Behind the Bastards - Part One: A Terrible Story About The Internet

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Just listen. Guest Margaret Killjoy.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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We love your plant, Sophie. Everyone loves your plant. Listeners, people on the Internet, find Sophie, on Twitter, and tell her you like her plant. It's a Raven's Easy, and it brings me so much happiness. It's my goth plant. It's a good plant. It seems very goth. It's like that song, what's something goth?

The Black Parade? That song was pretty goth, right? From when I was in high school? That seems goth. Yeah, it was like that. Margaret? I'm not laughing at your choices. It was not my choice. That was just like the one song. When I think about goth stuff from high school, that was a song?

That's the only thing I remember. I know there must be other goth stuff. As soon as I left high school, I did not notice a pop culture for 10 years. And I was way too elite of a goth at that time to be even listening to goth from my own era. I was far more interested in Sisters of Mercy. I've never even heard of that, but I was never goth. I was never into that stuff. I was just adjacent to it because the goth kids were also the kids

you were most likely to be able to play D&D with. Yes. That's how I caught that. Also, this is behind the bastards, and we're here with Margaret Kiljoy. This is a podcast about people you can play D&D with when you are in high school. Like Andrew Eldridge from Sisters of Mercy. Yeah, pretty good D&D person. I wish. I mean, yes.

Yes, definitely. Margaret, how do you feel about, like, what is it, fifth edition versus, I'm still a Pathfinder, you know, Pathfinder guy. Like, I never got past 3.5. It gave me everything I wanted in terms of rules. I actually like 5e more than 3.5. I wasn't expecting that to be the case. I thought 3.5 felt done, and then fourth edition was obviously a nightmare.

Yeah. I started playing 5e, and it's my favorite Dungeons & Dragons, and I can elitistly claim to be playing since AD&D. Yeah, that was my first generation was AD&D. I do remember Thacko. By the way, this is also, again, behind the bastards, and we're here. What is our job here? Are we not talking about D&D?

Not today. But we are talking with Margaret Kojoy, who is the newest person on our network, CoolZone Media. That's right. We have contractually locked you in to producing content and entering the death spiral of content creation for podcasts. I was going to say I'm really thrilled and very happy, but okay. I'm always going to call it a death spiral because it is.

Margaret, how are you liking the spiral? You know, all of life is a death spiral. That's right. You choose which spiral to go down into. Yeah, it's like a water park. Yeah, or a toilet. I mean, toilets and water parks, very similar in a number of ways. So yeah, we'll move on.

Margaret, how do you feel about people being harassed by the Internet until they commit suicide? Generally negative. Yeah, that was a bad habit. Yeah, that's not my favorite thing that's ever happened to anyone. It's not. I think at this point, everyone here has seen what happens when people come into the crosshairs of a digital hate mob.

It's like a daily occurrence on the Internet now. Yeah. So I think there is kind of some resilience that's been built up. Like we've all kind of been vaccinated from Gamergate. So I think maybe people are a little more prepared for it now than they used to be. But if you remember like Gamergate times, especially 2013-14, when these mobs started going after these women who were like video game reviewers and stuff, and how like it felt really unprecedented.

And it was just like this bizarre horrible thing that we all started to realize was going to be with us forever. Yeah, it's a problem. And it's a problem that continues on. Like it's one of those things, normally like people talk pretty openly about like, oh, who's the main character on Twitter today? You know, who's being like harassed or whatever today. But there's like, and that's kind of the side of it.

That's what I'm talking about, like that there's been some kind of immunity built up. That's the side of it where there's like, oh, yeah, you just know that like every now and then if you have any kind of prominence on the Internet, you know, you could wind up getting like yelled at or made fun of or whatever for a period of time. And that's just something, especially if you're going to be making things for the Internet, you just accept it. But even though it's gotten a little more standardized, there's still this really tremendously deadly underbelly to it.

Up until June of 2021, NIR was a well-loved developer of emulators. NIR, also known as BU, BYUU, was non-binary as well as autistic. These characteristics made them an ideal target of a website called Kiwi Farms. Do you know anything about Kiwi Farms, Margaret? No, this sounds like the kind of nightmare stuff that I've avoided successfully until this moment. That's a good thing to do. It's a good thing to avoid. In brief, Kiwi Farms is a forum where people gather information on

and harass individuals they call LOL cows. The name comes from the fact that the behavior of these people, specifically their reactions to harassment, provide an endless font of LOLs like a cow provides milk, right? That's how they're looking at this. We have this like stable of people who we can kind of prod and poke intermittently to like make us laugh. That's the attitude. Yeah, it sounds good.

It sounds like a lot of people who are doing well in life and emotionally. So one of NIR's friends wrote a Google Doc explaining what Kiwi Farms did to NIR, who seems to have been targeted for the same reason predators usually pick their targets. NIR had been abused before and they were seen as kind of vulnerable. Quote, and this is from one of their friends. Not to be defeated in their pursuit of utter emotional and psychological destruction, they went after who NIR treasured most, their friends. Doxxing some, directly harassing others, and even specifically seeking out suicidal people to target.

That broke NIR. After falling down a spiral of depression and eventually breaking off contact with everyone last year, I feared for the worst. Eventually, they were luckily able to get help and found medication that helped them cope with the psychological scars of abuse in late 2020. I first heard from NIR again in late October 2020 and we even started having chats. It seemed things were getting better. Unfortunately, medication can be a fickle beast. It didn't work forever. The looming threat of Kiwi Farms, of their power to destroy not just NIR, but also their friends,

caused them daily anxiety that just wouldn't go away. Worried that their friends would feel burdened by their condition again, NIR decided to avoid the subject. I only found out about this relapse today. To the people of Kiwi Farms, this is a video game. That people on the other side of the screen or reel makes no difference. That a light and the kill counter going up just like an FPS player would. Lacking any empathy, they have no regard for the damage they inflict on others. So as you might have guessed, NIR committed suicide in June of 2021.

Kiwi Farms denied having anything to do with the suicide or of encouraging harassment against NIR. It's worth noting that NIR is the third person in recent years who's suicide has been blamed to some extent on relentless harassment from Kiwi Farms. So today we're going to talk about where Kiwi Farms comes from. They're not the primary subject of our episode though. We will be talking about their very first victim and not just their very first victim. They're going to be talking about the person I think is probably the first victim of concerted online harassment. Like the first person that this happened to in any kind of sizable way. And that person is a, I guess you'd call them an internet content creator named Chris Chan.

Or at least that's the name she kind of has picked for herself. The first victim of like gamified abuse. And cool. Yeah. Do you know anything about this person? No, I don't. I know a lot about people harassing people on the internet and it causing real life impacts and bomb threats and doxing and all that stuff. Chris Chan is where that playbook started getting sketched out for the first time. Chris Chan has been kind of continuously harassed for something like 20 years now. It has been going on a tremendously long time. And I should note Chris Chan is not a good person and not a sympathetic person.

Like they are to blame for not the harassment but for a lot of the unpleasantness in their life because they've made a lot of horrible choices. I should note here that recently since about 2017, we'll get into this, Chris Chan identifies as Christine as well as Chris Chan. They still use both names but they identify as Christine. Now they have transitioned. We'll be gendering her properly even when we discuss her early life. And when I read quotes from other people talking about her, I'm going to do my best to not misgender her even when they do. We will still call her Chris Chan as well as Christine because again, she still identifies as Chris Chan on social media. So I think that's fine.

But yeah, so she was born on, Christine Chandler was born on February 24, 1982 at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her father Bob worked as an engineer at Western Electric. He was apparently a very gifted one and he held patents for nine different inventions over the course of his career. He collected classic jazz music and stamps. Her mother Barbara was a secretary at Virginia Power. She and Bob both had estranged children from other marriages prior to getting together. Barbara is alleged to have been abusive and we know her 17 year old son, I think emancipated himself before Christine was born. Bob had two kids who were not really in his life.

So both of these people were fairly old when they had Christine and had kids that they had kind of either abandoned or who had been like, I don't want anything to do with you. So maybe not great parents, probably not. I don't know everything about their circumstances. But you know, like if you have three kids, none of them want anything to do with you. That's maybe not the best side. Bad side. Barbara was and is, she is still alive, a massive hoarder. Christine's childhood was always going to be challenging.

You know, this is a lot already we've discussed a significant amount to kind of go into as a baby. At one point, Bob built a workshop for him and his child to make things in together. He was very excited about like, oh, you know, we're going to have all these projects together. And they never got to use it because Barbara just like filled it up with junk. She just is this kind of like. That kind of breaks my heart. There's really something more than, you know, father, daughter, crafting time. Yeah.

Yeah. But Barbara just like can't not collect shit, which is a thing that Christine will inherit. It may be the wrong word, but we'll wind up doing as well, you know. Christine claimed years later that she spoke her first word monkey at two months old, which is likely not possible. She lies a lot about things, you know, she makes up a lot of stuff. I don't think kids can say speak at that at that early estate. I've known a couple of two month olds and sure. And they're so familiar with the concept of monkey that also making random noises.

Yeah. They like, I don't know. I'm not an expert in child speech development, but. Well, I am. Okay. No, I'm not. Well, that's your previous job before this. Yeah.

I'm an expert at shit talking little kids because they can't talk back. They don't know how to talk. It's real easy. Does that mean you use up your one lie on them like right away? Yeah. Immediately. Immediately. But you just have to like keep it going for the rest of your life.

I did have, I had a person who I very close to their uncle, the lie that he told her was that Star Trek, the next generation was real. Yeah. That was she was like six and that, which is a nice lie. I think if you get to believe for a while that all those people are really up there, that's not a mean one. I actually might prefer that to Santa Claus. Yeah.

Let's just convince little kids. That the Starship Enterprise is out there. And then at age 10, you sit them down and tell them that there's no joy in the world. And yeah, they have to, they have to. Yeah. There's no replicators. Yeah. There's nothing.

Sorry. That would break kids in an interesting new way. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we need more of. Yeah. Well, you're going to break them some way, right? That's what we do to kids.

Do you? That's what we do. Apparently, Sophie. I don't know. I don't have kids because it seems like it's easy to fuck that up. Yeah. Fair. So speaking of which, back to our story of Christine Chandler.

So Christine says that after speaking her first word at two months old, she did not say another word for six years. She does have autism. The medical papers are available online. She has posted a ton of her papers. She gets into these online arguments and will post things to prove stuff she's saying. So this is not a case of a self-diagnosis. Right.

This is someone who has a medical diagnosis. And that part is credible. The idea that maybe she didn't say anything until she was six. It is not uncommon for people with autism to have kind of a delay of when they start speaking when their kind of language abilities come in and stuff. That's not an uncommon thing. Now, obviously, we're not particularly good as a society at taking care of autistic children now, or any children, but particularly children with autism.

Yeah. And the mid-1980s were the fucking wild west for that. It was just an incredibly brutal time to be a kid with autism. It was not even added to the DSM until 1980. It was not until 1987 that the diagnostic criteria was expanded to allow a diagnosis of symptoms became apparent after 30 months of age. And most kids are over two years old when they are diagnosed. So a lot of, yeah, fucked up stuff kids are dealing with who are born around the time that Christine is.

Now, the papers that we have showing a diagnosis for her are from 2004. She claims to have been diagnosed for the first time at around age five or six. If so, this would have happened right around the earliest time that such a diagnosis would have been possible. Christine claims the doctor who diagnosed her was a speech therapist at James Madison University. This doctor told her parents she had high functioning, which is not a term we use anymore, autism, and would never make it to high school or even be able to write her own name. And of course, Christine went on to do both of these things. I don't know how accurate that is, but it's certainly not out of line with other stories you hear from kids who were, you know,

going through the education system with this at the same time. So when Christine was very young, she was placed alone with a babysitter. She describes as abusive, the specific abuse she discusses as being locked in her toy room after having all of the lights turned off. As an adult, she consistently describes this experience as traumatic. Her parents continued to use the babysitter after this point. Christine believes this is what gave her autism, which obviously is not the case. But I believe she had some traumatic experiences with adults locking her away, you know, and stuff. So in 1990 to 1991 school year, Christine's parents pulled her out of class for unknown reasons.

She claims now that she was forcibly restrained by the school principal in a quasi-sexual manner. She also claims the principal was homosexual and that this is what inspired Christine's decades-long homophobia. It is unclear exactly what happened here. Christine is very Christian and very has been, was for most of the time she was, people knew anything about her, incredibly bigoted against gay people. So hard to say if this is like what happened here exactly, but there was apparently a court case over the matter. However, the actual court case that we have documentation on was not based in any sort of assault and was instead the county trying to have Christine sent to a special school.

So some of what she's saying may have just been resentment over this whole thing she was going through with the school. It is very hard to say. Christine was homeschooled during the fifth grade because of all of this, whatever actually happened. She was being homeschooled for a year. The family eventually left their hometown and relocated to Richmond over this issue. In 1993, when Christine was 11, she entered a Sonic the Hedgehog contest at KB Toys and won a shopping spree. Local news coverage. Yeah, there's actually video footage of her in this.

That's the kind of thing that when I was 11 in 1993, I probably would have made up that I had done. No, no, we know this happened. That was my dream when I was 11. Who wouldn't have wanted a KB Toys shopping spree in 1993? And to have one Sonic the Hedgehog contest. Yeah, a one a Sonic the Hedgehog contest, the coolest kind of contest. Yeah, there's video of this. That's awesome.

Unfortunately, the video is mostly people making fun of her because she's kind of like an awkward nerdy kid winning a contest and very excited and very happy, but she's clearly overjoyed in the footage, which is great. It's nice to know that she had a nice moment in her life. This seems to have sparked a lifelong fascination with Sonic the Hedgehog. She will be obsessed with Sonic for the rest of her life up to the present day to a degree that becomes very problematic. I'm going to find out later, aren't I? Yeah, it's not great. I think maybe it has something to do with the fact that like in a really difficult and largely unpleasant childhood,

this is like a shining moment for her. And so she kind of latches on to this. It's pretty bleak, Margaret. There's not going to be a lot of happy moments in this story. This whole thing is kind of heartbreaking because she's so far a very easy self-insert character. Oh, God. At this point, she's nothing but a kid who's been unfairly harmed by every single person who should be taking care of her. Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. So in middle school, this will be the least surprising thing we say today. Christine had difficulty with bullies. Yeah. Not super surprising. And it was, you know, she has, for I think understandable reasons, a really, really, really aggressive temper. And the particular way that kids would fuck with her was by setting her off so that she would have these kind of emotional explosions

and then she would get in trouble. You know, I think if we haven't been that person in our childhoods, we knew a couple of kids who were dealing with versions of that. Yeah. The only kid who was worse bullied than me was the one that you could set off like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You either, like, react that way to try to scare people off or you develop the ability to just kind of turtle up and pretend you're not affected by it at all.

Yeah. Yeah. And Christine, you know, is the explosive type. She did have a very good teacher during this time who actually understood her and was able to help her get along in class with other kids. When she graduated middle school, this teacher wrote her a note. And again, the note, like, Christine posts the note later, like, this is the thing that we, like, you can see it. And the note says, quote, the most important parting words I can leave you with well are to always remember this. You show people where your weak points are located, then they will know how to push your button.

If you never show them, they will never know. Okay. And that's your teacher's advice, which I can't say is bad advice. No. Yeah. You got to be, like, next level to, like, I wouldn't have been able to do as a teenager, but, you know, my favorite trick is pretending to show people where my weak spots are and then just being like, just kidding. I'm completely untouchable. Fuck you.

Yeah. But that doesn't, like, showing your belly doesn't work in middle school. No. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. All the anti-bullying advice I ever got was entirely garbage. Yeah. I have literally never heard good advice for kids of that age on how to deal with bullying. No.

And I don't think it exists. Yeah. Yeah. I think the only actual thing to do is stop kids from bullying. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of on everyone but the child in that situation to figure out how to deal with it. Yeah.

I don't know. Yay. You know who doesn't? Bully. I don't feel confident answering this. You're not doing this right now. Am I not? I mean...

I mean, you can, but I'm just the horrible ad transition. Look, when... Kidnapped children and puts them on an island off the coast of Indonesia to be hunted by the global 1%. Wait, if I say... That's not bullying. Will it get censored? Yeah.

I mean, maybe. Maybe a half and a half on it. Oh, no. I'm saying this so that you can censor when I say... Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. We can bleep them this time.

Yeah. So obviously it's not bullying to hunt children for sport on an island off the coast of Indonesia. That's just, you know, it's not like it's not bullying to hunt a deer. You know, it's just... Well, if you're hunting children for food, I feel like there's a different set of ethics there. I mean, Elon Musk is definitely like a use every part of the child that you hunt with a bow off the coast of Indonesia on blue aprons.

Oh, my God, it probably would be. It's like... I take it back, hunting for sport is better. Yeah. Just be evil. Just admit you're evil. It's better. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Speaking of admitting you're evil... Just like the at... No, I mean, just like... You're semats. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. 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 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 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.

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Boy, howdy. Lots of good stuff is happening to our protagonist. This is real bad stuff. I think this is, I would not go into detail about someone experiencing something like

this if it was not necessary for understanding the whole story of why they become the person that this architecture of harassment gets built around. Unfortunately, it is kind of necessary, although it is quite bleak. Part of why I feel a little better about saying it is that we know most of this because Christine has repeatedly posted it and discussed it and provided original documents. Yeah. Which is going exactly against the teacher's advice. Oh, God, yeah.

She does not take one bit of this advice, which, you know, anyway, yeah. So Christine had a number of female friends as a child. Some of them were suddenly abusive. One early friend who lived nearby convinced her to crawl under the house into a heating duct and then locked her inside. Christine, again, this is pre-transition and stuff, and she's really desperate to be like, to have like a girlfriend, basically, a social kind. To date or to be one of the girls?

I think to date. To date. Oh, okay. I mean, maybe there is some of that, like, I'll say that as a trans girl who dates mostly women, it's blurry. The desire to be one of the girls and to date the girls is all confused up. Yeah. And I think at this period, it is really blurry because she definitely takes a lot of particular

joy in hanging out with groups of girls at the school, and some of it's also probably just that they're less likely, to the extent that they make fun of her or harass her, it's not obvious in the way that when boys do it, she knows what's being done. It's clear that someone's attacking her. And I guess if you don't know that people are making fun of you, that's a more pleasant situation than knowing. Yeah. Until you find out, right?

Right. Until you get locked in a heating duct. Yeah. Yeah. It's very sad. I know later that she had another female friend who her father paid to hang out with her in order to make her look normal, which is, oh boy, again, parents of the year here. Like, he tried, he tried, it's not how we should have tried.

It's not how we should have tried, I don't know, he seems like he's kind of like a weird engineering dude who was not at all prepared to have a kid with the kind of needs that Christine had and yeah, yeah, I guess he tried. He tried to solve it like an engineering problem. Yeah. Yeah. That said, you know, there is a lot of kind of mockery, but I think it does seem like Christine had actual friends who she called her gal pals and some of them did care about her.

And I think there were some who kind of recognized that she's being victimized and wanted to provide her with some support. So in high school, she does kind of build a little community for herself. It was in high school that Christine started developing an increasingly elaborate fantasy world. This started with a school project where she had to create cartoon characters for a story. The characters couldn't be copyrighted, so she merged some of her favorite characters together, creating a mix of Sonic and Pikachu called Sonichu.

She fell in love with this character and started incorporating it into a variety of cartoon art that she seemed to create almost like kind of compulsively. Christine graduated around 2000, and this seems to have been the beginning of a long downward slide for her. The group of friends she'd made in high school went their separate ways. Christine went to a local community college and started studying, but she grew increasingly lonely and aware of the fact that other people were partnering off. In her idiosyncratic diction, Christine calls this her love quest, dedicated to finding

a sweetheart. As she started flirting with women, she found out that they all had boyfriends. As a result, Christine became obsessed with what she called the quote, infinitely high boyfriend factor. She grew terrified of being confronted by the boyfriends of girls that she flirted with and decided to instead create a special method to flirt only with boyfriend-free girls. This is like the diction she uses to discuss this. The end result of this idea was a sign that Christine created and would carry out in public

that said, I am a 21-year-old single male seeking an 18-21-year-old single female companion. This is like a sign that she will walk around with at school and stuff. It's an interesting call. Other variations of the sign read, I am seeking a boyfriend-free girl. You get the logic here. She doesn't want to upset anybody, but she's very, very lonely. In her mind, this is the logical way to go about doing that. I wish better dating advice had been made available to her.

Yeah, I do. You also have to wonder if online dating had existed more in its present form, would maybe that have been a little easier, or would people have just picked out her profile and made fun of it on Twitter? Probably the latter. God, I'm trying to figure out, is it better that I got my youth over with before the internet or is it? Oh, definitely.

Definitely. The internet's a nightmare. Chris Chan would sit, and she starts going increasingly by Chris Chan in this period of time, would sit around holding or stand around holding the sign on her college campus, which did not go over well. The dean ordered her to stop doing this, as she considered this behavior, technically soliciting sex, which I guess it kind of is. Not in that way.

Yeah. Like this. I don't know. Yeah. Also, it's definitely weird. I can't say that it's inherently any more harmful than the other ways people flirt on college campuses. No, it's substantially better than most of the things that come as romance and sex on

college campuses. It's not the worst way people are going about doing this within the context of a community college. Yeah. If this was a rom-com movie, she would be a side character, and then she'd find the other really nerdy girl. Yeah, there'd be another kid with a sign. Yeah.

And it'd be perfect. And that's the end, and nothing bad happens from here on, and that's the end of the show. So thanks for coming on, and happily ever after, that's the name of the show, right? Yep. This is the story of a weird person who everything ended well for. Hooray. Welcome to behind the basically nice weird people, a podcast that shouldn't exist. So after the Dean shuts down her love quest, Christine becomes obsessed with the Dean whose

name is Mary Lee Walsh and starts writing the Dean into an increasingly elaborate comics as the bad guys. Christine slandered the Dean via an animated newsletter she distributed and was eventually expelled for a year. And it's like when I say this, a lot of it's like weird and violent stuff happening to this character, to this Dean character who has the exact name of the real Dean, really specifically violent stuff. So maybe don't email that to random people at your college because Columbine happened.

This is post Columbine, so no excuses. People are not chill about that kind of thing. So Christine graduates in 2006 with an associates degree. She was briefly employed by a Wendy's for like three months, but could not get along with her manager or coworkers. So she fell increasingly further into her fantasy world, building an elaborate fantasy city named after her initials, which CWC will or quickville is usually how she'll pronounce it.

And she put starts putting like these drawings and stories on her MySpace and her personal website. In October of 2007, one user of the Something Awful forums brought up Christine, Chris Chan at this point, do during a thread about a separate online creator. During this time, goons would regularly find people making things online who are like weird or the stuff they're making is funny bad and then would just like put up threads to marvel at it. Sometimes it was mean and mockering.

Sometimes it was like legitimately like amazed and fascinated. You can see both in the original thread with people discovering Chris Chan's peculiar art style and her bizarre way of phrasing things. In short order, a new thread was made by a goon who lived in Charlottesville and claimed to have seen her around. Quote, this person used to leave business cards at my school's library where they would hang out for hours looking for a boyfriend free girl. This is how I first learned of them.

From here, I developed something of it's, it's, it's, this is the point of which is hard not to laugh. Well, that's the thing though, that's why people start being fascinated because it's so bizarre and like the ways of the idiosyncratic way she phrases things is just so like you kind of have to pay attention. It's just like so what? Um, and it's like not, there's a mix of like just people being mean and people just marveling at life.

Well, that's weird. Right. You know? And this is a different time in the internet when you start making fun of someone or even just like comment marveling at somebody on a website. The idea is not that this is going to like bleed into the real world, right? Right. Everyone knows that now.

This is 2007. So people are just like, Hey, here's this website where when we see something different, we like post it to be like, what's going on here? You know? Yeah. Um, some of it's mean spirited, but it's not all mean spirited. Um, so yeah, uh, to continue that quote, this is how I first learned of them. From here, I developed something of an obsession culminating last summer when I made a special

trip to a gaming store and local hangout where they would had posted they would be. They were every bit as, and then they use an offensive slayer for autistic people as I had imagined. Um, so this is what's interesting about this is that this is kind of the first piece of evidence you have. And one of the first ones I remember from that period of time of someone not just being like, Oh, look at this weird person that we're like talking about on the internet, but like going to see them exactly, exactly that's, that's an escalation.

Right? Yeah. It's like a huge violation. It's disgusting. Yeah. It's, it's like a, it's a whole thing that this is, this is like the first sign we get of like where things are going to go for the internet. So goons, which is what you call people on the forum this time quickly fell in love with

Christine, particularly the music videos that she had posted for a per rapper, the rapper contest, which is a rap video game. So she does it post a video where she's doing a rap and people make fun of it, right? By this point, most of her comics focused around her quest for a boyfriend free girl and included strange and unintentionally revealing sexual fantasies, along with lines like these as the sign off on her website, enjoy, learn and stay straight. And then in all caps, I am serious. She isn't like, huh, gay people.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so out of character for everything else that's happening about her life. That she's like deeply homophobic. Um, yeah. I mean, she's, you know, raised by these arch boomers. Oh yeah. No, totally.

And it was like, and it has decided to blame homosexuality for some of the trauma or whatever. It's just, it's just so interesting because like other than that thing, you're, you're sort of describing my friend group in high school. Yeah. You know, like people who are deeply weird, who fall into their own fantasy worlds and do kind of interesting stuff. And sometimes it's really cringy and sometimes it's really awesome. And sometimes you can't tell which of the two is happening and yeah, but I was definitely

a weird kid who drew a lot of comics in high school. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah. Like there's again, everything about her is just like one degree kind of off from a million other people. And as a result, she winds up being a spectacle for the internet. Right.

Um, so goons quickly latched onto the fact that Christine had lost a PlayStation rapping contest and made a fake winner page for herself on the website, along with a somewhat unhinged rant about the injustice of the fact that they were the real winner or, and like, so she calls the real winner, the X winner, um, and accuses her of violating rules that existed only in her own head. Um, she also mentioned going through quote, lonesome depression. And some goons in these original threads did make a note of the fact that she was dealing with some serious mental health issues.

One user called Jocamo posted, I understand that Mary Lee Walsh was some sort of administrator at the community college she attended and that she had her expelled, but what was it she did to cause that? Also, does anyone else think that a no contact order might be a good thing for her to have? I don't want to be a person who says, oh shit, she drew a picture, lock her up. But she does seem to have a pretty focused animus towards her sustained over a period of time. She seemed to have a hard time letting go if she sees herself as unfairly thwarted.

Maybe she will stick with making silly videos and comics for revenge, which is like not an unreasonable, when you look at like good grief obsession over this person, not an unreasonable like fear to have. Um, and yeah, it's, it's worth noting that like, if someone were on the internet doing this stuff, if you just like suddenly became aware of someone posting and saying a lot of the same things that Chris Chan was posting in this period today, you would think they were like in cell adjacent, right? There's a lot of violent fantasies about harm coming to her enemies.

There's a lot of obsession with sex. It does feel in cell adjacent. Yeah. It is. Yeah. And it is. Um, but that wasn't a thing back then. Again, this is 2007 or so.

And this is the only example of that concern that I found. Other posters did note that Christine engaged in some semi stalkery behavior. And this is from someone who apparently lived in the area. They found this out by stalking her. No, no, I think they just went to the, well, she's, she's, she's show. Yeah. The size of this are stalkers so far. Yeah.

Sure. This is someone who just says that like, I have seen her around campus. I thought she was just, I just thought she was in an anime club or something. I never saw her with signs. I learned a lot more about her when she messaged my sister on MySpace and invited her out for a soda. She, she declined and she became increasingly more harassive towards her until she blocked her.

Uh, uh, yeah. So. Okay. Yeah. You know, that's, that's where this story's going. That's why she's found it. Right. Yeah.

So be less creepy and you'll do much better. That's my dating advice to lonely listeners. Speaking of advice that like never helps anybody be less creepy, doesn't seem to work much either. Huh. Huh. Yeah. Okay.

Fine. Yeah. I think honestly, I think both with dealing with bullies and not being creepy, the best thing that works is having good role models, like people that you admire who like are better at handling those situations than you that you then like can see like, Oh, that's a better way to do things than the way my brain is telling me to do things. And then you become a better person. No, that's true.

That's part of cognitive behavioral therapy actually is modeling. Yeah. That's, so that's what everyone, that'll solve all problems. I'm glad we figured that out. No, I'm going to crowdfund a thing where we do just that and ignore all the possibilities for dealing with these problems because that's how we solve problems. It is actually a good solution. I'm not trying to minimize that.

Yeah. I've just, yeah. All of these things are like, I do think part of why she's having so much trouble is that her parents seem to be completely withdrawn from the world. You know, her dad is retired pretty early on in her life. Her mom is this like hoarder who hides at home. I don't think she gets any kind of adult modeling of like how to be in the world. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think anyone, I don't think she has anyone who like she can look at and be like, oh, this is like how you deal with a conflict. Yeah. Like this is how you negotiate like when you're having a disagreement with a person, you know? This is how you approach someone that you're interested in in a way that's like not threatening or kind of harassing. I don't think that exists for her at all, which doesn't excuse the fact that she is

now stalking people and doing some like really gross shit. But it's also, it's hard to see how this person could have easily learned like good ways to deal with stuff either. Yeah. Cause when your friends are in high school, you're all making terrible decisions and doing things terribly. But if you stay friends with them, then at some point you can be like, oh, that's how you date.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. And also like, I think if you, like everyone's going to be a shitty person at a certain point in their life, cause it's hard to be a person who's not shitty. It's a learning process for all of us. And I think the fact that Christine is going through these learning processes and posting everything that she is experiencing online and it is increasingly being consumed by

people who are now obsessed with her makes it kind of impossible for her to change in positive ways. Speaking of death spirals. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of death spirals. Well, the thing that commenters and it's just something awful right now that's kind of obsessed with it.

But the thing commenters are particularly delighted by is her sauna chew medallion. This is like a medallion she's made out of some sort of like, well, it's one of those kind of plateaus that you can like fire in an oven to actually harden it. She makes like a medallion shaped like the, yeah, Sculpey, something like that. She makes a medallion shaped like the face of this cartoon character she's created and she wears it everywhere. Especially while dressed as Ash Ketchum from Pokemon, like she's like wearing specifically that outfit, like the striped shirt and everything.

So goons are endlessly entertained by this. And they also find her MySpace page, which is filled with entries like this. To those who are reading this today, I was at the new Target store across from Forest Lakes just hanging around, not bothering anyone. And from out of the blue, these two jerks asked me to leave because they said that I was loitering. I was not. They were hoping to find an 18 to 23 year old boyfriend free girl like I usually do.

I think that's loitering. That is loitering. I'm pro loitering. But that is definitely loitering. Then from out of the blue, after I told them off, they came back with two cops. I was slightly intimidated, but mostly annoyed and ready to strike back on them. They asked me to leave and never return. I did not want to leave.

I would have left peacefully. In fact, I was ready to go, but I had one thing to say to them. During the middle of my speech, they chased me, pulled my pants and pinned me to the floor. As I struggled, they handcuffed my wrists and legs and they hogtied me. Not only did I feel humiliated from being the victim, but I was angry at them. Not only for handcuffing me, but for once again, thwarting my efforts and trying to find a boyfriend free girl. They drove me to the county jail, but fortunately, they did not keep me there.

I was released to my family. That's heartbreaking, I gotta admit. That's yeah. Heartbreaking. Fuck the cops. Definitely not making this situation better. I should note that I have edited this slightly. For example, she never says cops.

She calls them jerk-ops. She has different little terms like this for people that she dislikes. If you read it all this way without being completely up to date on your Chris Chan lore, it sounds like nonsense, so I'm altering it somewhat for this to be understandable. Yeah, that's a bleak story, right? Yeah. Obviously, a discussion should be had about when it is appropriate to walk around asking random people if they are boyfriend-free girls.

That's certainly not ideal behavior, but I think being tackled and hogtied is not gonna make that situation any better. No, because she would have left. Based on the way that her mental state was working, she just had to call them jerk-ops probably first. Yeah, she had to say some shit, because that's kind of what's going on with her. But of course, they're cops, so obviously they use egregiously excessive force on a mentally ill person.

You know who isn't a cop unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again advertising on the show, in which case? Definitely cops. Definitely cops. Do you think they do it ironically? Do you think that they're just like, I don't know, they're spending so much money. I know, but they get so much of it. Yeah, it's really weird.

Just like hate advertising. Anyway, yeah, here's the Washington State Highway Patrol to tell you how to bully people who can't fight back. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with 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 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. Ah, that was some great tips from the Washington State Highway Patrol on how to be brutally cruel to people who don't have the ability to fight back. I love it. Do you?

No. Me either. It was probably just ads for other podcasts. Well, like the newest show on our network, the Washington State Highway Patrol Cast. That's why you hired me. Yeah, that's actually a leak, that's Margaret's podcast. Every week, a new Washington State Highway Patrol officer talks about their job while Margaret tells them in recently elaborate ways they can fling themselves off the top

of a building. But here's the thing, I can't even take this bit seriously because they suck so much. Listen to our It Could Happen Your episode on the Washington State Patrol. There are like three episodes on the Chicago PD or the two behind the bastards as we did on Border Patrol. All we're saying is that. Or our entire series called Behind the Police. Every city in America you could dedicate weeks and weeks and content and not hit the bottom.

Every city in America has a bunch of dudes with guns who would see a kind of weird kid with a sign and a medallion that they clearly made themselves and decide hog tying is the right answer to this problem. So yeah, obviously something awful in 2007, compassion is not at the top of anyone's list and when people start finding this stuff out, reading these stories, there's this kind of like awe at her peculiarities in particularly her quest for a boyfriend-free girl. On MySpace, Chris Chan wrote in detail about her desire to find a quote, soulmate slash soul lover slash mother of future daughter, who she would name Crystal.

Christine's requirements for her girlfriend were specific and deeply offensive, stating that she must be white or sometimes white bodied and normal sized to thin. Real ugly women need not apply, nor should the quote low functionally mentally handicapped or autistic people, although quote, I myself am high functionally autistic, but that's beside the point. Yeah, there goes my like shred of, she's not a good person. She does fall into my category of like, well, how could she have been much better than this? But not a, just, I think there's a lot of blame.

She has to be hearing this from her dad and her mom, right? Like I don't think she would have picked up from fucking Sonic video games saying shit like this about people who aren't, you know. Yeah, cause then you're supposed to be blue in that game, I think. Yeah. It's been a long time. There's gotta be a lot of racism she was encountering as a kid. And she just didn't like it over it.

Yeah. I mean she's an adult now, but. Yeah, she should have at this point. Oh, that gets messy. I don't know how to say. Yeah. I am not enough of an expert to opine about. This is part of why people get obsessed with her cause it's this mix of like, this is what

stops you when you, when you start like making fun of her and you start like these, even these harassment campaigns, she'll always say or do something really awful that makes it easy to keep going cause then you don't have to feel as bad, you know. If she weren't a person with some really fucked up, unpleasant things that she was doing and saying, it would have been a harder for so many people to, to keep this up, you know. Which gets into really dark stuff about the ways that we choose to make people to demonize based on. Yeah.

Yeah. This is Kiwi Farms and when we talk about like that kind of harassment is mostly a bunch of terrible people picking people who are generally not terrible and harassing them. But there is in the germs of the Christian, in the Christian story, there are the germs of like every time you get people forming Twitter mobs over some like stupid bullshit to like destroy a person's life because like they didn't quite phrase something the way you liked it or because like, like the same, like all of it has its genesis here. You can see every piece of it here and some of it is just that like, oh well, she's racist.

So let's, let's keep making fun of her, you know. Right. Yeah. Which for some people is perfect. I'm like, they're, that's easy to justify and not necessarily in a bad way. I mean, like sometimes it, but you can't make fun of someone for like the sonic Pikachu. You have to make fun of them for being white supremacists. But it all just kind of blurs together for Christine and more than anything, what people

are laughing at is the fact that she's different, you know, like the, the fact that she's racist and stuff is a part of it, but it's, it's not the primary thing that she gets harassed over. Yeah. So once this is posted, a goon decided to reach out to Chris Jan writing quote, I just sent a little message to her on Myspace. Nothing mean I'm genuinely curious on what she thinks about some things. Hopefully she'll reply pretty soon, although I have no ideas of time zones or anything.

So this was immediately followed up by another goon expressing what a bad idea this was. And quite by accident, summing up the next 14 years of Christine's life. I know this is something awful, but at the end of the day, she does have a disability. I took a quick glance at this and immediately felt sorry for her. It's a words and all window into her lonely life. Her childish innocence clashes with her misguided attempts of acting grown up so badly it's disturbing and sad. Unfortunately, she can post on the internet, which means she can be ridiculed.

Yeah. That's heartbreaking. Yep. Yeah. There's people who get what's going on. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Pretty bleak. So this is like before troll culture really solidified the birth of troll culture. And so you can see how like some of the people involved in the birth of troll culture weren't necessarily coming at it. They were coming at it from like, look at this person. This is weird. This is interesting. This is strange.

She has all these elaborate comics and people like just want to read them and like, you know, you can discuss like whether or not it's cool to do that, but it's not harassment to like finds this person's posted their weird comics. Let's like laugh at them. You know? Right. That's not necessarily abusive or harassing. It's just like consuming someone's content maybe in a way they wouldn't like, but they

put it out there and you have a right to like feel how you do about it. Then it starts to expand to like, well, let's reach out to her in person. I want to talk to her, you know, I want to like see her. And there are people who were into the ground floor of this where you're just like marveling at this person's kind of weird behavior who are like, well, this is a disabled person. You shouldn't be like reaching out to them and like finding them in the real world and like, yeah, we could do a lot of damage here. There's like that.

You see that post someone being like, we could really do some damage here. This is a person who should not be fucked with, you know? So folks are aware of what some folks at least are aware of what could happen and it keeps happening. While there were more something awful threads about Christine over the years, it was 4chan where following her would develop into a subculture. And being 4chan, people immediately took things way too far. Now Encyclopedia Dramatica was new back then and Anans created a page for her.

Chris Chan found out about her Encyclopedia Dramatica page and if you know anything about this person, the worst thing that could happen is that she become aware that she has a page on ED because she's not going to handle that well. I think she finds out because of one of her stalkers emails her about it and this is going to be the first time where she really fails to follow the good advice her middle school teacher gave her. Instead of ignoring the trolls, Christine starts making dozens and dozens of corrections to the Encyclopedia Dramatica page, which is not a good call.

Obviously, if you know anything about this particular stream of the internet, this is the best thing you could have done for the folks making fun of her on 4chan. They're over the moon about this stuff. Because now they get to make fun of her attempts at defending herself and what she says and all this stuff. They found it hilarious like every defense she has. She would respond to incorrect claims about, for example, her sexuality by providing evidence to prove them wrong, so people would joke that she was gay or I think asexual and so

she would provide evidence of her sexual fantasies to 4chan in order to... Yeah. Fuck. Yeah, that's bad. It's comprehensively bad because some of the evidence, she has a female friend at this point, one of her few people that she actually can hang out with and be social with. And the evidence she provides to 4chan to show that she's straight is pornographic drawing she's made of this friend of hers.

That was probably really good for the friendship. Yeah, it does not go over well because Christine had previously expressed romantic interest in this person and the friend had very gently been like, I don't see you that way, but I want to be your friend and of course she's rightly horrified when she finds out that her friend has provided pornography that she drew of them to thousands of strangers. That's a thing you should be angry about. Bob's Burgers says this. Bob's Burgers has erotic friend fiction, Louise, I think is...

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Erotic friend fiction is not a winner in social circles. Don't post it online, you know, whatever you're going to do, certainly don't hand it to 4chan to prove that you're straight. And yeah, Christine loses this friend forever and of course it is the funniest thing that these people who are now stalking her have ever experienced and all of the terrible things only kind of escalate from there. But you know what doesn't escalate from here, Margaret, the episode because this is the

end of part one and it's, yeah, time for your plugables. How are you feeling, Margaret? It's not that I feel like I got tricked into coming on to whatever. It's fine, it's fine. It's not like this is really close to home, someone exactly my age who from the same part of the world. Weird, shitty behavior from classmates and like... Here's the thing, you can find literally there's probably more...

We're building this. There's probably more written about Christine than any other figure in history, in terms of biographical information. I doubt there is more biographical information about people like fucking Hitler out there. The degree to which people obsess over her life is insane and nearly all of what you're going to find is like really grossly voyeuristic and mocking. And I think this is an important story because it is kind of foundational to why the internet is the way that it is and why internet culture is the way that it is.

But it's also really, it was really important to me in telling this story, you have to get into an uncomfortable level of detail and I didn't want to just like make fun of this person because I don't think that's good. I do think this story is important because it builds to everything we're dealing with right now. No, totally. I don't think you're making fun of her. And then yet also the whole racist homophobic thing is not a good look for anybody regardless

of what they're dealing with. I wanted someone else who I felt like would kind of identify with the being harassed and made fun of. I was a weird kid who drew cartoons who had the cartoons taken away from me from a kid in class who would read them and shit. I get it. I get some of the shit that she must have been going through. And so I have actually a lot of compassion for this person who is not a good person.

I think you have to approach in a complex way. And it's unfortunate that like this should never have been a person who like needed to be a figure of kind of national attention. That is where this story ends. It ends with her on Tucker Carlson as a heads up. Oh, God. Yeah. I think like this is blown up to the point and again it's so foundational to like internet

culture that I think you have to get into it. But like it would be really easy to do that and just be like another two hours of people making fun of this person on the internet. There's a documentary series that's like a couple hundred hours in length on YouTube that you can find. It's fucking crazy how much shit there is about this person. I mean, which is, which is anyway, yep, I don't even know to, well, we'll explain all of that in part two, Margaret.

But for now, you got to plug anything. Well, I have a show coming out. I don't know whether I don't know whether it's announced yet. Is it announced yet? Can I can I announce it or no? We can. Yeah. Let's do it.

Let's fuck our corporate overlords. Let's do it. Literally, they have no say in this. What are you talking about? Well, let's pretend like we're sticking it to the man by me. All right. We're signing it. Fuck the man.

Yeah. That's why I'm signing a contract to do it. Yeah. Well, I have a new podcast coming out called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff and Cool People Did Cool Stuff is about, well, it's about cool people who did cool stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so people who like behind the bastards but don't like the bastards, you know, I'm

really, I'm workshopping the how to pitch this, but yeah. But yeah, so I have a new podcast coming out on May 2nd on Cool Zone Media. And other than that, you can find me on Twitter at magpiekilljoy or Instagram at Margaret Killjoy on Twitter. I stir up fights that I now feel slightly more guilty for stirring up after listening to this episode and on Instagram, I talk about how much I love my dog. Oh, that sounds much better than literally anything we've talked about today. Go find a dog.

Margaret's dog is exceptionally beautiful. Your dog is good. Your dog is good. Exceptionally beautiful inside and out. Oh my gosh. Thanks. Well, this has been fun. I'm glad we got to throw in a little middle finger to our corporate overlords.

Take that. Yeah, the man. The people who give us money whenever we ask and let us do whatever we want, that'll teach you, that'll learn you. All right, go hug a dog. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The 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 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts.