It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 36

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal 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 tech's 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 música, 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. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here.

And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Oh, it could happen here. And by goodness, it continues to. I'm Robert Evans. Sophie, my producer, just noted to me that we should probably introduce Shireen Lonnie-Yunus since you've recently joined the team and have been on several episodes.

And we just kind of rolled with it. Shireen, what are you? Who are you? Where are you? When are you? Those are a lot of questions I can't answer. You are a frequent ghost on, guest. Ghost.

You're a producer with iHeart. You're on the show Ethnically Ambiguous with Anna Hosnia. And you are our bud. I am your bud. Thank you. Yeah. I joined recently. Published poet.

A filmmaker, a depressed person. You know, I tick all the boxes. You helped Sophie bury that body the other year? Yeah. That was between us. Yeah, I don't know why we need to put that on mic. Between you and Lake Mead. Okay, well, everyone's going to know where that body is,

so I appreciate that. You're going to find it soon anyway. But yeah, it's really fun to talk to y'all, so it's nice that we can record me doing it now for work. Cool. Is that a good intro? Yeah. That is a good intro.

We're really excited to have Shireen on our team. It's something that we've been hoping that would happen for a while now. And we just feel very fortunate to have her voice as part of our very tight-knit group. And you're welcome, listeners. Yeah, motherfuckers. I feel very honored to be a part of such a small, tight-knit group, especially because everyone, I'm not even saying this to fish, please, but everyone here is much smarter than me.

And so I've been learning a lot, and I don't do nearly as much research as y'all do. So I hope to be the like a someone representing the audience that knows nothing. You know what I mean? Like, that's my role here is to really give people to let people be seen who have their heads empty like mine. So representation matters well i i feel like we had empty-headed represented when i joined the team but fair enough what are we what is our who are we today what are we doing today where are we today

chris you're the president of this episode oh no wait that's bad all right so i'm gonna i i think i think i have to assassinate myself it's the way this works um but yeah we're legally actually yeah that that i think next episode i assassinate myself this episode i'd get unelected or something but yeah we're we're talking about sort of two two convergent paths of how we got to like the most recent disaster with the most recent well this isn't even the most recent disaster with the most recent... Well, this isn't even the most recent disaster anymore, but... How we got to the place where Roe v. Wade is about to die. And, you know, there's two threads.

And tomorrow we'll be talking about the terrorism. But today we'll be talking... I say we, mostly we should read, but yeah. We're going to be talking about how... The sort of, of like half a century-long electoral movement that got us to this place yeah it's really interesting because i mean some of it is self-explanatory and some of it isn't but i think it's interesting to go back in time and really figure out how we got where we are so i think it's pretty obvious that like

republicans use the abortion issue uh to forge coalitions with like right wing and fundamentalist Christian voters. But Democrats are also using it to attract women voters. And it seems like neither party will risk modifying the rigid position that it has for fear of alienating those who the abortion issue has helped attract. Because it feels like it's this just we're at a standstill it's not solvable but it's actually the when you look at the history it's pretty i don't know it kind of makes sense how we landed here and every presidential candidate or any candidate in general will present these countries issues with like a sense of urgency especially this issue but it really feels like they're just using it to attract voters and then it gets ignored. But how did, how did, how did abortion become a partisan issue in America?

The polarization of the parties on this issue really started in the 1970s and party leaders just started moving farther and farther apart on the issue. And a lot of scholars say that this is a combination of like grassroots activism and also established, also just political strategy. So in the 1970s, the politicians' views on abortion didn't break down along the party lines. Republican President Gerald Ford, he opposed Roe v. Wade, but the First Lady was an abortion rights supporter and then his vice president rockefeller he presided over the repeal of abortion restrictions in new york um and uh in congress republicans voted against abortion about the

same rate as democrats so there wasn't a huge black and white good evil kind of thing going on. And it started to change in the 70s. So during his presidential campaign in 1972, Nixon began striking out anti-abortion positions or staking out anti-abortion positions as part of a strategy to appeal to Catholic voters and other social conservatives. voters, and other social conservatives. And after he won with the majority of Catholic votes, Republican strategists began using the same tactics in Congress, and they were forging coalitions with evangelical groups around opposition to abortion. And it was really this larger effort to make the Republican Party painted as this pro-family to help mobilize socially conservative voters that really value this idea of this like traditional and quotes family so it might have been both grassroots uh organizing but they i

think both of these efforts really focused around this idea of this traditional quote-unquote like christian good family um and i think that's still the uh a lot of the intention today is to really promote that and why abortion is wrong is because it kind of goes against this idea of what a family should look like or how families should act like in particular how a mother should act um so yeah thoughts yeah i mean like i definitely think we see that everywhere. That type of propaganda is, you know, there obviously, and then there in, like, the, like, oh, this is, like, hidden in type thing. But, yeah, I mean, Chris has talked about that quite a bit on certain things. So maybe Chris would be best to deep dive on that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things that have been like

like are percolating around this time too which is also like this is this is a period of like really intense feminist mobilization and this is also a period where you know the one of the sort of rights driving issues had been integration like like opposing integration and like promoting segregation and by this period they've like they've basically lost that and so they need like something right and like that something winds up being this vision of this sort of like of this like very specifically white christian patriarchal family and and i i think it's also interesting that like you know if you look at the initial abortion stuff is largely yeah i was like okay the republicans are targeting catholics

right and the reason they're targeting catholics because evangelicals in particular like haven't quite figured out what they think about this yet and this kind of like family stuff and the the i don't know it ties into this whole sort of this attempt to get evangelicals into politics for the first time or maybe not for the first time but they'd kind of been out of it for a while like on this sort of like well the rapture is coming so like what's the point of dealing with like this impure like secular sort of politics thing and yeah they get sort of roped back into it by the the the polarization of abortion and by making like by by making abortion in the family this incredibly sort of central part of what the republican platform is and by sort of like you know like attempting to destroy the kind of like more moderate uh

like rockefeller liberal wing of the republican party who just like get stomped don't exist anymore yeah no that's a good point and um i think it's interesting because i feel like we see a lot of candidates go back and forth on the issues now but it even started i mean it's been going on since forever because politics are all a scam. But Ronald Reagan really illustrates the shift because when he was a governor of California in 67, he signed a law that loosened abortion restrictions. But in his 1980 presidential campaign, he called for the appointment of anti-abortion judges. So he's just, I mean, just like any political candidate, he's going with the

tides. He's trying to get elected. He's not really, no one has actual morals that they stand on. Yeah. And only after 1988 does it show that more Democrats than Republicans were supporting access to abortion because before then it was pretty, pretty much even if not just a little bit uh yeah it was mainly honestly split over whether or not you were fucking catholic right like that was the primary determining factor yeah yeah and i think that there's an interesting thing there too because a lot of you know because it's like the the the anti-abortion people see reagan as like their but then he gets into office and he's like, not as strong on it as they wanted. And well,

we'll get into some of what that leads to next episode, but yeah, this, this was like fundamentally when you're looking at like the anti-abortion movement, it's a, it's a Christian nationalist power grab. And at that point they had just figured out the strategy.

So it was good enough that they were able to help get Reagan into office. But it was not consolidated enough that Reagan really felt the need to do much more than pay it lip service, you know? Yeah. Well, just an example of everyone campaigning on something that they know will get them voted and then kind of ignoring it once they're in office because, like, it served its purpose. them voted and then kind of ignoring it once they're in office because like it served its purpose um i think there's there's another interesting thing that's going on here with that too which is that at this point so this is this sort of the the john of like jerry farwell and the moral majority and okay if you want to hear me talk about this for a really long time uh go listen to my episode on the moonies and how reverend moon also was a huge part of this but there's like this giant shift in like the technology of recruiting voters where this is where you start getting mailing list

organizing this is where you start getting like you know enormous list of people to call for fundraisers this is where you start like you know this is where you start basically getting like the the weird facebook letter like chain mail things that we have now but like they were just like mail people like scare stories about like here's like an actual baby that we have now but like they were just like male people like scare stories about like here's like an actual baby that planned parenthood killed and like that also that's what i was saying by like the obvious things propaganda wise but yeah i i think that it's also like things on tv things in movies yeah yeah they're like uh things in movies yeah yeah they kind of try to pull at the heartstrings of some invisible heart they think people have um but even even like t like tv commercials

yeah things that like the traditional family that like yeah the nuclear white christian family is like the default basic family and anything that strays from that is abnormal um it's still the case now honestly i think yeah i know yeah calls for diversity or like putting a black friend in the show still you know what i mean like it's not really yeah i i have i i eventually i will do the entire rant that i have on this but like like this is a thing that like this is a powerful enough force that like for example if you look at like every asian american movie in the u.s the the entire plot of every asian american movie is trying to repair is a family like in an asian family trying to become the white christian nuclear family but having problems with it because they're having

family issues that get resolved and then having problems with it because they're chinese yeah and it's like it's it's this like warping sort of like yeah like structural basis of society that like it's like a black hole that like like it tears the fabric of reality and pulls everything else into it you know i i have the same gripe with a lot of just in general like uh movies and tv shows about marginalized people middle eastern people it always seems like the crux of the problem is cultural and overcoming whatever issue the culture is having to disrupt this perfect white Christian life that is presented as the ideal. But going back to abortion.

You're sorry? No, don't apologize. I would love to rant about this with you on another episode. You know what won't disrupt the white Christian hegemonic culture in the United States? Capitalism? The products? Well, actually, it eventually will, because the nature of extractive capitalism and endless growth will inevitably alter the world in ways that makes the lifestyles that those kind of people harken back to in their propaganda fundamentally untenable and impossible to exist on any kind of scale. But I don't know what my point was here.

Here's some here's some fucking ads. Oh, we're back. We're back. Let's go to's some fucking ads. Oh, we're back. We're back. Let's go to the late 80s, early 90s. So ladies, the lady, both Republicans and Democrats at this point, they were trying to appeal to the center for a while so they can remain as appealing to voters as possible. Mary Ziegler is a law professor at Florida State University who has studied the history of abortion and the abortion debate. She wrote in the Washington Post that the 1990s

and the early 2000s, for instance, many abortion opponents devoted their energy to supporting incremental restrictions like a ban on dilation or extraction, which is a technique for abortions later in pregnancy that opponents call partial birth abortion. And this restriction was eventually passed at the federal level in 2003,

and is far less sweeping than the heartbeat bills that many Republican voters favor today, which ban abortions, as you know, at six weeks. But Democrats, meanwhile, they were somewhat like equivocal on the abortion debate during this time period. Bill Clinton, in his 1992 campaign, he famously said that abortions should be, quote, safe, legal and rare. Hillary Clinton used the same language when she was running in 2008. Yeah, like I thought you still hear that too. Yeah, you really do. It's like just absolutely cowardly. Yeah, like we support it, but also don't do it.

Yeah, like, yeah. And obviously more recently, both sides of the abortion debate, they've come to seek broader change among abortion rights supporters. There's been an increasing awareness of reproductive justice. And this term was actually coined in 1994. And it describes an approach focused not just on the legal right to

abortion, but on safe, affordable access to a range of reproductive health care, as well as the ability to parent children safely. And it was in the 90s that a lot of organizations started to be formed to help support this, to help abortion rights justice kind of take form. Sister Song, which is the Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, was formed in 1997. And it was by 16 organizations of women of color that formed these four mini communities. They were largely made up of Native American, African American, Latina, and Asian American communities. And they recognize that we have the right and responsibility to represent ourselves and our communities. And I think this is important to note only because I don't think women of color get enough credit for really leading the fight to get reproductive

rights. I feel like a lot of i mean i can shit on white feminism all day trust me um but especially when it comes to this a lot of white women are like heralded as like i don't know these um political heroes when really most of the time with most issues when it comes to this uh women of color are in the background doing most of the work. That's another episode. But Sister Song defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we do have in safe and sustainable communities. So it puts a lens on the emphasis of affordability of abortions uh as well as on the legal status that it needs to have to even be safe and affordable um because the right of abortion means very little when we can't afford health care that we need um and this is something that

kimberly innes mcguire said she's the executive director of Unite for Reproductive Gender Equity called URGE. This is a rights group focused on young people. So there's a lot of things that emerged during this more recent time that came focused on more the justice aspect versus just the right to have it, because it doesn't do much if we have the right, and yet it's still inaccessible. So in the last five years, reproductive justice activists have campaigned to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which was first passed in 1976, and it bars federal funding for most abortions. It restricts Medicaid coverage for abortions, and the amendment makes it difficult

for many low-income Americans to pay for the procedure. The opponents of the Hyde Amendment have had some successes. In 2017 and 2019, Democrats in Congress introduced the EACH E-A-C-H Women Act, which would repeal Hyde and allow Medicaid to cover abortions. But Democratic candidates have campaigned to repeal hide as well. During her presidential run in 2016, Hillary Clinton called for the repeal of hide, and the whole Democratic Party followed suit, which is something that would have been unthinkable in the years when her and her husband were calling for abortion to be quote-unquote rare. So things have progressed a little

bit again. I think, uh, unfortunately though, most of it is for following the trends versus actual morals, but that's my opinion. Um, but on Hyde, um, uh, it feels like what has changed in the last five years is that a community of people, um by young people women of color decided that the status quo was not good enough so again it's just people in the background doing most of the work um and at the same time abortion rights activists have been working to reduce stigma around abortion and to present the procedure as a normal part of medical coverage. In 2017, in response to efforts to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, activists and ordinary people shared stories of their abortions under the hashtag

ShoutYourAbortion. So the left party, the Democratic Party, is definitely leaning now, obviously, to be abortion positive. But I also think it's definitely used as a way to attract voters more than anything else and um yeah uh i mean with our current president right now uh we all know he is biden has had a mixed record on abortion which is like very a good a good representation of just how flip-floppy politicians can be because when he was in the senate in 73 he was a 30 year old practicing catholic um who concluded that the supreme court went too far on abortion rights in the row case he told an interviewer the following year that a woman

shouldn't have the sole right and say to what what should happen to her body that's a quote uh the sole right to say what should happen to her body he doesn't think women should have that and by the time he left the vice president's mansion in 2017 he was 74 years old and he argued a far different view that government doesn't have the right to tell other people that women can't control their body um which is interesting because he he not only was very vocal about being anti-abortion but like he uh used like in 1981 he crafted the biden amendment to ban the use of foreign aid for biomedical research related to abortion so he was not only like vocal about it he actually tried to push it back. And he repeatedly voted for this

Hyde Amendment that prohibited the use of federal funds for abortions, including Medicaid, as I said. And both of these policies remain in place today, despite efforts by Democrats to end the ban on the use of federal funds. Here's one thought that I have. And again, I continue to be an advocate and don't take this the wrong way. We should learn from the right and how they made the progress they did with abortion. There are lessons there. And one of those lessons is that when you make something into the kind of issue that can get a politician elected. They will not actually pursue that issue if it's difficult unless you create true believers and put them into politics. Right. Reagan got elected in part on abortion.

Reagan didn't really do much about it. it it was it was diligent periods of time of not just like putting people in politics who believed in the cause but also of applying brutal pressure to elected leaders over decades who didn't confirm firm could or conform and we don't have that kind of time with like let's say climate change. But the same basic tactics need to be followed, which is you need to be vicious when you when your leaders, when the people you elect don't move on these issues. You need to be vicious and like a concerted and organized and like you need to come down on them like the hammer of fucking God. You know, I think that's that's how you win. But I think that's the biggest difference with the Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats, unfortunately, are far more cowardly in voicing what they want. Even even now, Biden is pro abortion, quote unquote. But he hasn't even said the word abortion out loud ever.

He's tweeted it once he tweeted in a statement shereen it was in a tweet the fact that there's a website there's a web there's a website that is called has biden said abortion yet and there's just a big no on it right now obviously um but he has like cast this evolution of his views uh as a like t like wrestling with his teaching of his faith or whatever um but it's obviously more it reflects a political calculation more than his views of fucking religion um and in 2015 for example he said i'm prepared to accept that at the moment of that the at the moment of conception there's human life and being, but I'm not prepared to say that to other God-fearing, non-God-fearing people that have a different view.

What the fuck does that mean? Nothing. Because he's a coward. What the fuck does that mean? He's a coward. Joseph Robinette motherfucking Biden. What in the Christing fuck does that mean? Yeah.

He also has been quoted to say that this issue is the most difficult thing he's had to wrestle with as a Catholic kind of thing. He's definitely made it this thing he needs to overcome or whatever the shit. It's a religion, right? Sure. It's a religion, and your religion has been, at the very least, what I'll say about the Catholics is they did not adopt this as like a venal political strategy, which the evangelical right did. The Catholic Church has been consistent on this for a minute now, so I get why somebody who is legitimately a believing Catholic would have to struggle with this. But the way you, what you, what you say, if you're actually not like a fucking, if you're not being a fucking goober about it,

what you say is, Hey, this is tough for me because of my faith, but this is the United States of America. And my faith does not dictate what other people get to do. And so I support the right to access to abortion that's what you say just please can you do that um but no i mean i only want to bring that up because i just think the democratic party has conducted themselves in a really cowardly way when it comes

to stuff like this versus republicans are so outright even like volatilely trying to tell you how they feel uh but but yeah that's that where do we go from here I don't know um yeah the world is the world it certainly is Shireen and uh we'll be back tomorrow uh Chris what's

our focus tomorrow uh tomorrow we're gonna look at uh the other side of how they got abortion other than like sort of running as an electoral issue, which is they did a. An amount of terrorism that is so large that, like most of the people talking about the terrorism missed most of the terrorism. Yeah, it takes a minute to list. Speaking of terrorism. That's the end of the podcast here's ads oh yeah ads i i know i just wanted to sorry there is post roll ads but if you're listening to

them that's a choice bless hey we always support people making the choice to listen to our wonderful advertisers like the washington state highway patrol and lately taseraser. Oh. Yeah, they've been running. Look, we don't approve that. We're getting them removed, but it is funny. Can I get a Taser first? Or is that not what that is? I mean, Shireen, we can expense you a Taser. Oh, shit, great.

I'll send a list of what I want. Perfect. Okay, bye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. 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. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. González 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 González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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It happened here. The thing that happened here was anti-abortion terrorism. 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. This is an important issue. We're going through the intro so we can get to the content faster get to the 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 Chris saved 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 forever 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 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 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, 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. do integration but a lot of the sort of de facto segregation like still exists but yeah like as i do that like you still see you know you 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. Yes, yeah. Wow. We're taking a bold stance here.

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. He, 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 movements 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 going they're like no like fuck off like we're not gonna like we want people to have abortions so you know but but he 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 convinced 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 non-violent 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 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, 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 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's a works at a clinic explained while pointing at the huge windows that surround the conference table in one of her clients. You pull them down, you can look through them, and you can find the protesters at the windows looking in. 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 it's yeah like these people like Krista the the the person I was talking about like she 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 non-violent stuff later but like

even in its sort of like non-violent phase this is a terror campaign like the 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 it's yeah yeah yeah and but you know this doesn't really work in in the 70s and 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 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 a very sort of quintessentially modern terrorist organization in that like they don't they don't have like a command structure it's not even so much centralized cells it's just like people just sort of can freely affiliate to it and like use this name to carry out attacks and the first one of these is it's it's this guy donnie benny anderson he kidnaps uh dr hector zavalos and his wife jean and originally like the the their 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 gonna 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 are people a lot of people who are more moderate than this like the 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 who are mentally ill. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. These are just Christians. No, 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 letter that they write, 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 they've been funding their activities by robbing abortion clinics and actually that's another 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,

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 used to sort of believe like I used to believe that like, oh, 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 the people that are genociding are going to kill them. And it was like, oh, oh, no 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 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 like the right tactic and he never like bombs anything but he like stops condemning violence in public and this this goes really really really badly really badly, really quickly. The Army of God publishes this like – it's initially a very clandestine thing, but they publish this manual about how to attack abortion clinics. But it has stuff from like pouring concrete over heating pipes, how to make bombs. anti-motion people do a lot which is pouring uh bucolic acid which smells like 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 a facility. And one drop of this stuff is enough that you can smell it months later. There's no way to easily clean it. And eventually, they're pouring gallons of this stuff into abortion clinics. Into the ventilation system. Yeah, yeah. There are more than 100 of these attacks to date, too. They've done this a lot.

Yeah. By 1984, this whole thing goes into overdrive. I'm going to read a quote from the book Armed for Life, the Army of God and Anti-Abortion Terror in the United States. The National Abortion 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. One of the other things that they do that is great is they have a declaration of war that the Army of God sends. They also 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 or spreads like wildfire people start using the army of god's bomb recipes to attack clinics in other ways like yeah we've talked 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 molotov at it like she is making napalm and like detonating napalm bombs like inside of these clinics. It is. Do they even care if people are inside or so? It's weird.

Initially, they're targeting empty buildings, but they're like they're like working themselves up to it. And like they start to be they you could read this in the writing, like they're working themselves up to a point where they're like be they they you could read this in their writing like 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 by 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 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 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 That's truly like in writing to horrify. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And like, like literally the next year in 1993, 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 so, you know, in, in, in, in, in, in 1993, 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 in 1993 uh these posters go up for this doctor named dr david gunn and uh he's one day walking back to his car when uh he gets shot three times in the back by michael griffin and he he dies and he he is the first that 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 anti-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 tv he's on all of the mainstream networks to defend killing abortion doctors and he does it again with uh shelly uh shanna's attempt to kill george tiller and a year later uh paul hill walked up to dr joe britain britain and blew his head off with a shotgun. Wounds' wife turns around and then killed an abortion clinic escort named James Barrett.

They had this guy on TV fucking every night saying that killing abortion doctors is justified and that he blew an abortion doctor's head off with a shotgun the next year. Well. And yet i don't think i'm 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. He was awful. We're going to talk about this more in a bit because it gets even worse. So that same year in 1994, there's a gunman named John Scali, the third, who walks into a building and murders uh shannon loney 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 at 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 that's it's named after the white rose society which is just like christian anti-nazi like non-violent resistance group who's like leaders were all killed by hitler for opposing hitler and they their thing is like well okay so the abortion is the is the new holocaust and so you know they have this banquet that's like in support of these terrorists and they at the first one of these 1996 they released this thing

called the nuremberg file project which was this like it was this archive of like abortion providers it has like their names it has their addresses it has photos it has their phone numbers um they target like and it's not just like doctors right they target clinic staff they target security guards target anyone 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 around the internet

there's enormous numbers of people who like providers who are who are put on this and they also like the the the white rose society like at this banquet they start putting out wanted posters with like a thousand dollar rewards for closing a clinic and five hundred dollars for like 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. Yeah, and there's a number of things you should think about that. 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 good point to cool stuff the fear tactics they would be like 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 where 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 an 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, 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 and decades so one of the other I think this bombing is famous but I don't think the reason why it happened is famous so there's a guy named Eric Rudolph oh yeah I was wondering

when you were going to talk about Rudolph so Eric Rudolph is most famous for nail bombing the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He sure did. Yeah. He put a bunch of hundreds of people. Yeah.

Yeah. He enters over people. He kills one, killed one. Yeah. It was a special forces guy, right? Yep.

Yep. Wasn't he? Yeah. Yeah. And he says that his commander in the, the three 27th air assault regiment taught him how to make bombs, like out of, out of like scrap stuff.

So he like scrap stuff. So he like he does it in 1996 he doesn't get caught. This guy detonated a nail bomb at the fucking Olympics. And then a year later Oh, don't worry

we're gonna a year later this twice. The next year, he sets off a bunch of bombs at an abortion clinic, and this is like, this is a double-tap bomb, there is a bomb in a trash can that's designed to kill the first responders.

This injures seven people. It injures seven, and it kills a police officer, actually. Does it? Oh, I didn't see that, but yeah, it kills a police officer. Yeah, and then, Oh, I didn't see that. It does. Yeah, it kills a police officer. And then the next one, he bombs an Atlanta nightclub and wounds six people. Oh, no, sorry. Specifically, a gay bar. Yeah, he bombs a gay bar.

And that one, he also, in the adjacent parking lot, because, again, he was trying to kill the first responders, 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 like permanently injures a nurse named Emily Leons who was like Emily Leons who was left half blinded like permanently maimed by the fact that again he set off a fucking nail bomb and he was not caught he he was not 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 i went and looked for this no anarchist has

killed someone with a bomb in the U.S. for 100 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 his trial just used to read his manifesto. Yeah, they just let him read his manifesto.

It's pretty wild. Wow. Where are all the pro-life activists when it comes to taking life? That's interesting. Well, but that's the thing, though. They're all in favor of like... The lives of the babies, they think.

Yeah, they're arguing that it's self-defense or it's defense of these babies. I'm not the most well-earned of this stuff. Defense of those who can't defend themselves is what they'll talk about. It is entirely within the moral universe within they operate. 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 they 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 you 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 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 in 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 is social and anti-abortion violence and i don't believe it currently meets our definition of terrorism uh reagan's called

reagan called the anti-abortion nonsense it's worse okay reagan called called the bombings the abortion clinic bombings quote anarchist activities like they're fucking they are 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 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 was just losing my mind the whole time. 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 action, I guess.

26 attempted murders, at least 42 bombings, 200 arsons, and then thousands and thousands of more assaults and random incidents. We should also point out here when we're talking about the murder counts the murder count is 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 the americans who went to australia to shoot abortion doctors both of which happened and threats against abortion providers have increased exponentially yeah just since 22 uh just since 2010 uh like they have more than quadrupled. It's constant. It's been escalating at such a rate

that every year's data is insufficient for talking about the current period. You can't even talk about it because all of the data is so inaccurate now. That's how fast this stuff is accelerating. And there's a few other things that we should mention when we talk about the statistics oh 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 um and you know and also like, I should put this out like, okay, so like they, they, they,

there's a lot of abortion doctors who are killed like outside of their clinics, but also, uh, there's a guy named James cop who, uh, 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. And he, he killed Dr. Barrett Slippy iny in in in the 90s

and like and you know and like it they like they keep doing stuff like this like in 2001 i don't know if i 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 rb of god with fake anthrax to plan 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 just tested positive and 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 well great that's the side of a good system yeah yeah they also a lot of planned parenthoods have something kind of similar set up with the receptionist where the basically the way it's set up is that if there's a mass shooter the receptionist can like seal off everyone but them yeah like 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 um 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 when we need to keep in mind with this data is that there's so much stuff doesn't get reported all of those numbers are low every single one of them is enormously low and there's 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

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 would 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 but to keep going after yeah like he got shot his clinic got bombed there was an entire uh i oh yeah his clinic got bombed what was the other one yeah he he was he was one of the he he was i think he 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 um 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 will show up to a place and they'll like chain themselves 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 in 1993 but uh they got their asses kicked by a bunch of anarchists and had to all run away which was extremely funny but yeah like i'm the other thing that that's important with with teller specifically is the extent to which the right-wing media is like like culpable

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 that that he's being subjected to by the media and then oh lo and behold uh 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 you know what would be dope here 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 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 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 mean, okay, I don't agree with all of its policy recommendations, but it's a book like interviewing abortion providers about their experiences. One of the people they interview is this guy named Rodney Smith, who's an abortion doctor. 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.

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 you tell me that and the cats 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 wow they do this shit all the fucking time and it never gets reported

and 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 tried to arrest they tried to arrest Vodney 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 that 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 gonna protest all your branches he gets kicked out of hotels um he gets attacked by an anti-abortion protester in the chambers of the supreme court like that's the big one how did they even get in the two, 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, grabs him, throws him out of his chair, picks up the chair and starts beating the shit out of him with his own chair. This is in the chambers of the Supreme Court. They beat an abortion doctor with his own chair. And, you know, 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 well uh. And 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 um but still it's very brazen uh 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 um and i've never heard of this before no me either this guy this guy right up your alley gare i know this is like the thing the thing i want to emphasize about this this is the things they did to one guy yeah right one doctor this is happening like this 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, 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'd been a doctor

who did other stuff. And when they abortion people, I think it was after they burned his house down, he was like no, fuck you. I'm only going to do abortions now. He is 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 left generally that they would have more of an instinct to free the horses yeah like, 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. And cats and dogs. Animal abuse and animal murder by itself is, like, pretty despicable. 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 is there is a lot of animal murder in the bible that's true never mind they do kill a lot of people and animals yeah okay well yeah but but but i mean i i will say that there is a thing that can happen where if if like sometimes targeted protests on a person just like

makes them reinforce like dig into their beliefs 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 there is 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 – 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, ar 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 common thing is they'll stand outside of abortion clinics talking about how they're going to make bombs and the chemicals that they're mixing. And yeah, they'll lay down on sidewalks in front of buildings. They will jump on people's cars. They will camp out in front of clinics for multiple day stretches. They send decoy patients into the clinics to disrupt it. It's just so much. Yeah.

And like the brazenness with like like again like yeah if there are things on there like okay like okay so like i 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 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, they literally do cross burnings. Like, fucking, they literally do clan-style fucking cross burnings. So 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, 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 can

compare you compare the reaction to this to like how they react to 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 front 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 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 you 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 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. A lot of the people who do these anti-abortion murders were just irregular anti-abortion prisoners, protesters. And 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 really scary things about this as well – I know 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 people who sought out abortion um 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 same

motivations are now like you can get rewarded for doing this 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 like a strict classical definition of fascism is the integration of of of like parties or like 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 a bombing abortion clinics for 50 years like 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 our clinic for years protesters started harassing tammy 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 do things like they'll use licenses, for example, because you have to get licenses 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 there 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'll pass laws specifically to make it so the clinics can't operate in various ways. People who are just district attorneys will do investigations into them over and over again. They also go after the kids of providers constantly. story from this book that again like no one ever talks about like they they kidnapped this this provider's child like her like 12 year old child like at a clinic and like tried to indoctrinate them and then eventually gave them back after a few hours but like again like they 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 to 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 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 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 US has ever committed is just rolling back. And 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 – 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, their action is able to be so successful. One, because, like, the tactics they choose 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 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 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 blocs 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 response from the government's always going to differ depending on who's doing the actual challenging. Yeah, and I think – I'll say 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 structural conditions for the left are just different.

But the second thing is also that like it is simultaneously true that the level repression 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, none of the James Revenge people have gotten caught yet. So, like, you know. We will see. Yeah. I mean, maybe by the time this episode comes out.

That would be unlikely. We'll see, like, in general, right? Yeah, yeah. Especially when movements are decentralized. But yeah, I mean, wow, they sure get to get away with a whole bunch of stuff. You could be doing

pretty public bombing incidents for almost a decade and not get caught. You can bomb the Olympics and not get caught for like seven years. 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. 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. Like, yeah, like we talked about we talked about on this show like a few weeks ago like like people 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 it when it happens there's not this big of a fuss i i do think it's also true though like i think there are a lot of people like i think most people don't know that this happened like i i think i think the there's an extent to which 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 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 you know they have enough people to wage a systemic campaign of terror and because of that they're able to inflict their sort of they're able to inflict their fascism onto the rest of the population

sigh that's a good ending sigh that was a good ending sigh onto the rest of the population. That's a good ending, Sai. That was a good ending, Sai. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez 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. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head,

search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners,

for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Unfortunately, some of these recordings haven't got the best sound quality.

We were walking around the Butterfly Center. We tried our best to block the wind, but some of it's pretty blown out. We still wanted you to hear them, so we've included them, but apologies that the sound quality isn't what it could be. So we've included them, but apologies that the sound quality isn't what it could be. There was a time when you could have been forgiven for believing that American fascism had been thoroughly beaten back, marginalized, and damaged beyond the capacity for reconstitution. Only the very foolish and dishonest believe that today. Every time the far right has taken a serious beating in this country, they've had a place to retreat to, a sanctuary to reorganize, recoup, and surge out again towards

the halls of power. That sanctuary is the U.S.-Mexico border. There's a song I quite admire by the drive-by truckers named after a young Mexican man, Ramon Casiano. In 1931, after the kind of stupid altercation young men have been having since time immemorial, Ramon was murdered by another kid named Harlan Carter. Harlan was convicted of murder and then led off by another judge due to a procedural issue with his case. It hardly needs to be said that Harlan was white. He went on to join the Border Patrol during a period when it was seen as a model of good racial policy by the Nazi government in Germany. Carter rose to lead the Border Patrol, helped to militarize it, and then went on to run the NRA

and turn it from a simple gun advocacy organization to the far-right culture war institution it became. Everything we're dealing with today from the far-right started at the border. And, to quote from that song, that's still where it is today. But the border is more than just a battleground in America's endless culture war, and it is more than just the system of violence men like Carter helped make it into. The United States' border with Mexico stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through the homelands of many indigenous peoples and across the migratory trails of numerous species. through the homelands of many indigenous peoples and across the migratory trails of numerous species. And to many, many people today, it's still just home.

Mariana Jones Wright runs a butterfly sanctuary that has, somewhat improbably, provoked the direct ire of a U.S. president and become the center of a series of conspiracy theories. She also grew up along the border in the Rio Grande Valley. In high school, she'd take trips to discotecas and bars in Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, Texas. Today, she runs the National Butterfly Sanctuary just outside of the nondescript town which seems to have endless strip malls, big box stores, and family-run Mexican food joints. You can go there and see wildflowers, walk in the woods, and if you're lucky, like we were, you might even find a snake and some monarch butterflies making their way across the continent without regard for borders or immigration checks.

So, you know, growing up here, we all led very fluid lives, and I use that word deliberately. I mean, in the 1970s, during the gas crisis, you know, when Carter was president, we would literally drive to Mexico to gas up our cars and then come back. In high school, we would go to high school for lunch and cocktails and then come back for class or skip class and come back for football games all the time. I'm going to skip class and come back for football games on Friday night. Friday nights, Saturday nights, we were all in Mexico partying our asses off. They had the best discos and clubs. And our parents were over there, too, having dinner. I know people who are citizens who live in Mexico because it's more affordable,

because they have reliable electricity. I mean, y'all are laughing, but no, no, no. The border for most people living there, sometimes called fronterizos, is an inconvenience. You have to drive to a certain crossing. Sometimes your truck gets checked. Sometimes the port of entry is closed and you're late for work. But in the public eye, especially during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, it looms like a scene from Lord of the Rings. And since then, it's also started to look like one. So growing up here, I knew there was illegal immigration.

It's impossible not to know. I mean, nearly everyone knows someone who came across. They came to visit family on a short-term visit to their home, or they crossed the river somewhere. didn't have a home or they crossed the river somewhere. But you'll see here, our river is wide and deep and dangerous. It's deadly. I mean, when I was growing up here, and I'm 52, I had friends who lived in Mexico. Their parents had homes and businesses here and there. Some of them rode the bus across the bridge every day for school in the morning. I mean, it was nothing. We never thought of anyone's status, you know, in terms of citizenship or anything else.

And also, sort of liminal somewhere where people like me are not coming up the wazoo. sports, to navigate in both countries in which they have citizenship and rule, or they have nothing. And there seems to be hardly any in between. In mainstream media, the border is presented as dangerous, as are the people crossing it. But it's hard to feel that you're in danger when you're watching the sunset over the Rio Grande and listening to the owls who begin their work after dusk in the ever-diminishing wild places along the river's north bank. Up until a couple of months ago, we were coming out here four or five times a week, sometimes twice a day on our boat. And bringing a lot of journalists out,

it almost never wound up in their reportage because they never saw it. You know, they were like, yes, take us out on the river. We want to see the illegals crossing. And we're like, dude, the only way to do that is to hook up with the MAGA campaign officials working with the border patrol. Some of the most beautiful and fragile landscapes in the country along the southern border. Part of Mariana's work is introducing kids to them. I've been lucky enough to spend time in

many of them. Camping in East County, San Diego, where the PCT begins, is one of my favorite things to do. Riding my bike in southern Arizona is an adventure I take at every opportunity, and I'm not the only one. From jaguars to butterflies, many species of wildlife live along the border and pass over it on a daily basis. The border might look serious on a map, but for much of the last century you'd have struggled to point to it on the ground unless you had a GPS device and far too much free time on your hands. These kids that'll be here this week as part of their academic study, they thought the Rio Grande Valley was a desert. They didn't know that, you know, that we had 11 biologically distinct ecosystems in a four-county region that would fit inside San Diego County,

a four-county region that would fit inside San Diego County, California, that, you know, that we have the river that's not a trickle when everybody flushes their toilets, you know, like it can be in El Paso. I mean, they had no idea that we're the edge of subtropical, you know, America, the neotropics in America. Since 9- since 9 11 though the border's become a physical thing a landscape thriving with life that somehow found a way to exist in places that can kill you with heat in the day and cold the night and sometimes both in 24 hours has been torn apart to provide people who have never been there with a chance to grandstand about security, and various government contractors a chance to line their pockets.

Ted Cruz recently posed in a boat, wearing body armour and standing next to a machine gun, just feet away from where we watched recreational boaters sail lazily along the river. As we walked from the centre down to the river, we spotted some trash on the ground and went to pick it up. It turned out to be a battery, the kind used in a tactical flashlight or weapon light. Mariana doesn't use those, and it wasn't there last time she walked down the trail. It's not just the wall that's ruining this landscape, she says. It's the constant presence of militarized border patrol, who see the area as a conflict zone, not a conservation one. Mariana knows this only too well. Her butterfly center backs up to the Rio Grande.

It's a beautiful, peaceful place, but since 2017, it has been under threat from the relentless militarization of the southern border. The butterflies, she says, are important for a number of reasons. So butterflies are critical pollinators to all of the green stuff, most of which we don't eat. People know bees pollinate about one-third of our food, and so they care about bees now because everyone would hate to lose one-third of our food. But butterflies pollinate all of the grasses, wildflowers, all of the grasses, wildflowers, shrubs, and trees on the planet. The ones that reduce erosion by holding the ground in place against wind and against rain and floods. The plants that reduce the radiant heat that would come off of the earth if we didn't have the green stuff.

They filter the water going into the water table and they produce oxygen for us. They filter our air. That's why butterflies matter. And that's why everybody should care about them and do what they can in their communities with their endemic native plants to provide habitat for butterflies. It's not just the butterflies who are in danger, either. It's disgusting. But it is, I hate to say entirely predictable,

I hate to say entirely predictable, but it's fairly predictable in an end-stage capitalist society where we're moving from a military-industrial complex to a border security one, where border walls and border security are the United States' number one export. And most people don't even know about BORTEC. There's an operating world. Why? I have been shot at by BORTEC many times. And people don't realize it was the CBP drones that were flying overhead in Minneapolis. To understand exactly what is at stake, both for the border and the butterflies, it's important to understand exactly what the border wall looks like on the ground. The border wall ecosystem is not just a wall.

It's a towering 30-foot steel structure topped with anti-climb plates. Along the barrier, which is often hundreds of yards from the actual border, there's a road wide enough for two of the expensive pickup trucks the CBP drives to pass each other. In remote areas, a road to allow construction vehicles to get to the wall also had to be built. For landscapes that had been untouched for centuries, it's been catastrophic. That's why the National Butterfly Sanctuary fought the border wall. In the summer of 2017, they found contractors on their land, using heavy equipment to destroy the plants they had worked so hard to protect. After we found the contractors here illegally clearing our land with no right of entry,

no eminent domain exercise, no waiver of NEPA and other laws, we filed suit against the federal government. That brought some publicity. And with it, a lot of people who said, you know, that we, if we opposed border wall, we must be for illegal immigration, as though the issue is that simple. The wall, in addition to being a colossal expense, much of which is funneled to Zeckelman Industries, a Canadian-owned steel company which was fined $975,000 by the FEC for illegal donations to the Trump campaign in 2020, is pretty useless.

The border wall is built miles inside the United States, that Border Patrol picks up ladders every day, to share photos of ramps built so vehicles could literally drive over border wall, like, you know, the old Range Rover commercials, and also other breaches. We also got a chance to explain to them that up until President Trump, the Border Patrol Union itself had opposed border wall. They had called it a waste of monies, ineffective, and really irrelevant to their mission of preventing illegal entry to the United States. Walking along the border, we found half a dozen ladders constructed from old wooden pallets. Alongside them were IDs, clothing, and detritus that migrants had either abandoned on their journey north or had thrown out for them by Border Patrol agents who'd apprehended them.

Either way, these discarded things told a sad story of young people, sometimes parents and sometimes children with siblings, crossing a river and then a wall to try to get a chance at a better life. What the border wall does do, very effectively, is funnel people through the giant gaps in it. From Texas to California, the Trump administration has rushed to build as much wall as it could in order to live up to the wildly exaggerated claims that Trump made in his 2020 election debates. We now have as strong a border as we've ever had.

We're over 400 miles of brand new wall. Of that over 400 miles, 350-odd were repairs to existing barriers or secure fences, as they are technically termed. But the rest was built in places that were easiest to access. In Southern California, mountains and valleys are simply skipped. The wall stretches across the flatlands in between. People are forced to cross in these gaps, in the hardest places, and as a result, many more of them die. The Butterfly Center isn't one of the hard places, but Mariana has found dozens of identity documents, some of them in evidence bags

labeled Department of Homeland Security. She says that people aren't dumping them. They are being stripped of their documents when they are detained. I know that the other side, as we're seeing in the videos that we're making here in Maine at the end of January, they claim that the cartel strips the migrants of their phones and their IDs and stuff, and that's a lie. The cartel is a lie. The migrants keep their phones because their phone is how they became a family to say, you have to send more money, or I made it in the store.

The phone is the bank lifeline that not only, you know, aids the immigrant, the cartel. That's the only way they get paid. And the fact that Border Patrol is making people undocumented is something folks in the United States don't understand. They don't see that we find garbage bags full of medical records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, IDs, and other things from migrants that they have brought here with them, their identities, and their illness, or the violence that they've suffered, and everything to make their asylum cases. But Border Patrol trashes all of that. Throughout the four years of the Trump presidency,

the Butterfly Center fought to protect the ecosystem they had created and to keep the pristine riverbank for barn owls, not Border Patrol trucks. Mariana isn't alone. The South Texas Birding Preserve was forced to back out of a deal with the feds after a community outcry at the thought of the loss of one of the very few wild places in the area. While they have, so far, been able to stop the construction of portions of the border wall, they have not been able to stop the multiple armed agencies that police the border, and often each other, from encroaching on the center's land. Currently in Texas, there are several overlapping missions to protect the border. Under Operation Lone Star, Texas National Guard soldiers are deployed to protect the border and prevent drug smuggling and child trafficking, at least according to the office of Governor Greg

Abbott. Sadly, they're not able to protect themselves from each other. So far, four soldiers have died by suicide, two in accidental shootings. Texas law allows National Guard soldiers to bring their own personal weapons, which were responsible for both deaths. And one drowned trying to save migrants from the river. Because the troops are deployed under state orders, not federal ones, they receive fewer benefits and their families are not compensated as well in the event that they die. In addition to the 10,000 Texas troops,

there are also 4,000 National Guard soldiers on federal orders along the border. Task Force Phoenix, as it's called, is a combination of 34 different guard units stitched together with very little cohesion or prior experience working together, and has been blighted by low morale. Troops in this deployment are three times more likely to have a car accident than seize illegal drugs. And a battalion deployed to McAllen had three soldiers die, the same number as the rest of the National Guard combined that year. DUI issues are so common that breathalyzers are being issued to units. The crisis isn't at the border. The crisis is the border. It's not only United States soldiers

dying along the southern border, it's also migrants. According to the Missing Migrants Project, and the state is admittedly better viewed than it is heard, migrants coming from Central or South America are far more likely to die at the USA's southern border than they are at any other point on the way there. 1,248 people died or went missing last year making the trek north, 595 of them at the border. Given that the border, both under Republicans and Democrats, is a weapon that's increasingly effective at killing people and increasingly present in political debate, it's surprising how many people have never been there. The border, at least the bits of it without

the wall, doesn't feel violent. One night while we were in Texas, we sat on the bank of the Rio Grande and looked across the river at the sunset. Behind us was a wall funded by private donations to a group called We Build the Wall. It's built so close to the river that the weight from the border patrol boats will see it undermined and washed away in less than five years. Across from us, little cabanas and bars studied the shoreline. It looked idyllic, and were it not for the thousands of armed people who make it their job to stop it, it would have been quite nice to swim across for a drink.

Swimming over was out of the question, but the peaceful border we encountered was not the one you'd recognise if you've seen Fox News over the past four years. For much of middle America, the border's constructed as a lawless land, somehow also as a desert despite the fact that 1,200 miles of it are marked by a river, and a place where cartel violence goes unchecked, human trafficking runs rampant, and young children are snatched away from their families and sold into sex slavery.

Of course, young children are snatched away from their families and sold into sex slavery. Of course, young children are snatched away from their families at the border, but that's your taxpayer money at work, not the Zetas or Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación. Sadly, the Butterfly Center's opposition to the wall combined with this political theater at the border to place a group of people who just wanted to be left alone to be nice to butterflies at the center of a culture war they wanted nothing to do with. At some point, the Trump White House became aware that 100 acres of Texas grasslands were holding out against all the legal,

and questionably legal, efforts of Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to destroy the little haven along the Rio Grande. We know that Jared Kushner said in May of 2019 in the Oval Office, we solved the butterfly thing. And Steve Bannon had been the former special advisor to President Trump, and then he is the one who started this PSYOP.

And they took aim at us, and instead of us being against the wall and possibly for open borders, they declared that we were a cartel front and actively engaged in trafficking humans and drugs, that we were not about conservation at all, but we were selling women and children into sex slavery. Mariana's Twitter bio at a time of writing reads, Do no harm, take no shit. And that's the approach she took as the MAGA community began to sling an increasing amount of shit at her. The North American Butterfly Association filed suit against Brian Colfage, slash We Build the Wall,

Tommy Fletcher, slash Fisher Sand and Gravel, slash TRG Construction, and Lance Newhouse, slash Newhouse and and Sons on December 3rd, 2019. Colfage, a U.S. Air Force veteran, attempted to crowdfund the wall after Congress wouldn't fund it, to the ridiculous extent that Trump desired. He raised over $25 million. In August of 2020, Colfage was indicted, along with Steve Bannon and two other co-defendants, on federal charges of defrauding hundreds of thousands of We Build the Wall donors. Federal prosecutors said that despite repeatedly assuring donors that Colfage would not be paid, the defendants engaged in a scheme

to divert $350,000 to Colfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle. Colfage was separately indicted in May of 2021 on federal charges related to his falsification of tax returns. In April of 2022, Colfage entered a guilty plea, having accounted for about $10 million in spending and a little under five miles of actual wall. Colfage's attempts to build the wall in Texas were hampered by the National Butterfly Center lawyers, who argued that it was a flood risk, because it is, and by various tax issues that Colfage's team seemed entirely unaware of. While they hoped to transfer the wall they built, which they called the Lamborghini of walls, to federal ownership, CBP wanted nothing to do with it, as they were building their own wall

outside of the floodplain. After ignoring a 2019 ruling, Colfage eventually built about three miles of wall in Texas and then declared the project complete. In November of 2019, with litigation ongoing, Colfage took to Twitter to accuse the National Butterfly Center of having a rampant sex trade the butterfly lady and everything and the butterfly center. At first, you know, we kind of reacted with humor, like, this is too funny. Like, who in their right mind would believe any of this? And, you know, we even tried addressing, I mean, I didn't know who Brian Colfage was at the time, but, you know, we even tried addressing, I mean, I didn't know who Brian Colfage was at the time, but, you know, we replied like, you have a very, very active imagination or you're a really, you know, twisted person. And we used the hashtag liar, liar, pants on fire. Because we really did think it was ridiculous.

But any notion that this was not deadly serious was soon dismissed. And now I've become this lightning rod for extremism in American politics, or as I've told others you know I've had I've had a lot of journalists ask me what does it feel like to be at the crossroads of the culture wars in America and I'm like I'm not at the crossroads of the culture war. I live in the borderlands, which are the proving grounds for fascism in America. That's where I live. And we're going to see it more and more.

Everybody's going to see it more and more. They test things like the aerostat balloons here. And the fact that we didn't cut them loose and shoot them down and set them on fire, the fact that we were like, oh, that's kind of a pretty innocuous, you know, white balloon in the sky. We can live with it. Means that now it's gone out from under DHS to DOD

and it's being deployed across the United States. Coming soon to a community near you. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Elian. Elian. 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. Gonzalez 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. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents.

Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit. It's the one with the green guy on it. dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast. A few weeks after Colfeggio's tweet, the Butterfly Center closed its rusty gate. It reopened in late April of 2022, but the almost three months in between were a harrowing experience for Mariana and for the staff when we arrived at the centre in early March.

There was a police surveillance tower posted in the car park, and young men in Humvees on the road we travelled down to get there. Despite them, or perhaps in a sense because of them, and the theatre they represent, Mariana doesn't feel safe. She carries a gun on her property. Even without the wall, the militarisation of the border has had a huge impact on the centre. If you walk down to the river, she shows us some of the roads and access routes that have been built. Concrete goes here in the base of the levee, or midway in the levee. concrete goes here in the base of the levee or midway in the levee. And then they have to fill the gap to make this road up here wide enough for two to three vehicles.

And then down here, they'll have a high-speed, all-weather road. So we fully expect there's border wall and then there's border wall system. There's border wall, and then there's border wall system. The road, the lighting, the sensors, those sorts of things are part of the system. And we think it's good that people seize our land, clear and alter this poor system. Otherwise, they come down this high-speed, all-weather road, have to slow down, go up, and drive along the canal. And we know the number one killer of Border Patrol agents is motor vehicle accidents. As we walk along one of the roads, we talk about the impact the wall has had on wildlife.

I tell her a story about a deer I saw try to get around the wall into a pond. For whatever reason, it was so desperately sad that I can't forget it. The devastation the border wreaks on human life tends to get the most press, and rightfully so. But Mariana has spent years watching the wall spread like a cancer over the ecosystem she loves. The testing site, the addition of herbicide to keep the enforcement zone dead and free of any vegetation. It has to do with the installation of all-night bright lighting that disrupts mammals. And of course, the wall, when it eliminates range area, when it forms that barrier for land mammals and reptiles, When it forms that barrier for land mammals and reptiles, you eliminate genetic diversity from breeding, you eliminate seed distribution, all kinds of other things. So, no, there's no way to build a wildlife park without investing in wildlife.

It's especially clear where they're building it, in the lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Conservation Corps. Of course, the human cost is even higher. Mariana first became aware of exactly what was at stake when she, like millions of other people, opened up her phone and learned about the most recent in a string of hate crimes inspired by anti-immigrant rhetoric. A very disturbed young man drove from Plano to the Walmart in El Paso and massacred 22 people and injured dozens others. We were very much aware of that and believe that is

ultimately what We Build the Wall seeks to provoke here. The shooter, who openly targeted Mexicans and believed in the Great Replacement Theory, which is common among white nationalists, had posted a manifesto on 8chan before he started his killing spree. In that manifesto, he complained of a Hispanic invasion and used rhetoric that mirrored that of Colfage and his fundraising collaborator, Steve Bannon. 2019 was the year the 8chan shootings dominated news coverage on extremism. I found myself as the world media's go-to guy for explaining what had happened. The hardest thing to get across was how much of the hate that had ended in dozens of murders

had started with shitposting. People spreading racist memes and hateful jokes within the confines of a digital echo chamber. For Mariana, the El Paso shooting was a wake-up call, hard evidence that online bullshit can turn into deadly violence. The longer she spent online reading far-right conversations, the more she realized Colfage's baseless allegations might mean real danger for her and her colleagues. After we filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security and there was publicity about that, and honestly, the timing of that was kind of good because we filed suit at the beginning of December. So by the time media picked up on it,

people were really already distracted by Christmas. You know, they were holiday planning and partying and shopping and all that. So there wasn't this enormous explosion of publicity and negative backlash. But we did start getting what we called disaster tourists, people who would show up going, we heard they're going to build the wall across the Butterfly Center. Show us where they're going to build our president's big, beautiful wall. And as long as they behaved, you know, we have maps. We would take their entry fee and say, okay, now you got to walk a quarter mile that way to the canal. That's where they're going to build it. And then walk another 1.2 miles to the border, to the actual border. And again, it gave us a chance to educate people.

And there was a lot of head scratching with people going, but why would they build the wall? Things seemed to be going well, but then they took a turn for the worst. Kolfage had tweeted that, quote, the only butterflies we saw were swarming a decomposing body surrounded by tons of rotting trash left behind by illegals, and his lies had become something of a fixture on the places where MAGA and QAnon overlap. Almost none of these people had ever visited the border, but years of propaganda had given them a fixed set of expectations about this place. They spun up ever more ridiculous fantasies and, by late 2019, some of them had even started to show up in person. 19, some of them had even started to show up in person. About that same time, police arrested two young men with Atomwaffen in West Texas, and they had been stopped and, you know, pulled over,

and they had all kinds of weapons and munitions and grenades and, you know, improvised explosive devices and everything in the car. And they said they were headed to the border. Then the militia people started coming here. And I was here the day the first ones came, the first that we know of, came inside the building to case the joint. And sometimes I sit here at the conference table to work. Sometimes I'm in this office right here. But I can always hear what's going on at the front counter. And we have a door chime. And so there are questions that people ask when they're first-time visitors. There are questions people ask when they're part of our tribe,

when they're naturalists, when they've come for the butterflies and the birds and all of that. And then there are questions people ask that make all of your spidey senses, you know, go off. And I heard that kind of questioning. And whenever that happens, I get my phone open to camera and I go out there. What the question you heard was that kind of triggered you a bit? They were asking about the lay of the land and how they would get to the river from here. And those aren't regular questions. When most people show up, they're like, we're here on family vacation and on our way to South Padre, but we heard there was a butterfly center. So we stopped to,

you know, so they may say like, where are the butterflies? People show up thinking we're a butterfly house. But when people immediately say like, how do I get to the river from here? Or explain to me where the access points are. You're kind of like, okay, no. And I took a picture of them from behind. And then I went out there and I was like, you know, hello, gentlemen, can I help you, you know, and make sure they, you know, it's like we are looking you in the face. We can identify you. And one of them kind of turned and walked off and one of them stayed to talk to me.

And they were like, well, we've just, you know, never been here before. And tell us what y'all are all about. And it was the week of Thanksgiving. And they were like, well, we've just, you know, never been here before. And tell us what y'all are all about. And it was the week of Thanksgiving. And we'd actually just had our potluck for staff and some of our members. So they're like, and you've got food. And they're like, can we have some pecan pie? Sure, have a slice of pie. But the other guy who had peeled off, I noticed him walking around.

He came and looked back here. He was noticing the cameras and all the places. He made his way toward the back of the building and started the same thing. And I was like, oh, and I told Luciano, go outside, photograph all the vehicles in the parking lot, you know, get license plates, get all the identifying information that we would need. get all the identifying information that we would need. And sure enough, there were two trucks backed in with the Punisher stickers and the 13 stars in a circle and the, you know, the don't tread on me and this and that. One of them was from New Mexico,

and I believe the other one was from, I want to say like Oregon or somewhere, but it was, yeah, I mean, it was, yeah, I've still got all that information. And then I, uh, so after they left, we downloaded the security camera video and put our photos and everything together. And I emailed everything to the commander for DPS down here, as well as the mission police chief, and then asked to meet with them. And, of course, the mission PD guys had no idea about the Atomwaffen people being arrested in Texas. They had no idea the militia was in town.

And then more and more of them kept coming. And, you know, one of them would drive up and down Sherbach in his huge jacked up truck. It was a red truck with the Trump flags. And he had two big great Danes that, you know, he would just be loud and annoying. He wanted everybody to know he was here on patrol and ready to intimidate. That was disconcerting, but the police responded. They wound up having several interactions with various militia people and even taking at least two of them that we know of into custody. And at least one of those was turned over to the FBI.

The man arrested had outstanding warrants and had been flying a drone in a controlled airspace. Another had been impersonating a law enforcement officer. Seeing the threat, Mariana realized that if she wanted to stay safe, she was going to have to take matters into her own hands. We don't know if it was done here or somewhere else. I assume it was not here because they didn't tell us it was here. Oh, no. The mission PD officer who is their liaison with the FBI came and met with me and thanked me for sharing all of that information. I mean, we knew what hotel they were staying at.

thanked me for sharing all of that information. I mean, we knew what hotel they were staying at. And we've had to become our own sort of security and detective force because nobody else is doing it. And I think most people in communities around the country think the police know what's going on and they're out there, you know, safeguarding us when we have learned the hard way that that is absolutely not true. Soon, she was plumbing the parts of the internet that she'd only heard mentioned on passing in the news. We were aware of Pizzagate. Yeah. Yeah,

we were aware that they had declared that Hillary Clinton and associates were running a satanic child, you know, sex ring with, you know, ritual sacrifice and all kinds of other preposterous stuff out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor, you know, where the pizza parlor didn't even have a basement, much less a satanic ritual child sex trafficking ring. Just a few weeks after the shooting in El Paso, We Build the Wall broke ground on their phase two project. Within sight and very much within shooting distance of the National Butterfly Center,

Mayor Arnon was under no illusion about the stakes. They know that they have the ability to incite violence in that way, to motivate people to take action, and they use a lot of really inflammatory rhetoric. Even Steve Bannon's broadcast is called The War Room. We're all at war. We're at war against the cartels. And we're at war for the soul of our nation. And we're at war against the Democrats. And, you know, and now they're at war against the Butterfly Center. In addition to her intelligence gathering, she started taking steps to protect herself and her workers.

They weren't exactly the sort of things she'd expected when she took a job where she'd hoped to write grants and talk to kids about butterflies. We had to develop some very rudimentary safety plans, like if there were a shooting, where you would shelter, how we would try to shelter how we would try to safeguard visitors and other things to like the women on staff even the guys on staff like I never have my hair down I always keep it up or under a hat or something because you just learn in basic self-defense that somebody's going to grab your ponytail or your hair as the fastest, easiest way to take control of your whole body, basically. So we just, we all take a variety of precautions and it has radically changed the way we, we operate here and the way we perceive this place, which used to be, I mean, we were blissful idiots coming to work in this oasis of flowers and butterflies every day. And, you know, my children described me as Snow White, that, ah, ah, with the butterflies landing on me and the

hummingbirds coming up and saying hello. Luckily, she wasn't alone. As soon as people heard about the threats to her in the center, she began to receive messages of support. It turns out it's not only right-wing grifters who can summon people to a remote part of southern Texas where the Rio Grande twists through the reeds, and locals switch to English and Spanish as the mood suits them. Groups from across the country, from veterans to indigenous nations, reached out to offer support. So first we had the water protectors and other nations, people came here and set up camp. They were good being here night and day to be our eyes and ears and a deterrent for the militia entering the property. And along with them came others like the Sierra Club Military Outdoors Program participants who also camped out here for a week.

And we had the Brown Berets and Veterans for Peace and even folks from the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. I mean, I hate to even include that since we get called pinko, commie, libtard, snowflakes and all of that. But those folks showed up willing to help in the face of fascism, in the face of these militia. But all this stress and the need for constant patrols and vigilance took its toll. Even with support, being the center of a fabricated firestorm of lies is no fun. It wasn't just Mariana who was impacted. The constant stress and the nonstop overflights of the Border Patrol helicopters impacted her staff as well.

And then in 2019, like all bets are off. Anybody can say anything they want. They can, you know, I hate to say it, but people get mental health days now if they pay, if they just for whatever reason are like, I can't deal with this shit today. They don't have to come to work. And I've lost good employees. In 2020, briefly, We Built the Wall won an injunction and kept building their privately funded wall. Massive erosion quickly undermined it, but the International Boundary and Water Commission report on the construction wasn't completed until March, by which time We

Build the Wall had completed three miles of wall. The consensus among hydrologists and engineers interviewed by ProPublica for a report on the wall said that the Rio Grande had scoured against the base of the wall, causing erosion and putting the wall in danger of collapse. With its very shallow foundation, Kohlfelser's wall was in immediate danger of toppling into the river. In response to this, Trump did what Trump does and took to Twitter to blame everyone else. In July of 2020, he tweeted, I disagreed with doing this very small, tiny section of the wall, going on to say, it was only done to make me look bad, and perhaps it now doesn't even work.

Should have been built like rest of wall, 500 plus miles. I should also note that he misspelled perhaps in that tweet. While Colfage was still reeling from this condemnation, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York announced indictments of Colfage and Bannon for wire fraud. The charging documents themselves are an unusually compelling read. We did a couple of episodes of Behind the Bastards covering them. The whole situation would be much funnier, though, if it weren't for all of the lives that Colfage and his cronies directly threatened. Anyway, it turned out they had been taking huge sums for their own personal use while concealing their use of funds that donors thought would be spent on the wall by creating, quote, sham invoices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes. Initially, all four entered not guilty

pleas. They seemed to be buying time, hoping that Trump would pardon them. In the end, he did pardon Steve Bannon, and you can make of that what you will, but the others were left to hang in the wind. This April, Kolfage entered a guilty plea to these and other charges. The failure of Bannon and Kofage's grift didn't stop them from using the Butterfly Sanctuary as a punching bag in their fundraising rants that they published to whatever sites had not gotten around to banning them yet. As right-wing radicals were deplatformed from Facebook and Twitter in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Mariana stopped getting tagged in their rants. But they didn't stop ranting. Soon, as it became clear that Trump had lost the election and refused to concede it, he began to lie about the election

and then attempted to overturn it by encouraging his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol. At this point, it became clearer that the same people who were fanatical about building the wall had also become entirely detached from reality. Even after Biden had been inaugurated and their lie had failed, a who's who, or perhaps a who's not in jail for sedition yet, of MAGA grifters continued to focus their rage at the QAnon-adjacent fantasies they'd concocted about unspecified cartels smuggling children across a butterfly sanctuary to sexually abuse them. Sometimes, they claimed, they cut the heads off of children so that the corpses were easier to transport. It's the kind of habitual, unhinged escalation that liberals and lefties on Twitter love to consume, mockingly, via aggregator accounts that enable mass gawking at the far right. But for Mariana, it was not at all amusing.

Like, I didn't even know Rumble existed. I didn't know what Rumble was. And then we were sent the video that Christy Hutcherson and Lindsey, something from South Carolina, made here in front of the Butterfly Center. And, you know, of course, there's the Ben Berkman stuff. And, you know, we don't watch War Room, but sometimes I do have to go find and film portions of those broadcasts where Steve Bannon is still bashing us and using that platform to bolster the lies. and, you know, really stir up the terrible sentiment and ultimately, we fear the stochastic terrorism. Let's stop for a second and go into more detail about the people she's referencing here. Christy Hutcherson founded a group called Women Fighting for America. On their website's About page, they note,

Today, Americans' closely held beliefs in freedom seem to be under constant attack from mainstream media, elitist academia, judicial activists, foreign aggressors, and many times elected politicians. These attacks highlight the two extremely different ideologies fighting for our country's future. Will we stand by and let America become a socialist, Marxist, or communist nation and give our children up to this hopeless vision? I should also note that Women Fighting for America actively solicits donations, which they note are not tax-deductible. Hutcherson incited rioters during the January 6th insurrection, and is generally what you might call a B-list MAGA star. Ben Berquam is a correspondent for Real America Voice, the network that hosts Steve Bannon's War Room podcasts.

In general, the folks most focused on harassing the Butterfly Sanctuary are a lower grade of MAGA influencer than the major national names. But they all have connections higher up to those big names. And when they do land a successful line of propaganda, it tends to filter up quite efficiently to those bigger names. it tends to filter up quite efficiently to those bigger names. In January of 2022, a year after the failed coup at the Capitol, some of these MAGA holdouts came to the Rio Grande Valley to pick on a target they thought they might have a better chance of taking. The We Stand America border security rally was headlined by the few remaining QAnon conspiracy theorists and supporters of former President Trump who had not gotten in trouble for the Capitol stuff. In part, like the entire phenomenon, the conference was a giant grift. But for many of the people taken up with its religious proclamations and wild lies of child trafficking and sexual abuse,

it was the last chance they felt they had to stop something evil. Mariana, up until that time, hadn't been aware of how serious the threats against her sanctuary were. Then a friend involved in local Republican politics reached out and told her, be armed at all times or out of town. Ahead of the rally, Ben Berquam appeared in a video on Gitter outside of the sanctuary, holding a pair of children's shoes, which he claimed were evidence of trafficking, and stated that he and the Butterfly Center were calling on Joe Biden to shut down the border. We're down here, we're actually heading down to Benson State Park to look at the end of the wall

where Joe Biden stopped building the wall. And this place, the Butterfly Center, they said they were afraid they had some credible threats that something was going to go on. So we came down here and we want to join our voices with the Butterfly Center and say we stand against the credible threats of the cartels trafficking children through the Butterfly Center and say, we stand against the credible threats of the cartels trafficking children through the Butterfly Center. And we demand, we call on Joe Biden to close this border down to protect the butterflies, because we all care about butterflies. I mean, you know, the children that are being sold, these shoes were from one of the children that was trafficked across. This wristband was from one of the children that was trafficked

across, smaller than my four-year-old daughter's arm. But what really matters to the Democrats are the butterflies. And so we unite with them. If that's what it's going to take to shut this border down, we unite with them and say, protect the butterflies, Joe, close down the border. Because we know you don't care about the kids. The same day, Piper Loomis and Hutchinson appeared in their own video holding the same suspiciously new-looking children's shoes. In their horrifically overexposed video, they suggested that NBC was, quote,

more concerned about butterflies than the little children and that the Butterfly Center was used as a route for the sex trafficking of children. Together, the video's title said, they would save America. Hey everyone, this is Lindsay Piper Loomis. I'm here with my bestie, Christy Hutchinson, Together, the video's title sure, but I got news. I've been hit by every single tabloid there is that there's some kind of credible threat with butterflies here in Mission, Texas from We Stand America and Women Fighting for America. I can tell you Women Fighting for America loves butterflies and we care about butterflies very much. So I wanted to come down here and see what the credible threat was. And if we have to protect the butterflies, we need to protect the butterflies.

I agree with that. So Biden, why don't you build the wall to protect the butterflies? Yeah, it's really that simple. But my question to this administration and to the National Butterfly Museum here, why are you more concerned. Why are you more concerned about butterflies than you are than the little children who are being trafficked right behind this center? And they use the butterfly land to come up through and bring these children who are trafficked and these women who are trafficked. You know, Tom Homan yesterday was speaking on stage and was telling one of the stories where he's seen a little child where he had to rescue.

And that one child had over 22 different people's DNA inside of them. That's disgusting. Yeah. So as much as I care about butterflies, I can tell you this, Lindsay. I care a lot more about our children and the children who are coming up and being exploited from the different countries by the cartels. That's what I care about. So I've been telling you guys about how children are tattooed according to how they're going to be trafficked or sold, into what type of trafficking, organ harvesting, sex drug and human trafficking, how they use their body.

They kill them. They use their body cavities to haul drugs across the border until the bodies start decaying. They find the bodies decapitated. I told you about the rape trees. But here we actually have a shoe from, and this actually, this is, this is what, so Lindsay, this is a little bracelet and there's a little, how much money it costs for this person to be brought aside to, to America from the cartels. The other thing is, is that the cartels, when they're getting ready to move children, they call them tickets. So they have no regard for life.

They don't care. They'll throw them in the river. They'll leave them in the desert to die. And they call them tickets. That's how disgusting this whole thing is. And America needs to wake up and understand we are at a war with the cartels. We are at a war to save our children. So thank you so much.

Yeah, and every state's a border state. And South Carolina is ranked one of the top in the nation for trafficking. Lindsay Piper Loomis with Christy Hutcherson. Together we're saving America. God bless. But this time they didn't stop with posting. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 Elian. Elian. 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. Gonzalez 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 Piece, 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. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of

fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands,

for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. On the day he was inaugurated, Biden signed an executive order rescinding Trump's emergency declaration at the southern border and ending some use of the DOD funding Trump had relied upon as an end-run around accountability. But he didn't, as he promised he would, stop building immediately. During the Biden-Obama administration, Trump campaigned on build that wall. Are you willing to tear that wall down? No, there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, number one. Like so much else, Biden didn't live up to his promises on the border.

There have been some small victories for basic decency, but Biden's record is deeply mixed. He's reunited hundreds of children with their families. The ended court negotiations about a financial settlement for them. Migrant apprehensions climbed to 1.7 million, a record in fiscal year 2021. But they also reflected an unusually high rate of adults attempting to cross the border multiple times. That's because Biden's administration defended Trump's use of Title 42, part of a 77-year-old law called the Public Health Service Act, which has been interpreted to allow CBP to release migrants back into Mexico without booking them. Often, this means they turn right back around across again, in a more remote and often more deadly place. Biden hasn't lived up to his promises

on the wall either. Mariana showed us a pile of wall sections, essentially giant metal poles just a little shorter than Trump Wall. You could be forgiven for thinking they were identical, but these, she explained, were not technically wall. And you see the border wall that was being constructed there, some of it has the tall bollards with the anti-climb plate, that's Trump. And then the short bollards are Biden. that's Trump. And then the short one is for Biden.

Because Biden is calling this levee repair and guardrail. Well, I snapped moody black and white photos of the wall from on top of a levee as I have all along the hundreds of miles of landscape that it cuts through like an open wound. Robert went down to see who made these new pieces

of the Biden barrier. But we didn't have much luck finding a label. The wall segments lay out in giant pallets, surrounded by construction debris and dirt. Every pallet is labeled, and so are all the shipping containers, but the wall materials themselves had no clear maker's mark on them. As we walked back along the dirt road, we asked Mariana about the video that brought us here in the first place. If you haven't seen it, it's a video of Kimberly Lowe,

a long-odds MAGA congressional candidate from Virginia. Kimberly is an interesting figure. She started out as a Sanders backer in 2016 and has radicalized since to such a degree that most of her local MAGA people want nothing to do with her. Some of them think she's some kind of double agent. Audio from the incident makes it clear why people might view Kimberly as unhinged. humanitarian crisis that's what we're here so you're okay with children being sex trafficked and raped that is not at all what this is about we have girl scouts spend the night here

that's how safe it is that's good yeah i have children in the car i hope it's safe here anyway we're not here to no you're you're here to make a show and to promote your agenda. So you can leave now. Thank you for leaving now. Thank you so much. But I'm sorry that you're okay with children being raped. No, I'm not okay with any of that. And your bullshit is a big problem. It's okay.

I'm going to go help the world while you're a really nasty person. We'll let Mariana explain what happened. So I was sitting here actually at the conference table and my son was at the front counter. He doesn't work here, but he was covering for a staff member who was out sick. And as I was saying, you hear things that are like, hmm, you know? So I was on a conference call. I had my headphones in, but my son came over and he gave me a note. And it said, you know, this woman says she's running for Congress and has her secret service agent with her.

And, you know, I thought that was strange. But then I, you know, I'm still on this call. But I, you know, I took my headphones out so I could hear them. And the one woman, Michelle, was claiming to be Secret Service. And I mean, I've had people like Beto O'Rourke when he was a congressman come visit. Michelle Beckley, who's a state representative. I mean, I've had, I've had people come visit and they don't have Secret Service, you know? So I knew that that was not true, that this woman was not Secret Service.

And the congressional rep, I asked my son to get her name, and he did. And I just did, you know, literally like one or two minute internet search for her. And it was immediately apparent that she was a MAGA candidate. And my son said, they want us to open the back 70 for them, but they don't want to pay admission. And on her Facebook page, I could see their Facebook live stream from just like five minutes earlier where they had driven down Sherbrooke to the gate where y'all have been and seen, you know, we have a great big private property, no trespassing sign. And then they went up on the levee and interacted with the Texas National Guard there. Her video ended before that, but a reporter with Stars and

Stripes I know was on the levee with the National Guard and interacted with Kimberly and Michelle. So they trespassed onto our property. Then they came here demanding that they be granted access without paying admission and declared just right up front, we want to go see the river and the illegals crossing on the rafts to the Butterfly Center. The rafts they were talking about were referencing a doctored image circulating around the right-wing conspiracy web. We stood at the dock in the image on that afternoon. There were no rafts. Mariana decided to try and talk the two women down. So, you know, I put my phone on record, carried it out there. I got two business cards

because it is my job to be professional and greet these people when they come. So I went out there and I said hello. And the rest of it is history, as they say. You have that audio of me saying, I know who you are and what you're up to. And I knew then it was a setup. For someone to come here and say those things and be doing their own, you know, sort of Project Veritas, Facebook live stream, border adventure from Virginia. As they say, none of it smelled right, you know. That didn't work, so she asked them to leave.

Well, it was when I told them they needed to leave and if they weren't going to leave, you know, we would call the police. And I told him I gestured to my son, just do it. You know, go ahead and call the call the police, which he did. And they were like, no, no, we're leaving. We're leaving. They went out the front doors, but then they stopped. So I opened the door behind them, like it moving ladies you know you have to leave and I was focused on Michelle who was on my left who was again saying she was secret service and laughing at her when I turned and Kimberly was on this side of me and had her phone up like this so I didn't know if she was taking photos or filming, but we talk about how everybody now has their own triggers. I do not want my photo taken.

I do not want anyone filming me. I don't, I don't want any of that, uh, because of how Colfage and Bannon and their fake news outlets and everything else have used my image and have put a target on my back. So she's standing there going, we're here at the Butterfly Sanctuary or whatever she called it. And I'm with this not nice lady. And I was like, oh, no. And I just put my hand up to block her from photographing or filming me or to swat it away. And then I immediately turned back toward the doors to retreat inside the building, but I didn't make it inside the building. I was flat on my ass on the ground. And I didn't know if Michelle had grabbed me from

behind or if Kimberly had pushed me or whatever, but then my son busted out of the building and was sort of over me. And I'm trying to get up off the ground and all this is caught on the video camera from the building. In a previous video, the women had indicated that they were armed, which is generally a safe assumption when MAGA types show up accusing you of child trafficking. The situation was rapidly growing more dangerous. My son feared for my life. He thought Michelle was going to stomp my face or my neck or my head. And she's a big girl. And at that point, Kimberly ran to her car. Somewhere in the midst of all that, she fled to her car where she had her three children waiting. Because this place is so dangerous and lawless and everything,

she brought her three children here for her opportunity to, you know, interact with cartel or whatever. I mean, it's just the whole thing just gets more bizarre. And, and Michelle at that point had taken my phone and I was just telling her, you're not leaving with my phone, give me my phone back. While Kimberly is again, live streaming from her car, yelling at Michelle to come get in the car. Michelle did walk to the car, declare, she's not bothering me about me. But my son had run to close the front gate because he didn't want them. I mean, he had just called 911. Unbeknownst to us, there was a visitor in the parking lot who had also dialed 9-1-1 and you guys have been here there's police on the corner there's police right I mean there's police

everywhere so my son ran to close the gate one so they couldn't leave with my phone two so they would be here when the police got here but then the police didn't come. And as she fled the property, she's filming herself and she's gunning it, the car, as she races towards the gate screaming, get the fuck out of my way, get the fuck out of my way. And then she swerves like this at my son who had to leap to the ground out of the way to avoid being hit by her red Range Rover. The center was full of visitors. Some of them called 911, but no one stepped in to help. Prior to this experience, yes, I would have expected our visitors, any decent human being to respond to a woman screaming,

help, help, help me, please, please help. But nobody did. Only my son. At first, they didn't fully grasp what was happening. But soon, Mariana had worked out who her attacker was. And so I relayed all of that to my boss and to the police. And, you know, my boss was kind of like, well, do whatever you want. If you feel like you need to close next weekend, then close next weekend. So we did. We closed that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And then we came back in the next Monday. And that's when we saw and people started sending us the videos that Berkman and Hutcherson had filmed here, presumably on Sunday. And there's probably a lot more stuff out there that we haven't seen. After leaving the Butterfly Center one day, we went for a walk towards some nearby trailer parks.

They're full of people who the locals call winter Texans. People from the colder parts of the US who spend a few months in trailer homes on the border so they can wear shorts in March and not pay expensive heating bills. We bumped into some winter Texans who were on their way to a bird sanctuary we'd just visited. They said they'd missed their usual trip to the Butterfly Centre.

Their friends in Minnesota, they said, couldn't believe that they would go down to the border. That's good, because boy, the stuff you get in Minnesota is not reality as to what's going on in the border down here. In what way? People don't understand. First of all, they said. because of COVID, but four or five years ago, we were working with the respite center here with Catholic Charities, when there were so many, they were allowing people to come over and own it.

The other thing I come with, I don't think that people realize, because of the river, there's not a straight line border. Yeah, it's not that. That you can't just build a wall straight up. Yeah. And that people live in their houses south of the wall.

And people's farms are south of the wall. Sometimes there's a wall and sometimes there isn't a wall. Everywhere we go along the border, we see division. Locals are losing places they love. And people from a long way away are performing a charade for personal and political gain. But it's not all that cut and dried. One taco shop we walked past has a special parking spot reserved for DHS employees.

A trailer park we drive by has thin blue line flags flying. Despite my best attempts at pulling the clueless foreigner card when we call them, they won't tell me why they have the flags or what they mean. Some of the National Guard troops we spoke to had been out of work before they came down to the border. Actually, I didn't have a job before. Oh, okay. It gave me a good opportunity and I'm planning to save it like probably the next two years. Okay. Wow, yeah. Do you get active duty pay while you're? Okay.

Wow, yeah. Do you get active duty pay while you're... Somewhat, but it's like... It's different because it's state borders, so it's not fair. Yeah, okay. Everyone on the border wants to feel safe, including Mariana. But the reason the border is remarkable at all is because so many people have to cross it. Some cross for work, some cross for fun, some cross to change their lives. But without people, the border doesn't have any significance. For Mariana, without people, she can't even enjoy

the quiet and calm in the sanctuary. She hopes, she says, they can reopen soon. I mean, honestly, I hope it doesn't last a whole lot longer because we all miss one another. We miss being here. You know, really of all the jobs that a person can have in the world, one where you get to interact with wildlife and garden and breathe fresh air and, you know, feel the rain on your face. I mean, it's pretty awesome. Yeah. And interact with people who are absolutely thrilled and fascinated, especially the children, just delighted, gleeful about their interactions here. We want to get back to that.

But we have to have more help before we can do that. We need professional guidance beyond what we've received three years ago when the first wave of community defense and mutual aid hit the ground here. Mariana doesn't know when she'll feel safe. But even with the center poised to reopen, as we write this, she isn't secure yet. You know, I feel like it's a cat and mouse thing. And they're the cat and we're the mouse.

And that they are going to continue to come back again and again until something really bad happens. I think it's almost a challenge, maybe at this point, from what I can tell about their psyche. You know, it goes right back to that winning. Yeah. You know, Steve Bannon's no loser. He's not used to losing. And anything short of achieving his goal, whatever that may be, is not winning.

If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering what you can do to help. If, like most Americans, you live a long way from the southern border and have never visited, it might seem strange to take up and travel there, to meet a nice lady and talk about butterflies, QAnon, while you have to drive past soldiers in fatigues with assault rifles to look at her pollinator garden. But Mariana says that even the small acts of solidarity make a huge difference. Even people just sending really nice email or letters is so good.

We'll probably have a wall of that when we get back. Because the flip side of that is the hate mail, the ugly messages, the death threats, the voicemails that are so horrible. So to hear from people that do support us and stand with us and feel like what's happening is horrible. Uh, people who write to say, you know, I told my quilting circle about what's happening at the butterfly center or, you know, I mean, and, uh, and we're going to make a quilt for you or, you know, whatever it is, you know, it helps. It really does. And then they can share our story because it's not just about the Butterfly Center. It's about what's happening to our democracy. It's about how these operations work to manipulate people with lies. I don't want to call it conspiracy theories or misinformation or any of that anymore.

They're just lies. And people need to start to understand that, whether it's about COVID or the trucker convoys or trans kids or the butterfly center. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. 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.

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Wrath. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my culture.

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.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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. González 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 González story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.