It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 50

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

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

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to the Iked Appen Hair's Practical Guide to Making Pumiculture Happen Wherever You Are. I am your host for this episode, Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism, and I'm your host for this episode, Andrew, of the YouTube channel Andrewism.

I'm joined here with Chris and James. Say hello. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having me. Technically, I'm the guest. Yeah, true.

Well, you're going to walk us through this I'm very excited to learn more about it yes so I really see it as a key component in our restoration of the earth and so I find it necessary that regardless of what direction your individual praxis is going in where you're looking to specialize

or whatever, quote-unquote specialize, I think it's still important to think about where your food comes from and think about ways that we can enhance and enlarge our food autonomy, especially considering the multilayering crises that are compounding these days

permaculture was first coined as a tomb by permaculturist bill mollison it's a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture and it's the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity stability and resilience of natural ecosystems it's a way of integrating landscape and people providing their food energy shelter and other material and other non-material needs in a sustainable way. And just to be clear, the concepts, the ideas, the principles that make up permaculture have existed long before Bill Mollison was born, have existed in cultures all over the world. Bill Mollison is just someone who has, I guess, given it a spin for a modern audience. But these principles, these ideas are things that have been in practice for thousands of years.

Tens of thousands even. From the approach to land management and settlement design to the whole systems thinking approach to nature, which can be seen in a lot of animist practices it has a long history and it's one that people who practice fumiculture today research fumiculture will inevitably uncover in their learning process. However, Bill Mollison first coined it in the 1970s as a response to the oil embargoes that were taking place at the time. By bringing together the traditional knowledge of a vast array of indigenous cultures and combining them with certain modern design and layouts, it created a movement that is now spreading across the world on every continent, honestly.

The way that permaculture views the world, the views systems, it comes with an outlook that recognizes that all biological material is a potential energy source. The aim is to try to trap energy on your land and to use that energy in the most efficient way before it degrades, to create circular economies and cycles of energy that allow for actual sustainable agricultural practice, which unfortunately has not been the aim of agriculture, especially industrial agriculture.

And so permaculture represents a challenge to that status quo. a challenge to that status quo. The ethics of permaculture are primarily focused on care for the earth, that being all living and non-living things, care for all people, thereby promoting self-reliance and community responsibility, so that we all have access to the resources necessary for existence, and care for community and specifically community that allows us to be to think of and approach our society in a way that benefits

all people in our life recognizing the community is not just our neighbors it's not just the people who live in our city or town it is all the living things that incorporate our surroundings and beyond the way that permaculture approaches design it's a lot of his emphasis in mimicking how the natural world would attempt to stabilize. Of course, these systems take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years to fully develop and age and reach some kind of stable state. But permaculture seeks to learn from, you know, these old growth forests and these elderly ecosystems and accelerate that process to establish things that will last generations,

to establish spaces that will provide for the needs of people hundreds of years down the line. provide for the needs of people hundreds of years down the line. When it comes to approaching permaculture design practically, first things first to recognize is that anybody can take part in permaculture design. Anybody can take part in constructing these sorts of systems. And it can be established, the basic principles can be established regardless of your circumstances your individual climate or biosphere because the principles are based on following what nature was doing anyway one of the first principles involves the recognition of the connections in a location seeing that a web is stronger than a single string meaning that all of these different parts these different

moving parts coming together create something stronger than if each individual person, each individual creature is trying to move by itself. It also looks at the connection between waste and resources. We all know the old adage that says, you know, one man's trash is another man's treasure. But when it comes to ecosystems, we should really be taking it quite literally. Because the waste of one part of the system directly feeds into the resource of another part decomposing plants and animals directly feed into the fungal networks and flourishing of the next generation of plants animals as and in that web in that network in that in those connections we can also recognize for principle two that each element performs

multiple functions if we are for example keeping chickens they can be a source of eggs and feathers and protein, of course, but they also produce mania and their daily activity helps to aerate the soil. And they also provide insect control, allowing your plants to further flourish. Banana trees, they provide bananas, of course, they provide fruit. They also provide starch and mulch and protection and shade and they hold water quite well, actually. When I had taken a permaculture design course a couple months ago, one of the things that I had learned from the guy who was running it was that he had told this story and he had done this this project in barbados and in barbados he was called to uh restore a sort of like an old sand mine um because it had run out of sand well it's close to running out of sand and so the community that was reliant

in that sand mine didn't really have any direction. Because their economy, their local economy, had been so reliant on those jobs. When he came in, it's just like, and he showed the pictures, it's just this very, very barren landscape. Very dry, very dusty. And I was honestly in disbelief that something so dead so destroyed something so devolved could be as radically transformed as he had transformed it unfortunately this is a podcast not a video otherwise i would show you the pictures but the transformation was stunning and one of the elements that he used to transform that dry landscape into a lush

food forest was banana trees because surprisingly banana trees are very effective well unsurprisingly banana trees are very effective at growing quickly and providing shade to other plants and so as these other plants are growing up they have the shaded banana tree to protect them from the harsh sun and so the banana trees while they may not be the top dogs of the forest in the end by the time the forest is fully established because banana trees don't get that tall they still are vital in that early stage in providing that function of shade that allows the rest of the forest to establish itself that's really cool it's very very very cool

i would show you all the pictures after is there like a place people could see them online like instagram they could look up or something? Yes. So if you go on wasamakipermaculture.org I believe he has the pictures up there. That'll be w-a-s-a-m-a-k-i permaculture.org And if I remember correctly,

he has the pictures on there yeah was it like a sand mine before or something yeah it was a sand mine yeah geez wow it looks like there's no goodness in the soil in the first one and then yeah yeah and so arriving to go back into the recording aspect, when it came to that project, a large part of it was just getting that life in the soil. So they were taking, they were getting mulch and mania from wherever they could get it, just to give some life to that soil. They would grow certain like hardy, fast- fast growing plants and then chop them down after they'd grown sufficiently so they would die right where they lay and provide nutrients to the soil

and that process was what helped to build up that soil even before you started planting the bananas and other stuff and were they able like you're saying they were getting some of that stuff wherever they could get it like um were they able to get that uh that was it like considered a waste product i guess by the people they got it from and so like i know i have chickens and they obviously produce like manure and i'll put some of it in my like vegetables that i grow but i'll just give it to anyone else who wants it um is that a thing that they were able to do there yeah i think people are donated um and i mean i would assume at least in trinidad i don't know what the case is in barbados but in trinidad there are bush trucks which pass every once in a while to collect whatever, you know, branches and cut grass and whatever people have put out from their yard work or whatever.

So I would assume that they would have asked the bush truck people to, you know, bring some of that stuff to the site to help out. Because a lot of people, you know, they just put that in front of the yard waiting for the bush truck to pass. And so a lot of very good potential sources of ecosystem building, that so-called waste, that really resources gets wasted when it can really serve a lot of these kinds of projects. Yeah, that's very cool.

Yeah. Yeah, it's something that like, I don't know, if you ever read UN documents about like stopping climate change, like they always have a giant section about circular economy stuff and about sort of, I mean, basically doing this stuff and then nothing ever happens and no one ever does it. And so, yeah, it's really cool that like this is a place where those ideas which like are if there's if we are going to survive as a species with like most of us alive and doing well we're going to have to do exactly getting implemented yeah i'm uh i'm kind of reminded just on this sort of topic of uh

i was in rwanda uh in like february of 2020 and one of the things that really struck me with this system of agriculture that they've devised where um they have paddies uh that they grow rice right like submerged and then in there there are living fish uh and then above them there are like little hutches with rabbits and i'm so like uh the rabbit manure helps to fertilize what's growing beneath and then like it's this kind of circular thing where i think they can feed some of the things that they cut off the the plants to the rabbits and it's sort of like and the fish will help keep the water clean i think they're like filter fish i can't quite yeah plants keep it clean for the fish it was fascinating i was like this is amazing like they're not as opposed to i grew up on a farm

and like i'm very familiar with some of the larger arable so like grain uh like grains in in the uk and how you're relying on a ton of exogenous inputs which I was just so impressed with the fact that they devised a system that didn't require those exactly you really want to of course

you will have to get external sources especially in the beginning as you're trying to establish the system but the aim is really to have the system continuously establishing itself and expanding itself and maintaining itself yeah would it be a system that works mostly um uh with like a plant-based food stuff i guess that seems generally more sustainable more sustainable. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,

mania is a really powerful source of fertilizer. And I think you can keep animals without eating them. Yes. Or using them anyway. If you just want to, you know. Because they make good companions and stuff as well. Yeah, that's totally fair. But yeah, I would say a plant-focused system could definitely work. And to sort of rhyme or align with principle two,

which said that each element performs multiple functions, it's also important to have each function supported by multiple elements. So you don't want to get all your food from one source. It's also important to have each function supported by multiple elements, right? So you don't want to get all your food from one source. You want to have a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars. I mean, having all your food coming from one source is basically what we do now with, you know, these monocultures, with this industrial farming that has these fields and fields and fields that are so susceptible to pests and disease that we have to basically drench them with chemicals just to allow them to survive because and the same guy who did the course he explained to me like this he said that when there's a system in nature and it's not in balance they basically

send out a signal saying hey this is not in balance come and fix it and so these so-called pests these bugs and stuff they come to these aberrations these freaks of nature these massive fields of crops and recognizing that this is not a sustainable um establishment in the landscape they try to try to optimize right he calls them he doesn't call them pests he calls them optimizers so if you have for example uh excessive amount of a certain pest in your system something's wrong with that system because those so-called pests those optimizers are only able to flood your system because they don't have the mechanism your system doesn't have the mechanisms in place to keep them in check so you don't have the fauna the larger insects and stuff in your system that will keep those pests in check there's an imbalance in place and that's

something that needs to be rectified and there are different ways to rectify it depending on the situation another example and this isn't um from the permaculture guy permaculture course another example was the um this i believe someone was talking about the presence of wolves in some of the parks in uh in the u.s and how reintroducing those wolves did so much to regulate the rest of the ecosystem the ripple effects that had on the rest of the ecosystem um stabilizing the deer populations and stabilizing um the beaver populations and stabilizing all these other different plants and animal species that you would think aren't even connected to the wolves but still their presence played a significant role

in maintaining that balance. Yeah, go watch How Wolves Change Rivers. It's literally five minutes and it rules. Yeah, it's amazing. I just like the concept of rewilding. Would that be a similar thing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, rewilding is basically...

but would that be a similar thing? Yeah, yeah. Rewilding is basically, permaculture tends to be more focused on sustaining human communities in a balance with the rest of the natural world, whereas rewilding is more focused on helping to rebuild ecosystems outside of the human sphere all right he says i understand it yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense to me so with principle three

which was to reiterate was that each function should be supported by multiple elements you want to get all your food from one source you wouldn't just want to grow like rows and rows of trees or rows and rows of corn. You want to grow a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars and all these different species and variations that would make up like an actual forest. The food forest is an approach that a lot of permaculturists would advocate and within a food forest you would have i believe seven major groups this sort of seven levels that create a sort of a beneficial system on the top layer you have the canopy which consists of the large fruits and nut trees they provide the most shade and they keep the whole area the climate of the area stable on that second layer you're going to have the low tree layer which has the dwarf fruit trees the

smaller fruit trees would fall under the canopy on On the third layer, you would have the shrub layer, where you'd grow your berries and other small plants. And below that, you have the herbaceous layer, where you would grow different herbs and spices and things like that. And then below that, you have your root vegetables. And below that, you have, well, you can't really go below the root vegetables. But next to those root vegetables, you would want to grow your soil surface crops, your ground cover. Like there are certain running beans and stuff that would help to create a ground cover, which protects the soil and prevents the establishment of undesirable plants, which we call weeds.

And then finally, the seventh layer is the vertical layer, which consists of the climbers and vines that would establish themselves on the low tree layer and the canopy. So if you have that sort of food forest system in place with all those seven layers, you're not getting each function supported by one element, you're getting it supported by many elements the same goes for water you don't want to get all your water source coming from just like the pipes and whatever water the government sends you you want to have water coming from

the rain if possible you might want to tap into the water table or you might want to depending on your situation you might have a stream or you might be on a hill in which case you'd have water flowing down and you want to find ways to trap that water and to conserve that water so that it's distributed throughout your system unlike a regular home garden part of the aim of a permaculture system is that it, just like in nature, it waters itself. It takes care of itself. And so you're going to want to have all sorts of different sources of water, elements in place to provide that water. Same goes for energy. You would want to get all the energy from one source. You want to combine human power, animal power, hydroelectricity if possible,

solar power if possible. Basically, redundancy is very important. Redundancy is very important redundancy is very important and i'll say it again for emphasis redundancy is very important the next principle principle number four is that you want to approach permaculture with energy efficiency in mind particularly your own energy. So on the more practical side of things, you might want to do what my mentor, my guide had done, which was a zone and sector analysis. So basically you draw like a map of your space. You outline your daily patterns and the energies that come from outside your site,

like wind and rain and flood and fire and pollution and noise and smells and all those different things you want to look at how you move through your space you want to look how the sunshine passes over your space you want to look at the view and you want to try to harness those good energies whether it be the rain or wind or whatever it may be the sun and plant accordingly you don't want to have sun sensitive plants on like the south side of your property of your space wherever the space is and you wouldn't want to have plants that need a lot of sun in the shade you also want to divvy up your space once you've you know done that map of your space you want to divvy it up into zones so i first zone would be your immediate living space the second zone would have an intensive kitchen garden so that first

zone would be a place of consumption and processing of whatever it is that your system is producing. It doesn't necessarily have to be a house. It could be a community kitchen or it can be a campus clubhouse. I don't know. It could be any space that you're using for consumption and processing. The next zone is going to be an intensive kitchen garden. It's a place where you'd want to grow the plants that cycle through more quickly um the spices and the herbs and the different things that you would use on a regular basis the next zone would want to have its focus on

local support community support and surplus so this zone, the first zone is actually technically zone zero. The second zone is zone one. And so zone two, which is that sort of local support space, that orchard, is where you want to grow your fruit trees, your ornamentals, you might want to raise animals there. And you basically want it to be a space where you can provide for the local community separate and apart from your own produce zone three would also have the emphasis on production zone three would be the space where you have your main crops the crops you spend a lot of time focusing on zone four would also have a lot of

investment in establishing a sustainable sort of life cycle for more long-term plants and zone five would be a space of wilderness, of forest, of wildlife corridors that allow spaces of free wilding even within your more constructed site. Having your systems split into zones helps you to reduce the amount of work that you put in, the amount of resources you use, the amount of maintenance you'll need And it also helps you to boost your yields and to recycle resources most effectively The fifth principle is the use of biological resources Natural insecticides, timber timber nitrogen fixers whatever the case may be you want to be using the systems that have evolved to fulfill those roles to fulfill those roles you may or

may not be afraid of certain creatures i myself personally i don't like frogs or toads or really i don't like most animals personally i just survive with them however comma i recognize the importance right so frogs and bats and snakes all these creatures help to provide like a stable system whether it be snakes dealing with um rats or bats dealing with insects or frogs also dealing with insects you might also want to use companion planting as well um like the three sisters method which is a combination of beans corn and what was the third one again it's squashes right and squash and that would help to establish you know itself and maintain itself it's sort of like a microcosm of the broader permaculture concept and one that has been in practice for hundreds of years the sixth principle is the practice of

energy cycling trapping sunlight through greenhouses making the most use basically out of the energy that flows through your system before it leaves your system recycling the organic matter that passes through your system so it produces no real waste um when i was at the site at the permaculture forest i witnessed a compost toilet for the first time and was immediately grossed out by the concept however comma upon being blown away by the product of those compost toilets. I changed my tune very quickly. And although I probably would not use a compost toilet on a regular basis, I think it has some benefit because we're flushing away some real power,

some real nutritious stuff. Of course, there are risks associated with using human mania um but the process that he had put in place involved using human waste um and then for every certain amount of human waste you would dump sawdust on top of it and that sawdust helps to deal with the smell so much so that i actually didn't smell anything when i opened up those those compost toilets but it also helps to create that balance between the carbon and the nitrogen that is required for compost and so after that um after a tub has been filled a compost toilet tub has been filled he seals it up leaves it for a year to break down and by the time it comes out it's just like regular soil however of course safety precautions i believe he only uses it for his orchards so only

like fruit trees and other kinds of trees i spent a lot of time so far discussing these sort of larger systems where you know i'm basically assuming you have several acres of land like this guy does i don't have several acres of land i don't have an inch of land um and i feel like a lot of people listening don't so there are elements that you can incorporate on the small scale such as grow boxes, you can have deep litter beds, you can have aquaculture systems. And that's actually one of the things that he first established, which was a series of aquaculture systems. And it's actually one of the main focuses of his project to this day.

But I was quite surprised as to the yield that could be produced from something as simple as a couple pipes put together with some tomato plants grown out of it. So, I mean, don't underestimate yourself or the space available to you because you might not be able to plant a whole forest, but you can do a little something. a whole forest but you can do a little something coming back to the food forest concept the eighth principle is the use of natural plant succession and stacking you want to group plants together that would give a continual production over time in both the short term and long term and like i established you want to have those layers in place, the roots, the vines, the trees, etc. The ninth principle encourages diversity, encourages polyculture, which is something

that I'm sure you would have picked up on by now. The tenth principle is increasing the edge within a system by creating unique niches that allow for the more rare, the more vulnerable corners of life to sustain themselves. And I think that's something that a lot of permaculturists do in terms of establishing their own systems. They have like a special focus or a certain passion project

to certain species that they just love and want to see flourish. And so they create these niches within their systems that allow for those creatures to flourish. Principle 11 implores that you observe natural patterns. Nature rarely goes in a straight line and you may want to make that pattern whether it be spirals or waves or branches whether it be patterns over time from you know the week to the month of the year to repeating patterns in the weather or the seasons you want to be observing these patterns and adjusting your system continually

the early parts of establishing a permaculture system is certainly the most difficult part but even five to ten years down the line when when the system is more established, more self-sustaining, you still want to be playing that role of tweaking it as you go along. And I think that's something that more people need to recognize about humanity. We didn't just spring on to hear like some sort of alien parasite leeching off of the earth, right? parasite leeching off of the earth right we just like every other animal like every other creature on this planet have a role to play in the ecosystems we inhabit unfortunately a lot of that activity has been destructive because of how our socioeconomic system has been structured but that's something we have a role in changing and part of that is recognizing that we are stewards so we we can be good stewards we can help to facilitate the flourishing of life we don't have to be grim reapers upon the systems

that we are a part of and so even even as you're late, quote unquote, in these long-term projects, 20 years, 30 years, you're still going to be tweaking and cultivating and hopefully expanding these systems over time. Principle 12 reminds us, we got to pay attention to the scale of these systems, to the long-term of these systems to the long term of these systems recognizing that this is something you want to establish over generations and finally principle number 13

is be positive experiment small learn from your mistakes scale up bring in more people get involved get more of your community of your social circle of your family of your affinity group of whatever the case may be get more people involved um in imagining this complex beautiful revolutionary project we have a long way to, but a lot of progress can be made in a short space of time. And there are a lot of projects already going on with this end in mind. I would suggest just going online really and just searching for the different permaculture projects happening around the world. Whether it be the food forests that Jeff Lawton is working to establish in Morocco, or the permaculture, permablit systems that people are putting in place in Australia,

or the greening the Sahara projects in the Sahel region across Africa, or the many small-scale projects taking place and large-scale projects taking place across the Americas. There are a lot of people putting in this work and there's a large community willing and able to support as you hopefully embark upon this journey. That's about it for me. Yeah, that's fascinating.

I'm really interested in this stuff. I yeah it's massively missing in our discussion about like i don't know how to phrase this rightly but uh like making a better world just to give it a really broad sort of phrasing and when we often think about like political discourse and when we think about political systems, but without food systems, we really like our hierarchy of needs is not satisfied. And I think that folks listening can make a really positive change really, really quickly and in their own lives and spaces if they sort of spend some time with this stuff yeah absolutely and it's cool i think um and important too to reference that like so much of this like like the person you named at the start whose name i'm sorry i've forgotten but like um i think yeah it's important to reference that like these are indigenous ways of of knowing and doing and being and living. And like you said, they've existed for millennia.

And like going back to that is good as part of a larger sort of way of respecting indigenous cultures and land rights and all the other things we need to do. 100%. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. 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 iheart radio app apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley

into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could

be done to make things better. Listen to Better on the i hot radio app apple podcasts wherever else you get your podcasts check out better offline.com it could happen here is a podcast that you're listening to. And, you know, mostly we talk about problems that you should be aware of. Sometimes we talk about solutions. And today, we're kind of going to talk about a solution. Today is one of our famed Good News episodes. So everybody, everybody celebrate and also give your name for the folks at home. Yay, I'm James. Yay, I'm Gare. everybody everybody celebrate and also give your name for the folks at home yay i'm james

yay i'm gare yay i'm chris wonderful guys that was perfect that was that was completely natural just just like we practiced um so the thing that the thing that is noteworthy and the thing that we're celebrating and also explaining today is that this summer, we're recording this, what, like a day into September, two days into September? So we are, yeah, it's September 1st. So we have officially gotten through the summer without a right-wing rally in Portland that degenerates into a gigantic brawl. This is the first year that has happened since 2017. So starting in 2017, Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys and other affiliated groups would very regularly, and they would do it throughout the year, but particularly during the summers,

hold protests and marches, and these all had different themes. They were Second Amendment rallies, rally against Marxism, rally in support of the fucking cops, protests and marches and these all had different themes they were the second amendment rallies rally against marxism rally in support of the fucking cops the him too rally all sorts of stupid stupid fucking names um but the main the main purpose of them all was so that there would be gigantic fistfights uh between you know proud boys and patriot prayer brawlers and anti-fascists that was the reason to hold these events And they got increasingly gnarly and increasingly violent until everything culminated in the summer of 2020. And this massive Trump caravan through the city with like thousands of trucks, people shooting paintballs and spraying mace and throwing shit off the back of trucks. A Patriot prayer member named Aaron Danielson got his ass shot to death by an anti-fascist during a somewhat unclear altercation outside of a parking garage. What I can say is that everyone involved was heavily armed.

And yeah, after that, there were some more very ugly fights. But an increasing like thing that happened was that there would be gunfire at these protests. And the next year, um, at an anniversary fucking fistfight thing, uh, a right wing demonstrator fired into a crowd of anti-fascists in downtown

Fort Portland who returned fire and drove him off. He was arrested. Um, a bunch of, there was a big stupid fight at a kmart in another part of town the same day an abandoned kmart parking lot that held a massive brawl and several of them got several of the proud boy types got real nasty charges from that one uh after the police as they generally did chose not to take any kind of action um and then you know things kind of

petered out and nothing. There have not been any right wing rallies since there was one mass shooting attack on a weekly racial justice protest in Portland earlier this year, where a fascist fired into a crowd of women who were doing corking duty. He killed one woman and he wounded four other people. And yeah, he was taken down, shot twice in the hip by a protester who was armed security for that march. And after that, there hasn't really been anything. And this is the interesting one of the things that there's a number of things that are interesting here. But one of them is that this has occurred while proud boy chapters are recording record recruitment uh there's more new chapters of the proud boys than

there were prior to january 6th and there have been at least 200 something right-wing gatherings around the country with like proud boys and other affiliated groups in attendance since january 6th um so nationwide the kind of rallies that port Portland's been seeing since 2017 got more common, and they didn't happen at all in Portland this year. And that's what we're here to talk about today. I think there's a couple of things that are have contributed to the current state of affairs, which I think broadly can be described as the right is kind of scared to do big events in Portland. There have been a couple of like sputtering attempts. They drove through town on their way to Washington real quickly as part of this caravan

once, but they didn't go through downtown again. It wasn't like one guy did fire at people on a bridge with a handgun, which the police did nothing about, but they're not willing to like hang around. And I think there's a few reasons why they've been scared off. Number one, they keep getting shot um that has happened several times now um number two the physical resistance to them has been gnarlier as of the fights um people have gotten smarter about how they do some aspects of the fighting involving like a lot of property like spraying paint on people's fancy body armor and shit which is expensive and then after five years of ignoring it, the state has actually started charging right

wing brawlers with felonies, which has scared, I think, a lot of them off. And yeah, so that's that's kind of where we are now. And I think one of the things people should be paying attention to is what Portland had to do and and both how long it took took but also like what kind of things were involved to actually get to this point because other folks are going to need to be willing to do some of the shit people had to do in Portland for years which includes like fucking strapping on gear and going out to confront these people in the street yeah I think um it's really interesting right because I just I know you've written a piece about this uh for new lines if i remember correctly yeah yeah yeah that'll be up by the time this uh this runs

cool um yeah i just read it i thought it was really good um it reminds me of like when we talk about anti-fascism historically right we sort of talk about the high points a lot and the one that at least i see most people going back to is the battle of cable street in london in 1936 which people will probably i know you've had it in bastards episodes before yes um and it's a very similar thing right like it's a broad intersexual coalition of people who are like we will not let you do this shit in our space and we will physically fucking stop you and if the police try and protect you we will stop them doing that as well there's incidents between mostly fascists and anti-fascists like throughout the 30s and a lot later in british history but it's a very similar kind of playbook i guess right it's like physical force opposition to fascist gatherings like not letting them feel safe in your space yeah not

letting them feel safe and not letting them go unopposed. Because I mean, one of the things that was kind of repeatedly a factor in Portland is that when the anti fascists outnumbered the right from the start, and significantly, there was a lot less violence on the days when that happened. And so it wasn't always a matter of people needing to show up to literally fight, there are times when like a show of force can work. I think a good example of that in recent times in Texas and the DFW area, obviously, is a hot point for different right wing groups, including the Proud Boys, harassing LGBT events, stuff like drag queen story hours and that sort of thing.

And members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, who we've had on the show and other affiliated groups, have been showing up armed in an armor, most recently to protect a drag brunch that was being counter-protested. And you can see photos of like, there's a fucking Proud Boy with a bat with fucking barbed wire wrapped around it. And in this, you don't show up with a bat wrapped in barbed wire unless you're hoping you're going to get to bash somebody's fucking head in. And that guy wound up standing off at the sideline all day long because a bunch of people were there with rifles. I think that guy may not legally be allowed to possess firearms. Yes, I also suspect that guy has a felony record.

Yeah, because he also had a nightstick and, like, several other, like, mall ninja several other more ninja meme tier weapons. Yeah. Yeah, those say to me. And look, if I'm going to be totally fair, meme tier weapons know no side in this fight because for a long time in Portland, there was an individual who would bring a pair of samurai swords

to every one of those demonstrations. And we are talking gas station grade samurai swords. Yeah, do they have the oil slick effect on them? They must have. They must have. No, he never drew his blades because, of course, then they would have had to taste blood. That's the rule.

Yeah, that's a legal ramification there. Also, it's impossible to take the swords out when you have them mounted on your back. It's also impossible to use them. It's literally impossible to take the sword out. Let have them mounted on your back it's also it's literally impossible to take this sort of let's do the tactical uh back scratch it's an offensive position but no i think it's worth talking about the types of other cities where there have been a sizable amount of far-right protests this summer especially targeted at queer people um and how portland is one of the cities where that did not happen i mean we've seen

a lot of stuff in dallas and the um fork people have been doing a pretty good job and both denying the right ground to game but also denying them any of their like fight footage that they love to gather yeah yeah they've they've done a really good job at balancing that aspect which is very very challenging it's very challenging and it takes a lot of discipline and obviously when we think kind of tactically about what guns mean in a situation like this they're tools that have ups the downside of guns is that if things go wrong and everybody's strapped the potential is for things to go very fucking wrong indeed um the upside is that when you have a line of people with rifles the dudes with knives and

batons and shit are a hell of a lot less likely to want to start a fucking fight because it's the the consequences are immediately obvious you could look at it as kind of like the protest equivalent of mutually assured destruction of sort of the old internet like of how the u.s of the soviet union managed nuclear tensions um yeah but it it has been very effective in dallas for that reason and i think it's i think the fact that protests became increasingly armed in portland and also that there are by my count at least three cases of fascists uh being run off or injured or killed by protesters with firearms that is part of why they didn't want to do that shit so much anymore.

I think that part's important too because I think there was a real danger after Rittenhouse that right-wing protesters were going to see this and just be like, no, we can just shoot these people because you have a situation where suddenly it becomes very clear that the state is not going to prosecute people if like right-wing protesters for shooting people but you know okay if if the deterrence is not the state if the deterrence is if you get into a gunfight you're going to lose and get shot like that that i think has been extremely effective in a lot of ways yeah earlier. That earlier stuff sort of hadn't.

I think it's probably worth noting as well that where it's been effective, it's been effective because it's been organized. I don't want to use the word discipline because maybe discipline implies authority that doesn't exist, but there's been some kind of collective restraint and agreement on rules of engagement and stuff. Yeah.

Because I've also seen folks try to do this unilaterally that does not fucking end well like if you're the if you're the one person open carrying uh expecting the state where that's not legal like you're just a one person going to prison yeah and obviously open carry protests only work in states where that can be done legally yeah doing that in tex Texas is different than doing that in California. Yeah, that's what I'm here to tell you. Yeah. But yeah, I think it's a force multiplier, right? Like these guys have,

I think especially people on the right have like absorbed so much like of this sort of like, there are types of male as delineated by the Greek alphabet bollocks and they've convinced themselves that they are alphas and they can win a fist fight. No, James, i've seen more sigmas than alphas at protests oh so many sigmas i've seen a few epsilons man i i don't know if that's a type of male i met a real sigma at an anti-mask protest in 2020 who brought his ar and a 60 round drum and bragged that he had

500 rounds loaded into magazines as he protested masks in front of the state capitol. And it was like the people he was protesting were specifically like about a dozen nurses who were standing around with us. It was like, you need those 500 bullets for those unarmed nurses wearing signs telling you to mask? He's ready for when the shit hits the fan robert

i'm guessing oh i i don't believe i saw a med kit i used to try to make a note of it i will say the right in the last year i've noticed more med kits and pictures that i've seen so good good i guess yeah but yeah like if you are a person who's not like physically enormous or like like i said these guys have convinced themselves that like they are somehow like top tier brawlers even though we've seen the patriot front videos and they're very funny like it's like a force equalizer i guess right it allows people to sort of enter that space without having to be 500 or like you know massive dudes i don't want to focus too much on specifically firearms because

i think that's less important than and not that the primary lesson of portland which is what is necessary to stop these people from showing up is consistent shows of force and i think one thing that i just kind of always found intellectually interesting is that you know when you when you read about like military strategy right um for every like guy who's actually kicking indoors getting into firefights in the field you have you know nine or ten people behind him who are responsible for logistics right um that's the only way a modern military works uh when you don't have a logistics train set up like that things go like they did for russia at the start of the invasion of ukraine where you have like hundreds of tanks without fuel and shit um when in portland protests an average

for a large protest i would say the average was around a thousand people now that's a large protest often they were smaller but when you would get these big hyped for a couple of weeks the proud boys are coming to town you'd easily easily get 1000 or 2000 people counter protesting. And, you know, it would be probably 10 or 15% who were who were showing up specifically ready to kind of throw down and ready to throw down and also with some experience doing it. And a much larger number who were some of them were there as medics, some of them were handing out water or other beverages, they were handing out food. There were people who were there just to yell and chant with signs to like be you know moral support there were people there doing transport blocking roads um people there doing you know um intel and stuff filming things um people who were there uh you know doing stuff like um covering up live streamers cameras

with with bubble wrap sheets or we used to have a band full of people who dressed as bananas who would oh yeah kind of kind of try to distract and drown out the far right there was one beautiful individual i saw a couple of times who was in black block except for they wore a kilt and they carried a pair of bagpipes and when like you would get a couple of fascists approaching a protester and like trying to get into an argument he would walk right up and he would just start playing the bagpipes so that they couldn't that's an offensive weapon yeah yeah it was beautiful um but kind of more important than the specific you do need and i i don't want to like distract this you always need a core of people who are willing and ready

to get into a fight when you're doing this kind of activism but the biggest thing is that people show up consistently um and one of the things portland had a number of different organizations like pop mob popular more mobilization that kind of existed to organize less uh radical um or at least kind of not necessarily less radical sometimes people who were just like because of whatever in their life were much less interested in the actual getting into a fight thing, but understood that the more people show up, the safer it is, and succeeded in ensuring that there was like a larger body of people at all of these events. And that, along with more groups like Rose City, Antifa, who kind of particularly earlier in the fights was a big street presence as well as did a lot of research and then other kind of newer um and often kind of smaller anti-fascist collectives that would organize people to straight up fight it was

it was this mix of all of that that allowed it to be that whenever they showed up there was always a group confronting them and it was nearly always larger um and it got to the point at the height of 2020 you know there was this right-wing protest before hand nobody quite knew how bad it was going to be Garrison you and I got there right as things were starting and it was the the anti-fascists were outnumbered kind of at the beginning of the day and things got really violent very quickly within an hour or two though about somewhere around a thousand people had showed up on the antifascist side and were organized and fighting it was a very impressive response time yeah and i think it is it's the actual it's the i mean people use the word like the term the diversity of tactics often just to kind of defend actions that are more radical um and there's the there's the other side of diversity

of tactics which is pulling in all of the background support that creates the sustainability for more radical actions like showing up and actually being a frontliner to get into fist fights with proud boys then there's all of the other stuff like whether that's like medics other support teams uh people playing doing like queer dance parties to push fascists out of areas all those types of things not only make the environment more sustainable so people can show up over a larger period of time because they don't get so burnt out because all they're doing is fistfighting um so i think those actions are another i think's, it's, it's worth not just ignoring those and not just discrediting those. Because once you have that type of presence and people know that you're going to, that those are the types of environments that you're able to create. When you're outnumbered by fascists and you need to call and you need to put out a call for support.

If you, if you have this kind of reputation that can that can help get a lot of people out very quickly and help with the that actually is like popular mobilization uh that right that's what that's what that it's what that actually means so that's how you can get the anti-fascist side to outnumber the fascist side like we saw in 2020 um despite that not being the case when it started. Yeah. And I think because the main thing that ended that fight was the anti-fascist side just moving as a massive, massive block and just pushing the fascists out of the area. Like, as soon as the fascist line broke

and you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in Portland streets directing the flow of movement you can't you can't stop that the force the force is too great and that requires there to be a large amount of people including people who are not gonna get into a fistfight with someone three times their size yeah i think another thing um that that maybe is important is that like and it's kind of at the core of anti-fascism right it's it's it's possible for people who have not just different tactics but different opinions uh like to create this broad-based alliance and not get cross with each other for not agreeing on everything and yeah or or at least least stop fighting with each other long enough to drive the fascists out.

Because Portland, by the way, another thing we should acknowledge, the Portland anti-fascist community can be quite messy. There are a lot of different factions and disagreements, and there have been a lot of arguments up to the present day. But, you know, as a general rule, when the right showed up, people mobilized and and threw down against them, you know, despite the fact that it was a mix of folks who were libs and folks who were radicals and folks who were, you know, something in between. It was and again, I don't this was never a particularly clean process and it didn't have to be. You know, you could point out, and if we had longer, we could point out all number of different like flaws and shortcomings and like things that were done that were wrong or unfair to somebody. But what was kind of more important than any of the ways in which the movement was flawed was at the end of the day that it persisted, that it kept bringing people out and that

it kept resisting and that the right seems to have kind of blinked before the left did here. Like that's what, what matters more than anything about Portland. People felt comfortable enough to continue to come out and it felt worthwhile enough. Yeah. But for the anti, specifically for the anti-fascist protests, they were able to create those environments that people, that, that families were felt totally comfortable coming out to. Um, and people felt that it actually was worthwhile like there was it was it was worth it to take an afternoon out of your day to show up and say no and yeah and and if you're able to physically display no you can't you can't come here yeah and that was um

you know obviously when we talk about the difference between doing that against the police as opposed to the right you know the police have a more in their current form have like 100 150 they've had 150 years or so to dig in you know yes um it's a harder target but yeah i i think the fact that um i think the fact that I think one of the strengths of the movement in Portland was that as a general rule, a lot of people who had a pretty diverse set of beliefs all felt this is a thing I can do and should do. This is worthwhile and important. These people need to be opposed in the streets, and that's worth some time out of my very limited fucking free time to go do um and that that is kind of i think the primary lesson if you want to know what other cities should take from portland it's the importance of developing a community like that a community information network like that but also just like a community where people can all kind where people feel like yes it is actually

it is worthwhile for me to show up and participate in this right like that's the hard thing is getting across when there's um you know a book reading at a library that the proud boys are going to show up and protest it's it's getting getting the message out to people in the area and getting a couple of hundred folks to show up because if you can get 200 people to show up to something like that there's never going to be that many fucking proud boys at the event it's going to be 30 or 40 of them or less maybe a dozen and if you're a fucking library and 20 proud boys show up to like cause a problem and you've got like a dozen kids inside getting read a book or some shit or it's a brunch

and yeah, 20, 30 Proud Boys show up, you have a huge problem. People could get really hurt. They could get fucked up heading to their cars. They can get harassed. It's scary. If that number of Proud Boys shows up and 100, 150 people show up to counter them,

then suddenly number one, all of the people who are being threatened by the fascists get this feeling that like oh my god i'm actually supported by the community that like people are willing to come out and defend me and defend people like me and number two the proud boys get the feeling like fuck even even here we're even in dallas right where we we might be outnumbered you know i think because a few other cities where protests have continued and where they haven't in Portland, I think we've seen a decent amount of activity this year in Salem.

And there have been far-right protests in Salem ever since 2017 as well. Yes. And the other place, because I just did a deep dive into this, is there's been a lot of people from the Portland area, from Vancouver, planning to go up to port towns in Washington. And it's been interesting talking with the people up there about, this is the first time they've really seen a large influx of people. And it's people who don't, it it's the proud boys who are not comfortable

showing up to portland anymore but instead they're going to drive three hours to go to this small town of 10 000 people yeah um and then watching people in this in this local area figure out how they're going to respond to this has been super intriguing uh there's been a whole bunch of people there's been affinity groups in the area setting up medic trainings for queer people who live in the town. There's been meetings between BIPOC groups and more gun-based queer groups about how they can mutually support each other as the far right descends on their city. And in some cases, you know, there was people in certain groups who, at previous protests that's happened the past month, they did not feel comfortable going out to the front lines of this type of thing. they described it as like a picnic that's like a quarter mile away. And it creates like a buffer zone in between people who want to go to the front lines and this whole background of people that's supporting you

and is going to help you out if you need anything. So all the various ways that you can incorporate a diversity of strategies and different type of groups into countering something that's moving to your city now. Just an interesting note based on how much I've heard people talk about, you know, Proud Boys coming up from Portland and Vancouver, just ending up feeling they have to drive three hours to other cities to get, you know, their whatever they want to do. Yeah, the ideal thing is that they walk away, not even beat up as much as demoralized and feeling like it was a waste of time and money.

Ideally they and their gear get covered in fucking paint or something. Um, and they lost six hours of time on a fucking Saturday. And if that kind of happens repeatedly, maybe they'll stop, you know, which is, which is again the goal is for them to

uh feel like it's not worth coming out you know like that's what yeah like people it's often said like you know make racists afraid again is a statement you heard a lot particularly after 2016 but it's a little more complicated than that it's not purely about fear it's also it's hopeless you want to make them hopeless you want to make them hopeless you want to feel like make them to feel like there's no fucking point in showing up and that's the most valuable thing is a victory condition that's that's above everything else is making them feel like there is no hope for their movement i think that the most recent as as a time of recording there was there was this uh protest on the 15th um that was a time of recording, there was this protest on the 15th that was a mix of TERFs and then a mix of far-right people.

There's this guy from Vancouver called the Common Sense Conservative who runs a little video blog thing that he was organizing some people to go up. There was 30 people, lots of them from out of state, who traveled up as a part of this like turf anti-trans side. And there was like 300 to 400 people from the local area who showed up and were like, no, you're not going to do this. the kind of more far right people because it sucks it's like it sucks when you have 300 people from the actual city that show up and go no and try to like physically remove you from this space yeah and i think you can sort of see mirrors of this and like the way leftists like protest work right where it's like it's it's a lot easier to hold together coalitions when you're winning and the moment you start losing the moments and things start going wrong like all of the infighting comes back and you know entire movements will just disintegrate and this this works the same way on the right if you

can if you can actually beat them consistently a few times you can start like holding on long enough for their internal group dynamics to unravel like this this is a way to beat them yeah yep um well that's about all i had to say not a complicated topic anything else all right well well as uh yeah anyway go uh go go yell at a fucking nazi um go go yell at a fucking Nazi. Go damage a fascist's body armor by spraying them with paint from a great distance.

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What's Kyling your Rittenhouse? Oh, in our Argentinian cultural center. Yay. Remember Kyle Rittenhouse. Oh, in Argentinian cultural center. Yay. Remember Kyle Rittenhouse? Remember that night where I spent way too much time online finding that kid's name and then he was arrested a few hours later and then he got off after murdering those people? Remember when that happened? I do. So are you saying that you're in some way responsible for what we're going to talk about today? No, this is not on me. This is one of the most truly cursed things that I have ever seen on the internet that maybe has ever existed. So I know people are just learning about this now, but I've known about this for a while because I kind of have a personal obsession with Kyleyle rittenhouse for reasons that should be obvious um uh yeah i've been i've been i've known about this for a bit

i just have never found a good time to bring it up but i guess i guess i guess we've now found it which is it's kyle in time yeah it's uh it's time to talk about the Centro Cultural Kyle Rittenhouse which exists in Argentina as part of, I think maybe we'll explain a little bit about what the broader context of these centros is, like what they are if people aren't familiar and then what the

fuck this abomination is all about. So these exist across Latin America more or less, also i've seen them in spain the spanish-speaking world but i think that's like a reflexive thing going back to spain and they're like community spaces they they vary hugely but i've been to different ones they've nearly always leftist or at least progressive and they're spaces where sometimes people can go and meet right communities can meet

sometimes they're like cultural events talks you can borrow books uh often like they're associated with neighborhood movements or what we might broadly call like anarchism but sometimes it's yeah explicit sometimes it's not it's like a community center type thing the closest thing we would have here would probably be like info shops but those kind of differ based on what what kind of anarchist info shop you're at um but yeah they're like like community gathering places you can pick up books or whatever yeah and um this one's a little bit uh a little bit odd yeah yeah because it is very much not leftist uh it claims to be argentina's first openly rightist cultural center and it's run by this guy called jose deadman uh he is a poster right this is a guy who many people will have become aware of today i have spent most of my

day watching his content on the internet uh good for you it's great i love my job i took three days off i went camping and then i just retoxified my brain with this shit immediately yeah um it's uh okay so jose denman right uh the reason that we are interested in him today uh is a because of his truly cursed posting history, and B, because the anti-terrorist police in Argentina raided the Centro Cultural Carl Rittenhouse last night. I've got some audio of the raid, which... We have to play this audio of the raid. Yeah, yeah, there were flashbangs. There were guns.

There were a lot of guys in plate carriers. That's wild. That's like the first real time anything related to Kyle Rittenhouse has faced any sort of consequence. That's right, yeah. Based Argentinian cops. Yeah, well, again, they can only do things that are funny. That's true.

And raiding a Kyle Rittenhouse-themed cultural center is funny. It is very funny. This is extremely funny like this is one of the funniest things i've ever seen as they go in uh you're gonna see some some of uh not only like artistically offensive but really offensive in every way murals uh so they're really bad yeah they're incredibly bad the the right is not good at street art no i mean and this is this is this is the real problem that they have as a sort of like strategy of like trying to mirror sort of left-wing cultural spaces is that like as as annoying as like left-wing cultural spaces are

like right-wing cultural spaces are like the worst thing to be and you can possibly imagine because there's nobody like every single one of these people is completely insufferable and again left left left wing sort of like social movements are always buffered by the fact that they have an incredible number of very talented artists. These guys, like... Donald Trump with a square head. I don't think you would describe it as quality artists who are responsible for the murals at the Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Center.

Yeah, he did them himself. There are videos. So, do we want to talk about what before we talk before talking about like why this was rated do we want to first talk about like what this actually is and like why it exists like like where did this come from okay so this comes pretty much out of this uh he he seems to some of his earlier posts about the censorship of dragon ball zed oh my god oh my god yeah which i will not profess i've probably it's probably z isn't it okay okay all right uh so i've i've given myself away as a non-anime understander at the outset uh i don't know why it was censored i i claims that it was... He uses a phrase like Femi Bolshe a lot.

Femi Bolshe, which I'm guessing is a portmanteau of feminist and Bolshevik. Oh, God, you're probably right. Yeah. So, he's definitely an insult. So, yes, the feminists are censoring DBZ. And this means I need to start a fascist hangout spot. That's the journey of this. Yeah, well, more or less,

I guess it seems to really come out of the lockdown. It seems to come out of him being unemployed from March of 2020. And there's a big anti-lockdown group in Argentina called Fuerza Unidaria Argentina, which he's part of. And that's if you look, actually, it says like Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Center and then it has Fuerza Unidaria written underneath. And so that seems to be a large part of it. It opened relatively recently.

I was looking for an exact date, but I couldn't find it. But it is within the last year. Yes, it has. It has been within the year i remember seeing something about this earlier this year um just to recap some of the art maybe because it didn't like art's a strong word paintings depiction yeah no art art requires a few a few things to make it actually art i i don't think this stuff qualifies as art no uh but and some of them i genuinely was unable to discern who are they supposed to be it's uh really difficult like it's it's it's kind of hard to tell who trump is and it's trump like this is this is this is how this is the level of artist we are dealing with here yeah trump looks like someone out of minecraft or something like his head is entirely square Trump. This is this is this is this is how this is the level of artist we are dealing with here. Yeah.

Trump looks like someone out of Minecraft or something like his head is entirely square. The width is equal to the height. Yeah. Which but they've

they've got one of the guys I saw was this guy called Malavo. Do people know who he is? No. Perhaps not. OK, this is probably

one that we won't include the video of in the podcast. But so he was he went to prison because he tortured leftists as a cop in argentina in the 70s right and then he escapes and in 2008 the cops come to his house to take him back and instead of going back to jail the live tv in front of his wife and children he shoots himself and like they just keep rolling the reporter's like five feet away and they're like oh he shot himself in the head he's down and now he's immortalized by yeah that looks like a

five-year-old's in cells finger painting on the walls this is this is what happens when people follow their leader hitler yeah it's true uh so there's there's other people that there's uh javier mile i think he's called he's like a he's the classic chad libertarian uh he's an argentine politician uh they of course have a confederate flag they have banners from the argentine civil war there's an imperial japanese flag yeah next to donald trump like i'm just i'm just looking at like the front like banner There's an Imperial Japanese flag. Yeah. Next to Donald Trump. I'm just looking at like the front like banner thing or like the front like mural at the end. There's a horrible, horrible picture of Kyle Rittenhouse wearing a suit that it looks so

funny. Like it's like I it's the the the image is just amazing it's god oh they had they have they okay i will say it looks like i drew it blindfolded with my left hand like it looks so bad the one thing okay i i think they're, well, okay, their depiction of Bolsonaro, like, It's fine. It kind of captures the grotesqueness of him, but like, he's doing finger guns. He is doing finger guns. Double finger guns. On, on, on, with the Brazilian flag behind him.

It's, remember, remember, this started with DBZ. Yeah, Rittenhouse's, like thing has like... What is it? The two holes? The two black circles on his face? I thought it was an eye patch, but no, it's not. There's like two or three black circles on the inside mineral of Rittenhouse. It looks like he's wearing an eye patch or like some kind of night vision optic, maybe? Also, as a Kyle Rittenhouse expert who spent hours combing through the clothing he was wearing, they have his hat completely wrong.

They have here like a reddish pinkish hat. And that's not the hat that he was wearing. He was wearing a tan hat with a white back mesh. And the hat was the reason we were able to figure out who he was because it has a little tear in the front. And we were able to compare that to get an exact match onto the suspect's facebook profile um so the hat is completely wrong so already they've dropped the ball here on any semblance of accuracy by drawing the completely wrong hat for this picture it's i'm insulted as someone who spent hours figuring out uh what this guy's name is. I'm insulted.

Yeah, there's all kind of cursed stuff. This Abascal, the Vox guy from Spain. Anyone who you can think of, he's just like a culture warrior, is depicted in finger painting style by this guy, by Jose Deadman. So he came to the attention of the authorities. Well, so he he came to the attention of the author well actually he came to the attention of the authorities before uh it will shock nobody to find that he has been sending unsolicited images of his genitalia to women for a very long time so he's been sending out a lot of are you telling me the dragon ball Z incel who started a Kyle Rittenhouse cultural center

has been sending out unsolicited dick pics? Yeah. Wait! I wonder if... Oh, no. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. I think I just had a revelation about this guy. Did you just crack this case wide open? Hold on. Hold on.

I can't wait to hear what you've come up with. I'm on the edge of edge of my seat i am thrilled uh i on the other hand i'm on their facebook page which is toxic as hell yeah their face their facebook's pretty funny they they they have a video of a woman inside they call yes when the woman comes in in there like just to prove it's a woman people say women don't come here like we have a woman who's afraid they've filmed like of like a like a five minute video of this woman sitting inside just so there was proof that there was a woman inside this building yeah they were so shocked yeah yeah yeah it's it's very clear that like they

had not been expecting it so he's actually been to jail for gender-based online violence. I think I figured out how this connects to Dragon Ball Z. Okay. Okay, I'm not 100% sure about this. My guess is that this guy is like a hardline... I've never actually heard this guy's name said out loud. Vic Mignogna, like, truther guy. Vic Mignogna is like like this he was a voice actor who

was on dragon ball z who like sexually harassed and assaulted like a shit ton of people um and in 2019 like the stuff came out and there was like a huge right-wing backlash around him and i i really wonder if this is the fucking thing that he was mad about he was mad that he was this voice actor that got canceled because oh he was mad that his favorite voice actor got canceled for sexually assaulting people yeah well so so vick tried to like uh the voice actor guy tried to sue a bunch of people with for defamation and got fucking absolutely owned in court and then all of the shit that he'd been doing for like decades like came out so it would not surprise me if this was like part of this guy like if this is part of the thing he

was fucking screaming about with dragon ball z being censored by the feminist bolsheviks the feminist bolsheviks yeah this is the worst thing i've ever said this is the worst organization ever had in my life yeah that's pretty great i think a large part of this cultural center and kind of the stuff behind it stems out of a whole bunch of like the anti-communist groups that have existed in argentina for a long time yeah yeah yeah his like so all his videos he has this backpack with like a hammer and sickle with like the no you know the circle and line through it um and he then he stages that everywhere with him uh and he has like um some he has like a bunch of anti-communist graffiti that he he also you'll see him in

his uh like in his facebook profile it used to say sometimes anti-social always anti-communist and it had like the yellow and black little thing um yeah and he's he's betrayed i think the tweet that first like announced it portrayed them as like uh libertarian ancaps which like they have like better dead than red that's not a fucking ancap like these people are trying to revoke the era of violence against the left in argentina in the 1970s right like that's what they're going for here yeah i think like in case people are not aware of this argentina had a like a incredibly brutal military data show killed a shit ton of people also like went around latin america training other death squads they had this group called the triple a which was a basically a fascist death squad that sort of

acted as a paramilitary for other wings of the state they killed a bunch of people eventually they coup the government um they're one of the people involved in operation condor they drop people out of helicopters also they yeah it was really fucking bad and and these anti these like anti-communist basically fascist death squads, or some of them fascist death squads. Literally fascist, yes. Yeah. Like we're too Nazi fascists. Like the style of slogans and propaganda that they're using for the center

is in the same vein as that. They're carrying that tradition in Argentina. And I think people are familiar with the Nazis. People should also, are probably somewhat familiar with the uh the uh the whole thing with tons of tons of nazis fleeing to argentina um and argentina being very welcoming to a whole bunch of like like like like german nazi like like actual like nazi nazis like with the membership card like third third reich nazis yeah so one thing that the uh that he So one thing that he did,

one thing that Derman did, or they posted it as we on their Facebook page with Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. They're like these mothers who made this weekly protest. I think it was weekly. And they wore white handkerchiefs, right? And they were like, where are our disappeared children? And they sort of mobilized maternity in this way

that made it very hard for the state to crack down on them right especially a state which is all about like quote-unquote traditional gender roles or whatever you you want to call it um so these mothers are like held up as a great example of peaceful protest of peaceful protest against dictatorship right of forcing them to acknowledge their crimes uh they're looked up to by a lot of people all around the world and he and his bros went out and vandalized a monument to them and then posted about it on their facebook like pretty openly like we did this look at us go so generally pretty much piece of shit guy uh he claims that the re he was radicalized by torturous sexual abstinence which is enforced upon him by the government with the covid 19 lockdown

uh-huh so he's claiming to be a var cell and not an incel of ourselves that's damn it i haven't said this in too long i mean if it's forced on by the government then it is involuntary yes yeah okay I guess that's some men choosing I'm just going to stop right here we don't need to continue this conversation it actually doesn't matter

no yeah he was unable to find intimacy with the people he wanted to and therefore decided to send them pictures of his penis instead which and then start a cultural center themed after kyle rittenhouse that's correct yeah i'm just i'm trying to think of like i i did a lot of stuff on like the aftermath of the rittenhouse shooting as well we immediately saw a whole bunch of a big wave of rittenhouse stuff in the better dead than red and anti-communist

action type uh like memes and I think that this very much stems out of that tradition as well the Kyle Rittenhouse being this like symbol of here is a shining example of someone who actually put in the work to kill communists quote-unquote communists obviously um and I think that with with the whole kind of uh like like anti-communist death squad framing of this, that matches up with a lot of the kind of the memes that were circulating in the weeks after the original shooting in Kenosha. And we can see this as like a physical manifestation of that type of memetic messaging. Like this is like a physical version of that. Of course, incorporating into just a larger kind of right-wing populist politics, you know, veering onto fascism.

And I think it's, but specifically with like the anti-communist action and better dead than red type memes that we're using Rittenhouse, that is a very clear kind of nexus point between these two things. It's like, why is someone in Argentina super into Kyle Rittenhouse? It's because of this. We already have this big strain of anti-communist stuff inside Argentina. Kyle Rittenhouse was used memetically in this way. Very easy thing for the right there to use. I think, I don't know i

think um james do you have do you have any other fun facts about this yeah i do yeah i do so there seems to be another guy who does most of this the speaking for them when they speak to the media uh he only gives his name once as jew uh like ju um but then he also claims okay wait for it wait for it because he claims to have jewish ancestry as well and therefore they can't be anti-semitic so very troubling maybe i'm pronouncing that wrong but you know i i can't think of another way it's only two letters uh so extremely troubling one thing that i did note as well is there is a whole lot of quote-unquote gender ideology talk right a whole lot of quote unquote gender ideology talk, right? And a lot of cultural Marxism talk.

So here's a guy who's extremely online and is parroting these kind of Ben Shapiro, American right turf talking points. You can also see like one thing that's very funny is there appears to be a punk band called war pigs who are selling uh i think it's figurines uh like world cup figurines perhaps uh which they are selling uh mundial it's a word he used um they seem to be basically pretending to be him online selling these figurines pretending they're fundraising for his center but then they're obviously using the money for their anti-fascist efforts that is incredibly bad yeah shout out to them war pigs uh look him up yeah they yeah give

him some money if you can buy a figurine so funny yeah he gets so fucking mad about it he made so many videos about it um and then his parents were uh like he talks about them as heroes of the marxist movement and like leftists and like revolutionaries so he's 38 now uh so his parents will have been young in the 70s perhaps but um certainly certainly like around in that period in their teens and 20s and uh he he talks about like how his parents were cruel to him and how the supposed Marxists like bullied him, how he, he says at one point he has Tourette's and they forced him to do

treatments, which he claims curtailed his opportunities to meet women. But he, he only mentions this once and he sort of goes off on these weird diversions. Yeah. It's a lot of very basic kind of online incel type stuff i want to talk a little bit about the sort of trans angle on this too because i think

so one of the things i think like is not very well known that at some point i will do a full episode on when i find when i'm able to like get enough stuff together and find people who are like really qualified to talk about it but argentina has had one of the world's most powerful trans movements for a long time and i mean they have stuff there that like like there there's there there is a law that passed um i think last year that were that like they have like a hiring quota so all for public service jobs there's a one percent hiring quota of people who have to be trans like really yeah they like they they have stuff there like they have done stuff there that is like like not even like on the agenda for like any other like trans movement i've ever seen so yeah they they're they're very strong they're

very well organized and the government has sort of, like, has done, like, a bunch of, like, genuinely very good, like, pro-trans stuff, like, under the pressure of this movement. And I think that, I think, like, in that context, I think his, the fact that he's obsessed with, like, gender-critical shit makes a lot of sense, because that's, you know, that's, like, one of the sort of right-wing things in Argentina is opposing this shit. But, like, it doesn't, I don't know, they're kind of losing that battle in Argentina is opposing this ship, but like, it doesn't, I don't know. They're kind of losing that battle insofar as like, yeah, you know, people,

people have done a really, really good job and fought really, really desperate and sort of horrible battles for decades. But yeah, they're, they're, they're sort of bearing fruit in really cool ways. Respect. Nice.

Good job. And so what else is bearing fruit is his posting because he has been raided by i i would urge you to watch his video i'll tweet it so people can find it there as well but a a metric shit ton of armed police um and the the reason they're raiding him is because he's made uh like a public threat, basically. He made this 11 and a half minute video. Notably, he says, Our total to support to the Brazilian hero who tried to create justice for all Argentinians.

And goes on to talk about this. This is with reference to the assassination attempt that we saw, what, last week? Yes. So last week, this fascist tried to assassinate the vice president of argentina and we're going to get more into this in our upcoming week of content titled assassination week assassination week assassination week upcoming we're gonna be a whole week of a whole week of episodes about assassinations um but in brief this this this happened and then the people at the cultural center made this live stream celebrating the attack and calling the perpetrator argentina's brazilian hero

yes uh it it really was just he also like tells people to rise up and stuff like there's some very clear calls to action in there in the raid they found a mortar shell and 184 millimeter mortar shell a drone and they they've confiscated a bunch of hard drive which i i do not envy the person who has to go through his phones and hard drives a lot of dick pics in there they're gonna see some balls they're gonna see some peen uh but hopefully that person can get some therapy and this isn't the first like this isn't the first time that the state has tried to come after them they actually uh there were discussions about like denying the crimes committed under the dictatorship right and how he can be prosecuted for that, because that was the thing that they were very clearly doing. So it seemed like he'd kind of been in the crosshairs of progressive

legislators in Argentina for a while. And then he went and made this batshit crazy video where he makes calls to violence. He says the left can't ask for nonviolence. He says the left doesn't respect democracy. And he calls the vice president a rat and a murderer and says that it's just a shame that she wasn't blown up and it's only because the weapon malfunctioned that this hero didn't get to do justice for all argentines i should have been the shenzhou abe guy like i'm sorry yeah look we're like he's just he's just built different yeah he's he's built different because he got sabotaged by all of his esoteric Nazism, which we will get more into in the upcoming Assassination Week.

Yep, we just got to record the theme music and then we'll be there. Yeah, the theme music. Yes. Cut together footage of all of the great assassinations. Yep. This is going gonna be half an hour constant assassination collage yeah these guys are extremely cursed there's more cursed stuff that they've done that like we probably shouldn't go into i don't think because like

i think you could just understand this is a lonely incel guy who's been on the internet too much become more and more radicalized and like surrounded himself with people who agree and it's been pretty funny to watch people prank him for a while like scrolling down their facebook page it's very funny to see people consistently like he doesn't seem to be an intellectual giant but it's also worrying and obviously he's advocating for violence against people who are already marginalized. Whenever someone starts taking things that are online out into the physical world, like making basically a monument,

like a physical place, it's always concerning. It's always one of the big red flags. Yeah, and I think specifically the fact that he had both a mortar shell and a drone is incredibly alarming oh you don't say yeah i just i just want to say i just want to put that on the record for a second yeah uh if he'd posted a little bit less he could have made it into assassination week but here we are amazing cucked by your own poster a tale a tale as old as time yeah if he'd stuck to tradition and not posted him they did also i just wanted to sell secondhand clothes at the center i don't know why i i don't know what they were going for there but they did that right he also sold coffee

really yeah well if you're in argentina and you want some secondhand clothes and coffee, I can tell you where not to go. Don't go to this place because there's odds are you're going to get raided by police when you're there. Yeah, I don't think there's much of this place left now. It looks like the door has not recovered from their entry, judging by the fact that they've taped a bin bag over it in the photos here. Yeah, hopefully someone can squat this place. Maybe the war pigs can get it and just host a collection of figurines there that would be based that'd be so sick yep if they need

money just let us know we'll do a fundraiser so i hope this is a good lesson in knowing when posting goes too far yeah yeah try try to keep your cringe online if you're going to do it i mean because you don't want to be this guy no you certainly do not want to be this guy complaining about dragon ball z and posting that results in uh the police raiding your kyle rittenhouse themed hangout spot yeah just yeah yeah truly one of the weirdest pivots from online to the streets that I've ever seen. This dude probably should have been in jail a long time ago. They're probably worth noting that like gender based violence is like the common denominator for people who do other terrible shit. And this is not not an example of that.

Yeah. Who could have thought that the raging incel misogynist would also have bad politics. Yeah. So keep doing a family bullshit. You have our full support. Indeed. Well,

that is it for us today to tune in next week. Uh, I think next week, right? Some next week or maybe the week after for our upcoming week of episodes titled assassination week. Yep. It's going to be great. Of course, not endorsing any political violence or assassinations of any kind.

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as 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.

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actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcast. Ah, 9-11 is in a couple of days. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about 9-11. Well, as Garrison said in the intro that we're not using, it's about things falling apart. And boy, did that happen on 9-11 two things that fell apart yeah yeah um yeah so this was originally going to be a slightly cruder episode than it wound up being but i'm just gonna i'm just gonna delve into the script and uh chris garrison you guys just buckle in because the reason i have you both as guests on this is that you are both too young to remember 9-11.

That's not true. I remember 9-11. That's a lie. How old were you? Like four? Yeah, I was four. But I remember my mom like, so she was trying to explain the Pentagon, right? And so she

has like a coaster on the ground and she's making an airplane with her hand. Is this going? Anyway, so as I said, neither of you properly remember 9-11. I don't remember 9-11. I was at the age where every moment of it is burnt into my into my brain, as is the reaction. So I wanted you both on this because we're going to talk about how 9-11 kind of became a cult and how to maybe deal with that. And then we'll be chatting about Glenn Beck's 9-12 project, which is something I'm sure neither of you are very familiar with. Now, in its sixth season, the popular cartoon South Park ran an episode in which Jared Fogle, who was at that point just a subway spokesman and not a convicted child molester, came to town and announced the start of a new program to give everyone AIDS.

Now, he was talking about dieticians and personal trainers to help people lose weight. But everybody heard AIDS, the disease, which led to wacky hijinks. That's the episode. It ends when everyone realizes they'd misunderstood Fogel and they all laugh. This leads them to realize that AIDS is finally funny because things that are tragic become funny exactly 22.3 years after they occur. That's the joke in the episode and went on to become a minor little internet joke that like, you know, once you hit that 22 year point, you can laugh about something tragic.

We are now at like 21 years and change since September 11th, 2001. And I think if we're all honest, most of us can admit that we've laughed at a lot of 9-11 jokes. We're recording this the day the queen died. And people are like photoshopping her face to be the Twin Towers. And it's so good. It's quite a time on the old internet. Now, I think the first, I think the hardest, at least, that I ever laughed at a 9-11 joke, I'm sure it's not the first time, was this picture of Trump Tower that was posted to

Twitter like right after he got inaugurated with the text, George Bush do ya thing? Still an excellent 9-11 joke. Now, the first person with any kind of platform to making a 9-11 joke was the recently deceased comedian Gilbert Gottfried. On September 29th, 2001, he took part in a roast of Hugh Hefner at the New York Friars Club. And I'm going to play you the audio of that right now. I have to catch a flight to California. I can't get a direct flight. They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.

Very tame. Very tame joke. Extremely tame joke. Honestly honestly not a great joke um but it went on to it was it's probably like what maybe the most famous and like kind of stand-up history like bombs um god freedom said that himself said that he lost the audience more than anyone else ever has um i think it caused some career problems for him. He later said that he... And this was only like a few weeks after. This was days after. So this is at the Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner

on September 29th. Is this where Too Soon is from? Well, yeah. I mean, I don't know that it originated there, but this was the response to him. And I think it's the first time I ever recall hearing someone say that. Gottfried said that like the reason he decided to tell a joke this close to 9-11 was that he was personally offended by the fact that anything could be too soon to make a joke about. One of the things that's interesting about this little side thing is that like after bombing and getting shouted at by the audience,

a little side thing is that like after bombing and getting shouted at by the audience, Godfried like decided to get them back by telling a particularly long and foul version of the aristocrats, which is a meta joke about jokes primarily. Anyway, it's basically just being as foul mouthed as you can possibly be to an audience. And that that audio has been lost to time apparently. But boy, you can watch a fun documentary about the aristocrats. Uh, if you want to learn more about that. Now, I think the first good actual comedy bit about nine 11 came out a little bit

after this, this was about two weeks after the day. And a couple of months later at like the three month point South park season five aired, uh, and they ran an episode about nine 11. Um, it has been criticized rightly, because there's some

kind of racist bits of humor in there. Yeah, that's not surprising. That's not surprising. That said, it's also kind of a valuable snapshot of history. For one thing, a huge part of the episode is just kind of like the Afghan child counterparts to the main characters in the show walking around their town as everyone is murdered by U.S. airstrikes. So it is not like the—it stands kind of in opposition to sort of the kind of like bootlicking responses you got. For some context, the show The West Wing, which is the favorite show of everybody who runs anything in politics right now, ran an emergency 9-11 episode like a couple of weeks after the attack, which was the kind of turnaround you didn't do in TV at that point in time.

So they put in a ton of effort to have this special nine 11 episode of the West wing. That number one in the alternate West wing universe, there's no nine 11. There's like some vague, like there's basically, basically the episode focuses on like a bunch of kids on a tour getting stuck in the white house.

Cause it locks down. Cause some vague terrorist attack thing happens in a fake country they made up. So when the West Wing needed to talk about Muslims and kind of like the breakout piece of this. Well, there's two breakouts. One of them is a very racist retelling of the story of Isaac and Ishmael that explains like why Muslims are always so angry all the time. of Isaac and Ishmael that explains like why Muslims are always so angry all the time. And then the White House press lady, C.J. Craig, goes on a rant about how awesome the intelligence apparatus is and how like what good people CIA agents are and how like the best thing to do for politics sometimes is to have a guy dressed as a waiter murder somebody with a silenced pistol.

Like it was out of its mind unhinged. That's the fucking like, so the fact that South Park does an episode that's like, yeah, we're going to murder a bunch of people in Afghanistan for no reason is like not a, not a bad response, not a bad thing to recognize about that day.

The other things that are like pretty good or pretty, I think meaningful sort of bits in that episode, it opens with all of the kids at the bus stop wearing gas masks as they stand in line for the bus. There's a piece in that episode that kind of sticks with me today still that I'm going to play for you guys. Remember when life used to be simple and cool? Not really. I don't know. I always found that bit fun. So when the school bus arrives, there's a cop on it searching bags and confiscating

items that might be used as weapons. The school classroom doors are reinforced with a massive military grade lock, which resonated more in a time when like school shootings weren't a constant thing. And it kind of hit me because, you know, when this episode came out and I watched it when it came out, I was at middle school, Clark Middle School in Plano, Texas. And on 9-11 and 9-12, the attacks were like the only topic of discussion that anyone had. And I have this vivid memory of a couple of girls in my U.S. history class weeping because they were scared that Al-Qaeda was coming for our schools next. Yes.

Like this was a very real worry for kids that I grew up with. A school in what, likeland texas or something no it was indeed it's a big school but like i'm certain that fucking osama bin laden had never heard the name plano texas let alone have the job the thing with like anytime a plane was like going down people would point at it and be like oh my god plane was like going down, people would point at it and be like, oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was definitely a meme.

And there was, you know, one of the most famous ones was this video called triumph.avi that started to spread on the Something Awful forums. That was just footage of the September 11th attacks set to Yakety Sax. of the September 11th attacks set to Yakety Sax. And again, these were all kind of the comedy that, you know, that South Park put out here and that you saw in stuff like the Triumph video were reactions to how fucking seriously everybody else took 9-11, right? Like I have to point out that like watching an episode like this or watching something like Triumph felt like legitimately transgressive in the days and weeks after 9-11 because it was kind of a, as we'll talk about, had turned into kind of like a secular cult.

And I think people who were just a few years old then or born after 9-11 missed this part of 9-11. I think you inherited the wars and the intrusions on civil liberties and the creeping fascism, but not the derangement by terror that had preceded it. Like everybody's permanently deranged from 9-11, but you didn't really get to know people before that kind of happened and drove a lot of them mad. As a kid, it was like a strange and exciting and scary moment. But I think my parents and I think the people who were kind of in their age range completely lost their minds. And oddly, that South Park episode

has kind of the best depiction of that too. There's a scene in which Stan, who's one of the main characters, they're all like middle school kids, walks into his house and sees his mom like lying on the couch, staring blankly ahead and just like weeping.

She's surrounded by tissues. She's been crying for days. And as her husband says, she's just been watching CNN for like the last eight weeks straight. And the image of her just kind of like lying on the couch, staring at the TV is I can remember every adult that I knew as a kid doing that. And it really did go on for days. Like people moved around as if they were like in kind of a shocked stupor. I'm sure there's places where this wasn't the case. But

for my family, who were very, very conservative people, and I think for people particularly who live closer to the attacks, like it was just this period of like post-traumatic stress for the entire country. I think a good amount of research backs up the fact that it had this kind of, and I think it is hard to understand if you weren't there, impact on people. I found a Pew Research study that I'm gonna quote from now.

Our first survey following the attacks went into the field just days after 9-11. From September 13th to 17th, 2001, a sizable majority of adults said they felt depressed. Nearly half said they had difficulty concentrating and a third said they had trouble sleeping. It was an era in which television was still the public's dominant news source. 90% said they got most of their news about the attacks from television, compared with just 5% who got their news online. And the televised images of death and destruction had a powerful impact. Around 9 in 10 Americans agreed with the

statement, I feel sad when watching TV coverage of the terrorist attacks. A sizable majority, 77%, found it frightening to watch, but most did so anyway. Fear was widespread, not just in the days immediately after the attacks, but throughout the fall of 2001. Most Americans said they were very, 28%, or somewhat, 45%, worried about another attack. When asked a year later to describe how their lives changed in a major way, about half the adults said they felt more afraid, more careful, more distrustful, or more vulnerable as a result of the attacks. And I think you can't separate this because the main people we're talking about here, when we're talking about the response to this, when we're talking about the people who got to

make decisions, it's boomers, right? Which is not all that different from how it is today, but even it was even more so boomers then. And, you know, my parents and the people of their generation are all children of the Cold War. They both grew up, my parents, on different military bases. And I can remember, you know, my dad told me stories about doing like duck and cover drills as a kid, like literally hiding under a desk to get ready for an atomic bomb. His family like went out into the countryside during the Cuban Missile Crisis to hide because they were afraid all the cities were going to get nuked. And this is not these are not uncommon experiences. So you have to think like, all of the all of the adults were either very close to this period or had spent most of their formative years, like constantly scared of

being murdered by a nuclear weapon. There have been clinical like studies and stuff that have shown that that fear of nuclear annihilation is a major factor in anxiety. Like it's not ever been properly, I think, explained how much that fucked up that generation. But what you had is all these people who had spent the first couple of decades of their lives living with the sword of Damocles over their heads and then the war ends right the cold war ends the USSR falls apart and suddenly people aren't talking about nuclear warfare for the first time in anybody's memory and I think for most of that generation they felt safe for the first time there was this kind of celebration

that was pretty bipartisan, that capitalism and democracy had triumphed and that like this kind of horror that had stalked through their childhood had been defeated. When people like Francis Fukuyama talked about the end of history, what Fukuyama meant was that liberal democracy was kind of, in his eyes, the end of the evolutionary road for states, which is a flawed idea. But the interpretation that I think people like my parents had was that we didn't need to worry anymore, right? Like that's the end of history, right? Our way of life had won and we didn't need to worry. And in 9-11 happens, and suddenly this decade or so of relief from that all ends in a minute. And all of that fear that they lived with their

whole lives came roaring back with abandon. 9-11 was like the emotional equivalent of splitting an atom. And the energy that was released by that is going to be used for something, right? I want to kind of touch on that a little bit because I mean, I obviously don't remember the 90s because I wasn't there. And it is such a fascinating idea to me of like this time where neoliberalism kind of reached their paradise like like we did it we could we we we did the thing we found the spot and how that you know talk about like the edge of chaos theory how it was built up to this super high point and then all because it because it got so high it then immediately crumbled yeah and shot down and there's's this thing that one of my favorite writers, Grant Morrison, talks about how 9-11 kind of became this moment where the world of imagination

and the world of like the lowest material visceral reality crashed into each other. And he says, quote, quote unquote, fiction became more realistic. Think plausible, realistic superhero movies like the Dark Knight films, fake news, deep fakes, AR, VR, and the rise of magical thinking. And I would extrapolate that out to stuff like QAnon and how these images that we thought were only viewable in film and television um became descended down onto the onto the dirtiest most visceral material plane um and then things that

were fake like this idea like the perfect 90s that's gonna be this is gonna continue like this forever that fiction uh it felt almost more real like it like. Like that should have been what's real and it's not anymore. Yeah, it feels like there's an alternate. And I think that's part of why liberals are still so goddamn in love with the West Wing. And by the way, I talk about liberals. My parents who loved Ronald Reagan more than life itself

watched every episode of that show. They thought it was wonderful. And the Republicans are always portrayed very sympathetically on the West Wing, right? It's very much this noble opposition sort of idea. And the, the, that I think there's something in that, that there's this almost sense that we've been locked out of the right reality. And that's, that's what, you know, that's what liberals are constantly hearkening back to with, with 9-11, but it's also, or with stuff like the West Wing, but it's also like what conservatives, I think for a while they were looking for that.

I think that's what George W. Bush promised and failed to deliver. It's what they were hoping to get with Romney. And when that didn't happen, I think part of what's going on with Trump is this desire, When that didn't happen, I think part of what's going on with Trump is this desire. Part of the desire to burn it all down is the inability to get back to this imagined prelapse area in the world. If you're talking about the collapse of reality and fiction going into each other, that's what Donald Trump represents. He is this so fictional person that in order to meet this new world where reality and fiction

are the same thing, you need somebody that represents that. So they turned to him because he was meeting the way they saw the world was going. Reality and fiction are going into each other, so you're going to get the reality television president, who kind of embodies that essence on a very, very visceral level. And I think that's part of why when you have 9-11 happen, you have all of this energy released. Both parties kind of come together in this idea that the United States should strike back and that we were at war. It's rightly pointed

out by people that particularly the protests against the Iraq war were massive. And they were they were historically large. But President Bush was also the most popular president of our lifetime briefly. And it's because people were in line behind this idea that we need to hit someone. Well, and I think something that's important about this that's completely forgotten is that the invasion of Afghanistan, there was like no protests. There were, there were a few, but like the left imploded like here's i'm gonna read a quote from doug henwood this is an attack on us there is a near certainty that something will be done soon clearly considerable use of force will have to be used to capture these motherfuckers um like adolph reed is like talking about how like there's going to have to be military action.

Like a bunch of the people from like who like the old school like anti-Vietnam War protesters like from SDS are like, well, we don't oppose all wars. We just oppose bad wars. So like here we should go invade Afghanistan. Like everyone lost their minds. Well, and I want to what I really the core of what I talk about today is why that happened. Because I think there's on particularly kind of some of the more superficial left-wing analysis of this, this idea that like George Bush did what he did in response because he's like this Christian holy warrior.

And there's a couple of reasons people do this, including the fact that he once referred to the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. And there's a couple of reasons people do this, including the fact that he once referred to the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. But as a general rule, what Bush did was not because of his Christianity and had nothing to do with any kind of conflict with Islam in particular. What it was, was the reaction of a group of a kind of fundamentalists, fundamentalists of belief in the American state reacting to an attack on the sanctity of that kind of idea. Yeah. And this is this is, you know, why all these liberals were on board, at least with, you know, the strike on Afghanistan or attacking Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens, probably no one embodies like what happened to a lot of the left better than Hitchens. Hitchens was a well known liberal journalist. He wrote an excoriating book about Henry Kissinger, right?

He's one of these people who is criticizing the empire, who is attacking it for its excesses, builds his career on that. And then 9-11 happens. And the first big thing he does is he puts out a massive column titled Bush's Secularist Triumph, in which he argues that the war on terror is not a crusade, but a battle to keep religion and public power separate. And I want to quote now from a study published in the Journal of Political Theology by William Cavanaugh of DePaul University. It's titled, The War on Terror, Secular or Sacred?

There may be some Christians who think that we are fighting for Jesus, but the battle is being won in the name of secularism. George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he and the U.S. armed forces have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined, and doubled. While the left makes apologies for religious terrorists, the right supports their obliteration to protect our secular state. Secularism is not just a smug attitude.

It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. That's Kavanaugh's summary of Hitchens' article. But, like, what's going on there is really interesting, because Hitchens is proceeding as an a priori assumption that the attack on the Twin Towers is an attempt by a theocracy to take over and destroy a secular state rather than an attempt to damage economically a military enemy and goaded into a war that would weaken it socially, militarily, and economically, which is exactly what had actually happened. The liberals that

Hitchens attacks, his former allies, are basically saying, don't take the bait, right? Don't do the thing that he wants you to do because it will lead to the results he wants to achieve. All Hitchens can see is that like Muslim extremists are scary and they want to hurt him as an atheist. Religion is doing things that hurt me. So I must destroy the people who believe in this thing. Yeah. And it's interesting because everybody, all of the people who are kind of on the side of this civic religion, which is why they're responding, because their civic religion has been attacked in this strike on the towers. They all find kind of different ways to justify it. Hitchens is a prominent atheist, so it makes sense that he kind of sees it as a fight against

theocracy. If you go through a lot of footage of news anchors in the immediate wake of the attack, Garrison, you and I were doing this a couple of nights ago. There were numerous references that the Twin Towers, which were a symbol of capitalism, and that's why they represent capitalist and American supremacy over capital. It's like American supremacy of the economic system. Yeah. It's like American supremacy of the economic system and a reified symbol of capitalism. Almost like it's like an idol to the god of capital.

Yeah, there's a number of different things you can find making this point. But in a column that published on 9-12, the Washington Post editorial board wrote, For three decades, the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center stood as the symbol of American economic might, as powerful an icon for capitalism as the Statue of Liberty is for freedom. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.

No, people were just saying this shit the day after. The other thing that's funny about it is, like, no one thought this before. Like, these are cheap fucking buildings. Like, the World Trade Center is like a license. Like it's literally, it's just like license. It's a name that's licensed out. It's like. That, you know, but that doesn't, because again, what you, by saying this, when they're

saying like for three decades, this was the symbol of American economic might. People, and I keep going back to my parents, but I think they represent a lot of Americans, People, and I keep going back to my parents, but I think they represent a lot of Americans, saw the defeat of the Soviet Union as being achieved by the U.S. economy, by capitalism, right? And that's the thing that ended history. That's the thing that got them to their neoliberal paradise. It's the thing that saved them from the nukes. And so by taking these towers down, bin Laden basically killed Superman, right? That's how they're reacting to it.

Yeah. George Bush and Christopher Hitchens and the Washington Post editorial board, they all saw their support for war, not as not based in religion. All of them would have denied this, right? But Kavanaugh argues that they were motivated primarily by what he calls the civil religion of the United States, which is why I've been using that term. I'm going to quote from his paper again. The United States has its own civil religion, which, though relying on the support of Christians and undoubtedly borrowing much from Christian imagery, transcends mere sectarian religion to unite all Americans on a higher ground. Indeed, this is what makes secularism compatible with

civil religion. What Robert Bella calls traditional religion is privatized, while civic rituals revolve around a generic God who underwrites America's identity and purpose in the world. In this sense, Andrew Sullivan is right. This is a religious war. The war of which 9-11 was a significant marker is not extremist and expansionist religion against a peace-loving and neutral secularist order. It is rather the violent confrontation of Islamist terrorism with the civil religion of American expansionism.

That is, the evangelical insistence that liberal social order is the only viable kind of social order. It is what Tariq Ali has called the clash of fundamentalisms. And I think that's important because I think one area in which the left really got things wrong in sort of their interpretation of what happens in this period is seeing it as a clash between kind of Christian fundamentalists as embodied by George Bush and Islamic fundamentalists. No, no, no. The people who were leading this country, including Bush, but including most of the liberals were America fundamentalists. They were fundamentalists in the idea of the secular American state. And so were my parents as conservative as they were. My family was never about, you know, Christianity needing to be spread over there. It was about this, this belief in

America as something holy and that something holy and sacred had been struck on September 11th. I will say, I, I think I, I don't know, it's easy for me to see why people think about this on the left sort of as this Christian holy war. Because, like, I grew up with a lot of people who, like, in the wake of this, who, like, really were full on into the crusade thing. Like, I had classmates who would talk about how they were going to join the military to kill all Muslims. Like, I mean, like, I think this is a real thing. Sure, and that's what, I mean, I think this is a real thing sure and that's what I mean that's sort of analytic wrong that's what that's what Kavanaugh is saying and that it's kind of scaffolded on Christianity but like that's fundamentally like the fact that there are some people who

are going and they're being like this is finally a religious crusade doesn't mean that's like what the leadership of the country is doing and as I'm to do, I think that's part of why we get Trump and the current Christian extremist surge is that it's a reaction to how kind of the neocons go with this, because for the neocons, this isn't really about this isn't about Christianity is something you use in this fight. But like, that's not what you're fighting for here. And I think there's, there's a good amount of evidence for the fact that Americans identified

something as being like holy about the twin towers, particularly after the attack from Kavanaugh's study in public theology quote, an August 2010 poll found that 56% of Americans regard ground zero as sacred ground and a slightly larger majority opposes construction of a mosque nearby for this region. A sacred aura surrounds the identity of the nation that was attacked on that day, and the attacks concentrated that sacredness in a particular location and time. It is not necessary to go back to the more famously evangelical George W. Bush

to make the link between piety and 9-11. In his speech at Ground Zero last September 11, 2010, Barack Obama talked about gathering at this sacred hour on hallowed ground and talked about how those who were not only killed but sacrificed in the attacks. God was invoked, of course, but it was a generic God who belonged to no particular faith because, as Obama made clear, the victims themselves were of many faiths. Yeah, this is, I mean, one of the things that I think

is interesting, if you're actually trying to analyze this, and you want to see kind of the degree to which why I think it's important to look at how people treated the space itself as sacred, is how actual religion responded in the wake of 9-11, and how Americans responded to religion in the wake of 9-11. Because, you know, it says there about 56% of the country see this as like hallowed ground in some way. And I think there's evidence that people kind of rose up to defend this civic religion more than they actually did their real faiths. And this is because primarily the reaction on a population basis to September 11th is that religiosity in the United States continued to decline. Right. There's a public idea that it led to this like surge of people coming back to the church and getting religious again.

But there's really no demographic evidence to back that up. And I want to quote from an article I found in Christianity Today. For a few weeks after 9-11, people packed the pews, but it soon became apparent there was not a great awakening or a profound change in America's religious practices, as Frank M. Newport, Gallup poll editor-in-chief, told the New York Times in November of 2001. Barna Group confirmed that conclusion in 2006. It tracked 19 dimensions of spirituality and beliefs and found none of those 19 indicators were statistically different from pre-attack measures. In other words, the 9-11 attacks didn't put American Christians on a trajectory towards

more orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer, church attendance, or scripture reading. Insofar as we can measure matters of faith, the decline of American religiosity continued apace. Spiritually speaking, said Barna's David Kinnaman, it's as if nothing significant ever happened. And that's something evangelicals have had to grapple with ever since. The U.S. did not turn back to God demographically. And while hateful attacks against Muslims surged, you have to acknowledge that a lot of those were from people who were more or less secular in the traditional sense. And this is part of why so many of the online atheists set sided with the alt-right in 2015 and 2016, right? It's because there are a lot of those people, while they would have described themselves as an opposition to Christianity as well, were very much a part of the same civic religion as everybody else and were willing to engage in racist attacks against members of a religion as a result of that. You know, when you look at the fact that a majority of Americans saw Ground Zero as sacred and opposed building a mosque because of that, a decent chunk of those people are not Christians

who oppose the building of a mosque, right? They're areligious or they're atheist, and they oppose the building of a mosque because they still see Islam as an enemy. Yeah, it's interesting. But Americans were not moved to embrace religion by the attacks and the deterioration of our sense of security that followed. And I think that evangelicals have never been able to actually accept this. A 2013 Barna Group survey found that most Americans, but particularly born-again Christians, believe 9-11, quote, made people turn back to God. And this, again, has led to kind of a fetishization of the period right after 9-11, quote, made people turn back to God. And this again has led to kind of a fetishization of the period right after 9-11. The writer of that Christianity Today article I

cited earlier theorizes, quote, my first suggestion is what we thought was hope wasn't lost at all. It was less Christian trust and character and redemption of God than American optimism, coated with not quite biblical bromides that when there's bad, good will follow. Americans love to believe that everything happens for a reason and that after a short period of time, sorrow will always turn into joy and suffering into sanctifications.

We quote Romans 8, 28. We know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him and incorrectly interpret it to mean that everything that happens to us will also somehow work out okay. And I think that they're onto something here. And this really, this goes back to what Kavanaugh was saying about how this civil religion is kind of grafted on over the bones of Christianity, right?

And it's, it's, there's so much, part of what's interesting to me here is that, well, I think it's, it's worthwhile that he quotes Romans 8,. I have to think that this belief that Americans have that everything happens for a reason is at least as undergirded by, like, Disney as it is with scripture. It's undergirded by the way we tell stories, by the way fiction works in our society, which is unique to us, right? Every culture does not tell stories the same way. Every culture does not tell stories the same way. Well, and I think, like, if you want to trace that out, too, like, I think that's part of the reason why people are so unbelievably into conspiracy theories here. Yeah. If everything needs to have a reason that it's part of an overarching grand narrative that ties everything together.

Yeah. And it, obviously, again, I don't want to, like, underplay, and perhaps we should do do an episode of maybe behind the bastards on the reaction of the religious right to 9-11, which was nuts and vicious and horrific. I'm not I'm not trying to deny that. But I think one of the things that happens in this period is they grow increasingly infuriated that that is not shared by a majority of the country, that it doesn't bring a religious revival, right? That that doesn't follow September 11th. Now, it is kind of, there's a couple of things that are interesting here. One of them is that the apocalyptic Christian believers, they do have kind of this in with the Bush administration. We know that at one point, a bunch of apocalyptic Christian representatives, like people who are kind of heading churches and stuff that believe,

there's this belief among certain Christians that you need to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and bring about the end of days and all this stuff. There's a bunch of shit that has to happen in Palestine in order for the apocalypse to come. And they're trying to get US presidents to make it happen. This is why Trump made some of the calls that he made, was to deliberately give those people a win, which is why some of the shit that happened in Jerusalem during the Trump administration was able to happen. All of that stuff is stuff that they went to George Bush. They had a two-hour meeting with him and Elliott Abrams and a bunch of his staff, where these representatives of kind of like the Pentecostal movement tried to get him to carry out this wishlist policy of acts around

Israel and Iraq to help them bring about the rapture. And the Bush administration didn't really do any of that. They have to take the meeting, right? They bring these guys in. They don't give them what they want. It's not until Trump that a lot of these guys get what they want. And what happens here, because you've got this death cult Christian group who see this as a crusade and who want a war with Islam. And they're constantly frustrated by the fact that even though he's supposed to be their guy, Bush doesn't go all the way for them, right? And this is part of why his military adventurism gets criticized effectively by guys like Trump who win the evangelical right, because the evangelicals say like, well, if we're not going to have a holy war, then like, what was this stuff?

We just wasted a bunch of money and a bunch of treasure and a bunch of young men for nothing over there. And that's part of like what Trump wins on. Now, these two factions, these neocons, the guys who wind up, by the way, the guys who are sort of on the civic religion side of the response to 9- neocons the guys who wind up by the way the guys who are sort of on the civic religion side of the response to 9-11 are all the people who wind up running the lincoln project right when you're talking about the republicans on that side of thing yeah and then the part the folks who break off the evangelicals the people who want a holy war

that's who winds up making the core of trump's support yeah Yeah. And yeah, and that's, I think, mostly where I'm going to leave us for today. On 9-12 next week, we'll have another special episode about Glenn Beck's 9-12 project that will be kind of the finishing of this. But I want to end, because we're talking about why I did this

and why I started by talking about jokes about 9-11 is because I think understanding, understanding the attack on the towers as like an attack on what had effectively become a god to a lot of Americans, even if they didn't realize it, right? The sanctity of this kind of neoliberal capitalist order and its historic inevitability, right? The fact that that's what was going on, that that was so dear to people, that justified so much violence, 20 years of war, of bombings, millions of deaths, is part of why I think there's a value in joking about 9-11. Which is not to say that what happened wasn't terrible. 3,000 and change innocent people were murdered in a truly horrific way.

If you actually sit down and watch the footage, the people falling out of the buildings, it's a nightmare. If you think about stuff like Flight 93, it's really stirring. You have these people who one moment they're heading to like see their families or go on a work trip or something. You're on a fucking plane, an experience I'm sure everybody has where you're just like trying to get from A to B. plane experience I'm sure everybody has, where you're just like trying to get from A to B. And in the space of like a few minutes, they have to all decide they're going to charge a bunch of terrorists, fight in hand to hand combat, and then pilot a plane into the ground in order to stop it from killing other people. That's that's powerful stuff. What what I think is important is desacralizing it because there's nothing sacred about mass murder. Um, and there's nothing

there's, we shouldn't see what happened there as anything, but what it is, which is a tragic, um, a tragic act of violence against innocent people, but taking it as like an attack on our soul as an attack on like our, our collective God. Um, when you start to do that, again, it kind of justifies any sort of violence. Like there's nothing that's off the table. And in the first few years after 9-11, there was nothing off the table. And we're never getting back to the world

that we had before, which is ultimately like what all that violence was about, right? All of everything terrible that was done in the wake of 9-11 was justified, even if people didn't say it, in the desire to get back to where we were in the 90s, right? In their heads, in their sense of security. I'm not talking about anything as like coarse as economic projections. I'm talking about in the sense of like optimism and basic security. And I think one of the people who got this best

in the immediate wake of the attack was Hunter S. Thompson, who, you know, was still alive at that point for a couple of years. And he wrote a column, I think it was for ESPN.com, because that's who he was writing for in those days. His career was well past its peak. But he wrote probably the best thing anyone wrote a week after 9-11. And I'm going to read you the end of that now. We are at war now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this war might last for a very long time. Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or ten years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history, which is no doubt true.

But history also tells us that ten years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a lifetime to people who are in their 20s today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. This is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New Yorkork city while the world trade center burned will never know what they missed the last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids compared to what's coming now the party's over folks yeah that is kind of the feeling uh yeah growing up in the early 2000s and not not knowing not never actually experiencing the 90s i mean in some ways ways, 9-11 feels very similar to me

as something like Pearl Harbor. They're both things that happened, I guess, before I was around. And they created the world that I already existed in. It never changed the world I was in it just it just became the world that i was in yeah for me 9-11 is my first memory like that is the first thing i remember and i yeah we got exactly the world that you would expect yeah from your first memory being 9-11 yeah it's um i mean, again, for me, I think the thing I identify most

is that little clip I played from South Park where one of the kids is like, do you remember when everything didn't suck? And she's like, not really. So yeah, go out, tell a tasteful joke about 9-11 and try not to worship the state. It doesn't end well. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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