Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 52

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

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

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

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Assassination Week, keep you bang bang, time-expulsive device, JFK, etc. Hello, welcome to Assassination Week. I hope you liked that intro from our good friend who we commissioned to do that intro from. So big props to them for giving us like 10 seconds of their time to record that intro.

Wow, it's been so long since we've been planning to do this. Yep, but here we are talking about killing people. It's great because when we first thought of Assassination Week, we're like, how are we going to fill five episodes? And then there's like so many more assassinations happening. There were two the next day. Yeah, we've decided to stop imagining things into the ether. Yeah, and so maybe Assassination Month is coming.

Who knows? Hey, look, here's the thing. If people keep getting assassinated, we will do more assassination episodes. That is the way it works. Yep, that is sadly part of our job. So we've already done one, I guess we did Shinzo Abe a little bit, but we're coming back to him. Yeah, we're going to do Shinzo Abe 2. We have a lot more context information about the assassination now.

But that is later this week. So we have five episodes all about assassinations, most of which have happened or tried to happen this year. Most of these are going to be pretty topical. Yeah, mine is not because I'm the first person I am. Well, I mean, look, we got to start with an historical assassination. We can't completely have it be just randomly jumping back and forth between times. There has to be some kind of logic. Yeah, well, assassination is the logic.

Today we're talking about Eta, Basque nationalist leftist group. And more specifically, I guess they're Operation Ogro, the killing of Luis Carrero Blanco in Spain in 1973. It's obviously not very current. It's often pointed to as a very influential assassination, one that made a difference and made a change. Often it's called the only thing that Eta ever did to advance the cause of Spanish democracy. I'm sorry if you think that they're like based leftist terrorists. This is not generally as an organization. We don't like people who murder journalists.

That's one of our stances. And so there's going to be a little bit of context around this that we need to give first. So maybe if we kick off with who they are, and then we can talk about that assassination in particular. How familiar are folks do we think with Eta? What do people know about them in the US? Not at all. Okay, I think they're famous for this assassination and for having literally the worst outfits I've ever seen in my entire life. That's bold.

The combination of the face mask and the beret is one of the most unfortunate things I've ever seen. It is hideous. You just wear the mask. It's cooler. It's bad shit. It's awful. Ah, truly dog shit. Okay, Chris, come in with the fashion police early on.

I say wear what you want. I think you all look great. And really alienating our ski mask and beret audience right at the start. So if you've managed to stick around through that hate speech, we're going to talk about Eta. They do like to wear a ski mask. It's part of an aesthetic, isn't it though? An aesthetic of like, I guess, 80s, 1980s terrorism. That is like woodland pattern kind of DPU camouflage, a cheap black ski mask, a balaclava and a beret.

Sometimes you can pick two of those things, but there's definitely like a vibe from that time period. I wonder why none of these groups worked. It must have nothing to do with the fashion. To be fair, the Zapatistas big ski mask, maybe it's the bobble. Maybe the bobble is what sets them apart. Yeah, no, it's the fact that you don't wear the beret on the ski mask. The Zapatistas look cool because they just wear the mask. Yeah, okay, yeah.

I think we're united in our belief that the Zapatistas look cool. And in many ways are cool, in fact. We're not talking about them today. We're talking about Eta. So it's an acronym, right? It's an acronym in Uskera or Basque. I don't speak Basque. It's a very hard language for me to learn at least.

I'm not going to say it's a hard language to learn because I think it depends on who you are. But it is one that I have historically struggled with understanding. It does have a generous smattering of Xs. So, you know, if you're seeing it out there, good luck to you. I will try and pronounce things as respectfully as I can. I spent a lot of time in the Basque country by grace saying I really, really love Basque people. They're very nice. I enjoy their food and their cider and their countryside. But today we're talking about this group Esca-Eta.

It stands for Uskadi-Ta-Asgata-Suna, which means like Basque homeland and liberty. They were going to call it Eta, but in certain Basque dialects that means duck. So they moved away from that. That would have been so much funnier. Yeah, right. You've been ducked, but they didn't do that. Right from the get-go, they were about this dual process of politics and political violence. Their slogan means keep up on both sides, and their logo is like a snake wrapped around an axe. The snake is politics and the axe is, I guess, political violence, terrorism, whatever you want to call it.

And over their years of action, they killed 829 people. So they were a pretty serious terrorist group. I don't know how many people the IRA killed, but I'm thinking of groups in there. I don't think it would be that many. I think they killed over a thousand. Well, I mean, the entire troubles killed like 3,500, so it's like a not a significant fraction of that. Yeah, I mean, the British government did a decent amount of that. Oh, definitely, yeah.

Yeah, but it's not a significant fraction of the total number of people who died in the troubles. So they're not like nothing. No, but it's only Eta up there, and look, this is much of a similar thing as we're going to see right where the Spanish state killed a lot of people too. And sort of armed groups acting in sort of coalition with the Spanish state. It's the safest way to say that, but certainly with the complicity of the Spanish state played a large part in this dirty war that Eta conducted with the Spanish state, right? And to understand them, you have to understand a little bit about Basque nationalism, early Basque nationalism. We can like find the guy who really constructs the idea of a Basque nation, right? Sabino Aranya is the guy.

He takes what is like a language. It's a very old language, right? It predates Latin and places where that language is spoken and takes it from like, these are the areas where this language is spoken to like, this is our nation. And all nations are created, right? Like nations don't come from the primordial soup. Like we don't evolve into one nation or another. They're fabrication, yeah. They're constructed by like entrepreneurs of identity who are elites to some kind of false consciousness, one might say, to maybe disrupt people from other things.

That's right, Zappatistas. Watch it. That's, yeah, we were coming for you with a woke mob. We're going to cancel you. Nations begin to exist when religion loses a claim on universal truth, right? This is like Benedict Anderson's speedrun. We don't need to go into the history of nationalism, particularly. It's important for people to know where the Basque land is. So the Basque land is in the northwest of Spain and the southwest of France, right?

It's these provinces where historically their mountainous provinces, people there were often shepherds. You'll often find Basque people in the United States like growing wine or doing sheep herding. And that's their sort of historical images themselves. And they speak this Basque language, right? So Eta come onto the scene as a Basque nationalist leftist group. Like they sort of have some elements of Marxism, but they're obviously like nationalist. They don't centre Catholicism, which is what previous Basque nationalisms have done, right? Previous Basque nationalisms have been elite constructs that centre language, poetry, and then Catholic identity.

Eta don't do that. That's where they're slightly better. Yeah, right. They're better than like the Karlists who are like, things went wrong when Spain moved away from this line of royal secession. And we need to go back to that and like extreme religious totalitarianism and a monarchy. They're better than that. Eta, I feel pretty comfortable saying that. And they've done some cool stuff.

They used to kidnap bosses who refused to negotiate with striking workers, which like, I don't know, watch out, rail company owners. But they definitely have like a leftist lean, right? They have this sort of pan third worldist idea or this pan sort of colonised people idea. They begin assassinating people when they take revenge for this guy who's called Chabi Estaballeta. You can look up that name if you want to see some X's in her name. But they kill the local chief of police, right? What happened is Estaballeta and this other guy were killed by a policeman. The police stopped them at a roadblock.

They run away. The police shoot them in response. They kidnap the local chief of police who has probably been torturing people, right? Like, you have to understand that all this is happening in the context of a Spanish state, which is extremely violent and repressive. And they kill this guy, right? Wait, this is under Franco, right? Yes, no. They begin under Franco, right?

So they, and their support probably peaks under Franco, right? And what we're going to see is actually they are somewhat integral to not bringing down the Franco regime. And in a sense, Spain never does bring down the Franco regime, right? And I want to get into that a little bit, but in destabilising the Franco regime. And they certainly, there was more support for this kind of political violence when the state is so obviously like undemocratic, unjust and incredibly violent towards people, right? So they, when they're killing members of the Guardia Civil, these are people who are torturing prisoners, right? Etta prisoners pretty often when they're captured turn up tortured in court, like very obviously, that they have been victims of beatings and physical violence, right? And a lot of things you'll see, they also kidnap this guy.

I forget if he's one of the founders of Vox and they kept him in a cellar for months and months and months and months. They, look, I don't like Vox, but I also don't like locking people in cellars. So two things can be bad. And Vox is a right-wing, populist Spanish party if people aren't familiar. They also did a lot of extortion. They also did a lot of extorting local businesses, right? They called it the revolutionary tax. So they got into some sort of more classic kind of organised crime stuff there.

But the assassination we want to talk about today is operación ogro. So the way they do this is they rent this flat, right? That's an apartment for American listeners. And they rent this flat and claim to be student, like sculpting students, right? Like art students were into sculpture. That's why we're covered in dust every day and we wear these overalls. And for five months, they spend every day digging a tunnel underneath the road by their flat, right? And in that tunnel, they pack 80 kilograms of explosive.

And what they're doing there is they're waiting for this guy, Luis Carrero Blanco, to come in his car, which he travels in every day, right? And they're going to explode that explosive and they're going to kill him. The reason they want to kill him is because they say that he is the best example of pure fascism, right? He's a former admiral. He's Spain's sort of prime minister. He's Franco's chosen successor, right? So he's going to take over from Franco.

And so by killing him, they're able to destabilize the whole Franco regime. Franco cries in public when he finds out Carrero Blanco is dead. So spoiler alert, Carrero Blanco is extremely dead. The way they did this is they dressed up as electricians, which is a lot of dressing up in this, which is kind of fun. And they painted a little line on a wall to be like, okay, when the car gets to here, we explode it. So the car gets to there, they explode it.

They launched this car over a church and it lands on the second floor terrace on the other side. Sometimes this is called like the Basque Space Programme, or Luis Carrero Blanco is referred to as Spain's first astronaut. That's really funny. You can find a picture of it. It is hysterical. It just goes. It's so funny. Yeah, periodically in Spain,

someone will be prosecuted for making this joke, this Spain's first astronaut joke. I saw it happen to someone pretty recently, and she had really made it a thing of making jokes. Actually, I think it's his grandchildren have noted that it's a problematic restriction of free speech that people keep getting prosecuted for this. What recently found that they weren't mocking his family or his memory, but they were just pointing the objectively funny way in which he died.

Which, you know, great for the court to agree that it was objectively funny, that a terrible fucking person died by being blown literally sky high. His driver and his bodyguard were also killed. It shouldn't be a bodyguard for a piece of shit. But the ETA guys had disguised themselves as electricians. After the bomb went off, they ran around shouting, oh no, we've hit a gas pipe. There's been a gas explosion. Everybody clear out.

Yeah, there sure was. Yeah, so pretty entertaining stuff. Acting is their side passion, I guess. The reason they did it, they did a presser, not long afterwards, wearing their outfits, which some of you may find offensive. And they cited his irreplaceable place in the hierarchy, and him being this, they called him a pure Francoist.

And oddly, ETA were not, at this point, they were less unpopular than they became later, because they weren't doing quite as much extortion, and they hadn't been engaging in quite as many murders of journalists. And you used to see this, I'll get to that later, actually. They got grudging praise from almost everyone for doing this. And because it really does destabilize and kick their legs out from under the Franco regime.

And it makes Franco cry, which I think is a laudable goal. It's good to make Franco cry more. So it kind of atomizes the Francoist state between people who are of this bunker tendency, who want to go hardcore and crack down, and those who are like, we don't have the ability to crack down. We'll lose all popular support if we do that. It really vaporizes the consensus

for what to do after Franco dies, which he does a few years later. I want to point out that people will, you'll read these articles on popular news websites or hot take websites where they're like, oh, this car bomb launched Spain into democracy. Don't do that. I think, first of all, the major error with that is the idea that Spain, quote unquote, transitioned to democracy.

When you have a pacted transition, where the people who did the war crimes in the previous regime are specifically not prosecuted and exempt from prosecution, that's not what democracy looks like. I think the most accurate way of just describing where Spain is is a post-dictator, like a post-dictatorship. And Spain is still there now. We see that with these prosecutions for mocking him, right,

with the fact that there are people in Spain who are still in prison for mocking the crown. That's not what democracies do. Good thing that could never happen in Britain. Yeah, look, you won't find me defending that either. But we don't make a big industry of talking about Britain's transition to democracy. Or maybe don't talk about transitions at all

given the powerful turf discourse in Britain. But I think it's problematic that folks talk about this, like, yeah, Spain is fixed. Spain has some dark shit that it needs to process. Like, it was not until the middle of the last decade that we started exhuming the graves from the Civil War, and that's still highly contentious, right? You still have a political party that doesn't want to do that.

Spain is still processing the fact that the Catholic Church took babies away from people who it considered to be leftists and gave them to people who it considered to be more appropriate to raise them. It's called niños robados, if you want to look it up. Yeah, Spain not transitioning to democracy, and I want to make that very clear. Some of the other shit that Eta does is really,

this is where they start to lose any claim to being like a liberation movement, right? Like, they bombed an Ipercourt. That's like bombing a target for American folks. In Barcelona, they killed 21 people. Now, I will say this is exemplary bad policing. They called the cops and were like, hey, we've put a bomb underneath the supermarket.

You ought to clear it out, and the cops were like, I can't tell if that's a real threat or not. And as a result, they do anything, and as a result, the bomb went off underneath the supermarket and 21 people died, right? They also alerted a newspaper in Catalonia beforehand. Reporters Without Borders still, for a long time, classified Spain as a place that was hostile to journalists

because of the attacks on journalists by Eta, right? Also, the state is hostile to journalism, but I want to point out that they killed journalists. They killed university professors who disagreed with them. They killed local counselors, and it was some of these very unpopular murders, which really sort of stripped support from them. And one thing that the Spanish state did,

or a couple of things the Spanish state did that really were extremely repressive against Eta was they would move Basque prisoners out of the Basque homeland and sort of hold them thousands of miles away from their families, from the Canary Islands and ship. They're probably closer to Africa than you are to your home country when they do that, right? And you would often see...

I don't know if maybe you guys have seen this. It's a white flag. It's got an outline of the Basque land. It's got an arrow, and it says, Úscal Presóac Úscal Eria. Have you seen that at protests? No, if you'd been at the protests, I was at it, but in the early 2000s in Europe, you would see that flag a lot. It just means Basque prisoners to the Basque homeland.

A lot of people got behind that, who might not have got behind other things that Eta did, right? But it does seem deeply inhumane to move these people so far away from their families. It's sort of an extra punishment. The Spanish state also had this thing called Gal. Gal is Grupo Antiterroristas de Liberación. So, I guess, like, Antiterrorist Liberation Group.

These were desquads, right? These were desquads aided and averted by the police. Eta enjoyed, like, a safe space in France, I guess, or, like, a freedom for prosecution. Certainly, under Franco, France was like, you know what, Franco really sucks, so you guys go ahead and send it. Do your terrorism way about a clavist.

I'm sure the French are also objected to their beret style. This is their safe space for your terrorism! Yeah, well, this is a whole... That's basically what they said. Yeah. This is, like, a whole thing with Mitterrand in France in the 70s. Like, France kind of became this weird, like... They basically had this open policy where, like, there was a bunch of...

Well, there were a bunch of people in Italy who got, like, falsely accused of, like, being the red brigades. What's that guy's name? The guy, Negri, Antonio Negri, who's, like, a kind of famous theorist. This theory kind of sucks by the end, but, like, they arrest him for, like, being a terrorist, and then he gets himself elected to parliament so he can get parliamentary immunity and then flees the country to France.

Yeah. Yeah, France really had... Somebody's was a weird time. Wasn't Carlos the Jackal also in Paris for a while? Yeah. Yeah. You love it, France. Open door policy to terrorists.

Like, this is the only cool thing France has done since 1968. Like... Yeah. Yeah, you're not wrong. They invented Parkour. When was that? Oh, that was, like, in the 90s. Okay, there you go. Okay, so the second cool thing.

You gotta hand that to them. Yeah. They'll hand that to the entire country of France. Yeah, maybe not, actually, given their treatment of migrant diasporas in recent years. And sometimes their firefighters will go out and beat the shit into the police. That is true. That is very funny. I do think we all have to give that to them.

I wanted to maybe end with this quote from Subcomandante Marcos. So we've talked a little bit about this appetizer. Yes. Yeah. So this is from a piece called I Shit Upon... Is it I Shit Upon the Revolutionary Vanguard of the Earth? Yeah. I mean, all the titles are, like, having problems translating Total Amundo, which is, like...

Yeah. I couldn't find it written in the original Spanish. Maybe that's just because I was googling wrong. They didn't put a lot of time in it. But I found so many of these appetizer texts that preserves better in these weird English translations. And I don't know if they're written in English. It's supposed to be possible they're written in English the first time. I don't think this one.

I think this particular one's a translation. Okay. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I tried to find it in Spanish, actually. So I'm just going to go with the translation. I think it's probably from Libcom or a similar website with, like, aging red and black ascetic vibes.

But I love those websites. So it's a little bit long. I hope you'll enjoy it. We don't see why. We should have, like, the eto kind of, like, reaching out in solidarity. And the Zappatis just has previously been like, now, dude, we are not the same. You're not just, like, an ascetic society. We are not the same people.

We don't see why we would ask you what we should do or how we should do it. What are you going to teach us to kill journalists who speak badly about the struggle, to justify the death of children for the reason of the cause? We don't need or want your support or solidarity. We already have the support and solidarity of many people in Mexico and the world. Our struggle has a code of honor inherited from our guerrilla ancestors, and it contains, among other things, respective civilian lives, even though they may occupy government positions that oppress us.

We don't use crime to get resources for ourselves. We don't rob, not even a snack store. We don't respond to words with fire, even though many hurt us or lie to us. One could think that to renounce these traditionally revolutionary methods is renouncing the advancements of our struggle. But in the faint light of our history, it seems that we have advanced more than those who resort to such arguments. I deeply enjoy this critique.

You can look it up. Eto was big on killing people who were tangentially related to the regime in any way, which we don't agree with. We should also add that they more or less definitively stopped doing stuff in 2018. They had a press conference. In their press conference, actually, Arnoldo Otegi, who was a former member, said that they wanted to express their sorrow for the pain and suffering other people have enjoyed.

He goes on, like, we feel their pain and that sincere feeling leads us to affirm that it should never have happened. Like, sure, buddy, you want to say sorry because you did terrorism. But I do think that, like, we're talking about assassinations. Again, we're talking about assassinations all week. There are ways to do leftist political struggle that are not killing random civilians and their friends and family members and bombing supermarkets, and those are the better ways.

But making Franco cry is good, sending Franco's successor into near-earth orbit is pretty funny. So we enjoy that one, at least, if not all of everything. I think it is worth pointing out, like, we've made this pretty obvious by that line, but Eto does not get a free space, a free Basque homeland. The Zapatistas have actually taken and still control territory, a thing that none of these weird guerrilla groups ever pulled off. So, you know... Yeah, they don't even get majority support, really, at any point.

Occasionally, there'll be people who are like, yeah, you know what, like, I agree with some of what they say, but their tactics are deeply flawed, you know, keeping people, like, torturing people, that kind of thing. The context of the dirty war with the state is important, but yeah, they don't succeed, right? And I don't think you do succeed by extorting the people you're claiming to liberate. Everybody doesn't work well.

So, up the Zapatistas, I guess. Yeah, that seems like a good place to end. Yep, cool. Yeah, so this has been Naked Append here. Join us tomorrow for more assassinations, and also the day after that, the day after that, and the day after that. Yep, don't wait. Hello, I'm the Ghost of the Queen, and this is Assassination Week,

and whose eye actually was assassinated? It was the IRA. Hi, welcome, welcome to Assassination Week, where we talk about all of the normal things. That's what we do. Talk about all the stuff that's totally normal and chill. We were just debating why we keep having to talk about Nazi furries, differences between cat boys and cat girls as they relate to Nazism,

and we're not going to get less stupid for today's assassination. So, let's talk about Argentina. One of the ones that happened pretty shortly after we planned on doing Assassination Week, we're like, oh, well, there's another one to add to the list. So, yeah, Christina Fernandez de Kirchner has been kind of one of the most prominent politicians in Argentina for almost two decades now. She was elected president after her husband served as a term, and then declined to run for a second, but she was elected in 2007.

After an eight-year run as president, she's now the country's vice president. She was expected to make a bid to return to the top job next year, but that's kind of up in the air. She's kind of left-ish. She's kind of the populist, like leftist kind of favorite. Did she talk a bit about Peronism and like the weird shit that's going on here? Please talk about Peronism. Maybe sing, maybe do it in the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Oh, God, no. Okay, so there once was a man named Peron. So, he had been, like, there's a whole thing. He gets like cooed. He's like, he like flees the country. And while he's not, you know, this is dictatorship, while he's not in Argentina, there's like this whole like, like a very classical populist movement to the point where like a lot of the theorizing

about what populism is, is theorizing about Peronism. And what you get is like two completely different like political factions, like casting all of those sort of aspirations onto the like, like onto the figure of like Peron who's like in exile. And so you can like, you know, you can say that like Peron has whatever, so Peron supports us, like Peron will be the guy who will save us. And like, so you get like, you get this really weird thing where there are like, there are like, there are Peronists who are like fascists,

there are Peronists who are like communists. So you get the split that happens. You have these left Peronists, you have these right Peronists, like when Peron comes back to the country, like the right Peronists start murdering the left wing Peronists. It's this whole fucking thing. And it's this, you know, this sort of like political formation like persists like an armored military dictatorship, it persists like through sort of like the

quote unquote transition to democracy. And like, basically everyone who has ran Argentina since like the quote unquote transition to democracy has been a Peronist of some kind. Christianer is, Christianer is from the left wing, sort of the new, the sort of like revitalized left like Peronism that comes around like the early 2000s. I mean, she's around, she's around actually in the 90s too. But in early 2000s, it sort of like, okay, so in 2001, there's this massive series of protestant uprisings in Argentina.

Like I would argue is like the last of like the great 20th century, sort of like working class revolutions, like people start occupying, like people start occupying their factories, like they go through like five prime ministers in like a month. Like they come very, very, very close to bringing down the government. And the thing that sort of stabilizes the situation is A, and this is a series of protests against like IMF austerity, right, which would be just like destroying the country.

And the way this sort of gets stabilized is that you get a new, you know, you get a new sort of like revitalized, like left Peronist populist thing. And the sort of populist deal is twofold. It's like one, okay, we're going to have a bunch of patrons networks and we're going to run like everything from like, sort of like job networks kind of like down, like right down to like, hey, we will like give aid to your neighborhood

as long as you stay as long as you sort of support us. And the second thing is like, they make the like, the ruling class like cuts this sort of, and this is this is particularly like, for an end of the Christian, like her husband's like cuts this deal basically, sorry, Nester Christianer cuts this deal with the working class, which is like, okay, if you guys don't,

if you guys stop trying to overthrow us, we'll give you a bunch of welfare programs. We will like do a bunch of stuff to like promote the sort of like national economy. And so it's this whole, it's like a left populism, but it's built on sort of like, like this very explicit, like we are going to buy off the working class so we can maintain capitalism,

but the capitalism is going to be slightly nicer. Yeah. And there's a few reactions to that, including the reaction from the right, which is very much like these welfare, all of these welfare programs are making our people lazy and unwilling to do actual work, which is kind of where some of our assassin

or attempted assassin gets some of his ideology from. But yeah, so a week before this assassination attempt, Argentine prosecutors announced that they're seeking a 12 year prison sentence for Mrs. Kirchner over accusations that she directed public roadway funds to a company owned by a friend of hers, accusations which she denies. I don't, I have no bid in this fight.

Yeah. The thing I would note is like, like almost everyone, so she, like, well, particularly Mrs. Kirchner, but she was also sort of like considered like the soft wing of the pink tides sort of like social democratic governments to come to power in this period. And like all of these people are kind of corrupt,

but they're not like more corrupt than any other like politician in this region. But like every single one of these people eventually, like there's a whole movement to like put them in prison because of corruption or something. And it's like, I mean, I don't know, like every, like they're politicians. Yeah.

What do you expect? Like the political rhetoric against Mrs. Kirchner had intensified in recent weeks amid the final stages of her corruption trial. And while she is probably the country's most prominent politician, even serving as vice president, seen as more powerful than then the president, she's also a very polarizing figure.

You know, her face is plastered on posters all around like working class neighborhoods. But Argentina's right has kind of made her out to be their boogeyman. She's kind of their, she's kind of like their top target. Last week in one opposition lawmaker commenting on her case said that Argentina should bring back the death penalty just for her case, just cause she's like,

a woman we don't like, so we should kill her. It sounds like our friends at the Carl Rittenhouse Cultural Center. Oh yeah. Yeah. Would you call her a Femi Bolshe? Oh, Jesus. Because they certainly would.

Oh, God. So yeah, but since the proposition of the 12-year sentence, hundreds of her supporters have been rallying or were rallying outside of her house every night, you know, calling her a victim of political persecution and doing these big, big rallies in support. And it was at such a rally on Thursday, September 1st, just after 9 p.m., when Mrs. Kirchner was returning home

from presiding over a session at the Senate accompanied by her security detail. She was greeting the massive supporters, letting the streets and signing copies of her book. And then a man rushed up through the crowd, aimed a semi-automatic pistol inches away from her face and pulled the trigger. But the gun didn't go off.

There's lots of footage of this incident. There was a lot of cameras rolling. It's kind of wild. Because she sticks the gun, like, right up in her face. It's just like, really, like, this is, this is like something out of, like, fucking, like, late 1800s Russia. It's very slapstick. It's very comical.

Yeah, the Franz Ferdinand level of... Well, speaking of, President Fernandes said in an address to the nation later that, quote, Christina is still alive because for reasons that have not been confirmed technically, the weapon, which was loaded with five bullets, did not fire. I can confirm technically that it is a piece of shit.

You can find... It was a.32 caliber. .380, wasn't it? It's a burst of thunder, isn't it? Oh, maybe I'm wrong. Well, isn't it like a specific gun that's, like, absolutely, like, the worst gun? Yeah, so these are... They're kind of funny. They're these, like,

they're burst so that... I think they're made in Argentina. They might be made in Brazil. I think they're made in Argentina. They make knockoffs of other gun designs, more or less. So it's in the style of a PPK, which has good precedent for killing bad people. That's what Hitler brained himself with.

But this is a knockoff. This is a cheap one. It's one of the guns that's approved for safe-sailing California, because it doesn't go bang. At least a version of this. I don't think the one that this person used was actually a thunder. But yeah, it's just a bit... I don't know. It's like when you go and buy a cheap knockoff of anything.

You know, like, sometimes it doesn't work. This one appears to be missing one of the grip screws, actually. But yeah, it's very rusty. This person didn't think this through very well, I guess, is what I'm saying. We'll talk a bit more about what was going on with the gun in a sec. You know what won't fail to murder the vice president of the country? These products and services would support the podcast.

Thank you, Bleach, for supporting our podcast today. It's what everyone says about butter help. It will not help you kill the vice president. It's a plug for ammonium nitrate. Federal police arrested Fernando Andrés Sabag Montiel, a 35-year-old Brazilian man who has been living in Argentina for about 20 years. They recovered the gun at the scene.

And then the next day, they searched his apartment. He had a studio apartment in like a working-class suburb of... Oh boy, what's... Oh boy. Andros. I'm going to send this one to the chat. Do I want to drop this in the chat? Let's let the people in the food.

I'm too Canadian. Spanish and sort of speak Spanish. It's a boot. There we go. I sent it to the regular cool zone chat. Oh, Buenos Aires. No, that wasn't... Garrison.

I can't read that. I have no idea. Garrison, that's the capital of Argentina. I don't know. I can't read it. I only... I never say words. I only read them.

Yeah, this is really the thing. Buenos Aires. Buenos? Buenos. Buenos Aires. I'm learning how to read ancient Greek for magic, and that's way easier than this. I was quibbled back.

Are you going to be like a Hebrew understander on Twitter? Are you going to be like... It means legal immigrants when he says that, guys. No, only for ancient Greek. Only for Greeks to use in spells. I forget that people who aren't Americans don't pick up the sort of like smattering of terrible Spanish that like everyone in the US can kind of do.

Yeah, no. I grew up as a kid in Saskatchewan. No one's going to speak Spanish there. Yeah, just food nouns. You can just do like a pollo and... But anyway, so they searched his studio apartment in apparently this big town. Buenos Aires?

This is Argentina or Asia. So people are going to be legitimately very angry. But it's fine. But anyway, they searched his apartment. They found just 100 bullets. Just around. Just like in various places or like... They said they just found 100 bullets

around his studio apartment. So that's the statement. It's amazing. People have a voice of video and highly recommend looking it up. So Mr. Montel is registered with tax authorities as an Uber driver. And he's not...

Pretty soon people figured out that he's not just a regular dude. There was a few signs. But most notably, the Son and Rad tattoo on his elbow. That'll do it. Yeah. So that's the Azov battalion logo, right? What is he...

James, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up, James. So yes, a wave of people who think they're smart but are actually not saw the Son and Rad and thought that he was doing this in solidarity with the Azov battalion. Isn't he like in a dukiness group? I'll get to it, not quite.

But no, it's not Azov battalion because the Son and Rad does not come from the Azov battalion. As most people listening to this show should probably know already. His social media accounts got taken down pretty quick, but we do have a few archives, which I'll be working off of to kind of paint the rest of this weird guy's picture.

He is steeped in a whole bunch of eclectic and esoteric things. He has various esoteric symbols tattooed across his body. He follows a lot of extremely interesting Facebook pages. He is, you know, is interested in stuff from far-right groups, conspiracy theories, mysticism, Freemasonry, quote-unquote alchemy and the Kabbalah,

again, quote-unquote the Kabbalah across many, many kind of political esoteric fascist interests. It's kind of, it's not very surprising. By the way, I just found out the, there's a whole page by that Caliburisk, you're a guy and you were right and I was wrong. It's a 32 ACP pistol.

Thank you, thank you. It wasn't 32 ACP. Huh, wow. Maybe if you spent less time making fun of my Spanish, we can learn something. That's plentiful. Yeah, I think in terms of levels of understanding here. For a while, he used the symbol of the Tyronal Order of the Knights, which was a fringe kind of far-right Argentine fascist,

mystical group from the 1980s. But he had that as his Facebook profile for a while. So he's like into the worst type of nerd things. Like instead of just playing D&D and getting it out of your system, he's like, I'm going to become a fascist and a wizard. You know, if he'd had a cultural center where he could play D&D with other people. Just saying. Talk about Dragon Ball, play D&D.

Yeah, paint. Do some really bad figure painting. Yeah, do art and we wouldn't have had a problem here. But instead, here we are. So maybe like looking at his Facebook page, right? You see stuff about like paganism, Viking, this death metal, not very good philosophers. These types of things don't immediately indicate a connection to the far-right.

Like you can't just take them by themselves. But when taken all together with the much more overt political things, you can get a fuller picture of who this person actually is. You know, it's like when I'm walking down the street and I see someone inside like a half skull mask, that doesn't immediately mean they're Nazi. But if I see the half skull mask and some questionable tattoos, I'm like, okay, then you're able to put that together. So same thing with here, right?

When someone's really into like pagan Viking shit, it may make me sigh die. But until I see some things that really confirm my suspicions, I'm not gonna, you know, talk to this person as if they are a Nazi. This guy is a Nazi. He is a big old Nazi. A few extremism researchers in Argentina have kind of made statements about this guy and what their take on it is as someone who actually is in Argentina, right? I'm an extremism researcher who lives in Oregon,

so I don't really have the same cultural understanding. We have a good grasp on the language which is helpful. I have a good grasp on the language when they're using magic words. When they're using words from real languages, not really. But no, they've talked about him like saying, this dude is quote, not explicitly connected to an organization, but they relate to the fascist ideology and compared him to kind of being the types of quote unquote like lone wolf attackers

that are not connected to any like specific political movement, but almost just like an emanation of political ideas online, like in Christchurch, Buffalo, and El Paso. Those were the places that he was kind of compared to is like people who aren't like inside a group but are willing to go out and take politics into the real world. But yeah, they compare his profile to other types of like quote unquote lone wolf, which is not a good term,

but like what that means is like as someone who's like isolated doing a mass shooting or a terrorist attack or an attempt at a political assassination. Montell was described as his friends as like eccentric and insecure and dishonest, but not necessarily openly violent or kind of openly invested in like political parties, which isn't surprising when you get someone into this like nerdy type of politics. That's like, yeah, they're doing politics as it relates to being like a weird nerd online.

But you know, who knows, his friends may just not not seen this side of him at all. Like who can who can say because he did have a lot of fascist tattoos. So like, like, come on guys. On the he had like, like we said, son in red on his left elbow on the back of his hands. He had a he had the iron cross and he had Thor's hammer. But like like the traditional one, not like Marvel movie shit in a funny maybe coincidence. This guy, the assassin was actually interviewed twice on television in like months before the attack, just as an average citizen on the street giving his opinion on politics.

One of them he they were he was interviewed with his girlfriend and they were complaining about Argentina's social welfare programs saying that they make people lazy. And then in another more recent one, in another more recent interview, he was asked if he supported Argentina's new finance minister, which he responded hell no. And then he offered his opinion as well, saying that he doesn't support Christina either. Christina is later the person he tries to kill. I will say this, this is this is not out of line for like, whenever a journalist tries to pick a random person on the street,

like it's like they're always interviewing Hitler Mussolini, like it's just every single time. Like this guy is a representative sample of those people. But yeah, so he gives up his unsolicited opinion on Christina, who he then tries to murder on TV just a month before he tries to kill her. So now back at the scene, authorities said that so the gun, they had five bullets inside. The serial number was partially partially removed. It was it was an older it was an older gun. It was not was was not brand new. They said that the gun model had not been manufactured in 40 years.

But it's the looks like it was made until 1978. So like, yeah, it's pretty old. Yeah, the gun could have failed to fire because it was broken or because it was just improperly loaded. Because have you come across the Argentine media articles which are explaining how to properly cock the hammer? That is some real, real, real interesting take stuff being like next time. So good stuff as always from our friends in the media. And reportedly, the gun tried to try to get fired twice. So pull the trigger at least two times.

And when they recovered it, there was no round chambered. So he may have just not like he could have just not cocked it at all. And that could be why I didn't fire. Like it's unclear that this whole thing is really like the like it's the verdict. Virgin Kushner assassin versus the Chad Abe assassin. The Chad Abe assassin went to the time of building his own weapon. He fired it twice. Bull shots went off.

Fucking Virgin, this guy zero fires it twice, doesn't doesn't build his own weapon. Zero bullets come out. Do we know if it's legal for this person to own the gun in Argentina? It's heard they like acquired it legally and not been able to test it illegally and not been able to test it. Because that would have also sort of got some attention to them. I believe it's illegal. Okay. Yeah, well, either way. Yeah, should have just done the older the old Abe method with the pipe gun and the battery, I guess.

Well, do you know what isn't illegal? And that's assembling Europe. No, it's that's very legal where I live. These products and services which support this podcast very not illegal. All right, we are we are back. I'm going to share with you guys the document I'm looking at. So you can so you can have have fun looking at all of these these symbols with me. Scroll to where the first picture is.

And then we'll then we're going to go over all of the all of the weird shit that we have. This is so we're looking at his Facebook likes here. Yes, these are the Facebook pages that he follows. It's going to zoom in on this. Dear God. Yeah. Yeah, this is a bit of a red flag. There's some yikes here.

So yeah, 35 years old, he has a Chilean father and an Argentine mother. He's lived in Argentina for at least 20 years. His profiles on Facebook and Instagram were taken down pretty soon. On his Instagram, he described himself as a devout Christian. Sure, buddy. Well, the night's a pop up on here. So yes, yes. He didn't comment on Brazilian politics very much.

It was mostly interested in Argentina. But and a lot of the esoteric Nazi stuff. A lot of the weird like there's actually an interesting history of esoteric Nazi stuff specifically inside Argentina as well. Obviously, a lot of Nazis fled to Argentina. They've kind of been a fostered ground for them. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff here. One of the pages he follows is named Camarada Miguel SS,

which is just a picture of like Nazi soldiers in armbands. I don't know. You're underselling this. That looks like Hitler nutting to me. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah. Biblioteca esoterica. But yeah, there's there's stuff on like Gnosticism.

There's stuff on Freemasonry. All of like it's kind of like a it's a little bit of a basic bitch here. This is like it's not it's for for this type of guy. It's not surprising. Obviously, he's not like a normal dude, but for someone who's into esoteric fascist stuff, you're like, OK, yeah, you hit all the things like you're. I'm not surprised looking at your page.

So yeah, like we said, he's tattooed with a black son, iron cross and a mill and a mill near. Now, obviously the iron cross and the mill near are not symbols created by Nazis. You know, they were previously existing symbols. Iron cross existed in the Prussian army. The mill near is an old Nordic symbol, but both of these were co-opted by the Nazis pretty pretty pretty strongly and now have very strong associations.

If you scroll down to the next page, I have all of his tattoos here. Oh, yeah. So you can see a bit of the son of red on his on his elbow. You can see some of the hammer on his. I believe his right hand has the hammer and his left hand has the has the iron cross. So, I mean, what's this diamond thing on his in a wrist?

I'm going to get to that. So the black son son of red. We've talked about this on the show a lot. It exists before Azov. A lot of lives. A lot of liberals now think it's an Azov battalion symbol. No, I mean, this, you know, a lot of Nazi mass shooters have had son of red like patches and stuff for years and years and years.

It's been very popular. It's also very popular among esoteric fascists. Yeah, also very popular among like, you see a lot of Wagner group guys with this. Like you see, there's a lot of Russian soldiers who have this shit on. Yes, but no, it makes sense as in its popularity as like an esoteric fascist symbol. This guy's into all of the esoteric fascist shit.

So he's of course, he's going to have a black son. So the that now James mentioned another tattoo, which kind of looks like a diamond, which is the Yigdrasil Immersal, which is how how that's how I'm going to pronounce it because nobody cares. It means a great tall pillar. It's known as like the tree bridge that would connect the earth to like the celestial like greater reality. The Arminstuhl plays an important role in like old Germanic paganism. It was there probably was a physical sacrificial site adorned with like big pillars. But like like a lot of the old weird German shit, it got Nazified.

Heinrich Himmler founded the Society for Research and Teaching of Ancestral Heritage in 1935, which was this was an organization with the aim of retracing quote, ancient Aryan artifacts that support the master race theory. And he used one of these for the original symbol of this organization, which is all about like tracing back old Germanic like pagan shit to be like, here's evidence that we're the master race. All of our he's like trying to manufacture anthropology, which supports all of the bad science that says we are Aryans and we are better.

So it's like fake in, you know, it's like the Indiana Jones stuff. Like this is this is this is what he's trying to do. But that one of the symbols used for that was the Immersal or the Yagdrasil. Possibly this symbol was also linked to Odin. It's unclear because the actual God of that represents Immersal is hard to trace. But yeah, probably a sacred object in the form of a pillar that represents kind of the the trunk of the Nordic spiritual cosmos that rises up into kind of the heavens. Yes, it's something it's something the Nazis pilfered from like Germanic paganism, turn it into Nazi shit

and became this idea around the spiritual center of like German nationalism. It's like it's this this this spiritual thing that represents how pure we are as German nationalists. Anyway, obviously the shooter is not German, which is kind of so I wonder I wonder why he has that. Huh, I wonder what he's trying to say there. It just likes German people. It's interesting in the culture. But yes, he has one of these on his I believe it's his left hand on on his forearm. It's a it's a it's a pretty intricate symbol. Yeah, that's like his best tattoo as well. Some of the others are pretty ropey.

Yeah, the the millenia tattoo is not very good. The the iron cross is pretty faded, but but the the great pillar one's decent in terms of like quality. Again, we're just we're just reviewing the tattoos of an esoteric fascist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, best fascist tattoo top five. Look, assassination week is also fashion week. Yeah, it's true. Would you say better or worse than Eta with the berries and the ski mask at this point? I like the ski masks. I think I think it's slightly better.

Oh, it's a bold take. So this the the thing that James was asking about previously, there's this really weird symbol that obviously looks kind of swastika ish. It's it's very like it's it's it's made up of like two different runes combined into one symbol. This this is this is the kind of logo of an esoteric neo nazi sect in Argentina founded by a very famous Argentina neo nazi named Nimrod de Rosario. Which I do like that his name is Nimrod. Yeah, it's like God, God. So yes, I highlighted this this thing. Do you want to try to try to pronounce that one that one's. Yeah, an Orden de Caballeros to Rodal de Argentina.

So like, so that is the name of the sect. It's the symbols, a combination of the odal rune and the tire rune. Hence the name Tyrodal or Tyrodal. It's a combination of these things into this new thing. So this is like very popular for this type of like kind of kind of esoteric Nazi writer inside inside Argentina. He had so the assassin or attempted assassin had a few of these things saved. Is it was actually an organization like the order of knights, the Tyrodal knights or have we say that? I mean, not really.

Is this a Facebook chivalric order? It's hard to say. I mean, like, no, they're not they're not out there doing tons of shit. Are they lapping? Yes, yes, they are. I mean, all as soon as when any one of these groups called themselves like an order of the knights, they're always larping. Like they're always they're always doing kind of a larp like whenever someone's into like the Templars and shit, you're like, okay. Who's that Texas politician recently who joined like the he's like sworn to protect Christians in the Holy Land. It was very funny. Yeah, like, come on. Yeah. All right. So he's a big yeah, he's got a lot of Christian stuff as well.

Like I'm looking at the and then what's with yeah, I mean, that's that's kind of with all of like the Gnosticism stuff, which draws on a lot of like Christian imagery or Catholic imagery. And he did describe himself as a Christian on his Instagram account, which still it's like, okay, bud, you're you're into some weirder shit than that. But yeah, there is there is there is some of a Christian basis for this style of like esotericism. I feel you. Whoa, I've just found is that I'm sorry, I've just scrolled down. Didn't expect to see that. Didn't expect to see what?

Is it like a cam girl or a cam official? Oh, yes. Yes. He was he was retweeting a cam girl on his Twitter. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I have some other stuff here on the the Argentinian Patriot Front. But please different Patriot Front than the American one. But that was just talking, I just wanted to talk briefly a bit about like Argentinian like Nazism or fascism, much like Brazilian stuff with Bolsonaro and the kind of the the the fascist groups that have been active in both countries for a while. Both of them have historical roots that go back to the 20th 20th century. They're a Nazi and neo fascist groups that have been active in Argentina for decades. We've talked we talked a little bit about this in the Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Center as well.

As it relates to like anti communist, you like stuff. One of the kind of oldest groups of of of Argentinian fascism formed into a new group called Patriot Front or Frente Patriot Patriota. How would you how would you say that? How would you say that? Patriota. Patriot. I was close. I was really there for like 80% of it. I really thought you had it. But yes, this this new group Patriot Front was formed in 2017. But it's based off of a very famous far right leader called Alejandro Biendinho. Just how again, that's how how I'm going to do it.

I should his name is his name is highlighted here. He's been active in Argentina's far right sphere for a long, long time. Like he's kind of like the main guy who's trying to do stuff. He's 66 years old. He was born in Argentina. Yeah, Argentina has a massive Italian population. This has been like this has been true for sort of a long time. Like, yeah, and this sort of this cuts both ways.

Politically, like a lot of those guys used to be anarchists. Like there's a huge anarchist movement in Argentina for a long time. Also a lot of weird fascists. So it is it is it is it is interesting that like this neo-Nazi assassin again wasn't part of any of these groups wasn't really aligned with this Patriot Front group. Wasn't really aligned with any other kind of actual like far right political activism. He was just into weird. He was into like dressing up as a wizard and talking about weird Gnosticism and fascism online. And then he tried to kill the vice president.

Did he live near her? Was this like an impulse thing or is this like a long planned? I think he did live nearby. I mean, I believe it's I mean, she was in the capital city. So yeah, yeah, well, it's a it's a big place. You could walkedly. You can you can you can get around if you're dedicated million people around the city of which cities again. I can't remember.

I can't remember either. I know I was to say who's to say. So yes, this is this is the story of the not assassination that was attempted a few weeks ago in Argentina and the guy behind it. Who should have just learned to play D&D like honestly. Yeah. Well, he did not. It's probably going to spend a long time in jail now. Probably.

I mean, he he did not kill the vice president, but he did put a gun in her face and tried to pull the trigger two times in front of tons of guns. Unfortunately, that gets you to attempted assassinations. Yeah, yeah, I think I think it's I think he did some crimes, even if he didn't know how to chamber his round properly. Yeah. Once again, the master race prevails. So yeah, and any any other notes on on this guy or the stuff in Argentina? Any any comments comments from the from the gallery? No, fascinating stuff.

This again, this is this is he is so much less cool and worse if an assassin than the big guy. This guy sucks. No, compared to he's he's he's the probably the least based guy we're going to be talking about. Yeah, I think. Right. Like at least Ato was successful in sending someone into near earth. Oh God. Also, you can buy Nimrod's books on Amazon.com.

Yeah. That's a problem. Expensing some of those. You shouldn't be able to do that. Come on. He has a Twitter account. Let's just read some of these tweets in English or Spanish? Spanish.

Drop the links. But I can I can trans I can do Google translate. Oh, we're talking about Zionist terrorism. The myth of the Holocaust. I mean, it's again, the myth of the Holocaust. He's a Nazi. What are you going to expect? Physical reaction to that last one.

Yes, so this this was the guy that had the symbol that that had the weird the weird combination rune symbol that that the assassin liked the books of and use the symbology of on his Facebook. I just I just sent the writers of a Twitter account to the cool zone chat. I feel like once once I go to Nimrod's Twitter page on the who to follow section, it recommends Alexander Dugan. Good. So that this this was the guy I I had vaguely read somewhere that this guy like like Dugan or something. He also isn't he dead? I believe he's dead. So who's running his Twitter account?

Well, he hasn't posted for a while. These are like 2016 posts. Some lackeys using the 90s. He died in 1997. OK, so this is like, yeah. This is like some lackey is is is is posting on his account to plug his books. Oh, wow. Maybe he's in a state.

Yeah, he's retreating the phalanx. It's funny. Lots of the people he retweet you go to their account and it's like this account is temporary unavailable because it violates Twitter's media policy. I wonder I wonder why I wonder what's going on there. Fucking Nazis. Yeah, I do like Nimrod's website is down, which is good. That is that is nice. His official website is is offline.

So that's good. It sucks that his books are on Amazon, but you know, it's good that he's dead. What can you do? It is it is it is good that he's dead. So he is dead, the vice president is not and the assassins probably going to be in jail for a long time. And that's the episode. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about assassinating world leaders. That's why it's called It Could Happen Here.

And today we're talking about a time where it did when John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Wilson Reagan with me today. James Stout, Garrison Davis, and of course the ghost of Ronald Wilson Reagan. Of course, the ghost of Ronald Reagan, who is a regular contributor to our to our podcast along with the ghost of the Queen. And yeah, now the ghost of the Queen has joined the team. Very excited. So obviously, John Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981, we're going to get into a lot of detail about Mr. Hinckley's life. This is something that is joked about a lot on the internet, including by me. You know, it's it's interesting because there's there's two strains of people who will like come out and tell you it's not cool to joke about John Hinckley Jr. shooting Ronald Reagan.

And one of them is right, which are the people who are like, Well, actually, like it's pretty messed up story. And he like it's it's kind of messed up to laugh about this family's tragedy because it was a family's tragedy. And the other people are like, No, it's fucked up because he had the hots for Jody Foster. And what was actually going on there was a lot more complicated than that. So we're going to talk about all of the things that happened in this shooting, which was messed up and which I probably shouldn't joke about on Twitter. Because it's actually really bleak. And in order to understand both why it's sad on a personal level and why it's a tragedy for the entire country. Yeah, I'm just going to start by talking about John Warnock Hinckley Jr., who was born on May 29, 1955 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, which is about two and a half hours from where I grew up in Oklahoma.

Unlike me, John's dad, who is John Warnock Hinckley Sr. was the chairman and president of Vanderbilt Energy. So they had lots of money, a lot of a lot of walking around money and Vanderbilt money. Yeah, and like most people who have good money, they don't stay in Oklahoma. They have any owls and at the Vanderbilt's big owl. Must have. I'm certain they did. Add owls to this story as you picture John's childhood. So they're rich as hell and they get the fuck out of Oklahoma and move to Dallas, Texas when John was four, which is so far weirdly like my life in a lot of ways, although I was a bit older. Maybe that's why I didn't get the madness. So that's not why. Normally getting kids away from Oklahoma really, really fixes stuff.

But John was taken to the only place more toxic than small town Oklahoma, a wealthy neighborhood in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. He attended Highland Park High School, the school where I would later lose several speech and debate competitions and win one or two as well. It's where if you if you're in the DFW area, the rich kids who don't have good drugs go to Highland Park. The rich rich kids with good drugs go to Jesuit because they're private school kids. But Highland Park is like the rich kids who are going to like try to sell you shitty ditch weed. Anyway, these are this is important Dallas Fort Worth context. And I assume it was the same when he was a child. As far as I've ever found any information, he was a pretty normal young man for that time and place.

There's no one really seems to notice anything particularly different about him. He does reasonably well in school. Later in life, he's going to express some racist thoughts in his diary and in other writings prior to the shooting. It doesn't really seem to have ever been a motivating factor in his life. And to the extent that he had regressive beliefs, they seem to have been due to the fact that he grew up in a sheltered, rich, all white environment. And that's not great for you. Yeah, shocked. Yeah, shocked.

In Texas no less. In Texas no less. One write up in the New Republic describes his childhood this way. Perhaps it is fear of what lies outside that makes the interior of the family so rigid and subdued like life in a well run bunker. The world of the Hinckleys was the rootless middle class sunbelt culture that nurtures pro family values, Christian fundamentalism and occasional mass murderers. Families move frequently but without compromising their parochialism. Everywhere people are white Christian Republican. Joanne explains John's egregious prejudices by saying he had never been around people of other races. Somewhere outside there are malign elements, minority groups, rock musicians, big government and the cynical, gosmos cosmopolites who dominate the media.

Mothers in this culture do not lavish attention on their children but on their furniture. Now, that is a coastal liberal elite like fucking paragraph trying to describe like people who grow up in this situation as someone else who grew up in a similar area. I think most of that is pretty silly and more to the point, it doesn't get to why John does this. We're getting to why John does this. It's not because he grew up sheltered and a little racist. That is not why he shoots the president. There is, however, a bit of that that does strike me as accurate as, again, a kid who grew up near here a couple of decades later, which is the description of his childhood as life in a well run bunker, which is kind of how it feels to live in these wealthy enclaves in the Dallas, Fort Worth area. I grew up in Plano, which is, you know, a couple of steps down the economic rung from Highland Park, but not all that far.

And yeah, that's that's not a bad description of it. It just doesn't generally lead to kids shooting the president. More often, it leads to them shooting up heroin and then dying of heroin overdoses, which was the big problem in Plano when I was a kid. That said, it's also worth noting that his parents are not as far as I can find like 50 stereotypes like his dad's not this super masculine guy who's like mentally abusive to his kid. His his mom's not like checked out. Neither of them are against the idea that their son might have a mental illness and need help for it. In fact, it seems like they're kind of more open to the idea of reaching out for professional mental health for their kid than a lot of parents would have been at the same time period. In 1976, John drops out of Texas Tech to go to Hollywood and try to make it as a musician. Again, his parents are very supportive of him. One cannot say they didn't try to help their son live his dreams when he gave up on music and he wanted to be a writer. They paid for him to take a class at Yale. We'll get to that in a second. It doesn't go well because he's anyway.

But John's not being honest with his ambitions, nor is he open with his parents about his mental health. We now know that John developed schizophrenia as a young man and had a series of psychotic breaks when he would get money to do stuff like this Yale writing class. He would take it and buy guns. He did go to Yale, but it was mainly to stalk Jodie Foster, who was going to Yale at the same time. Now, this is all occurring in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which is the fucking dark ages for treatment of this particular condition and a lot of other conditions. There are not a lot of good options. Among other things, I just said he's not open with his parents about the fact that his mental health is declining. I don't know how he really could have been. I don't think it's likely. It's certainly not the case. This didn't happen to John. But I don't think it's very likely for a young man in this time and place to be well equipped by his education or society to express what is going on in his head to his parents. To be fair to his parents, they're not equipped with an ability to really help him out here.

And they're doing the things you would want them to do. Again, they repeatedly are bringing in professionals to try to help. None of it is particularly useful, but it's not for lack of trying. Like a lot of people who struggle with similar mental health issues, John seeks refuge in fiction. Unfortunately for everybody, the movie that he finds himself most drawn to is Taxi Driver. And I think most people are aware of this part of it. Oh, boy. That's a bad choice. That's a really bad choice. Yes, if he had found maybe Adventure Time or something, it would have been a lot healthier. But instead, Taxi Driver, if you haven't seen it, the main character is this kid, Travis Bickel, played by a very young Robert De Niro.

It is weird to watch him because we're also used to old man Bob De Niro, who is thinking about assassinating like a presidential candidate, and then kind of through movie magic, rescues a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster from a pimp. And Hinckley thinks the movie is kind of talking to him and providing him with information about how he can fix his own life. He starts dressing like Travis Bickel. He starts wearing like an army jacket and boots and drinking the way that Bickel drank. He starts buying guns. He gets really into guns for, you know, he starts, you know, in letters that he's writing home to his parents. He starts talking about this relationship he has with a woman named Lynn, who isn't real, but who sounds a lot like one of the women that Travis Bickel has an interest with in the movie. And yeah, this is kind of the start of his obsession with Jodie Foster. And there are people who will like say that he's a pedophile because she's 13 in the movie.

That doesn't seem to be the case when he is actually stalking her and most obsessed with her. She is 18 and he is stalking her in real life and calling her on the phone and stuff, which is like bad and messed up. But he's not into her because she's young in this movie. He's into her because he's kind of losing his mind and obsessing with her, right? So while this is all going on kind of in the late stages of this, his parents bring in a psychiatrist. Again, they're willing to fund and support him in seeking professional help. The doctor they wound up getting for him. I don't know if he's a bad doctor for the time, but he's wrong as hell. He kind of looks at the fact that John has been normal, quote unquote, in high, quote unquote, in high school and like at the start of his college career. And so he looks at this kid who's like seems to be developmentally normal up to a certain point and then goes off the rails and says,

well, it's because you were sheltered and coddled by your rich parents and you're just lazy. Right. That's that's that's what this guy says. So a big part of his like advice to mom and dad is you got to cut him off. You can't can't keep giving him stuff, can't keep giving him money, can't keep taking care of him. So while this is happening and this guy is like making them make plans for John to be less reliant on his parents, John Hinckley is getting way more into guns. He does a lot of target shooting. He also plays a lot of Russian roulette with himself alone in his basement, which is not not great. Christmas of 1979, he takes a very famous photo of himself holding a handgun to his temple.

Now, John is increasingly harassing Jodie Foster in this period. Now, what he's doing is not he is not just obsessing with her and it's one sided. He is reaching her on the phone. They talk a couple of times. I didn't know that. Yes, they do. She is always very terse in their calls. Always you can tell is kind of frightened, but is very controlled and careful. I would describe the way she handles this is very responsible and like you can tell she's talked with like people. I think like her manager or something and like I have been advised like I don't want you calling.

She's very tries to be very clear here. And I think handles this as well as a person can possibly handle, you know, being stalked in this way. I believe he's able to get her number because like it's the 80s and people just have numbers in the phone book. Again, she's kind of taking a break from Hollywood right now and is going to Yale. His obsession with foster veers between these kind of like fantasies of like harming her or harming a guy that she's with or harming himself and eventually harming the president of the United States. Now, he is not one to shoot the president for political reasons. He has no kind of particular anger at the president that he wants to work out with a gun. He wants number one to impress her and he wants everyone to know his name and know his name associated with Jodi Foster, right?

Because again, he's very ill. He starts following Jimmy Carter around. He goes to like three different Jimmy Carter rallies in DC and in Ohio. There's video of him 20 feet away from Carter at one point. He probably has a gun on him. Like he gets really close to Carter. Again, one of the through lines here is that like presidential security wasn't great in 19. It's not very good.

John thinks about shooting Carter. He's probably there and equipped to do it, but he just can't get himself into the frame of mind to shoot Jimmy Carter, which is understandable because it is Jimmy Carter, right? Like he is a hard man to want to shoot to death. So there's a moment where he like, yeah, so he's kind of bouncing around after this period where he like is he thinks about shooting Carter, but he doesn't. He is in communication with this Nazi ideologue and they almost have a meeting, but they don't. That's all kind of obscure, kind of unclear. And then on October 6th, 1980, he gets arrested at the Nashville airport with a briefcase full of handguns and a pair of handcuffs. Hoopstamungus has it.

Hoopstamungus has not been in this situation. Picked up the gun bag. Oops. He says he's just trying to sell them. And they're like, well, you still can't get on a plane with a bunch of guns. This is pre-9-11 too. This is pre-9-11. So you have to assume he's looking weird.

He's like sweaty and in an army jacket and talking to it and they're like, well, we've literally never searched a single person before in the entire life of this airport. But let's check this guy. What's this massively heavy briefcase you're carrying? There's a dude just walking in with a stinger and they're like, no, no, let that guy on, but we got to check John Inkley. So he flies to Dallas where he buys more handguns and some explosive.22 caliber bullets. We will talk about that in a little bit, but they are explosive bullets. It's for a say. It's got.22 caliber bullets.

Yes, they are bullets that are meant to explode on impact. Is he like reading Soldier of Fortune magazine at this point? Because this nobody seems like. He's into gun culture, so we have to assume. I think his family is kind of casually conservative. He is kind of maybe, as is embodied by the Nazi thing, probably dabbling in some areas. Again, I think that's certainly not good for him. It's also I don't think politics.

I haven't seen any real evidence that politics is a motivating factor in what this guy is doing. He does get explosive bullets, probably helps that he has explosive bullets in terms of making this less dangerous. These are not good explosive bullets. They are meant to be fired out of a larger weapon than he fires them out of. But they are supposed to basically the idea is these are.22 caliber rounds. So the idea is that this little explosive charge in them makes them more like a.38. So we're not talking about like military grade weaponry or anything here. Why is he doing, you may not know, of course, but like if he's a massive gun dork.

He's not a massive. No, gun culture is different than right. He's buying a bunch of handguns. He's shooting a lot. I don't know that it would be. He's not particularly good or knowledgeable with. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I see. But gun culture is very, it's harder to get information about guns, right? Maybe the day he would have gotten a lot more into it. You're like just flipping through magazines. Exactly. You can't like look something up online. Yeah. Yeah.

It's.22 good for assassination. Exactly. Yeah. And this is also like, this is what he can afford, right? He gets kind of, he's lost his better guns, right? They have been their property of the state. So he winds up with this.22 and he gets these explosive bullets to try to make it give more of a kick. Obviously, the thing that's going on in the background here is that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are having a presidential election,

which Reagan wins. We'll talk a little bit about kind of that a bit later. But that happens. Reagan is the president-elect. He flies home. Hinkley flies home. Things continue to deteriorate in his own life. He's continuing to like travel around.

John Lennon is assassinated and he kind of goes a little bit nuts over that because he loves John Lennon. Also might kind of think that he is John Lennon. So that does not help his mental state. He visits the shrine to him in New York at one point. And kind of when he gets back in March of 1981, his dad cuts him off. Basically like says, you know, you've got your, here's your car, here's $200. We can't take care of you anymore, John. And I think this is his dad basically trying to take that psychiatrist advice of like,

we need to have tough love. He has to be forced to kind of get his shit together. But John Hinkley is not really capable of getting his shit together because he is profoundly ill. So he uses that money to pay for hotel rooms in Denver where he sits alone watching television with a gun. Not great treatment for schizophrenia. Reagan wins the election in what was a sweep electorally but fairly tight in terms of popular vote. He's got like 50.5% of the popular vote, something like that. It's pretty close.

And soon after taking office, he gets hammered on a bunch of stuff, right? The economy's not great. He's like going for a bunch of far right policies to unwind the new deal. A lot of which are unpopular and some of which he'd said he wasn't going to do in debates with Carter. He doesn't have the kind of traditional grace period most presidents get where they're broadly popular, right? It's not looking great for kind of the midterms is what I'm getting at. So Reagan staff is struggling to write the ship, trying to figure out like, how do we fix all this? Reagan or Hinckley, while this is going on, gets convinced that like shooting the president is a pretty good idea.

He doesn't have a lot of other options. He's kind of like running out of money and he's able to get a little bit more from his mom, but he's increasingly unhinged and alone and desperate. On March 29th, he checks into a hotel in DC where he finds in a local paper the president's schedule. He loads his 22 caliber revolver. He writes a letter to Jodie Foster and he travels to the Hilton where the president is set to deliver a speech to union workers. Here is how John's letter to her ends. Quote, I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you.

I've got to do something now to make you understand in no one certain terms that I am doing all of this for your sake. By sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me. This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodie, I'm asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever, John Hinkley. It's not great. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah.

I can never get. Yeah. Not a great letter to get. Not a great letter to send. Was this actually like delivered in the mail? I believe so. Yeah. I think she ends up getting this.

I mean, like she has to come to court and stuff when he goes on trial. It's like something he kind of demands. And I think she does to just make it easier for things to move along. Obviously, she does nothing wrong at any point in this process. She's just living her life and this guy is out of his out of out of his head and has easy access to guns, which is a problem. At 2 27 p.m. on March 30th, 1981, John Hinkley, Jr. opens fire at the president's entourage from just a few feet away. Reagan had been speaking to a bunch of union guys at this thing at the Hilton anyway, and they're kind of like walking out into towards the limo when this happens. John's first shot hits James Brady, the press secretary and former PR man for Phyllis Schlafly in his head.

He then wounds a police officer and a Secret Service agent. He actually does not hit probably does not. I think there's still a little bit of debate because it's like ballistics are kind of fucky, but he probably doesn't directly hit Reagan instead around fragments and bounces off the armored limousine penetrating the president's lung. None of the explosive bullets explode because they're not the right bullets for the gun. The barrel is too short. So it doesn't it might even do less damage than it would have done, although maybe they fragment because they're these weird explosive bullets and that's why Reagan gets hurt. Anyway, hard to say nobody really understands ballistics though that well today. There's a lot of debate over how all this stuff works.

Reagan had been in office for 69 days and no real plan existed for what to do if the president gets shot and is alive, but is unable to do the job of the president. Fucking George H W Bush is in the air a bunch of this time and like people can't reach him. They're like bet he's there saying you need to come back to Washington now. So kind of the people running the country for a few hours is Al Haig, the secretary of state and like a room full of guys in the cabinet who were all disagreeing about everything and none of whom are constitutionally supposed to be running the country. It's a real big problem. Like the fucking like the press ask at one point because he goes out there to be like, hey, the president's in surgery and they're like, well, who's who's in charge like with the nukes and stuff who's running the country. And he's like, we got a whole room for the guys. Don't worry. It's all fine. And they're like, is that what the law says? Because I don't think that's how it's supposed to go.

It's it's not great. It's actually a real problem. And they do they make a bunch of changes after this to make sure that like we never don't know who the president is when if this kind of thing happens at least. But on a political level, this is fucking gangbusters for the Reagan administration. And I'm going to quote from a write up an l pie here. The assassination attempt silenced criticism of his administration at a critical point early in his term explains hw brands author of the biography Reagan, the life in an email. The good humor he exhibited during his recovery. He spent only 12 days in the hospital convinced many skeptics. Some of some of his followers believe that God had forgiven him to allow him to finish his work.

And it is possible that Reagan thought so too. On the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt, journalist Dell Winton Wilbur published raw hide down a thorough investigation full of revelations of what happened that day. The book is written in the style of true crime and its title is a reference to the Secret Service codename given to Reagan. Raw hide Joe Biden's codename is Celtic and Donald Trump's was mogul. It reaches two important conclusions. Firstly, it argues that Reagan became the first president since Eisenhower to serve two terms because of the way he and his team handled the assassination attempt. And secondly, the White House did not reveal the seriousness of Reagan's injuries. He walks into the hospital and then stops breathing and collapses.

Like he walks in specifically because he wants to be seen walking in. And it's like they don't know that he's been shot at first. It's not like bleeding a bunch outside. He's bleeding internally. So it's this is like legitimately the best case scenario. It would have been hard to figure out what had happened to him kind of because you can't immediately tell that he's bleeding. A lot of people have been shot. And so everyone just kind of assumes he's having a heart attack, which is why they take him to the hospital.

He thinks actually, I think he believes that his Secret Service agent broke his ribs, getting him into the limo. But if they'd taken him to the White House first, he would have fucking died. He loses half of his blood in the surgery. Which is like bad. If you lose half your blood, that's not like a great injury. It's just lung collapsing is what's happening. Yeah, they've got him on oxygen and stuff. He's like barely able to joke with the doctors, which he does,

which is one of the things that like goes viral from this and makes him so popular because he's he's yucking it up. Oh, Ronnie. His yeah, this is belief. There's a number of massive long term fucking consequences to this. One of them is that this is why Nancy brings in Joan Quigley, the astrologer. Like this is when she you could refer back to behind the bastards to partner on the Reagan astrologer. But this is why the Reagan astrologer becomes like they start. They stopped having him do events when the astrologer says it's a bad day for it and shit because like Nancy,

this kind of breaks her and it also kind of breaks Ronald. He's not the same man after getting shot, which to be fair, he is 70 when this happens. So get it getting shot in the lung at 70. Most people are going to come back all the way. This is also probably doesn't help the Alzheimer's may accelerate the timetable there. On a political level, this goes fucking great for the Republicans and it allows them to do a lot of really fucked up shit. And I'm going to quote from CNN here. Today, Reagan is the only modern president who receives high marks from Republicans, Democrats and independents alike.

A look at the polls can quantify the roots of this enduring goodwill. Despite an electoral landslide over Jimmy Carter with a 44 state win in 1980, Reagan won a narrow popular margin of 50.7%. Moreover, Gallup's valuable presidential poll tracker shows that Reagan's approval ratings were significantly split along partisan lines after his 1981 inauguration, with 74% Republican support and 53% from independents, but 38% from Democrats. When Reagan came back to the Capitol on April 28th to push for his Economic Recovery Act, he was greeted by a hero's welcome in a three-minute standing ovation. He leveraged his political capital to help publish past his agenda. Before the end of the summer, the Reagan tax cuts had passed the House of Representatives, led by Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill and the Republican-controlled Senate, reducing the top tax rates from a confiscatory 70% and unleashing an entrepreneurial era.

That's how CNN categorizes it. That guy. That's what we got to call it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in 1984, Reagan wins 49 states and 59% of the popular vote. It is very clear kind of how this happens. And what this allows Reagan to do. It's fascinating, isn't it?

Because you have in Britain less than a year later, we have Margaret Thatcher, right? Who is similarly not doing very well until she gets to go to war for two tiny little cold islands in the Atlantic than no one knew about before. And then they proceed to just ravage the post-World War II social democracy consensus. Just fuck it up. And fucking, here we are now. Here we are. 2022 and people are going to die of cold in Britain this winter. I will say, in terms of just to be fair, one of the things people will say is a positive from this is that this is one of the things that helps push the arms treaty deals with the Soviet Union.

Because Reagan is like, God saved me for a reason and maybe it's to make nuclear war less likely. That's a bigger topic than today. It's a thing that he will claim and generally speaking, the fact that the Soviet Union and Reagan started talking about nukes during this period is not a bad thing. Always good to be talking about nukes. But yeah, what I will say, if we're looking at kind of the only clearly good thing that came out of the shooting, it's the fact that the justice system actually worked in this one instance, pretty much exactly how you would want it to. Hinkley was clearly not mentally competent to understand his actions, what he had done or to stand trial, and he was declared not guilty by reason of insanity. His father, tearful, took blame for the shooting for cutting his son off from resources. The psychiatrist who had botched his diagnosis admitted his mistakes on the stand and expressed regret.

Hinkley was sent to a psychiatric facility where he received decades of treatment and the treatment seems to have really helped him. On December 17, 2003, a federal judge ruled that Hinkley was entitled to unsupervised visits with his parents. This is five years before his dad died, so they get time together again. In 2007, he has a request for unsupervised visits as long as one month. This is denied, not because of any problems, but because of issues the hospital had not taken to prepare for the transition. In July of 2016, Judge Paul Friedman concluded that Hinkley did not pose a threat to himself or others and ordered him released. The conditions initially limited him to his residence where he lived with his mother in parts of Southern California. He was obviously forbidden from contact with past presidents of the United States or any of their family members or graves.

He was banned from contact with Jodie Foster or other entertainers. He was prohibited from watching violent movies, television, or online media. In 2018, a restriction confining him to his mother's house ended. He can now live anywhere he wants with doctors approval. On September 27, 2021, John Hinkley Jr., age 66, was approved for unconditional release by District Judge Paul Friedman. Friedman noted that, quote, very few patients at St. Elizabeth's Hospital have been studied more thoroughly than John Hinkley. And again, that's pretty much how it ought to work, right? Like, yeah, he shoots the president, but clearly because he's sick and you don't just punish sick people

when they don't know what they've done, so he gets treated for decades until he's better and now he's able to live a life. Yes, it's really good. Quite surprising. It is very surprising and part of why it's surprising is that one of the other negative lingering effects of John Hinkley attempting to shoot the president is that a lot of changes are made in many states to make it much less likely that people benefit from the same understanding judicial system that John Hinkley Jr. does. Okay, I'm going to quote now from a write-up from famoustrials.com, which has a pretty good bit on just kind of everything that happened here. It's a pretty fair summary, I think. Within a month of the Hinkley verdict, the House and Senate were holding hearings on the insanity defense.

A measure proposed by Senator Arlen Specter shifted the burden of proof of insanity to the defense. President Reagan expressed his support for the measure with the comment, if you start thinking about even a lot of your friends, you would have to say, gee, if I had to prove they were sane, I would have a hard job. Maybe that tells us more about you than what you think. Maybe that says a lot about your administration, who are, by the way, at this point, deep in Iran-Contra shit-selling cocaine. We're talking about all of this on an upcoming episode of Bastards, but yeah, they're all monsters. Joining Congress and shifting the burden of proof were a number of states. Within three years after the Hinkley verdict, two-thirds of the states placed the burden on the defense to prove insanity,

while eight states adopted a separate verdict of guilty but mentally ill, and one state, Utah, abolished the defense altogether. It sucks, always delivering. So the system works really well for John Hinkley Jr. And then nobody else. Ethically, I think they change it. I think the Justice Department of the United States, this is maybe one of, and probably in history, you will not find many cases of a guy shooting an active world leader and being treated ethically by the justice system. Like, he's handled very reasonably, I think.

Yeah. And never again, never again will that happen for anybody, even if they don't shoot the president. So, obviously, I wish John Hinkley Jr. Well, I hope his musical career goes fine. I fuck Ronald Reagan. I hate him. And yeah, it's probably made the world a lot worse that John Hinkley Jr. tried to shoot Ronald Reagan, because it empowered Ronald Reagan.

One of the lessons here, if we're talking about assassinations, is that it's a real wild card trying to assassinate a president or any other politician. And as a general rule, people are kind of programmed to think that somebody's cool if they get shot and don't die. Like, it's one of the cooler things that... Like, look, it just objectively... What do you do if you want to show John McClain as hard as hell? You can get, like, hit in the arm or something and just, like, work through it, right? Yeah. Like, what do people talk about?

Like, Teddy Roosevelt, when he was shot and how bad it was that he gave... Bad-ass it was that he gave a speech or how cool it is that fucking Andrew Jackson got shot about. But, you know, who they don't say any of these things about is JFK. That's right. Because dying is not cool. Because dying is not cool. Not cool at all. Over the roof of a church.

Yeah. Lame as hell. Yeah, so don't do that. But, like, you know, this is the... Look, if you want John F. Kennedy to stop being the president and you can successfully kill him, you will get what you want. He's no longer the president. If you were to have a political motivation, and again, Hinkley doesn't. Hinkley is not thinking about the top marginal tax rate.

Right. When he does this. But if you... If that had been his goal, this is the opposite of that, right? Because it just makes Reagan look cool and helps him, makes everybody feel like an asshole for fighting him for a while. So, like, he gets a bunch of shit through. And also, a bunch of laws get worse for mentally ill people. And on the whole, bad.

Bad, bad assassination. Bad assassination. Zero out of ten. Yeah, I have to say, based on the evidence we have here, shooting Ronald Reagan, not a good idea. They didn't do it. No. They let the whole team down. And we should just plug his album.

It's out on Asbestos Records. We should plug his album. Because, again, he's not responsible for this. Yeah, I think if he's happy singing songs, I'm happy for him. Yes, yes. I wish you the best of luck, John. You can buy his t-shirts. He's got t-shirts that he's trying to move, which I don't know.

I don't think it's bad to encourage his music career. Like, seriously, like, we're all doing it with a little bit of a smile. But what's the harm if John Hinckley Jr. thinks that people like his music? That doesn't hurt anybody. And, like, maybe if people can see that, like, if you treat people with mental illnesses like people who are ill, not fucking terrible people, then they can get to a place where they can sing songs on YouTube. And that's nice. Yeah, that's good.

That's an example, again, of the only time it worked the way it should. But it did work out pretty well in this case. Yeah. So, I don't know. Yeah. Take whatever lessons you want to out of this. Yeah. Many, many possible things can be learned.

A lot of different lessons we can take out of this. Don't hire Al Haig, but I feel like that's a generally good lesson. Yeah. There's a Phoenix punch band called Jody Foster's Army. I've just read this one, who makes songs about him. Which, yeah, buy their records, too. Fine. Yes.

No strong opinions on that either way. Anyone else got anything to say about John Hinckley Jr. or the assassination attempt on Ronnie Rawhide-Reagan? Also, we're talking about the IRA a lot this week. Probably not for nothing that Joe Biden's codename is Celtic. Hmm. Hmm. And the queen dies now? Makes you think, doesn't it?

Well, in me, it's a coincidence. I still suspect Liz Truss, personally. Hmm. I think that maybe Joe Biden shook hands with Liz Truss and, like, transferred a nerve poison onto her hand, and then she touched the queen. Definitely possible. Sweet Joe sipping a Guinness on the plane back, knowing that he's done his job. And his balaclava, inexplicably. Yeah.

Their fourth one. Anyway, hopefully nobody who has stuff going on listens to that and takes the wrong message out of it. Yeah. No. Kind to one another. Anyway, we're done. JK, this is Assassination Week. Who's assassinating my ex-former prime minister of Japan?

It's Assassination Week. It is. I would kind of, I would somewhat vangloriously argue the capstone of Assassination Week. It is the episode about the assassination that started it all. And by that, I mean we are here talking about the assassination of one Shinzo Abe. This is going to be a slightly different episode, both to the rest of the Assassination Week episodes and to the other episode we did on the assassination of Shinzo Abe. Partly because basically the day after, within about two days of our episode, our original episode about the Abe assassination dropping, there was confirmation that the reason Abe was killed was because of his connection to an organization called the Unification Church,

which is, I think, better locally known as the Munis. People might have listened to the very, very long episode I did about it. But yeah, there is an enormous amount going on there. And this is something that fortunately we have experts for. And yeah, so joining us to talk about this assassination and the Munis and sort of, I don't know, the sort of weirdness and the horror around everything that's been happening around this assassination is anti-fascist researcher Elisa Majuba. Yeah, Elisa is an anti-fascist researcher specializing in cults who's working with deprogramming imperialism, which is a collective of ex-Munis who've been documenting just sort of all of the shit the Munis have been getting up to

and trying to get more awareness of really the just incredible array of awful stuff that they've been doing. Yeah, so Elisa, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, and thank you. Thank you so much for joining us for this. I don't know why I'm saying us as if there's someone other than me on this episode and you, but you know, old habits die hard. I guess I've inherited the royal we, which is not great. Oh well, so someone will have to assassinate me soon. That's fine. Sometimes it happens. Hope it doesn't happen to you, though.

Yeah. That would not be the best assassination target, honestly. Yeah. So, okay, I guess the place I think we should start is talking about what we've found out about this assassin in the last sort of few months since this happened, which is that when the initial police reports came out, there was a bunch of very, very murky stuff about basically the police were like, this wasn't a political killing. It was about some organization. And I think me and you and every single other person who was like even tangentially aware of Japanese politics saw them say like an organization and was like, oh no, there's like a one in three chances at the booties.

Yeah, that's, yeah, I saw it like when they said something about like organization or religious organization, I was like, Yeah, I was like, hmm. Oh, I know what that probably is. Yeah. Wild. Yeah. And it turns out that, okay, so the assassin is a man named Tetsuya Yamagami, who was a Navy veteran. Yeah, made a series of unbelievably based and incredibly wild firearms with which he assassinated the former Prime Minister of Japan. What we've learned since then is that the reason he did this was that his basically like his family and his like life were completely destroyed

by his mom falling into this cult and by her, I mean, she she she gave this cult set like something like $700,000. Yeah, like roughly $720,000 US. Yeah, like literal like like multiple fortunes like she she she gave them all of her money and then she sold the company that like she had been running to give them more money. And yeah, what basically as best we can tell has happened was that he was he was looking at a way to like get back at the booties. And basically the problem was he, okay, so he didn't want to kill civilians, which I think is admirable and he couldn't figure out a way to like get at any of the like individual church leaders. And so here's the thing he decided to do was go after Shinzo Abe because as we're going to get to it in a bit. Shinzo Abe, lots of connections with the Unification Church, a thing that all of the people like writing glowing obituaries about him, I just like incredibly don't want to mention. Yeah, it's been left out of a lot of shit.

Yeah, and okay, so I guess to back up a little bit. Can for people who sort of don't know what this is, or for people who like may have heard of it but need a refresher. Can you talk a bit about what what what what the Unification Church actually is. And yeah, we can we can sort of go from there. Yeah, definitely. Okay, so the Unification Church or the Mooneys, they are a quote unquote new religious movement or pretty much a cult, you know, they're very culty and they're a cult. And they were started by Sun Young Moon, who was originally from what is now North Korea. And so basically this guy he claims he's the Messiah has this originally it started out as like a sex cult under a practice called I think the column, which is basically, he was supposed to quote unquote cleanse a woman's like relationship to God,

by having sex with her so he assaulted a number of people doing this stuff. And the church over the years has sort of like developed into more of a multinational corporation and political movement. And it has a lot of tools, I mean a lot of ties and connections to various governments around the world, including Japan, and is basically at the end of the day a tool of United States imperialism. There's some pretty, pretty direct ties to like the Korean CIA. Oh yeah, like, yeah, as well as the US CIA. So yeah, it's like this big umbrella of like groups different NGOs different like businesses. A bunch, it's just a whole conglomeration of things right, but very extremely virulently anti communist, and, you know, involved in some of some of the greatest hits of the last century like Iran Contra. Yeah.

And when we say involved in Iran Contra, like, okay, there's lots of people who are like sort of involved in Iran Contra. The moonies, like there is a deester, you can make the arguments that if the moonies had not been doing what they were doing in Nicaragua, Iran Contra wouldn't have been able to happen because the Civil War would have ended. Like, they, like, when I say like, when we say like they were involved in Iran Contra, like they are like on the ground giving people guns and money and keeping like literally keeping guerrilla organizations and like terrorist groups like in the war who wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Yeah, and then that's the thing like they did two Iran Contras, right, because they did the second Iran Contra with like, you know, when the CIA actually got money, but they were also doing the same thing like before that. In the sort of stopgap period where the CIA wasn't able to fund the Contras. So yeah, these guys are like. They were a nice back route for that money and all the other shit. Yeah.

So it's, yeah, they're very, very heavily involved. Like basically anywhere there is an anti-communist squad like in the world, you can find the moonies funding it. There are connections. Yeah, although, okay, I was weirdly the only one I the only one I haven't directly been able to find is I haven't been able to directly find any evidence that they were like that. Like specifically, they were helping Pino like I'm gonna say helping Pinochet. Okay. They were involved in Operation Condor and they were like doing shit with that. I haven't found evidence.

They like directly had any conversations with Pinochet, but that's he's like the the only person you can say that about and they probably did at some point. But you know, like Alfredo Strossner. Yeah, like they probably do. Like I mean, again, like they were they were they were there with Alfredo Strossner. They were there with what's that guy's name? Klaus Barbie, the cocaine. Oh yeah. Yeah.

I can't remember the name of the guy. Yeah. There was there was a guy in Bolivia who got installed for like a year that he got coot. Oh, yeah. No, I know who you're talking about, but I'm also forgetting his name at the moment. Yeah. No, it's funny because he's one of these guys where it's like, you know, I had a professor. I took I took a Syrian history class in college, right?

And there I think it's I really should if I'm saying is I really should know the year. But there's a year in like the 50s in Syria where there's like four crews in one year. And there were like two guys who will technically speaking had like had control of Syria. He was like, I'm just not even tell you these guys names because they get overthrown in like two months. And like that's that's that's this guy. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, this is a very sort of very serious and deeply scary, like death squad funding machine.

Yeah. Yeah. And that, you know, has continued to today pretty much. So yeah. Yeah. And okay. I think like, yeah. So yeah, there's sort of the death squad side of it.

The other thing I wanted to ask you about is about like what it's like being in the church and what it's like sort of. I don't know, because I think I think a big part of what's happening with this story is Tattoo Yamagami like basically watching his family get sucked in and not being able to do anything about it. And I was wondering if you could talk a bit about, yeah, I mean, sort of like what it's like being in the church and then what it's like just sort of watching it destroy people. Yeah. So I was born and raised in the church. I left when I was around 17. It was not, it was not nice.

Pretty much everybody I talked to who has also left feels the burden of this like perfect abuse that we had to endure. It was a bleak time for me. You know, there's just so much pressure put on members to follow leadership to do outrageous amounts of fundraising. They have a bunch of these fundraising teams, right? And they'll go out and they'll sell things and live in a van. Occasionally stopping at like different church centers to like, you know, sleep for the night or whatever they don't eat well. They don't get enough sleep, you know, like you're constantly around other people, basically like all of the methods of psychological torture you can do on a person, right? Which was, you know, pretty standard throughout the whole movement. Now, I was lucky enough not to go on any of these fundraising teams because I left before that could happen. But I still, you know, definitely feel like the psychological, you know, fallout from that and it's something I'll be healing with healing from for the rest of my life.

Yeah, so like there's, there's like no accountability for leadership, they can do whatever they want, but everybody else in the church, you know, has to follow what moon and the regional or national leadership says or the 36 blessed couples who are like some of men's original followers. It's like extremely hierarchical. There's a lot of racism within the group, a huge amount of sexism that is like, you know, directly tied into their their belief system because the fall of man according to the moonies is Eve having sex with Satan and then having sex with Adam and spreading that sin. So just like very inherently misogynistic, extremely homophobic and transphobic movement, just all around like so much sexual repression like you're not supposed to hold hands, kiss, do anything before marriage, right? And it's only that person. Well, of course, moon, you know, didn't didn't like this didn't apply to him at all. He could sleep with anybody's wife pretty much. So, yeah, it was just altogether a very intense environment, just so much indoctrination, going into the heads of the people who are part of it. Yeah, just altogether shitty group. Yeah. Yeah, so for me, I went away to school in another state when I was 14.

It got me like, you know, the physical distance as well as like the space and time to actually think and reflect on what was going on. And then I started doing some research online because I was like, Well, maybe what people are saying about it is true, it's a cult. And I came across this, the tragedy of the Six Marys, which was, you know, moon assaulting a bunch of women. And that sort of like made me just, you know, it sort of brought it to a head because I had like, you know, seen for the longest time how leadership was treated like other members had to live in like poverty. But they got like big mansions and like nice things, nice cars, expensive watches. But everybody else had to like give all their money to the church and, you know, was were like terrorized. And then eventually I was like, I think I have to go. I, like, I had been through the process of like meeting the mystical or the evil other, which, you know, like people outside of the church or you know, they're fallen, they're like, you know, basically, they have original sin. So they're kind of evil, right. You know, more people, queer people who were just like a hugely demonized group of people within the UC. And here I am today, I'm super queer. But like that, like, yeah, yeah. But like getting to know people when actually seeing, you know, like, oh my God, what they're saying, these people are not evil, they're normal, they're human, they are just different from straight people, I don't know. And that to me also made like a huge difference. And then when I was 17, I went to another school and I was like, I want to get laid. I've had enough of this.

So I went out and did that and that felt like, you know, once I finally lost my virginity, it felt like sealing the deal. I'm like, if I have to go to hell now. Okay. And it was cool because God didn't like immediately smite me where I, where I was in bed at that point, like, I lived and I'm here to tell the tale. So, yeah, that's how I left. That rules. This is much more gay of a story of what I was expecting, which is always a good thing. Yeah, it kind of, it reminds me a lot of like, the stories of sort of like, of people leaving, like, the really right wing, like evangelical. Like a lot of it reminds me of quiverful, but like, yeah, more intense, I think. Well, it's like, I think like the level of, I don't know, I guess the level of separation.

Yeah, it's a lot more isolated. Yeah, they seem to be at least sort of like integrated into like other communities and stuff, whereas the moonies, I don't know, like there's definitely like, people have friends outside of it, but like, generally like people kind of keep to the moonies because, you know, they're supposed to be like God's chosen people or whatever. So they, and they like, look down on everyone else because they're not moonies. So, yeah. It is, it's also interesting to me that like, literally the term is just the evil other, which is really. So I don't think that's a literal term, but like, that's how I sort of phrase it or whatever. Yeah, or just like fallen people would be or the fallen world, the outsiders is what they would say.

So just this very, you know, like, very, like stigmatizing language that they use for people. Lots of people are just called evil in the church too. They just call people evil like willy-nilly. It's like, oh, you're satanic. Like, no, that's not it. Not that. I don't know how to get a good tradition into this. Yeah, we're going to ads.

Yeah. So I wanted to also talk about specifically one of the things that the church does and one of the things like, the sort of one of the specific things that Tatsuya Yamagami seems to have been suffering from. And well, specifically his mom, but his sort of whole family is the financial abuse. Yeah. And yeah, I wanted to ask you a bit about what that looks like. And also, there's some stuff about the Japanese context that I think is slightly different than. Yeah.

So the American or the Korean context, I want to ask you a bit about that. Yeah, definitely. So across the board, unification church members are expected to bring in a lot of money through fundraising, through tithing, providing free labor or, you know, low paid labor through church businesses and stuff. So the case is though that in Japan, because of the rhetoric of the church, which is, you know, basically born out of, you know, the environment in Korea. So there's basically this thought in the church that they say that Korea is the atom nation, because that's where, you know, the Messiah came back. South Korea and, and that Japan is the Eve nation supposed to submit to the atom nation, and also sort of pay indemnity, which is a big word in the church and for the atrocities committed during the Japanese occupation of Korea. And so this means that Japanese members have to pay significantly more for pretty much everything.

So there's, it's like just, you know, like, instead of like a type of reparations where it's like, you know, will give you money, it's like they make them suffer for that fact. And so like, you know, fundraising goals are very high. Let me see, I think I had a figure here somewhere. So Japanese membership, they bring in roughly like 70% of the church's income. So a large amount for, you know, like proportionally not, you know, there are a lot of members in Japan, however, throughout the world that is like proportionally, you know, where it mostly comes from. And then as of several years ago, the Japanese church fundraising goal was 30 billion yen or around 210 million for that year, I believe. So just, you know, and so they go out selling. Ancestor liberation is one thing you're supposed to pay exorbitant fees for your ancestors to go to heaven.

There was a book called the Chun Song Young, and that book was extremely expensive and of course, much more expensive for members in Japan. So I read a figure where I think I don't remember what year it was and it was not very recent, I think it might have been like 1992 or something, or 2002 or something, I'm not sure. But it costs like roughly like 200,000 American dollars to go to the marriage ceremony, the one of the mass weddings that the moonies do where everybody is arranged marriage, arranged married. And so, yeah, just like these huge amounts of money directly flowing from the pockets of the membership and anyone they happen to, you know, have give them money into the coffers of the church and you know directly on up to like the moon family, who are billionaires. Another thing I'd say here is that they often, so for people who that they're trying to fundraise from, they often will target like elderly widows and people who are, you know, in sort of precarious places and come to them and say, your family member who's passed away wants you to give this donation to the church. They also like at one point made up like a fake Buddhist sect in order to like specifically target people. So it goes deep. There's a there's a lot to that. Yeah, I mean, like one of the things I remember reading those like the get that they had like this whole network of like fake mediums. Yeah, like like specifically to target people. Yeah, so we target the sort of widows which is like, I don't know, just so so much of the stuff that they do is just so

incredibly bleak like I think. Yeah. I mean, the thing that always that got me was the sort of like, like the way in which they're sort of weaponizing like, like Japan sort of war crimes in, yeah, in South Korea and North Korea as well and it's like, is like a on the one hand, like, yeah, like all A all this money is just going to like a bunch of like two rich fascists. And then yeah, be like, I think this is something else we sort of get into is like, okay, so the the church's main political allies in Japan are the people who did all that shit. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, no, it's just a constant deflection pretty much. Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting too, because like you get this like, so some of the newspapers they fund will like openly say that like Japan should rearm again. And like Japan should like start retaking Korea and then like, you have the other arm with their business being like, hey, pay us money for all the people you guys killed in this list.

I don't know, it's. Yeah, it's pretty fucked. It's the worst. Honestly, yeah. And I guess I guess yeah, I think I think this is as good a place as I need to go into. Like, okay, so the Moody's like could not do the things that they do in Japan without an incredibly large degree of institutional support. Part of this is sort is with the Yakuza because like you can't run like you can't do organized crime stuff like attempt like running an entire network of people to defraud widows like in Japan without the Yakuza like you having some kind of deal with them. Yeah.

And yeah, and that that also bizarrely ties in with sort of how how the Unification Church got integrated with the sort of mainstream. Well, yeah, you know, I'm just gonna call the mainstream like fuck it. People people people people people will quibble about the different factions of the LDP. I frankly don't care for reasons that we'll get to. But yeah, how they got like. I guess we talked about like the origins of how they got ingrained with Japan's like perpetual ruling party, liberal democratic party. Yeah, um. Oh, sorry, were you were you.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I can also go into it too, but yeah, no worries. Yeah, okay. Yeah, sorry, I wasn't sure that was a question. Yeah, sorry. No, it's okay. So yeah, it goes all the way back to like. So it goes, it goes back pretty far.

So Nobusuke Kishi, Abe's maternal grandfather. So he initially became sort of embroiled with the UC kind of stuff, unification church stuff in the early days of when the movement was in Japan. He collaborated on stuff like foundation for victory over communism, spoke at their, the founding of the organization at a UC church, which was, I think, next to Kishi's estate or something like that. Yeah, I think I think I think he sold them their first building in Japan. Yeah, I think so too. If I'm remembering something that I read at one point right. Yeah. So, um, so yeah, and then in 62, the UC was able to convert 50 leaders of the ultra nationalist Nietzschean Buddhist sec cult sect called, gosh, I don't know how to pronounce this real show Kosei Kai.

And they had a lot of strong use of yakuza connections. And then a saw me Kuboki was the first use UC president in Japan. He was the yakuza lieutenant and second in command of that group that I had just mentioned. Yeah. And the other thing we should mention about this about the sort of how the yakuza ties. Yeah. So is that. So, okay, so no basically Kishi is the guy who founds liberal, the liberal democratic party, right?

Like he, the liberal democratic party is his creation. It is like what that party is, is all of Japan's conservatives basically like basically ceding to his authority and being like, okay, fine, we're going to follow your lead. Um, and his, his party is like his base and his funding is basically a combination of like he like Kishi himself is a like archewel were to war criminal. Um, his, his base is basically in the old Japanese fascists. He is funded by like, well, partially funded like funded directly by the CIA. Um, he's also funded by, but the CIA in particular here is working through the yakuza because when it was this one of the sort of the will, like, will there be in the sort of like, well, will there be sent if you don't see a but yeah, basically American intelligence, the American army starts working through the yakuza as like an anti-communist force. And he, he gets bankrolled by this, these two guys named Kodama and um, Sasekawa.

Yeah, Sasekawa who were like, Kodama is like, like, the like middle basically like the guy who is in charge of the yakuza. He's also a fascist. Um, Raiichi Sasekawa is the self like literally called himself the world's richest fascist. Both of these guys are like huge bankrollers of, of Kishi. They are also, and you know, and when Kishi is like bringing in the church, like this, this is how, this is how all these people have got, have yakuza connections because yeah, it's the whole sort of Japanese right wing like political machine is like one like happy family that is doing, doing the worst stuff all together at the same time funded by the CIA. Yep. And like, and also I need to say this again, this is my episode about Kishi, but like, like the level of CIA involvement here, like there are individual CIA agents assigned to individual Liberal Democratic Party candidates in the 50s to make sure they won their elections. I did not know that bit that is. It's wild.

Yeah. So specific. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Concerning things concerning things. Oh, God. But yeah, so like, yeah, to this day, a lot of LDP candidates and politicians still have ties to the UC get donations from it, use like membership as like free labor, even like having secretaries from who are members of the UC, and

like, you know, sometimes they would, you know, see like some sort of like classified or, you know, information and stuff like that. So there's, yeah, there's like, apart from like that, like just so interconnected. Yeah. Do you remember the story about the the LDP is like number two guy like getting getting mooned to be able to visit Japan? Ah, sorry, I don't. Oh, God. Okay. So the my memory of this story was okay. So like Japan, Japan has a series of really weird laws about like, I mean, okay, Japan has a series of very weird laws about many, many things. One of them has to do with it.

It's something like if you've been convicted of a felony in another country, you can't enter Japan. Mm hmm. And I don't know if it's okay. I don't know if it's a felony. I don't know what the I forgetting what the legal bar is for what you have to be like convicted of in order to not be able to enter the country. But I like mooned is a I like he was like convicted by the US government of like perjury and a bunch of other shit crimes that he did. So he like technically legally could not enter Japan. And then like the the the the the the the the vice president of an office. Oh my God, I can't remember his title. But basically like what basically like the like the like the like the second most powerful man in Japanese politics in the 90s like very specifically did a whole bunch of visa bullshit. So that specifically moon could go to Japan legally. Not surprising. Not surprising. But wow.

Yeah, it's like. The length people will go to to collaborate with other fascists. Yeah, I think that's that's, I don't know, that's to me what makes this assassination really interesting. Is that like, okay, so if you ask like, even even like in Japan, if you had asked the average person what the connection between like Shinzo Abe and Education Church was like most people have no idea like before this assassination, those people had like no idea what that was. Yeah, yeah. After the assassination, this the whole landscape has changed. Yeah, I mean, it's been really interesting to watch it's like this this really seems like an incredibly sort of politically effective assassination because

Yeah. Okay, so you know you had there was there was you know you had the very the initial right wing backlash but the right wing backlash kind of It got kind of muted when it when it became clear that it like wasn't a left wing radical which I think would have actually been an enormous disaster. Yeah, but then the guy was Yamagami was pretty right wing himself. Yeah, it's like he's a right wing guy and but also like his story is really sympathetic. Yeah. Like, I mean, I feel for the guy like he had so much trauma in his life, honestly. And like, it's obvious like, and I think you know a lot of former members, you know, sort of understand how that feels.

Now, most of us have been assassinated prime minister, but so far so far. But yeah, like, I mean, we understand that pain of where he is coming from and like, you know, why upon learning that Abe had these ties, he sort of like felt like compelled to do something. And I think there's also this element at work here that's kind of weird, which is like, it's very, very hard normally to get like right wing Japanese people to turn on their own party. The one way that you can do it is by going, hey, look at these Koreans. So there's like weird dynamics going on here. Like there were some there were some like even further right parties who were like, you know, using this thing as a campaign thing of like, ah, this party is like a fake right wing party. Like they're all being run by like Koreans. And it's like, okay, that's like not like the thing that is bad about the Moons is not that they're Korean.

It's that it's all of the other shit. Yeah, they do. Yeah. And I think that's complicated. But also, yeah, like the political impact this has had has been like enormous. Yes. Like, yeah. Do you want to talk about that a bit?

Yeah, so, um, so, okay. Obviously, it has shined a lot of light on sort of the connections that a lot of members of the government there have from the LDP, as well as other parties have with the UC getting donations, etc. People are pissed about it, you know, as they should be. So I guess that Prime Minister Kishida had said that they want to cut ties with the unification church at this point. You know, it sort of remains to be seen whether that actually happens or not because it can just be like lip service kind of shit. But the politicians are and I'm not sure if this is specifically for the LDP or sort of across the board. There's like a thing where they're supposed to self report any ties or donations to the UC, which is just, you know, like, I don't know, like, I don't think everybody's going to come forward with that sort of thing if you're supposed to do it yourself. That's like, not how that should work.

But so I mean, like it remains to be seen, you know, if those ties are actually going to be cut. So also, like there has been sort of like a lot of support from like lawyer groups like the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, who has, you know, worked with, you know, cult members and like specifically a lot of unification church members or former members or whatever, who have, you know, lost money through spiritual sales. And they've also just recently called for the dissolution of the UC in Japan, which is pretty cool. And I hope that happens. Yeah, how realistic it is, given all of the strong ties to the government, but that would be cool. And then also, I saw a thing a couple days ago, that Japanese consulates and embassies have a program that is offering advice or assistance to UC members who are Japanese nationals and their children. And that ends on September 30, I think, so if anybody needs that, get in fast. But I think that also applies in America. So if like, you are a Japanese national and like a victim of the UC or if your parents are.

They, those open and I don't know exactly what the levels of support and resources they're offering are. But it's worth looking into for sure. But yeah, like so there's been like sort of this outpouring of support from various groups. And there's, you know, like, it's really shining a light on the issue of like, especially what it's like to be a second generation member of a cult and the trauma that people like us have gone through. You know, there are definitely a lot of calls for like support in mental health care, as well as like, you know, ways to sort of get people out of situations like that in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I hope this translates into actual resources and stuff. Yeah, just sort of like the LDPs for ratings, tanking, which like is good. And like it is very funny that Kishi does had to axe like half his cabinet because the ties are like too close.

But yeah, I don't know. I think it remains. Although he remains in power and he's got the UC2. Yeah. So it's like, you know, clearly there's not a lot like even if people are like having a little bit of like the smallest level of transparency about this stuff. Like I don't necessarily know how far it'll actually go into like, you know, making amends or like protecting people from further abuse or, you know, getting people their money back. I don't know. I think there's a, there's something I think that's really sort of, I don't know, like really grim about the way that this worked out, which the Japanese police knew what was going on and why the assassination had happened like immediately. Like they found his hard drive and he'd written out a whole thing about why he did it.

Yeah. And then they intentionally held the information and basically were able to maintain a press embargo until after the election happened. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, now everyone fucking hates the LDP. Like the, the, the permission to approve ratings like 36%, like it's really bad. I mean, it went from like 50, it went from like 52 to like 36 in like a couple of weeks. But because the people who are, people who are connected to the church are the people in charge, they were able to like suppress this information long enough to like shape how the election was going to go.

Yeah. And make sure that it was sort of like the right wing shock from, oh my God, this assassinated the prime minister and not wait, they assassinated the prime minister for a reason that's like incredibly justified and relatable to like, this is as relatable a motive of assassination as like I've ever seen. Yeah. I mean, it's like, as far as reasons for assassinating people go, this is a pretty like solid reason, like there's, there is stuff there. Yeah. And like, and I think it's just like, like it's, it's interesting this like it's, it's a rare assassination where the assassin is, is a very empathetic figure to like, I think a lot of the time when you get people doing stuff like this, like, it's, there's a sort of like one to one correlation with like, okay, like how, how, how do you feel about sort of like, like how do you feel about assassination in general is going to like determine your dictate like determine your sort of response to the actual action. Yeah.

Whereas I think here, it's different, because, you know, like that, yeah, this, this, this is someone who, yeah, I mean, I keep saying that he's sort of like eminently relatable, but it's like, yeah, this, this is someone who, I don't know, has been through just an incredible amount of trauma in a way that's like very easily sort of digestible to like regular people. Yeah, it's like, yeah, very obvious trauma and like, you know, yeah, I don't know. And I really hope that that that that really does actually translate into resources for mental health resources because I do too. I feel like as well as mental health resources, I help there are like, you know, financial resources and, you know, like all sorts of other resources as well because like, dealing with the fallout of you know, having been in a like a cult is incredibly difficult and requires a lot of space and time and a lot of people are, you know, left with like PTSD after that and it'll last for your whole life and that makes, you know, for a lot of people that makes, you know, having getting money and doing job things extremely hard, especially, you know, if you're like getting like, emotionally like thrown back into that all of the time. So I hope there are like more, you know, like material resources that are also available in addition to sort of like mental health care and therapy things. Because that's something that I feel like is all too often just not there for people who have been through abuse.

Yeah, and I think also there's there's this way in which like, like a lot of this, like in so far as there's any kind of like support network, like in the US and this is also true of Japan to I maybe as I don't know, the Japanese welfare state is not great. But yeah, like there's an extent to which like, the sort of like last safety net you have is your family. And, you know, like, this is this is the kind of thing that can very easily cut you off from your family and that that has you know, that has emotional consequences like yeah that that has enormous financial consequences that yeah, really don't like. I don't know it when I was originally doing research on this like I read a lot of sort of like people arguing about like, deprogramming stuff and it like, they just didn't talk about like that kind of stuff and it was always just sort of like, I don't know, struck me as really weird and I sort of like grotesque and detached way to think about it instead of like. Yeah, so yeah, it depends on like what type of care it is to because honestly deprogramming is another cult, it is another cult, it's an anti cult cult and it just you know, it re traumatizes those who are already traumatized and honestly like people who have been deprogrammed sometimes leave but a lot of the time it just increases their fervor for being part of whatever movement they're part of already. Because they're like oh if this is you know like what everybody's going to do to me if I leave like of course I got to stick with this because you know then like it's like every what they've been saying the whole time about, you know be being persecuted and like hurt and stuff

then becomes true right. Yeah I guess that's the thing I would say about like. The most disclaimer about deprogramming and though the collective we are a part of is called deprogramming imperialism that is because the only thing that needs to be deprogrammed really is imperialism and not people because that's not how that works. Yeah, radicalization requires a lot of trust, a lot of time, a lot of space, a lot of reflection. It's something that you know you can just like go and like lock somebody in a basement for two weeks and then like try to make them leave whatever movement they're part like that's just abuse. Yeah I think like I don't know I think it's as an industry it's not as sort of like powerful as it used to be but I think like. I don't know. There's a sense in which it's sort of like it almost has like civil war logic where it's like both sides deed the other side as sort of their like reason to exist. Yeah. And you know and both sides are traumatizing people and both sides need like specifically fighting over the same like group of people and each of them can sort of like offer the other side as like oh hey this is why we need to exist.

Thing but then it's like you know it like as with like most civil wars is like the actual people caught in it don't it's like no you don't actually need you don't want either side of the civil war you want out. Yeah. Yeah no it's definitely it's definitely one of those like oh you're stuck between a rock and a hard place kind of things it's like both options suck like yeah. Like the two party system. Stalin Stalin said two good things in his entire two things that were like funny and his entire life one of them was the Pope how many divisions does he have and the second one was they're both worse. And there I mean immediately he was wrong about they're both worse but like yeah that's a that's a that's a real thing that is the basis of all modern politics. Honestly that is honestly. We hate to see.

Hate to see it. Yeah. Yeah. On the other hand though I don't know like. I am kind of hopeful about this. Like I am too. It genuinely seems to have like changed like at the very least it's changed the way that the Japanese public like sees and understands this whole thing and like this is the first time I think ever. I mean like you know like the Communist Party and stuff I've been trying for like years to get people to care about this just no one has really cared since like.

I don't know like basic like sense Japanese left collapse and like the 70s like nobody's really cared about this and. I don't know it really seems like something like it really seems like this assassination has actually changed something about. Just sort of like the like. Just the way the Japanese politics is being structured right now. Yeah. And I don't know I'm not really hopeful. I would say I am too I mean like the more light that is shed on this I think the better and like. Unfortunately weird things happened but I feel like if there's any chance for some sort of.

Some sort of you know. Across the board or even in certain areas just specifically any sort of like justice that the amount of public attention on this now is you know. Potentially something that could help bring something like that about. So I don't it's been it's been like sort of a weird ride for us X members with all of that just sort of like retraumatizing to see everything happen. But at the end of the day I think a lot of us are hopeful that things can change now that people know about it because you know. Before that it wasn't something that was ever really talked about. Groups like this thrive on this sort of weird combination of like operating in the shadows and also when they show up it's through their own PR stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. And you know sometimes the best way to break that apparently is you shoot someone who was you shoot a guy who they who was working for them. And yeah I don't know. I mean yeah I feel like Yamagami sort of managed to at least you know he he did what he he did a thing and it has had sort of probably some of the impact that he imagined it would. So I don't know. Yeah like honestly like I from from what I've read of his stuff like I I think this went better than he expected it like it couldn't possibly have gone. Yeah. He seemed like really really sort of just like had abandoned all hope.

Yeah. And I don't know. I mean I like I guess the other thing that I really hope out of this comes out of this is that like you don't have to have people like destroying their lives a second time. Yeah. In sort of like just out of the incredible desperation of what they've been through. Right. Yeah. So any of that would be optimal.

Yeah. Yeah. Because the you know the more that the longer the unification church operates the more people will be abused and the more violence will come out of it like maybe this is the most high profile like recent bit of violence that's come out of the movement. But it's not unprecedented in any way so you know it's like that's what happens when people are abused. Yeah. And I think it's also worth just sort of like reminding people that one of the sort of so the church is sort of splintered into various factions. Yeah. A lot of the people well OK a Trump Trump gave a speech at like the at an event of the mainline church a bunch of like so what are the other guys like what are the other splinter factions had a bunch of people at January 6th.

So. Rod of Iron Ministries or. Yeah. Sanctuary church. And those are those are the guys who had the AR 15 gun blessing ceremony a few years ago that made the rounds where they were bullet crowns and their robes and they had the guns and they've also got land in in Pennsylvania and Tennessee and also in Waco Texas where basically preparing people for war with what Sean Moon has described as something akin to the globalist deep state Marxists. I don't know if those are his exact words but it was something like that. So they're you know like they're they have an active militia they're preparing for war.

That is what the rod of iron is for them that is the gun. Yeah and these are the if I remember my stuff on this right this is the fashion that owns car arms right. Yes they do. Yeah. Yeah. So they have a gun manufacturer now. OK. Like if Robert were here Robert would probably start quibbling with me about how good like the quibbling with me about the actual quality the weapons they produce but like.

OK. They have them. They have they they they they have a weapons manufacturing. Yeah. Which is terrifying. Yeah. And they make the Trump gun because of course they're all super pro Trump. Yeah.

Very like Patriot. A lot of QAnon overlap there. And actually Rod of Iron Ministries in Japan has been helping organize QAnon events. And yeah. So like there was also and so basically the relationship between Rod of Iron and the mainline you see is super tense Sean Moon and a couple of his other brothers basically want their mother dead. And who is she's the you know the head of the mainline church right now. And not just dead but like specifically beheaded. So there was an event recently over the summer I think it was like the end of June where Sean was gosh I forget I forget where he was in Japan.

But basically he was sort of like railing at the audience for supporting his mother. And then when people spoke up in defense of her they were literally like physically thrown out of the room. It was super intense. Yeah. There's there's footage of it. It is. Yeah. Yeah.

It's it's a really fucking intense moment. Yeah. And he's like they're saying she had like sex with a demon or something like that and had fallen and all of this you know got like I don't know. Sometimes I watch a bit of the guy's speeches just because I'm like I want to know what the fuck they're up to. Yeah. And at first of all it seems like he might do a lot of cocaine which would not be unprecedented given the moonies and all of their drug smuggling and shit. Well I mean we have like what was his name. Oh God.

I'm blanking on the name of what one of his other sons was like was like literally spending like a shell corporations like net income amounts like per month on cocaine at one point. Like. Was that Hyogen possibly. I think it was. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was Hyogen. Yeah.

And he's also enormous abuse of piece of shit. Yeah. It sucks. Yeah. People are all well. Okay. That's not true. The people who are still actively involved in the church and who didn't break themselves out and flee like the first opportunity they got are like enormous pieces of shit.

Yeah. I mean because like even at the end of the day if they're not specifically doing anything that like directly harm somebody they're giving money to these institutions that do into people who do and giving them support and you know. Reinforcing all of that shit. And then you know. Yeah. I mean. Most of them are just shitty in general too. Yeah.

I also like specifically also about like. Yeah. There were a couple of people who like got forcibly married into the family. Yeah. Like left and I don't I do not want people to get to get the impression that I think they're bad because they're not like they got. Yeah. Really horrible stuff happened to them. They were able to escape.

That's good. But also. Jesus Christ. Like. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing that it's like sometimes hard to talk to like you know childhood friends or my family who's still involved because I feel like it's like you know if you're supporting this group you're implicitly supporting fascism and murder and death squads and rape and all of these awful things. And you know a lot of members don't know that those bits of history about the church.

But if anyone who is listening is in the UC I would definitely say to look those things up because they are all over the place. Yeah. Okay. So specifically yet are really inside the league by Scott and Lee Anderson. Okay. I will say this. Yeah. They're it is kind of hard to read because these people are journalists they're not normally book authors and the idea of starting at the beginning of a story and then moving through to the end of it is like an entirely foreign concept to them.

So it is constantly jumping around between 16 million things. But yeah there is a lot of there's a lot of very good stuff in there. Yeah it's an incredible resource. I would also suggest reading the there's like a bunch of articles that Robert Pahry did from his consortium news about the UC and like stuff back in the day on it. I would also say check out how well do you know your moon. Yeah. That's another great resource has a lot of you know like links and direct citations of a bunch of documents and shit. All good stuff.

Also I would plug John Gorinfeld's book. Oh it's called it's bad bad moon rising bad moon rising. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's it's another really good book on that. Yeah I think a new edition came out like very recently. Yeah so I think he has it actually a PDF of it or something for free on his website.

Yeah. And then another book I would suggest is gifts of deceit about the Thompson Park scandal and Korea gate. Another good one. God yeah. The thing about the moon is like there's just like entire like there's entire genres of like crime that they do that like. Doesn't even like make most accounts of them because they're doing too much other crime. Yeah literally there's just so much crime to for there's they've just done so much that it's hard to keep track of everything. Yeah.

And they literally have a million shell corporations and they literally do things under different names and in different places and then different types of atrocities that it's like how are you supposed to keep up with all this. That's why they do it that way because you're not supposed to. I mean it is I don't know like I. Figuring out how intelligence operations work is like easier than like trying to untangle this shit. Yeah honestly like that that stuff was you know a little more on the nose it's like oh yeah clearly this is like a joint psychological operation and other like you know back channels for money and trafficking things and people and stuff. But then it's like oh God what company owns what and how much do they make and like where do they move their money around it's just like. Yeah I know. That's that side is like why navigate this.

Yeah. I am extremely fortunate to be a part of a group of people who's working on this stuff now. You know we're going to what we're going to try to do is sort of make like a unification church Wikipedia kind of thing. So that we have like all of it in one place and then you know potentially down the line maybe do like a people's history of the unification church or something like that. Yeah. But in the meantime we're just compiling a bunch of information. Yeah are there ways people can support you and also can support deprogramming imperialism in this the work you all have been doing. Yeah so I have a patreon.

It's a Lisa Majoub a l i s a m a h j o u b. You can follow me on Twitter at a Lisa underscore Majoub same spelling deprogramming imperialism has a Twitter. It is since the programming imperialism was not was too long to put in as a username. What we're using is no more cults which is no underscore more underscore cults. And then we have a Instagram as well under deprogramming imperialism I believe let me double check. And we will we will put links to all this stuff in the show notes. Yeah. Awesome.

Cool cool cool. Yeah it's deprogramming imperialism just just together together words sorry. It's just not working. The words are smashed together there's no space that's that's there we go I did it. Yeah well I think I think I think that's going to be all for us today. Thank you so so much for joining us. Thank you for having me I really appreciate this and hopefully you know this will just have help more people to sort of like understand what's going on there and sort of the history of the UC and as well as you know maybe shine some light on the obvious assassination and you know the more people who know about this the better I think so I really appreciate being on here because you guys have a pretty big platform so that means a lot to me. And I'm really I'm really really glad that that you came on for this because I don't know like it's really like it's really easy to like cover stuff like this and just never actually sort of like get to the human like the actual human impact of it.

Yeah. Yeah and so yeah I'm really glad I was able to talk to you. Thank you I'm glad I was able to talk to you because that it was fun it was fun it was informative and getting the word out we're doing it we're doing the thing. Yeah. Yeah. Feels good. Again I don't have any problems beating puppies. Oh no this isn't recorded.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here the podcast where Garrettson Davis is fine with violence against dogs. Yeah right as you said that Anderson Mark by the way. Wow. Wow. Cancelable. Yeah. Cancelable. Deathly allergic to dogs.

But they love you so much. So if people were if people were gonna pick an assassination method for me just to get a whole bunch of dog dander and rub it on my pillow and I'll be dead with I'll be dead the next morning. I've seen you get rubbed on by a bunch of dogs and you've never died yet. No I yeah yeah that's true. You get uncomfortable and you have to use your inhaler and it's you know but I don't I just I just ignore that. You get uncomfortable and you have to use your inhaler Robert's like that's great I'm super thrilled with that outcome. You know what other outcome I'm thrilled with. Oh good.

Hey. Great intro. Sick transition. So we are talking about the assassination of Alexander Dugan's daughter. Hell yes. It's it's it's it's kind of a wild story. There's a lot of weird things going on. We still don't know much about what actually happened.

There's a lot of conflicting theories a lot of experts who are saying different quote unquote experts who are saying different things. It's it's wild but I have a little write up here that we're going to go through based on what I assume everyone's questions will be about this assassination. First thing probably before we before we get into Alexander Dugan's daughter. I guess it's probably worth clarifying who Alexander Dugan is because to understand the nature of this assassination and possible motives. It's important to know who he is as a person. So I know we've talked about Dugan on the show before kind of briefly but Alexander Dugan is a Russian traditionalist neo-fascist political theorist. Some people call him a philosopher. I think that's being a little generous.

That's so many fun things in a row in that description. Oh yeah. Yeah he was born in 1962 into a high ranking military family and Dugan spent his early years as an anti-communist dissident in the collapsing Soviet Union. He joined various dissident ultra nationalist occult anti-Semitic and fascist groups or collectives that sprung up during the last two decades of the Soviet Union. In the 90s he was one of the founders of the Russian National Bolshevik Party which he left in the late 90s because the party was not fascist enough. So he left the political party. He helped start because it had too many of the Bolshevik parts of the National Bolshevik Party. He kind of carries on some of the traditionalist political philosophy from 20th century esoteric fascist writers like Julius Evola whose book on pagan imperialism Dugan translated into Russian.

Just as a brief bit of context for people. Now fascism and communism are portrayed as in strict opposition to each other but if we're going back to the 20s and 30s, a lot of these guys had a lot of things in common. There were times where the Communist Party of Germany and the Nazis would fight the cops together. There were people in the Nazi Party who were more or less national Bolsheviks in terms of their political outlook. And they were all murdered on the night of long knives like the Nazi Party had a left wing that it purged. Anyway, this is just like this is not coming out of nowhere. This isn't a new development.

Well, and the thing with Dugan is that he really is does carry on that type of red-brown alliance idea with a lot of his politics of bringing together some of the more harder fascists with some people who are more like authoritarian communists. And we see that with the National Bolshevik Party. At this point, Dugan is probably most known for his influence on contemporary Russian politics. The neo-eurasianism ideology, his writing on the multipolar world theory and his fourth political theory about the ascension of Russia as the world's like traditionalist political power and usurping the kind of political dominance of the United States. And Dugan's neo-eurasianism is described by Anton Shachakoslav, an Eastern European far-right scholar as quote, a form of fascist ideology centered on the idea of revolutionizing the Russian society and building a totalitarian Russian dominated Eurasian empire that would challenge and eventually defeat its eternal adversary represented by the United States and its Atlanticist allies, thus bringing about a new golden age of global political and cultural illiberalism. Unquote. So it's very centered in just being against the ideas of liberalism and being against like globalist liberalism like actual like globalization and still carrying over a lot of influences from esoteric writers like Julius Savola in terms of its anti-modern anti-liberal politics based in like traditional. Anti-multicultural, right? Like this, yeah. If you've ever seen someone screening about like global homo or something, like that's probably one of these guys.

Yeah, and Dugan's daughter actually in her last ever interview talks about that a little bit. About global homo? Yes. There's a lot of people in the U.S. who like see this shit and like mistake it for anti-imperialism and it's like basically because like they've lost the ability to like conceive of an empire that isn't the U.S. Britain or France and even that sort of tenuous and it's like guys like from a lot of these questionable accounts you get the attitude that like well only the United States is capable of being imperialism, which is then just say you're anti-U.S., just say you're anti the United States because you're not anti-imperialism because let me tell you something, there've been a lot of empires in history. Controversial statement from Robert Evans. Yeah, quite a few different empires over time. They're not all America. Probably worth like pointing out that Russia as it exists is an empire, right? It's just a contiguous one. It's one that is joined by land, not separated by seas, doesn't stop it being an empire.

Yes. As we can see with them trying to expand into Ukraine, which is heavily influenced itself by some of the theory that Dugan was writing from the 90s up until now. And then kind of in reference to Dugan's influence on contemporary Russian politics, especially since Russia's so far failed invasion of Ukraine, Dugan is often referred to as quote unquote Putin's brain or quote unquote Putin's Rasputin. And while he is certainly very well connected and has, and while he is certainly well connected and has quite a bit of influence in Russia and the global far right movement in general, the degree to which he holds a significant power in the decisions that Putin makes is definitely heavily contested among actual political experts. Yes. We think some of the whole Putin's brain and Putin's like Rasputin thing is a little bit overemphasized.

Over-emphasized sometimes Dugan's never held office. There's Dugan. Dugan's never, we don't even have a picture of Dugan and Putin together. Like we don't even know if they've actually like been in the same room. We don't know if they're the same person. Yes. Dugan and Putin are the same person. Yes. That's correct Chris.

The thing that is important to know about Putin as regards Dugan. Because again, as Garrison said, not trying to make a statement here about the degree to like saying that he is or is not any kind of influence. But Vladimir Putin has been doing this, has been working towards the where he is now for decades. And is a guy who has had a view of the world for decades that he's worked towards making real. And it's not a view of the world that you need to be Dugan's an esotericist. Like you do not need to think esoterically to understand what Vladimir Putin is doing. He wants to reunite the Russian imperial project that fell apart when the Soviet Union did using violence and whatever other means he can do. Which is why he's gone, done what he's done in Georgia.

It's why he's done doing what he's doing in Ukraine. This is not like complicated understanding Putin's motivations is not hard. I think a lot of people have kind of leaned into that Putin's brain thing, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, because in Dugan's seminal 1997 book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugan lays out his vision to divide the world up and calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances. While all in heavy opposition to Ukraine as a sovereign state, and a lot of Dugan's writing has been about trying to reconquer Ukraine and absorb it into Russia. Yeah, and he's a useful guy, but yeah, again, sorry. In an article from The Guardian that I was using, it's one of the sources for this episode, they claim that The Foundations of Geopolitics was a very popular book in the Russian General Staff Academy. And kind of was one of the things that shifted Dugan from like a weird esoteric dissident to actually becoming a more influential and prominent pillar of the conservative establishment inside Russia.

As Dugan's writing evolved, started to emphasize less the more esoteric elements, his writing did get more popular in Russia. But at this point, he is stronger as a symbol, less so than having actual personal influence over decision making. You know what does have influence over your decision making? They have influence over your decision making. The subliminal messages that we've been placing inside our ads for the past three years, that is been an esoteric project of my design to influence you to buy these products and services. Right, James? I'm trying to. I think we have a couple of different esoteric projects. I'm not sure what y'all says. I'm trying to get people to bring the Subaru Baja back. That was the Subaru car that had like a little truck bed in the back. Yeah, it was the Subaru car. Oh my God. What a fucking... Yeah, I was going to combine car and truck in one word, but I realized where that was taking me, and I stopped immediately.

No, it is a cuck. It is a cuck. It's my second favorite cuck. Why don't they call it the Subaru cuck, and I would buy one immediately. Yeah. The Subaru cuck. Yeah, please buy a Subaru cuck. Enjoy these adverts. And we're back. All right, so I think it's now actually time to talk about the actual casualty. This is assassination, which is not Alexander Dugan. It is instead Daria Dugina. Daria dead Gina more like it. Yes, so she was born on December 15, 1992.

Wow. Daria herself was a Russian journalist and far right activist who was very vocal in support of their... Well, I mean, yeah, she did work for a number of journalism outlets, not only in Russia, including in France. She was a journalist. She did work. It wasn't very good. She's a bad person, but she worked for a few French outlets. She was very vocal in support of the invasion of Ukraine in accordance with her father's political theories. She studied at the Moscow State University, specializing in the political philosophy of late neoplatonism. So you already know she's going to be really annoying. If anyone even tries to describe that degree program to me, I might hit them.

Absolutely no. We have in that one sentence alone laid out justification for assassination. Okay, come on. I think that's a bit too far. No, I'm going to say right now, I bought property with land so that when people say the word neoplatonism around me, I can get rid of the body. So here's some fun facts about Daria. She played the flute. She was in a band, I think in college, called Dacin May Refuse, which was an electronic music band. I bet her shit did actually rock. It probably did slap. This was when she was less of a fascist actually.

Now, just in terms of something that kind of an interesting note here. So Dacin translates to hear being, which was one of Alexander Dugan's favorite terms. It's related to the philosophical concepts, esposed by Martin Heidegger. Yes. So it's just a little nerdy reference to both her father. I guess she was probably exposed to the phrase via her father, but it's a Heidegger reference. So she named her electronic music band off of Heidegger. If you're in a band, you need to kill her ghost now, which is pretty funny. Yeah, if you're in a band with a Heidegger reference to leave that band now. But yeah, when she was in university, her friends say she actually wasn't really into her dad or her dad's politics.

Her friends talk about that. When she was in university, she really liked Guy de Borde. She was interested in some of the more French... Oh, the situationist. Yeah. Just quickly, it's like a lot of popular stuff on the left now, shit like a crime thing, but also stuff like Adbusters is influenced by Guy de Borde. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, also like the French Revolution in 18... 1968.

1968. Why was it 1848? Yeah, but... Yeah, I was sure. Guy de Borde. Yeah, Guy de Borde was arrived for 120 years and never aged. It was also, I will say this is a thing a lot of people don't know about de Borde, was influential in the development of war games and is part of the intellectual tradition that gave us Warhammer 40,000. That actually makes a lot of sense. His game is sick.

It makes complete sense, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so she wasn't into stuff like that inside university. Like situationism. Yeah. And then... Was she a situationist? Yeah.

She must have been if she likes de Borde. I don't think she would have described herself as that. But that was the types of stuff that she liked talking about. And that was the types of groups that she was involved with. She never talked about her father. And her father was already a very popular person at this time, specifically inside Russian universities. But she did not drive with that type of stuff. And then by the end of her kind of time in university, she started shifting more towards what her friends described as orthodoxy.

I would say is like she should have more towards her father's traditionalist stuff. I'm not sure what exactly caused this shift to happen. But here's a quote from one of her friends quote, it was strange because before that she not shown any interest in him and her father had no influence on her. That is strange. So yeah, by the end of her time in university and by the time she was out of university, she actually just became an activist with the international Eurasianism movement of Dugan. And began to arrange lectures for her father and became a very active supporter of his. And then after that she started writing for state run news outlets like RT and running parts of her father's website where she was then listed as his press secretary. And started to appear at the events of the Eurasian movement as a speaker as well.

So she shifted in like the last like probably 10, 15 years past like 10 years, she was shifting more towards her father, even though when she was in her 20s, she was more into some of the French leftist stuff. That doesn't surprise. Number one, it's pretty normal for young people to rebel against their parents in that era and be interested in stuff outside of it. And like, I think there's a couple of different ways this could have gone, but a thing that makes total sense to me is that she's rebellious, she explores some things. The primary thing she learns is that life out there is hard and like making a living on your own and completely like is difficult. And her dad has a lot of influence and she can make a lot of money working for him. And so back, back she goes. Yep.

I don't know the woman. She lost, she lost a lot of her friends over this because when she started doing stuff with her dad, her friends who were like, situations, people are like, no, fuck that. We're not going to hang out with you. It seems like we're going to be response. Yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of actually a bummer. Like I only, I only, I only got to this part of her life a few days ago when I was doing the research. And this is actually something I stumbled upon later into my research for this episode because I was mostly, I was only focused on like the actual assassination part.

And when I found this, I was like, oh, that's actually kind of sad. Yeah, that is sad. Yeah, I will say. I will say, I don't know if this is at work here, but there is a thing in like, there is a current in their French ultra left, like after 68, going into the 70s and 80s, that gets like really fucking weird and kind of goes fascist based around. It's a long story. There's a whole thing about a guy who was like sort of involved in the ultra left circles who was like, I think he'd been in, he'd been in a concentration camp, but he'd been in one of the ones that like wasn't an extermination camp.

And he started doing like Holocaust denial. And there's like this whole fucking thing where like a bunch of these people, like kind of went really, really fucking weird. The rest of the people, like the rest of the ultra left disowned them and like they like were kind of involved in a bunch of the sort of like, the, like founding the French neo fascism. Yeah, I mean, it's not like it's not, it's not a path that like has never happened before. Yeah, that's not coming out of nowhere. Especially when your father is who he is. That's not surprising.

So when she started, so yeah, in the past few years, she started acting as her father's press secretary, scheduling events for him. She was doing, she was doing more writing on her own in various outlets, including state run outlets, but also outlets in other countries. But definitely shifting more towards the kind of traditionalist Eurasianism side of politics. Earlier this year, she was sanctioned by both US and UK authorities who under under accusations that she was significantly contributing to online disinformation around Russia's invasion. And in an interview just a few months before her death, Daria expressed pride that both she and her father had been targeted by Western sanctions. They kind of she kind of wore it as like as like a badge of honor. Anti imperialism. In its filing the UK office of financial sanctions called a Dugina, a frequent high profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russia invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms.

Cool. And to get a sense of how she actually politically described herself in the months before her death in an interview from May of 2022. She described herself as quote, a political observer of the international Eurasianist movement and an expert in international relations. My field of activity is in the analysis of European politics and geopolitics. In this capacity, I appear on Russian, Pakistani, Turkish, Chinese and Indian television channels, presenting a multipolar world view of political processes. For me, a particularly important issue is the development of the multipolar world theory. It is clear that the globalist movement is over and the end of liberalism has come. The end of liberal history, unquote.

So and backwards Fukuyama and guess and guess what she thinks is going to replace liberal history. I have some theories. It's Orthodox traditionalist Russian fascism. She in that same interview, she described the war in Ukraine as quote, a clash between globalist and Eurasian civilization. Oh, I'll let my friends in Kiev know what they are. That's great. They'll be excited by that. It is.

It is one of the things that's been sort of interesting to me about this whole thing is like, OK, so do you can sort of comes out of like, like Russian national bullshit isn't to some extent, right? But then like, if you look at the propaganda about Ukraine, it's like, OK, these people are all these people are all Nazis, but like also their communists and also they're gay. And it's like, yes, well, that's the thing is like, you know, do people like Dugan and Dugina while being absolutely fascists can can pretend to be against Nazis for various reasons. Dugina definitely is and and Dugan as well are pretty homophobic. And they view gayness as a sign of like degenerate liberalism. So like, but like they definitely walk that line between like, but you know, and that that's the thing. A lot of the like red, brown alliance or national Bolshevik type things do is walk that line and how they how they try to present their, you know, cultural beliefs or heavily based in traditionalism versus their versus their beliefs on like, fascism and communism.

But anyway, we are let's see. And in her last ever interview, which took place on the day of her death, Dugina said that, quote, Western just like Biggie, by the way, I don't know who that is. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We need to stop. All right, we're doing a biggie episode next. You have your homework for this week.

These come back next week and do better. So in her last ever interview, she said that quote, Western totalitarianism has come to an end, and a special military operation is it seems to me, then the last nail in the coffin of this world hegemon. And then later on the interview, she talked about how environmentalism support for transgender people, quote, the conversion of a person into a homosexual, unquote, as well as veganism and veganism are tools with which the West is trying to fragment society and reduce its population. It's not that cocaine was expensive and the fucking Trader Joe's didn't lock its dumpster. It's that. Okay, awesome. So yeah, so those those those were the views that she espoused hours before dying.

So well, talking about the conversion of a person into a homosexual, transgender people, veganism as being the things that are destroying the West. To be clear, all of these things are based and showed in fact destroy the West. But if the if the thing that finally kills capitalism is dumpster diving teams, I will be thrilled. But I just don't see it happening. So before we get to the actual deed, let's set the stage for where this this event took place and where everything went down. So it's August 20th, a Saturday, Alexander Dugan and Daria Dugena are attending this festival just outside of Moscow, where Dugan's making a planned appearance at and he gave a lecture that Saturday evening at this festival. Now the the festival is called the tradition, quote unquote, tradition is what is whatever everything calls it. So I wonder what the festival is about, huh?

I'm sure it's just appreciation of of the headline song from the play Fiddler on the Roof. So best to sung by zero Mastel. Look it up. Seriously, it's an incredible performance. That must have been it, right? So the tradition festival is billed as quote, a patriotic cultural festival and family event for art, literature and music lovers. No dance, no traditional dance. This is the lamest thing I've ever heard.

So it's basically it's it's this traditionalist kind of quasi fascist like art festival for people who like neoplatonism is what it actually is. It takes place in Zarkov manner. It's this it's this biggest state about 12 miles away from Moscow. The tradition festival is supported by the Presidential Fund for cultural initiatives, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism for the Moscow region, among a few other kind of sponsors and both Daria and her father were special guests at this year's festival. In an interview, a colleague of Dugina's said that the conversation topics at the festival between Duke and his daughter and other tradition festival attendees. They said they said this in an interview quote, we talked about the Russian idea, the empire and the cultural war, unquote. So that's just like the regular conversations you're having at this festival to give you a sense of like what this thing actually is. And the blast that eventually that did kill Dugan's daughter happened shortly after Dugina left the tradition festival at the estate where her father had given a lecture just hours previous.

Do you know who do you know who won't blow up and I don't want to say that. Look, I'm going to say right now, if you are planning to assassinate a member of the Dugan family and want to sponsor our podcast, we're on board. I think we're fine with that, actually. Does it discounted tear for those people? Yeah, yeah, actually, we'll do it for free. Just give us a name. Because we are Freegans and we're a countdown society. This is this is part of our radical Freegan identity. This is this is this is what I'm going to do in between stealing old pumpkin spice coffee from the Trader Joe's dumpster.

Unbelievable. I will do it. I will do a traditionalism to because pumpkin spice coffee is destroying the West. We have to kill it. Yeah. Robert and Daniel fucking love the pumpkin spice. It's amazing. It's destroying.

It's disgusting. It's not for me to generate liberalism in the form of pumpkin spice coffee has to enjoy it in any way. I don't want to yuck your yum. I'm happy to enjoy it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would like to yuck your yum, Robert.

Oh, my God. Here's an outbreak. You know what? Yes. We are. We are back. I'm going to open up with a quote from. I love quotes from the bomb.

I don't know who that I don't know what that is. Oh, the bomb. The bomb. The blue heart. Yeah. Kablooie. Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. Bomb, when you exploded, what's going through your head then? What are you thinking about? Pots of Daria Dugina. We actually. Great. No, it's actually. No, no, perfect. Yeah.

We're finishing assassination week. To actually justify some of our kind of glee at this happening. Because Dugan's a horrible person. I'm going to. So is his daughter. They're both trash. Yeah. I am going to read a quote from a Peuter Sauer in the Guardian quote on Saturday night, the

violence that the ultra-nationalist Russian thinker Alexander Dugan has propagandized for decades suddenly entered his own life when his daughter was killed in a car bomb on the outskirts of Moscow. I think that's a really important thing that like he's made his entire career off of doing violence on other people and and promoting genocides on people that he doesn't like. There are people I know who are dead because of the war that he and his daughter urged to happen. So.

Yeah. Yeah. It's why it's it's it's the same thing as like when every single fucking neocon ghoul dies like no one should no one should no one should feel bad about them at all because they spent they dedicated their entire lives to having another country be invaded and having all these people killed their lives destroyed. So fuck them. But yeah.

The violence the violence that he's fetishized and and propagandized for decades has has actually entered his life for like the first time now and that's funny. So after giving a talk at the festival, Dugan and his daughter were due to leave the venue together in the same car if only but at the last minute, Dugan decided to travel separately and take different vehicles. He was sent off by the CIA. According to a friend of the family now, because at the last minute he did decide to take another vehicle.

This actually has spawned a lot of conspiracy theories, which we'll kind of get into it a bit later. But but this this is what happened is that they were they were they were going to leave together and at last minute they decided to take separate vehicles five minutes later while Dugan was driving a Toyota Land Cruiser on the highway. Oh, see now that makes a little bit of a tragedy that is a fine car. I didn't deserve to in that way. Yeah.

Why couldn't it why couldn't it have been a Ford, Robert sometimes sacrifices are necessary for the cause. Yeah, but this is I'm going to put that Land Cruiser on a flag. Let's let's let's all pour one out for Comrade Toyota Land Cruiser. You served us well. You made the ultimate sacrifice. So that mankind might be free to go off roadic. So as as as as she was driving this Toyota Land Cruiser on the highway, a bomb exploded

in her car, killing her immediately and sadly ripping the vehicle apart. Witnesses say debris was thrown all over the road as the Toyota Land Cruiser immediately lost control and crashed into a fence and engulfed in flames. Was anyone else hurt? No. There's incredible stuff. Yeah. I mean, a really solid assassination.

Honestly, it's one of the better executed ones, especially for a car, especially for a car bomb. For a car bomb. It's like it's one of the most impressive car bomb attacks that has ever happened. Yeah. That's great. You see a car bomb. That's.

Yeah. That car bomb, that car bomb killed nobody. But yeah, that was quite a car bomb. It was a big boom. We thought that fucker was an airstrike at first. Yes. Yeah. That was a large car bomb.

I witnesses called the fire brigade, but by the time they arrived, the entire car was up in flames and firefighters only found one badly burnt corpse in the remains of the vehicle. So investigators say an explosive device planted under the car, went off in the vehicle, caught fire. This happened about 12 miles west of Moscow on in the village near the village of a boy. You don't need to try that. Nobody needs to know. Professor Valim's, Val Zemi.

Versium. Versium. Versium. Versium. Okay. Versium. Near the village of Bolshar, Val Zemi. At around 9 30 p.m. local time.

Investigators do believe the bombing was, quote, premeditated and. Oh, really? Really? Yeah. It wasn't casual spur in the moment. a moment. Guys just walking down the street with a bomb, see Stugina driver. Hmm. Yeah, why not? It was like explosive addition. It wasn't it wasn't a vehicle error. This was a bomb planted under it. No, no, no, absolutely not. A Ford or a Chevy, a Pinto. Sure. Yeah.

If if if a fucking F 150 goes up like that, I'm blaming Ford, but no, this must have been a bombing. So the bomb was placed under the car on the driver's side. Now a friend of the family named Andre Krasnov, who's also the head of the Russia Horizon social movement, was that one of the first ones to confirm the reports of of Daria's death and but also said that the bomb could have actually been intended for her father. And he gave this quote to media quote, this was the father's vehicle. Daria was driving another car, but she took his car today while Alexander went in a different way. He returned. He was at the site of the tragedy. As far as I understand Alexander or probably them together were the

target unquote. Now this is this is just speculation actually from what I can tell. There is actually more evidence suggesting the car was indeed registered to Daria Dukina. I don't believe it is her father's car. We there was some of the vehicle registration was leaked by a Russian opposition news news site like a news site in in Russia who is not state funded leaked the car registration. It was registered to Daria, not not not Alexander Dugan. So but it is very likely that Dugan may have been a target as well, like very extremely likely. It's hard. It's hard to say. Now in one of the funniest parts of the assassination, footage posted on Telegram appears to show Mr. Dugan walking up to the site of the crash.

In shock with his with his mouth just gaping open and hands on his head like this like this surprise to me face. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. He's walking up to the site of the crash like, oh, it's very good. That is that is that's the sound of the faces making is we love to see a wizard in distress. So sad wizard. So the attack happened on Saturday and then come Monday, the Federal Security Service or the the FSB said that the murder has been solved come come come the next Monday. And this is this is not true. This is what we call a lie from the FSB. Yes, that's that's really disappointing and untruth. Yeah, that's wow. From the Russian FBI. No, no intelligence services ever told

a lie. Then no, that's disappointing. So so yes, according according to according to the the FSB, the the attack was mastermind by the Ukrainian secret surfaces and and carried out by an A's of Ukrainian national name. That's Aliya Volk, who fled. Wow. Last name Volk. Yeah. Yeah, we're we're putting the crime on Johnny racist. Keep hit the fan. Did it again? Who fled to Estonia? Estonia, that's Estonia. Estonia following the killing. So Russia. Russia's FBS did a very brief investigation. Yes, sorry. Russia's FSB did a very brief investigation claimed that it was this female Ukrainian citizen and that and that she fled the next day, which was Sunday. Ukraine says, nah, not really. Yeah, that is basically that

Ukraine is made. Yeah, Ukraine's really good at that noise, actually. It's one of those things. I would not be surprised. Obviously, if Ukraine did it, and they have the people responsible or some of their network are still in country, of course, you you make a denial. But if Ukraine did it and they were out of the country, I can't imagine why they wouldn't be like, yeah, man, we fucking did it. Yeah, so we're at war. I'll read the actual statement. So a Ukrainian official dismissed the accusations of Ukraine's involvement in the incident, quote, Ukraine, of course, has has nothing to do with this because we are not a criminal state, which is the Russian Federation. And even less, a terrorist state said, Mykilyo

Podialak, who is an advisor to President Zelensky. So yeah, I mean, maybe Ukraine obviously denies involvement in this. There's a bunch of people it could be. It could be Ukraine, could be the CIA, could be Ukraine and the CIA, could be the FSB or the GRU. A lot of people have theorized all of those things. Yeah, there's really no way to know. A lot of people could have done this. Yeah. Are we are we going to get into the person who designated the bomb or like the car they used? We don't know what actually happened. I'm going to get to some of this a bit later. But some of the actual mechanisms that causes to happen are still unclear because the because the FSB is not like given us any definitive

evidence on how this thing actually worked. But the head of the the Donetsk People's Republic, they issued their own statement on Telegram saying vile villains, the terrorists of the U.S. Scoundrels. So they're just they're just doing a Cobra commander. That's awesome. You know what? Vile villains, the terrorists of the Ukrainian regime trying to eliminate Alexander Dugan blew up his daughter in a car. We cherish the memory of Daria. She is a real Russian girl. That's their statement. I do. I love that they had in a car as if that makes it worse. But like if they blown her up some other way, it would not have been as vile.

But in a car. I just love that they ended with she was a real Russian girl. Yeah. It's like Pinocchio. It's very funny. So some some politicians and experts, quote unquote, experts have said that Putin himself may have orchestrated the bombing with little to no evidence in support of that theory. There was a British member of parliament said that Putin may have targeted Dugan over recent criticisms made against his government, which I find to be very fishy. Putin's gotten rid of a shitload of guys who used to be close to him lately and he didn't use car bombs for it. Yeah, he pushed about windows. They commit suicide. They get sick, you know. Yeah. A lot of many historians or like, you know, extremism kind

of researchers are definitely kind of eyeing up the the FSB. Sure. It's but it's it's really it's it's really unclear. There was a people proposed that like this this attack was orchestrated to kind of create a wave of needed anger in Russia six months into their failed invasion. Yeah, that works for them. Ruslan, a trad, a security researcher in the in the US think tank, Atlanta Council proposed that the the the FSB or other Russian state kind of apparatuses could have been involved, saying that's evident that the the murder of Dugana created a wave of needed anger in Russia. And that quote, Dugan is now mostly a symbol, not an instrument for the state. His role in the creation of current

Kremlin mythology for Eurasia and the so called Russian world has already ended and he and he can be sacrificed. Currently, the Russian army needs victories and a patriotic flame. So they they're kind of proposing that he was it was like this like symbolic sacrifice at like if we sacrifice this figure that means this thing, people will be willing to like keep on fighting. The Ukrainians literally have literally bombed and struck inside Russia at this point and killed 50,000 plus of their children. You would think that would be enough to make the Russians angry like blowing up this weirdo's daughter isn't going to be the thing that galvanizes the nation. Well, to be clear, though, this is the kind of dumb

shit the Atlantic Council would be advocating for. Yeah, absolutely. The Atlantic Council shit. Yes. Yeah. And one of the one of the funnier explanations that our theories being posited is by former Russian State Deputy Ilya Ponomorov, who is now in so in an appearance on his Russian language opposition TV channel in Kiev, alleged that that Dugino was killed by Russian partisans from a previously unknown anti Putin terrorist group dubbed the National Republican Army and that both Dugin and his daughter were targets. And according to this guy, the group authorized him to issue their manifesto via his telegram channel. This group is entirely made up. This is not real. This is like this like this like this like former

Russians. This is like this. This former Russian official turned this like Ukrainian Lib guy who claims that it's this secret anti Putin liberal terrorist group. No, that contacted him and and secret. This is this is their first ever attack. That's that they're going public as this new terrorist group. And I'm going to say this is the only one of these theories that is that I don't believe like the the this assassination is a lot like what happened to Epstein where everyone who brings up a theory has some other reason for having that theory. And so I don't trust anything anyone says about it. But every theory about why he might how he might have died is plausible, right? Like every all of these are plausible.

Yeah, I might like I don't listen. I don't care what the Atlantic Council has to say, but yeah, it could have been the FSB. I don't care about like what the Russian government has to say, but yeah, it could have been the Ukrainians, but definitely was not liberal terrorist groups first bombing. No, yeah, like this is this is the thing like that one of one of the like the like these single thing where like you can instantly tell that someone is lying about what happened to the bombing is when they say a previously unknown group like every single thing is constantly it's so hard to bomb things. Yeah, yeah, like. So it's Sergei, some Lenny is a German political expert with particular focus on Russia and

Eastern Europe. Yeah, he's definitely has made a lot of statements talking about how Kremlin's version of events is definitely he says totally fake and absolutely out of the scale of possibility in terms of blaming it on this this one Ukrainian as off fighter who infiltrated Russia. And well, well, so the FSB has produced quote unquote evidence in support of this theory, saying that this Ukrainian citizen who arrived in Russia in July with her daughter rented an apartment in the same building as Dugina's and spied on. Easy time to enter Russia as a Ukrainian, by the way, July of this year. Yes. Yeah. And your child with your child rented an apartment in the same building as Duke and

Stodder. So specifically is Duke and Stodder and spied on her in like the month before the killing. The FSB released a purported passport photo of the Ukrainian citizen as well as a footage that allegedly showed her in Russia with many people, including Ukrainian officials and kind of data analysts and like disinformation researchers pointing out the various ways that the document seems forged or digitally fabricated. And some Lenny also says that this National Republican Army group is completely made up because there's there's no way that there could be a terrorist group like this. It was like an actual group active that's not infiltrated by the by the FSB right now. Just like he's like, you know, not like

people can do individual acts of terrorism, but have like a group like a big group like this comprised of like former Russian officials. He's like, that's just impossible. That's just not that's just not going to happen. Yeah. No, I agree with all of that. Honestly, one reason why someone involved in the Russian security state is plausible is because this was such a good bombing. It was very good. It's it's I'm leaning whoever it is because the CIA is also like I'm leaning towards it's it's a state actor or because like fucking bombs are hard to make. Especially like almost close to 0% of the time when an independent terrorist group makes a bomb doesn't work the way it's meant to. Yeah. And like this

this wasn't even ignition based. This blew up as she was driving on the highway. So like remote areas. It was. Yeah, like it could. Yeah, it could have been like heat activated. It's it could have had like a timer based on ignition stuff. But like whatever mechanism that got it to blow up that they got it to blow up is more complicated than your average car bomb. And it was way more successful than your average car bomb. So it's like it's it's bizarre how good they were at doing this. Yeah. And like I think it's worth mentioning like OK, like there was a time where you could just if you needed to make up car bomb like you could hire a guy who would teach you how to make a car bomb. Like we don't live in

that era anymore like that. Like in the 70s, you could plausibly do that. Right. Although if that's the kind of training you want to offer for people to help try to take out Alexander again, sponsor our podcast. Yeah, we're yeah, our podcast sponsored by Becca Valley to Becca Harder. I do believe that I have this one source here that the FSB claimed that the bomb was either made of or equivalent to 500 grams of TNT, which is what? No, that seems like a bit much, which is complete bullshit. But it's just like you'd use an Oregon to get rid of a whale. But that's just one of the statements that that's like that's one of the statements that that the FSB has made on this, that it's 500 grams of TNT, which

is just not true. Like that's just not how bombs work. So now we're going to get to some we're going to we're going to close off here by talking about the the aftermath and the televised funeral because it's kind of funny. So family, friends, dozens of colleagues and acquaintances of Daria Dugina got together live on TV on the Tuesday after after after her death to bid their final farewell to the quote unquote journalist killed in the car bomb attack outside of Moscow. That's quoting from TASS, one of the one of the Russian state funded media outlets. I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to read a quote from Alexander Dugan, who this is something he said on the televised funeral quote, she had no fear really.

And the last time we talked was at the festival tradition. She said, Daddy, I feel like a warrior. I feel like a hero. I want to be with my country. I want to be on the light side of the force. She's with a lot of Russian people now. And she's with about 50,000 or so other Russians right now. I just love that. Like saying that his daughter walked up to her and said, Daddy, I want to be on the light side of the force. She's like in her mid 30s. Like what the fuck? I mean, a significant chunk of her body mass was converted into light. I just I just I just said that. I don't know. I just think it's a really funny thing that Dugan was saying on this televised funeral. Just a bizarre quote. He also said that he

wanted to bring up his daughter the way that he saw the ideal person to be saying, quote, the first words that we taught her as a child were Russia, our state, our people, and our empire, unquote. Again, none of this is true. Like he's just not a weird thing to say at your daughter's funeral. No, you got it. Look, look, he got a daughter. It's like any other kind of investment, right? Like and then she's been exploded. You got to get as much as you can. Like really, it's like ringing out a towel, you know, you got to just make that last little bit count. And then Vladimir Putin a few days after after the assassination signed a decree to to award her with the Order of Courage post posthumously. So she did she

did explode courageously. So yeah, that is that that's the assassination of Dugan's daughter. It's wild because we don't really actually know we don't we don't really know who actually did it. We don't know much about the actual event. We're unsure of the actual the actual like a ignition of the bomb, how the bomb actually operated, who actually did it. I mean, obviously, like this whether whether Dugan himself was a target or was specifically Daria Dugina. Now, obviously, this was like heavily planned based off of her and Dugan's schedule, right? Because they were both openly going to be at this cultural festival. Anyone could have access to. Yeah, but like, you know, like it did require like, you know,

people were tracking their movements, being like, Oh, Dugan's going to be at this festival on this day. So like, it's there is a lot of like background work that went into this. And it's fascinating that we just we actually know very little about who who may have done this and how and how the bomb actually operated. The primary clue we have is just how good the bomb was, which means one way or the other a nation state actor, probably, but that does not really narrow it much. So yeah, that was that was again, one of the assassinations that happened shortly after we planned assassination week. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's what like, man, like easily our most successful PR campaign, one of our best bits today. It's just so

wild to think like how close Dugan was to dying because remember, like he he was planning to leave in that same car. And then at the last minute, decided to take separate vehicles. So was he behind her when it went off? Or like, yeah, yeah, that's why we got that great photo of him walking up to the site. Oh, yeah, we should point this out to you. Like if it had actually been like 500 grams of TNT, like he that bomb would have still been exploding when he walked up to it, like we would have a picture of him going, Oh my God, and then just his face would explode. But I mean, like a lot of conspiracy theories have popped up being like, well, Dugan was supposed to be in that car. And then he left last minute. Maybe he was in on it. Maybe,

like, maybe, you know, the Russian state told him this was going to happen. And he, and he just let it happen. And it was doing it for like this PR thing. And like, who knows, like, like, maybe, maybe Dugan didn't know that this was going to happen. Like, like, there's, there's no way to like, you're just, you're just, you're just speculating at that point. You're just creating theories in your own head. But it is, it is kind of funny that, that Dugan almost was in that car and then he wasn't. And that is, that is, that is at the very least in the interesting aspect of this assassination. But it's no evidence for one specific thing, right? It could just be like, Oh, I'm going to make a stop somewhere on my way back home,

right? Like, so I'm going to take this, I'm going to take this other vehicle. Like, there's so many other possible reasons for why he may have switched cars. But it is, it is, it's another, it is another like thing to that, that, that the people are turning into various theories. Yeah. The thing I'll say about that is like, you have to have a lot of faith in your bomb maker to drive behind a car bomb. Like, intentionally, like you've got to be like, I don't know. Either that or you really hate your daughter in a way that's very reckless. Yeah, but you could just like turn off the highway or something or like, Oh no, my car broke down. No, you need to make sure that bit goes down. You got to drop her. You got to press the big

plunger into the box. Yeah. Well, at least we're ending on a high note. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I do like that. We started, we started assassination week with a car bomb. Yeah. And we're ending it with a car bomb. 500 grams of TNT. She declared the nearest church. No doubt. It's like poetry. It's like poetry. It rhymes. And I want to be on the light side of the force. Quote, fine. According to Dugan, one of the last things Daria Dugan said, I want to be on the light side of the force. Somebody, if there were real journalists left in the world, somebody would reach out to George Lucas and just try to get a quote. And you're not, don't email him. It's like just go to a mall near Skywalker Ranch and wait until he goes to the sparrow. You'll find him.

All right. We're done. That doesn't for us today. Check under your driver's side door if you're Alexander Dugan. Imagine if he wasn't involved or wasn't aware of this. He is going to be looking over his shoulder like nonstop now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a man who's never getting into a car. He hasn't like shimmyed under. He's going to have to look under every car he gets into. It's so funny. We'd love to see it. Anyway, ta ta. All right. We're done. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple

Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.