Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 50

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

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

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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 the iHeart app and here's practical guide to making permaculture happen wherever you are. I am your host for this episode, Andrew of the YouTube channel, Andrewism, and I'm joined here with Chris and James. Say hello. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having me. Technically, I'm the guest. Yeah, true. Well, you're going to walk us through this. I'm very excited to learn more about it. Yes. So I really see it as a key component in our restoration of the earth. And so I find it necessary that regardless of what direction your individual

practice is going in, we are looking to specialize or whatever, quote unquote specialize. I think it's still important to think about where your food comes from and think about ways that we can enhance and enlarge our food autonomy, especially considering the multi-layering crises that you know, compounding these days. Permaculture was first coined as a tomb by permaculturist Bill Mollison. It's an appointment to have permanent agriculture and permanent culture. And it's the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems, which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It's a way of integrating landscape and people

providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and other non-material needs in a sustainable way. And just to be clear, the concepts, the ideas, the principles that make a permaculture have existed long before Bill Mollison was born, have existed in cultures all over the world. Bill Mollison is just someone who has, I guess, given it a spin for a modern audience. But these principles, these ideas are things that have been in practice for thousands of years, tens of thousands even, from the approach to land management and settlement design to the whole systems thinking approach to nature, which can be seen in a lot of animus practices. It has a long history and it's one that people who practice permaculture today,

research permaculture, will inevitably uncover in their learning process. However, Bill Mollison first coined it in the 1970s as a response to the oil embargoes that were taking place at a time. By bringing together the traditional knowledge of a vastery of indigenous cultures and combining them with certain modern design and layouts, it created a movement that is now spreading across the world on every continent, honestly. The way that permaculture views the world, the views systems, it comes with an outlook that recognizes that all biological material is a potential energy source. The aim is to try to trap energy on your land and to use that energy in the most efficient way before it degrades, to create circular economies and cycles of energy

that allow for an actual sustainable agricultural practice, which unfortunately has not been the aim of agriculture, especially industrial agriculture. So permaculture represents a challenge to that status quo. The ethics of permaculture are primarily focused on care for the earth, that being all living and on living things, care for all people, thereby promoting self-alliance and community responsibility. We all have access to the resources necessary for existence and care for community and specifically community that allows us to think of and approach our society in a way that benefits all people in all life. Recognizing that community is not just our neighbors, it's not just the people who live in our city or town, it is

all the living things that incorporate our surroundings and beyond. The way that permaculture approaches design, it's a lot of its emphasis in mimicking how the natural world would attempt to stabilize. Of course these systems take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years to fully develop and age and reach some kind of stable state. Permaculture seeks to learn from these old growth forests and these elderly ecosystems and accelerate that process to establish things that will last generations, to establish spaces that will provide for the needs of people hundreds of years down the line. When it comes to approaching permaculture design practically, first things first to recognize is that anybody can take part in permaculture design.

Anybody can take part in constructing these sorts of systems and it can be established. The basic principles can be established regardless of your circumstances, your individual climate or your biosphere because the principles are based on following what nature was doing anyway. One of the first principles involves the recognition of the connections in a location, seeing that a web is stronger than a single string, meaning that all of these different parts, the different moving parts coming together, create something stronger than if each individual person, each individual creature is trying to move by itself. It also looks at the connection between waste and resources. We all know the old adage that says, you know, one man's trash is

another man's treasure, but when it comes to ecosystems we should really be taking it quite literally because the waste of one part of the system directly feeds into the resource of another part. Decomposing plants and animals directly feed into the fungal networks and flourishing of the next generation of plants and animals. And in that web, in that network, in those connections, we can also recognize for principle two that each element performs multiple functions. If we are, for example, keeping chickens, they can be a source of eggs and feathers and protein, of course, but they also produce manure and their daily activity helps to aerate the soil and they also provide insect control, allowing your plants to food the flourish. Banana trees, they provide

bananas, of course, they provide fruit, they also provide starch and mulch and protection and shade and they hold water quite well actually. When I take a permaculture design course a couple months ago, one of the things that I had learned from the guy who was running it was that he had told the story and he had done this project in Barberos and in Barberos he was called to restore sort of like an old sand mine because it had run out of sand well it's close to running out of sand and so the community that was reliant on that sand mine didn't really have any direction because their economy, their local economy, been so reliant on those jobs. When he came in, it's just like, and he showed the pictures, it's just this very, very barren landscape,

very dry, very dusty and I was honestly in disbelief that something so dead, so destroyed, something so devolved could be as radically transformed as he had transformed it. Unfortunately, this is a podcast, not a video, otherwise I would show you the pictures, but the transformation was stunning and one of the elements that he had used to transform that dry landscape into a lush food forest was banana trees because surprisingly, banana trees are very effective, well unsurprisingly, banana trees are very effective at growing quickly and providing shade to other plants and so as these other plants are growing up, they have the shaded banana tree to protect them from the harsh sun and so the banana trees,

well they may not be the top dog to the forest in the end by the time the forest is fully established because banana trees don't get that tall, they still are vital in that early stage in providing that function of shade that allows the rest of the forest to establish itself. That's really cool. It's very, very, very cool. I would show you all the pictures after. Is there like a place people could see them online, like Instagram, they could look up or something? Yes, so if you go on wasamaki, permaculture.org, I believe he has the pictures up there. That will be W-E-S-A-M-A-K-I permaculture.org and if I remember correctly, he has the pictures on there. Yeah, was it like a sand mine before or something? Yeah, it was a sand mine.

Yeah, geez, wow. It looks like there's no goodness in the soil in the first one and then by the end it's surviving. To go back into the recording aspect, when it came to that project, a large part of it was just getting that life in the soil. They were getting mulch and manure from wherever they could get it just to give some life to that soil. They would grow certain hardy, fast-growing plants and then chop them down after they had grown sufficiently so they would die right where they lay and provide nutrients to the soil. That process was what helped to build up that soil even before it started planting the bananas and other stuff. Were they able, like you were saying they were getting some of that stuff wherever they could get it? Were they able

to get that? Was it considered a waste product, I guess, by the people they got it from? I know I have chickens and they obviously produce manure and I'll put some of it in my vegetables to grow, but I'll just give it to anyone else who wants it. Is that a thing that they were able to do there? Yeah, I think people are donated. I mean, I would assume at least I'm turned out. I don't know what the case is in Barbados, but in Trinidad there are bush trucks which pass every once in a while to collect branches and cut grass and whatever people have put out from their yardwork or whatever. So I would assume that they would have asked the bush truck people to bring some of that stuff to the site to help out because a lot of people, they just put that in front of the yard waiting

for the bush truck to pass. So a lot of very good potential sources of ecosystem building, that so-called waste, that really resources gets wasted when it can really serve a lot of these kinds of projects. Yeah, that's very cool. If you ever read UN documents about stopping climate change, they always have a giant section about circular economy stuff and about basically doing this stuff and then nothing ever happens and no one ever does it. And so yeah, it's really cool that this is the place where those ideas which are... If we are going to survive as a species with most of us alive and doing well, we're going to have to do. Exactly. I'm kind of reminded just on this sort of topic of... I was in Rwanda in February of 2020 and one

of the things that really struck me with this system of agriculture that they've devised where they have paddies that grow rice, like submerged. And then in there, there are living fish. And then above them, there are little hutches with rabbits. And so the rabbit manure helps to fertilize what's growing beneath. And then it's this kind of circular thing where I think they can feed some of the things that they cut off the plants to the rabbits. And the fish will help keep the water clean. I think they're like filter fish. I can't quite observe the plants keep it clean for the fish. It was fascinating. I was like, this is amazing. They're not... As opposed to I grew up on a farm and I'm very familiar with some of the larger arable grains

in the UK and how you're relying on a ton of exogenous inputs, which I was just so impressed with the fact that they devised a system that didn't require those. Exactly. You really want to... Of course, we will have to get external sources, especially in the beginning, as you're trying to establish the system. But the aim is really to have the system continuously establishing itself and expanding itself and maintaining itself. Yeah. Would it be a system that works mostly with plant-based food stuffs, I guess, that seems generally to be more sustainable? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, mania is a really powerful source of fertilizer. And I think you can keep animals without, you know, eating them or using them anyway. If you just want to,

you know, because they make good companions and stuff as well. Yeah, that's totally fair. But yeah, yeah, I would say a plant-focused system could definitely be. And to sort of rhyme or align with principle too, which said that each element performs multiple functions, it's also important to have each function supported by multiple elements. Right? So you don't want to get all your food from one source. You want to have a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars. I mean, having all your food coming from one source is basically what we do now with these monocultures, with this industrial farming that has these fields and fields and fields that are so susceptible to pests and disease that we have to basically

drench them with chemicals, just to allow them to survive. And the same guy who did the course, he explains it to me like this. He said that when there's a system in nature and it's not in balance, they basically send out a signal saying, hey, this is not in balance, come and fix it. And so these so-called pests, these bugs and stuff, they come to these aberrations, these freaks of nature, these massive fields of crops, and recognizing that this is not a sustainable establishment in the landscape, they try to optimize. Right, he calls them, he doesn't call them pests, he calls them optimizers. So if you have, for example, excessive amount of a certain pest in your system, something's wrong with that system, because those so-called pests,

those optimizers are only able to flood your system because they don't have the mechanism, the system doesn't have the mechanisms in place to keep them in check. So you don't have the fauna, the larger insects and stuff in your system that will keep those pests in check. There's an imbalance in place and that's something that needs to be rectified and there are different ways to rectify depending on the situation. Another example, and this isn't from the Puma Culture Guide, Puma Culture course, another example was the, this, I believe someone was talking about the presence of wolves in some of the parks in the US and how reintroducing those wolves did so much to regulate the rest of the ecosystem, the ripple effects that had on the

rest of the ecosystem. Stabilizing the dare populations and stabilizing the beaver populations and stabilizing all these other different plants and animal species that you would think are not even connected to the wolves, but still their presence played a significant role in maintaining that balance. Yeah, go watch how wolves change rivers. It's literally five minutes and it rules. Yeah, it's amazing. It's just like the concept of rewilding. Is that what, would that be a similar thing? Yeah, rewilding is basically, Puma Culture tends to be more focused on sustaining human communities in a balance with the rest of the natural world, whereas rewilding is more focused on helping to rebuild ecosystems outside of the human sphere. He says, I understand it.

Yeah, yeah, that makes no sense to me. So with principle three, which is to reiterate was that each function should be supported by multiple elements. You want to get all your food from one source. You want to just want to grow like rows and rows of trees or rows and rows of corn. You want to grow a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars and all these different species and variations that would make up like an actual forest. The food forest is an approach that a lot of permaculturists would advocate. And within a food forest, you would have, I believe, seven major groups. This is sort of seven levels that create a sort of a beneficial system. On the top layer, you have the canopy, which consists of the

large fruits and nut trees. They provide the most shade and they keep the whole area, they'll climb into the area stable. On that second layer, you're going to have the low tree layer, which has the dwarf fruit trees, the smaller fruit trees that would fall under the canopy. On the third layer, you would have the shrub layer where you'd grow berries and other small plants. And below that, you have the herbaceous layer where you would grow different herbs and spices and things like that. And then below that, you have your root vegetables. And below that, you have, well, you can't really go below the root vegetables. But next to those root vegetables, you would want to grow your soil surface crops, your ground cover. Like there are certain running

beans and stuff that would help to create a ground cover, which protects the soil and prevents the establishment of undesirable plants, which we call weeds. And then finally, the seventh layer is the vertical layer, which consists of the climbers and vines that would establish themselves on the low tree layer and the canopy. So if you have that sort of food forest system in place with all those seven layers, you're not getting each function supported by one element, you're getting it supported by many elements. The same goes for water. You don't want to get all your water source coming from just like the pipes and whatever water the government sends you. You want to have water coming from the rain. If possible, you might want to tap into the water table or you might want to,

depending on your situation, you might have a stream or you might be on a hill in which case you'd have water flowing down. And you want to find ways to trap that water and to conserve that water so that it's distributed throughout your system. Unlike a regular home garden, part of the aim of a permaculture system is that it just like in nature, it waters itself. It takes care of itself. And so you're going to have to want, you're going to want to have all sorts of different sources of water elements in place to provide that water. Same goes for energy. You would want to get all the energy from one source. You want to combine, you know, human power, animal power, hydroelectricity, if possible, solar power, if possible. Basically, redundancy

is very important. Redundancy is very important. And I'll say it again, for emphasis, redundancy is very important. The next principle, principle number four, is that you want to approach permaculture with energy efficiency in mind, particularly your own energy. So on a more practical side of things, if you, you might want to do what my mentor, my guide had done, which was a zoning sector analysis. So basically, you draw like a map of your space, you outline your daily patterns, and the energies that come from outside your site, like wind and rain and flood and fire and pollution and noise and smells and all those different things. You want to look at how you move through your space, you want to look at how the

sunshine passes over your space, you want to look at the view. And you want to try to harness those good energies, whether it be the rain or wind or whatever, maybe the sun and plant accordingly. You don't want to have sun sensitive plants on like the south side of your property, of your space, wherever the space is. And you wouldn't want to have plants that need a lot of sun in the shade. You also want to divvy up your space. Once you've done that map of your space, you want to divvy it up into zones. So I first saw that be your immediate living space. The second zone would have an intensive kitchen garden. So I first soon would be a place of consumption and processing of whatever it is that your system is producing. It doesn't necessarily

have to be a house. It could be a community kitchen or it can be a campus clubhouse. I don't know. It could be any space that you're using for consumption and processing. The next zone is going to be an intensive kitchen garden. It's a place where you would want to grow the plants that cycle through more quickly, the spices and the herbs and the different things that you would use on a regular basis. The next zone would want to have its focus on local support, community support and surplus. So this zone, the first zone is actually technically zone zero. The second zone is zone one. And so zone two, which is that sort of local support space that orchard is where you want to grow your fruit trees, your ornamentals. You want to raise animals there and you basically

want it to be a space where you can provide for the local community separate and apart from your own produce. Zone three would also have the emphasis on production. Zone three would be the space where you have your main crops, the crops you spend a lot of time focusing on. Zone four would also have a lot of investment in establishing a sustainable sort of life cycle for more long-term plants and zone five would be a space of wilderness, of forest, of wildlife corridors that allow spaces of rewilding even within your more constructed site. Having your systems split into zones helps you to reduce the amount of work that you put in, the amount of resources used, the amount of maintenance you'll need,

and it also helps you to boost your yields and to recycle resources most effectively. The fifth principle is the use of biological resources, natural insecticides, timber, nitrogen fixers, whatever the case may be, you want to be using the systems that have evolved to fulfill those rules, to fulfill those rules. You may or may not be afraid of certain creatures. I myself personally I don't like frogs or toads or really I don't like most animals personally I just survive with them. However common I recognize the importance right so frogs and bats and snakes all these creatures help to provide like a stable system whether it be snakes dealing with rats or bats dealing with insects or frogs also dealing with insects.

You might also want to use companion planting as well like the three sisters method which is a combination of beans corn and squashes right and squash and that would help to establish itself and maintain itself. It's sort of like a microcosm of the broader public culture concept and one that has been in practice for hundreds of years. The sixth principle is the practice of energy cycling, trapping sunlight through greenhouses making the most use basically out of the energy that flows through your system before it leaves your system recycling the organic matter that passes through your system so it produces no real waste. When I was at the site at the permaculture forest I witnessed a compost

toilet for the first time and was immediately grossed out by the concept however upon being blown away by the product of those compost toilets I changed my tune very quickly and although I probably would not use a compost toilet on a regular basis I think it has some benefit because we're flushing away some real power some real nutritious stuff. Of course there are risks associated with using human mania but the process that he had put in place involved using human waste and then for every certain amount of human waste you dump sawdust on top of it and that sawdust helps to deal with the smell so much so that I actually didn't smell anything when I opened up those those compost toilets but it also helps to create that

balance between the carbon and the nitrogen that is required for compost and so after that after a tub has been filled a compost toilet tub has been filled he seals it up leaves it for a year to break down and by the time it comes out it's just like regular soil. However of course safety precautions I believe he only uses it for his orchards so only like fruit trees and other kinds of trees. I spent a lot of time so far discussing these sort of larger systems where you know I'm basically assuming you have several acres of land like this guy does I don't have several acres of land I don't have an inch of land and I feel like a lot of people listening don't. So there are elements that you can incorporate on the small scale such as grow boxes

you can have deep litter beds you can have aquaculture systems and that's actually one of the things that he first established which is like a series of aquaculture systems and it's actually one of the main focuses of his project to this day but I was quite surprised as to the yield that could be produced from something as simple as a couple pipes put together with some tomato plants growing out of it. So I mean don't underestimate yourself or the space available to you because you might not be able to plant a whole forest but you can do a little something. Coming back to the food forest concept the eighth principle is the use of natural plant succession and stacking. You want to group plants together they would give a continual production

over time in both the short term and the long term and like I established you want to have those layers in place the roots the vines the trees etc. The ninth principle encourages diversity encourages polyculture which is something that I'm sure you have picked up on by now. The tenth principle is increasing the edge within a system by creating unique niches that allow for the more rare the more vulnerable corners of life to sustain themselves. And I think that's something that a lot of permaculturists do in terms of establishing their own systems. They have like a special focus on certain passion projects certain species that they just love and want to see flourish and so they create these niches within their systems that allow allow for those creatures

to flourish. Principle 11 employs that you observe natural patterns. Nature rarely goes in a straight line and you may want to make that pattern whether it be spirals or waves or branches whether it be patterns over time from you know the week to the month of the year to repeating patterns in the weather or the seasons you want to be observing these patterns and adjusting your system continually. The early parts of establishing a permaculture system is certainly the most difficult part but even five to ten years down the line when the system is more established more self-sustaining you still want to be playing that role of tweaking it as you go along. And I think that's something that more people need to recognize about humanity. We didn't just spring on to hear like some sort of

alien parasite leeching off of the earth right. We just like every other animal like every other creature on this planet have a role to play in the ecosystems we inhabit. Unfortunately a lot of that activity has been destructive because of how our socioeconomic system has been structured but that's something we both role in changing. And part of that is recognizing that we are stewards so we can be good stewards. We can help to facilitate the flourishing of life. We don't have to be dream reapers upon the systems that we are a part of. And so even as you're late quote-unquote in these long-term projects 20 years 30 years you're still going to be tweaking and cultivating and hopefully expanding these systems over time.

Principle 12 reminds us we have to pay attention to the scale of these systems to the long term of these systems recognizing that this is something we want to establish over generations. And finally principle number 13 is be positive. Experiment small learn from your mistakes scale up bring in more people get involved get more of your community of your social circle of your family of your affinity group of whatever case maybe get more people involved in imagining this complex beautiful revolutionary project. We have a long way to go but a lot of progress can be made in a short space of time and a lot of projects already going on with this ended mind. I would suggest just going online really and just searching for the different permaculture projects happening

around the world whether it be the food forests that Jeff Lawton is working to establish in Morocco or the permaculture pulmonary systems that people are putting in place in Australia and or the greening the Sahara projects in the Sahel region across Africa or the many small scale projects taking place and large scale projects taking place across the Americas. A lot of people put it in this work and there's a large community willing and able to support as you hopefully embark upon this journey. That's about it for me. Yeah that's fascinating. I'm really interested in this stuff. I think yeah it's massively missing in our discussion about like I don't know how to phrase this rightly but like making a better

world just to give it a really broad sort of phrasing and when we often think about like political discourse and when we think about political systems but without food systems we really like the hierarchy of needs is not satisfied and I think that folks listening can make a really positive change really really quickly and in their own lives and spaces if they sort of spend some time with this stuff. Yeah absolutely. And it's cool I think and important too to reference that like so much of this like the person you named at the start whose name I'm sorry I've forgotten but like I think yeah it's important to reference that like these are indigenous ways of knowing and doing and being and living and like you said

they've existed for millennia and like going back to that is good as part of a larger sort of way of respecting indigenous cultures and land rights and all the other things we need to do. 100% It could happen here is a podcast that you're listening to and you know mostly we talk about problems that you should be aware of sometimes we talk about solutions and today we're kind of gonna talk about a solution today is one of our famed good news episodes so everybody celebrate and also give your name for the folks at home. Yay I'm James. Yay I'm Gar. Yay I'm Chris. Wonderful guys. That was perfect that was completely natural just like we practiced.

So the thing that the thing that is noteworthy and the thing that we're celebrating and also explained today is that this summer we're recording this what like a day into September two days into September so we are we are yeah what is September first so we have officially gotten through the summer without a right-wing rally in Portland that degenerates into a gigantic brawl. This is the first year that has happened since 2017 so starting in 2017 Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys and other affiliated groups would very regularly and they would do it throughout the year but particularly during the summers hold protests and marches and these all had different themes they were the Second Amendment rallies rally against Marxism rally in support of the fucking cops

the him to rally all sorts of stupid stupid fucking names but the main the main purpose of the mall was so that there would be gigantic fistfights between you know Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer Brawlers and anti-fashes that was the reason to hold these events and they got increasingly gnarly and increasingly violent until everything culminated in the summer of 2020 and this massive Trump caravan through the city with like thousands of trucks people shooting paintballs and spraying mace and throwing shit off the back of trucks and then a Patriot Prayer member named Aaron Danielson got his ass shot to death by an anti-fascist during a somewhat unclear altercation outside of a parking garage what I can say is that everyone involved was heavily armed and

yeah after that there were some more very ugly fights but an increasing like thing that happened was that there would be gunfire at these protests and the next year at an anniversary the fucking fistfight thing a right-wing demonstrator fired into a crowd of anti-fascists in downtown Portland who returned to fire and drove him off he was arrested a bunch of there was a big stupid fight at a Kmart in another part of town the same day a abandoned Kmart parking lot that held a massive brawl and several of them got several of the proud boy types got real nasty charges from that one after the police as they generally did chose not to take any kind of action and then you know things kind of petered out and nothing there have not been any right-wing rallies since there was

one mass shooting attack on a weekly racial justice protest in Portland earlier this year where a fascist fired into a crowd of women who were doing corking duty he killed one woman and he wounded four other people and yeah he was taken down shot twice in the hip by a protester who was armed security for that march and after that there hasn't really been anything and this is the interesting one of the things that's there's a number of things that are interesting here but one of them is that this has occurred while proud boy chapters are recording record recruitment there's more new chapters of the proud boys than there were prior to January 6th and there have been at least 200 something right-wing gatherings around the country with

like proud boys and other affiliated groups in attendance since January 6th so nationwide the kind of rallies that Portland's been seeing since 2017 got more common and they didn't happen at all in Portland this year and that's what we're here to talk about today I think now there's a couple of things that are have contributed to the current state of affairs which I think broadly can be described as the right is kind of scared to do big events in Portland there have been a couple of like sputtering attempts they drove through town on their way to Washington real quickly as part of this caravan once but they didn't go through downtown again it wasn't like one guy did fire at people on a bridge with a handgun which the police did nothing about

but they're not willing to like hang around I think there's a few reasons why they've been scared off number one they keep getting shot that has happened several times now number two the physical resistance to them has been gnarlier as of the fights people have gotten smarter about how they do some aspects of the fighting involving like a lot of property like spraying paint on people's fancy body armor and shit which is expensive and then after five years of ignoring it the state has actually started charging right-wing brawlers with felonies which has scared I think a lot of them off and yeah so that's that's kind of where we are now and I think one of the things people should be paying attention to is what Portland had to do and and both how long it took but also

like what kind of things were involved to actually get to this point because other folks are going to need to be willing to do some of the shit people had to do in Portland for years which includes like fucking strapping on gear and going out to confront these people in the street yeah I think um it's really interesting right because I just I know you've written a piece about this uh for new lines if I remember correctly yeah yeah yeah that'll be up by the time this uh this runs cool um yeah I just read it I thought it was really good um it reminds me of like when we talk about anti-fascism historically right we sort of talk about the high points a lot and the one that at least I see most people going back to is the battle of cable street in London in 1936

which people will probably I know you've had it in bastards episodes before yes um and it's a very similar thing right like it's a broad intersectional coalition of people who are like we will not let you do this shit in our space and we will physically fucking stop you and if the police try and protect you we will stop them doing that as well there's incidents between mostly fascists and anti-fascists like throughout the 30s and a lot later in British history but it's a very similar kind of playbook I guess right it's like physical force opposition to fascist gatherings like not letting them feel safe in your space yeah not letting them feel safe and not letting them go unopposed because I mean one of the things that was kind of repeatedly a factor in Portland is that

that when the anti-fascists outnumbered the right from the start and significantly there was a lot less violence on on the days when that happened um and so it wasn't always a matter of people needing to show up to literally fight there are times when like a show of force can work I think a good example of that in recent times and in Texas in the DFW area obviously is a hot point for different right-wing groups including the proud boys harassing LGBT events stuff like drag queen story hours and that sort of thing and members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club who we've had on the show and and other affiliated groups have been showing up armed in an armor most recently to protect like a drag brunch um that was being counter protested you can see like photos of like

there's a fucking proud boy with a bat with fucking barbed wire wrapped around it yeah and there and in this like you don't show up with the bat wrapped in barbed wire unless you're hoping you're gonna get to bash somebody's fucking head in and that guy wound up standing off at the sideline all day long because uh a bunch of people were there with rifles I think that guy may not legally be allowed to possess firearms yes I also suspect that guy has a felony record yeah because he also had a night stick and like several other like more ninja like memed here weapons yeah yeah those say to me and look if I'm if I'm gonna be totally fair meme to your weapons no no side in this fight because for a long time in Portland there was an individual who would bring a pair of samurai

swords to everyone of those demonstrations and we're we are talking gas station grade samurai yeah I just have the uh the oil slick effect on them they must have they must have no he never drew his blades because of course then he would have had they would have had to taste blood that's the rule yeah that's a legal yeah ramification there yeah also it's impossible to take the swords out when you have them mounted on your back it's just it's literally impossible to take this sort of let's do the tactical uh back scratch it's an offensive position but no I think it is worth talking about the types of other cities where there have been a sizable amount of far-right protests this summer especially targeted at queer people um and how Portland

is one of the cities where that did not happen I mean maybe we've seen a lot of stuff in Dallas and the Umfork people have been doing a pretty good job in both denying the right ground to game but also denying them any of their like fight footage that they love to gather yeah yeah they've they've done a really good job at balancing that aspect which is very very challenging it's very challenging and it takes a lot of discipline and obviously when we think kind of tactically about what guns mean in a situation like this they're tools that have the downside of guns is that if things go wrong and everybody's strapped the potential is for things to go very fucking wrong indeed um the upside is that when you have a line of people with rifles the dudes with knives and

batons and shit are a hell of a lot less likely to want to start a fucking fight because it's the consequences are immediately obvious you could look at it as kind of like the protest equivalent of mutually assured destruction of sort of the old internet like of how the US of the Soviet Union managed nuclear tensions um but it it has been very effective in Dallas for that reason and I think it's I think the fact that protests became increasingly armed in Portland and also that there are by my count at least three cases of fascists uh being run off or injured or killed uh by protesters with firearms that is part of why they they didn't want to do that shit so much anymore I think that part's important too because like I I think there was a real danger after Rittenhouse

that right wing protesters we're gonna see this and just be like no we can just shoot these people right because you know you have a situation where suddenly it becomes very clear that the state is not going to prosecute people if like right wing protesters for shooting people but you know okay if if the if the deterrence is not the state if the deterrence is if you get into a gunfight you're gonna lose and get shot like that that I think has been extremely effective in a lot of ways yeah earlier so sort of hadn't I think it's probably worth noting as well that like where it's been effective it's been effective because it's been organized and like I don't want to use the word discipline because maybe discipline implies the authority that

doesn't exist but like there's been some kind of collective restraint in agreement on rules of engagement and stuff which yeah because I've also seen folks try to do this unilaterally that does not fucking end well like if you're the if you're the one person open carrying uh it is expecting the state where that's not legal like you're just the one person going to prison yeah and obviously open carry protests only work in states where that can be done legally yeah doing that in texas is different than doing that in california yeah that's what i'm here to tell you yeah but yeah I think it's a force multiplier right like these guys have I think especially people on the right have like absorbed so much like of this sort of like there are types of

mail as delineated by the greek alphabet bollocks and they've convinced themselves that they are alphas and they can win a fist fight no james I've seen more sigmas than alphas at protests how you see basic oh so many sigmas I've seen a few epsilons man I don't know if that's a type of mail I met a real sigma at an anti-mask protest in 2020 who brought his ar and a 60-round drum and bragged that he had 500 rounds loaded into magazines as he as he protested masks in front of the state capital and it was like the people he was protesting were specifically like about a dozen nurses who were standing around was like you got you need those 500 bullets for those unarmed nurses we're in science telling you to mask he's ready for when the shit hits the fan Robin

no med kit I'm guessing oh I don't believe I saw a med kit I used to try to make a note of it I will say the right in the last year I've noticed more med kits and pictures that I've seen so good good I guess yeah but yeah like if you are that person who's not like physically enormous or like I said these guys have convinced themselves that like they are somehow like top tier brawlers even though we've seen the patriot front videos and they're very funny like it's like a force equalizer I guess right it allows people to sort of enter that space without having to be 500 or like you know massive dudes I don't want to focus too much on specifically firearms because I think that's less important than and not that the primary lesson of Portland which is what is necessary to

stop these people from showing up is consistent shows of force and I think one thing that I just kind of always found intellectually interesting is that you know when you when you read about like military strategy right for every like guy who's actually kicking indoors getting into firefights in the field you have you know nine or ten people behind him who are responsible for logistics right that's the only way a modern military works when you don't have a logistics train set up like that things go like they did for Russia the start of the invasion of Ukraine where you have like hundreds of tanks without fuel and shit when in Portland protests an average for a large protest I would say the average was around a thousand people now it's a large protest

often they were smaller but when you would get these big hyped for a couple of weeks the proud boys are coming to town you'd easily get a thousand or two thousand people counter protesting and you know it would be probably 10 or 15 percent who were who were showing up specifically ready to kind of throw down and ready to throw down and also with some experience doing it and a much larger number who were some of them were there as medics some of them were handing out water or other beverages they were handing out food there were people who were there just to yell and chant with signs to like be you know moral support there were people there doing transport blocking roads people there doing you know intel and stuff filming things people who were there you know

doing stuff like covering up live streamers cameras with with bubble wrap sheets or we used to have a band full of people who dressed as bananas who would kind of kind of try to distract and drown out the far right there was one beautiful individual I saw a couple of times who was in black block except for they wore a kilt and they carried a pair of bagpipes and when like you would get a couple of fascists approaching a protester and like trying to get into an argument he would walk right up and he would just start playing the bagpipes so that they couldn't that's an offensive weapon yeah yeah it was beautiful um but kind of more important than the specific you do need and I don't want to like distract this you always need a core of people who are willing and ready

to get into a fucking fight when you're doing this kind of activism but the biggest thing is that people show up consistently and one of the things Portland had a number of different organizations like pop mob popular more mobilization that kind of existed to organize less radical or at least kind of not necessarily less radical sometimes people who were just like because of whatever in their life were much less interested in the actual getting into a fight thing but understood that the more people show up the safer it is and succeeded in ensuring that there was like a larger body of people at all of these events and that along with more groups like rose city antifa who kind of particularly earlier in the fights was a big street presence as well as did a lot of research

and then other kind of newer um and often kind of smaller anti fascist collectives that would organize people to straight up fight it was it was this mix of all of that that allowed it to be that whenever they showed up there was always a group confronting them and it was nearly always larger um and it got to the point at the height of 2020 you know there was this right wing protest beforehand nobody quite knew how bad it was going to be garrison you and i got there right as things were starting and it was the the anti fascists were outnumbered kind of at the beginning of the day and things got really violent very quickly within an hour or two though about somewhere around a thousand people had showed up on the anti fascist side and were organized in fighting

it was a very impressive response time yeah and i think it is it's the action it's the i mean people use the word like the term the diversity of tactics often just to kind of defend actions that are more radical um and there's the there's the other side of diversity of tactics which is pulling in all of the background support that creates this is the sustainability for more radical actions like showing up and actually being a frontliner to get into fist fights with proud boys then there's the all of the other stuff like whether that's like medics other support teams of people playing doing like queer dance parties to push fascists out of areas all those types of things not only make the environment more sustainable so people can show

up over a larger period of time because they don't get so burnt out because all they're doing is fist fighting um so i think those actions are another i think that's it's it's worth not just ignoring those and not just discrediting those because once you have that type of presence and people know that you're gonna that those are the types of environments that you're able to create when you're outnumbered by fascists and you need to call and you do need to put out a call for support if you if you have this kind of reputation that can that can help get a lot of people out very quickly and help with the that actually is like popular mobilization that right that that's what that it's what that actually means so that's how you can get the anti fascist side to outnumber

the fascist side like we saw in 2020 um despite that not being the case when it when it when it started yeah and i think that because the main thing that ended that fight was the anti fascist side just moving as a massive massive block and just pushing the fascists out of the area like there's as soon as the fascist line broke and you have like hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of people in portland streets directing the the flow of movement you can't you can't stop that the force the force is too great um and that requires there to be a large amount of people including people who are not gonna get into a fist fight with someone three times their size yeah i think another thing um that that maybe is important is that like and it's kind of at the core of anti

fascism right it's it's it's possible for people who have not just different tactics but different opinions like to create this broad-based alliance and not get cross with each other for not agreeing on everything and yeah or or at least um stop fighting with each other long enough to drive the fascists out because portland by the way another thing we should acknowledge the portland anti-fascist community it could be quite messy there are a lot of different factions and disagreements and there have been a lot of arguments up to the present day but you know as a general rule when the right showed up people mobilized and and threw down against them you know despite the fact that it was a mix of folks who were libs and folks who were radicals and folks who were you know um

something in between um it was uh and again i don't this was never a particularly clean process and it didn't have to be you know you could point out and and if we had longer we could point out all number of different like flaws and shortcomings and like things that were were done that were wrong or unfair to somebody but what was kind of more important than any of the ways in which the movement was flawed was at the end of the day that it persisted that it kept bringing people out and that it kept resisting and that the right seems to have kind of blinked before the left did here like that's what what matters more than anything about portland people felt comfortable enough to continue to come out and it felt worthwhile enough yeah but for the

anti specifically for the anti-fascist protests they were able to create those environments that people that that families were felt totally comfortable coming out to um and people felt that it actually was worthwhile like there was it was it was worth it to take an afternoon out of your day to show up and say no and yeah and and if you're able to physically display it no you can't you can't come here yeah and that was um you know obviously when we talk about like the difference between doing that against the police as opposed to the right you know the police have more in their current form have like a hundred a hundred and fifty if they've had a hundred and fifty years or so to dig in you know yes it's a harder target but yeah i think the fact that um i think the fact

that i think one of the strengths of the movement in portland was that as a general rule a lot of people who had a pretty diverse set of beliefs all felt this is a thing i can do and should do this is worthwhile and important these people need to be opposed in the streets and that's worth some time out of my very limited fucking free time to go do um and that that is kind of i think the primary lesson if you want to know what other cities should take from portland it's the importance of developing a community like that a community information network like that but also just like a community where people can all kind where people feel like yes it is actually it is worthwhile for me to show up and participate in this right like that's the hard thing is getting

across when there's um you know a book reading at a library that the proud boys are going to show up and protest it's it's getting getting the message out to people in the area and getting a couple hundred folks to show up because if you can get 200 people to show up to something like that there's never going to be that many fucking proud boys at the event it's going to be 30 or 40 of them or or less maybe a dozen and if you're a fucking library and 20 proud boys show up to like cause a problem and you've got like a dozen kids inside getting read a book or some shit or it's a brunch and yeah 20s 30 proud boys show up you have a huge problem people could get really hurt they could get fucked up heading to their cars they can get harassed it's scary if that number

of powered boys shows up and 100 150 people show up to counter them um then suddenly number one all of the people who are being threatened by the fascists get this feeling that like oh my god I'm actually supported by the community that like people are willing to come out and defend me and defend people like me and number two the proud boys get the feeling that like fuck even even here we're even in Dallas right where we we might be outnumbered you know I think because a few other cities where protests have continued and where they haven't they haven't in Portland I think we yet we've seen a decent amount of activity this year in Salem a lot of blood and there have been far right protests in Salem ever since 2017 as well yes and the other place that because because I just

because I just did a deep dive into this is there's been a lot of people from the Portland area from Vancouver planning to go up to Port Townsend Washington and it's been interesting talking with the people up there about and this is the first time they've really seen a large influx of people and it's it's people who don't it's another proud boys who are not comfortable showing up to Portland anymore but instead they're going to drive three hours to go to this small town of 10,000 people yeah and then watching people in this in this local area figure out how they're going to respond to this has been super intriguing there's been a whole bunch of people there's been affinity groups in the area setting up medic trainings for for queer people who live in the town

there's been meetings between BIPOC groups and like more like gun-based queer groups about how they can mutually support each other as the far right descends on their city and in some cases you know there was people in certain groups who at at previous protests that's happened the past month they did not feel comfortable going out to the front lines of this type of thing but they uh but they were able to work with other organizers to set up kind of uh like support kind of like support like areas and even you kind of kind of like uh they described it as like a picnic that's like a quarter mile away and it creates like a buffer zone in between people who want to go to the front lines and then this whole background of people that's supporting you and it's going to

help you out if you need anything um so all the various ways that you can you can incorporate a diversity of strategies and different type of groups into countering something that's moving to your city now um just in interesting note based on how much I've heard people talk about you know proud boys coming up from Portland and and Vancouver just ending up feeling they have to drive three hours to other cities yeah to get you know there whatever whatever they want to do yeah the ideal thing is that they walk away not even beat up as much as demoralized and feeling like it was a waste of time and money ideally they and their gear get covered in fucking paint or something um and they lost six hours of time on a fucking Saturday and if that kind of happens

repeatedly maybe they'll stop you know which is which is again the goal is for them to uh uh feel like it's not worth coming out you know like that's what yeah like people it's often said like you know make racists afraid again is a statement you heard a lot particularly after 2016 but it's a little more complicated than that it's not purely about fear it's also it's hopeless you want to make them hopeless you want to feel like make them to feel like there's no fucking point in showing up and that's the most valuable thing is a victory condition that's that's above everything else is making them feel like there is no hope for their movement i think that the most recent as as a time of recording there was there was this protest on the 15th um that was a mix

of like turfs and then a mix of far-right people there's this guy from Vancouver called the common sense conservative who runs a little like video blog thing um that he was organizing some people to go up and i don't know it's it's there was a yes like 30 people lots of them from out of state who traveled up as a part of this like turf anti trans side and there was like 300 to 400 people from the local area who showed up and were like no you're not going to do this of and ever since then there's been a lot of infighting between the turfs and the kind of more far-right people because it sucks it sucks it sucks when you have 300 people from the actual city that show up and go no and try to like physically remove you from this space yeah

and i think you can sort of see mirrors of this and like the way left is like protest work right where it's like it's it's a lot easier to hold together coalitions when you're winning and the moment you start losing the moments and things start going wrong like all of the infighting comes back and you know the entire movements will just disintegrate and this this works the same way on the right if you can if you can actually beat them consistently a few times you can start like holding on long enough for their their internal group dynamics to unravel like this this is a way to beat them yeah yep um well that's about all i had to say not a complicated topic anything else all right well well as uh yeah anyway go uh go go yell

at a fucking nazi um go go damage a fascist body armor by spraying them with paint from a great distance you know go go uh i don't know do something else uh bye what's kyleing your written house oh in an art in argentinian cultural center yay remember kyle written house remember remember that night where i spent way too much time online finding that kid's name and then he was arrested a few hours later and then he got off after murdering those people remember when that happened i do so are you saying that you're in some way responsible for what we're gonna talk about today no this is not on me because this is one of the most truly cursed things uh that i have ever seen on the internet that that maybe has ever existed so i i know people are just learning

about this now but i've known about this for a while because i kind of have a personal obsession with kyle written house for reasons that should be obvious um uh yeah i've been i've been i've i've known about this for a bit i just have never had a good time to bring it up but i guess i guess we've now found it which is it's kyle in time yeah it's uh it's time to talk about the central cultural kyle written house uh which exists uh in argentina uh as part of i think maybe we'll explain a little bit about like what the broader context of these uh central cities like what they are if people aren't familiar and then what the fuck this abomination is is all about right so these exist across uh latin america more or less uh also i've seen them in spain

the spanish-speaking world but i think that's like a reflexive thing going back to spain um and they're like community spaces they they they vary hugely but i've been to different ones they've nearly always leftist or at least progressive and they're spaces where sometimes people can go and meet right communities can meet sometimes they're like cultural events talks you can borrow books uh often like they're associated with neighborhood movements or what we might broadly call like anarchism but sometimes it's yeah explicit sometimes it's it's not it's like a community center type thing the closest thing we would have here would probably be like info shops but those kind of differ based on what what kind of anarchist info shop you're at

um but yeah they're like like community gathering places you can pick up books or whatever and um this one's a little bit uh a little bit odd yeah yeah because it is very much not leftist it claims to be argentina's first openly rightist cultural center and it's ran by this guy called jose deadman uh he is a poster right this is the guy who many people will have become aware of today i have spent most of my day watching his content on the internet uh good for you it's great i love my job i took three days off i went camping and then i just retoxified my brain with this shit immediately yeah um it's okay so was he deadman right uh the reason that we are interested in him today uh is a because of his truly cursed posting history and b because the anti-terrorist

police in argentina raided the uh central cultural car written house uh last night i've got some audio of the raid which they wish we have to we have to play this audio of the raid yeah yeah there were flashbangs there were uh there were guns there were a lot of guys in plate carriers that's wild just um that's like the first real time anything related to cow written houses faced any sort of consequence that's right yeah based argentinian cops as well again yeah we could they could only do things that are funny it's that's true and this is and raiding a kyle written house themed cultural center is funny it is very funny this is extremely funny like this is one of the funniest things i've ever seen as they go in you're gonna see some some of uh not only like artistically

offensive but really offensive in every way murals uh so they're really bad yeah they're incredibly bad the the right is not good at street art no i mean and this is this is this is the real problem that they have as a sort of like strategy of like trying to mirror sort of left wing cultural spaces is that like as as annoying as like left wing cultural spaces are like right wing cultural spaces are like the worst thing to be in you can possibly imagine because there's nobody like every single one of these people is completely insufferable and again left left left wing sort of like social movements always buffer by the fact that they have an incredible number of very talented artists these guys like the donald trump with the square head is i i don't think you would

describe it as as quality artists who are responsible for the for the murals at the kyle written house cultural center yeah he did them himself uh there are there are videos uh so do do we want to talk about what before before talking about like why this was rated do we want to first talk about like what this actually is and like why it exists like like where did this come from okay so this comes pretty much out of this uh he he seems to some of his earlier posts about the center ship of dragon ball zed oh my god oh my god yeah which i will not profess i've probably it's probably z isn't it okay okay all right uh so i've i've given myself away as a non anime understander at the outset uh i don't know why it was censored i i'm he claims

that it was he uses a phase like femi bolshe a lot uh femi bolshe which i'm guessing is a portmanteau of feminist and bolshevik uh and he is god you're probably right yeah yeah so it he's definitely an insult yes the feminists are censoring dbz and this means i need to start a fascist hangout spot that's that's the journey of this yep well more or less uh i guess it seems to really come out of the lockdown it seems to come out of him being unemployed from march of 2020 and there's a big anti-lockdown group in argentina called fuesa unidaria argentina um which he's part of and that that's if you look actually it says like kyle written house cultural center and then it has fuesa unidaria written underneath um and so that seems to have been a large part of it uh it it

opened relatively recently i was looking for an exact date but i couldn't find it but it is within the last year yes it has it has been within the year i remember seeing something about this earlier this year um just to recap some of the art maybe because it needed like arts a strong word paintings yeah no art art requires a few a few things to make it actually art i i don't think this stuff qualifies as art no uh but and some of them i genuinely was unable to discern who are they supposed to be it's really difficult like it's it's it's kind of hard to tell who trump is and it's trump like this is this is this is how this is the level of artist we are dealing with here yeah trap looks like someone out of minecraft or something like his head is entirely square the

width is equal to the height uh yeah which but they've they've got uh one of the guys i saw was this guy called malevo do people know who he is i don't know perhaps not okay this is probably one that we won't include the video of in the podcast but uh so he was uh he went to prison because he tortured leftists as a cop in argentina in the 70s right and then he escapes and in 2008 the cops come to his house to take him back and instead of going back to general live tv in front of his wife and children he shoots himself and like they just keep rolling the reporters like five feet away and they're like oh he shoved himself in the head he's down and now he's immortalized by that looks like a five-year-old's yeah in cells finger painting on the wall this is this is this

is what happens when people follow their leader hitler yeah it's true uh so there's there's other people that there's uh Javier Millay i think he's called he's like a he's the classic chud libertarian he's an argentine politician uh they of course have a confederate flag they have banners from the argentine civil war there's an imperial japanese flag yeah next to jonal trump like i'm just i'm just looking at like the front like banner thing or like the front like mural on at the end there's a horrible horrible picture of kyle rittenhouse wearing a suit that it looks so funny like it's like i it's the the the image is just amazing it's god well they have they have they okay i will say it looks like i drew it blindfolded with my left hand like it looks so bad the one

thing okay i i think they're well okay the their depiction of bolson aro like it's fine it kind of captures the grotesqueness of him but like he's doing finger guns with the brazilian flag behind him it's remember remember this started with dbz yeah rittenhouse's like giant thing has like what what is it i think the two the two holes the two black circles on his face i don't know it's an eyepatch but no it's not no there's like two or three black circles on the inside mineral of rittenhouse it looks like he's wearing an eyepatch or like some kind of night vision optic maybe also as a kyle rittenhouse expert who spent hours combing through the clothing he was wearing they have his hat completely wrong they have here like a reddish pinkish hat and that's

not the hat that he was wearing he was wearing a tan hat with a with a white back mesh um and the hat was the reason we were able to figure out who he was because it has a little tear in the front and we were able to compare that to get an exact match onto the suspects facebook profile um so the hat is completely wrong so already they've they've dropped the ball here on any semblance of accuracy by drawing the completely wrong hat for this picture it's i'm insulted as someone who spent hours figuring out uh what this guy's name is i'm insulted yet there's all kind of cursed stuff this abascal the box guy from spain like anyone who you can think of he's just like a culture warrior is depicted uh in finger painting style um by this guy uh by horsey death man uh so he he came to the

attention of the author well actually he came to the attention of the authorities before uh it will shock nobody to find that he has been sending unlisted images of his genitalia to women for a very long time so he's been sending out a lot of are you telling me the dragon ball z in cell who started a chile written house cultural center has been sending out unsolicited dick fix yeah wait i wonder if oh no what maybe okay hold on hold on i i just i think i think i just had a revelation about this guy did you just crack this case wide open hold on hold on um yeah i can't wait to hear what you've come out with i i'm on the edge of edge of my seat i am thrilled uh but i on the other hand i'm on their facebook page which is toxic as hell

yeah their facebook their facebook's pretty funny they they they have a video of a woman inside they call yes when the woman comes and they're like just to prove it's a woman people say women don't come here like we have a woman who's afraid they filmed like of like a like a five minute video of this woman sitting inside just so there was proof that there was a woman inside this building yeah they were so shocked yeah yeah yeah it's it's very clear that like they had not been expected so he's actually been to jail for gender-based online violence i think i figured out how this connects to dragon ball z might okay i i'm not a hundred percent sure about this my guess is that this guy is like a hard line um i've never actually heard this guy's

nameset out loud uh vick mignogona like truther guy mick mick vignogona is like this he was a voice actor who was on dragon ball z who like sexually harassed and assaulted like a shit ton of people um and in 2019 like the stuff came out and there was like a huge right wing backlash around him and i i really wonder if this is the fucking thing that he was mad about he was mad that he was this voice actor that got canceled because oh he was mad that his favorite voice actor got canceled for sexually assaulting people yeah well so so vick tried to like uh the voice actor guy tried to sue a bunch of people for defamation and got fucking absolutely owned in court and then all of the shit that he'd been doing for like decades like came out

so it would not surprise me if this was like part of this guy like if this is part of the thing he was fucking screaming about with dragon balls being censored by the feminist bolsheviks the feminist bolsheviks yeah this is the worst thing i've ever said this is the worst realization i've ever had in my life yeah that's pretty great i think a large part of this cultural center and kind of the stuff behind it stems out of a whole bunch of like the anti-communist groups that have existed in argentina for a long time yeah yeah yeah his like so all his videos he has this backpack with like a hammer and sickle with like the no you know the circle in line through it and he then he stages that everywhere with him and he has like um some he has like a bunch of

anti-communist graffiti that he he also you'll see him in his uh like in his facebook profile it used to say sometimes anti-social always anti-communist and it had like the yellow and black little thing um yeah and he's he's portrayed i think the tweet that first like announced it portrayed them as like uh libertarian ancaps which like they have way better muerto que rojo like better dead than red yeah that's not a fucking ancap like these people are trying to evoke the era of violence against the left in argentina in the 1970s right like that's what they're going for here yeah i think like in in case people are not aware of this argentina had a like a incredibly brutal military data show killed a shit ton of people also like went around latin

america trading other death squads they had this group called the triple a which was a basically had fascist death squad that sort of acted as a paramilitary for other wings of the state they killed a bunch of people eventually they coup the government um they're one of the people involved in operation condor they drop people out of helicopters also they yeah it was really fucking bad and and and these anti these like anti-communist they basically fascist death squads or some of them fascist literally fascist yes yeah um are like the style of slogans the propaganda that they're using for the center is in the same vein as that they're carrying that tradition in argentina and i think people are familiar with the nazis people should also probably somewhat familiar

with the uh the the whole thing with tons of tons of nazis fleeing to argentina um and argentina being very welcoming to a whole bunch of like like like like german nazi like like actual like nazi nazis like with the membership card nazis like third third rike nazis yeah so one thing that the uh that he did one thing that dead man did or he they'd posted it as we on their facebook page with um las madres de la plaza de mayo they're like these mothers who made this weekly protest i think it was weekly and they wore white handkerchiefs right and they were like where are our disappeared children and they sort of mobilized maternity in this way that made it very hard for the state to crack down on them right especially a state which is all about like

like quote unquote traditional gender roles or whatever you you want to call it um so these mothers are like held up as a great example of peaceful protest of peaceful protest against dictatorship right of forcing them to acknowledge their crimes uh they're they're looked up to by a lot of people all around the world and he and his bros went out and vandalized a monument to them and then posted about it on their facebook like pretty openly like we did this this look at us go so generally pretty much piece of shit guy uh he claims that the really he was radicalized by torturous sexual abstinence which is enforced upon him by the government with the covid 19 lockdown uh huh so he's a so he's claiming to be a va cell

not an in cell of our cell that's damn it i haven't said this in too long i mean if it's forced on by the government then it is involuntary yes yeah okay i guess i guess we okay i'm so some men choosing so yeah i'm just gonna stop right here we don't need to continue this conversation it actually doesn't matter no yeah he was uh he was unable to find intimacy with the b-way he wanted to and therefore decided to send them pictures of his penis instead which and then start a cultural center themed after kyle rittenhouse that's correct yeah i'm just i'm just trying to think of like i i did a lot of stuff on like the aftermath of the rittenhouse shooting as well we immediately saw a whole bunch of a big wave of rittenhouse stuff in the better

dead than red and anti-communist action type uh like memes and i think that this very much stems out of that tradition as well the kyle rittenhouse being this like symbol of here is a shining example of someone who actually put in the work to kill communists quote unquote communists obviously um and i think that with with the whole kind of uh like uh anti-communist death squad framing of this that matches up with a lot of the kind of the memes that were that were circulating in the weeks after the original shooting in kanosha and we can see this as like a physical manifestation of that type of memetic uh messaging like this is like a fit it's a physical version of that uh of course incorporating into just a larger kind of right wing populist politics

you know veering on to fascism um and i think it's but specifically with like the anti-communist action and better dead than red type type memes that were using rittenhouse that is a very a very clear kind of a nexus point between these two things because you're like why is someone in argentina super into kyle rittenhouse it's it's because of this uh we already have this big strain of anti-communist stuff inside argentina the kyle rittenhouse was used mimetically in this way very easy thing for the right there to use i think i don't know i think um james do you have do you have any other fun facts about this yeah i do yeah i do so there seems to be another guy who does most of this the speaking for them when they speak to the media uh he only gives his

name once is jew uh like j u um but then he also okay okay wait for it wait for it because he claims to have jewish ancestry as well and therefore they can't be anti-semitic so um very troubling maybe i'm pronouncing that wrong but you know i i can't think of another way it's only two letters so extremely troubling one thing that i did know as well it's there is a whole lot of quote-unquote gender ideology talk right and a lot of cultural Marxism talk so like here's a guy who's extremely online and is parroting these kind of Ben Shapiro American right turf talking points you can also see like one thing that's very funny is there appears to be a punk band called warpigs who are selling uh i think it's figurines like world cup figurines perhaps uh which they are selling

uh Mundial it's a word he used um they seem to be basically pretending to be him online selling these figurines pretending they're fundraising for his center but then they're obviously using the money for their anti-fascist efforts that is incredibly bad yeah shout out to them warpigs look him up yeah they yeah give him some money if you can't buy a figurine that is so funny yeah he gets so fucking mad about it he made so many videos about it um and then his parents were like he talks about them as heroes of the marxist movement and like leftists and like revolutionaries so he's 38 now uh so his parents will have been young in the 70s perhaps but um certainly certainly like around in that period in their teens and 20s and he talks about like how his parents recruited him

and how the supposed marxists like bullied him and how he uh he says at one point he has Tourette's uh and they forced him to do treatments which he claims curtailed his opportunities to meet women but he only mentions this once and he sort of goes off on these weird diversions yeah it's a lot of very basic kind of online incel type stuff i want to talk a little bit about the sort of trans angle on this too because i think so one of the things i think like is not very well known that at some point i will do a full episode on when i find when i'm able to like get enough stuff together and find people who are like really qualified to talk about it but argentina has had one of the world's most powerful trans movements for a long time and i mean they have stuff there that

like like there there's there is a law that passed um i think last year that were that like that they have like a hiring quota so for public service jobs there's a one percent hiring quota of people who have to be trans like really yeah they like they they have stuff there like they have done stuff there that is like like not even like on the agenda for like any other like trans movement i've ever seen so yeah they're they're very strong they're very well organized and the government has sort of like has done a like a bunch of like genuinely very good like protrans stuff like under the pressure of this movement and i think that i think like in that context i think this is his this fact that he's obsessed with like gender critical shit makes a lot of sense because

that's you know that's like one of the sort of right wing things in argentina is opposing this ship but like it doesn't i don't know they're kind of losing that paddle in so far as like yeah you know people people have done a really really good job and fought really really desperate and sort of horrible battles for decades but yeah they're they're they're sort of bearing fruit in really cool ways respect nice good job and so what else is bearing fruit is his posting because he has been raided by i i would urge you to watch this video i'll tweet it so people can find it there as well but a a metric shit ton of on police and and the the reason they're raiding him is because he's made like a public threat basically he made a said it's about 11 a half minute video notably he says

are total to support to the brazilian hero who tried to create justice for all argentinians and goes on to talk about this this is with reference to the assassination attempt that we saw what last week yes so so last week this this fascist tried to assassinate the vice president of argentina and we're gonna get more into this in our upcoming week of content titled assassination week assassination week assassination week it's upcoming we're gonna be a whole week of whole week of episodes about assassinations but in brief this this this happened and then the people at the cultural center made this livestream celebrating the attack and calling the perpetrator argentina's brazilian hero yes it really was just he also like tells people to rise up and stuff like there's

some very clear calls to action in there in the raid they found a mortar shell and one 84 millimeter mortar shell a drone and they've confiscated a bunch of hard drive which i i do not envy the person who has to go through his phones and hard drives a lot of dick pics and they're gonna see some balls they're gonna see some pain uh but hopefully that person can get some therapy and and this isn't that the first like this isn't the first time that the state has tried to come after them they actually uh there were there were discussions about like denying the crimes committed under the dictatorship right and how he can be prosecuted for that because that that was the thing that they were very clearly doing so it seemed like he'd kind of been in the crosshairs

of progressive legislators in argentina for a while and then he went and made this batshit crazy video where he makes calls to violence he says the left can't ask for non-violence he says the left doesn't respect democracy uh and uh he calls vice president a rat and a murderer and says that it's a just a shame that she wasn't blown up and it's only because the weapon malfunctioned that this hero didn't get to do justice for all urgent times i should have been the shenzhouabe guy like i'm sorry yeah look weird like he's just he's just built different yeah he's he's built different because he got sabotaged by all of his esoteric naziism which we will get more into in the upcoming assassination week yep we just got to record the theme music and then we'll be there

the theme music yes cut together footage of all of the great assassination yep this is going to be half an hour constant assassination collage yeah these guys are extremely cursed there's more cursed stuff that they've done that like we probably shouldn't go into i don't think because like i think you could just understand this is a lonely incell guy who's been on the internet too much become more and more radicalized and like surrounded himself with people who agree and it's been pretty funny to watch people prank him for a while like scrolling down their facebook page it's very funny to see people consistently like he doesn't seem to be an intellectual giant but it's also worrying and obviously he's advocating for violence against people who are already marginalized whenever

someone starts taking things that are online out into the physical world like making basically a monument like a physical place um it's always concerning it's always it's always one of the big big red flags yeah and and i think like specifically the fact that he had both a mortar shell and a drone is incredibly alarming oh you don't say yeah i just i just want to say i just want to put that on the record for a second yeah if he'd posted a little bit less he could have made it into a assassination week but here we are i'm a cucked by your own poster a tale a tale is all this time yeah if he'd stuck to tradition and not posted them they did also just want to tell secondhand clothes at the center i don't know why i don't know what they were going for there but

they did all right i'm sure this is so coffee really yep well if you're in argentina and you want some secondhand clothes and coffee i can tell you where not to go not don't go to this place because there's odds are you're gonna get raided by police when you're there yeah i don't think there's much of this place left now uh i think they the looks like the door has not recovered from their entry judging by the fact that they've taped a bin bag over it in the photos here yeah hopefully someone can squat this place maybe the war pigs can get it and just toast a collection of figurines there that would be based that'd be so sick yep they need money just let us know we'll do a fundraiser so i hope this is a good lesson in knowing when posting goes too far

yeah try try to keep your cringe online if you're gonna do it i mean because you don't want to be this guy no you certainly do not want to be this guy complaining about trekking ball z and posting that results in the police rating your cow written how steamed hang out spot yeah just yeah truly one of the weirdest pivots from online to the streets that i've ever seen uh this dude probably should have been jail a long time ago uh they're probably worth noting that like gender-based violence is like the common denominator for people who do other terrible shit and this is not not an example of that yeah who who could have thought that the raging incel misogynist would also have bad politics yeah so keep doing uh fami bolshe shit you have

our full support indeed well that is it for us today tune in next week uh i think next week right some next week or maybe the week after for our upcoming week of episodes titled assassination week yeah it's going to be great of course not not endorsing any political violence or assassinations of any kind ah 9 11 is in a couple of days i'm robert evans this is it could happen here a podcast about 9 11 um well as as garrison said in the intro that we're not using it's about things falling apart and boy did that happen on 9 11 two things that fell apart yeah um yeah so this was originally going to be a slightly cruder episode than it wound up being but i'm i'm just gonna i'm just

gonna delve into the script and uh chris garrison you guys just buckle in because the reason i have you both as guests on this is that you are both too young to remember nine that's not true i remember nine i remember that's a lie i remember were you like four uh yeah i was four but i i remember my mom like so she was trying to explain the pentagon right and so she has like a coaster on the ground and she's making an airplane with her hand is this going into anyway so as i said neither of you properly remember 9 11 i i don't remember 9 11 i i was at the age where every like moment of it is burnt into my into my brain as is the reaction so i wanted you both on this because we're gonna talk about how 9 11 kind of became a a cult um and yes how to maybe how to maybe deal

with that and then we'll be chatting about glenn becks 9 12 project which is something i'm sure neither of you are very familiar with now in its sixth season the popular cartoon south park ran an episode in which jared fogle who was at that point just a subway spokesman and not a convicted child molester came to town and announced the start of a new program to give everyone aids now he was talking about dietitians and personal trainers to help people lose weight but everybody heard aids the disease which led to wacky hijinks that's the episode it ends when everyone realizes they've misunderstood fogle and they all laugh this leads them to realize that aids is finally funny because things that are tragic become funny exactly 22.3 years after they occur that's the

joke in the episode and went on to become a minor little internet joke that like you know once you hit that 22 year point you can laugh about something tragic we are now at like 21 years in change since september 11th 2001 and i think if we're all honest most of us can admit that we've laughed at a lot of 9 11 jokes we're recording this the day the queen died and people are like photoshopping her face to be the twin towers and it's so good it's quite a time on the old internet now i think the first i think the hardest at least that i ever laughed at a 9 11 joke i'm sure it's not the first time was this picture of trump tower that was posted to twitter like right after he got inaugurated with the text george bush do you thing um it's still an excellent 9 11 joke

now the first person with any kind of platform to make a 9 11 joke was the recently deceased comedian gilbert got freed on september 29th 2001 he took part in a roast of hugh hefner at the new york fryer's club and i'm gonna play you the audio of that right now i have to catch a flight to california i can't get a direct flight they said they have to stop at the empire state building first very tame very tame joke extremely tame joke honestly not a great joke um but it went on to it was it's probably like what maybe the most famous and like kind of stand-up history like bombs um got freed and said himself said that he lost the audience more than anyone else ever has i think it caused some career problems for him um he later said that this is only like a few weeks

after this was days after so this is at the fryer's club roast of hugh hefner on september 29th is this is this word too soon is from um well yeah this i mean i don't i don't know that it originated there but this was the response to him um and i think it it's the first time i ever recall hearing someone say that godfreet said that like the reason he decided to tell a joke this close to 9 11 was that he was personally offended by the fact that anything could be too soon to make a joke about um one of things is interesting about this a little side thing is that like after bombing and getting shouted at by the audience god freed like decided to get them back by telling a particularly long and foul version of the aristocrats which is a meta joke about jokes

primarily anyway um it's basically just being as foul mouthed as you can possibly be to an audience and that that audio has been lost to time apparently but boy uh you can watch a fun documentary about the aristocrats uh if you want to learn more about that now i i think the first good actual comedy bit about 9 11 came out a little bit after this this was about two weeks after the day and a couple of months later at like the three month point south park season five aired uh and they ran an episode about 9 11 um it has been criticized rightly so because there's some kind of racist bits of humor in there um yeah that's not surprising that's not surprising um that said it's also kind of a valuable snapshot of history for one thing

the a huge part of the episode is just kind of like the afghan child counterparts to the main characters in the show walking around their town as everyone is murdered by us airstrikes um so it's it is not like the it stands kind of an opposition to sort of the kind of like bootlicking response as you got for for some context the show the west wing which is the favorite show of everybody who runs anything in politics right now ran an emergency 9 11 episode like a couple of weeks after the attack which was the kind of turnaround you didn't do in tv at that point in time so you put in a ton of effort to have this special 9 11 episode of the west wing um that number one in the alternate west wing universe there's no 9 11 there's like some vague like

there's basically basically the episode focuses on like a bunch of kids on a tour getting stuck in the white house because it locks down because some vague terrorist attack thing happens in a fake country they made up so when the west wing needed to talk about muslims um and kind of like the breakout piece of this well there's two breakouts one of them is a very racist retelling of the story of isek and ishmael that explains like why muslims are always so angry all the time um and then the white house press lady cj craig goes on a rant about how awesome the intelligence uh apparatuses and how like what good people uh cia agents are and how like the best thing to do for politics sometimes is to have a a guy dressed as a waiter murder somebody with a silenced pistol

like it was out of its mind unhinged that's the fucking like so the fact that south park does an episode that's like yeah we're gonna murder a bunch of people in afghanistan for no reason is like not a not a bad response not a bad thing to recognize about that day um the other things that are like pretty good uh or pretty i think meaningful sort of bits in that episode it opens with all of the kids at the bus stop wearing gas masks as they stand in line for the bus there's a piece in that episode that kind of sticks with me today still um that i'm gonna play for you guys remember when life used to be simple and cool not really i don't know i always found that bit fun so when the school bus arrives there's a cop on it searching bags and confiscating

items that might be used as weapons the school classroom doors are reinforced with a massive military grade lock uh which resonated more in a time when like school shootings weren't a constant thing um and it it kind of hit me because you know when this episode came out and i watched it when it came out i was at middle school uh clark middle school in plano texas and on 9 11 and 9 12 the attacks were like the only topic of discussion uh that anyone had and i have this vivid memory of a couple of girls in my us history class weeping because they were scared that al qaeda was coming for our schools next um like this was a a very real worry for kids that i grew up with a school in what like midland texas or something no it was india it's a big school but like i don't i'm

certain that fucking osama bin laden had never heard the name plano texas let alone you have to do you have the thing with like anytime a plane was like going down people would point at it and be like oh my god yeah um no that was definitely a meme and there was you know one of the most famous ones was uh this this uh video called triumph dot avi that started to spread on the something awful forums that was just footage of the september 11th attacks set to yakity sacks um um and again these were all kind of the the the comedy that you know that south park put out here and that you saw and stuff like the triumph video were reactions to how fucking seriously everybody else took 9 11 right like i have to i have to point out that like watching an episode

like this or watching something like triumph felt like legitimately transgressive in the days and weeks after 9 11 because it was kind of a as we'll talk about had turned into kind of like a secular cult um and i think people who were just a few years old then uh or born after 9 11 missed this part of 9 11 um i think you inherited the wars and the intrusions on civil liberties and the creeping fascism but not the derangement by terror that had preceded it like everybody's permanently deranged from 9 11 but i you didn't really get to know people before that kind of happened and drove a lot of them mad as a kid it was like a strange and exciting and scary moment but i i think my parents and i think the people who are kind of in their age range um completely

lost their minds and oddly that that south park episode has kind of the best depiction of that too there's a scene in which stan who's one of the main characters they're all like middle school kids walks into his house and sees his mom like lying on the couch staring blankly ahead um and just like weeping she's surrounded by tissues she's been crying for days um and as her husband says she's just been watching cnn for like the last eight weeks straight and the the image of her just kind of like lying on the couch staring at the tv is i i can remember every adult that i knew as a kid doing that and it really did go on for days like people moved around as if they were like in kind of a shocked stupor i'm sure there's places where this wasn't the case um but for my family who were

very very conservative people and i think for people particularly who live closer to the attacks like it was just this period of um like post-traumatic stress for the entire country i i think a good amount of research backs up the fact that this it had this kind of and i think it is hard to understand if you weren't there impact on people i found a pure research study that i'm going to quote from now uh our first survey following the attacks went into the field just days after 9-11 from september 13th to 17th 2001 a sizable majority of adults said they felt depressed nearly half said they had difficulty concentrating and a third said they had trouble sleeping it was an era in which television was still the public's dominant news source 90 percent said

they got most of their news about the attacks from television compared with just five percent who got their news online and the televised images of death and destruction had a powerful impact around nine and ten americans agreed with the statement i feel sad when watching tv coverage of the terrorist attacks a sizable majority 77 found it frightening to watch but most did so anyway fear was widespread not just in the days immediately after the attacks but throughout the fall of 2001 most americans said they were very 28 percent or somewhat 45 percent worried about another attack when asked a year later to describe how their lives changed in a major way about half the adults said they felt more afraid more careful more distrustful or more vulnerable as a result

of the attacks and i think you can't separate this because the main people we're talking about here when we're talking about the response to this when we're talking about the people who got to make decisions it's boomers right which is not all that different from how it is today but even it was even more so boomers then and you know my parents and the people of their generation are all children of the cold war they both grew up my parents on different military bases and i can remember you know my dad told me stories about doing like duck and cover drills as a kid like literally hiding under a desk to get ready for an atomic bomb his family like went out into the countryside during the cuban missile crisis to hide because they were afraid all the cities were

going to get nuked and this is not these are not uncommon experiences so you have to think like all of the all of the adults were either very close to this period or had spent most of their formative years like constantly scared of being murdered by a nuclear weapon there have been clinical like studies and stuff that have shown that that fear of nuclear annihilation is a major factor in anxiety like it's not ever been properly i think explained how much that fucked up that generation but what you had is all these people who had spent the first couple of decades of their lives living with the sort of damocles over their heads and then the war ends right the cold war ends the ussr falls apart and suddenly people aren't talking about nuclear

warfare for the first time in anybody's memory um and i think for most of that generation they felt safe for the first time there was this kind of celebration that was pretty bipartisan that capitalism and democracy had triumphed and that like this kind of horror that had stalked through their childhood had been defeated you know when people like uh francis fukuyama talked about the end of history what fukuyama meant was that liberal democracy was kind of in his eyes the end of the evolutionary road for states which is a flawed idea but the interpretation that i think people like my parents had was that we didn't need to worry anymore right like that that's the end of history right our way of life had won and we like we we didn't need to worry

and in 911 happens and suddenly this decade or so of relief from that all ends in a minute and all of that fear that they lived with their whole lives came roaring back with abandon 911 was like the emotional equivalent of splitting an atom and and the energy that was released by that is going to be used for something right i i want to kind of touch on that a little bit because i mean i obviously don't remember the 90s because i wasn't there and it is such a fascinating idea to me of like this time where neoliberalism kind of reached their paradise like we like we did it we can we we we did the thing we found the spot and how that you know talk about like the edge of chaos theory how it was built up to this super high point and then all because it because it got so

high it then immediately crumbled yeah and shot down and there's this thing that one of my favorite writers grant morrison talks about how 911 kind of became this moment where the world of imagination and the world of like the lowest material visceral reality crashed into each other um and he says a quote the the collapse expressed itself in the material world when the twin towers of the world trade center were reduced to dust by determined extremists when cement occurred reality and fiction began their slow collapse into one another after the fall of the towers quote unquote reality became more fictional and quote unquote fiction became more realistic think plausible realistic superhero movies like the dark knight films fake news deep fakes ar vr and the rise of magical

thinking um and i would extrapolate that out to like stuff like you know qanon um and you know the how just these images that we thought were only viewable in film and television um became descended down onto the onto the dirtiest most visceral material plane um and then things that were fake like this idea like the perfect 90s it's gonna be this is gonna continue like this river that fiction uh it's felt almost more real like it like that that that should have been what's real and it's not anymore yeah it it feels like there's an alternate and i think that's part of why liberals are still so god damn in love with the west wing and by the way i talked about liberals my parents who loved ronald reagan more than life itself watched every episode of that show they

thought it was wonderful and the republicans are always portrayed very sympathetically on the west wing right it's very much this noble opposition sort of idea um and uh the the that i i think there's something in that that there's this almost sense that we've been locked out of the right reality and that's yeah that's what you know that's what liberals are constantly harkening back to with with 9 11 but it's also or with a with stuff like the west wing but it's also like what conservatives i think for a while they were looking for that i think that's what george w bush promised and failed to deliver um it's what they were hoping to get with romney and when that didn't happen i think part of what's going on with trump is this desire part of the desire to burn it all

down is the inability to get back to this imagined prelapse area because if you're talking about the collapse of reality and fiction going into each other that's what dot on trump represents he is this so fictional person that in order to meet this new world where reality and fiction the same thing you need somebody that under that that represents that yeah so they turn to him because he he was meeting the way they saw the world was going the reality and fiction are going into each other so you're gonna get the reality television president yeah who who who kind of embodies that essence on a very very visceral level and i i think that's part of why when you have 9 11 happened you have all of this energy released both parties kind of come together in this idea

that the united states should strike back uh and that we were at war it's rightly pointed out by people that particularly the protests against the iraq war were massive and they were they were historically large but president bush was also the most popular president of our lifetime briefly and it's because people were in line behind this idea that we need to hit someone well and and i think something that's important about this that's completely forgotten is that the invasion of afghanistan there was like no protests there were there were a few but like the left imploded like here's i'm gonna read a quote from doug henwood this is an attack on us there is a near certainty that something will be done soon clearly considerable use of force will have to be used to capture

these motherfuckers um it like adolf reid is like talking about how like there's gonna have to be military action like a bunch of the people from like who like the old school like anti-vietnam war protesters like from sds are like well we don't oppose all wars we just oppose bad wars so like here we should go evade i've got a set like everyone lost their minds well and i want to what i really the core of what i talk about today is why that happened because i i think there's on particularly kind of some of the more superficial left-wing analysis of this this idea that like george bush did what he did in response because he's like this christian holy warrior um and there's a couple of reasons people do this including the fact that he once referred to the invasion of

iraq as a crusade but as a general rule what bush did was not because of his christianity and had nothing to do with any kind of conflict with islam in particular what it was was the reaction of a group of a kind of fundamentalists fundamentalists of belief in the american state reacting to an attack on the sanctity of that kind of idea um and this is this is you know why all these liberals were on board at least with you know the strike on afghanistan or attacking afghanistan christopher hitchens probably no one embodies like what happened to a lot of the left better than hitchens hitchens was a well-known liberal journalist he wrote an excoriating book about henry kissinger right he's one of these people who is criticizing the empire who is attacking it for its excesses

for builds his career on that and then 9 11 happens and the first big thing he does is he puts out a massive column titled bush's secularist triumph in which he argues that the war on terror is not a crusade but a battle to keep religion and public power separate and i want to quote now from a study published in the journal of political theology by william cavanaugh of depole university it's titled the war on terror secular or sacred there may be some christians who think that we are fighting for jesus but the battle is being won in the name of secularism george bush may subjectively be a christian but he and the us armed forces have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the american agnostic community combined and doubled while the left

makes apologies for religious terrorists the right supports their obliteration to protect our secular state secularism is not just a smug attitude it is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of clergy on the state we are now in the middle of another such war and revolution and the liberals have gone a wall that's cavanaugh's summary of uh uh hitchens's article but like what's going on there is really interesting because hitchens is proceeding as an a priori assumption that the attack on the twin towers is an attempt by a theocracy to take over and destroy a secular state rather than an attempt to damage economically a military enemy um and

goad it into a war that would weaken it socially militarily and economically which is exactly what had actually happened the liberals that hitchens attacks as former allies are basically saying don't take the bait right don't do the thing that he wants you to do because it will it will lead to the results he wants to achieve all hitchens can see is that like muslim extremists are scary and they want to hurt him as an atheist religion is doing things that hurt me so i must destroy the people who believe in this thing yeah and it's interesting because everybody all of the people who are kind of on the side of this civic religion which is which is why they're responding because their their civic religion has been attacked and this strike on the towers they all

find kind of different ways to justify it hitchens is a prominent atheist so it makes sense that he kind of sees it as a fight against theocracy if you go through a lot of footage of news anchors in the immediate wake of the attack garrison you and i were doing this a couple of nights ago there were numerous references that the twin towers which were a symbol of capitalism and that's why they represent capitalist and american supremacy over capital it's like it's like american supremacy of the economic system yeah and and like a reified symbol of capitalism almost like it's like it's like an idol to like to the god of capital yeah there's a there's a number of different things you can find making this point but in a column that published on 912 the washington

post editorial board wrote for three decades the twin towers of new york's world trade center stood as the symbol of american economic might as powerful an icon for capitalism as the statue of liberty is for freedom exactly exactly i that's yeah yeah it's amazing no people were just saying this shit the day after the other thing that's funny about it is like no one thought this before like these are cheap fucking buildings like the world trade yeah there's a license like it's literally you it's just a like license is a name that's licensed out it's like that yeah but that doesn't because again what what you but by saying this when they're saying like for three decades this was the symbol of american economic might people and i keep going back to my parents but i

think they represent a lot of americans saw the defeat of the soviet union as being achieved by the u.s economy by capital it right and and that's the thing that ended history that's the thing that got them to their neoliberal paradise it's the thing that saved them from the nukes and so by taking these towers down bin laden basically killed superman right that's how they're reacting to it yeah um george bush and christopher hitchens and the washington post editorial board they all saw their support for war not is as not based in religion all of them would have denied this right but cavanaugh argues that they were motivated primarily by what he calls the civil religion of the united states which is why i've been using that term i'm gonna quote from his paper again

the united states has its own civil religion which though relying on the support of christians and undoubtedly borrowing much from christian imagery transcends mere sectarian religion to unite all americans on a higher ground indeed this is what makes secularism compatible with civil religion what robert bella calls traditional religion is privatized while civic rituals revolve around a generic god who underwrites america's identity and purpose in the world in this sense andrew sullivan is right this is a religious war the war of which 911 was a significant marker is not extremist and expansionist religion against a peace loving and neutral secularist order it is rather the violent confrontation of islamist terrorism with the civil religion of american

expansionism that is the evangelical insistence that liberal social order is the only viable kind of social order it is what tarik ali has called the clash of fundamentalisms and i think that's important because i think one area in which the left really got things wrong in sort of their interpretation of what happens in this period is seeing it as a clash between kind of christian fundamentalists as embodied by george bush and islamic fundamentalists no no no the people who were leading this country including bush but including most of liberals were america fundamentalists they were fundamentalists in the idea of the secular american state and so were my parents as conservative as they were my family was never about you know christianity needing to be spread

over there it was about this this belief in america as something holy and that something holy and sacred had been struck on september 11th i will say i i i i think i i don't know it's easy for me to see why people think about this on the left sort of as this christian holy word because like i grew up with a lot of people who like in the wake of this who like really were full on into the crusade thing like i had classmates who would talk about how they were going to join the military to kill all muslims like i mean like i think this is a real thing sure and that's what i mean that's sort of analytic wrong that's what that's what cavanaugh saying and that it's kind of scaffolded on christianity but like that's fun fundamentally like the fact that there are some people who

are going in there being like this is finally religious crusade doesn't mean that's like what the leadership of the country is doing and as i have to do i think that's part of why we get trump and the current christian extremist surge is that uh it's a reaction to how kind of the neocons go with this because for the neocons this isn't really about this isn't about christianity is something you use in this fight but like that's not what you're fighting for here um and i think there's there's a good amount of evidence for the fact that americans identified something as being like holy about the twin towers particularly after the attack um from cavanaugh's study in public theology quote an august 2010 poll found that 56 of americans

regard ground zero as sacred ground and a slightly larger majority opposes construction of a mosque nearby for this region a sacred aura surrounds the identity of the nation that was attacked on that day and the attacks concentrated that sacredness in a particular location in time it is not necessary to go back to the more famously evangelical george w bush to make the link between piety and 911 in his speech at ground zero last september 11th 2010 barack obama talked about gathering at this sacred hour on hallowed ground and talked about how those who were not only killed but sacrificed in the attacks god was invoked of course but it was a generic god who belonged to no particular faith because as obama made clear the victims themselves were of

many faiths yeah this is i mean one of the things that i think is interesting if you're actually trying to analyze this and you want to see kind of the degree to which why i think it's important to look at how people treated the space itself as sacred is how actual religion responded in the wake of 911 and how americans responded to religion in the wake of 911 um because you know it says there about 56 of the country see this is like hallowed ground in some way um and i i think there's evidence that people kind of rose up to defend this civic religion more than they actually did their real faiths um and this is because primarily the reaction on a on a population basis to september 11th is that religiosity in the united states continued to decline

right there's a public idea that it led to this like surge of people coming back to the church and getting religious again but there's really no demographic evidence to back that up and i want to quote from an article i found in christianity today for a few weeks after 911 people packed the pews but it soon became apparent there was not a great awakening or a profound change in america's religious practices as frank him newport gallup poll editor-in-chief told the new york times in november of 2001 barna group confirmed that conclusion in 2006 it tracked 19 dimensions of spirituality and beliefs and found none of those 19 indicators were statistically different from pre-attack measures in other words the 911 attacks didn't put american christians on a

trajectory towards more orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer church attendance or scripture reading in so far as we can measure matters of faith the decline of american religiosity continued apace spiritually speaking said barna's david kineman it's as if nothing significant ever happened and that's something evangelicals have had to grapple with ever since the u.s did not turn back to god demographically and while hateful attacks against muslims surged you have to acknowledge that a lot of those were from people who were more or less secular in the traditional sense and this is part of why so many of the online atheists set uh cited with the alt right in 2015 and 2016 right it's because there are a lot of those people um while they would have described

themselves as an opposition to christianity as well were very much a part of the same civic religion as everybody else and we're willing to engage in racist attacks against members of religion as a result of that you know when when you look at the fact that a majority of americans saw ground zero as sacred and opposed building a mosque because of that a decent chunk of those people are not christians who oppose the building of a mosque right they're a religious or they're atheist and they oppose the building of a mosque because they still see islam as an enemy yeah it's uh it's interesting but americans were not moved to embrace religion by the attacks um and the deterioration of our sense of security that followed and i think that evangelicals have never been able to actually

accept this a 2013 barna group survey found that most americans but particularly born again christians believe 9 11 quote made people turn back to god and this again has led to kind of a fetishization of the period right after 9 11 um the writer of that christianity today article i cited earlier theorizes quote my first suggestion is what we thought was hope wasn't lost at all it was less christian trust and character and redemption of god than american optimism coated with not quite biblical bromides that when there's bad good will follow americans love to believe that everything happens for a reason and that after a short period of time sorrow will always turn into joy and suffering into sanctifications uh we quote romans 8 28 we know that in all things god

works for the good of those who love him and incorrectly interpret it to mean that everything that happens to us will also somehow work out okay and i think that they're on to something here and this really this goes back to what kavanaugh was saying about how this civil religion is kind of grafted on over the bones of christianity right um and it's it's there's so much part of what's interesting to me here is that well i think it's it's worthwhile that he quotes romans 8 28 i have to think that this this belief that americans have that everything happens for a reason is at least as undergirded by like disney as it is with scripture it's undergirded by the way we tell stories by the way fiction works in our society which is a very unique to us right every culture

does not tell stories the same way well and i think like if you want to trace that out too like i think that's part of the reason why people are so unbelievably any conspiracy theories here yeah if everything needs to have a reason that it's part of an overarching grand narrative that ties everything together yeah and it obviously again i don't want to like underplay and perhaps we should do an episode of maybe behind the bastards on the reaction of the religious right to 9 11 which was nuts and it was vicious and horrific i'm not i'm not trying to deny that but i think one of the things that happens in this period is they grow increasingly infuriated that that is not shared by a majority of the country that it doesn't bring a religious revival right that that

doesn't follow september 11th um now it is kind of there's a couple of things that are interesting here um one of them is that uh the apocalyptic christian believers they do have kind of this this in with the bush administration we know that at one point a bunch of apocalyptic like christian representatives like people who are kind of heading churches and stuff that believe there's this belief among certain christians that you need to rebuild the temple in jerusalem and bring about the end of days and all this stuff there's a bunch of shit that has to happen in palestine in order for the apocalypse to come and they're trying to get us presidents to make it happen this is why trump made some of the calls that he made was to deliberately like give those

people a win um which is why some of the shit that happened in jerusalem during the trump administration um was able to happen all of that stuff is stuff that they went to george bush they did a two hour meeting with him and elliott abrams and a bunch of his staff uh were these representatives of kind of like the pentecostal movement tried to get him to carry out this wishlist policy of acts around israel and iraq to help them bring about the rapture and the bush administration didn't really do any of that they have to take the meeting right they bring these guys in they don't give them what they want it's not until trump that a lot of these guys get what they want and what you what happens here because you've got this this death cult christian

group who see this as a crusade and who want to war with islam and they're constantly frustrated by the fact that even though he's supposed to be their guy bush doesn't go all the way for them right and this is part of why his military adventurism gets criticized effectively by guys like trump who win the evangelical right because the evangelicals say like well if we're not going to have a holy war then like what was this stuff we just wasted a bunch of money and a bunch of treasure and a bunch of young men for nothing over there um and that's part of like what trump wins on now these two factions these neocons the guys who wind up by the way the guys who are sort of on the civic religion side of the response to 9 11 are all the people who wind up running the lincoln

project right when you're talking about the republicans on that side of thing yeah and then the part the folks who break off the evangelicals the people who want a holy war that's who winds up making the core of trump's support yeah um and yeah and that's uh i think mostly where i'm going to leave us for today on 9 12 next week we'll have another special episode about glinbeck's 9 12 project that will be kind of the finishing of this but i want to end because we're talking about why i did this and why i started by talking about jokes about 9 11 is because i think understanding understanding the attack on the towers as like an attack on what would have effectively become a god to a lot of americans even if they didn't realize it right the sanctity of this kind of neoliberal

capitalist order and it's it's it's um it's historic inevitability right the fact that that's what was going on that that that was so dear to people that justified so much violence 20 years of of war of bombings millions of deaths is part of why i think there's a value in joking about 9 11 which is not to say that what happened wasn't terrible three three thousand and change innocent people were murdered um in a in a truly horrific way if you actually sit down and watch the footage the people falling out of the buildings it's a nightmare if you think about stuff like flight 93 it's it's really stirring you have these people who one moment they're heading to like see their families or go on a work trip or something you're on a fucking plane

experience i'm sure everybody has where you're just like trying to get from a to b and in the space of like a few minutes they have to all decide they're going to charge a bunch of terrorists fight in hand to hand combat and then pilot a plane into the ground in order to stop it from killing other people that's that's powerful stuff um what what i think is important is desacralizing it because there's nothing sacred about mass murder um and there's nothing there's we shouldn't see what happened there is anything but what it is which is a tragic um a tragic act of violence against innocent people but taking it as like an attack on our soul as an attack on like our our collective god um when you start to do that again it kind of justifies any sort of

violence like there's nothing there's nothing that's off the table and in in the first few years after 9 11 there was nothing off the table um and we're we're never getting back to the world that we had before which is ultimately like what all that violence was about right all of everything terrible that was done in the wake of 9 11 was justified even if people didn't say it in the desire to get back to where we were in the 90s right in their heads and their sense of security i'm not talking about anything as like course is economic projections i'm talking about in the sense of like optimism and and basic security and i think one of the people who got this best in the immediate wake of the attack uh was hunter s thompson who you know was still alive

at that point for a couple of years and he wrote a column i think it was for espn.com because that's who he was writing for in those days he his career was well past its peak um but he wrote probably the best thing anyone wrote a week after 9 11 and i'm going to read you the end of that now we are at war now according to president bush and i take him at his word he also says this war might last for a very long time generals and military scholars that will tell you that eight or ten years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history which is no doubt true but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a lifetime to people who are in their 20s today the poor bastards of what will forever be known as

generation z are doomed to be the first generation of americans who will grow up with the lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed this is extremely heavy news and it will take a while for it to sink in the 22 babies born in new york city while the world trade center burned will never know what they missed the last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids compared to what's coming now the party's over folks yeah that is kind of the feeling yeah growing up in the early 2000s and not not knowing not never actually experiencing the 90s and yeah in some ways you know 9 11 feels very similar to me as something like pearl harbor like they're both things that happened i guess before i was around and it's just they created the world

that i already existed in like it never it never like it you know it never changed the world i was in it just it just became the world that i was in yeah for me 9 11 is my first memory like that is the first thing i remember and i yeah we got exactly the world that you would expect yeah from from your first memory being 9 11 yeah it's um i mean again for me i think the thing i identify most is that little clip i played from south park where one of the kids is like do you remember when everything didn't suck it's like not really um so yeah uh go out um tell a tasteful joke about 9 11 and try not to worship the state it doesn't end well hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production

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