It Could Happen Here - Anti-Abortion Terrorism

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Mia Wong walks us through the bloody and violent history of anti-abortion terrorSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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your podcast hey it it happened here the thing that happened here was uh anti-abortion terrorism uh hi i'm christopher wong i'm hosting this We're doing this really speedy. With me is Shireen, Robert, Garrison, and Sophie. Hi. Yeah, hi. Hi. Don't feel too speedy. I mean, this is an important issue. Yeah, we're going through the intro so we can get to the content faster. Yes, the meat. Get to the meat.

Yeah, let's get to the fucking meat let's get to the sandwich portion of the i don't know what i'm doing here let's talk about terrorism we're talking about terrorism sophie your favorite thing first save the day so okay we've talked about sort of abortion as a as a legal issue but running parallel to the sort of legal electoral campaign against abortion was a wave, a systemic campaign of terror that ranged from, you know, sort of individual personal humiliation and terrorization of individual women seeking abortion to like nail bombs and blowing abortion providers heads off with shotguns. blowing abortion providers heads off with shotguns um yeah so it it's it's extremely bad obviously but i think there's a tendency among people who look at anti-abortion violence as sort of like isolated from its historical context which is that okay the american right has always ruled by terror from like literally as early as extermination campaigns against indigenous people who like whose land they stole to you know the sort of horrific psychological

abuse and violence inflicted against slaves on their own plantation who there's an entire history of like denying abortion people to slaves for numerous reasons so you know there's no reason really to expect that anti-abortion uh militants like wouldn't be violent and i i think it's worth noting that that the tactics of of the sort of militant wing of the anti-abortion movement which are things like arson bombings and assassination are these these are the key tactics of the of of the segregationist movement when they were fighting against integration and you know lo and behold like as as abortion becomes the political glue for the right after they sort of – okay, well, they sort of lose the fight over integration. They lose the ability to legally say that you can't do integration, but a lot of the sort of de facto segregation still exists.

But yeah, as they do that, you still see – you see a new generation of sort of right-wing militants like taking the tactics of the old right-wing militants and uh using them to kill people which is bad yeah for the for the record yes that is our official position yeah wow way to be we're taking a bold stance here radical Radicals. So I think we should start with someone who was not killing people because I think it's useful to see the sort of like the arc of how this movement goes. So John O'Keefe was a Catholic anti-war protester. His thing was – okay, so he's anti-abortion right but he wants to fuse like the anti-nuclear anti-war movements with the anti-abortion movement sort of in in the wake of roe v wade and this doesn't work because the anti-war and the anti-nuclear movements are like driven by leftists and feminists and they're like no like fuck off like we're not gonna like

we want people to have abortions. So, you know, but he still is, like, dead set that there should be this sort of, like, direct action against abortion clinics. And he managed to convince this, like, quicker

peace activist named Charles Fager to, like, teach the anti-abortion movement the sort of, like, techniques of, like, the civil rights movement to do, like,

nonviolent civil disobedience. And so people like like in the in the early 70s like as as row like is happening people start like chaining themselves to abortion clinics and you know like i think this is if you've been around the left long enough like these are tactics i think you'd recognize but these these are very very different campaigns then you're sort of like chaining yourself to to a tree. Like the, and the biggest difference is like the, the extent to which the focus is just purely on terrorizing people. So I'm going to read a quote of like what these protests actually look like

from the book, living in the crosshairs, the untold stories of anti-abortion terrorism. The protesters stand at the entrance to the clinic's parking lot and badger the patients. When they come in, they get screamed at the protesters, write down they come in. They get screamed at. The protesters write down their license plates.

They send them cards. They make phone calls to their homes. Protesters also swarm clinics and harass the people who work there. Those window blinds, Christina, who works at a clinic, explained while pointing at the huge windows that surround the conference table in one of her clients. that surround the conference table uh in one of her clients you pull them down you can look through them and you could find the protesters at the windows uh looking in and krista who's the person who's talking about this like she describes like the the like these protesters would walk up to her and like say her kids names you know in order to get like the the doctor into this clinic who's doing the abortions like they have to smuggle him in like that he can't park in the parking lot because the abortion like protesters will get to

him so they have to they have to like smuggle him in in in krista's car and like even then people follow them constantly like the the doctors and nurses have to like change their routes to work every day they have these like decoys they have to use um like yeah and for the record i've gotten reports from folks who work for abortion access organizations saying they are now in multiple states using drones to follow people as they leave the jesus their uh their license plate numbers yeah that god that makes sense but yeah like these people like krista the the the person I was talking about, like she had to transfer her kids to a private school that like knew what her job was so that her kids wouldn't get harassed. And like we'll come back to this sort of quote unquote nonviolent stuff later. But like even in its sort of like nonviolent phase, this is a terror campaign.

Like the goal of this is to terrorize everyone involved by stalking them, by intimidating them, by harassing them to get them to not do abortions anymore. Yeah, making patients or people that want abortions too afraid to get them and people that provide them too afraid to provide them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, this doesn't really work in the 70s. But by the time you hit the 80s it starts to get really violent um in in 1982 there's this guy named donny ben don benny anderson and his two nephews matt and

wayne moore carry out the the first anti-abortion the first action of this this right-wing anti-abortion and also they're like really anti-gay like they had that they have a thing later on where they like they have this giant celebration for like the saudis beheading two gay dudes or three gay dudes like they're they're horrible yeah this network is called the army of god and oh these guys yeah they're that sounds familiar yeah they're this very actually in some ways like they're they're very sort of quintessentially modern terrorist organization in that they don't have a command structure. It's not even so much decentralized cells. It's just like people just sort of can freely affiliate to it and use its name to carry out attacks.

And the first one of these is – it's this guy, Donny Benny Anderson. He kidnaps Dr. Hector Zavalos and his wife, Jean. And originally, their plan is to kill them um don benny anderson like he but what he writes about it is that he has been talking to god and he's been talking to archangel to the archangel michael and they have commanded him to go and kill this person and eventually like negotiators fortunately are able to like talk them down and like the the doctor makes this like tells them like yeah no no i'm not going to do abortions anymore that they let them go but yeah i think like like it is important to note that like among people who are like this

hardcore i mean and this isn't you know i said like there people, a lot of people who are more moderate than this, like the whole sort of talking to God thing, like that is not uncommon. No, that is like very common. No, these are all people who in their churches will like say a bunch of gibberish words and tell everyone each other that they're speaking in like the secret

language of God that God has like put into their brains speaking in tongues yes yeah so like yeah like and i think i think like there's some tendency to like like i've seen i've seen people try to write this off as people who are mentally ill it's like no no no no no no these are these are they're not mentally ill they just believe in a different world than you do yeah and they're willing to use violence to make their world real yeah yeah and the the the the letter that they write uh like while they're holding these people captive says quote those who truly love god would kill the baby killers and it turned out later that uh they've been funding their activities by robbing abortion clinics and actually that's not that's the thing that doesn't that i don't think i've ever seen any of the like like i don't think this doesn't get included in like the list of terrorist

things people do against abortion clinics but they get robbed a lot like there's like a lot of these militants are just robbing abortion clinics to fund their stuff um and and this is again like the thing you have to keep in mind when you're trying to analyze it like if you literally believe the things that these people literally believe this is the only moral thing to do yeah if there if there were just try and like get in their heads if there were an organization literally murdering babies every single day this would be the right thing to do that's like you have to actually like they're not crazy they fundamentally exist in a world that is as different from from the one you live in as the world in a fucking marvel comic

like it's it's it's just another reality that they exist within yeah and like you get sort of like you get like like i don't know you call it like people who are trying to play the centrist angle who were like oh like people on the left don't understand that it's like it's not about autonomy for them they literally believe they're killing babies it's like that doesn't like a no but like yeah like yeah the fact that they literally believe that abortion is killing children the only thing that does is make them more fanatical and more militant and it's like yeah like i i used to sort of believe like i used to believe that like oh like people don't understand they really think they're killing babies thing and then i went to college and i like read it started reading about the history of genocides and i started reading about like what

how common it is for people who commit genocides to literally believe that if they don't do this genocide that uh the people they're genociding are going to kill them and it was like oh oh no no that that actually that just makes you more likely to do violence like it's and yeah you know this this goes exactly how to expect in fact the the and this is one of the other things that they're very effective about which is each attack like radicalizes more people to start doing attacks so remember remember john o'keefe the guy who was doing the non-violent stuff like he starts questioning whether non-violence is the right tactic. He never bombs

anything, but he stops condemning violence in public. And this goes really, really, really badly, really quickly. The Army of God publishes this, it's initially a very clandestine thing, but they publish

this manual about how to attack abortion clinics. has stuff from like like pouring concrete overheating pipes uh how to make bombs um they have this thing that the anti-abortion people do a lot which is pouring uh bucolic acid which smells like it it is the thing that makes vomit smell bad it it it is the thing that makes vomit smell bad like you you can you can smell like two parts per 10 million like of this thing like in a room and they'll take like a syringe and they'll inject it into a facility and like like one drop of this stuff is enough that like you can smell it like months later there's no way to like easily clean it and eventually like they're pouring gallons of this stuff like into abortion clinics into the ventilation system yeah yeah it's there are more than a hundred of these attacks to date too like it's they've done this a lot yeah by 1984 this whole thing goes into overdrive um

i'm gonna read a quote from from the book armed for life the army of god and anti-abortion terror in the united states the national abortionortion Federation identifies 30 incidents of arson or bombing in 1984, exceeding the previous seven years combined. The series of bombings included, but was not limited to, the offices of the National Abortion Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., as well as abortion clinics in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The signature of the Army of God was also found in a subsequent clinic bombing in saratosa florida um one of the other things that they do uh that is that is great is uh so they have this they have a declaration of war that the army of god

sends they also like like specifically send a death threat to uh harry blackman who was the blackman was who was the guy who wrote the supreme court justice who wrote roe v wade which is like you know this is a fun thing if you've been with like the whole discourse cycle but oh we shouldn't protest at these houses like yeah man a terrorist group like threatened to kill the justice who wrote this thing like and and that guy um the the guy who wrote that eventually carried out like this enormous bombing campaign where he started strapping like 20 pound like liquid propane tanks to gunpowder bombs and blowing up clinics with them. And this stuff spreads like wildfire. People start using the army of God's bomb recipes to attack clinics in other ways. Like, yeah, we've talked about sort of

like the other campaign stuff that they use um and and this this starts to like a lot of the people who wind up in the full-on terrorism stuff were like people who used to be like non-violent protesters so uh shelly shelly shannon who'd previously been like a non-violent protester like goes violent in 1992 and starts doing these like butyric acid attacks and then she graduates to arson she attacks seven clinics offices and health centers and these aren't like like when i say attacks like this isn't like they threw a ball top at it like she is making napalm and like detonating napalm bombs like in inside of these clinics, it is. Do they even care if people are inside or they, so it's weird. Initially they're, they're targeting empty buildings,

but they're like, they're like working themselves up to it. And like, they, they start to be, they, they, they,

they, you can, you can read this in the writing. Like they, they, they're working themselves up to a point where they're like, well, okay.

If there was a person in this building, we don't really care. And yeah. Yeah. And, but 1992, 1992 the army of god like specifically in it in its manual like as justification for killing people and uh lo and behold one year later after this is one of the other strategies they use what what what was their justification uh they're killing it's like well they're killing babies and uh they have a bunch of bible verses that they cite and they're killing it's like well they're killing babies and uh they have a bunch of bible verses that they cite and they're like now we can kill people because they're killing babies tight wow it's great it's that's that's truly like in writing too horrifying yeah wow okay

yeah and like like literally the next year in 1993 uh there's all these they start doing this thing where they put wanted posters with like an abortion doctor's name in them like like literally like stuff out of like a like a battled west movie or they'll have like their name and like where they live and like that fact that they're a doctor and say they kill babies and uh so you know in in in in in 1993 In 1993, these posters go up for this doctor named Dr. David Gunn. And he's one day walking back to his car when he gets shot three times in the back by Michael Griffin. And he dies. And he is the first.

David Gunn is the first abortion provider to be killed. And he is not going to be the last. He is not the last. Yeah. So this immediately and the moment someone does it it like it opens the floodgates and suddenly everyone is doing it and so you know this makes people like uh shelly shannon who we talked about like setting off napalm bombs who until this point has only like bombed empty buildings like she starts

like considering killing people and a few months later she shoots dr george tiller and if you're thinking to yourself hold on wait i thought dr george tiller was killed in 2009 and not uh 1993 you are right uh shelly's assassination attempt like she shot him like in both arms but he survived to be murdered a decade and a half later um meanwhile there's this guy named paul hill who's just like a like abortion clinic like protester right he emerges in like the national media scene because he's he's like the he's like the guy who will go on tv and defend uh michael griffin killing killing a doctor and they just let him do this he does the whole fucking talk show circuit they just let him do this to defend yeah on live. He's on all of the mainstream networks to defend killing abortion doctors. And he does it again with Shelly Shannon's attempt to kill George Tiller.

And a year later, Paul Hill walked up to Dr. Joe Britton. Britton in blue is head off with a shotgun. Wounds his wife, turns around and then killed an abortion clinic escort named James Barrett. and killed an abortion uh like at clinic escort named james barrett like they had this guy on tv fucking every night saying that he like calling saying that killing abortion doctors is justified and that he fucking killed he blew an abortion doctor's head off with a shotgun the next year well and uh yet i don't think i'm what's exciting is that i'm sure that when there are more attacks uh by pro-choice oriented people uh at no point will anyone get brought on a tv network to say anything but but ask that cops get more money to crack down on oh yeah yeah it's like just the

media asymmetry here is is awful we're gonna talk about this more in a bit because uh it gets even worse um so that that same year in 1994 there's a gunman named john scali the third who walks into a building and murders uh shannon looney who is a social worker and anti-abortion like she's an anti-abortion and anti-child abuse advocate who's working at plant parenthood and he just walks in and shoots her uh he shoots at a bunch of the doctors and the patients and luckily they all survive but then he goes to another clinic and he kills social worker uh leanne nichols who was like working at the front desk there and he's eventually arrested he gets away with both of these ones but then he goes and

tries to shoot up a third clinic and that one finally like he gets arrested for but like and the other thing is like the third clinic that he shoots at like that's a clinic that had already been bombed this is a clinic that they've been protesting for years and he's you know he goes there and he shoots at these people and he kills two more people and yeah and it's you know and they just like keep doing this and one of the sort of incredibly grotesque things is that like okay so the the the army of god has this they have a website right and their website has these these things they call like the prisoners of christ who are like people who are like it's like prisoners of conscience but like christ who they like celebrate and they

like raise funds for and one of the ways they do this is they have this thing called the white rose banquet which is like one of the most offensive names I've ever seen for an organization. It's named after the White Rose Society, which is this Christian anti-Nazi nonviolent resistance group whose leaders were all killed by Hitler for opposing Hitler. And their thing is like, well, okay, so the abortion is the new Holocaust. And so they have this banquet that's in support of these terrorists. And at the first one of these in 1996, they released this thing called the Nuremberg File Project, which was this archive of abortion providers. It has their names. It has their addresses.

It has photos. It has their phone numbers. They target – and it's not just doctors, right? They target clinic staff. They target security guards. They who's who's around there and that they have like these like lists of different categories of people so for if you're still alive uh your name will be in like bolded black if you've been wounded your name will be grayed like grayed out and then if you die there's like if you get killed or you die there's a strikethrough through it so this this

is a kill list they've assembled and this is just like going you die, there's a strikethrough through it. So this is a kill list they've assembled, and this is just going around the internet. There's enormous numbers of people, providers, who are put on this. And they also, the White Rose Society, at this banquet, they start putting out wanted posters

with $1,000 rewards for closing a clinic and $500 for convincing a doctor to stop giving abortions and because these people are just like like i cannot emphasize this enough like literal monsters in 1988 they auction off the gun that shelly shannon used to kill george tiller well that's like a fundraising thing so yeah and uh there's a number of things you should think about that one of that is one of them is the fact that the local police department absolutely had to be involved in that. Because normally murder weapons don't go back to anyone.

They're destroyed. Which means the police were like, yeah, we absolutely want you guys to be able to auction this gun off. Wow. That's a very good point to bring up. Cool stuff. The fear tactics, of course they would work if your whole if your name is on this list and you have a family and you know what i mean like god i'm mad it's it's yeah i i will say there is an interesting thing with this we're like a lot of

some of the a lot of people who like get targeted by this stuff like it just pisses them off and they get even more committed to it which is like incredibly rad but also like jesus christ they just they have these abortion provider kill lists and people on this list get killed it's and encouraged like people are encouraging to kill them and like they do this in the open like there are like literally like christian radio stations will like they they will be they'll do this thing where like they'll they'll they'll start listing like like like by name and the addresses of like where the abortion providers near them are and then start talking about the biblical verses that justify killing them and then they will literally say on the radio go kill this person and they could just do this no one stopped them ever they just got away with this for decades Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the other... I think this bombing is famous, but I don't think the reason why it happened is famous um so there's a guy named eric rudolph oh yeah i was was wondering when you were gonna talk about rudolph yeah yeah so that's right now so so eric rudolph is most famous for uh nail bombing the 1996 uh atlanta olympics he sure did yeah he put a bunch of hundreds of people yeah

yeah he enters over people he kills killed one yeah it was former special forces guy right yep yep and uh wasn't he yeah yeah and uh he says that uh his commander in the the 327th uh air assault regiment taught him how to make bombs like out of out of like scrap stuff so he like yeah so so okay so he does it in 1996 it doesn't get caught right this this this guy this guy detonated a nail bomb at the fucking olympics and then and then a year later oh don't worry we're gonna we're gonna a year later this twice i know next year the next year he he he sets off a bunch of bombs and he sets off a bomb at an abortion clinic and this is like he this this is a double tap bomb there is a there is a bomb in a trash can behind that that's designed to kill the first responders um this is injure seven people yeah and then

injure seven and it kills a police officer actually it does it oh i didn't see that but yeah it kills a police officer yeah and then like the next one he he bombs an atlanta nightclub and wounds six people oh sorry specifically he does this twice a gay bar yeah he bombed he bombs yeah he bombs a gay bar um and there were that one he also like in the adjacent parking lot because again he was trying to kill the first responders that the the police find a bomb and defuse it before it can go off and again they still don't get this guy. Not until 2003. The next year, he bombs another abortion clinic with a nail bomb. This time, he kills a security guard named Robert Sanderson and permanently injures a nurse named Emily Leons, who was left half-blind and permanently maimed by the fact that, again,

he set off a fucking nail bomb. Yeah, he was not caught for a while yeah and i want to stop here and talk about like how the bombing stuff is carried in the media right um as best i could tell and i went and looked for this no anarchist has killed someone with a bomb in the u.s for a hundred years like karl marx was closer to seeing the moon landing than a baby born today is of seeing an anarchist kill someone in the u.s with a bomb and yet anarchism everywhere is so constantly associated with bombings meanwhile the anti-abortion freaks fucking they bombed the 96 olympics with a nail bomb and he on when he was in his trial he released a manifesto talking about how deadly force is justified against people who operate abortion clinics he talks he talks about

a whole a whole bunch of like a whole bunch of anti-gay stuff a whole bunch of anti-abortion stuff like and he's like he's given the mic like on his trial just used to like read his manifesto yeah um it's pretty it's pretty wild wow where are all the pro-life activists when it comes to taking life that's interesting well but i mean but that's that's the thing though they're all they're all in favor of of like yeah they're arguing that it's self-defense for its defense of these these babies i'm not the most well defensive those who can't defend themselves exactly what they'll talk about yeah it is entirely within them the moral universe within they operate it's it is entirely consistent it's one of those things whenever like liberals will be like why don't they do this or why don't do

that that's not pro-life and it's like well because the word doesn't mean the same thing to you yeah it does that's fair well and and the the guy's doing this terror because like will occasionally you'll get some I mean, some of the pro-life people oppose this because they think it's bad optics. Right. But apparently it's not bad optics because, again, like, who are the people who get fucking remembered as bombers? Like, and I want to I want to read a quote from from the FBI. This is this is this is from from the book Armed for Life. This is from the book Armed for Life. In 1984, the year with the highest abortion clinic bombings to date, FBI Director William Webster went on television and informed the public, quote, bombing a bank or a post office is terrorism.

Bombing an abortion clinic is not an act of terrorism because the objective is social and anti-abortion violence. And I don't believe it currently meets our definition of terrorism Reagan's called Reagan called the anti-abortion it's worse okay Reagan called the bombings the abortion clinic bombings quote anarchist activities like they're fucking they're blowing up

abortion clinics and we're still getting fucking blamed for it like Jesus Christ I don't know a lot about anything so this is a lot of this is news to me which is wild that i'm hearing about a lot of this for the first time how have i not known about this they bombed the olympics and no one talks about it i just like i was just losing my mind the whole time and It's bad, and it's still happening. It's not...

It's just, like, three people were killed, and nine people were injured in an attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado back in 2015. Yep. There's been over... At least 11 murders tied to anti-abortion, like, action, I uh 20 26 attempted murders at least 42 bombings uh 200 arsons and then thousands and thousands of more uh like assaults and random

random incidents we should also point out here when we're talking about the murder counts the murder count is lower than it actually is because the murder count doesn't count the people who like the america like specifically the americans who went to canada to shoot abortion doctors and American like specifically the Americans who went to Canada to shoot abortion doctors and the Americans who went to Australia to shoot abortion doctors both of which happened and threats against abortion providers have increased exponentially just since

2010 like they have more than quadrupled like it is it's constant it's been escalating at such a at such a rate that every year's data is insufficient for talking about the current period like it's it you can't you can't even talk about it uh because all of the data is so inaccurate now that's how fast this stuff is accelerating and and like there's a few other things that like like we should mention when

we talk about the statistics one of the reason is the reason the death toll is like quote unquote only 11 is because uh bomb making is really hard. And a lot of these bombs don't go off. So, for example, in Canada, a worker at a clinic discovered a bomb with two pounds of nails in it that, quote, had a destructive capability of 100 feet. And also, like, I should put this out like, OK, so like, there's a lot of abortion doctors who are killed like outside of their clinics, but also there's a guy named James Copp who, who shot, he shot like four doctors and he shot them like in their homes, like with, with, with, with an SKS, like in their homes through their windows. in in the 90s and like and you know and like it like they keep doing stuff like this like in 2001 i don't know if i wonder how many people actually remember this i there was this huge anthrax scare what was it like that people were like like there were like there were anthrax attacks people were like mailing people letters with anthrax in it yeah and so right as this is happening um a guy

named clay wagner sends 800 letters signed by the r RB of God with fake anthrax to planned playerhood clinics in 17 states. And these anthrax packets, like it's not just like flour, right? These anthrax packets have BT in it, which is a pesticide that is so similar to anthrax that the package is tested positive. So all of these people, these 800 clinics who opened these letters, like thought they were going to die because they opened they opened a letter. There was white powder in it. It said it was anthrax and then it tested positive for anthrax and like to this day a bunch of abortion clinics like have uh like when they're like when they open their mail they have they have like a special room that is like sealed off so that if they open the mail and they open a chemical weapon, only the person reading the mail will die? Great. That's the side of a

good system. They also, a lot of Planned Parenthood have something kind of similar set up with the receptionist, where basically the way it's set up is that if there's a mass shooter, the receptionist can seal off everyone but them. It's like

a thing that you know you're getting into if you're in that gig. It's like a thing that you know you're getting into if you're in a plant if you if you're in that gig it's like someone might come in and i might have to die to try and stop them from getting to everyone else it's it's bad i mean just just from 2019 to 2020 there was a 125 increase in reports of assaults and batteries uh inside and outside clinics. There was double the amount of death threats from 2019 to 2020, and things have not gotten better

since 2020, so we're just waiting for all that new data to come in, because oh boy. Yeah, and I think there's another thing we need to keep in mind with this data is that there's so much stuff that doesn't get reported. All of those numbers are low. every single one of them is enormously low and there is a bunch of other stuff that these people do that just never gets talked about um well okay

so i think before we get into that i i do want to talk about the the most famous uh abortion provider who got murdered which is dr george tiller who is like a, a genuinely incredibly heroic figure who he was. So keep doing it after the first time you were shot. Like you would be a hero if you did it up until you got shot. Yeah. To keep going after. Yeah. Like he got shot.

His, his clinic got bombed. There was an entire, uh, I, yeah, his clinic up on what was the other one? Yeah.

He, he, he was, he was one of the, he, he was, I think he was, was actually I don't know if it was that anthrax threat or like a different anthrax threat but like people people like he

kept getting anthrax threats there was this thing called operation rescue which is I guess there's still version of this around but they're these like they do these like giant like non-violent civil disobedience campaigns where like thousands of people will show up to a place and they'll like chain themselves to the buildings and they'll like prevent anyone from getting in and they'll like terrorize everyone around there and his office

is one of the is one of the ones that was targeted 1991 which is like in there like they had this big campaign called operation rescue it was targeting like him specifically and there is one fun story in this which is they tried this in minneapolis 1993, but they got their asses kicked by a bunch of anarchists and had to all run away, which was extremely funny. But yeah, like the other thing that that's important with with Taylor specifically is the extent to which the right wing media is like like culpable in this. in this um like tiller like bill o'reilly specifically is is constantly yelling about tiller he calls tiller the baby killer he accuses him of running a quote a operating a death mill executing babies about to be born and destroying fetuses for just about any reason right up until birth date uh he one of his rants he literally says like right before well not right before like pretty close to when tiller gets assassinated uh quote if i could get

my hands on tiller well you know can't be vigilantes can't do that it's just a figure of speech but despicable oh my god it doesn't get worse does it get worse no well so he's just like this is just like the shit that that he's shit that he's being subjected to by the media. And then, oh, lo and behold, he gets murdered. You know what doesn't? Uh-huh. I don't know. I have nothing to say.

You know what doesn't do a coordinated terror? You know what would be dope? Here's what I'll say. You know what would be dope? If when somebody came to shoot George Tiller, that person had gotten shot repeatedly. That would have been cool. That would have been neat. But anyway, here's ads.

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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.

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And we're back with more horrifying stuff um yeah so there's a lot of focus i think you know there's been a lot of media coverage recently about this just because like you know as as a reaction to the incredibly bad faith like oh look at the sanctity of of people protesting at the supreme court it's like they blew people's heads off with shotguns but you know i and like that's good and i'm really glad there's more media reporting about this but i want to talk about you know there's there's an incredible focus here on the shootings and bombings and like there's good reason for that but i want to talk about some other shit that the forced birth fanatics do because it's horrifying it

doesn't get talked enough about enough um so one of the people who gets interviewed in in living in the crosshairs which is a great book by the way it's it's about uh i mean okay i don't agree with all of its policy recommendations but it's a book like interviewing like abortion providers about their experiences one of the people they interview is this guy named rodney smith who's an abortion doctor um and i'm just going to read the stuff that they do to this guy because it's. Okay. So protesters show up to his son's wedding. Um,

they, they burn his house and his farm down. They burn 17 horses to death. They kill their dog, their cat, and all of their possessions. Wow. Yeah.

From the book. How do the horses help kill babies? Can tell me that and the cats uh yeah we will uh yeah imagine imagine if an anarchist group did this yeah everyone would lose their minds i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna read a quote about this from this book someone mailed a letter postmarked the morning of the fire justifying killing the animals on Rodney's farm because Rodney quote murdered little children however the letter was untraceable they do this shit all the fucking time and it never

gets reported because the reason it never gets reported is because when the city comes to investigate they fucking destroyed the entire scene of the crime they destroyed the entire scene of the crime so thoroughly that when the fire marshal showed up the day after they they tried to arrest um they tried to arrest vodney smith smith for evidence tampering because they thought that he had done it great yeah that makes sense wow and let less lest you think this is the end of the shit that this guy goes through

right like they when they find out he's like going to like a conference or like they find out he's staying in a hotel, they do these campaigns where like they'll do these mass call-ins to the hotel saying, hey, there's this person here. Yeah. And if you don't kick them out, like we're going to protest all your branches. He gets kicked out of hotels. He gets attacked by an anti-abortion protester in the chambers of the Supreme Court. Like that Supreme Court's the big one how did they even get in the to the chambers of the supreme court he was just one of the people who

was showing up at this thing and the guy like throws him out of his chair but grabs and throws him out of his chair picks up the chair and starts beating the shit out of him with his own chair in this is in the chambers of the supreme court they beat an abortion doctor with his own chair in this is in the chambers of the supreme court they beat an abortion doctor with his own chair and you know so rodney had had security with him right because i you know it yeah when you're an abortion doctor and and people are this targeted at you yeah you you have security so you don't get attacked like this but the the court wouldn't let him like bring his private security inside and the rationalization was uh he had been assured that quote nothing ever happens in the supreme court wow uh-huh the thing about this

right you cannot find a news article about this right a guy got beat up by these people in the supreme court if literally anyone who was not a fucking forced birth anti-abortion fanatic did this there would have been a news cycle that would have lasted until the fucking end of time there would have been a movie and three shows made about it yeah and there's just nothing like that is wild like that is really showing like these things don't get these things aren't big problems right because they they they aren't challenging to any kind of power structure. So they're allowed to happen because they're just reinforcing things. They're not actually challenging things.

But still, it's very brazen when you're killing like 17 horses and going into the Supreme Court to beat someone with a chair. You would think that someone would say something. And I've never heard of this before. Yeah, me either. And this is like right up your alley, Gare. I know. This is like...

The thing I want to emphasize about this, this is the things they did to one guy. Yeah. One doctor. This is happening. This stuff, this kind of stuff, is happening to people is right like this stuff this kind of stuff is happening to people every fucking day across the country and there is nothing there is jack shit you might maybe see a report in local papers like maybe it is a it is a it is a just an incredible campaign

of terror but this guy is like he is staggeringly based uh he hit this quote from that book again uh rodney is used to this type of verbal abuse and sometimes reacts in kind when a priest called him a murderer uh rodney responded by calling the priest a child molester when the protesters told rodney they were praying for him he responded no you're praying upon us there's a difference so he rules and he likes he'd been a doctor who like did other stuff and when the abortion people i think i think it was after they burned his house down he was like no fuck you i'm only gonna do abortions now he is like staggeringly based wow like yeah which i guess also like this is this is a thing that like so like obviously like i don't

think any leftist has ever fucking lit people's horses on fire not that I know of generally they would have more of an instinct to free the horses yeah like you have to be like genuinely monstrous to light horses on fire like they scream like horses scream like when you light them on fire

I mean and cats and dogs animal like animal abuse and animal murder bites is like pretty pretty uh despicable and there's uh just justifying it by saying it's because they were on the property of someone who helps gives abortions is some wild some wild thinking none of those words are in the bible actually there, there is a lot of animal murder in the Bible. That's true. Never mind.

They do kill a lot of people in the Bible too. They kill a lot of people and animals. Yeah, okay, well. But I will say that there is a thing that can happen where sometimes targeted protests on a person just makes them dig into their beliefs. Sometimes, yeah. and that sometimes and and i and i think like here i think like there's a lot of people who are just stunningly brave who go through this shit and just still keep doing it because like this is something that they believe in and you know and those aren't even like that extreme examples of like the kind of stuff that happens again i mean again we've talked about like

again nail bombs right like people getting their heads blown off with shotguns. There's a systemic campaign of terror that is felt incredibly acutely by the people who need these services, who need to get abortions, who need to get reproductive health care, and is felt by the providers of that health care. And nobody else in society sees about it or talks about it. And they have, you know, okay, so I'm going to read another quote from Living in the Crosshairs about the tactics that these groups use because they have so many things. These tactics include bombings, arson, anthrax scares, and mass blockades. Extremists have also thrown butyric acid into clinics, glued clinic locks shut, locked themselves to clinic property using items such as bicycle locks or chains, drilled holes into clinic roofs so that clinics flood invaded invaded clinics vandalized clinics made threatening phone calls tried to persuade patients to go to fake clinics which we've talked about that in our uh our episode on crisis pregnancy centers but those

that is also like part of the systemic campaign of terror is deceiving and humiliating people into not getting abortions uh they they put spikes on driveways they they they'll they'll stand one of the this is a very common thing is they'll stand on stand outside of abortion clinics talking about how they're going to make bombs and like the chemicals that they're mixing and uh yeah they'll they'll lay down on sidewalks in front of buildings they will they will jump on people's cars uh they will camp out in front of clinics for like multiple day stretches. They send decoy patients like into the clinics to disrupt it. It's just so much. Yeah.

And like, like the, the brazenness with like, again, like if there are things on there, like, okay. And like,

okay. So like, I, I don't want to like make this point too much because like, yeah, you can get away with a lot of stuff, right? You've,

even if the state is hunting for you, there's a lot of stuff that you could do that you can get away with. But like the level of stuff they've been able to get away with a lot of stuff right you even if the state is hunting for you there's a lot of stuff that you could do that you can get away with but like the level of stuff they've been able to get away with like the fact that they've been able to literally on the air say that you should murder a specific abortion doctor mention them by name and the fact that i know people who have had the fbi show up to their doors because of jokes they made on Twitter. It is fucking appalling. Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, they're not, they don't,

the law doesn't exist. The law doesn't matter. It's all about who's actually challenging systems of power. Yeah, and the police are, like, again, this is, well, one of those is they literally do cross-burnings. Like, fucking, they literally do cross burnings like fucking like they literally do clan style fucking cross burning so i i can once again go back to the old rage

against the machine classic some of those who work forces are the same who burn crosses because it is literally the same people the cops will cooperate with them like um there's the other thing they do a lot is uh they'll just like shoot bullets through the windows of clinics yeah that is just constantly and they never get caught yeah they know no no one no one cares that is very common yeah and like a fire bombs happened to this day one of the incidents they talked about in that book was um so they like this is stuff that happened at like one clinic they they they set the clinic's fence on fire in the middle of the night they uh plug the downspouts on like the roof after like a giant snowstorm so that like when

when the snow melted the water like poured into this hole they drilled it flooded the entire clinic um they had another one where they they drilled holes in the ceiling of the clinic and ran a garden hose through it and flooded the entire building and yeah again like none of this stuff ever makes the news like like what and you you can compare you compare the reaction to this to like how they reacted the animal liberation front right yeah absolutely that that caused there was like there were like there are there were like like law enforcement like techniques there are law enforcement organizations that exist today specifically to stop people like like that exists today specifically because of this campaign to stop the animal liberation

for freeing animals like these people and you know and i should say this like also like there's this whole push to like oh we need to call these people terrorists and like yeah like bill clinton called these people terrorists and like what happened nothing like they they they got one law that was like fine that was like that was that was about trying to keep people from protesting grass out of clinic but that got struck down by the supreme court because again we live in in a society that is constantly moving towards theocratic fascism if you torch construction sites or sedans or people wanting to destroy sections of forest then you're then you're a terrorist um if you send out mail bombs and do and kill a whole bunch of horses

you're just you're just some some dudes i guess yeah and one of the things that's incredibly frustrating about the story is there'll be people who are being stalked right or that they're being harassed like they're being intimidated these people keep showing up they'll call the fbi and the fbi will go yeah we don't care and then the next day they'll get shot by the same person this happens multiple times with multiple and like both like the the we talked about this with the person who killed tiller um a lot of the people who do these anti-abortion murders like we're just irregular anti-abortion prisoners and protesters and like everything that happens a lot is like people will go to jail for an abortion bombing they'll come out and they'll do it again and it's like you know one of the one of

the really scary things about this as well i know this is this has been stated before this isn't by any means a new a new a new uh thought or framing but with all of the laws getting enacted around the whole like bounty hunter side of things for like how there's going to be you know citizens being deputized to track down both abortion providers and people who sought out abortion. It's giving all of this strain of thought, all of this driving ideology, it's deputizing it,

and it's giving it actual legal backing. So it's no longer just ignored by law enforcement. It is now being encouraged by local governments. All of these all of these same motivations are now like you can get rewarded for doing this um and oh boy will people seize on that opportunity yeah and i think that there's a thing we can talk about with with fascism here where it's like okay so like what what is fascism and if you're looking at like one of the one of the things that like if you if you're using using a strict classical definition of fascism is the integration of parties or party paramilitary forces into the state.

And this is what we're looking at is we're looking at these people who have been fucking bombing abortion clinics for 50 years starting to do this stuff and and i think like i'm gonna read another passage about the kinds of stuff they do to individual people because like i i think you know i mean i keep going back to just like here's the the high level terror that they're doing but like yeah like the individual people um after being verbally targeted at her clinic for years protesters started harassing tammy mad Madison through various written communications. First, the protesters distributed flyers throughout Tammy's neighborhood, including one at Tammy's door. The flyer listed Tammy's address,

the make and model of Tammy's car, and listed a telephone number purported to be Tammy's number. Then the protesters appeared at her home with signs displaying her name that said she kills babies and hires the baby killers. When they were outside Tammy's house,

they handed out flyers about her to anyone walking by they they do things like they'll use like licenses for example because again you have to get licenses right to to to provide abortions to be a doctor and so they use licenses to find personal information about people these the people out there are like i mean they're right-wingers right so they're they're really racist they like they they love screaming jew doctor at people because yeah like they racial slurs they they constantly out people like the nail bomb guy also attacked gay bars yep yep there's a lot of uh crossover in terms of uh who they want to attack yeah and like they do constant death threats there's also a thing i want to talk a bit about which is like these malicious legal lawsuits so one of the ways that people go after like clinics is that they're constantly clinics are like constantly under legal people are constantly

suing them people people are suing them just to find out personal information about them because the court will give court will give you information uh they get they have like these fake like fake case inspectors who will come in in order to infiltrate the things like they have there's legal enormous legal pressure from the state itself which is often trying to destroy these clinics they're like they'll pass laws specifically to make us the clinics can't operate in various ways um like people who are just like district attorneys will will do investigations into them over and over again uh they also they go after like the kids of providers constantly. I read a story

from this book that, again, no one ever talks about. They kidnapped this provider's child, her 12-year-old child, at a clinic, and tried to indoctrinate them, and then eventually gave them back after a few hours.

But again, they kidnapped a child of one of the people who works at these things and they're no one even talks about it like there's never there's never anything i just i don't know like i i just like the the more you go into this is like the more stuff that you see that like, like they, they target people's parents. They'll like show up at like the nursing homes of like the parents of like, of these doctors,

like they'll target their neighbors. They go after the donors to the clinics a lot. Like they'll, they'll, they'll send them pictures of like bullets and knives. One of the things they do often is that those burn down completely to the wrong clinic. So there's been a lot of cases where they just they attack the clinic next to it because they're not yeah mind-boggling the stuff they've gotten it's

yeah i want to i want to end on this guy named john brockenhoft who he bombs three abortion clinics over two decades like he's one of the guys who they sent to prison and then he came out and they bombed another abortion clinic um and i want to read this quote from him my orders to vietnam didn't suddenly materialize unexpectedly i volunteered to go because i saw the south vietnamese people were being threatened by a communist takeover and i figured if they were willing to fight for freedom they deserved to be free and deserved help too he goes on to point out in january of 73 i had just returned from voluntary participation in a bombing campaign in support of the liberty of people 8 000 miles away so i hope you will believe i will i would not have turned my back on my own people american babies my own people american babies if you had asked

for my help in bombing an abortion an abortionary in this country even in 73 and especially since it was not mere liberty but very of their very lives at stake i would have gone with you so this guy's literally saying he's still fighting the vietnam war but he's doing it to bomb abortion clinics and he went to vietnam because he wanted to kill communists and uh this guy uh was at the capital on january 6th that sounds about right so yeah like it like one of yeah we're like the moment we are at now is this sort of detrius of like every crime the u.s has ever committed is just rolling back and you know we're we're we're seeing all of these people who yeah fought in vietnam and

came back home and like killed a bunch of people who did abortions and did a bunch of bombings and now they're you know and they they they tried they just tried to do a coup they're probably going to get away with like an action like a legal coup pretty soon because they've now seized control of the court system and it's like well yeah this is how they did it they do a really effective uh combination of violent direct action and legal challenges uh their their actions able to be so successful uh one because like the tactics they choose to cause material damage and material change but also obviously like they're not getting like investigated the same way anyone else would right because like they they are they are capable of doing this effective action

because they don't face any any similar level of oppression to any other group that would that would be doing this especially if they're on the left um so like it's it's it's it's always useful to look at the tactics of your enemy and how they do certain things, but you can always have to realize, like, this is the same thing with January 6th. If it was a whole bunch of people in Black Block storming that,

the response from the cops would have been very different initially and continue on throughout the whole day in the subsequent investigations. So, yeah, always good to look into tactics but the the response from the government's always going to differ depending on who's doing the actual uh challenging yeah and i think i said two things about this one like there are things you can learn from how the right operates you can't carbon copy their tactics

and try to do them from the left because it just won't work because the start the structural conditions for the left are just different but the second thing is also that like it is simultaneously true that the level of oppression against leftists is higher than it is against right-wingers and also that's true and it's also true that you can do stuff and like people have and yeah i mean like none of the jane's revenge people have gotten caught yet so like you know we will we will see yeah i mean maybe by the time this episode comes out and that'd be like well we'll see like in general right yeah yeah especially when movements are decentralized um but yeah i mean wow they

sure get they sure get to get away with a whole bunch of stuff you can be doing like pretty public uh bombing incidents for almost a decade and not get caught um if you just you can bomb the olympics and not get caught for like seven years yeah it's wild and i'm also just assuming the vast majority of these guys are white and so they're not oh yes yeah so it's also that and also the fact that this didn't happen like a long time ago. It's still happening. And that's crazy that we still don't hear about it. Yeah, like we talked about on this show like a few weeks ago. Like people lit another abortion clinic on fire.

Like that happens still and will continue to happen. And people continue to not care about it because it doesn't threaten anyone who's in power and so the media doesn't care and it's been happening long enough that there's this sense of like normalization around it it's not seen as radical it's seen as oh obviously some people think that's justified it's not it's not surprising um and that normalization allows way more people to both feel capable of doing something, and when it happens, there's not this big of a fuss. I do think it's also true, though. I think there are a lot of people – I think most people don't know that this happened.

I think there's an extent to which the level of violence has been totally invisibilized. Sure. the level of violence has been totally invisibilized sure and you know because i mean the other thing about this again is the reason that they're working like this is because this is a completely minoritarian position right like they don't actually have that many numerical supporters it's just that they're able to sort of well you know they they they have enough people to wage a systemic campaign of terror and because of that they're able to inflict their fascism onto the rest of the population. That's a good ending, Sy.

That was a good ending, Sy. Yeah. That's, yeah. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. Thanks for listening. by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come

Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.