Fourth Reich Archaeology - The New Western Frontier w/ Matt Farwell (@HuntClancy)

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

We are absolutely brimming with joy this week as we welcome back the indomitable journalist, researcher, and all around swell dude, Matt Farwell.  Our day one homies will know that Matt was the very first guest we had on the show way back when we were just a wee baby podcast.  And we need not tell most of you that Matt’s Substack is a must read for any respectable noided leftist. But what you might not know is that Mr. Hunt-For-Tom-Clancy is a native of Utah, which is the backdrop for our episode today. Our entry point into this one is, of course, the Charlie Kirk murder at Utah Valley University. But don’t worry, this is not another Charlie Kirk assassination episode. Kirk’s killing is simply the first step on our path to discussing the larger geopolitical forces that have come together to reshape Utah and the broader American West in the image of the Military Industrial Surveillance Technology Complex.  What was once the frontier for American genocidal expansion Westward has become home to the next frontier for the new Data Center Imperialism—the information frontier.We start out by hearing from Matt about his on-the-ground experience in Orem, Utah in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, and his observations of the eerily ubiquitous presence of the national security state around the otherwise unknown Utah Valley University.  And wouldn’t you know that right now the national security state, just like the entire rest of the US economy, is going bananas for AI. So we zoom out to talk about data center imperialism and the deep roots of the surveillance state in the American West.   We focus on the Utah Data Center in particular (thanks, Obama!). Finally, we set the stage for a part 2 of our excavation, wherein we will delve into the historical particularities - including the regions colonization by Mormons and other sects - that make the New Western Frontier prime for the picking by a new generation of billionaire barons and their doomsday preaching hired guns of the military industrial complex. Enjoy! Follow Matt on Twitter  @huntclancyBuy Matt’s book https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/541784/american-cipher-by-matt-farwell-and-michael-ames/Subscribe to his Substack https://thehuntfortomclancy.substack.com

The following passage is from Greg Grandin's 2019 book, The End of the Myth, From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. had started to shake off whatever negative associations had been attached to it. The United States had emerged from the war with unprecedented economic power and a restored sense of confidence. And as it did, the word once again returned to mean a line, not to stop at, but to cross over, a challenge, and an opportunity. In the coming decades, the idea of the frontier migrated into nearly every scholarly discipline, including economics, agricultural science, politics, sociology, and even psychology.

Frontier was used to identify the terrain on which a proper ego was formed, as well as the field on which an unrestrained id was let loose. As a metaphor, it was put to great effect in literature, movies, and political speech. Roosevelt himself before his death started to use it not just to indicate a past that no longer existed but a future that might be attained. New frontiers of the mind are before us, he said shortly after his last election as president. In 1941, a physicist described research that was allowing for an intensive attack on a new frontier, the impending splitting of the nucleus of an atom.

Four years later, in July 1945, a month before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the builders of those bombs gave a report to Harry Truman. Science, the Endless Frontier, described research and development as a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote half a century earlier, referring to something different, to the way the frontier allowed individuals to avoid submitting to complexity, society became atomic. With the fight against fascism won.

Leaders of what would come to be known as the Cold War against communism found it easy to hitch the idea of the frontier to a new politics of expansion. America's frontier was now on the Elbe, the river separating Western Europe from the east, wrote John Knox Jessop, an editor of Life magazine in a long 1951 essay titled Western Man and the American Idea. Jessup was a key advisor to Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, who earlier in 1941 had coined the phrase American in century. Even as World War II still rage, Luce commissioned a series of reports describing

what the post-war world might look like. Jessup's lengthy treatise was meant to sum up the overarching philosophy behind the project. Jessup understood the frontier not as a defensive perimeter, but a civilization zone separating freedom from slavery, from Soviet slavery, a challenge that defined America's post-war mission. At some point during the World War, he said, the United States accepted responsibility for the fate of its parents' lands for the mother and father of its own past. That obligation was beyond question. On America, almost alone has fallen the awful responsibility of holding open the door

of history against the forces of evil until freedom is born anew all over the world. Drawing heavily on Turner, Jessus said that America's long frontier experience produced a new kind of human, a horizontal man capable of spreading the brotherly love of a true internationalism. Where Europe's vertical man gets bogged down in elaborating doctrine and reciting creeds, in arguing existentialism in Parisian cafes, the American treks across the plains and climbs the mountains unburdened by abstractions. He doesn't stop to make a suma. American democracy, as Turner had earlier written, was born of no theorist's dream.

In fact, the United States security frontier would soon entail much more than the Alp. By the late 1950s, it ran starting in the Northern Pacific from Alaska, around Japan, Southern Korea, and Taiwan, across Southeast Asia, Indonesia to be added later after its 1964 CIA supported coup, back under Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Southern Africa, with more countries from that continent to be included as decolonization from the U.S. Europe proceeded, up to the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia, to Turkey and Pakistan, then across the Elbe to Scandinavia and back around to Canada. It was a considerable radius and costly to secure, as Washington had pledged to do under

the terms of the various mutual defense treaties FDR and Truman had signed. But this was also largely the range open to U.S. Capitol, which for decades after World War II enjoyed a profitable return on investment. One of Luce's post-war surveys, borrowing a phrase Jacksonians often used to convey the boundless potential of the American continent, called on Washington to enlarge the practical area of human freedom. By this, the authors explicitly meant freedom to invest and extract. The horizon of the individual enterpriser, who is still the true source of wealth, the survey

continued, should be vastly widened. earlier, FDR said the world was fighting Nazism to protect four freedoms. Freedom from want, freedom from fear, of speech, of worship. Now Luce's team suggested adding a fifth freedom, individual enterprise. And as if to underscore the imagery of the world as the American West, the Truman administration put the Department of the Interior, that is, the agency that oversaw the Bureau of Indian Affairs manage the extraction of resources on domestic public lands, in charge of assisting third world governments within the sphere of U.S. influence to mine minerals and pump oil for

the world market. 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. 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've found more evidence of conspiracies, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize to the United States of America.

Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information that showed that there were two horsemen. 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 and a small... For example, CIS. Now, he has a mob. He knows so long as I'm not. It usually takes a national crisis.

A lot of killers, a lot of killers, why you think our country is so in a slave. Fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back, listener, and thank you so much for joining us. Before we get into today's episode, which is a real humdinger with returning guest Matt Farwell, we'd like to get the typical standard preliminaries out of the way. First of all, please do reach out to us, communicate with us, and we promise to communicate back with you via email at forthrightepod at gmail.com or on Twitter or Instagram at Forthrightepod. You know that you can and are most welcome to support our work on Patreon. and indeed we have launched tiers on Patreon

above and beyond the standard procedure and those upper tiers not only get to hang out with us on some Patreon calls, but you also get a shout out and Dick's going to shout some of our ground floor upper tier supporters at the end of this episode, and, you know, at the end of the day, this is a way for us to put fuel in the tank and to burn that midnight oil and maybe even one day to leave behind the old day jobs and dedicate ourselves even more fulsomely to this work.

And we appreciate all the support we've gotten thus far. Thank you so much, so much for your support. Now, in this episode, we are going to be joined once again by the inaugural guest of Fourth Rake Archaeology. That's right, it's Matt Farwell, the hunt for Tom Clancy. And Matt, since the last time we spoke with him, has moved west. That's right. he followed the advice of old Horace Greeley to go west young man and indeed his travels brought him

all the way out to settle on that western frontier in the state of Utah and wouldn't you know it not too long after our boy set down his roots back in Mormon country Charlie Kirk got got nearby in Orham, Utah. Now, listener, be not dismayed. This is not yet another Charlie Kirk assassination podcast. And if you are looking for that coverage and have not yet come across it, we would recommend our friend Parapower Mapping or Truenon, who have both done great coverage thereof.

Here, however, we are going to simply use the Kirk assassination as a jumping off point or perhaps as a landing strip for an excavation into what we're calling the new Western frontier with its roots firmly planted in the state of Utah, in that rocky mountain air. And so we'll begin this episode asking Matt about his on-the-ground experience in Orham in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, and then zoom out to the broader picture of the military, industrial, surveillance tech complex that is spreading across the state and indeed the entire western plains like so much prairie fire because believe it or not listener utah valley university that's right The college you had never heard of before September 10, 2025, is home to a substantial footprint from the national security state. And that foot is but a trace of the behemoth straddling the American West that takes the form of what we've called data center imperialism, the spread of these data centers

that comprise the infrastructure for the AI bubble that is engulfing the entirety of the American economy and threatening to engulf the economy, the economy of the entire world and while it may seem like this bubble is only being inflated to provide you content of your dreams everything from pornography to animated pornography In fact, it is inflicting itself into the body politic through almost unseen tentacles of a surveillance state whose fingerprints are invisible to the naked eye, whose activities are unseen and will even take some digs at Ed Snowden, or, as Dave Emery likes to call him, Eddie the Friendly Spook,

whose limited revelations about the NSA and its nefarious activities gave a tip of the iceberg view at a much larger, a much grander, and a much more totalizing, almost Lovecraftian monster that watches your every move, that simulates how you would react to certain stimuli, and that is guarded over by a population of people further and further from what we might consider normal. Now without any further ado, let's get digging. As we discussed, the needs of our industry are so great that we cannot cut down any of the sources of energy right now. They've got some money out there giving it away. I want to do what I want and I want to get to do what I want to get.

Why does this make sense knowing that climate change is real and knowing that it's a problem? Is that the intelligent revolution, the ability to do planning and discovery, will allow us as Americans to develop new materials, new energy sources and so forth because of the AI data centers. So our core argument is invest in the way we can now because the future will be so much cleaner and so much more efficient, efficient as a result of these algorithms. Clancy. Returning guest to the pod. Thanks for being here, Matt. Well, hey, friends. Thanks for having

me. It's really nice to be back. Dispatching from Salt Lake City, Utah right now. So, hello from the American West. Hell yeah. Returning guest, I'll say also our first guest ever, too. So welcome back. Wait, really? Was I really? Yes, indeed. I don't think I understood that. I was the inaugural guest. You were. We are honored to say that. that. No, but this has been like, you guys put a lot of work into this and you get down and dirty on stuff. Like, one of the things I found doing journalism and doing like, you know, the nonfiction writing stuff I do is how much you can just, any common narrative, like you can just kind of go and drill down more on it. And it gets weirder and weirder and weirder. And you guys are really good

at that. Oh, shucks, man. Much appreciated it, brother. No, we totally agree. I mean, you are a source of inspiration for us with the work you do. Well, I mean, it is, it's just like, it's a fascinating exercise to go and apply kind of the same standards you would apply at all, like, trying to interpret the news or understand kind of a current media narrative, and then to go apply it to, like, squeaky frown.

You know, I'm serious, though. Like, and that stuff is, um, especially as like the fringe becomes more the center. Yeah. You know, um, I, I don't know. I just feel like we're kind of surfing a little bit ahead of the zeitgeist right now. But, you know, like kind of skating, skating to the puck. We're, you know, Gretzky. Hell yeah.

Well, should we do a little bit of that today? Let's Gretzky. Yes. Love to use. Gretzky is a verb and appreciate the kind words, Matt. It means a lot coming from you, as Dick said, definitely a guy who does all that weird shit and one that we're proud to call a friend of the pod. Well, thank you.

Thank you. Likewise. And again, happy to be on here. And thank you for being accommodating on the scheduling. Like, listeners of the pod, you should know that in the back end, these folks are just as pleasant. as they are actually in real life or you know like on on this um i had some issues with not being able to record yesterday totally cool about it much cooler than certain bureaucrats i'm dealing with in my university right now anyways i'm not going to say any more about that well you know

that's we're all about the love and the friendship here we are all about being open and welcoming you with open arms welcoming the listener with open arms arms, and it is with both of those arms that we're about to dig into the subject of this episode, The New Western Frontier. So, Matt, you already hinted at your location. You're out in the great state of Utah, the Mormon paradise, and you were there, and you, on your substack, The Hunt for Tom Clancy, which one of many plugs that will give in this episode. Please subscribe. Please become a paid subscriber to The Hunt for Tom Clancy. That would be lovely. Seriously, do it. And just read a few. Like, if you don't like it, unsubscribe.

You know, but it's worth six or seven bucks to go through. And at this point, there's four years of the just weirdest shit I found out. that is all real, but is kind of surreal, too. You know, reality is strange. And reality in Utah is really strange. Extra strange, yeah, exactly. And I said it in the last episode that we did with you, that what's really special about the hunt for Tom Clancy is

you're not just reporting on internet sleuthing. Like, you are on the ground, and that's exactly where we're going to jump off from in this episode. Yes. So, as the listener is now going to be aware, we're recording this on October the 13th. A little over a month ago, Charlie Kirk was assassinated in the state of Utah on the campus of Utah Valley University in the town of Orham. And Matt, like the shoe leather reporter that you really are at heart, showed up on the scene. So I'm just going to pass the mic to you. Yeah, to describe that a little bit and like kind of give a TikTok of what went down?

Yeah, please do. I think first I have to preface this by, can I reveal that we have had lunch together a couple of times in... Is that okay? I can say that? Oh, yeah. Not blown anyone's cover? Sure. Okay. So you can attest to this that I am a magnet for weirdness.

Like, weirdness just kind of happens around me. And, like, us sitting right behind was weird at lunch, right? That was weird. Yeah. But that kind of weirdness just like, so on the day that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, as Steve Bannon on his podcast insisted on describing it, like correcting Jack Posobiot multiple times the next day, you know, just reinforcing the assassination language, which is interesting.

But, so on that day, I was driving my truck from the swimming pool to my department, and my brother and my nephew texted me. My nephew had been watching the thing live and was like, like, Charlie Kirk just got shot. And I'm like, what? And then they said it was in Utah. and at UVU, Utah Valley University. I, for some reason, was thinking Utah Valley, that I was thinking it was in Ogden,

which is about an hour north of here, and which is where Hill Air Force base, a massive logistical hub for the United States Air Force, is. And so I was like, okay, I can, like, drive up to Ogden. And my brother's like, no, dude, it's in Orem. And I, as a small child, was born in Provo, Utah, which is where Brigham Young University is, but I lived in Orem, Utah.

So, like, Charlie Kirk got shot in a place where I was a small tot. You know, like, right in the shadow of Mount Tempanooga's, most beautiful mountain on earth. I love it. Anyways, so I'm kind of like, shit, man. Well, I'm going to get down there. So I run by my department. I talk with one of my professors who's really, really cool. I'm taking a modernist poetry class from him right now, and he's fantastic.

And was like, hey, sir, I got to go. go do some work and he okay that's fine he didn't like he's like I don't understand who these people are but like go do your thing whatever so I get my truck and drive down now Utah is um it's a place where you know I used to live out in Virginia and to get from Virginia to D.C. I could go about 20 different ways right like there's no impediments to travel I can go on all sorts of different roads But to get to Provo Orum, you have to go on Interstate 15. Like, there's no way to not go on Interstate 15. It's the mountains here act almost like the water does in the District of Columbia area,

you know, where it's a geographic barrier that you have to kind of go through certain choke points to get. Anyways. Yeah, it was interesting. I looked at a lot of, like, Google Maps of Utah for prepping for this episode and was kind of surprised because I've never been out there, but you're totally right. Anybody can go and check out the map. Yeah. And it has changed in quite a few ways since I, you know, I left in 1989, right?

We moved to Turkey. And I would come back and visit my grandparents in Idaho and visit my aunt in Lehigh, which used to be like a country town, like cowboy country, and now is filled with subdivisions because the National Security Agency has a giant data center up there. But we'll get back to that. Anyways, I'm going down the highway and about at American FARC, it's spelled fork, it's pronounced FARC because of the Swedish Mormon immigrants. I'm serious, Spanish FARC too.

I had to explain that to two kids in the hot tub today because I knew they were outsiders. I knew they were Auslandas from Utah, you know, they were from somewhere else. And they were. They were from Minnesota. I knew it because they said FARC wrong. But so by American FARC is where I feel. first start getting passed by low visibility

cars and trucks, mostly trucks, big trucks, like Ford F-150 types, that have the sirens going, right? And these are the feds and the other cops responding. So that's Charlie Kirk got shot at, I believe, 1210.

I'm on the road down to UVU by 1240 and I get down to UVU by 140. So I as I sat there and observed the scene I also noticed I beat certain federal agencies down to the scene because it takes a FBI or HSI or U.S. Marshals or Customs, all of whom were there

takes them a little while to assemble their shit and get down from the FBI's headquarters is on Amelia Earhart Drive near the Salt Lake City Airport and I'm like, why the fuck would you put an investigative agency's headquarters on a road named after the most

famous missing woman of all time you know and it's also right down the street from Charles Lindberg Lane oh damn and I'm like there's some problems there too you know because I mean not only the fact that Charles Lindberg was like a Hitler fascist but

also that you know his baby got kidnapped and the FBI I got brought in to basically recover the dead baby after Norman Schwartzcoff's dad, also named Norman Schwartzcuff, who was commissioner of the New Jersey police at the time, couldn't recover the baby. Schwartzcoff would later go on to help overthrow Iran in 1956.

So this is all kind of important. Damn. These interrelations. Is there any Amelia Earhart connection to Utah? She's not like from there. I don't think she is. No, I think it's just, I mean, and it's also like, Why would you name something by the airport after Amelia Earhart?

You know, like, it just, these things, and this is a huge building, by the way. Like, this is, like, one of the big satellite office buildings in D.C. that you might see, right? Where you're like, oh, what's that place? It's got, like, real reinforced shit around it. And, like, seems to be trying to be, like, unobtrusive, but it's very obtrusive. You know, like, drive around Chantilly or anywhere. And it's, it's kind of like that. So you think this, this had to get multiple levels of approval for this building to be built.

And no one was like, why the fuck are we building a building on like, you know, because that's something like, diplomatically, we do that and other countries do that to fuck with people. Like the American embassy in India or one of the consulates is on like Ho Chi Minh Road. Right. And we've renamed Roads in D.C. to like fuck with. the Chinese or the Russians, right? But they're doing this themselves. Yeah. Even the Saudis, I think they wanted to change one to, like, Jamal Khashoggi

drive across from the Saudi embassy. But it was like a neighborhood thing, not from the feds. There's a lot of stuff in and around Salt Lake named after Jamal Khashoggi's uncle, Adnan, who was a, like, world-class arms dealer and trafficker, who assisted with the and Contra stuff. But, okay, back to, back to you of you. I get down there. Now, Utah Valley University is kind of a like, I went to a community college in Virginia that we, it was Thomas Nelson Community College at the time. It's changed its name, but we called it Harvard on the highway, right? Because it was like right on and off the highway, kind of. And that's

how it's important with UVU that it is right on the highway. And then it's right across a street from like a Walmart and a McDonald's. And so I go, I see all the cops, there's a lot of cops there. And so I go park in the Walmart. The Walmart is closed because there's still a presumptive active shooter out there

and I can't get like a fucking charger for my phone and I'm ill prepared. And then I go through this tunnel that if you listen to any of the like people that have been following up on it the tunnel kind of pops up. I go through the tunnel and then go up to campus and kind of

a media scrum, sort of by like the place where you'd be dropping people off if they're going to school, right? Like if you're dropping your significant other off to like go to their office or go to their class. So I go there. There's a bunch of media there and I'm in a suit. I find it's always useful in the work I do or the work I don't do to like wear a suit and look like semi respectable, like, it just makes everything else easier for me. And so, you know, especially like flying and shit, they treat me

really nice on planes. Um, because they think I'm an air marshal, I think, half the time. Because I'm also, like, since I'm a disabled veteran, I go up and ask to pre-board. But no one else on the like flight manifest knows that. They just know I'm a guy in a suit that, like, goes and sits in, like,

one of the shitty seats in the back. Because, you know, that's what I, what I could afford. Um, so anyways, I'm in a, this is all to say, like, I'm in a blazer, blah, blah, blah, all that bullshit. And, but, and they're, the firemen's kind of trying to keep people back. Again, there's still, like, they think an active shooter on campus. And what's the scene? Is there swarms of people?

Is there pandemonium? It's like a, like a music festival parking lot, but with armored vehicles and police cars. So there's a scrum of fire trucks. There are multiple mind-resistant armored personnel carriers that are pulling up with cops dressed in their finest G.I. Joe gear. And then they're all dumping off and going and just kind of milling about inside a building. Because every fucking cop in Utah, like sent someone. The University of Utah police sent like a police dog down.

Everyone sent somebody. Everyone shows up and everyone's in their G.I. Joe gear carrying their big guns, right? like they're um so it kind of has like a Halloween atmosphere you know where you're like this is weird but no I mean like on a on a more serious note like I walked around and I talked with a couple of the kids and there were like 5,000 people in that audience right including a lot of the kids it's a conservative area there's a lot of conservative kids and also if you haven't like been keeping in touch with the youth recently um the youth aren't Republicans and Democrats anymore the youth are like

well he's a Trotskyite and I myself am a Romanian fascist you know like it's a really weird mix of uh you know I started to notice this going back into the university system and hanging out with the younger people I'm like oh fuck this is like weird you guys are like some of you are malice

some of you are like Stalinists like what is going I know I know a fucking communist from Idaho shout out to the conference read that like went to boise state blows my mind um yeah he's really cool yeah no he's great um but uh and he looks like german jesus too you know just like long luscious blonde hair and like like total cowboy communist um it was the wildish i'm like you're an open communist in idaho but uh

so you know the kids that i talked to uh a cluster of about three or four like guys that were fresh and 19-year-old kids who saw someone get murdered right in front of them. Yeah. You know? That's fucked up. And a couple of, like, a couple of girls that were, again, about 19, you know? And I mean, at that time, like, I see the other, like, news vultures there. And, like, you know, I'm a pain scavenger, too, right?

It's kind of how I make part of my living. So I'm not putting myself above anyone. But I'm just saying that, like, I didn't have really the emotional capacity to be, like, process your trauma by telling it to me, you know, or like, give me a sound clip for my thing. So I just kind of, you know, told the kids, like, gave them the same advice I give to, like, soldiers who were asking me about shit, because they've been traumatized, right? Like, they've seen someone fucking murdered in front of them in a place that is really, like, kind of pleasantville in a lot of ways.

In such a gory way, too. In such a gory way. That's a very violent death. Yeah. And very, very public. So, you know, the kids are shaken up. The cops are like wandering around up. And like, I eventually just like take up a position on a bench because one thing I've learned reporting and just being a lifelong person who's able to kind of gather information is if you just show up somewhere and just hang out, just sit around, just let people get used to you for like 30 minutes, then you can fucking walk around.

right and again I kind of look like I look like I might be a fed you know I've been like I've got like my VA sunglasses and shit and I kind of talk to talk and I have my little army pins on and there are advantages to it but really if anyone out there is an aspirational reporter I don't know why the fuck you would be don't do it but if you are get to a place a little bit early and talk with the people there and talk with everyone and be nice to everyone and that will pay a lot of dividends. Like, I've, I've just learned this, I don't know, some people are like shitty to support staff or, you know, no way, man.

Those people know everything and they know how to like fuck shit up too. So like make friends with like the secretaries and the cooks and the like janitors, right? Like, and be legitimate about it and you will just reap a lot of benefits. Anyways. It was kind of the difference between the performed spectacle, right? Like if you're from the New York Times and you're performing the whole East Coast outsider bit to a bunch of Utahans, like the reaction that you're going to get is somebody who wants to act like an interviewee that they've seen on TV and to do the things that they think they should do and say as that role, whereas you're getting something that's a little. level more authentic than the filtered performative aspect of what people go out looking to be interviewed and get there a little five seconds well yeah and i mean when i went down there too

i wasn't necessarily interested in the event itself right like i know plenty of people that have died terribly right that's not something i'm like but i'm i was interested immediately in what the reaction to the event would be, right? And that's what I kind of wanted to go down there in catalog. And I haven't been disappointed because, you know, after I kind of established myself and figured out, like, I got a New York Times photographer came and sat down next to me. She gets up to go and I'm like, oh, where are you going? She's like, oh, the press conference. And I'm like, okay. And I had put out feelers to both the times and to Harper's about like, hey, I can go down and freelance this shit, right?

Because the other thing, I've been a freelance writer for fucking 15 years now. You know how many times I've ever had anyone call an editor to verify that I am on assignment? Never. No, once, once, one time, one time. And if I'm doing stuff with the military, they will want, like, you know, if I'm going on Fort Sill for a new Republic story or I'm going on Fort Bragg for the American Cipher. but see how I plug myself there. The, um, uh,

like that, you know, you have to go through a thing. But generally, you know, um, hey, I have freelance contracts with like nine different outlets.

Uh, and so some of them, some of them get used, man. And so on that day, I walked in and the cop was like checking press badges. I don't have a fucking press badge. Um,

and so I sure like my VA card. And I'm like, hey, I like, I'm a freelancer. I'm waiting on my editor. Like, I can show you an email.

And the Times reporter was like, you're not with the Times. And I'm like, well, I mean, you say that, but like, you're a freelancer. And, you know, she, I had, afterwards I had to, like, after I'd successfully talked my way past the cop, because the cop is from Utah. I am also from Utah. I'm just trying to see what happened in the town where I was like a little kid, man. You know, talked my way in. Then I went and had to talk to you with the New York Times reporter in front of her colleagues about her being a buddy fucker, blue falcon in the, uh, in the military parlance. And then I sat in the front row and I sat

next to the, uh, the poor guy, the university, the Utah Valley University, um, public relations director looks over at me. He's sitting next to me and he's like, yeah, I'm, uh, I'm set to retire in two days. I was going to retire on a September 12th. You know, I was in New York for, uh, for 9-11. And I figured like it would be appropriate to retire. after that day and then this happens. So I felt, you know, I felt bad for that guy too. Like, what a shitty thing. And then the governor comes out and the FBI dude comes out and like the cop dude for

UVU comes out. He's got a bald head, you know, like shiny. Classic look. And he was having a bad day too. Classic look, classic cop look. And they all chat. I yell out questions about if there are indications of foreign intelligence involvement. mostly because, again, I want to see the reaction to that.

Yeah. I don't know that there's foreign intelligence involvement, but I want to see what the FBI special agent in charge who came in two days prior to the incident from the cyberterrorism division, I want to see what his reaction to that is, right? Because Utah is a place with a lot of... covert critical national infrastructure. Yes.

Which also makes it a haven for spies. Like, I bet most Americans wouldn't think that the Redneck Riviera in, on the Florida Gulf Coast is like a foreign counterintelligence magnet. Oh, yeah. But it is. Because there's a lot of shit there, you know? And there's a lot of shit out here. And, you know, as I drove down, like, where the federal vehicles were starting to pass me was where I could look out to my right and see Bluffdale, which is where the NSA has its bumble hive database, which, to my understanding, is a, they essentially have a digital avatar of each one of us in there that is constantly fed with new digital information, right? Yeah.

And they can use that for two functions primarily. One, if all of a sudden you become a target and they need to take you out, well, they dip into your digital life and just see what the weaknesses are, right? And we all have them. Oh, yeah. We all have things we probably say on the internet or, you know, have looked up on the internet or whatever, or have tracked on our fucking Fitbit or have been captured by facial recognition from a Tesla car camera at high definition.

as we drive past right like the net is there we live in the net so it has that but then also it's a simulation like data thing where they have enough digital information on people throughout the world that they can basically play like sim world and see okay if a meteor strikes fucking i don't know vienna virginia how's everyone going to respond to And they can simulate that with imperfect digital avatars of who we are. Yeah. So that's there. There's a special forces camp up in the hills.

There's CIA shit. There's FBI shit. You know, whatever. Yeah. And we should get to all that in a sec. But it's interesting to juxtapose all of this digital sophistication with, this on the ground presence and I suppose that was kind of part of your thinking tossing out these questions live for these flesh and bone human beings in the room and their reaction

may not be what the simulation would produce for an optimal reaction right yes well and I mean and the other thing that I talked to you know I went up after the press conference like the governor came up and talked and yada yada yada um but after the press conference i made a b-line out of the press room and went right up to the fbi guy and was like hey man like i had another thing i didn't want to ask in front of like all the press but i'm a former soldier your security perimeter was terrible all your guys are bunched up do you not worry about secondaries, counter-ambushes, mortar teams, like, you know, basically you guys ain't ready for the Taliban. And to my surprise, he looked at me, he's like, yeah, former military, huh?

He's like, look, we conduct like T-TXs, like, tactical training exercises where we try to, like, instill that. But he's like, we're dealing with local LEOs and we're dealing with, you know, we don't have enough time to train everybody. and like and no one's going to learn until something like that happened. Holy shit. Just throwing him under the bus. I mean, I will, it was, it was like, it was fascinating to me because I am not used to in my, you know, in my professional life, like dealing with FBI people, I'm not used to them ever being candid. And that was incredibly candid. And this guy was just new on the job, too, right?

Didn't he replace somebody that had been fired within, I don't know, a week's? He just knew on the job. He replaced the former SAC who was a Pakistani American woman. That's special agent in charge for the uninitiated. Yes, who'd done a lot of work in Islamabad as a legal attache over there. She was one of the people that interrogated Siddiqui, I believe, this woman who maybe was a spy for Al-Qaeda, American woman of Pakistani descent. But, you know, which I'm like, actually, dude, if you could deal with, like, fucking Pakistani and Afghan hillbillies, like, this is a great place for you, actually.

Because it's the same terrain, it's the same geography. It's the same, like, personality types, frankly. and by all reports she was fairly effective in the job right but on the other hand you know salt lake city is the wokeest city in um in utah it's like if if utah is afghanistan salt lake city is Kabul um and i'm serious like and uh the um i think it is going to become more and more of an administrative priority my prediction that I've been saying since the Charlie Kirk thing is that Salt Lake City will get the next influx of federal troops and the next surge of federal law enforcement. And people at my university look at me

like I'm crazy when I say that because they're like, aren't they all Republicans? And I'm like, yes, but. Like, Steve Bannon hates Spencer Cox. The LDS Church has a lot of money and has not been particularly pro-Trump. And Mormon people and evangelical people, if you're not religious, you may not get this,

but they don't like each other. They pretend they make common cause sometimes, right? Because they have similar underlying belief structures about certain things, but they don't like each other. And Trump has more support and has thrown in more with the evangelical strain than he has with the Mormon strain.

The Mormon strain is Mitt Romney. You know, the Mormon strain is obstructionist to him. He doesn't like it. Right. And unfortunately, for him, the Mormons also have a really outsized presence in the intelligence community. Dating back a long time, yeah. Dating back a long time. And I think it's part of the reasons that it makes sense from a power consolidation model that you would want to

consolidate power over Salt Lake City and the whole Wasatch Valley or Wasatch Front, I'm sorry. The other thing I noticed was returning here after being on the East Coast and being in the Midwest or Mid-South and overseas and et cetera, et cetera.

This place is Northern Virginia 2.0. Like since 9-11? No, you just go past like the Silicon Slopes by Lehigh and see all the business names up there. It looks I, you know, it's, it's architecturally, it takes the, takes the beauty of, um, Cupertino California's architecture and combines it with like, you know, the grace of, um, the skyline

of Northern Virginia, of like Arlington, um, by the river. It's terrible. Yeah. You know, and it's just, it's just filled in like that community, Lehigh, I mentioned. It was cowboy country. There was nothing out there, uh, you know, like, farms and fields and ranchers and such it's all subdivisions and it's one of the biggest cities in utah now and that whole thing is because that nsa complex came in that's how big this all is like this is not a small thing this is what runs a portion of the state yeah and i think we're going to pivot to that in a second before we do i would be remiss not to cover or at least ask the question because there's been a lot of chatter and I think a lot of

it is just circumstantial. I don't know that there's any substance behind it, but about this firing of the prior FBI special agent in charge in the region, when you and I talked about it, it seemed like maybe it was just a purging of the DEI, that's kind of an administration-wide effort. But I know some people have speculated that perhaps it was to prepare the groundwork for an inept ground team on the scene for the Kirk assassination. Do you have any thoughts about that? Well, I mean, that makes me think of Donald Sutherland's monologue to Kevin Costner in the Oliver Stone masterpiece JFK, right? Where he's Mr. X. He's the Army, like, special ops guy.

Oh, yeah. Who right before the Kennedy assassination gets called away to take somebody to Antarctica. So he won't be there competently doing his job, right? Now, I don't know that that's what happened there. Like, but I could see how people would apply that model. I also think there's a model that Cash Patel is of India descent and a Hindu man. This woman was a Pakistani descent and a Muslim woman. There could also be some issues there, right?

Like, that's not a border free of conflict, like both on the physical border or in the mental borders of people's minds. right like we a lot of times especially with white people in america we tend to like think that there's only a racial dynamic to white people's interaction with everybody else but that's not true and there are there i think there's possibly a like racial and gender dimension there too they could adequately explain it as well yeah i mean just looking at the selfies of cash patel And like his whole look and discourse style wouldn't put anything past the guy, honestly, including having that type of improper, you know, from the eyes of the law, improper considerations in place. But, yeah, that's interesting to think about. Sure.

But again, if you're just thinking about it too from a power consolidation model. Like, if the FBI has a counterintelligence purview and, like, basically the responsibility to secure the secrets that are around Utah, Idaho, Nevada National Security Establishment stuff, because they go all the way up to Wyoming, too. Then you want someone, if you're the FBI director of your Cash Patil, you want someone that you trust in that job. Not necessarily the best person for the job, but someone the best person for you to have in that job. I talked with the I talked with the SAC and honestly he was the guy that I talked to he seemed pretty good at it you know and I I made it because he was with another agent too and I made a like comment to him like hey you're like you know you're not going to answer my question about foreign intelligence involvement are you he's like no like okay you know and then we just bullshitted

a little bit more but the way he was giving like his non answers I'm like hey you're skilled at this you know like some people are bad at that shit and but he was good at it um and he seemed like someone on the precipice to jumping to FBI super grades you know to like the real good jobs the ones where you might have a jet at your disposal reminds me of those X-Files episodes uh there was one i was watching the other day where like Scully's old buddy from the academy is trying to get her help on something, and he's like just this naked ambition trying to climb the ladder. And he's like, I don't care about you, Scully. I'll just climb over you and get to the top. You can keep on playing in the sandbox with that freak molder. A lot of those politics.

But that's actually like, you know, again, getting back to the plugging the hunt for Tom Clancy. Part of the contention for the hunt for Tom Clancy is that Tom Clancy created a model for how, like, military people and spies were supposed to act and like react to things right then young people read those books form that as their mental model for what government service in certain like areas was like joined up and then consciously kind of reenacted what they saw in tom clancy and so anyone who's been in dc and interacted with any fucking white house staffers knows that every single one of those motherfuckers watched the West Wing all the time.

Every single one. And every single one is living their own personal Josh Lyman, Sam Seaborne, you know, Jenna Maroney. Or no, she's from 30 Rock. Jenna Mahoney plays, I forget her name, but she's the assistant to Josh. Or C.J. Craig or whatever, right? Like, everyone is acting out these things

that they internalized from... like media that was produced largely as propaganda for the government. It's this weird fucking Oroboros. So you saying that the FBI agent is acting like someone from the X-Files actually fucking tracks perfectly. Mm-hmm. That's just old Guy DeBoach, our best friend of the pod, the spectacle inaction.

It's wild. I mean, even back to the, like, to us, being right behind fucking that other asshole at lunch that time and we were just at a place like on the side of the road and it wasn't like we were at

you know the palm or whatever fucking PJ Clarks although I love PJ Clarks yeah I think like that those guys inhabit a character as well you know and it's been one of the one of the things I've realized

more and more like you know I got to a level where I was able to observe, like, military people that were at a fairly high level while I was in the military because I was a driver to, like, you know, high-ranking people for a little while, until I got a DUI. Then I wasn't a driver anymore. I was a speechwriter. And, you know, all that is solved. I'm a good driver. Everything's fine. No one needs to get mad at me. I paid my debt at society. You know, like, let's be forgiving. But I didn't hurt anyone.

that leads me back into some of the reaction to the Charlie Kirk stuff too which was you know I mean Charlie Kirk as martyr to the cause being marketed so like effectively for a little bit right after and then completely just dropping off is also fascinating to me you know because that whole crowd is like it's a strange spectacle you know i mean honestly like if i have my choice in reporting if i'm going to go report on like a like wacky conservative conference or a wacky liberal conference i'll take the conservatives any day of the week 100% 100% way more interesting to hang out with way more unguarded you know they'll all like call me a communist and then still talk to me and like give me shit

i'll be like i'm not actually even a communist like i don't trust germans from trier so i can't like, get on board with Marx. But that never satisfies them. I lived in Bipberg as a little kid. The only acceptable kind of anti-communist is one who is anti-communist only as a function of being anti-German. Well, and I mean, yes, yes. And particularly anti-a-certain type of Romanized German from Trir, you know, which was a town that, during the days of Roman occupation of the Allamount lands and such was a Roman, you know, place.

So I just can't, I can't trust people that roll over for the empire like that. Anyone. How's that? I actually really like Trier. It's a nice town. But the, that's my stock answer. But the conservatives, like, they'll hang out with me and talk with me. And, like, it's less like being at Mormon church.

It's like hanging out with the Democrats is kind of like being at Mormon church. It's real scoldy. This sure is God made day and night. What you do in the dark will be brought to light. To be running the hide, slip and slide, talking about the moat in your neighbor's eye. But sure is God made you rich and poor. You're going to read just watch your soul.

You can run on for a long time. Run on for a long time. Run on for long. This is good to tee up the last piece of discussion in Orum that I wanted to cover. that will transition us outside of Orham to the larger Utah and western milieu of this data center imperialism that we wanted to talk about. But as long as we're on the subject of talking to conservatives and them being open, I know that you also spoke to some people about and involved in the UVU National Security Studies program, which seems to be kind of a feeder

into espionage services. Could you touch on that? Yeah, there was a kid there that like, okay, I'm old. So I used to watch this show called Beverly Hills 90210. And the central character in that, when he was at UC, at the like UCLA USC clone that they had there um he he was like the assistant to the chancellor right so he's a student but he's like kind of a like special student and one of the one of the kids i talked to i was like oh like you know he's in a suit i i think he's like staff but he's a senior a junior in the national

security like studies program there and this kid is pulled together like this kid has his shit together he um you know he reminds me of like kind of the fast burner kids from University of Virginia that are like on a one way you know they're going to get on a bus to the Dulles Discovery Center they're going to talk with their handler there and then they're going to get like on another bus

down to Williamsburg with a fake name so that the you know long term Soviet mole that is certainly there Harold Nicholson doesn't expose their true name but he was he was definitely one of those like

pipeline they're pipeline kids right and you brought up an interesting point in the in the notes by the way he does excellent preparatory notes for this were not I sound like I have attention deficit disorder because I do but there is a very good outline to this and in the in the notes you talk about like well how's this place kind of a feeder school if like sort of like no one's ever heard of it one it's the largest university in Utah what again it was when I was a kid it was a commuter school it's the large you Yeah, it's a huge university. It has a lot of students. Damn, yeah. So a lot of people go through there. And two, I'm going to rattle off a couple of other university names,

Lock Haven University, Alford University, the University of Rochester. Those are also huge CIA feeder schools and DIA feeder schools. But no one's ever heard of them, really, unless you go to them. I sure haven't. And so if you, like, go look up any of those schools, you'll see, like, holy shit, they send, you know, you know what one of the sleeper ones is the fucking banana slugs. Santa Cruz, man. Santa Cruz sends a lot of people into the Foreign Service and, like, spooky type foreign service people, like Joe Wilson people. Damn.

I always thought of them as couch dwelling stoners. I mean, that's what they want you to think. They want you to think that that the University of California at Berkeley is the leader in revolutionary thought when in fact, they're the leader in counter-revolutionary thought

because they're the home of like counterinsurgency for America. Theoretically. You know, like a lot of the theoretical basis comes out of Berkeley. Yep. And a lot of nuke shit. Oh, yeah.

And John Wu. John Yu. John Yu. John you. Yeah, not the director. Sorry. Shit. The guy that murders people with drones through legal justification,

not the guy that releases dubs. But so, yes, so UVU has, like, look, they need people to go work at the data center, right? Like, they need, in Newport News, Virginia, they need people to build aircraft carriers. So they have Newport News shipbuilding there that has an apprentice school, and they train up people. And if your readers don't know that in 1958, the higher education establishment throughout the entire United States effectively came under the control of the national security state, you should go read up on that because in 58 in response to Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration just fucking unleashed a fire hose of money on the university. and that money came with strings, right, as it always does. And part of the strings was that, you know, I've been embedded now in the university system. I'm a PhD student right now at the University of Utah.

I was previously a master's student at the University of Virginia. And, you know, and I've been around stuff. But like, anyways, I've been in it long enough that, and I was in the military for long. enough that they are essentially the same, right? Like culturally, the military has a class distinction system between officers enlisted and then it's further subdivided. I've started thinking of like graduate students as NCOs, non-commissioned officers. Undergraduates are like privates through like E4 and professors are officers. And then as you kind of go up like generals or deans, right? And so I had military friends of mine, old people, like retired military,

70, 80 year old people who were upset from the news coverage of Pete Hegseth yelling at all the generals, right, and calling them fat. And they were, you know, like, Matt, aren't you enraged at this? And I'm like, no, like, I don't think that the current crop of general officers over the last 25 years is like particularly distinguish itself or given itself any sort of like cause to be respected, right? And so do I mind, do I mind these clowns being yelled at by another clown? No, I view it as a circus that's entertaining to me. Right?

Yeah. And that, that kind of holds like true with the whole, like, the other question was, will, you know, are the general's going to kind of do anything? And I'm like, you know, if academics ask me that, I'm like, do your deans do anything? Like, are the deans and the executive vice presidents rising up against, like, the crackdown on academic freedom? No, they're careerists who have bought into the system and are fucking holding on while, like, the ship sinks around them, right? Because higher education's going to, like, crash in America, just demographically, right? There's not enough 18-year-olds graduating from high school next year to fill all the slots that are in college this year.

Yeah, and, I mean, it's been a long time since the graduating classes of four-year programs have not exactly had that entry pass, that ticket to the middle class that was sort of the promise of the whole system in the first place. 50 years ago or 60 years ago and it's something that like I'm 42 and I feel like I kind of caught the last chopper out of Vietnam as far as like I have a car right I have a house it's a small house in Arkansas that I own you know I mean I have a mortgage on it but like you know like it's a 700 square foot house but it's mine you know I have it um and I guess as long as I keep paying on it, which I plan to do. But I ask like the 20-year-olds, you know, like, hey, do you, do you ever expect to own a house? And they look at me like I'm fucking crazy because I am. Because they're looking at like, I'm graduating from undergraduate $100,000 in debt.

Then I'll have to go another $100,000 for grad school. And then I'll get out and not get a job. And, you know, I was, I was on the hill in the spring lobbying Congress. for like the student veterans thing i don't know some of my friends at uva in the vet group were like come up you know because they can wear a suit and talk to people and um i was at a part like a reception they had at the end and there's these two senior staffers from the senate health education welfare committee or some shit whatever it's called but they were they were like well hey like what are the youth like you know and kind of how how's that going like what's the mood and i'm like I think we're like five years and like one or two crises away from them like like like

killing all of you like I think like I think like I think I think I think like they're going to revolt and they're probably like you know I'm hey man systems actually working fairly well for me you know so like I don't need to revolt but like some of these kids it's not working good for and I get you know and I think we see that too trying to get back to the Charlie Kirk stuff you know that's a the the younger generation that really like was affected by that saw it live saw that stuff they're uh like they're facing a totally different reality than I faced at their age right and they're living in a totally different America than like I lived in their age You know, I was, I was in college right after 9-11.

The iPhone hadn't come out, right? Like, there was, there was a certain amount, you know, like, if Instagram had been around my freshman year at college, like, fuck, man, that's not good. That would have been bad, you know, because I just drank all the time. Yeah. And, you know, but, like, yeah. I I the the the cognitive effects of growing up with this kind of like surveillance I I don't you know I don't think that they're in a very stable welcoming environment and like you said the promise of kind of the last 50 years has really been rug pulled well I think that's a perfect point to pivot into talking about this surveillance state that is in if not in a state of ascendance already ascended without many people wise to its assent and is already in existence

and wouldn't you know it just like so many of the frontiers that the nation has faced in the past in order to, in, you know, consistent with Greg Grandin's thesis in the end of the myth, that the frontier sort of serves as this repository for the vision of the future. And to the extent that the promises for the present generation are deferred, they're projected onto the frontier. You don't have the life that you want. Now, well, go west, young man. You don't have the ability to enslave Africans any longer in the South or your ability to do so is in jeopardy.

Get that territory out west, you know, settle and conquer. Or go to Cuba and get yourself a sugar plantation. That's what the Galvan family in Virginia did. And they did very well on it because they got all their money. out in 59 before Castro took over and then they founded the most exclusive country club in Abermorel County where Tucker Carlson got in a fight with a Latino American member of the club and the Latino American member of the club got kicked out. That's the kind of place it is. Well, and this is the thing. It always is. You know, whenever you throw that boomerang at the

frontier and get the the Pavlovian dog of the American people to run after it and chase it, it'll always come all the way full circle back around and smack that dog in the face. And I think that that is an app metaphor for Utah. And with the digital stuff, this is making me think, too, of the fake digital frontiers I've seen the national security state really like throw itself into over the last like since I've been observing it really you know which I guess is kind of my whole life because I've grown up around all this shit probably since promise software the original promise pun intended yes yes and the way that it's been uh boiling frogged with us a little bit where

I think about this when I'm going to class where since COVID all the classrooms are now miced, right? They have like expensive audio equipment in there that records and they have expensive video equipment in there that can do like zooms, you know, or whatever other bullshit like telecom shit there is. But every classroom is wired for sight and sound and at UVA at least the security cameras were made by the Axis Corporation. So, like, I mean, we are, we kind of live in a Thomas Pynchon novel, too. In a, if you actually look and observe, like, just do this tomorrow. Walk around for an hour somewhere outside and really pay attention to how many security cameras are tracking you.

Now, they'll be at the corner of buildings. They'll be on ATMs. They'll be on doorbells. They'll be on cars, right? Like any new digital car has expensive. camera system around it and just see how much you are like capable of being observed throughout the day and then just think that that's with shit you can see right that's not with drones that's not with like the kind of spy cameras that they would you know would have been installing like near border

sides of the Soviet Union kind of stuff like assuming that your phone camera and microphone are not being remotely activated at any given time. Yeah. Which is also certainly a capability that these people have at their disposal. Well, and not even that, but also to go back in time and do that. Mm-hmm. Right? Like, do you ever go through your email from like 15 years ago and you're fucking horrified?

You're like, I can't believe I wrote like that or like, you know, oh, God, I can't believe I was talking, you know, like this or that? For sure. Like, we as humans, we forget them. But this shit doesn't forget, you know, and it reminds me of, again, as like an English literature person, you know, reading John Milton and Paradise Lost and, you know, the, like, energy of the satanic machine in there to, like, build and monitor and put into hierarchies, which is why it's interesting that it's being run by a man born in Germany who came to the U.S.

and made a killing in financial infrastructure stuff and then branched out and detect stuff. You know, I'm talking about Peter Thiel right there, who's obsessed with the Antichrist. To be fair, born to German parents in South Africa, I believe, or at least raised in South Africa, as so many of these people were. Oh, well, that's better.

That's better. Yeah, that's better. I mean, the fact that we've ceded a large portion of our financial and intelligence and, structure to South Germans who went to South Africa.

Like that's you know I think about the fact that we imported a bunch of the MRAPs, the mind-resistant anti-personnel vehicles

that like I didn't use in Afghanistan because I was too old for that shit. We used Humvees. But the other people that came

after me used we bought all those things from the South Africans. Now if you're buying a piece of equipment that the South Africans

had to use during apartheid. Are you the good guy? Like, how does that just visually go? And again, bringing it back to the Charlie Kirk UVU shit, those are what was pulling in to Utah, into the school in Utah were mind-resistant, armored personnel vehicles first developed in South Africa

so that white South African troops wouldn't get blown up by the black people they were repressing. Yeah. And this connects so perfectly to the story of the American West, which was, it's a happy tale full of mirth like South Africa, right? It was almost, I mean, the American West, the settlement, quote unquote, settlement of the American West through genocide and through the reservation and confinement system is inspiration. to the subsequent experiments in human confinement and domination. You know, it's contemporaneous in a lot of ways with the South African experience, but certainly as you get into the 20th century and the technology of confinement that was employed there. Oh, like IBM enabling the Holocaust?

IBM enabling the Holocaust. you know and it's all like a real merry-go-round concentration camps i believe their first use on a mass scale was in south africa correct exactly yeah by the british and the boer wars oh and were those were those the people that mahometh Gandhi volunteered to fight with like on behalf of because i think they were right because you know speaking of uh people born in South Africa who went on went on to other countries to like you know raise some hell

Muhammad Gandhi came out of South Africa and went back and ran stuff and you can't convince me he wasn't a British secret agent I'm sorry hey you know it's another theme

that we're revisiting in this episode perfidious Albion are problematic Indian subordinates of the white empire we talked about it with cash patel and our boy gandhi does not have the cleanest of hands on that regard well and it it's also where the like british colonial efforts pivoted after they lost the american colonies which revenue wise wasn't that big of a deal for them because they

got so much revenue from the sugar colonies in the Caribbean that they kept right like i didn't understand And I took a course on, like, you know, sugar and British abolition. And I didn't understand how deeply evil sugar was, which brings me right back to Utah because this is the place of mass sugar beet production in American history, which leads to things like the Smoot-Hawley TerraFact, which we're still seeing certain repercussions today. But that was to protect the Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California, sugar beet industry from the cane sugar industry offshore. So these patterns of colonial, like, movement and colonial, like, colonial state movement

have interesting, like, ripples into the modern day. A hundred percent. You know, as I say, as I'm drinking, I'm drinking a Coca-Cola. And the Coca-Cola Corporation was what happened when the South pivoted to sugar, like, to sugar slavery that was offshoreed. um rather than domestic cotton slavery you know to put it very simply and sprinkle in a little that south american cocaine original recipe the the Coca-Cola company still is the only corporation in america that has a license to import massive amounts of coca leaves from columbia

um that they then refine in new jersey into you know the syrup that becomes Coca-Cola after of course, removing the cocaine from it, which is sold to pharmaceutical companies, as they say. But you've got to wonder, right? Yeah. I mean, I watched The Sopranos. I know a few things. No doubt. No doubt. And the point is well illustrated that this frontier land, whether it's being used for the cultivation of sugar beets, or whether it is being used, used for the cultivation of a new product, i.e. mass surveillance, it finds a home in the American West, which is uniquely, not only geographically vast and isolated by, like you mentioned earlier, the mountains and the geographical characteristics of the zone, but it's also unique in its

human contents in the types of people and the types of groups that are based there. And so before we start to talk about that, just in case the listener is not aware, I wanted to give just a very, very brief overview of something you alluded to earlier, namely the Utah data center, which maybe the OG data center, Before Data Center was a part of our common parlance, as it is today, the Utah Data Center was built, and I spent a lot of time over the last week or so looking at contemporaneous articles. You got into this, huh? Yeah. From the Obama administration era, like the, let's say, 2009, when it was kind of on the,

horizon maybe. I don't know when the first ever reporting was, but this thing was the biggest data center of its kind in history at the time of its construction. It was completed and opened in 2013, in other words, into the first year of Obama's second term, but obviously was well underway before. I'm not sure if the plans were laid under the Bush administration. I think that they were already in place. I mean, honestly, they were probably in place in the Reagan administration.

Yeah. Because, no, but I'm serious. I can, I can like send you a document from the artificial intelligence steering committee in 1981 that outlines the intelligence community in the military's requirement for a computer based map of the earth that can be updated in real time and has like X, Y, and Z. Basically, they're describing Google Earth

in 1981 in this like thing. I sent it to my brother-in-law who's a professor of remote sensing at another university and was like, hey man, like look at this. Like they're describing, and he went through and looked at it and was like, oh yeah. And actually like this company became Keyhole, which then like sold to Google Earth so like you're right there and I say that too because if you look at the original Arapa net oh yeah arpa net yeah arpa net uh nodes right it's like there's a couple in California and then it comes out to utah the shit that pinch on was hypothesizing and crying of lot 49 in 1964 or whatever yeah well and and that was being conceived of

and discovered in that. I mean, back to the Frank Wisner archives at UVA, a lot of, I didn't understand this until I kind of went through these, but modern data science and modern computing power requirements, like those things, we didn't really have, even during the atomic bomb testing stuff, we didn't have a need for something much better than like Inniac or, you know, the vacuum tube type stuff. But as soon as the U2 spy plane, and especially once the satellites start rolling out, all of a sudden you need a way to store, to catalog, store, and retrieve time-sensitive data that you might have to compare a Russian missile silo in November to a Russian missile silo in January, right?

And you have to be able to find all that. And so the companies that start bidding for naval research contracts in the 50s and 60s, that's really where the groundwork for the type of computer data retrieval and storage and even the graphical user interface that we use now. It all comes out of this need to catalog, process, analyze, and store overhead reconnaissance, surveillance data and then they start thinking well shit if we can do it with all this what if we just put up like antenna farms everywhere and capture all the data and the rest as they say is history right yeah and now we have you know the uh the homunculus of that like

sam altman running around like being weird trying to buy up all the chips that exist yeah because the sand gin have assumed their final form yeah and what's really interesting about the construction and the unveiling of the udc the utah data center in bluffdale as you stated it's visible from highway 15 in a little town called bluffdale that's what about like it's closer to salt lake city than provo i think Yeah. Between Salt Lake City and Provo, this is my not on the ground Google Maps analysis. It's like 50 minutes. No, there's like a mountain that comes out that you have to get around.

And so, yeah, I mean, the best place to live is Lehigh because it's right next to it. The second best place is like around South Salt Lake and then kind of Western Valley area. But, I mean, that one massive national defense, like, project changed the geography of this area in, you know, in the way that, say, the after effects of the Manhattan Project changed the geography of Albuquerque. My lover comes to me with a rose on a bosom. The moon's dancing purple all through her black hair. She tells me she comes from my mother the mountain, and her skin fits her tightly, and her lips do not lie. She silently slips from her throat a medallion,

slowly she twirls in front of my high sing a tune allure a little i oh yeah and to talk about strangeness and temporal coincidence or not right at the same time that this data center was opening up was exactly the time when Ed Snowden, who was nowhere near Utah, he was on the east coast, in northern Virginia, in... No, he was in Hawaii. Hawaii. He was at the bunker data center in Hawaii. And from there is where he's collecting all of the information that later leaks, and it starts coming out in the same year, 2013, that the U.D.C.

goes live and so at least as I observe it and I was I remember experiencing this in real time in 2013 and I wonder if you guys have recollections as well from that time but looking back on it now it's like hmm interesting that the Snowden revelations that are kind of the extent of our current knowledge, even 12 years later, about what the NSA actually does, because Matt, you shared a little bit about what they are up to at the UDC, but it's almost speculative or uncorroborated, I think, at this point, what's really happening. And the kibosh upon leaks has been so strongly screwed on that, now it's like almost unimaginable that we would ever know the full extent of what's going on

there. But I wonder what you guys think. I would say just one other point that was sort of coming up right. I think it was actually just before this and sort of the impetus for a lot of this is the FISA court, you know, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was sort of really the pop and off point for was in the mix for all of this. Well, and I mean, if you want my, like, I think Ed Snowden's fake. Yeah. Eddie the friendly spook, as Dave Emery calls him.

Yeah, I mean, I, like, I very much remember Ed Snowden time because that was he jumped ship in... early June of 2013, and I had quite a few conversations with the guy who kind of trained me up to do journalism and, you know, was one of my first mentors in it and, you know, God rest his soul. But Michael Hastings died on June 18, 2013. And my big question with Snowden at that time, you know, having done a couple of stories with Hastings at that time, and Hastings at that time was the guy who got Stanley McChrystal fired from the Afghanistan job. He was a hot shit, like, national security reporter.

And Ed Snowden, rather than, like, leaking stuff to Michael or, you know, any of the other, I can count the number of good national security reporters I know on one hand, and I know a lot. But rather than leaking to any of those people, he leaks to Glenn Greenwald and, Laura Poitris. That's interesting. That's an interesting data point for me there. Yep. And then they bring in a reporter from the Guardian, a Scottish reporter from the Guardian,

and the Guardian will later take a hammer to their laptop at the behest of MI5, I believe. And then they bring in from the American side a fellow named Bart Gelman, who is a national security reporter for the National Post, or for the Washington Post. I'm sorry. That was suspicious to me because that is, that's an interesting sequence of events. And then Snowden's story was full of holes to me too because he and I went through infantry basic training roughly at the same time. I think he was a couple of months before me. And his story is that in basic training he had stress fractures. And that required, like that meant he couldn't be in the army anymore.

out processed out. Well, I'm here to tell you that in 2005, the United States Army was not at Fort Benning processing out holdovers due to stress fractures. They actually had people that had been there for six to seven months healing up so that they could go back into the cycle and go into the meat market. Like, the Army was not letting people go in the way Ed Snowden says he was let go. So that makes me think about other interesting shit. Gee, that reminds me of a Marine that had a checkered past in the 1950s.

Yeah, who also like spent some time in Russia. Suspicious discharge. Then other data points. What did Snowden's father do? And what did Snowden's grandfather do? And this is like a weird part of kind of deep America like national security state like arcania right but from a lot a lot of the stuff I've read and a lot of the people I've talked to the people that are given that are selected

for certain critical national like missions and stuff it really helps if they're from Revolutionary Warstock. You know, because again, you're dealing with a bunch of wasps at the end of the day, right? Like who were kind of running it. And wasps care about that shit, right? Well, Snowden's family goes back to the Revolution, baby. And he was from Elizabeth City, which is right next to Harvey Point, which is, you know, the CIA's, like, public training facility is Camp Perry, where they train the case officers.

They train the special ones at Harvey Point. They also train, like, people in explosives at Harvey Point. So all that is interesting to me, right? So my contention is that Snowden was sheep-dipped by the CIA into the NSA to run a deception operation against not the Soviets, but the American public, about the true nature and extent of the surveillance state. Now, all of the information that Snowden revealed had been revealed, in some way, shape, or form

before. It just hadn't been aggregated. Right? The FBI's carnivore program, the NSA's echelon program. Like, all of the shit was out there. The other legitimate NSA leakers, like Thomas Drake, right?

All this was out there. Snowden just provided a convenient narrative memes to hang it on people while also scaring the shit. out of the federal workforce who, hey, listen, if you've got a job that's paying you $100,000 a year, you don't, like, it's not that bad, it's not that stressful, you know, and you kind of like the people you work with, you don't want to lose that. Right.

You have no desire to lose that. And then if you're going to lose that and the FBI is going to come after you and, like, prosecute your kids for shit, like, you really don't want to lose that. But we have this fallacy in America that it's hard to keep a secret. That is fucking bullshit. It is that the easiest thing in America, if you've got money, is to get a secret kept, right? The Manhattan Project was all about that.

Listen, you, people in fucking Santa Fe, New Mexico knew some shit was going on, right? Of course they knew some shit was going on. People in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, knew some shit. was going on. You know what they did? They shut the fuck up about it because they got rich off of it or at least got lifelong employment from it. And you would shut the fuck up about it too. The mafia did it with, like that's how the mafia operates with people too. I mean, look, it's not lost on me that we're recording this on the day when Time magazine, a historic CIA publication, has on its cover praising the peacemaking efforts of one,

Epstein rapist associate with a puff piece article written by another Epstein rape associate who literally had his emails with Epstein published en masse not but a month ago and the secrets at this point in time is like I think you're right that you could keep a secret and now we're in an era where You almost don't need to because you could just conduct this shit above board and nobody cares. Right out in the open, right out in the, no, I mean, if you look at the, I had, I had this interesting, I worked on this profile of, um, when Michael, uh, died in L.A., we were working on a profile of John Brennan and who was coming in his CIA director. And I continued to kind of like work on it after he. Nice guy. Yeah, um, you know, I, I, I have many things to quibble with about, you know, with the Trump administration, but like, I also spent enough time, like, in and around the Middle East that, um, I do follow the, like, the enemy of by enemy is my friend right now. And on certain things, like, Trump has been kind of my friend. Like some of the people he's gone after, I'm happy to see him go after. You know, and maybe that's not my best.

like a motion, but Brennan is certainly one of those guys because, um, you know, while, while I was conducting like work on that, they had, uh, they had a couple of CIA case officers that were with the public affairs department that were essentially like the, you know, the press minders, right? They would get on the phone with me and corral me and blah, blah, blah, that bullshit. One of them was, uh, my friend Nedward, um, Ned Price, who you might have recognized from being the state department like spokesperson. Oh yeah. Yeah. Nedward was like one of my CIA handlers on the like on the Brennan story and uh anyways I'm I'm chatting with these guys and I ask you know kind of like I asked a question about

foreign intelligence involvement at the at the UVU thing I'm on this conference call with like eight CIA people the chief of staff like Brennan's chief of staff who's this little shit named Nick Shapiro who went to work for fucking Airbnb. He's a two-lane political hack and like a scumbag. Hi, Nick. But he, you know, he says something about like, well, if you, oh, the question I threw out there was, I was like, well, fuck, I wonder, like, he spent enough time in Saudi Arabia. I'm like, hey, did any of his kids get educational benefits or, like, scholarships that were

in any way, shape, or form funded by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia? and they were like, why do you want to know that? Like, why are you asking us that question? Oh, you didn't know? And I'm like, well, that's why, you know, because I wanted to see what you would say. And, but, yeah, well, and they said something to me where they're like, you know, trying to be like,

well, you know, you could like be helping the terrorists win or whatever. And I'm like, listen, has anyone on this, like, phone call actually, like, fired a weapon at an enemy in, like, like in combat i mean besides me because i've shot a terrorist but like i don't know that any of you have so like shut up and just tell me what i want to know you know but that's the um and i just met up with i was at a funeral for a buddy of mine who was a ex-cIA guy and there were some like actual cia people there you know and i'm talking to them at a bar called mcsobers which was ohio is amazing um ohio fucking rules it's like idaho um but the uh uh so i'm talking to these

guys and you know what my thought was it's like fuck man the current crop of like cia case officers are hedge fund bros or like venture capital bros it's the exact same like personality type and but they all dress like don't know why that's an aesthetic choice in like dc now but i was noticing it before I left like the cursed coast you know and um it was weird to see like 23 24 year olds dressing like consciously dressing like Donald Trump that was odd to me I mean I think all of this goes to a phenomenon and now as we zero in on the 90 minute mark I think maybe we set some of this off for a part two of this discussion that we can pick up where we're leaving off if your listeners want to listen to me ramble on about bullshit i uh am obsessed with like i'm happy

to do it well no i mean i don't think it's bullshit at all no i think it's it's um but i'm sure that our listeners will want to hear about kind of what is the next logical step in the world building that we are actually undertaking here beneath the surface level of detail and of illustration. Robot dogs equipped with Clearview AI technology and small darts filled with ricin. Yeah, all that shit. And it's like... That's coming. It's coming.

It's on the way. And it raises the question. It's on the way for sure. the infrastructure is being built. We are paying for it with our tax dollars, and it's not only going to the government to build it, but to a lot, a lot of very venal and horrible private billionaires and their lackeys who have set their sights on the American West

for this data center imperialism. and with Matt another aspect of this that we really want to cover so setting off from the premise that Ed Snowden was a fake limb hang limited hangout to cede the ground

I didn't expect to go there today but like you know okay whatever I'm going there yeah neither did I but honestly it's foundational to the next step and the next step is in order to get away with all this shit and to pull this absolute horrific ruse off on the American people who by definition you know appreciate freedom yeah and what it offers or say they do there's a real contradiction between that love of freedom and the unfreedom promised by the technologies in which we are all investing.

And so there's this question in my mind, and I think we all share this question, and we all maybe have some thoughts on it, but it takes a certain process of indoctrination which can be stronger if it builds off of already pre-existing in-group indoctrination in these Western fringe types of communities, one of which, of course, in Utah are the Mormons. Well, they're not fringe in Utah, baby. They're the dominant culture. No, exactly. In fact, in Utah, evangelicals are French. I was actually floored i looked it up there's like less than 10 percent of the utah population is evangelical christian no it's a it's a it's Mormon it's catholic uh it's muslim and it's eastern

orthodox and a lot of it is very old actually too um you know like the there are old middle eastern families they're old like greek families um you know out here but it has not you know again coming from kind of the south and the mid-south where like you know and even like Arizona where my nephew and my brother live and we went to that the mega church actually that Charlie Kirk attended was Dream City Church. What a name. Well, I wrote this profile of Mike Flynn for the for the New Republic that was a pretty good story. I wrote it like that was at the same church as Charlie Kirk. Yeah, that same church that I go to in that article with my nephew is the same church that Charlie Kirk attended.

Oh, shit. I don't know if I even put that together. Yeah. Yeah, Dream City Church. They have an amazing concession stand. It's like a movie theater. I bet. Yeah. And I saw like, you know, there's a guy walked around outside of there with like a six

shooter, like a big one too, like a, you know, like a cult python type shit. It was like, what the fuck? But, you know, that's just Arizona. But yeah, like Utah, it's Interesting in that, like, it has resisted kind of the evangelical strain that has taken over a lot of America since television honestly came out, you know, the Billy Graham kind of strain. And with it, the perhaps we could say alternative current among the conservative movement that today, may be occupied by the mainstream LDS Mormon Church

and that once upon a time perhaps was staked out by Philo T. Farnsworth, the original Mormon technologist of surveillance. Wizard. He's a wizard, dude. Yeah. He invented TV. He saw it in a vision while he was plowing a few. field in Rigby, Idaho, which is where my brother's buried.

So, yeah, we have, like, we have plenty of follow-up material to do another episode, and I'm happy. Hell, yeah. So I think we'll pick up with all of that next time, building on the foundation laid here. Before we sign off, Matt, we want to thank you heartily for your time for your... Hey, no, thank you. And thanks for... You sent out a mic, so I don't sound as shitty as I did last time. Oh, yeah.

Um, hopefully, inshally. Oh, I'm sure it's going to sound great. And besides, it's what you are saying that counts more than how it sounds. And to the listener, we've said it once, we'll say it again. Please, please subscribe to Matt's substack, the hunt for Tom Clancy by his book, American Cipher about Bo Bergdahl and the it's another chronicle of the decline and fall of the American Empire told in a way that only Matt can tell the story through this personal yet zoomed out panoramic lens that is peppered with the witticisms that you've enjoyed here over the last hour and a half.

have and we are going to pick this back up. Matt, you want to drop your socials and any other plugs that you might have for the listeners before we say farewell? Yeah. Yeah, if you want to get me on Twitter or X, I'm at Hunt Clancy. The Hunt for Tom Clancy on Substack. That's my thing. And look, there's 122 dispatches in there. It's seven bucks a month or $70 a year. sign up for a month like see if you like it read through the stuff and if you do keep going because it honestly does like i'm able to do this work because i have a pool of subscribers that you know pay me some money every month to do it and it's very much appreciated it's all used for gas or marijuana um or you know something something essential to the uh to the creative process

Yeah, business expenses. Yeah, I'll occasionally, you know, like, I'm not going to preclude that, like, I will maybe if I get, you know, enough subscribers take, like, a lady out to a fancy dinner, you know, but that's part of my process. Business development. Yeah, it's business development, and, you know, it's good. And we didn't even talk about, which the listener will learn if you peruse the dispatches from the hunt for Tom Clancy, but we didn't even talk about it. the fiery end that your Subaru met out there in the American West. My poor Subaru. Yeah, that's, you know, I said earlier, like, I would generally say, like, I have a paid-off car

and I have, you know, I have a house that I'm paying a mortgage on. Like, I'm doing pretty good as far as, like, America stuff, you know. Like, so honestly, if you're having real trouble and you want to read The Hunt for Tom Tom Clancy, you can email me and I'll help you out, too, like, honestly. But, um, like, I would rather. people know the information and like take money from you if that's the deal but um you know i i know this is a communist podcast so i figure i have to put that out but the uh um you know i do i do value the free exchange of knowledge um but i also like value being able to like get through the

month with fucking inflation you know um so uh yeah that's where we were with that yeah i'm sorry it's the end of the day it's like 10 30 here and i'm i'm stupid at this point i think i don't what you're talking to man this is amazing this has been amazing okay well thank you guys I I and yeah if you if you want to read my stuff like subscribe that's great it's fun there's it's not all

it's like this stuff either I I've been attending services at a the only place in the US where you can legally be mummified it's a pyramid cult in Salt Lake City founded by a an ex-mormid guy named Claude Newell who rebranded himself as corky raw and then summon bonum almond raw and they're also they have a

they have a license to make wine which they call nectar publications i don't drink so i haven't tried any of it but and then they also have the trademark on the term sexual ecstasy and they sell a sexual enhancement product called mur so there are three revenue streams are they're the only place in the u.s that you can be legally mummified and they'll mummify humans and pets um they accept donations and then they make the wine nectar publications and then they make like sex lube

dude it's like I get a little bit in there I incredible the Utah Rabbi Shmooley I went to I went to a ESP camp in Virginia where the army used to send like people to be trained to psychic spies

like all sorts of weird shits on there it's not all like um you know, like serious stuff. But it's all interesting stuff, I think. Hell yeah. And we love, love to have you on the pod. Well, I love being here.

And we can't wait to continue the conversation. Well, come out, come out and be in Utah for the next one. You know, you know I'm making that trip. Yeah, you guys should have fun. Come out for the winter. We'll go to Hot Springs. Oh, hell yeah. I love Utah.

Utah, honestly, Utah, one of the most beautiful states in the country in my book. Oh, it's gorgeous. No, I mean, I'm like, if I drive up to the gym to go to the pool, I'm passing, like, you know, I'm just seeing beautiful mountains. I'm like, it's gorgeous. I'm so happy to, like, be among this geography. I just wish it weren't peppered with, you know, devilish NSA data sites. Exactly.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, friends. Thank you. And to you, the listener, signing off, I am Don. And I am Dick. And on behalf of Matt Farwell, we say to you farewell. And keep on digging.

All right, folks, and this is the moment you've all been waiting for. As part of our new tiered Patreon membership, we are going to take. a little bit of time at the end of our episodes to give a shout out to all of those members who have really gone the extra step and made a generous monthly contribution. This one goes out to all of our doctoral candidates and research assistants. You know who you are, and frankly, I'm about to tell everyone else who you are because you deserve this shout out. Thank you so much to Frank, to David, to Al, to Kelly, to Annie, to John, and to Fern. You all rule.

We are so humbled by your generous offerings. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. When I was a good boy, I'd all would complain. When I was a girl boy, I'd all would complain. on the western flank I made a halie familiar pulling on the bridle-ranks come a cow-car yickey come a cow-car yike come a cow-car yuki come a cow-car yiki yeah oh the hardest battle was ever on the wilton's flame oh the hardest battle was ever on the western flank when to meet a bunch of cowboys running Come in a cow car, yicke, come a cow car, yi, yeah.

Come a cow car, yin, come a cow car, yin, yeah, yeah. When I mean a little cowboy, run in to jess and jessie jane. When me now, would you cover, run in to jett jett jane. That bullets were falling just like a shower rain. Come a cow car, yin, come a cow car, yke, yeah, yeah. Come a cow car, y, come a cow car, yeah. cow car yuki come a cowca yi yi yi yi yi yi oh the heart is better when it ever on bugger's me oh the heart is better