It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 5

Episode Date: October 16, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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. 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is on the cycle of being sort of okayly introduced. When this episode goes out, it will be Indigenous Peoples Day. And so to talk about that more, we're going to talk to Dahlia Kilsback, who is a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Citizenship and has studied and worked in federal Indian tribal policy. Dahlia, hello. How are you doing? I am doing well. Thank you for inviting me here today. Of course. Garrison is also here.ahlia, hello. How are you doing? I am doing well. Thank you for inviting me here today. Of course. Garrison is also here. Garrison, hello. Hello. I'm currently also doing writing about Indigenous stuff, but within the context of Canada, which people will probably

hear later this week. So yeah. I guess first thing I wanted to talk about is a little bit is about what Indigenous Peoples Day is and why it is that and not the other thing. I'm going to say it, Christopher Columbus Day, that is still like a federal holiday, but multiple cities and states have opted to use Indigenous Peoples Day instead. And the reasoning for that is acknowledging the atrocities that were committed by Christopher Columbus, who, first of all, did not discover America, but continued to not only use slavery, but commit different forms of genocide, rape, etc., all of these terrible atrocities. And so rather than celebrating somebody like that, Indigenous Peoples Day has been implemented in order to recognize the people who are actually here first and indigenous peoples across the americas their histories cultures and contributions yeah columbus real piece of shit worse christopher like yeah it really cannot be overstated how bad

that guy was like even even you know even people in that era who had committed their own genocides like isabel and ferdinand who you know expelled the jews from spain where it's like you know if once you've reached the sentence expelled the jews from x like you're already you're already in the the the the shit list of the worst people in human history and even they saw what columbus was doing it was like what on earth bad bad guy bad name things are going to continue to go badly and yeah that was another thing that that i wanted to talk about which which is federal Indian policy. And this is an incredibly broad area spanning like 300 years.

So we're not going to be able to go into an enormous amount of depth in it, but I think it's important that people have an understanding of A, just what the U.S. did and how everyone else has tried to sort of deal with it and then also the fact that this is something that changes over time and has has looked different it's like it's been bad in different ways yeah um and so when talking about federal indian policy um i always like to contextualize it within a larger sort of like Euro-American teleology of colonial conquest and then moving on to settler colonialism and where we are with federal Indian policy currently.

So how do we connect Christopher Columbus to where we are currently? So how do we connect Christopher Columbus to where we are currently? And this is the history of federal Indian policy and Western legal discourse and how European powers throughout history have defined what it means to be an Indian person in relationship to indigenous people' rights to their own land and to self-governance. So when we're looking at the different periods of federal Indian policy, prior to there being a United States government, we have the colonial period, which is 1492 to 1776. This is how federal Indian policy legal scholars divide that and it's really important to kind of give the difference between what is a colonial state versus a settler colonial state when you're talking about not just the United States government, but also the Canadian government and different governments globally. But I want to talk just a little bit about what I mean by the difference between a colonial government and a settler colonial government,

because they're tied together. um so by a settler colonial government i mean what i mean is that um it is defined by the deterritorialization of indigenous populations and so rather than in a colonial government as you had with christopher columbus and the spanish and with the English, et cetera, is rather than a state and sovereignty being conceived as all these resources are going back to the metropole, all these resources are going back to England or to Spain, et cetera, and colonial occupation is conceptualized within this way in settler colonial governments. The colonists come to these lands and stay, and what they define as sovereignty is within this land that they define now as their own. And in order for that process to happen, there needs to be different forms of genocide of the indigenous populations and so that's what we saw with Christopher Columbus and throughout history was just the depletion of a lot of our

indigenous populace and so when I mean about the United States being a settler colonial state I mean that this is current and ongoing. And so when we talk about federal Indian policy, federal Indian policy is always in this conversation with what started with Christopher Columbus as the doctrine of discovery. And so that's how we define the colonial period. And feel free to stop me and ask me questions else i'm just going to try to move quick quickly because there's a lot yeah i i think we probably should briefly talk about what the just the doctor discovery is um at least before we get to the marshall trilogy and stuff for sure so what does that actually mean legally? So legally, it's the discovery of a quote unquote newfound land by European colonial forces.

And the reason why it's called the Doctrine of Discovery was that indigenous peoples on these lands were deemed unable to govern themselves and they did not know how to utilize their land up to the definition of what the European powers thought land use was. Indigenous peoples didn't have the same concept of property and same with their relationship with resources and resource extraction. So when Christopher Columbus and all of these other colonizers, conquistadors came to the quote-unquote new land, they saw all of this rich plentiful resource and thought to themselves, well obviously these people don't know what they're doing because there's just so much.

They have not done anything with it. And we're going to take this back to ours because obviously they're inferior beings and don't know what property is. So legally, the doctrine of discovery conveyed legal title to an ownership of American soil to European nations, a title that devolved to the United States. And so this definition is expansive and expansive discovery implies that Native nations have a right to lands as occupants or possessors, but they are incompetent to manage those lands and need a, quote unquote, benevolent guardian, such as a federal government about this legal title, it devolves to the United States later on in history after the American Revolution. revolution and its own constitution and its creation of itself as a nation state then that turns into a settler colonial government yeah i think we can yeah we can get to what happens next then because yeah yeah you you have you have this elaborate legal framework that lets you steal people's land and murder them and then control it and then the outgrowth of that is this sort of weird event where the colonies go into rebellion and suddenly yeah there's not a colony they're not colonies anymore they just are the state

and so yeah but what happens next after the sort of formation of the United States? So after the formation of the United States, so we have this period, the American Revolution, which I'll not really dive that into, is 1776 to 1789, and it's called the Confederation Period. But next we have the Trade and Intercourse Act era, which is from 1789 to 1835 and so this is defined with the united states constitution and congress's exclusive right to regulate trade relations and make lands and land secessions and enter into treaties with tribes so this is a um treaty making era with the tribes that only the united States federal government is able to. And there's a distinction there because there had been a lot of contestation between states

and the federal government as to who is going to now deal with these nations that are within our own settler colonial borders. So whose job is that to solve this issue? So within the United States Constitution, there are three clauses that define the United States legal relationship to American Indians. And so these are the treaty making clause, the commerce clause, and the property clause. These are the treaty-making clause, the commerce clause, and the property clause. And so this movement from just relying on the doctrine of discovery and treaty-making processes between different European powers now is between the United States federal government and tribes. And so what this does is now tribes are located within the United States territory, and this places Indians within the boundaries and jurisdiction of the United States, and now they're a matter of domestic interest.

era which is about what does sovereignty mean for these tribes and to what extent do they even continue to possess it and how does that even sort of you know how does that work if you have when you have this new state that sort of just has has claim control here right and also during this period um well later on when we have um sorry, jumping ahead of myself, when we have the extermination of the treaty-making process, and this completely removes seeing tribes as independent sovereign nations. So I think that we'll kind of get more into that later. But the thing with federal Indian policy is that it's sort of self-prophesizing. So as settlers are moving across America, the United States government also has to create these policies in order to legalize these land cessations and movements. And a pattern that we do see here throughout history and throughout time is that the United States

federal government as a settler state is over the rights of over the rights to land and rights of indigenous peoples themselves, you have a priority of the settler state in order to acquire land so a lot of the reason why um later these treaties will be broken etc is because settlers are moving into these lands and the united states is then breaking these treaties in order to have more land, more land secessions. Yeah. Yeah. So the law is sort of just following the violence and it just becomes a sort of retroactive justification for just breaking everything.

It's a self-justifying sort of sovereignty. So this is the removal period and what a lot of people may have heard of. So it's from 1835 to 1861. And what we have is the extinguishment of Indian title to Eastern lands and the removal of Indian tribes westward. Act, which was authorized by President Andrew Jackson, which moved Indians from the east to the west of the Mississippi River into what was called Indian Territory. And what brought about this federal act was a series of three foundational statutes within federal Indian policy dictated by Chief Justice John Marshall. So first we have Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and Worcester v. Georgia. And I won't go into too much detail, but what these essentially did and legally defined tribes as being domestic dependent nations. And so it clarified more that, again, tribal nations are underneath the federal government's overview, not the states. So yeah, it placed tribes above state jurisdiction. And what this was trying to do was

solve some issues that tribes such as the Cherokee Nation had with different states when it came to land and jurisdiction over said land. But that is kind of the basis of a lot of federal Indian policy and still remains true today. And what is notable in each one of these statutes, what is notable in each one of these statutes, I believe particularly in Worcester v. Georgia, although it seems that it was supporting tribal sovereignty in that they were above state jurisdiction, a lot of these statutes cited racist president and the doctrine of discovery so what you see for federal indian policy is that a lot of the found well all the foundation for federal indian policy based on president is the doctrine of discovery which is reliant on the idea that american indians were savages and needed federal benevolence and paternalism in order to regulate their own affairs

yeah and i think that's well okay we should probably not just immediately get to allotment but yeah because there's there's also yeah this is also the period we used yeah the thing you were talking about earlier the thing you probably know about which is okay it's not true to say this is when this starts but this is indian removal act trail of tears territory and you know one thing that you know i think one of the sort of running themes of this is that you know the the the law in this context is just sort of it becomes a sort of retroactive excuse to do whatever like needs to be done from the perspective quote-unquote of the sort of of the settler state to just take all of this land yeah and i think maybe like one of the keystones of this is andrew jackson just straight up telling

the supreme court to fuck off so that he can do so he can do a trail of tears yeah um so the removal act um happened after all of these statutes that you already had that supported um federal indian sovereignty and so the cherokees in georgia were one of the tribes that were removed. And so you kind of see what you talked about, the retrograde kind of justifications for said removal, despite the statutes that are there. So although that, like Marshall in Warchester v. Georgia determined that the state of Georgia did not have jurisdiction over territory, although this territory was in the state's borders. Later on, you see with the Removal Act that although these statutes are still precedent in federal Indian policy, those were null in order for there to be more expansion of settlers within these areas. So when it was decided that, oh, wait, we do need this land and we don't actually want these

Indians here, let's put them to the side over past the Mississippi so that they're out of sight, out of mind, right? So we see more of this justification for settler expansion. And so again, we bring it back to these themes of like settler colonialism in order to kind of gain more of this land. And a lot of these statutes are still cited the doctrine of discovery in them. And rather than supporting tribal policy

the relationship between the united states federal government and american indians was not based on the rights of indians but more that they can't they can't govern themselves right and so so and that's the whole issue is like people like, they don't know what they're doing, so we're going to push them and take their land again. So I don't know if you want me to go too much into the Trail of Tears, but you're seeing a lot of patterns here. I think different forms of genocide, different forms of taking land. This was all around the same time as the Indian Act in Canada as well, which

did a very similar thing, especially starting in the 20th century as well, with the expansion of the assimilation programs. Yeah, and I think, one other thing I want to point out about this

is that, so one of the things that happens with trailersars is that the Supreme Court tells Jackson that he can't do this, and Jackson just does it anyways. And I think that's a very interesting, important moment because this is this thing where the federal government can tell the Supreme Court to fuck off, and there's nothing the Supreme Court could do about it. And if you look at what they did it to do the thing they did it to do was genocide and it's i think it's just i think this is very sort of i don't know this incredibly grim like you know

encapsulation of like what this state actually is which is this sort of genocide machine and whatever sort of you know this is what sovereignty is right it's the ability to break your own rules in order to maintain the system. So, you know, you break your own laws. And, you know, as we're going to get to in a second, like you break your own treaties continuously and you do this because, you know, the genocide machine has to keep moving. Right. And there's a couple of federal Indian policy theorists, Bindalore Jr., who's one of the most famous ones,

and David E. Wilkins, who talks about how there's no need for checks and balances within the federal Indian policy system. So you have Congress that is able to pass whatever act they want, and then you also have the Supreme Court, and then you also have the supreme court and then you also have executive action but it wasn't really delineated that well um within um especially when it comes to this period as to who is going to be dealing with the indians kind of thing um and so this kind of confusion

and not really completely defining what it means to be a domestic dependent nation, I think really just goes to show how much of a fragile edifice like settler colonial policy is within the system. But again, moving on, it comes back again to land. So the reservation era in 1861 to 1887, you have a lot of westward expansion of non-Indians, settlers, specifically to California. You also have the creation of Indian reservations and resulting Indian wars. the creation of Indian reservations and resulting Indian wars. So during this era, what you see a lot of are different types of attempts at assimilation and a lot of warfare. So you have a lot of the Plains tribes, my tribe, for instance, that are going through all of these battles, fighting forced removal onto reservations.

One of the most famous ones was the Battle of Recygrass or the Little Bighorn, where General Custer was killed by Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos and different instances of battles such as those and also where a lot of tribes were forcibly removed to areas that they weren't originally from so like how the Cherokees were moved to Oklahoma there was attempts of my tribe for instance Northern Cheyenne to be moved down to Oklahoma as well. And that's why there's some Southern Cheyennes in Oklahoma and then my tribe, the Northern Cheyennes in Montana.

Another thing that is happening during this period are boarding schools, the boarding school era. So this attempts at assimilation through education. And assimilation is also within the settler colonial kind of structure. It's defined as a process where Indigenous people end up conforming to different constructed notions of settler norms um so if they're not absorbed within the state completely then their attempted attempt to be assimilated um culturally um through education through languages in terms of economics and how you have a bunch of different sort of bureaucratic structures on these reservations trying to make tribal governments appear to be um or constructed as as settler colonial governments are um so maybe it's the three branches um in ways that aren't just compatible with different tribes culturally.

And you also have the attempted eradication of different kind of spiritual and cultural practices and a lot of Christianity being forced onto different people and just kind of terrible things that I think more and more people are becoming aware of due to, due to current movements, but we'll, we'll get into that more later. Do we want to talk about allotment briefly? Because if I remember correctly,

this is in the same period. Yes. Allotment period and forced assimilation. So this is like 1871 to 1934. And so this is the end of the treaty making process so the whole idea of um trying to force tribes onto reservations and sign these treaties were to again take land and make sure that the united states has more land and all the land, et cetera, that they could possibly have. So at this end of treaty making, federal allotment of Indian lands also happened in the Dawes Act. And so what this was, was an attempt to further shrink the reservation lands that tribes are already guaranteed within treaties.

So during this period, I think somewhere like 9 million acres were taken from tribal reservations during the allotment process. um taken from tribal reservations during the allotment process so the what the allotment process did was it counted each and every individual indian um that was eligible i think there were adults and um yeah adults that were eligible um and each one of them were given a certain parcel of land, a certain number of acreage. And once all of this land was calculated, what you had was an excess of land, quote unquote, excess of land that was utilized for is for pioneers and for settlers um if it didn't go um to the federal government it was to um incentivize settlers to colonize essentially settle on um indian lands so trying its hardest to not stay true to its tree making practices i think the other thing that was interesting to me about this is that like because one of the other goals of this is to sort of like oh it's the civilizing mission it's like

yeah we're going to turn them into we're going to turn these people into like like yeoman farmers like true american frontiersmen or whatever and it's just like it just doesn't work because economically it doesn't make any sense like you're breaking up all these like lands it's like it doesn't you can't just give someone like a small patch of like shitty land and have them farm like this doesn't like this it doesn't it doesn't like they certainly tried yeah yeah yeah like that was, like, that was one of the main things in Canada was about getting them to adopt, like, European farming practices. Yeah.

Which they already knew how to, like, get their own food, right? They were trying to change this whole system of, like, of food growth to this, like, to this European way of farming, and they were just forcing them to and there's yeah it's it's yes it gets it gets it gets super it gets super like dark and horrible

once you like look at like the letters that were being written by like the heads of these programs like you know instructing like these agents were stationed at these like reservations to like force people to be doing this at these, like, reservations to, like, force people to be doing this horrible farming for, like, all day, every day.

And I think, you know, the sign that this was, like, this is this is so bad that even the U.S. government eventually is, like, wait, this, like, this is fucked up and doesn't work. So I think that's yeah you transition

to sort of like the next phase i guess yeah a very short phase um yeah so the next phase um is the indian reorganization act and so this only lasted six years from 1934 to 1940 um so this is when allotment ended. As you said, the United States government was like, wait, this isn't working. What else can we do? The Indians aren't dying off. They're not assimilating. They're not acculturating. We don't know what to do with them. So maybe we'll have them adopt these constitutions. And a lot of them were just templates. So regardless of whether or not they were, I think compatible with tribal,

different tribes way of life, they were like, you have these constitutions now, now you're, you're a tribe. And this is what each tribe has to look like in order for us the federal government to recognize you as a legitimate entity uh and um and then so you have the establishment of these um tribal governments that consist of tribal councils and big business

committees etc however this period is fleeting very fleeting. And next, you have the termination era. So this is the period of time where the federal government essentially, even more so, wants to just get rid of the quote unquote Indian problem, which is the existence of indigenous peoples is the existence of indigenous peoples um that are reminders to the government essentially that they are a settler colonial force and they don't know what to do with us because they tried to commit genocide they tried to remove us etc etc it's still not working um they decided that our tribal governments um aren't aren't legitimate and they just decide, well, it's too much to try to keep up with our treaties and what we promised them when it comes to healthcare, education, housing, et cetera, et cetera. How about we terminate our federal responsibility, our trust responsibility that are delineated in federal running policy and in our treaties, and give them off to the states to decide what to do with.

And so during this period, you see sort of the federal dissolution of some tribes, such as the Menominee and other ones as well. So this is another dark time. The dark times just keep on coming. And what federal Indian policy scholars have characterized federal Indian policy as a pendulum. So swinging from side to side between this term this uh termination of tribes so the federal indian government as trying to get rid of tribes especially as you can see in this era and then the pendulum of the other side is self-determination but both of these are held

within the context of goals of assimilation so um this is just another phase of terribleness yep well i think this this phase also like one thing i think that also like is important people understand is that like like it's not like people aren't fighting this like the whole time i mean even going like even going back to the stuff the seventh cavalryth Cavalry, the 7th Cavalry lose boars, they lose battles all the time, people are fighting constantly. And this period, the termination period, is also where you see the rise of the American Indian movement. dove into more and all of these different things. In every instance, in every instance of federal Indian policy, you have resistance, which we're not covering here right now. But you have instances throughout history where indigenous peoples have fought for their rights to land, to, for their community,

to being sovereign nations, et cetera. And that's why the federal Indian, the federal government, not federal Indian government, the federal government has not been able to eradicate us much to their dismay. And so now I'm going to switch into the era that we are considered to be in, which I had mentioned when i talked about the pendulum of federal indian policy so now we are in the self-determination era which began in 1962

and we have the right it's characterized with the revitalization of tribal entities so going kind of back to when there was the Indian Reorganization Act, so we have our tribal councils. There's restoration of some tribes under federal recognition who were terminated. Again, not all of them. We also have the Indian Civil Rights Act. So this kind of guaranteed individual Indians some rights, not just characterized by their tribes, also the self-determination policy. So this is when Nixon condemned the termination policy and gave more control to Indians rather than the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was a federal bureau. control to Indians rather than the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is a federal bureau. And just kind of like other policies that have given the tribes more rights to determine for themselves and their own people to a certain degree underneath the federal government

as domestic-dependent nations. And again, I think that we have seen a lot more movement, but within the context of being within a settler colonial state, it's always, I think, a possibility that the federal Indian government, or the federal government, I keep saying Indian, the federal government will try to take more and more. And I think for instance,

when it comes to issues of fishing rights, issues of hunting rights with States, not even just with the federal government. So you have a lot of states throughout history, but still ongoing, that attempt to encroach on tribal treaties. And again, treaties are the basis of federal Indian policy. Without these treaties, the lands would have never been seceded to the United States. And so there's this sort of like legal conundrum, I would say, of where all treaties in the history of the United States with Indian tribes have been broken in some way, shape, or form.

But still, American Indians have to live on their reservations instead of having their land back. And so nowadays, a lot of movement has been towards land back, what this means, what is this process. And I think it means a lot of different things for different people, indigenous people. Because again, there's 574 federally recognized tribes. And so it's not one monolith of ideas, a monolith of beliefs, but by just by saying land back, that's like recognition that this was our land first, and you're not keeping your side of the deal and never have been. Could you maybe go a bit more into land back as a topic? Because specifically the past five years, it has really gained a lot more popularity as a slogan.

But I think for a lot of people who chant it and hear it don't always really know exactly what it means. There's a lot of mixed opinions on what it means. Of course, on the more reactionary side, people will be like, what, you're going to kick white people out of these areas? That's what a lot of the reactionary takes on Land Back is. And I'm sure most people who are listening to this podcast that's not what they think um but they may not

really know exactly what it means either um they may think it sounds like a good idea but they're not quite sure what it is do you mind kind of talking about how land back has like developed as as an idea and what like what like you mean by it personally at least yeah i think i could talk about more about like what i mean by it personally and what i've understood it to mean to other people um because i think um land back itself it means like a lot of different things and i don't think that there has been a concrete kind of idea of what it means. But I think a lot of the movement, I want to like contextualize it within a lot of the sort of activism that we've seen in the recent years. instance, NODAPL, the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. And kind of, I think that's one of the more recent events that have really illustrated on a wide scale, like globally, about Indigenous movements, sovereign movements, and especially when it comes to environmental justice. But what you saw there was encroachment on tribal treaty land

when it had to do with the Dakota Access Pipeline. So although it didn't cross some of the current reservation borders, it was in treaty land, you know, that kind of thing. Same thing with stop line three, how it encroached on the hunting land and the farmland that was not technically in the like residential, like not in like the reservation area where people live, but it's in the surrounding area that is for hunting that is specified in the treaty. So people are trying to use these like loopholes to get the pipelines through. People are trying to use these loopholes to get the pipelines through. Right, right.

And so I think what you see is a lot of solidarity across tribes because this is not new. This has never been new. And a lot of tribes can relate to that. brief overview of federal Indian policy is the different ways that Indigenous rights to land and sovereignty has been attacked in different forms by settler and colonial governments. And I think that the day and age that we live in now has allowed for sort of more widespread solidarity, especially over social media. And so when we say land back, for me, how I interpret it as what people mean when they're saying it is recognition

of our tribal sovereignty, of our right to this land that has not been respected. And then I also think that it means, well, if these treaties aren't being respected, then how is this treaty still valid? Right. How come we aren't getting our land back because you're not upholding your end of the deal? and recognize that this whole United States government is a settler state, right. Based on the doctrine of discovery, which is based on, um, denying tribes and American Indians of their rights to this land. Um, so some people might take it to this whole other context of, yeah, well, maybe this is all of our land, et cetera, et cetera. But in practice, what does this look like? And I think in practice, a lot of people are seeing it with reparations or people buying land back for tribes and giving

it back to tribes. And we have seen some of that, or also just people interrupting the narrative in their own mind of their Euro-American identity. So non-American Indians and primarily European settlers and their history of their own families taking part of the settler colonial process. And how has that, what about their lands? process and how has that um what about their lands there's everyone who um descends i guess from these these settlers and i want to be specific when i'm talking about euro-american settlers um and how they currently benefit from these systems and i think by saying land back um it's we're able to highlight this movement for tribal sovereignty and recognition on a global scale, instead of searching for justice within the quote unquote, like searching for justice within the courts of the conqueror.

How do we expect for the conqueror to be held accountable for all of these atrocities, attempts at genocide, assimilation, et cetera, by taking it more towards a global scale, such as no dapple highlighting these to other people as these are injustices. Um, this is, this is ongoing genocide. I think that land back has many, like a plethora of meanings in that sense. Yeah.

Yeah. I hope that answers your question. I, myself, might use it in some different ways. Because land, as we conceive it to be property, that concept grew in conversation with euro-american yeah absolutely yeah you know conceptions of property so i think that um moving forward when we talk about decolonization as a process and not like a metaphor um that thinking of land back not within that whole idea of euro-american property as well that, that's kind of another thing to consider. Yeah, I think Land Back would just be a whole other thing that will pay someone more qualified than our team to talk about on this show.

So because, yeah, that's definitely, you know, like all of the things we've discussed, they deserve their own deep dives by people that are not me, Robert, and Chris. that you would recommend for people wanting to learn more about this history um and then any kind of ways to i don't know i guess show support in these and these kind of like efforts that are going on yeah for sure um so in terms of resources and reading um i have read lorenzo veracini's um settler book on settler colonialism. That's really helpful when you're trying to understand that framework in terms of getting to know kind of more of the basics of like current issues impacting tribes. The National Congress of American Indians does a lot of work on the federal level. If you want to talk more about kind of lived current lived experiences of American Indians, there's Illuminatives and getting more involved in those as well. I think that they have some

tips, but I would recommend everyone getting more familiar with the land that they are on currently the tribes within their state and what they can do not just on the local level but on the state level to support tribal sovereignty because a lot of issues for instance I worked on this on the state policy level in Washington and in Montana, and both of those have a significant amount of tribes. But you have a lot of legislation that's trying to happen that infringes on tribal treaty rights. as ugly as it may be to say but sometimes voices of non-indigenous peoples are listened to more within those contexts so you need to get more involved on on those levels what sort of like at um non-profit organizations um work with your tribes or and what sort of issues are impacting tribes and again these are all going to probably be surrounding tribal sovereignty so maybe it's um fishing access hunting rights etc um I think that's a really good way to make some more tangible change to feel like you're doing

something to support tribal sovereignty while you're also educating yourself and making sure that their voices are at the forefront. And that's also applicable to the federal level, especially with, as you already said, like stop line three in Minnesota, contacting your legislators, et cetera, et cetera. And I think also when it comes to one of the larger issues besides environmental justice for Indigenous peoples, such as pipelines, you have right now missing and murdered Indigenous women. So looking into that a little bit more and who you can support, who's addressing those issues, along with there is another movement with boarding schools right now, because there's been a lot of bodies of young children

that have been uncovered and this is not an issue that happened a long long time ago like for instance my grandmother went to a boarding school. There's still schools that, although they're not called boarding schools right now, that were boarding schools, but are still in operation under different names, et cetera. So kind of familiarizing yourself with those histories. And then also there's a national, I think it's called the National Boarding School Healing Coalition based out of Minnesota. And looking into them and supporting their efforts with this issue is also a good place to start. Is there anywhere that people can find you online? Yes.

I don't really use um social media that much good for you yeah yeah yeah i try not to i don't know if i want people to find me do not yeah don't don't do it it's better it's better not it's better that people don't find anyone online it's better we're all just posting into the void there's nothing just the void well that is I think

gonna wrap up what we have today Chris do you want to close us out with a funny bit uh light your local gas station on fire. Wow. Jesus Christ. Killing it here.

Oh, my God. Jeez. Wow. All right. Goodbye, everybody. 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. 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. podcast or wherever you get your podcast what's terrible my me this is it could happen here a podcast about collapse and that's appropriate because everyone's faith in me as a colleague

has collapsed today as the result of a series of horrific clusterfucks on my part. I'm late to the meeting. I accidentally left the meeting when they started recording. Just a complete fucking shit show. Speaking of shit shows, my co-host, Garrison Davis. How are you, Garrison? Thank you. I'm the one that saved this. I had to send the guest the Zoom call. I know. I know. I'm not even supposed to be on this call. No, you're not. You're not even supposed to be working today that's not true well yeah but you're not on this call not on this call but here i am saving saving the pod this is enough this is enough witty banter this is a

daily podcast yeah all right and now let's bring on our guest for today monsignor alex newhouse alex how are you doing i'm doing well uh thanks for having me i feel like i was pulled in off the street just like bundled into a van and then yeah yeah we uh you know how people used to get like shanghai like like captured by uh allegedly allegedly and forced to work on on on boats in like san francisco and whatnot we do that with podcasts i mean that is actually most of what i've done to the people who work on your podcast i think i think i've had everyone from your show on our show now and it has been very much like i'm just pulling them on a string speaking of which alex you are one of the hosts of the terrorism is bad podcast a very uh, controversially named podcast.

Uh, and you work at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey center of terrorism, extremism, and counterterrorism center on not, not of, that would be a different center. Very important.

Very important. Yeah. Middle word there. We're not, we're not bringing you on to talk about how to make explosively formed penetrators. Not this time. Not this time. That is someone else, yeah.

You were also an actual games journalist. Yes, yeah. I got my start in this weird space via Gamergate. How do you feel about ethics in the game journalism industry, Alex? It's always been fine. People lost their shit yeah yeah all right anyway that's the end of that yeah i do want to actually start there alex because you and i both have something in common which is that we we got our start writing in a field that's wildly different from consulting with like governments on terrorism like Like for me, it was,

I wanted to write like dick jokes on the internet. And I just like stumbled into a bunch of ISIS propaganda that most people weren't aware of. And that started me like lecturing at universities and shit. And for you, it was Gamergate. So I'm interested in kind of you telling your story a little bit to start us off.

Yeah. So I was, I was during undergrad. I interned every summer at game spot uh video game website you may have heard of uh it's one of the two big ones along with ign um and when i was doing that i was so this was 2014 2015 2016 like right in the at the beginning stages of of gamer gate really popping off and uh what ended up happening is a lot of the the people i worked with a lot of my colleagues and friends were just in the blast zone they were just targeted by the absolute onslaught of of

harassment um and i just had a curiosity started looking into some of those people who were who were targeting my friends and colleagues and it ended up being a lot of the people that we're still talking about today uh you know it all all rolls back up to the Breitbart uh metropolitan area if you will yeah and um I don't know what do uh the thing that made me want to I mean obviously I've been aware if you work for a while but the thing that made me want to specifically bring you on is you started on a new project to create like a video game that that will hopefully have an ability to help like de-radicalize people and I'm I'm not entirely certain like of the details of the project, but I think it's a fascinating project because as,

as you know, all too well, a lot of this stuff started in gaming, not as a result of anything specifically about gaming, but the kind of like socialization that occurs in those spaces and the kind of like different communities. And it's been like, we have going back to the nins evidence of like different nazi groups

on the early internet like talking about like these are specific specific groups and subcultures that you know we'll have an easier time radicalizing and whatnot but yeah i'm interested in kind of what actually is going on with this project um and and how you think it's going to look at this stage i understand it's pretty early in development right now so i'm not expecting like you know an e3 walkthrough. Yeah, our E3 slice of life demo. I wish we had that. Yeah, we won a grant from DHS and FEMA, their terrorism prevention grant program this year.

We just got awarded it literally two weeks ago, so have not even started work on it at all but the project will be a collaboration between my center and a non-profit games development company called the i thrive foundation and basically what we are going to do is like build digital scenarios digital narratives that can be engaged with within classroom settings so we're targeting high schools for rolling this out and the idea is that we're going to give students the ability to take on roles that empower them to better understand how extremism and radicalization work as mechanisms, which will hopefully the idea is that it will improve resilience and civil integrity and all those fun buzzwords within high school communities. So we're not necessarily trying to de-radicalize already radicalized people, but we're really trying to build community awareness, community resilience to radicalization pathways. I mean, this is something I think about constantly because I get asked this a lot. I'll get emailed questions from people, sometimes as much detail as like, hey, I'm like a teacher and here's some things this kid in my class has said or something he put in an essay. And I'm like, I'm growing really concerned about him.

And like, what do I do? And my usual answer is, there's a couple of people who I respect that I'll try to direct them to. But I don't, I'm pretty good at how people get radicalized. It's something I spend a lot of time studying. I don't know how you, I have trouble figuring out

how to break down these pathways. Because like, right, the default for a lot of people and for a lot of time has been well you de-platform them right you um you get them off of whatever and there's there's i do certainly think there's there's utility in that but there's also you know the toothpaste tube effect the fact that when you you squash these popular areas where they're able to spread then they they filter off into increasingly isolated communities they develop new terms they find out ways to hide it. And that actually increases, you know, it may reduce the number of people who get radicalized, but the people who remain just get more and more extreme because they're even more isolated from, you know, everyone else. And I don't know, how do you, how do you break that radicalization cycle? Like, how do you stop that shit radicalization cycle like how do you how do you stop that shit before it gets you know to a tipping point

yeah I mean in general I'm with you I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of de-radicalization strategies and it's like an incredibly difficult task to pull someone out who's already going down these pathways and then like you said it's also an incredibly difficult task to make sure that when you are disrupting the radicalization networks

that they aren't just disappearing off to some other corner of the internet which we know they're doing like one of the reasons why we're we're working with a video game video game company is over the last few years we've noticed a big migration into video game platforms especially big social based video game platforms like rob big social-based video game platforms like Roblox and Minecraft, which are not even remotely prepared to deal with very well-developed, sophisticated radicalization networks. They have moved over there,

both for organization and radicalization reasons, since mainstream companies have started taking more of an interest in deplatforming them. And so we are ending up pretty wildly unprepared for this sudden onslaught of extremists being right in front of kids as they're playing games, or teenagers, or even young adults. So our idea essentially is to use that language, the same language that extremists are trying to adopt via the structures of video games, via the sort of interactivity there, to better communicate the impacts of extremism, what it looks like, how to identify it, and hopefully how to avoid falling into the traps that are laid for unsuspecting people. unsuspecting people. One of the issues, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, because we, we,

we talk a lot about, like, I think people have become increasingly aware of how bad Facebook in particular is, is a problem with this. It's, it's really where we owe a lot of the Boogaloo movement to. And now this stuff is coming out about like the data Facebook has had on just, and this isn't, this isn't, this is adjacent to radicalization um the mental impact that it's been having on teenagers right like the the just how bad it is for people and um i'm wondering like how do you scale this stuff i guess is the question like how do you actually how do you make the social internet less dangerous yeah i mean that's that's going to be extremely tough and we are even starting very very small. Like we're building on a narrative platform to target three high schools right now.

But the hope is that ultimately what we can do is build a tool set and a platform, like literally a game platform that can be used by high school teachers and high school classes throughout the country or throughout the world. school classes throughout the country or throughout the world. The idea will be to hopefully make a new sort of package of different methods and interactive experiences that can be reused into the future. But it is one of the big open questions that we will hopefully come to some sort of answer for throughout the project about how do we actually scale this up. But, you know, in general general it is again like one of the biggest open questions right now one of the reasons why i'm so skeptical of a

lot of d-rad and cbe techniques is they try to go for scale of effectiveness when in reality one of the best and only de-radicalization pathways that we know of involves people that you know and i know going out and meeting with these people one-on-one and having intensive frequent communications with them so um there's as far as we know there's not a good answer right now this is a huge place of research right now because we just straight up do not understand how to scale up um yeah radicalization prevention and de-radical i mean and and what you know what you're trying to do in like reaching kids in high school in something that's meant they're meant to be consuming while they're in school is even such an additional challenge because

i think you and i are both young enough to at least remember that like almost nothing that you put before kids in that context in a school gets through i i can i can think about like anti-drug programs and stuff when I was a kid and how ineffective they were. I had one effective anti-drug like speech by a teacher and it was just a teacher whose son was part of this. There was this one night in Plano where like six kids OD'd on heroin. There was a big Rolling Stone article about it. It was a very famous moment.

And her son was one of the kids who nearly died. And she just explained physically what happened to him and begged us not to do heroin. And that actually did stick with me. I've never shot up anything. It's this thing I talked about when I tried to explain like why ISIS propaganda was so effective. It's the it feels more authentic than the than the counter narrative, right? The counter narrative because it's it's usually focus grouped. It's coming as the result of like some sort of government initiative. A bunch of people worked together. It feels focus grouped as opposed to there's something inherently more compelling about something that just like feels like somebody who really gave a shit cares a lot, put this thing together, even if it's terrible. And I, that strikes me as a really, because if you're going to be scaling something and trying to reach a lot of people, it's going to have to be something that is put together at scale by

an organization. And how do you, I mean, I know this must be on your mind as you're trying to figure out how to craft this thing. I'm just interested in your thoughts on that really. Yeah. I mean, that exact challenge challenge is what led us to proposing the project project that we are. So the idea behind it or the, the impetus behind what we do, what we proposed is the exact problem of students just don't listen to people in whether that's anti-drug programs or anything like that.

Often my, my feeling about it is they are often resistant to it because it's very negative it's very don't do this don't do this um setting up boundaries for for uh kids and adolescents to act within it's all very declaratory very you know commanding um there's no there's no sense of treating kids like people who have control who have interests who have motivations it's all attempting to restrict them and so the idea is that we're going to attempt to build a game platform that actually empowers students to operate within roles that have control that that have something to say, to give them voices, to give them that sort of feeling of being an

established person within a certain scenario. The way that I've been thinking about it is that we're basically merging video games with the structure of a model UN conference or something like that. Hopefully, we'll be a little less nerdy than model UN conferences, but that's the idea of giving people power to make decisions, uh, and, and treat them like actual, you know, operating humans. Yeah. I, uh, I'm wondering, do you have any kind of models that you're looking at when you think of like something that you see as, as kind of worth, I don't know, emulating maybe the wrong word, but like, Oh, these people, I think got it right and and this was effective like or is this really a situation where you feel like we're kind of in the fucking wilderness here there's not

a lot of great models for what's effective we are very much in the wilderness yeah that's kind of what i was expecting you to say yeah it like so much of cve and d-rad work over the last 10 years has been directly towards trying to essentially recreate the like the the DARE model or the anti-drug model just in a different field um and so we're going to be pulling from scenario builders and like model UN and debate and like all these different models that seem to at least work to get kids engaged with like operating that sort of situation but it is going to be pretty i mean at least from what i understand it's going to be pretty new we're going to be out there really flying blind for a lot of it um but we will you know we have a pilot phase

built in to try to beta test this with with some of the students we're incorporating students and instructors in the actual creation development stage so that'll be a another hopefully good part of this will will give some students experience with the game development process which i think will help engage them as well yeah no that actually yeah that strikes me as a particularly good idea of like giving and also just giving them some agency so it's not like this is a thing that you are forced to consume like this is the thing that you can like learn something from i think that's that's very important i'm interested in how you see how you see this because like again we kind

of both got in around the same time gamergate is when i started paying attention to radicalization too how do you think it's changed since then How do you think like the nature of how particularly like younger people are being radicalized has changed? I guess I'm also interested because I get the feeling that back then it was mostly younger people getting radicalized and that's no longer the case. I'm just, as we're talking, I just came across a video on Twitter of a group of anti-vax protesters chasing parents and children away from an elementary school and screaming at them that they're raping their kids with a vaccine so clearly the problem is expanded but yeah yeah and honestly i one of the things that keeps me up at night is when we start if you know knock on

wood we are able to roll this out to more schools we're going to run into some probably very resistant parents who have been radicalized yeah um yeah i mean the The big one is what you said. The radicalization demographics have vastly expanded to incorporate so many more different types of people, so many more ages and even ethnicities and genders. But what we do know is that the hardcore of the violent extremists

are still targeting adolescents. We know accelerationists for instance hang out and try to uh essentially blackpill a bunch of teens especially autistic teens especially teens with mental health issues uh and bring them into a more violent more accelerationist posture um so i mean i think that has sort of stayed constant throughout all of this. One of the big changes has been platforms. You know, 10 years ago, it was much easier for a neo-Nazi to operate openly on YouTube or Facebook. But that has thankfully changed.

But they have spread out into, like I mentioned earlier, they've spread out into video games. They spread out into other sorts of platforms where the social aspect isn't necessarily the first part of the platform but rather a secondary aspect to it and they try to engage adolescents on their own turf

in a Roblox game or in a video game forum out there it's not even enough to say it feels like the task of reducing radicalization's not even enough to say it feels like the the task of reducing radicalization or not not even mention pulling it back just stopping the process feels not just like whack-a-mole but like whack-a-mole when you're surrounded by moles um and i guess that is the thing that keeps me up at night the most too is that like the problem has gotten because of how social media scales, I think in large part has gotten so much worse than it ever was.

And the I see these crowds of adults, you know, assembling in places like Los Angeles, showing up outside of schools to harass people. And like. I don't know what. I don't know what to do about that. Part of me thinks that the only effective long-term answer is to mobilize a larger number of people to show up to not necessarily confront those people, but make them feel outnumbered. And maybe they'll stop, and that'll start a process where they, they alter their thinking, like, I'm thinking kind of back to some aspects of the civil rights movement here, right, where you would have these people show up at schools to try to stop integration and whatnot, and they would be opposed often by by larger groups, and they would see the size of the marches in the street. And like, I don't know, I don't even know if it works that way anymore. If like knowing that, you know, 10 to 1 people think your stance on vaccines is stupid and they're

willing to show up to like yell at you if that would do anything but i don't know what i don't know what's going to do like i guess i'm asking you like can you have you figured this out because i don't know what the fuck to do um but it's it's it's not you can't we can't close our obviously you're someone who's trying to confront it directly but we certainly can't keep ourselves like just pretend it's not going to get worse right no totally and um you know i often feel like it's almost too far gone and you know frequently i worry that we've already passed some sort of point of no return on radicalization exploitation of social media. But one of the other things I've also recognized is that when you're in a space that is dedicated to one type of confronting, one method of confronting extremism,

very often they will forget about or deprioritize or or even ignore the other types the other methods and one of the tasks before us i think before we throw up our hands and give up is trying to tie together all the different facets of resisting extremism from the the hardcore confrontational doxing and showing up in the streets counter protesting which i think is an essential part of it to um working as hard as we can to try to get tech companies to to realize what's going on uh and then also on the educational side like what we're doing with this with this project um some of the things that make me at least a little bit optimistic is that there is obviously inertia both intentional and unintentional at tech companies. But frankly, they are still extremely far behind

in understanding how to even do deplatforming on their platforms, how to even identify who to deplatform. Like the majority of tech companies are still making content moderation decisions on a piece by piece basis, specifically looking at content. Very few of them are doing actor analysis. very few of them are doing social network analysis very few of them are looking at

even the links between like off-platform violence and on-platform content like it's the they are still very much in the stone ages when it comes to content moderation and that's so key when i think about like what actually would reduce the harm that these platforms are doing at scale. It's focusing on the actors. And not just like the individual actors, which is part of it. But the patterns that let you tell whether or not someone is like that same actor who's kind of like putting on a different hat, so to speak. Are you aware of like, is there any? Because I have not seen that happen yet.

I haven't seen Facebook take that seriously. And I have I have spent some time there. I haven't seen certainly haven't seen Twitter take that seriously. I haven't really seen. I don't believe TikTok is like they're they're they're they're just. seen i don't believe tiktok is like they're they're they're they're just um like you said they're going after they're taking it on a piece by piece basis which is never there's too many pieces that's never going to handle the problem right yeah i mean tiktok is crawling right now they are in their infancy um they don't they don't have a data sharing uh any sort of data

sharing system set up for for researchers or anything like that yet. I've seen optimistic signals. So I think Facebook's approach to QAnon and Boogaloo movement over the past year has been probably the best, the most positive development we've seen on the content moderation front because they took an actual network-based approach to it. It was hamstrung by a variety of different policy decisions, but it was still, from a mechanics standpoint, the most sophisticated one any of the companies has actually talked about openly. And YouTube has followed in their path. They've started taking more network approaches. They've taken moderation action against QAnon on a similar basis.

against q and on on a similar basis but the the thing that i want tech companies to start looking at is applying a lot of the techniques they're using for disinformation and info ops work to extremism and radicalization it's very similar but right now it seems to be just easier politically or just they are further along with doing the large-scale network analysis approaches on disinfo. Like Twitter is doing a lot of that, but it's all on information operations and authentic info. Yeah, as opposed to – and I worry too because I'm paying attention to kind of – you have this whistleblower from Facebook and how that's being politicized, right? How the right is kind of coming at this from a, they're trying to say, like, as Ben Shapiro said, they're trying to, to, um, to censor, uh, alternative media voices and the like. And I, I worry tremendously about

the politicization because number one, it means that at best we've got like three years to get something together before, you know know who knows who's winds up in the white house next but also if it's just this thing of like veering between who gets who gets paid attention to um based on like what is politically viable for facebook we're never going to solve the problem and i i i think i agree with you for the most part on the facebook's response to the boogaloo movement i mean i i guess i think the problem was that for the most part on Facebook's response to the Boogaloo movement. I mean, I guess I think the problem was that by the time they developed a functional set of responses to it, it had metastasized. It had grown strong enough to exist on its own, and a lot of people had gotten exposed.

What do you think is the actual – is reasonable to expect in terms of response time from these people? Because with Boogaloo stuff, it was about I want to say about three months, maybe. Well, no, it was more like five. It was about five months that it had from like December of of 2019 was when I started really noticing it. And then like, you know, May at the when when stuff really kicked off of the George Floyd protest is when you started to see action taking the tail into may yeah so i i guess that i i'm wondering like what is the half-life of this shit like how quickly do you need to to crack down on this stuff before it it it gets to be impossible to contain uh yeah i mean that's the the biggest limiting factor on that effectiveness of uh content moderation in general but also in in particular these new approaches that the tech companies seem to be experimenting with um my understanding is that part of the so i'm not i'm not defending facebook by any stretch i'm not here to yeah yeah the facebook uh rallying crew but my understanding is that they literally did develop an entirely separate approach to taking down the

boogaloo movement. So that explains at least a little bit of the delay, but, uh, hopefully, you know, my optimistic side hopes that they'll be able to apply it more quickly in the future.

Um, the problem is a lot of the network approaches that have been developed are have like these very high thresholds for attribution. So it has to be like a dedicated network that has crossed the line into criminal activity and is actively calling for you know political violence on like a network level and that like we all know that that isn't that is like the end goal or the end yeah point in it's terminal at that exactly right like that is the terminal point of the development of these extremist networks so you know we're one of the one of the things that we're working on is

trying to figure out a way to convince tech companies that you can and should take action earlier before it reaches that point uh and it's going to be a mosaic of things it's going to be combining violent extremism with hate speech with even like c-sam child exploitation stuff with um all you know criminal criminal conspiracy network policies all of those things need to be sort of thought of as pieces in a single big overarching umbrella that we can use to take down networks earlier on but you know it's a it's a that's one of the biggest tasks is just convincing them to think about it much, much earlier. Yeah.

All right. Well, that's, I think, most of what I wanted to get into today. Is there anything else you really wanted to, like, kind of talk about while you're here? Those are the big ones for sure. We will hopefully have more to talk about very soon in how we're approaching this project. It's going to be a pretty big project and it'll take two years to implement but we're pretty excited to see what

comes out of it. Yeah. Well, people can find you on Twitter at, it's just at Alex Newhouse, right? Alex B. Newhouse. Alex B. Newhouse, yeah. At Alex B. Newhouse. They can check out where you work at Alex B. Oh yeah. What was the last thing you brewed? Oh, I brewed a red IPA and I'm currently brewing three gallons of apple cider. Oh, nice. We just, um, we juiced 10 gallons of apples and pears that I just kegged after almost four weeks of fermentation that I know I've been, I've been looking at, I've been

looking at apple mills, like, uh, apple presses and yeah, I should, I should just buy one. And we found one to rent. So it was just like, I don't know, 30 bucks for the day. And we just gathered up all the apples on property. But it was rad. Definitely very soothing.

Yeah, we were juicing all of the apples the day that Tiny got shot at that protest in Olympia. So it was just like looking at the Twitter saying there's been a shooting at a protest

and being like, yeah, I'm glad I'm not working today. yeah, I'm glad I'm not working today. Yeah, I'm glad I'm not working today. Just having an idyllic afternoon pressing apples. This is a more enjoyable use of my time right now. Alright, well Alex, thank you so much for being

on. Thank you for what you're doing and thank you all for listening. Go with, you know, whoever. Whatever deity. Up to you. 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. 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. It could happen here. Might. Is. Possibly. Anyway, I'm Robert Evans. You know who I am because you're listening to this show, unless you stumbled upon this having never heard of the internet before, in which case this is a show about how things are kind of falling apart.

And we also try to talk every now and then about how to maybe put them back together a little bit. My co-host is Garrison Davis. Garrison, say hello to the people. Hello, people. I'd also like you to say hello to Sean. Hi, Sean. Yeah, there's a Sean somewhere out there.

There's probably a few Seans, yeah. At least one or two. Garrison, what are we, what are we, what are we? Well, we're finally doing something I've been wanting to do for a while, is branching off into kind of covering different parts of media and culture that kind of relate to all of these topics. I know both

me a little bit and Robert more so have worked for or have written for an online investigative journalism website called Bellingcat that deals in open source research. And one of the things that we're big fans of at Bellingcat, I've talked with a few of the other

people, is a game called Her Story, which is a video game that has maybe one of the better depictions of open source investigations. It's a very good game. I highly recommend it. I played it a few years ago. It was lovely. And I recently, well, originally when I bought Her Story, I bought both that game and a spiritual sequel called Telling Lies, which I did not play for a while because I was too busy.

And then I went to the Earth First gathering this summer, and I came back and I had some free time, so I played Telling Lies. And because of the content of that game, I found it really interesting. Because I'm not going to spoil tons of it, because I think you should play it for yourself, and part of it is solving the mystery on your own,

but part of it does take place in a green environmentalism, activism setting, and it has one of the more honest depictions of environments like that. So we are graced with bringing on the creator of both her story and Telling Lies, Sam Barlow. Hello. Hey, exciting to be here. Thanks for that lovely intro. bringing on the creator of both Her Story and Telling Lies, Sam Barlow. Hello! Hey! Exciting to be here. Thanks for that lovely intro. Yeah, I'm very excited to talk with you.

These games are some of my favorite things. First off, I guess I would just like to kind of talk about your inspiration for this type of detective game, because it is unique to every other kind of investigative game out there um and it's you know very much grounded in open source research um and like using computers in the real world what what kind of got you onto that kind of storytelling concept i mean i think there was a whole bunch of things that all kind of sparked off at once. Like when I made Her Story, this was my first independent video game. So I'd been making video games for 10 plus years, working on other people's franchises, more traditional things.

Kind of when I started out working on like Nicolas Cage movie tie-ins and extreme sports games and all these kind of things. like nicholas cage movie tie-ins and extreme sports games and all these kind of things um but uh at some point i got to work on the silent hill franchise which is this this very cool psychological horror franchise and it's one of the certainly at that point in time it was one of the few kind of established gaming franchises that had a story that was interesting and and took place in the real world and had characters and things. So kind of from that point, I was really digging into kind of a lifelong interest in storytelling, especially what we can do with it interactively and continue to be frustrated somewhat by working for these bigger publishers. And at one point I worked for three years, I was directing and writing this big budget video game that got cancelled. And that kind of gave me a moment to kind of sit and think like,

what do I want to do? Do I want to get on board another of these big video games? I was very frustrated at the kind of incremental change that you see in the kind of bigger budget video game space. It feels like things happen very slowly, which can be frustrating. So I was kind of looking around, this was when like iPhones, people gaming on their iPhones and stuff was kind of starting to blow up. The fact that you could now distribute a game individually, digitally and reach an audience was sort of changing the landscape so i kind of felt like i should get into that and so at its conception her story was was me going what are all the things i've wanted to do that that i wasn't able to do when i was working with

these bigger budgets with these more established kind of gaming templates so from the get-go, it was I wanted to deal with characters that essentially lived in the real world, which is a hard pitch. You know, if you're asking for big bucks, every video game has to essentially be about a superhero. It needs to be some kind of wish fulfillment for a teenage boy is generally what people are asking for. And the big thing with her story was subtext. Yeah.

As someone's interested in storytelling, I was always trying to push how important subtext is and the idea that there is, you know, there are layers to a narrative that you're not spelling out for the audience, that they're going to extract through performance or through whatever. And that was always a hard sell

when you were kind of dealing with these kind of bigger companies that had a very simple idea of what their audience was so I wanted to prove that the audience was actually smarter than we were giving them credit for and that if you gave more control to them if you gave more of the the kind of work of piecing these stories together that that would be not just something they could do, but which would actually be more interesting and more personal. And, you know, and with her story, I had a kind of lifelong love of like crime fiction and slightly more kind of gothic leaning crime fiction. And so I was like, right, I'm going to create a video game,

which is in that world and which kind of breaks a lot of the established rules of how you might tell a story um and you know a lot of that i was pulling from uh you know my love of uh some of the more kind of avant-garde literary stuff interesting pieces of kind of movies and things but it was it was pulling from a lot of different kinds of storytelling traditions and ending up in this, this interesting place where, like you say, it's kind of a game experience where you're essentially researching the

story yourself and kind of putting the pieces together. Yeah. Yeah. For people who don't know, it's like you're basically on a virtual desktop and you're sorting through like a hard drive full of footage. And the versatility of the game and people learning how to use search terms, right? Just like people

try to use, in open source, it's called using Google operators. It's the same thing. But also there's the other side of things. I think Bellingcat wrote an article about your game where they made a Python script to scan all of the videos for specific keywords

and put them into different folders and files. So it's like you can do the thing where you just search it, but you could take this to a ridiculous level where you're breaking the game open and doing it like you're actually investigating this and you need to be very quick. So I think her story is a lovely intro to this type of game concept and then for

telling lies you kind of changed you changed some things with it um you made like i guess i guess like an expansion would be the way i would describe it for how it like takes the same concept and pushes it further and i think watching these things now is very different after being like two years on Zoom, right? I'm sure you've heard this from other people as well. It's like, you know, because of how Telling Lies operates, it's like a lot of it is, well, you open the game because you're basically cracking open an NSA hard drive. So all of it is video from like webcams and stuff. So, you you know watching people talking to like their computer camera like this after spending years on zoom definitely uh hits harder i guess

it was one of those things where so when we were first working on this and conceiving of it uh which was i don't know uh maybe 2016, something like that. There was a leap, right? And as a storyteller, you allow yourself sometimes to take that one leap that the audience will take with you. And the leap there was like, these people are using video chat a lot. But, I mean, and as I was starting to put it together, I would start noticing people around that time doing video chat in the street on their phones,

which was, was something I was not used to seeing. And I was like, oh shit, maybe this is not too big of a leap. Um, but yeah, I think, I think it was the verge or somebody ran an article that was like telling lies is still a great game. Uh, mid pandemic, it's just real hard to play now that, that like this zoom thing is our lives. I mean, yeah, that was like, yeah, that was, that was a zoom thing is our lives i mean yeah that was like yeah that was that was a big thing i was interested in at the time was like what what is this doing to us what is communicating over the internet how does that change how conversations and things happen and was kind of looking into some of the research there so that yeah that was wild was uh was was

kind of living in that world for several years, putting the game out, and then spending two years on Zoom calls. Yeah, I mean, in a few ways, I think the game has aged very well because of that. And because the way people, people are more used to interacting with the computer in that format now. So when they're, you know, trying to search for these like hundreds of video files i think they can understand it better um so in some ways i think it's not it's not necessarily a bad thing um but yeah let's see so i think we'll i want to talk a bit about kind of the influences for kind of the surveillance aspect because like her story is filmed in a police interrogation room, basically the whole thing, whereas this

pulls video footage of people in private moments, essentially. Of course, this was after the Snowden stuff and after all of the other kind of... After surveillance became a bigger talking point. But what got you to decide you wanted to kind of

revolve the game around this concept of internet surveillance and then, you know, different three-letter agencies kind of fighting each other a little bit? So I think it was two things. One was in making her story and making lots of decisions somewhat intuitively, kind of when it was finished and it was a big success and I looked back on it and then kind of when a little bit of time had passed i then had this very different relationship where i'd you know forgotten that i was the person that made

it and so could have opinions about it and i was really interested in how that game established a level of intimacy with the main character that viva plays that you're seeing being interrogated despite the fact that it's happening through a computer desktop, despite the fact that there's none of what traditionally, you know, the agency you would traditionally have in a video game, which, you know, conventional logic would be that's how you would establish the idea that this person is alive and that you're in contact with them. But the act of like digging into all this video footage of Viva and seeing her on screen talking essentially at you created this this interesting amount of intimacy that a lot of people responded

to so i was like well that's one of the things that is interesting to me to take further because it's it's very rare that a video game creates this sensation of kind of intimacy or of getting close to or understanding people. And then it was Snowden. I think it was one of the early reports from all the various things that came out via Snowden. There was a particular operation in the UK, which I think was called OpticNerve or something. And the idea there was that they were spying on everyone's internet traffic. And I think it's a little bit easier to do that in the UK than it is elsewhere. And this one particular operation, I remember there was a PowerPoint slide

that was leaked that was like their internal presentation, which proved that like any leaked government PowerPoint will be the worst PowerPoint you've ever seen, like the clip art and just terribleness. Right. But in this scheme, what they did, and this blew my mind was for a period of, I think it was two years, every single video chat that went through Yahoo in in the uk was captured yeah and recorded and they had this issue which i think is if you want to go out surveillance kind of post uh 9-11 the the big problem with surveillance and and the extent to which it's now used is like what you do with all this data like it's it's it's just too much so they um they were capturing all this yahoo video chat and attempting

to you know add the metadata and sort it which is kind of interesting because that's kind of to some extent kind of how something like her story worked yeah yeah yeah totally and the biggest issue they had and they put up this powerpoint and it blew my mind was 30 to 40% of all the video chat through Yahoo at this point was sexual in nature. And they were concerned about the feelings of their operatives who were doing the tagging of all this data. So they'd put their best computer minds on it and they'd come up with an algorithm which would detect an excessive amount of skin tone and would then kind of flag and silo those clips.

And I just remember reading this and being like, what about the feelings of the people whose skin tone you're capturing, right? Like you weren't stopping to think like, why are we doing this? Shouldn't we be doing this? You're solving for the problem of like, how do we stop our agents seeing all this nudity? And I think there was a bunch of other anecdotes, right, in the Snowden stuff of people alongside him, like, you know, looking through people's webcam data and stuff in a voyeuristic way and just this constant invasion of people's rights. So I think that was one of those things where I was like, oh,

this is like new. I was like, oh, this is like new. Like, you know, we now have, you know, you worry about certain levels of like your privacy being invaded and you would certainly worry if someone was letting themselves into your house at night. But we suddenly found ourselves in this position where we have these phones that we put by our bedside at night that have cameras and microphones that are pretty much just running, right? And capturing and just the extent to which now technology

has transformed surveillance. And that was really interesting to me because I, and a big thing I wanted to do, so, you know, I've made her story and like growing up, I loved cop shows and I particularly loved the good ones. Like, like homicide life on the street, the U S there was a show in the UK called cracker. And these were like, you know,

somewhat nuanced in how they dealt with policing. But, you know, you're still, you know, we're in this position now where we're starting to ask deeper questions about whether we should watch this many cop shows um yeah when they're like the main thing on all television all the time yeah exactly and uh and that'd be like when i made her story partly i pitched the bigger publishers like we should do the equivalent

of a cop show like we should do crime fiction or cop show as a video game. And they would always be like, nah. And I would say, well, look, this is like the evergreen, you know, if you're a book publisher, you have a crime show, you have a crime book. You know, if you're doing movies, you're going to have some movies with this genre. It works. And they would always kind of push against that.

So when I made Her Story, that was, in fact, like the arc of playing Her Story to some extent mirrors my arc in that, like, at the top of it, I was like, I want to make an interesting detective game. And I want to deconstruct how detective stories work. And I then started to do a bunch of research where I was digging into, well, how do actual criminal investigations work? How does one interrogate a suspect? Doing all that stuff. And then I started to pull up what at the time, like there was a bit, it was slightly ahead of like the true crime explosion, but there was starting to be stuff on YouTube and in various places where footage from real investigations was online. And it was starting to get a bit

weird and interesting and people were kind of vicariously watching these things and um yeah that raised all sorts of questions they were trying to piece together their own kind of conclusions based on these leaked or sometimes officially released interview segments yeah and and there was one um in particular i got really into the Jodie Arias case. And the way the media spun that story and just really dug into, oh, there's like sex and murder and Mormons. And there's this beautiful blonde woman who now when she goes to court has gone brunette. And they were endlessly talking about on cable news, like her appearance and setting her up as this kind of femme fatale kind of ice maiden. On the flip side of this, I think there's like the, the thing with the making the murder documentary,

which I think I have some issues with how they handle the main guy, but particularly how they showed the totally immoral interrogation tactics used on used on brandon the kid um and that really cracked that whole thing open being like yeah the way the police are interrogating minors without without lawyers is shocking and that was that was that was part of this transition for me was was was yeah going into her story with like the hero of this is the detective it's andre brow on homicide life on the hero of this is the detective. It's Andre Brower on Homicide Life on the Street. It's the genius detective that's going to come in there and crack this case.

And the more I dug into, in cases like Jodie's, where there were various aspects to that case, she definitely did murder her lover, but there were lots of questions around whether the relationship itself was physically healthy. And by the end of it, like all of my sympathy was with Jodie, not with the interrogator who you watch it.

And you realize that like the reason this person is in this situation is because their life has gone very badly. Yeah. And the reason for that is everything that's happened in their life prior to this and they've never spoken to anyone about any of this stuff and suddenly they're in this room with the homicide detective who's like hey you can talk to me i'm the first person that's going to sit and listen to you and and all these tricks that they use to just get people talking and it becomes very intimate and becomes kind of like therapy session uh but by the end of it so so for me like the hook of her story is oh you get to solve a murder

but really by the end of it it's like a character portrait no yeah your empathy should entirely be with her that is less about uh seeing justice done right so i even but even coming away from that i was like i still feel slightly uncomfortable with with kind of having made this thing that is reveling in how much fun it is to be involved in the police work or whatever um and so i was definitely thinking about the snowden stuff thinking about that aspect and the extent to which technology has just so empowered policing in general to the point where it's, there's this great, like one of the core themes that I wanted to dig into in Telling Lies was that when you see people try and defend this stuff

and defend policing in general, they try and set it up so that you basically have, they talk in terms of families and very close relationships. So they're kind of like, well, the government is your parent and they're trying to look after you. And you understand as a parent, you're going to sometimes invade the privacy of your children, or sometimes you're going to inhibit their freedoms because you're trying to protect them and we all understand that and that's part of being human and that's all that's happening here with government right we're trying to protect you from the big bad the evil i saw like there's some tweet from the nypd the other day that was like uh you'll become you'll come running when evil is on your doorstep. Someone was saying something. And for me,

once you take that understanding of how people relate directly to each other, how families work, the second you scale it to the size of government, it breaks. Like you cannot extend that metaphor. And then when you add in tech,

you know, the extent to which, you know, privacy has been degraded of freedoms um you know when you start just blanket looking for crime right uh you start creating all the systemic issues that we have just suddenly become amplified um so that that to me was kind of interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, here is like a means to explore that. And like one of the things that was interesting to me about her story that in retrospect was the extent to which it was about watching video, which seems like a dumb thing to say, but like the choice to real video uh kind of inspired by watching all these interrogation pieces of footage from jody and people um you know was was kind of made as oh yeah that makes sense and i just kind of got on with it but then looking back i was like oh well it's interesting because people talk about this game as being an interactive movie but it's nothing

like a movie no not at all and it's not how movies work. It just happens that it uses a video camera. Only similarity is that it has live action footage. That's it. So I was like, I really want to go even further into that texture. And so I was just thinking about, and when I was starting to do my research, like the idea of surveillance

and the commonalities between like classic old school surveillance, i.e. someone sat in a car with some binoculars watching someone, and modern surveillance, the commonalities are that it's quite boring. There's just a lot of sitting and watching. It's a lot of doing nothing. But out of that, and when you kind of read the firsthand accounts of the people doing the surveillance or some of the depictions of this in media, like there's a level of intimacy that you get with the person you're surveilling, right? Where, you know, if you're just sat watching the minutiae of someone's life, if you're listening to a bug in someone's kitchen and just hearing all the just everyday shit in their lives, or if you are, you know, watching them through some kind of technology, you're just spending all this time with them. And that's like a very non-cinematic thing. It's like this, that minutiae

and the time stretching out of just being present with somebody. And that was kind of interesting to me of just kind of putting you in that headspace and kind of thinking about uh what that means i think that totally gets through because of the way you break up the conversations and telling lies you have to sit and watch these characters as they're just doing nothing for sometimes like like over five minutes they're just like sitting there um and you do get like very intimate with

these characters but it almost but like in a very like creepy way where you like you feel like i shouldn't be here uh just kind of the general feeling of telling it was really interesting because i like some people would have a very and this was you know completely again like trying to process how i felt watching the like the the videos of all the various police interrogations and stuff was like this is fascinating because as human beings we're fascinated by other human beings and here is this extremely interesting dramatic stuff where people are just really spilling their lives out it's why true crime blew up right but then you have all these moral questions around it and obviously obviously with Telling Lies,

it's inspired by lots of real things, but it's fake. And you're watching actors act this stuff. But still some people would have this real visceral reaction of like, I shouldn't be watching some of this stuff. And I'd be like, I mean, you can. It's like, that was where it became really not cinematic to me was like, you know, if you're watching a, you know, a noir film or, you know, a thriller and you have, you know, or even like the thing for the domestic stuff for me was, you know, you could watch a sitcom, watching any, a normal sitcom and the husband and wife are sat in bed chatting. At no point do you feel like i shouldn't be here

because you're in the the kind of classic hollywood invisible camera setup you're this you know you have permission to be there as the the invisible camera spectator and it doesn't feel as weird as it would if you were hiding in the closet of this couple's bedroom um so with the setup i'm telling lies you immediately feel like oh like, I am in this position that I shouldn't be in. So suddenly all those more domestic moments become charged with, like, a very different vibe. Yeah, because you're watching them and you're not invited. Like, right, you're sitting looking at this NSA hard drive and you're like, yeah, I'm not supposed to be watching this. Like, this isn't, they never invited me into this conversation.

Telling Lies very much feels like a much more mature game than Her Story. Not in terms of, like, it has more mature content, but in terms of this concept growing up and evolving and gaining more depth. Particularly because, you know, not only just because it has way

more characters, but because, you know, you get to, you know, all of your kind of games deal with some degree of characters lying to you and just doing straight lies to your face. That's my read on a lot of your games. I mean, the game is called Telling Lies. So you definitely see elements of all of these, trying to figure out what is true and what is not. I think it is interesting looking at how easier it is to lie

via these technological platforms. Sometimes you feel like telling the truth is just so much more work, and you may as well just get through with this conversation by doing a few white lies, which then spiral out of control. When you combine this with law enforcement, infiltration, all this kind of stuff, it gets very complicated very quickly. One thing that I think you guys handled very well

in Telling Lies was kind of the activism side of things. When I played this game, almost immediately after coming back from the Stop Line 3 protests and an Earth First gathering, everyone there is always very... People try to be aware of surveillance and be like, okay, you don't talk You know, everyone there is always very... People try to be aware of surveillance

and be like, okay, you know, you don't talk about certain things if there's phones nearby and stuff. So that whole side of things was very interesting to, like, play this game right afterwards, because you get to see, like, the other side of things, being like, okay, if the FBI is infiltrating this group, here's, you know, one of the ways that they do it.

And, like, that, from my perspective, being, you know, in the ways they do it and like that from my perspective being you know in activism spaces for a while not just like environmental ones but you know other ones like here in portland um you had you handled this topic very accurately um where what kind of stuff did you pull from to kind of create these like these you know environments and interactions between people because i'm not sure if you have any experience yourself and stuff like this or if you got people on to like you talk to people who are more experienced activists what was kind of your inspiration for like you know the opposite side of things not on like the law enforcement

so that was that was like one of the big initial jumping off points so uh like in terms of the the kind of real life inspirations like the the seed of this whole thing was i'm trying to remember when this was it was i'm gonna say 2009 2010 could be completely wrong here but it was um the guardian in the uk i think broke the story but it was and and we've recently had some good progress in this area, but broke the story of this UK spy cops operation, which was a specific unit within the London police whose job was to infiltrate groups to surveil them from the inside. uh groups to surveil them from the inside and um it was horrific and there were like a couple of things about it that were horrific one of them was that like essentially their modus operandi was to find vulnerable young women on the periphery of groups target them romantically and then they would be the collateral to get you know to to have people then more solidly enter into these groups and then they had like a whole you know stepped plan of like

once you're in how you kind of would would destabilize steer these groups from within and the the thing that really made this even worse was the fact that most of the groups, I think maybe all of the groups targeted with this particular unit were green activists. There's this incredible, incredible, like you couldn't make this stuff up, but there's a famous libel case where McDonald's was suing these two activists in the UK, right? Because they were putting up flyers, exposing some of the practices of McDonald's. And the group that they were members of,

which I think at this point was called Greenpeace, but it was different to the kind of more famous Greenpeace, in London prior to them doing this big kind of McDonald's thing was losing members. And it got to a point where there were so few people in this group that it would have shut down had it not been for the fact that there were a large number of undercover cops in this group. So, you know, if you imagine at some point there were actually more undercover cops and private security people undercover in this group than actual activists,

which has enabled the group to continue. And in fact, the original flyer that they put out was written, I forget the guy's name now, by one of these undercover cops. He wrote the copy for this flyer that went out and then saw these people dragged up in court and was this huge, you know, McDonald's won the case. But in terms of PR, it was hugely damaging to them. But yeah, that for me was the thing that seemed even more important. Because here you had this story of the state sanctioning the, you know, one of the most terrible abuses. Like essentially, you know, what was happening was pretty easy to kind of call it rape, right? Yeah, absolutely. There were women in sexual relationships with people

and thinking it was consensual, but not realizing that what they were getting into was not what they thought it was. And so this was just so appalling. And like from a just kind of base emotional level, at just a kind of base emotional level, I just, it was so hard for me to imagine the pain of, and these women were in relationships with these undercover officers for years.

Years, yeah. And part of the modus operandi was when you were done, you had to exit and disappear. And they had this whole plan where the cops would claim that they were being followed and that they were worried and then they would disappear. And then they would call from some European country and say that they'd kind of fled the country because they were worried that the cops were onto them. And then they would slowly kind of disappear. And this, you know, some of these were kind of pre modern internet.

So it was easier for someone to kind of disappear. I mean, like, but like this, this stuff totally happened in the green scare in the States in, you know, around 2010 too. This was my big question was this, you know, some of these cases were kind of the original inspiration. And when I started thinking about trying to tell a story inspired by this, originally it starts off and is, you know, still based in the UK and based on these things. And there's a particular flavor to it where the cops doing this work, it was part of the Met Police who were, you know, that's the more kind of gangstery, like there's a real reputation that the Met Police have. So these cops that were

chosen for this work were the ones that were a bit more kind of macho and edgy. And there was, I mean, there was so much stuff to it that was horrific. Like they would only pick cops that were married because they felt that that gave them some level of ability to be sleeping with these activists and not lose themselves in it. But obviously the wives didn't know what was happening. And there were just so many layers of this that I just thought was awful. And coming off the first story, I was like, well, I would love to tell an undercover cop story in which we 100% acknowledge that the undercover cop is bad.

Yeah. It's such a classic trope is the undercover cop story because you get to have your cake and eat it. You get to see someone on both sides of the law. You get all the tension and thrills of it. or you get all the tension and thrills of it. But usually, you know, whatever, even if the movie or the story or whatever has a bittersweet ending, the protagonist is always the undercover cop.

And ultimately, because they're the protagonist, they're the one that your heart goes to, right? And the secondary characters, whether that's like the wife in Donnie Brasco or Goodfellas or something, you know, they basically serve as a foil to the main character. So I was like, well, can we tell a story where we treat the wife and the activist who's being targeted and the other people

on the periphery of this guy? Let's think more about their perspective on this world and let's acknowledge 100% from our perspective that this is wrong. Everything that's happening is wrong and it's not justified. And then let's just see what the impact is on people. So once we started developing it and when I was speaking to Anna Perna about doing it, I felt like, oh, we should move this to the States to make it feel, certainly as well, because the larger audience is American,

to kind of reiterate and make it feel kind of more identifiable and have it be less quaint and British. So my number one question from day one was like, well, does this shit happen in the States? And is it, does it happen in the same way? And so we brought on a researcher who then started pulling stuff up. And the big thing for me was replacing the undercover group at the Met with the FBI. Yeah.

And then that became fascinating to me because then I started digging into the FBI and understanding their history and everything that's wrong there. their history and everything that's wrong there. But yeah, immediately I start seeing all these great examples of this explicit infiltration of green groups, some pretty horrific cases of entrapment where people infiltrate these groups and then encourage them to do more extreme and violent things on the record. It's the point where you're listening to like recorded FBI stuff

and you can hear the group being like, I'm not sure about that. Like that doesn't sound like a great idea, dude. And the FBI person is there going like, wow, I don't know. I really do think we should blow this bridge up, guys. And it's so obvious like when you listen to which is why a lot of these cases have ultimately been thrown out but um yeah it was it was it was i i guess for the project reassuring to see that all this stuff was happening over here yeah i mean and and the fbi like the specific fbi agent that we kind of follow definitely feels very american and feels very real um i i really like the actor that you got to play him um he definitely feels like a lot of kind of the law enforcement dudes who kind of handle this side

of things um that was that was that was definitely that was like an fbi he became like the fbi-ness of it became very important to it and it was interesting the way that the fbi they had this brand which is partly reinforced by the media like they had the great idea back in like 40s or 50s to themselves fund and support cop shows yeah so this whole idea we have through the x-files through pretty much every serial killer media whatever the idea of the fbi as being like the smartest and the best like that's put out by them but but yes it's really interesting to see they believe that like they are beyond reproach and um like they have higher standards for like you know if you want to

join the fbi there is in theory this kind of moral moral check that you have to pass but flipping backwards and shooting somebody when his gun falls out of his pants at a club well then you read about it and you're like actually the experience the lived experience and and we were it was it was so bizarre because i was like i really want to understand what it's like to be an fbi wife and um let's find let's reach out like the research i'd done and some of the stuff we pulled up i was like oh it it does sound pretty bad like there's a requirement if you're an fbi agent you have to move every three years or something okay so if you're the wife to an fbi agent you essentially move every three years and so you never get a

chance to build your own career or to make roots and so you're generally and the wage is not great which is why they're very uh vulnerable to uh corruption really um so you're generally living uh there's usually kind of areas where all the FBI families live. So it's this very insular world. And you start to see where some of these wives have come out and spoken about it. They're like, it's really shitty because our husbands who believe themselves to be like, you know, macho superheroes get to disappear for three days at a time. And we can never ask where they are or what they're doing. And there's this kind of internal code, which you see in a lot of law enforcement, right, where they will cover for each other or protect each other.

And you suddenly start to see that, like, you know, this is not like. Like, you know, this is not like, and in fact, I remember reading sort of the guy who inspired like Silence of the Lambs, the TV show Mindhunter was based on him and his book. This guy who was one of the early kind of serial killer profiling people within the FBI. You read his book. It's a terrible book. Yeah. When I heard that fincher was adapting i was like wow good luck um but it's incredible the lack of self-awareness he has um this guy is so sexist and so bad every time he introduces a woman it starts by from the legs up like he's

describing her and um at the very end of the book he reveals that his wife leaves him and he kind of writes as if this is a huge surprise and you're like yeah yeah he's calling this from chapter one and he has a best buddy so like the guy who's his who's the the kind of number two in mindhunter on tv um there's like a real life version of him and halfway through the book his wife hires an assassin to come a a hitman, to come in and kill him. And the guy just narrowly avoids it. And the guy writing the book is like, what an evil woman. Like, oh, my poor friend.

And you're like, well, hang on a minute. What was your friend like? Yeah, what was going on? Yeah, there's probably something going on there. something going on there so yeah it was uh yeah that that sense that which i think for me expanded beautifully to the bigger picture of like that character kind of believing that he's the good guy absolutely you know he's the sheriff in the western he's coming in and he's fixing problems and he's saving the world um but and then he slowly falls apart yeah and and and his inability like it's such a brittle worldview that he's yeah he is he is very once he yeah once he's exposed to

thinking that the world is maybe different it just totally breaks him yeah the his specific arc i think is extremely interesting um and i don't want to spoil it because i think it's it's too it's too shocking once you get to the final piece of his story you're like oh wow um i think that was laid out in a really beautiful way but it's it's it's not like shocking away like oh this this like doesn't make sense it's like oh no yeah i can see i can see why he's doing this but it's still it's like you kind of slowly watch this guy get broken down piece by piece um you know because he starts he's very much like the superhero fbi agent he's like yeah

i'm gonna i'm gonna stop these terrorists or whatever and then he just like yeah watching him progress throughout the story you can see like how pathetic he is sometimes there's a there's a great uh one of the uk spy cops um i forget his name. If we were doing this three years ago, I'd have had all these names in my head. But he, so he was assigned and he was, he infiltrated this green group somewhere in the UK for a couple of years, had this relationship with this girl, was participating and facilitating.

The one detail that I loved and tried to make sure was accurate was all these cops would have a van or they would have like a big truck in the UK because they realized that like in these smaller groups, like being the transportation was like your superpower. So like if you were someone who was like, oh, I'll drive everyone to the thing. I'll get us all there because I have this big van.

That was the easiest way to just kind of make yourself useful. But this guy's doing all that. At some point, they decide to pull him and they pull him out. He returns to his wife and his normal life back in London, but he can't go back to his normal life. And so he starts and he's done all the stuff of disappearing. But he just starts getting up and driving. And maybe he's in the north of England somewhere. Just shows back up and he's like, oh, I'm back, guys. And they're like, oh, shit, what happened?

I thought you had to, like, disappear because people were after you. And he's like, no, it's all right. And just goes back to living as an activist. And just goes back to living as an activist. And at some point, one of his superiors notices that the mileage on his police paid vehicle is huge. And they're like, why is this guy doing so much mileage? And it's because he's driving all the way back and continuing to live this life and inhabit this character that he set up. Um, and at some point,

uh, I think he gets found out and it all goes horribly wrong. Cause he no longer has like the fake ID and stuff that they gave him. Um, but yeah, I mean that, and it's like, that stuff's interesting, but then you,

it was always important to never be overly sympathetic when you see them struggling. No, there is a return to life. There is certain points where you see the FBI agent struggling because of how like smug he is. You're like, yes,

he's struggling. And you like get excited when he gets like, when he gets like reprimanded or he, you know, people are like mad at him for various reasons. It is very interesting how you like how sympathies get pulled in certain directions because like by the end of the game you definitely have a much fuller perspective on who this guy is and how his kind of psyche works um because he is really in a lot of ways like kind of pathetic as like a person um and he like needs to like hype

himself up for himself to like make himself feel like he's special and when that gets broken down he just completely collapses i guess one of the last things i want to talk about is like throughout all of your games you have kind of a through line of like fairy tales you kind of you bring in fairy tale concepts into all of these games um and i i like how a lot of your games are very open-ended in some ways i think her story being much more open-ended than Telling Lies in some ways. And I really like that you can't look up, like, what is the ending of this game? It's like, no, you have to piece it together in your own brain. And whatever you think the story is, that's what it is for you.

There's no definitive ending, especially for her story. And how this combines with fairy tales, I think, is a really interesting way to include mythology into these more modern stories. What's your thought process behind including mythology and fairy tales into these more modern stories of people interacting with government, law enforcement, and then just breaking down their own psyches under these high-tensed situations yeah i mean i think it i think it came initially with her story of yep thinking about the the kind of meta storytellingness of these things right of the extent to which their experiments and like how we tell stories um and but a lot of times like the myths and the the kind of classic stories that people go to those right to try and understand the bigger questions or uh something like um i guess partly came out of uh the start of her story i had like two youngish kids and you see you're reading them all all the classic stories.

And you realize the extent to which these are just encoding our society's values, right? Yeah, totally. I had this incredible book that was, that my parents got for me and I tracked down and made sure we still had when I had my kids. That was called, it was like folk tales of the peoples of the Soviet Republic from like the early 80s. And it was collected like a lot of it was Ukrainian. Yeah, yeah. Folk tales. And they were amazing because they were so dark.

Like the message of each of these stories was trust nobody. The rich will always win. You will end up dead and unhappy. Right. And each story would start with the poor peasant. His brother gets rich. He asks for help. The brother, like, is horrible.

Like, there's one story where there's this brother who's like, oh, if you want some grain because you're starving, then gouge out your own eye and I'll give you some grain. And then he comes back for more grain later and he's like, gouge out your other eye. Now chop off your hand. And it's like, they're so dark uh and i'm like but this is 100 reflecting what it was like to live in that world and grow up and you're preparing people for for the realities so um

you know i think that to me was really interesting and and her story tells this story that kind of to some extent grows out of this childhood um and then with telling lies definitely it was part of this idea of um of yeah how logan's character david sees the world and relates to his part in it and like his utter inability to realize that he's the bad guy in the story right Right. And he thinks he's the good guy. And, and that was like, that was partly the key to breaking his character. I think it was his daughter.

So he has this character who's like the six, seven year old daughter. And that's like, you know, he, he lets down and does horrible things to a whole bunch of people. But the thing he's not going to be able to get over is knowing that he's let his daughter down right knowing that at some point she will grow up and be an adult woman who if she

learns about what her father has done will will think less of him and you know will realize that he's the bad guy in the fairy tale whatever so um that was like just interesting to me to sit him in that moment and have him reading those stories and see see his relationship with his daughter um and yeah i think that yeah that yeah i think i'm just relating those things back to what are these these kind of base values and so much of those folk tales is preparing you for the fact that people are going to lie to you and trick you and all those kind of aspects. Yeah, a lot of them do deal with failures of trusting people and getting let down and being misled. A lot of those do kind of follow on these same kind of rough templates.

Let's see. Is there anything you're working on now that you want to plug? And of course, you know, people should pick up Telling Lies, Her Story. I have them on Steam. I think they are best suited to be playing on PC, but you can get them on console, you can get them on iOS. But anything upcoming? Yeah, we're working on currently currently uh this uh project called immortality um which is very ambitious uh it'll be out next year it deals with the story of an actress uh who only ever made three movies uh the latter half of the 20th century um and then disappeared. And we have recovered footage from these three movies. And it's been interesting because with Telling Lies,

like I've always been someone that when I think about the kinds of stories I want to tell, I've always thought that I'm not a capital P politics person, right? I tend to be interested in how people relate to each other and some of the kind of smaller politics. And once I got to Telling Lies like oh actually like there is some capital p politics absolutely 100 tied to all this yeah totally and so dug into that was like well so i want to do right by this right so it did involve speaking to lots of people it didn't involve bringing in all the research and everything um so coming away from telling lies and and as i mean it was making the game was insane because uh it was during uh trump right trump happens

and i remember going into it being like we're making this story about the fbi being bad that's a pretty reasonable end point and then once we hit trump you had all that stuff of like the good fbi agents in theory or the yeah the fbi might be the people that bring trump down and suddenly they it was 100 leaning into the myth of the fbi and i was like damn it and just everything uh getting worse and it was like oh this is like so intense to be making something and speaking to some of these issues whilst this is all happening. So finishing that, I was like, well, okay, for the next project, we are definitely going away from talking about real life issues and capital P politics.

And then just accidentally it's become, because we're talking about an actress in the 20th century and what it means to make movies and uh digging into that suddenly becomes about a whole other bunch of systemic issues um so yeah not not managed to avoid the politics again but it's it's been a really really interesting project i think i think once you crack that egg open of realizing that politics are kind of intrinsic to every story we tell, it's hard to kind of put that back in the box. Because once you realize you can use politics in a very interesting and complex storytelling way, that still doesn't alienate a lot of audiences. It's like, oh, yeah, this is just using another way to interact with the world.

I think that was one of the things that was slightly disappointing, I guess, with Telling Lies with telling lies was like when we're working on it i'm like we want to make sure we get these things right because like these are very important issues and there are some nuances and so we you know we don't want to accidentally say something that is incorrect or we don't want to give people the impression that we're you know yeah yeah yeah um so i was expecting some level of scrutiny in terms of discussing the game's themes and everything um and i guess like the the video games world is still not quite ready for that like they're quite happy to talk about the game mechanics and how this thing works and some big picture emotional responses but no one's willing to kind of uh dig deeper and we had like as the game was coming out and continues to be you you have the bigger name developers being like there's no politics in our

video games as they're like invading countries yeah we're gonna make a game about you know you know being a black ops unit taking down communist countries we're not gonna talk about politics we're gonna yeah constantly uh constantly just saying it's possible. They'll always say we both sides, right? We'll tell both sides and let people make the decision. Yeah. And something that I was very adamant, was very important to me on Telling Lies was like,

if we're making this game, it is not, the point of the game is not to give you a mush of information and have you decide the moral yeah you know good or bad of something like we are going into this 100 with the assumption that we and the audience or most of the audience believe that people doing these things are wrong and then we're just and then i'm interested in what does it do to the people? What, what is it like to be in this world? What are the consequences of ramifications? How does one exist and continue to live a life after having been involved in

these things? So for me, a political game is, it can't be a political story in any media. It can't be going back to first principles and pretending we're in debate club. I think that's just to infantilize the audience. I think you can say a political story is one which embraces and acknowledges the reality of the various power struggles and inequalities that we have. And then has something to say about or has a particular angle it wants to interrogate or something it wants to shed light on um but it's very childish and i think we're definitely struggling with this in video games to be like oh if it's about politics then it should be a big

question and we should assume no answers right and it's like yeah this is complete bullshit and and it kind of it can lead to some problematic ways which is why you see a lot of you know game footage in actual like terrorist propaganda like with like like with like nazis and white supremacist stuff they they use a lot of game footage in their propaganda videos when especially when you like both sides of these issues yeah it's uh i have a particular interest in the intersection between like politics extremism, and gaming, because gaming is very important to our modern extremist

ecosystem, particularly around 4chan and mass shootings. All of these things play into game culture. I'm not saying games cause these events to happen because they don't, but the way they interact with these people is actually interesting. This is very different from the way the Senate is. Oh, games are causing causing mass shooting because they're not yeah i think it's it's

it's it's a hard conversation separate thing it's it's yeah there is there is a fox news kind of hysteria around gaming but at the same time like and and clearly you know one way i pitched her story when i was telling people why it was interesting i was like this is a game about listening i was like that's cool because know, whatever you think about the larger politics of it, or the question of whether video games themselves are inherently harmful or anything, like the fact that still 99% of the stories we tell are about someone with a gun in their hand or a sword in their hand. And the power dynamics and the types of stories and the types of protagonists, like, it's screwed up. And I think to the same extent that the fact that, like, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about a bunch of glorified cops going around saving the world.

Like, you know, if you continue to reinforce these things. Yeah, all of the art we make are saying certain things about the world and we're reinforcing a certain narrative over and over again and not really thinking critically about it yeah that's the problem with making art i mean i'm i'm not trying to come off as being anti-gamer i would play a lot of games i really like gaming i just think some some companies need to figure out why why certain games are used in mass shooting manifestos and certain games aren't, particularly around politics. I'm particularly talking about white supremacy

and how certain games play into certain things. Even a game like Wolfenstein, which I think handles this topic very well, still will get brought up in certain propaganda videos because they do have cool shots of Nazis walking around. That's the problem it's kind of the problem with some of these things. And, you know, if they weren't killing, if Nazis weren't killing people as much, this wouldn't be as much of a

problem, but, because that's still a thing, that's still a thing that needs to get talked about. Anyway, this, this, this took a very sad, sad turn towards the end. Anyway, yeah, I will, I will just strongly recommend playing her story uh playing telling lies i think these games you know interrogate our our predispositions about

about kind of police detective work um and you just get to learn a lot you get to learn a lot about like people and characters because like a lot of these games you know where the setup is like oh solve this crime or mystery but then by the end you're solving a very different mystery and you're kind of solving what makes a person tick and it's very I really like the arc that you have in your games they've brought me a lot of

happiness so thank you for that and thank you for talking with all of us about your work I've enjoyed it, thank you thank you for having me and yeah, like I say I was hoping to have about your work. I've enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And yeah, like I say, I was,

I was hoping to have hundreds more conversations about what telling lies was about and about these issues when it came out, but it's, you know, that it's, I mean, it's hot, just the general media landscape now,

like you put something out there and it comes out and people consume it and move on. Like, you don't have that span of, like, discussion that, I don't know. It feels like it used to be a thing. Yeah, I think it definitely did used to be a thing. And definitely your games have had an influence on media in certain ways. I know there's been, a few other like projects that like netflix is doing that is kind of taking your concept but not really doing it correctly yeah yeah yeah no comment no yeah there's definitely been a lot yeah people always send me them they're

like oh this sounds a lot like her story this thing and it's like oh but it's it's built as a non-linear yeah yeah exactly it's like you you let people i don't know yeah usually it's like watch there are eight episodes you can watch them in any order which isn't how her story works no yeah like yeah there's a there's a yeah there's a whole different thing going on but um no i mean it's yeah it's interesting times for for that sort of stuff but um anyway play these games on steam and that that does it for today you can follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at HappeningHerePod and CoolZoneMedia. Do you have social media that you would like to plug?

Or would your people... If people are on Twitter, that's where I tend to be, despite its... Despite its... Yeah, I know. I am MrSambalo on Twitter, M-R-Sambalo. I will say, I actually do like your Twitter account. You do post some fun stuff every once in a while. That's kind of a weird condescending thing to say.

Anyway, bye for funny. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. 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. have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's going to be way too jarring to open an episode with. Well, we already did it, so let's keep moving.

Yeah, uh-huh. The episode's actually going to start with Garrison saying, that's way too jarring to open an episode with, and the listeners won't know what it was. That is a much easier opening. All right. I hate this. So we're doing, I'm going to be reading a thing today.

Cool. And then we're going to talk about the thing that we're reading. That's the show. And who are you and who is here? Oh, yeah. This is a good happen here. This is a good happen here. I'm Garrison.

I am our resident Canadian. Oh, good to know. Oh, yeah. That's Anderson. That's Anderson the dog. Yeah, we had to hire a Canadian for a diversity quota. Oh, good to know. Oh, yeah. That's Anderson. That's Anderson the dog. And here we have... Yeah, we had to hire a Canadian for a diversity quota. You don't.

You do not. Anyway, we have Chris here, Robert Evans, as usual, and Sophie. Hi. So, we're going to talk a little bit about Canada today. Oh, good. In the scripted what-if scenarios so oh good in the uh in like the scripted what-if scenarios first posited in the original it could happen here um it detailed what it might be like to live in the united states during a modern civil conflict and like one of the

stories that we kind of tell ourselves as a culture is about you know crossing up into the safe haven of canada whenever stuff breaks out in the States. Whether that be like an escape from just the hell that's US politics, or, you know, going up into the cold northern terrain, better equipped to deal with climate change. Canada is kind of just viewed as a bastion of liberal democracy in North America. You know, I've made jokes in the past about using my Canadian passport to escape up into the forest of Alberta when things get too dicey here in the States. But this weird utopian view of Canada is not just wrong about Canada's current political state, but also assumes that Canada is immune to the political shifts that the states have gone through the past few years, which it's very obviously not. the past few years, which is, it's very obviously not.

So, like, Canada internationally is, and specifically in the States, it's used as, like, you know, it's used as, like, America's little brother, but it's, you know, it's much more, you know, democratic, it's much more liberal, it's like this kind of ideal scenario for, like, what the States could be. And, like, Canadians have a weird view of the states as well. Canadians, they're both kind of obsessed. A lot of Canadians, I think, know more about US politics than they know about Canadian politics.

But almost in a way that we watch sports. It's like this thing that we watch as entertainment, like some kind of sick reality show. That's how I think a lot of canadians really view u.s politics um because it's just so wacky compared to the kind of more like civil parliamentary system that we have in canada u.s politics just looks very very bizarre and there's always this notion it's like no matter how bad things can get in canada at least we're not the States. At least we're not the US. And that is kind of a lot of

how a lot of stuff can just survive in Canada longer because it's just they view it like at least we're not as bad as the other people. So that's how it gives them some kind of

sense of security. But in terms of like in terms of canada as a country you know we we've said that canada as a country is basically just you know a few mining companies in a trench coat and the trench coat is health care um and that's that's really all they are as as as a country um but today we're going to be talking about kind of canada's slide towards farther right-wing politics, both historically and then more recently. Because a lot of what we've seen in the States has happened in its own weird Canadian way around the same time. But before we really get started, I think it would be remiss not to mention how the canadian government has historically treated indigenous and first nations people um living on that land uh of course like not only just hundreds of years ago but a lot more recently as well just in the past year there have been thousands and thousands of like hidden graves found across the provinces at the

sites of these residential schools um and the process of looking for these unmarked graves has like just just started. The Canadian Historical Association published a letter this past Canada Day, Canada Day is like Independence Day, but for Canada, saying that it was abundantly clear that Canada is guilty of genocide. I know there's a few episodes of Behind the Bastards

and I think even Worst Year that talk about residential schools and the genocide of indigenous people in Canada. So yeah, you can check those out. I wrote this episode to be more focused on Canada's political shifts the past five years, but since we're going to be

talking about Canadian fascism, I thought it would be irresponsible to not mention this up front as a thing. Very responsible, Garrison. Very responsible. So I'm going to try to take us through aspects of Canada's politics chronologically. You guys can butt in and kind of ask

questions and clarifications about stuff. But the first thing that we're going to start with is actually going to be on the First Nations side of things. And that's kind of how that's what mostly Indigenous people are called in Canada as First Nations. Even the Indigenous people up in Canada, most of them use that term.

So that's the term I'll be using for some of this stuff, just because that's the one that's used up there. So the residential schools program, I'm going to briefly mention a few things about it, just because of how it relates to some of the stuff that we're going to be talking about for the rest of the episode. Yeah, I'm going to read some words by Duncan Campbell Scott, who was the deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs.

This was like a rank in the Canadian government. He served as the deputy superintendent from 1913 to 1932, and he's arguably like the main architect of the residential schools program um he was he was also good friends uh with the first prime minister of canada john uh john john mcdonald so here's here is here's how this guy the the the the architect of this program this is this is how he kind of of talked about this in letters to both his underlings and just like openly, quote, it is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so close in the residential schools and that they

die at a much higher rate than in their villages, but this does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared towards a final solution for our indian problem it is quite within the mark to say that 50 of children who pass through these schools did not live to benefit from the education in which they had received so that's that's just what he calls it he says the final solution to the indian problem it's very very very clear what what like that's just the language he uses and this was like before hitler though like this was this was 1913 well i mean hitler was paying attention to these guys yeah like this this is just like this is the mindset of all of these same people this is all of all of the same thing um another another another quote from this dude is i want to get rid of the indian problem i do not think of it as a matter of fact that the country ought to continually protect a

class of people who are able to stand alone that's my whole point our objective is to continue until there's not a single indian in canada that has not been absorbed into the into the body politic and there is no indian question and no indian department that is the whole objective of this bill the bill referring to the residential schools program so that's that's how he talks about these things um there's other letters that he's sent that's like telling his um his like agents because he had like agents stationed at at uh canadian at canadian reserves to like not let indians do dancing because both that's you know that's doing their cultural practice but also it'll distract them from learning how to do western farming um like They weren't allowed to go to fairs or exhibitions

or anything that is reminiscent of any kind of cultural tradition that is not white and European. So he is a pretty bad dude. He probably deserves his own thing, this specific guy. But you can kind of see like these like fascist ideas and rhetoric are not foreign to canada um and you know it's been there since its infancy now canadian politics is very different in a lot of ways compared to american politics uh canada tries to kind of follow the european model whereas america is very much like the rebel state that tries to play by its own rules.

Kind of the first main difference is that Canada isn't a two-party system. It's more like a two-party plus system because, yeah, there still is the main liberals and the main conservatives, but there are other parties that actually can get elected. And it's not like a strictly two-party system the same way the States is. So that makes things more interesting.

And another thing that's really interesting about cultural politics that's different from the States, besides Canada obviously has a parliament and a prime minister, that's different. But Canada and Canadians view nationalism and patriotism very differently compared to United States citizens. Patriotism and in some ways nationalism have always been kind of more of a liberal progressive thing, in opposition to the states where it is not really seen as a liberal progressive thing. Even under conservative leadership, Canada kind of prides itself as sort of liberal utopia,

and that's where a lot of the patriotism and celebration of Canada comes from among its mostly liberal and more socially progressive citizens. They celebrate Canada as this great progressive nation, and that's where a lot of the patriotism comes from. It's like, oh, look how progressive we are. The nationalism part can be a bit more tricky, because you first need to understand like the english and french divide uh which within the country which i i barely understand that to be

honest i was i was i was i was born in the prairies that was you know much more like the protestant english english english settlement you know i'm not from quebec uh but we'll be talking about quebec a lot here because it is very important to how nationalism works in Canada. So the divide between the French and the English make elections really interesting because the English majority politicians usually need to court some of the French Canadian population and people in Quebec in order to get enough parliamentary seats to have a majority government because Canada works on having a majority within the parliament. You can have a minority in the parliament like the liberals currently have. So even if, you know, someone doesn't win a plurality of votes, they can still be in control of the government in a minority or usually a majority capacity. We'll get into this kind of stuff later.

But even though they need to get seats from Quebec to have, you know, decent control of parliament, Quebec kind of likes to act like its own special country. They even have their own, like, federal political party, the Bloc Québécois. And so, like, that's a federal party that operates in forwarding the interests of Quebec. Sometimes it functions as, like, a separatist party, but not really anymore.

So, although the Bloc Québécois is a lot more secular and progressive than basically any other major party outside of the NDP. But despite them being much more socially progressive, they're also one of the biggest nationalist parties in Canada. like one of the biggest nationalist parties in Canada. And, you know, the far-right parties in Canada have always had their, you know, brand of ethno-nationalism, but that's been much less pronounced than the kind of like keep non-French Canadians out of Quebec

and keep Americans out of Canada type of nationalism that's common with like liberals and specifically, you know, progressives inside Quebec. I mean, I can't blame them for wanting to keep Americans out. No, yeah. That's just good sense. If I could keep Americans out of America, I would do it. Yeah, but so that kind of sentiment, you can see how that can be used

to foster some not good things, though. That specific type of thinking of like keeping nationals like you know keeping foreign nationals out of your state yeah it's good to not have americans there but you know that's going to get extended towards other people yeah that's unfortunate yeah and like so even though you know the nationalism can be a lot more progressive that's not to say ethno-nationalism does not come up within these sects. Which is going to bring us to when I briefly talk about something from the 30s

called the National Unity Party of Canada. The National Unity Party that is a weird thing to say was originally called the Canadian National Socialist Unity Party. Oh wait, now that reminds me was originally called the Canadian National Socialist Unity Party. Oh, wait.

Now, that, hmm, here isn't, remind me, National Socialism, that seems like a term with a little bit of baggage, if I remember it correctly. Yep, it sort of does. So this was a party formed in 1934 by a little Nazi shithead named Adrian Arcand. Now, that is, if you cannot tell, that it's me trying to say a French name, so he is

from Quebec. This is a lot of Canadian Nazi stuff originates inside Quebec because it already has such nationalist tendencies. So, Arcand's introduction into nationalism started around the turn of the century amid fears in Quebec that Chinese immigration would threaten the white French Canadian working class.

This is still a big thing in Canada. Racism and nationalism against the Chinese is still a big thing. We will talk about this at the very end of these episodes because that's still a thing the Conservative Party talks about a lot. of these episodes. That's still a thing the Conservative Party talks about a lot. So, yeah, his internationalism was because of fears of Chinese immigration in the early 1900s.

So his anti-immigrant upbringing, plus the fact that he attended a Catholic school, there was no public schools in Quebec until the 1960s. All of the schools were either Catholic or Protestant. Now, this is also part of the cultural divide inside Canada, where usually the English speakers

are Protestant, and they're usually further west, and the Catholics are usually, you know, French Canadians. There's a lot of that inside Quebec. So he went to a Catholic school, which were at the time very anti-Jewishish because what was happening is the Jewish people in Quebec wanted to make their own Jewish schools and the Catholics in charge didn't want that because then the less people were inside Catholic schools and they weren't learning Catholicism. So there's a lot of stuff going on here

that is kind of contributing. So he was already anti-immigrant because of the Chinese and then he got exposed to anti-Semitism inside his Catholic schools and that pushed him onto this specific path. you know, already anti-immigrant because of the Chinese, and then he got exposed to anti-Semitism inside his Catholic schools, and that, you know, pushed him onto this specific path. So in 1930, Arkan made a deal with the head of the Conservative Party, R.B. Bennett, that in exchange for $15,000,

which is like $250,000 in today's money, Arkan would craft a smear campaign trying to assist the Conservatives in basically smearing the Liberals to gain more Conservative support inside the province of Quebec, which at the time was majority Liberal-leaning. So, Arcand got to work and started prepping, you know, like, pseudo-fascist propaganda for the Conservatives, and by the 1930 federal election, it absolutely worked. Bennett and the Conservatives won, they gained 24 parliamentary seats in Quebec, which is a massive

success. Before, they did not win any seats in Quebec. So gaining 24 seats over the course of just one election, massive win. So after getting the Conservatives elected, the Conservative Party dropped Arkan because he was a little hashtag problematic.

That's a shame. Uh-huh. So, after he got dropped by the conservatives, shortly later, Arkan made contact with the growing National Socialist Party in Germany. And over the next few years, he just, he started to gain more fascist contacts around the world. He would exchange

letters. People from, people, like, people from the German Nazis would come over and meet, and come over to Canada and see what he was doing. He would travel around meeting other Nazis around the world. So it was kind of just like – just gaining a lot more contacts. So then in 1934, he formed his own fascist party, which is the Canadian National Socialist Unity Party. And within that year, so in the mid-1930s, it merged with other Canadian nationalist parties that were more based in the West. So, you know, in the prairies like Alberta, Saskatchewan, and BC. So it merged with

a few other kind of nationalist groups and started gaining traction, getting thousands and thousands of members. This actually became an actual thing. You can find footage of his rallies and they're just terrifying. Just like, you know, it's the same thing whenever you see like the Nazis, you know, rallying in Britain. You know, it feels different than watching a nazi rally in germany because you can feel a lot more you know if it's it's it's the same feeling but come but come home your own countrymen kind of do the same thing that you associate with old footage of dead people is uh exactly real fucked up yeah so he was gaining was gaining a thousand numbers across Canada, mostly in the provinces of Quebec

and Alberta. The two main provinces we're going to talk about are going to be Quebec and Alberta because that's where a lot of the far-right stuff gets started out. So in 1938, so that's like four years after he started this, the Canadian National Socialist

Unity Party merged again, this time with various nationalist groups and so-called swastika clubs. Oh, cool. That were already inside like Ontario and Quebec, so on the eastern side of Canada. So now he united both the Quebec stuff, eastern Canada, and western Canada, and then he called that the National Unity Party. And Arcand appointed himself the Canadian Führer.

Oh, gosh. Sweet. So, and I'm going to quote from a Time magazine piece from July of 1938. Arkan scheduled Canada's first national fascist convention for Kingston, Ontario.

The mayor and city council did not want a fascist convention held in their city and called the police to prevent it. Defiantly, Leader Arkan slipped 45 of his leaders into a room near police headquarters. It's this old-timey language. Held forth unmolested

for five and a half hours. Upon emerging, Leader Arkan wired thanks to the mayor for his courtesy extended and announced the formation of the new National Unity Party. A flaming torch will be the new party's emblem. Canada for Canadians, its slogan.

And the upraised arm of its salute for King, country, and Christianity. Moving on to Ontario, Leader Arkan, supported by 85 of his blue shirts, he claims there were 80,000 members at the time, held a meeting in Mancy Hall that was attended by about 800 sympathizers. More impressive, however, there were three anti-fascist counter-demonstrations held simultaneously. Two outdoor anti-fascist meetings drew 400 persons, until broken up by police, fearing a clash. But at Maple Leaf Gardens, the Canadian League of Peace and Democracy attracted 10,000.

So this was the first big fascist rally in Canada in 1938. There was like, you know, 10,000 of these more liberal people rallying elsewhere and 400 like anti-fascists ready to, you know, beat up these Nazis. But then the police beat them up because history doesn't change, time's a flat circle. We're still doing the same thing now. Do you know who won't rally 800 canadian nazis called the blue shirts to sell you products oh my god who tell us promise that yeah depending depending what

yeah hello fresh has uh recently been sending. Why do you always pick Hello Fresh? There are so many worse brands that have accidentally advertised on our show. But we can't ignore the fact that they've been increasingly building their militant capacity for the last seven years. Anyway, here's some ads. We have too much to read. And we are back talking about the Canadian blue shirts. The Hello Fresh, Hello shirts. Harrison, please continue.

Blue aprons? Yeah, the blue aprons. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Chris, for saving the bit. Yeah, thank you. So next year, after his first rally, which was 1939, World War II obviously started to ramp up, and the Canadian government arrested Arkan for plotting to overthrow the state, and his National Unity Party was banned from federal elections.

Arcand was released from prison after the war, but he continued his political aspirations. He ran for federal election twice in Quebec, once in 1949 and once in 1953. Both times, he ran under his National Unity Party banner, despite it being banned from elections. I don't know how he did that. Laws are fake. Both times he placed second with over

5,500 votes, which is about 30% of the vote. Actually, the second time he ran just under a nationalist banner, and he got second as well, but he got like 40% of the vote. So he did slightly better just running as a nationalist in Quebec, not like the National Unity thing, because that was more overtly Nazi. But he kept holding National Unity Party public rallies until the mid-60s. His last rally, I think, attracted like 1,000 supporters.

That's way too many. I was hoping you were going to say like three, and there was going to be really sad footage, but that's sad in a different way. Yeah. So he finally died in 1967. Hooray! And with him also died the National Unity Party.

Also hooray. So I bring this one up because it's, one, fucked up and interesting. And two, it's indicative of the weirdness that can come out of Quebec's nationalist political bent. We can see that now with a modern neo-fascist Canadian political party that's based out of Quebec, which we will talk about shortly. But even the nationalist tendencies within Quebec's more mainstream progressive population. Like I'm going to read some of the policy positions of the Bloc Quebecois party. That's like the Quebec sovereignty party that is still actually very popular in elections, specifically in Quebec.

And just ahead of this, if you're a French speaker and you're frustrated by Garrison's pronunciations or my pronunciations of Quebecois, just note that your language isn't real. And it's fine. And you're descended from the French. Yeah, and you're responsible for this Nazi, so womp womp. Unlike English speakers who have been responsible for zero atrocities. French has just mispronounced Spanish. That's my take, okay?

You're just saying Spanish wrong. Here is the progressive liberal bloc quebecois policy positions. Quebec sovereignty, you know, up into independence, but usually it's just, you know, them pushing the interests of Quebec. Environmentalism. Abortion rights.

You know, pro-abortion rights. LGBTQ rights. Legalization of assisted suicide, opposition to Canadian participation in the Iraq war, abolition of the monarchy, forcing immigrants to speak French in Quebec.

Okay, now you lost me there. Blocking immigration to Quebec. You've also lost me there. Blocking immigration to Quebec. You've also lost me there. The Quebec secularism law, which bans public workers in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols, primarily targeted at Muslims and Sikhs. Yeah, you've kind of lost me there.

Yeah, we're lost. Exemption, Quebec's exemption from the requirements of the Multiculturalism Act. Yeah, I mean, i don't know the multicultural act but i'm gonna it's great it's it's good so yeah so you could kind of see how like they have you know all these like you know just pretty good stuff pretty good progressive things and then they get great until the racism then they get really anti-immigrant right so this is like this is kind of hard to explain to americans how like you can be very pro-gay, pro-abolition of the monarchy,

but then also be like, no, but we don't want those brown people in Quebec. Yeah. So, yeah. Anyway, we're going to move on from Quebec specifically, but don't worry, we will be back because you're still a problem. But there are other things to discuss.

So after Arcand's fascist Canadian movement, there was a stint of Canadian skinheads in the 70s, around the same time as the UK and the US. In the 70s, there was an unsuccessful Nazi party called the Nationalist Party of Canada that spawned a skinhead gang called Heritage Front. Heritage Front disbanded around the mid-2000s because the Canadian feds infiltrated it

and kind of cut that down. So critical support around the mid 2000s because uh the canadian feds infiltrated it and kind of you know cut that down so critical support to the canadian feds but now we're going to move on to unite the right uh not not not the unite right that you're thinking of the canadian unite the right movement from the 1990s early 2000s yeah but that one probably wasn't problematic right there is it has no lasting problems yeah Yeah, that's good. Okay. So, because of Canada's multi-party system, there's more opportunity for ideologically similar

parties to split the vote, you know, of people leaning in a certain direction. Throughout most of the later half of the 20th century, there were multiple conservative right-wing parties that were operating at the same time, which did split the right-of-center vote. This is in part what allowed Canada to rise as a liberal haven, because for a while, the conservatives just couldn't get elected because they were splitting

the vote too many ways, leaving the main liberal party to win the vast majority of elections. Obviously, this frustrated right-wing politicians and voters. Then in the 1990s, there were two main right-wing parties. There was the older progressive conservative party. They're like a classically fiscal conservative party with slightly less socially conservative beliefs. So, you know, I would rather take them compared to the alternatives here. The other major party was a right-of-center party called the Reform Party, which was much more of like a right-wing populist and extremely socially conservative party, more similar to like the Trump-era Republican Party. You know, they're much more right-wing populist, way more socially conservative, kind of what we

traditionally think of as like, you know, like a racist Republican. This is their party called the Reform Party. So after loss after loss throughout the 90s and during the turn of the century, concerted efforts were being made between these two parties to unite into one. In 1998, there was a Unite the Right conference held in Toronto, Ontario, trying to bring together politicians and delegates from these two main conservative parties. But they also brought in some much more extreme Christian fascist parties, which there was like four of at the time. There was a lot of Christian fascist parties around this time. So the conference

garnered negative news coverage, in part due to the inclusion of these far right Christian extremist parties. And then after the conference, polls were conducted that suggested that many of the progressive conservative supporters would rather vote liberal than vote for the new kind of merged, more extreme right-wing party so like a lot of these a lot of these like fiscal conservatives

are like no i i'm not gonna vote for all of this weird racism i just don't want there to be higher taxes so like i'm gonna i'm gonna rather vote for the liberals than vote for these fucking weirdos which i mean yeah like that's that that's the conservative i would rather have yeah absolutely um so the the conference didn't sit well with the with the progressive conservative party um That's the conservative I would rather have. Yeah, absolutely. So the conference didn't sit well with the Progressive Conservative Party, its politicians, or the political leaders. So the merger plans were cut off. They're like, nope, we're not going to do this. You guys are too weird and racist.

We're not doing this. Then in 2002, note I think this is important, that this was after 9-11. I think this is really the reason why this happened. One of the original Reform Party founders, the Reform Party is the more populist one, so one of the original founders, named Stephen Harper, took control of the populist conservative party and worked to improve the optics of the more extreme sides of his party. I think it's very important that this happened after 9-11, and this is how the merger actually worked. So in 2003, merger talks started up again, and in August of

that year, the two parties announced the merger had been completed, and there was a new united Conservative Party. In the announcement, Harper is quoted as saying, our swords will henceforth be pointed at the Liberals, not each other. And in December, Harper was voted in as the new party leader. The work did pay off. In the 2006 Canadian federal election, the Conservatives gained a controlling minority government among the electorate, with the former co-founder of the extremist,

you know, populist Reform Party, Stephen Harper, becoming the new Prime Minister of Canada. So this is how he got from Reform Party to being, you know, the Prime Minister throughout the 2000s. He was the Prime Minister of Canada. So this is how he got from Reform Party to being the Prime Minister throughout the 2000s. He was the Prime Minister of Canada for most of the time I lived there. That's who I think of when I think of the Prime Minister of Canada. I think of Stephen Harper.

So, Harper remained as Prime Minister until the 2015 election. That saw a noted blackface appreciator, Justin Trudeau, elected under the Liberal Party. So, that's good good what a good system we have that that man like just the sheer range of his blackface like there's no he has range look say what you will about the man robert be very careful to wear a lot of black no you under

no circumstances gotta hand it to him. You do not, in fact, have to hand it to him. Well, you have to hand him the little, the towel that he uses to get the blackface off of his face so that he can go into his work running Canada. Uh-huh. Yep. Cool. Great country.

Didn't we find out that like five of our governors all had blackface photos? Yes, we did. It was an amazing time. It was a big year for blackface. It really... It's incredible because I can't picture... Again, I grew up very right wing and definitely said some uncomfortable things in my time. I don't think there was ever a point at which I would have been like, yeah, this seems like a good idea.

Right? What the fuck? Yeah, it's pretty messed up. What is the joke? It's pretty bad. Justin Trudeau. This is the liberal. Yeah, he is.

Incredible. He sure is. He is the one. Yeah, he is. Incredible. He sure is. He is the one all of the wine moms thirst over. Yeah, that scans. Respect the wine moms, not. Yeah. Anyway, beyond making it easier to vote in right of center candidates, what the Canadian Unite the Right accomplished

was pushing the conservative establishment much further to the right than what the previously popular progressive conservatives had established, while maintaining the respectability and civility the progressive conservatives had cultivated. We are now going to skip ahead to 2017. In January of 2017, soon after US President Donald Trump put into place the travel ban from, you know, seven Muslim majority countries. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a message via Twitter to those fleeing persecution, terror, and war. Canadians will welcome you regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.

Hashtag welcome to Canada. So Trudeau is like, if the U.S. is going to be racist, we're going to let them in. For this next part, I'm going to quote from the New.S. is going to be racist, we're going to let them in. For this next part, I'm going to quote from the New York Times. Just hours after watching the television report suggesting Canada would accept immigrants that were shunned by Trump, the 28-year-old political science student packed his Glock handgun and rifle and trudged through the snow-covered streets of Quebec to a nearby Islamic cultural center. As 53 men were finishing evening prayers, he unloaded 48 rounds. Six people were killed, several of them with shots to the head, and 19 others were injured. One was paralyzed for life.

In the month before his rampage, the shooter trawled the internet 819 times for posts related to Mr. Trump, reading his Twitter feed daily, and homing in on the American president's travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. He kept a cache of guns underneath his bed at his parents' house, and among his friends was just his twin brother. The shooter told investigators that he wished he had killed more people, and he wanted to protect his family from Islamic terrorists. Experts on radicalization say that in Quebec, the French-speaking province surrounded by an English-speaking majority, the anti-immigrant far-right offers fertile imperialist ground for psychologically unstable youths seeking a sense of identity

and a scapegoat. The head of the Canadian-based Centre of Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence said that the Quebec mosque shooter was part of a growing number of educated, middle-class white youths in Quebec drawn to far-right ideas, fueled by the election of Mr. Trump and fanned by fears of immigration that threatens Quebec's identity. When the anti-radicalization center was started in 2015, they dealt with 16 cases of youths in the province that were getting radicalized by the far-right. Last last year which was like 2016 uh this center had 154 such cases so this is this is kind of the the arc of things really trump's trump's election did respire did spur a lot of this growing like oh these political beliefs are acceptable now right

like this is something that is like we, we are allowed to do this. And that did echo in Canada and across a lot of other countries. One of the victims of the Quebec massacre, his father said that he'd come to Canada from Algeria in the 1990s to escape terrorism. And he said that like Quebec did not create the monster, the shooter, but the Islamophobia that is inherent inside Quebec

gave him the motive. So this really does relate to the political situation of Canada, and it's not a coincidence that the majority of these types of attacks are inside either Quebec, Toronto, or if you know if you're if you're a white if you're if you're in alberta it's it's more tied to like other other like conservative values but like a lot of it is around quebec for a lot of these like shootings and all these acts of terrorism um there was like the uh there was the uh incel guy who ran over

tons of people in Toronto with his car. Same kind of thing, of getting more used to these, having these far-right ideas be more allowed, and then thinking them as more of a normalized thing. So the Quebec mosque shooting woke up a lot of people in Canada to be like, oh, we're not immune to this. This is an actual thing that we Canada to be like, oh, we're not immune to this. This is an actual thing that we have to deal with too. The next few months after Trudeau's

January announcement, border crossings did see an increase and Canada formally accepted more immigrants and refugees. The term in Canada is like an irregular spike of border crossings. The fact, the way Canadian media reported this, I think is very irresponsible. The way they tried to like frame this is like, after this announcement, we're getting so

many irregular crossings that only fueled this type of like, this type of anti-immigrant sentiment. It was not really great. A lot of the old articles I pulled up for this had really disgusting framing, especially viewing it now. So in March, the Canadian parliament passed a motion that condemns Islamophobia and requested the government recognize the need to quell the public climate of fear and hate specifically around muslims and immigrants um the motion was non-binding so it doesn't mean anything it's just the government saying something nice um but it's

still it's it's still sparked tons of outrage um you know it called on the government to condemn islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and uh discrimination uh the The margin was passed by a margin of 200 over 90. So people... A lot of the conservatives in Parliament didn't like this, but it garnered so much

online backlash. There were petitions and nationwide protests condemning this bill as an attack on free speech. And the person who introduced the bill, an MP named Aikra Khalid, received death threats through their email. They had their private information leaked. And it turned into this very, very big kind of...

One of the first things where it had these national protests in Canada, similar to how we had the free speech thing around 2017. This was the Canadian version of that, and how this kind of started. Then in December, Trudeau signed into the United Nations Global Migration Pact, which was another non-binding incentive designed to provide understanding among nations about how to deal with the global immigration crisis. Again, all these things are just people talking. But it made people very, very mad. Because if you're talking about it, that means it actually is real and it's actually going to affect you,

versus just ignoring that these problems exist. So really, after Trump's election, after the Quebec mosque shooting, then we have all these bills, this kind of ignited an in-person rallying possibility an in-person protest that canada hadn't really seen before for this type of like anti-immigration sentiments um and we'll talk more about these protests after after we have a little little bit of an ad break you know who doesn't get protested except for that one time when they illegally overthrew the government of Ecuador.

That's right, Garrison, our sponsors. Only one time did they cause mass protests as a result of overthrowing a sovereign government. That's pretty good, Garrison.

That's pretty good. Are you trying to do like a Banana Republic thing? What are you doing? I'm just saying, most podcasts, three to four governments overthrown by their sponsors. All right. It could happen here. Just the one, baby.

Hello, welcome to Why Canada Isn't a Liberal Utopia and actually has a lot of the same systemic problems that every other Western country does and it's not immune to fascist infiltration and fascist co-option. Sophie, make a note of that. So, we've talked a lot about Quebec and stuff, which is great because, yeah, it is a problem,

but this exists in the Western provinces as well. Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC have a lot of these growing kind of things, but they're not French Canadians doing this. They're more like what we in America would recognize as rural conservatives. So around all of this increased discussion around immigration in 2017, around the same time, people in Western Canada were facing a bit of an economic recession. They had significant job loss around this time, and

projects that traditionally brought work to the area, like pipelines, there was discussion of them getting stalled, and people moving more towards renewable energy. This kind of increased a lot of the political tensions between the Eastern liberal majority Canada and the Western, more rural Canada. Quoting an article from the CPC,

Trudeau just keeps giving away all of our money to immigrants, said Samantha. Oh boy, that is a French name. I'm not even going to attempt that one. We'll call her Frenchie. Samantha Frenchie. Anyway, this mother of five, she attended a January 5th rally with Webster,

her husband, and two of their children it was her first protest for any cause we're stuck paying for all this money that he wants to give away to everybody but canadians my kids are growing up and my grandkids and all of their kids are going to be poor and stuck in a hole that they're never going to get out of this is this is you know very common type of thing like oh we're getting taxed and taking all of our money and giving away to immigrants. This happened after the Syrian refugee crisis when Canada started accepting a lot of Syrian immigrants.

That's around the time that I left Canada. But I totally remember people having very similar sentiments of like, why are we paying for all of these refugees? And that's a thing that happens in the States too. So the economic tensions developing in Western Canada combined with the increase in anti-immigration sentiments among conservatives were in part spurred by the Trump presidency led to the Canadian Yellow Vest Movement.

This is totally separate from the French protest movement. The Canadian version just stole like the working class branding and just used it for their proto-fascist crusade so the Canadian Yellow Vests were a a group of connected protest movements

over the course of 2018 and 2019 that had a lot of like in-person rallies but also a lot of online mobilization it's kind of since died out but it was a major force in-person rallies, but also a lot of online mobilization. It's kind of since died out, but it was a major force in pushing right-wing extremism in Canada and having it be accessible to regular people. It's not like the Proud Boys at all, where it's specific bad people doing this thing.

It was appealing to the oil workers, appealing to the moms. It was primarily used Facebook as a means of passing off this type of information and making it seem acceptable. The Canadian Yellow Vests, quoting an article from Vice, Canadian Yellow Vests, which had over 100,000 members on their Facebook as of May 2019, carries the greatest potential for radicalization leading to violence in Canada right now, according to the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. The group's description says it was created to protest the carbon tax and build that pipeline and stand against the treason of our country's politicians who have the audacity to sell our country's sovereignty over to the globalist UN and their tyrannical policies.

But concerns over Canadians' oil sector appear to be a very little factor in the discussion that goes on inside these groups. Instead, members are obsessing over with the defending, you know, Western civilization from Islam, bashing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and spreading whatever, you know, far-right conspiracy theory is trending at the time. And I cannot overstate the amount that these people hate Trudeau. But it's not for reasons because he wore blackface. They find the most bizarre ways to hate this man. A lot of these people think that Justin Trudeau

is the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro. This is a very... This is... They do kind of look similar. This is a very, a very popular conspiracy theory in canada it is like the the way that trudeau is treated by conservatives is baffling because like i hate justin trudeau but i think i hate him for like reasonable reasons like he made a lot bunch of promises around you know environment stuff that he didn't follow through on not wild about the

blackface he doesn't do he doesn't do anything he is he does a lot of blackface like a shocking amount there's a lot of reasons to hate justin trudeau but not because he's the illegitimate son of fidel castro leading us to like lead and trying to sneak canada into the socialist un like that's not that's not what he's doing like yeah among other things if he was the illegitimate son of fidel castro there's a couple of those in the United States. One of his daughters is now like a right-wing radio personality in Florida. Oh, God, that makes so much sense. He had a lot of, you know, he's Castro.

He did a lot of fucking. Like, who would care? It's not your fault who your dad is. It's just like, it's like a weaker, like, funnier version of birtherism. Yeah. It makes sense thatnier version of birtherism. Yeah. It makes sense that this is Canadian birtherism. It is the Canadian version of that. It's very weird.

Justin Trudeau is very cringy. He lies about all of his promises. He talks a big game. He does a lot of virtue signaling. He does a lot of blackface. Those are all really good reasons to hate this guy. Really a lot of blackface. Yeah, a lot of blackface. Those are all really good reasons to hate this guy. Really a lot of blackface. Yeah, a lot of blackface.

But the ways that they come up with trying to make him seem like a bad dude are just baffling. Very bizarre. So in an interview with somebody from the Yellow Vest's exposed anti-fascist research team, which was a very good Twitter account around 2019. It's inactive now, but this was a very good account that did

really solid research into the LFS movement. In an interview, they were asked what type of impact they think the LFS could have in Canada, and this was their response. The image of the threat is no longer the skinhead blood and honor type. We're dealing with average people who don't understand

the impact of the rhetoric. They're calling for the mass death of an entire religion, or they're celebrating the violence against that religion, or they're celebrating violence against government officials. They are just one step away from outright fascism, but they can't see that, and they refuse to see that. Which I think is a very good summary of how the Yellow Vests were a popular movement, specifically on Facebook. Another part of it was the idea of Western separatism. The people in Western Canada feel ignored, they feel put upon, they feel oppressed. Not just for being Westerners, but they honestly feel oppressed because they're white. They feel like,

oh, we're focusing on only going to give money to the brown people. That's the kind of thing that they feel like in the West. They're like, well, you know, my right to free speech was taken away because of the non-binding bill, and refugees can just walk across the border, and they make more money than I do. So they have

all these ideas that are not actually based on reality, but they can believe them. And they find these news sources that are just echo chambers that reinforce this belief to the point where they become, radicalize themselves. It's a very, very common thing, especially around 2019. I was tracking a lot of these Facebook groups around 2019 as well, just in my spare time.

It's just interesting to watch them interact. I'm going to give a brief recap of a typical yellow vest protest around Edmonton based a bit off of a few CPC articles. Protesters would gather around

in front of the legislative building holding signs, wearing bright yellow vests. And they would do this basically every weekend for months and months and months on end. Some protesters may stand at a podium shouting conspiracy theories about how powerful the Jewish families controlling the world are, as one dude did at the Alberta legislature on January 5th, 2019.

Some may come sporting red, make Alberta great again hats. This was very, very popular, very popular. Others may prowl the sidelines, dressed like they belong to a biker gang. Instead of Hells Angels patches, they have patches that say, Wolves of Odin and Canadian infidels.

Oh, great. I'm going to give you one guess what type of ideology the Wolves of Odin have. Yeah. Clearly they're communists. Yeah, no, they're Nazis. But most of the protesters' voices are not from the fringes. Most of them just have jobs in high-rises,

or they drive for Uber, or they're teachers, or pipe fitters, or real estate agents. Although their message is muddled by all of these other much more overtly extremist talking points, they all have one thing in common, that they feel like they're getting ignored and being left behind by the liberals

in the East. This is echoed by one of the persons that got interviewed at these rallies was named Lynn Smith, who was a former oil and gas worker who now works in the East. This is echoed by one of the persons that got interviewed at these rallies was named Lynn Smith, who was a former oil and gas worker who now works in the school system. They were at a Yellow Vest rally in January of 2019. That was like the fourth protest she attended.

She said, they're just giving away our country. We have no rights anymore. They're taking them away. No more Lord's Prayer. But they're putting prayer rooms in schools for Muslims. Merry Christmas. You're not allowed

to say that anymore. It's supposed to be happy holidays. They're changing our country and we've got to stand up and say something about it because this is our country. I was born here. My parents were born here. It's wrong. So, you know, I'm sure people in the States are familiar with this type of rhetoric.

But the increased nature of it in Canada was surprising to a lot of Canadians and like surprising to a lot of like liberal Canadians because they're like, but you're in Canada. Why are you doing the States thing? Why are you doing the thing that they do in the States? Why are you doing it here? But, you know, the same reasoning, you know, people do it in the States is because they feel ignored by politicians. You know, that's why this happens in Saskatchewan and Alberta and BC way more than it happens in Ontario.

It's because the more farther away you are from the big cities, the less your interests are cared for by a lot of politicians. So the ones that speak to you are these extremists who are trying to prey on these actual financial insecurities. trying to prey on these actual, you know, financial insecurities. Some of the protesters say that they're not, like, opposed to immigration, but most of the focus of the Edmonton Yellow Vest rallies has been about who can come into the country and how they're allowed to get here. One guy named Brett Webster, the father of five who works in the construction industry, says, they're overwhelming our resources. We can't properly vet these people

and make sure it's safe for them to come in and make sure that they're skilled and assimilate into our country and know our ways and our values. So most of the extremist stuff in Canada outside of Quebec does come specifically from Alberta. The big cities in Alberta are Calgary and Edmonton. This happens also in a lot of the more rural areas

that mostly used to run on oil drilling. After losing an election to the more social democratic NDP party in 2015, the two provincial conservative parties in Alberta had their own little mini Unite the Right and merged together in 2017, leading to their success at the polls in 2019. So then the conservatives have since then done a whole bunch of stuff in Alberta, like cutting down their health care. Actually, a lot of the conservative voters don't like, but they voted for it because that was the platform. You just were being scared of brown people,

so you voted for the conservatives. But now your health care is cut. So that's how politics works. That's kind of a brief summary of the Yellow Vest movement and how it gained a lot of popularity. They would do rallies around polling centers. They would attack people. They would have violent rallies where a lot of older men

who were in the Yellow Vest movement would be pretty violent towards anyone in their area during a protest. But around COVID, the Yellow Vests kind of sputtered out. A lot of the people in these Facebook groups got moved into other conspiracy theory groups. And the Yellow Vests movement kind of lost its train. So that's where we're kind of going to end for today is with the Yellow Vests kind of fizzling out.

And in the next part part we'll talk about what's happening from like 2019 and the election that year took like kind of the present fascist rumblings um inside different sectors of canadian politics so yeah that is that's my that's my very very brief write-up of of right-wing populism and extremism in canada uh pre-20 pre-2019 great yep it's fun it's not fun it's it's it's upsetting um and it's you know it's a lot of the same problems we have here of you know politicians really ignoring people in certain parts of the country which provide provide very fertile recruiting ground for a lot of extremists i I think it's going to all end well. That is our official policy,

that everything is going to turn out great. Yeah, seems fine. I mean, there is actual ways of preventing this from happening, right? It's not a hopeless thing. We can actually do it if we want to. Just people with power to do it don't

like doing it. Cool and good. That is the message of the pod, Sophie. Cool and good. So, yep, that's Canadian fascism, part one. Cool. I would recommend if people want to learn more about the

Canadian yellow vests, check out the Yellow Vest Exposed Twitter account. There's also articles about them. They were a very good anti-fascist research team. I would just recommend if you want to learn more about this specific movement, all of their work on it

has been great. So yeah, shout out to Yellow Vests Exposed. That's the pod. Pod cast! Go get your Tim Hortons So yeah, shout out to Yellow Vests Exposed. That's the pod. Yay. Podcast. All right. Well.

Go get your Tim Hortons and. Yeah, go get your Tim Hortons and your, I don't know, maple syrup and go find a moose. Find a Canadian and just start screaming in their face. Call us at ColdZoneMedia or HappenHerePod on the twits and the inst. Just scream at them. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye. Ay.

Ay. Goodbye, ay. Ay. Ay. 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 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.

Hello, uh, wow. Nope, that's not it. Nope, that's it. Garrison, we've started the episode. No! Yes, we did. I didn't want you late. The episode has begun. It cannot be unbegunnited. Oh, that's horrible. Let's roll right into it. Let's talk more about fascism in Canada, Garrison.

So, welcome to This Is It Could Happen Here. Today, the here is Canada. That is where it could happen. This is going to be part two of my little deep dive into Canadian fascism and the far-right rumblings in general in the Great White North. Oh, God, that is a bad nickname for Canada. The Great White North.

Not inaccurate. Did not really think that one through. Oopsie doodle. Maybe they did. Yeah, there's a good chance they did anyway um the last episode we left off with the canadian yellow vests um and you know a frightening increase in islamophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric around late 2017 and 2018 after trump's election and we started the last episode by talking about one of canada's

first fascist political parties and we're going to start part two by talking about one of Canada's first fascist political parties. And we're going to start part two by talking about Canada's new neo-fascist political party that also got started inside the province of Quebec, just like the National Unity Party did. This one is called the People's Party of Canada. Before we get into the People's Party, I'm first going to give some background on the founder of the party, Maxime Bernier. And that's how I'm going to say his name. No one at me. It's good enough.

Bernier was born in Quebec in 1963 and is the son of a conservative talk radio host turned politician. Isn't that funny? Isn't that funny how that keeps happening? Yep. Yeah, so

Bernier entered politics in 2006. He ran as the Conservative Party candidate for the House of Commons in the same riding district that his father had represented in the 80s and 90s. Stephen Harper, leader of the new United Conservative Party, initially wanted

Maxine's father to re-enter politics, but Bernier Sr. was less keen on that idea and instead told Harper that perhaps his son should run in his place. Oh, radio and nepotism. Radio and nepotism. Yep, and politicians and yeah. Starting great. It is starting great. So at this point, Yeah. Starting great. It is starting great. So at this point, Bernier was more of like a free market libertarian-y type guy, still with some of the same conservative immigration stuff that's common in Quebec,

but he was more of just like a libertarian dude. Bernier easily won the writing. Writings are what we call districts here in the States. Ranking at 67% of the popular vote, which was the largest majority for a conservative politician outside of the province of Alberta. So he did very well. Bernier, who had a background in business, quickly rose through the ranks of the conservative party. Within the same year, he was appointed to be a cabinet minister in the Harper government.

And he worked as an industry minister from 2006 to 2007, before being promoted to a foreign affairs minister. And then in 2011, he was appointed as minister of the state. So in spring of 2016, after the 2015 federal election, Bernier put in his bid to be the new elected Conservative Party leader. So I'm going to briefly explain how Canadian elections work. You don't vote for a prime minister. You vote for a party within your specific district. If your party wins, they get a seat in parliament. Whoever has the most seats in parliament, that's whose prime minister gets elected. So whoever is the leader of the party, they will be prime minister if that party gets the most seats. So in 2016, Bernier put in his bid to be the new conservative party leader. He got remarkably close just to carrying the spot as leader of the conservatives.

In the final round of voting, he received 49.05% of the vote, losing to Saskatchewan conservative politician Andrew Scheer, who got 50.9%. So, less than a 2% difference. He was so close to becoming leader of the conservative party. Like, ridiculous. So, yeah. After his extremely slight loss, he continued to work in Scheer's conservative party for a few years. If you remember from the last episode, around this time was when the Islamophobia and anti-immigration talking points were starting to gain a new popularity. And Bernier followed along with this trend. He would tweet out about the dangers of extreme multiculturalism. And he had, like, an increasingly racist and divisive rhetoric, and that kind of caused some

drama within the conservative establishment. So, in August of 2018, around the same time the Yellow Vest movement in Canada was starting up, Bernier resigned from the Conservative Party with the stated intention of forming a new federal populist

far-right political party. Here's a segment from his resignation speech. And he does talk in a very thick French accent. I'm not going to do that. Ha-ha! No! No. No.

I'm helping here. Yeah, you're really helping. You need to channel the energy. Sacre bleu! Wow, I really hatedu! That was just direct audio from his speech. Yeah, that was. Instead of leading as a principled

conservative and defending the interests of Canada and Canadians, Andrew Scheer is following the Trudeau liberals. I was told that internal polling is showing that the liberals' response to Trump is popular and that in six months, if the polls change, the party's stand may change too. The same thing happened in reaction to my tweets on diversity and multiculturalism. This is another crucial debate for the future of our country. Do we want

to emphasize our ethnic and religious differences, or exploit them to buy votes as the Liberals are doing, or emphasize what unites us and the values that can guarantee social cohesion? Just like other Western societies grappling with this issue, a large number of Canadians, and certainly the vast majority of conservatives, are worried that we are heading in the wrong direction, but it's not politically correct to raise such questions. So yeah, I think, honestly, one of the main reasons why Bernier hasn't been super successful is because of his accent.

It's harder for Protestant white Canadians to support him because he talks with a French-Canadian accent. If he talked in good English, I think he would have won conservative leadership and his populist party would be way more popular than it is now. So critical support to – Other French racism is preventing the racist from being racist enough?

Yes. You love to see it. You love to see it. You certainly see it. We do. We do see it. You certainly see it. We do. We do see it. So, Bernier faced some pushback from his conservative colleagues, including Stephen Harper, of trying to divide the right and split the right-of-center vote.

And some of the less socially conservative members of the main conservative party decried Bernier's departure and subsequent New People's Party as just a plain attempt to pander to xenophobia and racist right-wingers. But Bernard went right to work and ran enough candidates under his new party to secure a spot in the federal election debates that were like, you know, how we watch presidential debates. Same thing, but these have, you know, multiple candidates because there are multiple parties. Same thing. But basically, he was able to get in the televised debates. The PPC, which is the People's Party of Canada, I'm just going to say the PPC now because it sounds funny, they started going viral on the internet after pictures of massive billboards with Berners' face and big text that said,

say no to mass immigration. This got very meme-y around 2019, these big PPC billboards. I'm going to read a bit from a write-up, and it's going down by some local Montreal anti-fascists. There have been suggestions that the PPC spokesperson and architect of its public relations strategy, Martin Maas, has been key to its embrace of the far right. Maas was owner of the publisher of the Quebecois Libre, which is an online libertarian news outlet that shut down in 2016. But that PPC's cozy relationship with racists is primarily due to the influence of this one person is highly doubtful. However, it's the PPC's positioning itself as the option of choice for those who find the Conservative Party insufficiently right-wing.

Racism is clearly just one of the most effective tools for such a strategy. Witnessing PPC billboards and tweets against mass immigration, also tweets about being against Antifa, and Bernier's diatribe about radical Islam being the biggest threat to freedom and peace and security in the world today, and how he complains about other parties are complacent and pandering to Islamists and promising that the PPC will make no compromise with the totalitarian ideology. A number of media articles have revealed the far-right connections to people active in the PPC as organizers and members whose signatures were used for the PPC to gain official party status. For instance, Derek Horn, the PPC volunteer and a security agent

who accompanied Bernier at a variety of events and media interviews, he has been revealed to be a founding member of the neo-fascist Canadian Nationalist Party, which we briefly mentioned in the last episode. Sean Walker is an American immigrant and organizer with the PPC in St. Catharines, as well as one of the people who signed on for PPC to be an official party. He was revealed to be the president of the National Alliance, a US-based neo-Nazi organization in 2007. Yay! National Alliance! He was also convicted of hate crimes at the time for

violent against people of color. Following these revelations, Walker was expelled from the PPC, and Bernier claimed that he'd slipped through the party's vetting process. However, it was also revealed that Bernier follows him on Twitter. Others who signed up for the PPC to be an official party include Janice Balch, a founding member of the Patriotic Europeans

against the Islamification of Auxent. And also Justin L. Smith, leader of the Sudbury chapter of the Soldiers of Odin. So, a whole bunch of fascist people are working for the party. And unsurprisingly, a number of candidates have made headlines as their social media posts from the past and present have surfaced featuring racism, Islamophobia,

and a lot of spreading of far-right conspiracy theories. That was just kind of common. There's too many, honestly, to mention. And it's not just that the PPC has a few bad apples in it. It's like the whole party is rife with these kind of sentiments. One gauge of this, and a sign that this is intentional, is looking at the candidates who have left the party or have been kicked out when it became clear that there would be no condemnation of the far right from the upper ranks. There was like, and just in like 2019 alone,

there was like three candidates who left or were either kicked out because they, you know, had objections to the racism rampant within the party. They were like complaining about, hey, these guys seem kind of racist, and then they were kicked out of the party, or they left. So, yeah, that's not a good problem to have. So, finishing up this little quote here, Indeed, a cursory look at the Facebook pages of PPC candidates reveals what's been really noteworthy is how selective the news stories

about racist tweets or Facebook posts have been. Almost every PPC candidate in Quebec has recently and repeatedly shared articles from climate denialist sources, including many with a conspiratorial bent. A candidate for Papineau even produced his own YouTube expose revealing how George Soros is behind an international globalist conspiracy theory to crash economies and make money spending panic about climate change. Secondary to climate denial, there's a lot of fears around free speech and mass immigration, which are both recurring themes in the PPC candidates. And roughly one in five have recently shared news articles from what we would deem national populist or far-right sources, including LesManchettes.com, which is the website of the French language translator of the

Christchurch Manifesto. Jesus. The guy who runs that website is also involved with organizing in the Montreal chapter of the Yellow Vests. Sorry. Yeah, so he both translated the Manifesto and he's also running the

Montreal Yellow Vest Movement. So that's fun. It's not fun. It's bad. Andre Piteri? Wow, that is very French. So I didn't learn French in Canada because I was in a weird Christian private school.

Otherwise, I could be a lot better at this job. Yeah. But anyway, there's just's a there's a there's a there's just like a far-right youtube channel uh but this guy uh called uh studio who a lot of his stuff was shared um and there's a more like eccentric and sporadic mix of of other news sources including uh unite the right attendee faith goldie who also ran for mayor of Toronto and got third place. Quebec-based QAnon figure Alexis Trudel. And the alt-right YouTuber Black Pigeon Speaks. Of course, the main Yellow Vest page was shared a lot.

And also sources from the highly racist The Voice of Europe. So, yeah, a lot of not great news sources being shared by the PPC. So that is the gist of the People's Party as of 2019. Overall, their performance in the 2019 election was kind of a flop. Bernier lost his own seat in Quebec. No PPC candidates got into office. And the party only managed to get 1.6 percent of the total national popular vote so that's good it only got 1.6 percent of all of the votes in canada so we're going to take a break from the people's party for now

and we will circle back towards it um at the end but uh after after an ad break we and we will circle back towards it at the end. But after an ad break, we will talk about what the main conservative party was up to during this time, and a little bit after the 2019 election. Yeah. Yep, and now the cat's just blocking the whole thing. Alright.

We're back. The cat is in the bathroom. I moved my cat, because they were blocking the camera. Hello! People's Party, The cat is in the bathroom. I moved my cat because they were blocking the camera. Hello. People's party. Not doing great in the first election. That's fun. Let's see what the regular conservatives were up to.

I'm sure it was things that are just good and cool. If I know anything about conservatives, it's that they're not... Not hashtag problematic? Yeah. Just go, Garrison okay just go i'll just be sad over here and the audience can know that i'm sad the whole time you're talking i would rather this episode be not such a not such a downer but it's it's hard to make these kind of an upper it's uh i'll make a bargain with the audience that if they listen i will i will do my french accent at least one more time oh boy we'll. I will say, doing the French accent,

this is the happiest I have seen Robert all day. Well, he does look very tired. You did say earlier, Garrison, and this was very funny, that you'd be better at your job if you could speak French. But given what we are here at Cool Zone Media, you would actually be much worse at your job if you could pronounce anything. And in fact,

if you were to speak French, I would fire you immediately. It's actually a requirement that you can't pronounce things to work for our network. No. Certainly not French. There's other languages you're allowed to know how to pronounce, but not French. No habla francais?

A raise! He gets a raise! So, let's pick up right after Maxine Bernier lost the conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer in 2017. Scheer won the leadership on a platform of classical financial conservatism and a slightly more socially moderate platform. When Scheer got into office, though, one of the things he faced criticism for, even among the conservative caucus, financial conservatism and a slightly more socially moderate platform um when sheer got

into office though one of the things he faced criticism for even among the conservative caucus was his association with a little media with was his association with a little media outlet called rebel media oh good yeah oh no so most most listeners may not know what Rebel Media is, but you've certainly seen their stuff or felt their effect. Yeah, it's like the rough draft of Breitbart and also Canadian. And Canadian, yes. So Rebel Media is a Canadian far-right neo-fascist propaganda outlet started in 2015 that has a lot of Breitbart-y vibes. Breitbart-esque? Yeah, Breitbart-esque. that has a lot of a lot of bright bardy vibes um rebel media yeah bright bartesque uh rebel media hosts and

contributors have included a white nationalist and white genocide proponent lauren southern um and proud boy founder gavin mcginnis um mcginnis produced a quote satirical video for rebel called 10 things i hate about the jews jesus fucking christ yeah

yeah so it and it and it is worth noting that both southern and mcginnis are canadian um there are actually a lot of uh alt-right figures that are canadian of course we have we have lauren southern gavin mcginnis um we have stephen crowder uh Stefan Molyneux, and of course, Jordan Peterson. All of those people are Canadian. Dr. Jordan Balthazar Peterson, yeah. Most of them still live in Canada. Is he still alive? Yes, he's still alive.

He made an insane tweet the other day. God, he made the most unhinged tweet. Oh, that was such a good tweet. No, that tweet made it all worthwhile, baby. Everyone go check his Twitter feed. It is amazing. You can hear his brain shorting out when you read that tweet. Like,

you need to go find this. You need to find the tweet. It is just, ah, it is the most beautiful piece of poetry I've ever read. It's like somebody taught a stroke how to type. It makes no sense. God, it's so good.

I'm going to quote an article by globalnews.ca on Andrew Scheer and rebel media. Quote, despite a string of controversies faced by Canadian right-wing media outlet The Rebel, including allegations of downplaying the Holocaust, newly minted Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer has so far continued to make himself available to the company that other

prominent Conservative politicians have criticized for its controversial reporting and activism. Scheer's campaign organization also has a direct connection to the rebel. His campaign manager, Hamish Marshall, is listed as the director of the company's federal incorporation records, which show its most recent annual gathering meeting was in February of this year. Following the leadership election in Toronto on Saturday, Scheer granted one-on-one interviews with a handful of major media organizations, including a face-to-face interview with The Rebel's Ottawa correspondent Brian Lilly. Prior to his convention interview, Scheer appeared on The Rebel in February in a studio interview with host Faith Goldie on her show On the Hunt. At the end of the discussion, Goldie asked Scheer appeared on The Rebel in February in a studio interview with host Faith Goldie on her show On the Hunt.

At the end of the discussion, Goldie asked Scheer if he would agree to go on a duck hunting trip with her after he wins the leadership on Canada Day, which he agreed to. We briefly mentioned Faith Goldie earlier in her connection to the People's Party and her brief campaign for the Toronto mayor. to the People's Party and her brief campaign for the Toronto mayor. But here's some more background on her and her coverage of the Unite the Right rally for Rebel Media, quoting from Winnipeg Free Press. In the course of her dispatches, Goldie argued the events in Charlottesville were evidence of a rising white racial consciousness that was going to change the political landscape in America. She also went to great- All right, well, she's actually not wrong there that was yeah she's not wrong but i think she's incorrect she's on the other side of the aisle on whether this is a good or bad thing

yeah she went to great lengths to laud the 20-point metapolitical manifesto composed by white nationalist leader richard spencer a document that includes calls to organize uh states along ethnic and racial divides and celebrates the superiority of white america faith uh goldie describes spencer's manifesto as robust and well thought out goldie was fired by rebel in mid-august in 2017 but not due to her participation in unite the right she was fired for appearing on a daily stormer podcast to discuss the right. Oh, good.

So yeah, good. Yeah, that's, that's fine. So yeah, fine. Nice to have her interviewing conservative leader,

Andrew Scheer asked for his reaction to unite the right and rebel media. Um, after what happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Scheer, who had previously been interviewed by Rebel multiple times, finally disavowed the outlets, saying, look, I believe there's a fine line between covering events and giving a platform to groups who are promoting a violent, disgusting point of view. I won't be granting interviews going forward. So that's nice that it took someone dying in Charlottesville to realize that you probably shouldn't talk to the fascist media source. So in the aftermath of Unite the Right, the mainstream conservatives kind of had to tread carefully around social issues because it's like, oh, yeah, they're still Nazis.

We probably shouldn't be pandering to them. But as more time and distance let the air cool, some conservatives went back to the same old rhetoric around the 2019 election. For instance, in his 2019 election campaign, Tom Kamik, one of the parliamentary representatives for Calgary, Alberta, wrote out and spread flyers with the all-caps header of CRISIS AT THE BORDER, with text reading, Dear Constituent, The Independent Auditor General of Canada has published a scathing report confirming that the Ottawa Liberals have failed to safely and responsibly manage Canada's borders. Since Justin Trudeau irresponsibly tweeted out that Canada would open its borders to anyone seeking entry, the number of people illegally crossing the border into Canada from the United States has surged past 1,000 a month, with almost 20,000 people illegally entering in 2018 alone.

And while speaking to voters, CEMEC repeatedly insisted that all the problems of people illegally crossing the Canadian border isn't a symptom of a failure of systems to respond to a growing crisis, but merely a failure for Border Patrol to assert control over people. to assert control over people. Quotes and flyer courtesy of, about this Tom Kemic guy, are courtesy of Dan Olson of Folding Ideas. He's a great Canadian documentarian

who released a magnificent piece on QAnon and conspiracy theories last year on his YouTube channel, Folding Ideas. Overall, I really like Dan. He makes very good stuff. Thank you to him for sending me those flyers. Anyway, during the 2019 election, Scheer led the Conservatives to gain a total of 26 seats inside Parliament, going from 95 up to 121.

But they did finish 36 seats behind the Liberals, despite beating the Liberals in the popular vote by 1.3%. So that was 34.4% for conservatives and 33.1% of the popular vote for liberals. The margin was just over like 240,000 votes. The Liberals lost 20 seats in the election and the NDP lost 15 seats. And this was the first time since 1979 that a party won the most seats without also winning the popular vote. What pushed the conservatives over on the popular vote was due to extremely high conservative turnout in various ridings. So basically more conservatives voted in certain ridings than they usually do. So even if the liberals still win the district, there were still more conservative votes to be counted.

And also they basically swept the prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where they won 70% of the vote in 60s, 5% of the vote, respectively. But their victories in those states and their higher turnout did not convert into many seats because the less population-dense areas have fewer federal ridings and fewer available seats. And the liberals had to rely heavily for seats in Ontario, the most populous province that includes cities like Toronto and, you know, a few other big cities. So, you know, Canada doesn't have the most democratic system. So the same way, you know, in the States, we're familiar with, you know, people losing popular votes, but still getting elected president and stuff. You know, in Canada, it's a little bit different because of how you vote for parties in your own little district.

But, you know, it's still not perfect, right? Because, like, it does feel weird for the leader of the country to not have, his party to not have also won the popular vote because of how, you know, districts work out and how higher turnout in some areas doesn't mean that it's going to have more seats. You know, but the other side of things here is that, like, Canada also doesn't have ranked choice. So, like, still, the majority of people voted for left of center candidates, if you include, you know, the Green Party, the NDP, and the Liberals. So even though Liberals lost the popular vote, there still was, is like a majority left of center voting so if they if they had ranked choice maybe the results would have been different so canada's system it definitely

isn't perfect for how they do elections um i would i would prefer ranked choices you know basically ever basically i would prefer that for like every country if they're going to have elections um so yeah just kind of explaining why they can lose the popular vote but still win a majority controlling government. So after the election, Scheer announced he was resigning as head of the conservatives in December of 2019. This was after it was revealed that he had used party funds for his children's own private schooling. So good for him. A new bid for conservative leadership went into effect. We're going to mainly

focus on two candidates here. There was Aaron O'Toole and Derek Solon. O'Toole fancies himself as another kind of classic financial conservative and a social moderate. He feels more like the old progressive conservative candidates from back before the 2003 Unite

the Right merger. We got some John McCain vibes here. But Derek Solon is more similar to the farther right parts of the US's current Republican Party, like anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, racist tweets, etc. But as a whole, Solon's extremism was rejected by Canadian conservatives. He got fourth place with 15% of the vote during the first round of voting. And ultimately, O'Toole won leadership after three rounds of votes. And O'Toole now has the new challenge of trying to appeal to the Canadian conservatives' more moderate wing, as well as the more Trumpian wing that's developed the past few years. He's been relatively successful in crafting a boring, polite Canadian version

of Trump's nationalism with slogans like Canada first and take Canada back, despite supporting trade deals outsourcing Canadian jobs to cheaper overseas markets, because they never actually mean what they say. And as the Liberals have grown more aware of canada's bloody history and have like toned down the red and white maple leaf patriotism the conservative party under o'toole has seized on this opportunity to make canadian patriotism more of a right-leaning staple just like patriotism is you know it's more of like a right-wing thing in the States. So basically after we were like, oh yeah, residential schools were bad,

Canada's kind of fucked up, liberals are like, okay, we maybe shouldn't be, we shouldn't be waving our maple leaf flags everywhere. Maybe we're not a perfect country. The conservatives are like, no, you have to be proud to be Canadian. So they've kind of taken patriotism to be their new thing. While previously it was much more of like a liberal thing.

The Islamophobia and overt religious bigotry under O'Toole has been slightly trimmed down, and climate change has at least been mentioned as existing. But there has also been increased discussion on trying to hack down Canada's health care and privatize more aspects of it, which, yeah, good job, guys. Take away the only good part of Canada. The province of Alberta under Jason Kenney has done this to a disastrous effect, raising the cost of medical care for lower class people, many of whom voted conservative. I have

family in Alberta and just the past five years, the changes to the healthcare system there has been horrible. It's not great. So basically what O'Toole wants is he wants to just privatize more elements of it. He has a specific term he uses. He wants to split the taxpayer health care and privatized health care into two sections, and you can choose which one to join in. Anyway, it's silly. O'Toole did take a wee little stance to distance himself from the more extreme wings of his party when he decided to remove MP Derek Solon from the caucus.

O'Toole announced that Solon would not be allowed to run as a candidate for the Conservative Party in the next election either, saying, Racism is a disease of the soul, repugnant to our core values. It has no place in our country and has no place in the Conservative Party of Canada. I won't tolerate it. Also, last year, O'Toole refused to say whether he thinks systemic racism exists. But the decision to remove Solon was made after it was revealed that he accepted a donation from the Canadian Nazi Paul Fromm during Solon's bid for Conservative leadership. Back in the 90s, Fromm was a figurehead of the Canadian far-right movement, appearing at heritage front rallies and also caught on video at a party

celebrating Hitler's birthday, which he lost his high school teaching job over. Well, look, it's just polite to celebrate a guy's birthday, you know, whether or not he's Hitler. Under no circumstances do you, goddess, celebrate Hitler's birthday, you know, whether or not he's Hitler. Under no circumstances do you got to celebrate Hitler's birthday. This isn't a hot take. So there has been a bit of a rift in the Conservative Party over how much Trumpian rhetoric should

be allowed in the Canadian Conservative Party. And this kind of rift has definitely increased after January 6th. The problem for conservative politicians is that to win elections, they need to appeal to the largest swath of voters. And that includes more socially conservative and increasingly far-right rural folks. But if they go too far, they'll lose the moderates to the Liberal Party. So it's like this delicate balance.

But to kind of give you an overview of what the current state of the Conservative votership is, 4 in 10 of the Conservative Party of Canada members, so people signed up to vote in the party, regular people, 4 in 10 would say that they would have voted for Trump,

4 in 10 say that they think Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, and 4 in 10 say that the Conservative and 4 in 10 say that they think Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, and 4 in 10 believe that the January 6th riot was staged, or was done by the Democrats or done by Antifa. So that's kind of the state of the Conservative Party in Canada for the voters. So politicians have to kind of – in order to win, they still need to appeal to those people, but they don't want to do that thing usually. Like, they usually don't, like, usually they're, like, a big talking point is, like, rejecting the divisive politics of the United States. Like, that's a big thing people say in Canada, is that, like, they don't want it to become, like, you know, like a fighting match. that like they they don't want it to become like you know like a fighting match because like the other main difference between canada's elections and america's elections is like america is like

always an election season right like every you know even after each election it's like you feel like campaigns start right up again um canada's campaigns only run like a few months before the election like like it is not like yeah that's one of those things you guys do objectively better than us and a lot of the world does. It's not just Canada. The idea that like, oh, elections are terrible. We should spend as little time as possible having them. It's like two or three months of campaigning. That's it.

It's not like a two-year, four-year thing. No, that is a thing that we should absolutely – the election should be about 11 minutes from the start of the campaign to the vote. 11 minutes from the start of the campaign to the vote. Everybody gets a minute to explain their, their politics. And then we vote and then we throw them into the sea. Yeah. So trying to, trying to craft marketing to the divided right wing,

it's been interesting to watch, you know, there's like videos of O'Toole walking through, you know, downtowns with pride flags in the background and, you know, featuring visible, like minority Canadians intermingling. But then you also have O'Toole, like, railing against cancel culture,

fueling suggestions that the liberal government's pandemic response is part of a socialist great reset, and pulling out the dog whistle on, like, China and the coronavirus, you know, as often as he can. O'Toole's in the past also downplayed Canadians' residential schools program and described the efforts of activists pushing to removal of statues of the residential school architects as stupid. So I do think O'Toole

prefers a Conservative Party resistant to far-right branding, but he knows he needs to appeal to its voters in order to win elections. So, it's just, it's a thing that's not great, but it's interesting to watch um in august of 2021 justin trudeau noted blackface appreciator uh called a snap election in an effort to gain more parliamentary seats in hopes of getting a majority liberal government something a prime

minister should not be allowed to do by the way like a prime minister should not be able to decide when to do elections that is like, should totally not be a thing. Like what? No, you shouldn't do that. But anyway, um, as the 2021 snap election ramped up,

the conservative party under a tool made some, uh, extremely questionable choices for their marketings and their slogans. Um, what does the phrase secure the future bring to mind? Anything? 14 words yeah so that became the new tagline for the entire conservative party under o'toole right okay sure we got we got we got we got secure the future billboards we got we got we got websites conservative.ca

secure the future uh we got mailers magazine covers all emblazoned with Secure the Future or Secure Our Future. And you know what will secure our future, Garrison? The Chevron ads that keep popping up? Uh-huh, yeah. That we keep trying to get rid of. Chevron is securing our future. Yeah. It's great.

You're welcome. It's a great time. Chevron appreciators, which is everyone. Ah, we're back and just time. Chevron appreciators. Which is everyone. Ah, we're back. And just appreciating Chevron. Just like Justin Trudeau appreciates Blackface. Just like Justin Trudeau. Yeah.

So, secure the future. Great slogan. Not a good slogan. Bad. I'm going to read a bit from a mailer that went out to Conservative Party members after a tool won leadership. Quote, a mailer that went out to Conservative Party members after a 2-1 leadership. Quote, I firmly believe Canada has everything it takes to recover from COVID-19 and enjoy a prosperous future.

If we have a government that knows how to secure the future, if the Trudeau Liberals stay in power, they'll continue spending taxpayer money at pandemic era levels long after the virus is behind us. The result? All the things we love about Canada will be in serious jeopardy. Our debt will become out of control, and they'll never be able to get back the Canada you and I grew up in, the kind of Canada our children and grandchildren deserve. So later on in the page, O'Toole says we need to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party and hold

Beijing accountable for sabotaging our economy and taking jobs from Canadian workers. And on August 16th, the Canadian Conservative Party Twitter account tweeted out, and I quote, Canada's recovery program will secure the future for you, your children, and your grandchildren. So, that's fun. Also, guess how many words is in that last sentence? 14.

It's 14 of them. Yeah. Yeah, we're going back to calling canada clanada again yeah it's like a dog whistle but except for you know a dog whistle only dogs can hear it except everybody hears it yeah it's just it's just a whistle it's just it's just a regular whistle yeah it's it's that he just tweeted it tweet yeah so as anyway um as o'toole was getting all Secure the Future pilled, Canada's actual far-right populist party, the People's Party, was gaining much more popularity amid the pandemic and the anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vax protests. The COVID-19 pandemic was a gift to the far-right in general

as it allowed the injection and proliferation of conspiracy theories to accelerate at levels almost never before seen, and provided fair recruiting ground to gain new followers. The PPC latched onto this and was extremely successful. They sponsored protests, they did a whole bunch of campaigns that were around anti-mask stuff, anti-vaccine, all of it. all of it. So the PPC was able to be not just a safe harbor for anti-immigration, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other far-right groups, but also now more mainstream anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, anti-government protesters, as well as, you know, gun rights activists and some general rule workers feeling left behind from even the conservative party. So the PPC has changed from a niche white nationalist party to a full-blown far-right populist force. What Bernier and the PPC have done so effectively since the pandemic is to use the broad concerns around COVID and freedom and the more, you know, mainstream concerns about economic anxieties,

job loss, loss of businesses, immigration, and changing culture, and manage to roll all of these things up into one tight package, which is really appealing to a lot of Canadians who are very anxious about the state of their country, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. So the results of the September snap election, which was, you know, last month, were basically the same as the 2019 election, except the PPC went from 1.6% of the vote to 5% of the vote, a big change. That means they were ranking above the Green Party and nearly tying the bloc Quebecois. So they made like... Quebecois!

I know like 1% to 5% doesn't seem like tons, but like this is a really big jump for a brand new party. Especially if they're ahead of the Green Party and tying the bloc party. That is like a notable shift. The University of Gulof professor of political science, Tamara Small, said this after the results

of the last snap election. Quote, I think the only leader who's ecstatic about last night's results is Bernier. I don't think they're going anywhere. I think it seems that he's taken the populism and attached it to far-right politics. The idea that Canada was immune to this sort of far-right populism, the idea that Canada was going to be free from the populism and attached to far-right politics. The idea that Canada was immune to this sort of far-right populism, the idea that Canada was going to be free from the populism that we saw in Europe, like what Nigel Farage is in the UK. But I think lots of people are wondering if Bonaire is just

going to say, I'm not here to form an actual government, I'm just here to challenge the system and use that as a way of gaining massive support. After CTV emailed the ppc for comment for their post-election story uh the party spokesperson sent back a one-line email response i don't respond to requests from leftist activists masquerading as journalists get lost so that's fun also in late september bernier's twitter account was temporarily suspended for encouraging his supporters to attack journalists oh Ah, great. Yeah, just not, like, I'm okay with criticizing journalists and stuff, because most journalists are, like, not great, but when you're using your political Twitter account to just, like,

tell people to just go attack the press, usually it's a bad sign of, like, a political party. Usually it's just like, yeah, political parties, when they do that, usually leads to bad things. We are going to talk about one, kind of wrapping up here, we're going to talk about one Ontario People's Party candidate named Mario Greco, who is another high school teacher and self-proclaimed game developer. A few years ago, I see Chris's win-sick, because, like, you know this can't lead to good things.

Oh, the gamers, it can't be good. So, a few years ago, Greco made a video game called Happy Culture Shootout. Oh, good. Quoting an article from PressProgress.ca. Happy Culture Shootout is a Space Invaders-style game that allows players to control a spaceship

that shoots laser beams at characters of various identity groups. Quote, this game is about an alien order to invade earth and transport all humans to happy land greco says on his personal website which includes other games that he authored like die mar which is about a young misunderstood hero who ceased to liberate post-war germany um oh boy in a in a since deleted in adeleted video obtained by Press Progress, the People's Party candidate delivered a presentation to university students several years ago, offering his post-mortem on the game. Greco expressed surprise that his students and faculty reacted negatively to the game,

with one calling it the most racist game I've ever played. Greco says his game was not racist in the slightest, noting that he made fun of his own Italian heritage. He also claimed that some students thought his gay pride parade level was hilarious. My friends and I love people of all cultures, and we also love humor of all types. That includes harmless racist jokes, Greco said in the video. The game was intended to make a joke about how ridiculous cultural stereotypes are, so we can laugh about it together and move on with our lives. During the presentation, the People's Party candidate offered an interesting side note about the game's Israel level. According to Greco, a faculty member at the university strongly recommended that he remove Jewish stereotypes from the game.

He was like, no, get rid of it immediately. Don't have any religious content whatsoever. I know that subject is very, very touchy. So, yeah, this is just a game where you mass shoot minority people. Anyway, in 2017, Greco posted a photo on Facebook of an illustration of Pepe the Frog, which he said was drawn by one of his students in the whiteboard of his York Region high school. Pepe had a little speech bubble that said, Free Kekistan.

Great. Yeah. So now... Look, the gamers are Nazis. So currently, Greco is spending his time tweeting about critical race theory and trying to get into office under the People's Party banner. In his Twitter bio,

he calls himself an egalitarian libertarian nationalist. And he still also teaches computer science at Ontario High School. I have a fun different way people call themselves fascists. I know, it's really great. It's not fun. These people are all the worst, most scum. And one more thing before we sign off.

Last month, right before the September election, I was forwarded some pictures of some People's Party of Canada posters and flyers put up linking to their campaign website that someone came across around town. Not Portland, like somewhere in Canada. like somewhere in Canada. Under the PPC logo, there was, you know, pictures of people's faces and big black text that said, it's okay to be white. Oh, great. Rad.

So that's the liberal utopia of Canada, everybody. And basically, yeah, like the reason why I wanted to put these episodes together is because like we, lots of like, you know, we make a lot of jokes about,

you know, escaping to Canada as the States gets too fascist and i just want to like say like i'm not saying canada's getting accelerated at the same rate but canada's not immune to the same thing like it's it's it's yeah you can't escape this you can't you can't run away from it authoritarianism by moving no yeah yeah unless you move to a country with no history of authoritarianism like i don't know germany uh-huh yeah and i think the other thing that's important with canada particularly is that like canada is like affected by american political trends and you see this absolutely like like one of the things that i remember looking at when i was when i was looking into sort of uh if you look

at the history of like anti-asian riots for example so there's this huge wave in 1907 that goes like it goes all the way up the west coast a lot of them and it ends in toronto yeah a lot of you know yeah and you see you see that like and you see that like today too where it's like yeah the toronto i think has the highest rate of of anti-asian attacks like in north america that's not surprising pretty impressive considering like the absolute shit show going on in like new york and la and seattle and it's like no toronto's worse no it's real bad there's i i talk a lot about how the far right's gaining a lot a lot more a lot stronger of an influence in alberta and it is spreading into other eastern eastern provinces not just inside quebec you know there was the incel attack

in toronto a few years ago that killed like i think like a dozen You know, there was the incel attack in Toronto a few years ago that killed, like, I think, like, a dozen people. Of course, there was the Quebec mosque shooting. There's been a lot of these kind of things popping off. And, you know, there's even more starting in, like, British Columbia as well, which has a decent far-right kind of influence, at least on the eastern side of BC, away from, like, Victoria and from Vancouver.

So, yeah, I just wanted to like put these together and be like, hey, you know, it's worth looking at these countries that we usually view as, you know, generally doing better and be like, no, like it's the same thing is happening there. And it's all part of the same overarching slide rightward that we've seen in both in like the UK.

We were even seeing it now in Germany. We're seeing it, you know, in obviously the States under Trump and in Canada, we're seeing it in obviously the states under Trump, and in Canada, even though the liberals have won the past few elections, it's still scooting rightward. So yeah, I just wanted to put this thing together. If you want to keep up to date on Canadian stuff, you can check out the Canadian Anti-Hate Network,

which does work tracking extremism in Canada. And yeah, that is what I put together thanks garrison yeah you're welcome you're welcome well that's the episode that's gonna do it for us here and it could happen here today come back tomorrow or you know whenever and we'll talk about another part of the world maybe uh i don't know portugal fuck it i I don't have stuff pulled for a Portugal episode. You have to give me way more heads up for that. You better get ready by tomorrow. No.

That's what we're doing now. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at ItCouldHappenHerePod and Koolzone Media. Leave five-star reviews, whatever. Goodbye. Goodbye. 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. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. 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.