of questions I can't answer. You are a frequent ghost on the guest.

Ghosts. You're a producer with iHeart. You're on the show ethnically ambiguous with Anna Hosnia. And you are our bud. I am your bud. Thank you. Yeah. Published poet.

Yes. Published poet. A filmmaker, a depressed person. You know, I take all the boxes. You helped Sophie bury that body the other year. Yeah. That was between us. Yeah.

I don't know why we need to put that on Mike. Between you and Lake Mead. Okay. Well, everyone's going to know where that body is, so I appreciate that. We're going to find it soon anyway. But yeah, it's really fun to talk to y'all. So it's nice that we can record me doing it now for work. Cool.

Is that a good intro? Yeah. That is a good intro. We're really excited to have Shareen on our team. It's something that we've been hoping that would happen for a while now. And we just feel very fortunate to have her voice as part of our very tight knit group. And you're welcome listeners. Yeah, I'm a lot of fuckers.

I feel very honored to be a part of such a small tight knit group, especially because everyone, I'm not even saying this to fish, please, but everyone here is much smarter than me. And so I've been learning a lot and I don't do nearly as much research as y'all do. So I hope to be someone representing the audience that knows nothing. You know what I mean? Like that's my role here is to really give people, to let people be seen who have their heads empty, like mine. So representation matters.

Well, I feel like we had empty-headed represented when I joined the team. But fair enough. What are we, what is our, who are we today? What are we doing today? Where are we today? Chris, you're the president of this episode. Oh, no, wait. That's bad.

All right. So I'm going to, I think, I think I have to assassinate myself as the way this works. But yeah, we're. Legally. Actually, yeah, that, that, I think next episode I assassinate myself. This episode I'd get an elected or something. But yeah, we're talking about sort of two, two convergent paths of how we got to like the most recent disaster with the most recent. Well, this isn't even the most recent disaster anymore.

But how, how, how we got to the place where Roe v. Wade is about to die. And, you know, there's two threads. And tomorrow we'll be talking about the terrorism. But today we'll be talking, I say we, mostly we should read. But yeah, we're, we're, we're talking about how the sort of like half a century long electoral movement that got us to this place. Yeah. It's really interesting because I mean, some of it is self-explanatory and some of it isn't. But I think it's interesting to go back in time and really figure out how we got where we are.

So I think it's pretty obvious that like Republicans use the abortion issue to forge coalitions with like right wing and fundamentalist Christian voters. But Democrats are also using it to attract women voters. And it seems like neither party will risk modifying the rigid position that it has for fear of alienating those who the abortion issue has helped attract. Because it feels like it's this just we're at a standstill. It's not solvable, but it's actually the, when you look at the history, it's pretty, I don't know, it kind of makes sense how we landed here. And every presidential candidate or any candidate in general will present these countries issues with like a sense of urgency, especially this issue. But it really feels like they're just using it to attract voters and then it gets ignored. But how did, how did abortion become a partisan issue in America?

The polarization of the parties on this issue really started in the 1970s. And party leaders just started moving farther and farther apart on the issue. And a lot of scholars say that this is a combination of like grassroots activism and also established, also just political strategy. So in the 1970s, the politicians use an abortion and didn't break down along the party lines. Republican president, Gerald Ford, he opposed Roe v. Wade, but the first lady was an abortion rights supporter. And then his vice president, Rockefeller, he presided over the repeal of abortion restrictions in New York. And in Congress, Republicans voted against abortion about the same rate as Democrats. So there wasn't a huge black and white, good, evil kind of thing going on. And it started to change in the 70s. So during his presidential campaign in 1972, Nixon began striking out anti-abortion positions or staking out anti-abortion positions as part of a strategy to appeal to Catholic voters and other social conservatives. And after he won with the majority of Catholic votes, Republican strategists began using the same tactics in Congress, and they were forging coalitions with evangelical groups around opposition to abortion.

And it was really this larger effort to make the Republican Party painted as it's like pro-family to help mobilize like socially conservative voters that really value this idea of this like traditional and quotes family. So it might have been both grassroots organizing, but I think both of these efforts really focused around this idea of this traditional quote unquote like Christian good family. And I think that's still the, a lot of the intention today is to really promote that and why abortion is wrong is because it kind of goes against this idea of what a family should look like or how families should act like in particular how a mother should act. So, yeah, thoughts. Yeah, I mean, like, I definitely think we see that everywhere that type of propaganda is, you know, they're obviously and then they're in like the like, oh, this is like hidden in type thing. But yeah, I mean, Chris has talked about that quite a bit on certain things. So maybe Chris would be best to deep dive on that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think there's there's there's a there's a couple of things that have been like, like, are percolating around this time to which is also like this is this is a period of like really intense feminist mobilization. And this is also a period where, you know, the one of the sort of rights driving issues had been integration, like a opposing integration and like promoting segregation and by this period they've like, they've basically lost that.

And so they need like something right and like that something winds up being this vision of this sort of like of this like very specifically white Christian patriarchal family and and I think it's also interesting that like, you know, if you look at the initial abortion stuff is largely Yeah, it's like, okay, it's Republicans are targeting Catholics, right? And the reason they're targeting Catholics because evangelicals in particular like haven't quite figured out what they think about this yet. And this kind of like family stuff and the, I don't know, it ties into that this whole sort of this attempt to get evangelicals into politics for the first time. Or not the first time but they'd kind of been out of it for a while like on this sort of like while the rapture is coming so like what's the point of dealing with like this impure like secular sort of politics thing. And yeah, they get sort of roped back into it by the polarization of abortion and by making like by by making abortion in the family this incredibly sort of central part of what the Republican platform is and by sort of like you know, like attempting to destroy the kind of like more moderate like Rockefeller liberal wing of the Republican Party who just like get stomped don't exist anymore. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And I think it's interesting because I feel like we see a lot of candidates go back and forth on issues now but it even started. I mean, it's been going on since forever because politics are all a scam. But Ronald Reagan really illustrates the shift. Because when he was a governor of California in 67, he signed a law that loosened abortion restrictions.

But in his 1980 presidential campaign, he called for the appointment of anti abortion judges. So he's just really mean just like any political candidate he's going with the tie and he's trying to get elected. He's not really, no one has actual morals that they stand on. Yeah. And only after 1988 doesn't show that more Democrats than Republicans were supporting access to abortion because before then it was pretty pretty much even if not just a little bit. Yeah, it was mainly honestly split over whether or not you were fucking Catholic, right? Like that was the primary determining factor. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that there's an interesting thing there too because a lot of, you know, because it's like the anti abortion people see Reagan as like their guy. But he gets into office and he's like not as strong on it as they wanted. And well, we'll get into some of what that leads to next episode. But yeah. This this was like fundamentally when you're looking at like the anti abortion movement, it's a it's a Christian nationalist power grab. And at that point, they had just figured out the strategy. So it was good enough that they were able to help get Reagan into office. But it was not consolidated enough that Reagan really felt the need to do much more than pay it lip service, you know. Yeah, well, just an example of everyone campaigning on something that they know will get them voted and then kind of ignoring it once they're in office because like it served its purpose.

I think there's there's another interesting thing that's going on here with that too, which is that at this point, so this is this sort of the the the John of like Jerry Farrell and the more majority and OK, if you want to hear me talk about this for a really long time, go listen to some of the Mooneys and how Reverend Moon also was a huge part of this. But there's like this giant shift in like the technology of recruiting voters. Whereas this is where you start getting mailing list organizing. This is where you start getting like, you know, enormous list of people to call for fundraisers. This is where you start like, you know, this is where you start basically getting like the weird Facebook letter, like chain mail things that we have now, but like they would just like mail people like scare stories about like, here's like an actual baby that Planned Parenthood killed. And like that. That's what I was saying by like the obvious things propaganda wise. But yeah, I think that it's also like things on TV, things in movies. Yeah. That are like. Yeah, they kind of try to pull at the heartstrings of some invisible heart they think people have.

But even even like like TV commercials. Yeah, things that like the traditional family that like the nuclear white Christian family is like the default basic family and anything that strings from that is abnormal. It's still the case now, honestly, I think. Yeah, no. Yeah, calls for diversity or like putting a black friend in the show still. You know what I mean? Like it's not really. Yeah. I have I eventually I will do the entire rant that I have on this. But like, like this is the thing that like this is a powerful enough force that like, for example, if you look at like every Asian American movie in the US, the entire plot of every Asian American movie is trying to repair is a family like an Asian family trying to become the white Christian nuclear family, but having problems with it because they're having family issues that get resolved and then having problems with it because they're Chinese. Yeah. And it's like it's this like warping sort of like. Yeah.

Like structural basis of society that like it's like a black hole that like it tears the fabric of reality and pulls everything else into it. You know, I have the same gripe with a lot of just in general like movies and TV shows about marginalized people, Middle Eastern people, it always seems like the crux of the problem is cultural and overcoming whatever issue the culture is having to to disrupt this perfect white Christian life that is presented as the ideal. But going back to abortion. You're sorry. No, don't apologize. I would love to rant about this with you on another episode. You know what won't disrupt the white Christian hegemonic culture in the United States capitalism. The products as well. Actually, it eventually will because the nature of extractive capitalism and endless growth will inevitably alter the world in ways that makes the lifestyles that those kind of people harken back to in their propaganda fundamentally untenable and impossible to exist on any kind of scale.

But I don't know what my point was here. Here's some here's some fucking ads. Oh, we're back. We're back. Let's go to the late 80s, early 90s. So ladies, ladies, both Republicans and Democrats at this point, they were trying to appeal to the center for a while so they can remain as appealing to voters as possible. Mary Ziegler is a law professor at Florida State University who has studied the history of abortion and the abortion debate. And she wrote in the wash in the Washington Post that the 1990s in the early 2000s, for instance, many abortion opponents, they devoted their energy to supporting incremental restrictions like a ban on dilation or extraction, which is a technique for abortions later in pregnancy that opponents call partial birth abortion.

And this restriction was eventually passed at the federal level in 2003, and is far less sweeping than the heart heartbeat bills that many Republican voters favor today, which ban abortions as you know at six weeks. But Democrats, meanwhile, they were somewhat like equivocal on the abortion debate during this time period. Bill Clinton, in his 1992 campaign, he famously said that abortions should be quote, safe, legal and rare. Hillary Clinton used the same language when she was running in 2008. Yeah, like I thought you still hear that too. Yeah, you really do. It's like just absolutely cowardly. Yeah.

Like we support it, but also don't do it. Yeah. And obviously more recently, both sides of the abortion debate, they've come to seek broader change among abortion rights supporters. There's been an increasing awareness of reproductive justice, and this term was actually coined in 1994, and it describes an approach focused not just on the legal right to abortion, but on safe, affordable access to a range of reproductive health care, as well as the ability to parent children safely. And it was in the 90s that a lot of organizations started to be formed to help support this, to help abortion rights justice like kind of take form. Sister Song, which is the Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective was formed in 1997, and it was by 16 organizations of women of color that formed these four many communities. They were largely made up of Native American, African American, Latina and Asian American communities, and they recognize that we have the right and responsibility to represent ourselves and our communities. And I think this is important to note only because I don't think women of color get enough credit for really like leading the fight to get reproductive rights.

I feel like a lot of, I mean, I can shit on white feminism all day, trust me. But especially when it comes to this, a lot of white women are like heralded as like, I don't know, these political heroes when really most of the time with most issues when it comes to this women of color and the background doing most of the work. That's another episode. But Sister Song defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we do have in safe and sustainable communities. So it puts a lens on the emphasis of affordability of abortions, as well as on the legal status that it needs to have to even be safe and affordable. Because the right of abortion means very little when we can't afford health care that we need. And this is something that Kimberly Innes Maguire said, she's the executive director of Unite for Reproductive Gender Equity called Urge. This is a rights group focused on young people.

So there's a lot of things that like emerged during this more recent time that came focused on more the justice aspect versus just the right to have it because it doesn't do much if we have the right and yet it's still inaccessible. So in the last five years, reproductive justice activists have campaigned to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which was first passed in 1976, and it bars federal funding for most abortions. It restricts Medicaid coverage for abortions and the amendment makes it difficult for many low income Americans to pay for the procedure. The opponents of the Hyde Amendment have had some successes in 2017 and 2019 Democrats in Congress introduced the each EACH Women Act, which would repeal Hyde and allow Medicaid to cover abortions. But Democratic candidates have campaigned to repeal Hyde as well during her presidential run in 2016 Hillary Clinton called for the repeal of Hyde, and the whole Democratic Party followed suit, which is something that would have been unthinkable in the years when her and her husband were calling for abortion to be quote unquote rare. So things have progressed a little bit. Again, I think, unfortunately, though, most of it is for following the trends versus actual morals, but that's my opinion.

But on Hyde, it feels like what has changed in the last five years is that a community of people led by young people, women of color decided that the status quo was not good enough. So again, it's just people in the background doing most of the work. And at the same time, abortion rights activists have been working to reduce stigma around abortion and to present the procedure as a normal part of medical coverage. In 2017, in response to efforts to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, activists and ordinary people shared stories of their abortions under the hashtag shout your abortion. So the left party, the Democratic Party is definitely leaning now, obviously, to be abortion positive. But I also think it's definitely used as a way to attract voters more than anything else. And yeah, I mean, with our current president right now, we all know he's Biden has had a mixed record on abortion, which is like very a good representation of just how floppy politicians can be. Because when he was in the Senate in 73, he was the 30 year old practicing Catholic, who concluded that the Supreme Court went too far on abortion rights in the rowcase.

He told an interviewer the following year that a woman shouldn't have the sole right and say to what should happen to her body. That's a quote. The sole right to say what should happen to her body. He doesn't think women should have that. And by the time he left the vice president's mansion in 2017, he was 74 years old and he argued a far different view that government doesn't have the right to tell other people that women can't control their body. Which is interesting because he not only was very vocal about being anti-abortion, but like he used like in 1981 he crafted the Binded Amendment to ban the use of foreign aid for biomedical research related to abortion. So he was not only like vocal about it, he actually tried to push it back. And he repeatedly voted for the Tide Amendment that prohibited the use of federal funds for abortions, including Medicaid as I said.

And both of these policies remain in place today despite efforts by Democrats to end the ban on the use of federal funds. Here's one thought that I have. Please. And again, I continue to be an advocate and don't take this the wrong way. We should learn from the right and how they made the progress they did with abortion. There are lessons there. And one of those lessons is that when you make something into the kind of issue that can get a politician elected, they will not actually pursue that issue if it's difficult unless you create true believers and put them into politics, right? Reagan got elected in part on abortion.

Reagan didn't really do much about it. It was it was diligent periods of time of not just like putting people in politics who believed in the cause, but also of applying brutal pressure to elected leaders over decades who didn't confirm firm or conform. And we don't have that kind of time with like, let's say climate change, but the same basic tactics need to be followed, which is you need to be vicious. When you when your leaders, when the people you elect don't move on these issues, you need to be vicious and like a concerted and organized and like you need to come down on them like the hammer of fucking God, you know, I think that's that's how you win. But I think that's the biggest difference with the Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats, unfortunately, are far more cowardly in voicing what they want. Even even now, Biden is pro-abortion, quote unquote, but he hasn't even said the word abortion out loud ever. He's like, he tweeted it in a tweet. The fact that there's a website, there's a website that is called has Biden said abortion yet and there's just a big no on it right now, obviously.

But he has like cast this evolution of his views as a like like wrestling with his teaching of his faith or whatever. But it's obviously more it reflects a political calculation more than his views of fucking religion. And in 2015, for example, he said, I'm prepared to accept that at the moment of the at the moment of conception, there's human life and being but I'm not prepared to say that to other God fearing non God fearing people that have a different view. What does that mean? He's like because he's a coward. Nothing. What the fuck does that mean? He's a coward.

Joseph Robinette motherfucking Biden. Yeah. What in Christ in fuck does that mean? Yeah. He also has quoted has been quoted to say that this issue is the like the most difficult thing he's had to wrestle with as a Catholic kind of thing. He's definitely made it this like thing he needs to overcome or whatever the shit. It's a religion, right? Sure.

It's a religion and your religion has been at the very least. What I'll say about the Catholics is they did not adopt this as like a venal political strategy, which the evangelical right did. Like they've been the Catholic Church has been consistent on this for a minute now. So I get why somebody who is legitimately a believing Catholic would have to struggle with this. But the way you what you what you say if you're actually not like a fucking if you're not being a fucking goober about it. What you say is, hey, this is tough for me because of my faith, but this is the United States of America and my faith does not dictate what other people get to do. And so I support the right to access to abortion. That's what you say.

Can you write the speeches, please? Can you do that? I mean, I only want to bring that up because I just think the Democratic Party has conducted themselves in a really cowardly way when it comes to stuff like this versus Republicans are so outright. Even like, volatily trying to tell you how they feel. But yeah, that's that. Where do we go from here? I don't know. Yeah, the world is the world.

It certainly is, Shireen. And we'll be back tomorrow. Chris, what's our focus tomorrow? Tomorrow, we're going to look at the other side of how they got abortion, other than like sort of writing it as an electoral issue, which is they did a. In amount of terrorism that is so large that like most of the people talking about the terrorism missed most of the terrorism. Yeah, it takes a minute to list. Speaking of terrorism. That's the end of the part.

Here's ads. Oh, ads. I know. I just wanted to. It's post role ads, but if you're listening to them, that's a choice. Hey, we always support people making the choice to listen to our wonderful advertisers like the Washington State Highway Patrol and lately Taser. Oh, yeah, they've been running. Look, we did.

We don't approve that. We're getting them removed, but it is funny. Can I get a Taser first? Or is that not what that is? I mean, Shireen, we can expense you a Taser. Great. I'll send the list of what I want. Perfect.

Okay. Bye. Hey, it happened here. The thing that happened here was anti-abortion terrorism. Hi, I'm Christopher Wong. I'm posting this. We're doing this really speedy with me. Shireen, Robert Garrison and Sophie.

Hi. Yeah. Hi. Hi. Don't feel too speedy. I mean, this is an important issue. Yeah. We're going through the interest.

We can get to the content faster. Yes, the meat. Get to the meat. Yeah, let's get to the fucking meat. Let's get to the sandwich portion of the... I don't know what I'm doing here. Let's talk about terrorism. What's happening?

We're talking about terrorism, Sophie. Your favorite thing. Save the day. So, okay. We've talked about sort of abortion as a legal issue, but running parallel to the sort of legal electoral campaign against abortion was a wave, a systemic campaign of terror that ranged from sort of individual personal humiliation and terrorization of individual women seeking abortion to like nail bombs and blowing abortion providers heads off with

shotguns. Yeah. So, it's extremely bad, obviously, but I think there's a tendency among people who look at anti-abortion violence as sort of like isolated from its historical context, which is that, okay, the American right has always rolled by terror from like literally as early as extermination campaigns against indigenous people who like, whose land they stole to, you know, the sort of horrific psychological abuse and violence inflicted against slaves on their own plantation, who there's an entire history of like denying abortion to slaves

for numerous reasons. So, you know, there's no reason really to expect that anti-abortion militants like wouldn't be violent. And I think it's worth noting that the tactics of the sort of militant wing of the anti-abortion movement, which are things like arson bombings and assassination are, these are the key tactics of the segregationist movement when they are fighting against integration. And, you know, lo and behold, like as abortion becomes the political glue for the right after they sort of, okay, well, they sort of lose the fight over integration.

They lose the ability to legally say like that you can't do integration, but a lot of the sort of de facto segregation like still exists. But yeah, like as I do that, like you still see, you know, you see a new generation of sort of right wing militants like taking the tactics of the old right wing militants and using them to kill people. Which is bad. Yeah. For the record, yes.

That is our official position. Yes. Yeah. Wow. We're taking a bold stance here. Radicals. So, I think we should start with someone who was not killing people because I think it's useful to see the sort of like the arc of how this movement goes.

So, John O'Keefe was a Catholic anti-war protester. His thing was, okay, so he's anti-abortion, right? He wants to fuse like the anti-nuclear anti-war movements with the anti-abortion movements sort of in the wake of Roe v. Wade. And this doesn't work because the anti-war and the anti-nuclear movements are like driven by leftists and feminists and they're like, no, like fuck off, like we're not going to, like we want people to have abortions. So, you know, but he still is like dead set that there should be this sort of like direct

action against abortion clinics. And he managed to convince this, convince this like quicker peace activist named Charles Fager to like teach the anti-abortion movement the sort of like techniques of like the civil rights movements and do like non-violent civil disobedience. And so, people like in the early 70s, like as Roe like is happening, people start like chaining themselves to abortion clinics. And, you know, like I think this is, if you've been around the left long enough, like these are tactics I think you'd recognize, but these are very, very different campaigns than you're

sort of like chaining yourself to a tree. And the biggest difference is like the extent to which the focus is just purely on terrorizing people. So, I'm going to read a quote of like what these protests actually look like from the book living in the crosshairs, the untold stories of anti-abortion terrorism. The protesters stand at the entrance to the clinic's parking lot and badger the patients when they come in. They get screamed at.

The protesters write down their license plates. They send them cards. They make phone calls to their homes. Protesters also swarm clinics and harass the people who work there. Those window blinds, Christina, who's at work at a clinic, explained while pointing at the huge windows that surround the conference table in one of her clients. You pull them down, you can look through them, and you can find the protesters at the windows looking in.

And Krista, who's the person who's talking about this, like she describes like these protesters would walk up to her and like say her kid's names. And, you know, in order to get like the doctor into this clinic who's doing the abortions, like they have to smuggle him in. Like he can't park in the parking lot because the abortion protesters will get to him. So, they have to like smuggle him in Krista's car. And like even then, people follow them constantly. Like the doctors and nurses have to like change their routes to work every day.

They have these like decoys they have to use. Like, yeah. And for the record, I've gotten reports from folks who work for abortion access organizations saying they are now in multiple states using drones to follow people as they leave the clinic. Jesus. Their license plate numbers. Yeah. God, that makes sense.

But yeah, like these people, like Krista, the person I was talking about, like she had to transfer her kids to a private school that like knew what her job was so that her kids wouldn't get harassed. And like, we'll come back to the sort of quote unquote nonviolent stuff later, but like even in it sort of like nonviolent phase, this is a terror campaign. The goal of this is to terrorize everyone involved by stalking them, by intimidating them, by harassing them to get them to not do abortions anymore. Yeah.

Making patients or people that want abortions too afraid to get them and people that provide them too afraid to provide them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this doesn't really work in the 70s. And by the time you hit the 80s, it starts to get really violent. In 1982, there's this guy named Don Benny Anderson.

It is two nephews Matt and Wayne Moore carry out the first anti-abortion, the first action of this right-wing anti-abortion. Also, they're like really anti-gay. They have a thing later on where they have this giant celebration for like the Saudis beheading two gay dudes or three gay dudes. What? They're horrible. Yeah.

This network is called the Army of God. Oh, these guys. These guys. That sounds familiar. Yeah. They're this very... Actually, in some ways, there were very sort of quintessentially modern terrorist organization in that like they don't have like a command structure.

It's not even so much essentialized cells. It's just like people just sort of can freely affiliate to it and like use this name to carry out attacks. And the first one of these is, it's this guy, Don Benny Anderson. He kidnaps Dr. Hector Zavallos and his wife, Jean. And originally, like their plan is to kill them. Don Benny Anderson, like he writes about it is that he has been talking to God and he has been talking to Archangel Michael and they have commanded him to go and kill this

person. It's eventually like negotiators fortunately are able to like talk them down and like the doctor makes this like tells them like, yeah, no, no, no, I'm not going to do abortions anymore and that they let them go. But yeah, I think like, like it is important to note that like among people who are like this hardcore, I mean, and this isn't, you know, I say like, there are people who are more moderate than this, like the whole sort of talking to God thing, like that is not uncommon.

No, that is very common. No, these are all people who in their churches will like say a bunch of gibberish words and tell everyone, each other that they're speaking in like the secret language of God that God has like put into their brains. Speaking in tongues. Yes. Yeah. So like, yeah, like, and I think, I think like there's some tendency to like, like I've

seen, I've seen people try to write this off as people who are mentally ill. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. These are these are not mentally ill. They just believe in a different world than you do. Yeah. And they're willing to use violence to make their world real. Yeah. Yeah.

And the letter that they write, like, while they're holding these people captive says, quote, those who truly love God would kill the baby killers. And it turned out later that they've been funding their activities by robbing abortion clinics. And actually, that's another thing that doesn't that I don't think I've ever seen any of the like, like, I don't think this doesn't get included in like the list of terrorist things people do against abortion clinics, but they get robbed a lot. Like there's like a lot of these militants are just robbing abortion clinics to fund their stuff.

And this is again, like the thing you have to keep in mind when you're trying to like, if you literally believe the things that these people literally believe, this is the only moral thing to do. Yeah. If there if there were just try it like getting their heads if there were an organization literally murdering babies every single day, this would be the right thing to do. That's like, you have to actually like, they're not crazy. They fundamentally exist in a world that is as different from from the one you live in

as the world in a fucking Marvel comic. Like it's it's it's just another reality that they exist within. Yeah. And like you get sort of like you get like, like, I don't know, you call it like people who are trying to play the center stand go who are like, Oh, like people on the left don't understand that it's like, it's not about autonomy for them. They literally believe they're killing babies. And it's like that doesn't like a no.

But like, yeah, like, yeah, the fact that they literally believe that abortion is killing children, the only thing that does is make them more fanatical and more militant. And it's like, yeah, like I used to sort of believe like I used to believe that like, Oh, people don't understand they really think they're killing babies thing. And then I went to college and I like read it started reading about the history of genocides. And I started reading about like what how common it is for people who commit genocides to literally believe that if they don't do the genocide that the people

they're genocide, you're going to kill them. And it was like, Oh, Oh, no, no, that that actually that just makes you more likely to do violence. Like it's and yeah, this this goes exactly how to expect. In fact, and this is one of the other things that they're very effective about, which is each attack like radicalizes more people to start doing attacks. So remember, remember, John O'Keefe, the guy who was doing the nonviolent stuff, like he starts questioning whether nonviolence is like the right tactic.

And he never like bombs anything, but he like stops condemning violence in public. And this this goes really, really, really badly really quickly. The army of God publishes this like it's initially a very clandestine thing, but they publish this manual about how to attack abortion clinics that has stuff from like like pouring concrete over heating pipes, how to make bombs. They have this thing that the anti abortion people do a lot, which is pouring bucolic acid, which smells like. It is the thing that makes vomit smell bad.

Like you can you can you can smell like two parts per 10 million. Like of this thing. Like in a room and they'll take like a syringe no injected into a facility. And like one drop of this stuff is enough that like you can smell it like months later. There's no way to like easily clean it. And eventually like they're pouring gallons of this stuff like into abortion clinics into the ventilation system. Yeah, yeah, it's there are more than a hundred of these attacks to date, too.

Like it's they've done this a lot. Yeah, by 1984, this whole thing goes into overdrive. I'm going to read a quote from the book Armored for Life, the Army of God and anti-abortion terror in the United States. The National Abortion Federation identifies 30 incidents of arson or bombing in 1984 exceeding the previous seven years combined. The series of bombings included but was not limited to the offices of the National Abortion Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington DC,

as well as abortion clinics in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. The signature of the Army of God was also found at a subsequent clinic bombing in Saratosa, Florida. One of the other things that they do that is that is great is so they have a declaration of war that the Army of God sends. They also like like specifically send a death threat to Harry Blackman, who was the Blackman was who was the guy who wrote the Supreme Court justice who wrote Roe v. Wade. Which is like, you know, this is a fun thing if you've been like the whole discourse cycle, but oh, we shouldn't produce at these houses.

Like, yeah, man, a terrorist group like threatened to kill the justice who wrote this thing. Like, and that guy, the guy who wrote that eventually carried out like this enormous bombing campaign where he started strapping like 20 pound like liquor propane tanks to gunpowder bombs and blowing up clinics with them. And this stuff spreads like wildfire. People start using the Army of God's bomb recipes to attack clinics in other ways. Like, yeah, we've talked about sort of the other campaign stuff that they use. And this this starts to like a lot of the people who wind up in the full on terrorism stuff

were like people who used to be like nonviolent protesters. So Shelly, Shelly Shannon, who who'd previously been like a nonviolent protester, like goes violent in 1992 and starts doing these like butric acid attacks. And then she graduates to arson. She attacks seven clinics, offices and health centers. And these aren't like like when I say attacks, like this isn't like they threw a Molotov at it. Like she is making napalm and like detonating napalm bombs like inside of these clinics. It is.

Do they even care if people are inside? So it's weird. Initially, they're targeting empty buildings, but they're like they're like working themselves up to it. And like they start to be, you can read this in the writing, like they're working themselves up to a point where they're like, well, okay, if there was a person in this building, we don't really care. And yeah, yeah. And in 1992, the army of God like specifically in it in its manual, like as justification for killing people. And lo and behold, one year later after, this is one of those strategies they use.

What was their justification? They're killing. It's like, well, they're killing babies and they have a bunch of Bible verses that they cite and they're like, now we can kill people because they're killing babies. Right. Wow. It's great. It's.

That's truly like in writing too. Horrifying. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And like literally the next year in 1993, there's all these, they start doing this thing where they put wanted posters with like an abortion doctor's name in them, like literally like stuff out of like a, like a battled West movie.

And they'll have like their name and like where they live and like that fact that they're a doctor and say they kill babies. And so, you know, in 1993, these posters go up for this doctor named Dr. David Gunn. And he's one day walking back to his car when he gets shot three times in the back by Michael Griffin and he, he dies. And he is the first, David Gunn is the first abortion provider to be killed. And he is not going to be the last. He is not the last. Yeah. This immediately, and you know, the moment someone does it, it opens the floodgates.

And suddenly everyone is doing it. And so, you know, this makes people like Shelly Shannon, who we talked about like setting off napalm bombs, who until this point has only like bombed anti buildings. Like she starts like considering killing people. And a few months later, she shoots Dr. George Tiller. And if you're thinking to yourself, hold on, wait, I thought Dr. George Tiller was killed in 2009 and not 1993. You are right. Shelly's assassination attempt, like she shot him like in both arms, but he survived to be murdered a decade and a half later. Meanwhile, there's this guy named Paul Hill, who's just like a abortion clinic like protester, right?

He emerges in like the national media scene because he's like the guy who will go on TV and defend Michael Griffin killing a doctor. And they just let him do this. He does the whole fucking talk show circuit. They just let him do this to defend. Yeah, on live TV, he's on all of the mainstream networks to defend killing abortion doctors. And he does it again with Shelly Shannon's attempt to kill George Tiller. And a year later, Paul Hill walked up to Dr. Joe Britton. Britton in blue is head off with a shotgun wounds.

His wife turns around and then killed an abortion clinic escort named James Barrett. Like they had this guy on TV fucking every night saying that he calling the saying that killing abortion doctors is justified and that he fucking kills. He blew an abortion doctor's head off with a shotgun the next year. Well, and yet I don't think I'm what's exciting is that I'm sure that when there are more attacks by pro-choice oriented people at no point will anyone get brought on a TV network to say anything. No. But ask that cops get more money to crack down on them. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It's like just the media asymmetry. He was awful. And we're going to talk about this more in a bit because it gets even worse. So that same year in 1994, there's a gunman named John Scali the third who walks into a building and murders Shannon Loney, who is a social worker and anti-abortion. She's an anti-abortion and anti child abuse advocate who's working at Planned Parenthood and he just walks in and shoots her. She shoots at a bunch of the doctors and the patients and luckily they all survive.

But then he goes to another clinic and he kills social worker Leanne Nichols who was like working at the front desk there. And he's eventually arrested. He gets away with both of these ones, but then he goes and tries to shoot up a third clinic and that one finally like he gets arrested for. And the other thing is like the third clinic that he shoots at, like that's a clinic that had already had already been bombed. This is a clinic that they've been protesting for years and he's, you know, he goes there and he shoots at these people and he kills two more people. And yeah, and it's, you know, they just like keep doing this. And one of the sort of incredibly grotesque things is that like, okay, so the army of God has this, they have a website, right? And the website has these things they call like the prisoners of Christ who are like people who are like, it's like prisoners of conscience,

but like Christ who they like celebrate and they like raise funds for. And one of the ways they do this is they have this thing called the White Rose Banquet, which is like one of the most offensive names I've ever seen for an organization. That's it's named after the White Rose Society, which is just like Christian anti Nazi, like nonviolent resistance group who's like leaders were all killed by Hitler for opposing Hitler. And they their thing is like, well, okay, so the abortion is the is the new Holocaust. And so, you know, they have this banquet that's like in support of these terrorists and they at the first one of these 1996 they released this thing called the Nuremberg file project, which was this like it was this archive of like abortion providers that has like their names has their addresses as photos it has their phone numbers. They target like that and it's not just like doctors right they target clinic staff that target security guards target anyone who's who's around there and that they have like these like lists of different categories of people. So if you're still alive, your name will be in like bolded black.

If you've been wounded, your name will be grade like grade out. And then if you die, there's like if you get killed or you die, there's a strike through through it. So this this is a kill list. They've assembled and this is just like going around the internet. There's enormous numbers of people who like providers who are who are put on this. And they also like the the the White Rose Society like at this banquet they start putting out wanted posters with like a thousand dollar rewards for closing a clinic and five hundred dollars for like convincing a doctor to stop giving abortions. And because these people are just like like I cannot emphasize this enough like literal monsters in 1988 the auction off the gun that Shelley Shannon used to kill George tiller. That's like a fundraising thing.

So yeah, and there's a number of things you think about that one of that is one of them is the fact that the local police department absolutely had to be involved in that because normally murder weapons don't go back to anyone that they're destroyed, which means the police were like, yeah, we absolutely want you guys to be able to auction this gun. Wow. The very good point to bring up the fear tactics. They would be like, of course they would work if your whole if your name is on this list and you have a family and you know what I mean, like God, I'm mad. I will say there is an interesting thing with this we're like a lot of some of the a lot of people who like get targeted by this stuff like it just pisses them off and they can even more committed to it, which is like incredibly rad but also like Jesus Christ. They just they have these abortion provider kill lists and people on this list get killed. It's encouraged like they are encouraging to kill them.

And like they do this in the open. Like there are like literally Christian radio stations will like they will be they'll do this thing where like they'll they'll start listing like like by name and the addresses of like where the abortion providers near them are that start talking about the biblical verses that justify killing them. And then they will literally say on the radio go kill this person and they could just do this. No one stopped them ever. They just they just got away with this. But for decades and decades. So what one of the other. I think this bombing is famous but I don't think the reason why it happened is famous.

So there's kind of Eric Rudolph. Oh, yeah, I was was wondering when you were going to talk about Rudolph. Yeah, yeah. So that's right now. So so Eric Rudolph is most famous for nail bombing the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He sure did. Yeah. He put in hundreds of people.

Yeah. Yeah. He killed one. Yeah, it was it was a special forces guy. Right. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

And he says that his commander in the 327th aerosol regiment taught him how to make bombs like out of out of like scrap stuff. So he like. Yeah. So okay. So he does it in 1996. He doesn't get caught. Right.

This guy this guy detonated a nail bomb at the fucking Olympics. And then and then a year later. Oh, don't worry. We're going to we're going to a year later this twice. I know year the next year. He he sets off a bunch of bombs and he sets off a bomb at an abortion clinic. And this is like he this is a double tap bomb. There is a there is a bomb in a trash can behind that that's designed to kill the first responders.

And this is your seven people. Yeah. And then you're seven and it kills a police officer actually. I does it. Oh, I didn't see that. But yeah, it kills a police officer. Yeah. And then like the next one he he bombs in Atlanta nightclub and wounds six people.

Oh, sorry. Specifically this is twice. Yeah. A gay bar. Yeah. He bombs. Yeah. He bombs a gay bar.

And there were that that one he also like in the adjacent parking lot because again, he was trying to kill the first responders that the police find a bomb and defuse it before it can go off. And again, they still don't get this guy. The next year. Not until 2003. Yeah. The next year he bombs another abortion clinic with a nail bomb. This kind of this time he kills a security guard named Robert Sanderson and like permanently

injures a nurse named Emmy Leons who was like Emily Leons who was he was left like half blinded like permanently maimed by the fact that again, he set off a fucking nail bomb. And he was not caught. He was not. He was not caught for a while. Yeah. And I want to stop here and talk about like how the bombing stuff is carried in the media. Right.

As best I could tell and I went and looked for this. No anarchist has killed someone with a bomb in the US for 100 years. Karl Marx was closer to seeing the moon landing than a baby born today is of seeing an anarchist kill someone in the US with a bomb. And yet anarchism everywhere is so constantly associated with bombings. Meanwhile, the anti-abortion freaks fucking they bombed the 96 Olympics with a nail bomb. And he on when he was in his trial, he released a manifesto talking about how deadly force is justified against people who operate abortion clinics.

He talks. He talks about a whole whole bunch of like whole bunch of anti-gay stuff, whole bunch of anti-abortion stuff. Like and he's like he's given them like like on his trial just used to like read his manifesto. Yeah. They just let him read his manifesto. It's pretty. It's pretty wild.

Wow. It's like. We're all the pro life activists when it comes to taking life. That's interesting. Well, but I mean, but that's that's the thing though. They're all they're all in favor of of like. The lives of the babies. Yeah, they're arguing that it self-defense for its defensive.

Yeah. These babies. I'm not the most well defensive. Those who can't defend themselves. Exactly. What they'll talk about. Yeah. It is entirely within them.

The moral universe within they operate. It is entirely consistent. It's one of those things. Whenever like liberals will be like, why don't they do this or why don't they do that? That's not pro life. And it's like, well, because the word doesn't mean the same thing to you. Yeah. That's fair.

Well, and the guys doing this terror because like you will occasionally like you'll get some I mean, some of the pro life people oppose this because they think it's bad optics. Right. But apparently it's not bad optics because again, like who are the people who get fucking remembered as bombers? Like I want to I want to read a quote from from the FBI. This is this is from from the book on for life in 1984. The year with the highest abortion clinic bombings to date.

FBI director William Webster went on television and informed the public quote bombing a bank or a post office as terrorism bombing an abortion clinic is not an act of terrorism because the objective is social is social and anti-abortion violence. And I don't believe it currently meets our definition of terrorism. Reagan's called Reagan called the anti-abortion nonsense. It's worse. Okay. Reagan called called the bombings the abortion bombing bombings quote anarchist activities.

They're fucking they're blowing up abortion clinics and we're still getting fucking blame for it. Like Jesus Christ. I don't know a lot about anything. So this is a lot of this is news to me, which is wild that I'm hearing about a lot of this for the first time. How have I not learned? How have I not known about this?

They bombed the Olympics. And no one talks about it. I was just losing my mind the whole like it's it's bad and it's it's still happening. It's not it's just like three people were killed and nine people were injured and tacked on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado back in 2015. There's been over at least at least at least 11 murders tied to anti-abortion like like action I guess 2026 attempted murders, at least 42 bombings, 200 arsons and then thousands and thousands of more like assaults and random random incidents.

We should also point out here when we're talking about the murder count is lower than it actually is because the murder count doesn't count the people who like the American like specifically the Americans who went to Canada to shoot abortion doctors and the Americans who went to Australia to shoot abortion doctors, both of which happened and threats against abortion providers have increased exponentially just since 20 just since 2010. Like they have more than quadrupled like that is it's constant. It's been escalating at such a at such a rate that every year's data is insufficient for talking about the current period.

Like you can't you can't even talk about it because all of the data is so inaccurate now that's how fast this stuff is accelerating. And like there's a few other things that like we should mention when we talk about statistics. One of the reason is the reason the death toll is like quote unquote only 11 is because bomb making is really hard and a lot of these bombs don't go off. So for example in Canada a worker at a clinic discovered a bomb with two pounds of nails in it that quote had a destructive capability of 100 feet. And you know and also like I should put this out like okay so like they there's a lot of

abortion doctors who are killed like outside of their clinics but also there's a guy named James Copp who who shot he shot like four doctors and he shot them like in their homes like with with with an SKS like in their homes through their windows and he killed Dr. Barrett Slippian in the 90s and like and you know and like it they keep doing stuff like this like in 2001 I don't know if I wonder how many people actually remember this I there was this huge anthrax scare what was an anthrax or like that people were like like there were like there were anthrax attacks people were like mailing people letters with anthrax in it.

Yeah. And so right as this is happening a guy named Clay Wagner since 800 letters signed by the RB of God with fake anthrax to plan playerhood clinics in 17 states and these anthrax packets like it's not just like flour right these anthrax packets have BT in it which is a pesticide that is so similar to anthrax that the packages just tested positive. So all of these people these 800 clinics who opened these letters like thought they were going to die because they opened they opened a letter there was white powder in it it said it was anthrax and then it tested positive for anthrax and like to this day a bunch of

abortion clinics like have like when they're like when they open their mail they have they have like a special room that is like sealed off so that if they open the mail and they open a chemical weapon only the person reading the mail will die well great that's the side of a good system. Yeah. Yeah. They also a lot of Planned Parenthoods have something kind of similar set up with the receptionist where the basically the way it's set up is that if there's a mass shooter

the receptionist can like seal off everyone but them. Yeah. Like it's like a thing that you know you're getting into if you're in a plant if you if you're in that gig is like someone might come in and I might have to die to try and stop them from getting to everyone else. It's it's bad I mean just just from 2019 to 2020 there was a 125% increase in reports of assaults and batteries inside and outside clinics there was double the amount of death threats from 2019 to 2020 and things have not gotten better since 2020 so we're just

waiting for all that new data to come in because oh boy. Yeah. And I think there's another thing when you need to keep in mind with this data is that there's so much stuff doesn't get reported all of those numbers are low every single one of them is normally low and there was a bunch of other stuff that these people do that just never gets talked about well okay so before we get into that I do want to talk about the most famous abortion provider who got murdered which is Dr. George Teller who is like a genuinely incredibly heroic figure who he was keep doing it after the first time

you were shot like you would be a hero if you did it up until you got shot. Yeah. To keep going after. Yeah like he got shot his clinic got bombed there was an entire oh yeah his clinic got bombed what was the other one yeah he was one of the he I think he was actually I don't know if it was that anthrax threat or like a different anthrax threat but like people like he kept getting anthrax threats there is this thing called operation rescue which is I guess there's still version of this around but there are these like they do these like

giant like nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns were like thousands of people will show up to a place and they'll like chain themselves the buildings and they'll like prevent anyone from getting in and they'll like terrorize everyone around there and his office is one of the is one of the ones that was targeted 1991 which is like in there like they had this big campaign called operation rescue it was targeting like him specifically and there is one fun story in this which is they tried this in Minneapolis 1993 but they got their asses kicked by a bunch of anarchists and had their all run away which was extremely funny but yeah like I'm the other thing that that's important with with tellers specifically

is the extent to which the right wing media is like like culpable in this like tiller like bill Riley specifically is constantly yelling about tiller he calls tiller the baby killer he uses him a running a quote a operating a death mill executing babies about to be born and destroying fetuses for just about any reason right up until birth date he won one of his rants he literally says like right before well never like pretty close to when tiller gets assassinated quote if I could get my hands on tiller well you know can't be vigilantes can't do that it's just a figure of speech but despicable oh my god it doesn't get worse doesn't get worse no well so he's just like this is just like the shit that

that he's that that he's being subjected to by the media and then oh lo and behold he gets murdered you know what doesn't I don't know I have nothing to say you know what doesn't do a coordinated you know it would be dope here here's what I'll say you know it would be dope if when somebody came to shoot George tiller that person had gotten shot repeatedly that would have been cool that would have been neat but anyway here's ads and we're back with more horrifying stuff um yeah so there's a lot of focus I think there's been a lot of media coverage recently about this just because like you know as a reaction to the incredibly bad faith like oh look at the sanctity of people protesting at the supreme

court it's like they blew people's heads off with shotguns but you know and that's good and I'm really glad there's more media reporting about this but I want to talk about you know there's there's an incredible focus here on the shootings and bombings and like there's good reason for that but I want to talk about some other shit that the forest birth fanatics do because it's horrifying it doesn't get talked enough about enough um so one of the people who gets interviewed in in living in the crosshairs which is a great book by the way it's it's about I mean I okay I don't agree with all of its policy recommendations but it's a book like interviewing like abortion providers about their experiences one of the

people they interview is this guy named Rodney Smith who's an abortion doctor um and I'm just going to read the stuff that they do to this guy because it's okay so protesters show up to his son's wedding um they they burn his house and his farm down they burn 17 horses to death they kill their dog their cat and all of their possessions wow yeah from the book how do the horses help kill babies can you tell me that in the cat yeah we will yeah imagine imagine if an anarchist group did this yeah everyone would lose their minds I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote about this from this book someone mailed a letter postmarked the morning of the fire justifying killing the animals on

Rodney's farm because Rodney quote murdered little children however the letter was untraceable wow they do this shit all the fucking time and it never gets reported because the reason never gets reported is because when when when this this the city comes to investigate they fucking destroyed the entire scene of the crime they showed the entire scene of the crime so thoroughly that when the fire marshal showed up the day after they they they tried to arrest um they tried to arrest Rodney Smith Smith for evidence tampering because I thought that he had done it great yeah that makes sense wow and let less less do you think this is the end of the shit that this guy goes through right like they when they find out he's like

going to like a conference or like they find out he's staying in a hotel that they do these campaigns where like they'll do these mass callings to the hotel saying hey there's this person here yeah if you don't kick them out like we're gonna protest all your branches he gets kicked out of hotels um he gets attacked by an anti-abortion protester in the chambers of the supreme court like that supreme court the big one how did they even get in the to the chambers of the supreme court you just wanted it was one of the people who was showing up at this thing and the guy like throws him out of his chair grabs him throws him out of his chair picks up the chair and starts beating the shit out of him with his own chair

in this is in the chambers of the supreme courts they beat an abortion doctor with his own chair and you know Rodney had had security with him right because I you know it yeah when you're an abortion doctor and and people are this targeted at you yeah you you have security so you don't get attacked like this but the the court wouldn't let him like bring his private security inside and the rationalization was uh he he'd been assured that quote nothing ever happens in the supreme court the thing about this right you cannot find a news article about this right a guy got beat up by these people in the supreme court if literally anyone who was not a fucking forced birth anti-abortion fanatic did this there would have been a news

cycle that would have lasted until the fucking end of time there would have been a movie and three shows made about it yeah and there's just nothing like like that is wild like that is really showing like these things don't get these things aren't big problems right because they they they aren't challenging to any kind of power structure so they're allowed to happen because they're just reinforcing things they're not actually challenging things um but still it's very brazen uh when you're killing like 17 horses and going into the supreme court to beat someone with a chair you would think that someone would say something um and I've never heard of this before yeah either this guy this guy right up your alley

gear I know this is like the thing the thing I want to emphasize about this this is the things they did to one guy yeah one doctor this is happening this is right like this stuff this kind of stuff is happening to people every fucking day across the country and there is nothing there is jack shit you might maybe see a report in the local papers like maybe it is a it is a it is just an incredible campaign of terror but this guy is like he is staggeringly based uh he hit the this is quote from that book again uh Rodney is used to this type of verbal abuse and sometimes reacts in kind when a priest called him a murderer uh Rodney responded by calling the priest a child molester when the protesters told Rodney they were praying

for him he responded no you're praying upon us there's a difference so he rules and he likes he'd been a doctor who like did other stuff and when the abortion people I think it was after they burned his house down he was like no fuck you I'm only gonna do abortions now she is like staggeringly based wow like yeah which I guess also like this is this is the thing that like so like obviously like I don't think any leftist has ever fucking lit people's horses on fire not that I know of like generally left generally they would have more of an instinct to free the horses yeah like that you have to yeah you have to be like genuinely monstrous to to light horses on fire like they scream like horses scream

like when you light them on fire I mean and and cats and dogs yeah animal like animal abuse now an animal murder bites is like pretty pretty despicable and there's uh just justifying it by saying it's because they were on the property of someone who helps gives abortions is some wild some wild thinking well none of those words are in the Bible actually there is there is a lot of animal murder in the Bible never mind they do kill a lot of people animals yeah okay well yeah but but but but I mean I will say that there is a thing that can happen where if if like sometimes targeted protests on a person just like makes them reinforce like dig into their beliefs and that sometimes yeah and and I think like here

I think like there's a lot of people who are just stunningly brave who go through this shit and just still keep doing it because like this is something that they believe in and you know and those aren't even like that extreme examples of like the kind of stuff that happens again we've talked about like again nail bombs right like people were getting their heads blown off with shotguns there's there is a systemic campaign of terror that is felt incredibly acutely by the people who need these services who need to get abortions who need to get reproductive health care and is felt by the providers of that health care and nobody else in society sees about it or talks about it and they have you know okay

so the the I'm gonna read another quote from living in the crosshairs about the tactics that these groups use because they have they have so many things these tactics include bombings arson anthrax scares and mass blockades extremists have also thrown butric acid into clinics glued clinic locks shut lock themselves to clinic property using items such as bicycle locks or chains drilled holes into clinic groups so that clinics flood invaded invaded clinics vandalized clinics made threatening phone calls tried to persuade patients to go to fake clinics which we've talked about that in our episode on crisis pregnancy centers but those that is also like part of the systemic campaign of terror is deceiving and humiliating

people into not getting abortions they put spikes on driveways they they they'll they'll still stand one of them this is a very common thing is they'll stand on stand outside of abortion clinics talking about how they're gonna make bombs and like the chemical that they're mixing and yeah they'll lay down on sidewalks in front of buildings they will they will jump on people's cars they will camp out in front of clinics for like multiple day stretches that they send decoy patients like into the clinic to disrupt it it's just so much yeah and like like the brazenness with like again like yeah if there are things on there like okay and like okay so like I I don't want to like make this point too much

because like yeah you can get away with a lot of stuff right you even if the state is hunting for you there's a lot of stuff that you could do that you can get away with but like the level of stuff they've been able to get away with like the fact that they've been able to literally on the air say that you should murder a specific abortion doctor mention them by name and the fact that I know people who have had the FBI show up to their doors because of jokes they made on Twitter it is it is fucking appalling yeah yeah cuz I mean they're not they don't the law doesn't exist the law doesn't matter it's all about who's actually challenging systems of power yeah and the police are like again this this

is what one of the they literally do cross burnings like fucking literally do clan style fucking cross burning so I can once again go back to the old rage against the machine classic some of those who workforces are the same who burn crosses because it is literally the same people the cops will cooperate with them like there's the everything that you a lot is they'll just like shoot bullets through the windows of clinics yeah that is super constantly and they never get caught yeah they know no no one no one cares that is very common yeah and like a fire bombs happened to this day that one of the incidents they talked about in that book was so they like this is stuff that happened at like one clinic

they they they set the clinic's fence on fire in the middle of the night they plug the downspouts on like the roof after like a giant snowstorm so that like when the snow melted the water like poured into this hole they drilled it flooded the entire clinic they had another one where they drilled holes in the ceiling of the clinic and ran a garden hose through it and flooded the entire building and yeah again like none of this stuff ever makes the news like it like what you can compare it you compare the reaction to this to like how they reacted to the animal liberation front right yeah absolutely that that cause there was like there are like there are there are there are like like law enforcement like techniques

there are law enforcement organizations that exist today specifically to stop people like like that exists today specifically because of this campaign to stop the animal liberation front for freeing animals like these people and you know and I should say this like also like there's this whole push to like oh we need to call these people terrorists and like yeah like Bill Clinton called these people terrorists and like what happened nothing like they got one law that was like fine that was like that was that was about trying to keep people from protesting outside of clinic but I got struck down by the Supreme Court because again we live in in a society that is constantly moving towards theocratic fascism.

If you torch construction sites or sedans or people wanting to destroy sections of forest then you're then you're a terrorist if you send out mail bombs and to and kill a whole bunch of horses you're just you're just some some dudes I guess yeah and one of the things is incredibly frustrating about the story is there'll be people who are being stalked right or that they're being harassed like that they're being intimidated these people keep showing up they'll call the FBI and the FBI will go yeah we don't care and then the next day they'll get shot by the same person this happens multiple times with multiple and like both that like we talked about this with the person you killed tiller a lot of

the people who do these anti-abortion murders like we're just irregular anti-abortion prisoners and like protesters and like everything that happens a lot is like people will go to jail for an abortion bombing they'll come out and they'll do it again and it's like you know one of the one of the really scary things about this as well I know this is this has been stated before it's isn't by any means a new a new a new thought of framing but with all of the laws getting enacted around the whole like bounty hunter side of things for like how there's going to be you know citizens being deputized to track down both abortion providers people who sought out abortion it's giving all of this strain of thought

like this whole all of this driving ideology it's deputizing it and it's giving it actual legal backing so it's no longer just ignored by law enforcement it is now being encouraged by local governments and all of these all of these same motivations are now like you can get rewarded for doing this and oh boy will people seize on that opportunity yeah and I think that there's a thing we can talk about with with fascism here where it's like okay so like what what is fascism and if you're looking at like one of the one of the things that like if you if you're using like a strict classical definition of fascism is the integration of of of like parties sort of like party paramilitary forces into the state and this is what we're

looking at is we're looking at these people who have been fucking a bombing abortion clinics for 50 years like starting to use this stuff and and I think like I'm gonna read another passage about the kinds of stuff they do to individual people because like I think you know I mean I keep going back to just like here's the the high level terror that they're doing but like yeah like the individual people um after being verbally targeted at our clinic for years protesters started harassing Tammy Madison through various written communications first the protesters distributed flyers throughout Tammy's neighborhood including one at Tammy's door the flyer listed Tammy's address to make a model of Tammy's car and listed a telephone

number reported to be Tammy's number then the protesters appeared at her home with science is playing her name that said she kills babies and hires the baby killers when they were outside Tammy's house they handed out flyers about her to anyone walking by they they do things like they'll they'll use like licenses for example because again you have to get licenses right to to to provide abortions to be a doctor and so they use licenses to find personal information about people these the people out there are like I mean they're right wingers right so they're they're really racist they like they they love screaming Jew doctor at people because yeah yeah like the racial slurs they they constantly out people like the nail

bomb guy also attacked gay bars yep there's a lot of crossover in terms of who they want to attack yeah and like they do constant death there's also a thing I want to talk a bit about which is like these malicious legal lawsuits so one of the ways that people go after like clinics is that they're constant like these clinics are like constantly under legal there people are constantly suing them people people are suing them just to find out personal information about them because the court will give court will give you information yet they have like these vacant like fake case inspectors who will come in in order to infiltrate the things like they have there's legal enormous legal pressure from the state itself which

is often trying to destroy these clinics they're like they'll pass laws specifically to make it so the clinics can't operate in various ways like people who are just like district attorneys will will do investigations into them over and over again they also they go after like the the kids of providers constantly I read a story from this book that again like no one ever talks about like they they kidnapped this this provider's child like her like 12 year old child like at a clinic and like try to indoctrinate them and then eventually gave them back after a few hours like again like they they kidnapped a child of one of the people who works at these things and there no one even talks about it like there's never

anything I just I don't know like I just like the more you go into this is like the more stuff that you see that like like they target people's parents still like show up at like the nursing homes of like the parents of like of these doctors like the target their neighbors they go after the donors to the clinics a lot like they'll they'll they'll they'll send them pictures of like bullets and knives one of the things they do often is they just burn down completely to the wrong clinic so there's been a lot of cases where they just they attack the clinic next to it because they're not it's yeah I want to I want to end on this guy named John Brockenhoft who he bombs three abortion clinics over two decades like he's one of the

guys who they sent to prison and then he came out and they bombed another abortion clinic and I want to read this quote from him my orders to Vietnam didn't suddenly material materialize unexpectedly I volunteered to go because I saw the South Vietnamese people were being threatened by a communist takeover and I figured if they were willing to fight for freedom they deserve to be free and deserved help too he goes on to point out in January of 73 I had just returned from voluntary participation in a bombing campaign in support of the liberty of people 8000 miles away so I hope you will believe I will I would not have turned my back on my own people American babies my own people American babies if you had asked for my help in bombing an abortion an

abortion area in this country even in 73 and especially since it was not mere liberty but very but they're very lives at stake I would have gone with you so this guy's literally saying he's still fighting the Vietnam War but he's doing it to bomb abortion clinics and he went to Vietnam because he wanted to kill communists and this guy was at the capital at January 6th that sounds about right so yeah like it like one of yeah we're like the moment we are at now is this sort of detris of like every crime the US has ever committed is just rolling back and you know we're we're we're we're seeing all of these people who yeah fought in Vietnam and came back home and it's like killed a bunch of people who did abortions and did a bunch of bombings and

now they you know and they they they tried they just tried to do a coup they're probably going to get away with like an actual like a legal coup pretty soon because they've now seized control of the court system and it's like well yeah this is how they do they do a really effective combination of violent direct action and legal challenges their their actions able to be so successful uh one because like the tactics they choose it caused material damage and material change but also obviously like they're not getting like investigated the same way anyone else would right because like they they are they are capable of doing this effective action because they don't face any any similar level of oppression to any other group that would that would be doing this

especially if they're on the left um so like it's it's it's it's always useful to look at the tactics of your enemy and how they and how they do certain things but you can always have to realize like this is the same thing with January 6th if it was a whole bunch of people in black block storming that the response from the cops would have been very different uh initially and continue along throughout the whole day and the subsequent investigations um so yeah always good to look into tactics but but the the response from the government's always going to differ depending on who's doing the actual uh challenging yeah and I think I just said two things about this one like there are things you can learn from how the right operates you can't carbon copy their tactics and try to do them from

the left because it just won't work because the start the structural conditions for the left are just different but the second thing is also that like it is simultaneously true that the level of oppression against leftist is higher than it is against right-wingers and also that's true and that's true and it's also true that you can do stuff and like people have and yeah I mean none of the James revenge people have gotten caught yet so like you know we will we will see yeah I mean maybe that time this episode comes out and I mean like well we'll we'll see like in general right yeah especially when movements are decentralized um but yeah I mean wow they sure get they sure get to get away with a whole bunch of stuff you could be doing like pretty public bombing incidents

for almost a decade and not get caught uh if you just have to bomb the olympics and not get caught for like seven years yeah it's wild and I'm also just assuming the vast majority of these guys are white and so they're not oh yes yeah it's also that and also the fact that this didn't happen like a long time ago it's still happening and that's crazy that we still don't hear about it like yeah like we talked about we talked about on this show like a few weeks ago like the people people did another abortion clinic on fire like that happens still and will continue to happen and people continue to not care about it because it doesn't threaten anyone who's in power and so the media doesn't care and it's been happening long enough that there's this sense of like

normalization around it it's not seen as radical it's seen as oh obviously some people think that's justified it's not it's not surprising um and that normalization allows way more people to both feel capable of doing something and it when it happens there's not this big of a fuss I do think it's also true though like I think there are a lot of people like I think most people don't know that this happens like I think I think there's an extent to which which the level of violence has been totally invisibilized sure and you know because I mean the other thing about this again is the reason that they're working like this is because this this is a completely minoritarian position right like they don't actually have that many numerical

supporters it's just that they're able to sort of you know they they they they have enough people to wage a systemic campaign of terror and because of that they're able to inflict their sort of they're able to inflict their their fascism on to the rest of the rest of the population that's a good ending sigh that was a good ending sigh unfortunately some of these recordings haven't got the best sound quality we were walking around the butterfly center we tried our best to block the wind but some of it's pretty blown out and we still wanted you to hear them so we've included them but apologies that the sound quality isn't what it could be

there was a time when you could have been forgiven for believing that american fascism had been thoroughly beaten back marginalized and damaged beyond the capacity for reconstitution only the very foolish and dishonest believe that today every time the far right has taken a serious beating in this country they've had a place to retreat to a sanctuary to reorganize recoup and surge out again towards the halls of power that sanctuary is the us-mexico border there's a song i quite admire by the drive-by truckers named after a young mexican man remon casiano in 1931 after the kind of stupid altercation young men have been having since time immemorial remone was murdered by another kid named harlan carter harlan was convicted of

murder and then led off by another judge due to a procedural issue with his case it hardly needs to be said that harlan was white he went on to join the border patrol during a period when it was seen as a model of good racial policy by the nazi government in germany carter rose to lead the border patrol helped to militarize it and then went on to run the nra and turn it from a simple gun advocacy organization to the far right culture war institution it became everything we're dealing with today from the far right started at the border and to quote from that song that's still where it is today but the border is more than just a battleground in america's endless culture war and it is more than just the system of violence men like carter helped make it into the united

states' border with mexico stretches from the atlantic to the pacific through the homelands of many indigenous peoples and across the migratory trails of numerous species and to many many people today it's still just home mariana jones right runs a butterfly sanctuary that has somewhat improbably provoked the direct ire of a u.s president and become the center of a series of conspiracy theories she also grew up along the border in the rio grand valley in high school she'd take trips to discotecas and bars in reynosa just across the border from mcallin texas today she runs the national butterfly sanctuary just outside of the nondescript town which seems to have endless strip malls big box stores and family run mexican food joints you can go there and see

wildflowers walk in the woods and if you're lucky like we were you might even find a snake and some monarch butterflies making their way across the continent without regard for borders or immigration checks so you know growing up here we all let very fluid lives and i use that word i mean in the 1970s during the gas crisis you know when carter was president we would literally drive to mexico to gas up our cars and then come back for lunch and come back for class and come back for football games we were all in Mexico partying our assets they had the press discos and clubs and our parents were over there too having dinner and i know people citizens who live in mexico because it's more affordable because they have reliable electricity

i mean y'all are laughing but i don't know the border for most people living there sometimes called frontier ethos is an inconvenience you have to drive to certain crossing sometimes your truck gets checked sometimes the port of entries closed and you're late for work but in the public eye especially during and after the 2016 presidential campaign it looms like a scene from lord of the rings and since then it's also started to look like one so growing up here i knew there was illegal immigration it's impossible not to know i mean nearly everyone knows someone who came across they came to visit family on a short term visit a different home or they crossed the river

somewhere but you'll see here our river is high and deep and dangerous it's deadly i mean when i was growing up here and i'm 52 i had friends who lived in mexico their parents had homes and businesses here and there some of them rode the bus across the bridge every day for school in the morning i mean it was nothing we never thought of anyone's you know in terms of citizenship or you know some sort of liminals to navigate in both countries and there seems to be hardly any in between in mainstream media the borders presented as dangerous as other people crossing it but it's hard to feel that you're in danger when you're watching the sunset over the Rio Grande and

listening to the owls who begin their work after dusk in the ever diminishing wild places along the river's north bank up until a couple of months ago we were coming out here four or five times a week sometimes twice a day on our boat and bringing a lot of journalists out it almost never wound up in their reportage because you know they were like yes take us out on the river we want to see the illegals crossing we're like yeah we're like dude the only way to do that is to hook up with the campaign officials working with some of the most beautiful and fragile landscapes in the country along the southern border part of mariana's work is introducing kids to them i've been lucky enough to spend time in many of them camping in east county san diego where the pct begins is one

of my favorite things to do riding my bike in southern arizona is an adventure i take at every opportunity and i'm not the only one from jaguars to butterflies many species of wildlife live along the border and pass over it on a daily basis the border might look serious on a map but for much of the last century you'd have struggled to point to it on the ground unless you had a gps device and far too much free time on your hands these kids that'll be here this week as part of their academic study they thought the real grand valley was a desert they didn't know that you know that we had 11 biologically distinct ecosystems in a four county region that would fit inside san diego county california that you know that we have the river that's not a trickle when everybody flushes

their toilets you know like it can be an el paso i mean they they had no idea that we're the edge of subtropical you know america the neotropics and america since 9 11 though the border has become a physical thing a landscape thriving with life that somehow found a way to exist in places that can kill you with heat in the day and cold in the night and sometimes both in 24 hours has been torn apart to provide people who have never been there with a chance to grandstand about security and various government contractors a chance to line their pockets ted cruz recently posed in a boat wearing body armor and standing next to a machine gun just feet away from where we watched recreational boaters sail lazily along the river as we walked from the center down to the river we

spotted some trash on the ground and went to pick it up turned out to be a battery the kind used in a tactical flashlight or weapon light mariana doesn't use those and it wasn't there last time she walked down a trail it's not just the wall that's ruining this landscape she says it's a constant presence of militarized border patrol who see the area as a conflict zone not a conservation one as i was saying they're the ones who leave the the trash very commonly used on the kind of lights mariana knows this only too well her butterfly center backs up to the Rio Grande it's a beautiful peaceful place but since 2017 it has been under threat from the relentless militarization of the southern border the butterflies she says are important for a number of reasons

so butterflies are critical pollinators to all of the green stuff most of which we don't eat people know bees pollinate about one third of our food and so they care about bees now because everyone would hate to lose one third of our food but butterflies pollinate all of the grasses wild flowers shrubs and trees on the planet the ones that reduce erosion by holding the ground in place against wind and against rain and floods the plants that reduce the radiant heat that would come off of the earth if we didn't have the green stuff they filter the water going into the water table and they produce oxygen for us they filter our air that's why butterflies matter and that's why everybody should care about them and do what they can in their communities with their

endemic native plants to provide habitat for butterflies it's not just the butterflies who are in danger either it's disgusting but it is I hate to say entirely predictable but it's fairly predictable in an in-stage capitalist society we're removing from military to a border security one where border walls and border security are the United States and most people don't even know about the border operating world why I have been shot at by warhead many times and people don't realize it was the CBP drones that were flying overhead in Minneapolis to understand exactly what is at stake both for the border and the butterflies it's important to

understand exactly what the border wall looks like on the ground the border wall ecosystem is not just a wall it's a towering 30-foot steel structure topped with anti-climb plates along the barrier which is often hundreds of yards from the actual border there's a road wide enough for two of the expensive pickup trucks the CBP drives to pass each other in remote areas a road to allow construction vehicles to get to the wall also had to be built for landscapes that had been untouched for centuries it's been catastrophic that's why the national butterfly sanctuary fought the border wall in the summer of 2017 they found contractors on their land using heavy equipment to destroy the plants they had worked so hard to protect after we found the contractors

here illegally clearing our land with no right of entry no imminent domain exercise no waiver of NEPA and other laws we um you know we filed suit against the federal government that brought some publicity and with it a lot of people who said you know that we if we opposed border wall we must be for illegal immigration as though the issue is that simple the wall in addition to being a colossal expense much of which is funneled to zeckelman industries a canadian-owned steel company which was fined 975 thousand dollars by the fec for illegal donations to the trump campaign in 2020 is pretty useless the border wall is built miles inside the united states that border patrol picks up ladders every day to share photos of ramps built so vehicles could literally drive over border wall

like you know the old range rover commercials and and and also other breaches we also got a chance to explain to them that up until president trump the border patrol union itself had opposed border wall they had called it a waste of of monies ineffective and really irrelevant to their mission of preventing illegal entry to the united states walking along the border we found half a dozen ladders constructed from old wooden pallets alongside them were ids clothing and detritus that migrants had either abandoned on their journey north or had thrown out for them by border patrol agents who'd apprehended them either way these discarded things told a sad story of young people sometimes parents and sometimes children with siblings crossing a river and then a wall

to try to get a chance at a better life what the border wall does do very effectively is funnel people through the giant gaps in it from texas to california the trump administration has rushed to build as much wall as it could in order to live up to the wildly exaggerated claims that trump made in his 2020 election debates we now have as strong a border as we've ever had we're over 400 miles of brand new wall of that over 400 miles 350 odd were repairs to existing barriers or secure fences as they are technically termed but the rest was built in places that were easiest to access in southern california mountains and valleys are simply skipped the wall stretches across the flatlands in between people are forced to cross in these gaps in the

hardest places and as a result many more of them die the butterfly center isn't one of the hard places but mariana has found dozens of identity documents some of them in evidence bags labeled department of homeland security she says that people aren't dumping them they are being stripped of their documents when they are detained i know that the other side as we see the videos of the you have to sit that's the only way they paid and um the fact that voter patrol is making people undocumented is something folks in the united states don't understand they don't see that we find

garbage bags full of medical records birth certificates marriage licenses IDs and other things from migrants and their illness or the violence that they they've suffered and everything to make their asylum cases but border patrol trashes all throughout the four years of the trump presidency the butterfly center fought to protect the ecosystem they had created and to keep the pristine riverbank for barn owls not border patrol trucks mariana isn't alone the south texas birding preserve was forced to back out of a deal with the feds after a co-initi outcry at the thought of the loss of one of the very few wild places in the area while they have so far been able to stop the construction of portions of the border wall they have not been

able to stop the multiple armed agencies that police the border and often each other from encroaching on the center's land currently in texas there are several overlapping missions to protect the border under operation loan star texas national guard soldiers are deployed to protect the border and prevent drug smuggling and child trafficking at least according to the office of governor greg abbott sadly they're not able to protect themselves from each other so far four soldiers have died by suicide two in accidental shootings texas law allows national guard soldiers to bring their own personal weapons which were responsible for both deaths and one drowned trying to save migrants from the river because the troops are deployed under

state orders not federal ones they receive fewer benefits and their families are not compensated as well in the event that they die in addition to the ten thousand texas troops there are also four thousand national guard soldiers on federal orders along the border task force phoenix as it's called is a combination of 34 different guard units stitched together with very little cohesion or prior experience working together and has been blighted by low morale troops in disdeployment are three times more likely to have a car accident that sees illegal drugs and a battalion deployed to mccallen have three soldiers die the same number as the rest of the national guard combined that year dui issues are so common that breathalysers are being issued to

units the crisis isn't at the border the crisis is the border it's not only united state soldiers dying along the southern border it's also migrants according to the missing migrants project and status admittedly better viewed than it is heard migrants coming from central or south america are far more likely to die at the usa southern border than they are at any other point on the way there one thousand two hundred and forty eight people died or went missing last year making the trek north five hundred and ninety five of them at the border given that the border both under republicans and democrats is a weapon that's increasingly effective at killing people an increasingly present in political debate it's surprising how many people have never been there

the border at least a bit of it without the wall doesn't feel violent one night while we were in texas we sat on the bank of the Rio Grande and looked across the river as the sunset behind us was a wall funded by private donations to a group called we build the wall it's built so close to the river that the weight from the border patrol boats will see it undermined and washed away in less than five years across from us little cabaneers and bars studied the shoreline it looked idyllic and were it not for the thousands of armed people who make it their job to stop it it would have been quite nice to swim across for a drink swimming over was out of the question but the peaceful border we encountered was not the one you'd recognize if you've seen fox news

over the past four years for much of middle america the board is constructed as a lawless land and somehow also as a desert despite the fact that 1200 miles of it are marked by a river and a place where cartel violence goes unchecked human trafficking runs rampant a young children are snatched away from their families and sold into sex slavery of course young children are snatched away from their families at the border but that's your taxpayer money at work not the zetas or cartel a list gone away with denarathion sadly the butterfly centers opposition to the wall combined with this political theater at the border to place a group of people who just wanted to be left alone to be nice to butterflies at the center of a culture war they wanted nothing

to do with at some point the trump white house became aware that 100 acres of texas grasslands were holding out against all the legal and quest would be legal efforts of department of homeland security and the trump administration to destroy the little haven along the real ground we know that jared kushner said in may of 2019 in the oval office we solved the butterfly thing and uh and steve bannon had been uh you know the former former special advisor to president trump and then he is the one who started this scyop and they took aim at us and uh instead of us being against the wall and possibly for um open borders they declared that we were a cartel front and actively engaged in trafficking humans and drugs that we were um not about conservation

at all but we were selling women and children into sex slavery mariana's twitter bio at a time of writing reads do no harm take no shit and that's approach she took as the marga community began to sling an increasing amount of shit at her the north american butterfly association filed suit against brian colfage slash we build the wall tommy fletcher slash fischer sander gravel slash trg construction and lance newhouse slash newhouse and sons on december 3rd 2019 colfage a us air force veteran attempted to crowdfund the wall after congress wouldn't fund it to the ridiculous extent that trump desired he raised over 25 million in august of 2020 colfage was indicted along with steve bannon two other co-defendants on federal charges of defrauding

hundreds of thousands of we build the wall donors federal prosecutors said that despite repeatedly assuring donors that colfage would not be paid the defendants engaged in a scheme to divert 350 000 to colfage which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle colfage was separately indicted may of 2021 on federal charges related to his falsification of tax returns in april of 2022 colfage entered a guilty plea having accounted for about 10 million in spending and a little under five miles of actual wall colfage's attempts to build the wall in texas were hampered by the national butterfly centre lawyers who argued that it was a flood risk because it is and by various tax issues that colfage's team seemed entirely unaware of

while they hoped to transfer the wall they built which they called the lamborghini of walls to federal ownership cbp wanted nothing to do with it as they were building their own wall outside of the floodplain after ignoring a 2019 ruling colfage eventually built about three miles of wall in texas and then declared the project complete november of 2019 with litigation ongoing colfage took to twitter to accuse the national butterfly centre of having a rampant sex trade taking place on your property and the death sick bodies when we first saw brian colfage's tweets and the we build the wall videos using my image and talking about the butterfly lady and everything and the butterfly centre um at first you know we we kind of reacted with humor like

this is too funny like who in their right mind would believe any of this and you know we even tried addressing i mean i didn't know who brian colfage was at the time but you know we replied like um you have a very very active imagination or you're a really uh you know twisted person and we used the hashtag liar liar pants on fire because we really did think it was ridiculous but any notion that this was not deadly serious was soon dismissed and now i've become this lightning god for extremism in american politics or as i told others you know i've had i've had a lot of journalists ask me what does it feel like to be in the crossroads of the culture wars in america and i'm like i'm not at the crossroads of the culture war i live in the borderlands which

are the proving grounds for fascism in america that's where i live and we we're gonna see it more and more everybody's gonna see it more and more they test things like the aerostat balloons here and the fact that we didn't cut them loose and shoot them down and set them on fire the fact that we were like oh that's kind of a pretty innocuous you know white balloon in the sky we can live with it means that now it's gone out from under dhs to do d and it's being deployed across the united states coming soon to a community a few weeks after kolfej is tweaked the butterfly center closed its rusty gate it reopened in late april of 2022 but the almost three months in between were a harrowing experience

for mariana and for the staff when we arrived at the center in early march there was a police surveillance tower posted in the car park and young men in humvees on the road we traveled down to get there despite them or perhaps in a sense because of them and the theater they represent mariana doesn't feel safe she carries a gun on her property even without the wall the militarization of the border has had a huge impact on the center if you walk down to the river she shows us some of the roads and access routes that have been built concrete goes here in the base of the levy or midway in the levy and they have to fill the gap to make this road up here wide enough for two to three vehicles and then down here they'll have a high speed all-weather road so we fully expect

there's border wall and then there's border wall system the road the lighting the sensors um those sorts of things are part of the system and we have to clear and alter this for system otherwise they come down this high speed all-weather road have to slow down go up and drive along the canal and we know the number one killer of water patrol agents is motor vehicle accidents as we walk along one of the roads we talk about the impact the wall has had on wildlife i tell her a story about a deer i saw tried to get around the wall to a pond for whatever reason it was so desperately sad that i can't forget it the devastation the border wreaks on human life tends to get the most press and rightfully so but mariana has spent years watching

the wall spread like a cancer of the ecosystem she loves the addition of herbicide to you know keep the enforcement zone dead and free of any vegetation it has to do with the installation of all night bright lighting that disrupts mammals and of course the wall when it eliminates range area when it when it forms that barrier for land mammals and reptiles you eliminate genetic diversity from from breeding you eliminate seed distribution all kinds of other things so no there's no way to build a wall like that of course the human cost is even high mariana first became aware of exactly what was at stake when she like millions of other people opened up her phone learned about the most recent in a string of hate crimes inspired by anti-immigrant rhetoric

a very disturbed young man drove from plano to the walmart in el paso and massacred 22 people and injured dozens others we were very much aware of that and believe that is ultimately what we build the wall seeks to provoke here the shooter who openly targeted mexicans and believed in the great replacement theory which is common among white nationalists had posted a manifesto on eight-chan before he started his killing spree in that manifesto he complained of a hispanic invasion and used rhetoric that mirrored that of colfage in his fundraising collaborator steve bannon 2019 was the year the eight-chan shootings dominated news coverage on extremism i found myself as the world media's go-to guy for explaining what had happened the hardest thing

to get across was how much of the hate that it ended in dozens of murders had started with shitposting people spreading racist memes and hateful jokes within the confines of a digital echo chamber for mariana the el paso shooting was a wake-up call hard evidence that online bullshit can turn into deadly violence the longer she spent online reading far-right conversations the more she realized kofage's baseless allegations might mean real danger for her and her colleagues after we filed suit against the department of homeland security and and there was publicity about that and honestly the timing of that was kind of good because we filed suit at the beginning of december so by the time media picked up on it people were really already distracted by christmas

yeah you know they were holiday planning and partying and shopping and all that so there wasn't this enormous explosion of of publicity and negative backlash but we did start getting what we call disaster tourists people who would show up going we heard they're gonna build the wall across the butterfly centers show us where they're gonna build our president's big beautiful wall and as long as they behaved you know we have maps we would take their entry fee and say okay now you gotta walk a quarter mile that way to the canal that's where they're gonna build it and then walk another 1.2 miles to the border to the actual border and again it gave us a chance to educate people yeah and uh there was a lot of head scratching with people going but why would

they build the wall things seemed to be going well but then they took a turn for the worst colfosh had tweeted that quote the only butterflies we saw were swarming a decomposing body surrounded by tons of rotting trash left behind by illegals and his lies had become something of a fixture on the places where maga and qanon overlap almost none of these people had ever visited the border but years of propaganda had given them a fixed set of expectations about this place they spun up ever more ridiculous fantasies and by late 2019 some of them had even started to show up in person about that same time police arrested two young men with adam waffen in west texas and they had been stopped and you know pulled over and they had all kinds of weapons and munitions and grenades and

uh you know improvised explosive devices and everything in the car and they said they were headed to the border then the militia people started coming here and um i was here the day the first ones came the first that we know of came inside the building to case the joint and sometimes i sit here at the conference table to work sometimes i'm in this office right here but i can always hear what's going on at the front counter and we have a door chime and so there are questions that people ask when they're first time visitors there are questions people ask when they're part of our tribe when they're naturalists when they come for the butterflies and the birds and all of that and then there are questions people ask that make all of your spidey

senses you know go off and i heard that kind of questioning and whenever that happens i get my phone open to camera and i go out there what the question you heard was that kind of triggered you a bit they were asking about the lay of the land and how they would get to the river from here and those aren't regular questions when most people show up they're like we're here on family vacation and on our way to south padre but we heard there was a butterfly center so we stopped to you know so they may say like where are the butterflies people show up thinking we're a butterfly house and you know but when people immediately say like how do i get to the river from here or explain to me where the access points are and you're kind of like okay we know that

and uh i took a picture of them from behind and then i went out there and i was like you know hello gentlemen can i help you you know and make sure they you know it's like we are looking you in the face we can identify you and one of them kind of turned and walked off and one of them stayed to talk to me and they were like well we've just you know never been here before and tell us which all are all about and it was the week of Thanksgiving and we'd actually just had our potluck for staff and some of our members so they're like and you've got food and they're like can we have some pecan pie sure have a slice of pie but the other guy who had peeled off i noticed him walking around he came and looked back here he was noticing the cameras and all the places

he he made his way toward the back of the building and started the same thing and i was like oh and i told luciano go outside photograph all the vehicles in the parking lot you know get license plates get all the identifying information that we would need and sure enough there were two trucks backed in with the punisher stickers and the 13 stars in a circle and the you know the don't tread on me and this and that one of them was from new Mexico and i believe the other one was from i want to say like Oregon or somewhere but it was yeah i mean it was i've still got all that information and then i uh so after they left we downloaded the security camera video and put our photos and everything together and i emailed everything to the commander for dps down here

as well as the mission police chief and and then asked to meet with them and of course the mission pd guys had no idea about the adam waffen people being arrested in texas they had no idea the militia was in town um and then they more and more of them kept coming and uh you know one of them would drive up and down sherbach and his huge jacked up truck there's a red truck with the trump flags and he had two big great danes that you know he would just be loud and and annoying he wanted everybody to know he was here on patrol and and ready to intimidate that was disconcerting but the police responded they wound up having several interactions with various militia people and even taking at least two of them that we know of into custody and at least one of those was turned over to the

fbi the man arrested had outstanding warrants and had been flying a drone in a controlled airspace another had been impersonating a law enforcement officer seeing the threat mariana realized that if she wanted to stay safe she was going to have to take matters into her own hands we don't know if it was done here or somewhere else i assume it was not here because they didn't tell us it was here so that you heard oh no the mission pd officer who is their liaison with the fbi came and met with me and thanked me for sharing all of that information i mean we knew what hotel they were staying at we and we had we've had to become our own sort of security and detective force because nobody else is doing it and i think most people in communities around the country think the police

know what's going on and they're out there you know safeguarding us when we have learned the hard way that that is absolutely not true soon she was plumbing the parts of the internet that she'd only heard mentioned on passing in the news we were aware of pizza gate yeah yeah we were aware that they had declared that hillary clinton and associates were running a satanic child you know sex ring with you know ritual sacrifice and all kinds of other preposterous stuff out of the basement of a dc pizza parlor you know where the pizza parlor didn't even have a basement much less a satanic ritual child sex trafficking ring just a few weeks after the shooting in el paso we built the wall broke ground on their phase two project within sight and very much

within shooting distance of the national butterfly center mayonym was under no illusion about mistakes they know that they have the ability to incite violence in that way to motivate people to take action and they use a lot of really inflammatory rhetoric even steve bannon's broadcast is called the war room you know we're all at war we're at war against the cartels and we're at war for the soul of our nation and we're at war against the democrats and you know and and now they're at war against the butterfly center in addition to her intelligence gathering she started taking steps to protect herself and her workers they weren't exactly the sort of things she'd expected when she took a job where she'd hope to write grants and talk to kids about butterflies we had to develop

some very rudimentary safety plans like if there were a shooting where you would shelter how we would try to uh safeguard visitors um and other things to like the women on staff even the guys on staff um like i never have my hair down i always keep it up or under a hat or something because you just learn in basic self-defense that somebody's going to grab your ponytail or your hair as the fastest easiest way to take control of your whole body basically so we just we all take um a variety of precautions and it has radically changed the way we we operate here and the way we perceive this place which used to be i mean we were blissful idiots coming to work in this oasis of of flowers and butterflies every day and you know my children described me as snow

white that i'm out there just with the you know the butterflies landing on me and the humming birds coming up and saying hello luckily she wasn't alone as soon as people heard about the threats to her in the center she began to receive messages of support it turns out it's not only right-wing grifters who can summon people to remote part of southern texas where the Rio Grande trips through the reeds a local switch to english and spanish as a mood suits them groups from across the country from veterans to indigenous nations reached out to offer support so first we had the water protectors and indigenous peoples like the cari so come ecrudo and navajo and other nations people came here and set up camp they were good being here night and day

day to be our eyes and ears and a deterrent for the militia entering the property and along with them came others like the sierra club military outdoors program participants who also camped out here for a week and we had the um brown berets and veterans for peace and um even folks from the socialist party and the communist party i mean i hate to even include that since we get called pinko commie libtards snowflakes and all of that but those folks showed up willing to help in the face of fascism in the face of these militia but all this stress and the need for constant patrols and vigilance took its toll even with support being the center of a fabricated fast storm of lies is no fun it wasn't just mariana who is impacted the constant stress and the non-stop

overflight to the border patrol helicopter has impacted her staff as well and then in 2019 like all bets are off anybody can say anything they want they can you know i hate to say it but people get mental health days now if they pay if they just for whatever reason are like i can't deal with this shit today they don't have to come to work and and i've lost good employees in 2020 briefly we built the wall won an injunction and kept building their privately funded wall massive erosion quickly undermined it but the international boundary and water commission report on the construction wasn't completed until march by which time we build the wall had completed three miles of wall the consensus among hydrologists and engineers interviewed by pro

publica for a report on the wall said that the rio grand had scoured against the base of the wall causing erosion and putting the wall in danger of collapse with its very shallow foundation kofage's wall was an immediate danger of toppling into the river in response to this trump did what trump does and took to twitter to blame everyone else in july of 2020 he tweeted i disagreed with doing this very small tiny section of the wall going on to say it was only done to make me look bad and perhaps it now doesn't even work should have been built like rest of wall 500 plus miles i should also note that he misspelled perhaps in that tweet while kofage was still reeling from this condemnation the acting us attorney for the southern district of new york announced indictments

of kofage and bannon for wire fraud the charging documents themselves are an unusually compelling read we did a couple of episodes of behind the bastards covering them the whole situation would be much funnier though if it weren't for all of the lives that kofage and his cronies directly threatened anyway it turned out they had been taking huge sums for their own personal use while concealing their use of funds that donors thought would be spent on the wall by creating quote sham invoices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes initially all four entered not guilty pleas they seem to be buying time hoping that trump would pardon them in the end he did pardon steve bannon and you can make of that what you will but the others were left to hang in the

wind this april kofage entered a guilty plea to these and other charges the failure of bannon and kofage's grift didn't stop them from using the butterfly sanctuary as a punching bag and their fundraising rants that they published to whatever sites had not gotten around to banning them yet as right-wing radicals were deplatformed from facebook and twitter in the lead up to the 2020 election mariana stopped getting tagged in their rants but they didn't stop ranting soon as it became clear that trump had lost the election and refused to concede it he began to lie about the election and then attempted to overturn it by encouraging his supporters to storm the us capital at this point it became clearer that the same people who were fanatical about building the wall

had also become entirely detached from reality even after biden had been inaugurated and their lie had failed a who's who or perhaps a who's not in jail for sedition yet of maga grifters continued to focus their rage at the q and on adjacent fantasies they'd concocted about unspecified cartels smuggling children across a butterfly sanctuary to sexually abuse them sometimes they claimed they cut the heads off of children so that the corpses were easier to transport it's the kind of habitual unhinged escalation that liberals and lefties on twitter love to consume mockingly via aggregator accounts that enable mass gawking at the far right but for mariana it was not at all amusing like i didn't even know rumble existed i didn't know

what rumble was and then we were sent the video that christie hutcherson and uh lindsey something from south carolina made here in front of the butterfly center and you know of course there's the ben berquem stuff and you know we don't watch war room but sometimes i i do have to go find and film portions of those broadcasts where steve bannon is still bashing us and and using that platform to bolster um the lies and and you know really stir up the the uh the terrible sentiment and and ultimately we fear the stochastic terrorism let's stop for a second and go into more detail about the people she's referencing here christie hutcherson founded a group called women fighting for america on their websites about page they note today americans closely

held beliefs and freedoms seem to be under constant attack from mainstream media elitist academia judicial activists foreign aggressors and many times elected politicians these attacks highlight the two extremely different ideologies fighting for our country's future will we stand by and let america become a socialist marxist or communist nation and give our children up to this hopeless vision i should also note that women fighting for america actively solicits donations which they note are not tax deductible hutcherson incited rioters during the january sixth insurrection and is generally what you might call a b-list maga star ben berquem is a correspondent for real america voice the network that hosts steve bannon's war room podcasts in general the folks most

focused on harassing the butterfly sanctuary are a lower grade of maga influencer than the major national names but they all have connections higher up to those big names and when they do land a successful line of propaganda it tends to filter up quite efficiently to those bigger names in january of 2022 a year after the failed coup with the capital some of these maga holdouts came to the real grand valley to pick on a target they thought they might have a better chance of taking the we stand america border security rally was headlined by the few remaining qanon conspiracy theorists and supporters of former president trump who had not gotten in trouble for the capital stuff in part like the entire phenomenon the conference was a giant grift but for many of the people

taken up with its religious proclamations and wild lies of child trafficking and sexual abuse it was the last chance they felt they had to stop something evil mariana up until that time hadn't been aware of how serious the threats against her sanctuary were then a friend involved in local republican politics reached out and told her be armed at all times or out of town ahead of the rally ben berquam appeared in a video on getter outside of the sanctuary holding a pair of children's shoes which he claimed were evidence of trafficking and stated that he and the butterfly center were calling on joe biden to shut down the border we're down here we're actually heading down to benson state park to look at the end of the wall where joe biden stopped building the wall

and this place the butterfly center they said they were afraid they had some credible threats that something was going to go on so we came down here and we want to join our voices with the butterfly center and say we stand against the credible threats of the cartels uh trafficking children through the butterfly center and we demand we call on joe biden to close this border down to protect the butterflies because we all care about butterflies i mean you know the children that are being sold these shoes were from one of the children that was trafficked across this wristband was from one of the children that was trafficked across smaller than my four-year-old daughter's arm but what really matters to the democrats are the butterflies and so we unite

with them if that's what it get if that's what it's going to take to shut this border down we unite with them and say protect the butterflies joe close down the border because we know you don't care about the kids the same day piper lumason hutchinson appeared in their own video holding the same suspiciously new looking children's shoes in their horrifically overexposed video they suggested that nbc was quote more concerned about butterflies than the little children and that the butterfly center was used as a route for the sex trafficking of children together the video's title said they would save america hey everyone this is lindsay piper lumas i'm here with my besty christy hutchinson and founder of women fighting for america i

went to the border with her last year for six days we are here at the butterfly center look at the credible threat they said there's going to be a big protest here there's no pre protest they're protesting what tell them about this butterflies what tell them why like what was the big deal i'm not really sure but um i i got news i've been hit by every single tabloid there is but there's some kind of credible threat with butterflies here um in mission texas um from we stand america and women fighting for america i can tell you women fighting for america loves butterflies and we care about butterflies very much so i wanted to come down here and see what the credible threat was um and if we have to protect the butterflies we need to protect the butterflies i agree with that

so biden why don't you build the wall to protect the butterflies yeah it's really that simple um but my question to this administration and to the national butterfly museum here why are you more concerned butterflies why are you more concerned about butterflies than you are than the little children who are being trafficked right behind this center and they use the the butterfly land to come up through and bring these children who are trafficked and these women who are trafficked you know tom homing yesterday was speaking on stage and was telling one of the stories where he's seen a little child where he had to rescue and that one child had over 22 different people's dna inside of them that's disgusting yeah so as much as i care about butterflies

i can tell you this lindsay i care a lot more about our children and the children who are coming up and being exploited from the different uh countries by the cartels that's what i care about so i've been telling you guys about how children are tattooed according to how they're going to be trafficked or sold into what type of trafficking organ harvesting sex drug and human trafficking how they use their body they kill them they use their body cavities to haul drugs across the border till the bodies start decaying they find the bodies decap decapitated told you about the rape trees but here we actually have a shoe from and this actually this is this is what so lindsay this is a little bracelet and there's a little how much money it costs for this person

to be brought aside um to to america from the cartels the other thing is is that the cartels when they're getting ready to move children they call them tickets so they have no regard for life they don't care they'll throw them in the river they'll leave them in the desert to die um and they call them tickets that's that's how disgusting this whole thing is and america needs to wake up and understand we are at a war with the cartels we are at a war to save our children so thank you so much yeah and every state's a border state and south carolina's ranked one of the top in the nation for trafficking lindsay piper lumas with christie hudgerson together we're saving america god bless but this time they didn't stop with posting

on the day he was inaugurated biden signed an executive order rescinding trump's emergency declaration at the southern border and ending some use of the dod funding trump had relied upon as an end run around accountability but he didn't as he promised he would stop building immediately during the biden um obama um administration trump campaigned on um build that wall are you willing to tear that wall down no i'm there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration number one like so much else biden didn't live up to his promises on the border there have been some small victories for basic decency but biden's record is deeply mixed he's reunited hundreds of children with their families the ended court negotiations about a

financial settlement for them migrant apprehensions climbed to 1.7 million of record in fiscal year 2021 but they also reflected an unusually high rate of adults attempting to cross the border multiple times that's because biden's administration defended trump's use of title 42 part of a 77 year old law called the public health service act which has been interpreted to allow cbp to release migrants back into mexico without booking them often this means they turn right back around across again in a more remote and often more deadly place biden hasn't lived up to his promises on the wall either mariana showed us a pile of wall sections essentially giant metal poles just a little shorter than trump wall you could be forgiven for thinking they're identical

but these she explained were not technically wall and you see the border wall that was being constructed there some of it has the tall bollards with the anti-climb plate that's trump and then the short one is calling this levy repair and guardrail well i snapped moody black and white photos of the wall from on top of a levy as i have all along the hundreds of miles of landscape that it cuts through like an open wound rubber went down to see who made these new pieces of the biden barrier but we didn't have much luck finding a label the wall segments lay out in giant pallets surrounded by construction debris and dirt every pallet is labeled and so will are all the shipping containers but the wall materials themselves had no clear makers mark on

them as we walked back along the dirt road we asked mariana about the video that brought us here in the first place if you haven't seen it it's a video of kimberley low a long odds maga congressional candidate from virginia kimberley is an interesting figure she started out as a sandersbacker in 2016 and has radicalized sense to such a degree that most of her local maga people want nothing to do with her some of them think she's some kind of double agent audio from the incident makes it clear why people might view kimberley as unhinged you're not here to cause any problems i'm sorry no you are here to promote your agenda and your agenda is not welcome here okay thank you so yeah for keeping the illegals out so you're not that has all these poor people in the humanitarian crisis

that's what we're here so you're okay with no that's not trafficked and raped and that is not at all what this is about we have girl scouts spend the night here that's how safe it is yeah i have children in the car i think it's safe here anyway we're not here to know you're here to make a show and to promote your agenda so you can leave now thank you for leaving now thank you so much but um i'm sorry that you're okay with children being great no i'm not okay with any of that and thank you your bullshit is a big problem okay i'm gonna go help the world like a really nasty person we'll let mariana explain what happened so i was sitting here actually at the conference table and my son was at the front counter he doesn't work here but he was covering

for a staff member who was out sick and um as i was saying you hear things that are like you know so i was on a conference call i had my headphones in but my son came over and he gave me a note and it said you know uh this woman says she's running for congress and has her secret service agent with her and you know i thought that was strange but then i you know i'm still on this call but i you know i took my headphones out so i could hear them and um the one woman michelle was claiming to be secret service and i mean i've had people like beto will work when he was a congressman come visit uh michelle bekley who's a state representative i mean i've had i've had people come visit and they don't have secret service you know so i knew that that was not true

that this woman was not secret service and um the congressional rep i asked my son get her name and he did and i just did you know literally like one or two minute internet search for her and it was immediately apparent that she was a maga candidate and uh my son said they want us to open the back 70 for them but they don't want to pay admission and on her facebook page i could see their facebook live stream from just like five minutes earlier where they had driven down sherbock to the gate where y'all have been and seen you know we have a great big private property no trespassing sign and then they went up on the levee and interacted with the uh texas national guard there her video ended before that but a reporter with stars and stripes i know was on the

levee with national guard and interacted with kimberley and michelle so they trespassed onto our property then they came here demanding that they be granted access without paying admission and declared just right up front we want to go see the river and the illegals crossing on the rafts to the butterfly center the rafts they were talking about were referencing a doctored image circulating around the right wing conspiracy web we stood at the dock in the image on that afternoon there were no rafts mariana decided to try and talk the two women down so um you know i i put my phone on record carried it out there i got two business cards uh because it is my job to be professional and greet these people when they come so i went out there and i said hello

and the rest of it is history as they say you have that audio or um you know of of of me saying i know who you are and what you're up to and i knew then it was a setup yeah uh for someone to come here and say those things and be doing their own uh you know sort of project veritas facebook livestream border adventure from virginia as they say none of it smelled right you know well that didn't work so she asked them to leave well it was when i told them they needed to leave and if they weren't gonna leave you know we would call the police and i told them i gestured to my son just do it you know go ahead and call call the police which he did and they they were like no no we're leaving we're leaving they went out the front doors but then they stopped so i opened the

door behind them like keep it moving ladies you know you have to leave and i was focused on michelle who was on my left who was again saying she was secret service and laughing at her when i turned and kimberley was on this side of me and had her phone up like this so i didn't know if she was taking photos or filming but we talk about how everybody now has their own triggers i do not want my photo taken i do not want anyone filming me i don't i don't want any of that uh because of how col fash and bannon and their fake news outlets and everything else have used my image and and have put a target on my back so she's standing there going we're here at the butterfly sanctuary or whatever she called it and i'm with this not nice lady and i was like oh no and i just put

my hand up to block her from photographing or filming me or to swat it away and then i immediately turned uh back toward the doors to retreat inside the building but i didn't make it inside the building i was flat on my ass on the ground and i didn't know if michelle had grabbed me from behind or if kimberley had pushed me or whatever but then my son busted out of the building and was sort of over me um and i'm trying to get up off the ground and all this is caught on the video camera from the building in a previous video the women had indicated that they were armed which is generally a safe assumption when maga types show up accusing you of child trafficking the situation was rapidly growing more dangerous my son feared for my life he thought michelle was going to stomp my face or my

neck or my head and she's a big girl and um and at that point kimberley ran to her car somewhere in the midst of all that she she fled to her car where she had her three children waiting because this place is so dangerous and lawless and and everything she brought her three children here for her opportunity to you know interact with cartel or whatever i mean it's just the whole thing just gets more bizarre and uh and michelle at that point had taken my phone and i was just telling her you're not leaving with my phone give me my phone back while kimberley is again live streaming from her car yelling at michelle to come get in the car uh michelle did walk to the car declare she's not bothering me about me um but my son had run to close the front gate because

he didn't want them i mean he had just called 911 unbeknownst to us there was a visitor in the parking lot who had also dialed 911 and you guys have been here there's police on the corner there's police right i mean there's police everywhere so my son ran to close the gate one so they couldn't leave with my phone two so they would be here when the police got here but then the police didn't come and as she fled the property she's filming herself and she's gunning it the car as she races towards the the gate screaming get the fuck out of my way get the fuck out of my way and then she swerves like this at my son who had to leap to the ground out of the way to avoid being hit by her red Range Rover the center was full of visitors some of them called

911 but no one stepped in to help prior to this experience yes i would have expected our visitors any decent human being to respond to a woman screaming help help help me please please help please please help but nobody did only my son at first they didn't fully grasp what was happening but soon Mariana had worked out who her attacker was and so i relayed all of that to my boss and to the police and uh you know my boss was kind of like well do whatever you want if you feel like you can then close next weekend so we did we closed that friday saturday and sunday and then we came back in the next monday and that's when we saw and people started sending us the videos that uh bergwam and Hutcherson had filmed here presumably on sunday and there's probably a

lot more stuff out there that we haven't seen after leaving the butterfly center one day we went for a walk towards some nearby trailer parks they're full of people who the locals call winter Texans people from the colder parts of the us who spend a few months in trailer homes on the border so they can wear shorts in march and not pay expensive heating bills we bumped into some winter Texans who run their way to a bird sanctuary we just visited they said they'd missed their usual trip to the butterfly center their friends in minnesota they said couldn't believe that they would go down to the border that's good because boy the stuff you the stuff you get in minnesota is not reality as to what's going on in the border down here in what way um people don't understand

like first of all they wonder why are you coming down and putting yourself in such danger I really did the idea so it's just squards of people attacking you you know it's like the people coming out of your brain right now I mean that's the impression they get and we say you know we go down to Mexico you do watts you go in the maximum yeah they do their best to help change perceptions they said and then we try to we try to do as much as we can to get factual information back home so people with questions and stuff like that we've worked um maybe well we haven't come the last few years for the COVID but um four or five years ago we were working with the respite center here with um traffic charities and there were so many they were allowing people

to come over and on it the other thing at Coleman's I don't think that people realize because of the river there's not a straight line extraordinary that you can't just build a wall and that people live in their houses south of the wall yeah you know and people's farms are south of the wall yeah sometimes there's a wall and sometimes there isn't a wall everywhere we go along the border we see division locals are losing places they love and people from a long way away are performing a charade for personal and political gain but it's not all that cut and dried one taco shop we walked past has a special parking spot reserved for DHS employees a trailer park we drive by has slim blue line flags flying despite my best attempts at pulling the clueless foreigner

card when we call them they won't tell me why they have the flags or what they mean some of the national guards troops we spoke to have been out of work before they came down to the border actually I didn't have a job before this oh okay it gave me a good opportunity and I'm planning to stay here like probably the next to you okay wow yeah you get active duty pay while you're somewhat but it's like it's different because it's state borders so it's not fun yeah okay everyone on the border wants to feel safe including Mariana but the reason the border is remarkable at all is because so many people have to cross it some cross for work some cross for fun some cross to change their lives but without people the border doesn't have any significance

for Mariana without people she can't even enjoy the quiet calm in the sanctuary she hopes she says they can reopen soon I mean honestly I hope it doesn't last a whole lot longer because we all miss one another we miss being here you know really of all the jobs that a person can have in the world when where you get to interact with wildlife and garden and breathe fresh air and you know feel the rain on your face I mean it's pretty awesome yeah and uh and interact with people who are absolutely thrilled and fascinated especially the children just delighted and gleeful about their interactions here we want to get back to that but we have to have more we have to have more help before we can do that we we need professional guidance beyond what we've

received three years ago when the first wave of community defense and mutual aid hit the ground here Mariana doesn't know when she'll feel safe but even with the center poise to reopen as we write this she isn't secure yet you know I feel like it's a cat and mouse thing and they're the cat and we're the mouse and that they are going to continue to come back again and again until something really bad happens I think it's almost a challenge maybe at this point from what I can tell about their their psyche you know it goes right back to that winning yeah you know Steve Bannon's no loser he's not used to losing and anything short of achieving his goal whatever that may be is not winning if you've made it this far you're probably wondering what you can do to

help if like most Americans you live a long way from the southern border and have never visited it might seem strange to take up and travel there to meet a nice lady and talk about butterflies QAnon while you have to drive past soldiers in fatigues with assault rifles to look at her pollinator garden but Mariana says that even the small acts of solidarity make a huge difference even people just sending really nice email or letters is so good we'll probably have a wall of that when we get back because the flip side of that is the hate mail the ugly messages the death threats the voicemails that are so horrible so to hear from people that do support us and stand with us and feel like what's happening is horrible people who write to say you know I told

my quilting circle about what's happening at the butterfly center or you know I mean and we're going to make a quilt for you or you know whatever it is you know it helps it really does and then they can share our story because it's not just about the butterfly center it's about what's happening to our democracy it's about how these operations work to manipulate people with lies I don't want to call it conspiracy theories or misinformation or any of that anymore they're just lies and people need to start to understand that whether it's about COVID or the trucker convoys or trans kids or the butterfly center 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

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