Behind the Bastards - Part One: Blue Dawn: A Right Wing Fantasy of Leftist Revolution

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Robert sits down with Garrison to read through a brand new novel that fantasizes about the aftermath of an Antifa revolution in ... 2021.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What hasn't slept in days, my host of this podcast. It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast hosted by a man who is just an absolute wreck of a human being. And as we always do whenever I'm a wreck of a human being, we're doing a book episode, everybody. You know, we actually don't do these all that often anymore because for a long time I couldn't find any good books for us to do.

It's harder than you would expect, but the audience loves a books episode. It lets us get by with a little bit less research one week and we don't have to do a rerun, so it keeps the new content flowing. And I know all you maniacs love that, but I finally found a fresh, you know like in the movie Fury Road,

how a Morton Joe lives in that Citadel where there's all that water, you know, inside the big rock. I found the book equivalent of that. And to pour it, I'm just gonna splash it all over our guests today. Garrison Davis. Garrison, how are you doing? I'm tired, but it all over our guest today garrison Davis garrison. How are you doing? I'm tired, but hanging in there Wow

Yeah, this is the day after both the Union negotiated its contract and Donald Trump got convicted of 34 felonies It was a crazy night for a lot of people. It was a crazy day in there I also got to take some of our co-workers to Waffle House for the first time. So it was really just a whole bunch of W's as they say. Yeah, this is actually now for the first time Donald Trump can truly have the Waffle House experience which is eating at a Waffle House as a convicted felon. Wow. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding.

We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games. And then, a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause, lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others forever. Rippling out for generations.

Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me.

I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fischer. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. All right, Garrison, you're ready to warm this open the fuck up? I always am. Okay. So, what? This is Behind the Bastards.

This is Behind the Bastards. The show that we're doing. Yes, it is Behind the Bastards. It's a book episode and I'm going to tell you what book it's about. But there's a lot of setup that we need for this, guys. So you know, Garrison, being a victim of state repression is a terrible thing. You know, having to force it. Oh really state repression is a terrible thing, you know, having the force of- Oh, really?

Yeah. You don't say. Yeah, yeah, very frightening, having the force of a nation's legal system and law enforcement arms brought down on your head, just for, say, speaking your mind or lifting your voice in protest. Or doing 34 counts of financial fraud.

Yes. It sucks actually being oppressed, but pretending to be a victim of censorship is great because you get all of the benefits of being a victim. You get that sympathy. You get to feel like a hero. You get to make like grand speeches about how you won't be silenced, but you don't actually have to face any consequences for any of your shitty behavior, right? And in the long list of fake victims in this country,

I think probably the fakest and one of my favorite is a guy named David Thomas Roberts. Now, David wrote a book back in 2012 called Patriots of Treason. And the plot of this book, this is not the book we're covering this week. Okay, okay. But you need to hear about it to get to that book.

The plot of this book is that an unhinged Barack Obama stand-in president. Many such cases. Yeah, it's one of those, it's like one of those right wing, this is what Obama's right about to do books because he publishes it right before he gets reelected. I'm like, I think we've seen this film before.

Got it, got it, got it. It's almost the Ben Shapiro story. His not Barack Obama stand in is Tyrell Johnson and is also a black president. Ooh, don't like that. No, it's really not great. Now, the plot of the book is that an Iranian American student,

like because Tyrell Johnson is unpopular, he attacks Iran. That's actually suggested as like, this is what the evil Democrat will do is bomb Iran. Of course. He's not popular. And so he bombs Iran and this Iranian American student who is both angry that his sister died in the attack and also loves the founding fathers of the United States and the Tea Party, carries out an assassination attempt against evil Obama.

And because they find some like Tea Party literature in his house, they use it as an excuse to arrest conservatives en masse. It's very funny. Very, very scary. I love conservative alternate histories that are exactly the opposite of what happened in real life. My favorite detail about the book, which I got from a Texas monthly review of it, is that the fake president in the book, Tyrell Johnson, was originally just named Barack Obama, and they did a find and replace.

And you can tell this because each chapter starts with an epigraph, and one of them is a real quote from Rick Perry about Barack Obama. But in the Perry quote in the book, Obama's name is replaced with President Johnson. Oh, that's funny. That's funny.

He's just got a call of Obama. That's pretty good. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. It's a perfect snapshot of the kind of mania among conservatives that existed around Obama in this period. This fear that like one of like a pretty milk toast liberal president was going to like become a dictator and massacre everybody to the right of, I don't know, fucking John McCain. Yeah, very, very funny. Now,

the reality is that in 2009, a Homeland Security analyst named Darryl Johnson wrote a report titled Right-Wing Extremism about the danger of groups like the Oath Keepers and other militias. And once the paper got out, it went viral among people like Alex Jones and also more mainstream right-wing commentators

who complained they were being persecuted. Johnson was forced out of his job and the report was retracted by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Again, the exact opposite of the right-wing fiction. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like a perfect opposite. So if the plot of this book I've described

sounds like the result of Chad GPT gobbling up like a hundred hours of Fox News and spitting out a novel, that is what Roberts has laid out as his creative process. He described how he gets his ideas this way in an interview with blaze media I watch Fox News get mad can't sleep then I turned the TV off and wrote my first book We're like in so many layers of like fiction it's like yeah, she's based on fiction based on Whoa of like fiction. It's like fiction based on fiction based on, whoa. Yeah, no, the guys in the fucking Plato's cave

are writing stories about the shadows on the walls. About the shadows, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good, that's good. The publisher that he uses for this is like a vanity press, like one of those places where you pay at least some of what it costs to get your book published. And the fact that he had no trouble getting published through this press or starting his own vanity press,

and the fact that he gets interviewed by like Texas Monthly as well as the Blaze, does not seem to have done anything to convince this guy that he is not in fact oppressed. And he said this to Texas Monthly, for a long time, the left was the champion of free speech. Look at the McCarthy era and the protesters in the 60s and the Vietnam era, but today I the 60s and the Vietnam era.

But today I think it's mostly the conservative voices that are silenced. Now, the specific act of persecution he claims to have endured is that his vanity publisher, AKA publishing, didn't display his book prominently at a 2012 event. And again, this is a vanity, this is not a real publisher.

2012. He's early, yeah. Yeah, he This is not a real publisher. 2012. He's early, yeah. Yeah, he's really, he's really on it. He's on the cusp of things. Yeah, he's cusp. And he's going to, because of this horrible, the horrible cruelty of not being as prominently featured as he thinks he should have been at one of their events,

he founds his own publishing company, Defiance Press. And I think these guys are going to be the host of a lot of our future book episodes, Garrison. One of their took. I'm gonna stay clean. Uh-huh, yeah. I'm sure if I look into Defiance Press, I'll get too excited.

So I'll keep myself in the dark. So they'll be more More interesting when I get surprised. Yeah. Yeah, you might yeah, I will see how surprised you are There's at least one surprising title in here, but it is a vanity press you you have to pay some of the costs They call it hybrid publishing Which is again just not a real publisher, you know? Like it's a vanity press. It's a one step above like Amazon, like Tindall Publishing or whatever. Yeah, they just mad mend the title.

Right. Yeah. Now their top titles, like the book, Texas, make the case for like, that makes the case for Texas Secession and it's sold about 10,000 copies, which is like not bad for a real book. But you know, that's that's kind of the best any of their things do.

Most of their products are nonfiction. But there are books. Well Texas Monthly describes it as like books that stretch that definition with titles like Corona, fascism, Trump and the Resurrection of America and hunt it, kill it and drag it home, which is apparently a self help book. So that that all sounds like a lot of fun. Are they talking about like dating or like going like hunting for food? I think they're talking about how hunting for food is like a metaphor for how you should handle everything in life. Totally. That seems yeah, it seems healthy.

Yeah, like, you know, in relationships, just like in hunting, sometimes you have to smother your body in deer urine so that you smell like deer piss. I have been hearing this actually. I have been here. I am currently soaking a pack of zins in a whole bunch of venison blood right now. Oh, there you go. You'll like this. They have a young adult book called Looks Like a Cheetah to Me that's apparently an anti-trans fairy tale. Of course.

I'm sure that one's great. Oh my God, man. As soon as you said that, I'm like, okay, I can see what there is. They're like, how could we do attack helicopter but legally distinct? Yeah. So that article in Texas Monthly on Defiance Press

included so many different book summaries that I felt were perfect possible subjects for Behind the Bastards book episodes. And I want to read you a quote about one of them that we're not covering this week, but we may in the future, probably later in the year from Texas Monthly. Chadwick Bicknell's 2022 novella, An American Carol, reimagines Ebenezer Scrooge as Alex Le DuMasse, a militant gay lefty who has sworn off attending a 4th of July party with his relatives because many of them support a Trumpian president.

After visits from George Washington, the ghost of America's past, Marilyn Monroe, the ghost of bizarrely America's present, and death, which apparently is what the near future, the near future holds for us if we don't watch out. Lydia Moss realizes the right is more tolerant than the left, recognizes the Trumpish commander in chief has actually made America great again and is spiritually reborn as a docile gay Republican.

That sounds amazing. I think we're going to have to get into that one. That sounds, that could be on my top 10 list of this year to be honest. That is, Steppenwolf's been pretty good, but. Steppenwolf's a fine novel, but Hesse could never. Alex Lid DuMasse. That's, that's, that's, that's stunning. Now there are a lot of hideous books these people have put

out, but the one we're going to actually do in this episode or maybe episodes, we'll see how it goes, is a little title named Blue Dawn and the author Blaine Lee Pardo is best known for according to his Wiki, his battleTech and MechWarrior novels. Now, there's maybe some easy, cheap jokes I can make about it, but from my reading of his books, he's actually kind of competent technically as a writer. He's not like Ben Shapiro.

He knows, like I wouldn't call him a good, I don't think his book is good, but like his sentences are structured well, and his chapters are, he understands the flow that a book is supposed to have, as opposed to a Ben Shapiro, who does not understand how you are actually supposed to structure things happening in a chapter.

Because he's a workman-like writer, right? He's a guy who's gotta put out genre fiction for a living. He also seems to have had some kind of real career as a military historian. So I was interested, you know, in Blue Dawn. Part of me was like, if this is just going to be kind of like slightly right-wing, mediocre fiction, this might not work for us because there won't be much to make fun of. And I was very wrong because Garrison, this is a right-winger writing a novel about like,

what if all of our anarchist dreams came true? Like he is like envisioning an alternate modern day if like the Antifa from Fox News was real. And it's fascinating to see what he thinks was just about to happen in 2020. Because there's a lot of courage that you have to have to write near future speculative science fiction. Right? Totally.

Like if it's really close. And he publishes this in July of 2021, and it opens with a fictionalized version of a coup in 2020. But it's a completely different coup than the one that we got. Okay, all right. Yeah, running something that gets that is like talking about like 2026 is oddly like harder than going to like 2052. Yes, you have a lot more like, um, runway. And he doesn't give

himself any runway. So this comes out months after an actual coup attempted by his people. And he's writing, like the whole book opens with like the Antifa coup that takes the White House and the Capitol building. God, that'd be so cool. It's fascinating. I'm gonna read, first I'm gonna read you a summary

of the book that I got on the Defiance Press website. And then we'll get into the actual text itself. Sounds good. Almost five years ago, America as everyone knew it came to an abrupt end in a spectacular coup d'etat. It was called the liberation by those progressives and radicals that screamed for its outcome. The fall by its victims whose freedoms were trampled.

The White House and Capitol were overrun by anarchists and the leaders of the once proud nation were either imprisoned or sent to social quarantine camps. The president was arrested and eventually died in prison, or so everyone was led to believe. America was rebooted in a new progressive socialist image. New America. The United States of old was gone, its history erased and rewritten, its icons destroyed.

By the time people tried to organize resistance, it was too late. How is New America spelled? One word or two words? It's one word, just New America. And everyone calls it that. Everyone calls it that without being like, that's the stupidest, it's been five years.

Like you're not kidding everyone. Like everyone buys into this entirely new Orwellian language, which like works in 1984, cause it's been generations since the government got in place. They're talking like that and it's literally been five years. I don't think new America is gonna catch on. I'm gonna be real.

I don't. I think that Gavin Newsom should use that as his campaign slogan and ruin it for them. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you Give him ideas So he's like, oh yeah, he's like cool he's like putting more hair gel on his hair he's like, yeah noose to new America That's the one they do but Gavin Newsom allied with the fucking anarchists is exactly like the level of politics

that this book is capable of. Yeah. I am ready to hear like what his version of like the utopian dystopia is, absolutely. Well, Garrison, we'll take that little journey together into New America. But first, we'll take that little journey together into new America. But first, let's take a journey into the products and services that support this podcast.

And it's not Gavin Newsom's hair gel. We don't know that. We don't know what brand he uses. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, first-hand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left

behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath.

Financial betrayal. This is not even the part, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.

A backpack that contained a bomb. While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect, a serial bomber planned his next attacks. Two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story. It's a human story. One that I've become entangled with. I saw as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out.

The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces, forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death. Their once ordinary lives, and mine, changed forever. It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom. And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat. Far right, homegrown, religious terrorism. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona.

And I'm Robert Fischer, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down.

They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is gonna sniper me out of some tree. But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything.

I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fischer.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Ah, wow, Sophie, I'm back and I am just feeling, you know, I put a solid pound and a half of that Gavin Newsom hair gel. Which by the way, folks, is- I'm brushing it through my hair now, everyone. It's just horse semen, you know,

but it works incredibly. Sorry, Sophie, I already committed to making that bib before you started talking. It's okay, I laid it up for you. You gotta move past that LA hair gel, Sophie. Yeah, wow. They get it all from that cowboy ranch in the middle of the city.

You got it all. They get it all from that cowboy ranch in the middle of the city. Um, so it starts with a character, Jack Desmond, a secret service assistant chief. Good name. Yeah, Jack, yeah. Again, he's like a workman-like genre writer, perfectly fine protagonist name.

He's a secret service man. He's at the White House as it's under siege. And this entire White House siege garrison is based on some clips this guy watched of Portland from Andy No's social media feed. It's very clear. But it starts with him talking about like

how the nation has been collapsing since the 2020 election. And this is clearly Trump is the president and the election has just happened. Anarchist cells sowed further division. Their desire was that the entire political system be violently taken down. Many politicians looked the other way and even funded their efforts,

hoping it would damage their political opponents in the upcoming elections. Little did they realize at the time that they were empowering people that were willing to take them down as well as their opposition. Classic democratic politicians funding the anarchists. I'm interested to see how much this is gonna differ Classic Democratic politicians funding the anarchists.

I'm interested to see how much this is going to differ from Alex Garland's understanding of American politics. Yeah, I am kind of curious about that as well. Although I think in this one, in my understanding in that is that like the bad guy president who bombs America is the Trumpian stand in and And then this Trump is like almost like a helpless child before this mob. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the climax is still like the West Coast forces

are invading the White House. So like, there you go. Yeah, in this it's, I think there's soldiers in that at least in this it's just, it's literally just an anarchist mob. It's just Antifa, yeah. That has fireworks. Yeah, of course. And then, yeah, we'll get to it.

So here's another paragraph from that intro. The presidential election became a quagmire of fraud, both perceived and real. The lawsuits drew bitterness and only added to the insecurity of daily life. The drawn out legal process led the protests, which morphed into rioting across the country. Brute force was applied to restore law and order, but it only generated more resistance and hate. Law and order began to dissolve. Indecision as to who had really won the election

torrent the American people. Munsit being suppressed by restrictions tied to the virus made their anger transition into undirected violence." And I find it interesting because that's like the opposite of where people were by that point. Like all that happened, you had an election that was deeply controversial. I mean, not for good reason, but it was, but like there wasn't widespread rioting and people were mostly just exhausted

by everything that had happened in 2020 by the time November rolled around and we're glad for it to be over. Very exhausted. Very tired. Also, and then Biden dies. As soon as like in early winter, the self-proclaimed president elect

who were led to believe as Biden has a cerebral aneurysm and dies. And then the vice. Not a bad prediction. Not a bad prediction. And then Kamala Harris gets assassinated by a right wing extremist. So boring.

That's how we get a constitutional crisis. And China and Russia leap into the breach to take advantage of all this chaos. And they send money to the anarchists, which is what makes the revolution possible. I don't know how they get it. Are they like, are they Vinmoing it to different food, not bombs groups and like bail funds?

How are they sending all of these weapons over? What does this actually look like? That's really funny. That's really funny. A choice. Russia is funneling some money to people quote unquote on the left, but it's certainly not anarchists. No, and it's certainly not like, they get mortars.

They're attacking the White House with actual mortars at some point. But parts of this do read like Portland fan fiction, and I'm gonna go back to the book now. Secret Service Assistant Chief Jack Desmond sat in the hot seat of the Service's Emergency Response Center two stories under the White House

and glared at the screens. The protesters had been getting bolder in the last few weeks, a few clamoring over the fence in Lafayette Park and then attempting to scale the perimeter fence around the White House. Each night the numbers grew. Each night new tactics were employed. The majority of the perpetrators had been apprehended,

but there was method behind their madness. The increased use of fireworks was part of a strategy. Desmond saw a pattern, which was a part of his job, to go beyond the raw data. They're testing our response, watching how we react. It spoke to him of a level of sophistication the FBI and the DOJ were not assigning to the leaders of the protests.

When the two groups hit the perimeter fence at different times, he finally convinced his superiors they were planning something bigger, something far worse. They're coordinated, organized, and upping their game. It's funny because it is definitely just Portland Fanfic, but also wildly underestimating the FBI and the DHS's presumption of like a complexity. Yeah. Because they they have some very interesting theories on how like these types of protests operate. Yeah.

Well, yeah, the reality is that they were like obsessed with attempting to find a leadership cadre behind the 2020 George Ford protests that like never existed. Yeah. Which is like, yeah. And you know, on the same token, like when there was actually a siege at the Capitol building, they weren't ready at all because they had not in any way prepared for the one that actually came their way.

This guy is kind of Fox News brain worms. You can tell he just kind of mainlined a raw diet of Andy No during the 2020 election. Here's his description of the White House surveillance system. There were cameras everywhere around the White House on micro drones, some planted on the fence, some camouflaged as nothing more than bolt satellite surveillance, not to mention the agents that mingled with the protesters decked out in all caps, Antifa Black.

Every single time he uses the word Antifa, it's in all caps. As if Antifa Black is a different shade. They've got their own special black. They licensed Vanta Black from that one guy. That would be so cool. We're just building shadow people. He talks about how some of them took out cameras with paintball guns, which is a real thing that people do.

Others have strobes to overload the night vision gear, and others used signs, large banners, and makeshift shields to conceal their nefarious activities. Yeah, this is just Portland, yeah. What are you concealing with a shield, guys? They're concealing that they're trying not to get shot with rubber bullets. One of the things I find fascinating

and kind of enlightening about this is that every time he talks about the crowd, he talks about it as if it's like a hive intelligence, like not like it's a group of actual people, but like it's some sort of like alien species where like the entire organization of people has a collective mind. So yeah, here's a-

Which isn't like wrong sometimes. It isn't wrong about how fear works. It's, he is crediting them with like, again, you and I have been to these kinds of things and seen how hard it is to get a group of thousands of people to take down one line of fence, right? No, absolutely. It's, in very brief moments,

you'll see a group of like 50 people move as like a fluid cluster Yeah, and do something really cool, and then it breaks out and to get into like like entropy But if they do they're wearing charcoal black not in yeah They're probably we probably didn't have the right color of black in Portland. Yeah Just honestly that that may be it just like a charcoal or like a faded or you know That may be it. Just like a charcoal or like a faded or, you know, definitely not.

Charcoal black would be nice actually. I agree. It's great. It's a great color. It's a great color. So here's another great line. The rules of engagement for a mass assault were known and he knew people would hesitate.

Thoughts of mowing down American protesters on the front lawn of the White House was the kind of thing that got you hauled up to Capitol Hill. He had reviewed the rules carefully with the teams at the start of his shift. As he watched the screens, he saw that the crowd was monitoring his people on the rooftops and their assorted purchase.

The problem was that the crowd was willing to risk it fueled by hate and organized by all caps and Tifa and other radical groups. They had gotten more sophisticated. It's the Antifa all caps for me, baby. Yeah. And then we get our actual Portland reference, Garrison. Okay. It's the Antifa all caps for me, baby. Yeah, and then we get our actual Portland reference, Garrison. Okay. The arrest of several cells in Portland and New York had resulted in bombings and two

assassination attempts on department heads, leaving one director in the hospital. This was beyond protests. This was now war, though the press played the entire thing down as minor incidents of violence and otherwise peaceful protests. Sure. entire thing down as minor incidents of violence and otherwise peaceful protests. Sure. Yeah. Again, it's this like, they did arrest a lot of people that they claimed were like leaders in Portland

and elsewhere. And you know what didn't happen is any directors of federal agencies got murdered. No, unless I missed that in the news cycle. Yeah, I feel like they would have hit on that pretty hard. Yeah. I did wanna, anytime one of these guys gives me something to drill in on, particularly in this, the press playing down incidents of violence at peaceful protests and stuff,

I want to like dig into that as much as I can. And there's a couple of good articles on that by some scholars who have actually analyzed the way in which the media tends to cover social justice protests and what things they tend to highlight in their coverage. One of the first papers I found was by Danielle Brown and Summer Harlow in the Journal of Press and Politics titled, Protests, Media Coverage and a Hierarchy of Social Struggle. This is what they write. Scholars across disciplines have scrutinized press coverage of collective action, exploring

the institutional, organizational, and individual influences that shift the quality and quantity of coverage. Many different structural, organizational, and institutional features of media production and social disruption affect media coverage of social movements. However, most scholars have shown that the institutional logics of the mainstream media do not favor social movements, and only the most appealing or newsworthy features of a movement are likely to result in news coverage. And when we talk about like,

what are the most newsworthy features of a movement, that's like incidents of violence or anything that can be characterized as violence. A police car is on fire. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. That's the, like, if that happens, that's the only thing that's winding up in

a lot of coverage on a protest. If a dumpster's on fire on day one, it might get something. If dumpster's on fire on day 25, no one cares. Yeah, yeah. It's become the norm. And Harlow also wrote an article for the Washington Post in 2021 where she summarized the data she's collected during years of research into how the media covers protests. Quote, my own research analyzed about 1500 protest related news stories published throughout 2014 in mainstream alternative partisan and online news publications.

Articles about conservative protests like protests opposed to immigration or LGBT rights or protests supporting Trump and gun rights are less likely to be negatively framed as riots than other types of protests. In contrast, Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to be negatively framed as riots than other types of protests. In contrast, Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to be framed as riots, as news coverage focuses more on violence, property damage, and confrontations with police. For example, a 2017 San Antonio Express News article about an anti-white supremacy protest, which was included in another study I did, started with a reference to brawls that broke out and the arrest of protesters who swarmed the sidewalk, hurling insults and chanting.

The aim of the protest was placed in quotation marks, white supremacy, which arguably delegitimizes protesters grievances." And yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty normal stuff. She surveyed a hundred journalists from Missouri, Virginia, Arizona, and Texas in 2018 and 2019 and combined those surveys with an analysis of 932 protest-related stories from newspapers in those states, and found that most journalists said that they were neither supportive

nor unsupportive of protesters generally, and were less supportive of racial justice movements than they were of women's rights or immigrants' rights, which I found interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, again, it's the opposite of what this guy reports because reality is the opposite

of what actually happened. But let's return to the fantasy of China-funded antifa taking the White House. It is certainly more fun. So this next line here gives us both collapsible ladders as a sinister weapon and gives us our first anti-mask line. "'Sir,' the captain seated in front of him spoke up, pointing to the far left monitor.

"'Look, I think those are collapsible ladders.' Jack saw them too. In the crowd, they were hard to make out, even with night vision. They'd used them before to toss up makeshift barricades, but tonight, tonight felt different. Leaning in, he toggled the microphone on and tore off the black mask he'd been forced to wear

since the pandemic began. He couldn't afford to have his voice muffled. Not now. This is Rabbit to all stations. Southeast corner, ladder spotted. Prepare for breaching attempts. I like that the collapse of the ladder is hard to spot too. It's very good.

What kind of lad letters are they carrying? That you can't very easily see an extendable letters like it's like three times the height of a man Yeah, I love this house sinister the ladders are yeah, it's it's all beautiful that Line he is really proud of that one. Oh, it's so good. So the protesters working with military precision penetrate like right after this. He gets a call that while they're sieging the White House, rioters have already

penetrated the Capitol and taken the speaker of the House hostage. So he has to order a condition red because protesters are headed for them next. The crowd surges forward and the cops start shooting. He could not hear the gunfire and the ERC, but he heard it over the speakers. Rubber bullets at first sprayed a swath of the rioters, but they did not recoil like they had before, though a dozen or more dropped from the kinetic impacts.

Most got right back up and continued the climb. Body armor. Fucking Amazon and eBay. They would run out of rubber bullets soon. Then things would get ugly and bloody. Fucking Amazon and eBay. You can get body armor on eBay. I wouldn't recommend it, but they don't sell it on Amazon.

Anyway, whatever. Maybe they mean like motor cross gear, I don't know. Like airsoft, I mean airsoft armor is fine for rubber bullets. Yeah. I don't think they mean like ballistic armor. I think they just mean just like padding. Yeah. That does make, if these guys are all dressed

as airsofters though, it does make them seem a little bit less threatening. Now it's unclear to me because he makes a big deal about how they're using fireworks at the start. He starts, there's a line here where like they start. He yells mortars because they start exploding. Yeah, this is an Andy No thing. Andy No calls all fireworks mortars.

Yes. This like when they say mortars, they don't mean like actual military mortars. What they mean, Fourth of July fireworks. In this it's in this garrison, it's both because he starts by talking about fireworks and meaning mortars. And then he says mortars. In this garrison, it's both, because he starts by talking about fireworks and meaning mortars, and then he says mortars, and it becomes clear over the course of the fight that they are actually shooting real mortars at the White House.

Okay. Presumably the Chinese gave it to them. Okay. But these are now, we are both getting like fear-mongered of like they're using fireworks to test the defenses, and now they have real mortars. Okay, all right.

So that's where this goes. We now cut to a new character, Charlie spelled just with an I, Kaczynski who was a lady Secret Service person who works on the president's detail and she busts in the Oval Office. This is we presume President Trump and she's like, you know, we got a real problem here.

The Antifa's are about to take the White House. Part of why this is very funny to me is that the first thing President Trump says is like, I can't leave, what about my family, my wife and son? And real President Trump absolutely would not be concerned with that in this situation. Absolutely not. He would leave them to die.

Several shots at the bulletproof glass of the Oval Office, snap cracking on the armored glass. The President rose as another explosion went off outside, throwing tiny bits of grass and dirt on the window. He moved to her side as two additional agents rushed in flanking him. My family, my wife and son. So she promises to get his kids and yeah,

there's a, Charlie takes him down an elevator. We're informed that the elevators in the White House can be electrified after use. So they'll kill anyone trying to access them. And there's also a gas system to pump knockout drugs into the shaft if it were breached. I looked into this. I couldn't find any evidence one way or the other. Maybe, maybe that's true. I hope so. So he calls our boy Jack calls the secretary of defense and tells him to scramble

the troops. And the troops are under attack too. The military base, joint base bowling was just hit by two car bombs and is being shelled. And so is Andrews Air Force Base. So the Antifa's have carried out on the same night overwhelming attacks against two military bases, the Capitol and the White House. And again, in the most impressive actions you and I saw, they were able to tear down a fence after like five hours. After like two weeks of practice.

Briefly. This is an unprecedented level of coordination. Yeah, this is, I'm really wondering what the signal loops are like for these antifa. Those signal chats gotta be going crazy. Hey guys, we're bombing Joint Air Force Base Antus. We're in the Pentagon. We are in the Pentagon. We've got the speaker. Air Force Base entrance

God we've got a speaker Yeah, it's really funny So there's a moment here where the Secret Service had or that start where the president tells the the the Secretary of Defense to send the army and to crack down on the protests and the secretary of defense won't do it. He's not willing to send American troops in to fight Americans on American soil. And this is again a thing that happened. Now in real life what happened is President Trump asked General Milley, his secretary of defense, can you just shoot them in the legs?

Yeah. And Milley was like, no. I can't have the army just go shoot protesters in the legs. Anyway, I find that very funny. But you know, Garrison, what's not funny and what won't shoot you in the legs? Are lovely advertisers? They might shoot you in the legs. If it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again, they'll definitely shoot you in the legs. Are lovely advertisers. They might shoot you in the legs.

If it's the Washington state highway patrol again, they'll definitely shoot you in the legs. Well, yeah. Yeah. All right. So we'll come back, but first here's some ads. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast

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It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. A backpack that contained a bomb. While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect, a serial bomber planned his next attacks. Two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story. It's a human story. One that I've become entangled with. I saw as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out. The victims of these brutal attacks

were left to pick up the pieces, forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death. Their once ordinary lives, and mine, changed forever. It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom. And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat. Far right, homegrown, religious terrorism. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fischer, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the valley.

Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is, is he gonna snipe me out of some tree? But not me.

Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere.

If you keep asking me this, I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fischer. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house. The Hunt. A family annihilation.

Today. And a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. All right, Garrison. So that's our cold open, right? The White House is sieged and taken.

The president is, it's kind of unclear what happens to him. Like we know from the summary that he's supposed to have died in this. But- Yeah, cause he was like taken captured or died in prison. Allegedly. But we don't see him die in this, right?

We, you know, as a spoiler, he's not actually dead, Garrison. Of course not. Donald Trump is alive and living in secret five years after. I'm sure he's gonna lead some like resistance force, hopefully. Yeah, oh, Garrison, you've predicted exactly where this book is going. I mean, yeah, of course, of course.

So chapter one, it opens with a character named Andy Forrest and Andy is in a cancer ward at a hospital watching his dad die. It's National Hospital 114, because all of the hospitals were in a sinister manner, nationalized. They're communist hospitals now. They're communist hospitals now, yeah.

Cool. And his father is classified as non-essential, non-contributing. So there's debate about whether or not his recovery is even worth it. And he's angry that he had to fight to get the treatment he got, and it's still not working.

Just like in Canada. Yeah, just like in Canada. I don't know like his experience sounds a lot like the hospital experience I just had with my dad that exists in our current system But yeah, he's unhappy about it And part of why he's unhappy is that his sister's here and his sister is a sinister member of the new Antifa law enforcement agency the social enforcement agency. Oh, they have, they have Antifa cops. Garrison, they sure do. And they are literally, they're literally Antifa mobs that follow people around and

harass them if they're bad. That's funny. That's funny. So I'm going to read you. So this is it. This is the description of his sister. Oh, first, actually, there's a line I need to read here about the hospitals. Andy wished he could afford private health care, but at the same time was glad he couldn't. If I made that kind of money, it just would have put a target on my back. In numerica, making money

was a curse. Is it? That's not actually that doesn't actually make sense. Can you buy better healthcare with your money or not? Or is it a curse? Or is it a curse? I forgot about numerica for a second. That he will not let you forget. Garrison, you're about to get so many different fucking acronyms and shit shoved in your face. Oh, I'm so, I'm so thrilled for acronyms.

I love me some fake three letter agencies. Are y'all ready for this? Banana, anyway, okay. Here's a description of his sister. The woman wore her black shirt with red piping on her collar, showing her rank in social enforcement. Where the National Security Force, NSF,

was a potent arm of the FedGov, social enforcement was a less controlled and thus more dangerous. Born out of the all caps Antifa and BLM mobs during the liberation, the act is informal police dispensing social justice as they saw fit. Oh wow, that's really something special. It's beautiful. That's really something special. It's in that beautiful.

That's amazing. That's really nice. I like the collar piping, classy. Classy, nice. It's good to know that we still have style when the Antifa mobs are made part of the government. NSF has like a good ring to it. Yeah. Yeah, that's nice good ring to it. Yeah.

Yeah, that's like, dispensing social justice is just deeply, deeply funny. It's extremely funny. Her name is Karen. And the first thing he notices about her is that she's put on weight since the last time he saw her. Cool. Because of course.

Cool insult, my guy. Yeah, so they have a fight. He says it's because she and her social justice goons got their dad fired from his job. Quote, because of the SEs, he lost his house, our mom, almost everything he had, and his reputation because of the investigation. The police seriously canceled culture?

The police, that's literally what they are. They took his mom from him. Oh, fuck, it's so funny. So she's like, no, he was a bad, our dad did a bad thing. He supported a domestic terrorist group and he didn't change his class curriculum to the standard. The man was a professor at Sojourner Truth U and refused to adhere to the rules.

So Andy gets angry first because Sojourner Truth University is supposed to be Mary Washington University, but all of the schools with Washington in the name got purged during the Great Reformation. Nice, nice. And again, it's like, I actually, yeah, I think Sojourner Truth deserves the university more than Mary Washington.

Agreed, yeah. But whatever. I don't know that anybody cares that much Here's him describing what happened to his dad his father had been a respected historian But the NSF had ruined him sir surely sojourner truth would have been opposed to that They had sent social enforcement teams to follow him everywhere harassing him to the point where he couldn't get to his classroom They broke windows at the house set fire to his car and relentlessly followed him Screaming and shoving to the point where businesses Wouldn't allow him in everything he typed was monitored screened and often edited big tech monitored every keystroke

He made or so he claimed this this is this is the retributive justice blueprint. This is what we need to get Big tech and an Tifa mobs hand in hand. Yeah, big tech working out like perfectly with random mobs of people breaking windows. Sending in keystroke loggers to gangs of... Mark Zuckerberg just can't wait to partner with an Antifa mob. He would love this. He would love this, definitely. This has been his dream since the beginning. Andy's sister was part of the social enforcers, or SE,

a part of what the FedGov called the Great Reformation. Again, he's already introduced all these concepts before, and now we're getting the info dump on them, which is just, is a little sloppy. That's what we call good writing, Robert. An editor would have called this. Yeah. No, that's what we call solid writing.

That's called world building, Robert. The overview throw of the government was called the liberation by almost everyone out loud. In whispers, however, it was called the fall. Karen had consumed the Kool-Aid of the riot. Whispers it was called. Yes. So yeah, he'd gotten fired by the school

who didn't even care that he'd done nothing wrong. And then came the NSF interrogators, separate from the SE, they were just as bad, if not worse because they had a fragment of legitimacy the social enforcers lacked. The NSF claimed he knew radicals and that he had incriminating materials in his possession, materials that were never produced, only alleged.

They allowed him to be hauled before two people's tribunals, the kangaroo courts of the SEs with no evidence. And he lost two years of his life, exiled to a social quarantine camp, denied his freedoms. He had come back from social quarantine, a hollow shell of a human being. In the end, Karen had done nothing for her father, other than attempt to persuade him to provide the names of his associates. She'd been in social enforcement and could have vouched for him, perhaps called off their dogs. Instead, she let their father die emotionally.

Now the cancer was doing the rest. And Andy reveals that the terrorist group he was charged with being a member of was the Republican Party. Oh my God, that's funny. And Karen's like, no, he actually had ties to another group called the Sons of Liberty. And Andy's like- Liberty and an actual terrorist

group. And Andy's like, well, when did it become illegal to support a cause? Well, Andy, you've just been inconsistent there. Was your dad just a member of the Republican Party or was he a member of this terrorist group? But it's fine. Anyway, Karen and Andy continue to argue. He calls them a bunch of thugs who go out to administer, you know, self-described justice to innocent people.

And Karen says, we don't go after innocent people. Innocent people have nothing to fear. Yada, yada, yada. It's it's it's it's it's mostly the rest of their argument is there's some some good world building when we get to the end of this chapter here This is just like a boomer writing his own scary enemy and then getting scared himself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah Where Karen saw him as flawed and he saw him as a man who honored his friends the mention of their mother hit hard When their father had lost his job and was tormented non-stop by the social enforcers

She had left him his mother lived under a crowd of a cloud of fear that she would be attacked while stepping out to get groceries. That was part and parcel with the tactics of the social enforcement teams. Harassment was a weapon in their hands. She moved in with a friend but was unable to get work. Her name was on a list because of their father. She took her life six months later, never even speaking to Andy's father. He had not been released released for her funeral Karen laid the blame at their father's feet So that's their totally realistic situation here. Yeah, I found it powerful very very scary Yeah, very scary. So that's that's our opening and then we get to the district So we're introduced to a new character

Kaylee Lietrem who I think from reading this was former CIA and is now a part of the FedGov actual law enforcement agency, so not the anarchist mobs, but like basically the FBI and the CIA and all of the other law enforcement groups got amalgamated into a different organization that didn't have the name police in it because that's scary now.

It's really just the word that we have a problem with. Nothing that they do systemically. To be fair, there's definitely like a third of, I don't know, people on the left that I've met that just want to make the police their own police. No, that is true. But, you know. Another third who just wants the scenario as written here

and the other third who try to think of something a little bit better than both of this. Yeah, but, and the reality is that all three of those groups together are about 200 people. Um, like not quite enough to overthrow the White House Capitol and two military bases at once. A lot of Twitter posts about 200 though. Every one of them on Twitter.

So there's some great descriptions here when the boss of the National Support Force, which is this law enforcement agency comes in, and you really, you get a lot about the author from how he describes her, because I think this is supposed to be AOC. The secretary of the National Support Force came into the room, a perky woman,

probably the same age as Kaylee in her mid to late 30s the secretary had a quasi Hispanic look to her What is whatasi-Hispanic? Anyway, he's very, again, it's like whenever Ben Shapiro talks about AOC, you can just like, you can feel the thirsty. Yeah. The secretary had a Quasi-Hispanic look to her.

Dark skin, pristine long straight hair and almost perfect makeup she wore the single gold pip on the collar of her jacket that signaled her rank other than that she wore a small black flag pin adorned with the white outlined fist and arrow lightning bolt stabbing downward the law the old flag had long been banned deemed far too racist and prejudice to ever be shown in public nice nice base nice, bass, bass, bass. Wow. I like that also they have like Star Trek uniforms with like pips on them now.

They get little pips, yeah, no, that's good moves. It seems like the new government's making some solid choices. I like that they like add in details that they're like, by the way, she's hot, hair luscious. Makeup almost perfect. Almost perfect. She fucked up one bit of it.

They're like one eyelash out of place. Xoxo. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. So, you know, she gets into some sort of bullshit argument with the secretary lady who is like, have you been briefed as to why you were brought here? And Kayleigh, we can tell is like the bad girl who doesn't play by the rules, but gets results. So the secretary asks, have you been briefed

as to why you were brought here? And Kayleigh responds, no, I presume it's because somebody fucked something up and you need me to unfuck it. Watch your language, Kayleigh, her direct supervisor, Burke Dorn said from his seat next to her. Dorn was the oldest man in the room and had been FBI back in the day. When they formed the National Support Force,

the FBI, DHS, state and local law enforcement had all been combined. The word police had been dropped because it had been deemed offensive and potentially racist. And I do love that all of these old FBI guys and shit are still cops. They just had to call themselves something different. No, it shows a, it is a weird, like,

fundamental misunderstanding of, like, everything. Yeah, it's very funny. That, like, yeah, it is basically the same guys. It's just AOC is in charge of the CIA now. Finally, the leftist revolution has accomplished its goal. So they're all concerned because the sons of Liberty are back There's some they had thought that they killed all these guys Kaylee was like I buried the bodies myself. We took them out But there have a OC buried the bodies. No, no, no Kaylee who's our our I think our self insert girl character

Yes, okay author who's our, I think our self-insert girl character from the author. So we thought, but there have been some recent acts, bombings, cyber swipes, and an assassination or two. We had our friends in Silicon Valley crunch it and they say there's a pattern. You think the Sons of Liberty or the SOL are back? The use of the acronym was important. The use of a full name gave terrorist groups identity,

using an acronym to humanize them. They weren't people, they were just a thing and needed to be dealt with. It was the language of the FedGov which made it the language of numerica What a lie? Wow. There's a lot to unpack. There's so much going on there.

I don't know if we have time to unpack that. The level of dehumanization of three-letter acronym terrorist groups. I'm like, whoa. What about the FBI? Yeah, like the FBI is an acronym. Yeah. So it becomes clear that what's happened is they wouldn't, you know, when these attacks started,

they started like following up on any leads who were kind of close to some of the Sons of Liberty people that they took out. And they saw on like a security camera footage next to a car that used to belong to someone who was in the Sons of Liberty people that they took out. And they saw on like a security camera footage next to a car that used to belong to someone who was in the Sons of Liberty. They got a clear picture of Donald Trump. They think there's a 53% chance in their facial recognition

that it's really him. And Kayleigh's like, I don't know, that's not very high. And they're like, no, take a look. And she's like, I'm confused. He was arrested and put in prison. I saw the pre-trial motions. He died of a heart attack in his cell. Everyone saw the body.

It was all over the net. Dorn diverted his eyes to the conference room table and the secretary drew a long breath before continuing. What you saw was what the country needed. Closure. Our friends in Hollywood helped us craft something that would help everyone heal. He survived?

We were unsure. We haven't seen any trace of him or his details since the liberation. We believe there was an almost zero chance of him being alive. The city was on fire and citizens were roving the streets. The trader president wasn't a quiet man. If he had been alive, he would have popped up.

We did some good CGI with our Hollywood associates and gave the people what they wanted, justice. And then there's an Epstein reference. Jesus. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. We couldn't have him Epstein himself. He was dead, which was all we wanted. But now it's clear he's not dead. And you can see I think Kayleigh is going to turn out to be a good character

because she's disturbed that they lied about the president being dead. I love the idea of Donald Trump living and hiding in the underground for five years. He would hate hanging out with these guys. Oh my God. Because they are not the same class level. He does not fuck with these people, actually. Like he's not gonna wanna hang out

with the sons of liberty. He's able to spend five or six years completely silent in the underground when the real Trump gets cut off of Twitter and creates a new app so that he can tweet on the toilets. Like the discrepancy between the real man and this like cold-blooded operator president is extremely funny to me.

Sure. Anyway, Kayleigh's Concerned because she's used to being able to see through the propaganda and she hadn't caught that they lied about this But now she's like you want me to assassinate the president of the United States He is not the president not anymore. The secretary had rage in her voice. It was understandable She and the she and the president had been sworn enemies years before the liberation. On top of that, they've already declared him dead. The United States is what we have made it, not what he was in charge of. That country is no more.

He's a war criminal. The man is a monster, an abomination. What I want is for you to do your job. The world thinks him dead, so we need to maintain that. Can you do it? And yeah, she's like, yeah, I need all the money you can give me and I need a team. And she's told that she's going to be, she's going to have to fight against the, the, the, the S E groups out there. Right. So the, the remnants of the real cops have a conflict with the social enforcement cops because they don't actually follow any rules. They're just mobs of people who break windows and light your car on fire Which is the best work the best world building in this book so far

But apparently AOC is in the process of trying to destroy the social enforcement organization Great because it's yeah, what if the world was full of like There's maybe like 20 anarchists who are actually like this, but what if everybody was those 20 people? Yeah, well what if there were enough of them to overthrow the government exactly yeah? And they just like keep going afterwards to they just can't stop breaking windows. Yeah, and we get a little inside AOC is mine here six years ago I was an outspoken junior congresswoman a radical in my own party now

I control the most powerful agency in the Fedgov So yeah, she's she has she she pushed through the restore civil liberties act which rolled all of the different police agencies together So that's that's fun. And yeah, there's like a Line about how they had to fire a few thousand cops to make this new cop agency that's all the cop agencies and that's a small price to pay to restore public confidence. Now the numerical people can feel a sense of confidence in their law enforcement, even in her own head,

it's numerical. So there's like the real cops and like the cancel culture cops both working independently at the same time. Yes, yes, yes, Garrison. That's at the same time. Yes. Yes. Yes, Garrison. That's my understanding. OK. Yeah. OK. Sure. Now that ends chapter two or chapter one. And now at chapter two, we start in Alvarado, Texas.

It was all one chapter. That was one chapter, Garrison. A lot of ground. Right. He made moves, you know. We're we're almost done with this episode, but I wanna introduce you to Raul Lopez, who is, he's 18 years old, and he's trying to decide, should he join the youth core? No.

Most of his fellow high school graduates stood in line for reparation points and stimulus relief rather than the land jobs. The TV news said Numerica was prospering, but he never saw it. Many businesses had been damaged by the riots and closed up forever, and others had simply left their buildings gutted for copper wire and plumbing. So what's changed?

We still have TV news. We still have businesses like. Yeah. What's different is that the entire economy seems to be based around reparations. Reparations and stimulus. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we have like universal basic income and reparations and nationalized healthcare.

We did it, Joe. It's kind of unclear. We did it, Joe. And the cancel culture cops. Yeah, the cancel culture mob cops. Raul goes into the recruiter's office for the youth corps and she's like hot. That's the first thing he notices. If she's hot, she's got a small triangle insignia

on her right collar, which he says is probably a rank. I think it might actually be like the queer triangle, like for concentration camp inmates because she's about to talk to him about the different minority groups he's a part of and how many points he'll get from them on his reparations. It's bad, it's bad, Garrison. So weird.

Also, this is a personal pet peeve, but he describes the electronic device she's using as a DigiPad and like, just call it an iPad, man. You wrote this in 2021. It's set in 2025. They didn't invent a new set of tablets. Just give her an iPad. Like, it's fine. Just say tablet. Like this is so, Oh tablet, right. This is so like,

DigiPad is so boomer coded. DigiPad? Come on man. It's so boomer coded. Come on man. Like we have tablets. So, Roel was the first person in his family to graduate high school.

And she, his mom, wanted him to go to college. Roel had tried to explain to his mother that his grades had, and she, his mom, wanted him to go to college. Ruel had tried to explain to his mother that his grades had been low, that jumping straight into college was not really an option. The problem was that when college had been made free,

everyone wanted to go. The colleges couldn't handle the massive influx. Students got in based on race, sexual preference, poverty level, even with that right here. Jesus Christ. What are we doing? What are we doing? What are we doing here? So how many dicks have you sucked?

Is on the application paper? Jesus. Yes. Oh my God, it's so funny. Sorry, not enough dicks for the graduate program. Not enough dicks so your grades matter. Literally that's what he's like, he's like, because of all the different things that count,

your grades actually matter and my grades aren't high enough to get in. And that's like why the system's broken. That's so funny. Like it sounds like the system's still merit-based then. Incredible. Yeah, it's very funny. So this lady is like, no, you could go to college

if you do two years in the youth core, you get into any school that you want, right? And there's even classes in the evenings to help you prepare for school and those grades can boost your high school grades retroactively so you can get into better colleges. It actually sounds like the youth core is a great deal, Garrison.

That sounds like a pretty good deal. You get paid, you get free room and board, on the job training, free admission to any college you want. That's not a bad deal. Yeah, sounds great. So he asks, does it pay? And she tells him, we pay off the freedom scale. It isn't a lot, but we're providing you room,

board and training. You'd be ranked by reparation points. You are Hispanic, so that would give you some points, but being male will hold you back for points based on sex. By any chance, are you gay, transgender, or part of an oppressed religion? See, I'm fine with them giving cis men less points, to be honest.

I'm like, that seems- That's exactly what she says. She tells Raul, you'll still make more than a privileged white man. There you go, there you go. You're still on the team, buddy. And Raul asks, even if more than a privileged white man. There you go. There you go You're still on the team buddy Role asks even if we did the same work, of course the recruiter said with a smile The scale ranks people by their oppressed status the more oppressed you are the more you're compensated It's based on the reparations scale used for monthly checks. It's all designed to make things fair There's just this is so Fox News brain.

Like there's so- Fox News brain. Such a high number of people who genuinely believe like this is what like the Democrats want to do and like have already done for colleges. People think this is already what is happening. Like this is DEI. This is like-

It's really funny. And it's like he's he's like, I don't what prevents somebody from just lying about being gay to get more money. But he also doesn't do that, which is kind of like what are you working against the author's point? Anyway, I think this is a good place to end for now. We've seen our vision of the of the terrifying Antifa utopia, Garrison. I think it's interesting to see this actually laid out by somebody who's like a baseline level of competent at writing.

So you can really actually see what they think is going to happen or what they think the Democrats want. Fascinating stuff. I do wonder what my oppression level would be like How much do I make I would I would love to try to try to quantify this honestly, but maybe that's for another another time Yeah, maybe that's for another time. Well Garrison, you know what's not for another time The end of this episode your plot right now. Oh Oh yeah, what do you got to plug Garrison? Uh, I don't know. There's probably some a Good Appen here episode on some terrible thing that's happened that I put out recently. So go check out a Good Appen here.

Sometimes we talk about good things too. So you never know. It's always a gamble. And then you can find me on X, the place to go to see what's happening at Hungry Boat Eye. Yeah, that's where Garrison will be whipping up his social enforcement mob. I'll try. I'll try. Yeah. Yeah, it was really uncomfortable hearing you call it X.

I was like, what are you talking about? Thank you. Thank you. All right, everybody. We did it. It's fucking over. Bye. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal.

I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games.

And then, a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause, lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others forever. Rippling out for generations. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher. your podcasts. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down to the cave. As I track down clues. I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.