Behind the Bastards - Part One: Harlon Carter: the Man Who Militarized the Cops and the NRA

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss Harlon Carter and NRA.  FOOTNOTES: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/04/27/meet-the-2-texans-who-took-over-the-nra-and-made-the-gun-rights-group-a-feared-and-powerful-force/%3foutputType=amp  https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/22/us/harlon-b-carter-longtime-head-of-rifle-association-dies-at-78.html  https://www.linktv.org/the-legacy-of-the-texas-rangers-a-look-at-the-long-history-of-violence-at-the-border  https://timeline.com/harlon-carter-nra-murder-2f8227f2434f  https://bostonreview.net/articles/america-as-a-tactical-gun-culture/ https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/04/us/hard-line-opponent-of-gun-laws-wins-new-term-at-helm-of-rifle.html  https://nraontherecord.org/harlon-carter/ https://medium.com/epic-magazine/sons-of-guns-a250e6637593  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/battleground-america  https://scholar.colorado.edu/downloads/s1784m73m  https://addran.tcu.edu/history/files/Dissertation-Prospectus-2.pdf  http://web.archive.org/web/20190331211610/http://www.davekopel.com/NRO/2000/Misfiring-at-Harlon-Carter.htm  https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2022/05/31/how-nra-evolved-from-backing-1934-ban-on-machine-guns-to-where-it-is-now-commentary/  https://www.thetrace.org/2020/01/gun-industry-legal-immunity-plcaa/  https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-28/how-defective-guns-became-the-only-product-that-can-t-be-recalled  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LW0MNW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Matt, Leib, how are you doing today? I'm good, man. I just got married. You did just get married. I got married to former guest Francesca Fiorentini. Yeah, one of our favorite guests with our least favorite. Oh, shit! How dare you? I'm just being an asshole. We love you.

That's why I've brought you on to read you a 12,000-word script about... Oh, a script? Oh, a script. That's right, Matt, because I do love you. We have such a good time talking. And I wanted to celebrate that you have embarked on this new chapter of your life. Yeah, love. I'm making you very sad. Yeah, actually, this is the perfect palette cleanser to a weekend of joy. That's right. That's right. Coming on this podcast and just being just torn to shreds emotionally. Because there's got to be no joy here. Matt, how do you feel?

First off, I guess, have you ever heard of a motherfucker named Harlan Carter? Harlan Carter, I don't think so. Okay, okay. Is that Jimmy Carter's brother? Oh, boy, not at all. That would be Billy Carter. And Billy Carter will be on our episode behind the heroes. Yeah, because he seems pretty chill. I thought you were going to ruin that guy because you seem pretty dope. Can you imagine back when, like, the biggest scandal a president had was that, like, his brother made bad beer?

Right, yeah. Mike, what a time. Yeah, in the 70s. What an administration. Yeah, it was just like, hey, his brother's too cool. Yeah. Dudes were not supposed to rock this much. That was, you know, that was the biggest scandal he had.

We got to get this guy out of the White House and put in a dude who's going to do part of a genocide. Anyway, Matt, how do you feel about the proliferation of firearms in American society? I'm pro. Okay. I think, you know, the more guns, the better. Obviously, nothing, you know, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I think we all know that. And I think it's 19 good guys with guns stacked outside of a classroom for 78 minutes.

Exactly, dude. Just kind of sitting around waiting to be like, oh, man, I can't wait to be a hero. I'll just give it another 45 minutes. You've got to clock in first. Yes. So it's interesting. It's fun that we got to the military, the incompetent militarization of police because this is a thing, one of the things that's frustrating. Obviously, you and I may have some slightly different attitudes towards firearms.

But I'm frustrated with American gun culture, which I think is primarily toxic and also the culture of police militarization, which is 100 percent toxic. And the guy we're going to talk about today, Harlan Carter, is the dude who started both of those things. He's the guy who started militarizing the police and he's the guy who made the NRA. So if he's got a picture of him, he looks like who you would cast if you were putting Kingpin, that comic book villain. He looks like Kingpin. He literally looks exactly like Kingpin. Oh, my God. Sorry for body shaming the NRA guy.

I would prefer any gangster to. It's not even body shaming. He just looks like his neck is the width of his ears. No, he's like a literal dickhead. The most dickheadish head I've ever seen. He is a chode someone poured into a suit. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that this is what Joe Rogan was like.

I want this. If Joe Rogan. Someone has been cutting Joe Rogan's HCH with lemon juice just to try to keep him from getting too huge. But if Joe got the amount of HCH that he intended to shoot into his testicles, this is how he would look. Yeah, he would look like this guy. His neck would be even thicker. He's exactly the way you are picturing him in your mind listeners. He does kind of look like because Alex Jones has that thick neck, but he's not that.

He's a little smaller. Yeah. And Joe Rogan's got that that big muscle muscle guy head. If like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, if you like in vitro fertilized, like cut their sperm in half and like merged him together with the egg from like a dead California condor, you would get Harlan Carter. What's better is this painting of him where he literally looks like Dr. Evil. He does. He does look like Dr. Evil. Who painted him?

I don't know. Oh, a lot of people. He's a very important person that we would not get drinks with. Fair. So we're going to have to start by discussing the history of gun control in the United States. And because this is the United States, that also started with white supremacy. And only, yes, like just from this is just a guess, but I bet you gun control laws that have been enacted were mostly racist. Yeah.

It's one of those things when you get these, you get these arguments online where like people will be like, gun culture is white supremacist. And it's like, yeah, an awful lot of it is. And then folks who are pro gun will be like, well, gun control is white supremacist. And you're both right because it's the United States of America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like people talking about like, oh, well, the Democratic Party used to be like was a white supremacist party for a very long time.

And it's like, yeah. Yes. Yes. Both major US parties are primarily rooted in white supremacy. 100%. And it's always, it's always super weird that, you know, whenever someone is just like, no. And it's like, what, why are you, you don't need to be so attached to being a Democrat that you're just going to refuse to believe that it's. This doesn't make an argument one way or the other about gun control because like you could say that like zoning laws have a lot of the rooted white supremacy.

It doesn't mean zoning shouldn't exist. Right. Fundamentally, yeah, factories maybe shouldn't be in the same place as apartment complexes. But that also like, yeah, anyway, whatever, we're going to do our. Oh yeah, we're doing gun control. We're doing CRT on this podcast. This is going to be a little bit. Yeah.

We're going to be talking a shitload about the border patrol. But first, let's talk a little bit about the history of gun control in the United States. Obviously, 1619 thereabouts is when the first African enslaved people are brought to the United States. Well, it wasn't the United States then, but you know what I'm saying, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The colonies against their will and not that long after in 1680, which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back then. The Virginia assembly passed one of if not the earliest gun control laws in the colonies. Now, this law did not restrict the ability of white people to be armed.

It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't gun control, but weapons control. But this law passed in 1680 made it a crime for any African American to carry a weapon or weapon like object. Now, that last term there is interesting, Matt, because you could, I mean, I like as a man, right? Anytime you're out in the world, you think about all the different things you could use as weapons. Everything is a weapon. It's just the thing that happens. I enter every room going, what could I use for self-defense and or if I just felt like harming someone. Yeah, if I had to defend myself against the 84-year-old man next to me in the post office, how hard could I hit him with one of these empty cardboard boxes?

Seriously, in the genes of every dude is just Mark Wahlberg going, I would have stopped 9-11 if I had been on that plane. And, you know, that's all of us. It would have been so funny. It would have been really funny if he'd stopped it, but then he'd had to try to land the plane and had accidentally crashed it into the White House. Like, oh, God. Anyway, so as you might guess, the vagueness around the term weapon-like object meant that this law, it didn't just like ban black people from carrying guns. It meant that they could be punished brutally for holding any object if it could be used to hit somebody. This started what wound up being like a more than a century-long tradition of elderly black people being banned from having canes.

Oh, my God. Because you can hit someone with the cane, right, as Gandalf showed us, you know? Yeah, oh, yeah. They weren't being fooled by that in Virginia in 1680. Yes, we will part an old man from his walking stick. I know a wizard staff when I see one. You think I don't know you're going to cast a spell? Now, this being 60 years after the forced importation of African slaves to the continent, the 1680 law was aimed at slaves, obviously.

But it applied equally. There were some freed black people in the colony at this period, and it applied to them as well. The law was amended in 1723 to specify that African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for any purpose, be it hunting or self-defense. And again, 1723, it's kind of important to be able to use a gun, you know, just if you're living in the Virginia frontier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of other people with guns, and it seems like it's time to have one. You need food and stuff, you know? And there's bears?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you catch your food if you are not allowed to use a gun? You can trap, but I think the purpose here, no one's thinking about like, they're doing whatever they can to make these people's lives harder, because they're terrified of the existence of free black people. Yes, of course. And under this law, a freed black person who defended himself from a white person using a firearm was committing a crime, technically with any weapon, like any tool they were to use to defend themselves would be illegal. So gun control in the early colonies, most of the time, these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the exceptions of the rule.

Because as a rule, the laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things and more just kind of generally trying to make it possible for black people and slave to free to challenge white supremacy in any way. Right, yeah. So it wasn't just guns, and in fact, because guns were like not as good back then, those were less of a focus than some other objects that might surprise you. Possession of dogs by black people was heavily regulated in this period. They couldn't have dogs? Well, it was not impossible, but it was very hard.

If you were a black person who wanted to own a dog in Maryland in the early 1700s, for example, you were forced to get a license from the Justice of the Peace, who was going to be a white man. So it was not easy to get a license from a Justice of the Peace for this. And if you managed to get one, you were still restricted to owning no more than one dog at a time. Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for black people under any circumstances, and even allowed slave patrols to kill dogs found in the house of a black person. So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is very old indeed. Of course, I should have known.

Of course, dog control also ties directly to white supremacy. Well, and it's one of those that you have to, again, weapons, firearms are a lot less deadly back then. So like a gun, you get one shot and it's not easy to reload. I think there are some revolvers. But yeah, a dog, a dog, you don't need to reload, right? A Doberman will keep fucking going until, you know, yeah. So that's what, you know, white folks were particularly scared of. And again, it's also worth noting, obviously, the prohibition against black people carrying guns

or other weapons makes sense if you're afraid of a slave or, you know, just an uprising, right? Because a group of people with guns can do an uprising. You can't really effectively organize a bunch of dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together. It's hard to do. I'd like to see it though. It would be cool. That would be the greatest. What they're doing here, they don't want black people to be able to defend themselves from like mob violence, right? Like individual and families, they don't want them to have any kind of defense

if like somebody wants to do a murder, you know? Jesus Christ. They're just like inventing, inventing laws that are completely useless. The idea that somehow this is like, oh, well, we can't, we can't kill that guy. He lives in a kennel filled with ravenous dogs surrounding him. Like he's fucking Ramsey Bolton. Just like ready with hungry dogs to bite your dick off. If I'm, yeah.

I'm mad. So in the late 1700s, spoilers, the American Revolution broke out. Hell, yeah. Yeah. And by 1787, we have us a constitution, you know? We get, we fight them English, we beat them, and then we're like, oh boy, this first government, we try it as a giant shit show. We should probably like give another shot at this and they do a constitution. And eventually this constitution comes to include a bill of rights

and the now infamous second amendment. We're going to be talking a lot about the changing ways this has been interpreted through time. And despite what people tend to say on either side of the modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to interpret how the so-called founding fathers intended it to function. And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in agreement about pretty much anything. But one thing is perfectly clear. They did not see the right to bear arms as extending to black people.

Now, black people were not categorically forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States. But in those states where it was legal for them to own arms, they were always required to register those weapons with the government. This was not the case for white people. While there was some hope during the revolution among black Americans that independence would bring about an improvement in their circumstances, and that was not unreasonable, again, the British Empire allowed slavery too. So at this stage in time, it's not like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that like,

well, maybe things will get better when they don't have a king anymore, right? Yeah, yeah. Obviously that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, there's some uprisings in the new United States. In 1811, Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed. And in response to this, New Orleans made it a crime for black people to carry weapons. And this was, again, primarily even more than guns, banned them from stuff like canes. Crutches, wheelchairs.

Yeah, definitely no one with an assault wheelchair. Yeah. Yeah. So as we've discussed in our behind the police series, Southern Police Department started a slave patrols made up of armed white dudes searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a boot on the neck of even free black people. In 1825, Florida gave slave patrols the right to enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition, or any other weapons found.

And obviously, as is the case with no-knock raids today, these often were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes. Right. By saying you felt threatened. Yeah. In the early 1860s, obviously, we have us a civil war over slavery. And broadly speaking, this goes pretty well. If you think slavery is bad, US civil war, broadly speaking, goes all right.

Yeah. Now, one of the most kind of revolutionary aspects of the civil war is that for the first time in US history, a shitload of black men are legally carrying guns in an organized way. Right. 179,000 black people serve in the Union Army, which is roughly 10% of its total. And you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men with guns

marching across the US South, which really freaks out people in the South. Yeah, that's got to be the scariest thing. They looked at that and they're like, see, this is what I'm talking about. This is the scary shit I did not want to happen. Yeah. This is why we're losing, started this war that we're losing. Yeah. Yeah.

So post-civil war, black people are not immediately entitled to the same rights as white people. Mm-hmm. So starting in 1865, which is the year the war ends, states like former states that had lost, basically, start enacting black codes. And these are kind of, okay, these people aren't slaves anymore, but we want to treat them that way.

So let's just write new... Let's just... We'll take the old laws that we had that restricted slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control, and we'll replace the word slave with servant or something similar so that we can try to hold them under the same laws. In Mississippi, black people were still banned from possession weapons or ammunition. And if white people turned them in for this crime,

they would be given their firearms as a reward. And again, this is after they've been freed. So they, like, should have the right to bear arms and whatnot. Right. I want to quote now from a 2021 honors thesis by Alexandra Lanzetta from the University of Colorado. Quote, Other southern states to enact their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana.

Its prohibited African-Americans, not including veterans, from owning guns without a license or special permit. Not surprisingly, these permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally obtain a gun. This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns, making the potential penalties of exposure even greater. Punishment for having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of the weapon. Old slave patrols re-emerged to enforce the black codes and to terrorize African-Americans.

This, along with a combination of great incentives to catch blacks with weapons captured over their newfound freedom, created a white frenzy, making it extremely difficult to hide a gun as an African-American. White frenzy is the worst frenzy. It's the most common frenzy, too, in this country. Yeah, no, it's their most traditional American frenzy, but it is not a fun one. We do love us a frenzy.

We love a frenzy. We love a good frenzy. We love a bad frenzy. So, 1865, a bunch of black codes come into effect to basically try and keep black people in similar positions to how they'd been during slavery, even though the war was over. So, in 1866, the U.S. Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which this is like, there's a big old fight over this. And this is the law that basically says,

hey, these people have the same rights that white people have on the bill of front. That's what that does, you know? And, you know, things do get a lot better for a while. Yeah, reconstruction at this point was like, look, do you ever just like read up on reconstruction and go like, holy shit, for a hot second there. We seem to be on a good track for a minute. We're on a good track.

Like, it seemed like shit was gonna like work out. Yeah, things get a lot better for a while, and then there's a violent reaction from the reactionaries. And they do an insurgency, which is kind of centered around the KKK. We have talked about this in other episodes. It ends with a series of demeaning bigoted laws aimed at maintaining white supremacy in the former Confederacy. These are, you know, Jim Crow laws, right?

And these come into place alongside a wave of lynchings which kill at least like 5,000 black Americans. Obviously, there's no way of knowing the actual total. Good chance it was significantly more, but at least 5,000. So, in response, black people do what you would expect. They form militias, you know? They start carrying guns for what I don't think I need to explain the logic here, right? And they organize to stop lynchings.

This culminates in Louisiana in 1876, where a bunch of clansmen who are also government officials, these are like elected leaders in Louisiana who are also in the KKK, are charged with conspiring to disarm a meeting of black Americans. Basically, like, one of these groups of black folks had gotten together with guns to, like, figure out how to protect their community. And these state officials, like, try to take their weapons away. Right.

A bunch of courtship happens, it goes to the Supreme Court, who rules in favor of the Ku Klux Klan, saying that the state had the legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common good. God. And, you know, in this period of time, there's also one of the things happening during the lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person who is attempted to be lynched has a gun,

and they shoot the people trying to lynch them. And when that happens, a number of laws are passed in different towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms. And in fact, those are some of the first specific laws against the carrying of concealed handguns. Now, this is an area where, like, the kind of the anti-gun control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff. It's very much worth noting all gun control in the United States in this period

is not based in white supremacy, in part because a lot of it is put in areas where, like, most of the population is white. And there was, it's worth noting, significantly more gun control in portions of the, like, the so-called Wild West than there are in a lot of those same states today, in places like the Dakotas and whatnot. It was common for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted. In many towns, if a visitor came into town,

they would be expected to leave their guns with the local police before entering. They'd get, like, a little card or something. You weren't supposed to like... Like, there were... And there's, you know, a lot to be said about, like, why this is being done. But in general, it's being done because they see that it's perfectly reasonable to say that, like, well, there should be restrictions on what you can do in town with a firearm, right?

Right, yeah. Walking around with a gun seems, I don't know, threatening. Yeah, they certainly don't want you doing it openly. And then, like, there's a bunch of... There's laws about carrying concealed and those kind of vary from place to place. But it's worth noting that the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral actually occurred because a guy... Like, it was over gun control, right?

Like, a guy was openly carrying his guns in the city. And, you know, there was... As far as I'm aware, like, everyone involved in that, I'm pretty sure, was, like, a white dude. So I don't think there's anything particularly racist in the gunfight. You could talk about it involving, like, police overreach. Sure. Which people will make the case that, like, this was a case of, like, a fucking early cop going bug fuck on some people.

Yeah, yeah. Don't tread on me, and just people... Do you see this whole time? I didn't know that that was a real gunfight at the OK Corral. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, no, no. It's a pretty cool story, as it perfectly accurately described in the documentary Tombstone. It's a great doc. Starring Val Kilmer, yes.

Yeah, I thought the reason was, you know, like, a card game got lost or something, or someone had, like, extra aces up their sleeve. But it turns out, gun control. No, that would be the documentary... Shit, was it Maverick? What's the documentary about the card guy who gets like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I need to rewatch that. That was a good fucking...

That's a good movie. My other guess was gonna be a giant metal spider who tries to take over the cell. My third favorite documentary. And this is what brought about the famous US law against the carrying of gigantic metal spiders. Right, right, right, right. Which I consider to be the civil rights era of the day. Me, of course. I think access to giant metal spiders should be democratized.

I mean, that's just a legitimate... Well, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a giant metal spider is a good guy with a giant metal spider. I would argue that you can't be a bad guy with a giant metal spider. Agreed. Cause look, no matter what it's doing, if I get to see a giant metal spider tromping around town, my day's improved. Like, okay, what that spider's going to do.

Everyone feels safe and happy. Everybody feels better with a giant metal spider. So... This podcast is brought to you by giantmetalspider.com. Promo code, giant metal spider. Get yours today. It's actually right on time because it is about that time. Wow.

Well, look. Everybody's talking a lot about AR-15s. You know what's more powerful than an AR-15? A metal spider the size of the Chrysler building. That is scary. Yeah, yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. 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 badass 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. 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. 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. Oh, we're back. So you have, you know, again, the Wild West, how common gunfights and stuff were, especially in like cities and towns, is exaggerated. But also there was a lot of like, there were a lot of robberies, there were a lot of crimes, like, and it's the same as it is today.

Like the gunfights that have kind of come down to history were like the ones that the media went nuts on in the day, like the gunfight at the OK Corral. But broadly speaking, by the end of the 1800s, most places in the United States had banned the concealed carrying of handguns. Although open carrying remained legal in a lot of places. We'll talk about when that ended. In 1893, the government of Texas said that, quote,

the mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder, to check it is the duty of every self-respecting law-abiding man. And again, he was probably saying that primarily because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns. This is the governor of Texas in 1893. So do keep that in mind. But US gun control in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the specter of armed black people.

And even where laws were perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law. Lenzetto writes, quote, another example of discrimination is found in legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era involved an 11-year-old black boy with a toy gun. In St. Louis in 1900, it was illegal to fire a gun within city limits, but the boy was charged for violating this law.

However, when his case was being reviewed by a judge to determine his guilt, it was discovered that the gun was fake. Knowing this new information, the judge should have dropped all charges given that it is not possible to fire a fake gun. But this was not the case. Instead, the boy was found guilty and the judge fined him $10, almost $310 today. Which is interesting.

Again, another thing that goes back very far is black kids being penalized for having toy guns. Quite far back. I mean, it's literally just, these are like rulings. It's like, well, you scared me. That's the entire thing. I believe the explanation for the deaths of countless black people. Well, and it's also just like this.

I was scared. Perhaps we're fundamentally frightened by the concept even if it's a toy of black people having guns because that's how we maintain our power over them, right? Right. Which is, again, even in these areas where concealed carrying or open carrying is illegal, it's generally not illegal for white people to do

if they're being vigilantes, right? This is a key aspect of this period. And this brings us back to the glorious state of Texas. Like much of the South after the Civil Rights Act, legislators had to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm black people were not motivated by racism. Brendan Rivas from Texas Christian University writes, quote, the post 1865 laws, however, used race-neutral language

to accomplish a racially motivated goal. Most of these laws attempted to disarm black Texans, but some from the 1870s stopped to curb the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone. For instance, a part of the Texas slave code prohibited slaves from carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer. And a law passed in 1866 prohibited laborers

from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent. And race-neutral language at the 1866 law achieved the same result as the slave code without specifically declaring that African-Americans should be disarmed. Their arming was conditional, subject to the authorization of an interested white party.

Similarly, the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those local offices. And you can guess which of those happens more often. And this is the state of affairs legally

in the state of Texas when Harlan Bronson Carter is born on August 10th, 1913 in Granbury, Texas. Now, at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that it was the home of Davy Crockett for a little while. And every town in Texas was Davy Crockett's home for a little while. Not super, impressive.

Every town is just, he stayed at a motel here for two weeks. Just fucking all our hookers. He's like a celebrated hunter and frontier guy. And Harlan certainly, I heard God knows how many fucking stories about Davy fucking Crockett when I was a kid in my mandatory Texas history class. I am going to guess in like 1920,

young Harlan Carter is growing up and learning even more of these stories. And obviously he's also enmeshed in the local gun culture of the time. Pretty much everywhere is semi-rural. So he's, you know, he does a lot of hunting. He does a lot of target shooting. He becomes an excellent shot from an early age.

And he develops an intense affinity for firearm, shall we say. So when he's young, the family moves to Laredo. Laredo is a border town, right? And they moved to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent. And in fact is one of the very first Border Patrol agents. So the year that they moved to Laredo is 1927, Harlan's 14.

And it's the same year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes a trip to the town and expresses in an official document his shock to find that, quote, Laredo was strictly a Mexican town. Probably 90% of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent. He adds with horror, the only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself. And this is an interesting, like Laredo at this point,

because it's so heavily Mexican, is not a town controlled by white people. And the police are not a white force, right? You'll note that quote I read earlier states that like kind of the laws against gun control were usually mainly like put into force against like armed black people. And that's why some politics could be used

to try to stop white vigilantes. Well, this is one of those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police force is not white. So the Border Patrol, however, is not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican folks are running things, right? That does not thrill them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, next, you know, they'll start inviting other Mexicans to live here and they won't stop the border. I mean, I love the idea of these like people going to a town right on the border of Mexico in Texas, which used to be Mexico and being like, what the hell are all these Mexicans doing? Yeah, these communities that had been there for decades before the state of Texas was the thing

that anyone had thought of being like, these people are going to change the nature of Texas. Yeah, this is not the Texas I know that we invented about 20 years ago. Yeah, that we invented when I was 15. Yeah, exactly. So this Inspector Guy Perkins, again, as exactly as racist as you might expect,

and he decides that Laredo's immigration cops are not going to be able to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, which are again geared towards enforcing white supremacy if the state of affairs in Laredo remains the way that it is. So he carries out what he describes as a, quote, full-scale house cleaning. Now, in the wonderful book, Migra, Kelly Hernandez writes,

quote, he charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector and border patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrant smuggling and forced just under half of Laredo's 28 border patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select border patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo sector

because all were experienced well-disciplined fighters who knew the country well. Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the border patrol station from the local Mexican American political elite. Tension quickly mounted between the ex-Rangers in the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo police department. While the border patrol enjoyed close relations

with the local police in most borderland communities, in 1927, several officers of the Laredo border patrol got in their Model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling and shooting up the police station. Holy fuck. So he cleans house, brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which is like the most racist police force

in the United States at this period, and has them shoot up the police station. Fucking A. I mean, like on the one hand, A cab. Yeah. I mean, it's like on the one hand. But on the other hand, I don't think it's A. I think it's just these particular cabs.

You know what I mean? Yeah. They're going after specifically an armed group of Mexican Americans. It's also probably worth noting that in this period, if you're being a fucking, being a Mexican American police officer in Laredo in 1927 is a bit different from being a police officer

pretty much anywhere in the United States at this point, which is part of like why the border patrol is purging them. Because he's like, you guys, they're not stopping immigration. They're not like violently cracking down on people who aren't white. They're not enforcing white supremacy. So we have to get rid of them with guns. Yeah.

And they get rid of. They do get rid of the Laredo police force with guns. So the only time in American history that police have been able to be fired. Yes. Yeah. This is the one time it happened. This is what it took.

The one time. So it's safe to say that Laredo was a pretty wild place when Harlan Carter was an adolescent. His father, Horace, was among the first cohort of border patrol agents hired in 1927. And he was transferred to Laredo in 1927 as part of this process. It's entirely possible that Horace Carter

was one of the guys shooting that police station. Yeah. And in this period of time, Harlan's father would have seen his job as explicitly to use violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most people were not white. Quote from Migra. Although most local stations develop their own strategies,

policies and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo border patrol and local Mexican American leadership. The cleanup transformed the Laredo border patrol into a refuge for white violence

within Mexican dominated Laredo. So they've turned the border patrol prior to this and they're all like local guys, right? So they don't really care about like Mexican America, like Mexicans coming into America because like that's how they got there, right? That's like their family, everybody. And again, they also probably don't see the border

as this solid thing. No, it's completely made up. Because their relatives have lived here for forever. They used to not be like a thing to cross. Yeah. But this is the period where the border is really is becoming a thing in a way that hadn't been before.

And part of how they do that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of white people and have them shoot anybody who disagrees, right? Like that's how the border becomes real in Laredo. The American way. And it's how borders are enforced everywhere. Yeah. That's why borders are bad, folks.

Yeah, although today, I mean, there's a long conversation to be had about the fact that the border patrol today is extremely diverse. Like one of the things people on the left particularly have gotten wrong about Evaldi is like the assertion that like, well, they probably didn't go in because those kids were Hispanic.

And it's like, have you seen a pictures of the Evaldi police? A lot of them are Mexican-American. And the border patrol guy, like it's a whole thing. Like if you go down to border communities, you'll see it's not that simple. White supremacy is always as like superficial and simple as it seems. Yeah.

So in 1930, Harlan, aged 16, joins the National Rifle Association. And again, the NRA is rightfully, again, I'm more pro-gun than most people on the left tend to be. But the NRA is like undoubtedly, we'll be spending hours talking about this, incredibly toxic. It's not at this point, right?

There's nothing wrong with the NRA at this age, really. And in fact, the NRA has its roots on the correct side of the Civil War. There's these two Union generals who are like, because again, Civil War, one of the things early on, the South is doing pretty well. And part of why they're doing pretty well is that all the boys who wind up fighting

in the Confederacy's military, like they're country boys, right? They've grown up shooting and hunting. And using guns to enforce white supremacy, they're good with firearms. Whereas most of the northern boys who get drafted are like city kids, and many of them had never had any chance to use firearms. So they're like, they suck with them, right?

And these two Union generals are like, boy, our soldiers are really bad at shooting and it takes a long time to train them up. Maybe if we should get ready for the next war by having an organization where boys who grow up in urban areas can go in and learn how to shoot. That seems like a good thing to encourage. And the NRA, up until the early 20th century,

is like a sportsman's association. You're doing it for target shooting, you're doing it for hunting. Now, it is worth noting that from the beginning, and this was not seen as problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect to it as well. It's not like a military organization, but part of the purpose of the NRA

is to prepare people to be part of the military, if necessary. And this is also, the military is a really different thing in this period. We have a big standing army during the Civil War, but we hadn't before, and we don't quickly afterwards, right? Like this is, again, when World War I happens, they have to make an army when World War II happens. They have to make an army in a way

that it had not hugely existed prior to this. So there's this understanding that if there's an emergency, we're going to need to activate all of these civilians, and they need to be ready to fight and whatnot. So, yeah, the US Defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons and other equipment to the NRA, which would sell them to members quite cheaply.

This used to be able to get World War II guns like Garen's for really cheap from the NRA. It was a bunch of stuff they did like that. So in February, 1931, the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of their house, right? Now, they have no idea who does this. This is the origin story of so many racists would go on. Oh, boy, Matt.

So, again, as far as I know, it was never figured out who had done this. But a couple of weeks after their car is stolen, on March 3rd, 1931, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harlan's mother sees three Hispanic boys quote-unquote loitering out in front of the house. Now, she says loitering. We have no idea.

They may have just been like walking around or like, even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this. But like, racist white lady sees people who are not white vaguely close to her house, and she decides that like, these boys must have been who stole my car. Yes, yes. The earliest recorded incident of Karen.

Yeah. Yeah. So Karen Carter calls the cops. Karen Carter. Well, you can't really call. It's 1931. Some people do have phones. I don't know if they do.

It's not easy to call. It's not as easy to call the cops. They send a pigeon or whatever those guys did there. No. Her son winds up taking this into his own hands. Ah, yes. That's right. I'm going to quote from a write-up and timeline here.

The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn't be home for hours. So the son picked up his shotgun and walked out the door. It didn't take him long to find the boys, who were between the ages of 15 and 12 at a swimming hole nearby. He demanded they come home with him. When they asked why he wouldn't say,

15-year-old Ramon Casiano responded, hell no, we won't go to your house and you can't make us. Carter and Casiano started swearing at each other. Casiano pulled out a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter lifted his shotgun to Ramon's chest. According to testimony from that time, Ramon told him not to do it and pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back and laughed.

Annoyed by Ramon's lack of fear, Carter asked if he thought he wasn't going to shoot. Then he did. Casiano lay dying on the ground with a two-inch shotgun wound in his chest. Jesus. So that sounds familiar, right? Yup.

There's shades of written house. There's shades of Zimmerman, you know? Like this is, again, not, and obviously I'm sure like, if we had been around at the time and there was a lot of information to the news, we'd say, oh, there's shades of like this thing that happened in like 1920 and this thing that happened.

We just happened to know the most recent incidents. Yeah. This is a very familiar incident, right? And you can imagine even if this happened today, it would be a massive culture war. Well, he had a knife. What was he supposed to do? He was just defending his family.

You know, yada, yada, yada. So it's worth noting, talking about why Harlan felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which there are some like, it's not really legal to carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff, but this is, you're not supposed to like walk out

to try and solve the robbery of your car with a 12 gauge shotgun. Like that's not explicitly legal. Yeah. But there's a long history of vigilante violence by white people. And so whether or not this actually is legal is going to come down heavily on the local courts, right?

And so the fact, because this is happening in Laredo, if this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city of hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue. Because it's happening in Laredo, this is going to be a problem for Harlan, right? Did you call Dallas the city of hate? That's literally its nickname.

What? Yeah. That's the name of Dallas, Texas is the city. We killed JFK. Yeah. I mean, good point. Holy shit. Yeah.

The city of brotherly hate. That's, um, wow. I mean, not anymore, but like that is, that is the nickname of Dallas, Texas. Like, um... Oh. Yeah.

So because this happens in Laredo, the law is not as on his side, as you might expect if it had happened in some other parts of Texas. Harlan Carter is arrested, he is tried, and he is convicted of murder. Um, he's sentenced to three years in prison. Again, you can say like,

he should have been sentenced to more. I, I... I'm mixed because he was a child, right? Right. This is bad, but also like, I think you have to, if you believe children are not culpable in the way that adults...

Anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years. Um, his family appeals the, the, uh, the judgment. Um, and they complain for about a number of things. They say the judge is related to the prosecutor. Uh, that, that self-defense had not been adequately explained to the jury.

That one of the witnesses was like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy. A bunch of racist shit. Yeah, yeah, they were like, well, uh, the judge failed to consider that, uh, the victim was no angel. Mm-hmm. That like, that's based. Yeah.

Although they focus more on like the, the kid who watched him's friend to get his brother or whatever, get murdered was no angel. Yeah. He was also no angel. Um, so eventually... You are legally allowed to kill no angel? That's right.

That's right. That's in the Bible. That's right. That's why anytime I see a bunch of floating eyes, I just start shooting. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That was a biblical angel joke.

Sure was. So, eventually a judge with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, um, agrees that like the case was bad and he overturns, uh, Harlan Carter's conviction, uh, on these grounds and because, quote, several of the material witnesses for the state have been discredited having been convicted

of infamous crimes. Um, it does not seem accurate that they were convicted of infamous crimes. Yeah. Um, but, you know, it's also worth noting that like Harlan's dad helped run law enforcement in Laredo. Mm-hmm.

Um, it's impossible that some of the people who had witnessed the shooting were, like, targeted by the police to provide plausible deniability for his kid. Mm-hmm. Um, if not likely. So, Harlan gets let out of prison. Um, his conviction is overturned

and he, he proceeds with life now as a young adult as a free man. Uh, he enrolls in the University of Texas, but he changes his name. So, his, his original name had been Harlan, H-A-R-L-A-N, and he swaps out the A for an O. Um, and he does this basically under the understanding that like,

well, this will make it hard. If people go looking for Harlan, Carter, his criminal record, they won't find anything. Wait, so he changed it to Horlan or Harlan? Harlan, Harlan. Okay, okay. H-A-R-L-O-N is supposed to H-A-R-L-A-N, right?

Okay, okay, got it. And again, it's, it's a marker of, like, how different the time is that, like, this works perfectly for him. For decades. Like, people are like, ah, well, they, they swapped an A with an O with no other we can do.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, well, the search engine doesn't do other letters, so fuck it. It was so easy to get away with crimes back in the 30s. My God, was it easy. Speaking of getting away with crimes, you know.

If you walked fast, like, if you could walk pretty fast, you could get away with a crime. Oh, man, those are the days. Those were the days. Let's bring them back. Robert, do you know who else gets away with crimes? Uh, the C-A-R-L-O-N Corporation,

when they hired those mercenaries to gun down union organizers in Latin America? That was a lob and you took it, I'm very proud of you. Yeah, yeah. Drink. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

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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,

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. And I'm just going to have a nice refreshing sip of... Oh, it's a classic drink, you know?

That tastes like locking a bunch of nuns and union organizers in a church and lighting it on fire. God, that's good stuff. Yummy. Love it. So, again, it's one of those things. If this had kind of been

the end of Harlan Carter's story, I'd say like, well, that was a fucked up thing that happened, but I guess I don't believe a 16-year-old should be locked in prison for their whole life. So...

But that's not the end of the story. It sucks that there are cases where it would be sick if he had... It's like with Kyle Rittenhouse. I don't think the right thing was to throw him in a hole for forever. Certainly the right thing is not to turn him into a celebrity

and give him millions of dollars. That may be even worse, but I think fundamentally you have to believe that, well, if a child does something, even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused on the possibility of rehabilitation

because otherwise, you don't actually believe that children are less responsible than adults. And anytime you try to set up... Anytime you try to be more punitive, it always affects, you know, brown people and people of color way more. And obviously, yeah, like Raymond Casiano

suffers even more for whatever, however questionable you want to think. His call to pull a knife might have been... Again, you could argue justified because the other kid had a fucking gun. Yeah, yeah, a fucking shotgun. It's... One of the problems with guns in America

is how often angry teenage boys get ahold of them. And this is, again, quite an old story. Yeah, the tale was all this time. But regardless of what you think should be done when kids commit murder, Harlan definitely committed murder. It's not self-defense.

And anyone who says otherwise is probably racist. But it's worth noting that even modern sources... And this is something... This is where things get really incumbent. Even modern sources that are, like, very pro-gun control, very anti-Harlan Carter, who will attack Harlan for his later work with the NRA, tend to tell the story of what happened with him

and Raymond Casiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce Harlan's claims of self-defense. This is a very strange thing I've noticed in a couple of sources. I've read a lot of articles about this guy. And his actions can be framed in fascinating ways. I want to highlight, particularly, a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler.

And Gunfight, there's actually, like, five books titled Gunfight. I think one of them seemed to be slightly grifty. It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who does an anti-gun book because I think maybe that's where the money was. I don't know, I'm not going to go into date because I haven't read it.

I haven't read it. But there's a bunch of books with this title. The good one, the one that you would actually be worth reading, is Winkler's Gunfight. He's a UCLA professor. And Gunfight is a critical history of the battle over the Second Amendment in U.S. politics. That has a lot of really useful context,

including some of what I went over about, like, the early racism and gun control. It's a good, and again, very much anti-NRA. But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter and Raymond Casiano, which I find very peculiar. Quote, Carter loved guns from childhood. He was an excellent shot

and would go on to win two national shooting titles and set 44 national shooting records during his lifetimes. His most infamous shot, however, came at the age of 17 when, in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun into the chest of a knife-wielding Mexican teenager. Nope. That's a weird way to describe that, right?

That's not what happened at all. That's not what happened at all. That's such a weird way for... And again, Winkler is like, he's a professor of law at UCLA. Like, he's all over the New York Times writing about this kind of stuff. It's like really weird that he describes it that way.

Maybe it was just like, oh, man, I've done all this other research. I'm just not gonna... I'm just gonna go with the autobiography that he wrote. This description. It's just like calling Raymond Casiano a knife-wielding Mexican teenager. Yeah, right.

It's such like an unsettling way to choose to phrase that. It's very strange. It was just like, people forget that Casiano was guilty. Because he had a knife. Guilty of bringing a knife to a gunfight. It is... Yeah.

Yeah. Again, the book is not at all right-wing or reactionary. There's a lot of good stuff in there. The fact that he describes Casiano's murder in this way, though, makes me question some stuff that like, maybe I missed in vetting this thing. Because it's a really weird passage. It's so strange.

Now, let's compare that to this write-up by a right-wing dude, Dave Coppell, from an article he wrote explicitly defending Harlan Carter's legacy. Now, in this article, he's critiquing a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that accurately noted, quote, 50 years ago, Carter shot and killed a 15-year-old boy

and was convicted of murder. Arguing against this, Coppell writes, the letter admitted the fact that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang of intruders led by the boy, and that the boy was menacing Carter with a knife. Again, this is also not true. No.

He was not defending his mother's ranch. They were swimming. Yeah. They were swimming and having a good time and being accused of doing a crime. That they, I mean, did they do the crime even? I don't think there's ever been any evidence that they did. There's evidence that they even stole a car.

Again, this is a little murky, but it kind of seems like what happened is, their car was stolen. A couple of weeks later, she sees some Mexican kids walk past their house towards a swimming hole and six her son on them. Right? That kind of seems like what happened.

That seems, that tracks. And it's weird because Winkler and Coppell could not be more apart ideologically. But their description of this murder is very similar. I don't want to harp too much on this, but it's really weird to me that that happened. Yeah. Do you have any inkling as to why that may be,

or is there just a... Most people don't dwell too much on... It took me a while, actually, to find good specific details about what happened that day. And I think most people take the attitude that just like... Well, he said he was defending his mom, and that's the... I don't know.

I think, in part, Winkler's covering a lot of ground, because his book is not focused on Carter. It's a whole history of how the Second Amendment has been interpreted and ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries. So he does have a lot of ground to cover. It's just very... I guess that one of the things he did was just kind of

brush over what happened there. Right. Yeah. Just an unconscious bias. Yeah. Like the way I would do it, right? Because it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history to not go into detail,

but I would have just said something like, he confronted another teenager over something his mother said. Or he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicion. So even that would be better, right? Yeah. And also, this is... You do a podcast.

You're a UCLA professor. Yeah. Again, I don't want to like shit on him too much because it's like there's a lot of good stuff in the book. It's just that part... I don't get it. I don't get why you would write about it that way. Anyway, so Harlan Carter commits murder,

does two years in prison, goes to college, and then he decides to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Border Patrol. He becomes an agent in 1936, three years after leaving prison. Carter's rise was rapid, if not meteoric, so he joins in 1936, having been in prison two years earlier. In 1950, he's running the entire Border Patrol.

Wow. Now again, Border Patrol is a lot smaller back then. It's a lot newer. It's easier to become head of the Border Patrol. And also, his murder was definitely something on his resume. You know what I mean? Probably on like the secret... I don't think he put it on his paper resume,

but I'm sure... No, sure, certainly. Because he's known in Laredo, like I'm sure the guys giving him his first gigs all know about it and think it's rad, right? Yeah. But he also, he does keep it a secret publicly, right? Like he doesn't brag about it in public.

Again, when he's hanging out with his buddies, I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly. But it's not like a part of his public persona as a... Sure. You know, once you're the head of the Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know? Right, right, right. It's not like today in which that would be something

he would be celebrated for about on, you know... Oh, yeah, he would... Like the shotgun that he used to kill Raymond Casiano with an auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah, exactly. And he would have used it to buy an F-350 with... The daily wire would give him his own column.

Yes. It would be a whole thing. Yeah, he'd be making documentaries with Matt Walsh. Yeah. Times were a lot more chill back then, which is... It is when we're talking about the story of this guy who does like a racist murder as a teenage boy and like, wow, he really was less proud of it

than he would be today. Right, exactly. Yeah, that's where we're at. Where we're like, oh, wow, he didn't make that like his whole brand? Yeah. Weird. Wild.

So the Border Patrol had shifted at this point from being geared mainly towards policing the border to being a force for policing Mexican-Americans inside the United States, on the pretext of them being potentially undocumented migrants. As a result, their work strayed further and further from the border and increasingly into American cities, factories, farms, and anywhere expected of harboring illegals.

Some Border Patrol agents had difficulty with this, right? This was not a lot of the folks who had signed up earlier. This was not like the thing that they had signed up for specifically. Harlan, though, is hugely supportive of this change. And in fact, he wanted to expand the Border Patrol's purview even further and use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely. Jesus.

This was justified in his mind by the fact that a large number of undocumented migrants were living and working, or this was justified publicly, right? So Harlan, there's like a racial motivation, but you can't use that like as we talked about earlier, right? Like you have to hide when your laws are racially motivated. So the justification is that a large number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches

and other businesses in the borderlands, often under nightmarish slave-like conditions. Now, this is a real problem that's happened, right? As it is today, right? Yes, completely. And yeah, there's this like suggestion of a new thing called the Bracero Program that will provide kind of like a legal way for these people to like work, but they'll have, you know,

there will be more control over the conditions that they can work in, which obviously the people who would be hiring them don't like. Right. It's a whole thing. Just fucked every which way. From the perspective of Harlan Carter, though, this is primarily a humanitarian pretext for carrying out like a purging of Mexican Americans from like the borderlands.

And I'm going to quote from Migra again. Carter had convened a meeting to request the assistance of the US military in the National Guard to purge the nation of undocumented Mexican nationals and seal the US-Mexico border. The Border Patrol's proposal was titled Operation Cloudburst and consisted of three basic steps. First, an anti-infiltration operation on or near the border would seal the border with the assistance of 2,180 military troops.

In addition to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic. Two metal picket barbed wire fences eight feet high and eight feet apart with rolls of concertina wire in between and one roll of concertina wire on top of the fence nearest Mexico built several miles along the border would form the fence. But previous experience had taught the Border Patrol that fenced areas still needed additional security.

Therefore, the concertina fence would be reinforced by officers in jeeps who will be directed to the scene of any attempted fence or canal crossing by observers in radio-equipped towers. So this is the first modern, this is the wall, right? This is the start of it. This is the beginning of that. Not that there hadn't been like fences and stuff in different areas before then. This is the first time someone's like, we need to build a wall

and has like a concerted vision of that. And specifically a vision of using the wall as a system of violence in order to keep the borderlands white, right? That's what he's doing here. And he invents that shit, you know? Wow. Wow. He's like the Thomas Edison of making racist borders.

That's right. Yeah, wow. He's the Elon Musk of border racism. Sure. Yes. So to continue that quote. Race X. Race X.

Jesus Christ. I wanted to do a pun. Sorry. Good work. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm going to continue that quote. Second, a containment operation would maintain roadblocks on all major roads

leading from the Southwest to the interior of the United States. These roadblocks would be used to inspect traffic, including railroad traffic, for the purpose of detecting illegal entrants and to maintain safety patrols around the checkpoints. Roadblocks were planned for strategic locations that would prevent aliens from fleeing to the interior of the nation when the mopping up operations, the third phase, began. The mopping up operations would be conducted in northern areas

such as San Francisco, where the task forces would raid designated locations such as migrant camps or places of business. So San Francisco, I don't know if you've ever been, Matt. Yeah. Not super close to the border. Oh, yeah. Right?

Well, I guess close to like a sea border, right? No, no, no. Which is what we're building towards. I mean, those are the other aliens that they also want to put a fence around. Yeah. Watch out for all those turtles and fucking, you know. Don't worry, we'll get rid of those in a couple of decades. Right, exactly.

Just put a few more of those soda, you know, fucking, soda rings in the water. But yeah, no, not close to the border. I lived in San Francisco and I'll tell you, it was a trek to get to San Francisco. Pretty far north. Yeah, exactly. So the primary downside to his plan, right?

This is a pretty good idea if you're a white supremacist, right? Solid plan. The only problem with it is that it is wildly unconstitutional. So there's this thing, right? This law that kind of gets in the way of this. So right at this point in time, nowadays the border patrol, like you see those guys fucking walking around and they look like soldiers, right? They've got their plate carriers and their AR-15s and all their fucking cool tactical gear.

At this point, the border patrol is like slightly better armed than a modern Boy Scout troop, you know? Like they're not packing that much heat compared to what they're going to be packing. They have a lot of merit badges. They have a lot of merit badges in racism, but there's not a ton of them, right? So they can't do this without the US military. And in fact, the military is going to wind up being a significant portion of the effort if they try to do this.

But here's the problem. There's this stupid fucking bullshit ass 1878 law called Possecomatatus, right? And that means you can't use the military to enforce domestic laws without Congress's approval. Oh, damn. Yeah, I know. I know. We all hate Possecomatatus. Yeah, dude.

I, for one, think the military should enforce all of the laws. Yes, dude. Particularly jade walking. Exactly. They're the best at it. You don't want a bunch of Boy Scout border patrols getting a merit badge for walking a Mexican old lady across the border. You should have drones making sure, watching for people to cross the street illegally.

And we should have MLRS rocket systems to just bombard the area if they cross the street, not at a crosswalk. Exactly, dude. We want more Robocops than we want them to be. Absolutely. Yeah. Better roll. And reinstate the draft and use it to stop jaywalking and littering.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Someone cuts you off, someone's speeding, Agent Orange immediately. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, this fucking law, Possecomatatus, really grinds Harlan's gears. Yeah.

So, obviously, I should also note here that the fact that the military is not supposed to be used to enforce the law doesn't mean it isn't, right? Right. So, you know, they've Googled the Watts riots. Yes. You know, the government has a way of finding out, figure, making it, being able to use soldiers to do cop shit when it needs to. But in this case, the government wasn't willing to, like, push things that far, right?

And the general who's, like, job it is to, like, basically the general who's liaising with Carter is a guy named Swing who really wants to do this, like he's a racist too. But he's like, hey, we can't make this work legally right now, but we could do it if the president issued a proclamation, like it's not impossible to do, but, like, it's, you'd have to get Eisenhower on board. So, Harlan Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's people and he tries desperately to get approval, but Eisenhower isn't quite willing to deploy troops. Now, he, again, not to give Ike any credit, he agrees with Harlan's basic goals.

He just, this, like, using the army in this way is a little too far for him. Yeah. But, again, he's not against this. So in May of 1954, Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, right? INS. We don't have INS anymore now. We've got ICE.

Whatever. But, like, these guys are in, so he's basically, now he's Carter's boss, essentially, this, like, general. Yeah. And Swing had a long history of commanding troops in battle from Mexico to Korea. Obviously, you could see the fact that now a general is in charge of INS as, like, the start of the militarization of the border patrol, and Swing is a bastard in his own right, but this is really happening in part because of, like, what Carter is pushing to turn the border

patrol into, right? This is not just the start of the militarization of the border patrol. The border patrol is going to become the first large police agency to militarize, right? This happens decades before, you know, we talked about the Watts riots, which happened, like, a decade or so from now, and then the LA riots, which were a big, you know, decades later, which were a big pusher. This happens way before all of that. This is 1954, so this is, like, in a lot of ways, the beginning of police militarization

happens because Harlan Carter and General Joseph Swing want to cleanse the border lands of Mexican Americans. Yeah. Quote, as promised, one month after joining INS, Swing announced that he would lead the US border patrol in an intensive, innovative, and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the US-Mexico border. No one questioned how in four short weeks he had prepared the officers of the border patrol for such a massive campaign.

I mean, at this point, too, what was even the, the, like, what were the migration numbers? Like, was it even that, I mean, certainly it's not as much as it was now, but I'm thinking about, like, what, 1950s, 1950s Mexico was what, they had, you know, the civil wars not that long ended. Yeah. The PRIs in power, it's, isn't it fairly stable at this point? I feel like, yeah, so it's like, it's like what they were doing this pretense of, like, oh, we got to stop the illegals.

I mean, we're not even talking about, like, you know, we're not talking about modern Latin American immigration that we have today, which is uses a pretext for all sorts of racist laws against Latin Americans here legally. We're talking about a lot, like, yeah, labor stuff that's taught. And again, they have to, like, do moral panic and stuff about the treatment of migrants. But like, this is all very messy, because, like, some of the biggest people opposing the government doing this crackdown are these different ranchers and other employers who are like, who want to exploit people's labor.

It's not, there's a lot that's, that's going on overall in this issue, but when it comes to Harlan Carter, it's pretty simple, right? He's racist, you know? Yeah. He's trying to do a racial purge under the pretext of like, oh man, you know, they're not paying fair wages, like he gives a shit. And it's, you know, he's, he's also like starting the process of, of justifying, figuring out ways to justify this, and that are like palatable to large chunks of Americans.

And yeah, that's, that's what's happening in this period of time, and you know what else is happening right now, I'm going to ask you for your pluggables. Oh, hell yeah. So my pluggables are, I just finished the entire series, the Sopranos pot yourself a gun is a podcast that I do with Vince Mancini. And we just did our very last episode, we watched all of it. We watched all the Sopranos and you can listen to the series finale wherever you get your podcast.

So check that out. And also follow me on Instagram because, you know, I feel like that's where all the like cool kids hang out. So like, you know, hit me up, hit me up there. And also be, be excited because me and Vince, our next show, we're going to be talking about the wire. That's right. 20 years after the wires come out, finally, two white men will break down the wire because

finally, you know, finally, someone's got to do it. I mean, that is the right group to break down the wire season two. Oh, for sure. For sure. Very excited. You got to make sure at least one of you is a pole. Oh yeah, we're going to get some, we got some poles who are going to come on. We got a bunch of Greek Baltimore friends who are going to come on.

It's going to be great, but yeah, look, look, look for that coming. What do you call it? Probably when you pod through the garden, you know, which, you know, kind of continues our tradition of having a really bad title for a TV rewatch podcast. Yeah. So check it out whenever that comes out. But for now, listen to pod yourself a gun. You can go back, listen to the whole thing, tell your friends who your favorite character

on the wire was. Um, I mean, I relate the most to bubbles because I used to love heroin, um, but, uh, other than that shit, probably Clay Davis. Clay Davis is cool. He's a, he's a state senator who says, who says shit a lot. She, she, you know, for a show that is like lift, lift it up as one of the greatest TV shows of all time. They're sure certainly are a lot of catchphrases.

It's a weirdly catchphrase heavy show for something that is incredibly serious. You know, what the fuck did I do? You got, you know, you got a proposition, Joe is like, I got a proposition for it. It's like, this is a serious show, but they love catchphrases anyways. I'm excited. That's awesome. Me too. Hi, cash.

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. 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 with like a lot of guns, but our 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. 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. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.