Behind the Bastards - Reading: Unintended Consequences

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Robert is joined by Karl from InRange TV for a discussion and reading of the book, Unintended Consequences.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. Oh my goodness gracious! It's the podcast behind the bastards that this is that you're listening to right now on the internet.com. Sylvie. Robert. How was that? We doing good?

You're doing great. Proud of you. We're doing great. We're doing good? Okay, great. Well, with me to help me do great is my buddy Carl Casarta from InRangeTV. Carl! Hey!

How are you doing? I'm doing all right. I'm glad to be here again. I've really enjoyed our last collaboration and looking forward to the topic we have today. Oh boy. Today's going to be a fun one. We're doing another book episode. We're actually going to record hopefully two today, although we generally just do one a week

because this helps me get ahead for some travel that I have planned. And my goodness Carl, we have quite a book for everyone today. So I received in the mail from a fan a couple of weeks ago a hardcover copy of a book called Unintended Consequences. Now, Sophie, Carl knows this book. Everyone who's in gun culture is aware of this book. You want to describe that cover to our audience? I think it's the Declaration of Independence on fire.

Is that what I'm seeing? That's certainly part of it. Yeah, I can only see the top of it. Can you zoom? All right, one sec. Let me see if I can properly. Here we go. I'm just going to Google it Consequences Book Cover.

Oh. I recommend people at home check this one out because it is quite a cover. I take it back because all I could see was the top, which is the Declaration of Independence on fire, but it looks like a soldier attacking a topless woman who's been blindfolded. Yeah, I think she's a Lady Justice. You can see her scales there, right? So it's like some sort of SWAT team operative attacking Lady Justice. And there's nipples.

You can see like it's full. There's full frontal nudity on the cover of John Ross's Unintended Consequences. That's a super hot Lady Justice getting the full Elyon Gonzalez treatment with a full SWAT team guy with an MP5. Yeah. What a choice. What a series of choices. Wow.

All right. Yeah, and I think he wrote this. When exactly was this published? 1996, I think, actually. So yeah, this would have been right after Elyon Gonzalez because I think you're right, Carl. They're very clearly like doing, because the cop on the front has an MP5, which if I'm not mistaken is what the cop who grabbed Elyon Gonzalez and that famous photo had and it's his body language is not dissimilar.

No, it isn't. But honestly, I think this is one of those weird things where the Elyon Gonzalez thing happened after they did the cover art. So it's a weird thing where like I actually simulated art. Yeah. That's interesting. It's kind of weird. Yeah.

So in that regard, I guess they kind of nailed it, although it wasn't going after Lady Justice, of course. Yeah. It was going after a poor kid trying to escape. Yeah. And it's interesting because I think the main influence behind this book and in brief, this is like a kind of fantasy about gun confiscation leading to a civil war type scenario against like the evil gun grabbing government.

And I think it was very directly inspired by Ruby Ridge, which is kind of like a seminal moment for a lot of people. And is actually like just so we're clear, an example of the government doing a lot of really fucked up things because they shot a child and his mom to death in a raid gone horribly awry, not to kind of like whitewash some of the sketchy shit that like their father was doing. But like, it's definitely an example of government overreach. But that Ruby Ridge kind of leads us into this kind of explosion of action on behalf of the

movement, which culminates in a big way in the Oklahoma City bombing after the Waco tragedy. So you've got like the series of largely police overreaches with high body counts and it kind of ignites this militia movement. And into that, into that culture comes a guy named John Ross. Now, John is an interesting guy. He calls himself, he was actually a Democratic congressional candidate in Missouri in 1998, but he calls himself a pre Roosevelt Democrat, which he defines as a Democrat without the socialism, which is interesting because like it's not that far pre Roosevelt that the Democrats were the party of slavery.

Like how pre are we going? John is a question I would ask anyone to find themselves that way. What is your understanding of John Ross? Because he's a pretty interesting dude. Yeah, I don't know. I looked up some stuff and some interviews with him and it's very clear that whatever he described myself as that when he wrote this book, he was promoting it very much to the Republican side of things, even back in the 90s and early 2000s, which is not surprising considering how firearm centric his content was, right?

I don't know a lot about him individually, but I do know quite a bit about the culture around the book and the gun shows and the environment that that was written in if we get into that a little bit because that was going on then in the gun community and now I would have to say it's hard to believe it's actually better now than it was then, but back then it was a pretty weird space. Yeah, and this is one of those books you would not have found unintended consequences in like a Barnes and Noble. Like it wasn't that kind of, I mean, maybe now you can. I'm sure like places like Powell's books that make a point of selling absolutely everything sell it, but this was a book that like I started to encounter in the early 2000s, like gun shows.

It's one of those books you would find at gun shows. And it's not, it's in a lot of people compare it to the Turner Diaries. It is not a neo-Nazi book is my understanding, although there's some problematic shit in it as I'm sure we'll get into. You mentioned that, but when you go to the gun shows, I mean gun shows now are still a thing, right? There's like some weirdness there for sure. But back in the late 90s, early 2000s, a gun show was like this kind of dark, dank, musty place with, you first walk in and there's the guy in the right corner, the old man with his Nazi paraphernalia. On the left side was the Confederate paraphernalia.

And then there was the book vendor that had all the occult knowledge about how to make this thing full auto or how to make booby traps. And right there next to that was this book from John Ross, Unintended Consequences. And it was like, I think a lot of people went to the gun show not only for that, but to go pick up those crazy books that have now of course been replaced by the internet. You can come back and you can have that feeling of being the guy in the know. And you don't really see that as much at the gun shows anymore. Yeah. It's in part because there's just so much more money, not just in the gun part, but in the culture part of gun culture, right?

There's like a whole media ecosystem. There's big name magazines. There's large, obviously large YouTube channels. There is like, it didn't feel in that there was that period, the late 90s, early 2000s where gun culture didn't really feel vibrant. It kind of felt like it was, it was something that was dying and not particularly healthy just in the, not even in like a, not to get into like a moral sense, but just in like the, it did not seem like something that had a bright future for a while there. Yeah.

This is a topic for another day, but I actually feel, I think that the honestly, the assault weapon ban of 94 actually made it more vibrant because it got people to, it really woke up in maybe some good ways and in some bad ways an interesting creation. It got people involved in a way that I don't think people were that concerned about before the AWB. And I think that's one of the things that fired it back up. It did. And I think you get, you get a lot of funding from politicians and from political action groups and whatnot from the industry that starts coming in, which is responsible for like kind of revitalizing gun culture in a lot of ways and moving it out of this kind of,

you know, dank gym filled with weirdos kind of space that you were describing. So what is your understanding about like the overarching plot of unintended consequences? Have you read this before? Yeah. I actually, I was one of those guys that picked that up off the counter because I'm like, what the hell is this thing? Right. And, and I mean, the overarching plot as I know it is a guy named Henry Bowman who's the protagonist and in it,

if I recall correctly, it's been decades since I've read it. It takes and builds up an argument based on a number of relatively accurate historical events like the breaking of the bonus marchers, the Ruby Ridge, Waco, amongst others. And then guides that up to a position in which Henry Bowman gets involved in a shooting in which he ends up killing some ATF agents, which then he turns into essentially counterculture coup revolt to destroy the ATF is there to the reason or at least one of the reasons that this country is falling into tyranny. I mean, that's a real simplistic summary, but that's the premise. And that's interesting because my recollection, like this is not an uncommon starting point for kind of novels in this space that like the ATF, there's some big gun confiscation grab.

This is essentially how the Turner Diary starts. But the Turner Diary starts with the assumption that like it happened and everything's already been outlawed. And that's kind of like where it goes from there, whereas this, I think, is kind of more of a slow burn to the start. And I just noticed that my copy from Accurate Press is the publisher of this book. Has Mr. Ross' signature in it? Oh, wow. Yeah, I got a real peach of a copy here. I believe the hard copy version of that's been out of print for a long time and is relatively valuable, actually.

Well, there we go. I'll take this. I'll try to trade this for a Mannlicher M94 or something like that. This is going to be an interesting conversation because as I remember in the book, this is a challenging piece of work because there's a lot of problems here, obviously. But there's also a lot of stuff in it that's not necessarily incorrect. Yeah, he's definitely not coming at it, like especially on a technical level. I think he does know what he's talking about, like it's not one of these. We've laughed about the Ben Shapiro books and the things he gets wrong about guns.

I believe John Ross actually knows how firearms function. I do. I agree with you, and I think he gets some of the historical stuff. True is correct as well, to be honest. Yeah, he's a nerd about this, although I should note, so he had a regular internet column for a long time. He's kind of an older dude now, so I don't think it's still going. But his Wikipedia says that his column Ross and Range was where he discussed topics that interest him. Quote, a recurring theme is understanding and coping with women.

So, and that was my recollection of this book too, that like, not a lot of, we're not going to find a lot of well written female characters here. But yeah, it notes on the back here, John Ross is an investment broker and financial advisor in St. Louis. He went to Amherst College, which I think might surprise some people, and he was an early concealed carry advocate. So this is also a thing, like when you talk about sort of the history of gun culture and this guy's role in it. There was this period of time, like now most states have some sort of concealed carry a lot. Even in California is getting easier to get a concealed carry license. I know someone in San Diego who just got theirs, which was like, there's been a series of legal battles around that. But it wasn't possible to legally concealed carry in a lot of the country like 30 years ago.

Oh, less than that. It wasn't that long ago the concealed carry was considered like a pretty crazy concept. And as one state after another started really changing to the point where we see a number of states now which don't even require permits anymore. They're called constitutional carry. But 20 something years ago, that wasn't the case. Like you have to go through two days of training and get a background permit and you have to apply for this and have a background check. And that was in a place that was permissive like Arizona, other places it was considered impossible. But like you said, in California, even there are certain counties that I think are kind of shall issue now.

Yeah. And it's one of those things where even in like a place like Texas, which has I think most people who kind of aren't super aware of the history. See is just like always this passion of gun rights. And like the 90s, you could not carry a gun in Texas under very most circumstances. And in fact, one of the things that changed that I forget the exact year you may know more about this than I do. But there was a mass shooting at a Lubies where a guy killed a lot of people. And at least one of the people who was in the Lubies during the shooting like had a weapon in their car, but they couldn't bring it in. And that kind of ignited the concealed carry movement within sort of Texas.

And John Ross was a big part of that in Missouri and was like a major advocate for it in Missouri. So that's kind of the context of this dude and in which this book is written. So there's a lot going on here. And now we're going to we're going to start this very small print book. I should note this is a massive book. This is like this is like the size of the first two Lord of the Rings books. Like this is a this is an enormous text. So heads up, I don't think we're ever going to get through all of it.

But this is a this is a an interesting piece of history here for people who are we see how tiny the font is. Oh, yeah, Sophie, look at this. Oh, my God. I know this is this is there are so many words in this book. Wow. So do we have I'm going to look up the word count. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, you should do that. So it starts with present day. It was late afternoon when he finally heard them coming to kill him.

The wind was blowing gently towards him and it carried the sound well. Two choppers he judged from the pitch of the engines, possibly three. Henry realized that his first emotion upon hearing the sound of the rotor blades approaching was an overwhelming sense of relief. The waiting was over. His next thought concerned the relatives of the men that were about to die. The widows will never understand that their husbands died because the government got a little too heavy handed after June of 1968. He scanned the sky until he spotted the aircraft approaching from the north. This isn't that isn't quite right.

The Kennedy and King killings weren't the first links in the chain that dragged us here. No, the death sentence was handed down before World War Two. So this guy is getting ready to like murder a bunch of federal agents coming to his house. And he's thinking about the March of Tyranny and like debating with himself whether or not it started with the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. Already shades of Waco too, because if you've ever been to the Waco site, there's memorial stones that are placed by the Davidians. And they memorialize not only their own lost people, but they memorialize each lost ATF agent, which was sort of impressive to see. That is interesting. I actually was unaware of that.

That's interesting. They pretty much memorialize it as a tragedy all around. And there's there's stones there for the government agents that died. Huh, I did not know that. That's certainly like more nuance than I think we're going to get on Waco here. So, yeah, it's a what is a solo third? I guess that's the gun he's got here. Yeah, that's that's a I believe that's a 20 millimeter in the same.

Okay, so it's like an anti anti. Yeah, a lot of like it's an anti vehicle weapon like very big bullet 20 millimeter bullets is like the size of a small person's forearm. Yeah, it's anti material. Yeah, it's for shooting through armored vehicles. So he decides after like debating with himself while he's willing to kill these waiting to kill these federal agents that the thing that ended started the end of liberty in the United States was a supreme court case involving a moonshiner who was arrested in 1938. A federal district court had thrown out the charges as being unconstitutional and the government had appealed at the hearing something very unusual had happened. Neither the moonshiner nor his lawyer had seen fit to appear before the court to argue the case. They didn't even bother to file a brief on the moonshiner's behalf. The court ruled for the government judicial precedent was set and the issue was never again heard by the supreme court.

The 1939 ruling became the foundation upon which many additional laws were constructed. The supreme court's been ducking that issue ever since Henry thought as he strained to hear a change in the approaching noise. Well, guys, the time has turned. It's time you thugs had a little history lesson. I don't suppose you're familiar with what happened in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. So you're seeing he's drawing like a line here between the Nazis cracking down on the Warsaw ghetto and massacring Jewish people and charges against bootlegers during that's actually after prohibition 1938. That's interesting. Like this is this is a weird opening.

I'll give it. I'll give one thing to him. He's definitely a better writer than Ben Shapiro like already. And if you read the book, he knows more about sex in general, too, even if his even if the way he models his female. Not a high bar. I was going to say super low bar. Robert, I didn't find the word count, but the this book is like only has five star reviews. Yeah, that makes I will because the only people who read this other than like Carl and I right now are people who are already primed to want to read this book.

It's it's just very interesting because normally when we do a book episode, it's like the reviews are horrendous. I have not seen a review that isn't five stars. Yeah, that makes sense. There's 500 plus on Amazon and they're all five stars and like there's even like fan art in the room. Oh boy. I'll bet you don't want to look at that fan art, Sophie. You simply do not know. No, yeah, but it's interesting is this what I was talking is he does get into a lot of actually he does reference a lot of real history like that US versus Miller is that Supreme Court case.

And in that that moon that that bootlegger had a shotgun that was below legal length, I believe, or something like that. And neither of them showed. But the court ruled in an interesting way that the gun that they were persecuting him for wasn't useful as a militia weapon. Therefore, it didn't apply. Ah, so this is like the start of kind of the probe that's that's where is that where the law against like short barreled shotguns came. No, we're talking that's the 1934 NFA. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the moonshiner had a shotgun that was by believe was below legal length.

And that's what this was about. But then when the court ruled against him, they didn't rule against him because of they ruled that the shotgun really wasn't viable for militia use, which then opens up a weird door about does that mean specifically that the that the Second Amendment applies only to guns that are for militia martial use like an air 15, for example. Yeah, that's where you see this stuff and these arguments come out of. That's interesting because with DC versus Heller, like there's this kind of understanding that the current Supreme Court understanding is that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to bear arms. And it seems like in 38 they were saying that like this gun is illegal because it is not something that would be useful as part of a militia. And so we like the individual does not have a right just to bear arms for individual purposes. So right is an legal if it's not useful in a militia.

Yeah, so reading this, it says the Supreme Court handed that individual right might exist in the context of a common obligation to possess arms and to cooperate in the work of defense and that a sought of shotgun. The firearm issue in this case was not protected because it had no reasonable relationship to the preservation preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia. Now, that's a fascinating ruling because I think basically everyone today would be angry at it. Like if you're pro gun control, then you're going to be angry that it's basically saying like, well, weapons that are useful in terms of like fighting in part of a militia are legal like an air 15. Which I think pro gun control people generally disagree with. And if you're pro gun rights, you're like, well, why, why would I be able to have an air 15 but not a much less deadly weapon, a sought off shotgun that's like way less effective at killing people. That doesn't make any sense either. It's a pretty like it is a pretty nonsensical ruling, I think by most standards. I know there's more wrapped up in that because I think there was a lot of fear over specifically sought off shotguns as a result of like the bootlegging era, right?

Because that was like a famous crime gun, even though they're not not any deadlier than a lot of other weapons that people had easy access to like a Thompson or something, which would have been pretty widely available in the mid 30s. Although that was regulated by the NFA too. Speaking of being regulated by the NFA, it's time for Adberg's. Yeah, you know, who's not regulated by the NFA is our sponsor, the Mac 10. If you want, if you want a gun that'll you can make out of a single stamped piece of metal. That's that's going to be one of your better options. And they're superb for a gunfight in a phone booth. Mm hmm. Oh my God. Yeah.

Good to know. 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 on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm thinking back. We're back from ads. I'm thinking of my favorite movie, Gun Fights. Have you ever seen the movie, Gross Point Blank, Carl? No, I actually haven't. Oh, it's got maybe the least accurate gun fight where like, what's his fucking name?

Let's just go with John Ritter. He looks like John Ritter. John Cusack. It's one of the Johns. John Cusack is in like a gunfight in a 7-Eleven and he's dual wielding glocks, which he's firing blindly and taking cover behind the chip aisle at a 7-Eleven, which provides excellent cover. Can stand gun rounds. It's one of my favorite movie, Gun Fights. Okay, so start of the book, December 11th, 1906. All right, so we're starting with two guys firing there.

Boy, there is just a lot of, I think one of the reasons this is so popular is this is a lot of just very technical gun stuff. Like the opening of this chapter is him walking through like firing tens of thousands of rounds with a Winchester Model 1903, which was an old 22 semi-automatic rifle. And it's just kind of like discussing how the firearm works and how the rules regarding like this early gun sport worked, which is a thing I think that if you're buying this book at a gun store, you're probably interested in. But not a thing I think most readers are going to be interested in. So we're going to skip ahead just a little bit here. Yeah, this is just a lot of, oh, wow. And now there's a picture of a guy on top of a mountain of, are those skulls? Show us, show us, show us.

I want to see. What are you standing on here? I'm sad that we can't see what you're seeing. Oh, no, these are target blocks. So it's, yeah, it's just kind of nerdy gun stuff like he's explaining the like this guy. I'll read you a representative paragraph. Okay, the St. Antonio fairgrounds closed in December 15th 1906 add topper wine using three semi-auto Winchester 1903 rifles had shot 72,500 wooden blocks thrown in the air. He had missed nine more than a half century later, another man employed by Remington would hit over 100,000.

His throwers, however, would stand by his left shoulder and gently toss the blocks straight out along the same path the bullet would take. Topps record shot under the rules laid out by another man in the 19th century would never be broken. In 1906 skilled riflemen were universally admired. People like ad and plinky topper wine spent much of their time urging young boys and girls to earn gun safety and hone their shooting skills. Um, okay, so he's talking about the birth of the gun culture here. That's actually quite nice. I was worried at first that this was because there's bears of resemblance to some of the photos you would see of like frontier men standing on top of like buffalo skulls, but it's just a guy standing on top of a bunch of like blocks that he shot during some time, a type of old timey shooting contest.

Yeah, we're going back to like the shooting these wooden blocks and then like Annie Oakley would shoot glass balls and it was exhibition shooting, which was almost explicitly done with 22 rifles and it was kind of a cool thing and people really did exhibit some amazing skills. Yeah, and the next chapter is 1918 and we're still going into like the birth of gun culture. So he's he's kind of framing like the idea of shooting sports as a character in this book. Again, I get why this is popular among like the specific people it is. We're not it's not like the Turner Diaries where we jump right into there's a civil war and like here's my here's my like racist theories about whatever. Like we're really talking kind of at length about the birth of gun culture, the creation of the maximum gun, the kind of stuff we talked about in our in our behind the bastards episodes. Now, I think this is probably maybe not the best narrative late to start with you to start your fiction novel with a very long, but it does kind of you know,

it reminds me a little bit of is like Michael Crichton where you've got these like books that have this this like science fiction or whatever theme, but the first like 30 pages is him like vamping about chaos theory or whatever kind of mathematical thing he's interested in. Instead of nature finding the way guns will find the way. Yeah, we'll find the way. Yeah, yeah. But I think in 1918 there are 19 was it 1919 he gets into like this is this book is really a difficult thing to discuss because it's hard. Yeah, it's so it's a bit schizophrenic, right? There's this narrative in there of this revolt, but there's a lot of actual real history in there. He gets into the bonus marchers, which was a pretty fucked up thing, honestly.

Yeah, yeah. July 16, 1932, we get Smedley Butler as a character. So yeah, and he's talking about the bonus marchers here. Although I think it's interesting like the pieces of Smedley's story that he does take out here like the opening quote he gives from Smedley here is, take it from me, this is the greatest demonstration of Americanism we've ever had pure Americanism will need to take this beating as you've taken it stand right and steady. You keep every law and why in the hell shouldn't you who in the hell has done all the bleeding for this country in this law and this Constitution anyhow, but you fellows, which is it's interesting because the thing they're taking and this is the period where for people who aren't aware you've got these World War One veterans when the economy collapses who are are owed a bonus that's being paid out over a very long period of time. And because everyone is in dire financial straits, they're like, we want the money now.

Can we just get the money that's owed to us now when they have a big march on DC, which is cracked down on via Douglas MacArthur using tanks. And before it is cracked down on Smedley Butler, who is like, I think still to this day, the most highly decorated Marine in history, he's certainly like in the running for it. He had two medals of honor, which he had very mixed opinions of, but he definitely earned them. And he shows up to like speak in defense of these men and support their cause. And it's interesting because they're they're kind of framing what Smedley is doing here as a defense of kind of this idea you see Robert Heinlein talk about a lot. This is kind of the thing that's come down to us in Starship Troopers, but it's something Heinlein played with a lot that like this idea of like the citizen soldier being the ideal kind of building block of a free society. And I don't think that's actually what Butler believed, obviously, because by the end of his life, Butler had come around very much against militarism and like was saying things that like I believe I've only ever been a gangster for capitalism. So it's interesting that they've picked this specific time to kind of hone in on Smedley Butler and turn him into a character in this book because I'll check here, but I'm not sure if I think we're going to get Butler stopping the business plot.

But that said, this is a really valid piece of history. And this is one of those things when we talk about like areas where I think it's possible to get people on the right kind of in line with some of the things I believe. I think it's really useful to talk about history about things like the bonus marchers where it's like, well, you can't really trust the government and when it comes down to who's going to violently crack down on people standing in favor of their liberty. Maybe it's these these police forces that you're continually trying to like fund and arm heavily and perhaps this is a place where we could come together and discuss some shared interests. Gee whiz guys, maybe if we actually looked this, you know, with clear eyes, we'd realize we kind of had a mutual problem here regardless of our particular peculiarities as to why. So we introduced this character, Cam, who's this veteran and who's about to we're told at the end of page 26. Cam Bowman did not know that the government had its own agenda concerning the bonus army. Cam Bowman had less than three weeks left to live. And then in the next chapter, we have him getting murdered, along with everybody else by General Douglas MacArthur. The soldiers had been instructed by their commander to clear the bonus marchers out of the area by striking them with the flats of their sabers blades, not the cutting edge.

And this was what the cavalrymen did. It was like being struck by a three foot steel bar and Lieutenant Cameron Bowman's left wrist was shattered like kindling. He did not cry out or fall down, but when Bowman saw the soldier prepared to deliver a second blow, he finally accepted his fate and gave ground. As he made his way to the bridge, his ruin wrist beginning to scream in agony. Bowman saw three men leading the army troops and he was stunned by what he saw. He did not recognize the two army majors who had both later come to prominence. The main in charge of leading the infantrymen, cavalry and tank division, however, was impossible to miss. The lesser ranked soldiers were Major George S. Patton and Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. The senior officer was the chief of staff of the United States Armed Forces, General Douglas MacArthur. And this is interesting because that's very accurate. That's completely true.

It's neat because these guys, all these these these figures, both of whom would become generals or all of whom would be general. I mean, MacArthur was a general when this happened. Patton and obviously Dwight D. Eisenhower are going to be generals very quickly in World War Two. And they are both, I think, today, broadly speaking, heroic figures for conservatives, particularly Patton. Eisenhower, interestingly, has a really mixed history there because, you know, he he's who the the John Birch Society focuses on him as like a secret communist. So there is this longstanding distrust of Eisenhower on the far right. But MacArthur becomes a major far right figure, especially after he gets fired by Truman during the Korean War. He's a big part of we just had an episode on kind of some of the early like Christian conservative movements in the United States and like the reforming of the idea of the Fourth of July. He's a big part of this.

So it's interesting to me that Ross is kind of emphasizing his role here, which which is a big one. Because I don't think that's done a lot in in conservative sort of like far right propaganda these days, MacArthur, because he was such an anti communist tends to be heralded. So at least this guy so far seems to be pretty consistent. Yeah, I don't know how that would have been received now versus when it was actually published initially, right? We have a pretty different world from then. But it is interesting to note that I don't know about John Ross's thoughts on workers rights, but he's certainly concerned with veterans rights because these bonus marchers is one of the arguments he uses to portray the government as becoming an authoritarian regime that doesn't seem to care about its people, including its own veterans. And he uses the bonus marchers as or the breaking of the bonus march as one of those examples. And it's really compelling to me because obviously that is a really valid point.

The breaking of the bonus army is totally an example of the government becoming like doing an unhinged authoritarian thing. But it's also a choice. And John Ross, I feel like just based on what I'm reading here knows too much history for this not to have been a choice to not discuss any other aspects of Butler's career or the business plot or kind of the elements of this that are the government tilting its hand on the scale in favor of capital. And I think that's because obviously John Ross has his own biases here. He's worried about communism. It's fascinating to me that he seems to be tying the destruction of the bonus army, the massacre of these soldiers in with like the creeping socialism in the government because I really don't see it that way. And I'm sure MacArthur wouldn't have seen it that way. But also I have to I have to respect the fact that he is very astutely identifying MacArthur is like part of the problem here.

That's really interesting to me. Yeah. And this is like the first example in the book and he goes through and I and each and every one of these, like I said, he'll he'll get to Ruby Ridge and he'll get to Waco and he uses these as an argument that slowly builds up to the culmination of this this rebellion that that Henry Bowman actually engages in. Yeah, I think part of what's fascinating to me about this is it is I don't think John Ross and I have a lot in common and I don't think we would agree on a lot. But up to this point, he's he's not wrong. I would argue that like his analysis of the building problems of authoritarianism in the US government are incomplete, and he's leaving out some really important moments. But he's not all he's also not wrong. And I have not noticed any like, you know, any racism here so far. And I have not noticed.

He's not inventing things out of whole cloth, which is like what you see in the Turner Diaries, right? And I'm not comparing these two because they're super similar. For one thing, this is objectively a better written book. And for another thing, the Turner Diaries by page 28, you have ingested enough racism to kill a large dog. And we haven't really seen any yet out of this. Yeah, no, and I spent a long time since I've read this, so I don't want to speak to the nuance that might be missing in there. Of course. So this is not a this is not a promotion for this. But but like there's a I found a interview with John Ross later in which apparently Timothy McVeigh, of course, the bomber of Oklahoma City said that he was inspired by the Turner Diaries. The Turner Diaries is a terrible vitriolic racist Nazi book. It is unreadable if you are not like studying it as an academic or a Nazi.

And Timothy McVeigh said that if he had read unattended consequences, it might have changed his approach to the problem. And that's an interesting thing. So we have these people that, of course, been become, I don't know how to put it, they got pushed further down the path of extreme, extreme beliefs by things like the Turner Diaries. And it's weird that Timothy McVeigh kind of argued that the unattended consequences might have actually tempered him, which is a strange thing to think. Yeah, because this book is a revolutionary kind of book. And I've come across that, too. And I've always wondered, did McVeigh mean he might not have carried out an attack or just that maybe he would have like gone because like the stuff Bowman does. The Turner Diaries, obviously, like the thing that inspired McVeigh is they blow up. I think it's literally the Pentagon or in its FBI headquarters, they said, I feel like a big bomb at FBI headquarters, which was something he considered. And he picked the target he did the Muraba building in Oklahoma City because it had a large FBI presence.

And that was really who he was targeting as a result of Waco, although he was obviously fine with the fact that it blew up like a daycare and a bunch of other things besides. But I wonder if he's saying, I don't know that maybe I would have like organized with people as opposed to like carrying out a bombing. Or is he saying, perhaps I would have like done what Bowman does and carried out like a series of armed attacks specifically on federal agents as opposed to like a bombing campaign that was much less discriminant. Like, I'm not sure McVeigh is saying I wouldn't have done a violent thing if I read this book. But it's also probably if he had patterned his attack off the kind of attacks you see in unintended consequences, probably wouldn't have blown up a daycare. I agree. I'm not trying to say that. I'm not trying to say that this book would have turned Timothy McVeigh into putting flowers into rifle barrels, right? But it's an unclear quote, but it's an interesting thing to note. Yeah, I'm not trying to like make a broad moral point about like, well, it would have been better if he'd been radicalized into just shooting some feds as opposed to blowing up.

I'm really not trying to get into the weeds there. But I think if you are interested in like radicalism and what causes people to do stuff like that, I think there might be a tendency to just discount what McVeigh is saying. And I don't know that we should because I think it is interesting that like when different media radicalizes people, it radicalizes them to take different actions. And that's not, this is not the kind of like thought I would blast out on Twitter because it's difficult to get out in 280 characters. And it's going to seem like you're saying something different than what you are. But I don't think that's not a thing we should think about and study perhaps is where it is. Yeah, I mean, art is an interesting thing and books are an interesting and fiction is an interesting thing. I mean, I think one of the most inspirational books that the Unabomber referenced was by Al Gore.

Right, right. And Timothy McVeigh just to go back to him was also heavily influenced by fucking Star Trek. He was a huge fan of Star Trek and of Star Wars. And so, yeah, I mean, it's just interesting to see that. And it's interesting like the different kind of, because both Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries and Ross, you can see broad similarities in that they are both people who advocate for an armed overthrow of the government. Now, they're both arguing that for different things. And I think they both see a different world as desirable as a result of that. But it is compelling if you're someone who kind of studies radicalization to see the different ways they go about it. And Ross is really building a much slower case that is based on real history about the necessity of a revolt against the government.

And I think it's important that we're like noting the things that he's leaving out. But the choices he's making here are really interesting. And you know who else makes interesting choices, Carl? Monsanto? They absolutely... So, Carl, have you ever been driving through like a rural part of the country seeing like beautiful fields with corn and other crops and going? I wish those farmers would get thrown in prison if the wind happened to carry seeds from one field to the other that didn't have the legal right to use those specific patented genetically modified seeds. Have you been thinking that like just driving through the countryside?

I really have. I really think that all the food we eat needs more DRM around it. Absolutely. That's the problem with food is that it doesn't have digital rights management and that's the beautiful dream of Monsanto. Digital rights management for everything. I think that's a beautiful dream. Let's hear these ads. 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.

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Oh, we're back. So you had a Monsanto kick these days, huh, Carl? Yeah, I'm a big fan of it. You know, ready roundup is pretty good on a salad. I do, I do. Who was that? Was that the Monsanto guy that like someone tried to get him to like drink weed killer? I think that sounds vaguely familiar. It's so safe. Let me chug this. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing like a Monsanto bong on a Saturday night. Oh, my gosh. That that does sound fun because then also, you know, you're you're killing whatever insects are on your weed. Nice and safe. All right. So Carl, page 29, we are bat what there's so much history here. So we're 1936. Now, we're talking to a woman named Zofia, who I am guessing here is some sort of refugee from the bad things that are happening in Europe.

Yep. Okay. Yep. That seems to be what's happening here. All right. So we've got this lady talking with her mom, yada, yada, yada. Oh, I think we're okay. So she, yeah. This is this is I think setting up one of our characters. Yeah, she's marrying some guy named Irwin Mann, who's also a Jewish refugee, which is again, so that's a nice bit of change from the Turner Diaries. It does seem like a number of our heroes are going to be Jewish people. So that's, yeah, this is one of the character he this is this character becomes, if I recall correctly, one of the fighters in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. And so he's he's using this character to demonstrate the ability of the individual to fight the government with small arms. Gotcha. Okay. Well, that makes sense.

Um, so 1938, we've got a treasury agent hiding in the woods. Oh, I think this is him writing out the arrest of that moonshiner. Is that what's coming here? Yeah. That'd be Miller. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. Cool. Um, so that's fine. Um, let's, you know, that's an interesting note. I mean, I wouldn't say that you should read this book like a history book because that would be that would be wildly inappropriate. However, if you wanted to get like a basic bullet point timeline of things that would be worth further investigation, this book's full of that. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff to like look into here. And again, it's it's there's he's making a very specific ideological case. So it's incomplete as we noted with like Smedley Butler and probably incomplete as we're talking about like gun control and prohibition because he's really focused on this 38 case,

which is kind of late in the history of like arms like 34 is when we get the NFA. So it's interesting to me that he's not kind of focusing on any, I mean, it makes sense based on kind of the ruling here, but it is interesting that that's kind of that seems to be where he's starting in terms of gun control regulations as opposed to going in anywhere earlier. Yeah. The watershed of gun control is considered 1934. And then the second, the second strike to the core of the heart of that is the 1968 gun control act, both of which are heavily discussed in the book. Yeah. And I suspect he's kind of going for this moment in 38 because it's a little easier to build sympathy for the audience for this like small scale bootlegger rather than like the 34, gun control and 34 was heavily driven by you have like this this soaring rate of organized crime and you have like these really horrible murders in the street. And I think it's probably he's probably making a choice as a writer here that like, well, I'm going to have to put in a lot more legwork to get people on,

to get people seeing the government as the clear bad guy in that one than I am if I focus on this like small moonshiner who's got this sawed off shotgun. And it makes this easy case that like they're they're kind of making this this ruling that I can claim is where like all of this illegitimate stuff is descended from like he's making, he's giving you a very incomplete look at the history, but he's making what I think is a pretty smart editorial choice. Yeah, he definitely was strategic in what he did with that. It is also interesting to note the people that don't know this in the audience. The 1934 NFA, the National Firearms Act, which was to regulate machine guns, short barreled rifles, short barreled shotgun suppressors isn't actually a gun law, it's a tax law. It's actually done through the right and so it's what they do is they don't make it impossible to own these things, but they regulated as a tax stamp, which at the time was $200 and was cost prohibitive was actually more than the value of the gun.

But now that we come to the future, you can't make more machine guns, but you can still buy them. But it's still the same $200 tax net, but it's very interesting that it's a tax law, not really unnecessarily a gun law. Yeah, that's really compelling. And again, this is something that he's skipping entirely over. And what he does here in the next couple of chapters is interesting. So after we're introduced to these moonshiners and we get the start of the arrests that leads to their case, we have a chapter that's November 9th, 1938 in Germany, where they're sending a bunch of, we focus in on a Jewish family and who they are sending to Dachau. So we've got like the Nazi sending guy to Dachau, we get one page of that. And then so that's a one page chapter that literally it ends with the line, he was going to Dachau.

And it's talking about like, okay, I'll read the last two lines here. The watchmakers shared a fate with almost a quarter million of his countrymen and every single one of his relatives who was still in Germany as of November 9th, 1938, he was going to Dachau. And then the very next chapter after that one page chapter, we get a district like the basically the minutes of a district court meeting for this case, United States versus Miller involving this bootleger. So he's really very kind of directly making a comparison between the Nazis shipping people off to concentration camps and this bootleger going to court over an illegal short barreled shotgun. Which is definitely like, this is the most problematic the book has gotten so far at least over our reading of it. And you can see what he's doing here, right? Like this is not particularly subtle, although it does I think count as subtle within this genre of literature.

Yeah, he's setting up the argument that gun control lends itself to what we saw in Nazi Germany, which is genocide, etc. He's drawing a direct comparison between the agents of the state in both countries. Yeah, and of course, it's a much more complex argument to that, but there is some hysterical gun control leading itself to that too. So he's not entirely wrong. Right, because a lot of early and this it's interesting to me, again, in terms of like the things he does choose to read out. This is not so far an explicitly racist novel, but he's making the choice to not lead at all with the history of gun control as it involves the suppression of black people's right to carry concealed handguns, which is a big part of early laws against concealed handguns, was to stop black men in the reconstruction area from carrying concealed handguns, which they did because people would try to murder them. And he's definitely leaving that out.

He's also, we just did an episode on this with Margaret Kiljoy, leaving out a decent chunk of like there were a number of some of the first gun control laws in the country were also passed in order to stop anarchists from carrying handguns and as part of like the labor movement. And so we're not really getting any of that we are really he is making a really pointed choice by focusing on Miller in 1938 as kind of the birth of all this gun control. And that's interesting to me because it does. This is kind of we've talked about how careful he's being and he had this is a very careful book so far he is not it is not like an unhinged screed at all and it does not read that way. But he is making some really distinct editorial choices about what he leaves out and I think that's really worth kind of highlighting. Yeah, I don't disagree and I don't recall all of it, but I don't recall this book really getting into issues like the Panthers or civil rights in regards to firearms in their use, which of course is a topic that has been so left off of the American historical record that it's been intentionally ignored. It's like I call it intentional amnesia where we don't want to talk about those things where black people use guns to defend themselves and the reason they still exist is because they had a gun in their possession. I don't remember that being in this book and it would it's interesting because that you're right it lends it would have lended itself even more credibility to his argument if he had included it.

Yeah, I mean it would you could have slotted that in here and it would have like worked as part of the narrative progression he's building, but I also think that would have really turned off a decent chunk of who he knew was kind of and it's also I'm sure this is this is also based on like he didn't. I think it's very possible Ross doesn't see that as part of really the history of of unfair gun control in the United States now I don't know the man so I don't know the degree to which that was a choice or that was just stuff he was unaware of but he seems so knowledgeable that I do have trouble. Imagining he wouldn't at least know about like the Panthers and stuff which perhaps we haven't gotten to but again I don't recall from an earlier reading of that book this book I don't recall that being a part of this. If it's in there it's not heavily profiled at all and I think I would be more along the lines of thinking that he knew the audience he was targeting and did not want to alienate them and yeah that's one of the things we've talked about in previous work together is like you know the community and the gun community is getting is getting much more as much it's becoming a much larger tent but it's still a big uphill fight and that that level of acceptance definitely did not exist in 1996 when this book was published so by including things like that I think that he would have lost his core targeted audience which is why we see those five star reviews on this book because it's very specifically read only by the people that are going to like it. Yeah, and the next like 40 or so pages of this are really heavily dealing with Irwin Mann and the Warsaw ghetto uprising. We're getting into a lot of World War II stuff and it's going to be in here that I think it's is it Bowman's dad that gets introduced as a World War II veteran right because he's star he comes in here.

Yeah, Walter Bowman. Yeah, so so by page 93 is kind of when we're introduced to the Bowman family who's going to be our protagonist family and he comes into the story at at at right after the end of kind of our chunk on the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Where we have so so May 16 1945 is when we kind of meet the family of the guy who's going to be our main character. And I think we'll probably come back to that when we when we deal with this again but so that's that's the introduction to this book is 92 pages of what is effectively like the history of shooting sports and gun control like this is a real slow burn of a starter and it's different from any other book with kind of a broadly similar theme that I think I've gone through. I have to say it's probably one of the smarter pieces of kind of right wing militant like propaganda literature that I've seen. And it is something that if you're not of that ideology, there's even aspects of this that you could enjoy because there is like quite a bit of history in here that that's interesting. But as we've talked about it's also very incomplete history. I do kind of find this fascinating in a way that, for example, Ben Shapiro isn't right. Like there's actually a lot to say about this. That's not mocking the writing in addition like the writing is not. It's not particularly like inspired writing like I'm not going to call this guy. This is not like a tour de force of narrative power. But it's not like there's nothing about it that's jumping out to me is incompetent or bad or at all. Like it's just like, I mean, it's definitely like a slow burn, but kind of in the same way, you know, I get shades of Tom Clancy from this actually.

Oh, I would agree. I think it's very much in that vein. Yeah. And the writing is, it is readable. It's, I don't know how, where would I put it in terms of quality. It's functional prose. Yeah. Kind of like Stephen King. It tells the story, but it's not necessarily Shakespeare. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's certainly not, you're not like, I can't think of any lines here that jumped out to me as like particularly artful, but nothing like, you know, nothing that made it difficult to read. It's just kind of, it's, if you're not interested in this history or in the technical details, and this is something I know from the book, he really loves getting into the technical details about how all of his guns work and stuff. And even if you, like in a way that's very Tom Clancy. So if that's your thing, you may find aspects of that compelling. I tend to think even as someone who likes guns that it can be a bit of a slog at times. Well, you mentioned what you were at page 96 when they just introduced his father. I think this book is like 530 pages. So you're like, you're less than one fifth through the book. Yeah. And that's just beginning to introduce the main characters for the storyline.

Yeah. So we'll come back to this, but I think it is interesting to talk about how this guy chooses to introduce this book that has become so influential in US gun culture. Because it's a pretty, he makes some pretty intelligent choices here that I think are going to be surprising to people just based on the cover, which is not a subtle cover. No. You don't see this much anymore, but like in the early 2000s, this book was influential enough that at the gun shows and on all a bunch of the cars at the gun show, you'd see stickers that said, Henry Bowman is my president. Yeah. And this book was a big deal. Yeah. And it makes sense that it is because I think number one, there's a lot of people who are going to be attracted to some of the ideas of like revolt against the government and like an armed insurgency and seeing themselves as men. As members of that, obviously, but aren't going to be drawn to the fact that the, for example, the Turner Diaries is just a piece of genocidal propaganda and is very clearly that from the beginning.

And it makes total sense to me that this book succeeded in drawing those people in and providing them something to identify with because I really do get why they find this to be an identifiable work. He does some very smart work early on to make this feel both intellectual to the kind of people who are going to be drawn to it and to make it effectively radicalizing. I see why this is so effective to the people it was effective on. I see why a guy like McVeigh would read this and even feel like, oh, shit, I wish I had come across this first. Yeah, no doubt. I think I said this earlier. It's a very hard book to put into a category because as we were going through just these 96 pages or whatever, there's real history in there. And there are things that people may not have ever been aware of that this government has been culpable of and other governments have been culpable of that he did his cherry picking on to make his argument.

But by his cherry picking, it's not to say that the things that he particularly picked are not true narratives. Like his discussion about the bonus marchers and later on in the book, other topics are real accurate things. And a lot of that, which I don't know if that's for now or some other day, but a lot of this falls under the terrible regime of Janet Reno and some of her actions and a lot of that's in this book. Yeah, yeah. And Janet Reno definitely deserves to be a bad guy in your history books. Yeah, so I mean, he really does demonize some people that deserved it, but like you said, it's not necessarily holistically inclusive. And that's what's challenging about it. That's the thing, too, is like if you're focusing on these people and these moments as like horrible moments and these people and these trends as like negative, you're absolutely in the right.

But also when you when you make that out to be the whole story, you're very clearly excising chunks of history and particularly like chunks of history of the oppression of black and indigenous people that could be a part of your argument. If they were if you were willing to include them as a part of the aggrieved classes that you're speaking to. And I think Ross clearly is not here. But you can see how people would find this appealing and also be like, well, I'm not a racist and this isn't a racist book. And yeah, it makes sense that this has had the impact that it's had. Yeah, it's fascinating. I don't know. I wonder what its repercussions are until now because it's been out of print for a while.

I don't know if it ever came back in the reprint. There was supposed to be a sequel. I don't think that ever came out. There was never a really bad B grade version of it like left behind did with Kirk Cameron and all that. There was never like there was never the left behind movie of unintended consequences, right? But I feel like I suspect that if that were if that pump were to be primed, I bet it would be successful still to this day. Well, I think there is essentially a reboot of unintended consequences written by a guy named Matt Bracken, who's a regular on Info Wars enemies, foreign and domestic. Are you familiar with that series?

I've heard of it. I've never read it. Yeah. It says, yeah, I have not read that one, but I know it. It's broadly speaking kind of in the same narrative terrain that we've talked about where there's like this kind of insurgency and overthrow of the evil American police state that is, of course, like a left wing police state. They see it as. Yeah, I'll read you the the Amazon for this bullets rained down upon a packed football stadium, killing dozens, triggering a panic stampede, which leads to a thousand more deaths. A police marksman kills the sniper, a mentally unbalanced desert storm veteran holding a smoking assault rifle.

It's an open and shut case or so America is led to believe in the aftermath of the stadium massacre and outraged public demands and into the threat posed by assault rifle. So yeah, and then America passes gun control and the yeah, it leads to a crackdown that leads to an uprising, right? That book was written before that event, but man, that is shades of Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. And it's interesting because Bracken frames it in his book apparently as like, well, this is what leads to like this huge FBI crackdown of the militia and it's unjust. And the militia has to find out the truth about this. What I'm guessing is like this shooting that was engineered in order to create gun control. When in reality we had an almost identical shooting and the result was was nothing like on a legislative level. I guess bump stocks. Yeah, I think I think it was it was Trump made essentially a fiat ruling that bump stops are legal.

But there was no assault weapons ban. Not from that event. No, there wasn't. But it is interesting that all of these books hinge themselves that that the fight for the fight against an authority and increasingly authoritarian American government is always hinged on the loss of gun rights versus some amalgamation of all sorts of horrible things that the government has done. It's always that one thing. It's always that single platform of it's the gun rights being lost that causes to revolt versus here's gun rights amongst many other problems that cause a revolt. Like that's interesting to me. Yeah, they zero in so much and there's such certainty to and you can even see this in like some of the Alex Jones conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook where it's like just historically looking at the last 30 years, creating a false flag mass shooting is not a good way to get gun control because most mass shootings have not resulted in gun control. Right.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think a lot. You see Columbine as being the one that did. Which absolutely Columbine did where it comes from, right? Yeah. And so that the argument is that each and every and sadly so many of those events have happened since Columbine that each and every one is going to be the one that does that. Historically, except for Columbine, that has not been the case. Yeah, it really I mean, there have been again some like state level laws that have been that have been come in the result of like mass shootings, but even that's not is not super common. It is interesting that like that that's still such a focus. I think there is probably you could probably make quite a good living if you were to rewrite a variation of this book.

That was a little bit smarter about your opening cause and that that steered more towards trying to reach some of those people on the libertarian left as well as the libertarian right. You could probably make a pretty good living doing that. You might need to get better cover art to than than John Ross picked. Although his cover art beats the hell out of Matt Brackens, which is like a really shitty. You know, I kind of now I remember. I think I remember the cover of that book. It's like it's like the Don't Try It on Me snake with a name or something. Right.

Yeah. It looks like clip. It's like clip art. Yeah. It's clip art pasted together. You know what it looks like? It looks what's the name of that that guy who was he was in Congress. He was like a TV host.

And then he got in the Congress and he had to leave because he sexually harassed somebody. What was his fucking name? I don't know. There's so many of those. What's his Al something? Are you talking about Al Franken? Al Franken. Al Franken.

Oh yeah. The cover. He groped people. Right. Yeah. He groped that woman on that plane. Yeah. Yeah.

It looks like the cover of enemies foreign and domestic. It's like this this like lazy clip art of a snake cuddling a rifle. It looks like the cover of like a left-wing book making fun of gun culture from like 2003. Like it doesn't look like the kind of cover. The only thing that would make that cover art better is some googly eyes. Yeah. It's really a pretty lazy cover. Like I wouldn't guess it was a pro gun book by the cover art because it kind of looks

like it's making fun of the Gadsden flag as opposed to an ironic. Whereas at least with unintended consequences, there is no mistaking what kind of like ideological world this book inhabits. So you said there was a sequel to this enemies foreign and domestic. I think there's like five of them. Oh my gosh. Wow. I think there's a ton of these books.

Matt Bracken. Yeah. There's at least so there's enemies foreign domestic. There's enemies foreign and domestic. The reconquista, which I think is about Mexicans taking over the Southwest. And then there's foreign enemies and traitors. So he's got at least three of them. Yeah.

So this is the kind of stuff that would be so pervasive. And maybe it still is in some instances at the gun show. We talked about at the beginning of this. Right. You'd walk in there and there was that giant book section. And it was all sorts of this kind of stuff. And I guess the best thing you could say about unintended consequences is it was the best of its breed.

It was the most readable. It seems that way. Yeah. Probably the least shitty. If you want to say that of that stuff. Like if I mean on one on one end you got the Turner Diaries, which is like the most vile thing you could think of. And then you've got unintended consequences, which is much more nuanced.

And then you had stuff like we're talking about now somewhere in the middle. Mostly poorly written quality of a zine. But unintended consequences had the polish of being a legitimate book. Yeah. I would say this is the gold standard of this kind of this particular kind of narrative propaganda. It definitely seems to be which, which does not mean I think most people reading it are going to enjoy it or that I think it's narratively a well constructed piece of fiction.

Because again, we're 93 pages in and we have not really gotten to the narrative yet, which is a choice. But it's also kind of broadly in line with this is being written in the period when Michael Crichton is and Tom Clancy are like the biggest authors in the United States. And it does seem like very much in line with that. So yeah, you can't divorce it either from the time it was written and what was popular then. Carl, I think that's going to do us for at least the first episode on unintended consequences.

We'll reconvene and see if we want to go more into this or maybe look at what a Matt Bracken's books. But I'm endlessly fascinated with this species of novel. There's like 800 more pages of this book, like literally. There's so many more pages of this. And enemies foreign and domestic is also 568 pages. So we're delving into Jesus a lot. Well, I think I think I think that we only got this far into it does speak to the density

of what it is and how complex a topic this book is. Like if you wanted to describe the term, if you wanted to talk the Turner Diaries, you could you could summarize that in 30 seconds, right? I mean, it doesn't it is not an intelligent work on its end. The consequences is and that's what makes it interesting because whether or not you want to agree or disagree with any of the content in it, anyone reading it, even if you're against what it's about, will probably find something out in it that they didn't know about. Yeah.

And I'm not trying to promote anything. I'm just saying in that regard, it is an interesting work because yeah, I'm going from the bonus marchers to the Warsaw ghetto to Ruby Ridge to Waco to all of those things combined. There's a lot of nuance in that. Like most people wouldn't know about US versus Miller, that that Supreme Court ruling about that sawed off shotgun. There's all that's in there. And while it is cherry picked, it is done in a way that it's there's there's there's

content there above and beyond. Maybe it's intended point. Yeah. Yeah. And certainly like it's it's not a lazy example of what it is. It's it's like he put a lot of work into this. And I think did so in a pretty intelligent way. And that's that's interesting to study just as someone who's kind of drawn into this this

sort of thing and is interested in its impact on the world. Like it's meaningful and worth understanding that like he put the work he did into this and it's had the impact that it's had. Well, Carl, you want to plug your plugables before we roll out? Sure. You can find me at inrange.tv. I create firearms history and other types of content. It's kind of all over the place, but it's all somehow lynch pinned around the concept of

firearms and the history of firearms or the civil rights associated issues around them, including up until today. So if you want to check out my video and some of the other stuff, you can find all of my distribution points at inrange.tv. Yeah. Check out Carl. Check out inrange.tv. Probably don't check out enemies for and domestic.

But you know, you can get a lot of the same things by watching the documentary Trimmers, which is my manifesto. Oh my God, that guy would have been a character in this book. Definitely. Burt Gummer is a character that fell directly out of unintended consequences. It is worth, it doesn't really stand out in the movie, but it is worth noting that he and his wife in 30 seconds go from huddling in their basement to making pipe bombs on the roof. Burt Gummer has seven copies of unintended consequences, all of them signed.

One of them with some DNA on it from John Ross, I guarantee it. Yeah. This may be Burt Gummer's copy of unintended consequences. All right. Thank you, Carl. 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.

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