Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Curse of the Big Eater

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

This week we take a brief hiatus from our series within a series “the Warren Commission Decided,” and travel back to the present day to weigh in on a topic of much discussion these last few weeks: the killing of United Healthcare's former CEO, Brian Thompson, and the spectacle that has ensued ever since. To be clear, this episode won't have any conspiracy theories. Nor will there be any debates about "who done it" or even whether the assassination was justified. No, here at Fourth Reich Archaeology we know full well that you can get that sort of thing just about anywhere these days. So, instead, we offer you a tutorial on how to apply the tools we’ve sharpened (and the artifacts we’ve uncovered) over the last five months to the spectacle that has come to bear since the early morning hours of December 4, 2024.  Most of the music here is from the band The Coup, fronted by Hero of the pod, Boots Riley.Happy holidays to all!

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. So 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 of 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. 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, we're the CIA.

He has a mile. He knows so long this is a die. I'm afraid of we'd 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? This is a day. I'm not going to be a national globe. Big Dead Fort Reich is coming. This is Fourth Reich. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back. Now, in this episode, we're going to step away from our series within a series

the Warren Commission decided and come back to the present day to talk about something that has been the subject of much discussion as of late and something we thought that we ought to throw our two cents in about. That is, of course, the killing of Brian Thompson and the spectacle that has come to bear in the days and weeks that followed. Before we get started, I want to once again thank everyone for their support. We have a humble little project and we are pushing through this thing with little more than our hopes and dreams and aspirations that one day our message will get to the main stage. We love hearing from you and we invite you to write us. You can reach us by email at 4thrikepod at gmail.com, or you can hit us up on social media

or on Twitter and Instagram at 4thrikepod. And of course, we do have a live and active Patreon where if you're feeling generous, you could always send us some money. Okay, Don, an unknown and disgruntled young man who maybe had promise in his earlier days becomes radicalized by perhaps reading the wrong set of books or talking to the wrong set of folks. Oh, you're talking about Lee Oswald? No, no, no. It's a little different. Let me finish. Oh, you must be talking about John Hinkley, Jr. No, no, no. This guy assassinates a major player in our... Oh, you're talking about Arthur Bremmer. Oh, I get it now.

James Earl Ray. Basically, what we're getting at is, this guy sound familiar. Oh, you're talking about Mark David Chapman. Right, I'm talking about... Luigi Mangillon Issa Luigi. So anyway, look, in the last couple of weeks, the country has been in a literal frenzy

over the assassination of the United Health Care CEO, And there's been no shortage of hot takes and conspiracy theories. And we want to say right at the outset, this episode isn't going to be that. Do you want to maybe tell the listener what this episode will be, Don? Sure. I think what we're really trying to do here is to bring to bear our patented Fourth Reich archaeology lens. to offer our insights and commentary, not on who done it or who didn't done it, or even was the act itself justified or worth celebrating.

No, here on Fourth Reich Archaeology, said it before, I'll say it again. We are not here to reinvent any wheels. We are here to bring to bear something a little different than what you get elsewhere. So I think one of the pillars of what we hope to achieve through this intervention is to talk a little bit about the noided lawyer perspective, not the Nancy Grace perspective or whatever you get from Jeffrey Tubin or those other jackal. office on TV. But the noided lawyer perspective, you know, looking at it through the lens of one who acts like they know.

And the other pillar of what we're doing here is that attention to the spectacle that lies at the core of most everything that we do here on Fourth Reich archaeology, right? we exist in the realm of spectacle and therefore our analysis will look to the spectacle for clues about what is really going on behind the surface of this propaganda of the deed, this potentially deep political event that has emerged with the killing of the United Health Care CEO. Yeah, that's exactly right. And the way we'll do it is we will not belabor the facts, because you can get the facts

pretty much anywhere. Or nowhere. or nowhere but we'll do a brief timeline of events and then just get into a discussion about how beautifully the system was able to ingest and shoot out the story but that you know it won't be all doom and gloom we do think that this event also brings front and center at its core what it is is a criminal procedural drama. So it really does give us an opportunity as licensed practitioners of the law to give you some insight on what we're seeing and what we think the process would look like and how the facts, events, and so-called evidence might play in a court of law. A quick disclaimer

that we have to. We are legally obligated to do, and that is that none of what we say should be construed as legal advice. This is, of course, purely an educational and hopefully aspirational piece of entertainment.

So, you know, we're not giving you legal advice, and it's certainly not a solicitation of any sort of attorney-client relationship. Dick and Don are fictional characters. any resemblance to any person's real or historical is purely coincidental.

All right, so I think with that, let's just get digging. Unfortunately, the CEO of United Healthcare is now dead. This was not a random attack. Somebody was waiting for him, according to sources outside, across the street, and shot him not once, but twice. Yo, y'all, y'all, y'all. He's got five million ways to kill a CEO. Slap him up and shake him up and then you know.

Let him up to float and bat him with a dough. You can do it drunk or do it this go. It's simply out of tough and insults he tells us that the American people at the living soon. I think it's really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him. That's a sickness actually.

Do you check to have elasticity? Did they cut off your electricity? Did you scream in, yeah, explicitly. All of this is deeply troubling for corporations, worried about the security of their top executive. Right, well, the security posture for top corporations has changed dramatically since the shooting. The security

of your shit. Murder babies with their molars on the ariola. Control the Pope Dalai Lama, holy rollers, and the Ayatollah. All right. So, Dick, I think maybe we kick it off to you to just set the stage with a very brief overview of the timeline of events that commenced around the shareholder meeting for United Health, 2024, in Midtown, Manhattan. Sure thing. In the early morning hours of December 4th, 24, right around 6.44 a.m. Eastern Time, the CEO of United Health Care, Brian Thompson, walks out of the Hilton Hotel in Midtown, Manhattan. Thompson is in New York City to speak at an investors meeting, but just as he steps away from the entrance of the hotel, he's gunned down.

mask, assassin, wielding a handgun with a silencer. There are no witnesses, but the whole thing was caught on tape. The gunman gets away. We learn over the next day or so that after the shooting, the gunman hops on a city bike and rides through Central Park, where he allegedly ditches a backpack, and makes his way to New York's Port Authority bus station where he departs from the city. Now, at this point, no one knows who he is, but Over the course of the next few days, the news starts distributing images and videos that were captured through the New York surveillance statement.

It's worth mentioning that New York City mayor and alleged criminal in his own right, Eric Adams, did pretend that the NYPD knew who he was and that they had his name and identity. Do you remember that? he gave some press conference. So the FBI says that it contacted the NYPD on December 5th, the name of the alleged CEO shooter. Four days later, when he was caught, the NYPD said that that name wasn't on their radar. Do you know what the NYPD did with that tip that it was investigated? I'm sorry, who gave them the tip?

The FBI says, I think they got it from San Francisco PD. Okay. So the FBI contacted the NYPD, they said they gave that name on December 5th. I got a different version of that story. And I think that you should communicate with the police commissioner or Rebecca Weiner, our intelligence commissioner, and see if their version is the same version. The Eric Adams point is such a good one

because it brings front and center this issue of alternate facts and making sure that your version matches mine. So the hunt begins for this person of interest by the name of Luigi Mangione. A few days later, Mangioni is identified by a McDonald's employee in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Now, the story goes that is actually a customer that pointed out Mangioni to the McDonald's employee, but in any event, the McDonald's employee calls the police. Here's the crazy part. When police find Mangione and ask him to take his mask down,

one of the cops says, I knew it was him the moment I saw his face. And this makes the press. So then Mangione's arrested, and he's in Pennsylvania. On him, they find $8,000 in cash, a 3D printed gun, and a manifesto, which I think is more of it's basically like what what they're framing up to be a confession right it's not much of a manifesto there's only two pages I don't think that qualifies as a manifesto I think you've got to be at least double digits pages to be a manifesto right and most manifestos aren't um the first two sentences aren't basically like a confession right not only a confession but an apology to the feds yeah exactly a shout out to the feds in support of their cause support the troops the thin blue line those are sort of the facts and of course there's

the evidence that they found and we'll talk about that when we get there towards the end of this episode but coming back to what you said about eric adams he totally said that shit and then when they found man gion recently he gets on and he says look i told you guys i told you that it was this leftist crazy leftist that did this, which I think brings us to the meat of our episode. And that is how quickly the events took on this, you know, I don't want to say life of its own, but became, sort of fit, fell into the political discourse in a very, in a manner that's like fluent, right, or fluid. Yeah. A prearranged narrative. Exactly. like a pre-existing mold for a narrative about the event exactly so how quickly the act the events that happened

sort of fell into that pre-existing mold and how familiar the story was to everyone and how easy it was for people to fall under one of two major sort of camps yeah and those camps are i think on the one hand you have and this camp started to form really from the moment of the shooting but especially when the alleged shell casings bearing the inscription deny delay depose that purportedly represent the motto of the health insurance industry for claims to be denied for the waiting game and the phone tag to delay a person and wear them out from pursuing the claim and then depose the person to force them to undergo a painful process in order to give up their claim rather than press it against the insurance company and that whole discourse popped off

even before Luigi's identity had been disclosed or revealed, and certainly before he was apprehended. And I guess you could describe that media silo or that camp as people who broadly support the action or at least consider an action like Luigi's, alleged action to be inevitable or unsurprising in a system that is itself murderous and callous towards human life. Yeah, and this camp, to be clear, like, this camp can also include folks who would acknowledge that

murder is a repulsive and disgusting act, but that it can be justified, right? it's this is comeuppance this is a murder but a just killing right i think there's a wide range of belief systems or of takes that fit in this camp it's not so narrow and confined and it runs the gamut all the way from the one end of the spectrum that's you know let's cheer this on this is a great thing. There should be a million Luigi's popping up all over the place to the

well it is tragic that this individual lost his life but the system gives rise to this level of rage and so you can't be too surprised

that somebody would take the law into his own hands given the absence of any response from the sort of democratic or legitimate channels of complaint that would ordinarily, at least in theory, permit somebody to seek relief for, as in Luigi's alleged case. And I say alleged because, right, we are just ourselves going by what the media tells us. Certainly don't really pretend to understand whether Luigi is actually the guy that did it, whether he is actually had this back surgery, whether he was a United Healthcare

client or anything like that, right? We don't know any of that. We haven't seen any of that. But assuming that all that is true, I think this camp that we're describing would allow that such a person, a person who had been through the experiences that were told that Luigi went through would go to those extremes. Totally. We got the key team, you better run. We got the gear team. We got the gear team. You better run.

We got the key team. We'll get to the other camp in a second, but because you mentioned it, I think it's worth pointing out here. And we'll talk about it more in a minute. But it's like, look, because the killer was not apprehended at the crime, because there doesn't seem to be any eyewitness or there's no direct evidence, nor will there likely ever be. Much of what's going to happen in the next, in the coming years, unless there's a confession of some sort, of course, much of what's going to happen in the coming years is going to be guesswork, investigation that will lead to a jury trial, hopefully, and the Mangione will be either found guilty or not guilty. And that's all we can really go by.

I don't think even through the criminal process, will we ever know the full truth of what is going on? What we'll know is whether a jury of Mangione's peers found him guilty of a crime. Right. We call it the adversarial process for adjudication, right? It's not that there's one side that's objective and another side that's subjective, no. these are two sides which compete with one another to prevail upon the decider and that's sort of a microcosm in fact for these two spectacle camps that we are describing here right there is the adversarial process in the courtroom there is the adversarial process on the level of spectacle that's playing out, and, you know, kind of like the courtroom, once you abstract and aggregate

the experience of something like the criminal legal system, the so-called court of public opinion is equally rigged by capital to support a certain predetermined outcome. 100%. On the sky wait for missiles to show It's been to flow Cause they got the TV We got the truth They own the judges

And we got the proof We got hella people They got helicopters They got the bombs And we got the We got the key team We got the key team You better run

We got the kit On our way there Do you want to describe The other camp Yeah I'll do the other camp And I'll do it through Our man

The Fiora Hair Trump he really does have this weird fucking ability to distill things but so the other camp is a group of folks who view this and who view the other side of this as sick people that there's a sickness and group a that we discussed a second ago they're sick individuals because who would ever view the death of another person as something to be celebrated. And this is not the way to bring about any change. And in fact, the United Healthcare CEO, that man is the real hero. He represents everything that's good and well in America because he

came from nothing and he worked his darndest to make it to the top reminds me of John J. McCloy that's right or Jerry Ford or Sherman Cooper or any number of folks that we've discussed on this podcast

that fall under that myth of the American dream of the hardworking man of the pursuer of justice and truth and freedom and democracy And so to the right wing, I'm just going to use a shorthand and say the right wing, but to this camp, because it's not actually going to be just right wingers, right? Many people in the democratic establishments who would identify themselves as liberals would fall under this camp as well.

People that we might call right wing, but they wouldn't think of themselves as right wing. Of course, understanding that the climate is where it is, but nonetheless, condemning the violence and saying that if you want to change something in our country, this is not the way to do it. The way to do it is to present an argument through the right channels to convince people, to persuade people, like a civilized, you would do in a civilized society. you know i would i could totally see certainly the joe biden's of the world if they could string a sentence together to say that but i could also see and actually what i you know the process i'm describing that came out of like peter thiel's mouth right like it's um it's the same sort of thought process in this camp and and basically what it does is they're reducing the other side as broad and vast as it was that we described earlier right it could fall all sorts of ideologies will fall under it

they just reduce it to this view that a straw man exactly they're all murder they're all out in the streets with pitchforks basically an unruly mob that would exact mob justice and in that way they're no different than a lynch mob that's coming after the prosperous solely because they're successful. And so what this second group does is uses the events that come out, the facts that do come out in the public discourse, and exploits it to have this guy, Mangione, fall under the paradigm of like the lone nut, right? They do everything they can to make him seem crazy. Right. And it reminds me a little bit of the kind of paradigm that we set up in our very first episode where we were talking all about cognitive dissonance and how the incoherencies and inconsistencies and inconsistencies that

characterize our society kind of have the effect of driving people insane and this is a stark example of it that you see it being deployed in real time right it's the forced conformity with either you join us in calling for this guy's head and in celebrating the life of the slain, quote-unquote, self-made insurance executive, or you are an outcast of society. And it reminds me of, I don't know, Dick, if you ever watched any of those Jeddah Krishna-Murti lectures on YouTube back in the early days of YouTube. This were a favorite of mine. I think, you know, since I've kind of come off the guy

given his adjacency to some kind of suss new agey type of shit, but he has this quote, which is that adjustment to a profoundly sick society is no measure of health. And that's been resonating with me a lot lately. because they're forcing this dichotomy on people in order to take away any kind of a serious analysis. A serious analysis. And if you don't fall into one of the two camps,

you are maladjusted, right? Is that what you're saying? It's like you either have to think... Well, if you don't fall in, If you don't fall into the right-wing camp, I mean, even more narrow, right? Like, even everybody in the, in the quote-unquote, left camp or whatever you want to call that, everybody that does not unite behind unequivocal condemnation of a crime is guilty of something. whether they're guilty, you know, at the level of being an accessory, whether they're guilty, you know, now, as of this recording...

Of some grand moral failing? Yeah, I think we could say we're recording on December 17th. So today is the day when the actual charges came down in the indictment, and those included a terrorism charge. And so terrorism is all about using... violence or threats of violence in order to exact a political outcome? On civilians. It's violence, threat of violence on a civilian target to reach a political outcome. Right.

And so in any speech act thereby that is not in unanimous rejection of the deed, is itself terroristic because if you don't say that you know you'll go after and help to prevent a repeat if you don't sign up for the war on the rabble then you are suspicious it puts this event right in the same column as 9-11 or any other pearl harbor it's like if you you aren't with us, it's no different than if we were to say you were with the hijackers on 9-11, right? It's the same value. 100%. And it's pretty depressing, actually, that we've reached this point, especially in the wake of October 7th and the genocide in Gaza where the same dynamic was deployed against the pro-Palestine protest. protesters and maybe the forces that control the channels of the spectacle that are pulling the

strings playing the mighty warlitzer of today which to be frank puts frank whizner's mighty warlitzer of the 50s and 60s to absolute shame you know they don't feel like it's necessary even to harp anymore on protest to genocide because protest to genocide has waned so significantly as the death has just grinded and grinded on to the point where people have disengaged by enlarge. You don't see the same type of mobilization. And so what's next? Oh, well, you know, we better get our defenses up, we better prepare the groundwork for the coming corporatocracy. And yeah, of course, we already live in a corporatocracy. But I think the incoming administration is poised to ratchet the level of corporatocracy up even higher.

And so this gives them a little preemptive juice to sheet. themselves from the inevitable backlash that will be forthcoming. Yeah, it's incredibly depressing to me to think about how this event can be exploited. We've talked about, when we're off air, we've talked about at length of how the powers that be can use this event and manipulate it, right? For example, and it's like, look, we're not going to make this into an episode. of speculation or whatever. I'm just going to say it is suss, right? It's very suspicious because it's awfully convenient and it's ripe for exploitation. For example, I wouldn't

be surprised that if in the next year, year and a half, we've talked about this, we'll start seeing legislation, both locally, maybe federal legislation, creating added protections to execs, maybe tax exemptions, tax credits for private security, added privacy protections for people that are running, you know, executives and CEOs, things that will further shield the ruling class. Yeah. I think that the point you just made is so important that I'm going to make it again. I just echo what you just said. There is, an incoming legislative and a regulatory agenda that is in the works part of that, and this is kind of more fun to think about, I think, but this idea that will build into the tax code

some write-offs, or I guess it already would, to some extent, be a business expense. Yeah, it would be like an ordinary, yeah, it would be. a business hand, but they could definitely ratchet it up, couldn't they? Yeah, and they could even do it, I believe, at a sub-legislative level, because a lot of the stuff is like tied to economic indicators. The Congress doesn't have to get involved every year to reset, like, how much can you deduct from your FSA, right? How much can you deduct for health care expenses? There's some formula in place where the IRS has executive discretion over that. And you could imagine ratcheting up the write-offs for executive security. For example, empower the domestic blackwaters of the

world. Let a million black waters bloom to follow around these billionaire motherfuckers everywhere they go and the other thing that you said that i'll just say it again and slowly so that the listener catches on is maybe even more important namely the idea of preserving even more privacy protections from private sector actors including private sector actors with government contracts. And I think this will end up being a subject of a lot of our forthcoming episodes because I, for one, and we've discussed this, I mean, it's shared among Fourth Reich archaeology.

We found, let's say, a set of bones, and we've been piecing them together. And what it looks like to us is a forthcoming attack organized by the private sector, in particular, led by the tech sector against governmental institutions to finish the job that was started by Dick and Don the first, right, Cheney and Rumsfeld, of privatizing. the US government. In fact, it goes back even before. I'm not talking about during the Iraq war. I'm talking about when they were in the Ford administration. So as that process culminates when what were once government activities are now going to be carried out to an ever-increasing degree by private corporations, the level of accountability that the public is entitled to over government conduct through things like the Freedom of Information Act, through things like the Administrative Procedure Act, all of those mechanisms don't really extend to private

contractors and you can bet that the Thompson assassination will be an excuse to whittle even more down the sliver of accountability that private government contractors are subject to yeah through I was going to say through the Administrative Procedures Act through FOIA also through just voting for people through the legislative, just like voting for the right person to come in. Like once everything is in the power of the private sector, it doesn't matter. Not to say it matters so much now,

but it'll be the final nail in the coffin because it doesn't matter on any level. Who you have in office? The last point, I think it's credit to you for bringing it up, but it's like this event, gives yet another opportunity for the likes of like Cash Patel or Vivek or Elon to be like, look at how inept our government is. They didn't even catch the guy.

It was a McDonald's employee that caught the guy. We don't even need the FBI. Seriously, think about the super meme mashup that Musk's Minutes. are manufacturing of government ineptitude between the Thompson assassination and the New Jersey drones that nobody knows what the fuck they are and all of this shit that is just example after example of the government showing its ass and the private sector pointing the finger and laughing, listener, they're laughing at you too,

okay, they're laughing at any semblance of democratic control that you might have dreamed that you ever had over the world that you live in. And this is what's so frustrating to watch this taking place because you see people ostensibly of the left and you it's understandable just sitting on the sidelines and putting on the sunglasses getting out the lawn chair and waiting to watch the whole system self-destruct which yeah

the system is shit it's evil it's bad the people that run it are evil and bad but the people that are detonating the bomb and that are standing on the ready to rebuild a new system in its place are worse guess is through this world I've wondered I've seen lots of funny men

some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen and is through your lives You travel Yes, it's through your life you roam You will never see an outlaw Drive a family from their home Okay, should we go on to the next portion of our discussion, or is there more to say?

Let's move it along. Okay, so Don and I are particularly tickled by the events because what it does is it brings main stage the legal process, criminal procedural, criminal law, which we love, and we're obviously lawyers, so this sort of stuff, it's always nice to see it in the news because it's, it's, so garbage the way that the news covers it. It's just awful. And so we thought we would take this opportunity to give you a little rundown of what we're seeing and why we think it's bullshit. Or maybe not bullshit, but why, you know, our take on what we're seeing so far. And I think to quote Mark Lane, what we're seeing is a bit of a, Rush to judgment. Exactly.

So let's, from just the starting point, right? And Luigi's lawyers said this, and you can go and look at it. But in our judicial system, you're innocent until proven guilty. And that happens at a jury trial, a trial, a trial. by your peers or there is also what you know there is a process by which you can plead to a charge and you could view that sort of as a confession but in a criminal trial what happens is that the prosecutor will present to the jury evidence evidence is falls into two buckets it's either going to be direct or

circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence is the strongest evidence you're going to find. This would be something like eyewitness testimony or confession. I always view direct evidence as like you look outside the window, you see it's raining. That's direct evidence of rain. The other category of evidence, which is called circumstantial, is more attenuated. And so going back to the rain example it's not that you look outside the window and see rain but you look at the door and someone walks in and they've got a umbrella that they're shaking off that's wet and so you think oh it must be raining outside i didn't see the rain but the sky in front of me is soaking wet there could be other explanations for why that is but we know through your lived experience you know that

when you see that, it means rain. Now, this is important because the evidence, all of the evidence that supposedly ties Mangione to the crime has been circumstantial. The press has not really acknowledged that. In fact, every piece of evidence is described as damning or new evidence that is sure to, you know, sure to convict the guy. And I think that is ultimately harmful and prejudicial to Mangione, because what it does is it injects into the discourse that this is, every piece of evidence before it's been examined, before it's been analyzed for credibility, it's sort of

accepted. Some... Yeah, the biggest example of this that I've seen. has been the fingerprints? Yeah, this is breaking news that we can bring you in this moment. We just learned moments ago that fingerprint matches that were taken right here in Pennsylvania match the water bottle that was found outside of the crime scene. Obviously, this is a major and the first big forensic development that we've heard about.

Exactly, that's what I was going to say. Go ahead. Cook on the fingerprint. Well, correct me if I get the detail wrong. but I believe the fingerprints were extracted from a water bottle that was found in a backpack that was left in Central Park that contained monopoly money. Am I getting that right? Yeah, and it was like partial prints too, not full fingerprints, partial prints.

Yeah, but that sounds right. It was on like the water bottle and apparently a kind bar that wasn't with it. yeah and so what they said was that the prince were smudged and they couldn't positively match the prince but that they were consistent with his prince which it's like if you're the defense you would be pretty happy with a description like that like they you get the person on the stand that made that evaluation of the fingerprints and you grill them under cross-examination, it's not going to be that persuasive in court, right? Like, it's by no means even close to a positive identification.

But yet, and this is where all of this spectacle is so noxious. on the legitimacy of the legal process itself because you have all these TV people saying that it's basically a smoking gun, like this smudged fingerprint on some random backpack that didn't have anything deadly in it in the first place. And it's not even positively identified other than, you know, presumably it's maybe the same type of backpack or the same general description of backpack that was on the surveillance camera video but it's like they're making a lot out of very little and i guess that to bring it back for a moment to the two silos point and the two camps right inevitably and this is maybe

just bringing it back for a second. But inevitably, the right-wing camp, what we've described as the right-wing camp that represents capital has an immense advantage in terms of its power, reach, and ability to persuade not through facts and logic okay but through just bashing you over the head with their narrative 24 hours a day everywhere that you look and that's not only TV it's also I mean social media at this point in time is just as fake as the mainstream media like all of the signal

boosting and signal de boosting is so many dials on a switchboard at the back and call of the likes of Elon Musk and his ilk. It's important listener

for you to remember fingerprint forensics it is more art than science it's largely a lot of guesswork. It's highly susceptible to inaccurate results inconsistent results and you know oftentimes I think about how people in the past

would rely on something like lie detectors which I think I hope by and large everybody knows that lie detectors are inaccurate and not admissible not admissible in the courts but fingerprints much like that it's not as scientific as you would believe same goes with the casings the the bullet casings right the other thing that people are saying is like damning evidence are these bullet casings which it's the same thing you said don it's like it's just casings that are consistent right the the it's just consistent with what um the gun they found on him was and it's like yeah in the past there was this idea that like forensic bullet you know,

ballistics analysis was like a fingerprint for a gun. But that has largely been debunked. And so more than anything that, you know, this evidence that has come to light, it's exactly like you said. It's basically just fodder for the system to work in and implant into the brains of hundreds of millions of people the conclusion that they want.

Yeah. And the Warren Commission is never, far away from us here in Fourth Reich Archaeology, because as you were saying that, it reminded me of one of the phone calls between LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover in the week after Ruby killed Oswald, where LBJ actually asks Hoover about the lie detector. Can you pay attention to lie detector? And Hoover says, I would not pay 100% attention to them.

That he wouldn't trust it for reliability in telling whether a person is lying or not. All that they are is a psychological asset in an investigation. I wouldn't want to be a part to sending a man to the chair on a lie detector. But it's basically a psychological persuasion technique where people will be more inclined to confess if they're hooked up to a machine that they believe will indicate whether they're telling the truth or not. For instance, we have found many cases where we've used them in a bank where there's been

embezzlement and a person will confess before the lie detector test is finished. are more or less fearful of the fact that the lie detector test will show them guilty. So, and you could kind of think of the entire media narrative as one giant social machine that's hooked up to Luigi Mangione to try to get him to confess. Psychologically, they have that advantage because it's a misnomer to call it a lie detector, because what it really is, it's the evaluation of the chart, that is made by this machine, and that evaluation is made by a human being, and any human being

can be apt to make a wrong interpretation? In fact, I think that segues into drilling down a little bit on something you just touched on in passing, which is the plea bargaining process. Mm-hmm. Certainly. It's like pretty well understood by now that the police and the prosecutors are, are able to stack charges on a person with the intent of facing them down with a massive sentence, if convicted? Right.

And injecting charges that they know full well, they're basically like concession points, right? It's like, we'll stack the charges, make it seem like it's a lot worse than it really. is just so that we could pull some out when we want to reach an agreement. Right. Like this terrorism charge, for example, right? That's a real force multiplier in sentencing terms. And it will give leverage to the prosecution to say, look, you could either face trial and you risk, you know, 10 life sentences if you're convicted.

with this terrorism charge and everything, or you could take murder two for 20 years or something like that. I'm not saying that that would be a deal that they would necessarily offer him, because in this particular case, I feel like there's actually a very different dynamic than in most cases given the publicity. I agree the publicity definitely changes things, But going back to our idea about how there are these two silos, if I'm a prosecutor in New York, I'm undoubtedly in the silo that views this as some egregious harm, right?

And I'm going to think that there's got to be 12 people in New York that agree with me. Really? See, I don't know if I agree with you there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's like, you know, there are 12 New Yorkers that are going to say that, you're not going to do this in my city sort of deal. Yeah. See, where I would hesitate if I were the prosecutor is the jury pool in New York is going to be pretty tainted in favor of this defendant no matter what. It's going to be real hard to find a New York City jury. Yeah.

And there is the. option it's been done in other high profile cases before in fact i wouldn't be surprised if the prosecutor attempts to do it here of moving venue and of course the defense would would fight that tooth and nail because they don't want to get out of new york city where and maybe we should remind the listener if you don't know already especially for maybe our non-american listeners In the United States jury system, all that it takes is one juror to derail a guilty verdict. Right? In order to convict a person beyond a reasonable doubt, there must be unanimity in the jury verdict.

Absolutely. I don't know. Look, I don't think it'll play out. I'm not sure how it'll play out. But the reason, if I were a prosecutor, the reason I would go for it is kind of like the same reason they went for it in the O.J. trial, right? Like, OJ at the time was a very sympathetic character, but it's looking, like, the evidence that they've got, they're putting together. I mean, yeah, but OJ killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Like, that shit's not sympathetic.

That's true. This is true. The other thing for me, the reason I would do it is because everything is there for them. Allegedly. Sorry. He was not going to do. But it's like, let's put it this way. If I were the defense, funnily enough, I would also want to go to trial.

But my trial strategy would to make it not about health care, right? But the prosecution has everything they need for that, right? Like they can, they can frame this guy up pretty well. to say, okay, look, you got everything, you got the gun, you got the motive, you got everything, right? But as a defense lawyer, I would want to exclude as much of that evidence as I could. Certainly the health care stuff. You know, shout out to the fact that there's no evidence that he was a United Healthcare insured. But the reason I think both sides will want this to go into the jury,

to in front of a jury because it's ultimately a role of the dice and it's ultimately it's these camps that we're talking about right and it's like okay um which side do you have more faith in and honestly if i'm one of the on the on the right wing of things and i'm viewing things in which i imagine the prosecutors would be on the right side of things where they abhor violence against CEOs there's some part of me that's got to think that that like the better angels of people will prevail and they will see that it was wrong likewise if i was a defense lawyer doing this case i would want to hope and think that notwithstanding and obviously you would do everything you could to defend the

case but my hope would be notwithstanding the facts there's got to be at least someone on that jury who will vote their conscious. And their conscious being that this may have been a justified thing. Yeah, and the prosecution is kind of relying on the assist from the media machine. Yeah, exactly. In appealing to people's better angels for conformity with a capital-friendly moral compass. Yeah, exactly. it's high it's just hard to tell i mean as you say like it doesn't seem like the kind of case that

there's any incentive to take a plea um but maybe that you know who knows what how the next six to 12 to 18 months play out right i mean anything could happen all the way from his lawyer could try to get him declared incompetent to stand trial you know know we don't know what his mental state is even though certainly his speech is not at all disordered right he's we've seen some clips where he's like yelling outside of the car and stuff like that but you never know his lawyer also i think it's another one of these weird coincidences that makes this such a lightning rod issue did you hear his lawyer is married to to the woman that's representing Diddy?

Yeah, I did. You don't get hired by Diddy randomly. Like, he's not looking in the phone book, you know? And so who knows what advice he's getting and how much control he will exert over his own defense, because certainly his very reminiscent, of Lee Oswald shouting outside of the squad car routine was indicative of a real fight-it-to-the-end posture

and if indeed the manifesto and the motivation is as the media is reporting it to be, essentially a grudge against the health care industry and he undertook this propaganda of the deed to get himself into this position you know that would suggest that he would want a very public trial and assuming that that happens i think you know hopefully our listeners will join us in being prepared to see through the facile fork in the road that directs you to be a Luigi Stan or to be a hater. You know, choose the elevated path where what you're really on the lookout is for fascist maneuvers by the techno-fascist media machine to use this spectacular event to further marginalize the range

of action that you have at your disposal to dissent against the murderous system that we live I think it's obvious that we certainly belong in the camp that does represent a very broad range of opinions and views, but come on. I mean, you can't look at the American health care system with an objective lens, especially if you've actually experienced the fucking thing. anybody that spent that spent an hour on the phone with an insurance company yeah like i'm just glad health care is back on the discussion table not that i think anything's going to change in a positive way because of this and not that i think anyone's called to you know discuss the health care system in the days that have followed but i note that one of my grapes during our election specials was that no one's talking about health care and at least now it's back on the forefront for the time

being until there's some other thing that happens uh i forgot to say so the third option so okay so you know so luigi he could take a plea and this whole thing will be over he'll lose his appeal rights it basically will be a confession he'll agree that it he did it and it amounted to some lesser crime he could also go the jury route right he's entitled to a trial by jury and it will be up to i don't know how it's done in new york but i imagine it's 12 individuals to decide his fate right so there's the plea option there's a trial option there is the third option done which is he gets hit with the heart attack ray gun and suicides he does a suicide or something and i don't think there's any real threat of that as of now i think the most likely outcome of this is that it goes to trial but it's

possible right yeah i tend to agree with you i mean you look at somebody like epstein i mean the threat that he posed, should his secrets be revealed, was vastly, vastly more than anything that Luigi Mangione poses to the system. In his case, it would be essentially a grudge hit or something. I mean, it just, it would... It's not the existential threat. Not at all. I don't think it is.

you know because he's just one guy he's just he is whatever like family power his people have in the politics of Maryland yeah it's a backwater this is not a big fish yeah exactly and that actually brings us to our last portion of our episode right it's as you say he already fits so well into the mold of the lone nut that the machine already knows what to do with them and is already doing it to such an amazing degree so rapidly was is it you know the the the modern media machine or corporate machine whatever you want to call it how quickly it was able to identify it and just slot him in as this lone nut. And it's why I thought the title,

the curse of the Big Eater, was a good one for this episode because Mangione means glutton or Big Eater in Italian. And that phrase, Big Eater, to me, it's like Pac-Man, you know? And just like so many others in our sort of historical

20th century view, he falls right in line with them. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about that. Maybe that could give us some light at the end of this tunnel. Well, I don't know about light at the end of the tunnel.

You know, thinking about this Pac-Man metaphor, it's almost as though, you know, Mangione activated one of the buttons in Pac-Man. And so for a brief period, the ghosts started flashing, and he could eat them. But Pac-Man spends most of his time just trying to gobble up the dots. And the ghosts are the ones that have the power to end the game. and in the arcade of the spectacle in which we are all just eight-bit globs of pixels, the power to turn the ghosts flashing rests outside of our hands.

And that doesn't give me hope, it doesn't affect me one way or the other, because it's just a fact of life. But I think the point that you were making is absolutely right. That the, and once again, to bring it back to the Warren Commission, the ability for this trope to take on a life of its own and all of the pieces. And even, like, I don't know if this will come out before or after, the episode on Alan Dulles, but Alan Dulles, remember, at the Warren Commission, he handed out copies to all of his fellow commissioners of another book about presidential

assassinations that had preceded Kennedys. And that book already had made this mythic prototype of the lone nut that he was trying to shoehorn Lee Oswald into. So the round hole is already there and if the peg is square, you know, I think that the machinery of the spectacle has the power to sand off the sharp edges and fit that square peg into that round hole and make this into just another lone nut phenomenon. But perhaps if people are discerning of the larger forces at play here, where you could make your own light in this situation is to insist that if you really care, if you really care about murder of executives, then the only rational response is to change policies

in such a way that another Luigi Mangione becomes impossible, or at least the possibilities and the call to arms would wane. If you can take care of people's health care, if you expropriate these vultures of their sickening power over life and death, of their commodification of human health, the mere idea that there is a market for every single disease, every pain, every problem that you have is another market. And as long as that's true, the only thing that will reduce the likelihood of a repeat assassination of one of these executives that's profiting off of sickness is to make it so that nobody does.

I think this is a good spot to close off our episode. Thanks again for tuning in. And join us next week when we pick right back up with our series within a series, the Warren Commission decided. For now, I'm Dick. And I'm done. Say farewell.

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