Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Anniversary Episode

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

It's our birthday! Well, technically, it's not until this Saturday, but given everything going on in the world, we think we deserve a pass for celebrating early. And considering the monumental occasion, we decided it is time for some R&R. This week, we shut off our lamps, hang up our hard hats, and take some time to reflect on the past year, the present moment, and what’s to come. Since our very first episode, our view has been that it is high time that we wise up and realize that there is a complete disconnect between the purported ideals of the United States and the reality of the actions taken by the American government, namely the horrific history of enslavement, exploitation, and the series of successive genocides.  It is now, more than ever, difficult to square the American ideals of truth, justice, and equality with the American actions of slavery, genocide, and forced migration. In this episode, we take it back to the basics and reflect on what this project means to us and what we consider its core values.  As a result, we think this episode is another good one to help new listeners dip their toes in our project.  Because we walk through the foundational pillars, new listeners will leave with a capsule course on what Fourth Reich Archaeology is all about. And what it is all about is friendship. As we say many times in this episode, this project is powered by friendship–the friendship shared between Dick and Don, but equally important is the friendship we've forged with all of you who tune in week after week. In this next year, we hope to deepen those bonds. We really don't want this to be a one-way street. We want to hear what is on your mind. To that end, we are excited to launch the Fourth Reich Archaeology Hotline. To access the number, sign up on our Patreon. We look forward to hearing from you.

Hello, please leave a message after the tone. Dick, Don, this is Gerald Ford, calling to wish you a happy anniversary on behalf of myself, Betty, the kids, and Michigan's whole fifth district. Thanks to you, my long, personal nightmare of being obscure and cast aside as an inmate. inconsequential president is over. Now listen here, you pink-o-commy beatnecks. This is Dick Nixon. I guess I'll wish you a happy anniversary, but I'll say one thing about your little podcast.

That's the faggiest goddamn thing I ever saw since Kissinger dragged me to that Bahamian party. Richard, Donald, this is Henry Kissinger. I would like to congratulate you for one year of podcasting. Your predictions and analysis may be properly called Providential. Hi, boys, it's Joe Alsop here. Just calling to say, what a marvelous job you have been doing with this. program, truly a tremendous effort. You have not made one misstep. It's just fantastic.

But might I make one suggestion? Dick, Don, and to the Whole Fourth Reich Archaeology podcast, this is George de Morinchilt. My Jean and myself would like to wish you a very happy anniversary and thank you for all you have done to clear the name of my old friend Harvey Lee Oswald. Majan wants to give her statement in person. Dick, Don, I'm also want to tell you on behalf of our little two moths, the two donkeys, they wag their tail every time you come on the radio and they know what is a good person. So thank you. Thank you for the Fourth Reich

archaeology. You know, people are always asking me, what is Fourth Reich archaeology? And I got to answer them honestly. And I don't know. In fact, I don't know anything. Boys, it's Joe again. Now I don't know what happens. back there, but here's what I have to offer you. Now, I suggest that you announce the establishment of a toll-free hotline. It's Tom Oman. The borders are. I don't know about you guys trying to take down a force right, because I thought we just getting started.

But anyways, happy birthday. Hey, greetings Dick and Dawn. This is Jack Kennedy. I'm calling to give you my most heartfelt of congratulations upon the completion of one year of your Fourth Reich Archaeology podcast. I hope that the living members of the Kennedy family are showing their appreciation for the efforts

that you gentlemen have put in to expose the cover-up behind my untimely murder. And to remove any doubt, The guilty parties are... The mailbox is full and cannot accept any messages at this time. Goodbye. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States.

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. The Warren Commission was science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going on. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more... Easy victims of a big lie than a small law. For example, with the CIA.

Now he has a mob. He knows so long as is nine. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? Not a more with the CIA. The national global. Thank you for all your eyes is coming. This is Fourth Reich. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick.

And I'm Don. Welcome, listeners, to a special episode today. We are celebrating our first year birthday or anniversary, however you want to call it. and it's coming around the day after this will be released on August 2nd, August 2nd of 24, if you can believe it, was our very first episode debut, and we have sure come a long way since then. Before we get into anything, as always, we would like to thank you for tuning in for supporting our project and for being the wind in our sails as we sail through the turbulent oceans of the present day here in our little Fourth Reich archaeology raft.

So we appreciate you for liking the pod, for subscribing to the pod, for sharing the pod, on your social media and referring friends and followers our way at Fourth Reich Pod on Twitter and Instagram. And if you've not yet had the chance to do those real light-lift sorts of things for us, we would be grateful if you would. We have not missed in our whole first year a single week of broadcasting. We have delivered, as promised, every single Friday

without fail, we're up to 54 episodes, so even more than one per week with more bonus content on Patreon. And that is in spite of the fact that we both

are full time and indeed often more than full time employed with our day jobs as, believe it or not, practicing attorneys. Don't hold that against us, though, folks, because what we are to you are Dick and Don, your faithful friends and hosts, and we have done our best to not only deliver on a weekly basis,

but to deliver quality on a weekly basis without slipping, even when we have to burn the midnight oil to get that sweet, sweet podcasting to your headsets. As of this recording, had our episodes streamed or downloaded over 204,000 times, which, Dick, I don't know about you. I think we came into this without really any expectations of what was going to happen. Yeah, I mean, I'm basically just doing this to talk to you, Don. I think the first week we did this, I said, this is really just a friendship podcast. And I maintain that.

This podcast is powered through the power of friendship. That's a fact. And we've made a lot of good friends along the way, too. And shout out to all of those who have. made guest appearances to date. We love you and appreciate you, and we can't wait to have all of you back. Nobody wore out their welcome here, and we'll have even more guests and visitors in the coming year. The other little statistic that I wanted to share that comes to us from Spotify is that we have listeners ostensibly in 129 different countries,

which is pretty cool. So, ben-vindus, bien-benito, bienvenu, welcome, and whatever else reaches you, listener. However, we are reaching you, we're glad that you're tuning in. And we hope you'll continue. And this will be the part where I will come in and once again ask that you please consider supporting us on Patreon. We are so grateful for our Patreon supporters. You folks are really the ones that give us faith that this can perhaps one day be a full-time,

real deal operation. We're so grateful for our Patreon supporters we implore you if you are able to if you like what we've been doing please consider subscribing to our Patreon

we've over the last year tried to offer our Patreon subscribers some additional treats you'll find full versions of episodes that we have only published partial versions of our ongoing series the big con is an example of one i think it was

the last big con episode don we only did a partial drop on the public feed and if you join our patreon you can get the whole thing we've done a similar thing with our ruby episodes the episodes about Jack Ruby, the assassin's assassin, and we plan to keep doing that. We don't really like to do it. I don't know about you, Don. It's not my favorite thing sort of gatekeeping content, but we got to do something to get the engine going on this thing. And I think this has been a way that other podcasters do it, so we're doing it too. The big thing is that we are trying to avoid any sort of of ad space or special interest, corporate interest. So we really are relying on you, the listener,

to support us. All right, friends, it is indeed our birthday. and so I wanted to kick things off by exchanging a little bit of a birthday present with all of you. We are one year old now, and in the last year we've been so completely gobsmacked by the positive response about this program. We have really enjoyed all of the correspondence. Our email is forthrightepod at gmail.com. And it really comes back to it. We've just been so amazed by the power of friendship,

the connections we've made. And so now, one year in, we decided to get ourselves a little birthday present, and that is a phone number. That's right. We are rolling out the Fourth Reich Archaeology hotline. Now, the hotline will be available for our paid Patreon subscribers. And really, we hope to be a venue for you to call in and tell us what's on your mind.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we love interacting with our listeners via email. I've had some great exchanges on there. Heard some great anecdotes and, you know, different people will reach out to us to share the ways in which perhaps theirs or their family's history have intersected. with some of the subject matters that we cover, and the hotline, you know, in addition to just chatting us up and sharing what's on your mind or asking questions, it will be a way for us to pool some questions to do Patreon-only Q&A type episodes. And also, you know,

one of the features that we were thinking about is that if folks have particular talking points, whether it be from your lib-brained coworkers or your Trump-loving grandmother or whatever, that perhaps we could make ourselves of assistance in formulating some articulate response there to and you know i know that that's one thing that we hear from people a lot that there's all this bullshit out there and i mean that was really one of the purposes that we had going into this is just the level of political discourse is so corrupted and infused by layer upon layer of mendacity and dishonesty and distortion that we thought we might be able to help some people to untangle all of the lies and to cut through it in a way that makes sense.

That's intuitive. That's not too sophisticated. I think we aim to address a very general public and we try not to make too many assumptions about insider knowledge about any of the topics that we cover. And so this hotline, hopefully, you know, I'm excited to try it out and see just what more we can do to be of use to you, our listeners, who we are really doing this for this is not a career for us we're not doing this for a paycheck we are not grifting you i hope that you'll believe us there when we say it uh we really are just doing this because what the fuck else can we really do in this utter hellscape that we all live in i started this thing it was a friendship of two and now i think it's a

friendship of men. That's right. And that's what this is all about. Our message is love. Our message is truth. Our message is justice. Justice, of course, really to understand where we are and how it is we can get out. Yeah, I mean, I think part of what we have on offer here and part of what has moved us to go from, you know, whatever, Twitter or whatever, to actually speaking and doing some historical analysis is this idea that the mainstream political formations on the left are perhaps insufficiently paranoid when dealing with the status quo.

To give just one example, you know, I've had this conversation with many friends who are incredible people, organizers, you know, doing political activism on the left, and I'll offhandedly drop a remark like, oh, yeah, and just wait till like AOC, Neutral, realizes that line of argument or something similarly cynical and I've had the experience where a remark like that is perceived really negatively like what do you mean you know these are people

that are on our side and we have to support them and cheer them on so that we'll have a place in the conversation a seat at the proverbial table of politics and there's nothing dumb or wrong with having that view but i think that it is somewhat dangerous to hold that view without understanding the potential pitfalls of putting your faith into a persona like, just to use the example, because she is kind of everybody's first referent as a mainstream socialist in the United States. I guess you could say the same thing about Bernie Sanders, although I think nobody now believes that he has a future of pursuing higher office, given his age.

But with respect to either one, I think you have to take a jaundist view both of their background and of all of what surrounds them and defines their rise to the mainstream position. and you see that behind it there's stuff like, I don't know, a well-financed Netflix documentary that centers AOC as the face of the so-called squad, or, you know, her internship with Senator Ted Kennedy while she was coming up, or her post-college employment in a startup run by, Israeli tech bros. All of these red flags that would otherwise be off the radar are to the noided leftist

front and center. And I'll give a shout out on the AOC Suss background points to the Twitter account rap game Edward Bernays, who I think was the first to really put this all in one place. at the time took a lot of flack for it but has largely been vindicated over time the latest example being aOC's truly unjustifiable and senseless vote in favor of including iron dome funding in the latest package of aid to Israel and of doubling down on that vote what did she say she's like, I have the receipts. Google is free.

Yeah. Oh, my God. And that's a great, it was so whack. It's a great jump-off point because it's like one of our overarching themes or overarching points is like they are lying to your face. They are lying through their teeth to you. Like what is she even saying when she's bringing up her backup? right she's talking about a completely different thing yeah exactly and it's like she is implicitly throwing under the bus the only Palestinian member of Congress

Rashida talib the other main Muslim member of Congress Ilhan Omar and the very small number of Democrats that voted with the Marjorie Taylor Green amendment to remove any funding for Iron Dome from the aid package. And it's like you have got to insist upon a complete and a total boycott. There's no distinction between defensive and offensive weapons when the recipient is committing genocide. And in fact, not only is it against international law under the provision prohibiting, aiding, and abetting the crime of genocide. It's against U.S. law,

against the Leahy Amendment that prohibits the provision of any military material to a country that is engaged actively in war crimes. So it's like the justification and the doubling down is all giving reasons and giving cope. for why she is willing to violate both U.S. law and international law through this yes or no vote. And, you know, that's just one example, but it goes a lot deeper than that too. Like, as JFK heads, Dick and I both have dealt for a long time with people on the left who espoused the Chomsky few right that jfk was not a target for the deep state because he was just a cold war hawk anyways and you know it it's silly to focus on who killed jfk it's silly to focus on what really happened on 9-11 and what really happened in the intelligence community to allow the 9-11 attacks to go off the way that they did and on and on and on

and on that at the risk of alienating people that want to move on we're saying no you have to insist on truth as the foundation for politics and that although it's more difficult and it becomes more so by the day, given the reduction of the attention span of the average person, thanks to technology. It is nevertheless necessary if there is to be some sort of a solution that does not just loop right back onto the highway to hell that we are speeding down. and that foundation of truth is exactly what we've been focused on laying down since we started this project and it just so happens that you know i don't know that any or many of our listeners will have been in much disagreement with any of the positions we've taken over the

past year but a lot of other people who consider themselves on the left surely did diverge from some of our prognostications from a year ago. And I don't know about you, Dick, but I re-listen to our very first episode to see sort of where we were at. And, I mean, we were pretty much vindicated on pretty much all fronts. Like we were ringing the alarm bells about genocide. That's something that we were doing from long before. I mean, in the conversations that led us up to the idea for a podcast. We were talking about that constantly since October, 2023, but certainly by August of 2024, we were calling it by its name.

Yeah. Fundamental, this is another pillar. Let's call them the pillars of the podcast. Pillar number one, friendship. Pillar number two, anti-genocide. close to pillar number three which is anti-fascism but those are so connected too

it's like and this is where I do still get into arguments with people all the time in real life online whatever that people will say oh you're exaggerating there's not fascism in America

there's still rights and we still have to have civil dialogue with people on the other side And when they say people on the other side, they're referring to the Trump administration. And it's like, there's no civil dialogue with fascism. And if a regime is knowingly and is willfully committing the crime of genocide, then whatever quibbles you have about the definition of fascism, at least to my mind, fly out. the window like how are you going to draw a line like exactly like as if we are really who we

purport to be as a country if there is a genocide happening goal number one should be to make that stop that should be the number one to do right given if if we are to believe everything we've been told growing up about the horrors of the 20th century and about how, you know, America came and, you know, stood for truth and justice. And I think it shouldn't be controversial to say we have to sort out this crisis that is happening with, with our tax dollars. And it goes back to this idea of, America as an oppositional entity to the kind of boogeyman embodiment of evil in history, which is Hitler's Nazi regime and the Third Reich, right?

The post-war international order, the United Nations, the international criminal court, the International Court of Justice, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and on and on and on with these post-war treaties to guarantee a modicum of common rights for all. That project has been used as the sort of first domino to judge. justifying all of the U.S.'s military adventurism ever since, because the Cold War military interventions were all launched on the pretext that the Soviet Union and that the evil communist system was anathema to the rules-based international order that we, quote unquote, And by we, it's really meant to refer to the Western powers, right?

The allies in World War II, excluding the Russians, who, of course, sacrificed more people and bore a much larger load of the actual military conflict than any other power. But that is what gives cover to things like the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and on and on and on, the mini wars that went undeclared that whether they were just proxy wars or supported by special forces or whatever all over the world. And not just the wars, but all of the dirty work, the coups, the regime changes, the covert ops, all the bullshit, the cloak and dagger shit that is just so reprehensible. up of dictatorships. Yeah. Justifying all of that one in the same under this flag.

And so not only is it essential to understand and to internalize the hypocritical nature of all that action undertaken in the name of a rules-based international order, but also a bit about the specifics of how that lie has been sold to not just the American people, but all over the world. I mean, there was a time, and I think it still is the case, generally speaking, that, for example, Europeans have a much more cynical view of U.S.-backed militarism. but that's always contested and the rise of far right parties that idolize Trump throughout Europe is very real and is very alarming the extent to which the fake narrative of history has permitted this wave of fascism

to overtake the globe. Like the stakes right now are just incredibly high. And I think they're too high to permit even one little lie like that JFK was killed by a lone nut to slip through because they have consequences. You know, one of the things that we're doing here is I hope we're making it clear through connections in the past is like you know if they did it then they're doing it now right like the john jay mccloy becomes the Elon musk right it's um it's time is a flat circle right it's all just sort of there in the playbook in that playbook it was coming up of course in the

19th century and even before, but it really took off in the post-war era, this public-private connection, right? How is it that, you know, the J.D. Vance-Thiel connection, right? How is that even possible? Well, it wouldn't be possible if you didn't have the McCloys of the world. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And, and that's kind of why we picked the Ford presidency as the real cleanup job of the coup of 63 and setting the table for the sort of neocon takeover and it's really the vision of America in the Reagan period that has stuck ever since you know the shining city on a hill idea and concept although he took it from perhaps the founding generation or whatever, when Reagan said it, what he meant was

everybody needs to follow the American model. And what that means is everybody needs to be under American domination until they can get up on their own two feet, in other words, until there's a puppet that is sufficiently loyal to the plan that we can trust. And all of this taking on in what I think is another one of our fundamental pillars, spectacle, right? All of this happening in this age of spectacle, like you mentioned, this idea of what America once was and what could be. It's this perfect concept, this idea that, oh, we had this heyday, we were so great. and let's strive for that again. Meanwhile, it's never been that way.

It's not like that way now, right? When Reagan's saying that in the 80s, he's saying, let's make America great again. He's forward-looking. It's acknowledging that we're in a pretty shitty spot right now, and he's saying it was so great in the past. Well, that place in the past never really existed for so many millions of people. Yeah.

And, of course, it was never fully realized. as a result of Reagan's presidency in the future, right? And this sort of story is basically been on repeat over and over again through the decades ever since, right? It's this idea of how great it was in the past. Let's romanticize the way that we had it back in the day, totally ignoring the realities of what that means. And then there's this forward-looking part of it

where it's like, this is where we're going to go. and all the while, you know, conditions keep getting worse and worse and worse. Right. And implicit in the forward-looking side of things is vengeance against the enemy who has steered us off the course, who has taken away. The old release valve. Yes. It's the old release valve to tamp down any real deal. discourse, any real sort of coming to terms with the past, coming to terms with the things that we

ought to come to terms with, we throw that to the wayside in favor of the release valve. And it all sets up this national identity that thrives on the kind of libidinal desire for belonging in a larger community or in a project that's larger than oneself, which then supersedes thanks to the spectacle, right, that repackages things. And again, I know Mad Men came up in our last episode with Max on Jack Ruby, and I know we have plans to do a dedicated Mad Men episode or series of episodes with Matt Farwell down the line.

But again, the show Mad Men is so on the button when it diagnoses the problems of contemporary America as being the result of these guys who were thrown into a war zone, who were traumatized, whatever, are actually mad, as in they are insane. You know, all of the lead characters are themselves mentally deranged people, you know, somewhere on the spectrum towards psychotics, and their talent is to make up stories, to make up narratives that funnel the feelings of resentment, of desire for belonging, of desire for comfort towards the purchase of consumer goods. And that's really what the spectacle has been so effective at doing.

That's what has kept the American ship afloat. I mean, every economic bubble that has inflated over, you know, cyclically, over the last several decades, is you could think of it like a piece of chewing gum that's being thrust into a hole on the side of a boat to keep the water out, to keep it from sinking, and then that bubble pops, and then there's another one, right? and it's all increasingly fake. With each turn, it's another layer removed from authenticity, removed from reality. The financial economy is based on the generation of froth at the surface. It's really disconnected from production of real things. You know, that's what the American,

economy and we've had this conversation off mic but that's really where we're at today in the so-called service-based economy yeah that's exactly right it goes hand in hand with that same time period right it's all of a sudden the basic wants and needs of well i'll say the basic needs of americans are being met for the first time at mass scales right more people are fed more people have housing more people are doing just all right and so what comes with that is this era where Americans as part of their identity it becomes a consumer based sort of culture where they express themselves through consumer choices and they are able to do so because for the most part their jobs are increasingly becoming service jobs, jobs that give them more time, jobs that give

them more freedom to participate in the market. Yeah. And ultimately, there's a, it calls into question the fundamental assumption of Marxism, which is that the alienation between, the worker and their labor will come to a head at some point and bring the worker into a confrontation with the owners of the means of production. And what American capitalism has sought to achieve is to smooth over that fundamental contradiction to such an extent that to use a metaphor from the matrix that people will choose the blue pill you know whatever that means and I think it doesn't take a real crystal ball not talking about the journalist but the mechanism for for

seeing the future, it doesn't take one of those to see that between virtual reality, constant surveillance, and dependence on screen technology, there is a short horizon for the time when people will be able to reproduce cheaply. and have a very low bar of entertainment needs met. You know, you could also think of like the spaceship in the movie Wall E of the Walt Disney Corporation. Which is really nuts because if you go to one of their properties, odds are, I don't know, maybe one out of three people will be on wheels, whether it's babies and strollers or people in scooters.

Yeah, well, there you have it. I mean, I guess from our perspective, that's a bad thing. And that's becoming perhaps an increasingly subjective take. And that's what the, for example, the abundance bros or the entire tech industry, really. And its lackeys are not all wealthy people and they're not even all people. who have like a clear path to being wealthy. But you see it all over the place of the cult of technology and this belief that if your basic needs for food, shelter, and entertainment can be met by some machine that imitates life. that that is sufficient for human thriving.

And I don't know if there's like a scientific or objective way to reject that, but I will say fuck that in the strongest terms. I mean, this is what I think the tech industry is planning for by basically paving the road to decrease the standards of living in the, the United States pretty drastically. You know, I think a lot of the economic agenda of mass deportations, for example, and increasing through tariffs, the price of consumer goods, and the concentration of the housing stock into the hands of private equity, and on and on, all of these maneuvers that

are coordinated. You know, let's not forget that part of this is also epistemological of what we're doing to elucidate the role of what we might call conspiracies or covertly coordinated action by the ruling class. You know, outside and in direct contradiction of the stated goals that these people purport to pursue right like when Elon Musk says that he wants to create an interplanetary future and colonize Mars or whatever the fuck like that's obviously bullshit what he wants to do is to enrich himself and to support research and development of military technologies that will enable total informational awareness, utter and complete surveillance of every person's every move, this type of thing. It has nothing to do with, oh, you're going to have a

great life on Mars while Earth is like in climate collapse. Yeah, and the end game being just how to best establish control. Yes. Right. Just how to get better at control. at control and that's really the end game I guess the other end game of course is to be the first person to make it to one trillion dollars seems to be a goal that these guys are shooting for which hopefully never happens but I understand will be likely to happen in our lifetimes Don which not even in our lifetimes I think within the next 10 years I mean unless Elon's special K plug can do the right thing and

then yeah that's what we're looking at while we're on the subject this point about the massive inequality and wealth like alarm bells should be ringing this is another I think symptom of where we

can say safely that like We are at a critical point. If the sign that we're going to, you know, very soon have our world first trillionaire, if that's not a sign to people that something is seriously fucked up, that's essentially the return of like a global monarchy, right? If that's not a sign that things are fucked up, that's, I don't know. I don't know, maybe we deserve it. Yeah, but I still don't think that regular people,

do deserve to be slow walked into hell, you know, for all the future generations. I am willing to spend my life the rest of the time, however short or long it might be on earth, rather than trying to join forces with those powers, I think that the only dignified way to live a life is to oppose them however you can and you know that doesn't necessarily mean and it in most cases cannot mean just for the sake of survival totally disconnecting or you know dedicating all of your efforts to revolution whatever that means I don't know. I'm going to

I'm going to I'm going to I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm And this is actually a good transition to talk a little bit about kind of what we see what we see in the the future, what we hope will happen, and what may be helpful to break the cycle, to get out of the time loop in which we seem to be trapped, where, you know, I talk to my liberal family members, and they are utterly depressed about the state of things, completely finally on board with my long-time rejection of the Democrat Party as an effective countervailing force to the open fascism on display from Trump and his ilk.

And, you know, without really any national leaders or any national political formations to grasp and direct that energy in a productive way, you know, notwithstanding the small exceptions, like I think we mentioned in a recent episode, our critical support for Zoran Mamdani's mayoral efforts in New York, where surely the, all the tricks in the book will be pulled out against him, you know, whether that means that he's precluded, from winning the general election or whether that means that he's just rat-fucked at every corner

and they try to make a de Blasio out of him. God, the way they've tried to rat-fuck this guy already, right? The shit about him, his responses and his college applications. Yeah. Like, they're throwing everything they got out of it. Oh, yeah. And this is how you know they're scared, right? and this is how, you know, they're, they got nothing else.

They're desperate, yeah, they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. But I think we can throw a few potentially productive ideas out there. We'll throw them into the ether and hope that they materialize into something concrete. Because I think that for some of these ideas, it would potentially help us to put just a few bricks on the path towards liberation in our lifetimes. And one of those has to do with interjecting in the spectacle. So as we've been talking about, that is kind of one of our goals in launching this project to break the hold of the spectacle and to pierce the totalizing worldview that it imposes on people's minds,

whether through education, as Bob Marley used to call it, brainwash education, or through the media. and one way that I've put out there a few times on Twitter that I'll just voice here is the construction of a communist Fox News, what I've called half-jokingly a communist Fox News. Like, we know about a lot of other media outlets and podcasters and YouTubers and whatever that have a platform that reach combined millions of people but who are nevertheless in their own little silos, including ourselves, giving a cut of the take to Patreon, to YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to any number of these tech companies whose intentions are the opposite of liberation.

And, you know, I think not only in the content that we are conveying, but also in the form through which we convey it, we could better collectively reflect the values that we all espouse and that's very difficult to do it's much easier said than done and it's something that i think we are willing more than willing to participate in to co-plan and coordinate with other folks out there and for that reason you know just wanted to get it into this episode put it on record and invite anyone to work with us towards that goal. You know, we're not trying to say that it's the Dick and Don company that would be owned. We're talking explicitly about seizing the means of production

and collectivizing them among the people that are involved and cutting out these middlemen, these intermediaries who continuously have their hands in our pockets and force us to compete with one another when we could all do better through cooperation. And if we don't really believe that we could all do better through cooperation, then I don't think that we have the right to call ourselves communists in the first place. Right. I agree with you there. I think it would be so great if there was a place where we could come together as a collective or cooperative to get this broader message across a place where people can actually speak freely. Yeah. And a reminder, we are JD's. We are able to navigate the legal waters of this stuff. We may not have the biggest content catalog out there, but we are just to underscore that it's a serious provocation to put out there and a serious invitation to anyone who would take part.

And it won't happen overnight, but it really ought to happen rather than the kind of hamster wheel pursuing a bigger following within the little silos and you know what niche can we fill of course we respect our comrades of course we continuously make an effort in all of our episodes to avoid repeats of things that others have done and we just want to live that solidarity through practice. So that is one of our, I'd say, New Year's resolutions for the new year of podcasting. Yeah, what do we call that one? Seizing the means. Seizing the means, baby. That's what it's all about. Seizing the means, that's good. Yeah, totally. I would just want to point out, right? Not to say that we're looking for in the Joe Rogan of the left situation.

right it's i don't think this is that uh i think it's more as uh as our 30th president said when he became minority leader there on on this team there are no bench players everyone gets a everyone gets some playing time right we we want and that's really what our project's about right the folks who have written in and the folks that have really engaged with our message we we do our best to respond and to also listen and to really take your feedback and think about it and try and connect with you on that level and I think there's so much more of that that can be done and I think it's absolutely necessary that we move off of these standard platforms when when doing this Yeah, I remember still the great Jimmy Fallingong of the program to chill podcast in one of his earlier episodes made a comment to the tune of, and I'm paraphrasing, is not a parasocial relationship that we are seeking to establish.

it really is a connection, a real connection. And I think that's exactly where we're at as well. We do not view you, the listener, as a means to an end, to a media career, or to a dollar count on our Patreon subscriptions. It's really about doing whatever we can. It's not really clear what we can do, but to actually make a difference and get the fuck off of this road to ruin that we so clearly are on. I mean, and just to underscore with a few predictions, that was another thing that we wanted to do in this episode. We could take a little detour from, you know, what we and you can do together.

But as far as what's coming, right, we know for a fact that the big, beautiful bill, which we covered in our second installment of the Big Congress series, it's going to put so many boots on the ground of the American Gestapo known as ICE, right? We heard in that episode in the mashup from Tom Holman, the human gorilla, which is an insult to the gorilla. I have a patch of gun. We've got patch and gun on test duty. We didn't get that badging gun out in this. street and those badge and guns are going to be out in the street and billions upon billions upon

billions of dollars have been allocated to augment the force that these thugs that are black bagging people in home depot parking lots out of walmarts everywhere in the country that they are going to do so with a vast arsenal of both fours, force, manpower, and surveillance technology. And that is going to really change the dynamic. I mean, all of our solidarity and support for the brave souls out there, tracking ice, resisting ice, sending out messages in their communities about ice. I mean, this is the first real face of the fascist crackdown that's to come.

And it's a perfect storm of events too. We are heading towards some real problems, I think, with the way the economy is panning out. I think you are going to start seeing the crunch on everyday Americans. You have this perfect storm of sort of events brewing where the Trump administration and his cronies have really frothed up, I think, the base on this anti-immigrant narrative, right? They've really made this a message for the MAGA movement. And so you have folks that are harboring this terrible hatred towards immigrants. At the same time, you know, I think we both talked about this, but I surely believe that within the next couple of years, during the Trump administration, you're going to see a major crisis.

likely economic crisis, right? You have the student loan stuff popping up again for millions of Americans. That means that they're going to have to start making payments that they haven't made in like six years, right? You have all the tariff stuff, the cost of goods is going up. You have this stagnation in income, I think, you know, you add on top of that this idea of like AI taking our jobs and the layoffs that are happening. And you take all of that and you open up all of a sudden plenty of jobs at ICE, right? Plenty of jobs at the FBI, the NSA. the DEA plenty of jobs opening up in these enforcement positions and and what you get is an automatic army right people who are pissed off of their financial situation pissed off of you know pissed

off at immigrants and then they're basically given guns and batons and um sent out in the streets yeah and and this is where mentality is so important because you do see at least anecdotally, stories of people coming out in defense of their neighbors, people who voted for Trump saying, well, I thought that he only meant deporting people with criminal records or people who were dangerous or whatever. I didn't think it meant taking away my neighbor and her kids and sending them to a country that they've never been to before. and I'm against that and that's who knows how widespread any of these positions are

but you do get the sense that there's at least enough of a critical mass you know just among the people that were showing up for Trump rallies for example and here's where again the parallels to the third Reich are so salient. And I have recently read this book about the night of the long knives when Hitler kind of closed ranks and purged all of the members or all of the leading members of the SA, which had been the real Nazi jackbooted militias on the streets that were getting in scrapes with communists that were having all these fights to help bring the Nazis into power and yet they did so on the promise of some redistribution right some of their fervor was what you might call

revolutionary in as much as it was directed against the old powers that be and when that demand for redistribution came into conflict with the continued support of the military in Germany and of the old families of the nobility who had all the highest ranking posts in the military and the industrialists who controlled the economy it was an obvious choice that what you have to get rid of are those people at the bottom and so a similar dynamic here is at play where you have Trump swelling the ranks of ice and trying to essentially draft an American S.A. And using the anti-establishment feelings that are naturally ginned up by a situation of extreme inequality in order to fill those ranks.

And to fill them not only with people who just need the job, but with people who are zealous and people who will carry it out with cruelty and with a vengeance. And eventually, you know, that could blow up. But I think in the meantime, you know, we have to keep our eye on all of the forces lining up behind Trump to shape what will come next. And this is why I spent such an ungodly amount of time preparing for my appearance recently on Brother Isaac's Coexist Inc. podcast listening to Tucker Carlson

because there's other voices who are adjacent to Trump who are providing a better, more coherent articulation of the vision that they are seeking to carry out in the short term. And there's nobody who is head on confronting, dismantling, and opposing that vision. Nobody. No Democrat except maybe Rashida Talib in the entire United States Congress in both houses. you know it's a real vacuum and that's why it's incumbent upon us not dick and don but us people who see things for what they are to fill the void because if we don't

who the fuck is gonna nobody as far as i can tell yeah 100% right if we're not talking about it if we're because i'm not hearing it very much right and if if i'm not talking about it i don't know who you know where else we're going to hear it right i mean i do have some contacts in the congress and what i hear from them is there's nothing going on the dems are just biding their time hoping that the pendulum will swing their way in 2026 and maybe they can do whatever the fuck they would have done if it hadn't have been for Trump and try to get things back to normal or whatever, there's no vision whatsoever. There's nothing.

There is nothing. And it's not surprising, right? And this is what we covered in our 4th of July episode where we were doing that excavation into the Civil War era. But you've got to think the... goal is the number one goal is always going to be maintain the status quo don't rock the boat don't make things so crazy that it's not predictable so the Dems biting their time that to me seems like obviously they're doing that because what else do they want to do right

they're not going to shake things up so much so that it would jeopardize their spot right That was the only thing I was going to put in, but I think we can move on. But it's, no, it's worth making the point because just even to put one more finer point on it, look at what's happened over the last 22 years since the global war on terror spun out into the Iraq War and utterly destabilized and destroyed the entire Middle East. I mean, that was objectively acknowledged as having been built on lies and not accidental lies, knowing misrepresentations of ginned up evidence that came from the mouths of total frauds on the payroll. And there was never any accountability.

the disaster spun out of control to proportions that cannot even be measured and we today in 2025 pretend like it never even happened and the same type of thing is just going to keep on happening over and over and over again this is what we mean by being trapped in a time warp that we are stuck in this site where horrible things keep happening, the evil motivations behind them are transparent, everybody knows about it and yet does nothing. And then it happens again, and then it happens again, and then it happens again. And so this is where, you know, I think we can pivot to what's our advice for the listeners for this next year. And I think we could take this advice

ourselves as well and we're always saying you know we attempt to hold ourselves to the standards that we set out i for one am certainly not always successful in my personal life often letting you know professional courtesy and professional considerations get in the way of being my true self 24 hours a day 365 days a year and i think that we all owe ourselves a little leeway. But at the same time, we should hold ourselves and one another to some account to be truthful, to be truthful about what we know to be true. And to not countenance the lies and the repetition of the lies that our currency almost made a condition of participation in discourse and that rejection of that pattern of if you want to be listened to you must parrot this set of false assumptions about the world

of false narratives about our history. And then you can try and talk your way out of it based on those false assumptions. I think, and it's again parroting what we said in the July 4th episode, but it's so important to refuse to do that. It's just the bare minimum that we all need to do to move the goalposts to something that's going to get us results and not something that's going to get us empty participation trophies at best.

What do you say? Where do we go from here? Maybe we do some final thoughts. We're rounding out on, you know, Don, I said, I said, we'll do this one in an hour. And as always, we're now a little bit over. I think on your last point, it's important to stay skeptical, to always speak your truth. But at the same time, you know, I'm a first generation Muslim American.

Like, I code switch with the best of them. I totally understand when you got to sort of keep quiet to stay safe. So my final thoughts I'll say is stay safe out there. And definitely, definitely, when you are in the company of friends and you hear your friends saying things that you don't think is the truth. Be sure to speak up. And if you don't know what to say, hit us up on the fourth rank archaeology hotline. That's right. That's right. I don't know. Should we do final thoughts? Maybe what you're, let's talk about maybe just a quick overview for the listener, what we plan for the,

for the year ahead. We got many pots on the stove. We are, I'm sure our longtime listeners can tell. We're a bit scatterbrained over here. We like to pull on threads and a lot of times we see that the threads just, you know, they begat more threads. And so we've got a lot of series, a lot of serieses, a lot of series is within series. And we're doing a whole hell of a lot of podcasting. But that's not the end of it, right? We're doing so much more. We are really going to, I think, blow our listeners away this next year with all the things that we've been cooking up uh you may have seen the trailer for our pseudo documentary that's been in the works even i think was conceived before the podcast idea in the first place that is of course

gerald time ford traveler yeah and it it's sort of the uh i would say the starting bell for our video content, film content, media beyond just the pod sphere. Yeah, we're working on fictional screenplays. We've got some ideas towards putting Jerry World into a book to compete with the essentially mainstream. The long list of esteemed... Hack biographies. esteemed biographers, including, I think Donald Rumsfeld, is one of them. Motherfugger wrote a book about Jerry. Yeah, and, you know, essentially, I think Dick and I, we do have the magic of friendship on our side. We would love to devote not only our media talents and abilities to these side gigs,

but you know we're also thinking about ways to involve ourselves aside from our current employment in impact litigation in the type of legal work that the noided left cries out for this is not a solicitation we're not offering legal advice we're not all yeah all that we're doing is simply putting a little bit of our cards on the table to implore you to stick with us for another year and beyond because we love you. We love human beings and we hope to operationalize that love in the name of liberation for all. people. That I think we agree is the highest goal that one can pursue here on the planet Earth and the odds are stacked up against us, but it's a lot more fun to fight against them than it is to try and

scheme away into the C-suite, so to speak. You got any final thoughts, Dick? No, I guess you said it, man. Look, we love doing this. We will continue doing it. I love talking to Don. Oh, well, I talk to you more than once a week, but I love speaking with you on air. We do the project.

We do it for each other. I do it to keep my sanity, but of course we do it for our listeners. We are so grateful for everything we've done. done for everything you have done for us, for everything we've done together. And I'll just reiterate, look, this Fourth Reich Archaeology train, it is bound for glory. We are not going to stop until every fascist has been brought to justice. And so right now what that means is we get together and we talk on our mics for about an hour or two and we, you know, cut up little cheeky little videos and we try and get the message out but we are really going to ramp things up

our goal is to get this message out to as many people as possible to wake people up to wisen folks up to really try and change things from the way they are yeah and and and you said something that just reminded me, you know, justice is the goal here. And it brings me back to what we've been talking about with respect to the genocide that I think forgot to mention at the time. But with all of these creeps and enablers coming out of the woodwork to try and undo the damage of their opposition to those who spoke out against the genocide from the jump and who want to be welcomed into the tent with open arms. I'm thinking especially of the recent efforts by the pod save bros to once again finger wag at the left and say that ideological purity

is counterproductive and that in fact we need to pat everyone on the back who is just now coming out against the genocide in Gaza and to say to those people okay get in the back of the fucking line you can have a spot in the tent but you do not speak for the movement against this genocide and in fact if you want a place in the tent the bare minimum condition is that your call to action not end at a call to simply cease the famine cease the killing and cease the genocide instead it must include as a sine qua non, a call for justice, and that means justice for the perpetrators,

means putting your faves, to quote Christine Pelosi about the Epstein list, to put some of your faves into the dock in the hague, at a minimum Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, William Burns, the list goes on and on, but they must pay for their crimes because they committed them knowingly and willfully against humanity. And to let them off the hook is to open the door for the next genocide. and that is something that we must, under no circumstances, permit.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Again, it's really been a wonderful wild ride. We look forward to continuing on this journey with you. I look forward to continuing it with you, Don. And until next time, I'm Dick. And I'm Don. saying farewell and keep on digging. We refuse to be

what you wanted us to be we are what we are. That's the way it's going to be if you don't know You can't educate time for no equal opportunity. Talking about my freedom, talking by freedom, people freedom, and liberty. Because we've been trotting on you, I impress much too long.

Rebell, rebelle, we've been taken for granted much too long, rebel, rebelled. Babylon, the system is a vampire, vampire, vampire. Sucking the children day by day, yeah. Babylon system is a vampire, fallen empire. Look out you said, sucking the blood out the sufferer. Yeah Building church and university Oh, oh yeah

Look outside deceiving the people continually Yeah Graduating thieves and murderers Oh yeah Suckin' blood out the sufferers Yeah Tell the children

the truth Tell the children The truth