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

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Part Two with guest, Margaret Killjoy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I did it. Should we auto tune that? Yeah, please, absolutely. Chris, make it horny. Like really horny. Well, this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that has introduced the way I just introduced it. What are you going to do about it? Find another show?

Going to listen to something else? No, you're not. You're stuck here. You're stuck here with me. With me and with Margaret Kiljoy. Margaret, welcome to the show. Hello. How are you doing, Margaret? I'm doing great. Nothing bad or sad has happened. I'm sure that we're going to be talking about sunny, sunshine roses.

Yeah, I like thinking about good things. You know, there's a lot that makes me angry in the world. Like, for example, Hollywood didn't really do anything good with... Didn't do enough good with Bruce Campbell when he was like young and super hot. What's up with that? How could you not... I was just talking about this on Twitter, they're right. Like, how was he not in more stuff when he was like, you know, army of darkness young? Like, how do you not make the maximum use of that guy?

It's unbelievably infuriating. Yeah, his jaw is just left... Incredible. Yeah, you could bludgeon people to death with that jaw and they'd be happy about it. And you can almost kill him in every movie. Sam Raimi nearly murdered that man like 30 times and Bruce just kept coming back for more. Like, what a hero. Anyway...

What a hero. I feel like we really lost out on some great Bruce Campbell movies. Like, why not just cast him as Superman? Is he dead? No, no, but just like when he was like super young, right? He's been great. He's aged into a wonderful career as like the old guy kind of aging action hero type character. He does that in a lot of things.

He does that in Burn Notice and in The Ash vs. The Evil Dead show. Like, he's had a wonderful career. I'm sure he's very happy. But like, young Bruce Campbell, think about like, why not try him as Superman? Like, just throw it in there, just see what we get, you know? Just cast Bruce Campbell as Superman and let it happen. And have Sam Raimi direct it. Like, my God, can you imagine that movie?

That would have been nuts. I'm trying to delay us getting back to a very uncomfortable series of conversations. I was going to say, are you avoiding the task at hand? Yeah, because it's about to get a lot worse. Thanks everyone for tuning into this episode where there's absolutely like no joy. We don't even get like the moment of laughing at Hitler being given fucking cocaine by his doctor who's angry at the other doctor for giving him heroin.

That was a good time. Those are the good moments. Those are the ones that make the show worth it. None of those in this story. Oh, okay. Yeah. When we last left off, Christine, she had provided 4chan with evidence of that she was straight by giving hand-drawn pornography

of one of her few real-life friends, which is bad call. Yeah. Generally bad call. Not generally a bad call. Always a bad call. What if it had worked though? What if the friend had been like, it's true. I've been thinking about you this whole time.

That's not a 0% chance, but it's not a betting chance. Like someone out there, their kink would be realizing that their friend had without asking for their consent written pornography about them and handed it to 4chan. That person exists, right? Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah.

But that person is also on 4chan, right? Right. Yeah. Like there is a, yeah, anyway. So this goes bad and it also kind of supercharges this growing fandom. It is kind of a fandom. I think you have to look at it that way around Chris Chan. Like people realize not only does this person respond when you poke them,

which is like the number one thing that lets a bully know it's time to keep on bullying. But that you can get incredible content out of like lying about them on the internet and waiting for them to correct you in ways that make their entire life worse. So, you know, she has basically proven herself to be like a comedy pinata for these people, right? Right. That is how they're looking at it. So, yeah. It's not great.

This all sets off a three year period of near constant baiting by trolls, most of whom would pretend to be women interested in dating Christine. So they would reach out to her and like they would catfish her with like photos and messages with the goal of getting her to like reveal shameful things to them. And again, this is a thing that happens a lot to all sorts of people now. This didn't really happen much in like 2008, 2009. This is not as nearly as common as it would be. And especially it was not a thing that people did to create content for huge anonymous masses of internet users.

Like this is really where that begins. Yeah. One of the first of these trolls convinced Christine to mail them her beloved Sonichu medallion. This thing that she's like made that she wears everywhere that's like her most valued possession in the world. So this person pretends to be a girl who's interested in her and like asks for the medallion as like a token of love. And then when they get it, they post a video of themselves smashing it and lighting it on fire. Cool. Yeah.

Good. We really made a good thing with the internet. You think back to like 1999 people saying like, oh, this is when people are connected, it's going to make some of the evils of the 20th century impossible to repeat. No. It's just going to mean that like when the evils of the 20th century are repeated, we like throw a fucking whatever, trans-wave or whatever filter on it and stick like a meme joke on it.

We sell t-shirts of it and shit like. Might as well. Yeah. It's frustrating. So she eventually makes another medallion and she in due time gets catfished by another Anon, who this time convinces her to shove it up her ass and like tape it and stuff. On another occasion, she gets tricked into driving across the state for an orgy that never happens. And these are all like some of these are the same people over and over again.

These are a lot of different people. Yeah. Yeah. So the worst of her catfishers, I think the person who like breaks her medallion and lights out a fire and shit, goes by the name of Blue Spike. And this person who is like carrying out what I think we can say is like profoundly almost psychotically abusive cables is 13 years old. Oh, fuck. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's scant. Oh God. And because Christian is like what 26 or something. She's in her like mid 20s at this point. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I guess one of the things that this kind of reveals is that the way the internet enables abuse means that if you're the kind of person who isn't capable of disengaging in the way that Christine is, high school never ends, middle school never ends. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. That's good.

Like so no one is, so you have, there's no ones that, I mean everyone's at fault, no one's at fault. Yeah. Everyone's like, everyone's bad also. Everyone has something that means like, well, this 13 year old can't really know the full implications of what they're doing. Right? Yeah. And Christine is awful, but also can't really fully know the full ramifications of the decisions they're making. It's just this horrible engine that has been built kind of by accident that is now like churning these people towards calamity,

which is good. It's the ghost in the machine. Yeah, it's the ghost in the machine. Oh my God. Because the 13 year old could have been, because like, when I think about my friends who were, you know, I mean doing some version of this stuff in the 90s on various directions, like just the internet didn't exist in the same way, the 13 year old could have also been Chris Chan. Yeah.

You know, I'm like, wow, engine of sound. Yep. Yep. So they reveal the fact that they're a 13 year old to Chris after having catfished Chris for months during one of the most horrific moments in Chris Chan history, which is called Christerie, which is legitimately funny. That's legitimately funny. Yeah. Yeah.

But this moment is, I'm just going to play the audio of Blue Spike, this fucking teenager, revealing this to Chris Chan, because in the voice of this kid is something important. Do you really want to know? Yeah. A chance. Not right now. Come on, please. No, I can't.

Please, Julie, I've just been through a whole lot of mess for you just now. Whoa, what happened? I don't say that in private, but let me hear what you say first from your heart. This is so hard for me to say. You love me, don't you? I do, but there's something else I need to say. I just don't know how to do this. I don't know how to tell you this.

Can I have a few minutes? Blue, he's not there. Fuck! There's like a breakdown in there. Chris, I came back now. I wonder what happened there. This is cute. I'll put the fans for like five minutes, and then I'll tell you, please.

I'm sorry, thank you. No, I'm ready to tell you. Okay. This whole time, Chris, you've been having sex with a 13-year-old boy, you sick fuck. You lose. What? Yeah, I'm a 13-year-old boy, Chris. Yeah, so that's enough.

In that kid's voice and like the glee in it, that's the voice of the soul of the Internet. That is the disembodied soul of digital culture speaking in that moment. Oh my God. That's rough. I used to do the opposite of this when I was a teenager. I made my friends hung out on IRC and we would catfish, we would catfish pedos and then like get them be like, oh yeah, we're going to like phone sex you and get them to call us and then trace their number and reveal them to their workplaces.

Yeah. And obviously, I feel okay about that. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, but this is very different because like, Christine doesn't think she's hanging out. Obviously, she's not aware that this is a 13-year-old. And this is occurring, the reason there's other voices. This is during like a fan call, kind of like a prototype of like what Twitch streamers and stuff do now almost, where like you have a famous person and like people are coming

in and like chatting with them and stuff. Okay. So this is a thing that is occurring where he's talking to this person, he thinks is like his online girlfriend in front of a bunch of fans that she thinks are like real fans of hers, but aren't. But no, does she have any real fans? Yeah, she does. It gets, it's weird.

Okay. There's definitely people who like, there's always like a name 4chan after her. That is, that would be a funny thing to start. That's a good lie to teach kids. You heard it here first. That's where 4chan got its name. That's pretty bleak, right? And if that had been the absolute height of how fucked up things had gotten, this would

be a really sad story. But this happens in 2009. And every, the harassment of Christine goes on right up to this day. In 2010, her father died, leaving her and her mother in increasingly desperate financial states. In 2014, their fucking house burnt down along with most of their possessions. This is probably due to the fact that Christine's mom is a hoarder. There was a lot of bad decisions made about how to keep the house, RE fire safety.

And these are not, her mom, especially after their dad, is not a very functional person. And Christine's not a very functional person. And so things just get out of hand in there. This is one of those things. I'm not a, CPS is probably does more harm than good in my opinion, but somebody, it should have been in any decent society. Some responsible person should have stepped in and been like, this can't continue without outside intervention.

Someone needs to take care of you both. Right. You're not capable of doing that. Right. Like not, I'm not talking about institutionalization, but like just a nice person who could like sit down with him and be like, Hey, you can't keep all these newspapers stacked up next to this old coffee machine that sparks all the time or whatever. I don't know what caused the fire.

Right. That's one of the things that like the people who make fun of Christine kind of don't always, some of them do, but don't always take into account that like this is a person who's in like a dangerous and unhealthy living environment for reasons outside of like the weird shit they're doing on the internet. Right. It's pretty, pretty bad. She's still at home.

She hasn't moved out. She is not really capable of living independently. I think she would have been at some point. I don't think she was inherently like incapable, but like the person that she becomes in part due to this, cause like this fandom and stuff, like it's this constant positive reinforcement along with negative reinforcement. So she's both getting made fun of, but she's also people are giving her money. People are like praising her work.

This like community springs up around her and she believes that she's like becoming a famous content creator, which means there's not, to the extent that she ever had any kind of positive pressure to change in a, in a direction that would lead to her being able to like take care of herself more effectively. That goes away because of all this. Like it's both positive and negative attention. That's all bad for her. Yeah.

Yeah. That 13 year old is a grown ass person. That 13 year old was a grown ass person right now. Maybe listening to this show. Maybe listening to this show. Maybe feels horrible about it. I really don't know much about what happens to blue spike afterwards. I would hope they've become a better person.

Most people do. I wouldn't put money on it. I wouldn't put money on it. Cause they were on the internet, right? Yeah. I caught wind of someone from my high school who did something real bad to me like, like 10 or 15 years later bragging about it on Facebook. Like, remember that was really funny when we did this one horrible life altering scarring

thing. Yeah. Yeah. I get that kind of feeling. Like that, that fucking, there's so much cruelty in that voice. Yeah. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe.

I hope so. And maybe if you're listening, you should reach out and pretend like you're better and then be really horrible to wait. No, don't do that. You should do that if you're willing to like meet us in a secluded woods without leaving any information about where you're headed. So, yeah, all this financial desperation, like one of the ways in which Christine solves it as she starts taking commissions from fans and a lot of these are like ironic people

making fun of her or trying to get her to illustrate like horrific things, scenes of like violence and I think there's some sexual abuse and stuff in there. You know, it's 4chan stuff, right? Yeah. Your mind can put the rest together. But a decent amount of it is genuine. And this is the thing that's, I think it is also toxic for the reasons I've outlined, but a lot of people, I think, increasingly appreciate her in kind of the same way people

do Ed Wood, if that makes sense, where it's like, this is good artwork. These aren't good comics, but there's so much heart in them in such a specific and unique way that people gain a sort of enjoyment from it. That's not entirely based in, it's not really based in mockery, even though it's like laughing, they're not consuming her work the way she intended for it to be. But there are people who do just like are fascinated in a way that's not just about being mean. You know, how art works. No, I mean, yeah, like, well, ironic engagement leads to earnest engagement because sometimes

irony is just a defense mechanism of like something that you actually enjoy, you know? Yeah. So the same way that like ironic Nazis, you're like, no, you're just a Nazi. You actually just enjoy it and you cloak it in a shield of irony, you know? Yeah. You can do that in reverse too, I guess. So that's happening too. And again, I think it's part of like, I'm sure Christine loves that dimension of it.

I also, again, I think it's kind of like helping to keep her from ever growing as a person in ways that could, I got to talk about growing out of like liking weird Sonic art or making comics, but like growing out of being unable to like take care of herself in basic human ways. Yeah. Not knowing how to react and. Yeah, not knowing how to deal with conflict. Not knowing how to like, yeah.

I don't think she was inherently incapable of growing in those ways, but I think becoming the center of this circus kind of locked her into continuing to play these roles in the way that like when you get rich and famous at age 18 for something, a lot of times you never grow up. We've seen this a bunch. There's that great line in Bojack Horseman where they make the, I forget which character it is, but says that like whatever age you get rich at, you never, like that's the age you stop developing as a human being.

And I think you can make a similar case to whatever age you get like super internet famous at. You just get like locked into that forever. Oh my God, that's, yep. Especially works really well since like the whole vampire is class analysis. Speaking of ghosts in the machine. Yeah. So by the mid aughts, most of the early places like something awful where people had gathered

to gawk at Christian's life and her artwork had moved on, right? Like something awful. It is not really the center of what actually grows into the problematic part of this. It's just kind of like where people start gawking. A lot of people like I was someone who paid a, like I've been following Christian's story since like 2006 or seven, you know? Okay. So when I was like literally a child myself, I first became aware of this person.

And most of the folks who are kind of like in the, we're just kind of like fascinated with her eventually stopped tuning. And especially once the abuse started when 4chan gets involved, a lot of people who had initially been interested are like, well, this is really fucked up. Now you're not just gawking at like some weird outsider art. You're like abusing a person. And there's this kind of growing awareness that something deeply fucked up is happening. 2014 in a new forum called Kiwi Farms is created for the most dedicated trolls and

observers of Christian. This is where Kiwi Farms comes from is specifically to follow and mock Christian. So they escalate things even beyond what 4chan had done. Some forum members took photos of the Chandler's homes from the street. At one point, Christian and her mother assaulted the owner of a gaming store with a car because Christian had been banned from the gaming store. And so like she and her mom attacked this person, which is again, not great people. Like not, not great people.

Yeah. When both had their court date, people from Kiwi Farms are there to document it for the lules. Like there's like people actually show up in court to watch this. Yeah. We should trick them into becoming war correspondents or something. Yes. Yeah.

Get them to like troll some specific Russian conscript by joining a territorial defense battalion. Yeah. Or just troll the concept of like an SU 29 by getting bombed or something. I don't know. So I'm going to read a quote from her right up in New York magazine here. Over the eight years they've contacted Chandler, her pastor and her parents posing as journalists, former classmates, psychiatrists, potential business partners and others in the hopes

that these ruses yield more confidential info. Twice, female Kiwi farmers arranged real life dates with Chandler, both of whom used fake names and wore wires to record these outings. Packages and letters are routinely sent to Chandler's residents, many of which contain obscene materials designed to unsettle the recipients. In one instance, someone sent prostitutes to visit Chandler's house, then called the family to taunt them about it. Oh my God.

So we're, we're well past just like, oh, look at this weird stuff, you know? Yeah. If every date you've ever been on was a joke at your expense. Yeah. And this is happening right around the same time Gamergate is. And everyone else, and this is the kind of thing like when Gamergate hit, everyone around me, I remember being so surprised at what was happening. And even before Kiwi Farms, I had been seeing versions of that stuff happen to fucking Christian.

And I think there were a few people like that who were like, oh shit, this is gone everywhere now. This is a broken containment. You know, this is not just like how the internet deals with their special person that they're all obsessed with. This is like now with a set of tactics that are used on a wide variety of people. Of course, like the most, even then, like considering how fucked up Gamergate is, I think Christian deals with more fucked up and targeted harassment than any of the Gamergate victims, not to minimize

it, but like, right, this is some, this is so comprehensive. And again, at the point at which Gamergate starts, this has been going on almost a decade. Right. Well, and it's like most of the Gamergate people have probably had, get to have real friends in their life instead of just ironic friends who are trolling them. At least for the Gamergate people, you know, for the Gamergate victims. I don't care what happens to the traitors of Gamergate. Fuck those people.

But this is like, this is her entire adult life is dealing with this pretty much. Yeah. I can't even. It's impossible to comprehend what that would do to you. Yeah. I mean, I've talked to and I've had the experience of like, you know, the kind of high school experience of being like, oh, I've been invited to a party. I bet it's just to make fun of me.

Right. Yes. And like, and that plays a number, you know, that messes with your sense of self 20 years later, right? Yeah. Like once, you know, or like, or over the period of a year or two or something, you know, just the idea that someone's entire life from middle school on is a hell. It's like literally a Dante's Inferno.

I've never read Dante's Inferno, but let's pretend like I have. Yeah. It's mostly about a dude wanting to fuck a chick, but then she dies. And so he makes fun of the governor of Venice a lot, something like that. All right. I'm hearing my Dante writes. It's really horny and it's petty grievances. It's actually not all that different from the stuff Christian is putting together.

Like that. How many of the greatest pieces of art in history where someone who's just like, I live in a private world and I'm going to write about it. Yeah. I'm angry this relationship didn't work out and I have specific petty grievances about local elected officials. Now I'm going to create one of the most infamous works of art in the history of human learning. What a good system we have.

It's pretty funny. It's pretty dope. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You know what else is dope? Products and services that people can spend their money and attention on. Oh my God.

There's nothing as good as a product and a service. Yeah. That wasn't my best ad transition. I'll figure it out for the next one all in sight. It's going to be so good. There's no violence against H&M or something. I don't know. We'll figure it out.

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Texas history class, right? Because it's an independent nation, so that makes sense. Horseshit, like always horseshit in my experience. It was nothing but nonsense. And they really gloss over the slavery stuff, by the way, especially since my Texas history teacher was also, I think he was the volleyball coach. It might have been tennis. It's been a long time at this point, but he was a coach, right?

He was one of these like, like most of my history teachers were mainly coaches who then got stuck teaching history. Great. And I would like, you know, I played D&D and shit as a kid and so I would like take my D&D books with me around and like read them in between classes and stuff when I had free time. And this fucking day, he like sees it. I'm not like reading it in class.

It's just like below my stack of books and he like grabs it and he walks to the front of the class and he starts like reading from it and making me explain things and laughing at me in front of the class. Oh my God. I know. I mean, it's entirely possible. I said some things that would have gotten me arrested if my friends hadn't been such good friends because I definitely like said some Columbine-y shit about that dude, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Because when you're a teenager and you don't know how to deal with conflict, yeah. Fucking A. God damn. I fucking hate Texas schools. My gym teacher made fun of my duck boots in front of the entire class. Oh Jesus. And I never wore duck boots again.

I still haven't worn duck boots again. They're really, they're great boots. I'm sure you look excellent in duck boots. Yeah, I need a good pair. Nice heel on it. Man. Anyway. We need to like, no, that's legal incitement.

So Christine at no point in the story has been a particularly healthy person. Obviously, you know, even before the internet really got involved, she expressed homophobia and racism, but years upon years of ceaseless, demented harassment did not help matters. Over the years, a group of trolls started working in a concerted fashion to convince Chris Chan, who always had a tenuous grip on reality that other dimensions existed and that her cartoon characters and cartoon girlfriends and cartoon child that she had all created for this cartoon series she's been drawing for years were real somewhere in the universe. Now there's a whole timeline you can read online in painful detail if you want to.

I want to quote now from a section from Chris Chan's absolutely voluminous dedicated wiki hosted on sonichu.com for some reference as to the scale of the obsession we're dealing with here now. The quickie, you know, the wiki dedicated to the CWC, that's, that's her initials. Currently has 2,197 articles. What the fuck? Okay. It's out of its mind.

How have I not heard of the most famous person in history? It's, it's, you had to, yeah, we'll get to that. A quote. In September, 2017, Joshua Wise contacted Christine to commission artwork. With the two in contact, Wise decided to see for himself Christine's gullibility. In late October, 2017, he again contacted Christine, posing as John Yamada. As Yamada, Wise claimed to be a soldier from game industry, a location set in the franchise Hyperdimension Neptunia, and inquired if Christine still had her old Sega Dreamcast console,

telling her it contained a partial portal into Quickville, which is like the fake version of Charlottesville she's created for her comics. Wise used the lore from Neptunia to play into Christine's existing preconceptions about reality and her belief that fictional worlds exist in alternate dimensions, giving her validation over those beliefs, which would both prime Christine for following under Wise's spell, and eventually encourage her to retreat further into his fantasy world to cope with her real world problems. So this Snowballs into a group of, which is like, this is like mental abuse on a really

like kind of hard to fathom scale. It's Snowballs into a group of trolls convincing Christian that they could destroy Quickville, her fantasy world, which is basically the only thing good going on in her life. So they put the fantasy city that she's created up for ransom and they start making her do a variety of horrible things to stop it from being destroyed. They had her confess to being a pedophile and confess to raping her own mother. Then they threatened to release those confessions publicly if she didn't record herself shitting on the floor and punching herself on in the face until she cried.

At one point they asked her to punch her mother, which she did. Oh my. So Black Mirror is just a pale imitation. Black Mirror ain't got shit on the stuff people have been doing to Chris Chan for like 15 something years. Yep. So these trolls who are known kind of in the Chris Chan fandom, I don't know what you want to call it, but these trolls are referred to as the idea guys.

And they eventually blackmail Chris Chan out of a bunch of money like $6,000. I'm sure she has a lot of. Yeah. This is like I think money that her and her mom need to exist. This abuse is actually so horrific that it pisses off people on Kiwi farms who think this is going too far and is no longer funny. So a group of these, again, pretty psychopathic folks on Kiwi farms start dedicating themselves to dismantling these plots and even trying to force some of the idea guys to face legal action.

The leader of this group, Noel, is also the main mod on Kiwi farms. I think he might have founded it. I'm not as up on that stuff. And he's like was big into Gamergate. He's extremely anti-Semitic. He believes in like white genocide theories. He uses the N word a bunch. He's like a very gross dude.

And the fact that this guy and people like him are horrified enough by the abuse level that has grown, that they start to defend Christine says something significant about how bad things have gotten. This motherfuckers like, okay, well, that people are going too far. It's pretty bleak. Now, I don't know how much detail to get into. We could talk for tens of hours about this story. And some people have, which is part of what I find so unsettling. Coverage of Chris Chan ranges from the obviously hateful.

The write-up of her life on Encyclopedia Dramatica is basically just non-stop slurs focused on the fact that she's now transgender. She comes out in 2017. So this is like if you've been following the Chris Chan story, most of the time this has been going on. That has not been like a factor in it. That's a fairly recent thing for her. But not all of it is like super hateful. The Chris Chan wiki is weirdly neutral. I think they still misgender her, but it's otherwise written basically like a historical document.

Like it's not full of like insults and stuff. There's some editorializing and judgment, but it's pretty straightforward. And then there are the documentaries. You can find numerous YouTube videos about Chris Chan's life. But by far the most detailed is Chris Chan, a comprehensive history, which is currently at part 59. At present, there are more than 20 hours of content. Now, I want to play you the opening to the most recent of these videos, which to its credit does not misgender her. These are not like disrespectful or mean. They're just profoundly unsettling in their detail.

On October 16th, 2017, Christine published the final pages of Sonichu issue 12, marking its completion. The comic begins with episodes 25 to be or not a tomb girl told from the perspective of Sonichu's then son, Robert Sonichu. So that's like just analytical, almost like scientific in its level of dissection. They cover every moment of her life. And again, it's almost there's a degree to which it's almost more unsettling than the hateful stuff. Like you're not going to find anything cool in there. They are careful once she transitions because this starts before that point. But once she does, they're very careful about gendering her properly.

It's not mean. It's just detailed to an extent that I don't know anyone else's life has ever been documented. I mean, it's interesting because it says that in the opening. It's like, well, what makes us so obsessed? That's the people who have a problem here. I mean, Christian has a problem. She's living in hell. But these people, they have a problem. Yeah, this is a problem, right? If a friend were to be like, so I finished hour 20 of my documentary on this person whose most notable attribute is that they make kind of off-putting comics. I would be like, so we got to get you help, right? We got to get you out of this. Whatever you're doing, you're not in a good place.

Like, do you need to talk? Yeah. It's pretty good stuff. But it is kind of worth noting that the obsession is not entirely hateful. Right. Yeah, it's weird. Well, that piece also shows that she's come around on LGBT. Yes, she's not 18 now.

I think maybe some. There's a lot of chrystery to get into. I could not tell you the extent to which she has come around on race. I certainly hope so, but I'm not aware of that happening. Yeah, there's like weird little fractures within these communities. Like in Encyclopedia Dramatica, the people who document her mock and deride the people who are like sending her money and making documentaries about her and like offending her and stuff. So there's even like weird little fractures in this fan community. And it's weird because like a lot of the folks, even with these kind of impartial documentaries, the people who follow them are a lot of the trolls who torment her. So it's all this like weird riborose of the internet being a mistake.

Obviously, you know, at this point Kiwi Farms has largely moved on from Chris Chan. She's still a topic of discussion from time to time. And in fact, she's like kind of the first lol cow, you know, the first person they treat this way. But they have a bunch of other people. They spend a lot more of their time focusing on other folks. I think at this point she's kind of beneath interest for a lot of them. They're kind of bored of it. For Chan is also more or less over her. But the years of obsession and the different pranks and ons played on her are part of the site's DNA now.

In fact, the harassment of Christine Chandler has been going on for so long that it has had an influence on the DNA of the entire modern internet. Like there is shit that like Russian troll farms were doing that was pioneered in the campaigns of harassment against this person. And yeah, it's kind of architecture of harassment that is such a mainstay of online discourse was built in large part to fuck with this one person. And that brings me to the end of the story for now. This, well, late in 2021, a user on Kiwi Farms posted a phone call with Chris Chan. The audio is a woman clearly a member of Kiwi Farms trolling Chandler talking to her about Chris Chan's desire for an incestuous relationship with her mother. And if you remember, they as a threat got her to like claim to me. Yeah, exactly.

Business Insider notes that, quote, in August 2016, Chandler wrote a Facebook status defending a mother and son in Mexico who reportedly said they were in love, which the Daily Mail reported at the time. Although incest is quite a controversial topic. These are circuit. There are circumstances where there would not be so much harm as one may think, feel or believe, she said, unless the sex act was abusive, hurtful or would result in an unwanted birth of a physical or mental challenged child. I would not judge or persecute the parent and child. Chandler wrote that she herself had dreams of having sex with her mother, although she never acted on them. And like, who knows the degree to which this is true. Right.

Because she also just says shit for reactions, but like she's also getting pretty detailed in this. In this call with this Kiwi Farms member, Chris Chan states that the fan fix these like things she said to her fans on the internet about wanting to have a relationship with her mom had become a reality. Now, I am not going to play any graphic details from this call in which Christine discusses molesting her very elderly mother. But I will play a segment where the person calling her explains her interest in Christie because it provides some insight into how these people keep tricking Christine. Relationship, but I just thought because I'm not huge on Christie and you know, whatever, I just thought that the whole solitary franchise is very interesting. And that's how I got into you when I was younger, right? But I had, I didn't have any idea that Barbara was the barber and you had that sort of relationship. I never got any of those vibes. But how did you approach her? I approached her with care and caution. It was a time first. So I just gave her comfort and talked with her and we just freshed out slow and stay. And then I encouraged her positively by her making the first move and she wanted to do it.

Oh, she did? Really? She made the first move? You hear that excitement in her voice when she gets Chris to admit to that, like, you get what she's doing here, right? The degree to which she is fishing for responses. And that's pretty clear. I think if you listen to the whole tape, it's pretty clear. So it goes on, the audio was subsequently shared by Null of Kiwi Farms and in short order, it goes viral on Reddit. Now, that audio contains claims by Chandler again that she's molested her 79 year old mother. I have no idea whether or not Christine actually did anything with her mom. It is certainly not impossible, right? But there's again, numerous documented instances of Chris Chan being convinced or led to lying about things or even fantasizing about things that never happened as if they had happened. Because again, she's been convinced that all these sort of fantasies of hers are real by people who often pretend to be characters she's created breaking through some dimensional barrier and then catfishing her.

She doesn't have a great grasp on what is actually happening in physical reality anymore. Her lawyer, because this all winds up being a big court case, her lawyer seems to be making this claim saying, Ms. Chandler's frequent and sometimes over the top presence on the internet is partly a product of mental health issues causing misguided attention seeking and often provocative engagement with others. So within hours of this call going viral on Reddit, Chris Chan starts to trend on Twitter, leaked text messages begin to go viral at around the same time. And in response to some of these Chandler tweets, there is drama in the air today, each and every one of you are all encouraged to withdraw from any and all dramas gossip rumors and whatever else will and already has approached your way today. So she's trying to like clamp down on some of the stuff. It doesn't work.

She gets arrested on August 1st on suspicion of incest, which is a fifth degree felony in Virginia. Additional charges are noted to be pending. Her arrest was of course, live streamed by a right wing troll named Ethan Ralph. In the video, Chandler was heard telling Ralph, everything is going to be all right. The Green County Sheriff's Office later states that Chandler was being charged due to allegations of sex crimes against a family member. As you might expect from Central Virginia law enforcement, the fact that Chris Chan was trans immediately becomes an issue. She was initially listed as female in the jails online system, but her gender was changed to male a day or so later, the jail gave no reason for the change. Hooray, hooray.

Most of the time when you think about people who are in hell because of the way that their neurodivergence is treated by society, you usually think about psychiatric institutes, right? And you think about how people in psychiatric institutes will put people in hell mentally. It's the democratization of that. It's the decentralization of, you no longer need an institute to completely ruin a neurodivergent person's life. Everyone can have part of them. We have essentially allowed random 13 year old kids and forums to craft little mental asylums that they can then trick people into being in or force them into being in and lock them into using the internet. Cool. Good thing we built.

Yeah. It's just, but this is like why I think people have to look at this and what has happened, because I don't think people often see that. That is what's going on online. This is a seedy underbelly and from this gross little underbelly that doesn't get much attention, the tactics that are pioneered here filter up and do get used by institutions and organizations on a grander scale to carry out targeted harassment for often political purposes. Yeah. And that's a story worth telling. And you know what other story is worth telling, Margaret? What's that?

The story of how has an island off the coast of Indonesia, where you assuming you have several hundred thousand dollars to spend and your friends assuming they are equally financially well off, can hunt children for sport and for food, you know? I'm I'm vegan. Do they have options where they provide after I hunt the child? Yes. Where they provide other other sustenance? They actually have a tempeh version of a child brisket that that's quite actually quite good. Often when I'm there, I sometimes prefer the tempeh, you know? Yeah. Not bad, you know?

Yeah. And they'll they'll they'll mount your trophy while you eat. So, you know, it's really great. Everything's good in the world. This bit is getting old. I feel good about my complexity. All the bits get old, Sophie. This one's getting there. You have to.

This is a good old Doritos days. When you when a bit gets old, you got to keep it going for two to three weeks at least after it's old. And then you cycle to the next bit. Yeah, you got to really make it be a problem for folks. To be fair, it was old two to three weeks ago. Yeah, but I never listen. I know. But you know who does listen?

These products and services. 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 and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back and I'm thinking about what the next bit will be. I can always judge because I cycle through a few and really it's the one that makes Sophie react like she wants to hit me. That's when I know I found a good new bit. Which I would never do. Never ever. You did throw a thing at me once. You harmed Anderson. I didn't harm Anderson. Yes you did.

I accidentally cut you with a machete. Yeah, but you were swinging it near Anderson. Yeah, but I didn't harm Anderson. She's traumatized. She's fine. She loves machetes. Anderson knows she's always safe around me with a machete. Yeah, but her mom is it. There was a lot going on and in fairness to me, I was on a lot of painkillers.

I feel like that's fair, Sophie. You threw things at me. Yeah, but I didn't make contact unfortunately. So is this all just like a little life lesson about complicity and culpability? Yes, everything is. And now you're all culpable and complicit for listening. Thank you. Thank you. That's the beauty of complicity.

Speaking of complicity, the jail system, the criminal justice system. That was so depressing, Robert. It's so depressing. But they'll be so good about both trans issues and mental health issues, right? Yeah, this is definitely going to make everything better for Christine being incarcerated. So the judge decides to hold her without bond, both for her safety and for public safety, largely due to the fact that there's like immediately immediate circus around the fact that she has been arrested.

The online shit show that's just always around her accelerated mightily after her arrest. In local Virginia news, she was listed as a, quote, transgender internet personality. Now, this is fucked up for a number of reasons, including the fact that, like, the fact that she's trans is almost no part of this story really. Right. Up until it gets made that by the conservative media. Like, it's pretty late in her career as a public person, and it's never really the focus of any of, like, the shit she does that's, like, you know,

trying to run down the run owner for a video game store or something. Like, it only, it becomes the central part of the story once mainstream conservative media picks it up. Now, that local Virginia news article I found on KVIA did go into detail about her background as an internet personality, but the article is still framed in such a way as to allege that, like, she is, like, being trans is a central part of her identity as a creator. Okay. Like, you see what they're doing there, right? Like, I'm trying to, like, they're, that's the thing.

I think that kind of more mainstream sources don't know what to do with someone who's, with Chris Chan's actual story, which is very complicated and very weird. Yeah. There's a huge of things in it, but trans people are always a culture war thing, the right can grasp onto, and so that's just what they do here. And it's, I mean, it's, I can't speak for all trans people, but I know that, like, being trans is, like, not a huge part of my life. Like, I mean, it is because it has to be, because I have to think about my safety everywhere I go.

I have to think about how people are going to treat me, whether or not I'm actually in a good place. You know, all of these things, right, that people who are marginalized along a lot of different axes have to every day. But it's like, I totally understand the, like, no, I just happen to be a woman. Like, it's not the center of my, like, being, you know? It's like, three weeks ago or so, people in Ukraine were just as vulnerable to getting shot by artillery as they are now, but it was less of a factor in their life because people weren't shooting at them. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

So the Daily Mail also identified her as a trans YouTuber, Chris Chan. Also calling her a YouTuber is not really particularly accurate, because that's not really the primary thing that she did anyway. But, again, this is the Daily Mail. So did the Blaze, who, and the Blaze, as it describes her this way, describes Ethan Routh, that right-wing videographer, as a podcaster and streamer. It does not note that Ethan Routh was arrested in 2016 for felony assault on a police officer and had a warrant for his arrest sent out in November of 2021 for violating a restraining order.

He's just a podcaster and streamer. Yeah, yeah. The corners of the internet who'd been mocking or obsessively following Chandler for years at this point reacted in predictable ways, and for them this became yet another chapter in her weird and winding story. But for the right-wing media, Chandler was a perfect example of the danger of the trans menace, a suitably bizarre individual they could use as a scapegoat. On August 6th, while Chandler sat in jail, Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment of his show, more than five minutes of primetime coverage, to Christine Chandler.

I really do apologize, but I feel the need to play some of Tucker's coverage here, so you can see where he takes this. A YouTube personality called Chris Chan has just been arrested in Virginia on, of all things, incest charges. Authorities say Chan was having sex with his 79-year-old mother who has dementia. Chris Chan is a biological man, but he identifies as a woman. Reportedly, Virginia authorities initially went along with that. They classified Chris Chan as a female, and that means Chris Chan, who is an accused sex criminal, would have been housed in a women's jail. We understand that decision has been reversed, likely due to public pressure. It became public, unfortunately, for the state of Virginia, and Chan is now being considered a man by the jail.

But this is not an isolated incident. Many prisons in this country do house biological men with women. This is something we predicted. I think that's about enough, Sophie. You see what's happened here, right? This story has been turned into a culture war issue over the danger of trans people in women's prisons. That's what Tucker finds useful in it, right? And that's where it immediately gets turned. And obviously, the real story of Chris Chan is of an individual who is profoundly sick and has been for a long time in ways that have nothing to do with their gender identity. They are primarily the victim of abusive parenting, of bullying from peers, of an inadequate educational system, and, of course, of her own bad choices and bigotry.

All of these problems were exacerbated by an unprecedented campaign of online harassment, probably more significant and encompassing than any other single individual on Earth has endured. There are a lot of things to take out of the story of Chris Chan. But of course, once she went viral enough for the mainstream conservative media to focus on her, everything about her story gets boiled down to a trans-culture war thing. And it's funny as if it happened in the UK, people claiming to be on the left who would be making this same culture war arguments about sexual assaulting men in women's jail or whatever. I mean, I'm sure you can find folks on the left here who made that argument. I tried not to delve too much into the YouTube discourse around this arrest because who needs that shit? Chandler's time in prison, or in court, was as surreal as you'd expect. She repeatedly asked to go home to get some of her things like her video games and stuff.

Oh, damn it. Yeah. Yeah, she told the judge I'm famous on the internet, like interrupted him at one point when he was talking about his concern that people would seek at her location, which is like why he justified keeping her on bond. Um, Chandler was present at hearings in November of 2021 in February of 2022, where her case was subject to continuances. Her next court case is July 28th, 2022. She remains incarcerated and her only connection to the outside world has been through written correspondence and phone calls, all of which have been doodly analyzed and shared with the community of people who follow her every move. A large reason for the continuances seems to be that her defense attorney is attempting to get her mental health evaluated. I think he's going for a like, she is not competent to stand trial. I don't think she is. Yeah, that's us.

Yeah. Easy to prove. Yeah. Um, but so because these people are still reaching out to her and stuff and because she is the person that she is at this point and has been kind of trained in the way she has been three days after her first continuance, she writes a letter to Noel from Kiwi Farms and her defense lawyer in which she defends incest and claims to be Jesus Christ's reincarnation. Um, yeah. Which is both like you can see is admitting that she carried out the behavior she's accused of, but also I would argue is pretty good evidence that she is not at all competent to stand trial. Yeah. Um, I don't know what's actually going to happen with this case. I, there's not much to hope for. I, because I don't have a lot of faith that like there's an institution that knows how to deal, help her at all.

Like I don't know what, like this is like a tragic case where the thing that's actually needed is a very patient, very emotionally intelligent, nice person to just help her. Yeah. A team of well paid social workers. Yeah. A team of very well paid social workers, right? Like that's if we actually, if those existed anywhere in the United States. Yeah. Those are contradictory.

Yeah. Everyone I know is in social work wants out just because they can't afford rent. Yeah. But, but that's what's necessary. It's like a team of people who care need to like help de-radicalize isn't the right word. Like, but like need to try and help undo some of the damage and help her break some of these terribly toxic patterns that she's gotten into. Yeah. Um, she needs to not, I'm not, I don't think like banning anyone from the internet is, is going to help, but she needs to not be online. Right. I'm not saying I don't believe that a judge should order her off the internet forever. I think that would be more harmful than any, than helpful.

But like what she definitely part of what she needs is to not be so fucking online. Um, cause that ain't doing any favors for her. Right. Or to somehow be disconnected from the like, um, Yeah. Like, like I have a feeling that for her, and I'm, I'm so not a mental health expert or anything. No. Um, but I have a feeling that the ability to continue to post content probably is like very important for her. Right.

And like, and probably very important for some people who earnestly like what, what she does. Um, but some way to keep the online coming. Like if the internet became a one way thing for her. Yeah. If you can filter it somehow. She just needs people to like, I mean, I've had to do this where like, you know, if I have an article go up on a website with real bad trolls, my friends are just like, uh, don't read the article. Don't read the comments here.

I'll tell you the good ones and just don't look, you know. Yeah. I'm not saying this is the magic solution to 17 years. No, no, no, there's, there's no magic solution to this. Um, but yeah, something, some fucking thing like that. Right. Yeah. Or I don't know.

Uh, boy, it's quite a pickle. This, this whole situation. Um, and I don't know what's to be done about it, but like, it's, it undergirds everything that the internet is today. Yeah. Yeah. It's all the things that people could do. Yeah.

Because I mean, you know, people I know or people would do to me things that they would then laugh about amongst 10 people. And so those 10 people would find it funny that, you know, whatever happened or whatever. And then I mean, it's also one of those things where it's like, I think things happen and this is a little bit projection or something, but like things happen to trans women before we come out that mostly only happen to women, like to women who are known to be women at the time of the harassment or something like that. And so I, you know, I don't think it's a coincidence that Gamergate, uh, you know, the first large

scale to my understanding, large scale systematic, um, use of this type of thing, um, over more than one person. I don't think it's a coincidence that it first happened to a woman, um, who even if no one involved knew that it was happening to a woman. And maybe it is a coincidence and maybe I'm just like, you know, looking out for, like, no, even my home, I don't know, I really depends on how she feels about, she's still racist. I think she might still be, I don't know, I think it's certainly less, less like of a thing than it used to be.

Um, she, I don't think she's, uh, anti gay anymore. Yeah. But which, which does show like, I guess some of like, and this is both part of it. Positive and negative cause like the good thing is that, okay, so she's clearly capable of growth and change, but the, the ugly side of that is that like all of her growth and change has occurred within the context of this bizarre world of internet harassment that she's really the only person who has ever endured to this extent. Yeah.

Um, and so yeah. This is a hard sell when you were like, the person who has been harassed more than, and I'm like, I know some people who had to like move houses and like, you know, I've had like, you know, and then I'm like, oh yeah, no, okay, okay, I mean, fortunately she hasn't, to my knowledge, so I guess she's, I don't know, the story that you brought up at the very beginning of someone being driven to suicide by bullying, you know, um, and that happening, uh, with maybe increasing frequency or maybe I'm just aware of it. Yeah.

It's hard to like rate that from like a, is it getting more common or not? I don't really know. Um, but yeah, I, yeah, I hope she gets that like, uh, unicorn social worker who, uh, can figure out some way to better enable her to exist in the world without being as prone to the harms that have befallen her as she currently is. Yep. Yeah, it is weird. Like I think if she had never, it's that it's the kind of question of like, if she had

never engaged with the people making fun of her stuff online, would this still be happening? And obviously you can't know that, but so much of it is because, um, she never learned that kind of lesson that clearly people in her early life were trying to treat you the teacher that like you, um, if you show people where you're vulnerable, that's where they're going to attack you. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's heartbreaking though, right? Because like if we have a culture where in order to produce content, you have to have

a thicker skin, you are creating a culture where people who, um, are prone to having a thicker skin are the people who are going to come forward and be, be held up. And you're also going to have like people, you know, I feel like we've probably all known people who started off kind of cool. And then as they got more famous and they started like not listening, they had to stop listening to their haters because if you listen to people hate you all day, nothing good's going to come of that, but then they stopped listening to reasonable critique as well. You know, there's like, there's so many reasons why vulnerability should be a possible, a

thing that we can do, you know, um, as, as creators and it's just, I mean, I, I, I don't know. I have so many thoughts about this and some of it is even just like the way that like, like walking down the street as a, as, as a woman is, is more vulnerable than walking down the street as a man, just like in general, right? You are like basically saying like, I am more vulnerable, but if you do it right, it's a position of strength. It's a position of like, I'm so strong that I can be this vulnerable.

And I, I wish I knew how to like cultivate that in, in culture to allow that to happen more. Yeah. That's some, I agree with you about the importance of that. I have no idea how you, cause I think most of the people I know who have that, it was kind of a process of, um, endurance that was produced by endurance eventually, you know, and I, cause I don't want to be like the sociopathic boomer, the response of like, well, that's, that's because what they actually need to do is just like tough it out, you know, and

that's the only way anything good ever happens. And it's like, no, I don't think kids have to tough out psychopathic things being done to them. Yeah. Like cruel people. I actually don't think that's a good basis for like an ongoing understanding of how society should work. What?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don't think people should have to endure any of the things that Chris Chan has endured. Um, uh, and I don't think that the answer to like what's happened to her, what's happened to other people who have been in variations of this is like, well, they just needed to like get harassed enough that they got over it. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh. Cool. All right. Well. Margaret. Margaret, it's time for the plug. How you doing? Yeah.

Well, if you want to hear about good things, oh, that's an excellent, that's an excellent plug. No, no, Margaret, Margaret, what, what's that first word, uh, if, hey, no, no, no, no, it's good, good, good, good. Yeah. This. Sorry, Robert's not familiar. Let me, let me type dictionary.com in the Google.

Yeah. That's G-G-U-D. Robert, it's that thing that we do every once in a while around Christmas. Get really drunk on Moldwine. That, that too. But I mean, you know, that is a good thing, if, if there's an alligator in the dirt and start a fire over it. is a good thing, depending on your choices.

That's just you, Robert. Okay, please continue, Margaret. I think I understand. Uh-huh. Yeah, so I am a host of a new podcast on them. I forget the name of the network. It's like a refrigerator zone. It's something about like a, no, it's a-

Oh, Pod Save. A place that- A Pod Save America. A place that things are cold. A place that things are cold. Oh, oh, you mean freezing. Yeah, on freezing media, on cool zone media, I'm starting a new podcast called Cool People Did Cool

for Stuff. And it will not- Well, actually, I'm sure there'll still be horrible tragic things that happen. Because lots of bad things happen to good people also. Especially when people are trying to do cool stuff. But it is a show about cool people who are trying to do cool stuff or did cool stuff.

And it launches May 2nd. And then I also have like a bunch of books and music and all kinds of other things. And I am on Twitter at magpiekilljoy and I'm on Instagram at Margaretkilljoy. If you're not following Margaret, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah, what are you doing? What are you doing?

What are you doing? Yeah. Come on. Come on. It's just weird. Yeah, fuck off. Yeah. Well, fuck over to Margaret's Twitter account.

Yeah, fix your error. Yeah. And, you know, that's the episode. Woo-hoo. Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone 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 was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences 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. 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.