Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 63

Episode Date: December 17, 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. It could happen here is a podcast and it is kind of happening here. Because there was just an attack on several power substations in the state of North Carolina that left something like 40,000 people without power for several days, I believe at the moment at least one person died as a result of this. There have been car crashes. It's pretty fucked up.

And we are going to be talking about that obviously as a result of this. Number one, there were a lot of immediate suspicions that came out that this was tied towards Drag Queen story hour type event that was going to be being held on the day that the attack was carried out. There's suspicions that this is the result of far right activity. And yeah, we're going to talk about that and everything around that right now. We have on the episode for today myself, Garrison Davis, James Stout, and we are also bringing in friend of the pod researcher and woman about town, but not this town, a different town because we live on opposite sides of the country. Molly Conger. Molly, I've been saying your last name wrong for years, even though we've been friends for quite a while now. I don't know why I never said anything. It's come up so many times. So Garrison, you've kind of been taking point on putting together this one, so I'm going to let you kind of take the reins unless you want me to direct this more.

But I do think kind of the place to start is, are we watching a gigantic right wing insurgency unfold or is this a more complex case? And obviously the answer is the latter as it is. Anytime someone poses a question like that. No, we're going to pick the simple, more scary, more inflammatory option and leave it at that. Yeah. Do a tweet. Send tweet. No, so yes, the aftermath of the North Carolina attack has kind of, it's gotten a lot of people to learn about infrastructure attacks for the first time and get really scared about them and realize that this is a problem. I then start bringing up past incidents where this has happened and trying to draw this like overall pattern, which isn't entirely incorrect. But the way they're going about it is not very responsible nor really well informed.

Yeah. So one of the things we've seen is like the there have been a lot of attack. Like it does seem accurate to say that over the course of the last year or two, there have been more attacks on power infrastructure. But that doesn't mean we have we have lots of data on this. There has the past five years, there has been a pretty strong increase in the number of attacks on power stations. And it's also true that this is a thing the right has been the far right, like the Nazi right in particular has been trying to get people to do for longer than anyone on this podcast has been alive. This goes back to the Turner Diaries, even pre that stuff. This is in siege. And this is, you know, there has been very recently this summer, a couple of pieces of fairly well put together Nazi propaganda that was advocating for people to carry out attacks like this. And the reason is that it's easy and it's high impact.

It's very easy to fuck up a power substation. All you need is a gun. And it's very easy to get away with it because most of them have effectively zero security. Yeah. And it explained how to do it as well, right? Sorry, Molly. Like it was literally a guide to fucking up a substation. Yeah, because they're specific. We're not going to give you guys a guide to fucking up power substations on this podcast, but it's not hard. That's next week. Yeah, that's next week in our three part. It's on the Patreon. You're going to be on the Patreon. That's the Patreon special episode, how to destroy power infrastructure for fun and profit.

No, but I think too, if you're trying to propagandize people to take action, you know, we've all seen plenty of manifestos from people who carried out mass shootings trying to propagandize people to take action in that fact. But we've also seen the chats when somebody fails, right? Like if somebody doesn't get what they call it, you know, a high score, if somebody carries out a mass shooting that doesn't result in very many deaths, it's embarrassing for them. But this is for the perpetrator relatively low stakes. If you fail, no one will know. If you miss, no one will know. If you hit it and it just looks like vandalism and the power doesn't go out, no one will know that you failed and you can try again later. You don't die. And that's the title of one of the pieces of propaganda that I sent you, right? The title of it is Make It Count, which is an abbreviated form of a quote from Siege. It's a Nazi insurgency manual from a couple of decades ago. The general gist of the quote is that, you know, the price of failure is death. So whatever you choose to do, make it count. So this is a relatively low stakes for the perpetrator way to have a very high impact with low risk of personal failure.

And what I did find and we'll get off, we'll move to the broader topic in a second because I think focusing too much on the Nazis right now is going to frame things the wrong way. But one of the things I did find interesting about that piece of propaganda was the acknowledgement and the introduction that like carrying out these mass shootings is not going to accomplish our brother goals in part because people have gotten inured to them. Whereas destroying power infrastructure, if you can fuck up the grid, they believe that's going to like, and I think obviously this is a silly line of thought, but they think it's going to like lead to the... I mean, this is always what they think it's going to lead to like the race war that they want, right? That's the thinking there. The B in that equation is like A to B to C, like if this, then question mark race war? Yeah, they're Nazis, you know, they're Nazis, they're not right about things. But the fact that all this propaganda is out there, the fact that they've been talking about this so long is part of why everyone is convinced that like there's this massive new insurgency that's just broken out and that that's what all of these attacks are, which doesn't mean that none of them are. It's also worth noting that the year before this happened in the same state in North Carolina, a group of Nazis were arrested by the feds for trying to attack power infrastructure.

And they also had plans on the Pacific Northwest where there have been in Washington, Portland attacks on some power infrastructure. I mean, they're also just so happens to be... A lot of Nazis here, yeah. Both the Carolinas and the Pacific Northwest are home to a lot of people who self-describe as like militant neo-Nazi accelerationists. What I think we should do now before we get too much off this, and we can return to this topic, is talk about the fact that, and this is kind of the important context, a lot of people who aren't Nazis fuck up electrical grids all the time. It's actually very easy and people seem to just enjoy it. It's an American pastime. I think there's been a lot of missteps people have taken in talking about this and kind of, you know, some people have gotten scared and have kind of, you know, not looked at this fully analytically in a way that is actually really helpful because there's been a lot of kind of retrospective misinformation going around on attacks that have happened in the past few months that have only really gotten reported on or noticed in the wake of the North Carolina attack, which has kind of caused this narrative to come out that since the North Carolina attack, there's been like a bajillion of other attacks happening in quick succession, which actually isn't true.

I first want to talk about the types of stuff that people are generally getting wrong about this because it's a good deal. People are misunderstanding some of what's going on here. So there was this, you know, pretty viral story made by a new station in Florida that came out a few days ago talking about how it's all caps. Substations targeted report shows intrusions had Duke Energy power stations in Tampa Bay and elsewhere in Florida. So very scary, obviously, because Duke Energy is also the place in North Carolina that was attacked. Founded by the guy who invented the modern cigarette, by the way. They learned that from you. Thank you. It is based, Garrison, yes.

If you look at the actual story, these intrusions that they're talking about happened last September. They did not happen a few days ago. And then also similarly, for the first time, there was reporting on a whole bunch of substation attacks in the Pacific Northwest. That reporting was dropped after the North Carolina attacks, in part because a memo was posted by a few different news sites that they probably did open records requests in the wake of the North Carolina attack. They found this memo reported on it. And now people have learned about this other thing that happened in November. So, but people who don't, who really are only looking at headlines or only looking at tweets or posts, wherever, right? They look at these attacks, they look at, you know, the succession of them becoming public after the North Carolina thing. And they're kind of drawing this narrative that these things have happened one after another. And it's part of this brand new wave of things.

And it is part of a wave of things on like the broad sense, but it's not all happened within the past two weeks. So the first thing is like when it's super easy for disinformation and misinformation to spread very rampantly in the aftermath of these types of attacks and these types of incidents, you know, some of these probably are not attacks. And it's really easy to kind of glom onto an error that's compelling and scary. And if you just dig a little bit deeper, you'll realize there's a whole bunch of context that you're missing. So that's always an important first step when these things are happening. Yeah. And it's part of the part of the story here. I think part of why it's important to understand that like the surge in attacks on power infrastructure is a thing, but it's not necessarily tied to the fact that Nazis are attacking the power infrastructure. Is that like it's easy to do.

It's easy to do casually. And this has been known for a while. About a decade ago, 2013, there was an attack in the Bay Area on, I think, was it two power substations? The Metcalfe Sniper. Yeah, the Metcalfe Sniper. We don't know how many people were involved. It's suspected more than one. Yes, yes. And this was a very, if this was a practice attack, a training attack, then it was a very effectively carried out one because we still don't know who did it.

Regardless of the motive, this incident has been mythologized in a lot of extremist circles as like an example of here's a successful thing that is replicable and you can get away with it. This is one of the most highly referenced incidents of infrastructure attack on, you know, across, you know, whether you're like anti-Siv Luddite or whether you're a neo-Nazi accelerationist. This specific 2013 attack is highly referenced. And we'll circle back to this towards the end, but I guess I'm going to quote from a recent report by the George Washington University on power substation attacks. They are extremely common. They are becoming increasingly common since 2016. White supremacists are not the only ones who do them. They were also from 2016 to 2019, a whole bunch of ISIS inspired terrorism also hit some stations across the United States.

They are not exclusively done by white supremacists and there's also sometimes they're just shot at by random people with guns. Yeah. Step up from a roadside. Let's be honest. So the Metcalfe attack, it's not impossible that it was just an unusually lucky group of Yehuz who wanted to shoot some power infrastructure. We have no idea. I think the number of rounds fired directly into the system probably makes that unlikely. Almost every intelligence agency will disagree with you on that, Robert.

Yeah, but they didn't catch shit. But to Robert's point, I think there is some value in remembering that a drunk guy in the woods might love to fire a gun at something that's going to spark. And if you're going to shoot a gun, you might as well shoot it a lot. But you probably wouldn't shoot it 200 times. No, but it was very, it was, it was very, anyway, there is, and we talked about this a bit in our planning. There was one attack and Molly, you probably could recall the year better than I was, but it was a couple of years ago where the guy attacked a power substation because he, and he talked about this at length in his trial. He thought people were on their phones too much. Yeah, so I sent this one to you.

Based. Based. I loved, I love to find a court record. I love to spend all my, all my pocket change on Pacer and they've given me access to the law library. So I spent all day today looking for any case where not just charged or convicted any case where USC 1360 18 USC 1366 was brought up. So 1366 is the federal statute for damaging or conspiring to damage an energy facility. So energy facility means power lines power substations coal mines nuclear facilities any place where power is made right so it's a pretty broad statute. And so I looked up a few dozen cases where that was on the table to sort of bring the temperature down and say like, okay, aside from Nazis trying to cause a race for water some other things that lead to somebody getting charged with this other motivations other scenarios.

And that case was Jason Woodring, Jason Woodring in August 2013. He tried to use a, this is a quote from some news coverage at the time, tried to lasso a train with a cable attached to a high voltage tower. He is still in prison. Right, right to this man. We'll do it. Everyone was distracted by their screens, by their phones, by their gaming, and you just wanted people to remember what's important. So he tried to lasso a train with a high voltage wire. Yeah, we probably don't need to add this. He was a big enthusiast of methamphetamine. He has some court ordered substance abuse treatment. And we wish him nothing but the best. I think he's going to be just fine. But I found some other cases where there was an intentional attack with the, you know, with the stated intention of bringing down the grid but for like non Nazi reasons.

Yeah, I mean, in the early 2000s, a bunch of ELF activists were charged with 1366 for arson's to energy facilities. This is an odd one. In 2019, a guy named Stephen McCrae was sentenced for attacking one substation by shooting out the cooling fins. And as part of his plea agreement, he admitted to three other attacks. He got caught because he told a friend of his that he'd been shooting shit up. And his friend was concerned and went to the FBI and they had his friend record some of their conversations. So he said things like stated motive was attacking corporate America. So something to be done about global warming. He wasn't noted as an environmental activist, but he was concerned about the corporations, which I don't know.

He could have come from a couple of different places. Yeah. Yeah, lizard people maybe. Right before his arrest, he told his friend that he was planning a granddaddy event that would make national news and shut down the whole West Coast. Okay, well that's funny, the friend went to the FBI. Yeah, sometimes. Don't tell that to your friend. Yeah, already anyone if you're planning to do that.

Your friend is still snitching you, that sucks, but like, don't tell that to your buddy. Although, according to the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, which is another tool I really enjoy, he was released in September. That's good, I hope he's doing better. I'll say, this I think helps to make the point that like, this is not all or mostly Nazis doing this kind of thing. A lot of people want to do this. A third case that sort of fits the same pattern, a guy who shot out a transformer for reasons I can't quite discern based on the court filings. But again, in all three of these cases, the Miles Maynard case in Alabama in 2008, Jason Woodry in 2013, Stephen McCrae in 2019, they all had court ordered psyche vows. And in McCrae's case, there were questions about his competency to stand trial. Miles Maynard died shortly after being released from prison.

These are people who were not well. Not that being unwell or having a substance use problem makes you shoot at a substation, but these aren't explicitly ideological. These are people who just got an idea in their head and didn't control it well. Yeah. And I think part of when you're kind of looking at just any of these attacks you're trying to discern as stuff pops into the news. Is this likely part of an insurgent trend or is this like some dudes fucking around? One of them would be like, what was the how much like how much effort and planning does it look like went into the Metcalf attack looks like quite a lot. I would say the most recent Portland and Washington attacks, given the extent to which there were break-ins look like it was organized. They seem very a lot of steps had to had to go in.

So let's have an ad break and then we'll go into some more actual details of the North Carolina attack and some of the Pacific Northwest ones. And then kind of circle back to why people are talking about accelerationism so much. You know who loves planning a series of infrastructure attacks? The sponsors of this show attacks on the infrastructure of your wallet. We're back and nothing that we said before the break can legally be called incitement. It's a joke. It's fine. So now we're going to we're going to talk a little bit more about the details of the North Carolina attack and some of the attacks in the Pacific Northwest. And yeah, just get into some more of the actual details that have been going on with these most recent attacks that have kind of caused people to speculate on various things.

So the agencies involved in investigating the North Carolina more County attack have disclosed very little information about what's happened. They've said that the equipment was hit by gunfire and that the shooters appeared to know what they were doing. Investigators have found nearly two dozen shell casings from high-powered rifles in the area. Around 45,000 people lost power and that power outage lasted for like at least five days as the company tried to replace these very large pieces of equipment, many of which were damaged beyond repair. So investigators are zoning in on two threads of possible motives centered around extremist behavior for the attack that happened last Sunday. One of these one of these is writings by extremists on online forums, encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure as well as a series of recent disruptions of LGBTQ plus events across the nation by domestic extremists according to law enforcement sources disclosed to CNN. So these are the two things that people are looking into initial speculation like of the night of the shooting centered on right wing backlash towards a drag show that was set to be held that same day at a nearby theater. The drag show was shut down as it was going on because the power went out.

And there was a local a local activist made some cryptic comments on their Facebook and they then received a police visit. I also like that the this person who who made these cryptic posts was also an army psychological operations officer. She was asked to leave. Like her job was I said this was the person that that that posted about this big time to the drag show. So take that as as you will this person's group earlier that day had had a protest involving armed individuals in military gear to push back against the drag show. So but but yeah so those are the two threads and investigators are looking into is one accelerationist rhetoric and writings that has gotten more popular the past few years and then to maybe connected to this wave of like anti queer stuff. Let's see one one one one interesting kind of thing of note is that three weeks before this attack, another substation was deliberately disabled in eastern and North Carolina. This, the stack happened on Friday November 11.

It shut down electricity for about 12,000 homes and businesses power was restored in a few hours though this one this one was easier to fix. In a statement posted on the company's website for a few days after the incident. They described it as vandalism, and the company said that vandals quoted damaged transformers causing them to leak coolant oil, but the statement does not explicitly say what the method was. And this is again not uncommon because you're trying to like find people who might have like that's part of how you can like make a case against people is if you can prove they know details of the case that aren't publicly possible like there's a reason why they're not going to say what caliber the weapon is or whatever. They did say it wasn't the same as the one used in in the Metcalfe attack, which was 762 short. So yeah, yes, but the the gun that was used on the December North Carolina attack was different than the casings found at the 2013 one. In fairness, doesn't mean much. That does not mean much at all. It doesn't. I know there was a lot of initial sort of anger and frustration over the use of the word vandalism and the initial reporting. I think it's fine to use that word, because when you don't know what happened.

All you can see that happened is that someone damaged property. We don't know the motivations behind it. We don't know that they intended to knock out power because like we said, sometimes people in the woods just shoot at shit because yeah, funny. So I think it's fair to not want to use that word, but I think in initial reporting, especially from authorities, especially from people who could get sued reliable later down the line, the word vandalism is not incorrect. No, and it's this is like, I think if you're at if you want to know like what would immediately set someone someone off that like something is likely not vandalism or the Metcalfe attack is good because so much was fired at the transformer. I would say if like a thing that would make me think maybe this is just some yahoo fucking around is if it's 30 rounds or less fired and there's no attempt to actually break on to the facility 30 rounds kind of a standard capacity magazine. The reason why because because the North Carolina attack in December did not have many rounds, but the reason why it isn't we do know it's intentional is two substations were hit like one person hit one then travel and went to another. I just seem like a lot of a lot of people sort of expressing this outrage is that, you know, as we're tying these other incidents to it, you know, the ones in Florida, the ones in Pacific Northwest, when we have very little information, it's OK to call it vandalism because that's the baseline, right? You don't have to use if you start using terrorism for every minor incident. It dilutes it.

It's not helpful. It creates hysteria. I just wanted to get on the table. Yeah. I mean, like, yeah. So even in, like, November, the FBI was issuing warnings of reported threats to electricity infrastructure by people espousing racially or ethnically motivated extremist ideal ideologies to, quote, create civil disorder and inspire further violence. So FBI was sending bulletins to private industry multiple times in the past two months. There's been a lot of bulletins being sent out, which is why I think part of why this in the aftermath of the attacks with all these public record requests and more reporting on it, where people are realizing how much of a thing this actually is.

I think in attacks like these on substations or other power grid infrastructure are definitely more common than what you might think and do seem to be increasing in frequency in the broad sense. And some of some of them are certainly have, as we know from arrests that have taken place, are part of decentralized right wing attempts at an insurrection. That's not wrong to say it's just the problem is larger and more complicated than that. And to some extent, it's a problem of like, I would, I would be shocked if part of the explanation for why this is happening so much more is not that Americans have a shitload of guns and during the pandemic, people were bored and kind of. Going crazy, like, you know, people have no chill. Yeah, they have no chill. They're stuck at home and you're out in the middle of nowhere and it's easy to do and you want to see something spark. That's part of the problem, right?

Yeah, I mean, and they have been increasing since 2015. There's there were 70 reports of emergency or electric incidents and disturbances caused by suspected physical attacks, sabotage or vandalism from January to August of 2022. That figure represents a 75 percent increase from 40 percent around reports in like 2015, which is the first year that there is comparable data for. And it's it's also worth really noting that there is and was as soon as this happened in Metcalf in 2013, suggestions were made as to a really easy way to make it harder to do this, which would not be wildly expensive, which is to put sandbags in front of the coolant systems, which will block most conventional rounds. And at that point, I tech. Yeah, not high tech, not hard to accomplish. And it would also let you know anyone who is going to get around those sandbags is going to be ideologically committed, right? Yeah, whatever. Yeah, you can shoot a sandbag still.

A reason why there is so many of these attacks is because a lot of these very important pieces of infrastructure are highly visible and really only protected by a chain link fence. So in a lot of cases, an attack can be carried out without even entering any kind of restricted grounds. You can point a gun through a chain link fence and do the thing. I mean, you can be hundreds of yards away, right? It's a 308. You could be easily several hundred yards away out of the range of any camera and you could take enough potshots to destroy it. It has that kind of penetrative power, a 30 at six, you know, not hard. Hunting rifle that your granddad has.

Anyone who shoots elk regularly could do this, you know, without any realistic way of catching them if you're out in a rural area. I'm kind of shocked that these people actually did like in terms of, I don't know, we can talk about this later, but obviously the area they're in has a very high concentration of very heavily trained people in unconventional warfare. Oh, yes, we should. That is a factor in North Carolina, is that all of this is occurring on the outskirts of Fort Bragg and a year ago, people who were active duty Marines attempted to carry out a similar attack and were Nazis. Do we want to talk a little bit about that specifically about Robin Sage or is that too interesting? Yeah, I think it's relevant, certainly like the first thing I thought when I thought about this area was like, oh, shit, that's right by Serpent Pines. I think maybe the show was supposed to happen in Serpent Pines, which is kind of central to the United States Army Special Forces community. And a few times a year there, people newly qualifying to be SF soldiers will do an exercise called Robin Sage. It's military larping. Yeah, well, yeah, yes, it's the military doing larping, but also not the military, right?

So like, people I'm sure will be familiar and people who enjoy Twitter.com will be familiar in the fact that the United States has sometimes helped rebel movements across the world to overthrow a government. So it's the thing that it likes to do. It's yeah, it's shocking. Every revolution in fact has been fermented by the United States and the CIA specifically, because people can't think for themselves. So they what they do in Robin Sage is they practice training a rebel movement that's comprised of civilians, right, or untrained fighters. So these people will go out in small teams, infill, and then they'll meet a bunch of people who are not soldiers, they might be former soldiers, they might be local volunteers, they might be people from the area. And they will train them for a few days, right, just like they would if they were actually training up like a guerrilla army and then they'll do a simulated attack. Which you might recognize as potentially a bad idea. Which we now might be seeing as an issue because someone someone did an attack.

So like, you have in that area a ton of SF troops, right, and who span the political spectrum, and a ton of randos who have been trained by SF troops in guerrilla warfare, right, unconventional warfare is what they call it. And if you were doing unconventional warfare, this would be a very effective thing to do, right, that's why there's been this massive panic about cyber attacks on the grid. Especially since the start of the war in Ukraine, very funny, we panicked about cyber attacks when in fact you could just go shoot it. You don't need to be that complex, but that's right. It's a weak point. And you would know that if you've been practicing unconventional warfare. And so like this happening in this very specific area kind of raise some flags for me. It's not super weird that this is the second time in the course of a year that there's been an attempt or a successful attack on North Carolina power infrastructure.

Right. Like it's not surprising. This is at the very least the DHS is not surprised about this earlier this year. They have issued many alerts warning that domestic violence extremists are going to are planning to target the power grid. In February, three people had to plead guilty, which we already talked about in 2020. There was those people arrested in Idaho. They were planning attacks on power stations and highlighting highlighting locations of transformers and other substations and other power infrastructure and planning to take them out and then using the blackouts to go do other crimes, including assassinating ideological opponents. So like there's there's been a lot of there's been a lot of extra focus on people's plans to do infrastructure attacks and, you know, plans on like, Hey, this seems like a problem and people have been talking about it more because it does seem to there is at least increasingly high high high profile cases.

And at least in the case of this past one in North Carolina, the DHS is currently saying that it does appear to be deliberate. And they're they're investigating to see if it's if it is tied to ideological motives. But again, it is worth emphasizing that not all of these things are are these types of incidents. An example of something that I think has been misreported on is this recent attack or it's not an attack, but it's been reported as an attack in South Carolina. On December 7, there was an individual in a truck that opened fire near a Duke Energy facility. Employees witnessed this truck pull up. It was around 5 30pm. This guy opened fire in what appeared to be a long gun and then sped away. No, no one was hurt.

There was no outages. There was no reported property damage. And currently, sheriffs are saying that this was that this was a completely random act that was that wasn't even targeted at the power station. They said that the only connection between this shooting and the power station was their proximity. This wasn't an actual attack on a power station. This was just a coincidence. But because this was a few days after this attack in North Carolina, people can read headlines about someone shooting outside of power station in South Carolina and get turned into this big thing. You're like, that's actually not what's going on. You need to look a little bit closer.

No. Similarly with this stuff in Florida, you know, there's been a lot of retroactively, you know, trying to apply this this this accelerationist idea onto those onto those instances as well when there's simply not the evidence. Yeah, it's one of the things you have to like as talking about the fact the folks who are like insurrectionary. One of the force multipliers they have is that the United States has a tremendous amount of people who are just assholes and have guns. And that's just their own guns, guns they stole from the military. That that is also a factor specifically in North Carolina. James's point about the proximity to Fort Bragg, though, you know, like so. Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, obviously different branches of military, different parts of the state of North Carolina. But you know, there was that attack last month that was near Camp Lejeune. We have the Camp Lejeune cell that was wrapped up. They're actually still awaiting trial on the third superseding indictment.

And they were stealing guns, right? Or at least attempting to. That's how they got caught. They were stealing guns from the military. The initial indictment was for illegal first trafficking and illegal guns. Yeah. The Marine Corps lost a ton of plastic explosive at 29 palms last year as well, like a very large amount, which is concerning. Yeah. A startling quantity of high explosives. Right. And so I was combing for records for anything mentioning Fort Bragg, looking for other cases related to this specific geographical area, because the Moore County is literally right outside Fort Bragg, which is where the US Army Special Forces are. Are hanging out. And so this would not be the first time we had radicalized soldiers out of Fort Bragg. I mean, you go back to the 80s. Michael Tubbs, a founding member of the League of the South, did his first terrorism when he and some other Special Forces buddies committed armed robbery of machine guns from the Army for the Klan. Yeah. With the intention of using them to start a race war.

But then in August of this year, a Special Forces soldier named Killian Ryan was indicted for lying on his security clearance application. He had already been granted a security clearance. Mind you, he had been granted this clearance. But it turns out, oh, he was a Nazi. I don't know how the security clearance process didn't catch the fact that his email address was Nazi ACE 1488 at gmail.com. Oopsie doopsy. But they did not catch that. Easy to have a look.

Well, you know, sometimes it's hard to check. You know, there's lots of simple mistakes that anyone could make. Well, anybody could make this kind of a thing. So, you know, you see, this wasn't a surprise to DHS and it shouldn't be. These are their mistakes. I also did want to note, as we're talking about these Special Forces guys and the potential of them being radicalized. Oh, you mean like Timothy McVeigh? Well, Timothy McVeigh was a regular army.

He washed out a Special Forces soldier. Yeah, he didn't quite make it. Big Stealer Valor. What's his name? Yeah, this is not an uncommon thing. I am currently writing a story that includes a large section about a Marine that tried to steal equipment. From military bases to then go do a mass shooting at a synagogue. And this guy has what was a Nazi before he joined the Marines.

We've got to shut down the Marines until we figure out what's going on. We have got to shut this down until we figure out what's going on. Yeah, and you've got Eric Rudolph, the guy who carried out the Olympic Park bombings in 96 was with the 101st Airborne Division. He was an air assault specialist. And he carried out the bombing of the Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia and then went on the run for months, I think. Yeah. And he was a Nazi, by the way. Oh, he was on the run for a long time.

Yeah, it took a while. His autobiography really details all the squirrel and nothing he did in the woods. Yes. And by the way, he carried out a number of other bombings, including a bombing. He carried out a bombing of an abortion clinic. He carried out the bombing of a lesbian bar. We talked about this earlier this year. We did part of one of our many series.

We talked about this guy. We had a whole episode dedicated to him. I do want to briefly talk about some of the stuff happening in the Pacific Northwest as well and how this ties in and how there is. As opposed to some of the incidents that were like the incident in South Carolina stuff in the Pacific Northwest while happening previous to the North Carolina attack does seem to be deliberate. And there has been some interesting pieces of information that have come out in the past few days. So the electrical grid has been physically attacked at least six times in Oregon and Western Washington since mid-November. Attackers used firearms in at least some of the incidents in both states and some power customers in Oregon and Washington experienced at least brief service disruptions as a result of the attacks. Just two days before the North Carolina attacks, the FBI and Oregon's Titan Fusion Center issued a memo that warned utilities about these recent attacks and how there could be more of them.

Saying, quote, power companies in Oregon, Washington have reported physical attacks on substations using hand tools, arson, firearms and metal chains, possibly in response to an online call for attacks on critical infrastructure. Continuing to say that in recent attacks, criminal actors bypassed security fences by cutting the fence links, lighting nearby fires, shooting equipment from a distance, or throwing objects over the fence and onto the equipment. And the aim according to the memo is, quote, violent anti-government criminal attack, which is kind of a catch-all term that these people use for a whole bunch of kind of white supremacist affiliated accelerationist violence. It's kind of a silly term because these people really aren't anti-government. They're just, they just want, they're fascist. They're anti-this government because they think this government's too liberal. But yeah, so there was an attack on a substation in Clackamas County on Thanksgiving morning. The power company calls this a deliberate physical attack.

This is the one where two people cut through fences and use firearms to shoot up and disable numerous pieces of equipment. A security specialist for the company wrote this kind of brief on it and has mentioned how that there are local people who are affiliated with larger networks of extremist groups that have called for such attacks and have provided instructions on how to do these types of things. And saying, quote, there's been a significant uptick in incidents of break-ins related to copper and tool or materials theft. But now we are dealing with quickly escalating incidents of sabotage. So that's the kind of, that's the brief from the security specialist who works at this power company. Four days after that Thanksgiving morning attack, there was another incident at a Portland General Electric substation also in the Clackamas area. So these things happened pretty close to one another in the same county, some of the same people were affected. A few details on this one have been released.

But the PG&E team said that, quote, our teams have assessed the damage and have began to repair the impacted facilities. Knocking out the lights, it can be an end goal, right, that everyone, it's dark and everyone's inconvenienced and there's an idea that, you know, making things worse will help fence sitters radicalize towards the right and become accelerations themselves. But the darkness, it's not its own end goal for some of these people. In the Camp Lejeune cell, in the Collins case, they specifically spelled out in some of their planning discussions that the darkness was step one. Once the lights were out, once infrastructure was damaged, the police were distracted, communications were down, people couldn't use their cell phones. They would use that period of chaos to carry out a series of targeted assassinations. And that's not a new idea either. I found a case from the 90s even.

This case from the late 90s, the North American militia, it was a splinter group from the Michigan militia wolverines. Graham and Ken Carter went down, in this case, they were reconning targets, including power stations, TV stations, a military base, federal buildings. And their plan was to knock out communications and power and use that period of chaos to kill several federal judges and politicians. So this is a recurring theme, you know, that this case was in the 90s and then we have that recent case, the Collins case, those guys haven't even been tried yet. And the stated intention is to use that period of chaos to do additional crimes of terrorism. And I mean, there has been more incidents that definitely do seem to be intentional. Like beyond the ones in Oregon, there was also ones in Western Washington that included setting the control houses on fire, forced entry and sabotage of intricate electrical control systems, causing short circuits by tossing chains over the overhead bus work and a ballistic attack with small caliber firearms.

So that's a lot of stuff going into planning and preparation going into something that's happening. That's a perfect example. Yeah. And as a general rule, if you are encountering one of these stories and you're trying to determine, should I put this in my head as something that is maybe part of something bigger or something that might be people fucking around, that's the kind of stuff to look for is how much effort went into it, how elaborate was it, does it seem like planning was involved? I would say another thing is like, does it seem, is it timed for something like Thanksgiving, right? Like it's not an accident that they picked Thanksgiving to attack a substation, because if you're trying to do something that's going to have an impact doing it on a day like that where everybody's at home, people are, and there's also a higher power draw in general, like there's a lot of reasons why someone would want to do that. But it all points towards, this is something that's part of an organized set of actions as opposed to the normal thing of Americans attacking their own power infrastructure for no good reason. Yeah. Which we love to do.

Do you know what else we love to do, Robert? Consume goods and services, guys. That's right. We love consumption. And our hero based lasso king would say that's part of the problem. Hey, we're back. All right, Garrison, take us home, which hopefully is not Fort Bragg. No. Yeah. Pivot, this podcast is run by the USASock.

Yeah, hopefully not. So yeah, the past year we've seen federal authorities multiple times warn about these types of threats to critical infrastructure. There was a local bulletin posted in late November after the attacks in Oregon and Washington saying that the targets of potential violence includes public gatherings, faith based institutions, LGBTQ plus communities, schools, racial and religious minorities, government facilities and personnel and US critical infrastructure. So it's definitely something that people are talking about more as instances do seem to be getting more common. Now I'm going to use some of the research from a, not an article, but I guess not quite a study like this, I don't know how to describe it, an analysis piece, I guess, from George Washington University's program on extremism entitled mayhem, murder and misdirection violent extremist attack plots against critical infrastructure in the United States. So, since 2019, what supremacist attacks and plots against critical infrastructure do seem to have distinctly increased between 2016 2022 white supremacist plots targeting energy systems dramatically increased in their frequency 13 individuals associated with the overall white supremacist movement

were arrested and charged in federal court with planning attacks on the energy sector. 11 of these attack planners were charged after 2020. The rise of accelerationist ideology and doctrine during the past decade did likely fuel these increased attacks within the white supremacist mill use that are targeting critical infrastructure and and the energy sector in particular. So, if you look at the data from 2016 to 2022, if you look at 94 cases of individuals who are alleged to have planned, quote, violent extremist attacks. 50, 59% of those people were identified as white supremacists and 37% of those incidents involved some level of planning, specifically planning attacks on critical infrastructure. Now, six of those 16 white supremacist plotters had discernible tangible connections to named groups and organizations like the Bay, Saddam Waffen division and the National Socialist movement. And, but and 14 out of the 16 people were known participants in a greater kind of online network that connects various like cells or even just aesthetic styles, common among the neo Nazi accelerationist movement. So, and one of the more kind of interesting data points is the number of white supremacist plots that are specifically focused on the energy sector, related to nuclear reactors materials with the waste sector and of course power substations. And there's 13 13 cases of individuals who reportedly planned to conduct attacks on a variety of energy infrastructure from small assaults on local on local power lines to potentially devastating attacks on power grids or even nuclear facilities.

And, and those represent 87% of the white supremacist related cases in which critical infrastructure was targeted so most of that is specifically on power grids like that's that is that is what these focus on. The first case within this data point range of 2016 to 2022 dates back to 2017 when a former Florida National Guardsman and the founder of Adam Waffen division was arrested in Florida and charged with, you know, unlawful possession of explosive devices and explosive materials. They, one of one of one of this guy's roommates who was also a member of Adam Waffen told told jurors that this guy intended to target a number of different locations for explosive attacks using this material, including a Jewish synagogue power lines and a new and a nearby nuclear reactor site. And this guy in his apartment had had propaganda and book materials on the functioning of nuclear reactors and other power supply stuff so like you know these types of things that people study on, and then plan out to do. And what we're seeing more commonly now is a very intensive propaganda team putting together kind of manuals on how to do these types of things both both like in both for like to inspire you to do it but also like instruction manuals like here's here's where you should shoot here is like here is how to actually do it and it's it's they're unfortunately designed quite well. And that's something that is newer. That is a direct product of the types of aesthetically driven propaganda that has flourished on sites like telegram. And they're they're getting quite good at making propaganda it's not just it's it's not just, you know, random random books strewn upon your apartment anymore. It's very well made documents on how to do that load online.

So the three the three men who just pleaded guilty in February for their conspiracy to attack power facilities. One of those men Jackson say wall in the in the original complaint it says you know, cook had recruited his friend say wall to join the cause from the outset cook believed say walls graphic design skills could be an asset to the group's propaganda effort. So he was recruited to the cell because he was good at graphic design. Now I've read these manifestos, I would not say the graphic design is good, but it's certainly better than sort of a cut and paste scene right there's clear digital design element here. And that's on purpose and they know that that's how they're going to get eyes on this stuff. I mean, Robert we both read all those manifestos in the last couple of days. They are certainly a step up. They are what they what they make me think of is when I first when I first got into reporting on extremism it was because I went through every issue of like ISIS's magazine to beat right after the the Bataclan attacks. And it's number one like there was when that Adam Waffen guy killed his roommates and he had converted to Islam and was like very much into ISIS there was this like surprise from people who don't think a lot about this stuff. But a lot of these guys had a lot of admiration for the way that ISIS put together their propaganda campaign which included a lot of very detailed guides for how to do things like carry out rent vehicles and carry out vehicular attacks right like this is you know we're this is the way terrorism works and these guys are taking a little bit of a different tack but again not that like as as Molly pointed out there were a number of ISIS inspired attacks on power infrastructure just didn't get a ton of play but like none of this is

like all of this is in line with the trends that we have seen globally in the way in which insurgent movements function. I think you know this well produced easily spread propaganda and these online networks that they created to spread this propaganda, mean that we're not just you know we have these cases of these organized cells that got caught. But it's not just organized cells that have the capacity to carry out these attacks because any idiot in a telegram group can open that manifesto with the detailed instructions for carrying out an identical attack. So this is called disseminates becomes contagious. There's this people talk about a lot online now about stochastic terrorism and some of us here might be a little bit to blame to that but a lot of times they're they're getting it wrong. Because what's what what these Nazis are doing this is inspirational terrorism which has been a thing for as long as terrorism has existed. I mean that's why they have their calendar of saints you know yeah exactly there's a lot of debate about like when to use stochastic terrorism but kind of in my mind when I tend to think it's appropriate is when the attempt is to kind of use the way algorithms on various sites in the internet work to spread propaganda that's meant to cause that's meant to inspire attacks because that is it's a type of inspirational terrorism but it's it's clearly a new evolution of it because of its reliance on those networks.

This is again we're getting into the weeds is there anything else you wanted to kind of get into here Garrison. I mean no I kind of I kind of wanted to wrap up by talking about some of the pterogram stuff so I think we kind of we kind of hit on a lot of stuff that I that I wanted to mention. In 2019 two years after that first that that that that first attack 2017 and two years later. And we already we already talked about a whole we already talked about the two other kind of main instance that are well known from 2020 and then stuff that is that that just got. There was there was court cases as recently as February 2022. We also mentioned in terms of the their their plans to take out power stations to then carry out assassinations. So those are the two other incidents that I wanted to mention. But yeah I mean it's I think the other kind of aesthetic similarity I think is that I think we actually are seeing some of the some of the recent pterogram stuff also take cues from not only like ISIS and Islamic terrorism but also some of

the types of anarchist writing that have that have has gotten more popular since you know. ELF type stuff like where I think we're seeing some of some of the aesthetic silings feels very reminiscent of like early crime think. Some of it some of it is similar to things around the types of like eco sabotage manuals that were that were very popular in the 90s and 2000s. Some of the techniques are very similar because both eco terrorists and acceleration accelerationist Nazis both find value in attacking things like power and power power substations or burning down 5G towers. That's a big emphasis of this recent like almost 300 page manifesto and instruction manual. They focus a lot on how you know in early 2020 regular people felt inspired to burn down 5G towers people who are not otherwise extremists. And how how do we get people who are regular people to get to that point where they're willing to a damage public infrastructure. And that's kind of a lot what a lot of what that 300 page kind of manifesto slash manual tries to talk about.

Anyway, if we want to end on on a hopeful note, I think I have at least sort of the small bright spot for us. It's in the original affidavit for the search warrant into Liam Collins the the the head of the Camp Lejeune cell. So in that original affidavit for the search warrant in his case, the FBI agent writing the affidavit says that they first started looking into Collins because he was doxxed in the Iron March leaks. Yes, we were reading those doxxes and they said, Oh, wow, a Marine who's a Nazi, we should talk to him. So, you know, when doing this work in identifying these people from these leaks and sort of the slog of picking through like maybe this guy's a fucking nobody, but we will identify them so their communities can keep an eye on them. That work matters. That work made it into Newsweek and it made it to the FBI. It's a weird filter system, but eventually this guy got caught before he committed a massive nationwide act of terror.

So keep doxxing Nazis. In a similar incident, there was an officer of the Lafayette police department that joined. I believe this this exact same terrorist cell that was then doxxed by yeah, he was he was he was doxxed by anti fascists and then he turned and snitched on his fellow Nazis. Right. So the investigation opened because of a doxx and they got a powerful cooperating witness because of another doxx, it makes them nervous. If eyes are on them, they can't conduct covert operations. So keep doxxing your local Nazis. No, I mean, like it can it can literally be like in terms of these cells planning to do assassinations of people that can actually save people's lives.

If these people are actually serious and are willing to carry out their plans that they are, you know, actively training for actively preparing materials for this type of work is some of the most solid anti fascist research that people have done. It absolutely saved lives. Yeah, I've no doubt about that. We'll continue to save lives. So doxxed Nazis and, you know, if if you're drunk out in the woods and one of your buddies says, hey, why don't we shoot a power substation? Don't do it. Just shoot cans. Just shoot cans.

Stop science. It's the American. Stop science expired fire extinguishers. Those are fun to shoot. Let me tell you. All of the anti-sid people turn off this podcast in a fit of rage and then realize that they're listening on the phone and then have a moral crisis. Uh, to the anti-sid people who have built a radio out of sticks. And then realize that podcasts don't come out through the radio.

Tragic. Anyway, the episode's over. I think, Robert, 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. Because 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 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 defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, it's James. I just wanted to explain why you're only going to hear my voice in the first episode, but you're going to hear Garrison in the other episodes as well. And that's because I went to Tornacious Unicorn Ranch twice once during the period that we're going to call the Siege and once again in the summer of 2022. And so the part that only I experienced, only I'm going to talk about, we felt that was the most honest way to do it. I hope you enjoy it. I have worked on this for a very long time. Hard Scrabble Pass in Southern Colorado in the winter. It's not where you'd expect to start a story that's fundamentally about the internet. But it's where a four-wheel slid a rental car in the spring of 2021.

If you remember back then, Biden had just been inaugurated, some chads had stormed the capital, and vaccines were gradually being administered across the country. Less remarkably, Frontier Airlines were taking forever to find my damn bag, and I was trying to get there before dark. About a week before, I'd seen a tweet. I followed this inacious unicorn ranch because I grew up as a farmkate who didn't really slide quite as easily as others did into the superman show stuff. And I certainly didn't slide anywhere near conservative politics. What the ranchers were doing, building a queer haven and anarchist alpaca farm and co-op inspired me. I've been missing country life a lot during the pandemic, and I wanted to get out onto the ranch. But that wasn't really why I was driving an inappropriate rental car through a whiteout.

I was doing that because I'd seen this tweet. And that tweet said the ranch was under attack and they needed help. The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch is under attack by local bigots and militia. They have threatened violence publicly to us and those that help or associate with us. They have encroached on our property, armed at night with the intent to harm those of us that live here. We need help. That's where this story starts for me. It's where this story starts for a few characters you're going to hear this week.

But it's not where the story really starts. It starts with Penelope Loge, who we'll call Penny, working at a big box store and dealing with increasing transphobia, both online and in person, in the early Trump era. Penny's a veteran and a country girl, and she was looking to get out of the city. Along with her partners, Kat and Jen, she decided to rent some land and set up farming rescued alpacas. So we started in Livermore, Colorado, which is on the whole entire other side of the state. And it really was a reaction to what was happening to the queer community, not only locally, but kind of what we were seeing nationally,

about two years into the Trump presidency, where things were just getting really bleak and dire for the majority of people that we hung out with. We were originally going to try to like just make a bus that was road worthy and we could live in and just kind of be nomadic. But we couldn't really onboard and help other people that way. That was really just... It would have been hard to have the cats we have on a bus. Yeah, we also had like, even at that point, we had like four cats or two, three cats, whatever. There was two at the time, but still too many for a bus. Well, yeah, and dogs and whatever.

So I had always wanted to do a homestead and I grew up farming and ranching. So it was very natural for me. And so we found a ranch that we could rent in Livermore and me, Kat and Jen just kind of set out to start somewhere. So I was a haven for queer people, but also a home for us, you know. It turns out the United States did something of an alpaca crisis. The animals were once extremely fashionable and herds popped up all over the west in the 1980s. Now that generation of alpaca ranchers are aging out of the hard physical labor that makes about every day on a ranch. And their alpacas are often left to their own devices.

The unicorns, as the people in the valley call them, adopt these alpacas, which are often neglected and care for them. They refeed them slowly so they won't die from the bloat that comes from refeeding too fast. And they sell their fibrous yarn. Gradually, with a ton of hard work and a growing community, they built their ranch into a sustainable operation. But as the herd grew and their unfortunate rental agreement became clearer, they decided they needed a different ranch. And so they moved across the state to Westcliff. And it was a rented ranch that we were trying to rent to own. We thought we were renting to own, actually. And then that rug got pulled out from underneath us.

When we went to purchase it, they were just like, no, you haven't been renting to own, you've just been renting. And we would have an additional $100,000. So it was like, yeah, great. We had to move right as COVID was getting bad in America. So like March of 2020, that was fun. Yeah, it was the worst and best move all at the same time, because the roads were fucking empty. Like quarantine was in full effect, so the roads were empty. So we were traveling with trailers full of animals on empty roads.

And then after the restrictions lightened and we got used to what the normal traffic flow was, we were like, fuck this. But it was cool, like having everything shut down. The big problem was we couldn't rent anything, because every rental place had shut down. And so really, it was like the beginnings of the community for us. It was like we tapped friends and comrades to help. Social media. Yeah, and everybody really stepped up and helped with that move. So it was cool. Westcliff's where I met them.

It's a beautiful town in the Sangre de Christos. In the summer, it's full of tourists taking weekend trips to the mountains and eating ice cream. And in the winter, it's quiet, snow covered, beautiful, and absolutely freezing. In March of 2021, I drove through to town in the afternoon, and what I figured was an inconspicuous matter. Everyone else who visited the ranch that month had picked up a tail. Aside from a few strange looks, I think I got through okay. I took a long, lonely winding road through the valley and then turned down a dirt road toward the ranch. Penny met me at the gate in a plate carrier with a rifle.

We briefly hugged. And then I quickly parked my car outside the dirt that the growing queer community at the ranch called home. It was a profoundly strange experience. Inside the house was full of warmth, conversation, and laughter. People enjoying each other's company and enjoying being out of the biting wind and snow. Outside was cold. We wore plate carriers and the ranchers carried long guns. I carried a camera, a GoPro, and an iFAC.

And then, dressed in battle rattle, we broke the ice on the alpaca drinking tanks and tried to stop the recently adopted animals from refeeding too quickly. I walked and talked with Penny and Jay, another of the unicorns whose story we'll get to later, about the stress that the increasing threats to them had had on them. But first, we met the animals. We have sheeps. We have goats. We have, of course, alpaca.

We have ducks and chickens. Day-to-day... Doggoes. Lots of dogs. We have five Pyrenees, which are livestock guardian dogs, and a couple of blue healers, rescues, and my dog, Starbuck, and... Oh, yeah, eight cats.

But the vast majority are the alpacas. It might sound idyllic, and in many ways it is idyllic. But the work on the ranch never stops, and sick alpaca need tending to almost constantly, even during the siege, which we will get too soon, I promise. There was a lot that volunteers could help with, but animal husbandry wasn't on the list. So even after long nights patrolling their ranch, cold and afraid,

Penny and Jay often had to take it in turns looking after old animals with bloat, as they laboured to breathe. Here's one that I recorded. Can you set that down and help me stand her up? Because we're just going to see if we can get her to walk. Right, if you'll... Okay.

I know, I know. There you go. There you go. There you go, there you go. There you go. My fills are perping. Good. Next up, baking soda in there.

Oh! Gotta walk, baby. That's part of this. I know, that's part of this, though. Okay, okay, okay. Oh, baby. We can't do that. It's alright, love, it's alright.

Well, if you're not going to walk, my love, I gotta do this. I know it hurts. Yeah, okay. Let's get you in the crush. Yeah. There you go. It's okay. There, that's a good burp.

There. There. Sounded like there was a little bit more movement. Yeah, I'm getting the feeling that they probably didn't even start asking for help until the weakest of their herd was actually dying in the old field. The story about how we got from a thriving and happy ranch community built on the anarchist principle of mutual aid and solidarity to what the unicorns called the siege.

It's a story that's about lies, bigotry, and the internet. But it's hard to think about those things too much at the ranch, because in the two trips I've taken, I felt nothing but incredible sense of love, solidarity, and supportive community. If you've engaged with the story of the ranch at all, perhaps following Tenacious Unicorn Ranch online, it's probably because of the siege. But I don't want this to be a story that's just about guns, bigotry, and community defense. I also want it to be a story about how,

long before the siege began, the community at the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch realized that nobody was coming to save them. And so they decided to save themselves. Yeah, sure, they want to kill us. And they say it routinely. But when we call it out, you know, hey, stop killing us. Not even like, fuck you, just, hey, could you just lay off the whole

killing us thing? Could you maybe follow Jesus' teachings and not kill us? You fucked him, fuck it. Unap, like, fucking unsympathetic victim screaming trannies. Like, oh, alright, so no, is the answer. No, you can't stop killing us. Good, good. Excellent. Maybe time to get guns now.

The day I slipped slid my way across hard scrabble past in my not-so-trustiness and outmira, was the same day that a gunman walked into a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, and killed 10 people with an AR pistol. My social media feed was filled with the sadly all-too-common reactions to these all-too-common mass murders that happen in this country. But the next day, I saw people flooding gun shops

in the fear that the state would begin enforcing restricted gun control laws. It didn't. As I did this draft, another young man with another gun has walked into a gay bar in Colorado Springs, about an hour from the ranch. It's an intensely conservative city that hosts focus on the family. You'll know by now that the Club Q shooting resulted in the death of five people, including two trans people,

and injured 21 more. I'll be honest with you, it felt a bit weird driving through Colorado to write a story about guns that was broadly positive, and in a sense, it still does today, but the reason this story about guns is positive really has very little to do with guns, and everything to do with people. It's really a story about solidarity, more than it is about AR-15s, but some people will never

get past the AR-15s enough to see that. In case you missed it, or you caught one of the reports at a time that seemed to skim over the fact that the ranch is wrapped, we should give an account of the siege up top here, so you understand what happened. Understanding why it happened, that's another episode, and now, just understand that some boomers log into their social media, and the queer elimination rhetoric we've reported so much about

overlapped with their small community in a valley in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and this was the result. Things started as they often do these days online, with a throwaway comment about a parade in town. The girls didn't really know that they'd moved into the reddest county in Colorado. At the time, Lauren Boba was their congressperson, but soon they started to get an idea of what some people, pretty small minority of people as it turned out, thought about them.

So it started on Facebook, honestly. We started seeing more comments of people getting weird about it, and then there was literally, to this day, I will still say, it was a fascist fucking parade. You're talking about July 4th, 2020. July 4th, 2020, they did a fascism. The local fascists did a fascism, and we observed this by accident,

because we were like, oh, a parade, that doesn't sound interesting. But we did go into town to get some coffee, and ran smack into a fascist parade. And fascist in what sort of, like, presentory things made you read of a fascist? Yeah, fascist in the most direct way. There was Christian nationalist flags, 3% of flags, confederate flags,

carried by armed white people, screaming about the government and the Libs and the queers. It was a, they did a fascism. In the footage, there's that one guy with a shirt that says, I know things and own guns or something like that, and shoot things. And shoot things, yeah. Completely missing the point of that quote.

I know and shoot things, yeah. And so, like, it was a overtly hard right sponsored parade that was supposed to be, like, hard like that. Like, it was, like, set up as a protest because of the COVID restrictions. They weren't letting people have a parade, and this was their answer to that. And so, really, all we did was call that out on Twitter.

We were like, wow, like, there's a fascist parade in West Clifton. We'll come back to this parade next episode. It's organized by a local newspaper, which is to be perfectly frank, the most batshit crazy boomer brain worm thing I've ever seen in print. It was an open carry event where militias from across the US come to open carry unloaded guns

for reasons that we can't really pin down. Soon, the unicorns calling out the parade on Twitter set keyboard fingers clicking. I've said fingers here, but these people give off a distinct single finger typing vibe, if I'm honest. We started, the first thing that we noticed was the tails. We started getting tailed from points that everybody,

that we were very public about frequenting, like peregrine coffee and chappies. We started getting, picking up tails from those points routinely. And that... So, like, people, like, following you? Yeah, yeah. Not very covertly in the same three vehicles. And they wouldn't just follow us.

Anyone that they figured out knew us. Yeah, anybody that announced on any social media platform that they were coming to see us, they would then follow. And then it really got, it became super into the physical world when Nine News, well, Nine News did a piece on us in which the sheriff's department came up because they were mass reporting us for animal abuse.

A lot of the harassment came from a website you're probably familiar with now, but maybe you wouldn't have been back then. It might have been Kiwi Farms at that time. Kiwi Farms and Locals. You don't have to say their names. Yeah, if we could blank out. But it's one of those things where, like,

cis people don't even know that Kiwi Farms exists and more people need to fucking know because it's ridiculous. At some point, they already harass us. We've done a couple of episodes. I don't want to give them attention, but, like, I don't know. Whatever you think is best.

That is worth mentioning, I think. Yeah. It's an entire forum dedicated to harassing trans people that get any sort of popularity, ruining their lives as best they can with the stated goal of making trans people kill themselves. Yeah. And there's a lot of members, like,

like, notable turfs are part of it. Like, everyone has found this website now and people need to know at least that it exists. Yeah, it's a truly awful cesspool. They spend all of their time obsessing over trans people. It seems like it's worth naming them. But please save yourself a time and don't click over there.

It's nothing good. Soon, things got more real. A local news reporter who covered the ranch got a parcel with a white powder in it. That powder wasn't deadly, but it was a real threat. Soon, that threat came to the ranch. The 9 News reporter thing happened and then we started getting,

like, warnings from people that were monitoring chat rooms. Like, they were like, oh, hey, like, the chatter about y'all has skyrocketed and, like, it is blatant, like, people making plans to burn your home down and kill you. Like, and locals started warning us that, like,

hey, this has happened before. You got to get ready. This is real. They have run up other people on top. Yeah, like, don't be pretensive about this. Like, we're being serious. And so me and Jay started for about two weeks we were walking patrols around the perimeter.

The Unicorns were afraid, so they took steps to defend themselves. Lots of the people at the ranch, like Jen and Kat, who you can hear in this interview, didn't want to carry guns. Penny and Jay had some military experience and they knew how to use and carry guns. So every night, they set out walking the perimeter

to watch for intruders. On their property line patrols, they realized that there were people out there at night looking back at them. That night is when me and Jay came back from that and put out a very heartfelt cry on Twitter. Like, we don't know what the fuck to do. We're terrified and any help would be amazing.

They were armed at this point, but they weren't ready for a gunfight. That's a very different thing. Sadly, though, the gunfight they weren't ready for wasn't going to wait until they were. Yeah, armed, rudimentally armed, by the way. Like, Jay had a hunting rifle. No, a shotgun at that point.

Yeah, yeah, that was that one. And I had my Springfield AR. And so we scared them off, but that made it clear and present for us. And so we put a heartfelt call out onto Twitter and Aldo was up here the next day and caught people on the property that night. Like, it was armed people on the property, multiple people.

Aldo arrived the next day, spurred on by that same tweet I'd seen. This isn't his voice, but they are his words. We won't say too much about him, other than that he has significant experience with this kind of thing, and he spent his own time and money to drive across the West to help some queer folks

he'd never met who just wanted to raise our packets and be left the fuck alone. I saw a post on Twitter from someone else boosting the original Tenacious Unicorn Ranch plea for help. I reached out to them, and after some back-and-forth and letting them vet me, we agreed I would drive down to help them out. I took a little time to do some map studies of the area

and confirmed some suspicions about local law enforcement. The sheriff at the time had publicly spoken at and supported Oath Keeper's rallies as a keynote speaker, alongside Stuart Rhodes, as well as other prominent Oath Keepers and 3%ers. The cops haven't ever been much of an option to march on these people safe, but this was on a whole other level.

I called some people to tell them I was heading to its Tenacious Unicorn Ranch for accountability's sake. At the time, I was binging an unhealthy amount of letter candy, and when one of them asked me why I was driving six to seven hours to help total strangers, the first thing I thought was, when a friend asked for help, you help them. Other gave us his account of what happens.

Again, for everyone's safety, we're not going to use his voice, but that night he patrolled the perimeter, often nearly being run off the road on the way to the ranch. He said at first when he saw the tweets, he thought Penny and Jay were overreacting, but after that tale and after what happened that night, he knew something very strange was going on. So, on arrival at the hard-packed road off the highway,

there were two cars on the other side of the highway from the intersection, backed in with their headlights off. There was an old Durango and a truck that I couldn't make the model of on the other side of that Durango. Once I turned down the road, probably 200 yards after turning, I looked back and saw one of them turn on their headlights and start gaining on me until they were tailgating. I started to slow and pull over to see if they would pass,

and they slowed and stuck with me. I had a suspicion about the two cars initially, and this was confirmation. I can't really say how fast we started going, but I know it was significant enough that I was starting to oversteer and lose traction on the back end of my car on turns. I knew Penny and the rest were waiting at the property gate, so I signaled Penny to say,

hey, I got a tail, keep the gate locked, you'll see me driving by. Tell me what vehicle is following me. The vehicle slowed down as we approached the gate, so it appeared they may have been anticipating me to do the same. Once I passed the gate, they continued to follow. It turns out it was the Durango, which I later found out had been doing drive-bys of the property the past couple of days. The Durango quickly realized what Aldo was doing

and pursued him past the ranch, further down that snowy dirt road. After I passed the ranch, I accelerated a little more to create some distance and drove to a spot that I had seen on the map on the way down that looked like I could effectively turn around without extra maneuvering. As I turned around, they had closed the gap and started to slow. Once they were pulling up next to me, I turned my high-loom and carry light on them to at least disorient or over-stimulate them with bright white light

and tried to catch faces. The windows had a dark tint, so it was not feasible. My other goal was trying to convey, I see you, and I have the advantage, without actually visually threatening them. The driver had been rolling their window down until I put that light in the window, then immediately stopped and rolled it back up.

At that point, it was apparently enough to make them decide it wasn't worth it and take off. I legally carry a sidearm with me the majority of the time and had it on me. I had my hand on it, but didn't feel the need to draw during that encounter. In the two minutes since he turned off the hardtop, Aldo's ideas about what he was in for had pivoted almost as fast as his car did in that pullout.

Earlier on, while driving to the ranch from my house, I had the thought, you know, this is probably bullshit and a bit of an overreaction on their part, so maybe at least I can deescalate some of their anxiety and give them some rest. This will probably just be a lot of nothing. Clearly, I was mistaken. And after that encounter, my mind was very much reoriented

to the present reality. Driving through the gate, I had to prepare myself to the new possibility of actual exigency, and I thought, oh shit, there's something to this. Well, pitter-patter, motherfuckers. Aldo sent a message to Penny, saying that he was free of his tail, and she opened up the gate.

Quickly, he drove up the same dirt road I did a few days later in the morning, where the scared and sleep-deprived unicorns were hiding from the cold and from the same people who had just tailed him down the dirt road. Once at the house, we made introductions, and I explained that a trusted source had boosted their call for help, and I was willing to drive over to see what, if anything, I could do to offer them in the form of assistance.

They gave me situational awareness of the property, who lived there, et cetera, then went over what had been happening up until my arrival. The local harassment, people following them and doing drive-bys of their property, the Kiwi Farm's threats of, quote, burning them out of their home. They had also mentioned there was a probing incident

a couple nights before that had really set them off when they caught another unknown individual probing their fence on the southern side of the ranch. They detailed how they hadn't slept for almost 48 hours since that incident, which had prompted their call for help. I could tell they were just done mentally, emotionally, physically, but still keeping it together. So I said something to the effect of,

you've done a great job, go get some rest, I'll stay up and take the watch. That was around 9 p.m. The crew went to get some deserved rest, and I got ready to go out. Before stepping back outside, I had to ask myself, what the actual fuck is going on? I walked outside, grabbed my rifle and plates,

put on some extra layers of warm clothes, and got ready for what turned out to be a long night. Quickly, as the unicorn slept, Ardo got to work making a plan to keep the property and the people there safe. Having never been on the property, I went ahead and, to the best of my ability, in the dark, started estimating distances,

high, low ground, points of opportunity, weakness, cover, concealment, hazards, and any other unclear backdrops like the other residences that I had needed to be aware of. That all came into play later. Based off what I found, my best guess is, I started working a patrol on foot, covering the areas I thought were vulnerable

and most likely for incursion. The roadside seemed like the most likely point of opportunity for them, since there was no barbed wire and a single low wire fence being the only barrier to entry on the property. Pretty quickly things got weird. At around 2130, I heard the first vehicle pass by. There was decent moonlight at the time,

and I could see that it matched the shape and size of the Durango. They were driving by with their lights off, slow rolling, and had made a stop about halfway down the property line on the roadway. They repeated this multiple times, so this kind of confirmed my theory of the easiest point of access off the roadway. The drive-by has continued sporadically,

and twice from high point on property, I watched them turn their headlights back on, heading toward the highway, and stop on the hard pack, where another vehicle could be seen sitting with its headlights on. Aldo is pretty experienced in this scenario. So is Paul, another of the defenders who came a few days later,

and it's not my first rodeo with these things either, but that doesn't mean it wasn't scary for all of us, but especially for Aldo, who arrived first and was patrolling a small farm he'd never seen, facing attacks from an unknown number of armed assailants. I can't remember how many times I wish I had my NVGs

with me for better situational awareness, but they had been sent off for repairs, so I relied heavily on the moonlight, which there was a decent amount of. Not ideal doing a foot patrol on your own in the dark with an unknown number of people. Multiple times I thought, I should get one of them up.

There's way more ground that I can safely cover. I don't know the terrain well enough, but of course I ignored that intuition and told myself, okay, I'm overthinking this right now. These dudes are just trying to fuck with the queers, and this is purely intimidation. I'm just going to keep working the vulnerable areas,

watch them play their dumb bullshit games, and let the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch folks rest. Besides, at the time, I didn't know that Tenacious Unicorn Ranch folks before that night. While they did great with what they had available to them, I had no idea how they would respond in a shit-hit-the-fan situation.

What their personal capabilities were, if they could be relied on for team movements, and didn't want to risk relying on someone running on fumes. So I said, fuck it, it'll be fine. His fears, as it turned out, were more than justified. A little before midnight, cloud cover came in while I was walking along the west fence line

and saw what I assumed was a dim flashlight or a cell phone light flash about halfway along the north fence line by the road. And about 15 to 20 seconds later, another flash making me think that they were moving west towards the ranch gate. One time, I noticed anyone on foot, so I started slowly working my way down quietly

to see if I could get closer for a good visual on who it was walking the roadway since the moonlight went away. I stopped about 40 or so yards from the gate and squatted down low to reduce my profile and just watch. After about 10 minutes, I heard quiet voices and then a very distinct Earl from the man

that appeared in turn to call out after he activated the gate's motion-sensing light. I remember I had to stop myself from laughing, from them not only having such shitty discipline, but also at what was a perfectly comical chud name. I stood up and watched another dude come out of the dark into the light of the ranch gate who very much had the build of an Earl.

The first guy began lifting and pulling at the gate lock and chain while Earl was trying to cover the motion-sensing light. They stood at the gate and I could hear them whispering for about a minute before I got annoyed at just how dumb they were and how they didn't notice me creeping closer to them while they were doing all this.

Finally, from around 15 yards, I went ahead and lit up the two males on my flashlight both had their faces covered in no visible weapons and a fairly sarcastic voice I said something to the effective Hey, what are you idiots doing? Stop playing with the gate. Go away. It worked.

I didn't really feel I had much recourse other than to give a verbal warning at that point because they were still technically not on the ranch property and they had not made any visible attempts to trespass or do any property damage. Both of them ran off in the most awkward, non-athletic way you could think of. I didn't see anyone else in the area

so I approached the road to watch them jump into a car and drive off. I kind of laughed at myself and remember saying out loud God, you guys are impressively stupid. Okay, they're probing the property now. I realized these guys weren't working at a higher operational capability. I also felt a little more comfortable that

even though I didn't have my NVGs to work in the dark environment, they didn't either. After staying out for another 30 minutes to make sure they were taking a break, I went back inside to warm up for a few minutes, get some food and change my socks. It seemed they had maybe gone and reconvened after they got caught trying to tamper with the gate.

I turned off the lights inside the house that were visible from the road, so I wouldn't be visible. And also just to see if that might make someone tempted to believe that Tenacious Unicorn Ranch folks had turned in for the night. Things were quiet for the next hour or so. While I was walking close to the east fence line toward the road, I remember a fox

letting out a scream from less than 100 feet away from me. That honestly was more startling than all the other events from the night up until then. If you haven't heard a fox screaming, it does indeed sound like someone being murdered in the most brutal way possible. I heard a fox, probably the same fox, a few nights later on the ranch.

Even in the midst of the siege, there was still a working ranch. And so as well of protecting people from violence, the ranchers and their prunian mountain dogs also had to make sure they were protecting the chickens from foxes. Sadly though, foxes weren't the only visitors that night.

A few hours later, a much more serious threat emerged. The night continued to be quiet for the next while and I decided to move along the east side of the property line. The cloud cover broke around 215 and I could see some movement and hear low voices again. I got low and held my position since it was

fairly safe. It could make out two figures walking towards me inside the property boundary. I waited until they were about 30 or so yards away and I was pretty sure there were no others working flanks before using my rifle light to begin the process of PID and figuring out if they were armed. As soon as I saw them, I noticed they were both armed.

One with an AR with no optics and the other with an M1A with optics on it. I realized that while I had the high ground I was not comfortable with the backdrops due to the house across the road potentially being in line with my firing position and started shifting to a safer spot in case the confrontation escalated into an engagement.

I called out my first command while moving to a better position to their left side. You are trespassing on private property. Slowly place your weapons on the ground and show me your hands. Do it now. The two men froze in place but did not survive and I recognized in that moment that these were two different men than who I had seen

earlier. I called out again. Drop your weapons or I will fire on you. Do it now. As soon as I finished that sentence they both looked at each other with their rifles and low ready turned to the right and ran. I pursued them so that I wouldn't lose the advantage I had and to make

sure there was no way they could make it uphill towards the house or get into a more advantageous firing position if they decided to turn on me. While parallel to them so I could keep on the uphill side I called out stop and place your weapons on the ground. Realizing there might be others out there watching my light move I turned it off so I wasn't such an obvious

target and made short bursts of the two men fleeing so that I could maintain a visual on them. It wasn't an ideal way to handle it but this was all an incredibly unideal situation to begin with. After sustaining a fast-paced run over uneven terrain and somehow not falling on my face I realized we were moving toward the fence

line and quickly looked around with my light to make sure no one else was waiting for them and also armed. At that point I turned my light back on them and they both pivoted directly to the fence since we were still some distance from the gate where it appeared they were heading toward. The first one with the M1A pushed the fence down and hopped over.

The second one panicked and with both hands tossed his AR across the small ditch on the other side of the fence and I watched it fly halfway across the road while he struggled over the fence. He scurried over and kicked his rifle across the road before picking it up and disappeared with the other male into the small ravine on the other side. I realized

I was disadvantaged where I was located and repositioned to a small rocky mound nearby so that I could at least get prone and have some cover if they decided to fire on me. I laid there and recovered my breath for a minute or so watching to see if anyone else was out there and then moved toward the house to make sure there weren't other incursions I may have missed while occupied

with the other two who disappeared. After trying and failing for a second time it seems that the local bigots took a break for the evening but out on the unicorns couldn't. That was it for the rest of the night. I did go back down and find their entry point where the fence had been newly damaged and bent inward

and tracks leading over the patchy snow from the roadway. Then I walked back to their egress point where the fence had been bent outward. Everything that occurred that night was clearly a hostile incursion and they demonstrated intent to harm others on their own property. The only reason that didn't happen is because we were armed

and prepared. I think they realized at that point that the ranch was not a soft target and the occupants these men painted as weak were in fact hard people willing to protect themselves and stand up against their aggression. More importantly the residents of the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch just wanted to be left the fuck alone.

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 it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy

story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple 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 is 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 Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. It was a couple of days after Aldo had his run in with the locals when I arrived. Everyone was on edge. And everywhere we went it was with guns.

So I remember there was a point when I was here which was like a week or so after the Aldo ran those guys off that we were going out somewhere and so folks were like, well can someone who is comfortable using a gun stay behind? That's what it was at.

Yeah. It's not all of us want to or can. I'm too scared of guns. I recognize that they're very important. I'm surrounded by people who can defend me. And I think that's important to allow space for that too.

What kind of saying there is really important. Not just for this story but for folks listening to this and thinking, oh fuck I need to get guns. If you want to get guns go ahead and get them. If you can, safely and legally. But what you need is community. Everyone at the ranch

works hard every day to keep their project going. Sometimes that's with a gun. Most of the time it's with a sack of crunchy alpaca food or sometimes with a keyboard. The community that sustains the ranch is much bigger than the people on the ground. And it's a great illustration of the power of solidarity to sustain a project which,

in times like today's, the world really needs. Today hundreds of queer people visit the ranch every year for hundreds of different reasons. Kat takes care of the ranch's visitors and manages social media. Jen helps administer a Patreon account for the ranch, complete with daily alpaca photos and updates on events.

When I arrived at the ranch in 2021, it became pretty clear that I wasn't the only one who'd seen the tweet. Paul and Aldo both have backgrounds in combat arms. Both of them fought in wars they now don't think were a great idea, and both of them were willing to use the skills the state gave them to protect people who the state wouldn't.

Paul, like Aldo and I, came because of a tweet. I saw Aldo tweet like a stop sign or something, and it said, you know, a few years ago, I never would have imagined being on, like, a transgender anarchist alpaca farm. But here I am. And I think I DM'd him or something,

and I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? And we ended up signal chatting, and he explained what was happening and what had happened the day he was there, or one of the days he was there, and I was like, oh, wow, that sounds super fucked up. Hey, I'm gonna book a flight. Before Aldo left, they picked up another tail.

We went into Westcliff, the closest town for something, I think just to the gas station. And when we came back down at the Query, down by the airport, which is like three or four miles down the road towards the town, two or three vehicles pulled out and started following us,

and one of them pulled down the road the ranch is on, and we just drove straight, and then they followed us, and we turned around two or three roads down, and then the third vehicle that had been waiting now was waiting for us to come back and pull in. So, like, they were trying very hard to tail anyone and get, like, identifying information.

When I arrived, Paul and I slept in the guard trailer. Well, I slept. Paul stayed up all night walking patrols and keeping an eye on the fence line. If you're familiar with Hey Duke and Edward Abbey's eco-anarchist novel, The Monkey Ranch Gang, that's a pretty good way to envision Paul, albeit without the misogyny and racism

that makes it pretty hard to have any respect for that book or his author. Throughout the night, I check in on Paul. It wasn't a large trailer, and when I did, I'd look through his night vision at the strange movements in the fields around the ranch. People seemed to huddle behind a pickup, and they used the headlights to try and blind us.

Night vision doesn't really work that way anymore, but they moved around throughout the night thinking that we couldn't see them, staging in different areas on the ridge above us with a commanding field of view and presumably a field of fire as well. We assume they were trying to watch us as we sat there watching them.

It was actually pretty fascinating. So, a house that happens to be visible from the ranch, or another property that's visible from the hilltop that the ranch was on here, every evening, it would start to get dark out, and then 15 or 20 cars would show up. Oh, yeah, it was like 15 to 20 cars. Which has never happened since.

Yeah, so 15 to 20 cars would show up, and I can't remember what precipitated it, but the second night I was here... Oh, I know what it was. Somebody walked their dog, and I happened to kind of meet them down by the gate because they were walking up the road. It was like 2 o'clock in the morning during a blizzard,

and I was like, this is very unusual. So, I met them down there, and I happened to have night vision gear, and they... It was obviously from them, because from that point on, they would actually point vehicles at the ranch with their headlights on the entire night

from some properties that are closer to the highway, which, like, is semi-effective. It makes this bloom for 15 feet around that vehicle, but then everything else you can just see, so it didn't matter. Inside the house, it got harder and harder to move over the course of the next few days.

A support came flooding in. There were thousands of rounds of ammunition, plate carriers, plates, the kind to stop bullets, and boxes of first aid supplies. One day, Paul and I sat around staging first aid kits, unwrapping and preparing the products to make them easier to use.

People messaged every day volunteering to help, and we looked them up using some background check websites they often used for work to check that they weren't sure to try to infiltrate the ranch. Yeah, the amount of support that we've seen is largely absurd. Like, I would have never guessed that,

like, people would have come out this hard for us. Yeah. They must be nice to know that, like, everybody fucking wants you to succeed. Right? Yeah. It gets us through it. Like, you can't troll me. Yeah.

No, there are no haters that can get to us, because of how much support that we know is out there, not only locally, but internationally. For fuck's sake, internationally. We have people from all over the world that have, like, taken a moment to be like, what can I do? Like, what do you need right now?

Like, and that is just like, you can't troll that out of me. Like, there is nothing you can say that I can't be like, yeah, but also, I've got 12 people who would kill you for me. So, I don't know, like, fuck you. The ranch became something of a core celebra on the arm left.

The outpouring of support was incredible. In March of 2021, we all probably felt a little bit helpless. A summer of uprising and revolt had yielded a new geriatric white dude in charge. COVID was still raging, and the cops had shown less anger at thousands of church-storming congress

than they did at kids holding black lives matter platoids in the street. In a time when it was difficult to feel powerful, the ranch openly defying attempts to scare the man of the valley gave people a sense of success, and they were more than willing to show up and help. So, yeah, I want to talk about that,

because you guys attempted to basically stock up on firearms at a time in American history when that may have been hardest and most expensive, and what sort of got you through was a lot of people from all over the Internet showing solidarity. Real leftists from all over the world. Like, it was literally all over the world.

A lot of anti-fascist organizations. Yeah, we got sent plate carriers. People did runs for ammo. People would buy ammo, organize something, and get ammo and food and things, and then just drive up, drop it, and leave, because not everybody's ready to be in an active zone where you could get shot,

but they would do runs out to drop stuff off for us. It was crazy, crazy. But that solidarity wasn't just on the Internet. It was in the valley as well. Even before the attacks on the ranch began, the unicorns knew they were coming. They knew because people told them. And people told them because they cared about them

and wanted them to be safe. They cared about them because, from the outset, the unicorns had made themselves an important part of their community. When the counties stopped recycling waste that could be recycled, the unicorns stepped up and volunteered to do it themselves. On my first trip, I joined Penny and Jay

for the long drive into Canyon City with a rickety horse trailer full of old beer cans and a truck with a struggling transmission. The money they get paid to recycle the cans is less than the gas they spend getting there. But it's an important thing to do, so they do it. Hey, Garrison here. Now that we have talked about how the siege happened,

we need to explain why. At the start of this series, we said that this was a story that was about the Internet. And it is. It's a story about how the Internet has allowed a section of the American right that's always existed to develop links and gained both power and coherence in the last two decades,

thanks largely to online organizing. The story of how these groups got where they are is a long one. It starts with talk radio, with Rush Limbaugh, with Glenn Beck, and the gradual drift to Fox News from bad journalism to outright barking for genocide seven nights a week at prime time. It's a story that we can't tell here,

not in its entirety, but we can show you a little of what it looks like when that rhetoric leaves the forums and Facebook comments and lands on the ground in a small town in Colorado. There are two versions of the truth in Westcliff. There's the one that most of you are going to hear, and then there's the one that you can find George Gremlich pervading in his local newspaper,

The Sangre de Cristo Sentinel. The Sentinel is probably best summarized as a print version of the Facebook comments from some of your older relatives that you've hopefully long since muted. It's the guy who doesn't know when to stop booming on about Obama at the Thanksgiving table, but in a stream of consciousness unedited print format.

We're going to let George lay out what the Sentinel is about in his own words. We didn't get much joy out of trying to speak with him, and not for lack of trying. I approached his office numerous times, knocking on the door and trying to have a good old chat with George, but luckily he did go on the record for the Texas TL in Exile podcast. This kind of spectacular programming to white dudes shooting the breeze

is certainly a tried-and-true recipe for success in the podcasting space, but you could be forgiven for not having heard of this particular podcast before, because even though we knew about it, it took us forever to even find it on the hit podcasting app, Rumble. We moved to Custer County from the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York about 12 years ago, and the wife and I were basically political and Second Amendment refugees. We had a couple of friends who had moved to Southern Colorado,

and they said that the most conservative county, maybe in the state, certainly in Southern Colorado, is Custer County. It's about an hour and a half south of Colorado Springs, high in the Rocky Mountains, population 4,500, a ranching community, stunning views, just simply beautiful. Two small towns right in the middle of the county, each with about 5,600 people in it, and hardcore conservatives, I'd say 65% of the county's registered Republicans. But even in his conservative paradise,

George found that most folks couldn't live up to his high standards for political engagement. After Obama got elected, his first term, slowly over that 40-year period, interest in the Tea Party started diminishing as Obama was destroying the country. After he got elected the second time, we had our first meeting since his election in January, and normally at that point, after four years, we're again, 40 to 60 people showing up. At that meeting, only 12 people showed up, and it was doom and gloom. Obama's destroying the country, there's nothing we can do, blah, blah, blah. We started talking local, we got to keep Custer County red,

and the fact came up, which has been a problem in the county forever, was that the local newspaper and the only newspaper in the county was extremely liberal paper. And we had done research over the years, and we found out that, of course, over America, this phenomenon was common, that rural counties tended to have liberal papers. And it just because the lips hesitate to that media, and they know they could have an influence on the population via that. So the meeting was over, we went home, and on our way home, I turned to you and I said, we're going to start a paper.

So next day, I spent a whole day building a business plan on how to start a Christian conservative newspaper in the rural community. Now, we couldn't find the research that George is talking about, and that's probably because it's not true. What we can find is that 1,300 largely small newspapers closed in the past 15 years. To learn more about the newspaper business in southern Colorado, we spoke to George's arch-rival, the publisher of the only other publication in the west, or at least the only other one in the valley.

Jordan Hedberg. You are the editor of the... The owner and publisher. I could barely spell my own name, so the publisher of the Wet Mountain Tribune newspaper. Jordan and George aren't exactly best pals. Largely thanks to George's attacks on Jordan and his publication, we asked Jordan to give us a sense of the competition in the local media market, and for his overall thoughts on the sentinel. I think it's his lies. I mean, that's the problem with the sentinel.

I don't see the media space as a zero-sum game. If somebody wants to have an openly conservative newspaper in this town, I think there's plenty of readers. It doesn't really compete with me because we do just community news, and we always have since 1883, so we've been here for a little while. I don't see it as a zero-sum game until you start lying about things because you're in what you perceive to be a power struggle. So that's the problem with the sentinel.

There's no problem with the sentinel overall other than that they like to tell lies to kind of justify their existence. Jordan's take on the founding of the sentinel, whose logo prominently features a bald eagle on the cover if you hadn't quite picked up on the vibe yet, was a little different. You know, they got started in their minds during the Tea Party movement to combat hyper-liberal newspaper, but they only labeled the Tribune that because they needed an enemy.

You know, they were very whipped up about Obama getting elected, and at the time there had been that Aurora shooting, and so the real reason they really got started was when Carl put an assault weapons magazine ban into place, so you couldn't have anything that could fire more than 15 rounds after the Aurora theater shooting, which was, I guess, 10 years ago this week. So that was one of the big things that really got them started, was what they felt like an attack on weapons,

but they did it in a community that's very, you know, pro-second amendment. I mean, at the time it was probably 60% Republican. These days it's 50%, but still a majority. Even the moderates and most Democrats probably have guns and are okay with the idea of that, but they had a much more militant style saying, hey, we should be allowed to arm ourselves with whatever. But again, they still had to create a bunch of lies locally,

saying that, you know, at the time it was the former owner that the Tribune was hyper-liberal, communist, you know, against guns, which wasn't the truth. Gun rights and the threat of gun confiscation have been a constant source of profitable panic for agitators on the right for decades now. In West Cliff, there doesn't really seem to be much controversy about guns. People who want them have them, and people who don't don't.

On my drive from the airport to the ranch, I stopped at a couple of gun stores, and I'd seen people lining up by magazines, guns, and other things that they'd worried about the government banning, which seems a very odd reaction to a mass murder in your state. But once I got to rural Colorado and past Mantik's gun room, there wasn't really any of that, it was just some old dudes impining about the relative value of different big-bore revolvers, and an SKS which had been entirely violated by someone's attempt to make it more modern.

George, apparently, has seen an earlier mass shooting in Aurora as an opportunity for the Liberals and Rhinos he so loathed to take away his guns, and an opportunity for him to take a stand against him. He decided to take a stand at a place where no one really disagreed with him, and against a thing that wasn't really happening. But nonetheless, he decided to rally the troops and hold, well, we'll let him describe what he held. During the legislative session, as you remember,

the whole state was up at arms about this. I mean, there was demonstrations in Denver, I mean, we were pissed off, and the SOV's passed it. So West Cliff has a July 4th parade that we actually took over here, the Central took over here for a couple of years, and there's usually maybe 25, 30 floats in it, entry, everything from goats to horses to who knows. Hold on, George, let's dwell on that for a minute.

When I mentioned that I came down there, and then you had like 500 or 600 people in this parade, I think it might have got glossed over. How big are these towns to start with? Because it's basically a combination of Silver Cliff and West Cliff, right? Yeah, each town has about 500 people. Out of 500 people, out of a total of 1,000 people, I mean, you can describe it,

but describe that to the listeners for a little bit about what that parade looks like versus how many people are on the sidewalk. Yeah, yeah. So normally, and the people already had an entry, and we usually had maybe 15, 20 people marched down with, you know, gads and flags and stuff. But those gun laws, the magmen, I mean, just energized the sentinel tremendously.

So we decided a couple of months before July 4th, that we were going to turn the tea party parade entrance into a Second Amendment protest entry. So we printed up flyers, and we innovated Southern Colorado, every gun shop, pawn shop, everything with thousands of flyers come to the West Cliff July 4th saying, and tell them what part to go to,

what place to go to, and protest these BS laws and stuff like that. And so that morning, the parade starts at 10 o'clock. We set up shop in front of a, we told the parade organizers, we might have some more people coming, so we had a field where we could set up, and we set up there, and we had a couple extra, we had three or four extra guys there to check guns.

We said, you know, you could bring long rifles, no magazines, they got to be clear, shoulder carried only, holstered pistols, you know, and we had a whole bunch of people to check for safety and stuff like that. And so we had no idea how many people were going to show up. And normally there's 25 entries, and maybe 150 people in the parade, maybe 200, total.

And all of a sudden, on Main Street where our field was, around 830, there was a traffic jam that went down like a mile, both ways. And people were turning into our parking lot field there, and going nowhere else, and they kept coming, and coming, and coming, and coming. This went on for an hour and a half, the sheriff were freaking out. We had over 500 heavily armed citizens there that morning

with about 25 military trucks, a dozen and a half, we had a Korean war half-track there with a 50-cow on top. Jordan, the Tribune publisher, saw things a little bit differently. But right before the Sentinel got started, they were like, hey, we're going to advertise, and they did it all across the state. They said, bring your big, black, evil guns to Custer County.

And the problem is, that was the issue. This is a family event. And so ever since then, so what happened was, in response, the Republican Town Council and the Republican Chamber of Commerce all said, we're not going to have a parade. We can't have a bunch of randos showing up right after the Aurora theater shootings carrying massive amounts of firepower. Even if you claim it's unloaded or whatever,

we just can't have that for a family event. And so the thing is, is they took out a permit and did the parade themselves. So that's really how things... So 4th of July for them is sort of their anniversary every year. They really consider that whole thing to be that way, but that's really what happened. And it's a conservative area. There's no bravery marching assault rifles to Custer County.

Now, if they'd done it in downtown Denver where guns are banned, or at least those types of guns, at least you could say they had a backbone. Yeah, you're taking a stand, but it's not MLK going to film. So the problem with the Sentinel is the lies. If they're just a conservative paper, fine. They're allowed to have their opinion, but they tend to tell lies constantly.

George Had miraculously managed to turn a mass murder into a sort of pseudo-victory parade for a culture war that he was fighting every day with his newspaper. Soon enough, and largely thanks to this parade, the culture war would be opening a whole new front on the tenacious unicorn ranch. Of course, the Sentinel has opinions about the ranch and transfolk in general.

When we arrived in Westcliff, Gareth and I grabbed a coffee at Peregrine Coffee Roasters, long-term friends at a ranch, and supporters of me staying up all night with Paul, and then up all day with Penny and Jay. We also grabbed a copy of the Sentinel from the dispenser, pulled up a chair, and started a live reading. Even after a year of me being aware of their rhetoric,

it did not disappoint. So I just searched the word gender on the Sentinel's website. We got an article on social-emotional learning, which is basically the right trying to rebrand their critical race theory shit, but make it even broader. And we do have an article from January of last year called Meet the Gun-Toting Tenacious Unicorns in Happy Valley.

Let's click on that and see what the Sentinel has to say. What is this guy's name? The Eric Siegel? Yes, High Country New. Oh, what they've done there is just played a recipe from High Country News. Oh, so they just stole this from somewhere else. It's worth stopping here to point out that the Sentinel

does this a lot. It's not clear if they have permission or not, but they seem to dedicate at least half their print pages to aggregating content that is mostly from the far right of the internet. Notable examples include a really spectacularly racist piece on anti-material rifles, which we will not read, and numerous far right commentary sites,

which turned shreds of news into a thousand words of panic-rungering opinion. Anyway, let's see what they have to say about the pretty good article that Eric Siegel wrote about the Unicorn Ranch for High Country News. Note, the Sentinel is predominantly featured in this article, negatively, of course. Hold on to your cowboy hats, fellow patriots.

This is one wild ride. For the first time ever, we are warning our readers that the article below is very, very disturbing. In many aspects, it may not be appropriate for some folks or children. Our apologies. But the citizens of this wonderful county need to know how the county has been portrayed. Magnificent stuff.

So, I guess the article is kind of a... It's a relatively positive article. So, they do have an edit at the bottom that the Sentinel wrote based on the article. Well, folks, the veil has been lifted. For those of you who haven't seen or experienced left-wing fascism, here it is. From Biden to Polis,

and all the way down to this hypocritical bunch of hate-filled xenophobes, they are all the same, filled with hate, paranoia, self-righteousness, intolerance, and the desire to rule and control, and obsessed with violence. Their radical, narrow-minded view of the world and our rural community is the only allowable viewpoint.

All of a sudden, the citizens of Custer County are fascists and Nazis. This fascist rhetoric with George, himself a transplant from outside the valley who has tried to transform local politics, it's referring to, is what sparked off the confrontation that brought me, Aldo, and Paul

to the ranch last year. Yeah, so that one wasn't even a parade. What it was was a protest on the 4th of July because during COVID, they weren't doing any parade things. They just did this as a protest. Right. And so the sheriff and everybody,

I mean, you couldn't distinguish it from a 4th of July parade. Except there wasn't, I don't think the fire department and stuff took the sheriff's office and the fire department didn't take part. It was really a bunch of people on horses, marching guns, stuff like that.

But the flags were a little more disturbing. Most of the American flags were replaced with 3% flags or the thin blue line flags. There was a couple of Confederate flags. Always fun. I still can't figure out the Confederate flag. I still can't figure out the Confederate flag. Long way south here.

But there is that lost cause myth that does take place here. And they'll say it's not a racist flag, but it absolutely is. This was the parade the unicorns called out. And this was what put them at the center of Gramlich's conspiracy-riddled hate machine. Jordan gave us a little more insight

into exactly who those fascist groups were. The people at the Sentinel brought to town for their little protest parade. George Gramlich is a member of Oathkeepers. We've been able to confirm that through not only himself, but Thompson Reuters had an investigative reporter that confirmed that for us.

So Oathkeepers is a big one. 3% you'll see some of those shirts around. The two of them are kind of synonymous. None of it's super organized. It's kind of like saying that antifa is super organized. It's very decentralized. The problem is that they do write extreme things. And I think people like myself

and then definitely the unicorn ranch suffers. Because they can't really spread their message without an enemy. And you were asking earlier how much influence do they have. Not a lot. They have about 800 subscriptions from what I can tell. Some receipts accidentally got put in my box versus theirs. Because we're the Wet Mound Publishing Company.

And they're the Mountain Publishing Company. The Post Office and all their glory. Occasionally give me a win. But you know, they're 800 to maybe a thousand by their own numbers. The Sentinels stance on vaccines will definitely not shock you considering everything else we've said

about George and the Sentinel thus far. So this comes from marketticker.org. Effectiveness of primary infection against severe, critical or fatal COVID-19. Reinfection with 97.3%. Irrespective of the variant of primary infection or reinfection and with similar and with no evidence for waning.

Similar results will be found in subgroup analyses for those less than 50 years of age. Got it? No? Let me explain it. If you got COVID-19 and lived you are more than 90% percent certain with a very narrow confidence band protected against a severe or fatal ED in hospital or dead second infection

even though coronaviruses always mutate. And I'm just going to check really quickly if that's what they're saying. And normally, yeah, they've quoted this sort of out of context. And there is no evidence of protection ever goes away. That is not what the quote says.

If you look at the jab. I think you get the picture. James Babel, transphobia and general boomer anti-wokism. Oh, there's a piece here. The US Army is really struggling to recruit right now. Imagine you're an 18-year-old white Christian male in Georgia

with a family history of military service. As you progress through your teen years you watch Confederate statues being torn down and military bases being renamed. Endless media and elitist demonization of your culture as racist and deplorable and backwards. What is the best thing in leadership

that thinks diversity and inclusion, i.e. fewer white men, is the best thing since sliced bread? Would you volunteer? Identity politics works both ways. Trash my tribe and I won't associate with you, let alone risk my life. Shouldn't be a shock then

that those expressing a great deal of trust and confidence in the military drop from 70% in 2018 to 45% today. So that's why no one wants to do in the military Wow, there's a whole piece on how to protect your wealth by... Oh, wow, no, there's a whole section of this called the Second Amendment Corner.

Okay, interesting. So there's a picture here of a bunch of ATF agents, obviously armed in plate carriers and a pride flag. And this is a joke, this is a funny. And it says, corporate wants you to find the difference between this picture and this picture. And then it says they're the same picture.

So I guess the ATF are out there enforcing pride. And the same comic that we'd seen was frankly bizarre. The two pictures on this comic were an ATF visit. This particular ATF visit

got hyped up all over the right wing media as a raid, a gun grab, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, what happened was a dude purchased a lot of guns and the ATF came by to check if he had sold any of them. It's not routine, but it's not super uncommon either.

Anyway, on one side was a photo of the ATF agents in plate carriers with rifles and on the other was a pride flag. Because apparently in Custer County the existence of queer people is a similar oppression

to the people who did Waco coming to your door. Jordan has also noted this turn in the rhetoric of the Sentinel. For two years, their sole purpose was to rail against COVID restrictions. Now with many of those gone along with 22 people from the county

where the average age is 60 they've pivoted to culture war topics when election fraud and COVID don't seem to have stuck. Now it's just we're against it was all the big life, the election was stolen

critical race theory even though it's a bunch of crap and unfortunately the Unicorn Ranch in the past it was more against anybody that was gay but there's not many of those in the community more because they kind of got run out

from the Sentinel it just conserves in general really hostile. But now it's totally on the trans and again it kind of fights back against the conservative upbringing that I had which was

as long as you're not interfering with me then there's really no conflict. I've talked about queer exterminationist rhetoric before and it's very evident that what we are seeing here is a version of that. Fortunately George doesn't seem to have stuck the landing but it doesn't mean that this stuff

isn't dangerous. It goes without saying that the Unicorns weren't trying to trans anyone's gender from their ranch they were just trying to be left alone it's not their actions that people disagreed with it's their mere existence

especially while the attack on the ranch might have failed other attacks on queer folks haven't and that makes havens like the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch even more important today. Next episode we're going to talk about what brought people to the ranch and how to make a queer

home in rural America. 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 get a little bit of a little guy to go after the big guy. Each season we'll take you inside

an undercover investigation and we'll take you to the next episode. Thanks for watching. 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 we'll 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 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 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. The Ranch in July 2022 is a very different place to the one I visited in March of 2021. For one thing, it's not so cold that my water bottle freezes every night, but more notably

there's less tension in the air and no one's wearing a plate carrier. Not everyone who is there for the seat stayed. Some of them had only been visiting or they'd found other places to live since then. But Penny, Kat, Jen and Jay have been constants on the ranch

since 2020. Something I've struggled with so far is giving a sense of just what a welcoming and friendly place the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch is. It's a thing I haven't really stopped thinking about since I first visited and a thing that a lot of folks have been looking for for a very long time.

Even in the worst time to the siege, when Penny and Jay barely slept, when Aldo was out running off chud with guns or when Paul and I were sat up all night absolutely destroying the Costco snack melange that Penny had prepared for us, people always seemed to be laughing.

When we sat down to talk about the siege, we started off by laughing. It's a difficult topic and it was a scary time. But I guess it's easier to laugh about it a year later when you know everyone's okay. Well, let's go over everyone's legal names, date of birth, social security number,

maybe your four digit what? List of fears, that sort of thing. Any kings? Lots. We'll run past 45 minutes. Kings like don't have.

We don't want this to be just a story about the worst week the ranch ever had. We want it to be a story about a community that overcame adversity and is thriving. That community extends way beyond the dome which Unicorn has called home and even beyond the valley that they live in.

But we should start with that valley. Because even at the peak of the siege, it seems like most people were on the Unicorn's side. Or at least, they just wanted to leave them alone. It was because of warnings from other people in the valley that they knew to patrol their perimeter

at night. Had they not been there, this might be a very different story. A year later, everyone in the valley values Unicorn's being there. During the few days we spent there this summer, we visited neighbors for drinks. We went into town for

donuts and coffee and dropped in on Jordan, the Tribune publisher, at his ranch. It's none of the Unicorn's of pariahs sitting up in their house surrounded by guns and afraid of what's coming next. They're active members of the community and they're very welcome. There was a time when this community wasn't

as friendly to queer people. But they've always been here. I spoke to Penny about this last year while we drove to the recycling centre in the next county to recycle Wethliff cans. Yeah, like we're doing the same thing y'all are doing. Like you should not pick up on that.

Not to mention also that there are queers here. We're not the first wave. It's like we're not breaking any fucking mold. We're definitely loud. We didn't get couted out

and bent over and told to shut up our whole life. So we're definitely like, fuck you, we're queer. And they don't like that. Yeah, I know. That makes all good old boys uncomfortable and I get it. Also, fuck you.

Yeah, no, we're going to be who we are living the way we want to. Look, if you can hang two Trump flags and a Confederate flag from the back of your truck and drive down Main Street screaming fucking horrible hateful things and feel perfectly justified in doing

that, I'm going to just be queer. Like I'm going to go ahead and be as loud as I want to be. Obviously, you think it's okay to have personal expression. There's freedom of speech right there. You really, really think it's okay. So I'm going to go ahead and take you

up on that. They have this like, I don't know, like if it was some kind of like, don't ask, don't tell. Yeah, well that's what they keep saying does. It's like, well, you don't have to be in our face about it. I'm just living. I'm not coming into your home

and humping your couch. I'm just being alive. It can be easy, especially if you only connect with the rural places through the media to see cities as queer spaces and the countryside is unfriendly to queer people. Well, politics in rural America can be pretty bad.

It's never really been true that queer people don't belong there. The unicorns pointed this out. Historically if you know anything about history like country spaces are queer fucking spaces. Like we're the ones out here doing the actual work while fucking old fucking

cis white men just collect money from doing shitty ranching that damages animals, damages the earth and fucking does not build community or help anybody but themselves. Queer integration into country spaces is so fucking important because we bring heart and empathy and all these things

that capitalism is stripped out of these areas. We bring that back and we've always fucking been here. Like fuck off. Real cowboys were constantly fucking constantly. They fucked

a lot. Each other. And they were mostly like black and brown people. Yeah, it wasn't white. The west was not white. And by the way like we have said this before and we'll say it again, nature is inherently queer and we fucking belong here. Like we fucking

belong wherever the fuck we go like that is a queer space. There is no like hard line that country spaces are for cis people. Fuck that. Like we belong here. We've always been here and we're really good at it. After the siege and its coverage

everyone knows that the unicorns are queer icons. But they're only part of the local queer community and they have other folks over for game nights once a week. They told us one story about Pride Month in Westcliffe this year and thankfully it didn't involve the ATF. There was a really adorable

during Pride Month we went to Family Dollar which is like one of the few stores in town. And I guess we were talking to the manager who was checking us out and he mentioned like, oh yeah, like I have like I have a gay and a trans working here.

You know, I love y'all, you know. And it was it was very, it was a little a little embarrassing but the heart was there. You know what I was like? It was very heart full. You just out of two of your employees. I mean that's cool. But the point is like even Family Dollar in middle of nowhere, Westcliffe

has two queer employees like you know, we're everywhere. Queer people had always been in the valley but it had become harder to share who they were with their neighbors in recent decades. They never stopped existing

but they stopped being safe. We're connecting with a lot of queer people that have lived here for a long time. The fact that a community is so hostile that their queer community has to be closeted does not mean that the queer community isn't here

it just means that a lot of assholes are here. Don't Ask, Don't Tell an institutional version of closeting is something that Penny is very familiar with. She was in the army as a Calvary Scout while the policy was still in place. If you're not familiar, Don't Ask, Don't Tell

was a military policy that was in place from 1994 until 2011. Under the policy anyone who wasn't straight was to remain in the closet and in theory they were protected from discrimination but if they came out as gay or bi or trans or

otherwise queer, they could be discharged. Queer people were not even allowed to talk about anything related to their queerness because doing so would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline and unit cohesion

that are the essence of military capability. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a fucked up policy. I had a boyfriend and a girlfriend when I was in the military and I definitely was like this is my best friend in Germany and he comes over

and sometimes spends the night because we're best friendos. I don't know, it was really, really damaging. It was just really, really damaging to like 100% not be able to be yourself but then also be able to leave post

and have a secret life where you were yourself you know, like and then when you go out with the guys there's always those weird moments where you do run into other gay locals that you have known and you've had deep conversations

with in other contexts and just have to be like no, don't talk to me like we don't know each other which is I'm sure damaging for them you know, that can't be fucking normal I don't know, that's weird and then on the throw on top of that

that you're also a girl you know what I mean, so you're pretending to be a gay man who's straight sometimes around certain people but really you're a gay, you're a bisexual

woman pre-surgery and with the wrong hormones and so it just ends up being a soup of just like compartmentalization to the point where you just like forget

people and then they show back up and you're like oh yeah, like you're from this quadrant of my life like I don't know, it's not healthy it doesn't do good things Don't Ask, Don't Tell had pretty devastating consequences for the mental health of thousands of service people

the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 20% of trans people have served in the military over twice the rate of cisgender people but until very recently they weren't even allowed to do so openly not being able to be yourself

with people that you're expected to risk your life for isn't really conductive to good morale or indeed quote the unit cohesion that is the essence of military capability there's no doubt that being familiar with guns, something they

gained from military experience did help the unicorns but it's not the only thing that helped them sometimes especially on Twitter where things seem to get reduced to simple terms to fit into the discourse of the day the tenacious unicorn ranch story has been reduced

to a story about guns undoubtedly guns are a part of the story but they would have been useless without community and solidarity that is something that the unicorns at the ranch have taken to heart a year later they're doing mutual aid

work with the Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation driving truckloads of donations to them every few months and using their internet presence to get donations if we want to look at this story as an example of anarchism in action and it's important to remember that

if we want a world where the state is not the only entity with the ability to do violence we should also want a world where it's not the only entity responsible for caring for people with unmet material needs alongside ranch work Penny and Jay also make ends meet

by working construction jobs on local buildings something that George from the Sentinel is very proud of and that other local residents are beginning to regret is that Custer County doesn't have a building code here's a snippet of his conversation

with TL about that and one example TL is that this county is so free we don't even have building codes if you want to live here you can build yourself a shack with twig to live in it you know that's

that's the way it is here in my little burg in Texas too yeah so do you really need them do you really need them I mean that's something I think should be attacked in other ways but

go ahead but that's one of the things that make Custer County and one of the reasons I moved to this one building codes basically have caused housing prices to become unreachable for the middle class

the problem with this conservative utopian vision is that it has resulted in a lot of residents getting ripped off by less than upstanding builders and now left with their homes falling apart that's where Penny and Jay can step in

and make a decent side income drywalling and finishing buildings that well often are not very old are already crumbling like we've always said this community is 99% awesome and that has held

true we do contracting work because there are no building codes in Custer County as opposed to what like the libertarian ideal of no building codes is it actually just means that there's a bunch of shoddy

houses that need repaired constantly and we have construction skills so we're in people's homes repairing them and doing work for the actual people of the county daily we frequent

businesses up here because we're all about local support we build community gleefully we build community like we really enjoy it up here the community now is a little smaller than when James first visited currently five people live at the ranch full time

but they still have a couple of trailers open to trans folks in need of a safe place to stay or you know visiting journalists looking for a safe place to stay is how Jay first came to the ranch like a lot of us she had a difficult time

at the start of the pandemic the world was changing and it seemed in May of 2020 that America was as well for a lot of people with less progressive parents the BLM Uprising presented a difficult choice between family and community

Jay was one of those people that had to face that choice so basically I was living in Dallas working retail living in my car when the pandemic started

and so I was furloughed luckily Texas is actually surprisingly good about unemployment so I had that my parents are retired from the military around there and

when the BLM Uprising happened I did some things and basically my parents were like you either can stay here and not be associated with antifa

or you can't stay here if you're associated with antifa so I was like okay I guess I'm leaving then which is fine there was a lot of tension there anyways

it wasn't good for me so because of the unemployment I was like okay I for once have some resources I'm already living in my car I can just kind of travel around for a bit

why not I think I just posted on Twitter trans commune win as probably most queer people have and one of my permaculture mutuals actually was like hey have you heard of this place it's not far from you

and posted a link to I think it was the vice article and I sent a message with a bunch of questions about it and making sure it wasn't transmedicalist or anything like that which is always what you want to see

when so many contacts the ranch about coming up I way prefer an in depth breakdown in a lot of questions to in case you're not familiar with what a transmedicalist is we'll let Paul ask that question for you

we're gonna play this not to make Paul look bad we're playing it for you because I think it's important to see what kind of space the ranch is it's not one where you can't get things wrong it's one where you can ask if you don't know something and because everyone there

had shown that they were willing to risk life and limb for one another to assume that you're asking it because you care about them and you want to know how to say things in a way that won't hurt anyone what the fuck is a transmedicalist someone who thinks that so primarily

so this does not describe any of us but a transmedicalist is someone who first and foremost thinks that all trans people should be on hormones all trans people should have surgery all trans people should strive towards and they don't believe in

and they don't believe in anything but the gender binary as well so basically if you don't want to transition directly from a male to a female or drive a female to a male you're not a real trans person you're not real

they think those trans people are making it worse for other trans people you're not allowed to be non-binary so that was my next question are non-binary people they hate those people they think they're faking so but like do they say they're not trans

they often call them trans trenders because it's like a popularity contest they think so yeah and those people suck Jay has found a home at the ranch now and just like everyone else there she's a part of the family

which takes care of one another it was actually really funny because Jay showed up and the assumption I thought was for a little bit and then you just didn't leave and it was great it was very natural this is exactly what a lot of queer people talk about online

which is well then Jay brought a passion that we hadn't seen with a lot of people that had come up a lot of people had come up with this like yeah we'll just see what it is or whatever but Jay came up with knowledge about theory

and had studied really like conscientiously a part of this project which was huge I mean for me part of what Jay has been able to help with is organizing the moving of animals to different pastures James was at the ranch last year

when they were replacing their old fence and planning out their fields I'll tear down this ready ass fence and this back fence here as we build the new kind of structure for the girls out in that field when we're doing the fence

heightening so it's not only security increase but we'll also fence off the driveway and then the girls the babies and mommas will actually get access all the way down the driveway and up this hill a little bit

hey babies come on and yeah we'll just structure our fields a little bit better and the girls will have two pastures which is kind of huge we can rotate them in too then we can start actual permaculture or is it permaculture?

in this context it's regenerative agriculture thank you that's what I was looking for you can also permaculture people do it too but what we're doing is that's both really we'll be doing both so you can use either

there's definitely an industry like agriculture is the new thing but it's still capitalism and it's still exploitative but there are also people doing real regenerative agriculture talking with Jay it's very evident just how passionate they are about these topics

and how things like biodiversity and regenerative and permaculture processes tie into many aspects of the ranch itself the capitalist project is homogenization and simplification the entire goal is things like monocrops

the entire goal is the gender binary and controlling the reproduction of labor controlling cis women and queer gender expression is a big part of that you can't have those things and have a capitalist

white supremacist environment where you can extract from the earth and from labor that is such a key component like western project and nature doesn't care

nature is queer, nature just exists fungi have thousands of sexes and genders and that's fine part of the point of nature is biodiversity because that is the most

effective method for actually iterating and testing what works in surviving and we're bimodal by the way not binary and if you need to look that up you can go ahead and do that and permaculture in particular

one big problem with permaculture is there's a lot of white people who use the practices and don't acknowledge that it all comes from indigenous cultures it all comes from indigenous life ways and

money by not saying that that's important to address permaculture has its value but if you're not learning from indigenous people and giving back to indigenous people you're doing it wrong

just because the immediate threat of armed men breaking into the ranch has gone away doesn't mean that they still don't have to be careful in April of 2021 after the siege was over the then sheriff

Shannon Byerly claimed that one of his deputies went to the ranch to ask questions about a road traffic accident that one of the ranchers had been involved in he claimed the deputy was met by armed and uncooperative ranchers who barred the deputy from entering

body cam video obtained by Reuters thanks to a public records act request shows nothing of the sorts the deputy met a single person not visibly armed who was polite and courteous in subsequent interviews Byerly acknowledged

that he had been mistaken in his account but we'll let you hear Jay's account of the events that day so my Chevy Blazer had been sitting over the winter it had a bad alternator and we finally got the money together to replace

the alternator looked it over everything seemed fine and I was going back to Texas to grab some stuff and bring it back and went around a apparently black

ice corner and I'm pretty sure what happened was my tire popped around I was only going like 35-40 because there's ice it's still early in the morning it was like 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning or something like that

and I'm pretty sure what happened was my tire popped and then my Blazer proceeded to tumble you know roll over into the luckily not a ditch or anything just on the south left side of the road

and so I called Penny and got picked up we take care of our own it only was you no reason and then I was like okay let me look at towing around the area

and the local towing company which is just like a small family owned one guy basically on their facebook business page they said they opened at like 9 or 10 or something like that

so I was like okay it's going to be on the side of the road until then and I'm going to go to sleep until then because I was just in a roll over accident you'll probably concussed probably whiplashed at least totally so I was in my trailer

and I suddenly in my pj's and suddenly get a call from dispatch and they're like there's a deputy at your gate can you go blah blah blah so I was like okay took a vehicle down in your pj's

or on me and I basically just as you do with cops as any sane human does answer to the extent that you're legally required to be polite but also

I'm not going to invite you on I'm not going to be your friend you're not my friend answered questions he did the usual were you drinking like five o'clock in the morning it's like six o'clock right now

I was going back I was driving back to Texas to pick up stuff I was starting a road trip that's not when you get blitzed I don't know yeah so he gave me his car and left

and I was like okay that's fine that was weird and it was weird to me too that they apparently have some kind of relationship with this towing guy because they didn't even ask me hey do you want it towing to this place

they just toed it before they even contacted me and so either you bring the title over to sign it over to the towing person or you pay him like four or five hundred dollars to bring it back here

so that's what actually happened but then for some reason the local sheriff started telling a very different account of what took place outside the unicorn's driveway so that was the start of this incident

then birely the sheriff started getting interviewed and in those interviews he would say there were six of them they met us at the gate armed were extremely hostile to the point where my sheriff felt inferior

he felt fear for his life and had to retreat back we don't know he might have felt fear for his life but he also said we don't go there anymore but he said on record we don't go there anymore because it's too scary oh my god

and so that is setting us up to be killed that is setting us up to be marked by police it's like you know this is kiwi farm says this all the time this is tranny weiko what is the setup for it to become that

because then now all of his deputies are just ready to shoot us on site because we're dangerous a reporter from Reuters was looking into the incident and heard the conflicting stories from the sheriff and the unicorns but she thought of an easy fix to definitively know what happened

she just spoiled the body cam footage which proved unequivocally that they were lying their fucking ass off and we were telling the truth and by early retired this year I don't know if well and she when she

she went back oh god yeah and by early it was like can I remove my comments because she asked she she like I don't know if it was a follow she said do you have any additional comments and his additional comments were can you please remove my previous statements from the record

and she said no and she emphatically said no and then published it internationally this wasn't the first suspect incident regarding the local sheriffs when Paul was at the ranch in the immediate aftermath of the original siege he witnessed cops

hanging out with the group of people who were actively harassing the ranch I was here for a week and at one point there was like 15 to 20 cars at Chud Ranch which it's up to you to release that location

it's called Chud Ranch but it's the Ranch of Chuds you can see it from here there were two sheriff's deputies sitting at the curb the entire time as those cars pulled in there they were protecting our harassers

well they were sitting there side by side talking to each other while the cars pulled in there you probably have said this before and I just didn't remember yeah I mean it must have been 20 of them so the other end of that is then it got publicized

the sheriff then said we don't know anything about it they didn't contact us they couldn't verify the statements made in the media about threats against the ranch they were super snooty about it they made it sound like

Chud Ranch clearly doesn't want to be part of our community so why would we help them that seemed to be the implication Sheriff Byerley who spoke at a 2015 Oath Keepers rally has since resigned as sheriff but for understandable reasons

the unicorns still don't dial 9-1-1 when they feel in danger instead they reach out to Paul to Aldo and a network of community members who helped with their security both online and on the ground they also routinely train with firearms and have added

a much more serious fence to the property than the one that the intruders climbed over in 2021 right after James and I's most recent visit this past summer Kiwi Farms started being in the news a lot more due to a campaign attempting to take it down

but as the hate forum entered the discourse again the unicorns had started noticing cars driving past the ranch repeatedly, something that Paul, Aldo, and James observed during the siege and now in just the past few weeks trans people have been killed

in a nightclub just an hour away from their house just a few miles away from the bar where we met them this past summer to celebrate at Jay's birthday tomorrow we'll talk about what those threats mean for the ranch and where they are now.

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 not on the good and the bad ass 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. 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 and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one

that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth

his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days

that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows at 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 in 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On our drive down from Denver to Westcliff we were first going to meet up with the unicorns in Colorado Springs for a little birthday dinner. James and I arrived

a few hours early so I had the bright idea to stop at the headquarters of the evangelical media organization Focus on the Family. I hadn't been there since I was a little Christian kid so I was curious

what it would be like for me to walk through now. What was it like walking through their little headquarters and welcome center? What were the general vibes? That was fucking bonkers. So we went in initially

and we've gone into the bookshop and I found a book that told me that was called Sex in Marriage. I've seen a book with a pink triangle on the cover that is about LGBTQ people

which is deeply trucking and troubling. It's about men struggling with their sexual identity. I see. Queer eliminationist rhetoric hasn't just been confined to Christian bookstores or the internet.

In November of 2022 it became very clear how this kind of nonstop 24x7 hate speech being beamed into everyone's homes impacts them. On the eve of transgender day of remembrance as club Q, a gay bar

in Colorado Springs was preparing for an all-ages drag show a 22-year-old shooter walked in and killed five people leaving 25 more injured. The shooter was ultimately tackled and still whipped by a U.S. Army veteran

Richard Vieiro and stomped in the face by an unidentified trans woman. A few days after the club Q shooting on so-called Thanksgiving the focus on the family headquarters was defaced leaving behind a graffiti

message pointing out the organization's culpability from pioneering the kind of gay exterminationist propaganda that the modern conservative right is embracing. The message left on the property that James and I visited just a few months

prior read quote their blood is on your hands five lives taken. Way back in 2020 I put together a behind the bastards on Focus on the Family and their founder James Dobson and I've covered Focus on the Family's

increase in anti-trans propaganda earlier this year on this very show. After the graffiti was left on their headquarters on Thanksgiving a statement was released by the Colorado People's Press and I'm going to read a few parts of that

quote it is no accident that the club Q shooting happened in Colorado Springs a city steeped in homophobia, transphobia and white supremacy. It is no surprise that somebody did this in this city that is home to such

a hateful organization as Focus on the Family. If you visit their website you will see them eagerly display their desire to rid the world of all queer people. It is important to us that you understand why Focus on the Family must be held accountable

for the ramifications of their hateful theology. You have likely seen the onslaught of anti-trans legislation of which Focus on the Family is a huge proponent both in funding and propaganda. Focus on the Family's goal

is to eradicate queerness unquote Two of the five people killed in the club Q shooting were trans people and in the days after the attack figures on the right continued to call for attacks on trans people and drag queens

using their familiar language of groomers and grooming while of course completely ignoring multiple figures within their own midst who have very well documented relationships with people convicted or suspected of sex crimes but obviously evidence or logic doesn't

really make a difference in these types of situations. What's happened is that a handful of figures on the right have decided that they can gain power, influence, and money by whipping up hatred towards queer people. With this hate has come an uptick in violence

and this only makes queer havens like the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch more important. Last month in Tulsa, Oklahoma after a donut shop hosted a drag queen and queer art event a man in a mega hat smashed the windows

of the store with a baseball bat and threw in a Molotov cocktail. The attacker also taped a note with Bible verses and homophobic and transphobic slurs on the window of a neighboring shop. This wasn't the first time the store had been targeted and this attack happened

a day before the shop was set to host another drag art event. On December 3rd a right-wing activist and former US Army Psychological Operations Officer claimed on Facebook that God had caused a power outage in Moore County, North Carolina

in an effort to shut down a drag show that was currently taking place in a local theater. Earlier that same day a holiday themed drag show in Columbus, Ohio hosted by a Unitarian Universalist Church

was canceled due to threats and protests outside by Proud Boys, Patriot Front and a number of unidentified armed men in camo. Patriot Front chanted blood, liberty and victory while the Proud Boys chanted

feds, feds, feds back at them. Victory! Despite their disagreements the two groups seemed perfectly fine working together to shut down the drag event. The Nazi group White Lives Matter, Ohio

was set up a few blocks away in their skull masks and were seag hiling to drivers passing by. After it became clear the drag show was not going to take place, the groups moved to a busier, more visible street to wave their groomer signs.

A few dozen Patriot Front members stood chanting outside of a Chipotle as a Christian demonist flag flew behind them. On December 7th someone fired a gun through the window of a bar in Renton, Washington after threats against the bar

were posted online for hosting the drag queen's storytime. Just a few days ago on December 13th the FBI designated Extremist Militia Group named This Is Texas Freedom Force showed up armed with guns outside

of a Christmas themed drag show in San Antonio, Texas. Other right wing groups like the San Antonio Family Association and the Fascist Patriot Front also had members present. By the end the crowd protesting the drag show was greatly outnumbered

by people showing up to support and defend the queer event. Some of whom also showed up armed. Something that was mentioned across the multiple interviews we did while visiting the ranch is the idea of microcosm and macrocosm.

The tenacious Unicorn Ranch story and the threats of violence that they have faced really does embody a microcosm version of the transphobic and queer eliminationist rhetoric and genocide campaign that the country as a whole

is experiencing. It's just that this local manifestation of it happened to be on an alpaca farm as odd as that may be. Apparently kind of funny animal. And then the way they run with their head all the way down to the ground

and just... Yeah, they're impracticalities. Yep. Little camels. Camels. They're animals straight out of a giblet. You know, they really are. Designed by committee. They have the same amount of magic.

Yeah, just driving up here, seeing them. I was like, wow! Fire that. Yeah, they are like unicorns. They're like mythical animals. Yeah, they're just kind of like, wow, is this real? It's like a fucking tauntaun?

What's going on here? They just look so snuggable. They just want to snuggle them. The way they walk like that, like they're like... Here I come. Yeah. When they do a trot like on their head...

This is clown face. Really good dad. Yeah. For this last episode of the series, we want to give you a sense of what regular life is like at the ranch. Now that it's been almost two years since the siege,

and people have had time to process, grow, and adapt. One thing that's growing is the number of alpacas. We have a hundred and ninety-six. A hundred and ninety-six, something like that. With the recent Kriyas born, we have a hundred and ninety-six alpaca.

Let's talk a little bit about alpacas. I think they're interesting, right? You came into most of your alpacas as rescues. Yeah. At the original ranch, we purchased

a ten alpaca, but it was like a rescue purchase. The only way that we could get them to give them up is if we paid money for them. It was all from really lovely people. It was just like, these weren't alpacas they wanted. And then,

we learned really quickly that there is a problem in America with alpaca ranchers aging out of being able to take care of these really massive herds that they've built, and either euthanizing

or splitting up herds, which is both things are not great for the health of the alpaca. Especially euthanizing. Yeah, for sure. That ends that story. But, so we found really quickly that there is a,

as a rescue, we were able to help more animals and afford animals. Because we were on the acres that were on, we could take in entire herds and not break them up, which is a big deal.

And so our first intake of rescues was 76 alpaca from a really great couple in horse tooth that was retiring. Really great animals, hardy, really quality fiber.

And we just kind of have been with that model ever since, as a rescue. The way you are sustainable as a ranch is, in addition to working outside is selling the fiber, right? Yeah, both sheep and the alpaca

provide fiber that we then turn into, really what we do is turn it into yarn and then sell the yarn. We've never needed to go beyond that because we've always sold out of our yarn almost immediately. Speaking of sheep, here's a nice little clip of James

fawning over some of the door sets. There's a, yeah. Nice looking sheep. Right. Little baby door sets. Yeah. Some of them that are mixed with,

they remember with the black face. Scotch black face? Yeah. They're a really lovely mix. Yeah, that's a nice combination actually. Pretty rugged sheep. Nice and big and just rugged like they put up with everything. Yeah.

You can see their coats are just like bread, like they're just... like fleece. And they're like, well fleece on the head and the neck. Yeah, they make really good. We mixed it with our alpaca yarn this year. And it's a wonderful yarn. It's really rough thinking that there's people

that are just like, fucking alpaca farmers. Like, what's gone wrong in your life? You're so angry at someone for looking after these fluffy animals. Yeah, like the big thing was there was that moment where they had the Nazi parade in town.

And that's what really like we called them out on it. And that's what started the animosity. But like it was a parade of Nazis. Like, I don't feel bad. You know what I mean?

It's weird that they took it to the level of oh yeah, well we're going to burn down your house and kill you all. That'll show you. Yeah, it'll show us that you're Nazis. In our conversation with Jordan from the Tribune, as somebody who was born

and raised in this area, he gave us his perspective on why people may have thought they could get away with attacking the ranch and how there has been this cultural shift in recent years to allow this kind of

reactionary militancy. You know, again, I don't think it was anything super organized other than a bunch of these individuals that had already been sort of organized deciding to do something really stupid. Yeah, incredibly stupid.

And knowing that the sheriff and a lot of other people wouldn't take it that seriously. That's what I wondered. Yeah, they thought they could get away with it. And has there been a history of that? Like, have they done, has that sort of thing happened in the valley? In the past, there's been plenty of just as I said, but usually that stuff wasn't condoned, so eventually they get caught.

You mean in terms of like or minorities, you know, in the past there was always some of those types of things, but it also wasn't condoned or even excused even against most, if it came out then those people were shunned and shamed even by Republicans.

But these days it's much more like well, we'll look the other way, you know, now it's tipped the other direction. Thankfully so far, the efforts of these few individuals to harm or pressure the unicorns out of the community have

unequivocally failed and in some ways just made stronger bonds. Yeah, they wanted you to leave. Yeah, I mean all of it was designed to make you so afraid you would go away. Like, yeah. Terrorism.

And that hasn't happened, right? So you're a year and change, a year and a half almost. Yeah, two years in this location. Two years and change. Yeah, plus since since the racist peak. Yeah. And how are things now? Great.

I think at this point people legitimately love us, like locals. Yeah, people call us the unicorns and everybody knows who we are and it's not in a bad way. Like, it's really we feel at home here. Because of the timing of their initial

move over to Westcliffe it made local community building kind of challenging and little did they know that they would crucially need community and support in the months to come. So because it was during the pandemic

and everything was on lockdown, we didn't establish a lot of community. We Annie moved in who was somebody we knew down in Berthard, which was very close to us and so she moved up here

at the exact same time we were moving up here. So we did have somebody that we could talk to and interact with, but they were just as new to the area as we were. And, I mean, honestly, setting up a ranch and moving from one location to another when you're talking about

multiple hundreds of animals and at that point we were six people. We were very self-focused for the first six months we were up here. So our general sweep was they have Shakespeare in the park and it's a tourist town. So it seems great.

We moved here because we could afford this house and no other house in Colorado. And then it slowly started to become a parent that we'd moved into a very red area. But again, there wasn't any overt signs upon a

rifle. Like everybody was cool. And honestly, like, people are still pretty cool mostly. 99% of people are cool. Yeah, it's the 1% of people that suck. As things have steadily stabilized and settled into a version of normal, the unicorns

have been getting more involved throughout the local community. A little while back, they stepped up to assist with recycling for the county. We stepped up for a small period of time when the recycling company that was handling the county's recycling folded, we stepped up

with our horse trailers and just collected recycling and drove it to a facility. Now, there's actually a facility in the West Cliff landfill that does recycling for this county and the neighboring three counties.

And that was a building that, like, we designed and the person who's running it, Rocky Mountain Recycling Joni's her name. Amazing people. They're doing great things and we're glad that we could help in whatever way we could. It just became a government project

and that's when we stepped out because that's not really what we're about. And as socialization has been able to get more possible since the pandemic, the unicorns have developed ways to connect with the existing community of queers and weirdos

in the area. Jen put together a weekly game night and it's slowly growing and we're bringing in queer people to play board games and stuff. Yeah, we've got four different people from in town who otherwise don't really have a connection to their inch

coming in to play a board game or maybe Magic Night. And I have a sleeping suspicion that's going to keep growing. What are we playing tonight? It might be Arkham Horror 3rd edition or it might be Mysterium or it might be Magic. My favorite is Magic.

Because I would love to beat everyone here in the game. Oh my gosh, you should play with us. Yes, that'd be so fun. But yeah, even little things like that. It's just small ways to build community. It's important because we need to be here when like if it gets really bad. On the macrocosm scale

things do seem to be getting bad. When we talked with Jordan about how George from the Sentinel was targeting the unicorns the conversation segwayed into how there's been this shift from economic conservatism

to this rising brand of far-right Christian vanguardism. I suppose to classify some of the movement you see in conservative America right now where it all starts to make sense is that in the past conservatism was always trying to push against

sort of this idea of revolution or progress or too fast. They always go back to the French Revolution that's where the left and right kind of started. Saying, hey, if you move too quickly with progress everybody gets their heads chopped off. So that was kind of conservatism which is we don't really believe in anything necessarily

we're just going to hold the tradition but at the same time that's how conservatism was here until the Soviet Union fell. And then all of a sudden something switched which is we have the system that won. Our system should spread across the world because if everybody did American

style capitalist democracy we would enter this weird and randian utopia. A free market street. We'll end a history but on a conservative side. You're talking to your liberalism. That's exactly what it was. Thomas is 2001 particularly here

pushed it over. It went from like okay maybe we're actually going to try to push this on other countries. And really what I called the alt-right or the conservative right now they got bit by the utopian bug which is if everybody is armed at the teeth

if everybody lives the way that they dictate they should live which is some weird and randian version of life and morality then we'll enter utopia. And so if anybody stands against you as that prophet you are the enemy.

That's why the right now turns on themselves all the time. Anybody that stands against them is the enemy. A liberal stops utopia. Anybody that stops utopia is liberal or communist. And I think if you look

at it in that lens the world makes a lot more sense. I don't see very much utopianism at all on the left anymore whereas on the right it's everywhere. So it's one of those weird political things that's flopped the other direction. Now just in different words, different ways utopianism is on the right now.

They also need to have some type of conflict. They need to have a purging episode. You have to purge everybody that's on the other side to enter utopia. And that's why Christians are really into it. They read the book of Revelation we have to have the civil war we have to purge all the leftists

because on the other side we enter the kingdom of God. It's the millenarianism. Yeah, exactly. It's absolute millenarianism and that's what we're facing here. If I was to sum it up that's how I'd say it was it's definitely millenarianism in the local form.

If we are going to look at the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch story as a microcosm of transphobic violence then I think it should also be seen as a case study of the invaluable role solidarity and community have in resisting

the concerted effort to harm queer people. Back when the siege was just starting simply feeling able to go to sleep because people were willing to show up for you is just one example from this story that's a powerful display

of the values many people claim to have but seldom implement. We were exhausted and so to have people show up and be like you will be safe tonight lay down, get sleep and trust it enough

to sleep because it was incredible. It was incredible. As the unicorns continue to make connections and become a known staple of the larger local community it's made organizing any harassment against them more difficult.

I bet a bunch of those people who hate us have tested the waters with their friends like those unicorns and they're like what they're cool. I bet that's happening because we keep making friends. But that's been our ongoing precautions because it hasn't

the animosity from that group hasn't gone away and it does resurface every once in a while like some people threaten to kill our dogs a little while back and things like that. Possibly the same people we're not sure Possibly, yeah. No way of confirming or denying that.

Nowadays some security measures have been integrated into their everyday lives thanks to support they've gotten from strangers. We definitely have cameras so we had to go find me where people amazingly kind of like through

a large amount of money at us which afforded a better fence and cameras everywhere on property. There's a lot of things like gear. Yeah, better gear and upgrades and stuff like that. So we kind of

are in an ongoing keep us safe mode but like cameras and guns, that's how we do it. And I do, I really do think like we showed the shitty people of this town like don't fuck a mess with us. Well, we showed what we showed was that

community matters and if you aren't a shit heel the day after the club cue shooting. Once again the ranch posted a tweet asking for people to come. This time they didn't need help they wanted to offer it.

They're only an hour or so away from Colorado Springs and they wanted to offer their home as a place to heal to talk and to begin moving forward as a part of the community struck by violence and hate. In addition to a home

for the ranchers and the animals the ranch also provides emergency housing for queer people who aren't safe wherever they currently are. There have been lots of residents at the ranch in the four years they've been operating. Some of them come briefly and use

the stability to get set up with a fresh start in some place. Some others intend to stay but find the country life isn't for them and some like Jay become permanent fixtures on the ranch. The term you've kind of used a lot

to describe this place is like a queer haven. And the past year definitely there's been a pretty volatile increase in transphobia and queerphobia even like a resurgence of homophobia. So as this type of stuff

is happening as we're seeing more kind of rhetoric around like queer genocide or queer extermination is how do you see this place and you know possible places like it fitting in to kind of how the world seems to be going. Yeah, so what we've seen aside from people wanting

to come up here and live permanently that we've put that on hold right now because we're just kind of we need more space. We don't have the space to like facilitate but what we have found is something that we are as a haven the thing that we

do that's most important is groups of queer people come here for recharge and to feel like it is recharging to spend a week up here in community with other queer people with no burden from the outside and just being yourself

building connections and network. Yeah, and like kind of reigniting your fire for revolution and for you know and kind of I don't know like I don't know like touching base and realizing that like the community is still

big it is still growing people are still standing strong being able to come up here and really invite that for a week or two has been from the letters I get really important to people and so that that is what we like deliver

routinely we do also like emergency like save people when we can like if you're just got kicked out on the street you don't know what to do but you can kind of like you have somewhere to go but you can't get there yet

we are a really good way station for people in that position you come up you know touch grass for a week and then go back out into the world like and given you know climate collapse and encroaching fascism which if you don't get then you need

to probably study your history listen to this podcast more often probably yeah there you know the rainbow railroads there's going to be a lot of bad things happening and it's going to happen quickly

well we'll still be here we're trying to grow to a size that like can help people more directly well also we are already we're still here yeah we didn't grow we'd still be here and we you could count on us but the networks that are set up um yeah like

being able to quickly get people out of the country being able to quickly get people to safety from anywhere in the country uh that's what we have been focusing on watching much like we started in response to the violence that was

that was ratcheting because of the Trump administration we haven't lessened that right like we are we're setting up networks and possibilities to get people safe from very unsafe situations uh in this country and that's kind of

where it's going fucking everywhere right now so that kind of networking has we've found not only bolstered people but is really important the need for places like these is growing just as quickly as the manufactured panic around drag

shows in response the unicorns have decided to expand to another property in the valley and one in boulder county these properties will allow them to serve a larger community to grow crops have horses and increase

the amount of emergency housing they can provide the unicorns have launched a new go fund me to help cover some of the starting costs to get the new locations up and running and begin farming operations the additions would not only be providing more housing

and income but also add the ability to offer support groups and host queer events that are safe and accessible to folks in and around boulder county colorado we've said from the beginning this project isn't about us

this project is about the community and giving us a strong hold of just fucking hope instead of walking away from this series thinking oh I'm going to go move to the ranch because I guarantee there's not enough room for everybody listening

even with the ongoing expansion but people should take what we've learned from the tenacious unicorn grant and apply it elsewhere wherever you are you can apply this example with all of its ups and downs

to perspective havens across the continent whether in cities or in the country building queer zones doesn't need to take form as a completely isolated closed off commune as we've seen here

having connections and fostering community with those around you is a crucial part of maintaining a livelihood beyond just mere survival while this has been a story about the internet and how it provides

both positive connections and a medium for some of the worst bigoted hatred and a story about guns both how they have been used as a tool to protect trans people in rural colorado as well as being part of the original threat to trans lives

and now a seemingly increasing one but if there's one thing that I hope people can take away from this story it's how all of these positive aspects are meaningless unless people are willing to demonstrate solidarity

and work towards building a community that's capable of ensuring a queer haven like the tenacious unicorn ranch is able to continue despite threats from queer exterminationists if you want to keep up with the ranch

you can find them at tenaciousunicornranch.com where you can also find their Patreon and the GoFundMe page for their expansion you can find James at James Stout and you can find me at Hungry Bowtie see you on the other side

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 was 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 RevereGear Podcast 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 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.