Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 57

Episode Date: October 29, 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So look, I ain't going to hold you. I was not going to cover this because I feel like there's something that needs to be discussed at the domino table to cook out. And I just don't want to feed the machine. But at some point we got to decide who's man is this.

And somebody got to come get their boy ye. We got to decide, okay, when did he cross the line, y'all? And has he crossed the line? Because the important nuance of this is how we've survived is collective. We needed each other to survive. So when somebody got out of line, we looked out for each other. I don't know if you know this, but cornrows like the braids inside of people's hair were maps. The Negro spirituals, you sang songs as code for when it was time to go.

And so we had to carry it to them and when she got free, you know, she escaped herself and then decided I'm going to go back and get as many people as I can. Like this is, this is our story. We take care of each other. So that's why it's hard for us to just write people off to just cancel, especially if they black. It's hard for us because it's like we need to take care of each other. We can't let these white people like tell us what to do with our folks. But that being said, at some point we like, all right, nigga, you are on your own. You have hurt us too much.

So I didn't want to cover you because I still don't know how I feel. There are some statements that he said are obviously inexcusable, but I just didn't want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of that conversation. The Kanye stands and I'm done with these people. I just don't want to be a part of conversation. But Sophie hit me and the good folks that it can happen here here and was like, yo, we got to talk about this. And I was like, all right, I was on the fence. We need to talk about it.

Who's mans is this, y'all? Somebody come get that boy. So it's a crossover with the homie Garrison, Robert, and it could happen here team, Shareen. And we discussed this stuff. So dropping into our feed and they feed. It could happen here with politics. Let's rock. I'm just waiting for Kanye's Gnostic phase.

That'll probably be a good development. I mean, as soon as it starts being. It starts talking about Sophia and. I'm excited for when he runs for president and then declares his opponent to be. The Demiurge. We were on the same track there. We know what's coming. That's going to be a good day.

Welcome to it can happen here. Yes. Where we talk about Kanye West's inevitable war against the Demiurge. Oh my gosh. We joined again by Shareen and prop. So we just talked about kind of Kanye West history up towards his most recent. White Lives Matter t-shirt stunt and his anti-Semitic posts on Instagram and Twitter.com. And my main interest in the aftermath of these statements.

Kind of mostly how right wing media reacted to what was going on. And to one of their darlings kind of saying some questionable things. And what that might tell us about how they'll handle overt anti-Semitism. And fascistic kind of consumerism in the future. I'm going to do a quote from New Republic again about. What happened in the direct aftermath of of Kanye West's posts quote. Fox News meanwhile posted an article that West merely had been locked out of his account due to an unspecific violation of the company's policies.

After spending such a wholesome number of hours providing him with a platform for his White Lives Matter stunt. The network assured coverage of his anti-Semitism other than to point to it as the product of mental illness. The effort to sweep the second round of nasty bigotry under the rug after celebrating the initial outpouring is breathtakingly cynical. But not particularly surprising. The fact that West was at least for now the platform from social media accounts that he was using to traffic hate speech. Is in itself catnip for far right figures. And so unquote so many a far right grifter has tried to turn this into a free speech issue. However Kanye associate and fashion week White Lives Matter buddy Candace Owens tried to deny the anti-Semitism altogether.

Within days of his Twitter rant Candace Owens on her daily wire podcast was defending Kanye saying quote death. Con three should be interpreted as a move to protect the Jewish people. After all because because because Def Con is a defensive military category not an offensive military category. See these are the words of a deeply unserious person. Exactly. I'll be a very dangerous one but deeply unserious. This is this is it's those things. OK be conservative think however you want but it's that stuff that is so infuriating to me where I'm like you know you do not sit across the table for me.

She knows you know you know and it's like OK just I just like like break character once you know just just like. No what is you like there's no way I can't take you there's no way you believe that. No there's no way. Candace has been playing the long game for a while and that kind of reaches that reaches a culmination towards the end of this episode which we'll talk about. But let's let's let's play the clip there because she also does some pretty gross anti-Semitic kind of defensive stuff as well talking about how you can't see the word Jewish without people getting upset. If you are an honest person you did not think this tweet was anti-Semitic you did not think that he wrote this tweet because he hates or wants to genocide Jewish people. This is not represent the beginning of the Holocaust. That's if you're an honest person you'll meet that you will admit that right.

If you're an honest person when you read this tweet you had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I had I had no idea when I read this tweet what the hell he was talking about this tweet inspired questions not answers. First and foremost what is death con three. Did he mean death con three which would be a military defense position not an offense for those of you that are offended a military defense position. Is he tweeting this because he's reading the Newsweek headline calling him an anti-Semitic. Is he angry because he can't believe that he's not free to talk about people in his life who happen to be Jewish right without being accused of anti-Semitism. Is he saying I'm not going to shut up and I'm going to keep tweeting and I'm going to keep calling these people out referring to his friends that he feels slighted by. Is he talking about Jerry Kushner and Josh Kushner.

If you're a liar you'll say I know I was scared. I actually thought that Kanye West was going to launch a military strike in Israel because that's the reaction like when I woke up and I looked at the headlines. The reaction was like Kanye West had gotten together a military strike and it was going to go forward in the morning time in Israel. That was that was the reaction that was met with this week. Now once again I want to make this very clear. This is not a defensive tweet. This is an open question which never seems to happen anymore. It's like you cannot even say the word Jewish without people getting upset in the same way that you're not allowed to say black anymore.

So there is definitely a lot in that clip. I guess first off we can talk about talking about the tweet as simply asking questions about Jewish people. It's like you're just like directly doing the Jewish question like what you can't frame this over. So just ask like you're just asking questions about Jewish people really. And then and then Owens tries to link this to like a Zionist position implying that attacks on Jewish people and anti-Semitism are only legitimate if they're in the form of a military action against the nation of Israel. Which is not how anti-Semitism operates. That's like that's just that's just that's just not what that is. And it's it's it's pretty gross again just it's the same daily wire racism denying shtick by you know it's the same thing they do by saying racism doesn't exist anymore because they're not racist laws in America which first of all isn't even true.

There are guys but second of all that's not what racism is like that even if there weren't racist laws that doesn't mean there's no racism. And she like the yeah man it's like like I'm trying to put my words together because there's a certain type of like sinisterness. Yeah no it's a type of yeah it's a totally they're both deeply unserious but it's also like explicitly complicit in the in the like the rise of far right Christian fascism like it's it's it's so absurd but in a very dark way. Yeah I heard Kanye this morning this is what days this October October 20th a clip from Pierce Morgan no less like trying to call him on his anti-Semitism and yeah just like I know we're talking about Candace but it's like it's in the same vein of like ain't no way you bleed is is in in that he was like listen I apologize I was talking about my experience in the music industry which is a verifiable fact ran by Jews. And I was like but you ain't no way ain't no way and just great character like Alex Jones broke character before like was Tucker Carlson boat character. Tucker Carlson in court was like this is entertainment don't take me serious you know just like let me have that moment where I'm like okay at least be honest with what I'm dealing with here just break character like this just give me that at least I know what I'm dealing with. No yeah like saying this is an open question you cannot say the word Jewish that people getting upset like you you know what you're doing.

You know exactly what and with the with the after the like death calm three tweet his follow up implying that Jewish people and invented cancer culture like Robert said directly reference that that's that is just directly ripped from like Nazi theory. Like it's it's it's so blatant like even even canis Owens's boss Ben Shapiro had to acknowledge that Kanye's tweets were anti Semitic he he he made a tweet saying back from the Jewish holiday now which don't. Ben like Ben Shapiro I know what you're doing I know what you're calling it the Jewish holiday fuck you yeah back from the Jewish holiday now as usual two things can be true at once. Kanye's moves towards pro life faith and family conservatism are encouraging his death con three posts and black Hebrew is a light language are clearly anti Semitic and disturbing. It's like Ben Shapiro like the more this is this is this is this is basically Ben Shapiro saying the more he agrees with me the more he becomes a Nazi but I'm sure this is just a coincidence. Which which I did steal from I did steal that from someone on Twitter so. Well thanks to be true. That's my Ben Shapiro impression that's about things to be true.

Look look both things both things can be let's say that you all right I'm going to do I'm going to do a brief tangent on this guy named Jason Woodlock. So Woodlock is a sports journalist and podcaster who hosts the show Fearless Soldiers on Glenbeck's blaze media where he quote protects the realm of common sense and challenges the group think mandated by elites. And he is like over half a million followers on Twitter does he made a series of not great statements that are still up and went extremely viral with a lot of likes. Saying quote Kanye West and Dave Chappelle is there a pattern the industry wants both of them canceled black rappers and comedians are free to denigrate black people. And white men a million different ways but there's a line they better not cross and everyone knows it. I wonder I wonder what he's saying I wonder what he's implying there. The conflation of this is actually also as person a member of the black community card carrying that is that is frustrating. And yeah we do need to talk about you know among ourselves like what is acceptable in terms of how we speak about our own women how we speak about you know our fellow brothers and sisters in the world that is something that needs to be discussed but you don't get to call that.

You know so Jason Jason is black but he similarly works for a far right media company. I'm gonna give you I'm gonna give you a phrase and you could use this later. Okay. I'm pretty sure Shireen knows it too. It's all skin folk and can folk. So just go ahead continue and what he's talking about here saying that there's there's there's a lot you're free to you know talk about you know bad things that black people and white people have done. The line that you better not cross he's obviously talking about Jewish people. Someone someone asked him hey what's what is this line.

And then Jason posted you can't question black entertainers unhealthy relationship with non religious Jewish power brokers in Hollywood. Okay. Yeah. This was obviously called out as being extremely anti Semitic which then he replied you think I have a problem with people who speak a Semitic language. Not true. I have a problem with the secular culture particularly Hollywood's promotion of it and black celebrities embrace of it. I believe those celebs have an unhealthy partnership with non religious Jewish people. He chose the words that was a dance.

Again this is this is just exactly you're just doing anti Semitism like you can't you can't like it's not about speaking a Semitic language and you know that like you know this that you're you're you're just doing a bit like. And here's what's crazy like you know in my early days of like moving into more like activist kind of justice circles and and for real like even in some of the like church spaces I was in because again I grew up in like a very different church. Very different church tradition than the rest of these foods is that the Jewish community was in a lot of ways upheld as an example for us in that like look. They don't let nobody talk about nobody they don't let they don't they don't let it ride you not allowed to talk and they were like we need to be like that. They were like the way that the way that like look they come in they set up a community they they they keep their money within their community like their dollars circulate around that and when you look at like statistics they was saying among the black community it's like. A dollar on you know a dollar only circulates once to our community I'm saying like I don't have a numbers right but they were saying like within the Jewish community that dollar goes around like 50 60 70 80 times because they support each other. You know and they were like that's something that as black people we need to start learning how to do like yo stop being crabs in the bucket like support each other you know I'm saying man learn from their community. You know learn from the fact that like you know they keep their narrative alive they don't allow oppression to happen to them they've they stuck together how they've accrued wealth you know I'm saying I don't know how healthy this understanding is but.

I'm saying that's what we would start like look at how they accrued wealth like learn from them you know so so when it when when you hear it coming out of. A black entertainers mouth something anti submit it just it creates even more because you just like. Man what like. I think one of their aspect of that which will actually going to get to in a bit is some of that kind of admiration can be a double edged sword though. It is that's what I'm saying like I'll know how healthy it is but that's what we were taught yeah yeah but like. Like what you said about like there you know how a dollar circulates way more you see Kanye later starting to use some of that rhetoric in terms of promoting Jewish people as like. Controllers of financial engineering like you see that type of you see that bridge we're gonna talk about that just like in a sec also quick piece of history about Jewish Jewish people in banking. Which it's ill like they as a people got into that they were basically forced into they were forced to because they weren't allowed farmland.

Yeah like you wouldn't allow the farm so they're like well we got to find a job somehow let's do banking you mad that they good at it like. You know I mean I mean like this is this part that's like really can I'm like you know why do you know why jazz exists segregation. Naked racism that's why blues why is there hip hop because self sec like we did something with the trash you gave us like. So I think that yeah anyway the segregation made that happen yeah. I'm going to read a quote from your Rosenberg quote Conga's tweets exemplify why anti-Semitism is so hard to uproot it's a self affirming conspiracy theory. The anti-Semite claims that Jews control everything then if they're penalized for their bigotry they point to that as proof heads they win tails Jews lose. Kanye posted his second tweet before the first one was taken down perfectly demonstrating how the Jews control everything is a preemptive anti-Semitic defense against consequences for expressing anti-Semitism. It's a common misconception that anti-Semitism is just a personal prejudice against Jewish people.

It's not it's also a conspiracy theory about how the entire world works which is why it ropes in conspiracy theorists from all ideologies and all backgrounds. It creates this antagonizing catch 22 for Jews when confronted with anti-Semitism. If we say nothing the hatred spreads unchecked if we say something and it results in any consequences for the anti-Semite the bigot just uses that as proof of their anti-Semitic worldview. So that's a good kind of 101 explainer on how this kind of whole thing operates you know talking about Jewish power brokers in Hollywood and people called out on that they're like oh see this is an example of them trying to silence the the truth and you know all of this type of shit. So the one super interesting thing that has happened since all of these tweets and the aftermath and stuff has has happened is that we got some leaked video from the Tucker Carlson and congate video. So this is this is this is this is fascinating. So vice vices motherboard obtained footage of Kanye making bigoted statements about Jewish people and bizarre claims about fake children as well as describing visions of connect of kinetic energy cities sent to him by God. And we're not sure how vice got these yeah unerred clips but we have them and they're extremely fascinating both on for like what Kanye is doing and how he made these statements before his tweets. Also it's interesting on like what Tucker is doing like you're explicitly obfuscating direct anti-Semitism but still allowing the dog whistles to be to be present.

So inside their interview that that did air Carlson and Kanye together outlined some of Fox's favorite boogeyman from the Clintons cover restrictions cancel culture and liberal elites. But what Fox left on the cutting room floor is just as revealing the Tucker Carlson tonight's team decided to edit out a clip of Kanye saying that he's vaccinated against COVID-19 which is you know. Okay yeah in a segment talking about black genocide and Planned Parenthood they edited out Kanye's statements about the lost 12 tribes of Judah. Planned Parenthood was made by Margaret Sanger a known eugenics with the KKK to control the Jew population when I say Jew I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah the blood of Christ who the race the people known as the race black really are. This is who our people are the blood of Christ this as a Christian is my belief. So inside the television broadcast it has it has those parts about Planned Parenthood and the KKK but then after he mentions the KKK it cuts 30 seconds ahead. So it skips over all that stuff around Jews and the lost 12 tribes of Judah which kind of get that that is that is some of the type of black Hebrew Israelite stuff that Robert and prop we're talking about in the previous episode how they're they're one of like the lost tribes who who went south. So that that is that but it's interesting so like he's directly talking about that way before his tweets that Tucker just completely edited out.

Now on the on the Planned Parenthood point so Sanger was indeed a racist and you Genesis a stance that the Planned Parenthood organization has since like obviously to denounce. But you know claims about Planned Parenthood specifically operating to kill unborn black babies are just common rhetoric in the pro life like circles and conspiracy spaces it's not that that part is not really true but it is a very common talking point. Yeah that Margaret Sanger point is is something that like yeah you know even I like in my sort of you know evolution of the way I think and feel and believe you know I'm the child of a Black Panther you know I'm saying so like when you you you hear things about eugenics and Margaret Sanger and a connection to Planned Parenthood and you like oh well yeah not that stuff's evil you know I mean yeah and you know obviously I I'm a I'm a cisgendered male you know so. There I there's definitely holes in the story of understanding the complications of what it means what abortion and reproductive rights mean because I just I didn't know you know and but as you you know grow mature travel for me like the the. The biggest the biggest change in my thinking has been travel and relationships and just you know I would I should say reading off the naughty list you know. And you start understanding those complications but yeah that was like that that Margaret Sanger note is a note that's hit often you know and it becomes very difficult until you're like. Until you until you until you in the situation you don't mean in like you are like look this is this is this is affordable health care and is right down the street you know and when you're in that situation it's like.

In practice so yeah that but that that Margaret Sanger was it that's a tough little swallow yeah and the Planned Parenthood organization has spent a long time. For their for for their like an initial inclination and some of the like eugenicist starting points that that they had and making sure that they're not they're not you know yeah. Continuing in that clearly that's not their stance in that history. Well yeah and like and like actually addressing like hey is is is locations of our clinics specifically geared towards like. Being in more targeted communities where it's like lower class and people of color as opposed to white affluent communities and they have they have taken steps to actually like. Make sure that they're planning of clinics and locations is not is not oversaturated in yeah and that being said I'm like affluent white communities they got health care. So it's like it was a different story you know I'm saying it's like go where is needed I'm like ain't got no health care over here that's why they're here you know. I mean this isn't obviously this isn't a Planned Parenthood stand video or podcast but at the same time I'm like.

Well of course they got their problems like every other organization got their problems but like the idea that there's this like sinister plot. You know is clearly the rantings of someone who is not well. You know it does it's it is parroting just conspiracy talking points at this point though the way the way he does it the way he's doing. And in one of the more blatantly anti-Semitic sections that was edited out Kanye complains about Kwanzaa being taught to his kids in school. And in and says that he would prefer his kids learn Hanukkah because it comes with financial engineering. I was biting my tongue on my political opinion because I thought it would be better for my children. And now you look up and my kids are going to a school that teaches black kids a complicated Kwanzaa. I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah in Kwanzaa at least it will come with some financial engineering.

I'm sorry what wait wait. I mean this is this type of thing like you should learn from the Jews because they're good at controlling money. Yeah it makes me feel like he purposely tweeted that stuff because it was cut out. Like because like maybe that was furthering his idea of being. I mean I think I think he tweeted that stuff out he tweeted that he tweeted stuff on Twitter in response to him getting banned on Instagram. And the stuff on Instagram was directly against a rapper who was calling him out on his shit. I don't know if Kanye watched the Tucker Carlson interview. I don't know.

And then in one of the more bizarre things that he said Kanye West talked about a so-called fake child that had been planted in his home. Including he went into explicit detail talking about the child's name and the parents name. And this this video clip was not posted to protect the family's privacy. But he went into great detail and we have some we have some like transcripts saying actors professional actors placed into my house to sexualize my kids. He he he he he he he referred to the so-called son of an associate seemingly implying that the child was fake saying that we we did not believe that the person was her son because he was way smarter than her. And he it's it's this is like the most clear example of the ramblings of someone who like isn't OK. Like you know this is someone having a mental health episode. Like Kanye has spoken frequently about living with bipolar disorder and experiencing manic episodes in 2019.

He discussed how experiences these with David Letterman saying quote when you're in this state you're hyper paranoid about everything and everyone in my experience. Other people have different experiences. You know everyone is now an actor. Everything's now a conspiracy. And this is what's happening. You're thinking everyone's an actor and everyone's conspiracy. This is really. I mean you can look at gang stalking which is probably an expression of people having schizophrenic episodes. Yeah. Where people believe that like crowds of just random folks on the street are like part of an organized stalking thing. Or just there's these one kind of common thing that happens in psychotic episodes for some people is a belief that their loved ones their spouse or whatever has been replaced by someone who looks exactly the same. There's also certain kinds of we call that we call that Nathan Fielder syndrome.

It's rehearsal. I was going to say that but I didn't want to drag him into this. No. No. No. He's beautiful rehearsal episode. It's I mean it's one of those. This is I don't know how you actually would ever study this but I think one of the major problems are our civilization has that might actually end us is the fact that every mental illness on the planet is vastly exacerbated by the person having a lot of money which also happens to make it virtually impossible to treat because no one around you will admit that anything's wrong. Yeah. And this again might someday combine with the fact that we have an addiction on this planet to handing a single individual the keys to a nuclear stockpile. This might all end in really badly for everybody. I mean and when you're one of those famous people in the world you constantly feel like you're being gangstocked because you are. Yes. Like that's the point I was always watching you like every like it's it's not humans weren't designed to reach that level of fame.

That's not something that we'd like developed like it's that's that should that should not be possible. Our brains are not equipped for it. Yeah. And then I feel like it's like they get affirmed in that belief because a lot of people do rely on them and maybe their mania to like make make sure they get paid or make sure like their family. Absolutely. They're being yeah you're being you know I like I have a small list of like actual like a list like celebrity friends who have been you know who are like for real celebrities and also like yeah my my last accountant stole two hundred thousand dollars from me like and I didn't even know you know this person you know I had this person on tour with me and you know they robbed this guy robbed the opener like just all these like stories to where you're like well yeah the people you do have around you. So even if you didn't have mental health issues you would get paranoid you would still get paranoid. Yeah it's reasonable to get paranoid. Yeah. Yeah it's I yeah all of it's all of this is very obvious as a problem. Yeah. But yeah and what's unsettling to me.

So I just want to say really quickly one of the things that the fact that Kanye as you pointed out years earlier very astutely talked about the things that happen to him when he is having an episode in a very lucid way. Yeah makes me wonder and maybe this is a little conspiratorial where there are people listening who are like well shit if we can just play into that stuff we might be able to get him to we might be able to push him in whatever direction we want because there's definitely a whole bunch of people. I mean I can totally see Candace Owens doing that because she's she's been playing him like a fiddle for a long time and that's gonna long time that's gonna reach a tipping point at the end at the end of this episode. So yeah one one one could ask how could you be so heartless. Oh my God how could you be so good as the last one. It wasn't how could you be so not they're evil. But also I didn't get that one along the same thread of a tortured artist thinking they have to be depressed. Yes make art. I think there's an element of that even for Kanye like I don't think. I mean I think those if he's medicated or not you know what I mean like he is he is that sometimes he goes off medication. Yeah exactly. You know and I and again the tortured artist thing I know some like New York Times bestsellers authors who are like yes I know I'm bipolar and I know when I have to write this book.

I'm going to get off these pills. I'm going to write it in in two days. I'm going to turn it. Yes I think that's that's made worse by people like tying like people in doing my research for this episode. A lot of people talk to us in person and like talk about like his genius. Exactly. And I think this idea of his genius mixed in with his mental state can create a really volatile reaction in someone's brain when they feel like certain altered states of consciousness are what makes you have your genius. And that's a really on the way people have talked about this to Kanye in person I think it's really unhealthy. Yeah I would argue that telling a child they're a genius is abusive and it's probably true for telling an adult it's one of the worst things you can ever tell anybody. No one's a genius stop using that word. Yeah it's poison. You think your illness is your genius. Going back to this like to these leaked unused Tucker Carlson videos something like this in like in a better world would like completely tank Tucker forever. Like yeah it should but none of that matter. Yeah because in any other yeah in any other universe at that point you should be like yo we got to stop the cameras man. No yeah like yeah yeah this leak reveals unequivocally how Carlson uses his platform to sanitize anti-semitism and other conspiracy theories for a general audience. Carlson cuts out just enough to claim plausible deniability. This will not impact him professionally at all. He makes a living manipulating people on Fox News.

This should tank him it won't but it does reveal how he works with extreme clarity having these behind the scenes glimpses. And then also having having the added context of these cut segments also shines a light on some of the more dog whistley aspects that did make it into the aired interview. Like this bit that started with that that started with Kanye talking about his grievances with Jared Kushner. You know where he made these peace treaties. Where was that do you know the facts on this right here so I'm like well I think that was between Israel and some of the Arab nations. I just think it was to make money. I don't know is that is that too heavy handed to put on this platform. No that's that's your opinion. We're not in a censorship business. OK thank you. And I just think that that's what they're about is making money. I don't think that they have the ability to make anything on their own. I think they were born into money. So when Kanye said I don't think they have the ability to make anything on their own and talking about you know peace treaties with the intent to make money.

Carlson knew that Kanye was just talking about like the Jews like that's like he knew that's what was going on and decided to keep those dog whistley aspects. It's yeah I'm going to quote from a lad near I this provides uncontrovertible proof that Carlson knew Kanye was being anti Semitic during the interview. In other words Tucker Carlson and his team purposely edited their footage to make Kanye's comments into a dog whistle instead of a foghorn. He purposely coded Kanye's anti Semitism Carlson knows how to spread anti Semitism while avoid getting called out. He did it here. This itself should be a far bigger scandal than anything Kanye has said. Carlson knowingly spreaded this code anti Semitism and knowingly kept the anti Semitism that he knew he wouldn't get called out on and knowingly cut the part that he knew would get him in trouble. Carlson spent has spent years spreading anti Semitic conspiracy theories from a full documentary about George Soros destroying Western civilization to multiple uses of the great replacement conspiracy theory to anti Semitic guests talking about globalist elites ruling in D.C.

This is who Tucker Carlson is America's leading purveyor of mainstream anti Semitism. He also showed everybody the the ultra light beam to the genitals. He sure did. He did one good thing. One of the more based moments. That was a thing. I was like, all right, man. Okay. Genital tannin. Got it. But yeah, that's his that's his particular like mutant power is saying something without saying something. And all of us know what you saying, but you ain't say it. So when I go, what the fuck did you just say? You could say, what are you talking about? Nothing.

You know, it I mean, yeah, he's got it. I mean, he's he's the Picasso of that like just and it's and it's so infuriating. And speaking of kind of dog whistles and stuff similar to Kanye's bit about the Jews, Korean and cancel culture by doing the whole. I don't think they have the ability to make anything on their own statement. Kanye is employing another kind of classic anti Semitic trope that or that originates with Nazi propaganda. That you know, Jews are incapable of physical labor or making things. This comes up a lot in the 1940 Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, one of the most vile films ever made a quote from Mike Rothschild. So now I don't think Kanye.

Kanye has not seen the eternal Jew. No, the only people most weird Nazi nerds who reference the eternal Jew haven't seen the eternal Jew. But but the point is that you don't need to see it. These no, these these stereotypes are so ingrained to how many people see Jewish people that there's things that you can believe without the slightest consideration or like a deep thought. Well, and they were, you know, the eternal Jew was influential in anti Semitic propaganda, but a lot of what it was doing was kind of codifying almost, if you will, the most popular stereotypes and racialist attacks of the day. Like it didn't invent stuff so much as it was like, all right, we're going to we're going to boil it all down and kind of the most iconic form. Yeah, this is I was today years old. I had no idea what you were talking about.

But but I can see how that concept has such source material because as somebody who, you know, I just anti Semitism is just has never been on the menu for me. Some of the the tropes that come with that, in my mind, seems so bizarre. I'm like, what are you sure? What did that come from? What did you talk about? They did what now? You know, so like some of like, so to know that like, well, there is source material. There's there's stuff that comes from it comes from this time.

It was because it is this was like an intentional thing that people have been pushing towards for hundreds of years. Like this is it's yeah, this didn't just happen. This is like people are trying to make this a reality. Like it's it's been a propaganda project and a hate campaign that's been genocidal for hundreds of years. Yeah, because I'm like, OK, you know, at sometimes. OK, I'm trying to say what I let me try to figure out what I say. Sometimes you can track. Yeah, like the protocols, like the protocols.

I was like, until you understand those protocols, like some of the anti-Semitic thought and rhetoric is like, man, what the fuck are you talking about? Like what? You know, texts like that don't just like pop into existence. Someone wrote that with a specific intent. It was an intent for something. But what I'm the point I'm trying to get at is like, there are some racist sentiments and tropes that I I'm following your logic as to why you're saying that about them. Like clearly it's a racist trope, but black men are violent. And I'm like, well, OK, I mean, if all you know of us is gang violence, if that's all you've seen, I'm following your logic.

You just never been exposed to any other stuff. Now, once you get exposed to any other stuff, you still feel like that. It's like, all right, you just you just trash, you just you just trash. But I'm like, I'm following I'm following you. You know what I mean? You only know rap music. OK, that's all you know of us. OK, then you think that this is what we are.

Fucking racist, because clearly most people are more everybody's more than the one thing you're trying to put them in, you know. But I'm following that. It's just for me, again, like I said, since anti-Semitism was never on the menu, like it was never just it just wasn't a part of my world. When you hear things like the Protocols of Zion and and some of this stuff, even even learning about the Holocaust. Like if you a black person, you like, what's your deal? Like what what's what you what is so wrong with them? Like I don't understand why you don't like them so much. Like it's like I can't even follow your logic.

You know, because yeah, it's not even personal hatred of all people, right? No, it's it's framed within this conspiratorial thing. But like, no, I don't hate Jewish people. I'm just questioning the Jewish power brokers in Hollywood. And I think that they have too much influence, right? That's how it's framed and that's how people that's how someone like Kanye might actually think. I actually feel because he works in Hollywood. Yeah, right.

But that but that is the only way you get there is because of decades of anti-Semitism. Yeah, that's it's it's it's that's that's the kind of point I was trying not to get at. Yeah, the J.K. Rowling banker goblin didn't just like exist by itself. Exactly. Like none none of these things are made in a vacuum. I never thought of that till you said it. Oh, shit. Oh, yeah, there's a star of David on the floor of the bank. I didn't even notice it.

Yeah, what I mean, one of the things people will point out that is true is that that was not a set they were filming in an actual building. And they chose to have that there. And the building had a star of David in the floor. And they chose to film there. Yes, it seems like that would have been something people might have noticed. Yeah, at least somebody who had just not even go over it. Yeah.

Just don't run like, yo, yo, maybe maybe listen, maybe we don't mean anything by it. But it could be seen as, you know, yeah. And just like just like none of these things are in a vacuum and Kanye's own statements are not in a vacuum. After Kanye made these tweets, you know, 4chan was quick to get it was quick to eat up the Kanye pill. They had Kanye. Kanye threads took up of took up most of Paul's posts for for days. There's there's just there's screenshots of of Paul just Kanye posts after Kanye posts. All of all of the trending ones are all about Kanye.

Nick Fuentes and his like gripper followers were celebrating the tweets. They see this as an opportunity to kind of mainstream, you know, their their brand of horrible anti-Semitic fascism. And I I I hope people are prepared to take on, you know, fake Kanye stand accounts that are going to pop up everywhere to defending his anti-Semitism. Like, you know, and defending and talking about anti-Semitism from the point of quote unquote being a Kanye fan. It's there's a lot of. Yeah, I was like, we've been a lot of fascist trolling is going to is going to come in the mask of Kanye West now. And we have been in this works. Yeah, we've I mean, we've been enduring great among Black Twitter.

We have been enduring Kanye stands for a while. You know what I'm saying? That are just like, no, he's just a genius. Y'all don't understand. He playing 3D. We've been enduring this for a while. It's actually been very interesting in the sphere of the Internet. I exist in of seeing people being like, yeah, no, I got nothing.

So people tap out. Yeah, there has been a good amount of people that have finally tapped out. And I think well, I think what is that type of vacuum opens up space for bad actors to use the mask of Kanye to then just promote fascism under under this mask now. It's like what they do with Trump in his in like mega hat and everything. Sure. I mean, like anything this creates a more specific type of dog whistle. I think because mega is obviously way more way more broad. I meant like I meant like Kanye's use of the show.

Absolutely. I mean, we have, you know, Nick Fuentes posted the tweets in his disc and in his telegram saying, no way, we are so back. Do you trust the plan? Bake to Alaska. Do you trust the plan? Bake to Alaska posted in his telegram. This is real vindicated. And one of my least favorite telegram channels, Zoomer Waffen, which God, God damn it. I know.

God, it's called what now? Zoomer. Every time I talk about Zoomer Waffen, I like I lose five years of life. So people again, because folks who are not terminally online or like, what are you guys talking about? Waffen means weapon in German. The reason that it is a thing the Nazis talk about is that the SS had like a bunch of different things the SS did. But one of the things they had was a unit that existed within kind of the traditional hierarchy called the Waffen SS, which means the weapons SS. They committed a shitload of war crimes.

Ever since Waffen has been a thing that you can kind of like stick to the end of the name of a group and you're signifying that you think the SS was based. Adam Waffen is kind of the most prominent terrorist group in the United States and other countries. That's been a big thing. And you know, it not like zoom, like you get what they're saying when they call themselves Zoomer Waffen, right? It's a thing. Anyway, that's what you need to know. I just, I get so pissed because I'm like, these fucking nerds. And you're so dangerous.

You fucking nerds. It sucks. I hate you. Yes. I'm just like, you just, God, if you weren't so dangerously violent, you know, just fucking nerds. That is the recurring statement on this show. Is that if they weren't dangerous, they would be much more funny. Yes.

So yeah, the zoomer Waffen's posted the tweet and not not not all heroes wear capes somewhere easy gap merch and with it's anyway. So just two days after the anti-Semitic posts on his social media accounts, which got him banned. Kanye then attended the Nashville premiere of Candice Owens daily wire documentary project. The greatest lie ever sold George Floyd and the rise of BLM. And just imagine being one of the most famous people on the planet and choosing to hang out with the daily wire. Yeah. It's like like they like the word grooming obviously means nothing now. Yeah.

Like they they groomed him into this shit. Like, yes, they really did and groomed him into this nonsense. It's kind of made a lot of choices here. And those choices were like very selfish and based in narcissism. And while he is sick, he's not a victim fundamentally, but he also is being taken advantage of. Right. Like that's that's fair to say that doesn't exculpate him from his guilt in this. We're going to talk more about that.

Wake up, Mr. West. Another Kanye reference. Wake up, Mr. West. And like real quick, the part that is so well, obviously it's all infuriating. But I'm like, you're going out of your way to purposefully tear down black people when they suffering. Yeah. You don't have to. You don't.

You can even say like, hey, you know, which is true. Like there are some in the organization of Black Lives Matter as an organization. There's some problematic stuff that needs to be discussed and worked out. You know what I'm saying? And being like, OK, well, let's get some oversight here. What are we doing here? Let's have some accountability. Yeah.

You don't have to. Why are you? Why are you attacking George Floyd, man? Well, because this is this is this is Kenneth Owens explicit grift. Exactly. That's my point. I think her job is to conflate the Black Lives Matter nonprofit organization with Black Lives Matter movement as an idea and use criticisms of the nonprofit organization to basically

say that any form of advocacy by people of color in using the Black Lives Matter movement banner is is discredited because of the issues with the formal nonprofit organization in Portland. I have never I've never seen a single thing related to the Black Lives Matter organization, not a single thing. I mean, I guess maybe the signs like are sold by them. I don't know, though. But like it's not it's not a presence.

Now what we're talking about. Exactly. Uprisings. It's not like it's the the the conflation of the of the nonprofit organization with the movement is the specific thing that Candace Owens has focused on for the past five years of her career. That's that's what she makes money on is is is exploiting this little thing. And it's the thing that Tucker has adopted.

And this is the thing that she is convinced it's just so it's just so like what do you do? Like, OK, so any any OK. Talk about talk about globalism. You OK? That's your little thing. That's your little thing. OK, you know, you don't like the you don't like the Democrats, you know, you know, Brandon,

whatever. But it's like, OK, a man died. And that's and the cop was proven guilty. And that's that's that's the most gross part because Kanye's embrace of conspiracy theories now about the fentanyl thing, right? Yeah, but his embrace of conspiracy theories is not just limited to anti is not just limited to anti-Semitism. Yeah.

He now openly denies the proven facts of the events that led to the most recent international uprising in the Black Lives Matter movement. He jumped on board his pal Candace Owens absurd quote unquote documentary that claims the sequence of events proven in court and witnessed by the world via cell phone footage did not actually happen. That's why I'm like, you're going out of your way now. It's like you you're you're on a path and I'm like, you're purposefully going out of your way to hurt us.

And that's the part that I'm like, like I said, I don't use the word cone often. But I'm like, like, why are you doing? Why are you doing this? Like you you're it will because we know why you're doing it. And it's just like Candace, come on. Like Kate Kate for the Republicans, do what you got to do. If you honestly think the solutions for our community comes from the conservative world. Kate for do what you got to do.

You don't have to go out of your way. Like this is you're going to like you're taking the scenic route to just attack. I'm OK, yeah, it's they it's because I don't they don't actually believe that that's what the solutions are. That's the thing. They're just living a really wealthy extravagant lifestyle. Candace Owens gets to travel with Kanye West to Paris Fashion Week. She gets to have a red pepper premiere with Kanye West, Kid Rock and Ray J.

Like that's that's the life that she has been able to create by exploiting this thing. And of course she's going to do it because that's how you become a millionaire. Yeah, two kinds of people get successful on the right. One kind is fuck you got mine. I'm going to get what I can as quickly as I can. And the other is I want to create a Christian fascist ethno state. Like those are the two kinds and one feeds into the other and Candace Owens has decided I'm fine with helping the other kind of prominent conservative accomplish their goals because

it won't get too bad, you know, during my lifetime. I can make enough money. I'm one of the good ones. They're like this is this is the same thing with someone like Blair White for, you know, for for trans issues, there's there's there's these specific tokenized figures Dave Rubin with, you know, with gay people, like if they they align as one of the good ones and they think that things won't get bad enough in their lifetime and they'll they'll just they'll just be able to profit.

This I yeah, yeah, hey, wait, is Dave Rubin wait just to make sure I'm paying attention. Is Dave Rubin the dude that was like, well, scientifically speaking, a mermaid couldn't be that dark? No, that's that feels like a Ben Shapiro or Crowder bit. I don't remember specifically. Okay. I thought either way. That was hilarious.

It was one of those clowns. Yeah. Well, scientifically speaking, they're all paid by the same dude. It doesn't matter. They're all like, I still need to get this joke off. So it's frustrating that Kanye not only just attended the premiere, but is now actually parroting the disinformation and the and the talking points that Candace Owens used in her faux documentary.

So just a few days after he went to the red carpet, he started spreading the disinformation on the police's murder of George Floyd on a podcast. I watched the George Floyd documentary that Candace Owens put up. One of the things that his two roommates said was they want a tall guy like me. They want a tall guy like me. And the day when he died, he said a prayer for, you know, eight minutes. He said a prayer for eight minutes. They hit him with the fentanyl.

If you look, the guy's knee wasn't even on his neck like that. When he said, mama, mama, his, his girlfriend, they said, he screamed for his mama. Mama was his girlfriend. It's in the documentary. So that's pretty bad. And after after that, he starts talking about other kind of random conspiracy theory stuff that inevitably leads him to making more comments about the Jews. So here's that clip.

They blocked me out. The Jewish media blocked me out. This shit lit. Right. I'm lit. Right. I'm lit. I'm lit.

I'm saying J.P. Morgan, I put $140 million in the J.P. Morgan, and they treated me like shit. So if J.P. Morgan Chase is treating me like that, how they treating the rest of y'all? That's outrageous. Yeah. And it's murderous with Chase accounts. That's what I'm saying. I am outraged by the time people always, they want to calm it down.

Because no matter what, you didn't break no law. I didn't break a law. I didn't break a law. The bank shouldn't be a judge or jury on anything that's going on. But this is, it's, it's like a social contract. Candice Owens has a word for it, I'm forgetting. But it's basically like, they told Candice Owens she couldn't hang out with me for the Jewish people.

What I'm doing is I'm me too in the Jewish culture. I'm saying y'all got to stand up and admit to what y'all been doing, and y'all just got away with it for so long that y'all don't even realize what y'all doing. And it's like, y'all can't fuck with me either because y'all behind that gay defense, y'all soft, y'all hands got soft. You ain't out here getting beat up every day like me. You ain't out here getting called crazy every day like me. I'm not going to play anymore of that podcast, because honestly, this is where it starts getting

into the territory where it's just kind of exploiting someone's mental health issues for entertainment. And it gets like, this is where it gets very disjointed. Connie starts talking about how the Louis Vuitton company killed one of his friends. Oh boy. Oh, it's on my Virgil. Yeah. Who actually died of cancer.

It's a conspiracy that Connie's developed the past year. And he also talked about this for seven minutes in the unused Tucker Carlson segments, which I'm also not going to include because I don't think we should. Also for context, Virgil is like royalty among our community, like what he did being the first black head designer at Louis Vuitton. And I think a lot of us think, a lot of us, I sound like Trump. A lot of people are saying, no, but there is an understanding that like in a lot of ways Kanye was jealous of him in the way that he was able to succeed in Louis Vuitton.

And then now that he's gone and clearly Kanye doesn't grieve well. As we know. Yeah. And yeah, that would be fair. Yeah. Another segment of the Tucker leak includes a clip where Connie is discussing visions from God on how to build free energy and fully kinetic energy communities and kinetic energy cities.

So this, like this is where I'm not going to actually include any more clips of Kanye because it's just, it's, it's just the laughing at the person who's not doing okay bit. And that's not cool. Now obviously like mental illness is not, cannot be used as an excuse for bigotry or antisemitism. But exploiting someone's suffering through like a manic episode to score political points is also like immoral. And we're seeing a lot of like false choices being presented towards mental illness and

antisemitism. And the answer can actually be both, you know, those struggling with mental illness do not kind of, they don't originate these types of bigotry, right? But in, but when you're a manic, you can latch on to things and reflect them. And that's not saying it's okay. But that also it's, we should not deny that like, I have seen a lot of people saying like mentally ill people don't say racist things, which are like, that's not true. Like if like, if you've been around a lot of mentally ill people, they can act, they

can. It's the same thing with people, when people's brains are deteriorating on dementia, one of the last things they can say are curse words. It's one of those weird like, like vector points inside our brain. So yeah, you actually can be racist when you're not usually racist. If you're experiencing a severe mental health episode, and that's not, that's not excusing you for your behavior, but also we shouldn't create this false division. And we shouldn't like, in some ways it's like, you're like a gatekeeping mental illness

by saying, no, no real mentally ill person could say these bad things. Which they're not actually in support of people experiencing mental distress. Yeah. It's on that same lane is like the, you know, the mass shooters and stuff like that. Exactly. If you're just going to call it mental illness, then like you can obfuscate any responsibility. But also refusing to acknowledge that mental health can play a factor inside some mass shootings also misses the point.

Exactly. It's yeah. It can play a very large factor, especially in the wave of like schizo wave inspired shootings. Exactly. And that's what I was going to say that, that, that conflation of something that really is real and really is important, you know, you see that I see that with like, I've known people who've worked in like, you know, like legit human trafficking, like not like the

dog whistlely version, but like actual rescuing, you know, trafficked girls from the sex industry who were like pulled from a village, you know what I'm saying? And put into a brothel, like people that are like really out here, like actually doing the work, you know, where trafficking is a thing, you know, and then you conflate it with these, you know, QAnon conspiracies and then like, and of course, a person who really works in this thing, you're like, you finally feel like you're getting some traction with people that actually care about the stuff you care about, you know what I'm saying? And now, now it's like, if you mentioned trafficking, it's like, yeah, you, I can't, it's like,

how do I, you, it's like, no, seriously, it's really a thing, guys, really it is, you know, but trying to disentangle it from, yeah, it's what you're saying is like to, to, to do a one or the other thing is missing the point of both situations. Yeah. Yeah. Because obviously like Kanye isn't someone who's dealing with like a temporary mental health episode where he's yelling slurs on the side of a sidewalk, Kanye is like an affluent man who's making calculated and financially driven choices.

But that still doesn't mean that stuff like bipolar does not play a factor in the types of impulsive decision making he's making and the types of people that he surrounds himself with, which influences this pattern of behavior combined with like social media and combined with his celebrity status creates this cycle of really unhealthy choices. Yeah, like when you're talking about like fake children being planted in your home, I mean, red flag guys, like, yeah, that's not like it's, that's, that's not dismissing that as being no way related to mental illness, I think is kind of a misstep. Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's caught one of the things that's tough about this is that it hits all of the areas that like the primary places where conversation takes part socially or worst at dealing with, yeah, because like, as we've said, mental illness is a major factor in this. It also does not exculpate him from bad behavior. It doesn't make what he's saying not racist. But it's also tied into like this deep manipulation campaign that the right is because they've been looking for a guy like this forever and you can see like that that's why Tucker and

all these folks were so quickly to spin up when he wound up being like amenable to that. Yeah, because he's very clearly being encouraged to keep doing these sort of things for like entertainment and clout. And I think a lot of the responses to this kind of show how stigmatized that more severe personality disorders are compared to stuff like anxiety or depression or ADHD. Because you also don't want to like villainize bipolar disorder and stigmatize it further because a lot of people can live with bipolar disorder. I've known I've known people that live with bipolar disorder who are not going on anti

Semitic rants. Like it's exactly it manifests different in lots of other people. So it's you should not use this as an example to stigmatize other people with this or say it's just this. It creates you have to talk about you have to kind of think about this in a multi in a multi fasted fashion where someone's not just good or not just bad. It's actually you have to get, you know, less into like puritanical, you know, perfectly unblemished victims when, you know, yeah, evilly like like evil intention depressors.

Like it's more complicated than that. And the internet the internet's bad with that bad was nuance one of turns out the internet sucks at nuance to close us off. We're going to talk about how Kanye really has kind of been plagued by people by people like Candice Owens, because a little over a week after his banishment from the two big mainstream social media platforms, this past Monday, Connie announced that he has entered a deal to buy the failed far right social media platform, Parler. Parler CEO George Farmer said that his wife, conservative influencer Candice Owens approached

Kanye about a parlor deal while attending his Paris Fashion Week show where the boat where the pair of them wore the black wore the white lives matter shirts. So Candice Owens has been playing Connie this entire time and is and is convinced Connie to buy her husband's failing business. Like she's just playing him like like Parler has currently only 50,000 daily active users even gab getter and Trump's and Trump's truth social have way more daily users than Parler and Candice Owens has has convinced has convinced Connie to buy this way. I'm sorry.

Just platform. I'm sorry. Did you say her husband owns Parler? Yes. Her husband is the CEO of Parler. Okay. And for an idea of how failed it is, the people I know who spend a lot of their time hanging out in far right spaces don't even get on parlor anymore like it's so it's not it doesn't

matter. It's yes, it's the CEO is Candice Owens's husband. I am the Clint. I did not mean it's an obvious grift, right? Yeah. I'm like, see, which is not this is a bad one. She's a very smart. Yes.

This is a successful grifter. She that is I can't believe it. Like she finally broke character. What I've been asking for these last two these these two hours is give me a moment of clarity. You just gave it to me, right? Like she Oh, there it is. This is what I've been waiting for. Got it.

I have got it. I've I've I've one more page before we before we close out. So. Okay. Okay. All right. I feel I don't know. I can't explain this the sense of relief.

I feel like it's so weird to say that, but I feel so relieved that I'm like, no, it's extremely telling. And it confirms a lot of the things that we've been thinking about what's been going on between her and Kanye for the past like five years. So Kanye has been hit with a with a $250 million lawsuit by the family of George Floyd. The lawsuit was filed by Roxy Washington on behalf of her and George Floyd's daughter, Gina, as they said, in a statement, Washington's lawyers confirmed that she's doing Kanye West and his business partners for defamation, harassment, misappropriation and infliction

of emotional distress. And the legal team is allegedly considering a number of other possible defendants in the case, including Candice Owens. So it sucks that that's happening. But I like that, like that, that's just like retraumatizing to the entire family that they're having to dredge up all this stuff to sue fucking Kanye West and Candice Owens. That sucks. But I hope that they get all of their money.

Like, yeah, I, I, I hope that they get all of their money. They get to live forever on the money of Kanye West. It's like, look, dude, like again, it's just that like that old saying is like, you ain't got to like me, but just you, you don't, you also don't have to be in my way, you know? So even when I look at somebody like a Candice or whatever this like this sphere of, of specifically persons of color in this right wing grift that I'm like, you don't like, you don't have to help me, but you also don't have to hurt me, you know, and that's, and that's the part to me.

Again, I keep coming back to that as like, you're going out of your way to hurt us. Like that's, that's, I'm like, I don't get it, man. Like you don't, you don't have to do, there is so much money. Here's the thing, and this is going to sound terrible, but I mean it to be terrible. There is so much money to be made off white people. Like you can make so much money from them. We have a lot of it. We took it from everywhere else.

Yes. You can make so much from them without destroying it, without tearing us down, you know, just it's like, get your money. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm, I'm now going to read like my thesis on this because I, again, I, I did, I did, I did not, I initially did not want to cover this. I thought we probably shouldn't, I thought that it's, it's kind of exploiting the same

media cycles that encourages this type of unhealthy behavior in the first place. But I, I, I, I, I have a thesis on this that I want to kind of go through and then drop it on. Then we can, and, and, and this discussion. So in an online economy based on shock ad driven, heated discourse and data collecting online engagement, Kanye's outbursts are useful to be deployed as ready made ammunition for culture wars. Even though what he said is so obviously beyond the pale, quoting New Republic, West's celebrity

still existent, despite the years of controversy and alienation is simply too valuable for the right. After decades of being denied the endorsement of, of predominant celebrities, with the exception of like Clint Eastwood and, and, and someone like Donald Trump and the rights gritting their teeth through how celebrities don't really matter to them. The right cherishes the affection it receives from controversial crossover figures such as Elon Musk and Kanye West and doesn't want to lose them to disrepute or at least wants to continue using them in spite of it.

West's willingness to lend his imprimatur to the pet causes of people like Carlson and Kenneth Owens makes him invaluable and unjettisonable. To pick up a quote from the, from the Washington Post, polling has repeatedly shown that white republicans view themselves as targets of discrimination equivalent to non-majority groups. Carlson and Trump sharing in that sense highlight anecdotes that reinforce that sense and push back against the group that's most forcefully calling for the playing field to be leveled. The left, the new elite. So Carlson sees Kanye wearing a shirt that explicitly casts whites as victims and understands

the opportunity. Here's a member of the inner circle of the elite, a black man who's willing to elevate the idea that white lives are disadvantaged in an equivalent way to black lives. To validate the victimization and discomfort. Let's set up an interview, unquote. So for Carlson's purposes, West did not have to be wholly coherent. He can easily edit out the parts where he's ranting about the Jews, visions of kinetic energy cities, and fake children.

Carlson was able to present to his viewers a famous black man who is being punished for holding views abhorred by the gatekeeping cultural elites. In the podcast, West combined his anti-Semitism and anti-black infantilization into slander that Jewish people have owned the black voice. But it's Kanye whose voice and platform is being used by far-right grifters for profit by stoking white populist racism against both Jews and black people. And now to buy their failed social media apps. The conservative Christian right that has grown to use Kanye as a token won't be so

quick to disown him for overtly conspiratorial or bigoted statements. One of the lessons that the right has learned from Donald Trump is that there's no advantages to be gained from criticizing one's own, as long as they're remaining loyal to the fundamental causes of the movement, especially when it comes to exploiting white grievance. West is then permitted to be as blatantly anti-Semitic as he wants without fear of sanction. He is clearly bigoted and suffering, but the right clearly considers him to be the most useful idiot. Or perhaps one of the brave few people who's willing to say the things that others may

think but don't yet dare utter. Some have argued that there's no point in searching for meaning in Kanye's almost decades-long dissent. That there's no deeper insight here, just the truth that anti-Semitism is noxious and we're a tragically long way from defeating it, but I think that misses the relatively clear trajectory that Kanye has been on since ultra-life beam, to this now Christian identity but black shit, and the very real danger and influence that a relatively small and unknown weirdos like Candace Owens can have on country-wide politics.

And finally, to paraphrase from the Columbia Journalism Review, Kanye West's statements are not of no consequence, but anyone who spends time thinking about them and talking about them needs to not be complicit in exacerbating those consequences, whether that be platforming bigotry or stigmatizing mental health issues. If the media and the press must cover Kanye, they should do so with context and with an eye towards accuracy, reality, history, and motivation. At minimum, coverage should isolate what's important to Kanye's and the story and describe it clearly for what it is, rather than mining him for controversy and then performing ignorance

or agnosticism about the substance of what he's saying. Sadly, too much top-line coverage of Kanye's recent outbursts did the latter, with several mainstream outlets referring to the tweets and headlines as alleged anti-Semitic posts, or wrote that the posts have been widely deemed to be anti-Semitic, language that clearly reveals more about the authors than its subject. So that's kind of my thesis on why this is worth talking about and all of the moving aspects about what's going on here between Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Kanye West. So yeah.

Good work. That was really good work. Let's all go be sad. Yeah, there's not really a solution here, except besides the stuff I just said. I mean, all of this has at its root the same problems, which is that when you allow money to equivocate social and political power or equal social and political power, and when you then hand certain individuals huge amounts of money, a lot of them will either be outright evil or out of their minds or a combination of the two, and they can cause tremendous

damage to society as a result of it. So it's good. Yeah. I think that there's two, from my perspective, there's the metaphorical question of, okay, is he disinvited to the barbecue? Which is, again, a metaphorical question. I don't know if you guys know what I mean when we say that, was like, can he come to the barbecue?

Yeah. So the question we need to ask as a community, as the culture, he so lovingly decides to mock, but is that okay? So as a community, what does it take for us to finally disavow somebody's statements and just be like, all right, brother, you're gone? Because right now it's up for debate. There are people that like, we checked out long time ago. There are other people that are still like, we love the old Kanye and that genius is still

in there. Yeah, but this album slaps. Okay, I know he problematic. I know he put the red hat on, but the Sunday services was so dope. You know what I'm saying? Like, so you have that discussion continually happening. But I think that that's something as for our community, we need to learn how to, we need to really discuss, you know, what does it take for us to like finally let somebody go?

Like, again, I keep going back to R. Kelly because I'm like, dog, we knew, we knew since Aliyah that like this brother had problems, you know? I mean, I think if there's a way to not alienate him fully so that his only friend is Candace Owens, that would be great. Exactly. That's why it's up for debate. It's like, I don't know how that process works. That's what I'm trying to say.

That's part of the part. That's part of the problem. It's like, you, but you know why we, why it hasn't, why it doesn't happen so fast. Like I said, like our defenses normally are collective identity is the community. That's how we defend each other and protect each other from falling off the edge, either from the police or from yourself is like, you bring them in and just be like, oh baby, we need to have a talk, you know? But at some point you're like, all right, fam, we done, you know?

And that's what happened with R. Kelly. It was like, all right, dog, we tried, you know, we tried. We can't do this no more, you know? I think there's that. And I think there's also another question. Obviously the American evangelical, which, you know, statistically speaking still only represents nine to 11% of Christian as a whole across the world. So you really like, it's a, this is a specific to us in America problem.

And I just wonder, that's another question to me, like y'all are like, they always looking for whether it was Tim Tebow, or you always looking for champions, you know, and, and this keeps happening to you, keeps happening to you and y'all end up looking like assholes, you know what I'm saying? And just not like the faith you say you profess, like, when are y'all going to stop looking for champions? Like when you're going to stop looking for yo, and just be like, let's just do the shit our book says, you know, like, for better or for worse, like, you know, I just think

that these are, again, these are interesting cultural questions. See, you don't need no celebrity. Like why y'all always think you need a celebrity because you just, because again, you just trying to be cool while at the same time saying that you stand against the culture. It's like, well, fuck, well, if you stand against the culture, why are you always trying to have somebody from the culture to be your hero? You know, like, well, shit, like, I don't know. I'm just saying, like, I think I do think that, again, I don't have no answers either.

But I think that these are like questions that everybody that this fool affected, y'all really need to ask yourself, like, you need to ask yourself, you know, like you said, like the mental health stuff, the problem of celebrity, which is a bigger problem. But to me, these are, he, he, he may, he's making us inadvertently ask ourselves these big systemic questions that we still are afraid to reckon with. I feel like I think that's a good note to end on. Well, everybody, that's going to do it for all of us here at the various, the several

podcasts that this is, you can listen to hood politics by typing hood politics into whatever it is you used to look for things and you can listen to it could happen here by typing it could happen here into whatever thing you type stuff into, go type stuff now, bye. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Join Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

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

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God is dead. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome to the podcast where- The first episode of Spooky Week podcast. We tried to figure out who murdered God and come to the conclusion that it was almost

certainly Wil Wheaton. I'm pointing my finger at someone else, actually, Robert. I'm fingering Bigfoot and the death- Wow, okay, now, Daniel, I'm gonna need you to just cut that audio line out of the episode so that everyone on the team can play it as a drop whenever we need to, James, admitting to fingering Bigfoot. All right, that's gonna be an episode. Everybody have a good week? God bless you.

No, this is it could happen here. This is Spooky Week, right? Yeah, we're recording our first Spooky Week episode. This is the first Spooky Week episode, yeah. Praise be to God. Yeah. All right, what do we have for the ladies and not the gentlemen, this one's just for the ladies.

I'm gonna say that right now. Yeah, it says hers and slurs. It's... That's... Jesus. It's... Yeah, it is. What we got today, what we got today, Robert, Garrison, is some stories about cryptids.

So, I wanna start in the autumn of 1993, Garrison was not alive and Robert and I were much younger. And I wanna start in Northern California where one night three men set out to execute a pretty routine weed trade, right? They had a drugs and cannabis off, got some money, come home. And it's not exactly a secret that at that time and in that place, there was a lot of illegal girl operations. And it's not exactly a secret. Yeah, have you heard about this?

Yeah, I mean, number one, once you hit about anywhere in the coastal Northern California from Santa Cruz on up, Bigfoot is like a topic, not even really of discussion, but there's just Bigfoot shit all over the goddamn place. From Arcade to Grant's Pass is probably the biggest density of Bigfoot shit, but it's all throughout Oregon, all throughout Washington. You get a decent amount in Idaho, I think too, but yeah. People make a lot of money of Bigfoot. There's even a Bigfoot highway up there, but yeah, I was listening to a dog shit podcast

recently. It's not very good. It's called Wild Thing and it's by some former NPR reporter. There's Squatch's podcast, right? Yeah, she's doing like a Bigfoot thing. It's just not very good. Like there's bits in there where she'll like quote one guy who's like, there's a lot, there's so much evidence for Bigfoot.

If you type Bigfoot into Google, there's like 11 million results and then an actual scientist will be like, there's no evidence for Bigfoot and she just is like, what are we to think? What can we do? Both sides. Both sides. Yeah. I did not find it very edifying. I was listening to what was alone on the mountain this weekend.

There were two sides to Bigfoot story, Robert. It doesn't matter if one of them is wrong. No. It's very fun. But yeah, I've been, because I also, the parts of the West Coast that are Bigfoot country are also the parts of the West Coast that grow like more pot than anywhere else on planet Earth. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is interesting, isn't it? Because these two things may or may not overlap. Yeah, I think they do. Yeah. Please continue. Yes. So Hulu made a, I will use a loosely use a word documentary here.

Yeah. Hulu is good for this. So I'm going to use a few words loosely here. So according to David Holt House, journalist, which is again a word I'm using, maybe loosely, but he does a pretty good job in what I've seen essentially. He's fine. Holt House. Yeah.

So the interesting thing about him and what I do kind of like about him is he's, he worked as a trimmer. Yeah. So the pot industry, the people who move the marijuana around the country, including smuggle it into places where it's still fully illegal. There's the people who sell it either illegally or at dispensaries. There's the people who grow it. And then the largest by number chunk of the weed trade are the trimmers.

And those are the people every season, usually in the fall come down for three or four months. Northern California, Southern Oregon mostly. And they take raw marijuana that's been like bucked and cut off of the plant and they trim it into the kind of buds that you buy. And this guy was doing that back in the nineties and he ran into these stories about a big foot murdering two or three Mexican guys. Yeah. That's exactly it.

Yeah. So I think he actually does a really good job in this documentary. Yeah. I actually didn't think it was bad. Yeah. No, no, I was ready for it to be bad, but I was quite impressed with. So what happened is, yeah, like Robert says that there are these probably migrant, probably undocumented workers, right?

Who come. Well, a lot of them, there's a good chunk of them probably, I don't know. My estimates, maybe 20 to 30% are like mostly white kids from various parts of the country. A lot of them are folks who are either kind of seasonally unhoused. Many of them like live and camp basically in places like Arcada, a big chunk of the year. And then we'll live on farms while they trim. There are a decent chunk who are undocumented.

A lot are Hmong, like a lot of are like first, like particularly older Hmong people who like came here after Vietnam and started businesses and then like their kids and grandkids got into the pot trade and were like, well, my, you know, grandma or my aunts retired and they like they living in the woods and are good at trimming like we can make a bunch of extra money this way. It's all sorts up there. Yeah. It's kind of fascinating.

So these three guys set out to do this deal, right? That they're three of the people who fall into the undocumented labor category and they never come back. The whole house is sitting in one of these farmhouses or in a trailer or something when a couple of guys come in and say, Hey, those dudes never came back. And they've been killed, right? They seem to have been sort of pretty brutally murdered, but the weed that they were carrying was still there.

So it wasn't like somebody should come down and stole the weed, right? Yeah. You, by the way, if it was a weed industry thing, you probably wouldn't because everyone's got a lot of fucking weed. I mean, people do steal weed, but if you're out there doing a murder, it's probably because somebody's fucking with your business in a bigger way than whatever they happen to have on the fucking farm. I wouldn't be surprised if a pot murder would not result in whatever shit they had in their

trailer actually getting jacked. Okay. Well, I don't know. Yeah. Because the weeds are things that everyone has. So at the time, their deaths are largely, if not entirely factually, attributed to Bigfoot, right? It's put out there that these people were murdered by Bigfoot.

Now, they are not the only people whose deaths have been blamed on Bigfoot. Earlier this year, July 10th, 2022, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office reported the murder of Mr. Jimmy Knighton, and the press release, they said, Larry Sanders has reported killing Mr. Jimmy Knighton by the South Canadian River. Sanders and Knighton had been noodling in the river on July 9th. Okay. Now, yeah. So give it to me, Robert.

You're from this part of the world. Yeah. It's just when you stroke a catfish. Yeah. You don't stroke? Well, yes, basically. It's when you use kind of your fingers as bait and you catch a catfish by the mouth. Right.

Great. Yes. We call it noodling. What a country. Yes. I mean, James. See, Robert, to the kids these days, catch a catfish by the mouth being something very different.

Yeah. So does noodling. Yeah. Or as the Mormons call it, soaking. Sure. Oh, God. There's a great story. This is off topic, but there was just an outbreak in South Lake City of armpit crabs because

so many Mormon kids are having armpit sex and also not using protection. Oh, dear. It's awesome. It's so funny. Really? No, it's not. That's just, wow. Yeah.

We're still doing this. We're still doing this, Gare. We're going to be doing this the rest of your natural life. Yep. We're never getting past this shit. This is what the future holds for you, decades of arm fucking. So Sanders and Knighton, they were old school noodling. They weren't online noodling.

Sure. Of course. Yeah. That's the best kind of noodling in my opinion. That's what I've heard. So they're at the river. At some point, Mr. Sanders becomes convinced that Knighton has summoned Bigfoot to kill him.

No, that's interesting. You don't hear that a lot. Yeah. You don't because I didn't think Bigfoot was summonable. That wasn't on the table of things that I thought one could do to a Bigfoot. I mean, I've always thought Bigfoot was summonable, but not for murder. For sex, sure. Okay.

Yeah. That's why his armpits are so crabby. Well, that's what everyone says about Bigfoot. Mm-hmm. So you can identify him in a crowd. So at some point, Sanders becomes convinced that Bigfoot is on his way. Knight is going to kill him. And so he unfortunately strangles his noodling partner to death.

Well, that's tragic. Mm-hmm. And then noodling part. Well, I don't know. His noodling partner to death. Well, I guess we're just going to leave it. We're just going to leave it. We're just going to move straight on.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it does sound rather tragic. It does sound rather sad, but he seems to have reported pretty openly that he believed that Bigfoot was on its way, and if he didn't stop this ritual, that Bigfoot will kill him. And a lot of, as it turns out, things that people can't really explain, often the times when people are inhuman to other humans, tend to be explained as the actions of monsters, right?

Yeah. And I want to quote from the documentarian, the director, Joshua Roefe, who made that film. He says, the thing that people should be afraid of is not the boogeyman in the woods. It's our next door neighbors who will usually commit acts of violence that will then terrify everybody on the block or in the neighborhood. Roefe said that working in Northern California was very scary. We did enter a sort of underworld, for lack of a better term.

And you know, we were really mindful to try not overstay our welcome there. So I want to get into cryptids a little bit, and I want to get into some of the more famous ones, as well as a curse. I've got a curse here. Oh, good. Yeah. The curse is great because it's invented by the California Park Service. But I want to explain kind of the social functions that they sometimes serve, as well as just

having some fun talking about cryptids. So the one that I thought might serve a social function, and probably the most famous cryptid aside from Bigfoot, is our friend, the chupacabra, right? And yeah. Yeah. In English, that translates to goat sucker, which is... Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. We're staying on this bit, I see. Yeah. Yeah, we're on themes. It's not a bit, Garrison. It's culture. Yeah. Yeah.

Chupacabra is not a costume. I'll say this. I'm reading a great book right now about the Hapsburg... It's called Good Sucker. No. It's called The Last Emperor of Mexico, and it's about that Hapsburg who tried to become the Emperor of Mexico. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And they hung his ass in like three weeks. Yeah. It's very funny. Love to see that. But yeah. Good stuff. I respect to the people of Mexico.

So actually, the Chupacabra doesn't come from Mexico. Comes from Puerto Rico. Oh, I didn't know that, actually. Yeah. So we've got a little bit about the Chupacabra. Perhaps the best source for this, as far as I can find, is this guy, Benjamin Redford, who has written a book about the Chupacabra. And he shows that nearly all of the eyewitness accounts can be traced back to this one, the

first account, which was this woman called Madeleine Tolentino in the 1990s in 1995 in Puerto Rico. Right. So it's also much more recent than I thought. Like the Chupacabra is 27 years old. It is younger than me, which is quite remarkable given how much cultural impact it's had. Yeah. I thought it was much older.

Yeah, me too. I thought it was this, and like an old, tiny border legend. And you're what, 49, James? That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Just make sure. No, yeah.

I'm just kicking it here for a couple more years before I can claim that sweet eye-heart media attention. Yeah, get that AARP, be able to go to the fucking, the Sizzler and get 5% off. That's it, Ben. I've got to be issued my 1911, which you get when you're 60 years old. You get a 1911 and you get a Luby's gift card. Yeah. And you get to evoke the Second World War whenever anyone is rude to you, even if you

weren't in it. And you're allowed to drive your car into a farmer's market in the state of California up to twice. Yeah, yeah, up to twice. After that, you have to move to Oregon. Mm-hmm. That's right. So, yeah.

Until my retirement, I want to talk a little bit about this stupid couple of so, they're fascinating because like with Bigfoot, right, there are, as you have mentioned, 11 million Google results, but no actual Bigfoot, right? No one's ever found a Bigfoot. No one can present to you. Bigsfeet. Yeah. Yeah.

But it takes an eye, right? It's from the Italian, Bigfiti. That's righty. That's right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. So, there aren't a Bigfiti, but there are Tupacabras.

And the reason there are Tupacabras is that what people, a Tupacabra, right, the name goat sucker, and this will shock you, Garrison, especially, that the way that they are sucking goats is perhaps not the way you would expect. Interesting. Yeah. Mm-hmm. They're very innovative in this regard. What is happening is people are finding their goats, their chickens, their livestock with

their throat ripped out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, it is the way you would expect them.

And most animals need throats, right? Yes. It's one of the parts that, yeah, they're not interchangeable. They're not, yeah, they're really. That's good to know. This is all really important information. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So, throat-free goats, cattle, sheep, chickens tend not to survive very long. A lot of times, people come out in the morning, find their animals throatless and dead. Yeah. They're throated, sure. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

You could call it a deep throating. That's where they get it right deep in the throat. So, they, these animals are dead and the, people claim that they're drained of blood, which isn't quite true. Of course. No, there's only two possible explanations. Mm-hmm. Do you want to go through it?

One obviously being vampires. The other being this, being this Crippen creature. Well, of course. That's the only possible things it could be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's where the Venn diagram overlaps. Is this kind of, it's, it's got goat-like legs actually, but then it's bipedal. It has kind of a human torso and a sort of lizard meets wolf face. It's how. Okay. So, we're, we're, we're verging in like Jersey Devil vampire territory. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it, it prefers warmer climate. It doesn't like Jersey and frankly. I mean, me neither. So, that's something. Yeah.

Yeah. So, if you go east to New Mexico and I don't think anyone else should either. No, it doesn't, it doesn't care for Bruce Springsteen and it doesn't want to live in New Jersey. So, it, it, it stays out west, but it's been reported all over the world actually. Now, the, there are a couple of interesting things about these tubercarbons. One is that people have found them, especially in Texas, right? Are you familiar, Robert, with Texas blue dogs?

No. Okay. Let's go tell Robert something about Texas. Yeah. Well, lady, I don't have her name written down here, she was a Texas nutritionist and she, By the way, I will say when it came to like cryptids people taught me about in Texas, it was the chupacabra.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're basically Mexico. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Not Ted Cruz, who is the other famous Texas cryptid. Yeah. But unlike Ted Cruz, this, this chupacabra had actually been to a farm and it had been ripping out the throats of these animals, right? And this lady had a problem with, with the animals throats being ripped out. And then one day she finds a corpse of what she presumed to be a chupacabra. It is hairless, it looks kind of like a dog, but it has pronounced glands on its bumps, on its back, I guess, and it has thick, blue skin.

So what, why would you do, Robert, if you, if you were living in Texas, you come across a dead chupacabra? I mean, fry it up a little bit of a double sauce, you know, maybe even some green chili throw that shit on there and just kind of fry it. Yeah. I hadn't even. Yeah, that makes sense. That one didn't even hit me.

But yeah, having, I don't know if there was a couple of taco spots we went to in Texas, which that might have been what was going on. Yeah. You just get whatever kind of meat, doesn't matter, meets meat. Mm-hmm. Yep. So that's not what this lady did. She was a nutritionist, perhaps.

So she was a little, little worried about the nutritional content of the chupacabra. She had it stuffed and, and it's in her living room today. Okay. That sounds science-y. So is it just like a coyote? Like what, like what, what is it? Well, that's an interesting question, isn't it, Garrison? That is an interesting question, Garrison.

Yes. What the, what the blue dog seems to be is some kind of hybrid of a Mexican wolf on a coyote that has some kind of mange, which has made all its hair fall off. Nearly all of the chupacabras are, are some sort of canine with mange because mange makes it look like a fucking monster. Yeah. Yeah. So what, yeah.

Like if you saw a giant Sphinx cat, you would also think that's a cryptid. Yes. Yeah. And especially if they've been ripping the throats out of your animals, right? Cause these poor coyotes and feral dogs and such is, are so weakened by the mange that they can't prey on wild animals. And so they tend to come. Okay.

Right. It's pretty easy to catch chickens if you can get into the coop, right? Cause they got nowhere to go or to catch goats. And so unfortunately- Poor little guys. What's happening is that these dogs, these various canids are getting mange. And they are unfortunately too weak to hunt. And so they're killing things like captive goats and chickens.

And that is where the chupacabra myth comes from. Going back to the bipedal chupacabra though, it's very interesting. That sounds a little bit more fun. Yeah. So in the year before the chupacabra was seen, there was a film made in Puerto Rico and it was called species. And, uh, very- God.

Oh man. Yeah. Okay. So essentially the, uh, the original eyewitness reports, which began the year after that film was released. Uh-huh. Yeah. This I've heard.

They all perfectly describe the creature. Uh, it's got the spines on its back. Uh, Radford. Radford is the person doing right in the book. Radford said the, uh, the resemblance between the creature, which is called sill in the film and the chupacabra is really impressive. So yeah, the, uh, the old quadrupedal chupacabra, it's a dog with mange. The bipedal chupacabra seems to be exclusively explained by this, this movie and people's

feelings about United States colonialism in Puerto Rico, specifically the number of defense facilities and labs in the Yonke Rainforest and their feelings that maybe something like this shit could come out of one of these US labs because if the US was developing a terrible creature that sucked the blood of people, it would absolutely do it in one of its colonial properties. Um, yes. That entirely makes sense. So this, this in a sense, the chupacabra, according to Radford's theory, gives a physical

manifestation of this feeling of disgust with the, uh, with the United States. And I got a couple of other cryptids. Uh, I was going to talk very briefly about the beast of Proctor Valley. And then I want to talk about the curse of Bodie, which is a curse, not a cryptid. Uh, but first Robert, do you know which, what will not ambush your livestock and rip its throat out? Um, I mean, like a, like a good sheepdog wouldn't do that. That's right.

And that's why this episode is presented by Border Collies. Wow. Let's hear from some of the Collies. We finally, we finally got the big deal with the Border Collie. Yeah, that's right. The Astral Complex. That's good. Yep.

Just use promo code, uh, Robert Evans, when you're buying your Border Collie for 10% off. Just walk up to a Border Collie and shout my name in its face. Uh, try to grab its food away from it rapidly too. That's a good way to get their attention and, uh, see what happens. Yep. Refuse to be herded. Yeah. See, see if it likes that.

All right. We're back. I hope you've all got your Border Collies, uh, cause this, this next, this next cryptid is, it's a little local one. Okay. So they're a cryptid to bit like the Chupacabral across the country, but the one that we have closest to San Diego is called the Proctor Valley beast. And now to understand the Proctor Valley beast, I think you got to understand Proctor Valley

. Proctor Valley is exactly the sort of dirt road that you go down when you're 16 years old, when you want to go somewhere with your date, pound a few beers and get away from your parents. Right. These kind of exist all over the country, all over the world, probably. And they're a little closer, they're close enough to know about, but far enough away to seem weird and distant. Right.

Proctor Valley is a gravel road and you can drive down at a regular car, but it's pretty washboarded, there's no lights, there's no street lights, nothing like that. Right. These days, your greatest danger when you're driving, uh, riding a bike or walking or driving down Proctor Valley road is the border patrol, absolutely hauling ass in, in one of their, um, Ford Raptors, which they seem to have obtained and I will never understand their love for the Ford Raptor. Yeah.

It is. I don't know how much those cost, but it is an obscene amount of money to spend on a pickup truck. And it's also like, look, if I'm going to be out in the, in the middle of nowhere and trusting an off-roading vehicle, my first pick is not going to be the Ford goddamn Raptor. Well, you've got to buy American rubber. Yeah, but they're border patrol.

Of course they're driving Fords. Unbelievable. Yeah. Well, they always have a predator drone hanging out. It can come rescue them. Yeah. Yeah. The border patrol and steroid abusers in my old neighborhood in West LA shaking hands

over the Ford Raptor. Yeah. Ford Raptors with illegal things. Yeah. Ford Raptors. The car you can only drive if you have adult onset acne caused as a result of injecting hormones into your fucking thigh every night. Yeah.

They sell a lot of them in LA, coincidentally. Yeah. Well, you really need one for, you know, getting down Beverly Hills Boulevard. Not the good hormones, like the ones you, you steal from the horse's blood. Yeah. Yeah. The hormones you take when you're wanting to be more macho, but maybe not quite, not quite achieving your gender insecurities.

Okay. Yeah. So that's it, that a young couple headed off down Proctor Valley Road one night and their car broke down. So the young man gets out, this is a male female couple, and he's going to fix the car, right? And he says to the lady in a very chivalrous way that she should lock the door so she's safe, right?

And that's the last she hears of him. So she assumes he's gone off to get some help and she nods off, right? She's got the door locked. She's very safe. She nods off and she's to work and buy a kind of scratching sound and the wind's howling. Every time the wind blows, there's a little scratch on the roof, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, right? Wind noise.

I'm not going to do the wind noise. And she starts shitting herself, right? She's very scared now. Scratch, scratch, scratch, wind, wind, scratch, scratch, scratch. And she stays there till sunshine when she's sun up, when she's working up by the good people of the San Diego Sheriff's Department. San Diego Sheriff's Department are shouting, they're pointing guns, they're doing their thing.

They're doing that because her boyfriend is hanging upside down, dismembered from the tree above her and his nails are catching the top of the car every time the wind blows him, right? He's been killed by the Proctor Valley Beast. Now, the Proctor Valley Beast is an animal of kind of nondescript shape and size. In the 1970s, the local radio DJ organized a search for the Proctor Valley Beast, right? People went out at night. They saw the Proctor Valley Beast, most of the stories, it kind of looked like a kind

of winged bipedal, half human, gobbling creature. It changed in form in the 1970s when people conducting, it's just kind of a teen radio thing in the 1970s, right? People conducting this search reported finding a deranged cow. The cow was probably not deranged. The cow was just sleeping. Yeah, I've known more cows than most people. I grew up on a cow farm.

I've seen them behave in a variety of ways. I've never seen one appear deranged. Yeah, sometimes they're moving very quickly. Sometimes they're scared. Sometimes they're sick. Deranged is an interesting, because cows don't really have enough going on up there to be deranged. Like you didn't grow up in the United Kingdom in a certain period of time, Robert, when

our cows became mad. Well, but that's still, I've seen cows that have mad cow disease and they're like, they're ill, but they're, I don't know. Yeah. They're not like forgetting the name of their eldest daughter as they lose their way home. Going on violent rampages. They're not asking where their husband who died 23 years ago is when they wake up in the middle of the night.

Anyway. A senile cow. They have to go live on a farm when they go, oh, that's why you haven't seen them, Robert. I sure do like that, young Ronald Reagan. That's my cow voice. Yeah. Yeah. They get old, they forget things, they vote for Donald Trump, they do a fascism.

That's what happens to cows. It's the only way cows can die. Otherwise they live very happy and fulfilled lives in the countryside. So why do we have this Proctor Valley beast, right? Why is there a mad cow that murdered a young man who was out late nights with a young woman? No one knows who this young man is, right? I did try my best to find reports of any murders in Proctor Valley, and of course it won't surprise you to learn that we have in fact discovered dead bodies in Proctor Valley because unfortunately

Proctor Valley is just a few miles from the border. Ah, yes, well. And I've spent quite a lot of time out in that area and unfortunately the people that we are finding dead in Proctor Valley haven't been killed by a deranged cow or a bipedal beast, but in fact by the elements, right? People trying to cross the border and find a better life for themselves and not making it as far as the dirt road which leads to a small town, which leads to a big road, which leads to a big town that is close to there.

And so what the Proctor Valley beast is a myth that serves to tell kids to not drive down dirt roads late at night on their own, right? It's doing kids. Fuck your parents. Yeah, absolutely. Fucking send it. Your Miata can handle it. Get off road.

Do some drifting. What's the worst that could happen? Maybe if you're out there, take a gallon of water and maybe I'm not going to say that because there might be a crime. Yeah, we can cut that, but I was going to say a handgun with a single bullet in case you get stuck off road. A silver bullet and a nail to hit it with. So the last curse I want to get to you is the curse of Bodie State Historic Park.

Do you know where that is, Robert? No, when you said Bodie, I thought immediately about the movie Point Break. OK, I haven't seen it. Oh, well, that's OK. Yeah, Garrison, you seen it? No, I haven't seen Point Break. Oh, sorry, I forgot. This is you've seen Point Break.

This is an audio medium. Yeah, that's right. I can't shake my head. No, no, I've not seen Point Break. You haven't seen Point Break? No, my God. Oh, my God. I only watch the filmmakers previous far superior film that will not be named.

Uh-huh, this is a joke that like one person will get who's a cynic. Well, we're going to have to watch Point Break, but there's a guy named Bodie on it and he is kind of a cryptid. Interesting. So there Bodie has a bit of a problem, right? Bodie is an abandoned. He was robbing all those banks anyway. Yeah, this story doesn't involve some robbing.

Oh, good. Yeah, a bit of a bit of theft on the podcast. So what happened to Bodie is Bodie's got a problem, right? Bodie has a problem specifically with mail because almost every week when the rangers from Bodie travel into town to get the mail, they have to collect half a dozen or so little packages containing little things like rocks, peaches of wood, fragments of pottery, or coins.

And all of those little packages have letters attached to them. And I'm going to read from some of those letters. Please find enclosed one weather beetle, an old shoe. The shoe was removed from Bodie during the month of August 1978. My trail of misfortune is so long and depressing it can't be listed here. Another one. You can have these Godforsaken rocks back.

I've never had so much rotten luck in my life. Please forgive me for ever testing the curse of Bodie. OK. So what we got here is a curse, right? Yes. Good old fashioned. If you steal something from the town, the town will come back and hurt you, right?

Yeah, yeah. So Bodie popped up in the late 19th century gold rush, right? It's in between Mono Lake and Lake Tahoe. They did. It's named after a gold prospector. There was some gold found there. In fact, at its height, Bodie hosted around 10,000 people, right? And for those 10,000 people, there were 60 saloons,

which is a pretty good ratio. There's multiple documented gunfights on the main street. But it seems like your stereotypical world west town that after the gold rush was over, it wasn't such a great place to live. So people abandoned it. And it's now managed by the California Park Service, right? And the California Park Service curates this ghost town in arrested decay so that people can come and see this little slice of history.

And there's a lot we can learn from these places that have been abandoned, right? We can learn a lot about the history of everyday life. Like, oh, what things do people have in their kitchen? Why with this next to that? Why is there a knife here? Why are the beer bottles kept here? There's a lot that historians could learn over time that they might not find initially.

So it's important to keep these things in really pristine condition, right? The problem that they had was once they opened the park, you could just walk around town, right? It's not like a museum. There aren't little little ropes. There aren't plexiglass dividers keeping you away from stuff. And people took that as an invitation to Stealship and Stealship they did. So the Aparks Ranger, who I cannot find the name of anywhere,

but at some point, Apark Ranger, giving the walking tours around Bodhi, started telling people about this legendary curse. And this curse, he said, made it so that anyone who took anything from Bodhi would be pursued by bad luck for the rest of their life. Didn't really think anything about it, didn't want people to steal shit, right? And as a result, hundreds of people who had stolen things from Bodhi started returning them in the mail, right?

They're blaming everything from cellulitis, cancer, failed relationships on the thing that they stole from Bodhi. Now, this would just be funny if it wasn't for the fact that every single one of these items has been stolen from a protected site, right? So the park service has now set itself up with this huge administrative burden, which is reporting a theft for every single shoe or piece of glass or button that's stolen from Bodhi. So it's taking up a huge inordinate amount of their time,

and they no longer will speak. I've tried to reach out, I didn't get a response. I did drop them a Facebook message on their page, trying to talk to someone about this, but they no longer talk about the curse because it's created such a burden for them, filing police reports or all these broken buttons. See, this is the actual curse that they did themselves.

This is how most curses actually work, is that you just actually, like, the effect is what you turn the thing into. And now you're forced to do all these police reports, and that's the actual effect of the curse. Yeah, I think it's wonderful. I think it's great that they made this rod for their own back. You know what won't curse you with cancer or cellulitis, Garrison? I cannot.

Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff that effort... ExxonMobil will give you cancer, so... Yeah, well, the gold that we're about to plug... That's totally safe. You can huff that gold, you can melt it down, dip your hand in, get a gold-plated hand, totally fine. So yeah. Lick it.

Lick it. Bop it? You missed that too, Garrison. Sure. It's a shame. No, Bop it was incredibly popular when I was a kid. Okay. It was, like, everywhere.

All right, we're back, and having all received our little bags of gold for that plug. We did. Yep. I have mine right here. I like to keep it with me in case the shit hits the fan. I've buried mine in the middle of the Oregon desert. Smart.

I've buried a couple of things in the middle of the Oregon desert. None of them gold. Well, that was that big foot. It depends on your definition of gold. Yeah, big foot armpit is what you buried out there. And your definition of that guy, I started a barbershop. And whatever. Continue.

Okay, yeah, yeah. We don't need to talk about that on the podcast. Thanks for raising that out, Daniel. We don't want any more of Robert's felonies on Maine. It's only a felony if the police find the body. That's true, but maybe you could put some shit out there about a curse related to the body. Yeah, curses, for sure.

Give it some mange. And then struff it. So why do we have curses encrypted? Obviously, partly because it's just fucking fun. And partly because some of our beliefs, right? Like if we look at Dirkheim or what Dirkheim thought religion was, religion is kind of an outgrowth of society that unites people based on a moral code, right?

And functionalists more broadly in sociology believe that these beliefs serve a function in society. And I think a lot of these things help us explain things that we can't otherwise explain or give a more palatable explanation for things that we don't care to explain, right? Or things, and like in nearly all of these cases, there are things that rip children away from their mothers.

There's another Mexican, like shape-shifting witch that rips children away from their mothers, right? Unfortunately, there are things that rip children away from their mothers, and your tax payer dollars pay for them, right? But it works a little better to explain things that don't fit with our other systems of belief through, like if we fundamentally believe, right,

that the world is good and capitalism is wonderful, and that gradually things will trickle down so that everyone gets richer if the rich get richer first. It can become very hard to explain the state of the world unless you are a member of the Conservative and Unionist party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of course. And so instead, we create these external things, right? These things that go bump in the night.

So sometimes they can be a proxy for external forces, right? The chupacabra, in a way, kind of explains as we get closer to nature and nature pushes back on us a little bit that why that happens, right, rather than just saying, oh, fuck, we've given all these coyotes mange. How on earth are we in a state where there's a blue dog walking around? The chupacabra also serves as a way

to kind of personify for people in Puerto Rico, either consciously or unconsciously, that the terrible impact of the United States Colonial is on that, right, which it's not very hard to see. Even the Proctor Valley beast, right, that says, stay away from this dark road near the border late at night. There are reasons to stay away from there,

but unfortunately, there are also reasons to go there and try and help people who are genuinely suffering. And lots of people I know go and leave water out there. So these curses, they're kind of like credit scores, right? They're not real, but they can sometimes ruin your life. And so sometimes it's just easier to pretend that it's magic doing that rather than this overarching

global system, which is not very nice. And that's kind of where I want to finish up, I guess, is these are ways to explain things that we can't always explain. And that's sometimes OK, because sometimes it can be hard to confront these things. You got anything else you want to say about cryptids, Robert? I don't know.

I think if you're in an industry that's adjacent to illegal drugs and you murder someone in the woods, it's probably a good idea to blame it on Bigfoot. So that would be my advice for our listeners, is to blame your crimes on Bigfoot. I don't know. Do you guys believe in Bigfoot? Let's end by talking about that.

Oh, because I actually believe in a physical ape-like thing that's been thusly undiscovered, that roams in forests. Some people say ape like garrison. Primate, I think, doesn't necessarily mean ape-like. Sure, primate. Probably not. Maybe Australopithecus. I do not think that.

There's a physical one exists. Now, I think, like we've mentioned before, like the words, you can say like a curse isn't real, but it can still have effects based on how we talk about it and how we can kind of make it real by our own actions and the same thing. I don't think Bigfoot, the primate, exists. But as a cultural symbol that has impact,

it is real in some way. But it's not like a physically manifesting. Yeah, I would agree with you. Except for, I would say, it is real in a physical way. And finally. Have you seen Bigfoot, Robert? Is this why you drop in your Bigfoot size? Yeah, I actually have.

I've seen a couple of large animals out in the woods. I have seen weird stuff in the woods. I don't think I'm not comfortable calling it Bigfoot. Well, I am. Weird things in the woods, certainly. Yeah, I've seen a lot of weird things in the woods, and all of them were Bigfoot, as far as anyone has ever been able to convince me.

And you know, when you get right down to it, isn't that what Christmas is all about? Yes, happy Halloween. Happy Halloween, everybody. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys,

we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get to the heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal

system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, oh no.

There's that monster coming to kill me with his fentanyl knife. Ah, it got me. What a bummer. Welcome to this. Welcome to Spooky Week where we're talking about all of the scariest things. A podcast with foreshadowing. That is foreshadowing.

That's right. It's with Deputy Garrison Davis just over the fentanyl by being near it. And we'll now assume 17 knock-hands. Yep. It was very scary. Thank you. Very spooky.

It's good to be back with Spooky Week. All right. So this episode, I believe Chris has something very special prepared for us. Yeah, so today we are talking about one of the most immediately recognizable and enduring symbols of Halloween. And one of the things that I've had

to spend the most time cropping out of party invitations when I was sending them to kids in high school. Transgirls and pumpkins. No, we're talking about this. God damn it. We're talking about other iconic Halloween inventory. No, no. Yeah, well, this is the one like specifically,

I had to spend a lot of time cropping this out of. I fucking like party invitations to people because if you're in your fucking shitty Christian suburb and if you send a kid home with an invitation that has a black cat on it, their parents will pull them out of public school because of the rising threat of Satanism. Better to stick to the tried and true.

Put the unibomber on it or something. Yeah, you got lots of nice stars. Put some crosses on it instead. But like a cornucopia, make sure it's called like a harvest festival or some bullshit. Yeah, harvest festival. Yeah, no, come to my fucking pentagram party or your party site.

So yeah, we were talking about the black cat. And ironically, the black cat association with witchcraft is actually, this is the Catholic Church's fault as are many things. As the most thing. Only bad thing they've ever done. But even created Protestantism. It's a real issue.

So true. So, OK, so Pope Gregory the Ninth made cats eternally feast on his soul, took office of the pope in 1227. And six years later, in 1233, he issues his first papal bull. This bull is called Vox and Rama. And Vox and Rama is essentially like it's a giant anti-witchcraft bull that is designed to like. OK, what do you mean by bull?

Like people, people bulls are these like orders, basically, that are like declared by the pope and they turn into sort of like they have a sort of legal status. That they're they they determine what sort of church doctrine and church position is good. It's basically like it's like it's like the it's like it's like an executive order for the pope. OK, all right.

And they can just do this. And so they do this a lot. And yeah, this is the sort of anti-witchcraft one because he's trying to rally support for like stamping out a bunch of heretics in Germany for the crime of like not believing in Catholic doctrine and giving off their money to the pope. So this bull like directly links cats to satanic rituals.

There's this whole thing about like half cat, like half people. Oh, I wish it was to be there. Oh, I wish. Go, bull. We are. We are back to iconic trans girl Halloween imagery. We full circled.

There are no new moral panics. This is a fucking furry panic in like 1233. It's it's amazing. It's cat girls kill God. Yeah, unfortunately, the product of this is that. You know, like this, this, this, this, this spate. From here, it's off to the races, right? Black cats have become associated with witchcraft

and then sort of in general with bad luck and you get this whole sort of like, you know, crossing a black cat, like bringing bad luck. And this has really sort of devastating real word effect on cats. Like there are sort of they're like it is. Mm hmm. Yeah, like, I mean, like, like throughout Europe,

like from this point on, like periodically, there was mass killings of cats in Europe because like these people are fucking barbarians and savages who like should never have been allowed to like leave their stone huts. Um, when I was getting a while ago, when I was getting some childhood cats, we were talking to the cat agency and we learned

that they don't allow people to adopt black cats during October because people either buy them as props and then like a get rid of them or just like abuse them. Um, it's, it sucks. It's like an actual problem. Yeah. And Phil, are we going to get to the great cat massacre?

No, what is the great cat massacre? Ah, that sounds like a sequel to that, to that mouse Sherlock Holmes movie that Disney made. Yeah, it's extremely dark version. Yeah, no, the great cat mask is a book by Robert Danson. It's like a, it's a very, like if you're doing a history graduate degree and you're reading like these sort of histories of everyday life

or like histories of popular laughter, you will read the great cat massacre. And he details how like basically in France, I can't remember when, but these printer's apprentices were like the apprentices lived with the printer, right? And the printer's wife also had a bunch of cats which she cared for much better than the apprentices. So they got mad and started doing cat murders.

Oh, no. They put the cats on trial and convicted them of witchcraft. Wait, wait. So this was like, this was like judicial murder. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They sentenced the cats to death by,

I think they hung them or something. Oh my God. Shit. Did the cats have like a defense attorney? Like what is? Well, it's a witchcraft, well, you're supposed to have an advocate at a witchcraft trial. So one would hope, but unfortunately my guess though

is you're probably going to get another cat which is like not a great defense attorney. No, they don't get a single fuck. Oh, I don't know. They could really fuck up your face or something if they just, you know, when it claws out. I don't know if the cats had a defense attorney. It's an excellent question.

If someone's read it more recently than me. This is reminding me of that great poster. Someone took from a vet's office that was like fighting cats. It's like don't fight fair, use drugs, great one. Oh yeah. Yes. But you know, okay. My piece of advice to you is don't fight fair.

Yeah. Use drugs. Yeah, it's great. It's good, it's good. Good general advice. And put them in your Halloween sweets. Yeah. Yeah.

Four shadowing. Yeah. PM. So according to a study from the journal animals, black cats have the highest rate of euthanasia and shelters and have lower rates of adoption, like have the lowest rate of adoption among all fur colors, which is like extremely fucked up. And it's also like the number of cats that we euthanize every year is just so bleak.

It's very sad. Yeah. So fuck the Catholic church. This is their fault somehow. However, comma, for millions of people across space and time, the black cat has met something else entirely. This black cat with its fur raised and back arched is the bringer of the class war, the herald of the new world.

And its name is sabotage. And it's a Beastie Boy song about it. Yeah. And before we get into how the Sabotabby or the Sabokitty became associated with sabotage, we have to talk about what sabotage actually is. And the reason we have to do this is because sabotage like does not mean the same thing now as it did when the term was coined. So if you look at sort of the modern definition of sabotage, it's almost entirely focused

around sort of the physical destruction of property, like here's Mary and Webster's definition, for example, destruction of employer's property, such as tools or materials or the hindering of manufacturing by discontented workers to destruction or obstructive action carried on by a civilian or enemy agent to hinder a nation's war efforts. And okay, so part of the reason why I even want to think about sabotage is sort of like a physical act of destruction has to do with the sort of folk etymology of, you know, where the word sabotage came from, which is supposedly dates back to these like early 1800s French workers throwing these wooden shoes called sabots, it's like machines to break them.

And the problem is that this sort of just isn't true. Um, like there's no direct evidence that anyone sabotaged machines by throwing your shoes into them, which seems like kind of in a kind of inefficient way. Just grab a stick. Right. Like you need your shoes to walk on. Yeah. And the other thing is that sabotage is only-

These are the people who put cats on trial, they weren't always thinking in straight lines. That's true. This is the 1800s, so hopefully we're slightly past the cat trials. But what's interesting about this is the other thing about this, okay, like sabotage is a French word, right? The French shoot, the word for the shoe is sabote. Like it doesn't start up until like the late 1800s, it literally just means someone who like it means to make a wooden shoe.

Okay. But it turns out it's actually, its actual origin is more interesting than this. The term sabotage as, you know, like the sort of like worker action was invented by the French anarchist, Emile Pigot, Puget, I don't, P-O-U-G-E-G, I don't know how to pronounce that. It does not, it does not matter. No one cares. Pouche.

Pouche? I don't know. He's French. Sure. Okay. It's not a real language, it's fine. I feel slightly bad because he's one of the few good Frenchmen. Him?

Controversial statement. Him and Foucault, the only flawless French man. So Emile Pigot is like, he's a, I'm just gonna, this guy's extremely French. Yeah, but he's also, he is, he is in the, he's in the period of French cool, which is to say he is, he is an anarchist, he is a cynicist, he is doing all of the shit. And he, like he invents the term sabotage as part of this report to the CGT's 1879 conference in some cities. I can't remember.

So the CGT is a really weird union. It means CGT means like the general confederation of labor of workers basically. Actually, it's really funny because, because, because of how similar like French, Spanish and Portuguese are, there were like 16,000 unions across like 12 countries that are named the CGT. They're all either the CGT or the UGC, because they're all just like confederation and they're all, confederation or something. Yeah.

So the first CGT is like a very, very weird union. They're like, they're the only union I've ever seen that has at various points been an anarchist union, a communist union, a liberal union and a social democratic union. And it also like, the thing they're famous for sort of now is the fact that they sat out like every revolution that's ever happened in France. Like they're, they're, they're probably most famous for like telling people to like basically signing a pact with the government and trying to get people like to go back to work when May 68 was happening.

And you know, the CGT, the CGT is still around today. They have like 700,000 members or something like the second largest union in France. And I don't know, it's interesting. So they'll go on strike for like pension stuff, but they won't go on strike to like abolish the class system and sort of how I put it. But in the late 1800s and early 1800s, they are a very, very radical, syndicalist union. And Emile Pigot, who again, like, like anarchist par excellence is like their vice secretary. So Pigot like invents, he invents the word sabotage as a way of translating basically

the Scottish term that I, okay, I apologize for my Scottish pronunciation. I don't, I genuinely don't really have many problems with Scottish people. I think the term is go Connie, basically, which means go slow. Here's Pigot from his pamphlet, sabotage. That's like his explanation of like what's going on here. The first part of it is him quoting a British pamphlet. That's about what go Connie is. If you want to buy a hat worth $2, you must pay $2.

If you want to spend only $1.50, you must be satisfied with an inferior quality. A hat is a commodity. If you want to buy a dozen of, why is it a dozen of shirts? Okay, I don't know. People wrote weird in the early 1900s. If you want to buy half a dozen shirts at 50 cents each, you must pay $3. If you only spend $2.50, you can only have five shirts. Now the boss declares that labor and skill are nothing but commodities like hats and

shirts. Well, we answer, we'll take you at your word. If labor and skill are commodities, their owners have the right to sell them like the hat seller sells hats and the haberdasher sells shirts. These merchants must give a certain value in exchange for an equivalent value. For a lower price, you will have an article of either lower quality or smaller quantity. Give the worker a fair wage and he will furnish you with his best labor at its highest skill. On the other hand, give the worker an insufficient wage and you forfeit the right to demand the

best and most of his labor any more than you can demand a $2 hat for $1. The Go Conny consists then in systematically applying the formula, bad wages, bad labor. So yeah, basically what this is, it's a kind of strike where it's kind of like a slowdown or there's another kind of striker's name I'm forgetting right now where it's like you exactly follow the rules. Work to rule. Yeah, it's kind of like a work to rule strike. It's basically like, okay, so you're not being paid enough.

So you just intentionally work really shittily and just keep working slowly and badly until bosses pay you more. And so this has been a big thing in Britain and Pigot like sees this and he writes basically like a paper like recommending that the CCT starts using this as a tactic, but he's trying to find a French word for it and he's like, I don't know how to translate this. And so what he thinks of is there's this sort of like, well, okay, so here's where it gets messy because it's like there's like a couple versions of the story. One version of it is like work as if you're being like hit with a wooden shoe.

So true. I wake up every morning and turn on my podcasting mic and a clog just flies in through my window and smacks me in the face. That's why Sophie, that's why Sophie had to move. Yeah. There's these sling shots set up outside my windows that launch these clogs right at my face every morning. Hilariously.

Hilariously, we are going to come back to sling shots in maybe 20 minutes. So there's this thing in France like so people with wooden shoes basically generally are like peasants, right? They're people from earlier. And there's this whole sort of stereotype in France that like in this period and like through the 1800s, there's like these people with their wooden shoes and they're like peasants and they're like ignorant and they're bad at working and like. And so basically what Pagot is the other theory of what's happening here is he's like reversing

this thing, right? He's like, well, okay, here's this stereotype of like workers working badly. And he's like, okay, no, what if we did this on purpose? Like what if we were intentionally just lazy? And it's important to note that like and Pagot does this in his writing that like so he invents the word sabotage. Like he sure as hell didn't invent the content of sabotage here's from the pamphlet sabotage again.

Sabotage is a form of revolt is as old as human exploitation. Since the day man had the criminal ability to profit by another man's labor since that very same day, the exploited the exploited toiler has instinctively tried to give his master less than what was demanded from him. In this way, the worker was unconsciously doing sabotage, demonstrating in an indirect way the irrepressible antagonism that arrays capital and labor against one another. Okay, I have to I have to do a call out post on poor, poor get poor, whatever. That was very sexist.

He said every man. That's true. That's not the women should also be forced to work. Non-binary people should be forced to work eight hours a day, hopefully more. So the fact that he's just making men work is a little sexist garrison doing a Hillary Clinton there, doing a Glenn Greenwald there. That's right. I'd love to see it weirdly, weirdly in terms of in terms of cancelling a Frenchman, a French

dude for sexism, like pretty mild, not going to lie, least problematic Frenchman. He probably did do something horrible, I just didn't see it when I was reading about it. But you know, such as such as the guy who invented sabotage. So we have sabotage as like, you know, and this is an interesting thing about this, right? When Pigot was first like defining the word, right? Like he literally is just talking about like labor slowdowns, right? And you know, very quickly, sabotage comes to mean other things and here's, here's again from this same pamphlet, he's quoting the secretary of a railway union, who's like on

strike for the right to unionize, and this is what the fucking railway union secretary guys says, with two cents worth of a certain ingredient, utilized in a peculiar way, he declared, it will be easy for the railway men to put the locomotive in such conditions as to make it impossible to run them. Such a fucking absolute, absolutely based 1870s French railroad union secretary. It's great stuff. It's actually funny because like, so he's just like out there just like saying this and like, every modern union has like a giant disclaimer in their thing saying like we do

not endorse the destruction of machines like we do not do crimes. We are not. Yeah, the fucking based French guys like, no, no, no, no, no, no, like we we are actively threatening you to destroy like every locomotive in France. If you do not let us form this union, this is why this is why my organizing with the I heart union is solely based on us planning future terrorist attacks. If we don't, if we don't get our way, the Hollywood sign will never, never be the same again.

Oh God. I've already poured sugar into the gas tank of my podcast recorder. Great. That's going to work out perfect. Unfortunately, the gas tank of the podcast is like my stomach. So we're kind of it's it's it's just as effective as actually pouring sugar into things. Yeah. That's why I'm hiding under your bed with a funnel right now.

Some sugar. On the other hand, Garrison, do you know what else will put locomotives in such a condition that will make it impossible for them to run? Is this an ad break? Is this? Yes. The dynamite, the products and services that support this podcast. Yeah.

The fucking the rail companies are making the trains not be able to work. The trains are too long. They are too long. OK. Dynamite. The answer is dynamite. And we're back. OK.

So from here, the definition of sabotage starts to sort of expand very rapidly. First from the IWW in 1913 about what sabotage is. Oh, God. Oh, boy. I'm so curious. Sabotage is is sabotage is a destruction of profits to gain the definite revolutionary economic end. It has many forms.

It may mean damaging the raw materials is that destined for a scab factory or shop. It may mean spoiling it may mean the spoiling of a finished product. It may mean the displacement of parts of machinery or the disarrangement of a whole machine where that machine is the one upon which other machines are dependent for material. It may mean working slow. It may mean poor work. It may mean missending packages, giving overweight to consumers, pointing out defects and goods using the best material where the employer desires of alteration and also the telling

of trade secrets. In fact, it has as many variations as there are lines of work. This is this is so fascinating because sabotage definitely now is way more associated with like earth first like you left tactics. And this is like very labor focused like sabotage is done by the people who are working at the factory or place of production on the products that they're working on. That is extremely fascinating. Yeah.

And I think there's another thing too, right? Because like there is this sort of physical aspect of it. But again, like this was created as like as a term of sort of like like specifically like syndicalist political struggle, right? Yeah. And as that term, like it's a lot of what they're talking about when people talk about sabotage is just like strikes and like labor slowdowns. And that that part of the connotation of sabotage has just like completely faded.

Yeah, no. And we're going to get into sort of like how that happens in a bit. And it's so based on addressing actual material changes as opposed to like a lot of sabotage now is almost like performative, like even like even like left type stuff, it does it does get a thing done. Like yes, this thing did burn down, but they're going to build another one. It's all it's obviously it's it's for kind of like spectacles built into what the actual goal is.

And for this kind of stuff, it's actually it's about like it's more like improving labor conditions. Yeah. And like there's a lot of this that is that is specifically designed not to be like very noticeable. There's a very common thing you get strikes like in the US, even like sort of like conservative truck or strikes will do this thing where like, OK, so the truckers will go on strike and then they'll hang like the basically like hang like fragments of metal and shit from

like the top of overpasses so that if you drive another truck under it, it'll like fuck up the top of the truck. And that's that's kind of stuff isn't like it's not designed specifically not designed to be public, right? It's designed to be something that like, OK, like it's it's it's it's it's it's about like directly materially hurting the bosses. Yeah. It's like a long period of time, not just like once like single action, you do it and

you run away and hope to never and hope to never be caught. It's like, no, I'm just going to work slowly for two years and cost my boss like thousands of dollars in profit. I mean, there's there's there's something like the OK, so I I guess I'll talk about it here. So I've been I've been doing some episodes next week are going to be about Lula, who's like the sort of like great like originally labor leader and turns sort of like. Why am I blanking on the name friend of the people of Haiti?

Yeah, we're going to get to that. That's what he turned into. There's nothing else. Yeah, yeah, no. But yeah, so he's a former president of Brazil, may be the next president of Brazil also. Maybe. But you know, he has this interesting sort of like he doesn't want to labor organizing under the military dictatorship, and he has this really interesting lot because during

the military dictatorship of Brazil, there's a bunch of these sort of like like underground leftist paramilitary groups. And like like his brother gets arrested by the military and tortured horribly. And he has this really interesting line about that talking about these clandestine groups, which is like OK, like if like if you guys had like talked to like the 2000 people who work in this factory instead of doing this completely clandestinely and not even telling your own family that you're a communist, like maybe if you talk to people like they couldn't have grabbed you off the street and just like arrest like and like disappeared you overnight

because there would have been people there. Yeah. And that's the thing like all of this stuff, like this kind of sabotage relies on like you and like everyone else around you also doing the thing. And that makes it like harder to crack down on because you just you know, you sort you have critical mass. And yeah, and that's something I think is very different from sort of modern sabotage, which is yeah, based on these sort of like either either like OK, we're doing this and

we're going to get arrested or it's like here is like a secret cell in like the woods in Oregon and no none of the people in this group will ever see each other again after they like spike this tree. I wonder if it has its roots in like I don't know when these like subpo people in France existed. But like in Britain, we have the Luddites at around a similar time who are sometimes seen as one of the original like trade unions, right, who would break break boilers and the industrial revolution.

Yeah. Yeah. Britain still incidentally makes it a capital crime to destroy a boiler or like to break a boiler. Yeah. Holy shit. Well, it's a way of break because what the like the Ned Ludd is just like fictional leader of the Luddites, right?

Like this giant general who's supposed to come and they were like, oh, it was Ned Ludd mate. I don't think about it. And so they like, they made it a capital time to try it, but to try and break up specifically that right to what like Chris is talking about, like, like it's obviously like personifying the forces of labor as a giant general is not something that continued throughout space and time. But that solidarity where like someone in the factory fucked up the boiler, everyone

in the factory has something to gain from fucking up the boiler. So as long as we don't tell anyone, the boiler stays fucked up. Yeah. And I was just saying like to go actually like specifically writes about what he's writing about the stuff, the stuff in the 1930s, like the late 1830s, like he specifically writes about like the Luddite that that kind of labor struggle in Britain is like one of the as one of the sort of like forbearers. Yeah.

Like the charists and the yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The charists are great. We should do a thing on them. Yeah. But so this stuff is sort of like, yeah, a lot, a lot of this stuff is people, it's people

in the 18, like the 1890s and like 1900s, like looking back on those groups. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I want to sort of pivot a little bit, which is okay. So we've mentioned the IWW and the IWW are the people who are basically like responsible for associating sabotage with the black cat. And it's sort of unclear how this happens.

Here's how the modern IWW talks about in 2011, it, which is like the sort of like sabotage cat picture, it was probably conceived by IWW member Ralph Chaplin, most famous for penning the IWW labor anthem solidarity forever, who produced many of the IWW's early silent agitator graphics, which themselves had close association with hobo signs described elsewhere in this gallery of IWW culture, I can cut that part. Although today the cat has a general association with the IWW sometimes even as its mascot, its original purpose was as a code or symbol for direct action at the point of production, specifically sabotage.

Indeed, the cat may have been, may even have been chosen due to the convenient wordplay Sabotabby, possibly even a direct inspiration from Mel Blanc's characterization of Bugs Bunny often, Bugs Bunny is often mispronounced sabotage, sabotage, hey, so Bugs Bunny really should be as like an anarchist sabotage icon. So as described in the section of sabotage, it must be emphasized that the latter did not mean destruction of machinery or equipment. Although I really think that's partially like the modern IWW being like, hey, don't sue us.

Like, this is the thing with the old IWW is like, you'll get you'll get like statements from IWW leaders who are like, we, we're not the guy we don't like our strikers aren't the people who break machines. There's another group of people who are like here also, but who are not us, who are not us, who are destroying all these things. I never do crimes. It's great stuff. Only my identical twin Harrison does cry.

Yeah, it's a bad twin. It's amazing how many symbols of industrial labor come from the wobbly, it's like the raised fist also comes from the IWW, right? Like it's incredible this global impact. Yeah, what I mean, like, I think there's a reason for this, which is that like, okay, if, if, if you are, if you are a capitalist in the early 1900s, like this cat is the spookiest shit you've ever seen, like it is terrifying. Like they are like groups of wobblies will like try to step off a boat and people and

like the like sheriffs will just immediately start shooting them. Like it is to this day, I think, I think the IWW is the only leftist group in the history of the US outside of Puerto Rico that has ever taken an American city, which they did in the, it was a very small town on the border. They actually, they actually took American cities like during the Mexican Revolution. And that mountain maybe, the United mind. Well, they didn't actually like, that's the thing though, they didn't actually like fully like drive out like, okay.

Yeah, true. Yeah. Like they, like the IWW like actually fully like took over these towns and was like, who are the fucking running this down? But you know, this thing that starts happening here is you get like, like people are really desperate. There's still, there's a bunch of houses, like there's a bunch of like old mansions from this period, like late 1800s early 1900s, like in Chicago, that are all built online

in one street. And the reason they were all built that way was because they wanted to be on the road to the on the road to the fucking nearest military base so that when the revolution come, they came, they can run and hide. Like this is how scared peace people are. And the like bosses start offering workers things as a compromise that like most people today like think our socialism, like they have like you start getting companies that have like into that have their own workers councils in them.

Like the heroes here is the workers council will give the workers council a bunch of shoulder how the shop floor works like please don't overthrow us like Rockefeller like develops the idea of putting workers on corporate boards, like specifically as a way of trying to buy off workers and stopping them from like sabotaging their way to revolution and just like stealing all Rockefeller's property for the working class. And you know, we've been talking about a lot about this and sort of like the American context and like sort of the French and English context. But you know, partially because the etymology partially because of like who's involved with

like the Pacific black cat thing. But like syndicalism, which is the sort of like this ideology of using democratic unions doing a general strike to like seize control of the means of production and in the class system. This is fucking everywhere. This is these people spread like wildfire like I think I think probably the most famous syndicalist other than the IWW are the CNT in Spain, but like, you know, the Italian in 1917, 1919, like syndicalists in Italy, like very nearly pull off a revolution during

a period that becomes known as the Benio Rosso or like the two red years, they they wind up being betrayed by the Italian socialists. And that's how we get Mussolini. But yeah, who could have guessed, but you know, there are enormous syndicalist unions like everywhere that there's there's these huge syndicalist unions in both Brazil and Argentina and sort of bizarrely, both Brazil and Argentina both have these sort of like general strike anarchist revolutions in both 1917 and 1919. Yeah, it's wild.

Like the syndicalists are everywhere. There's there's like there's syndicalist like 10 workers in Brazil, they're in Venezuela, there's an IWW section in South Africa, there's like syndicalists in Egypt, they're in Japan. Like it from this period from like the late 1800s through really even the early so the early 1920s, like these people are a pretty significant section of like the entire international labor and socialist movement and everywhere in syndicalism goes this black cat goes with them. Now unfortunately, as the 1900s wear on the influence of syndicalism begins to wane as

a combination of both intense post-war war one repression and you know, as this as reaction to sort of like Red Scare reactions to the Russian Revolution. And also the sort of rise of like Leninist Communist parties who have their own doctrines that don't like rely on sabotage in the sort of theoretical sense that syndicalism does. And this this has like this this this has a bunch of sort of maligned effects on what people think sabotage is unfortunately. But do you know what else degraded the use of sabotage as a political and ideological weapon?

Yeah, it's it's adds it's the advertising industrial complex, not the beastie boys. And we are back. But wait, there's still more sabotage because unfortunately, you know, as as the sort of like the syndicalist movement is declining and like every single one of these people is getting shot. There was waiting in the wings another type of sabotage that we've talked about a lot on this show. And yeah, this is ecological sabotage, which I'm okay, I also see people calling it eco

tudge and like, I'm sorry, I love you. I love you all forest defenders. That is a dog shit word. Like not a word. Eco tudge. Like, come on. Like, this is this is not this is not actually a good word. We can do better.

It's also called monkey wrenching after the the the the work of ecological activists and inveterate racist Edward Abbey. That's right. And sexist. Don't let him off the hook. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's an old white dude, Edward Abbey.

Yeah. He's he's a very like he is a very like Pacific Northwest kind of guy who's at a South West kind of guy. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. It's like guy who's white really likes forest does not like round people. He loves a fucking desert like the desert boomers love some Edward Abbey.

They pay a thousand mo up recently and like the amount of people selling like first editions of Edward Abbey books got egg egg egg without like entire like first editions of like Earth first gathering posters and stuff for like thousand dollars to someone who's on an off-road safari. Oh, nice. Yeah. That's a copy of the monkey. This may be a first edition actually.

Damn. Do you want to tell the crowd what this book is about? The monkey wrench gang? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's a group of people who have some fun times. These people who travel around, they play with some trains and some diggers. They play with diggers.

Yes. Yes. Yes, they were. They were diggers. Yeah. I don't know. He was just having fun times. Also, there's something that I did not know for a while, but Edward Abbey also wrote one

of the adaptions of Lolita to play on stage. Oh, shit. I forgot about that. Yeah. I just an unproblematic guy doing stuff. Fetus loves trees. Yeah. Well, okay, so here's the one genuinely unproblematic thing he did.

He wrote this, he wrote another book called Eco, well, okay, so he's involved in the writing of this. There's a lot of people who've contributed to this, but he's involved in the writing of a book called Eco Defense, a Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching, which is this like unbelievably intricate and detailed guide to doing everything from like tree spiky to disrupting power lines to breaking wrench equipment to sabotaging vehicles and aircraft to freeing animals from traps to defeating surveillance to sinking ships to a section that is called only quote fun with slingshots.

Oh, great. Great. In the book. Oh, it sure is fun. Yeah. Even in Monkey Wrench Gang, like he goes into great detail about how to start a caterpillar like bulldozer. No, like a lot of it was like how to do terrorism, but like in a novel, I feel like.

Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah. Well, it's like there's a whole genre of like of post-World War II French films that are this with prison breaks where it's like as much people who'd like been in concentration camps and like had broken out of them are making these movies that are like just really intricate. Okay. Okay.

This is how you make a lockpick. Like this is this is how you figure out guards, like a shift changes. Like this is how you like take out these boards. It's great stuff. It's one of the better kinds of things. And Eco Defense, like it's not the most banned book I've ever seen an award that goes to yeah, it's not. So, on the one hand, like the FBI is in a weird position because they can't like technically

ban it because the U.S. has this thing called the First Amendment that like you can sometimes win in court. Does it? Does it really? Here's the thing. Here's the thing. The Eco Defense Handbook was not written by Edward Abbey. It was written by David Foreman.

Yeah. Well, okay. There was a four word in the book written by Edward Abbey. Okay. That's the first one. And I think I think he was involved with the publication with it like somewhat like David Foreman and Edward Abbey were friends. They were their buddies.

They were Abbey. I get Abbey. Abbey is less involved with this. And so far as he like Foreman, like the FBI tries to like entrap him for writing this book. Like all like all most of the people who like I wonder why sections to this. Yeah, like all these people like people start the FBI tries to arrest him on other stuff because unfortunately this book doesn't violate traffic law.

So they can't arrest you for it. And okay. I don't buy it on Amazon. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's on the Anarchist Library for free. Yeah. Yeah.

Don't buy it. Yeah. Don't give Jeffrey Bezos your money. Yeah. Turn on a VPN. Use Tor and go to the Anarchist Library. I know. It's in this category of books that are like, like, okay, when you have your normal banned

books list, they don't include just two kinds of books include one is they don't include books where it's like, well, they didn't technically ban the book, but they tried to arrest everyone who wrote it. And then two, they don't include Alfredo Bonanno's arm joy, a book for which he was arrested, thrown in prison and kept there while the Italian government on orders from the Supreme Court like took every copy they could find and lit it on fire and giant bonfires. The other thing with the you could have hand-sandbook, even if they did not arrest the owners, I've talked with a lot of green anarchists from who were active during the green scare.

And they definitely arrested people. Oh, yeah. Just for having a book. Yeah. Like if you had it, that was evidence that you were a terrorist. Like it was something that like you don't talk about. You don't put your fingerprints on it because having this book could get you in trouble. Like you don't, like it's, there's multiple ways to ban a book, one of them being if you

have it, they're going to try to charge you with like terrorism enhancement stuff. Yeah. They might also try to use it as a pretext. So yeah. Fun book. Yeah. And so, and like, I think, yeah, calling it like I think with, so I think a lot of the stuff that people were doing that got called monkey wrenching or sort of like ecological

sabotage is just called ecoterrorism today because people have to, well, there's like a whole loop of this, right? Because there's, there's, there's, there's the FBI to the green scare going like all of this is terrorism, we're going to use the fucking entire like giant, like military apparatus we've built up to like go after, but people setting free animals. But then, but then like, like at some point, and this is, I think this thing is very interesting in the last sort of like five, 10 years, like people who weren't really involved with the original stuff decided that ecoterrorism was cool.

And now everyone on Twitter just talks about ecoterrorism all the time, which is like. They talk about it. Interesting term. And this is the thing, those people don't do it and it's like, come on. Like, but on the other hand, there are a lot of people like. We should maybe caveat for our British listeners that you absolutely can be prosecuted for having that book and the multiple people who have been prosecuted in the last two years for the anarchist cookbook.

I mean, you can still be, oh yeah. You, it's like they, they can't ban you from selling it. Yeah, even if you're, even if you're an American, you can still get, they, they've still gotten people for having the book. Like it's. Yeah. That's, that's, that's usually the thing about how the censorship works, right? Is it like, like you, you were allowed to be a capitalist and sell it, but you're not

allowed to buy it because it means you're a terrorist. Yeah. Wonderful stuff. Yeah. In Britain, you can't even, it seems like the anarchist cookbook, right? People have been prosecuted. Oh yeah. And anyone should be prosecuted for the anarchist cookbook because it, because it's dog shit.

Anyone who had it. Yeah. I've always wanted to do like a deep dive into like the history of all the shit that's been blamed on that book and all the people who have. And it's funny too, because it's not like the army literally doesn't publish fucking field manuals that you could just buy at a store that like has all the same shit. Like, yeah. Yeah.

But you know, terrorism is when we do it and not when they do it. Yeah. That's right. So I want to talk about, so like this whole thing is, is a product of like this, like, you know, this is what sabotage sort of turns into, right? And there's, you know, and so some of the people stuff that like is being done here isn't really that destructive. Like a lot of people like, you know, like people like sitting in trees, right?

There's a lot of stuff that's sort of like civil disobedience that is like, you know, included in this stuff. But then there's also like, but you know, but the like stuff like spiking trees is where you, I think you, and it's basically like destroying construction equipment is where stuff you start to get this sort of like modern understanding of sabotage is like a thing that like an activist does to like a piece of machinery. But you know, like there's a lot of things people do, like people sabotage, like whaling ships.

But then also I want to sort of close the episode with this is that like, there's a lot of people in a lot of other places in the world who do like, who do a lot of stuff for ecological defense that doesn't get put under this framework, where for example, there are groups like the Niger Delta Avengers who are like, okay, fuck it, if the Nigerian government is just going to execute ecological activists, we're going to pick up guns, we're going to blow up pipelines and we're going to start shooting. And you know, there's ground in between like the sort of like we're going to sabotage and we're going to like do armed struggle, like in Ecuador, for example, one of the responses

you see to sort of like attacks on indigenous land by capitalist developers is indigenous groups being just like, fuck it, we're doing an uprising. And then tens of thousands of people like spend three weeks fighting in the fighting cops in the street until they stop. And you also see stuff that's like, it's kind of like, okay, so one of the other specifically in France to do this all the fucking time, like one of the older sort of like workers, like sabotage tactics is just like you kidnap your manager. And like people do this like now in France, like, it's just like, okay, you're the manager,

you can't leave until you agree to our demands are like, but like, people will do this in ecological settings. Well, like a government minister to like negotiate something, it'll be there'll be like a my manager around and people will just be like, okay, like we're kidnapping you, like, we'll let you go when you stop doing this. And that's good, good stuff. Yeah. And I think, and I think like, and these tactics also sort of spread like, for example, in

Chile, if you look at like, if you look at their sort of like, like Milton ecological struggles, especially like indigenous, the Puche resistance, like that is a place that like more than anywhere else have ever seen love setting construction equipment on fire. Like they really, they really like this lighting back hose on fire. It's good stuff. But having sort of said all of this, like the fact that sabotage is synonymous with sort of like property destruction is like, I genuinely think like a triumph of corporate propaganda because the original meeting of it, right, the original politics behind it,

which is this like very explicit class politics of like, fuck it, like if we are not going to get the actual like products of our own labor, we are either not going to work or we are going to take it from you, or we're going to make sure that you also don't get the products of our labor, like that stuff's all just sort of gone. And that's that's that's very sad to me because it's a good politics and we need more of it. And yeah, all of this sort of is to say that workers have no reason to fear the black cat, but bosses, owners and capitalists live in fear. Your time will come.

Happy Halloween. Yeah. Happy Halloween. Cut fences. Somehow I didn't somehow I never mentioned bolt cutters in here, which is sort of wild. Oh, yeah. That's fine. Buy a bolt cutter that hopefully will be for bolt cutters.

So something I learned on a job once is that like, okay, so so Bart razor wire is really scary stuff. Like it has like it has like anti clotting agents in it that like I've like on the wire, but I've gotten past a lot of razor wire. Yeah. Well, but I mean, the thing about this right is that like, you could just cut like it's actually really easy to just cut like the chains on the chain link. So, so many people like I can do it.

I'm not very strong like you could just sort of do this and like this and this is useful for a lot of things. Like, for example, you have to break down sections of fences and fences in your lawn. Like, yeah, you could you can do lots of fun things with bolt cutters. Keep the kids. Oh, tin snaps. Keep the kids off your lawn. Yeah.

Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys is the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

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

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right. It's spooky week. It's it can happen here. Those were ghost noises if you hadn't realized.

And that must mean that today we are doing a podcast about mass graves. What's going on? What the fuck's happening in the background? It's like running water is running water. We've summoned a fucking spirit. Where's that coming from? Yeah. I don't hear it.

I don't I don't hear anything, guys. You're just you don't hear it now, right? It's gone. No, it's the podcast where we convinced Garrison that there's a ghost in the zoom machine. It's okay. I could I could like do it. I could do a lesser banishing of the pentagram if you really want to. It's fine.

I'm not worried. I like the pentagram. It's it's what I'm tattooing on my children. Oh, nice. Mm hmm. Got me too. Yeah. You haven't done the forehead though, like a coward.

You've done that. Yeah. No. I mean, elbow elbow is the way to go. So, Garrison, what do you know about mass graves? Never been to one to my knowledge. They seem like they're not great. Usually they're a signifier that something something not great happened, a little bit

of an oopsie. Yeah. Yeah. Can be a way to hide one's mistakes, certainly. Where would you have yet to guess where the biggest mass grave in the world is? Where would you go for? Well, I know there's a lot of big ones in Canada. But if I'm going to guess, they call those schools in Canada, don't they?

They should. They should. Yeah. I would say like Russia, maybe has the biggest mass grave. I don't know. That's just like off the top of my head. No, it's not. It's you got to guess, Shireen.

Oh, no. I know where the biggest cemetery is, but I guess that's very different. Yeah. Where is the biggest cemetery? Iraq. Oh, really? Okay. Iraq has the world and it's supposed to be haunted, so, ooh.

This one is not haunted, but as far as I can tell, it's the biggest mass grave in the world, about 34,000 people. And this is in Spain. Spain does not get enough credit for its mass graves, in fact. And only to Cambodia in the number of mass graves that it has. Spain has about 115,000 people who were forcibly disappeared and are still buried in unidentified graves. But about 35,000, 34,000 of them are buried in the place we're going to talk about today,

which is the Valle de los Caídos or the Valley of the Fallen. So the Valle de los Caídos is not only a mass grave, but it's also a Catholic basilica. It's also the largest basilica in the world, and it was built by Juan Francisco Franco, who was the dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975. And it was also his own grave until 2019, when Spain dug him up, put him in a helicopter, flew him across the country so that no one could, like, car bomb or protest or otherwise desigrate his corpse, and buried him in another grave. So that's what I want to talk about today.

The Valle de los Caídos, it means Valley of the Fallen, right? Incidentally, there's a film called Valley of the Dead, which has anyone else seen this? Was it just me who decided to curse himself? Okay. Just you. Just me. More of the shame. Many more people should be enjoying Spanish Civil War zombie fiction movies.

In which both sides come together to fight against the greater foe of the undead. Not actually a thing that happened. So it's the Valley of the Undead. Yeah, it could be called the Valley of the Undead, but they didn't quite get that far. Some of the least spectacular dubbing I've ever seen in a film. I'm used to watching, like, English stuff dubbed in Spanish, but I don't think I've before seen something Spanish dubbed in, like, really cringe American English. It's not great.

No, it's not. But in a sense, it is also great, but in a sort of enjoyably bad sense. But yeah, it is. It is very funny. It's on Netflix. It's free. Malle Naziros, I think it was called in Spanish, but Valley of the Dead in English. So yeah, people should check it out if they want a different spooky film to watch as

Halloween. So, let's talk about the Valley of the Fallen. It was built under Franco's direction as kind of this national act of atonement for the Civil War. At first, he said it was going to be a memorial to both sides, so that's Valley of the Fallen. But first, it was supposed to be a memorial to the martyrs of his glorious crusade against the Reds, against Stalinism, against Satanism, against all the things that are bad, according to Franco's.

But it wasn't really, it was just a giant monument to Franco's national Catholic ideology, which kind of fuses the nation and the church in this one massive ball of terrible shit. It's designed in a neoclassical style, which fascists love. Fascists love the neoclassical style because they can, like, draw these direct lines between themselves and the empires of antiquity, right? Except without the fucking paint because they're cowards and fools. They need them to look white because they're tiny babies. This is true.

Yeah, yeah, they never did the thing where they, like, bedazzled their statues, like the Greeks and the Romans did. More is to shame. Someone should bust in there with some glitter spray paint and tart it up a bit. They haven't done that, unfortunately. Look, return to tradition, make your statues look cringe. Yeah. That's how they're supposed to look.

Don't worry. The statues do look cringe. But unfortunately, they're not shiny, which is disappointing. And it's built of granite, though, which I guess is kind of a return to tradition. It was built very near the Escorial, which is, like, the resting place and palace of the kings of Spain. And that's because Franco wants to draw a link between himself and Philip II, right? Philip II was the king of Spain, who at the time that he ruled ruled every continent that

was known to European people, or ruled territory, which is great, which is not a problem, of course. It's, in fact, good. An inbred old Spanish dude was ruling other places that he couldn't really conceive of and had never visited, and there are no problems with that. Okay, so work begins on Vaid los Cairos in 1940, right? It's the year after the end of the Spanish Civil War. And Franco decrees that he's going to make this memorial to the glorious national crusade

against the Reds. And, unbelievably, he wanted work to be finished in a year, which, obviously, he's not operating in, like, reality because he's a piece of shit, but it took 20 years to build, right? So he was off by, yeah, big construction, I understand, Francisco Franco. And like King Philip, he couldn't plunder the entire labor and capital of the Americas to build his folly. And instead, he relied on the forced labor of about 20,000 prisoners of war. These were former Republicans, right?

And they were forced to build a church. Obviously, many of them did not like the church and were not really very fond of building what is now the biggest Catholic cathedral in the world, actually. And it has the biggest cross in the world, which shocked me that the biggest cross in the world wasn't in the United States, but I'm sure Ted Cruz is actively working on it as we speak, or Joe Arpaio. Yeah, I feel like if you walked around my hometown and told people that the biggest cross in the world was a Catholic one, they would immediately spend $20 trillion building

a bigger one. The only thing that could convince them to defund the police would be owning the Catholic cross. Maybe we should put that, maybe we should enter that into the discourse on true social or something. But Franco, of course, is not the only person buried there, right? Right next to Franco, in the center of the Basilica, is his friend Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera.

Primo died exactly 39 years before Franco on the 20th of November, 1936, and he died because he was killed by the Republicans, which is based on good. And he has this little gravestone there next to Franco, which, of course, has not created any problems after Spain sort of began to transition to democracy when Franco died. Right? It's, of course, not a bad thing to put a giant monument to fascism and Francoism, and nobody is going to turn up there and do a fascism in the years afterwards. Oh boy.

Yeah, it's a little bit unfortunate. So every day at 11 o'clock, a priest says a mass, and at that mass, you can generally find old people who will sort of mill around for a while and then quietly start doing fascist salutes, which is not great. Eventually. Yeah. They have to be comfortable first? Yeah.

Yeah, you've got to sample the vibes and then do a fascism, and the vibes here are probably not great. They also have a choir, so then they acquire a small children who sing, why? Because fucking what? Because everything about this is cursed. There's a film about these little children who go to a quote unquote traditional school at the Basilica, which I can imagine it's great, and they learn all kinds of wonderful things about critical race theory.

Yeah, so the priest also says a prayer for the fate of Spain and the blessed martyrs, which really is wonderful and perhaps points in the direction of the complicity of the Catholic Church in lots of the war crimes that we're going to talk about today. Second consecutive episode where the Catholic Church responsible for the whole thing. Wow, I can't believe the Catholics did anything bad. Oh. No, it's shocking, isn't it? Given their history of being kind and good and generally respectful towards people they

disagree with. So true, James. Yeah, no problems with the Catholic Church. So this particular church is hewn, it's just a giant hole in a granite ridge, right? It's again a giant hole cut by the forced labor of prisoners of war. It's called the Valley of the Fallen because today it houses the remains of about 33,000 people. And this is what makes it the biggest mass grave in the world, right?

The monuments register include many of their names and it has the motto, caídos por dios y España, so fallen for God in Spain, which conveniently overlooks the fact that most of the people there didn't like God very much and really didn't like the version of Spain as being presented here either, right? Because the vast majority of them were Republicans, people who had fought against Franco's idea of Spain and civil war, and the bodies that came there really kind of came there in two distinct ways. And so like I said, Spain has about 114,000 odd people who are buried in unidentified

graves, right? The vast majority of these people are Republicans who were killed by Francoist forces, but some of them are not. Some of them are Francoists, Catholics, Karlists, other right-wing fascist type people who were killed by the Republicans, right? Now, the bulk of those people were dug up and identified by the Francoist regime in the time that he was in power, and many of them were moved to the Valley of the Fallen and they were identified there.

But the majority of the people in the Valley of the Fallen were Republican people whose remains were taken without their consent from mass graves where they were victims of Franco's terror, right? And they were moved to the Valley of the Fallen to be some kind of like weird pyramid sacrifice ritual. I don't have a complete grasp of Catholicism, but I certainly don't understand this shit to sort of, I don't know, make Franco's temple more like spectacular. And it's very strange, it's very cruel, right?

I want to quote from the BBC article in 2011 that was written about one of these people, Jorge Valrico. So Jorge Valrico Canales was taken from his home in August 1936 in the middle of the night and shot by a fascist execution squad. His town had fallen to the uprising and he had been singled out as a socialist. In 1959, his remains were dug from a well and moved to the Valley of the Fallen. More than 30,000 war dead from both sides were transferred there on Franco's orders. For me, it's excruciatingly painful that my father's remains were in a place built

to the glory of the victors in a military coup, so it's Faustal Canales. It feels like a double crime, first when he was executed, then when they moved his body without our permission to a place which is totally inappropriate. So that experience sadly is far from uncommon, right? Between 1959 and then 1983, like I said, about 30,000 of these graves were dug up. Lots of these were like shallow road sized graves. They were wells. Some people were buried in graveyards and they were transferred to the Valley.

Sometimes they weren't transferred in their entirety, incidentally. These mass graves are not well organized, so to perhaps give some context here, Spain began exhuming these mass graves in 2007, right? There was a historical memory law passed. They're often just jumbles of corpses and bones, right? Some of these mass graves contain like 1,000 people. Right. I don't imagine them being like, hey, we're going to do a mass grave now.

You know what I mean? Like they're just kind of digging a hole and putting bodies in it. Yeah. Yeah. It's fair to say, yeah, no one made a good plan, which is unfortunate, isn't it? But yeah, they, like, well, they would get all the people who they identified as socialist or feminist or otherwise objectionable to their vision of Spanishness and then kill them all. Yeah.

And then put them in a hole because they considered them to be less inhuman. And they seemingly seemed to have, like, dived into the hole and then grabbed some bits and pieces and moved them to the Valley of the Fallen at some point. Wait. So, like, how are, did, okay, like, what actually, like, how are like the bodies in the Valley of the Fallen, like, held? Like, what are they? Just like, are they in like caskets?

They just dumped them in another hole? No, there are, like, there are, like, various, it seems like there are various different, like, some of them are in these little stone, there are, like, these little stone tomb-looking things, but I don't think that those actually contain the remains. I think they're in these various pits. So, they just, it's another, they moved them from one mass grave to another mass grave that they built a sacrifice temple over. Yeah.

So, they're beginning to exhume the already exhumed bodies front, so they're now digging up the Valley of the Fallen, right, to, to identify these remains. Catalonia has a DNA registry, so if you believe that you're, it would be like, people of our generations, grandparents, if you believe that your grandparents are in a mass grave, they would disappear, then you can register your DNA and they test it against the mass graves that they're exhuming. Wow. So, that's how they, that's how they identify people, and, Chris, do you know what won't

dig a mass grave and throw your grandparents in it? I, I cannot. Exhumed mobile. That's right, everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Black Rifle Coffee Company.

Well, I was just going to go with Coca-Cola, but that works too. Well, that's three options, please. Three for three. Here's the ad. And we're back, hopefully, there was no reference to mass graves in those adverts, but we can't promise you that, sadly. We also can't promise you that there's mass graves they didn't talk about. Yeah, that's probably more likely, isn't it?

Anyway, enjoy that advert for Nestle. Moving on, some of these mass graves have been identified by a Spanish nonprofit group called Innovation and Human Rights, and they actually have this incredible data set, specifically on the Valley of the Fallen, where you can look up the location of, of the corpses that are there, right? So like, where did these, where the, of the remains that have been identified from where, where did they come? Um, 3,902 corpses, that's about 70 busloads of dead people.

If you want to imagine that, um, they came from this small town of Talagana, which is where I used to live. That's not a big town. I was trying to think of like a California town to contextualize it by, but I think most people wouldn't have heard of, of towns that small. Uh, this, despite being a pretty rural, uh, area, the, the Camp de Talagana can take, contributed about 20% of the corpses that remain in the Valley. And that's probably because it's part of Catalonia, right?

Catalonia was, Spain is a, is a multinational state. So there are lots of nations within Spain, right? Catalonia, the Basque country, being the ones that people are most familiar with. Franco particularly hated Catalan separatists. And so as part of this ongoing punishment of Catalonia for like trying to leave Spain during the civil war, uh, the Francoist dug up the remains of the people they'd already murdered and moved them to a long way from Catalonia, right? Uh, the Vidalos Galilos is near Madrid.

Conditions for people who built the Valley were pretty appalling to, uh, the workers and their families lived in these shacks, according to archaeologists who exhumed them last year. Families lived in nine meter square shacks with no water electricity. They made shoes out of old tires and they had no windows or no heating. Their beds were made of stone and they and their children suffered from malnutrition. Uh, it's, it's not particularly rare for people to have suffered from malnutrition in Spain after the civil war.

Uh, this period was called the years of hunger. Uh, but even so, it seems like there was particular cruelty, uh, applied to these people, many of whom were serving sentences for things like forming unions or forming student political movements, right? Like they, they weren't like, they hadn't done anything wrong, uh, that they were the victims of a totalitarian state. Uh, so one of those people is Nicholas Sanchez, uh, Aborneus. Um, he was interviewed being a Catalan newspaper, a national, uh, and he, uh, he, uh, he, uh,

he talks a lot about his memories there and incidentally, uh, he escaped after a few months with the help of Norman Mailer's sister. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Based Norman Mailer's sister. Yeah. She's incredibly based actually.

Uh, like, yeah, she, she like helped him escape and then ferried him across the Pyrenees to France, uh, where he, uh, escaped into exile in Argentina and lived for decades and the only good, well, okay, I was going to, I was going to make an only good Argentinian exile joke, but I probably is actually genuinely worth mentioning that a lot, like a lot of people who were Jews fled to Argentina too, like right before World War two. And that's a huge thing. And you get people like calling them Nazis because they're fucking dumb as shit. And it's like, guys, come fucking on.

Like you, if you can't tell between a Nazi and the people they were killing, like, please stop. Okay. It's not about people doing this shit because, oh my God. Yeah. Maybe, maybe don't cast dispersions, maybe, uh, do a little bit of reading first. Um, so yeah, a lot of people, a lot of them end up in, in Argentine exile actually. Ironically, Argentina also claims universal jurisdiction.

So what we've seen in the last few years is like, uh, Spanish historical memory groups trying to, uh, trying to get people who perpetrated crimes against humanity under Franco extradited to Argentina to be questioned, which, which is also very funny given that Argentina has its own legacy of crimes against humanity, right? And Spain does this shit too, actually, Spain claims universal jurisdiction and will try and like extradite people who have done crimes against humanity in formerly colonized countries without Spain has not faced up to its own crimes against its own population. You know, I, I will say, I am entirely down for like intentionally starting some sort

of like Spain, Argentina, like shit fast, where both of them like get pissed off at each other and start trying each other's war criminals. That seems really funny. I would be, I would be even more impressed to see, um, are you familiar with who both of our Garthones is? See that weird prosecutor guy? Yes. Yes.

He tried to, uh, he tried to try us officials for crimes against humanity for the things they did at Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. It would be outstanding. I would love to see like Spain and the United States come to blows over like their respective crimes against humanity. It would be wonderful, uh, sadly, and like in Iraq too, I think he like, um, what was it called that the, uh, did they call it enhanced interrogation techniques that they were using

when they were like electrocuting people and such? Yeah. So like he tried to prosecute people for that. Sadly, like everything else in Spain, he strayed a little bit too close to looking at the corruption of the Spanish state and lost his position, uh, which is a shame. Uh, he did some pretty chuddley shit himself. Like he very clearly presided over trials where people had very clearly been tortured and was just like, Oh, that's interesting to see you in the witness box.

So being this testimony, I'm not going to note the fact that you've like very clearly been beaten to shit with a night stick. Uh, she's, yeah, Spain, a country with no problems famously. Um, so yeah, uh, Albonnoz escapes, actually there's a film called the Los Angeles Barbaros, the barbarous years, I guess, uh, the barbarian years, uh, which, which, um, looks at his escape and he was one of only two people to escape. So people died building the Valley of the Fallen, right? And then were buried there in this weird monument to, uh, to Francoism.

Uh, so like I said, Spain really hasn't dealt with its legacy of, um, mass murder, right? Um, and it never really had a truth and reconciliation commission. Never really dealt with the amount of people murdered after the war. Um, and it's really only in the last like 10 or 15 years that Spain has begun digging up these mass graves. So, um, under Pedro Sanchez and the socialist government, um, they've, they've begun doing more to deal with this in 2007 and earlier Spanish socialist government passed this thing called the law for historical memory and the law for historical memory funded, um, the recovery

of the memory of the civil war, right? And you can draw very obvious parallels between how Spain has dealt with its civil war and its tradition to democracy and how the United States has dealt with its civil war, right? And you will see like there is, um, do you got, do you know what Vox is? Yeah. They're like the insane far right party in Spain. Yes. Uh, and so fucking cringe.

Holy shit. I don't know what the standards of far right parties like, oh my fucking god. Oh god. Yeah. I fucking, uh, do they wear silly outfits? Oh, yeah, I would imagine so. I don't, I don't think, I don't think there's ever been a picture of them like where they haven't been in like the weirdest looking shit because occasionally some of the like

Spanish fascists wear some pretty gay outfits and it's really funny. Are you talking about the, the foreign legion, the ones who were like, if Tom of Finland created a military unit, yes, that is exactly who I'm referring to. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They, they are not so much like outright fascists as a, as a fascy military unit. Yeah.

But yes. Uh, yeah. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Absolute thirst trap. And just like if people should Google photos if they haven't seen them, it'll occasionally pop up on like a Twitter or something where people will find these incredibly butch dudes

who like, like it's not that they've unbuttoned their shirts just so you understand. It's just that their pecs are ripping out of their shirts. No, it's their shirts are not equipped with buttons. Yeah. Yeah. Because it, yeah, like to be in that unit, you have to be so incredibly buff that you are, you start buttoning your shirt from the navel down. And which to be fair, it is more appropriate in Spain.

I remember like, uh, I used to teach in Spain and then I taught in the United States and like coming back and being like, oh, I really have to change the way I dress, uh, to be appropriate for an American audience. Um, but yeah, the, to get back to mass graves and away from tactical thirst traps, uh, the, what Spain didn't have, right, was like, uh, Franco didn't get hung upside down from a gas station and beaten with sticks in the face, right? Well, more is the shame. Uh, there's still time, right?

His body, his body is still available for beating, uh, you know, maybe, maybe there would be the worst thing, but, uh, Spain never really faced its past, right? So in 1977, an amnesty law was passed, which prevented any criminal investigation into the crimes committed in the Franco years. Um, statues of Franco, some of them were not moved until like the last five or 10 years. So when they were removed, um, it was like the government just went in in the night and scooped them up and no one really said anything and then they were gone. And so like Spain has only really, really recently entered into this period, like that

we call it second transition, uh, and that's like its transition from, uh, Spain began transitioning to democracy in 1978, right? But what we call the period after that, it's more of a post dictatorship than like a complete democratic transition and Spain was still processing, as you can see, right? Any of its crimes under Franco and it's, it's really only begun to process those in the last few years. So, um, that gets us up to the 2017, oh, that I think of 2018 election of Pedro Sanchez, right?

And the socialist government and, um, their decision to exhum Franco, right? So Franco's, Franco's lying in this monument, right? It's the biggest mass grave in the world, uh, and on the day of his death on the 20th of February every year, uh, it's, it's a gathering place for fascists, right? So Franco and Primo de Rivera both died on the same day and, uh, fascists and catalysts both love this, this kind of weird spiritual magic shit. Oh, really? Oh, really?

Yeah. You don't say. Yeah. I've, I've heard, I don't know, there are some books about it, apparently. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

It, it's said that both of them have a fondness for this stuff. So then both dying on the same day, it's an extremely fucking cursed thing. Uh, that has led to, uh, it sucks. It sucks if you, if you ever have to go near this place on the 20th of November, which I don't recommend. Oh God, I could only imagine that must be the, that must be the worst time. Yeah. Cause it's all, cause it's all of the nerdiest Nazis.

Like it's, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, if, if like nerdy, like Nazi internet people had a real life place to gather and just openly do fucking fascist salutes. God, that sounds like, it sounds horrible. It's a fascist with a calendar. Like, no. Yeah. But a calendar who's like into praying, it's like, uh, like really, really, really insane. Being into praying.

Yeah. I'm just, I'm just going to say this. If the, if the anarchists were in charge, we wouldn't be having fucking stupid cringe prayed fascist meetings, this can be prevented. The C and T can rise a third time. Uh-huh. Sure. Sure.

But it is the nerdiest thing ever to think about a fascist, like updating their Google calendar being like, yeah, for all their spiritual holidays where their leaders died. Why do they always celebrate the day that their leaders died? It's always the weirdest thing. That should be a celebration for us. Well, it's not, it's just, it's a death cult, right? Like, it's like, like their leader dying is, this is the moment when they finally express the pure core of fascism.

That's true. That, that's actually a really good observation that actually is, is more on the point than what it should be. Right. Yeah. Like immortalizing them on that day. Forever. Yeah.

Uh, Viva la Muerte was the slogan of the, fuck, the African, the African army, um, like, yeah, I think it was Spain's foreign legion actually, like long lived death and they called themselves like the, uh- Yes. Yes. That is their slogan. They called themselves the, um, what's it called, the, the fiancee's of death. Yeah.

They're, they're, they're all gay because they're all married to death, um, which is pretty metal, they're also kind of flashy, but yeah, that, that, that does really showcase the whole, uh, death cult aspect of fascism. Yeah. You know, you know what? Isn't a gay necromancer again? We can't promise. Oh, okay.

James, I wish, I wish we could advertise some more gay, gay necromancers. I would, I would be in my element. Ah. Yeah. I've just done an ad read for a couple of minutes. I should have, should have let you know. I am just so jealous. That's all.

That's the end of life. Yeah. Please enjoy these gay necromancy products and services. Okay. We're back. I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did. So the incredibly cringe and just boomery fascist celebration on Franco's death, uh, and Primo de Rivera's death on the 20th of November always happened at the Vidalos Caídos,

right? They would turn up in 2010, Spain banned, uh, like fascist symbolism, but this hasn't really stopped fascists doing fascist symbolism, right? Bringing their philand flags, giving it the fascist salute, um, marching, uh, and just generally doing like a cringe, like where, where like, uh, ROTC cosplay meets the Catholic church stuff, um, on the 20th of November of a year at Franco's grave. Uh, and like, there, there are always flowers on Franco's grave, like you can't go there on a given day and not find, uh, someone like lamenting the fact that Franco's dead and

they can no longer just disappear, people they disagree with, right? It's shit. Uh, and so, uh, and today an amusing, uh, sort of side effect of this was that, do you remember the Storm Area 51, like Facebook thing? Oh, I sure do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In 2019, three years ago, uh, I didn't realize. It was a lot longer ago when you said that way. It does.

It also, it also feels like a very 2020 thing. It does. It does. Yeah. So the Spanish version of this was invade via los caídos. With a slogan that like, if the state, the state can't get him if we get him first. So true. So true.

So what? Yeah. I don't think this was an anarchist attempt to steal his body, but like massive respect if it was. I think it was just some extremely online people doing something that they thought was and actually is funny, uh, which is like, unfortunately, it didn't really come to much, uh, because they planted this on the 20th of November, 2019. And in October, 2019, Franco's body was removed from the Valley of the Fallen.

Oh, wow. Okay. See, this, this is, this is the thing with all of these things. It's the same thing with the fucking stop Coney thing. Like the problem that all of these groups have, if they want to do is they always set their date too far out. Like you got to give it, like at max, it has to be like two weeks out because if it's any longer than that, you use your momentum, you can get fucking, yeah, you get scooped.

So look, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you want to seize the body of a dead dictator and throw them into a canal, you have to move fast. And that's why I'm announcing that for, for, for November 19th, we're all, no, we probably should not go to Russia to, to, to have fun with Trotsky's body. Should we? Yeah. Trotsky's body in Russia? Yeah.

I thought so. I, I know I've seen. Did they take it back from Mexico? I have had, I've, I've had friends that have gone places to make fun of Trotsky's body. Um, Lenin's body is Lenin's body is up for grabs. Okay. It's just sitting there. Yeah.

I think we should start small. Let's encourage the fans of the podcast between now and what we got, right? But now in 11th of November, right? Go after Papadok Duvalier, get, get him, start, you know, uh, and then move on from there. Okay. It is, it's in Mexico. I, yeah. Let's go.

Right. Closer to the sort of geographical heart. Yeah. And we don't need to go into a war zone. So yeah, in the middle of November, we're all going to be going, going to Mexico. Road trip. Yep. Field trip.

Yep. Let's go. You know, I, I will say there is something genuinely interesting here about the way that like, okay. So you, you, you look at sort of fascism, sorry, you look at fascism's death drive in the way that it sort of like creates these monuments to death. And then like you look at the way that every single sort of like, like all of the say socialist regimes, like it's not so much that they have a death drive, but it's like they're

like, all of them, like I learned this recently, like, so I knew that they didn't tune, that they'd like embalm Stalin, right? And like, well, they embalm Lenin. They embalm Mao. I've seen Lenin. I learned they also, yeah, they, they, they, but I also learned they did it to Ho Chi Minh too. Oh yeah.

It's like, they did it to like all of these people and it's like, there's, there's this sort of weird, like almost inversion of it where it's like, like fascism is based sort of on like, you know, like on the sort of totalizing worship of death, whereas Stalinism is like, it has this kind of inversion of it where it's like, it's based on like a kind of like eternal life for their leaders in this also incredibly bizarre way. I don't want to be like all of Europe is determined by its previous like totalitarian religions, but there's there's something orthodox about the way they've done the dead Russian dudes. So I want to talk about Franko's corpse a little bit and then I want to end with something

else because I don't want to just focus on Spanish fascists because they suck and I hate them. And I am sad that they are not all dead, but Franco is. So Franco's family weren't allowed to use the Spanish flag on his coffin. Yeah. So instead, they fucking got the Franco with flag, right? The old nationalist flag, which because they are filth, they did that instead. They carried his his coffin onto a helicopter.

They flew him by helicopter to Madrid, where the services provided over by a priest who is the son of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina, the man who led the failed 1981 coup that attempted to topple Spain's young democracy. So great to see this continuation of these elites, right? Like this is a this is a country which has, of course, moved on completely from its civil war and dictatorship. On the positive side, Franco is now buried with his wife and he is very near to Luis Carlos Blanco, who people will remember as a podcast alumni in Spain's first astronaut.

So I was going to quote Vox, but I won't because they fucking suck. And now once you quote Vox, you should just like throw fruit at them. And I think that's like, that's not an actionable threat, right? It's just sure. Sure. Don't throw like any fruit, sort of potentially lethal, right? Like like a large watermelon or something potentially fatal, like just a banana. Or if, you know, the Vox representative is like allergic to a fruit, you throw it at

them, gets on their face, then they die, then it gets blamed on James, we go get taken into a years long lawsuit and then we all lose our jobs. Don't do that. Don't do that. No. Blame someone else for that. You can, if you are directing the police to me in Spain, they can contact me via Twitter DM.

Yeah, at chop, at chapeau trappers. Yep. That's where you can find me. Yeah. Yeah. Sell traps. Okay. So, of course, Vox make exactly the same bullshit destroying history argument that neoconfederates

make in the United States. It doesn't make them any more right because they're in fact wrong. But incidentally, someone else died on November the 20th. And that is one Buena Ventura Doluti, right? Unlike Franco, he is not buried in a monument made by fucking slaves. He's buried alongside other anarchists in Montjuic in Barcelona. You can visit his grave there. It's very cool.

You can always meet interesting people hanging around his grave. And if you're in Barcelona, you should do it. Deruti died in the middle of the Battle of Madrid, like so many other Spanish anarchists. He died. It's a little unclear, actually, if he died because someone negligently discharged their own weapon into his back, which seems to be the most likely case, or leading a frontal charge on a machine gun, which is how so many Spanish anarchists died. Because they were so utterly convinced of their incredible...

And they're not wrong. They were right about most things. But their willingness to die for anarchism was perhaps a little bit problematic. Well, this is a thing across a whole history of anarchism. One of the reasons the Russian Revolution went the way that it did was that the first crop of Russian anarchists, the moment the White Army formed, immediately just went to the front lines and all got killed. And Lenin and Trotsky are fucking chilling, and Lenin, fucking Petrograd being like, ah!

Yeah, which is exactly what happened in Spain, right? Deruti has casto ferrer, all these people get to the front lines and immediately start killing fascists. And while tanky people, I was going to say something else, like spending their time plotting and scheming from becoming a completely fucking irrelevant political force in Spain to taking over in a year and a half, because they are the only people willing to provide weapons and many of the anarchists are dead. What were you going to call tankies instead of people?

Yeah, I can't think of anything about that at all. What were you going to call tankies instead of people, James? Just it makes me angry. And I was just going to just... That is an evasive answer. I'm not on this dodge with the word fozzi, etc. Yeah, it's just going to say scum or filth or a British swear word that I can't use on the podcast because it offends American people, which is fine, it's disappointing.

I don't want to be cancelled by work mob. We're not going to have a heated Australian moment. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I nearly went full Australian, which I've done it before on television and it just doesn't end well. In Spanish, not English, which is also a Spanish word. 20th of November in Spain this year, it'll be like what, three weeks when people are listening to this, some fascist shithead if you live in a town in Spain will be walking

around doing shitty fascist things. And people who live in Spain, of course, are very aware of this, but I wanted to finish it said with another thing that anti-fascists in Spain do in November. So on the 15th of November this year, anti-fascists all over Spain will be gathering to remember 15 years without Carlos Palomino. People might not know who Carlos Palomino is, but I want to very briefly recap his story to finish up. So on the 11th of November, 2007, Carlos Palomino and about 100 other anti-fascists got on the

subway in Madrid to counter-protest a right-wing rally in Luzela, an immigrant neighbourhood that's home to McGrid's Chinatown today. On the train on the way there, he ran into a 24-year-old Spanish soldier, Jose Estebanes. Estebanes was dressed in clothes, I don't want to talk about the brand actually because we shouldn't hype market Nazis, but the clothes showed that he was a far-right-skinhead, right? Carlos Palomino notes this, Estebanes takes offence at Carlos Palomino, noting his Nazi clothes and stabs him with a machete. He stabs someone else as well, but unfortunately Carlos dies pretty quickly.

He was 16 years old at the time of his death. He was the only child of his mother, and he lived with his mom, who was separated from his dad and his grandmother. It affected his mother, as one can imagine, pretty terribly, the loss of her young son. And as a result, his mother has become a prominent anti-fascist activist in Spain. She founded the Association of the Victims of Fascist Racist and Homophobic Violence, and 10 years after his death, 1,000 people turned out in a memorial to him. And ever since he died every year, you'll see these massive rallies in Spain of anti-fascists.

If you've ever seen, do you remember like a year or so ago, there was this video going around Twitter, and there was a group of people chanting, like, aquí están los anti-fascistas. Here are the anti-fascists. I see such videos on Twitter all the time, so I don't know. But it gained relevance among people who I've never seen engaging with Spain in any degree before. And it was a huge rally, so in 2021, thousands of people came out to remember him. And I'm sure thousands of people will this year, too.

With Spain's, like, Spain's right for a long time tried to couch itself in terms of like the neoliberal center, right? Yeah, so like the partido popular would see itself in terms of like, maybe the Tories in Britain or the editories are pretty mental. But like this kind of neoliberal European right, yeah, and it broadly sort of wanted to see itself as part of this like post-fascist European right. But in recent years, it's just taken this swing towards the hard right. Like Vox has emerged, and even the partido popular, which would have seen itself as like

neoliberal right, have tried to like out Vox Vox, and they're now like just openly standing Francoism again. And in this climate, anti-fascism has also seen itself resurgent, I guess, when anti-fascist identities in Spain are more relevant or more common than they would have been 10, 15, 20 years ago, something like that. And as a result, these memorials for Carlos have become bigger and bigger every year. So I wanted to end with a letter his mum wrote to global anti-fascist collectives in 2011. In our memories, all the anti-fascist victims will always exist, who fighting for a world

of equality, dignity, freedom and social rights were killed by the ideas of intolerance and fascism. The memory will exist for all those victims who, due to their different cultures, religions or sexual orientations, were murdered by the same murdering hands who hate those who are different. Now it's time to continue working against hate, that it's the best tribute we can offer. Their struggles were not in vain. We will continue the path, although they are no longer with us.

In every action of anti-fascist struggle, they're inside and in each and every one of our hearts, which I thought was really poignant. His mother is amazing. Yeah. This whole thing fucking breaks me. Like I was thinking this was a time when like I too was being a teenage anti-fascist in Spain and this is someone who's like almost exactly my age and obviously it's not alive anymore and yeah, I'd encourage people to read more about him.

I normally share these events on social media when they happen and yeah, this is extremely sad and continues to be extremely sad because Spain refuses to face up to its past of dictatorship. You can look up where Franco's grave is, organize a protest and execute it within two weeks and toss them in the river if you want. I'd be very proud of you. That is absolutely a legal thing to do and I would be prosecuted in Spain, but yeah. Incidentally, Spain has prosecuted everyone from fucking clowns to puppeteers. Okay.

Now it's serious. When you start coming out for the clowns is when I started getting personally insulted. We need to do our episode on clown block soon, don't we? I can put on my clown block right behind me. Okay. And then the British police will send someone undercover in your clown movement for five years. No.

Who will marry one of you? Let me be a silly jester. Leave me alone. Nope. Not in Britain. It's a crime. All right. Okay.

That's been our podcast, few crimes. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

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

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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

Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the final Spooky Week episode. Hi, welcome. This is, this is, it could happen here. This is our last Spooky Week episode for this year. And we're going to be talking about something extremely spooky and Halloween themed. Rainbow Fentanyl, the newest deadly threat hiding in your kid's trick-or-treat basket.

Or so you would think if you're a frequent viewer of Fox News or really any local cable news channel. And that Rainbow Fentanyl in particular is troublesome because of its appearance. This is treacherous deception to market Rainbow Fentanyl like candy. This is every parent's worst nightmare, especially the month of October as Halloween fast approaches. That was Fox 5 News New York and DEA special agent Frank Tarantino giving a press conference on the Rainbow Fentanyl scourge sweeping the nation.

It's not hard to see how this narrative became the new, protect the children, pearl-clutching panic. It's a natural extension of the police officer touches Fentanyl and spontaneously overdoses lie that local news across the country have been pushing for over a year now, coupled with the old classic poisoned, drug-laced, tampered Halloween candy myth that's captivated American parents for decades. Whether it be razor blades and apples, needles and Tootsie rules, meth in gummy bears, cocaine candy corn or THC sour patch kids.

If you've ever watched any local news during the month of October, clips like these should sound really familiar. Police in at least two Wisconsin towns are investigating reports of possible Halloween candy tampering. Breaking right now at 10, concerns about possible tainted candy in O'Connor, Milwaukee tonight. Police tell us they've received reports of a suspicious person handing out Tootsie rolls on Oakwood Avenue, right now police have no evidence that any candy has definitely been tampered with.

The world's leading researcher on Halloween candy tampering, Joel Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, has found little evidence to substantiate Halloween candy fears. Joel Best has published multiple studies analyzing the legitimacy of Halloween candy tampering, including his research paper, The Razor Blade in the Apple, the social construction of urban legends, and his sociology book Threatened Children, Rhetoric and Concern Around Child Victims. I have followed press coverage of Halloween back to 1958, so more than 60 years.

And I cannot find any evidence that any child has ever been killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick or treating. So let's go back to kind of where all this started. The first report of Halloween treats being tampered with in North America was in 1959. That Halloween, a California dentist named William Sheen distributed 450 laxative laced candies to children, 30 of whom fell ill. He was later charged with outrage of public decency and unlawful dispensing of drugs. This is kind of like the only incident that this has ever actually happened with.

It was back in the late fifties. This is the only true one of someone like handing out actually laced candy to tons of kids. Now, to determine whether the current tampered Halloween candy myths hold any weight, Joel Best examined 25 years of Halloween coverage from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. In his research, he found that there's only been one confirmed death from a poisoned Halloween candy and it wasn't from a nefarious stranger who wanted to harm trick or treaters.

The fatal incident occurred in 1974 after a Texas man named Ronald Clark O'Brien poisoned his eight year old son with a cyanide laced pixie stick shortly after he took insurance claims out on his children. O'Brien had reportedly given poisoned pixie sticks to his daughter and three other neighborhood children, but the candy had not been consumed. Since then, Joel Best said that in some instances, kids tamper with their own candy to get attention, or a friend or a family member played a prank that went awry. Or even a foreign object ended up inside candy during the manufacturing process, and that's

the majority of these types of claims that you'll see on the local news. Now Halloween can be a particularly dangerous holiday, but not due to tampered candy. The real notable danger comes from pedestrian deaths. A study published last year in JAMA Pediatrics analyzed data over a 42 year period in the United States and found a 43% higher risk of pedestrian deaths on Halloween night when compared to the week before and after. John Staples, a lead author and clinical assistant professor of medicine and a scientist at University of British Columbia said that, quote, we found that particularly among kids age four to eight,

the risk was tenfold higher on Halloween. So yeah, Halloween actually is pretty dangerous, but it's from a car, not from someone sneaking drugs into your kid's candy. Last year before the current rainbow fentanyl scare, the drug-laced trick in your kid's treat was weed-laced candy and snacks, causing, quote, unquote, THC overdose among children. But shady marijuana pushers packaged them just for kids, and if stony patch kids are mixed in, it's hard to tell. And unfortunately, the black market is making it easy for children to get these products.

Ben Salem police confiscated what looks like normal candy during a traffic stop earlier this month, but these sweet tarts, they're medicated. These sour patch candies have a twist, and these Cheetos are anything but. All of these items are laced with THC. By laced with THC, they mean the $40 stoner patch dummies are a manufactured weed candy sold in legal weed shops across the country. The fact that these novelty THC products are incredibly expensive and in packaging covered in weed leaves doesn't seem to matter.

But yes, I'm sure the black market is super eager to give away tiny $50 bags of weed Doritos to children dressed as the Avengers. All right, now the details on a big warning for parents tonight. Police officers in Ben Salem confiscated these items during a traffic stop. It's candy laced with marijuana. And now police don't want these friendly looking snacks to get into the wrong hands with Halloween coming up. I'm going to quote from filter mag, quote, attorneys general across the country are participating

in the annual tradition of urging parents to stand vigilant against free drugs disguised as candy. On October 26th, four state AGs issued such claims, all using the same data and language, which appears to have been generously prewritten for them by the Department of Homeland Security. Ohio, Illinois, Connecticut, and in New York and Arkansas earlier that month, decried the dangers of youth THC overdose. But without hinting at what those dangers might be, except for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who alone of the AGs swung big, saying, New York parents should be on

the alert for deceptive cannabis products that look like standard snacks and candy, but contain dangerously high concentrations of THC. These products are especially dangerous for our children. We've seen an increase in accidental overdoses among children nationwide, and it's vital that we do everything we can to protect our children and curb this crisis and prevent any future harm or even worse, death. Now that's a stunning claim, even by weed disinformation standards. To date, there's been no confirmed evidence that THC overdose has ever killed anybody,

adult or child. So with all of that drug-laced Halloween history onto the latest rainbow-colored menace in your child's trick-or-treat basket. As Halloween approaches, federal authorities are warning parents about the deadly consequences of fentanyl pills, particularly about the rainbow variety that look like candy. The Drug Enforcement Agency first put out a statement on multicolored, quote unquote, rainbow fentanyl near the end of August 2022, claiming during that month that the DEA and law enforcement partners seized brightly-colored fentanyl and fentanyl pills in 26 states.

And this is how the presence of colored fentanyl was framed in the DEA's initial statement, quote, this trend appears to be a new method used by Mexican drug cartels to sell highly addictive and potentially deadly fentanyl made to look like candy to children, unquote. Now obviously, children aren't the biggest consumer base for these drugs since they have no money, have very low tolerance, and are unlikely to be a repeat customer. But that hasn't stopped the DEA from continuously referring to these colored pills as quote unquote, marketing to attract kids, as if there's rainbow fentanyl ads on Nickelodeon or something.

It seems the only one marketing rainbow fentanyl is the DEA itself, and now news channels across the country. This is from Good Morning America. A warning, certainly one here that parents need to hear with Halloween coming up. It's about potentially deadly fentanyl pills that look like candy. Obviously, the DEA is an enforcement agency, not a harm reduction agency. And the way they've been talking about fentanyl the past few months has focused more on old war on drugs style propaganda with anti immigrant drug warriors pushing the fentanyl for kids

narrative. The DEA's messaging seems largely targeted to parents and more intended to cause panic than actually work to prevent overdoses. And it distracts from experts that say drug criminalization is what actually increases overdoses, not these quote unquote, candy colored pills. Mariah Francis, a resource associate with the National Harm Reduction Coalition, says such rhetoric is quote, an active byproduct of drug policies that prioritize criminalization and political agendas over active harm reduction, unquote, as colored fentanyl can actually

serve as an indicator that these pills are not prescription drugs. The other war on drugs style scare tactic being used a lot recently has been promoting heavily publicized drug seizures and making highly exaggerated claims about what the busts mean to the illicit drug supply and public health. Michigan and Ohio, we seized approximately four million deadly doses. Medical agent in charge, Orville Green, says nationwide that number jumps to 36 million deadly doses seized in just four months and they're in pill and powder form. The source materials coming from China produced by drug cartels in Mexico, calling them quote

unquote, deadly doses. Like yeah, dude, if you quantify your seizure by an amount that could be potentially deadly, I suppose you could only measure in deadly quantities. I could do the same thing with caffeine. I can go to the store and pick up like 10 bang energy drinks and be, I just got a deadly dose of caffeine. Like yeah, that's if you're measuring it in that way, sure, you can measure it as deadly doses.

Plus in that clip from Fox to Detroit, you can see the anti-China, anti-Mexico angle that they're running with. Now, obviously places like Fox News has been eating this stuff up. Just during the first half of September, the network mentioned rainbow fentanyl at least 66 times on the air over the previous month, weaponizing the narrative to blame migrants at the border and China for the supposed threat that the drug poses to poor innocent children. And many of people's most trusted news sources, which are local news outlets, have contributed to the DEA's panic by parroting the agency's statements as pure fact, pushing the claim

that rainbow fentanyl is meant to attract kids just at face value presented without any skepticism, without any fact-checking or information from independent drug policy experts. Here is a headline from ABC24 in Tennessee, quote, rainbow fentanyl, the colorful marketing tactic already in Memphis streets. And this is from a TV channel in Raleigh, North Carolina, DEA warns of so-called rainbow fentanyl putting children at risk. And headlines like that have been a dime a dozen the past month, never once bringing up that there's not a single piece of evidence that these pills are being peddled on the

playground. This is exactly the kind of behavior from news organizations that leads to misinformation and panics, which distract from actual public health dangers and relatively simple things we can do to combat them. Fox News, many local news stations and the DEA itself, has now joined in the long-standing annual tradition of Halloween candy-based fear-mongering by baselessly claiming that parents should be concerned about fentanyl appearing in their child's Halloween candy. Federal agents with an urgent warning to parents about potentially deadly fentanyl pills that

look just like candy. Dubbed rainbow fentanyl, authorities are calling it a newly-packaged poison as Halloween is around the corner. The idea that people are going to give away free drugs for Halloween, which is just wild concept, I wish I would go out trick-or-treating more if there was free drugs. But this idea has been boosted by elected leaders and non-DEA government officials. Florida's Attorney General Ashley Moody did a whole press conference saying, quote, Halloween can be very scary, but nowhere near as scary as rainbow-colored fentanyl that

looks like candy and can be lethal in minute doses. Whether these drugs are being transported in candy boxes or mixed in with other common drugs and sold to unsuspecting users, the threat posed to the safety of kids and young adults is very real. Just one pill laced with fentanyl can kill, so parents, please talk to your children about the dangers posed by this extremely lethal drug. Halloween can be scary, but that isn't it anyway. Senator Rob Portman wrote, quote, we must have all the boots on the ground to interdict

deadly rainbow fentanyl as Halloween approaches. Which he posted alongside a Fox News story about fentanyl disguised in candy packaging, which is simply a common tactic to smuggle drugs through borders, which is why such packaging is found so often in drug seizures. Now nobody is planning to give away free, skittle fentanyl to little Timmy when he comes knocking on doors, and more, quote, boots on the ground is exactly what law enforcement wanted when they started this lie. The DEA budget has gone up every year, and so have fentanyl overdoses.

But it's the won't-somebody-think-of-the-children angle that's so irresistible to news media. It provides a huge rush to our culture's actual favorite drug, fear for our children. It's the same undercurrent that fuels attacks on drag queens and trans people. Fear for the kids. While a long piece in CNN explicitly said, parents of young children should not overly panic, we all know how easy it is for children to pass candy around to each other. As if rainbow fentanyl is going to be shared around M&Ms at a lunch break or something. In one of the more silly things that I found, people running the account for ABC7 Eyewitness

News hid over 100 replies pointing out the disinformation in their so-called Eyewitness News story in their tweet that read quote, hashtag breaking 12,000 fentanyl pills seized in wrappers of skittles, whoppers, sweet-tarts at LAX, sparking renewed Halloween warnings to parents. So yeah, they hid over 100 replies to that tweet basically saying, this is bullshit, you have no idea what you're talking about, this story, again, it conflates methods of drug trafficking with a long-standing myth of expensive drugs being hidden in cheap Halloween candy.

And then by far the most ridiculous thing that I found, it's just because it's kind of absurd and slightly funny, Laura Trump on Fox News did the most ridiculous rainbow fentanyl segment that I could find, including spreading the blatant lie that police officers have indeed died by simply touching fentanyl. Yeah, you look at the police officers who when they just pat people down and they find it, if it touches their fingers, they literally go into shock and almost die from it, some I think have died from it. The idea that you could have a kid anywhere in America, if one child dies from this on

Halloween, I got to tell you, we have to take action to stop this right now because parents are terrified and we have no answers. What are we supposed to do? They're going to go trick or treating. So Democrats ruin Halloween too? Yes. And they really do. They ruin everything.

So what you wouldn't know by watching these types of news programs, whether they be Fox News or just regular cable news is that the colors in these drugs have been added to pills for years. The real danger isn't that kids are being given fentanyl like candy. It's that fentanyl is being pressed into the shapes of other prescription drugs like oxycodone and people will take a fentanyl pill thinking it's something else and then overdose. And throughout many of these news stories, they don't mention Narcan or if they do, they mention it in the context as saying like this school in LA now carries Narcan.

That's how bad things are getting. They use the presence of Narcan as like a bad omen, which means no, people should just have Narcan everywhere because it's great. More on that later. But these colored pills provide such a compelling visual for anyone with a financial stake in continuing prohibition. In a way, the DEA is right. Rainbow fentanyl is a marketing stunt, but one concocted by the DEA itself as a justification

for its own existence rather than drug sellers marketing their product to kids using the escalating demonization of fentanyl to call for increased funding to law enforcement and border patrol and the need to convince a public acclimating to the idea of fentanyl that actually fentanyl is even scarier than what they once thought. Quoting filter mag again, quote, people sell drugs because they are economically motivated to do so. No one except the DEA and its allies is arguing that it's a good business strategy to kill off your adult buyers and give free samples to children, a previously untapped customer

base because the fentanyl wasn't never pretty enough. And not because children do not have money. The emergence of different colors of pressed pills alongside the traditional blue fentanyl pills won't lure in younger buyers. If anything, it'll help keep newer buyers safe, unquote, brightly colored fake pills that are clearly fake are helpful for people being cut off of their prescription and turning to street drugs to remind them that what they're getting is not the oxycodone that they're used to, but something more potent.

And for more on what fentanyl actually is and to kind of get an expert opinion on these topics, I interviewed Ryan Marino, the resident fentanyl expert who's cited in basically all of these new stories. So after this ad break, you will hear that interview. First, can you introduce yourself? So I'm Ryan Marino. I'm a medical toxicologist, emergency doc and addiction medicine specialist. So what exactly is fentanyl?

What's the deal? What is the actual thing? Because people, I know, have heard a lot about it, but they may be unaware, like, what this type of opioid is, how it's different from other things, why it's around. Yeah. And I think most people hear kind of one side of fentanyl. And so fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. So it's a lot like heroin, morphine, oxycodone, all those other things.

It acts the same way. The difference is that it is more potent and because it is fully synthetic, it can be made without the necessity for like large poppy fields, weather, all that stuff. But it's very easy to produce. It's used medically all the time. It's like one of the most ubiquitously used medicines and very invaluable for its medically uses. But in the street, because of its potency, small amounts can make a huge difference in

the dose that people get. And so fentanyl in street drugs has been the main driver behind what people call our opioid overdose epidemic and the kind of record breaking overdose deaths that we've had in recent years. I would like guess that one of the biggest reasons that people have heard about fentanyl is due to police officers and all of the stories from the past year of police officers spontaneously overdosing by either touching it, getting too close to it, breathing the same air that it's around. Can you overdose by touching fentanyl?

You cannot. So there is a patch that's made for the medical fentanyl. So it can absorb through your skin if you try really, really hard, but it's incredibly ineffective even with the best pharmaceutical technology that money could buy. This is still very slow, very ineffective. Touching fentanyl cannot cause an overdose. And the way it exists on the street, particularly, you're never going to encounter the form or quantity that you would need to cause an overdose.

So these stories are nothing more than urban legends and misinformation. Why are people having these effects then, right? Because there's videos of people fainting and falling over and they're like, this police officer needed to receive Narcan and was rushed to the hospital. What's actually happening there? Because people obviously look like they're experiencing something, but it doesn't really match up with what fentanyl is able to do. So it's a really interesting phenomenon.

And if you look at any of these stories, any of these videos, you can very clearly see people having real symptoms. I'm not trying to cast any doubt on that. But what's reported and what's shown is actually the opposite of what fentanyl would do. And so people report feeling very anxious, breathing very rapidly, having their heart race, all of the things that fentanyl would actually cause the opposite. And so I can only speculate on what's really happening there. But my guess would be that this is some sort of panic reaction related to the fact that

people are hearing about this every day, hearing that fentanyl is killing hundreds of thousands of people, hearing that other people have just dropped down from being near it. And there's also this related concept called the nocebo effect, which is kind of like the dark side of the placebo effect, if you will. And so basically, it's just that if you believe something so strongly, you can have very negative of real symptoms from it. And the way you would treat this would be with a placebo, which in these situations, Narcan is a placebo.

So the fact that Narcan works for some of them kind of suggests that there is some sort of placebo nocebo effect going on. I know that fentanyl has become more common since the pandemic's rough. I would say probably starting in California is what most of it looks like. In terms of the whole opioid epidemic thing, why has this become such a big problem in the past three years, specifically with fentanyl getting into so much of the supply? Well, so fentanyl started getting cut into heroin, particularly on the East Coast pretty early on, probably like 10 or more years ago now, and took a while to make its way West.

It seemed like California actually had different heroin and particularly like black tar heroin was more prevalent there, which can't be as easily replaced with a powder for anyone who's familiar with heroin. But now, I mean, there is really no other opioid supply. So things like heroin are almost impossible to come by just because it doesn't exist in the world. The like oxycodone, oxycontin, all of these pills that people used to sell on the street also just don't exist because they're not being prescribed anymore.

Some of them aren't even being manufactured anymore. And so what's left is really when you take away the supply, but you don't address the demand is something's got to fill it. And fentanyl is there. Fentanyl is really easy to make. It's relatively cheap and simple to produce. And so you can press it into pills that look like oxycodone. You can mix it up into a powder that looks like heroin and gives people similar effects.

But because it's so much more potent, which it's like 50 times more potent than heroin. So I mean, if you think just in terms of percentage wise, like a one or 2% difference could be double the dose when you compare it to something. So that's where the trouble comes in. And then with the rainbow fentanyl angle, the DA has been talking about how a fentanyl is this new thing to market to children. They've sort of like market a lot being like this is like some advertising job done by big drug to sell to sell to kids is first off, like, why would these drugs be pressed

into different colors? Like with with with with the fentanyl pills being in, you know, the multicolored collections. What's the actual purpose of that? Well, so that's a great question. And I don't know what to make of whatever the DEA is doing and why they make these announcements because there's there's no evidence behind it. They have provided no evidence and their own press releases going back years show multiple colors of fentanyl pressed pills.

My best guess and in talking to like people who use drugs, people who work in the same space across the country is that pharmaceuticals come in different colors. And so these probably were mostly just to mimic things like oxycodone tabs. Also I mean, dealers like to add their own kind of like marked the things in terms of heroin will come with different like stamps on the bag. So probably something similar there. But also I mean, people just tend to like things that are are colored more than like a grainy beige pill if it comes with like a pink or a green on it.

It's going to be more desirable. But there's no evidence whatsoever that this is intentionally marketed towards children. Children are not good clients for drug dealers. These are just things that adults want. American adults are the ones buying these drugs. I guess, can you speak more on how the DEA's rhetoric's around this thing, especially it's been like escalating the past few months leading up to Halloween, right? It's been a lot of heavily publicized seizures saying like, we seized enough fentanyl to

kill 500 million people or something like they're like they frame it in this really like a bombastic way. And then there's a lot of stuff talking about how it's it's being hidden in like candy boxes and they're going to be giving it out on Halloween to your kids and like, what is the DEA doing? Like what's their incentive for talking about it in this way? And obviously, I can't like ask you like, what is the DEA doing, Ryan? Why are they doing this? But like from your perspective, like, like this rhetoric doesn't seem very helpful in

terms of actually preventing overdoses. It seems to be kind of just fear mongering and specifically with stuff like with the drugs being hidden inside candy boxes, there's reasons for why people might do that to smuggle them. But with all of the rhetoric that the DEA has been been pushing, like, is it like actually dangerous the way that they've been talking about it in terms of like, it's not it's not talking about harm reduction, it's not talking about ways to actually help. It's just like scaring parents, it seems.

Yeah. I mean, I think the DEA is solely a law enforcement agency. There is no one there involved in the treatment of addiction in terms of like addiction science chemistry, no one there who is like a former drug user even. So their motives are always suspect to me. And I think with this rainbow fentanyl press release, they put it out. There was no evidence behind it that none of it made any sense. The term rainbow fentanyl wasn't even searchable before August of 2022 when the DEA made this

announcement, which is kind of crazy to think about. And then within six weeks of that announcement, US Congress has pledged to give them hundreds of millions more dollars to quote unquote, fight rainbow fentanyl, which is again, a thing that does not exist. And I mean, looking back, the DEA budget has gone up year on year, hundreds of percent since like the 1980s, but even within the context of our opioid overdose crisis has gone up year on year for all of the past, I don't know, however many years you want to look at it.

Their department size grows every year and overdose deaths go up every year. So whatever they're doing is obviously not working. And like you said, I mean, they particularly ignore and distract from things like harm reduction from real evidence based measures and kind of public health investments that we could be making. And when it comes to hundreds of millions of dollars extra being thrown at the DEA for rainbow fentanyl, and we think back to what was it just like last winter, when the current administration set aside, I think $30 million towards harm reduction, being the first time

the federal government has put aside dedicated money for harm reduction, and that created its own kind of like moral panic backlash as well. But $30 million was the first and only federal investment in harm reduction. And yet $300 million can be drummed up at the drop of a hat for an invented crisis. So it does really kind of beg the question of like, what are we doing here and why are we continuing to do things that don't work? What do you wish people knew that would help them maybe combat some of the misinformation that gets pedaled by like lots of like local TV stations are very quick to cover these

types of stories, very quick to cover the stories of like, your local cop just almost died at the school by getting within five feet of a fentanyl vaporizer or something. Like, what do you wish people knew to help like combat this type of stuff? I mean, it seems like common sense is just not common when it comes to drug topics. If the police were saying that people were giving out guns for Halloween, if they were saying that they found uranium or plutonium in a car and four officers went down, that would require serious consideration and fact checking before it ever was reported on or accepted.

And so I mean, I think when it comes to this idea that someone was in a car with a bag of fentanyl and nobody in the car was affected, but the officers outside the car all went down like just basic kind of critical thinking or applying any lens of skepticism, I mean, makes all of these narratives fall apart. So that would be, I mean, my biggest ass in people watching these stories. I feel like the onus of responsibility really should be on the ones who are reporting it, not to just necessarily take the words of law enforcement as authority on every subject, especially when they do not have the background to be authorities on how things like fentanyl

work. Before we close out, I would like to talk a little bit about Narcan. Like what it is, what it does and where people can get it. So Narcan is amazing. I cannot say enough positive things about Narcan. I mean, I'm not like a religious person or anything, but if miracles were to exist, Narcan is literally a miracle. And especially if anyone has ever seen it in action.

But so what it is for people who don't know Narcan is the brand name nasal spray of naloxone, which is the antidote or the reversal agent for anyone experiencing an opioid overdose, including fentanyl. And there are no opioids that Narcan does not work on. It isn't going to reverse every situation, certainly. But it is a perfect antidote, so to speak, or as close to one as we have ever had. And so I mean, if you are worried about someone experiencing an overdose, it's something that you can carry or have nearby and anyone can give it.

It was the nasal spray was actually designed with taxpayer dollars, interestingly enough, so that an untrained child could administer it. And so it's very easy to use. It's very easy to obtain for the most part nowadays, it's available, and I think almost every state without a prescription, you can just go to your pharmacy and ask for it. If you can't get it from like your local health department or another harm reduction organization. But I have it in my car and every work bag I have, I take it with me when I travel. It's something that people can carry and really makes a big difference.

And obviously, you don't want to experience or come across someone having an overdose, but it's much better to have with you. If you need it, then to be unprepared and have to kind of deal with the consequences. And I think this far into this like opioid overdose crisis that the United States and now most of the world has been experiencing, most people can probably think of someone who they know who they've lost to overdose or or similar situation. And you don't want to kind of be stuck regretting it later. Well, thank you so much.

Where can people find you on the internet? So I'm mostly just on Twitter at Ryan Marino, just my name one word. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about the latest scourge hiding inside your kid's Halloween basket. Thanks, Kersen. So with that, that does it for us today here at It Could Happen Here. Have fun trick or treating.

If you have any drugs, good for you. I'm happy you got this for free. Watch out for cars. Those are actually dangerous. And thanks to thanks to everybody who attended the recent It Could Happen Here live stream. Thank you so much for coming. I hope to get through more questions, but we went a little long because there were so many people, but I will I will answer two more questions here.

Did you know that the latest My Little Pony movie has a literal xenophobic fascist dictator as an antagonist? No, I did not know that, but it's not surprising based on what I know about the recent My Little Pony media. And then what do you think is the most important thing somebody can have for a disaster or chaos preparedness? My personal answer to that would probably be friends. Friends are really useful.

Books on how to like make stuff and like how to like, you know, basically survival books because you don't want to count on having the internet. And then I don't know, like water, water filters, water purification tablets. Those would be those would be my picks. But I hope everyone has a happy, happy Halloween. And that does it here for I Could Happen Here, closing out our latest spooky week. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

And 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. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.