Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 5

Episode Date: October 16, 2021

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Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I literally had to go like Thanos and I don't want to have to be the villain, but when I went and did the Donda thing, Yay returned. And everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out Drink Champ's conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeart Radio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit. On the podcast 90210MG, visit Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning.

We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is on the cycle of being sort of OKly introduced. When this episode goes out, it will be Indigenous People's Day.

And so to talk about that more, we're going to talk to Dalia Kilsback, who is a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Citizenship, and has studied and worked in federal Indian tribal policy. Dalia, hello, how are you doing? Hi, I'm doing well. Thank you for inviting me here today. Of course. Garrison is also here. Garrison, hello. Hello. I'm currently also doing writing about Indigenous stuff, but within the context of Canada, which people will probably hear later this week. So yeah.

I guess first thing I wanted to talk about is a little bit is about what Indigenous People's Day is and why it is that and not the other thing. Yeah, so Indigenous People's Day, as many people know is replacing, I'm going to say it, Christopher Columbus Day. That is still like a federal holiday, but so multiple cities and states have opted to use Indigenous People's Day instead. And the reasoning for that is acknowledging the atrocities that were committed by Christopher Columbus, who first of all did not discover America, but continue to not only use slavery, but commit different forms of genocide, rape, etc., all of these terrible atrocities. And so rather than celebrating somebody like that, Indigenous People's Day has been implemented in order to recognize the people who are actually here first. And Indigenous Peoples across the Americas, their histories, cultures, and contributions.

Yeah, Columbus, real piece of shit, worst Christopher. Yeah, it really cannot be overstated how bad that guy was. Even people in that era who had committed their own genocides, like Isabella and Ferdinand, who expelled the Jews from Spain. Once you've reached the sentence, expelled the Jews from X, you're already in the shit list of the worst people in human history. Even they saw what Columbus was doing. It was like, what on earth? Bad guy, bad name. Things are going to continue to go badly. And yeah, that was another thing that I wanted to talk about, which is federal Indian policy. And this is an incredibly broad area spanning like 300 years.

So we're not going to be able to go into like an enormous amount of depth in it. But I think it's important that people have an understanding of, I mean, just what the US did. And how everyone else has read this sort of deal with it. And then also the fact that this is something that changes over time and has looked different. It's been bad in different ways. Yeah. And so when talking about federal Indian policy, I always like to contextualize it within a larger sort of like Euro American like teleology of colonial conquest and then moving on to settler colonialism and where we are with federal federal Indian policy currently.

So how do we connect Christopher Columbus to where we are currently. And this is the history of federal Indian policy and Western legal discourse and how European powers throughout history have defined what it means to be an Indian person in relationship to indigenous peoples rights to their own land and to self governance. So, when we're looking at the different periods of federal Indian policy, prior to there being the United States government we have the colonial period, which is 1492 to 1776. And this is how federal Indian policy legal scholars divide that. And it's really important to kind of give the difference between what is a colonial state versus a settler colonial state when you're talking about not just the United States government but also the Canadian government and different governments globally. But I want to talk just a little bit about what I mean by the difference between a colonial government and a settler colonial government, because they're tied together. So by a settler colonial government, I mean, what I mean is that it is defined by the de territorialization of indigenous population populations. And so rather than in a colonial government as you had with Christopher Columbus and the Spanish and with the English country, all these resources are going back to the metrical all these resources are going back to England or to Spain, etc. And colonial occupation is in is conceptualized within this way in settler colonial governments. And they must come to these lands and stay and they're what they define as sovereignty is within this land that they define now as their own. So, and in order for that process to happen.

There needs to be different forms of genocide of the indigenous populations and so that's what we saw with Christopher Columbus and throughout history was just the depletion of a lot of our indigenous populace. What I mean about the United States being a settler colonial state, I mean that this is current and ongoing. And so when we talk about federal Indian policy, federal Indian policy is always in this conversation with what started with Christopher Columbus, the doctrine of discovery. And so that's how we define the colonial period and feel free to like, stop me and ask me questions also I'm just going to try to move quickly quickly because there's a lot. Yeah, I think we probably should briefly talk about what the doctor discovery is. Let's see if we get to sort of the martial trilogy and stuff. For sure. What does that actually mean legally. So, legally, it's the discovery of a quote unquote newfound land by European colonial forces and the reason why it's called the doctrine of discovery was that indigenous peoples on these lands were deemed unable to govern themselves and they did not know how to utilize their land up to the definition of what the European powers thought land use was that indigenous peoples didn't have the same concept of property and same with their relationship with resources and resource extraction. So when Christopher Columbus and all of these other colonizers, conquistadors came to the quote unquote new land. They saw all of this rich plentiful resource and thought to themselves well obviously these people don't know what they're doing because there's just so much.

They've not done anything with it. And we're going to take this back to two hours because obviously they're inferior beings and don't know what property is. So, legally, the doctrine of discovery conveyed legal title to an ownership of American soil to European nations, a title that devolved to the United States. And so this definition is expansive. Expansive discovery implies that native nations have a right to lands as occupants or possessors but they are incompetent to manage those lands and need a quote unquote benevolent guardian, such as a federal government who holds legal title. And so when we're talking about this legal title, it devolved to the United States later on in history after the American Revolution. And so rather than being colonial states, as the United States like 13 original colonies, given the American Revolution and its own constitution and its creation of itself as a nation state, then that turns into a settler colonial government. I think we can get to what happens next then because you have this elaborate legal framework that lets you steal people's land and murder them and then control it. And then the outgrowth of that is this sort of weird event where the colonies go into rebellion and suddenly, yeah, they're not colonies anymore, they just are the state. And so, yeah, what happens next after the formation of the United States?

So after the formation of the United States. So we have this period, the American Revolution, which I'll not really dive that into is 1776 to 1789 and it's called the Confederation period, but next we have the Trade and Intercourse Act era, which is from 1789 to 1835. So this is defined with the United States Constitution and Congress's exclusive right to regulate trade relations and make lands and land successions and enter into treaties with tribes. And this is a treaty making era with the tribes that only the United States federal government is able to and there's a distinction there because there had been a lot of contestation between states and the federal government as to who is going to now deal with these relations that are with our within our own settler colonial borders. So whose job is, is that to solve this issue. So within the United States Constitution, there are three clauses that define the United States legal relationship to American Indians. So the treaty making clause, the commerce clause and the property clause. And so this, this movement from just relying on the doctrine of discovery and treaty making processes between different European powers now is between the United States federal government and tribes. And so what this does is now tribes are located within the United States territory, and this places Indians within the boundaries and jurisdiction of the United States. And now they're a matter of domestic interest.

And that leads it to one of the sort of complicated questions that that changes to this whole era, which is about what does sovereignty mean for these tribes and to what extent to the even continue to possess it. And how does that even sort of, you know, how does that work if you have this new state that sort of just has his clean control here. Right. And also during this period. Sorry jumping ahead of myself when we have the extermination of the treaty making process, and this completely removes seeing tribes as independent sovereign nations. So I think that will kind of get more into that later but the thing with federal Indian policy is that it's sort of self prophesizing. So as settlers are moving across America. The United States government also has to create these policies in order to legalize these land cessations and movements. And a pattern that we do see here throughout history and throughout time is that the United States federal government as a settler state is over the over the rights to land and rights of indigenous peoples themselves you have a priority of the settler state in order to acquire land. So a lot of the reason why later these treaties will be broken, etc. is because settlers are moving into these lands and the United States is then breaking these treaties in order to have more lands more land cessation.

Yeah, yeah, so the law sort of just following the violence and it's just becomes a sort of retroactive justification for yes, just making everything. It's a self justifying sort of sovereignty. Yeah. So this is the removal period and what a lot of people may have heard of. So it's from 1835 to 1861 and what we have is the extinguishment of Indian title to Eastern lands and the removal of Indian tribes westward. So, one of the most notable acts is the removal act which is authorized by President Andrew Jackson, which moved Indians from the east to the west of the Mississippi River into what is was called Indian territory. And what brought about this federal federal act was a series of three foundational statutes within federal Indian policy dictated by Chief Justice John Marshall so first we have Johnson be Macintosh Cherokee Nation be Georgia and I won't go into too much detail but what this these essentially did and legally defined tribes as being domestic dependent nations. And so it clarified more that, again, tribal nations are underneath the federal government's overview, not the states. So yeah it placed tribes above state jurisdiction and what this is trying to do was solve some issues that tribes such as the Cherokee nation had with different states when it came to land and jurisdiction over subland.

But that is kind of the basis of a lot of federal Indian policy and Solar Mains troop day and what is notable in each one of these statutes. Particularly in Warchester, the Georgia, although it seems that it was supporting tribal sovereignty in them, in that they were above state jurisdiction, a lot of these statutes cited racist president and the doctrine of discovery so what you see for federal Indian policy is that a lot of the foundation for federal Indian policy based on president is the doctrine of discovery, which is reliant on the idea that American Indians were savages and needed federal benevolence and paternalism in order to regulate their own affairs. And I think that's, well, okay, we should probably not just immediately get to allotment, but yeah, because there's also, yeah, this is also the period we used, yeah, the thing you were talking about earlier, the thing you probably know about, which is, okay, it's not true to say this is when this starts, but this is Indian removal acts, Trail of Tears territory, and one thing that I think one of the sort of running themes of this is that the law in this context is just sort of, it becomes a sort of retroactive excuse to do whatever needs to be done from the perspective quote unquote of the sort of the settler state to just take all of this land. Yeah. And I think maybe like one of the keystones of this is Andrew Jackson just straight up telling the Supreme Court to fuck off so that he can do so he can do a Trail of Tears. Yeah. So, the removal act happened after all of these statutes that you already had that supported federal Indian sovereignty and so the Cherokees in Georgia were one of the tribes that were removed. So, you kind of see what you talked about the retrograde kind of justifications for said removal despite the statutes that are there.

So, although that, like, Marshall and more just review Georgia determined that the state of Georgia did not have jurisdiction over charity territory, all this tear, although this territory was in the state's borders. So what you're on you see with the removal act that, although these statutes are still precedent in federal Indian policy. Those were no in order for there to be more expansion of settlers within these areas. And it was decided that, oh wait, we do need this land and we don't actually want these Indians here. Let's put them to the side over past the Mississippi so that they're out of sight out of mind. Right. So we see more of this justification for settler expansion. And so again we bring back to these themes of like settler colonialism in order to kind of gain more of this land and a lot of these statutes are still. They're still cited the doctrine of discovery in them and rather than supporting tribal policy, the relationship between the United States federal government and American Indians was not based on the rights of Indians but more that they can't they can't cover themselves. Right. And so so and that's the whole issue is like people are like, they don't know what they're doing so we're going to push them and like take their land again. So I, I don't know if you want me to go too much into the trail of tears, but you're seeing a lot of patterns here. I think different forms of genocide different forms of taking land. And this was this is all around the same time as the Indian Act in Canada as well which was did a very similar thing.

Especially starting in the 1900s it's starting in the 20th century as well with the like expansion of the like assimilation programs. And I think I guess the one other thing I want to point out about this is that, you know, so one of the things that happens trail of tears is that the Supreme Court, like, tells Jackson that he can't do this, and Jackson just does it anyways. And I think that's a very interesting important moment because, you know, this is this is this thing right where the federal government can tell the Supreme Court to fuck off, right and there's nothing the Supreme Court could do about it. And if you look at what they did it to do, the thing they did it to do was genocide. And it's, I think it's just I think this is very sort of, I don't know, this incredibly grim, like, you know, encapsulation of like what this state actually is, which is this sort of genocide machine and whatever sort of you know this is what sovereignty is right is the ability to break your own rules sort of sort of in order to maintain the system so you, you know, you break your own laws. And, you know, as we're going to get to a second like you break your own treaties continuously, and you do this because you know the genocide machine has to keep moving. Right. And there's a couple of federal Indian policy theorists. Find a lawyer junior who's one of the most famous ones and David II Wilkins who talks about how there's no need for checks and balances within the federal Indian policy system.

So you have Congress that is able to pass whatever act they want and and then you also have the Supreme Court and then you also have executive action, but it wasn't really delineated that well within, especially when it comes to this period as to who is going to be dealing with the Indians kind of thing. And so this kind of confusion and not really completely defining what it means to be a domestic dependent nation. I think really just goes to show how much of a fragile edifice like settler colonial policy is for is within the system. Moving on, it comes back again to land so the reservation area era in 1861 to 1887 has you have a lot of westward expansion of non Indians settlers, specifically to California you also have the creation of Indian reservations and resulting Indian wars. So, during this era what you see a lot of are different types of attempts at assimilation and a lot of warfare so you have a lot of the plains tribes my tribe for instance. That are going through all of these battles fighting forced removal on to reservations. One of the most famous ones was the battle of greasy grass or the little big horn, where general cluster was killed by Sue Cheyenne and a wrap a hose and different instances of battles, such as those and also where a lot of tribes were forcibly removed to areas that they were weren't originally from so like how the therapies were moved to Oklahoma. There was attempts of my tribe for instance more than Cheyenne to be moved down to Oklahoma as well. And that's why there's some southern Cheyenne's in Oklahoma and then my tribe the northern Cheyenne's in Montana.

Another in another thing that is happening during this period our boarding schools, the boarding school era so this attempt at assimilation through education and assimilation is also within within the settler colonial kind of structure. It's defined as a process where indigenous people end up conforming to different constructed notions of settler norms. So if they're not absorbed within the state completely then their attempted attempt to be assimilated culturally, their education through languages in terms of economics and how you have a bunch of different sort of bureaucratic structures on these reservations trying to make tribal governments appear to be or constructed as settler colonial governments are. So maybe it's the three branches in ways that aren't just compatible with different tribes culturally. And you also have a tentative eradication of different kind of spiritual and cultural practices, and a lot of Christianity force on the different people and just kind of terrible things that I think more and more people are becoming aware of due to due to current movements but we'll we'll get into that later. I want to talk about a lot and briefly because if I remember correctly this is in the same period. Yes, allotment period and forced assimilation. So this is like 1871 to 1934. And so this is the end of the treaty making process. So the whole idea of trying to force tribes onto reservations and sign these treaties were to, again, take land and make sure that the United States has more land and all the other states, etc, that they could possibly have. So at this end of treaty making, and federal allotment of Indian lands also happened in the Dawes Act.

And so what this was was an attempt to further shrink the reservation lands that tribes are already guaranteed within treaties. So, during this period, I think, somewhere like 9 million acres were taken from tribal reservations during the allotment process so the what the allotment process did was it counted each and every individual Indian. It was eligible, I think there were adults. Yeah, adults that were eligible, and each one of them were given a certain parcel of land a certain number of acreage. And once all of this land was calculated what you had was an excess of land quote unquote excess of land that the tribes obviously didn't need because they had still too too many people. And so what the excess of land was utilized for 10 years and for settlers, if it didn't go to the federal government, it was to incentivize settlers to colonize essential on Indian lands. So trying its hardest to not stay true to its treaty making practices. I think the other thing that was interesting to me about this is that like, because one of the other goals of this is to sort of like, ooh, is the civilizing mission is like, yeah, we're going to turn them into, we're going to turn all these people into like, like, human farmers, like true American financiers men or whatever. And it's just like, it just doesn't work because economically it doesn't make any sense. Like you breaking up all these, like, lands is like it doesn't, you can't just give someone like a small patch of like shitty land and have them farm like this doesn't like this. It doesn't. It doesn't like, they certainly tried. Yeah, yeah, like that was one of the main thing. One of the main things in Canada was about getting them to adopt like, like European farming practices.

Yeah, which they they they already knew how to like get their own food, right? They were trying to change this whole system of of like a food growth to this like, to this European way of farming and it just and they were just forcing them to and there's yeah, it's it's it gets it gets it gets super it gets super like dark and horrible. Once you like look at like the letters that were being written by like the heads of these programs, like, you know, instructing like these agents were stationed at these like reservation that's like force people to be doing doing this horrible farming for like all day every day. And I think, you know, the sign that this was like like this is like this is so bad that even the US government eventually is like wait this this like this is fucked up and doesn't work. So I think that's yeah, your transition to sort of like the next phase, I guess. Yeah, very short phase. Yeah, so the next phase is the Indian reorganization act. And so this only lasted six years from 1934 to 1940. So this is when allotment ended, as you said the United States government was like wait this isn't working. What else can we, we do the Indians aren't dying off. They're not assimilating they're not a culturating we don't know what to do with them. So maybe we'll, we'll have them adopt these constitutions and a lot of them were just templates. So, regardless of whether or not they were, I think, compatible with tribal different tribes way of life.

They were like, you have these constitutions now. Now you're, you're a tribe, and this is what each tribe has to look like in order for us, the federal government to recognize you as a legitimate entity. And, and then so you have the establishment of these tribal governments that consist of tribal councils and big business committees, etc. However, this period is fleeting, very fleeting. And next, you have the termination era. And so this is the period of time where the federal government, essentially, even more so wants to just get rid of the quote unquote Indian problem, which is the existence of indigenous peoples that are reminders to the government essentially that they are settler colonial that they don't know what to do with us because they tried to commit genocide they tried to remove us, etc, etc, it's still not working. They decided that our tribal governments aren't aren't legitimate and they just decide well, it's too much to try to keep up with our treaties, and what we promise them when it comes to health care, education, housing, etc, etc. And so we want to unite our federal responsibility, our trust responsibility that are delineated in federal Indian policy and in our treaties, and give them off to this to the states to decide what to do with. And so during this period, you see sort of the federal dissolution of some tribes, such as the mononomy, and other ones. So this is another dark time there, the dark times just keep on coming and what federal Indian policy scholars have care characterized federal policy as a pendulum, the swing swinging from side to side between this term and this termination of tribes so the federal Indian

government as trying to get rid of tribes, especially as you can see in this era, and then the pendulum of the other side is self determination, but both of these are held within the context of goals of assimilation. So this is just another phase of terrible mess. Well, I think this phase also, like one thing I think that also like is important people understand is that like, like it's not like people aren't fighting this like the whole time. I mean, even going like even going back to the stuff the 7th Cavalry like the 7th Cavalry lose like boars they lose bells all the time people are fighting constantly and this is this period the termination period is also where you see the rise of the American Indian movements. Yeah, a lot of these periods can be like dove into more and all of these different things. In every instance and every instance of federal Indian policy you have resistance which we're not covering here right now. You have instances throughout history where indigenous peoples have fought for their rights to land to for their community to being sovereign nations, etc. And that's why the federal Indian, the federal government not federal Indian government the federal government has not been able to eradicate us much to their dismay.

So now I'm going to switch into the era that we are considered to be in which I mentioned when I talked about the pendulum of federal Indian policy so now we are in the self determination era, which began in 1962. It's characterized with the revitalization of tribal entities. So, going kind of back to when there was the Indian reorganization acts that we have our tribal councils. There's restoration of some tribes under federal recognition who are terminated. Again, not all of them. We also have the Indian Civil Rights Act. So, this this kind of guaranteed individual Indians, some rights, not just characterized by their tribes also the self determination policy so this is when Nixon condemns the termination policy and gave more control to Indians rather than the Bureau of Indian Affairs such as the federal Bureau, and just kind of like other policies that have given the tribes more rights to determine for themselves and their own people to a certain degree underneath the federal government as an independent nations. And again, I think that we have seen a lot more movement, but within the context of being within a settler colonial state. It's always, I think, a possibility that the federal Indian government, or the federal government, I keep saying Indian, the federal government will try to take more and more. And I think, for instance, when it comes to issues of fishing rights issues of hunting rights with states not even just with the federal government so you have a lot of states throughout throughout history but still ongoing that attempt to encroach on tribal treaties.

And again treaties are the basis of federal Indian policy without these treaties that lands would have never been seceded to the United States. And so, there's this sort of like legal conundrum, I would say, of where all these all treaties in the history of the tribes with Indian with Indian tribes have been broken in some way, shape or form. But still, American Indians have to live on their reservations instead of having their, their land back. And so, nowadays, a lot of movement has been towards land back, what this process is, what is this process and I think it means a lot of different things for different people, indigenous people. Because again, there's, there's 574 federally recognized tribes and so it's not one monolith of ideas monolith of beliefs but by just by saying land back. That's like recognition that this is our this was our land first, and you're not keeping your side of the deal and never have been. You maybe go a bit more into land back as a topic, it's like specifically like the past five years, it has really gained a lot more like popularity as like a slogan. But I think for a lot of, a lot of people who you like chanted and hear it, don't always really know exactly what it means that there's a lot of like mixed opinions on what it means. Of course, unlike the more like reactionary side, it's like people be like, what you're going to like kick white people out of these areas, like that's kind of, that's what a lot of like the reactionary takes on land back is. And I'm sure most people who are listening to this podcast, that's not what they think. But they may not really know exactly what it means either. They may think it sounds like a good idea, but they're not quite sure what it is. Do you mind kind of talking about how land back has like developed as as an idea and what like what like you mean by it personally at least.

Yeah, I think I can talk about more about like what I mean by it personally and what I've understood it to mean to other people. Because I think land back itself it means like a lot of different things and I don't think that there has been a concrete kind of idea of what it means. But I think a lot of the movement I want to like contextualize it within a lot of the sort of act activism that we've seen in their recent years. So for instance, no dappled Dakota access pipeline in 2016. And kind of, I think that's one of the more recent events that have really illustrated on a wide scale like globally about indigenous movements. Sovereign movements and especially when it comes to environmental justice. But what you saw there was encroachment on tribal treaty land within the movement it had to do with the Dakota access pipeline. So although it didn't cross some of the current reservation borders, it was in treaty land, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, same thing with stop line three how it encroached on like the hunting land and the farm land that was not technically in that like residential like like like not unlike the reservation area where people live but it's in the surrounding area that is for hunting that is specified in the treaty. People are trying to use these like loopholes to get the pipelines through. Right, right. And so I think what you see is a lot of solidarity across tribes because this is not new. This has never been new. And a lot of tribes can relate to that. And what you've seen and what I hope that I've highlighted throughout this kind of very brief overview of federal new policy is the different ways that indigenous rights to land and

sovereignty has been attacked in different forms by settler and colonial governments. And I think that the day and age that we live in now has allowed for sort of more widespread solidarity especially over social media. So when we say land back for me how I interpret it as what people mean when they're saying it is recognition of our tribal sovereignty of our right to this land that has not been respected. And then I also think that it means, well, if these treaties aren't being respected, then how is this treaty still valid. How come we aren't getting our land back because you're not upholding your end of the deal. Well, some people also might mean and recognize that this whole United States government is a settler state right based on the doctrine of discovery, which is based on denying tribes and American Indians of their rights to this land. So some people might take it to this whole other context of yeah well maybe this is this is all of our land etc etc. But in practice what does this look like. And I think in practice a lot of people are seeing it with reparations or people buying land back for tribes and giving it back to tribes, and we have seen some of that or also just people interrupting the narrative in their own mind of their Euro American identity so not non American Indians and primarily European settlers and their history of their own families taking part of the settler colonial process and how has that. What about their lands there's all everyone who descends I guess from these these settlers and I want to be specific when I'm talking about Euro American settlers and how they currently benefit from these systems.

And I think by saying land back. It's, we're able to highlight this movement for tribal sovereignty and recognition on a global scale, instead of searching for justice within the quote unquote like searching for justice within the courts of the conqueror how how do we expect for the conqueror to be held accountable for all of these atrocities attempts at genocide assimilation etc, by taking it more towards a global scale such as no dapple highlighting these two other people as these are injustices. This is ongoing genocide. I think that land back has many like a plethora of meanings in that sense. Yeah. Yeah, I hope that answers your question I myself might use it in in some some different ways. Because land as we conceive it to be property kind grew that concept grew in conversation with Euro American. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Conceptions of property so I think that moving forward when we talk about decolonization as a process and not like a metaphor that thinking of land back, not within that whole idea of Euro American property as well that's that's kind of another thing to consider. Yeah, I think I think land back would just be a whole other thing that will pay someone more qualified than our team to talk about on this show. Because yeah, that's definitely you know, like all of the things we've we've discussed they deserve their own deep dives by people that are not me, Robert and Chris. Let's see, is there any kind of resources either books or stuff online that you would recommend for people wanting to learn more about this history, and then any kind of ways to. I don't know, I guess show support in these and these kind of like efforts that are going on.

For sure. So in terms of resources and reading. I have read Lorenzo Veracini's settler book on settler colonialism. That's really helpful when you're trying to understand that framework in terms of getting to know kind of more of the basics of like current issues impacting tribes, the National Congress of American Indians does a lot of work on the federal level. If you want to talk more about kind of lived current lived experiences of American Indians there's Illuminatives and getting more involved in those as well I think that they have some tips. But I would recommend everyone getting more familiar with the land that they are on currently the tribes within their state, and what they can do on not just on the local level but on the state level to support tribal sovereignty. Because a lot of issues, for instance I worked on this on the state policy level in Washington and in Montana, and both of those have a significant amount of tribes. So a lot of legislation that's trying to happen that infringes on tribal treaty rights. And the thing is, is as ugly as it may be to say but sometimes voices of non indigenous peoples are listened to more within those contexts. You need to get more involved on those levels, what sort of like add nonprofit organizations, work with your tribes or, and what sort of issues are impacting tribes and again these are all going to probably be surrounding tribal sovereignty so maybe it's fishing access,

surrounding rights, etc. I think that's a really good way to make some more palatable, tangible change to feel like you're doing something to support tribal sovereignty while you're also educating yourself and making sure that their voices are at the forefront. And that's also applicable to the federal level, especially with, as you already said like stop line three in Minnesota, contacting your legislators, etc, etc. And I think also with when it comes to one of one of the larger issues besides environmental justice for indigenous peoples such as pipelines you have right now missing a murdered indigenous women. So, looking in looking into that a little bit more and who you can support who's addressing those issues along with. There is another movement with boarding schools right now, because there's been a lot of bodies of young children. That have been uncovered and this is not an issue that happened a long, long time ago, like for instance my grandmother went to a boarding school. There's still schools that although they're not called boarding schools. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Right now that we're boarding schools but are still in operation under different names, etc. So kind of familiarizing yourself with those histories.

And then also there's a national, I think it's called the National Boarding School Healing Coalition based out of Minnesota and looking into them and supporting their efforts with this issue is also a good place to start. Is there anywhere that people can find you online? Yes. I don't, I don't really use social media that much. Good for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I try not to. I don't know if I want people to find me. Do not. Yeah. Don't do it. They probably can't find me. It's better not. It's better that people don't find anyone online.

It's better we're all just just posting into the void. There's nothing. Just, just avoid. Well, that, that is, I think, going to wrap up what we have today. Chris, do you want to close us out with a funny bit? Light your local gas station on fire. Wow. Jesus Christ.

Killing it here. Oh my God. Jeez. Wow. All right. Let's go. I heard ready was number one for podcast, but don't take our word for it. Find it against the chronic was podcasts and I heart radio app or wherever you get your

podcast. Conquer your new year's resolution to be more productive with the before breakfast podcast in each bite size daily episode, time management and productivity expert Laura Vander Kamm teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home. the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts.

When PT Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American Sideshow. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all.

In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com slash presents. What's terrible, my, me. This is, it could happen here, a podcast about collapse.

And that's appropriate because everyone's faith in me as a colleague has collapsed today as the result of a series of horrific clusterfucks on my part. I'm late to the meeting. I accidentally left the meeting when they started recording just a, just a complete fucking shit show. Yeah. Speaking of shit shows, my co-host, Garrison Davis, how are you, Garrison? Thank you.

I'm the one that saved this. I had to send the guest the Zoom call. I know. I know. I'm not even supposed to be on this call. No, you're not. You're not even supposed to be working today. That's not true.

Well, yeah. But you're not on this call. I'm not on this call, but here I am saving, saving the pod. This is enough. This is enough witty banter. This is a daily podcast. Yeah. All right.

And now let's bring on our guest for today, Monsignor Alex Newhouse. Alex, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. I feel like I was pulled in off the street, just like bundled into a van and then. Yeah. You know how people used to get like Shanghai like captured by allegedly allegedly and forced to work on boats in like San Francisco and whatnot?

We do that with podcasts. I mean, that is actually most of what I've done to the people who work on your podcast. I think I think I've had everyone from your show on our show now, and it has been very much like I'm just pulling them on a string. Speaking of which, Alex, you are one of the hosts of the terrorism is bad podcast, a very controversially named podcast, and you work at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey Center of Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism Center on, not of, that would be a different center.

Very important. Very important. Middle word there. And we're not bringing you on to talk about how to make explosively formed penetrators. Not this time. Not this time. That is someone else, yeah. And you are also a, you are also a actual games journalist.

Yes. Yeah. I got my start in this weird space to be a gamer gate. How do you feel about ethics in the game journalism industry, Alex? Always been fine. Like lots of shit. Yeah. All right.

Anyway, that's the end of that. Yeah. I do want to actually start there, Alex, because you and I both have something in common, which is that we, we got our start writing in a field that's wildly different from consulting with like governments on terrorism. Like for me, it was, I wanted to write like dick jokes on the internet, and I just like stumbled into a bunch of ISIS propaganda that most people weren't aware of. And that started me like lecturing at universities and shit.

And for you, it was gamer gate. So I'm interested in kind of you telling your story a little bit to start us off. Yeah. And I was during undergrad, I interned every summer at GameSpot, a video game website you may have heard of. It's one of the two big ones along with IGN. And when I was doing that, I was, so this was 2014, 2015, 2016, like right in the, at the beginning stages of, of gamer gate really popping off.

And what ended up happening is a lot of the, the people I worked with, a lot of my colleagues and friends were just in the blast zone. And they were just targeted by the absolute onslaught of, of harassment. And I just had a curiosity, started looking into some of those people who were, who were targeting my friends and colleagues, and it ended up being a lot of the people that we're still talking about today. You know, it all, all rolls back up to the Breitbart metropolitan area, if you will. And I don't know, what do, the thing that made me want to, I mean, obviously I've been

aware of your work for a while, but the thing that made me want to specifically bring you on is you started on a new project to create like a video game that, that will hopefully have an ability to help like de-radicalize people. And I'm, I'm not entirely certain like of the details of the project, but I think it's a fascinating project because as, as you know, all too well, a lot of this stuff started in gaming, not as a result of anything specifically about gaming, but the kind of like socialization that occurs in those spaces and the kind of like different communities. And it's been like, we have, going back to the 90s, evidence of like different Nazi groups

on the early internet, like talking about like these are specific, these specific groups and subcultures that, you know, will have an easier time radicalizing and whatnot. But yeah, I'm interested in kind of what actually is going on with this project and, and how you think it's going to look at this stage. I understand it's pretty early in development right now, so I'm not expecting like, you know, an E3 walkthrough. Yeah, our E3 slice of life demo, I wish we had that, um, yeah, we won a grant from DHS and FEMA, their, their terrorism prevention grant program this year.

We just gotten awarded it like literally two weeks ago. So have not even started to work on it at all, but the project will be a collaboration between my center and a nonprofit games development company called the I thrive foundation. And basically what we are going to do is like build digital scenarios, digital narratives that can be engaged with, within classroom settings. So we're targeting high schools for rolling this out. And the idea is that we're going to give students the ability to take on roles that empower them to better understand how extremism and radicalization work as mechanisms, which

will hopefully the idea is that it will, it will improve resilience and, you know, civil integrity and all those fun buzzwords, um, within, within high school communities. So we're not necessarily trying to de radicalize already radicalized people, but we're really trying to build community awareness, community resilience to, to radicalization pathways. I mean, this is something I think about constantly because I get asked this a lot, you know, get, I'll get emailed questions from people sometimes as much detail as like, Hey, I'm like a teacher and here's some things this kid in my class has said or something he put in an essay and like, I'm growing really concerned about him and like, I, what do I do?

And my usual answer is you, there's a couple of people who I, uh, respect that I'll try to direct them to, but I, I don't, I'm pretty good at how people get radicalized. It's something I spent a lot of time studying. I don't know how, how you, I have trouble figuring out how to break down these pathways because like, right, the, the default for a lot of people and for a lot of time has been will you de platform, right? You, um, you get them off of whatever and there's, there's, I do certainly think there's there's utility in that, but there's also, you know, the toothpaste tube effect, the

fact that when you, you squash these popular areas where they're able to spread, then they, they filter off into increasingly isolated communities that develop new terms. They find out ways to hide it and that actually increases, you know, it may, it may reduce the number of people who get radicalized, but the people who remain just get more and more extreme because they're even more isolated from, you know, everyone else. And I don't know, how do you, how do you, how do you break that, that radicalization cycle? Like how do you, how do you stop that shit before it gets, you know, to a tipping point?

Yeah. I mean, in, in general, I'm with you. I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of de radicalization strategies and it's, it's like an incredibly difficult task to, to pull someone out who's already going down these pathways. And then like you said, it's also an incredibly difficult task to make sure that when you are disrupting the radicalization networks that they aren't just disappearing off to some other corner of the internet, which we know they're doing. Like one of the reasons why we're, we're working with a video game, video game company is over

the last few years, we've noticed a big migration into video game platforms, especially big social based video game platforms like Roblox and Minecraft, which are like not even remotely prepared to deal with, you know, very well developed, sophisticated radicalization networks. They have moved over there, both for organization and radicalization reasons, since mainstream companies have started taking more of an interest in deplatforming them. And so we are ending up like pretty wildly unprepared for this sudden onslaught of extremists being right in front of kids as they're playing games or, you know, teenagers or even young adults.

So our idea essentially is to use that language, the same language that extremists are trying to adopt via the structures of video games, via the sort of interactivity there to better communicate the impacts of extremism, what it looks like, how to identify it, and hopefully how to avoid getting, you know, falling into the traps that are laid for unsuspecting people. One of the issues, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, because we talk a lot about, like I think people have become increasingly aware of how bad Facebook in particular is, is a problem with this. It's really where we owe a lot of the Boogaloo movement too, and now this stuff is coming

out about like the data Facebook has had on just, and this isn't, this isn't, this is adjacent to radicalization, the mental impact that it's been having on teenagers, right? Like the, just how bad it is for people. And I'm wondering like, how do you scale this stuff, I guess is the question, like how do you actually, how do you make the social internet less dangerous? Yeah, I mean, that's, that's going to be extremely tough. And we are even starting very, very small, like we're building, we're building on a narrative platform to target three high schools right now.

But the hope is that ultimately what we can do is build a tool set and, and a platform like literally a game platform that can be used by high school teachers and high school classes throughout the country or throughout the world. The idea will be to hopefully make a new sort of package of different methods and interactive experiences that can be reused into the future. But it is one of the big open questions that we will hopefully come to some sort of answer for throughout the project about how do we actually scale this up. But you know, in general, it is again, like one of the biggest open questions right now.

One of the reasons why I'm so skeptical of a lot of DRAD and CVE techniques is they try to go for scale of effectiveness when in reality, one of the best and only DRAD equalization pathways that we know of involves people that you know, and I know, going out and meeting with these people one on one and having intensive frequent communications with them. So there's, as far as we know, there's not a good answer right now. This is a huge place of research right now because we just straight up do not understand how to scale up radicalization prevention and de-radicalization. I mean, what you're trying to do in like reaching kids in high school in something that's meant

they're meant to be consuming while they're in school is even such an additional challenge because I think you and I are both young enough to at least remember that like almost nothing that you put before kids in that context in a school gets through. I can think about like anti-drug programs and stuff when I was a kid and how ineffective they were. There was, I had one effective anti-drug like speech by a teacher and it was just a teacher whose son, it was part of this, there was this one night in playing where like six kids OD'd on heroin.

There was a big Rolling Stone article about it, it was a very famous moment. And her son was one of the kids who nearly died and she just explained like physically what happened to him and begged us not to do heroin. And that actually did stick with me. I've never, never shot up anything. But you know, like the, a lot of it doesn't work. And I think part of why, it was this thing I talked about when I tried to explain like why ISIS propaganda was so effective.

It's the, it feels more authentic than the, than the counter narrative, right? The counter narrative, because it's, it's usually focus grouped. It's coming as the result of like some sort of government initiative. A bunch of people worked it together. It feels focus grouped as opposed to there's something inherently more compelling about something that just like feels like somebody who really gave a shit of cares a lot, put this thing together, even if it's terrible. And I, that strikes me as a really, because if you're going to be scaling something and

trying to reach a lot of people, it's going to have to be something that is put together at scale by an organization. And how do you, I mean, I know this must be on your mind as you're trying to figure out how to craft this thing. I'm just interested in your thoughts on that really. Yeah. I mean, that exact challenge, challenge is what led us to proposing the project, project that we are.

And the idea behind it, or the, the impetus behind what we do, what we proposed is the exact problem of students just don't listen to people in what, whether that's anti drug programs or anything like that. Often my, my feeling about it is they are often resistant to it because it's very negative. It's very don't do this, don't do this, setting up boundaries for, for kids and adolescents to act within. It's all very declaratory, very, you know, commanding. There's no, there's no sense of treating kids like people who have control, who have interests,

who have motivations. It's all attempting to restrict them. And so the idea is that we're going to attempt to build a game platform that actually empower students to operate within roles that have control, that, that have something to say, to give them voices, to give them that sort of feeling of being an established person within a, within a certain scenario. The way that I've been thinking about it is that we're basically merging video games with like the structure of a model UN conference or something like that.

Hopefully we'll be a little less nerdy than model UN conferences. But that's the idea of giving people power to make decisions and, and treat them like actual, you know, operating humans. Yeah, I, I'm wondering, do you have any kind of models that you're looking at when you think of like, something that you see as, as kind of worth, I don't know, emulating maybe the wrong word, but like, oh, these people, I think got it right. And this was effective, like, or is this really a situation where you feel like we're kind of in the fucking wilderness here?

There's not a lot of great models for what's effective. We are very much in the wilderness. Yeah. We're going to be pulling. That was kind of what I was expecting you to say. Like so much of CVE and DRAD work over the last 10 years has been directly towards trying to essentially recreate the, like the, the dare model or the anti-drug model just in a different field.

And so we're going to be pulling from scenario builders and like model UN and debate and like all of these different models that seem to at least work to get kids engaged with like operating in that sort of situation. But it is going to be pretty, I mean, at least from what I understand is going to be pretty new. We're going to be out there really flying blind for a lot of it, but we will, you know, we have a pilot phase built in to try to beta test this with, with some of the students where incorporating students and instructors in the actual creation development stage.

So that'll be another hopefully good part of this will, will give some students experience with the game development process, which I think will help engage them as well. Yeah. That strikes me as a particularly good idea of like giving and also just giving them some agency. So it's not like this is a thing that you are forced to consume. Like this is the thing that you can like learn something from. I think that's, that's very important.

I'm interested in how you see, how you see this because like, again, we kind of both got in around the same time. Gamergate is when I started paying attention to radicalization too. How do you think it's changed since then? How do you think like the nature of how particularly like younger people are being radicalized has changed? And I guess I'm also interested because I get the feeling that back then it was mostly younger people getting radicalized and that's no longer the case.

I'm just, as we're talking, I just came across a video on Twitter of a group of anti-vax protesters chasing parents and children away from an elementary school and screaming at them that they're raping their kids with a vaccine. So clearly the problem has expanded. Yeah. And honestly, one of the things that keeps me up at night is when we start, if, you know, knock on wood, we are able to roll this out to more schools, we're going to run into some probably very resistant parents who have been radicalized.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the big one is like what you said, like the radicalization demographics have vastly expanded to incorporate so many more different types of people, so many more ages and even ethnicities and genders. But what we do know is that the hardcore of the violent extremists are still targeting adolescents. We know accelerationists, for instance, hang out and try to essentially blackpill a bunch

of teens, especially autistic teens, especially teens with mental health issues, and bring them into a more violent, more accelerationist posture. So I mean, I think that has sort of stayed constant throughout all of this. One of the big changes has been platforms, you know, 10 years ago, it was much easier for a neo-Nazi to operate openly on YouTube or Facebook, but that has thankfully changed. But they have spread out into, like I mentioned earlier, they've spread out into video games. They've spread out into other sorts of platforms where the social aspect isn't necessarily the first part of the platform, but rather a secondary aspect to it.

And they try to engage adolescents on their own turf in a Roblox game or in a video game forum out there. It's not even enough to say it feels like the task of reducing radicalization, or not even mention pulling it back, just stopping the process, feels not just like whack-a-mole, but like whack-a-mole when you're surrounded by moles. And I guess that is the thing that keeps me up at night the most, too, is that like the problem has gotten, because of how social media scales, I think in large part, has gotten so much worse than it ever was.

And the, I see these crowds of adults, you know, assembling in, you know, places like Los Angeles, showing up outside of schools to harass people and like, I don't know what, I don't know what to do about that. Like part of me thinks that the only effective long-term answer is to mobilize a larger number of people to show up to, you know, not necessarily confront those people, but make them feel outnumbered and maybe they'll stop and that'll start a process where they alter their thinking. Like I'm thinking kind of back to some aspects of the civil rights movement here, right, where you would have these people show up at schools just to try to stop integration

and whatnot, and they would be opposed often by larger groups, so they would see the size of the marches in the street, and like, I don't know, I don't even know if it works that way anymore, if like knowing that, you know, 10 to 1 people think your stance on vaccines is stupid and they're willing to show up to like yell at you if that would do anything. But I don't know what, I don't know what's going to do, like, I guess I'm asking you like, can you have you figure this out, because I don't know what the fuck to do. But it's not, you can't, we can't close our, obviously you're someone who's trying to confront

it directly, but we certainly can't keep ourselves like, just pretend it's not going to get worse. Right. No, totally. And, you know, I often feel like it's almost too far gone and, you know, frequently I worry that we've already passed some sort of, you know, point of no return on radicalization exploitation of social media. But one of the other things I've also recognized is that when you're in a space that is dedicated

to one type of confronting, one method of confronting extremism, very often they will forget about or deprioritize or, or even ignore the other types, the other methods. And one of the tasks before us, I think before we throw up our hands and give up is trying to tie together all of the different facets of resisting extremism from the hardcore confrontational doxing and showing up in the streets counter protesting, which I think is an essential part of it, to working as hard as we can to try to get tech companies to realize what's going on. And then also on the educational side, like what we're doing with this, with this project,

some of the things that make me at least a little bit optimistic is that there is obviously inertia, both intentional and unintentional at tech companies, but frankly, they are still extremely far behind in understanding how to even do de-platforming on their platforms, how to even identify who to de-platform. Like the majority of tech companies are still making content moderation decisions on a piece by piece basis, specifically looking at content. Very few of them are doing actor analysis, very few of them are doing network analysis. Very few of them are looking at even the links between off-platform violence and on-platform

content. Yeah. They are still very much in the stone ages when it comes to content moderation. And that's so key. When I think about what actually would reduce the harm that these platforms are doing at scale, it's focusing on the actors and not just the individual actors, which is part of it, but the patterns that let you tell whether or not someone is that same actor who's kind of like putting on a different hat, so to speak.

Are you aware of like, is there any, because I have not seen that happen yet. I haven't seen Facebook take that seriously, and I have spent some time there. I haven't seen, certainly haven't seen Twitter take that seriously. I haven't really seen, I don't believe TikTok is, like they're just, like you said, they're going after, they're taking it on a piece-by-piece basis, which is never, there's too many pieces that's never going to handle the problem. Yeah. I mean, TikTok is crawling right now.

They are in their infancy. They don't, they don't have a data sharing, any sort of data sharing system set up for me sutures or anything like that yet. I've seen optimistic signals. So I think Facebook's approach to QAnon and Boo Glue movement over the past year has been probably the best, the most positive development we've seen on the content moderation front because they took an actual network-based approach to it. It was hamstrung by a variety of different policy decisions, but it was still from like

a, from like a mechanic standpoint, the most sophisticated one any of the companies has actually talked about openly. And YouTube has followed in their path. They've started taking more network approaches. They, they've taken moderation action against QAnon on a similar basis. But the, the thing that I want tech companies to start looking at is applying a lot of the techniques they're using for disinformation and info ops work to extremism and radicalization. It's very similar, but right now it seems to be just easier politically or just they

are further along with doing the large-scale network analysis approaches on disinfo. Like Twitter is doing a lot of that, but it's all on information operations and, and I'll take info. Yeah, as opposed to, yeah, people, yeah. And I, I worry too, because I'm paying attention to kind of, you know, you have this whistleblower from Facebook and how that's being politicized, right? How the right is kind of coming at us from a, they're trying to say, like, well, as Ben Shapiro said, they're trying to, to, um, to censor, uh, alternative media voices and

the like. And I, I worry tremendously about the politicization because number one, it means that at best we've got like three years to get something together before, you know, who knows who's winds up in the White House next. But also if it's just this thing of like veering between who gets, who gets, uh, paid attention to, um, based on like what is politically viable for Facebook, we're never going to solve the problem. And I, I think I agree with you for the most part on the Facebook's response to the

Boogaloo movement, I mean, I guess I think the problem was that by the time they developed a functional set of responses to it, um, it had metastasized, it had grown, it had grown strong enough to exist on its own and a lot of people had gotten exposed. What do you think is the actual, is reasonable to expect in terms of response time from these people? Because with Boogaloo stuff, it was about, I want to say about three months, maybe, well, no, it was more like five. It was about five months that it had from like December of, of 2019 was when I started

really noticing it. And then like, you know, May at the, when, when stuff really kicked off with the George Floyd protest is when you started to see action taken the tail into May. Yeah. So I guess that I'm wondering like, what is the half life of this shit? Like how quickly do you need to, to crack down on this stuff before it gets to be impossible to contain? Uh, yeah, I mean, that's the biggest limiting factor on the effectiveness of, of, uh, contemplation

in general, but also in, in particular, these new approaches that the tech companies seem to be experimenting with. Um, my understanding is that part of the, so I'm not, I'm not defending Facebook by any stretch. I'm not here to be the Facebook. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman, join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI, how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Yes, I promise you. Oh, God, seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there

for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. So tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'll include, but my understanding is that they literally did develop an entirely separate approach to taking down the Boogaloo movement. So that explains at least a little bit of the delay.

But hopefully, you know, my optimistic side hopes that they'll be able to apply it more quickly in the future. The problem is a lot of the network approaches that have been developed are have like these very high thresholds for attribution. So it has to be like a dedicated network that has crossed the line into criminal activity and is actively calling for, you know, political violence on like a network level. And that like, we all know that that isn't, that is like the end goal or the end point in its terminal at that.

Exactly. Right. Like that is the terminal point of the development of these extremist networks. So, you know, we're, one of the, one of the things that we're working on is trying to figure out a way to convince tech companies that you can and should take action earlier before it reaches that point. And it's going to be a mosaic of things is going to be combining violent extremism with hate speech with even like CSAN child exploitation stuff with all of, you know, criminal, criminal

conspiracy network policies, all of those things need to be sort of thought of as pieces in a single big overarching umbrella that we can use to take down networks earlier on. But you know, it's a, it's a, that's one of the biggest tasks is just convincing them to think about it much, much earlier. Yeah. All right, well, let's, I think most of what I wanted to get into today, is there anything else you really wanted to like kind of talk about while you're here? Those are the, those are the big ones for sure.

We will hopefully have more to talk about very soon and how we're approaching this project. It's going to be a pretty big project, it won't take two years to implement, but we're pretty excited to see what comes out of it. Yeah. Well, people can find you on Twitter at, it's just at Alex Newhouse, right? Alex B. Newhouse. Alex B. Newhouse. Yeah.

At Alex B. Newhouse. They can check out where you work at at C-T-E-C-M-I-I-S. And yeah, I'm excited to see, maybe we'll have you back on when you, when you, you actually put out the game, but I'm really interested in looking at that. Oh yeah. What was the last thing you brewed? Oh, I brewed a red IPA and I'm currently brewing three gallons of apple cider. Oh, nice.

We just, we juiced 10 gallons of apples and pears that I just kegged after almost four weeks of fermentation that I'm very excited. I know. I've been looking at, I've been looking at apple mills, like apple presses. Yeah. I should, I should just buy one. We found one to rent. So it was just like, I don't know, 30 bucks for the day.

And we just gathered up all the apples on property, but it's, it was rad. Definitely very soothing. Yeah. We were juicing all of the apples the day that tiny got shot at a, that protest in Olympia. So it was just like looking at the Twitter saying there's been a shooting at a protest and being like, yeah, I'm glad I'm not working today. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm glad I'm not working today. It's having an idyllic afternoon pressing apples. Yeah. This is, this is a more enjoyable use of my time right now. All right. Well, Alex, thank you so much for being on. Thank you for what you're doing and thank you all for listening. Go with, you know, whoever, whatever deity up to you.

The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls, you know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery. In the art world, you knew the painting was fake. Um, listen to art fraud starting February 1st on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the union hall, I say it's a matter of life and death.

I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed. Right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade all we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham

that killed Dr. King except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence as far as I was concerned did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halbert, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago.

We controlled the courts. We controlled absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this.

I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool-bidget. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Send a deep cover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. It could happen here. Mike is possibly. Anyway, I'm Robert Evans. You know who I am because you're listening to this show unless you stumbled upon this, having never heard of the internet before, in which case this is a show about how things are falling apart and what we also try to talk every now and then about how to maybe put them back together a little bit.

My co-host is Garrison Davis. Garrison, say hello to the people. Hello, people. I'd also like you to say hello to Sean. Hi, Sean. Yeah. There's a Sean somewhere out there. There's probably a few, Sean.

Yeah. At least one or two. Garrison, what are we? What are we? Well, we're finally doing something I've been wanting to do for a while is branching off into covering different parts of media and culture that relate to all of these topics. I know both me a little bit and Robert more so have written for an online investigative journalism website called Bellingcat that deals in open source research.

One of the things that we're big fans of at Bellingcat, I've talked with a few of the other people, is a game called Her Story, which is a video game that has maybe one of the better depictions of open source investigations. It's a very good game. I highly recommend it. I played it a few years ago. It was lovely. I recently, originally when I bought Her Story, I bought both that game and a spiritual

sequel called Telling Lies, which I did not play for a while because I was too busy. Then I went to the Earth First gathering this summer and I came back and I had some free time so I played Telling Lies. Because of the content of that game, I found it really interesting because I'm not going to spoil tons of it because I think you should play it for yourself and part of it is solving the mystery on your own, but part of it does take place in a green environmentalism, activism setting. It has one of the more honest depictions of environments like that.

We are graced with bringing on the creator of both Her Story and Telling Lies, Sam Barlow. Hello. Hey. Exciting to be here. Thanks for that lovely intro. Yeah. I am very excited to talk with you. These games are some of my favorite things.

First off, I guess I would just like to talk about your inspiration for this type of detective game because it is unique to every other investigative game out there. It's very much grounded in open source research and using computers in the real world. What kind of got you onto that storytelling concept? I think there was a whole bunch of things that all sparked off at once. When I made Her Story, this was my first independent video game. I'd been making video games for 10-plus years, working on other people's franchises, more traditional things when I started out, working on Nicholas Cage movie times and extreme sports

games and all these kinds of things. At some point, I got to work on the Silent Hill franchise, which is this very cool psychological horror franchise. It's one of the, certainly at that point in time, it was one of the few established gaming franchises that had a story that was interesting and took place in the real world and had characters and things. From that point, I was really digging into a lifelong interest in storytelling, especially what we can do with it interactively, and continued to be frustrated somewhat by working

for these bigger publishers. At one point, I worked for three years, I was directing and writing this big budget video game that got cancelled, and that gave me a moment to sit and think like, what do I want to do? Do I want to get on board another of these big video games? I was very frustrated at the incremental change that you see in the bigger budget video game space. It feels like things happen very slowly, which can be frustrating.

I was looking around. This was when iPhones, people gaming on their iPhones and stuff was starting to blow up. The fact that you could now distribute a game individually, digitally, and reach an audience was changing the landscape. I felt like I should get into that. And so, at its conception, her story was me going, what are all the things I've wanted to do that I wasn't able to do when I was working with these bigger budgets, with these more established gaming templates?

So from the get-go, it was I wanted to deal with characters that essentially lived in the real world, which is a hard pitch. If you're asking for big bucks, every video game has to essentially be about superhero. It needs to be some kind of wish fulfillment for a teenage boy is generally what people are asking for. And the big thing with her story was subtext. Someone's interest in storytelling, I was always trying to push how important subtext is and the idea that there are layers to a narrative that you're not spelling out for

the audience, that they're going to extract through performance or through whatever. And that was always a hard sell when you were dealing with these bigger companies that had a very simple idea of what their audience was. So I wanted to prove that the audience was actually smarter than we were giving them credit for and that if you gave more control to them, if you gave more of the work of piecing these stories together, that that would be not just something they could do, but which would actually be more interesting and more personal. And with her story, I had a kind of lifelong love of like crime fiction and slightly more

kind of Gothic leaning crime fiction. And so I was like, right, I'm going to create a video game which is in that world and which kind of breaks a lot of the established rules of how you might tell a story. And you know, a lot of that I was pulling from my love of some of the more kind of avant garde literary stuff, interesting pieces of kind of movies and things. But it was it was pulling from a lot of different kind of storytelling traditions and ending up in this this interesting place where like you say, it's kind of a game experience where you're essentially researching the story yourself and kind of putting the pieces together.

Yeah. Yeah. For people who don't know, it's like you're basically on a virtual desktop and you're sorting through like a hard drive full of footage. And the versatility of the game and people learning how to use like search terms, right? Just like people try to use like in open source, it's called like using like Google operators. It's the same kind of same thing. But also there's like the other side of things.

I think Bellingcat wrote an article about your game where they like made like a Python script to scan all of the videos for specific keywords and put them into like different folders and files. So it's like you can do the thing where you just like search it, but you could like take this to a ridiculous level. You're like breaking the game open and doing it like you're actually like investigating this and you need to be very quick. So I think her story is a lovely intro to this type of game concept.

And then for telling lies, you kind of changed, you changed some things with it. You made like, I guess, I guess like an expansion would be the way I would describe it for how it like takes the same concept and pushes it further. And I think watching these things now is very different after being like two years on Zoom. Right? I'm sure you've heard this from other people as well. Like, you know, because because of how telling lies operates, it's like a lot of it is, well, you open the game because you're basically cracking open and then I say hard drive.

So all of it is video from like webcams and stuff. So you know, watching people talking to like their computer camera like this after spending years on Zoom definitely hits harder, I guess. It was one of those things. So when we were first working on this and conceiving of it, which was, I don't know, maybe I don't know, 2016 or something like that, there was a leap, right? As a storyteller, you allow yourself sometimes to take that one leap that the audience can take with you.

And the leap there was like, these people are using video chat a lot. I mean, and as I was starting to put it together, I would start noticing people around that time doing video chat in the street on their phones, which was something I was not used to seeing. I was like, oh, shit, maybe this is not too big of a leap. But yeah, I think it was the verge or somebody ran an article that was telling lies is still a great game mid pandemic. It's just real hard to play now that like this Zoom thing is our lives.

I mean, yeah, that was a big thing I was interested in at the time was like, what is this doing to us? What is communicating over the internet? How does that change how conversations and things happen and was kind of looking into some of the research there? So that, yeah, that was wild, was kind of living in that world for several years, putting the game out and then spending two years on Zoom calls. Yeah.

And in a few ways, I think the game is aged very well because of that. And because the way people are more used to interacting with the computer in that format now. So when they're trying to search for these like hundreds of video files, I think they can understand it better. So in some ways, I think it's not necessarily a bad thing. But yeah, let's see. So I think, well, I want to talk a bit about kind of the influences for kind of the surveillance

aspect. Because like her story is filmed in like a police interrogation room for basically the whole thing. Whereas this pulls video footage of people like in private moments, essentially. Of course, this was like after like the Snowden stuff and after all of the other kind of, after the surveillance became a bigger talking point. But what got you to decide you wanted to kind of revolve the game around this concept of internet surveillance and then, you know, different three letter agencies kind of fighting

each other a little bit. So I think it was two things. One was in making her story and making lots of decisions somewhat intuitively kind of when it was finished and it was a big success and I looked back on it. And then kind of when a little bit of time had passed, I then had this very different relationship where I'd, you know, forgotten that I was the person that had made it and so could have opinions about it. And I was really interested in how that game established a level of intimacy with the main

character that Viva plays that you're seeing being interrogated, despite the fact that it's happening through a computer desktop, despite the fact that there's none of what traditionally, you know, that the agency you would traditionally have in a video game, which, you know, conventional logic would be that's how you would establish the idea that this person is alive and that you're in contact with them. But the act of like digging into all this video footage of Viva and seeing her on screen talking essentially at you created this interesting amount of intimacy that a lot of people responded to.

So I was like, well, that's one of the things that is interesting to me to take further because it's very rare that a video game creates this sensation of kind of intimacy or of getting close to or understanding people. And then it was Snowden, I think it was one of the early reports from from all the various things that came out via Snowden. There was a particular operation in the UK, which I think was called optic nerve or something. And the idea there was that they were spying on everyone's internet traffic. And I think it's a little bit easier to do that in the UK than it is elsewhere.

And this one particular operation, I remember there was a PowerPoint slide that was leaked that was like their internal presentation, which proved that like in any leaked government PowerPoint will be the worst PowerPoint you've ever seen, like the clip art and just terrible mess, right? But in this scheme, what they did, and this blew my mind was, for a period of I think it was two years, every single video chat that went through Yahoo in the UK was captured and recorded. And they had this issue, which I think is if you want to go out surveillance kind of

post 9-11, the big problem with surveillance and the extent to which is now used is like what do you do with all this data? Like it's just too much. So they were capturing all this Yahoo video chat and attempting to add the metadata and sort it. Which is kind of interesting because that's kind of to some extent kind of how something like her story worked. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And the biggest issue they had, and they put up this PowerPoint, and it blew my mind was 30 to 40% of all the video chat through Yahoo at this point was sexual in nature. And they were concerned about the feelings of their operatives who were doing the tagging of all this data. So they had put their best computer minds on it and they'd come up with an algorithm

which would detect an excessive amount of skin tone and would then kind of flag and silo those clips. And I just remember reading this and being like, what about the feelings of the people whose skin tone you're capturing, right? Yeah. Like you weren't stopping to think like, why are we doing this? Shouldn't we be doing this? You're solving for the problem of like, how do we stop our agents seeing all this nudity?

And I think there was a bunch of other anecdotes, right, in the snow and stuff of people alongside him, like, you know, looking through people's webcam data and stuff and in a voyeuristic way and just this constant invasion of people's rights. So I think that was one of those things where I was like, oh, this is, this is like new. Like, you know, we now have, you know, you worry about certain levels of like your privacy being invaded and you would certainly worry if someone was letting themselves into your house at night, but we suddenly found ourselves in this position where we have these phones that we put by our bedside at night that have cameras and microphones that are pretty much

just running, right? And capturing and just the extent to which now technology has transformed surveillance. And that, that was really interesting to me because I, and a big thing I wanted to do is, you know, I've made her story and like growing up, I loved cop shows and I particularly loved the good ones like, like Homicide Life on the Street, the US, there was a show in the UK called Cracker. And these were like, you know, somewhat nuanced in how they deal with policing. But, you know, you're still, you know, we're in this position now where we're starting

to ask deeper questions about whether we should watch this many cop shows. Yeah, when they're like the main thing on all television all the time. Yeah, exactly. And, and that'd be like when I made her story partly, I pitched the bigger publishers like we should do the equivalent of a cop show, like we should do crime fiction or cop show as a video game. And they would always be like, nah, and I would say, well, look, this is like the evergreen, you know, if you're a book publisher, you have a crime show, you have a crime book,

you know, if you're doing movies, you're going to have some movies with this genre. It works. And they would always kind of push against that. So when I made her story, that was in fact, like the arc of playing her story, to some extent mirrors my arc in that, like, at the top of it, I was like, I want to make an interesting detective game, and I want to deconstruct how detective stories work. And I then started to do a bunch of research, whereas digging into, well, how do actual criminal investigations work?

How does one interrogate a suspect doing all that stuff? And then I started to pull up what at the time, like there was a bit, it was slightly ahead of like the true crime explosion, but there was starting to be stuff on YouTube and in various places where footage from real investigations was online. And it was starting to get a bit weird and interesting in that people were kind of vicariously watching these things and that raises all sorts of questions. And they were trying to piece together their own kind of conclusions based on these leaks or sometimes officially released interview segments.

Yeah. And there was one, in particular, I got really into the Jodie Arias case, which is like a, and the way the media spun that story and just really dug into, oh, there's like sex and murder and Mormons, and there's this beautiful blonde woman who now, when she goes to court, has gone brunette and they were endlessly talking about on cable news, like her appearance and setting her up as this kind of femme fatale kind of ice main. On the flip side of this, I think there's like the thing with them, the making the murder documentary, which I think I have some issues with how they handle the main guy,

but particularly how they showed the totally immoral interrogation tactics used on Brandon, the kid. And that really cracked that whole thing open, being like, yeah, the way the police are interrogating minors without lawyers is shocking. I think that was part of this transition for me was going into her story with like the hero of this is the detective. It's Andre Brown on Homicide Life on the Street. It's the genius detective that's going to come in there and crack this case.

And the more I dug into in cases like Jodie's where there were various, you know, aspects to that case, she definitely did murder her lover, but there are lots of questions around whether the relationship itself was particularly healthy. And by the end of it, like all of my sympathy was with Jodie, not with the interrogator, who you watch it and you realize that like the reason this person is in this situation is because their life has gone very badly. And the reason for that is everything that's happened in their life prior to this. And they've never spoken to anyone about any of this stuff.

And suddenly they're in this room with the homicide detective who's like, hey, you can talk to me. I'm the first person that's going to sit and listen to you and all these tricks that they use to just get people talking. And it becomes very intimate and becomes kind of like therapy session. But by the end of it, so for me, like the hook of her story is, oh, you get to solve a murder. But really, by the end of it, it's like a character portrait and your empathy should

entirely be with her. And it's less about seeing justice done, right? So I even, but even coming away from that, I was like, I still feel slightly uncomfortable with kind of having made this thing that is reveling in how much fun it is to be involved in the police work or whatever. And so I was definitely thinking about the Snowden staff, thinking about that aspect and the extent to which technology has just so empowered policing in general to the point where it's, there's this great, like one of the core themes that I wanted to dig into

and telling lies was that when you see people try and defend this stuff and defend policing in general, they try and set it up so that you basically, they talk in terms of families and very close relationships. So they kind of like, well, the government is your parent and they're trying to look after you. And you understand as a parent, you're going to sometimes invade the privacy of your children or sometimes you're going to inhibit their freedoms because you're trying to protect them.

And we all understand that and that's part of being human. And that's all that's happening here with government, right? We're trying to protect you from the big bad, the evil. I saw like, there was some tweet from the NYPD the other day that was like, you'll come running when evil is on your doorstep. Someone was saying something, and for me, once you take that understanding of how people relate directly to each other, how families work, the second you scale it to the size of government, it breaks.

You cannot extend that metaphor and then when you add in tech, the extent to which privacy has been degraded of freedoms, when you start just blanket looking for crime, you start creating all the systemic issues that we have just suddenly become amplified. So that to me was kind of interesting. Well, here is like a means to explore that and one of the things that was interesting to me about her story that in retrospect was the extent to which it was about watching video, which seems like a dumb thing to say, but the choice to use real video kind of inspired by watching all these interrogation pieces of footage from Jody and people was kind of

made as, oh, yeah, that makes sense, and I just kind of got on with it. But then looking back, I was like, oh, well, it's interesting because people talk about this game as being an interactive movie, but it's nothing like a movie. No, not at all. And it's not how movies work. It just happens that it uses a video camera. Only similarity is that it has live action footage. That's it.

Yeah. So I was like, I really want to go even further into that texture. And so I was just thinking about, and when I was starting to do my research, like the idea of surveillance and the commonalities between classic old school surveillance, i.e., someone sat in a car with some binoculars watching someone, and modern surveillance, the commonalities are that it's quite boring. Right? There's just a lot of sitting and watching.

It's a lot of doing nothing. Yeah. Right? But out of that, and when you kind of read the first hand accounts of the people doing the surveillance or some of the depictions of this in media, like there's a level of intimacy that you get with the person you're surveilling, right, where, you know, if you're just sat watching them, a new chef, someone's life, if you're listening to a bug in someone's kitchen and just hearing all the just everyday shit in their lives, or if you are, you know,

watching them through some kind of technology, you're just spending all this time with them. And that's like a, that's like a very non cinematic thing. It's just like this, that minutiae and the time stretching out of just being present with somebody. And that was kind of interesting to me of just kind of putting you in that headspace and kind of thinking about what that means. I think that totally gets through because of the way you break up the conversations and telling lies.

You have to sit and watch these characters as they're just doing nothing for sometimes like, like over five minutes, they're just like sitting there. And you do get like very intimate with these characters, but it almost, but like in a very like creepy way where you like, you feel like I shouldn't be here, which is kind of the general feeling of telling lies. It was really interesting because I like some people would have a very, and this was, you know, completely, again, like trying to process how I felt watching the like the videos of all the various police interrogations and stuff was like, this is fascinating because

as human beings, we're fascinated by the human beings. And here is this extremely interesting dramatic stuff where people are just really spilling their lives out. It's why true crime blew up, right? But then you have all these moral questions around it. And obviously with telling lies, it's inspired by lots of real things, but it's fake and you're watching actors act this stuff. But still some people would have this real visceral reaction of like, I shouldn't be

watching some of this stuff. And I'd be like, I mean, you can, it's like, that was where it became really not cinematic to me was like, you know, if you're watching a, you know, a noir film or, you know, a thriller and you have, you know, or even like the thing for the domestic stuff for me was, you know, you could watch a sitcom watching any a normal sitcom and the husband and wife are sat in bed chatting at no point do you feel like I shouldn't be here because you're in the kind of classic Hollywood invisible camera setup, you're this, you know, you have permission to be there as the invisible camera spectator and it doesn't feel as weird as it would if

you were hiding in the closet of this couple's bedroom. So with the setup on telling lies, you immediately feel like, oh, like this, I am in this position that I shouldn't be in. So suddenly all those more domestic moments become charged with like a very different vibe. Like, you're watching them and you're, you're not invited, like, right, you're, you know, you're sitting looking at this NSA hard drive and you're like, yeah, I'm not supposed to be watching this.

Like this is, this isn't, they never invited me into this conversation. Telling lies very much feels like a much more mature game than her story, not in terms of like, it has like more mature content, but like, in terms of like this concept growing up and like evolving and gaining more depth, particularly because, you know, not only just because it has way more characters, but because, you know, you get to, you know, all of your kind of games deal with some degree of like characters lying to you and like just doing like straight lies to your face. That's kind of a, that's my read on a lot of, a lot of your games.

Um, I mean, you're, the game is called telling lies. So, so you definitely see like elements of, of, you know, all of these trying to figure out what is true and what is not. I think it is interesting looking at like how easier it is to lie via these technological platforms, um, sometimes it just like, you feel like telling the truth is just so much more work and you may as well just get through with this conversation by doing a few white lies, which is an spiral out of control. Um, when you combine this with, you know, law enforcement, infiltration, all this kind

of stuff, it gets, it gets very complicated very quickly. Um, one thing that I think you guys handled very well in telling lies was kind of the activism side of things. So like when I, when I played this game, like almost immediately after coming back from the stop line, three protests, um, and like, and like an earth first gathering, you know, everyone there is always very, people try to be aware of surveillance and be like, okay, you know, you don't talk about certain things if there's phones nearby and stuff. So Jen, so that whole side of things was very interesting to like play this game right afterwards

because you get to see like the other side of things being like, okay, if the FBI is infiltrating this group, here's, you know, one of the ways that they do it. And like that, from my perspective, being, you know, in activism spaces for a while, not just like environmental ones, but you know, other ones like here in Portland, um, you had, you handled this topic very accurately, um, where, what kind of stuff did you pull from to kind of create these like, these, you know, environments and interactions between people? Cause I'm not sure if you have any experience yourself and stuff like this, or if you got

people on to, like, like you talked to people who are more experienced activists, what was kind of your inspiration for like, you know, the opposite side of things, not on like the law enforcement. So that was, that was like one of the big initial jumping off points. So, uh, like in terms of the, the kind of real life inspirations, like the, the seed of this whole thing was, try to remember when this was, it was, let's say 2009, 2010 could be completely wrong here, but it was, um, the Guardian in the UK, I think broke the story, but it was, and we've recently had some good progress in this, uh, this area, but, um, broke

the story of this UK spy cops operation, which was, um, a specific unit within, uh, the London police whose job was to infiltrate, uh, groups to surveil them from the inside. And, um, it was horrific and there were like a couple of things about it that were horrific. One of them was that like, essentially their modus operandi was to find vulnerable young women on the periphery of groups, target them romantically, and then they would be the collateral to get, you know, to, to, to have people then more solidly enter into these groups. And then they had like a whole, you know, stepped plan of like, once you're in, how you kind of would, would destabilize, steer these groups from within.

And the, the thing that really made this even worse, um, was the fact that, uh, most of the groups, I think maybe all of the groups targeted with this particular unit were, uh, green activists, um, there's this incredible, incredible, uh, like you couldn't make this stuff up, but, um, there's a famous, uh, libel case where McDonald's was suing these, these two activists in the UK, right? Because they were, um, putting up flyers, uh, exposing some of the practices of McDonald's and the group that they were members of, which I think, uh, at this point that's called green peace, but it was different to the, the kind of more famous green piece, um, in London,

um, prior to them doing this big kind of McDonald's thing, um, was losing members. And it got to a point where, uh, there were so few people in this group that it would have shut down. Had it not been for the fact that, uh, there were a large number of undercover cops in this group. Yeah, if you imagine at some point, uh, there were actually more undercover cops and private security people undercover in this group than actual activists, um, which has enabled the group to continue.

Uh, and in fact, the original flyer that they put out was written, uh, I forget the guys name now, um, by one of these undercover cops. He wrote the copy for this flyer that went out and then was, you know, saw this, these people dragged up in court and was this huge, you know, McDonald's won the case. But in terms of PR, it was hugely damaging to them. But yeah, that, that for me was the thing that seemed even more important because, because here you had this story of the state sanctioning the, you know, one of the most terrible abuses. Like essentially, you know, what was happening was, um, pretty easy to, to kind of call it

rape, right? There was women in sexual relationships with people and thinking it was consensual, but not realizing that they, this was, you know, they, what they were getting into is not what they thought it was. Uh, and, and so this was just so appalling and like from a, uh, just to kind of base emotional level, uh, I just, it was so hard for me to imagine the pain of, um, and these women win relationships with these undercover officers for years. Yeah.

Uh, yeah. And, and part of the modus operandi was when you were done, you had to exit and disappear and they had this whole plan where the cops would, uh, claim that they were being followed and that they were worried and then they would disappear and then they would call from some European country and say that they'd kind of fled the country because they were worried that the cops were onto them and then they would slowly kind of disappear. And this, you know, some of these were kind of pre-modern internet. So it was easier for someone to kind of disappear.

I mean, like with like this, this stuff totally happened in the green scare in the States in, you know, around, around 2010 too. This was my big question was, was this, you know, some of these cases were kind of original inspiration. And when I started thinking about trying to tell a story inspired by this, originally it starts off and, and, and is, you know, still in based in the UK and based on these things. There was a particular, uh, a particular flavor to it where the cops doing this work, it was

part of the Met Police who were, you know, that's the more kind of, uh, gang story. Like there was, there's a real reputation that the Met Police have. So these cops that were chosen for this work were the ones that were a bit more kind of macho and edgy. Um, and there was, there was, I mean, there was so much stuff to it that was horrific. Like they would only pick, uh, cops that were married. Um, because, uh, they felt that that, uh, gave them, uh, some level of ability to be sleeping with these activists and not lose themselves in it.

Um, but obviously the wives didn't know what was happening. Um, and, and there was just, there's so many layers of this that I just thought was, uh, was awful. And, and coming off the first story, I was like, well, I would love to tell an undercover cop story in which we 100% acknowledge that the undercover cop is bad. But yeah, like they are like, yeah, cause, cause it's such a classic trope is the undercover cop story because you get to have your cake and eat it. You get to see someone on both sides of the law.

You get to, you get all the tension and thrills of it. Um, but usually, you know, whatever, even if the, even if the movie or the story or whatever has a bit of sweet ending, the protagonist is always the undercover cop. And ultimately, because they're the protagonist, they're the one that your heart goes to, right? And the secondary characters, whether that's like the wife in Donny Brasco or Goodfellas or something, you know, they, they basically serve as a foil to the main character. So I was like, well, come, can we tell a story where, um, we, we treat the wife and the activist who's being targeted and the other people on the periphery of this guy, uh, let's think

more about their perspective on this world and let's acknowledge 100% from our perspective that this is wrong. Everything that's happening is wrong and it's not justified. And then let's just see what the impact is on people. Um, so once we started developing it and, uh, when I was speaking to Anna Turner about doing it, um, I felt like, oh, we should move this to the States, um, to make it feel certainly as well, because the larger audience is American to, to kind of reiterate and make it feel kind of more identifiable and have it be less quaint and British.

Um, so my number one question from day one was like, well, does this shit happen in the States? And, and does it happen in the same way? And so we brought on a researcher who then started pulling stuff up and, and the big thing for me was, um, replacing the undercover group at the Met, uh, with the FBI and, and then I, that became fascinating to me because then I start digging into the FBI and understanding their history and everything that's wrong there. Um, but yeah, immediately I start seeing all these great examples of, of, yeah, this explicit

infiltration of green groups. Um, so pretty horrific cases of entrapment, um, where, you know, people infiltrate these groups and then encourage them to do more extreme and violent things on the record. It's the point where you're listening to like recorded FBI stuff and, and you can hear the group being like, I'm not sure about that. Like that doesn't sound like a great idea, dude. And the, the, the FBI person is there going like, wow, I don't know. I really do think we should blow this bridge up guys.

And it's so obvious like when you listen to it, which is why a lot of these cases have ultimately been thrown out, but, um, yeah, it was, it was, it was, I guess for the project reassuring to see that all this stuff was happening over here. Yeah. I mean, the FBI, the specific FBI agent that we kind of follow definitely feels very American and feels very real. Um, I, I really like the actor that you got to play him. Um, he definitely feels like a lot of kind of the law enforcement dudes who kind of handle

this side of things. Um, that was, that was, that was definitely, that was like an FBI. He became like the FBI-ness of it became very important to it. And it was interesting the way that the FBI, they had this brand, which is partly reinforced by the media. Like they had the great idea back in like 40s or 50s to themselves funded support cop shows. Yeah. And it's a whole idea we have through the ex files, through pretty much every serial

killer media, whatever, the idea of the FBI is being like the smartest and the best. Like that's put out by them, but it's really interesting to see. They believe that like they are beyond reproach and, um, like they have higher standards for like, you know, if you want to join the FBI, there is in theory this kind of moral, moral check that you have to pass. And flipping backwards and shooting somebody when his gun falls out of his pants at a club. Yeah. Well, then you read about it and you're like, actually the experience, the lived experience

and, and we were, it was, it was so bizarre because I was like, I really want to understand what it's like to be an FBI wife and, um, let's find, let's reach out and like the research I had done and some of the stuff we pulled up, I was like, Oh, it, it does sound pretty bad. Because a requirement, if you're an FBI agent, you have to move every three years or something. So if you're the wife to an FBI agent, you essentially move every three years. And so you never get a chance to build your own career or to make roots. And so you're generally, and the wage is not great, which is why they're very, uh, vulnerable

to, uh, corruption really. So you're generally living, uh, there's usually kind of areas where all the FBI families live. So it's this very insular world. And you, you start to see, uh, where some of these wives have come out and spoken about it. They're like, it's really shitty because our husbands who believe themselves to be like, you know, Marchos superheroes get to disappear for three days at a time and we can never ask where they are or what they're doing.

And there's this kind of internal code, which you see in a lot of law enforcement, right? They will cover for each other and protect each other, um, and you, you suddenly start to see that like, uh, you know, this, this is not like, and in fact, uh, I remember reading, um, sort of the guy who inspired like Silence the Lambs, the TV show Mindhunter was based on him and his book, um, is this guy who was one of the early kind of, uh, serial killer profiling people within the FBI. To read his book, it's a terrible book. Yeah.

When I heard that Fincher was adapting, I was like, wow, good luck. Um, but it's incredible the lack of self-awareness he has. Um, this guy is so sexist and so bad. Every time he introduces a woman, it starts by from the legs up like he's describing her and, um, at the very end of the book, he reveals that his wife leaves him and he kind of writes as if this is a huge surprise. And you're like, yeah, yeah. He's calling this from chapter one and he has a best buddy.

So like the guy who's his, who's the, the kind of number two in Mindhunter on TV, um, there's like a real life version of him. And halfway through the book, his wife hires an assassin to come a hit man, to come in and kill him. And the guy just narrowly avoids it. And the guy writing the book is like, what an evil woman, like, oh, my poor friend. And you're like, well, hang on a minute. What did your, what was your friend like?

Yeah. What was going on? Yeah. There's, there's probably something going on there. So yeah, it was, uh, yeah, that, that sense that, which I think for me expanded beautifully to a bigger picture of like that character, kind of believing that he's the good guy. Absolutely. You know, he's the sheriff in the Western.

He's coming in and he's fixing problems and he's saving the world. But and then he slowly falls apart. Yeah. Like it's inability, like it's such a brittle worldview that these guys have, he is, he is very once, yeah, once he's exposed to thinking that the world is maybe different. It just totally breaks them. Yeah. The, the, his specific arc, I think is extremely interesting.

Um, and I don't want to spoil it because I think it's, it's, it's too, it's too shocking once you get to the final piece of his story, you're like, oh, wow. Um, I think that was laid out in a really beautiful way. But it's, it's, it's, it's not like shock anyway, like, oh, this, this like doesn't make sense. It's like, oh, no. Yeah. I can see that.

I can see why he's doing this. But it's still, it's like, you kind of slowly watch this guy get broken down piece by piece. Um, you know, because he's, he starts, he's very much like the superhero FBI agent. He's like, yeah, haha, I'm going to, I'm going to stop these terrorists or whatever. And then he just like, yeah, watching him progress throughout the story and you can see like how pathetic he is sometime. There's a, there's a great, uh, one of the UK spy cops. Um, I forget his name.

If we were doing this three years ago, I'd have had all these names in my head. But he, um, uh, so he was assigned and he was, uh, he infiltrated this green group somewhere in the UK for a couple of years, had this relationship with this girl, um, was participating and facilitating, um, the, the one detail that I loved and tried to make sure was accurate was all these cops would have a van or they would have like a big truck in the UK because they, they realized that like in these smaller groups, like being the transportation was like your superpower. So like if you were someone who was like, Oh, I'll drive everyone to the thing.

I'll get us all there. Cause I have this big van, um, that was the easiest way to just kind of make yourself useful. Um, but this guy's doing all that at some point, um, they decide to pull him and, uh, they pull him out. He returns to his wife and his normal life back in London. Um, but he, he can't go back to his normal life and so he starts and he's done all the, the stuff of disappearing, uh, but he just starts getting up and driving and maybe he's

in the north of England somewhere, just, just shows back up and he's like, Oh, I'm back guys. And they're like, Oh shit, what happened? I thought you had to like disappear cause people are after you and he's like, no, it's all right. Uh, and just goes back to living as an activist. Um, and his, at some point, one of his superiors notices that the mileage on his police paid, you know, vehicle is huge.

And they're like, why is this guy doing so much mileage and it's cause he's driving all the way back, uh, and, and continuing to live this life and, and inhabit this character that he's set up. Um, and at some point, uh, I think he gets found out and it all goes horribly wrong cause he no longer has like the fake ID and stuff that they gave him. Um, but yeah, I mean that, and it's like that stuff's interesting, but then you, it was always important to never be overly sympathetic when you see them struggling. Uh, no, there is, there is certain points where you see the FBI agent struggling because

of how like smug he is. You're like, yes, he's struggling and you like get excited when he gets like, when he gets like reprimanded or he, you know, people are like mad at him for various reasons. It is very interesting how you like, how sympathies get pulled in certain directions. Cause like by the end of the game, you definitely have a much fuller perspective on who this guy is and how his kind of psyche works. Um, cause he is really in a lot of ways, like kind of pathetic as like a person. Um, and he like needs to like hype himself up for himself to like make himself feel like

he's special. And when that gets broken down, he just completely collapses. I guess one of the last things I want to talk about is like throughout all of your games, you have kind of a, a through line of like fairy tales. You kind of, you bring in fairy tale concepts into all of these games. Um, and I, I like how a lot of your games are very open ended in some ways. I think her story being much more open ended than, than telling lies in some ways. Um, and I, I really like that you kind of, you can't like look up like, what is the ending

of this game? It's like, no, like you have to, you piece it together in your own brain. Like that. And whatever you think the story is, that's what it is for you. There's no like definitive ending, especially like, especially for her story. Um, and how this combines with fairy tales, I think it's really interesting way to like include like mythology into these more modern stories. What's kind of your thought process behind, you know, kind of, kind of including mythology

and fairy tales into these more like modern stories of like, you know, people interacting with like government law enforcement and then just, you know, breaking down their own psyches under these high tensed situations. Yeah. I mean, I think it, I think it came initially with her story of, yeah, thinking about the, the, the kind of meta storytelling-ness of these things, right, of the extent to which their experiments and like how we tell stories, um, and, but a lot of times, like the myths and the, the, the kind of classic stories that people go to those, right, to try and

understand the bigger questions or, uh, certainly like, um, I guess it partly came out of, uh, the start of her story, I had like two youngish kids and you, so you're reading them all the classic stories and you realize the extent to which these are just encoding our society's values, right? Yeah, totally. I had this incredible book that was, um, that my parents got for me and I tracked down and made sure we still had when I had my kids that was called, uh, was like folk tales of the peoples of the Soviet Republic, uh, from like the, the, the early 80s and it was collected

like you, a lot of it was, I think it was Ukrainian folk tales and they were amazing because they were so dark, like the message of each of these stories was trust nobody, the ritual always when you will undead and unhappy, right? And each story would start with the poor peasant, his brother gets rich. He asks for help. The brother like is horrible. Like this is one story where there's this brother who's like, oh, if you want some grain because you're starving, then gouge out your own eye and I'll give you some grain and then

it comes back for more grain later and he's like, gouge out your other eye now, chop off your hand. And it's like, they're so dark. Uh, and I'm like, but this is 100% reflecting what it's like to live in that world. And grew up and you're preparing people for the realities. So, um, you know, I think that to me was really interesting and, and, and her story tells this story that kind of to some extent grows out of this childhood. And then with telling lies, definitely it was part of this idea of, of, yeah, how Logan's

character David sees the world and relates to his part in it and like his utter inability to realize that he's the bad guy in the story. Right. Yeah. He thinks he's the good guy. Um, and, and that was like, that was partly the key to breaking his character. I think it was his daughter. So he has this character who's like the six, seven year old daughter.

Um, and that's like, you know, he, he lets down and does horrible things to a whole bunch of people. Um, but the thing he's not going to be able to get over is knowing that he's let his daughter down, right, knowing that at some point she will grow up and be an adult woman who if she learns about what her father has done, we'll, we'll think less of it and, you know, we'll realize that he's the bad guy in the fairy tale, whatever. So, um, that was like just interesting to me to, to set him in that moment and have him reading those stories and see, see his relationship with his daughter.

Um, and yeah, I think that, yeah, that, yeah, I think it's, kind of just relating those things back to what are these, these kind of base values and so much of those folk tales is preparing you for the fact that people are going to lie to you and trick you and, you know, all those kind of aspects. Yeah. A lot of them do deal with like, you know, failures of trusting people and, you know, getting, getting let down and being misled. A lot, a lot of those do kind of follow in these same, same kind of rough templates.

Um, let's see. Is there anything you're working on now that you want to, uh, that you want to plug? Um, and of course, you know, people should pick up telling lies for a story. Um, I have them on steam. I think they are best suited to be playing on PC, but you can get them on console. You can get them on iOS. Uh, but any, anything, anything upcoming? Yeah.

We're working on, uh, currently, uh, this, uh, project called immortality, um, which is very ambitious. Uh, it'll be out next year and it deals with the story of an actress, uh, who only ever made three movies, uh, the latter half of the 20th century, um, and then disappeared. And, uh, we have recovered footage from these three movies. Um, and it's been interesting cause, uh, with telling lies, like I've always been someone that when I think about the kinds of stories I want to tell, I've always thought that I'm not a capital P politics person, right?

I tend to be interested in how people relate to each other and some of the kind of smaller politics. Um, and once I got to telling lies, it was like, Oh, actually, like there is some capital P politics. Absolutely. 100% tied to all this. Yeah, totally. And so dug into that was like, well, so I want to do right by this, right?

So what did involve speaking to lots of people that didn't involve bringing in all the research and everything. Um, so coming away from telling lies and, and as, I mean, it was making the game was insane because, uh, it was during, uh, Trump, right? Trump happens. And I remember going into it being like, we're making this story about the FBI being bad. That's a pretty reasonable end point. And then once we hit Trump, you had all that stuff of like the good FBI agents in theory

or the FBI might be the people that bring Trump down. And suddenly they, it was 100% leaning into the myth of the FBI. And I was like, damn it, and just everything, uh, getting worse. And it was like, Oh, this is like so intense to be making something and speaking to some of these issues whilst this is all happening. Um, so finishing that, I was like, well, okay, for the next project, we are definitely going away from talking about real life issues and capital P politics. And then just accidentally it's become, because we're talking about an actress in the 20th

century and, uh, what it means to make movies and, uh, digging into that suddenly becomes about a whole other bunch of systemic issues. Um, so not, not managed to avoid the politics again, but it's, it's been a really, really interesting project. I think, I think once you crack that egg open of realizing that politics are kind of intrinsic to every story we tell, it's hard to, it's hard to kind of put that back in the box because once you realize you can use politics in a very interesting and complex storytelling way, that still doesn't alienate a lot of audiences.

It's like, oh yeah, this is just using another way to interact with the world. I think that was, that was, uh, one of the things that was slightly disappointing, I guess with telling lies was like, when we're working on it, I'm like, we want to make sure we get these things right because like these are very important issues and there are some nuances and so we, you know, we don't want to accidentally say something that is incorrect or we don't want to give people the impression that we're, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so I was expecting some level of scrutiny in terms of discussing the game's themes and everything.

Um, and I guess like the, the video games world is still not quite ready for that. Like they're quite happy to talk about the game mechanics and how this thing works and some big picture emotional responses, but no one's willing to kind of dig deeper. And we had like, as the game was coming out and continues to be, you have the bigger name developers being like, there's no politics in our video games. As they're like invading countries, you know, being a Black Ops unit, taking down communist countries. We're not going to talk about politics.

We're going to, yeah, that constantly, uh, constantly just saying it's, it's possible. They'll always say we, we both sides, right? We'll tell both sides and let people make the decision. And something that I was very adamant was very important to me on telling lies was like, if we're making this game, it is not, the point of the game is not to give you a mush of information and have you decide the moral, you know, good or bad of something like we are going into this 100% with the assumption that we and the audience or most of the audience believe that people doing these things are wrong.

And then we're just, and then I'm interested in what does it do to the people? What, what is it like to be in. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that

down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast. The podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general

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life after having been involved in these things? So for me, a political game is, it can't be a political story in any media. It can't be going back to first principles and pretending we're in debate club. Cause that just, I think that's just, that's to utilize the audience. I think you can say a political story is one which embraces and acknowledges the reality of the various power struggles and inequalities that we have. And then it has something to say about, or has a particular angle it wants to interrogate or something it wants to shed light on.

But it's very childish. And I think we're definitely struggling with this in video games to be like, oh, if it's about politics, then it should be a big question and we should assume no answers, right? And it's like, yeah, it is complete bullshit. And, and it kind of, it can lead to some problematic ways, because why you see a lot of, you know, game footage in actual like terrorist propaganda, like with like, like with like Nazis and white supremacist stuff, they, they use a lot of game footage in their propaganda videos when, especially when you like both sides of these issues.

Yeah. It's a, I have a particular interest in the intersection between like politics, extremism and gaming, because then gaming is very important to our modern kind of extremist ecosystem, particularly around like 4chan and like, you know, like mass shootings, all of these things play into game culture. They're not saying games cause these events to happen because they don't. But like the way they interact with these people is actually interesting. You know, this is very different from like the way like this Senate is like, oh, games

are causing mass shooting because they're not, it's, it's, it's, it's a completely separate thing. Cause yeah, there is, there is a Fox news kind of hysteria around gaming, but at the same time, like, and clearly, you know, one way I pitched her story when I was telling people why it was interesting. I was like, this is a game about listening. I was like, that's cool cause you know, whatever you think about the larger politics of it or the question of whether video games themselves are inherently harmful or anything, like the

fact that still 99% of the stories we tell are about someone with a gun in their hand or a sword in their hand and the, the, the power dynamics and the story, the types of stories and the types of protagonists like it's screwed up. And I think to the same extent that the fact that like the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about a bunch of glorified cops going around saving the world, like, you know, if you continue to reinforce these things, yeah, obviously all of the art we make are saying certain things about the world and we're reinforcing a certain narrative over and over again and not really thinking critically about it.

Yeah. That's the problem with making art. I mean, I'm, I'm not trying to come off as being anti-gamer. I would play a lot of games. I really like gaming. I just think some, some companies need to figure out why, why certain games are used in mass shooting manifestos and certain games aren't, particularly around like politics. Like, this is particularly, particularly talking about like white supremacy and how certain

games kind of play into certain things because even, even a game like Wolfenstein, which I think handles this topic very well, still will, you know, get brought up in certain, you know, propaganda videos because they do have cool shots of Nazis walking around, right? And that's kind of the problem with some of these things and, you know, if they weren't killing, if Nazis weren't killing people as much, this wouldn't be as much of a problem. But because that's still a thing. That's still a thing that needs to get talked about.

Anyway, this, this took a very sad, sad turn towards the end of anyway, yeah, I, I will, I will just strongly recommend playing her story, playing telling lies. I think these games, you know, interrogate our, our predispositions about, about kind of police detective work. And you just get to learn a lot, you get to learn a lot about like people and characters because like a lot of these games, you know, or the setup is like, oh, solve this crime or mystery. But then by the end, you're solving a very different mystery and you're kind of solving

what makes a person tick and it's very, you've, I really like the arc that you have in your games. They've brought me a lot of happiness. So thank you, thank you for that and thank you for talking with all of us about your work. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

And yeah, like I say, I was, I was hoping to have hundreds more conversations about what telling lies was about and about these issues when it came out, but it's, you know, that it's, I mean, it's hard just the general media landscape now, like you put something out there and it comes out and people consume it and move on. Like you don't have that span of like discussion that, I don't know, feels like it used to be a thing. Yeah. I think it definitely did, did used to be a thing.

And definitely your games have had an influence on media in certain ways. And I know there's been like a few other like projects that like Netflix is doing that is kind of taking your concept, but not really doing it correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely been a lot.

Yeah. People always send me them. They're like, Oh, this sounds a lot like her story. This thing. And it's like, Oh, but it's, it's not non-linear. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

It's like you, you let people, I don't know. Yeah. Usually it's like watch, there are eight episodes. You can watch them in any order. Which isn't how her story works. No. Yeah. Like, yeah.

There's a, there's a, yeah. There's a whole different thing going on. But, um, no, I mean, it's, yeah, it's interesting times for, for that sort of stuff, but, um, anyway, play these games on steam and that, that does it for today. You can follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at happen here pod and cool zone media. Uh, do you have, do you have a social media that you would like to plug or would your people, if people are on Twitter, uh, this right tend to be despite it's despite it's top.

Yeah. I know. So I am, I am, uh, mr. Sambalo on Twitter. M.R. Sambalo. I will say, I actually, I actually do like your Twitter account. You do, you do post some fun stuff every once in a while.

That's, that's kind of a weird condescending thing to say, um, anyway, bye for putty. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind baby beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected when we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad and host of finding Rafi, a new podcast from I heart radio and fatherly listen every Tuesday on the I heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Robert sex Reese host of the doctor sex re show and every episode I listen to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues and yes, I despise every minute of it. Yeah. She, she made mistakes too. Right. I mean, she did kill everyone at her wedding, but hell is real. We're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it.

So join me. Won't you listen to the doctor sex re show every Tuesday on the I heart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you who settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and you just kind of fell into it. And you know, it's like totally fine. Just another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself.

Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say. You could start a podcast with speaker from I heart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love and maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Speaker.com. That's a SBR.

E a K. That's going to that's going to be way too trying to open an episode. Well, we already did it. So keep moving. Yeah. Uh-huh. Um, the episode is actually going to start with Garrison saying that's way too jarring to open an episode with and the listeners won't know what it was.

That isn't much. That isn't much easier. Opening. All right. So we're doing, I'm going to be, I'm going to be reading a thing today and then we're going to talk about the thing that we're reading. Um, and that's, that's the show and who, and who are you and who is here? Oh yeah.

This is it. Who are you? Here. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison. I am our resident Canadian. Yeah. That's Anderson.

That's Anderson the dog. And here we have, we had to hire a Canadian for a diversity quota. You tell you to not anyway. We have Chris here, uh, Robert Evans as usual, um, and Sophie, so we're going to talk about, uh, we're going to talk a little bit about, about Canada today. So good in the, uh, in like the scripted, what if scenarios first deposited in the original it could happen here. Um, it detailed what it might be like to live in the United States during a modern civil

conflict. And like one of the stories that we kind of tell ourselves as a culture is about, you know, crossing up into the safe haven of Canada, whatever stuff breaks out in the States. Um, whether that'd be like an escape from just the hell that's US politics, um, or you know, going up into the cold Northern terrain better equipped to deal with climate change. Canada is kind of just viewed as a bastion of like li- of liberal democracy in North America. Um, you know, I've, I've made jokes in the past about using my Canadian passport to escape

up into the forest of Alberta when things get too dicey here in the States. But this like weird utopian view of Canada is not just wrong about Canada's current political, uh, state, but also assumes that a Canada is like immune to the political shifts that the States have gone through, uh, the past few years, which is, it's, it's very obviously not. Um, so like Canada internationally is, and specifically in the States, it's, it's viewed as like, you know, Canada, it's used as like America's little brother, but it's, you know, it's much more, you know, democratic, it's much more liberal.

It's like, it's like this kind of ideal scenario for like what the States could be. And like Canadians have a weird view of the States as well. Like Canadians, they're both like, they're like, they're kind of obsessed. Like a lot of Canadians, I think, know more about US politics than they know about Canadian politics. Um, but almost in like a way that we watch sports, it's, it's like, it's like this thing that we like watch as entertainment, like, like some kind of like sick reality show. That's how I think a lot of Canadians really view US politics, um, because it's just so

wacky compared to the kind of more like civil parliamentary system that we have in Canada. US politics just looks very, very bizarre. And there's always this notion, it's like, no matter how bad things can get in Canada, at least we're not the States, at least, at least we're not, at least we're not the US. And that is kind of a lot of, a lot of how a lot of stuff can get really get, can just like survive in Canada longer because it's just they, they view it like, at least, at least we're not as bad as the other people. Yeah.

So that's how, you know, it gives them some kind of, some kind of sense of security. But in terms of like, in terms of Canada as a country, you know, we've said that Canada as a country is basically just, you know, a few mining companies in a trench coat and the trench coat is healthcare. Um, and that's, that's really all they are as, as, as, as a country. But today we're going to be talking about kind of Canada's slide towards farther right wing politics, um, both, you know, historically and then more recently, because a lot of what we've seen in the States has happened kind of in its own weird Canadian way around the

same time. Um, but before we really, before we like really get started, I think it'd be remiss not to mention how the Canadian government has historically treated indigenous and First Nations people, um, living on that land. Of course, it's like not only just hundreds of years ago, but a lot more recently as well, just in the past year, there have been thousands and thousands of like hidden graves found across the provinces at the sites of these residential schools. Um, and the process of looking for these unmarked graves has like just, just started.

Um, the Canadian Historical Association published a letter this past Canada day, Canada day is like independent state, but for Canada, um, saying that it was abundantly clear that Canada is guilty of, is, is, is guilty of genocide. Um, I know if there's, there's a few episodes behind the bastards, um, and I think even worst year that, that talk about residential schools, um, and, and the genocide of indigenous people in Canada. So yeah, you can, you can check those out and I wrote this episode to be more focused on Canada's political shifts the past five years, but since we're talking to be talking

about Canadian fascism, I thought it would be irresponsible to not mention this upfront as like a, a thing very responsible garrison, very responsible. So I'm going to try to take us through aspects of Canadians, of Canada's politics chronologically. Um, you guys can butt in and kind of ask questions and clarifications about stuff. Um, but the, the first thing that we're going to start with is actually going to be on the First Nations side of things. And that, that's kind of how that, that's what mostly indigenous people are called in Canada as First Nations.

Um, even, you know, the indigenous people up in Canada, most of them use that term. So that's the term I'll be using for some, some of this stuff, just cause that's the one that's used up there. Um, so the, uh, the residential schools program is where I'm going to briefly mention a few things about it just because of how it kind of relates to some of the stuff that we're going to be talking with for the rest of the episode. Um, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to read some, I'm going to read some words by, uh, by Duncan Campbell Scott, who was the department, uh, who was, who was the deputy superintendent

of Indian affairs. This was like a rank in the Canadian government. Um, he served as the deputy superintendent from 1913 to 1932, um, and he's arguably like the main architect of the residential schools program. Um, he was, he was also good friends, uh, with the first prime minister of Canada, John, uh, John, John McDonald. So here's, here is, here's how this guy, the, the, the, the architect of this program, this is, this is how he kind of talked, talked about this in letters to both his like his

underlings and just like openly quote, it is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so close in the residential schools and that they died a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared towards a final solution for our Indian problem. It is quite within the market to say that 50% of children who pass through these schools did not live to benefit from the education in which they had received. So that's, that's just what he calls it.

He says the final solution to the Indian problem. It's very, very, very clear what, what, like that, that's just the language he uses. And this was like before Hitler, though, like this was, this was 1913. Well, I mean, Hitler was paying attention to these guys. Yeah. Yeah. Like this, this is just like, this is the mindset of all of these same people. This is all of, all of the same thing.

Um, another, another, another quote from this dude is, I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think of it as a matter of fact that the country ought to continually protect a class of people who are able to stand alone. That's my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there's not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the, into the body politic. And there is no Indian question and no Indian department. That is the whole objective of this bill, the bill referring to the residential schools

program. So that's, that's how he talks about these things. Um, there, there's other letters that he's sent that's like telling his, um, his like agents, cause he had like agents stationed at, at, uh, Canadian, at Canadian reserves to like not let Indians do dancing because both that's, you know, that's doing their cultural practice, but also it'll distract them from learning how to do Western farming. Um, like they weren't allowed to go to fairs or exhibitions or anything that, like that, anything that has like, that is reminiscent of like any kind of cultural tradition that

is not white and European. Um, so he, he is, he is a pretty, pretty, pretty bad dude. He probably deserves his own, his own thing, the, this, this specific guy, but you can, you can kind of see like these like fascist ideas and rhetoric are not foreign to Canada. Um, and it, you know, it's been there since its infancy. Now Canadian politics is very different in a lot of ways compared to American politics. Uh, Canada tries to kind of follow the European model, whereas America is very much like the rebel state that tries to play on its, that play by its own rules.

Um, kind of the first main difference is that Canada isn't a two-party system. Um, it's, it's more like a two-party plus system because yeah, there still is the main liberals and the main conservatives, but there are, there are other parties that actually can get elected. Um, and it's not, it's not like a strictly two-party system the same way the states is. So that makes things more interesting. Um, and another thing that's really interesting about like cultural politics that's, that's

different from the states. You know, besides, you know, Canada obviously has like a parliament and the prime minister. That's different. But the Canada view and Canadians view nationalism and patriotism very differently, uh, compared to, um, to like, um, United States, um, citizens, um, patriotism and in some ways nationalism have always been kind of more of a liberal progressive thing, um, you know, in opposition to the states where it is not really seen as a progressive thing. Um, it's like even under conservative leadership, Canada kind of prides itself as a, as sort

of like liberal utopia. And that's where a lot of the patriotism and celebration of Canada comes from among it's you know, mostly liberal and more socially progressive citizens. They like celebrate Canada as like this great progressive nation. And that's where a lot of the patriotism comes from is like, oh, look, look how progressive we are. Um, then the nationalism part can be a bit more tricky, uh, because you first need to understand like the English and French divide, uh, which within the country, which I, I barely

understand that to be honest. I was, I was, I was, I was born in the prairies that was, you know, much more of like the Protestant English, English settlement, you know, I'm not from Quebec, uh, but we'll be talking about a Quebec a lot here because it is very important to how nationalism works in Canada. So the divide between the French and the English make elections really interesting because the English majority politicians usually need to court some of the French Canadian population and, and people in Quebec in order to get enough parliamentary seats to have a majority

government because Canada works on having a majority within the parliament. Um, you can have a minority in, in, in the parliament like the liberals currently have. So even if, you know, someone doesn't win a plurality of votes, they can still be in control of the government in a minority, in a minority or usually a majority capacity or we'll get into this kind of stuff later, um, but even though they need to get seats from Quebec to have, you know, a decent control of parliament, Quebec kind of likes to act like it's own special country. Um, they even have their own like federal political party, uh, the bloc, Quebecois.

And so like that, that's a federal party that operates in forwarding the interests of Quebec. Sometimes it functions as like a separatist party, but not really anymore. So although the, the, the, the, the bloc, Quebecois is a lot, is, is, is a lot more secular and progressive than basically any, any other major party outside of the NDP. Um, but despite them being much more like socially progressive, they're also like one of the biggest nationalist parties, um, in, in Canada. And you know, the, the, the, the far right parties in Canada have had, always had their, you know, brand of ethno nationalism, but that was, that's, that's been much less pronounced

than the kind of like, keep non-French Canadians out of Quebec and keep Americans out of Canada type of nationalism that's common with like liberals. Um, and specifically, you know, progressives inside Quebec, which is not, I mean, I can't blame them for wanting to keep Americans out. No, yeah. That's just good sense. If I could keep Americans out of America, I would do it. Yeah.

But so that kind of sentiment, you can see how that can like, you know, be used to foster some not good things though. That, that, that, that specific type of thinking of, of like keeping nationals, like, you know, keeping four nationals out of your state. Yeah. It's good to not have Americans there, but you know, that's going to get extended towards other people. Yeah.

That's unfortunate. Yeah. And like, so even though, you know, the nationalism can be a lot more progressive, that's not to say ethno nationalism does not come up within these sex, um, which is going to bring us to, uh, when I briefly talk about something from the thirties called the, uh, called the national unity party of the national unity party of Canada, um, the national unity part, national unity party. That is a weird thing to say, um, was a, was originally called the Canadian national socialist

unity party. Um, Oh wait. Now that here isn't a remind me, national socialism, that seems like a term with a little bit of baggage. Yeah. Remember correctly. Yep.

It sort of does. Um, so this was a party, uh, formed in, uh, 1934 by a little Nazi shithead named Adrian Arkon. Um, now that is, if you cannot tell that it's me trying to say a French name. So he is from Quebec. This is a lot of Canadian Nazi stuff originates inside Quebec because it already has such nationalist tendencies. Um, so Arkon's introduction into nationalism started at around the turn of the century,

um, amid fears in Quebec that Chinese immigration would threaten the white French Canadian working class. Um, this is still a big thing in Canada, uh, racism and nationalism against the Chinese is still a big thing. We will talk about this at the very end of this, of this, of these episodes because it's that's still a thing the conservative party talks about a lot. Um, so yeah, his, his, his internationalism was because of fears of Chinese immigration in the early 1900s.

Um, the, the anti, his, so his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, so his anti-immigrant upbringing plus the fact that he intended the Catholic school. Um, the, the, there was no, there was no public schools in Quebec until the 1960s. All of the schools were either, uh, Catholic or Protestant. Now this is also part of the cultural divide inside Canada where usually the English speakers are Protestant and they're usually further west and the, and the Catholics are usually, you know, French Canadians. There's a lot of that inside Quebec.

Um, so he went to a Catholic school, uh, which were at the time very anti-Jewish because what was happening is the Jewish people in Quebec wanted to make their own Jewish schools and the Catholics like in charge didn't want that because then that'd be less people were inside Catholic schools and they weren't, you know, learning Catholicism. So there's a lot, a lot of stuff going on here that is kind of contributing. So he was, you know, already anti-immigrant because of the Chinese and then he got, got exposed to anti-Semitism inside his Catholic schools, uh, and that, you know, pushed him onto this specific path.

So in 1930, um, Archon made a deal with the head of the conservative party, RB Bennett, in exchange for $15,000, which is like $250,000 in today's money, Archon would craft a smear campaign, um, trying to assist the conservatives in basically smearing the liberals to gain more conservative support inside the province of Quebec, which at the time was majority liberal leaning. So Archon got to work and started prepping, you know, pseudo fascist propaganda for the conservatives. Um, and by the 1930 federal election, it absolutely worked.

Um, uh, Bennett and the conservatives won, they gained 24 parliamentary seats in Quebec, which is a massive success. Like before they, they did not win any seats in Quebec. So gaining 24 seats in for, over the course of just one election, massive win. Um, so after getting the, after getting the conservatives elected, uh, the conservative party dropped Archon because he was, you know, a little hashtag problematic. Um, that's a shame. Uh-huh.

So after he got dropped by the conservatives, uh, short, shortly later, Archon made contact with the growing national socialist party in Germany. Um, and over the next few years, he just, he started to gain more fascist contacts around the world. He would exchange letters, people from people like people, people from the German Nazis would come over and meet what, and come over to Canada and see what he was doing. He would travel around meeting other, other Nazis around the world. Um, so this is kind of just like just gaining a lot, a lot more contacts.

So then in 1934, he formed his own fascist party, which is the Canadian national socialist unity party. And within that year, so in the, you know, mid 1930s, it merged with other Canadian nationalist parties that were more based in the West. So you know, uh, in the prairies like Alberta, Saskatchewan and BC. So it merged with a few other kind of nationalist groups and started gaining traction, getting thousands and thousands of members. This actually became an actual thing.

You can find footage of, of his rallies and they're just terrifying. Just like, you know, it's the same thing whenever you see like the Nazis, you know, rallying in Britain. And it feels different than watching a Nazi rally in Germany because you can feel a lot more, you know, it's, it's, it's the same feeling, but come, but come home. Your own countrymen kind of do the same thing that you associate with the old footage of dead people is a real, real fucked up. Yeah.

So he was gaining thousands of members across Canada, um, you know, mostly in the provinces of Quebec and Alberta, so the two main provinces we're going to talk about are going to be Quebec and Alberta, because that's where a lot of, a lot of the far right stuff gets started out. Um, so in 1938, so that's like four years after he started this, uh, the Canadian National Socialist Unity Party merged again, this time with various nationalist groups and so-called swastika clubs, um, in that we're already inside like Ontario and Quebec. So on the eastern side of Canada.

So now he, he, he united both the Quebec stuff, Eastern Canada and Western Canada. And then he called that the National Unity Party. And Archon appointed himself the Canadian Fuhrer. Oh, gosh. Rare. Uh-huh. Yes. Sweet.

So, and I'm going to quote from a time, time magazine piece from July of 1938. Archon scheduled Canada's first national fascist convention for Kingston, Ontario. The mayor and city council did not want a fascist convention held in their city and called the police to prevent it. Finally, leader Archon slipped 45 of his leaders into a room near police headquarters. This is old timey language held forth, unmolested for five and a half hours upon emerging leader Archon wired thanks to the mayor for his courtesy extended and announced the formation of the new National Unity Party.

A flaming torch will be the new party's emblem, Canada for Canadians, it's slogan and the upraised arm of its salute for King, Country and Christianity. Moving on to Ontario, leader Archon, supported by 85 of his blue shirts, he claims there were 80,000 members at the time, held a meeting in Mansi Hall that was attended by about 800 sympathizers. More impressive, however, there were three anti-fascist counter demonstrations held simultaneously. Two outdoor anti-fascist meetings drew 400 persons until broken up by police, fearing a clash.

But at Maple Leaf Gardens, the Canadian League of Peace and Democracy attracted 10,000. So this was the first big fascist rally in Canada in 1938. There was like 10,000 of these more liberal people rallying elsewhere and 400 anti-fascists ready to beat up these Nazis. Would then the police beat them up because history doesn't change, times a flat circle, we're still doing the same thing now. Do you know who won't rally 800 Canadian Nazis called the blue shirts to sell you products? Oh my God, who?

How us? Promise that. Yeah. Depending what, yeah. Because Hello Fresh has recently been sending their food stock. Why do you always pick Hello Fresh? There are so many worse brands that have ads that have advertised on our show. But we can't ignore the fact that they've been increasingly building their militant capacity

for the last seven years. Anyway, here's some ads, we have too much to read. And we are back talking about the Canadian blue shirts. The Hello Fresh, the Hello Shirts, please continue. Blue aprons. Yeah, the blue aprons. Thanks Chris, thanks Chris for saving the bit. Yeah, thank you.

So next year after his first rally, it was 1939, World War II obviously started to ramp up. The Canadian government arrested Archon for plotting to overthrow the state and his National Unity Party was banned from federal elections. Archon was released from prison after the war, but he continued his political aspirations. He ran for federal election twice in Quebec, once in 1949 and once in 1953. Both times he ran under his National Unity Party banner, despite it being banned from elections.

I don't know how he did that. Loser fake, yeah, both times he placed second with over five and a half, five and a half thousand votes, just about like 30% of the vote, actually, but the second time he ran just under a National Spanner and he got second as well, but he got like 40% of the vote. So he did a slightly better just running as a Nationalist in Quebec, not like the National Unity thing, because that was, you know, more overtly Nazi. But he kept holding National Unity Party public rallies until the mid sixties. His last rally I think attracted like 1000 supporters.

That's way too many. I was hoping you were gonna say like three and there was really sad footage, but that's no sad in a different way. Yeah. So he finally died in 1967 and with him also died the National Unity Party. Also. Hooray. I just went up because it's one fucked up and interesting and two, it's like it's indicative

of the weirdness that can come out of Quebec's Nationalist political bent. We can see that now with a modern, you know, neo-fascist Canadian political party that's based out of Quebec, which we will talk about shortly. But even like the Nationalist tendencies within Quebec's more mainstream progressive population, like I'm going to read some of the policy positions of the Bloc Kebukwa party that's like the Quebec sovereignty party that is still actually very popular in elections specifically in Quebec. And just ahead of this, if you're a French speaker and you're frustrated by Garrison's

pronunciations or my pronunciations of Kebukwa, just note that your language isn't real and it's fine. All right. And you're just saying Garrison. And I didn't from the French. Yeah. And you're responsible for this Nazi. So.

Yeah. So unlike English speakers who have been responsible for zero. Zero atrocities. It's just mispronounced Spanish. That's my take. Okay. Anyway. You're just saying Spanish.

Here is the progressive liberal Bloc Kebukwa policy positions. Quebec sovereignty, you know, up into independence, but usually it's just, you know, them pushing the interests of Quebec, environmentalism, abortion rights, you know, pro-abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, legalization of assisted suicide, opposition to Canadian participation in the Iraq war, abolition of the abolition of the abolition of the monarchy, forcing, forcing immigrants to speak French in Quebec. Okay. That's good.

You lost me. You lost me there. Blocking immigration to Quebec. You've also lost me there. The Quebec secularism law, which bans public workers in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols, primarily targeted at Muslims and Sikhs. Yeah. Yeah.

We're lost. And Quebec's exemption from the requirements of the Multiculturalism Act. Yeah. I mean, I don't know the Multicultural Act, but I'm going to lose me there, too. It's great. It's good. So yeah. So you could kind of see how like they have, you know, all these like, you know, just pretty

good stuff. Pretty good progressive things. It's going great until the races. And then they get really anti-immigrant, right? So this is like, this is kind of hard to explain to Americans how like you can be very like pro-gay, pro, you know, abolition of the monarchy, but then also be like, no, but we don't want those brown people in Quebec. Yeah.

So yeah. Anyway, we're going to move on from Quebec specifically, but don't worry. We will be back because you're still a problem. But there are there are other things to discuss. So after our cons fascist Canadian movement, there was a stint of like Canadian skinheads in the 70s, you know, around the same time as the UK and the US. In the 70s, there was an unsuccessful Nazi party called the Nationalist Party of Canada that spawned a skinhead gang called Heritage Front.

Heritage Front disbanded around the mid 2000s because the Canadian feds infiltrated it and kind of, you know, cut that down. So critical support to the Canadian feds. But now we're going to move on to unite the right, not, not, not the right that you're thinking of the Canadian unite the right movement from the 1990s, early 2000s. Yeah. But that one probably wasn't problematic, right? There is, it has no lasting problems.

Yeah. That's good. So because of because of Canada's multi-party system, there's more opportunity for ideologically similar parties to split the vote, you know, of people leaning in a certain direction. Throughout most of the later half of the 20th century, there were multiple conservative right wing parties that were operating at the same time, which did split the right of center vote. This is in part what allowed Canada to rise as like a liberal haven because for a while,

the conservatives just couldn't get elected because they were splitting the vote too many ways, leaving the main liberal party to win the vast majority of elections. Obviously disfrustrated right wing politicians and vote and voters than in the 1990s. There were there were there were two main right wing parties. There was the older progressive conservative party. They're like a classically fiscal conservative party with slightly less socially conservative beliefs. So, you know, I would rather take them compared to the alternatives here.

The other major party was a right of center party called the reform party, which was much more of like a right wing populist and extremely socially conservative party. More similar to like the Trump era Republican party, you know, they're much more right wing populist, they're way more socially conservative, kind of what we traditionally think of as like, you know, like a racist Republican that this this this is their party called called the reform party. So after after loss after loss throughout the 90s and during the turn of the century, concerted efforts were being made between these two parties to unite into one.

In 1998, there was a unite the right conference held in Toronto, Ontario, trying to bring together politicians and delegates from these two main conservative parties. But they also brought in some much more extreme Christian fascist parties, which there was like four of at the time. There was a lot of a lot of Christian fascist parties around this time. So the conference garnered negative news coverage in part due to the inclusion of these far right Christian extremist parties. And then after the conference polls were conducted that suggested that many of the progressive

conservative supporters would rather vote liberal than vote for the new kind of merged more extreme right wing party. So like a lot of these a lot of these like fiscal conservatives are like, no, I'm not going to vote for all of this weird racism. I just don't want there to be higher taxes. So like I'm going to I'm going to rather vote for the liberals than vote for these fucking weirdos, which I mean, yeah, that's that that's the conservative I would rather have. Yeah, absolutely.

So the conference didn't sit well with the with the progressive conservative party. It's politicians or or the political leaders. So the merger plans were were cut off. They're like, no, we're not going to do this. You guys are too weird and racist. We're not doing this. Then in 2002, no, I think it's important that this was after 9 11. I think this is really the reason why this happened.

One of the original reform party founders that the reform party is the more populist one. So one of the original founders named Stephen Harper took control of the populist conservative party and worked to improve the optics of the more extreme sides of his party. I think it's very important that this this happened after 9 11. And this is how the merger actually worked. So in 2003, merger talks started sort of up again and in August of that year, the two parties announced the merger had been completed and there was a new united conservative party. In the announcement, Harper is quoted as saying, our swords will henceforth be pointed

at the liberals, not each other. And in December, Harper was voted in as the new party leader. The work did pay off in the 2006 Canadian federal election. The conservatives gained a controlling minority government among the electorate with the former co-founder of the extremist populist reform party, Stephen Harper, becoming the new prime minister of Canada. So this is how he got from reform party to being the prime minister throughout the 2000s. He was the prime minister of Canada for most of the time I lived there.

That's who I think of when I think of the prime minister of Canada is I think of Stephen Harper. So Harper remained as prime minister until the 2015 election that saw a noted blackface appreciator, Justin Trudeau, elected under the liberal party. So that's good. What a good system we have. That man, like just your range of his life is like, there's no, you have to look, say what you will about the man, very careful to wear a lot of black, no, you under no circumstances

has got to hand it to him. You do not, in fact, have to hand it to him. Well you have to hand him the little, the towel that he uses to get the blackface off of his face. So he can go into his work running Canada. Yep. Cool. Great country.

Did we find out that like five of our governors all had blackface photos? Yes we did. It was a big year for blackface. It really, it's incredible because I can't picture, like again, I grew up very right wing and definitely had some, said some uncomfortable things in my time. I don't think there was ever a point at which I would have been like, yeah, this seems like a good idea. Right.

What the fuck? Yeah, it's pretty messed up. What is the joke? It's pretty, it's pretty bad. And Trudeau, weirdo, liberal, incredible, he sure is. The one all of the wine moms thirst over. Yeah. Yeah, that scans.

Respect the wine moms, not. Yeah. Anyway, beyond making it easier to vote in right-of-center candidates, what the Canadian Unite the Right accomplished was pushing the conservative establishment much further to the right than what the previously popular progressive conservatives had established while maintaining the respectability and civility the progressive conservatives had cultivated. We are now going to skip ahead to 2017. In January of 2017, soon after US President Donald Trump put into place the travel ban

from, you know, seven Muslim majority countries, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a message via Twitter to those fleeing persecution, terror, and war, Canadians will welcome you regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength, hashtag welcome to Canada. So Trudeau is like, if the US is going to be racist, we're going to let them in. For this next part, I'm going to quote from the New York Times, just hours after watching the television report suggesting Canada would accept immigrants that were shunned by Trump, the 28-year-old political science student packed his Glock handgun and rifle and trudged

through the snow-covered streets of Quebec to a nearby Islamic cultural center. As 53 men were finishing evening prayers, he unloaded 48 rounds, six people were killed, several of them with shots to the head, and 19 others were injured. One was paralyzed for life. In the month before his rampage, the shooter trolled the internet 819 times for posts related to Mr. Trump, reading his Twitter feed daily and homing in on the American president's travel ban on several Muslim majority countries. He kept a cache of guns underneath his bed at his parents' house, and among his friends

was just his twin brother. The shooter told investigators that he wished he had killed more people, and he wanted to protect his family from Islamic terrorists. Experts on radicalization say that in Quebec, the French-speaking province surrounded by an English-speaking majority, the anti-immigrant far-right offers fertile and perilous ground for psychologically unstable youths seeking a sense of identity and a scapegoat. The head of the Canadian-based Centre of Prevention of Radicalization, leading to violence, said that the Quebec mosque shooter was part of a growing number of educated, middle-class

white youths in Quebec drawn to far-right ideas, fueled by the election of Mr. Trump, and fanned by fears of immigration that threatens Quebec's identity. When the Anti-Radicalization Centre was started in 2015, they dealt with 16 cases of youths in the province that were getting radicalized by the far-right. Last year, which was like 2016, this centre had 154 such cases. So this is kind of the arc of things. Really Trump's election did spur a lot of this growing, like, oh, these political beliefs are acceptable now, right?

This is something that is like, we are allowed to do this. And that did echo in Canada and across a lot of other countries. One of the victims of the Quebec massacre, his father said that he'd come to Canada from Algeria in the 1990s to escape terrorism. And he said that Quebec did not create the monster, the shooter. But the Islamophobia that is inherent inside Quebec gave him the motive. So this really does relate to the political situation of Canada. And it's not a coincidence that the majority of these types of attacks are inside either

Quebec, Toronto, or if you're in Alberta, it's more tied to other conservative values. But a lot of it is around Quebec for a lot of these shootings and all these acts of terrorism. There was the in-sale guy who ran over tons of people in Toronto with his car, same kind of thing of getting more used to these kind of having these far-right ideas be more allowed. And then thinking them as more of like a normalized thing. So the Quebec mosque shooting kind of woke up a lot of people in Canada to be like, oh, we're not immune to this. This is like an actual thing that we have to deal with too.

And the next few months after Trudeau's January announcement, border crossings did see an increase in Canada formally accepted more immigrants and refugees. And the term in Canada is like an irregular spike of border crossings. The way Canadian media reported this, I think is very irresponsible. The way they tried to frame this is like after this announcement, we're getting so many irregular crossings that only fueled this type of anti-immigrant sentiment. It's not really great. A lot of the old articles I pulled up for this had really disgusting framing, especially

you know, viewing it now. So in March, the Canadian Parliament passed a motion that condemns Islamophobia and requests that the government recognize the need to quell the public climate of fear and hate specifically around Muslims and immigrants. The motion was non-binding, so it doesn't mean anything. It's just the government saying something nice. But it still sparked tons of outrage. You know, it called on the government to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism

and discrimination. The margin was passed by like, it was passed by a margin of like 200 over 90. So people, a lot of the conservatives in Parliament didn't like this. But it garnered so much online backlash. There were petitions and nationwide protests condemning this bill as an attack on free speech, and the person who introduced the bill, an MP named Ikra Khalid, received death threats through their email, and they had their private information leaked. And it turned to this very, very big kind of, one of the first things where it had these

like national protests in Canada that were similar to how we had the free speech thing around 2017, this was like the Canadian version of that and how this kind of started. And in December, Trudeau signed into the United Nations Global Migration Pact, there's another non-binding incentive designed to provide understanding among nations about how to deal with the global immigration crisis. Again, all these things were just people talking, but it made people very, very mad. Because if you're talking about it, that means it actually is real and it's actually going to affect you, or it's just ignoring that these problems exist.

So really, after Trump's election, after the Quebec mosque shooting, then we have all these bills, this kind of ignited a in-person rallying possibility and in-person protests that Canada hadn't really seen before for this type of like anti-immigration sentiments. And we'll talk more about these protests after we have a little bit of an ad break. You know, who doesn't get protested except for that one time when they illegally overthrew the government of Ecuador? That's right, Garrison, our sponsors. Only one time did they cause mass protests as a result of overthrowing a sovereign government.

That's pretty good, Garrison. Are you trying to do like a banana republic thing? What are you doing? I'm just saying, most podcasts, three to four governments overthrown by their sponsors. It could happen here. Just the one, baby. Hello. Welcome to Why Canada Isn't a Liberal Utopia and actually has a lot of the same systemic

problems that every other Western country does and it's not immune to fascist infiltration and fascist co-option. Perfect title. Sophie, make a note of that. So, we've talked a lot about Quebec and stuff, which is great because, yeah, it is a problem, but this exists in the Western provinces as well. Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC have a lot of these growing kind of things, but they're not French Canadians doing this.

They're more like what we in America would recognize as rural conservatives. Around all of this increased discussion around immigration in 2017, around the same time, people in Western Canada were facing a bit of an economic recession. They had significant job loss around this time and projects that traditionally brought work to the area like pipelines where there was discussion of them getting stalled and people moving more towards renewable energy. This kind of increased a lot of the political tensions between the Eastern liberal majority Canada and the Western more rural Canada.

Quoting an article from the CPC, Trudeau just keeps giving away all of our money to immigrants, said Samantha... Oh boy, that is a French name. I'm not even going to attempt that one. Who called her Frenchie? Samantha Frenchie. Anyway, this mother of five, she attended a January 5th rally with Webster, her husband, and two of their children.

It was her first protest for any cause. We're stuck paying for all this money that he wants to give away to everybody but Canadians. My kids are growing up and my grandkids and all of their kids are going to be poor and stuck in a hole that they're never going to get out of. This is a very common type of thing, like oh, we're getting taxed and taking all of our money and giving away to immigrants. This happened after the Syrian refugee crisis when Canada is accepting a lot of Syrian immigrants. That's around the time that I left Canada, but I totally remember people having very

similar sentiments of why are we paying for all of these refugees. That's the thing that happens in the States too. The economic tensions developing in Western Canada combined with the increase in anti-immigration sentiments among conservatives were in part spurred by the Trump presidency, led to the Canadian Yellow Vest movement. This is totally separate from the French protest movement. The Canadian version just stole the working class branding and just used it for their proto-fascist crusade.

The Canadian Yellow Vests were a group of connected protest movements over the course of 2018 and 2019 that had a lot of in-person rallies, but also a lot of online mobilization. It's kind of since died out, but it was a major force in pushing right wing extremism in Canada and having it be accessible to regular people. It's not like the Proud Boys at all where it's specific bad people doing this thing. It was appealing to the oil workers, appealing to the moms. It was primarily used Facebook as a means of passing off this type of information and making it seem acceptable.

The Canadian Yellow Vests, quoting an article from Vice, Canadian Yellow Vests, which had over 100,000 members on their Facebook as of May 2019, carries the greatest potential for radicalization leading to violence in Canada right now, according to the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. The group's description says it was created to protest the carbon tax and build that pipeline and stand against the treason of our country's politicians who have the audacity to sell our country's sovereignty over to the globalist UN and their tyrannical policies. But concerns over Canadians' oil sector appeared to be a very little factor in the discussion

that goes on inside these groups. Instead members are obsessing over with the defending Western civilization from Islam, bashing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and spreading whatever far-right conspiracy theory is trending at the time. And I cannot overstate the amount that these people hate Trudeau, but it's not for reasons because he wore blackface. They find the most bizarre ways to hate this man. A lot of these people think that Justin Trudeau is the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro.

This is a very... Oh, crap! This is... It kind of looks similar. This is a very popular conspiracy theory in Canada. The way that Trudeau is treated by conservatives is baffling, because I hate Justin Trudeau, but I think I hate him for reasonable reasons. He made a bunch of promises around environment stuff that he didn't follow through on.

He talks about the blackface. He doesn't do anything. He does a lot of blackface. Like a shocking amount of blackface. There's a lot of reasons to hate Justin Trudeau, but not because he's the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro, leading us to sneak Canada into the socialist UN. That's not what he's doing. Yeah, among other things, if he was the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro, there's a couple of

those in the United States. One of his daughters is now like a right-wing radio personality in Florida. Oh, God! That makes so much sense. Oh, no. He had a lot of... You know, he's Castro. He did a lot of fucking.

Yeah. Who would care? It's not your fault who your dad is. It's like a weaker, funnier version of birtherism. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. It is like the Canadian version of that.

It's very weird. He's like, Justin Trudeau is very cringy. He lies about all of his promises. He talks about a game. He does a lot of virtue signaling. He does a lot of blackface. Those are all really good reasons to hate this guy. Really a lot of blackface.

Yeah, a lot of blackface. But the ways that they come up with trying to make him seem like a bad dude or just baffling. Very bizarre. In an interview with somebody from the Yellow Vests exposed anti-fascist research team, which was a very good Twitter account around 2019. It's inactive now, but this was a very good account, a very good account that did really solid research into the Yellow Vests movement. In an interview, they were asked what type of impact they think the Yellow Vests could

have in Canada. This was their response. The image of the threat is no longer the skinhead, blood and honor type. We're dealing with average people who don't understand the impact of the rhetoric. They're calling for the mass death of an entire religion, or they're celebrating the violence against that religion, or they're celebrating violence against government officials. They are just one step away from outright fascism, but they can't see that and they refuse to see that, which I think is a very good summary of how-

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Yes, I promise you, seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

So tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The Yellow Vests were a popular movement specifically on Facebook. Another part of it was the idea of Western separatism, like the people in Western Canada feel ignored, they feel put upon, they feel oppressed, not just for being Westerners, but they honestly feel oppressed because they're white.

They feel like, oh, we're focusing on only going to give money to the brown people. That's the kind of thing that they feel like in the West. They're like, well, my right to free speech was taken away because of the non-binding bill and refugees can just walk across the border and they make more money than I do. So they have all these ideas that are not actually based in reality, but they can believe them. And they find these new sources that are just echo chambers, that reinforce this belief to the point where they become radicalized themselves.

It's a very, very common thing, especially around 2019. I was tracking a lot of these Facebook groups around 2019 as well, just in my spare time, because it's just interesting to watch them interact. I'm going to give a brief recap of a typical Yellow Vests protest around Edmonton, a bit based off of a few CPC articles. Protesters would gather around in front of the legislative building, holding signs, wearing bright yellow vests, and they would do this basically every weekend for months and months and months on end.

Some protesters may stand at a podium, showed in conspiracy theories about how powerful the Jewish families controlling the world are, as one dude did at the Alberta legislature on January 5th, 2019. Some may come sporting red, make Alberta great again hats. This was very, very popular, very popular. Others may prowl the sidelines dressed like they belong to a biker gang. Instead of Hell's Angels patches, they have patches that say Wolves of Odin and Canadian Infidels.

Oh, great. I'm going to give you one guess, what type of ideology the Wolves of Odin have. They're not these. They're not these. Most of the protesters' voices are not away from the fringes. Most of them just have jobs in high-rises, or they dry it for Uber, or they're teachers, or pipe-fitters, or real estate agents. Although their message is muddled by all of these other much more overtly extremist kind

of talking points, they all have one thing in common that they feel like they're getting ignored and being left behind by the liberals in the East. This is echoed by one of the person they got interviewed at these rallies was named Lynn Smith, who was a former oil and gas worker who now works in the school system. They were at a Yellow Vest rally in January of 2019, which was like the fourth protest she attended. She said, they're just giving away our country. We have no rights anymore.

They're taking them away. No more Lord's Prayer, but they're putting prayer rooms in schools for Muslims. Merry Christmas. You're not allowed to say that anymore. It's supposed to be happy holidays. They're changing our country, and we've got to stand up and say something about it because this is our country. I was born here.

My parents were born here. It's wrong. I'm sure people in the States are familiar with this type of rhetoric, but just the increased nature in Canada was surprising to a lot of Canadians, and surprising to a lot of liberal Canadians because they're like, but you're in Canada. Why are you doing the States thing? Why are you doing the thing that they do in the States? Why are you doing it here?

The same reasoning people do in the States is because they feel ignored by politicians. That's why this happens in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and in BC, way more than it happens in Ontario. It's because the farther away you are from the big cities, the less your interests are cared for by a lot of politicians. The ones that speak to you are these extremists who are trying to prey on these actual financial insecurities. Some of the protesters say that they're not opposed to immigration, but most of the focus

of the Edmonton Yellow Vest rallies has been about who can come into the country and how they're allowed to get here. One guy named Brett Webster, the father of five who works in the construction industry says they're overwhelming our resources. We can't properly vet these people and make sure it's safe for them to come in and make sure that they're skilled and assimilate into our country and know our ways and our values. Most of the extremist stuff in Canada, outside of Quebec, does come specifically from Alberta. The big cities in Alberta are Calgary and Edmonton.

This happens also in a lot of the more rural areas that mostly used to run on oil drilling. After losing an election to the more social democratic NDP party in 2015, the two provincial conservative parties in Alberta had their own little mini unite the right and merged together in 2017, leading to their success in the polls in 2019. The conservatives have since then done a whole bunch of stuff in Alberta, like cutting down their healthcare. Actually, a lot of the conservative voters don't like, but they voted for, because that was the platform.

You just were being scared of brown people, so you voted for the conservatives, but now your healthcare is cut. That's how politics works. That's a brief summary of the Yellow Vest movement and how it gained a lot of popularity. They would do rallies around polling centers, they would attack people, they would do violent rallies where a lot of older men who were in the Yellow Vest movement would be pretty violent towards anyone in their area during a protest. But around COVID, the Yellow Vests kind of sputtered out.

A lot of the people in these Facebook groups got moved into other conspiracy theory groups, and the Yellow Vests movement kind of lost its train. That's where we're going to end for today, is with the Yellow Vests fizzling out. In the next part, we'll talk about what's happening from 2019 and the election that year to the present fascist rumblings inside different sectors of Canadian politics. That's my very, very brief write-up of right-wing populism and extremism in Canada pre-2019. Great. Yeah.

It's fun. It's not fun. It's upsetting. It's a lot of the same problems we have here of politicians really ignoring people in certain parts of the country, which provide very fertile recruiting ground for a lot of extremists. I think it's going to all end well. That is our official policy, that everything is going to turn out great.

Yeah, seems fine. There is actual ways of preventing this from happening. It's not a hopeless thing. We can actually do it if we want to. Just people with power to do it don't like doing it. Cool and good. That is the message of the pod, Sophie. Cool and good.

Oh. Yep. That's Canadian fascism. Part one. Cool. I would recommend if people want to learn more about the Canadian yellow vests, check out the yellow vest exposed Twitter account. There's also articles about them.

They were a very good anti-fascist research team. Yeah, I would just recommend if you want to learn more about the specific movement, all of their work on it has been great. Yeah. Shout out to yellow vests exposed. That's the pod. Yeah. Uncoos.

All right. All right. Go get your Tim Hortons. Tomorrow. Yeah, go get your Tim Hortons and your, I don't know, maple syrup and go find a moose. Find a Canadian and just start screaming in their face. Follow us at Whole Zone Media or Happen Here pod on the Twits and the Inst. Just scream it.

The Twits and the Inst. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye. Good bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Will you? Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Yes, we did it has begun. It cannot be unbegunned. Oh, that's all right. Let's let's roll right into it Let's talk about okay fascism in Canada Garrison. So well welcome says it could happen here today the Today the here is is Canada that is the that is where it could happen This is gonna be part two of my little deep dive Into Canadian fascism and the far right rumblings in general in the great white north and oh god. That is a bad Bad nickname for Canada the great white north

Not an accurate did not really think that went through Oopsie doodle Maybe they did maybe they yeah, there's a good chance. They did Anyway, the last episode we left off with the Canadian yellow vests And of you know of frightening increase in Islamophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric around late 2017 and 2018 After Trump's election and we started the last episode by talking about one of Canada's first fascist political parties And we're gonna start part two for talking about Canada's new neo fascist political party that also got started inside the province of Quebec Just like the national unity party did this one is called the people's party of Canada

Before we get into the people's party I'm first gonna give some background on the founder of the party Maxine Bernier, and that's home. That's that's how I'm gonna say his name No one at me. It's good enough Bernier was born in Quebec in 1963 And it's the son of a conservative talk radio host turned politician. Isn't that funny? Isn't that funny how that keeps happening? Yeah, so Bernier entered politics in 2006 He ran as the conservative party candidate for the House of Commons in the same writing district that his father had represented In the 80s and 90s

Stephen Harper leader of the new United Conservative Party initially wanted Maxine's father to re-enter politics But Bernier senior was less keen on that idea and instead told Harper that he that perhaps his son should run in his place Oh radio and nepotism radio and nepotism. Yep, and and politicians and yeah Starting so it is it is starting great So at this point Bernier was more of like a free market to libertarian Libertarian-y type guy, you know still was some of the same like conservative Immigration stuff. That's that's common in Quebec But he was more of just like a libertarian dude Bernier easily won the writing writings are what we call districts here in the States

Ranking at 67% of the popular vote Which was the largest majority for a conservative politician outside of the province of Alberta. So he did he did very well Bernier who had a background in business quickly rose through the ranks of the conservative party Within the same year. He was appointed to be a cabinet minister in the Harper government And he worked as a as an industry minister from 2006 to 2007 before being promoted to a foreign affairs minister And then in 2011 he was appointed as he was appointed as minister of the state So in in spring of 2016 after the fifth after the 2015 federal election Bernier put in his bid to be the new elected conservative party leader

So I'm gonna briefly explain how Canadian elections work You you don't vote for a prime minister You vote for a party within your specific district if you if if your party wins They get a seat in Parliament whoever has the most seats in Parliament. That's whose prime minister gets elected So whoever is whoever is the leader of the party? They will be prime minister if that party gets the most seats So in 2016 Bernier put in his bid to be the new conservative party leader He got remarkably close just securing the spot as leader of the conservatives in the final round of voting He received forty nine point zero five percent of the vote

as losing to Saskatchewan conservative politician Andrew Scheer who got fifty point nine percent so boy Less less than two percent difference. He was so close to becoming leader of the conservative party like ridiculous So yeah after his extremely slight loss He continued to work in Scheer's conservative party for a few years If you remember from the last episode around this time was when the Islamophobia and anti-immigration talking points were starting to gain a new Popularity and Bernier followed along with this trend. He would tweet out about the dangers of extreme Multiculturalism and he had like an increasingly racist and divisive rhetoric and that kind of caused some drama within the conservative establishment So in August of 2018 around the same time the yellow vest movement in Canada was starting up

Bernier Resigned from the conservative party with the stated intention of forming a new federal populist far-right political party Here here here's a segment from his resignation speech and he does talk in a very thick French accent I'm not going to do that Yeah Channel channel the energy That was that was just direct audio horrible speech. Yeah, that was Instead of leading as a principled conservative and defending the interests of Canada and Canadians Andrew Scheer is following the Trudeau liberals

I was told that internal polling is showing that the liberals response to Trump is popular and that in six months if the polls change The parties stand may change too. The same thing happened in reaction to my tweets on diversity and multiculturalism This is another crucial debate for the future of our country Do we want to emphasize our ethnic and religious differences or exploit them to buy votes as the liberals are doing or Emphasize what unites us and the values that can guarantee social cohesion Just like other Western societies grappling with this issue a large number of Canadians and certainly the vast majority of conservatives are worried that We are heading in the wrong direction, but it's not wrong to raise such questions So yeah, and I think I honestly one of the main reasons why

Banner hasn't been super successful Is because of his accent like he is it's harder for Protestant white Canadians to support him because he talks with a French Canadian accent If if he talked in like good English, I think he would have he would have won conservative leadership And his populist party would be way more popular than that than it is now. So critical support to Yes, other French racism is preventing the racist from being racist enough. Yes, you love You love to see it You certainly see it. We do we do see it

So Brunner faced some pushback from his conservative colleagues including Stephen Harper Of trying to divide the right and split the right of center vote and Some of the less socially conservative members of the main conservative party Decried Brunner's departure and subsequent new people's party as just a plain attempt to pander to xenophobia and racist right-wingers But Brunner went right to work and ran enough candidates under his new party to secure a spot in the federal election Debates that were like that, you know that how we watch presidential debates same thing But these have, you know multiple candidates because there are multiple parties same thing

But basically he he was able to get in the televised debates The PPC which is the people's part of Canada. I'm just gonna say the PPC now because it sounds funny They started going viral on the internet after pictures of massive billboards with Brunner's face and big text that said say no to mass immigration This this this got very this got very me me around like 2019 these big these big PPC billboards. Um, I Wonder I'm gonna read a bit from a write-up and it's going down by some local Montreal anti-fascists There have been suggestions that the PPC spokesperson and architect of its public relations strategy Martin mass has been key to its embrace of the far

Right mass was owner of the publisher of the Kebukua Libre Which is a an online libertarian news outlet that shut down in 2016 and that PP But that PPC's cozy relationship with racist is primarily due to the influence of this one person is highly doubtful However, the PPC is positioning itself as the option of choice for those who find the conservative party insufficiently right wing Racism is clearly just one of the most effective tools for such a strategy witnessing PPC billboards and tweets against mass immigration also tweets about being against Antifa and Burner's diet tribe about radical Islam being the biggest threat to freedom and peace and security in the world today and how he complains about Other parties are complacent and pandering to Islamists and promising that the PPC will make no compromise with the tolerant ideology a

number of media articles have revealed the far-right connections to people active in the PPC as Organizers and members whose signatures were used for the PPC to gain official party status For instance Derek Horn the PPC volunteer and a security agent who accompanied Burner at a variety of events and media interviews He has been revealed to be a founding member of the neo-fascist Canadian and nationalist party, which we briefly mentioned in the last episode Sean Walker is an American immigrant and organizer with the PPC in St. Catharines as well as one of the people who signed on for PPC to be an official party He was revealed to be the president of the National Alliance a U.S. based neo-nazi organization. Oh boy. He's seven He was also national alliance. He was also convicted of hate crimes at the time for violence against people of color

following these revelations Walker was expelled from the PPC and Burner claimed that he'd slipped through the party's vetting process. However, it was also revealed that Burner follows him on Twitter Others who signed up for the for the PPC to be an official party include Janice Balch a founding member of the patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of Oxtent and Also Justin L Smith leader of this of the Sudbury chapter of the soldiers of Odin So a whole bunch of whole bunch of fascist people are working working for the party And unsurprisingly a number of a number of candidates have made headlines about there as their you know

social media posts from the past and present have surfaced featuring like racism Islamophobia and a Lot of spreading of far-right conspiracy theories, you know That was just kind of common. There's too many honestly to mention And it's not just that the PPC has a few bad apples in it It's like the whole the whole party is rife with these kind of one these kind of sentiments One gauge of this and the sign and a sign that like this is intentional is the as looking at the candidates who have left The party or have been kicked out when it became clear that there would be no Condemnation of the far right from the upper ranks. There was like

And just in like 20 and 19 alone. There was like three candidates who were you left or were either kicked out Because they you know had objections to the racism ramp it within the party They were like complaining about hey these guys seem kind of racist and then they were kicked out of the party or or or or they left so Yeah, that's that's a not a good problem to have So in finishing up this this little quote here Indeed a cursory a cursory look at the Facebook pages of PPC candidates reveals What's been really noteworthy is how selective the news stories about racist tweets or Facebook posts have been almost every PPC candidate in Quebec

Has recently and repeatedly shared articles from climate denialist sources Including many with a conspiratorial bent a candidate for Pap and you even produced his own YouTube expose revealing how George Soros It's behind an international globalist conspiracy theory to crash economies and make money spending a panic about climate change Secondary to climate denial. There's a lot of fears around free speech and mass immigration Which are both recurring themes in the PPC candidates and roughly one in five have recently shared news articles from what we would deem National populist or fall right sources including less manchettes calm Which is the website of the French language of the French language translator of the Christ Church Manifesto

Jesus and that the guy who ends up website is also involved with organizing in the Montreal in the Montreal chapter of the yellow Sorry. Yeah, so he he both translated the manifesto and he's also running the Montreal yellow vest movement. So that's fun It's not fun. It's bad Andre Pytree pipe puter. Wow So I didn't learn French in Canada because I was in a weird Christian private school. Otherwise, I could be a lot better at this job Yeah But anyway, there's there's a there's a there's a there's just like a far-right YouTube channel

with this guy called a Studio who a lot of his stuff was shared and there's a more like eccentric and sporadic mix of Of other news sources including a unite the right attendee faith Goldie who also ran for mayor of Toronto and got third place Quebec based Q and on figure Alexis Trudel And the alt-right youtuber black pigeon speaks of course the main yellow vest page who was shared a lot and also sources from the highly racist the voice of Europe, so Yeah, a lot of a lot of a lot of not not great news sources being being shared by the PPC So that is the gist of the people's party as of 2019

Overall their performance in the 2019 election was kind of a flop Bernard lost his own seat in Quebec. No PPC candidates got into office and the party only managed to get one And the party only managed to get one point six percent of the total national popular vote, so That's good. It only got 1.6% of all of the votes in Canada So we're gonna take a break from the people's party for now and we will circle back towards it at the end But after after an ad break we will we will talk about the what the main conservative party was up to during this time and And and a little bit after the 2019 election, so yeah

Yep, and now the cat's just blocking the whole thing. All right We're back the cat is in the bathroom. I moved my cat because they were blocking the camera Hello People's party not doing great in the first election. That's fun. Let's see what the regular conservatives were up to I'm sure it was things that are just good and cool If I know anything about conservatives, it's that They're not not hashtag problematic. Yeah, yeah, just let's just go garrison. Okay I'll just be sad over here and the audience can know that I'm sad the whole time you're talking

I would rather this episode be not such a not such a downer, but it's it's hard to make these kind of an upper It's I'll make a bargain with the audience that if they listen I will I will do my French accent at least one more time. Oh boy. I will say doing the French accent This is the happiest I have seen Robert all day. Like well He does look very tired. You didn't say earlier garrison and this was very funny that you'd be better at your job If you could speak French, but given what we are here at it cool zone media You would actually be much worse at your job And in fact if you if you were to speak French, I would I would fire you immediately

It's actually a requirement that you can't pronounce things to know our network certainly not French There's other languages. You're allowed to know how to pronounce but not French. No oblover on say Arrays So let's pick up right after Maxine Bernere lost the conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer in 2016 in 2017 Sheer won the leadership on a on on like a platform of classical financial conservatism And a slightly more socially moderate platform When Scheer got into office though, one of the things he faced criticism for even among the conservative caucus was his association with a little media With was his association with a little media outlet called rebel media. Oh good. Yeah

Yeah, so most most listeners may not know what rebel media is But you've certainly seen their stuff or felt their effect. Yeah, it's like the rough draft of Breitbart and also Canadian and Canadian. Yes So Canadian so Rebel media is a Canadian far-right neo-fascist propaganda outlet started in 2015 that has a lot of a lot of Breitbart-y vibes Um, rebel media test. Yeah, Breitbart test Rebel media hosts and contributors have included a white nationalist and white genocide proponent Lauren Southern and Proudboy founder Gavin McGinnis McGinnis produced a quote satirical video for rebel called ten things. I hate about the Jews Fucking Christ. Yeah

Yeah So in it and it is worth noting that both southern and McGinnis are Canadian They're actually a lot of Alt-right figures that are Canadian. Of course, we have we have Lauren Southern. We have a McGinnis We have Stephen Crowder Stefan Molyneux and of course Jordan Peterson all of those people are Canadian and most of Jordan Balthasar Peterson Yeah, most of them still live in Canada when they're not alive. Yes, he's still alive He made an insane tweet the other day

Hey, God, he made the most Oh, that was such a good tweet. No, that tweet made it all worthwhile, baby He got everyone to go check his Twitter feed. It is amazing You can you can hear his brain shorting out when you read that You need to find the tweet it is it is just it is the most beautiful piece of poetry I've ever read It's it's like somebody taught a stroke how to type I'm gonna quote an article by global news dot ca on Andrew Scheer and rebel media quote Despite a string of controversies faced by Canadian right-wing media outlet to the rebel including allegations of downplaying the holocaust

Newly minted conservative party leader Andrew Scheer has so far continued to make himself available to the company that other prominent conservative politicians have criticized for its controversial reporting and actions that are being taken away from the Rebellion's have criticized for its controversial reporting and activism Sheer's campaign organization also has a direct connection to the rebel his campaign manager Hamish Marshall is listed as the director of the company's federal incorporation records which show its most recent annual gathering meeting was in February of this year Following the leadership election in Toronto on Saturday Sheer granted one-on-one interviews with a handful of major media organizations including a face-to-face interview with the rebels Ottawa correspondent Brian Lilly Prior to his convention interview Scheer appeared on the rebel in February in a studio interview with host to faith Goldie on her show

On the hunt at the end of the discussion Goldie asked Scheer if he would agree to go on a duck hunting trip with her after After he wins the leadership on Canada Day, which he agreed to We briefly mentioned faith Goldie earlier in her connection to the people's party and her brief Campaign for the Toronto mayor, but here's some more background on her and her coverage and her coverage of the Unite the Right rally for rebel media quoting from Winnipeg Free Press In the course of her dispatches Goldie argued the events in the Charlottesville were evidence of a rising white racial consciousness That was going to change the political landscape in America. She also all right. Well, she's actually not wrong That was

Incorrect, she's on the other side of the aisle on whether this is a good or bad thing Yeah, she went to great lengths to laud the 20-point Metapolitical manifesto composed by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer a document that includes calls to organize States along ethnic and racial divides and celebrates the superiority of white America faith Goldie describes Spencer's manifesto as robust and well thought out Goldie was fired by rebel in mid-August in 2017 But not due to her participation in Unite the Right She was fired for appearing on a daily Stormer podcast to discuss Unite the Right. Oh good. Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah, that's that's fine. So yeah, nice to have her interviewing conservative leader Andrew Shear

Ask for his reaction to Unite the Right and rebel media After what happened in Charlottesville in 2017 Shear who had previously been interviewed by rebel multiple times Finally disavowed the outlets saying look, I believe there's a fine line between covering events and giving a platform to groups who are promoting a violent Disgusting point of view. I won't be granting interviews going forward So that's nice that it took someone dying in Charlottesville to realize that you probably shouldn't talk to the fascist media source So in the aftermath of Unite the Right the mainstream conservatives kind of had to tread carefully around social issues because it's like Oh, yeah, they're they're still Nazis, which probably shouldn't be pandering to them

But as more time of distance let the air cool some conservatives went back to the same old rhetoric around the 2019 election For instance in his 2019 election campaign Tom Keemac of the Parliamentary representative of one of the Parliamentary representatives for Calgary, Alberta wrote out and spread flyers with the all-caps with the all-caps header of crisis at the border With text reading dear constituent the independent auditor general of Canada has published a scathing report confirming that the Ottawa Liberals Have failed to safely and responsibly manage Canada's borders since Justin Trudeau you're responsibly tweeted out that Canada would open its borders to anyone seeking entry The number of people illegally crossing the border to Canada from the United States has surged past 1,000 a month with almost 20,000 people illegally entering in 2018 alone And while speaking to voters of Keemac repeatedly insisted that all the problems of people

Legally crossing the Canadian border isn't a symptom of a failure of systems to respond to a growing crisis But merely a failure for border patrol to with to assert control over people Quotes and flyer courtesy of about this Tom Keemac guy courtesy of a Dan Olson of folding ideas He's a great Canadian documentarian who released a magnificent piece on QAnon and conspiracy theories last year on his YouTube channel of folding ideas Overall, I really like Dan. He makes very good stuff So thank you to him for sending me those those those flyers Anyway, during the 2019 election, Scheer led the Conservatives to gain a total of 26 seats in the inside parliament going from 95 up to 121 But they did finish 36 seats behind the Liberals despite beating the Liberals in the popular vote by 1.3%

So that was 34.4% for Conservatives and 33.1% of the popular vote for Liberals The margin was just over like 240,000 votes The Liberals lost 20 seats in the election and the NDP lost 15 seats This was the first time since since 1979 that a party won the most seats without also winning the popular vote What pushed the Conservatives over on the popular vote was due to extremely high conservative turnout in various in various writings So basically more Conservatives voted in certain writings than they usually do So even if the Liberals still win the district, there were still more conservative votes to be counted And also they basically swept the prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan where they won 70% of the vote and 65% of the vote respectively

But their victories in those states and their higher turnout did not convert into many seats Because the less population dense areas have fewer federal writings and fewer available seats And the Liberals had to rely heavily for seats in Ontario, the most populous province that includes cities like Toronto and a few other big cities So Canada doesn't have the most democratic system In the states we're familiar with people losing popular votes but still getting elected president and stuff In Canada it's a little bit different because of how you vote for parties in your own little district But it's still not perfect because it does feel weird for the leader of the country to not have his party to not have also won the popular vote Because of how districts work out and how higher turnout in some areas doesn't mean that it's going to have more seats

But the other side of things here is that Canada also doesn't have ranked choice So still the majority of people voted for left of centre candidates if you include the Green Party, the NDP and the Liberals So even though Liberals lost the popular vote there's still a majority left of centre voting So if they had ranked choice maybe the results would have been different So Canada's system, it definitely isn't perfect for how they do elections I would prefer ranked choice because basically I would prefer that for every country if they're going to have elections So just kind of explaining why they can lose the popular vote but still win a majority controlling government So after the election, Scheer announced he was resigning as head of the Conservatives in December of 2019

This was after it was revealed that he had used party funds for his children's own private schooling So good for him. A new bid for Conservative leadership went into effect We're going to mainly focus on two candidates here There was Aaron O'Toole and Derek Solan O'Toole fancies himself as another kind of like classic financial conservative and a social moderate He feels more like the old progressive Conservative candidates from back before the 2003 Unite the Right merger We got some like John McCain vibes here But Derek Solan is more similar to the farther right parts of the US's current Republican party

Like anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, racist tweets, etc But as a whole Solan's extremism was rejected by Canadian Conservatives He got fourth place with 15% of the vote during the first round of voting And ultimately O'Toole won leadership after three rounds of votes And O'Toole now has the new challenge of trying to appeal to the Canadian Conservatives' more moderate wing As well as the more Trumpian wing that's developed the past few years He's been relatively successful in crafting like a boring, polite Canadian version of Trump's nationalism With slogans like Canada first and take Canada back

You know, despite supporting trade deals, outsourcing Canadian jobs to cheaper overseas markets Because they never actually mean what they say And as the Liberals have grown more aware of Canada's bloody history And have like toned down the red and white Maple Leaf patriotism The Conservative party under O'Toole has seized on this opportunity to make Canadian patriotism more of a right-leaning staple Just like patriotism is more of like a right wing thing in the States So basically after we were like, oh yeah, residential schools were bad, Canada's kind of fucked up Liberals are like, okay, we maybe shouldn't be waving our Maple Leaf flags everywhere

Maybe we're not a perfect country The Conservatives are like, no, you have to be proud to be Canadian So they've kind of taken patriotism to be their new thing Well, previously it was much more of like a liberal thing The Islamophobia and overt religious bigotry under O'Toole has been slightly trimmed down And climate change has at least been mentioned as existing But there has also been increased discussion on trying to hack down Canada's healthcare and privatize more aspects of it Which, yeah, good job guys, take away the only good part of Canada

The province of Alberta under Jason Kenney has done this to a disastrous effect Raising the cost of medical care for lower class people, many of whom voted Conservative I have family in Alberta and just the past five years the changes to the healthcare system there has been horrible It's not great So basically what O'Toole wants is he wants to privatize more elements of it He has a specific term he uses, he wants to split the taxpayer healthcare and privatize healthcare into two sections And you can choose which one to join in Anyway, it's silly

O'Toole did take a wee little stance to distance himself from the more extreme wings of his party when he decided to remove MP Derek Solan from the caucus O'Toole announced that Solan would not be allowed to run as a candidate for the Conservative Party in the next election either Saying racism is a disease of the soul, repugnant to our core values It has no place in our country and has no place in the Conservative Party of Canada I won't tolerate it Also last year O'Toole refused to say whether he thinks systemic racism exists But the decision to remove Solan was made after it was revealed that he accepted a donation from the Canadian Nazi Paul Fromm during Solan's bid for Conservative leadership Back in the 90s, Fromm was a figurehead of the Canadian far-right movement appearing at heritage front rallies

And also caught on video at a party celebrating Hitler's birthday which he lost his high school teaching job over Well, look, it's just polite to celebrate a guy's birthday, you know, whether or not he's Hitler Under no circumstances do you gotta celebrate Hitler's birthday This isn't a hot tick So there has been a bit of a rift in the Conservative Party over how much Trumpian rhetoric should be allowed in the Canadian Conservative Party And this kind of rift has definitely increased after January 6th The problem for Conservative politicians is that to win elections they need to appeal to the largest swath of voters And that includes more socially conservative and increasingly far-right rule folks

But if they go too far, they'll lose the moderates to the Liberal Party So you have to take this delicate balance But to kind of give you like an overview of what the current state of the Conservative like, votership is 4 in 10 of the Conservative Party of Canada members, you know, people signed up to vote in the party, you know, regular people 4 in 10 would say that they would have voted for Trump 4 in 10 say that they think Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election And 4 in 10 say that the Conservative... And 4 in 10 believe that the January 6th riot was staged

Or it was done by the Democrats or done by Antiva So that's kind of the state of the Conservative Party in Canada for the voters So, you know, politicians have to kind of, in order to win, they still need to appeal to those people But they don't want to do that thing usually Usually they're... A big talking point is like rejecting the divisive politics of the United States That's a big thing people say in Canada They don't want it to become like, you know, like a fighting match

The other main difference between Canada's elections and America's elections is like America is always an election season, right? Even after each election, it's like you feel like campaigns start right up again Canada's campaigns only run like a few months before the election Like it is not like a thing Yeah, that's one of those things you guys do objectively better than us And a lot of the world does, it's not just Canada The idea that like, oh, elections are terrible

We should spend as little time as possible having them It's like two or three months of campaigning, that's it It's not like a two-year, four-year thing No, that is a thing that we should absolutely... The election should be about 11 minutes From the start of the campaign to the vote Everybody gets a minute to explain their politics And then we vote and then we throw them into the sea

Yeah So, trying to craft marketing to the divided right wing It's been interesting to watch, you know, there's like videos of O'Toole Walking through, you know, downtowns with pride flags in the background And, you know, featuring visible like minority Canadians intermingling But then you also have O'Toole like rally against cancel culture Revealing suggestions that the Liberal government's pandemic response is part of a socialist great reset And pulling out the dog whistle on like China and the coronavirus, you know, as often as you can

O'Toole's in the past also downplayed Canadians residential schools program And described the efforts of activists pushing to removal of statues Of the residential school architects as stupid So, I do think O'Toole prefers a conservative party resistant to far-right branding But he knows he needs to appeal to his voters in order to win elections So, it's just, it's the thing that's not great, but it's interesting to watch In August of 2021, Justin Trudeau, noted blackface appreciator Called a snap election in an effort to gain more parliamentary seats

In hopes of getting a majority Liberal government Something a prime minister should not be allowed to do, by the way Like a prime minister should not be able to decide when to do elections That is like, should totally not be a thing Like what? No, you shouldn't do that But anyway, as the 2021 snap election ramped up The conservative party under O'Toole made some extremely questionable choices For their marketing and their slogans

What does the phrase secure the future bring to mind? Anything? The 14 words Yeah, so that became the new tagline for the entire conservative party under O'Toole Great, okay, sure We got secure the future billboards We got websites, conservative.ca, slash secure the future We got mailers, magazine covers, all emblazoned with secure the future Or secure our future

And you know what'll secure our future, Garrison? The chevron ads that keep popping up That we keep trying to get rid of That's securing our future It's great, it's a great time Chevron, appreciators, which is everyone Ah, we're back and just appreciating chevron Just like Justin Trudeau appreciates life based

Just like Justin Trudeau Yeah, so secure the future, great slogan, not a good slogan, bad I'm gonna read a bit from a mailer that went out to conservative party members After O'Toole won leadership I firmly believe Canada has everything it takes to recover from COVID-19 and enjoy a prosperous future If we have a government that knows how to secure the future If the Trudeau liberals stay in power, they'll continue spending taxpayer money at pandemic era levels Long after the virus is behind us

The result? All the things we love about Canada will be in serious jeopardy Our debt will become out of control and they'll never be able to get back the Canada you and I grew up in The kind of Canada our children and grandchildren deserve So later on in the page O'Toole says we need to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party And hold Beijing accountable for sabotaging our economy And taking jobs from Canadian workers And on August 16th, the Canadian Conservative Party Twitter account tweeted out And I quote

Canada's recovery program will secure the future for you, your children, and your grandchildren So that's fun Also, guess how many words is in that last sentence? 14 It's 14 of them Yeah, we're going back to calling Canada, Canada again Yeah, it's like a dog whistle, but except for, you know, a dog whistle, only dogs can hear it Except everyone hears it

It's just a whistle? It's just a regular whistle? Yeah, it's that he just tweeted it, tweet Yeah, so as anyway, as O'Toole was getting all secure the future pilled Canada's actual far-right populist party, the People's Party, was gaining much more popularity amid the pandemic and the anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vaxx protests The COVID-19 pandemic was a gift to the far-right in general as it allowed the injection and proliferation of conspiracy theories to accelerate at levels almost never before seen and provided fair recruiting grounds to gain new followers

The PPC latched onto this and was extremely successful They sponsored protests, they did a whole bunch of campaigns that are around anti-mask stuff, anti-vaccine, you know, all of it So the PPC was able to be not just a safe harbor for anti-immigration, white nationalists, and neo-nazis and other far-right groups, but also now more mainstream anti-lockdown, anti-vaxx and anti-government protesters as well as, you know, gun rights activists and some general rule workers feeling left behind from even the conservative party So the PPC has changed from a niche white nationalist party to a full-blown far-right populist force What Bernard and the PPC have done so effectively since the pandemic is to use the broad concerns around COVID and freedom and the more, you know, mainstream concerns about economic anxieties, job loss,

loss of businesses, immigration and change in culture, and managed to roll all of these things up into one tight package which is really appealing to a lot of Canadians who are very anxious about the state of their country especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic So the results of the September snap election, which was, you know, last month, were basically the same as the 2019 election except the PPC went from 1.6% of the vote to 5% of the vote, a big, a big change That means they were ranking above the Green Party and nearly tying the block Kebukwa So they made like, Kebukwa! I know like 1% to 5% doesn't seem like tons, but like this is a really big jump for a brand new party

especially if they're ahead of the Green Party and tying the block party That is like a notable shift The University of Guloff Professor of Political Science Tamara Small said that, said this after the results of the last snap election quote, I think the only leader who's ecstatic about last night's results is Bernard I don't think they're going anywhere. I think it seems that he's taken the populism and attached to far-right politics The idea that Canada was immune to this sort of far-right populism The idea that Canada was going to be free from the populism that we saw in Europe, like what Nigel Farage is in the UK But I think a lot of people are wondering if Bernard is just going to say, I'm not here to form an actual government

I'm just here to challenge the system and use that as a way of gaining massive support After CTV News emailed the PPC for comment for their post-election story The party spokesperson sent back a one-line email response I don't respond to requests from leftist activists masquerading us journalists, get lost So that's fun Also in late September, Bernard's Twitter account was temporarily suspended for encouraging his supporters to attack journalists Yeah, great I'm okay with criticizing journalists and stuff because most journalists are not great

But when you're using your political Twitter account to just tell people to just go attack the press Usually it's a bad sign of a political party Usually it's just like, yeah, political parties when they do that usually leads to bad things We are going to talk about one kind of wrapping up here We're going to talk about one Ontario people's party candidate named Mario Greco Who was another high school teacher and self-proclaimed game developer A few years ago, I see Chris as a winster because you know this can't lead to good things The gamers can't be good

So a few years ago, Greco made a video game called Happy Culture Shootout Quoting an article from pressprogress.ca Happy Culture Shootout is a space invader style game that allows players to control a spaceship that shoots laser beams at characters of various identity groups Quote, this game is about an alien ordered to invade Earth and transport all humans to happy land, Greco says on his personal website Which includes other games that he authored like Daimar, which is about a young misunderstood hero who seeks to liberate post-war Germany In a since-deleted video obtained by Press Progress, the people's party candidate delivered a presentation to university students several years ago Offering his post-mortem on the game Greco expressed surprise that his students and faculty reacted negatively to the game, with one calling it the most racist game I've ever played

Greco says his game was not racist in the slightest, noting that he made fun of his own Italian heritage He also claimed that some students thought his gay pride parade level was hilarious My friends and I love people of all cultures, and we also love humor of all types That includes harmless racist jokes, Greco said in the video The game was intended to make a joke about how ridiculous cultural stereotypes are, so we can laugh about it together and move on with our lives During the presentation, the people's party candidate offered an interesting side note about the game's Israel level According to Greco, a faculty member at the university strongly recommended that he remove Jewish stereotypes from the game He was like, no, get rid of it immediately, don't have any religious content whatsoever

I know that subject is very, very touchy So yeah, this is just a game where you mass shoot minority people Anyway, in 2017, Greco posted a photo on Facebook of an illustration of Pepe the Frog Which he said was drawn by one of his students in the whiteboard of his York region high school Pepe had a little speech bubble that said, free Kekistan Great So now, so currently, Greco is spending his time tweeting about critical race theory And trying to get into office under the people's party banner

In his Twitter bio, he calls himself an egalitarian libertarian nationalist And he still also teaches computer science at Ontario High School I have a fun different ways people call themselves fascists I know, it's fun It's not fun, these people are all the worst, most scum And one more thing before we sign off Last month, right before the September election, I was forwarded some pictures of some people's party of Canada posters and flyers Put up linking to their campaign website that someone came across around town

Not Portland, like somewhere in Canada Under the PPC logo, there was pictures of people's faces and big black text that said, it's okay to be white Great, rad So that's the liberal utopia of Canada everybody Basically, the reason I wanted to put these episodes together is because we make a lot of jokes about escaping to Canada as the states gets too fascist And I just want to say, I'm not saying Canada is going to accelerate at the same rate But Canada is not immune to the same thing Yeah, you can't escape this problem of creeping authoritarianism by moving

No, in particular Unless you move to a country with no history of authoritarianism, like I don't know, Germany Yeah, and I think the other thing is important with Canada particularly Canada is affected by American political trends and you see this Absolutely One of the things that I remember looking at when I was looking into sort of, if you look at the history of anti-Asian riots for example So there's this huge wave in 1907 that goes all the way out to the west coast A lot of the big Canada

And it ends in Toronto A lot of the big Canada And you see that today too, where it's like, yeah, Toronto I think has the highest rate of anti-Asian attacks in North America That's not surprising Which is pretty impressive considering the absolute shit show going on in New York and LA and Seattle And it's like, no, Toronto is worse No, it's real bad I talk a lot about how the far right is gaining a lot stronger of an influence in Alberta

And it is spreading into other eastern provinces, not just inside Quebec You know, there was the incel attack in Toronto a few years ago that killed like a dozen people Of course, there was the Quebec mosque shooting There's been a lot of these kind of things popping off And you know, there's even more starting in like British Columbia as well Which has a decent far right kind of influence at least on the eastern side of BC Away from like Victoria and from Vancouver So yeah, I just wanted to put these together and be like, hey, it's worth looking at these countries that we usually view as generally doing better

And be like, no, the same thing is happening there And it's all part of the same overarching slide rightward That we've seen in both the UK, we were even seeing it now in Germany We're seeing it in obviously the states under Trump And in Canada, even though the Liberals have won the past few elections, it's still scooting rightward So yeah, I just wanted to put this thing together If you want to keep up to date on Canadian stuff, you can check out the Canadian anti-hate network Which does work tracking extremism in Canada

And yeah, that is what I put together Thanks, Garrison Yeah, you're welcome, you're welcome Well, that's the episode, that's gonna do it for us here and it could happen here today Come back tomorrow or you know, whenever And we'll talk about another part of the world Maybe, I don't know, Portugal, fuck it I don't have stuff pulled for Portugal episode

You have to give me way more heads up for that You better get ready by tomorrow No That's what we're doing now Follow us on Twitter and Instagram and it could happen here Pott and coolzone media, leave five star reviews, whatever Goodbye Goodbye

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com Or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly, at coolzonemedia.com slash sources Thanks for listening I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago

He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free Until one day when he started talking with the FBI And promised that he could take the mob down I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Check out Drink Champ's conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday On the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences and a life without parole My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts