It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 52

Episode Date: September 24, 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.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. 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 Assassination Week. He puke, bang, bang, timely explosive device, JFK, etc. Hello, welcome to Assassination Week. I hope you like that intro from our good friend

we commissioned to do that intro from. So big props to them for giving us like 10 seconds of their time to record that intro. Wow, it's been so long since we've been planning to do this. Yep, but here we are talking about killing people. It's great because when we first thought of assassination week we're like how are we going to fill five episodes or there and then there's like so many more assassinations happening there were there were two the next day yeah we've decided to stop imagining things into the ether um yeah and so maybe assassination

month is coming uh who knows hey look here's the thing if if if people keep getting assassinated we will do more assassination episodes that is the way it works yep that's uh that is sadly part of our job uh so we've already done one, I guess. We did Shinzo Abe a little bit, but we're coming back to him. We're going to do Shinzo Abe 2. More later, because we have a lot more

context information about the assassination now. But that is later this week. So we have five episodes all about assassinations, most of which have happened or tried to happen this year most most of these are going to be pretty pretty uh topical yeah mine is not uh because the first

one i am so well i mean look we got we got it we we got we got we got to start with a historical assassination we can't we we can't completely have it be just randomly jumping back and forth between uh times there has to be some kind of logic yeah well the assassination is the logic but yeah today uh we're talking about uh eta uh basque nationalist leftist group and more specifically i guess their uh operation ogro the killing of luis carrero blanco in spain in 1973 uh it's like obviously not very very current it's often pointed to as like a very influential assassination right one that made a difference and made a change uh often it's called the only thing that eta ever did to advance the cause of spanish. I think this is not, and I'm sorry if you think that they're like based leftist terrorists. This is not,

generally as an organization, we don't like people who murder journalists. That's one of our stances. And so there's going to be a little bit of context around this that we need to give first. So maybe if we kick off with who they are, and then we can talk about that assassination in particular how familiar are folks do we think with with etta what do people know about him in the u.s not at all yeah people okay i think well they're i think they're famous for this assassination and for having literally the worst outfits i've ever seen in my entire life. That's bold. That, that, that, the combination of like the face

mask and the beret is like one of the most unfortunate things I've ever seen. It is hideous. It is, you got, just wear the mask. It's cooler. It's batshit. It's awful. Oh, truly dogshit. Okay, Chris come in with the fashion police early on.

I say wear what you want. I think you all look great. And really alienating our ski mask and beret audience right at the start. So if you've managed to, you know, stick around through that hate speech, we're going to talk about Etta. They do, yeah, they do like to wear a ski mask. It's part of an aesthetic isn't it though like there's an aesthetic of like i guess 80s 1980s terrorism that is like uh like woodland pattern

kind of dpu camouflage dpm camouflage uh a cheap black ski mask balaclava and a berry like sometimes you can pick two of those things but it's definitely like a vibe from that time period hmm i wonder i wonder why none of these groups worked it must have nothing to do with the fashion to be fair the zapatistas big uh ski mask maybe it's the bobble maybe the bobble is what sets them apart it's it's it's the fact that yeah you don't wear the beret on the ski mask the 70s look cool because they just wear the mask. Yeah. Okay, yeah.

I think we're united in our belief that the Zapatistas look cool. And in many ways are cool, in fact. But we're not talking about them today. We're talking about ETA. So it's an acronym, right? It's an acronym in Euskera or Basque. I don't speak Basque. It's a very hard language for me to learn, at least.

I'm not going to say it's a hard language to learn because I think it depends on who you are. But it is one that I have historically struggled with understanding. It does have a generous smattering of X's. So, you know, if you're seeing it out there, good luck to you. I will try and pronounce things as respectfully as I can.

I've spent a lot of time in the Basque country. By grace, I really, really love Basque people. They're very nice. I enjoy their food and their cider and their countryside. But today we're talking about this group, Esca Eta. It stands for Euskadi Ta Escatasuna, which means like Basque homeland and liberty. They were going to call it atta uh but

in certain basque dialects that means duck so they moved away from that that would have been so much funnier yeah right you've been ducked uh but they didn't do that they right from the get-go they were about like like this dual process right of of politics and political violence their slogan means keep up on both sides and their logo is like a snake wrapped around an axe the snake is politics and the act is acts is i guess political violence terrorism whatever you want to call it um and over their years of action they killed 829 people so they're a pretty serious terrorist group right like i can't i don't know how many people the ira killed but i'm thinking of groups in there i don't think it would be that many killed like i think they killed like over a

thousand okay well i mean i say like the entire troubles killed like 3500 so it's like a not insignificant fraction of that yeah i mean the british government did a decent amount of that and oh definitely yeah loyalist yeah but like it's not an insignificant fraction of the total number of people who died in the troubles so they're not like nothing no but like it's not an insignificant fraction of the total number of people who died in the troubles so they're not like nothing no but like it's only etta up there and look this is much of a similar thing as we're going to see right where the spanish state killed a lot of people too and sort of armed groups acting in sort of coalition with the spanish state it's the safest way to say that but certainly with the complicity of the Spanish state played a large part in this dirty war

that ETA conducted with the Spanish state, right? To understand them, you have to understand a little bit about Basque nationalism. Early Basque nationalism, we can find the guy who really constructs the idea of a Basque nation, right? Sabino Arana is the guy. He takes what is like a language. It's a Basque nation, right? Sabino Arana is the guy. He takes what is like a language. It's a very old language, right?

It predates Latin. And places where that language is spoken and takes it from like, these are the areas where this language is spoken to like, this is our nation. And all nations are created, right? Like nations don't come from the primordial soup. Like we don't evolve into one nation or another

They're a fabrication Yeah They're constructed by Entrepreneurs of identity Some kind of false consciousness One might say To maybe distract people from other things That's right Zapatistas

Watch it We're coming for you With a woke mob we're going to cancel you nations begin to exist when religion loses a claim on universal truth right this is like benedict anderson speedrun we don't need to go into the history of nationalism particularly it's important people to know where the basque land is uh so the basque land is in the northwest of spain and the southwest of France, right? It's these provinces where historically they're mountainous provinces.

People there were often shepherds. You'll often find Basque people in the United States like growing wine or doing sheep herding. And that's their sort of historical image of themselves. And they speak this Basque language, right? So ETA come onto the scene as a Basque nationalist leftist group. Like they sort of have some elements of Marxism,

but they're obviously like nationalist. They don't center Catholicism, which is what previous Basque nationalisms have done, right? Previous Basque nationalisms have been elite constructs that centered language, poetry, and Catholic identity. ETA don't do that. So that's where they're slightly better. Yeah, yeah, right.

They're better than like the Carlists who are like, things went wrong when Spain moved away from this line of royal secession and we need to go back to that. And like extreme religious totalitarianism and a monarchy like i they're better than that i feel pretty comfortable saying that uh and they've done some cool stuff like they used to kidnap bosses who refused to negotiate with striking workers uh which like i know watch out rail rail company owners uh but they they definitely have like a leftist lean right

they have this sort of pan third worldist idea or this pan sort of colonized people idea uh they begin assassinating people when they take revenge for this guy who's called uh chubby esteballeta um you can look up that name if you want to see some X's in a name. But they kill the local chief of police. What happened is Esteban Barrieta and this other guy were killed by a policeman. The police stopped them at a roadblock. They run away. The police shoot them in response. They kidnap the local chief of police, who has probably been torturing people. You have to understand that all this is happening in the context of a Spanish state, which is extremely violent and repressive. And they kill this guy.

Wait, this is under Franco, right? Yes. No, they begin under Franco. And their support probably peaks under Franco, right? Like they, and what we're going to see is actually they are somewhat integral to not bringing down the Franco regime. And in a sense, Spain never does bring down the Franco regime, right? And I want to get into that a little bit, but in destabilizing the Franco regime. And they certainly, there was more support for this kind of political violence when the state is so obviously like undemocratic unjust and incredibly violent towards people right uh so they when they're killing

members of the guardia civil these are people who are torturing prisoners right etta prisoners pretty often when they're captured turn up tortured in court, like very obviously that they have been victims of beatings and physical violence, right? And a lot of things you'll see, they also kidnapped this guy, I forget his name. He's one of the founders of Vox and they kept him in a cellar for months and months and months and months.

They, look, I don't like Vox, but I also don't like locking people in cellars. So two things can be bad. Vox is a right-wing populist Spanish party, if people aren't familiar. They also did a lot of extortion. They also did a lot of extorting local businesses, right? They called it the revolutionary tax. So they got into some sort of more classic kind of organized crime stuff there. And but the assassination we want to talk about today is Operation Ogro. So the way they do this is they rent this flat, right?

That's an apartment for American listeners. And they rent this flat and claim to be student, like sculpting students, right? Like we're art students, we're into sculpture. That's why we're covered in dust every day and we wear these overalls. And for five months, they spend every day digging a tunnel underneath the road by their flat. And in that tunnel, they pack 80 kilograms of explosive. And what they're doing there is they're waiting for this guy, Luis Carrero Blanco, to come in his car, which he travels in every day. And they're going to explode that explosive and they're going to kill him. The reason they want to kill him is because they say that he is the best example of pure fascism.

He's a former admiral. He's Spain's sort of prime minister. He's Franco's chosen successor? So he's going to take over from Franco. And so by killing him, they're able to destabilize the whole Franco regime. Franco cries in public when he finds out Carrero Blanco is dead. So spoiler alert, Carrero Blanco is extremely dead. The way they did this is they dressed up as electricians, which is a lot of dressing up in this which is kind of fun and they they painted a little line on a wall to be like okay when the car gets to here we explode it so the car gets to there they explode it they launch this car over

a church and it lands on the second floor terrace on the other side uh sometimes uh this is called like the basque space program or luis carrero blanco is referred to as spain's first astronaut that's you funny yeah you can find a picture of it it is hysterical the car like it's just it just goes it's so funny yeah it's it's periodically in spain like uh someone will be prosecuted for making this joke this spain's first astronaut joke i saw it happen someone pretty recently like and she had really made it a thing of making jokes uh actually i think his i think it's his grandchildren have noted that it it's a problematic restriction of free speech that the people keep getting prosecuted for this and a court recently found that they

weren't mocking his family or his memory but they were just pointing the objectively funny way in which he died which you know great for the court to agree that it was objectively funny that a terrible fucking person died by being blown literally sky high and it's his driver and his bodyguard were also killed uh shouldn't be a bodyguard for a piece of shit uh but they the uh the eta guys had disguised themselves as electricians after the bomb went off they ran around shouting oh no we've hit a gas pipe like there's's been a gas explosion. Everybody clear out. Yeah, there sure was. Yeah.

So pretty, pretty entertaining stuff. Acting is their side passion, I guess. And like the reason they did it, they did a presser not long afterwards wearing their outfits, which some of you may find offensive. And they, they cited like his irreplaceable place in the hierarchy right and him being this they called him a pure francoist and oddly like etta were not at this point they were less unpopular than they became later because they weren't doing quite as much extortion and they hadn't been uh engaging in quite as many murders of journalists right and

and you used to see this uh i'll get to that later actually they got grudging praise from almost everyone for doing this right and because it really does destabilize and kind of kick their legs out from under the franco regime and and it makes franco cry which i think is a laudable goal like it's good to make franco cry uh franco cry more so they well it kind of it kind of um it kind of atomizes the Francoist state between people who are of this bunker tendency who want to go hardcore and crack down and those who are like,

we don't have the ability to crack down. We'll lose all popular support if we do that. And it really sort of vaporizes the consensus for what to do after Franco dies, which he does a few years later. I want to point out that people will, you'll read these articles on like popular news websites or like, you know, like hot take websites where they're like,

oh, this car bomb launched Spain into democracy. Don't do that. I think first of all, the major error with that is the idea that Spain quote-unquote transitioned to democracy. When you have a pacted transition where the people who did the war crimes in the previous regime are specifically not prosecuted and exempt from prosecution, that's not what democracy looks like. I think the most accurate way of just describing where Spain is, is a post-ddictadura like a post-dictatorship and Spain is still there now like we see that with these prosecutions for mocking him right with

the fact that there are people in Spain who are still in prison from mocking the crown like that's not what democracies do good thing that could never happen in Britain. Yeah, look, you won't find me defending that either. But we don't make a big industry of talking about Britain's transition to democracy. Maybe don't talk about transitions at all, given the powerful TERF discourse in Britain. But yeah, I think it's problematic that folks talk about this like, yeah, Spain is fixed like

spain has some dark shit that it needs to process like it was not until the middle of the last decade that we started exhuming the graves from the civil war and that's still highly contentious right you still have a political party that um that doesn't want to do that spain is still processing the fact that the catholic church took babies away from people who it considered to be leftists and gave them to people who it considered to be more appropriate to raise them it's called ninos robados if you want to look it up but yeah spain not transitioning to to democracy and i want to make like that very clear some of the other shit that etta does um is really this is where they start to lose any claim to being

like a liberation movement, right? Like they bombed an Ipercor, that's like bombing a target for American folks in Barcelona. They killed 21 people. Now, I will say this isn't, this is exemplary bad policing. They called the cops and were like,

hey, we've put a bomb underneath the supermarket. You ought to clear it out. And the cops were like, like, hey, we've put a bomb underneath the supermarket. You ought to clear it out. And the cops were like, I can't tell if that's a real threat or not. And as a result, didn't do anything. And as a result, the bomb went off underneath the supermarket

and 21 people died, right? They also alerted a newspaper in Catalonia beforehand. Reporters Without Borders still, for a long time, classified Spain as a place that was hostile to journalists because of the attacks on journalists by ETA, right? Also, the state is hostile to journalism. But I want to point out that they killed journalists, they killed university professors who disagreed with them, they killed local counsellors. And it was some of these like these very unpopular murders which really sort of stripped support from them and one thing that the spanish state

did a couple of things the spanish state did that really were extremely repressive against eta um was they would move basque prisoners out of the basque homeland and sort of hold them thousands of miles away from their families from the canary islands and shit uh like they're probably closer to africa than you are to your your home country when they do that right um and you would often see i don't know if maybe you you guys have seen this it's a white flag it's got an outline of the basque land it's got an arrow and it says, Have you seen that at protests? Now, if you'd been at the protests,

I was at, but in the early 2000s in Europe, you would see that flag a lot. It just means Basque prisoners to the Basque homeland. A lot of people got behind that who might not have got behind other things that ETA did, but it does seem deeply inhumane to move these people so far away from their families. it's sort of an extra punishment the spanish state also had this thing called gal uh gal is grupo anti-terroristas de liberacion so uh i guess like

anti-terrorist liberation group uh these were death squads right uh these were death squads aided and averted by the police etta enjoyed like, like, a safe space in France, I guess, or, like, a freedom for prosecution. Certainly under Franco, France was like, eh, you know what? Franco really sucks, so you guys go ahead and send it. Do your terrorism, wear your balaclavas. I'm sure the French also objected to their beret style.

This is a safe space for your terrorism yeah well there's a hole that's basically what they said yeah yeah this is like a whole thing with mid-orange in france in the 70s like france kind of became this weird like like they basically had this they had this open policy like there was a bunch of uh well there are a bunch of people in italy who falsely accused of being the Red Brigades. What's that guy's name? The guy, Negri, Antonio Negri, who's a kind of famous theorist. His theory kind of sucks by the end.

But they arrest him for being a terrorist. And then he gets himself elected to Parliament so he can get parliamentary immunity and then flees the country to France. Yeah, France really had... The 70s was a weird time. Wasn't Carlos Sajakal also in Paris for a while? Yeah. Yeah. You love it, France.

Open door policy to terrorists. This is the only cool thing France has done since 1968. Like... Yeah, yeah, you're not wrong. They invented parkour. When was that? Oh, that was like in the... Resident X.

Okay, there you go. Okay, so the second cool thing. Got to hand that to them. Yeah, let's hand that to the entire country of France. Yeah, maybe not actually given their treatment of migrant diasporas in recent years. And sometimes their firefighters will go out and beat the shit into the police. That is true. That is very funny. i do think we all

have to give that to them uh i wanted to maybe end with this quote uh from uh subcomandante marcos so we've talked a little bit about the zapatistas so this is from a piece called i Shit Upon... Is it I Shit Upon the Revolutionary Vanguards of the Earth? Yeah. All the titles are like having problems translating Total Amundo, which is like... Yeah. I couldn't find it written in the original Spanish. Maybe that's just because I was Googling wrong.

And I didn't put a lot of time in it. But I found so many of Zapatista texts are preserved better in these weird English translations. And I don't know if they're written in English. It's supposedly possible they're written in English the first time. I don't think this one. I think this particular one's a translation. Okay.

But, yeah. Yeah, I've tried to find it in Spanish, actually. So I'm just going to go with the translation. I think it's probably from libcom or a similar website with like aging red and black uh aesthetic vibes uh but i love those websites so it's a bit long i hope you'll enjoy it we don't see why we should have like the eto are kind of like reaching out in solidarity and the zapatistas have previously been like no dude we are not the same you're not just like ascetics aside we are not the same people um we don't see why we would ask you what we should

do or how we should do it what are you going to teach us to kill journalists who speak badly about the struggle to justify the death of children for the reason of the cause we don't need or want your support or solidarity we already have the support and solidarity of many people in Mexico and the world. Our struggle has a code of honor, inherited from our guerrilla ancestors, and it contains, among other things, respective civilian lives, even though they may occupy government positions that oppress us. We don't use crime to get resources for ourselves. We don't rob, not even a snack store. We don't respond to words with fire, even though many hurt us or lie to us. One could think that to renounce these traditionally

revolutionary methods is renouncing the advancements of our struggle. But in the faint light of our history, it seems that we have advanced more than those who resort to such arguments. I deeply enjoy this critique. You can look it up uh eto was big on killing people who were tangentially related to the regime in any way which i don't agree with uh we should also add that they more or less definitively stopped doing stuff in 2018 and they they had a press conference and in their press conference actually uh arnaldo ortegi who was a former member uh said that they wanted to express their sorrow for the pain and suffering other people have endured.

He goes on, like, we feel their pain and that sincere feeling leads us to affirm that it should never have happened. Sure, buddy, you want to say sorry because you did terrorism. But I do think that, like, we should, we're talking about assassinations, going to be talking about assassinations all week.

There are ways to do leftist political struggle that are not killing random civilians and their friends and family members and bombing supermarkets and those are the better ways but making franco cry is good sending franco's successor into near-earth orbit is pretty funny uh so we we enjoy that one at least if not everything i i think it is worth pointing out, like, we've made this pretty obvious by that line, but ETA does not get a free Basque homeland. The Zapatistas have actually taken and still control territory,

a thing that none of these, like, weird gorilla groups ever pulled off. So, you know. Yeah, they don't even get majority support really at any point yeah like occasionally there'll be people who are like yeah you know what like i agree with some of what they say but their tactics are deeply flawed you know these keeping people like torturing people that kind of thing uh and the context of the dirty war with the state is important um but yeah they don't succeed right and i don't think you do succeed by by extorting the people you're claiming to liberate that generally doesn't work well so

up the zapatistas i guess yeah that seems that seems like a good place to end yep cool yeah so this is this has been it could happen here join us tomorrow for more assassinations and also the day after that the day after that and the day after that, and the day after that. Yep. Don't wait. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire

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

as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother, trying to reach Florida from Cuba. Sunday 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline 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. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while

uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. Hello, I'm the ghost of the queen, and this is Assassination Week. And as I actually was assassinated, it was the IRA. Hi, welcome to Assassination Week, where we talk about all of the normal things. That's what we do. We talk about all the stuff that's totally normal and chill.

We were just debating why we keep having to talk about Nazi furries, differences between catboys and catgirls as they relate to Nazism. And we're not going to get less stupid for today's assassination um so let's let's talk about argentina uh one of one of the ones that happened pretty shortly after we we planned on doing assassination week we're like oh well there's another one to add to the list. So yeah, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has been kind of one of the most prominent politicians in Argentina

for almost two decades now. She was elected president after her husband served as a term and then declined to run for a second. But she was elected in 2007 after an eight year run as president. She's now the country's vice president. She was expected to make a bid to return to the top job next year, but that's kind of up in the air.

She's kind of leftish. Yeah. She's kind of the populist, like leftist kind of. Talk a bit about Peronism and like the weird shit that's going on here please talk about Peronism maybe sing

maybe do it in the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber oh god no okay so there once was a man named Peron and he so he had been like there's a whole thing he gets like cooed he's like he like flees the country and while he's not in the you know this is dictatorship like while he's not in argentina there's like this whole like one of like a sort of very classical populist

movement to the point where like a lot of the theorizing about what populism is is theorizing about peronism and what you get is like two completely different like political factions like casting all of their sort of aspirations onto the like like like onto the figure of like peron who's like in exile so you can you can like you know you can you can say that like peron has whatever so peron supports us like peron will be the guy who will save us and like so you get like you get this really weird thing where there are like – there are Peronists who are like fascists. There are Peronists who are like communists. So you get this split that happens. You have these left Peronists.

You have these right Peronists. Like when Peron comes back to the country, like the right Peronists start murdering the left-wing Peronists. It's this whole fucking thing. Peronists. It's this whole fucking thing. And it's this, you know, this sort of political formation persists through another military

dictatorship. It persists through sort of like the quote-unquote transition to democracy. And basically everyone who has ran Argentina since the quote-un unquote transition to democracy has been a Peronist of some kind

um Krishna is from the left wing sort of the newly sort of like revitalized left like Peronism that comes around like the early 2000s I mean she's around she's around actually in the 90s too but in the early 2000s

it sort of like okay so in 2001 there's this massive series of protests and uprisings in in argentina that like i i would argue is like the last of like the great 20th century sort of like working class revolutions like people start occupying like people are occupying their factories like do they go through like five prime ministers in like a month like they they come very very very close to bringing down the government and the thing that the thing that sort of stabilizes situation is a and this is this is a series of protests against like imf austerity right which would be just like destroying the country and the way this sort of gets stabilized is that

um you you you get a new you know you you you get a new sort of like revitalized like left peronist populist thing and the sort of populist deal is twofold it's like one okay we're going to have a bunch of patronage networks and we're going to run like everything from like sort of like job networks kind of like down like right right down to like hey we will like give aid to your neighborhood as long as you stay as long as you sort of support us and the second thing is like they they make the like the ruling class like cuts this sort of this is this is particularly like fernanda krishner like uh her husband's like cuts this deal basically sorry nester krishner uh cuts this deal with with the working class which is like okay if you guys don't if you guys stop trying to overthrow us like we

will give you a bunch of welfare programs. We will like do a bunch of stuff to like promote it, the sort of like national economy. And so it's, it's, it's this whole, it's, it's,

it's like a left populism, but it's, it's built, it's built on sort of like, like this very explicit, like we are going to buy off the working class so we can maintain capitalism, but the capitalism is going to be slightly nicer. Yeah.

And there's a few reactions to that, including the reaction from the right, which is very much like all of these welfare programs are making our people lazy and unwilling to do actual work, which is kind of where some of our attempted assassin gets some of his ideology from. But yeah, so a week before this assassination attempt, Yeah, so a week before this assassination attempt, Argentinian prosecutors announced that they're seeking a 12-year prison sentence for Mrs. Kirchner over accusations that she directed public roadway funds to a company owned by a friend of hers. Accusations which she denies. I don't – I have no bid in this fight.

Yeah, I mean the thing I would note is, like, like, almost everyone, so she, like, well, particularly Mr. Christian, but she was also sort of, like, considered, like, the soft wing of the pink tide, sort of, like, social democratic governments that come to power in this period, and, like, all of these people are kind of corrupt, but they're not, like, more corrupt than any other, like, politician

in this region, but, like, every single one of these people eventually, like, there's a whole movement whole movement to like put them in prison because of corruption or something and it's like i mean i don't know like every like they're politicians like yeah what do you expect like the political rhetoric against uh mrs kirchner had intensified in recent weeks amid the final stages of her corruption trial. And while she is probably the country's most prominent politician, even serving as vice president seen as more powerful than the president, she's also a very polarizing figure. You know, her face is plastered on posters all around like working class neighborhoods. But Argentina's right has kind of made her out to be

their boogeyman. She's kind of like their top target. Last week, one opposition lawmaker commenting on her case said that Argentina should bring back the death penalty just for her case, just because she's like, a woman we don't like, so

we should kill her. It sounds like our friends at the Kyle Rittenhouse cultural center oh yeah yeah yeah would you call her a femi bolshi because they certainly would oh god so yeah but since the proposition of the 12-year sentence uh hundreds of her supporters have been rallying or were rallying outside of her house every night um you know calling her a victim of political persecution and doing these big big rallies in support and it was at such a rally on thursday september 1st just after 9 p.m when mrs kirchner was returning home from presiding over a session at the senate accompanied by her security detail she was greeting the massive supporters lighting the streets and signing copies of her Returning home from presiding over a session at the Senate, accompanied by her security detail,

she was greeting the massive supporters, lighting the streets, and signing copies of her book. And then a man rushed up through the crowd, aimed a semi-automatic pistol inches away from her face, and pulled the trigger. But the gun didn't go off. There's lots of footage of this incident. There was a lot of cameras rolling. It's kind of wild. Because he sticks the gun, like like right up in her face it's just like it really like this this is this is this is like something out of like fucking like like late 1800s russia it's extreme it's very slapstick it's very comical it's um yeah the franz ferdinand level of well speaking of uh president ferdin

president um uh fernandez said in an address to the nation uh later that quote christina is still alive because for reasons that have not been confirmed technically the weapon which was loaded with five bullets did not fire um i can confirm technically that is a piece of shit you can find it was it was a 30 it was a 32 caliber 380 wasn't it it's a burst of thunder isn't it oh maybe i'm wrong what was it yeah wasn't wasn't it like a specific gun that's like absolutely like the worst gun so these are they're kind of funny they're these like they're bursar so that i think they're made in argentina they might be made in bra these are, they're kind of funny. They're these like, they're Bursa. So that I think they're made in Argentina. They might be made in Brazil.

I think they're made in Argentina. Uh, they, they make knockoffs of other gun designs more or less. So it's in the style of a PPK, which has good precedent for killing, uh, bad people,

right? That's what Hitler brained himself with. Um, but, uh, this, this is a knockoff. This is a cheap one.

Uh, it's one of the guns it's approved for safe sale in california uh because it doesn't go bang uh at least a version of this i don't think the one that this person used would actually have thunder but yeah it's just a bit it's like uh i don't know it's it's the um it's like when you go and buy a cheap knockoff of anything you know like sometimes it doesn't. This one appears to be missing one of the grip screws, actually. But yeah, it's very rusty. This person didn't think this through very well, I guess, is what I'm saying. We'll talk a bit more about what was going on with the gun in a sec. You know what won't fail to murder the vice president of a country?

These products and services support the podcast. Thank you, Bleach, for supporting our podcast today. It's what everyone says about butter help. It will not help you kill the vice president. Here's a plug for ammonium nitrate. Federal police arrested Fernando

Andres Sabag Montiel, a 35-year-old Brazilian man who has been living in Argentina for about 20 years. They recovered the gun at the scene and then the next day they searched his apartment.

He had a studio apartment in like a working class suburb of, oh boy, what's, oh boy. Benaros Al, oh boy. I'm going to send this one to the chat and let someone else handle this one. Let's send it to the chat. I'm too Canadian. Spanish and sort of speaks Spanish.

It's a boot. There we go. I sent it to the regular cool zone chat. Oh, Buenos Aires. No, that wasn't the one. Garrison. I can't read that I have no idea It's the capital of Argentina I don't know, I can't read it

I only, I never say words I only read them Yeah, this is the thing Buenos Aires Buenos I'm learning how to read ancient Greek for magic, and that's way easier than this. I was quibbled back.

Are you going to be like a Hebrew understander on Twitter? Are you going to be like, it means legal immigrants when he says that, guys. No, only for ancient Greek. Only for Greeks to use in spells. I forget that people who aren't Americans don't pick up the sort of smattering of terrible Spanish that everyone in the

US can kind of do. Yeah, no. I grew up as a kid in Saskatchewan. No one's going to speak Spanish there. Just food nouns. You can just do like a pollo. But anyway, they they searched his studio apartment in apparently this big town bueno buenos aires right this is argentina erasure

so people are gonna be legitimately very angry but it. But anyway, they searched his apartment. They found just a hundred bullets. Just around. Just like in various places? They said they just found a hundred bullets like around his studio apartment. So that's the statement. It's amazing.

If people haven't watched the video, I'd highly recommend looking it up. So Mr. Montel is registered with tax authorities as an Uber driver. And he's not... Pretty soon people figured out that he's not just a regular dude.

There was a few signs, most notably the Sonnenrad tattoo on his elbow. That'll do it. That's the Azov Battalion logo, right? James, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up, James. Oh, God. So, yes, a wave of people who think they're smart but are actually not Yes, a wave of people who think they're smart but are actually not saw the Sonnenrad and thought that he was doing this in solidarity with the Azov Battalion.

Isn't he like in a Duganist group? I'll get to it. Not quite. But no, it's not Azov Battalion because the Sonnenrad does not come from the Azov Battalion. As most people listening to this show should probably know already. His social media accounts got taken down pretty quick, but we do have a few archives, which I'll be working off of to kind of paint the rest of this weird guy's picture. He is steeped in a whole bunch of eclectic and esoteric things.

He has various esoteric symbols tattooed across his body. He follows a lot of extremely interesting Facebook pages. He is, you know, is interested in stuff from far-right groups, conspiracy theories, mysticism, Freemasonry, quote-unquote alchemy, and the Kabbalah, or again, quote-unquote the Kabbalah, across many kind of political esoteric fascist interests. It's not very surprising. By the way, I just found out there's a whole page

by that Calibra Skura guy, and you were right and I was wrong. It's a 32 acp pistol thank you thank you thank you it wasn't 32 acp huh wow yeah yeah maybe if you spent less time making fun of my spanish we can learn something in terms of levels of understanding here for a while a while, he used the symbol of the Tyroidal Order of the Knights, which was a fringe, kind of far-right Argentine fascist mystical group from the 1980s. But he had that as his Facebook profile for a while.

So he's like into the worst type of nerd things. Instead of just playing D&D and getting it out of your system, he's like, I'm going to become a fascist and a wizard uh you know if he'd had a cultural center where he could play dnd with uh other people just saying talk talk talk about dragon ball play dnd yeah yeah uh paint do some really really bad figure painting do art then we wouldn't have had a problem here but instead here we are so but be like looking at his facebook page right you see stuff about like paganism vikings death metal not very good philosophers these types of things don't immediately indicate a connection to the

far right like you can't just take them by themselves but when taken all together with the much more overt political things you can get a fuller picture of who this person actually is um you know it's like when i when i'm walking down the street and i see someone inside like a half skull mask that doesn't immediately mean they're nazi but if i see the half skull mask and some questionable tattoos i'm like okay then that that then you're able to put that together um so same thing with here, right? When someone's really into like pagan Viking shit, it may make me side-eye, but until I see some things that really confirm my suspicions,

I'm not going to talk to this person as if they are a Nazi. This guy is a Nazi. He is a big old Nazi. A few extremism researchers in Argentina have kind of made statements about this guy and what their take on it is as someone who actually is in Argentina, right? I'm an extremism researcher who lives in Oregon, so I don't really have the same cultural understanding.

But you have a good grasp on the language, which is helpful. I have a good grasp on the language when they're using magic words when they're using words from real languages not really um but no they they they've they've talking about him like saying uh they're not this dude is quote not explicitly connected to an organization but they relate to the fascist ideology and compared him to kind of being the the types of quote-unquote like lone wolf

attackers that are not connected to any like specific political movement, but almost just like an emanation of political ideas online, like in Christchurch, Buffalo, and El Paso. Those were the places that he was kind of compared to as like people who aren't like inside a group, but are willing to go out and take politics into the real world. But yeah, they compared his profile to other types of quote-unquote lone wolf, which is not a good term. But what that means is as someone who's isolated doing a mass shooting or a terrorist attack or an attempt at a political assassination. isolated doing a mass shooting or a terrorist attack or an attempt at a political assassination. Montel was described with his friends as like eccentric and insecure and dishonest,

but not necessarily openly violent or kind of openly invested in like political parties, which isn't surprising when you get someone into this like nerdy type of politics. That's like, yeah, they're doing politics as it relates to being like a weird nerd online. But, you know, who knows? His friends may just not seen this side of him at all. Like who can say? Because he did have a lot of fascist tattoos. So like, come on, guys. On the, he had, like we said, Son and Rad on his left elbow.

On the back of his hands, he had a, he had the Iron Cross and he had Thor's hammer. Oh, wow. But like the traditional one, not like Marvel movie shit. In a funny, maybe coincidence, this guy, the assassin, was actually interviewed twice on television

in like months before the attack, just as an average citizen on the street giving his opinion on politics. One of them, he was interviewed with his girlfriend, and they were complaining about Argentina's social welfare programs, saying that they make people lazy. And then in another more recent and then in another more recent one good in another more recent interview he was asked if he supported argentina's new finance

minister which he responded hell no and then he offered his opinion as well saying that he doesn't support christina either uh christina is later the person he tries to kill which you know i will say this this is this is not out of line for like whenever a journalist tries to pick a random person on the street like it's like they're they're always interviewing hitler mussolini like it's it's just every single time like this guy is a representative sample of those people but yeah so he he gives up his unsolicited opinion on christina who he then tries to murder on tv just a month before he tries to kill her. So now back at the scene, authorities said that the gun, they had five bullets inside.

The serial number was partially removed. It was an older gun. It was not brand new um they said that the gun model had not been manufactured in 40 years um but it's uh it's the it looks like it was made until 1978 so like yeah it's pretty old yeah the gun could have failed to fire because it was broken or because it was just improperly loaded um because have you come across the argentine media articles which are explaining how to properly cock the hammer on one piece that is some real real real interesting take stuff being like next time

uh so good stuff as always from from our friends in the media reportedly the gun tried to get fired twice so pulled the trigger at least two times and when they recovered it there was no round chambered so he may have just not cocked it this is really like he could have just not cocked it at all

and that could be why he didn't fire it's unclear this whole thing is really like it's unclear that this whole thing is really like the like it's the verdant virgin kirschner assassin versus the chad abe assassin that the chad abe assassin went to the time of building his own weapon he fired it twice bull shots went off a fucking virgin this guy zero fires it twice doesn't doesn't build his own weapon zero bullets come out oh do we know if it's legal for this person to own the gun in argentina or had heard they like acquired it

legally and not been able to test it illegally and not been able to test it because that would have also sort of got some attention to them i believe it's illegal okay yeah well either way yeah should have just uh done the old uh the old abe method with the pipe gun and the battery i guess well do you know what isn't illegal and that's assembling your own no no it's uh that's very legal where i live uh these products and services which support this podcast very not illegal all right we are we are back um i'm gonna share with you guys the document I'm looking at so you can have fun looking at all of these symbols with me.

Scroll to where the first picture is. And then we're going to go over all of the weird shit that we have. So we're looking at his Facebook likes here? Yes. These are the Facebook pages that he follows. I'm just going to zoom in on this bear boy.

Dear God. Yeah, this is a bit of a red flag. There's some yikes here. So yeah, 35 years old. He has a Chilean father and an Argentine mother. He's lived in Argentina for at least 20 years. His profiles on Facebook and Instagram were taken down pretty soon. On his Instagram, he described himself as a devout Christian.

Sure, buddy. Well, the Knights Templar pop up on here. Yes, yes. He didn't comment on Brazilian politics very much. It was mostly interested in Argentina. But and a lot of the esoteric Nazi stuff. A lot of the weird, like, there's actually an interesting history of esoteric Nazi stuff, specifically inside Argentina as well.

Obviously, a lot of Nazis fled to Argentina. It's kind of been a fostered ground for them. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff here. One of the pages he follows is named, uh, Camarada Miguel SS, which is just a picture of like Nazi soldiers, uh, in armbands. I don't know. You're underselling this. Uh, that looks like Hitler nothing to me.

There's, there's, there's a lot of stuff, uh, bibliotheca esoterica, but yeah, there's, there's stuff on like gnosticism there's stuff on freemasonry um all of like it's kind of like a it's a little bit of a basic bitch here this is like it's not it's for for this type of guy it's not surprising obviously he's not like a normal dude but for someone who's into esoteric fascist stuff, you're like, okay, yeah, you hit all the things. Like, I'm not surprised looking at your page. So yeah, like we said, he's tattooed with a black sun, iron cross, and a Mjolnir. Now, obviously, the iron cross and the Mjolnir

are not symbols created by Nazis. You know, they were previously existing symbols. Iron cross existed in the Prussian army. The Mjolnir is an old Nordic symbol. But both of these were co-opted by the Nazis pretty strongly and now have very strong associations. If you scroll down to the next page, I have all of his tattoos here. Oh, yeah. So you can see a bit of the sun here. Oh, yeah.

So you can see a bit of the sun of red on his elbow. You can see some of the hammer on his... I believe his right hand has the hammer and his left hand has the iron cross. So, I mean... What's this diamond thing on his inner wrist i'm gonna get to that okay so the black sun sun and rad we've talked about this on the show a lot um it exists before azov um a lot of libs a lot of liberals now think it's an azov battian symbol uh no i mean this you know a lot of nazi mass shooters have had uh son and rad like patches and stuff for years and years and years it's been very popular

it's also very popular among esoteric fascists yeah also very popular among like you see a lot of wagner group guys with this like you see there's a lot of russian soldiers who have this shit on so yes but on so it makes sense in its popularity as like an esoteric fascist symbol this guy's into all of the esoteric fascist shit so of course he's gonna have a black son um

so the, now James mentioned another tattoo which kind of looks like a diamond which is the Yggdrasil emursal um which is how how that's how i'm going to pronounce it because nobody cares um it it means a great tall pillar it's known as like the the tree bridge that would connect the earth to like the celestial like greater reality theminsule plays an important role

in, like, old Germanic paganism. It was, there probably was a physical sacrificial site adorned with, like, big pillars. But like a lot of the old weird German shit, it got Nazified. Heinrich Himmler founded the Society for Research and Teaching of Ancestral Heritage in 1935.

This was an organization with the aim of retracing, quote, ancient Aryan artifacts that support the master race theory. Oh boy. He used one of these for the original symbol of this organization, which is all about tracing back old Germanic pagan shit to be like, here's evidence that we're the master race. He's trying to manufacture anthropology, which supports all of the bad science that says we are Aryans and we are better. It's like the Indiana Jones stuff. This is what he's trying to do. But one of the symbols used for that was the Imensul, or the Yagdrasil. Possibly this symbol was also linked to Odin.

It's unclear because the actual god that represents imensro is hard to trace um but yeah probably a sacred object in the form of a pillar uh that represents kind of the the trunk of the nordic spiritual cosmos that rises up into kind of the heavens yes it's something it's something the nazis pilfered from like Germanic paganism, turned it into Nazi shit, and became this idea around the spiritual center of like German nationalism. It's like it's this spiritual thing

that represents how pure we are as German nationalists. Anyway, obviously the shooter is not German, which is kind of... So I wonder why he has that I wonder what he's trying to say there he just likes German people he's interested in their culture but yes he has one of these on his

I believe it's his left hand on his forearm it's a pretty intricate symbol yeah that's like his best tattoo as well some of the others are pretty ropey yeah the the millionaire tattoo is not very good um the uh the the iron cross is pretty faded but uh but the the great pillar one's decent um in terms of like quality again we're just we're just reviewing the tattoos of an esoteric fascist yeah yeah yeah best fascist tattoo top five um look assassination

week is also fashion week yeah it's true would you say better or worse than etta wizard berries and the ski mask at this point i like the ski masks i think i think it's slightly better oh it's a bold take so leave it this the thing that uh uh james was asking about previously there's this really weird symbol that obviously looks kind of swastika ish it's it's very like it's it's it's It's made up of two different runes combined into one symbol. This is the kind of logo of an esoteric

neo-Nazi sect in Argentina founded by a very famous Argentinian neo-Nazi named Nimrod D. Rosario. Which I do like that his name is Nimrod. Oh, God. So, yes. Nimrod de Rosario, which I do like that his name is Nimrod. Yeah. It's like, oh, God.

So, yes. I highlighted this thing. Do you want to try to pronounce that one? That one's... Yeah. Orden de Caballeros de Rodal de Argentina. So, like... So, that is the name of the sect. It's... The symbol's a combination of the Odal rune

and the Tyra rune, hence the name Tyrodal or Tyrodal. It's a combination of these things into this new thing. So this is very popular for this type of like kind of kind of esoteric nazi writer uh inside in inside argentina he had so the assassin or attempted assassin had a few of these things saved um he was actually an organization like their order of knights the tyroidal knights or however we say that i mean not really is this a facebook chivalric order it's it's hard to say

i mean like no they're not they're not out there doing tons of shit. Are they LARPing? Yes, yes, they are. I mean, as soon as any one of these groups calls themselves like an order of the knights, they're always LARPing. Like, they're always doing kind of a LARP. Like, whenever someone's into like the Templars and shit, you're like, okay.

Who's that Texas politician recently who joined like the, he's like sworn to protect christians in the holy land it was very funny yeah like come on yeah uh all right so he's a big yeah he's got a lot of christian stuff as well like i'm looking at the uh and then what yeah i mean that's that's kind of with all of like the gnosticism stuff which was draws on a lot of like christian imagery or catholic imagery and he did describe himself as a Christian on his Instagram account, which still, it's like, okay, bud,

you're into some weirder shit than that. But yeah, there is some of a Christian basis for this style of esotericism. I feel you. Well, what I've just found is that... Sorry, I've just scrolled down. Didn't expect to see that. Didn't expect to see what? Didn't expect to see what?

Is it like a cam girl? Olicam? Oh, yes, yes. He was retweeting a cam girl on his Twitter. Yes. Okay, yeah, yeah. Okay, good. So I have some other stuff here

on the Argentinian Patriot Front. But I... Please. the argentinian uh patriot front um but i please different patriot front than the american one um but that was just talking i just wanted to talk briefly a bit about like argentinian like uh nazism or fascism um much like brazilian stuff with bolsonaro and the kind of the fascist groups that have been active in both countries for a while. Both of them have historical roots that go back to the 20th century. There are neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups that have been active in Argentina for decades. We talked a little bit about this in the Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Center as well as it relates to anti-communist stuff. One of the kind of oldest groups of Argentinian fascism

formed into a new group called Patriot Front or Frente Patriota. How would you say that? How would you say that? Patriota. I was close. I was close. Yeah, you were really there for like 80% of it.

I really thought you had it. But yeah, so this new group, Patriot Front, was formed in 2017. But it's based off of a very famous far-right leader called Alejandro Biondino just how again that's how I'm going to do it

his name is highlighted here Biondini? he might just be Italian yeah that's not a Spanish sounding name he's been active in argentina's far right uh sphere for a long long time like he's he's kind of like the main guy who's trying to do stuff he's sick 66 years old um uh he was born in argentina um yeah i Yeah, Argentina has a massive Italian population. This has been true for sort of a long time.

Like, yeah, and this cuts both ways politically. Like, a lot of those guys used to be anarchists. Like, there was a huge anarchist movement in Argentina for a long time. Also, a lot of weird fascists. So, it is interesting that this neo-Nazi assassin, again, wasn't part of any of these groups, wasn't really aligned

with this patriot front group, wasn't really aligned with any other kind of actual far-right political activism. He was just into weird... He was into dressing up as a wizard and talking about weird Gnosticism and fascism online

and then he tried to kill the vice president. Did he live near her? Was this an impulse thing? Or was this a long planned... I think he did live nearby. I believe she was in the capital city. So yeah.

That's a big place. You can walk. you can get around if you're dedicated million people around the city of which city is it again i can't remember i can't remember either i you know i i who's to say who's to say so yes this is this is the story of the uh not assassination that was attempted a few weeks ago in argentina and the guy behind it who should have just learned to play dnd um like honestly yeah uh well he did not it's probably gonna spend a long time in jail now probably i mean he he did not kill the vice president but he did put a gun in her face

and tried to pull the trigger two times in front of tons of cameras unfortunately that gets you to attempted assassination yeah yeah i think i think it's uh i think he did some crimes even if he didn't know how to chamber his round properly yeah once again the master race prevails so yeah and any any other notes on uh on this guy or the stuff in argentina any any uh comments comments from the from the gallery no fascinating stuff this again this is this is he is so much less cool and worse of an assassin than the big guy this guy sucks yeah no compared to he's he's he's the probably the least based guy we're gonna be talking about yeah i think by far right like at least eto was successful in uh sending

someone into near earth oh god also you can buy nimrod's books on amazon.com yeah that's a problem all right yeah expensing some of those you shouldn't be able to do that come on he has a twitter account let's just read some of these tweets are they in English or Spanish Spanish drop the links

I can do google translate oh he talks about Zionist terrorism the myth of the holocaust oh the myth of the holocaust i mean it's again the myth of the holocaust he's a nazi he's a he's a what are you what are you gonna expect physical reaction to that last one but yes so this this was the guy that had the symbol that that that had the weird uh the weird combination rune symbol that uh that the assassin liked the books of and use the symbology of on his Facebook.

I just, I just sent the writers of a Twitter account to the cool zone chat. Um, I do. Once, once I go to Nimrod's Twitter page on the who to follow section, it recommends Alexander Dugan. Good, good.

This was the guy I had vaguely read somewhere that this guy liked Dugan or something. Isn't he dead? I believe he's dead. So who's running this Twitter account? Well, he hasn't posted for a while. These are like 2016 posts.

Some lackey is using the Twitter. How did he die in like the 90s? He died in 1997. Okay, so this is like, yeah, alright. This is like some lackey is posting on his account to plug his books. Oh, wow. Maybe he's in a state. Yeah, he's retweeting the

phalange. It's funny. Lots of the people who retweet you go to their account and it's like this account is temporarily unavailable because it violates twitter's media policy yeah I wonder I wonder why I wonder what's going on there bunch of fucking nazis yeah I do like

Nimrod's website is down which is good that is nice his official website is offline, which is good. That is nice. His official website is offline. So that's good. It sucks that his books are on Amazon. But, you know. It's good that he's dead. What can you do?

It is good that he's dead. So he is dead. The vice president is not. And the assassin is probably going to be in jail for a long time and uh that's the episode welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows. Presented by I Heart and Sonorum.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother, trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jacqueline 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. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. This is assassination week. Oh God, my left armpit, it hurts so much. My lung doesn't feel so good. Ronald Wilson Reagan. Six, six, six. Six letters in any way, whatever.

I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about assassinating world leaders. That's why it's called It Could Happen Here. And today we're talking about a time where it did. When John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Wilson Reagan. With me today, James Stout, Garrison Davis, and of course, the ghost of Ronald Reagan,

who is a regular contributor to our podcast series. Along with the ghost of the Queen. Yeah, now the ghost of the Queen has joined the team. Very excited. So obviously, John Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981. We're going to get into a lot of detail about Mr. Hinckley's life. This is something that is joked about a lot on the internet, including by me. But, you know, it's it's interesting because there's there's two strains of people who will like come out and tell you it's not cool to joke about John Hinckley Jr. shooting Ronald Reagan.

And one of them is right, which are the people who are like, well, actually, it's a pretty messed up story. And it's kind of messed up to laugh about this family's tragedy because it was a family's tragedy. And the other people are like, no, it's fucked up because he had the hots for Jodie Foster. And what was actually going on there was a lot more complicated than that. So we're going to talk about all of the things that happened in this shooting, which was messed up and which I probably shouldn't joke about on Twitter because it's actually really bleak. And in order to understand both why it's sad on a personal level and why it's a tragedy for the entire country. Yeah, I'm just going to start by talking about John Warnock Hinckley Jr., who was born on May 29th, 1955 in Ardmore, Oklahoma,

which is about two and a half hours from where I grew up in Oklahoma. Unlike me, John's dad, who was John Warnock Hinckley Sr., was the chairman and president of Vanderbilt Energy. So they had lots of money, a lot of walking around money. That Vanderbilt money. Yeah. And like most people who have good money, they don't stay in Oklahoma. They have any owls? I know the Vanderbilt's big owl enjoys.

I'm certain they did. Add owls to this story as you picture John's childhood. Yeah. So they're rich as hell and they get the fuck out of Oklahoma and move to Dallas, Texas when John was four, which is so far weirdly like my life in a lot of ways, although I was a bit older. Maybe that's why I didn't get the madness. So that's not why.

Normally, getting kids away from Oklahoma really, really fixes stuff. Good call. Yeah. John was taken to the only place more toxic than small town Oklahoma, a wealthy neighborhood in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. He attended Highland Park High School, the school where I would later lose several speech and debate competitions and win one or two as well. It's where if you're in the DFW area, the rich kids who don't have good drugs go to Highland Park. The rich kids with good drugs go to Jesuit because they're private school kids. But Highland Park is like the rich kids who are going to like try to sell you shitty ditchweed.

Anyway, these are this is important. Dallas Fort Worth context. And I assume it was the same when he was a child. As far as I've ever found any information, he was a pretty normal young man for that time and place. There's no one really seems to notice anything particularly different about him. He does reasonably well in school. Later in life, he's going to express some racist thoughts in his diary and in other writings prior to the shooting. It doesn't really seem to have ever been a motivating factor in his life.

doesn't really seem to have ever been a motivating factor in his life and to the extent that he had regressive beliefs they seem to have been due to the fact that he grew up in a sheltered rich all-white environment um and that's not great for you um shocked yeah shocked one right in texas no less yeah one write-up in the new republic describes his childhood this way perhaps it is fear of what lies outside that makes the interior of the family so rigid and subdued, like life in a well-run bunker. The world of the Hinckleys was the rootless middle-class sunbelt culture that nurtures pro-family values, Christian fundamentalism, and occasional mass murderers. Families move frequently, but without compromising their parochialism. Everywhere, people are white, Christian, Republican. Joanne explains John's egregious prejudices

by saying he had never been around people of other races. Somewhere outside, there are malign elements, minority groups, rock musicians, big government, and the cynical gosmos cosmopolites who dominate the media. Mothers in this culture do not lavish attention on their children, but on their furniture. Now, that is a coastal liberal elite

like fucking paragraph trying to describe like people who grow up in this situation as someone else who grew up in a similar area. I think most of that is pretty silly and more to the point, it doesn't get to why John does this.

We're getting to why John does this. It's not because he grew up sheltered and a little racist. That is not why he shoots the president. There is, however, a bit of that that does strike me as accurate as, again, a kid who grew up near here a couple of decades later, which is the description of his childhood as life in a well-run bunker, which is kind of how it feels to live in these wealthy enclaves in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I grew up in Plano, which is a couple of steps down the economic rung from Highland Park, but not all that far. And yeah, that's not a bad description of it. It just doesn't generally lead to kids shooting the president. More often, it leads to them shooting up heroin and then dying of heroin

overdoses, which was the big problem in Plano when I was a kid. That said, it's also worth noting that his parents are not, as far as I can find, like 50 stereotypes. Like his dad's not this super masculine guy who's like mentally abusive to his kid. His mom's not like checked out. Neither of them are against the idea that their son might have a mental illness and need help for it. In fact, it seems like they're kind of more open to the idea

of reaching out for professional mental health for their kid than a lot of parents would have been at the same time period. In 1976, John drops out of Texas Tech to go to Hollywood and try to make it as a musician. Again, his parents are very supportive of him. One cannot say they didn't try to help their son live his dreams. When he gave up on music and he wanted to be a writer, they paid for him to take a class at Yale. We'll get to that in a second. It doesn't go well. But John's not being honest with his ambitions, nor is he open with his parents about

his mental health. We now know that John developed schizophrenia as a young man and had a series of psychotic breaks. When he would get money to do stuff like this Yale writing class, he would take it and buy guns. He did go to Yale, but it was mainly to stalk Jodie Foster, who was going to Yale at the same time. Now, this is all occurring in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which is the fucking dark ages for treatment of this particular condition and a lot of other conditions. There are not a lot of good options. Among other things, I just said he's not open with his parents about the fact that his mental health is declining. I don't know how he really could have been. I don't think it's likely. It's certainly not the case. This didn't happen to John, but I don't think it's very likely for a young man in this time and place to be well equipped by his education or society to express what is going on in his head

to his parents. And, you know on in his head to his parents. And, you know, to be fair to his parents, they're not equipped with a lot of like, you know, an ability to really help him out here. And they're doing the things you would want them to do. Again, they repeatedly are bringing in professionals to try to help. None of it is particularly useful, but it's not for lack of trying. Like a lot of people who struggle with similar mental health issues john seeks refuge in fiction unfortunately for everybody the movie that he finds himself most drawn to is taxi driver and i think most people are aware of

this part of it oh boy that's a bad choice that's a really bad choice yes if he had found maybe adventure time or something it would have been a really bad choice. Yes, if he had found maybe Adventure Time or something, it would have been a lot healthier. But instead, Taxi Driver, if you haven't seen it, the main character is this kid, Travis Bickle, played by a very young Robert De Niro. It is weird to watch him because we're all so used to old man Bob De Niro, who is thinking about assassinating a presidential candidate

and then kind of, through movie magic, rescues a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster from a pimp. And Hinckley thinks the movie is kind of talking to him and providing him with like information about how he can fix his own life. He starts dressing like Travis Bickle. He starts wearing like an army jacket and boots and drinking the way that Bickle drank. He starts buying guns. He gets really into guns for, you know, he starts, you know, in letters that he's writing home to his parents. He starts talking about this relationship he has with a woman named Lynn who isn't real,

but who sounds a lot like one of the women that Travis Bickle has an interest with in the movie. And yeah, this is kind of the start of his obsession with Jodie Foster. And there are people who will like say that he's a pedophile because she's 13 in the movie. That doesn't seem to be the case when he is actually stalking her and most obsessed with her. She is 18 and he is stalking her in real life and calling her on the phone and stuff, which is like bad and messed up.

But he's not into her because she's young in this movie. He's into her because he's kind of losing his mind and obsessing with her, right? So while this is all going on, kind of in the late stages of this, his parents bring in a psychiatrist. Again, they're willing to fund and support him in seeking professional help. The doctor they wound up getting for him, I don't know if he's a bad doctor for the time, but he's wrong as hell. He kind of looks at the fact that John has been normal, quote unquote, in high school and like at the start of his college

career. And so he looks at this kid who's like, seems to be developmentally normal up to a certain point and then goes off the rails and says, well, it's because you were sheltered and coddled by your rich parents and you're just lazy, right? That's, that's, that's what this guy says. So a big part of his like advice to mom and dad is you got to cut him off.

You can't, can't keep giving him stuff. Can't keep giving him money. Can't keep taking care of him. So while this is happening and this guy is like making them make plans for John to be less reliant on his parents, John Hinkley is getting way more into guns. He does a lot of target shooting.

He also plays a lot of Russian roulette with himself alone in his basement, which is not great. In Christmas of 1979, he takes a very famous photo of himself holding a handgun to his temple. Now, John is increasingly harassing Jodie Foster in this period. Now, what he's doing is not he is not just obsessing with her and it's one sided. He is reaching her on the phone. They talk a couple of times. I didn't know that. Yes, they do.

She is always very terse in their calls. Always, you can tell is kind of frightened, but is very controlled and careful. I would describe the way she handles. This is very responsible. And like, you can tell she's talked with like people, I think like her manager or something. And been like,

I have been advised, like, I don't want you calling it. She's very, tries to be very clear here. And I think handles this as well as a person can possibly handle, you know, being stalked in this way.

I believe he's able to get her number because like it's the 80s and people just have numbers in the phone book. Again, she's kind of taking a break from Hollywood right now and is going to Yale. His obsession with Foster veers between these kind of like fantasies of like harming her or harming a guy that she's with or harming himself

and eventually harming the president of the United States. Now, he is not one to shoot the president for political reasons. He has no kind of particular anger at the president that he wants to work out with a gun. He wants, number one, to impress her, and he wants everyone to know his name and know his name associated with Jodie Foster, right? Because again, he's very ill. He starts following Jimmy Carter around. He goes to like three different Jimmy Carter rallies in DC and in Ohio. There's

video of him 20 feet away from Carter at one point. He probably has a gun on him. Like he gets really close to Carter. Again, one of the through lines here is that like presidential security wasn't great in 1980. Yeah. Like it's not very good. John thinks about shooting Carter. He's probably there and equipped to do it, but he just can't get himself into the frame of mind to shoot Jimmy Carter, which is understandable. That's fascinating. It is Jimmy Carter, right? Like he is a hard man to want to shoot to death.

Is Jimmy Carter, right? Like he is a hard man to want to shoot to death. So there's a moment where he like, yeah, so he's kind of bouncing around after this period where he like is he thinks about shooting Carter, but he doesn't. He is in communication with this Nazi ideologue and they almost have a meeting, but they don't. That's all kind of obscure, kind of unclear. And then on October 6th, 1980, he gets arrested at the Nashville airport with a briefcase full of handguns and a pair of handcuffs.

Now, Hoops Among Us hasn't. Hoops Among Us has not been in this situation. Picked up the gun bag. Oops. Yep, it's the wrong bag. He says he's just trying to sell them and they're like well you still can't get on a plane with a bunch of guns john inkley jr and this is this is pre-9-11 too yeah this is pre-9-11 so he you have to assume really he's looking weird he's like sweaty and in an army

jacket and talking to him and they're like, we've literally never searched a single person before in the entire life of this airport, but let's check this guy. What's this massively heavy briefcase you're carrying? There's a fucking, there's a dude just walking in with a stinger

and they're like, no, no, let that guy on. But we got to check John Hinckley. So he flies to Dallas where he buys more handguns and some explosive.22 caliber bullets. We will talk about that in a little bit, but they are explosive bullets for his handgun.

Explosive.22 caliber bullets? Yes, they are bullets that are meant to explode on impact. Is he like reading Soldier of Fortune magazine at this point? Because this, nobody seems like- He's into gun culture, so we have to assume. I think his family's kind of casually conservative. He is kind of maybe, as is embodied by the Nazi thing, probably dabbling in some areas. Again, I think that's certainly not good for him.

It's also, I don't think, politics, I haven't seen any real evidence that politics is a motivating factor in what this guy is doing. He does get explosive bullets. Probably helps that he has explosive bullets in terms of making this less dangerous. These are not good explosive bullets. They are meant to be fired out of a larger weapon than he fires them out of. But they are supposed to basically, the idea is this,

these are 22 caliber rounds. So the idea is that this little explosive charge in them makes them more like a 38. So we're not talking about like military grade weaponry or anything here why is he doing uh you may not know of course but like if he's a massive gun dork why he's not a massive no gun culture is different than right he's buying a bunch of handguns he's shooting a lot i i don't know that it would be he's not particularly good or knowledgeable with it, right? Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, I see.

But gun culture's very, it's harder to get information about guns, right? Of course. Maybe today he would have gotten a lot more into it. You're like just flipping through magazines. Exactly. You can't like look something up online. Yeah. Yeah.

Is 22 good for assassination? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And this is also like, this is what he can afford, right? He gets kind of a, he's lost his better guns, right? They're a property of the state.

So he winds up with his 22 and he gets these explosive bullets to try to make it give more of a kick. Obviously, the thing that's going on in the background here is that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are having a presidential election, which Reagan wins. We'll talk a little bit about kind of that a bit later. But that happens.agan is the president elect um he flies home hinkley flies home things continue to deteriorate in his own life he's continuing to like travel around john lennon is assassinated and he kind of goes a little bit nuts over that because he loves john lennon also might kind of think that he is john lennon so that does not help his mental state he visits the the um the the the what is it the shrine to him in

new york at one point and kind of when he gets back in march of 1981 his dad cuts him off um basically like says you know you've got your here's your car here's 200 we can't take care of you anymore john and i think this is his dad basically trying to take that psychiatrist's advice of like, we need to have tough love. He has to be forced to kind of get his shit together. But John Hinckley is not really capable of getting his shit together because he is profoundly ill. So he uses that money to pay for hotel rooms in Denver where he sits alone watching television with a gun. Not great treatment for schizophrenia. gun. Not great treatment for schizophrenia. Reagan wins the election in what was a sweep electorally, but fairly tight in terms of popular vote. He's got like 50.5% of the popular vote,

something like that. It's pretty close. And soon after taking office, he gets hammered on a bunch of stuff, right? The economy's not great. He's like going for a bunch of far right policies to unwind the New Deal, a lot of which are unpopular and some of which he'd said he's he's back he's like going for a bunch of far-right policies to unwind the new deal a lot of which are unpopular and some which he'd said he wasn't going to do in debates with carter he's not he doesn't have the kind of traditional grace period most presidents get where they're broadly popular right um it's not looking great for kind of the midterms is what i'm getting at um so reagan staff is struggling to right the ship, trying to figure out how do we fix all this. Reagan, or Hinckley, while this is going on, gets convinced that shooting the

president is a pretty good idea. He doesn't have a lot of other options. He's kind of running out of money, and he's able to get a little bit more from his mom, but he's increasingly unhinged and alone and desperate. On March 29th, he checks into a hotel in D.C. where he finds in a local paper the president's schedule. He loads his.22 caliber revolver. He writes a letter to Jodie Foster, and he travels to the Hilton, where the president is set to deliver a speech to union workers. Here is how John's letter to her ends. Quote, I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress ends. Quote, I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now

is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I've got to do something now to make you understand in no uncertain terms that I am doing all of this for your sake. By sacrificing my freedom

and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me. This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodi, I'm asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed

to gain your respect and love. I love you forever, Sean Hinckley. It's not great. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, not a good letter to get. Yeah, not a great letter to get. Not a great letter to send. Was this actually delivered in the mail?

I believe so, yeah. I think she winds up getting this she has to come to court and stuff when he goes on trial it's like something he kind of demands and I think she does to just make it easier for things to move along obviously she does nothing wrong

at any point in this process she's just living her life and this guy is out of his head and has easy access to guns, which is a problem. At two twenty seven p.m. on March 30th, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. opens fire at the president's entourage from just a few feet away. Reagan had been speaking to a bunch of union guys at this this thing at the Hilton anyway. And they're kind of like walking out into towards the limo when this happens. John's first shot hits James Brady, the press secretary and former PR man for Phyllis

Schlafly in his head. He then wounds a police officer and a Secret Service agent. He actually does not hit probably does not. I don't I think there's still a little bit of debate because it's like ballistics are kind of fucky, but he probably doesn't directly hit Reagan instead around fragments and bounces off the armored limousine penetrating the president's lung. None of the explosive bullets explode because they're not the right bullets for the gun. The barrel is too short. So it doesn't it might even do less damage than it would have done, although maybe they fragment because they're these weird explosive bullets and that's why Reagan gets hurt. Anyway, hard to say. Nobody really understands ballistics all that well today.

There's a lot of debate over how all this stuff works. Reagan had been in office for 69 days and no real plan existed for what to do if the president gets shot and is alive but is unable to do the job of the president. Fucking George H.W. Bush is in the air a bunch of this time and like people can't reach him um they're like he's they're saying you need to come back to washington now um so kind of the people running the country for a few hours is al haig the secretary of state and like a room full of guys in the cabinet who are all disagreeing about everything and none of whom are constitutionally supposed to be running the country right um it's a real big problem like the fucking like the the press ask at one point because haig goes out there to be like hey the president's in surgery and they're like well who's

who's in charge like with the nukes and stuff who's running the country and he's like we got a whole room for the guys don't worry it's all fine and they're like is that what the law says because i don't think that's how it's supposed to go um it's it's not great it's actually a real problem and they do they they make a bunch of changes after this to make sure that like we never don't know who the president is when if this kind of thing happens at least um but on a political level this is fucking gang busters for the reagan. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in El Pai here. The assassination attempt silenced criticism of his administration at a critical point early in his term, explains H.W. Brands, author of the biography, Reagan,

The Life, in an email. The good humor he exhibited during his recovery, he spent only 12 days in the hospital, convinced many skeptics. Some of his followers believed that God had forgiven him to allow him to finish his work, and it is possible that Reagan thought so too. On the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt, journalist Del Winton Wilber published Rawhide Down, a thorough investigation full of revelations of what happened that day. The book is written in the style of true crime, and its title is a reference to the Secret Service codename given to Reagan, Rawhide. Joe Biden's code name is Celtic and Donald Trump's was mogul. It reaches two important conclusions.

Firstly, it argues that Reagan became the first president since Eisenhower to serve two terms because of the way he and his team handled the assassination attempt. And secondly, the White House did not reveal the seriousness of Reagan's injuries. He walks into the hospital and then stops breathing and collapses. Like he walks in specifically because he wants to be seen walking in. And it's like they don't know that he's been shot at first. It's not like bleeding a bunch outside. He's bleeding internally. So this is like legitimately the best case scenario.

It would have been hard to figure out what had happened to him, kind of, because't immediately tell that he's bleeding a lot of people have been shot and so everyone just kind of assumes he's having a heart attack which is why they take him to the hospital he thinks actually i think he believes that his secret service agent broke his ribs getting him into the limo um yeah but if they'd taken him to the white house first he would have fucking died he loses half of his blood in the surgery like it's that's which is like bad if you lose half your blood that's not like a great injury um just it's his lung collapsing is what's happening like yeah they've got him on oxygen and stuff he's like barely able to joke with the doctors which he does which is one of the things that like goes

viral from this and makes him so popular because he's he's yucking it up oh ronnie um his uh yeah this is believe there's a number of massive long-term fucking consequences to this one of them is that this is why uh nancy brings in joan quigley the astrologer like this is when she you could refer back to behind the bastards two-parter on the reagan astrologer but this is why the reagan astrologer becomes like they start they stop having him do events when the astrologer says it's a bad day for it and shit because like nancy this kind of breaks her and it also kind of breaks ronald he's not the same man after getting shot which to be fair he is 70 when this happens so getting shot in the lung at 70 most people aren't going to come back all the way. This is also probably doesn't help. The Alzheimer's may accelerate the timetable there.

But on a political level, this goes fucking great for the Republicans, and it allows them to do a lot of really fucked up shit. And I'm going to quote from CNN here. Today, Reagan is the only modern president who receives high marks from Republicans, Democrats and independents alike. A look at the polls can quantify the roots of this enduring goodwill. Despite an electoral landslide over Jimmy Carter with a 44-state win in 1980, Reagan won a narrow popular margin of 50.7%. Moreover, Gallup's valuable presidential poll tracker shows that Reagan's approval ratings were significantly split along partisan lines after his 1981 inauguration, with 74% Republican support and 53% from independents, but 38% from Democrats. When Reagan came back to the Capitol on April 28th to push for his Economic Recovery Act, he was greeted by a hero's welcome and a

three-minute standing ovation. He leveraged his political capital to help pass his agenda. Before the end of the summer, the Reagan tax cuts had passed the House of Representatives, led by Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill and the Republican-controlled Senate, reducing the top tax rates from a confiscatory 70% and unleashing an entrepreneurial era. That's how CNN categorizes it. That guy.

That's what we got to call it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in 1984, Reagan wins 49 states and 59% of the popular vote. It is very clear kind of how this happens and what this allows Reagan to do. It's fascinating, isn't it? Because you have in Britain, like less than a year later, we have Margaret Thatcher, right? Like who is similarly not doing very well until she gets to go to war for two tiny little cold islands in the atlantic

no one knew about before like and then they proceed to just ravage like the like post-world war ii social democracy consensus just fuck it up and fucking here we are now here we are 2022 and people are gonna die of cold in britain this. I will say in terms of just to be fair, one of the things people will say is a positive from this is that this is one of the things that helps push the arms treaty deals with the Soviet Union, because Reagan is like, God saved me for a reason. And maybe it's to make nuclear war less likely. That's a bigger topic than today. It's a thing that he will claim.

And generally speaking, the fact that the Soviet Union and Reagan started talking about nukes during this period is not a bad thing. Always good to be talking about nukes. But yeah, what I will say, if we're looking at kind of the only clearly good thing that came out of this shooting, it's the fact that the justice system actually worked in this one instance pretty much exactly how you would want it to. Hinckley was clearly not mentally competent to understand his actions, what he had done, or to stand trial, and he was declared not guilty by reason of insanity. His father, tearful, took blame for the shooting for cutting his son off from resources. The psychiatrist who had botched

his diagnosis admitted his mistakes on the stand and expressed regret. Hinckley was sent to a psychiatric facility where he received decades of treatment, and the treatment seems to have really helped him. On December 17, 2003, a federal judge ruled that Hinckley was entitled to unsupervised visits with his parents. This is five years before his dad died, so they get time together again. In 2007, he has a request for unsupervised visits as long as one month. This is denied, not because of any problems, but because of issues the hospital had not taken to prepare for the transition. In July of 2016, Judge Paul Friedman concluded that Hinkley did not pose a threat to himself or others and ordered him released. The conditions initially limited him to his residence where he lived with his mother in parts of Southern California.

He was obviously forbidden from contact with past or present presidents of the United States or any of their family members or graves. He was banned from contact with Jodie Foster or other entertainers. He was prohibited from watching violent movies, television, or online media. In 2018, a restriction confining him to his mother's house ended. He can now live anywhere he wants with doctor's approval. And on September 27th, 2021, John Hinckley Jr., age 66, was approved for unconditional release by District Judge Paul Friedman. Friedman noted that, quote, very few patients at St. Elizabeth's Hospital have been studied more thoroughly than John Ainkley.

And again, that's pretty much how it ought to work, right? Like, yeah, he shoots the president, but clearly because he's sick and you don't just punish sick people when they don't know what they've done. So he gets treated for decades until he's better. And now he's able to live a life. Yes, it's really good live a life. Yes.

Yeah. Really good. Quite surprising. It is very surprising. And part of why it's surprising is that one of the other negative lingering effects of John Hinckley attempting to shoot the president is that a lot of changes are made in many states to make it much less likely that people benefit from the same understanding judicial system that John Hinckley Jr. does. that people benefit from the same understanding judicial system that John Hinckley Jr. does. Okay, I'm going to quote now from a write-up from FamousTrials.com, which has a pretty good bit on just kind of everything that happened here. It's a pretty fair summary, I think. Within a month of the Hinckley verdict, the House and Senate were holding hearings on the insanity

defense. A measure proposed by Senator Arlen Specter shifted the burden of proof of insanity to the defense. President Reagan expressed his support for the measure with the comment, if you start thinking about even a lot of your friends, you would have to say, gee, if I had to prove they were sane, I would have a hard job. Maybe that tells us more about you than what you think. That says a lot about your administration, who are, by the way, at this point, deep in like Iranan contra shit selling cocaine and in any way we're talking about all this on an upcoming episode of bastards but like

yeah they're all monsters uh joining cons congress and shifting the burden of proof were a number of states within three years after the hinkley verdict two-thirds of the states placed the burden on the defense to prove insanity while eight states adopted a separate verdict of guilty, but mentally ill and one state, Utah abolished the defense altogether. Good. Always delivering. So the system works really well for John Hinckley, Jr.

I think ethically, I think they change it. I think the justice department of the United States, this is maybe one of it. Probably in history, you will not find many cases of a guy shooting an active world leader and being treated ethically by the justice system. Like, he's handled very reasonably, I think. And never again, never again will that happen for anybody, even if they don't shoot the president. happen for anybody even if they don't shoot the president so yeah um obviously i wish john hinkley jr well i i hope his musical career goes fine um i fuck ronald reagan um hate him and uh yeah uh

it's probably made the world a lot worse that john hinkley jr tried to shoot ronald reagan because it empowered Ronald Reagan. One of the lessons here, if we're talking about assassinations, is that it's a real wild card trying to assassinate a president or any other politician. And as a general rule, people are kind of programmed

to think that somebody's cool if they get shot and don't die. It's one of the cooler things. Look, just objectively it's what do you do if you want to show john mcclain as hard as hell you can get like hit in the arm or something and just like work through it right like what do people people talk about like teddy roosevelt when he was shot and how bad it was that he gave a badass it was that he gave a speech or how cool it is that fucking andrew jackson you know who they don't say any of these things about

is jfk that's right they don't because dying is not cool because dying's not cool not cool at all over the roof of a church yeah lame as hell yeah but like you know this is the look if if you want john f kennedy to stop being the president and you can successfully kill him you will get get what you want. He's no longer the president. If you were to have a political motivation, and again, Hinckley doesn't. Hinckley is not thinking about the top marginal tax rate when he does this. But if that had been his goal, this is the opposite of that, right? Because it just makes Reagan look cool and helps him, makes everybody feel like an asshole for fighting him for a while so like he gets a bunch of shit through and also a bunch of

laws get worse for mentally ill people and uh in on the whole bad bad bad assassination zero zero out of ten yeah i have to say based on based on the evidence we have here, shooting Ronald Reagan, not a good idea. They didn't do it. No. Let the whole team down. And we should just plug his album. It's out on Asbestos Records. We should plug his album.

Because again, he's not responsible for this. Yeah, no. If he's happy singing songs, I'm happy for him. Yes, yes. I wish you the best of luck, John. You can buy his t-shirts. He's got t-shirts that he's trying to move, which I don't know. I don't think it's bad to encourage his music career. Like, seriously, like we're all doing it with a little bit of a smile. But what's the harm if John Hinckley Jr. thinks that people like his music? That doesn't hurt anybody. Like if you treat people with mental illnesses, like people who are ill,

not fucking terrible people, then they can get to a place where they can sing songs on YouTube. And that's nice. That's good. That's an example again of the only time it worked the way it should, but it did work out pretty well in this case. Yeah. So I don't know.

Yeah. Take whatever lessons you want to out of this many many possible things can be a lot of a lot of a lot of different lessons we can take out of this much don't hire al haig but i feel like that's that's a generally good lesson yeah uh there's a phoenix punch band called j Foster's Army. I've just read as well, who make songs about him. Great. By their records too. Fine, yes.

No strong opinions on that either way. Anyone else got anything to say about John Hinckley Jr. or the assassination attempt on Ronnie Rawhide Reagan? Also, we're talking about the IRA a lot this week. Probably not for nothing that Joe Biden's code name is Celtic. Hmm. Hmm. And the queen dies now?

Makes you think, doesn't it? You're telling me it's a coincidence? I still suspect Liz Truss, personally. Hmm. I think that maybe Joe Biden shook hands with Liz Truss and, like, transferred a nerve poison onto her hand and then she touched the queen. Definitely possible.

She wanted to be number one. Sweet Joe sipping a Guinness on the plane back, knowing that he's done his job. In his balaclava, inexplicably. Therefore, it's one. Anyway, hopefully nobody who has stuff going on listens to that and takes the wrong message out of it yeah no kind to one another uh anyway we're done

welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looks so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs

with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, or wherever you get your podcasts. I am shocked and devastated by his assassination. but no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if women are left behind. I am shocked and devastated by his assassination, a loss for Japan and our world. JK, this is Assassination Week. Who's assassinating my ex-former Prime of japan it's it's assassination week it is it is i i i i would kind of i would somewhat vaingloriously argue the capstone of assassination

week it is the episode about the assassination that started it all um and by by that i mean we are we are we are here talking about the assassination of one Shinzo Abe. This is going to be a slightly different episode, both to the rest of the Assassination Week episodes and to the other episode we did on the assassination of Shinzo Abe. basically the day after, within about two days of our episode, our original episode about the Abe assassination dropping, there was confirmation that the reason Abe was killed was because of his connection to an organization called the Unification Church,

which is, I think, better colloquially known as the Moonies. People might have listened to the very, very long episode I did about it. But yeah, there is an enormous amount going on there. And this is something that fortunately we have experts for. And yeah, so joining us to talk about this assassination and the Moonies and sort of, I don't know, the sort of weirdness and the horror around everything that's been happening around this assassination is anti-fascist researcher Elisa Majub. Yeah, Elisa is an anti-fascist researcher specializing in cults who's working with deprogramming imperialism which is a collective of ex-moonies who've been documenting just sort of all of the shit the moonies have been getting up to and trying to get more awareness of really the the just incredible array of awful stuff

that they've been doing yeah so elisa welcome to the show hi thanks for having me i really appreciate it yeah and thank you thank you so much for joining us for this i don't know why i'm saying us as if there's someone other than me on this episode and you but you know old habits die hard i guess i guess i've inherited the royal we which is not great oh well so someone will have to assassinate me soon that's fine sometimes it happens hope it doesn't happen to you though you seem yeah that would not be the best assassination target honestly yeah so okay i i guess the place i think we should start is talking about what we found out about this assassin in the last sort of few months since this happened which is that when when the initial police reports came out there was a bunch of very very murky stuff about

basically the police were like this wasn't a political killing it was about some organization and i think me and you and every single other person who was like even tangentially aware of japanese politics saw them say like an organization and was like, oh, no, there's like a one in three chances at the booties. Yeah, that's yeah. I saw it like when they said something about like organization or religious organization. I was like, yeah, I was like, hmm. I know what that probably is. Yeah.

Yeah. Wild. Yeah. probably is yeah it was yeah wild yeah and and it turns out that okay so the the assassin is a man named tetsuya yamagami who was a a navy veteran um yeah made a a series of unbelievably based and incredibly wild firearms with which he assassinated the former prime minister of japan what we've learned since then is that the reason he did this was that his basically like his family and his like life were completely destroyed by his mom falling into this cult and by her i mean she she she gave this cult set like something like seven hundred thousand dollars yeah like roughly seven hundred and twenty thousand us dollars yeah like literal like like multiple fortunes like she she she gave them all of her money and then she sold the company

that like she had been running to give them more money and yeah what what basically as best we can tell has happened was that he was he was looking at a way to like get back at the boonies um and basically the problem was he okay so he didn't want to kill civilians which i think is admirable and he couldn't figure out a way to like get at any of the like individual church leaders and so the thing he decided to do was go after Shinzo Abe because as we're going to get to in a bit

Shinzo Abe lots of connections with the unification church a thing that all of the people like writing glowing obituaries about him just like incredibly don't want to mention yeah it's been left out of a lot of shit yeah and okay so i i guess to back up a little bit um can for for people who sort of

don't know what this is or for people who like may have heard of it but need a refresher can you talk a bit about what what what what the unification church actually is and yeah we can sort of go from there yeah definitely okay so the unification church are the moonies uh they are a quote unquote uh new religious movement or pretty much a cult you know uh yeah they're very culty they're a cult um and they were started by sun myung moon who was originally from what is now north korea uh and so basically this guy he claims he's the messiah uh has this uh originally it started out as like a sex cult um under a practice called i think picarum uh which is basically uh he was supposed to uh quote unquote cleanse a woman's like

relationship to god by having sex with her so he assaulted a number of people doing this stuff. And the church over the years has sort of like developed into more of a multinational corporation and political movement. And it has a lot of tools, I mean, a lot of ties and connections to various governments around the world, including Japan, and is basically at the end of the day, a tool of United States imperialism. There's some pretty direct ties to the Korean CIA, as well as the US CIA. So yeah, it's like this big umbrella of groups, different NGOs, different like businesses, a bunch. It's just a whole conglomeration of things. Right. But very extremely virulently anti-communist and, you know, involved in some of some of the greatest hits of the last century, like Iran Contra for the fascists.

Yeah. Greatest hits for us. And when we say involved in iran contra like okay there's lots of people who are like sort of involved in iran contra the moonies like there there is a decent there you can you can make the arguments that if the moonies had not been doing what they were doing in nicaragua iran contra wouldn't have been able to happen because the civil war would have ended like they like when i say like when we say like like they were involved in the iran contra like they are like on the ground giving people guns and money and keeping like literally keeping guerrilla

organizations and like terrorist groups like in the war who wouldn't have been able to otherwise yeah and then and then also and that's that's the thing like they did two iran contras right because they they they did they did the second iran contra with like with you know when the cia actually got money but they were also doing the same thing like before that when they in the sort of stopgap period where the cia wasn't able to fund the contras so yeah these guys are a nice back route for that money and all the other shit yeah so it's yeah they're very very heavily involved like and, anywhere there is an anti-communist squad, like, in the world, you can find the Moody's funding it. Yep. Although, okay, I will say this.

Weirdly, the only one I haven't directly been able to find is I haven't been able to directly find any evidence that they were, like, that, like, specifically they were helping Pinochet. Like, I'm going to say helping Pinochet. Okay. like, that, like, specifically they were helping Pinochet, like, I'm gonna say helping Pinochet, okay, they, they, they were involved in Operation Condor, and they were, like, doing shit with that, I haven't found evidence they, like, directly had any conversations with Pinochet, but that's, he's, like, the, the only person you can say that about, and they probably did at some point, like, but, you know, like, Alfredo Strassner, yeah, like, they probably did, like, I mean, again, like, they, they were, they were, they were there with Alfredo Strassner, they were there

with, um, what's, what's that guy's name uh klaus barbie the cocaine oh yeah yeah i can't i can't remember the name of the guy yeah there was there was a guy in bolivia who got installed for like a year that he got cooed i can't remember his name right now um is yeah no i i know who you're talking about but i'm also forgetting his name at the moment yeah no it's funny because he's one of these guys where it's like you know i i i i had a professor i took i took a syrian history class in college right and um there i think it's i really should if i'm saying this i really should know the year but there there's a year in like the 50s in syria where there's like four coups in one year and there were like two guys who technically speaking

had like had control of syria he was like i'm just not even telling these guys names because they get overthrown in like two months and like that's that's that's this guy yeah yeah yeah but yeah this is a very sort of very serious and deeply scary like death squad funding machine yeah yeah and that you know has continued to today pretty much so oof yeah and okay i i think like yeah so yeah there's sort of the death squad side of it um the other thing i wanted to ask you about is about, like, what it's like being in the church and what it's like sort of, I don't know. Because I think a big part of what's happening with this story is Tetsuya Yamagami, like, basically watching his family get sucked in and not being able to do anything about it and i was wondering if you could talk a bit about yeah i mean sort of like what what what what it's like being in the church and then what it's like just sort of watching it destroy people yeah

so um i was born and raised in the church uh i left when i was around 17 it was not it was not nice um pretty much everybody i talked to who has also left uh feels the burden of this like perfect abuse that we had to endure um it was a bleak time for me. Uh, you know, there's just so much pressure put on members to follow leadership, to do outrageous amounts of fundraising. They have a bunch of these fundraising teams, right? And they'll, they'll go out and they'll sell things and live in a van, occasionally stopping at like different church centers to like, you know, sleep for the night or whatever. They don't eat well. They don't get enough sleep. You know, like you're constantly around other people. like all of the methods of psychological torture you can do on a person, right? Which was, you know, pretty standard throughout the whole movement. Now, I was lucky enough not to go on any of these fundraising teams because I left before that could happen. But I still, you know, definitely feel like the psychological, you know, fallout from

that. It's something I'll be healing with healing from for the rest of my life um yeah so like there's there's like no accountability for leadership they can do whatever they want but everybody else in the church you know uh has to follow what moon and the regional or national leadership says, or the 36-plus couples who are some of Moon's original followers. It's extremely hierarchical. There's a lot of racism within the group, a huge amount of sexism that is directly tied into their belief system

because the fall of man, according to the Moonies, was Eve having sex with Satan and then having sex with Adam and spreading that sin. So just like very inherently misogynistic, extremely homophobic and transphobic movement, just all around like so much sexual repression, like you're not supposed to hold hands, kiss, do anything before marriage. Right. And then it's only that person. Well, of course, Moon, you know, didn't didn't like this didn't apply to him at all. He could sleep with anybody's wife pretty much. So, yeah, it was just altogether a very intense environment, just so much indoctrination uh going into the heads of the people who are part of it um yeah just altogether shitty group yeah um yeah so for me i i went away to school in another state when i was 14 um it got me like you know the physical distance as well as like

the space and time to actually think and reflect on what was going on. And then I started doing some research online because I was like, well, maybe what people are saying about it is true. Maybe it is a cult. And I came across this, the tragedy of the six Marys, which was, you know, moon assaulting a bunch of women. And that sort of like made me just, you know, it sort of brought it to a head. Cause I had like, you know, seen for the longest time how leadership was treated versus how regular members had to live in like poverty. Um, but they got like big mansions and like nice things, nice cars, expensive watches. Uh, but everybody else had to like give all their money to the church and, you know, was,

were like terrorized. And then eventually I, I was like, I think I have to go. I, like I had been through the process of like meeting the mystical or the, the evil other, which, you know, like people outside of the church or, you know, they're fallen. They're like, you know, basically they have original sin. So they're kind of evil. Right. And gotten to know more people, queer people who were just like a hugely demonized group of people within the

UC. And here I am today. I'm super queer. But like that, like, hell yeah. But like getting to know people and actually seeing, you know, like, oh, my God, what they're saying. These people are not evil. They're normal. They're human. They are just different from straight people. I don't know.

That to me also made like a huge difference. And then when I was 17, I went to another school and I was like, I want to get laid. I've had enough of this. So I went out and did that and that felt like you know once I finally lost my virginity it felt like sealing the deal I'm like if I have to go to hell now okay and it was cool because God didn't like immediately smite me where I where I was in bed at that point like I lived and I'm here to tell the tale. So yeah, that's how I left. That rules.

I don't know if anyone can relate. This is much more gay of a story than I was expecting, which is always a good thing. Yeah, definitely. It reminds me a lot of the stories of what i was expecting which is all which is always a good thing yeah it kind of it reminds me a lot of like the stories of sort of like of people leaving like the really right wing like evangelical was like a lot of it reminds me of quiverful but like yeah more intense i think well it's like i think like like the the level of i don't know i guess the level of separation yeah it's a lot more isolated yeah they seem to be at least sort of like integrated into like other communities and stuff whereas the moonies

i don't know like there's definitely like people have friends outside of it but like generally like people kind of keep to the moonies because you know they're supposed to be like god's chosen people or whatever so they yeah and they like look down on everyone else because they to the moonies because they're supposed to be God's chosen people or whatever. And they look down on everyone else because they're not moonies. Yeah. It is. It's also interesting to me that literally

the term is just the evil other. Which is just really... So I don't think that's a literal term, but that's how I sort of phrase it or whatever. But yeah. Or just like fallen people would be or the fallen world, the outsiders is what they would say. So just this very, you know, like, very, like stigmatizing language that they use for people. Lots of people are just called evil in the church, too. They just call people evil, like willy n's like oh you're satanic like no that's not it yeah that's not that i don't know how to get a good transition into this yeah we're going to ads yeah so i i wanted to also talk about specifically one of the things that the church does and one of the things like the the sort of one of the specific things that tetsuya yamagami yamagami seems to have been

suffering from and well particularly his mom but his sort of whole family is the financial abuse yeah and yeah i wanted to ask you a bit about what that looks like and also there's some stuff about the japanese context that i i think is slightly different than yeah sort of the american or the korean context i want to ask you a bit about that yeah definitely so uh across the board uh unification church members are expected to bring in a lot of money through fundraising, through tithing, providing free labor or, you know, low paid labor through church businesses and stuff. So the case is, though, that in Japan, because of the rhetoric of the church, which is, you know, basically born out of, uh, you know, the, uh, environment, um, in Korea. Uh, so there's basically this thought in the church that they say, um, that Korea is the Adam nation, uh, because that's where, uh, you know, the Messiah came back, South Korea,

and that Japan is the Eve nation supposed to submit to the Adam nation and also sort of pay indemnity, which is a big word in the church, and for the atrocities committed during the Japanese occupation of Korea. And so this means that Japanese members have to pay significantly more for pretty much everything. So there's, it's like just, you know, like, instead of like a type of reparations where it's like, you know, we'll give you money. It's like they make them suffer for that fact. And so like, you know, fundraising goals are very high. Let me see. I think I had a figure here somewhere. Yeah, so Japanese membership, they bring in roughly like 70% of the church's income.

Yeah. So Japanese membership, they bring in roughly like 70% of the church's income. So a large amount for, you know, like proportionally not, you know, there are a lot of members in Japan, however, throughout the world that is like proportionally, you know, where most of it comes from. And then as of several years ago, the Japanese church fundraising goal was 30 billion yen or around 210 million for that year, I believe. So just, you know, and so they go out selling ancestor liberation is one thing. You're supposed to pay exorbitant fees for your ancestors to go to heaven. fees for your ancestors to go to heaven. There was a book called the Chansunggyeong, and that book was extremely expensive, and of course, much more expensive for members in Japan. I think I read a figure where, I think, I don't remember what year it was, and it was not very recent. I think it might have been like 1992 or something, uh, or 2002 or something. I'm not sure, but it costs like roughly like 200,000 American dollars to, uh, go to the marriage

ceremony. The, one of the mass weddings that the Moonies do where they, everybody is arranged marriage, arranged married. Um, and so, yeah, just like these huge amounts of money uh directly flowing from the pockets of the membership uh and anyone they happen to you know have give them money uh into the coffers of the church and you know directly on up to like the moon family who are billionaires. Another thing I would say here is that they often, so for people who, that they're trying to fundraise from, they often will target like elderly widows and people who are, you know,

in sort of precarious places and come to them and say, your family member who's passed away wants you to give this donation to the church uh they also like at one point made up like a fake buddhist sect in order to like specifically target people so it goes deep there's a there's a lot to that yeah i mean like one of the things i remember reading that was like yeah they had like this whole network of like fake mediums yeah Yeah. Like specifically to target people. Yeah. To target the sort of widows, which is like.

I don't know. So much of the stuff that they do is just so incredibly bleak. Like I think. Yeah. I mean, the thing that got me was the sort of like. Like the way in which they're sort of weaponizing like like japan's sort of war crimes in yeah in south korea and north korea as well and it's like it's like a on the one hand like yeah like all a all this boy is just going to like a bunch of

like two rich fascists and then yeah b like and i think it's something else we can sort of get into is like okay so the the church's main political allies in japan are the people who did all that shit yep yep so yeah no it's just a constant deflection pretty much yeah and i mean it's interesting too because like you get this like so some of the newspapers they fund will like openly say that like japan should rearm again and like japan should like start retaking korea and then like you have the other arm of their business being like hey pay us money for all the people you guys killed and it's just i don't know. It's... Yeah, it's pretty fucked. It's the worst. It's honestly, yeah. Yeah, and I guess

yeah, I think this is as good a place as I need to go into like, okay, so the Moody's could not do the things that they do in Japan without an incredibly large degree of institutional support. Part of this is sort

is with the yakuza because like you can't run like you you can't do organized crime stuff like attempt like running an entire network of people that are fraud widows like in in japan without the yakuza like you having some kind of deal with them yeah and yeah and and that that also bizarrely ties in with sort of how how the unification church got integrated with the sort of mainstream well yeah you know i'm just gonna call them the mainstream like fuck it people people people will quibble about the different factions of the ldp uh i frankly don't care for reasons that we'll get to but yeah how how they got like in yeah i guess we talked about like the origins of how they got ingrained with japan's like perpetual ruling party liberal democratic party

yeah um oh sorry were you were you oh yeah yeah yeah i mean i can also i can also go into it too but yeah no worries yeah okay yeah sorry i wasn't sure that was a question yeah sorry no it's okay um so yeah it goes all the way back to uh like so it goes it goes back pretty far so nobasuke kishi uh abe's maternal grandfather uh so he uh initially became sort of embroiled with the uc kind of stuff uh unification church stuff uh in the early days uh of when the movement um was in japan uh he collaborated on stuff like the foundation for victory over communism uh spoke at their uh the founding of the organization at a uc church which was i think uh next to kishi's estate or something like that yeah i i think i think i think he sold them their first building in japan i'm pretty sure if i'm remembering something that i right yeah so um so yeah and then uh in 62 the uc was able to convert 50 leaders of the

ultra-nationalist uh nichiren buddhist uh sect called sect called oh gosh i don't know how to pronounce this ryosho kosei kai uh and they had a lot of strong yakuza connections um and then uh asami kuboki was the first uc president in japan uh he was the yakuza lieutenant and second in command of that group that i had just mentioned yeah and and the the other thing we should mention about this about the sort of how the yakuza ties yeah though is that so okay so nobusuke kishi is the guy who founds liberal democrat the liberal democratic party right like he the liberal democratic party is his creation it is like what that party is is all of japan's conservatives basically like basically ceding to his authority and being like okay fine we're gonna follow your lead um and his his party is like his base and his funding is basically a combination of like

he he like kishi himself is a like arch world war ii war criminal um his his base is basically in the old japanese fascists he yeah is funded by like well partially funded like funded directly by the cia um he's also funded by but the c the cia in particular here is working through the yakuza because one of what was this one of the sort of the uh will like will there be in the sort of like well will there be technically not cia but yeah basically american intelligence the american rb starts working through the yakuza as like an anti-communist um yeah force and he he gets bankrolled by this these two guys named kodama and um sasakawa yeah sasakawa who are like kodama is like like the like milk basically like the guy who is in charge of the yakuza he's also a fascist um rayuchi sasakawa is the self-disclosed like literally called

himself the world's richest fascist and both of these guys are like huge bankrollers of of kishi they are also and you know and when kishi is like bringing in the church like this this is how this this is how all these people have got have yakuza connections because yeah it's it's the the whole sort of japanese right-wing, like, political machine is, like, one, like, happy family that is doing the worst stuff all together at the same time, funded by the CIA. Yep. And, like, and also, I need to say this, because I said this in my episode about Kishi, but, like, the level of CIA involvement here, like, there are cia agents assigned to individual liberal democratic party candidates in the 50s to make sure they won their elections i did not know that bit that is it's wild yeah so specific wow yeah yeah that's yeah concerning things concerning things oh god um but yeah so like yeah to this day

a lot of ldp candidates and politicians still have ties to the uc get donations from it uh use like membership as like free labor uh even like having secretaries, uh, from who are members of the UC and, uh, like, you know, sometimes they would, you know, see like some sort of like classified or, you know, uh, information and stuff like that. So there's, yeah, there's like, apart from like that, like just so interconnected. like just so interconnected yeah do you remember the story about the the ldp's like number two guy like getting getting moon to be able to visit japan ah sorry i don't oh god okay so the my memory of this story was okay so like japan japan has a series of really weird laws about, like... I mean, okay, Japan has a series of very weird laws about many, many things. One of them has to do with... It's something like, if you've been convicted of a felony in another country, you can't enter Japan.

And I... I don't know if it's... Okay, I don't know if it's a felony. I don't know what the... I'm forgetting what the legal bar is for what you have to be, like, convicted of in order to not be able to enter the country. But, like, Moon is a, like, he was, like, convicted by the U.S. government of, like, perjury and a bunch of other shit because of the crimes that he did. And so he, like, technically, legally could not enter Japan. And then, like, the vice president of, um, and I'm not sure what his name was, but, God, I can't remember his title, but basically, like, what, like, basically, like, the, the, the, like, the, the, the, the second most powerful man in Japanese politics in the 90s, like, very specifically did a whole bunch of visa bullshit so that specifically moon

could go to japan legally not surprising not surprising but wow yeah it's like um the lengths people will go to to collaborate with other fascists yeah and i think that's that's i don't know that's to me what makes this assassination really interesting is that like okay so if if you ask like and even even like in japan if you would ask the average person what the connection between like shinzo abe and edification church was like most people have no idea like before assassination, most people had like no idea what that was. Yeah. Yeah. After the assassination, this, the whole landscape has changed.

Yeah. It's, it's been really interesting to watch. It's like this, this really seems like an incredibly sort of politically effective assassination because. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, you, you, you had, there was, there was, you know, you had the very there was you know you had the very the initial right-wing backlash but the right-wing backlash kind of it got kind of muted when it when it became clear that it like wasn't a left-wing radical which i think would have actually been an enormous disaster

yeah but then the guy was yamagami was pretty right-wing Yeah, it's like he's a right-wing guy, but also his story is really sympathetic. Yeah. I mean, I feel for the guy. He had so much trauma in his life, honestly. And it's obvious. And I think a lot of former members sort of understand how that feels uh now most of us have been assassinated a prime minister but so far so far but yeah like i mean we understand that pain of

where he is coming from and like you know why upon learning that abe had these ties he sort of like felt like compelled to do something yeah and i think the i mean there's also this element at work here that's kind of weird which is like okay it's very very hard normally to get like right-wing japanese people to turn on their own party uh the one way that you can do it is by going, hey, look at these Koreans. So there's, like, weird dynamics going on here. Like, there were some, like, even further right parties who were, like, you know, using this thing as a campaign thing.

It's like, ah, this party is, like, a fake right-wing party. Like, they're all being run by, like, Koreans. And it's like, okay, that's, like, not... Like, the thing that is bad about the moonies is not that they are korean it's that it's all of the other shit yeah they do yeah and i think that's complicated but also yeah like the the the political impact this has had has been like enormous yes like like enormous yes like yeah do you want to talk about that a bit yeah so um so okay obviously it has shined a lot of light on sort of the connections that a lot of uh members of the government there have from the ldp um as well as other parties, have with the UC getting donations, etc.

People are pissed about it, as they should be. So I guess that Prime Minister Kishida had said that they want to cut ties with the Unification Church at this point. It sort of remains to be seen whether that actually happens or not, because could easily just be like lip service kind of shit um but the uh politicians uh and i'm not sure if this is specifically for the ldp or sort of across the board um there's like a a thing where they're supposed to self-report any ties or

donations to the uc which is just you know like i don't know like i don't think everybody's going to come forward with that sort of thing if you're supposed to do it yourself that's like not how that should work but um so i mean like it it remains to be seen you know if those ties are actually going to be cut um so also like there has been sort of like uh a a a lot of support from uh like lawyer groups like the national network of lawyers against spiritual sales um who has you know worked uh with you know cult members and like specifically a lot of unification church members or uh former members or whatever who have uh you know lost money through spiritual sales um and they've also just recently called for the dissolution of the uc in japan which is pretty cool and i hope

that happens yeah how realistic it is uh given like all of the strong ties to the government but that would be cool um and then also i saw a thing a couple of days ago, uh, that Japanese consulates and embassies have a program that is offering advice or assistance, uh, to UC members who are a Japanese national and like a victim of the UC or if your parents are, they those that are open and I don't know exactly what the levels of support or resources they're offering are, but it's worth looking into for sure. But yeah, like so there's been like sort of this outpouring of support from various groups. And it's really shining a light on the issue of especially what it's like to be a second generation member of a cult and the trauma that people like us have gone through. um you know there are definitely a lot of calls for like support and mental health care as well as like you know ways to sort of get people out of situations like that in the first place um yeah yeah i i don't know i i i i i hope this translates into actual resources and stuff. Yeah.

Just sort of like the LDPs ratings tanking. Yeah. Which like is good. And like, it is very funny that he, she does had to ask like half his cabinet because the ties are like too close, but yeah,

I don't know. I think it, it remains, although he remains in power and he's got test but you see too interesting yeah so it's like you know clearly there's not a lot like even if people are like having a little bit of like the smallest level of transparency about this stuff like i i don't necessarily know how far it'll actually go into like you know making amends or like protecting people from further

abuse or you know getting people their money back i don't know i i think there's a there's something i think that's really sort of i don't know like really grim about the way that this worked out which said the japanese police knew what was going on and why the assassination had happened like immediately like they found his hard drive and he'd written out a whole thing about why he did it yeah and then they intentionally held the information and basically made were able to maintain a press embargo until after the election happened yeah yeah you know now everyone fucking hates the ldp like the the the provincial approval rating is like 36 like it's really bad i mean it went from like 50

it went from like 52 to like 36 in like a couple of weeks but because the people who are people who are connected to the church are the people in charge they were able to like suppress this information long enough to like shape how the election was gonna go yeah make sure that it was sort of like the right-wing shock from oh my god this assassinated prime minister and not wait they assassinated prime minister for a reason that's like incredibly justified and relatable to like this is as relatable of a motive of assassination as like i've ever seen yeah i mean it's like as far as reasons for assassinating people go this is a pretty like solid reason like yeah there's stuff there

yeah and like and i think it's just like like it's it's interesting this like it's this rare assassination where the assassin is is a very empathetic figure to like i i i think a lot of the time when you get people doing stuff like this like it's there's a sort of like one-to-one correlation with like okay like how how how do you feel about sort of like like how do you feel about assassination in general is going to like determine your dictate like determine your sort of response to the actual action? Yeah. Whereas I think here it's different because, you know, like, yeah, this is someone who, yeah, I mean, I keep saying that he's sort of, like, eminently relatable, but it's like, yeah, this is someone who, I don't know, has been through just an incredible amount of trauma in a way that's like very easily sort of digestible to like regular people.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, very obvious trauma. And like, you know, yeah, I don't know. It's. I really hope that that, that that really does actually translate it into resources for mental health resources because... I do too. I feel like as well as mental health resources, I hope there are like, you know, financial resources and, you know, like all sorts of other resources as well. Because like dealing with the fallout of, you know, having been in like a cult is incredibly difficult and requires a lot of space and time. And a lot of people are you know

left with like ptsd after that and it'll last for your whole life and that makes you know for a lot of people that makes you know having getting money and doing job things extremely hard especially you know if you're like getting like emotionally like thrown back into that all of the time um so i hope there are like more you know like material resources that are also available in addition to uh sort of like mental health care and therapy things because that's something that i feel like is all too often just not there for people who have been through abuse yeah and i think also there's there's this way in which like like a lot of this like insofar as there's any kind of like support network like in the u.s and this is also true of japan to i maybe a i don't know the japanese welfare state's but yeah, like, there's an extent to which, like,

the sort of, like, last safety net you have is your family. And, you know, like, this is the kind of thing that can very easily cut you off from your family, and that has, you know, I mean, that has emotional consequences, but, like, yeah, that has enormous financial consequences that

really don't, like, I don't know. When I was originally doing research on this, like, I read a lot of sort of, like, people arguing about, like, deprogramming stuff. And it, like, they just didn't talk about, like, that kind of stuff. And it was always just sort of like i don't know struck me as really weird and a sort of like grotesque and detached way to think about it instead of like yeah so yeah it depends on like what type of care it is too because honestly deprogramming is another cult it is yeah another call it's like an anti-cult cult. And, um, it just, you know, it, it re-traumatizes

those who are already traumatized. And honestly, like people who have been deprogrammed sometimes leave, but a lot of the time it just increases their fervor for being part of whatever movement they're a part of already. Um, because they're like, Oh, if this is, you know, like what everybody is going to do to me, if I leave, like, of course I got to stick with this. Cause you know, then like, it's like every, what they've been saying the whole time about, you know like what everybody's gonna do to me if i leave like of course i gotta stick with this because you know then like it's like every what they've been saying the whole time about you know being persecuted and like hurt and stuff then becomes true right yeah i guess that's the thing i would say about like uh that's my disclaimer about deprogramming uh and though the collective we are a part of is called deprogramming imperialism that is because the only thing that needs to be deprogrammed really is imperialism and not people because that's not how that works

yeah deradicalization requires a lot of trust a lot of time a lot of space a lot of reflection it's not something that you know you can just like go and like lock somebody in a basement for two weeks and then like try to make them leave whatever movement they're part of. That's just abuse. Yeah, I think like... I don't know. I think it's... As an industry, it's not as powerful as it used to be, but I think like...

I don't know. There's a sense in which it's sort of like... I don't know. It almost has like civil war logic where it's like both sides need the other side as sort of their like reason to exist yeah and you know so like in both you know on both both both sides are traumatizing people and both sides need like like they're specifically fighting over the same like group of people and each of them can sort of like offer the other side as like oh hey this is why we need to exist thing but then it's

like you know like like as with like most civil wars it's like the actual people caught in it don't it's like no you don't actually need you don't want either side of the civil war. You want out. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's definitely, it's definitely one of those like, Oh, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place kind of things.

It's like both options suck. Like, yeah. Like the two party system. Yeah. God. Stalin, Stalin said two good things in his entire entire two things that were like funny in his

entire life one of them was the pope how many divisions does he have and the second one was they're both worse and they're i mean admittedly he was wrong about they're both worse but like yeah that's a that's a that's a real thing that is the basis of all modern politics. Honestly. That is. Honestly. We hate to see. Hate to see it.

Yeah. Yep. On the other hand, though, I don't know, like, I am kind of hopeful about this. I am kind of hopeful about this. Like I am too. It genuinely seems to have like changed. Like at the very least, it's changed the way that the Japanese public like sees and understands this whole thing. And like,

this is the first time I think ever that there, I mean like, you know, like the communist party and stuff have been trying for like years to get people to care about this. Just no one has really cared since like, I don't know, like basically since Japanese left collapse and like the communist party and stuff have been trying for like years to get people to care about this just no one has really cared since like i don't know like basically since japanese left collapsed in like the 70s like nobody's really cared about this and i don't know it it really seems like something like it really seems like this assassination has actually changed something

about just sort of like the like just the the way that the japanese politics is being structured right now yeah and i don't know i'm moderately hopeful i would say i am too i mean like the more light that is shed on this i think the better and like unfortunately weird things happened, but, uh, I feel like if there's any chance for some sort of, um, some sort of, you know, across the board or even in certain areas, just specifically any sort of like, uh, justice that the amount of public attention on this now is, you know, potentially something that could help bring something like that about. So I, I don't, it's been, it's been like sort of a weird ride for, for us X members with all of that,

just sort of like re-traumatizing to see everything happen. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of us are hopeful that things can change now that people know about it. Because, you know, before that, it wasn't something that was ever really talked about. Groups like this thrive on this sort of weird combination of like operating in the shadows. And also when they show up, it's through their own pr stuff yeah yep and you know sometimes the best way to break that apparently is you shoot someone who was like you you you shoot a guy who they who was working for them and yeah i don't know i mean I mean, yeah, I feel like Yamagami sort of managed to at least, you know, he did a thing and it has had sort of probably some of the impact that he imagined it would. So I don't know. from what I've read of his stuff like I think this went better than he expected it like it could have possibly

have gone like he seemed like really really sort of just like had abandoned all hope and I don't know I mean like I guess the other thing that I really hope out of this comes out of

this is that like you don't have to have people like destroying their lives a second time in sort of like just out of the incredible desperation of what they've been through right yeah preventing any of that would be optimal yeah yeah because the you know the more that the longer the unification church operates the more people will be abused and the more violence will come out of it like maybe this is the most high profile like recent bit of violence that's come out of the movement uh but it's not unprecedented in any way so you know yeah it's like that's what happens when people are abused yeah and i'm

and i think it's also worth just sort of like reminding people that one of the sort of so the church is sort of splintered into various factions um yeah a lot of the people well okay a trump trump gave a speech at like the at an event of the mainline church uh a bunch of like so one of the other guys like one of the other splinter factions had a bunch of people at january 6th so rod of iron ministries or yeah uh sanctuary church and those are those are the guys who had the uh the uh ar-15 gun blessing ceremony a few years ago that made the rounds where they wore bullet crowns and their robes and they had the guns and uh they've also got land in in pennsylvania and tennessee and also in waco texas where they're basically preparing people

for war with what sean moon has described as something akin to the globalist deep state marxists uh i don't know if those are his exact words but it was something like that uh so they're you know like they're they have an active militia they are preparing for war that is what the rod of iron is for them that is the gun um yeah and these these if i remember my my stuff on this right this is the fashion that owns car arms right yes they do yeah yeah so they have a gun manufacturer now okay like if robert were here robert would probably start quibbling with me about how good like the quibbling with me about the actual quality of the weapons they produce but like okay they have them they have they they they they have a weapons manufacturing base, which is terrifying.

Yeah, and they make the Trump gun because, of course, they're all super pro-Trump, very, like, patriot. A lot of QAnon overlap there. And actually, Rod of Iron Ministries in Japan has been helping organize QAnon events. in in japan has been helping organize q anon events um and yeah so like there was also and so basically the relationship between rod of iron and the mainline you see is super tense uh sean moon and a couple of his other brothers basically want their mother dead and who is she's the you know the head of the mainline church right now. And not just dead, but specifically beheaded. So there was an event recently over the summer, I think it was the end of June, where Sean was... Gosh, I forget where he was in Japan.

But basically, he was sort of like railing at the audience for supporting his mother, Hawk Jahan. Uh, and then when people spoke up in defense of her, they were literally like physically thrown out of the room. Um, it was super intense.

Yeah. There's, there's footage of it. It is. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a really fucking intense moment.

yeah. And he's like, they're saying she had like sex with a demon or something like that and had fallen and all of this you know got like i don't know sometimes i i watch a bit of the guy's speeches just because i'm like i want to know what the fuck they're up to yeah um and at first of all it seems like he might do a lot of cocaine which would not be unprecedented given the moonies and all of their drug smuggling and shit. What was his name? Oh god, I'm blanking on the name.

One of his other sons was literally spending a shell corporation's net income amount per month on cocaine at one point like was that hyojin possibly i think i think it was yeah yeah i think it was yeah and he's also enormous abusive piece of shit uh yeah yeah uh it sucks huh yeah people are all well okay that's not true the people who are still actively involved in the church and who didn't break themselves out and flee, like, the first opportunity they got are, like, enormous pieces of shit. Yeah, I mean, because, like, even at the end of the day, if they're not specifically doing anything that, like, directly harms somebody, they're giving money to these institutions that do and to people who do and giving them support and you know reinforcing all of that shit and then you know most of them are just

shitty in general too I also like specifically also about like yeah there were a couple of people who like got forcibly married into the family who left. I do not want people to get the impression that I think they're bad because they're not.

Like, they got... Yeah, really horrible stuff happened to them. They were able to escape, and that's good. But also, Jesus Christ. Yeah. christ like oh yeah yeah and that's the thing that it's like sometimes hard to talk to like you know childhood friends or my family who's still involved um because i feel like it's like you know if you're supporting this group you're implicitly supporting fascism and murder and death squads and rape and all of these awful things um and you know a lot of members don't know

that those bits of history about the church um but if anyone who is listening is in the uc i would definitely say to look those things up because they are all over the place yeah okay so specifically yeah i'll read inside the league by scott and lee anderson i okay i i i i i will say this yeah they're it is kind of hard to read because these people are journalists they're not normally book authors and the idea of starting at the beginning of a story and then moving through to the end of it is like an entirely foreign concept to them so it is constantly jumping around between 16 million things but yeah there is a lot of there's a lot of very good stuff in there yeah it's a an incredible resource i would also suggest uh reading uh the there's like

a uh a bunch of articles that robert parry uh did from his consortium news about the uc and like stuff back in the day on it um i would also say check out how well do you know your moon uh yeah that's another great resource has a lot of uh you know like links and direct uh citations of a bunch of documents and shit uh all good stuff uh also i would plug uh john gorenfeld's book um oh it's called uh it's bad moon rising bad moon rising yes yes yeah john is great he yeah it's it's another really good book on that um yeah i think a new edition came out like very recently yeah so i think he has it actually a pdf of it or something for free on his website um yeah uh and then another book i would

suggest is uh gifts of deceit about the tong park scandal and Korea gate. Another good one. God. Yeah. The thing about the mood is like, there's just like entire, like there's entire genres of like crime that they do that. Like doesn't even like make most accounts of them because they're doing too much other crime

yeah literally there's just so much crime to for there they've just done so much that it's hard to keep track of everything yeah and they literally have a million shell corporations and they literally do things under different names and in different places and then different types of atrocities that it's like how are you supposed to keep up with all this? That's why they do it that way, because you're not supposed to. Yeah, I mean, it is. I don't know. Figuring out how intelligence operations work is easier than trying to untangle this shit. Like that, that stuff was, you know, a little more on the nose. It's like, oh yeah, clearly this is like a joint psychological operation and other like, you know, back channels for money and trafficking things and people and stuff. But then it's like, oh God, what company owns what and how much do they make?

And like, where do they move their money around? It's just like, I don't know. That's that side is like, how do I navigate this? Yeah. I am extremely fortunate to be a part of a group of people who's working on this stuff now. You know, we're going to what we're going to try to do is sort of make like a Unification church wikipedia kind of thing uh so that we have like all of it in one place and then you know potentially down the line maybe do like a people's history of the unification church or something like that yeah but in the meantime

we're just compiling a bunch of information yeah are there ways people can support you and also can support deprogramming imperialism in this, the work you all have been doing. Yeah. So I have a Patreon. Uh, it's Elisa Majub, A L I S A M A H J O U B. Uh, you can follow me on Twitter at Elisa underscore Majub, same spelling,

uh, deprogramming imperialism has a Twitter. Uh, it is since deprogramming imperialism was not, it was too long to put in as a username. The one we are using is nomorecults, which is

no underscore more underscore cults. And then we have a Instagram as well under deprogramming imperialism, I believe. Let me double check. And we will, we will put links to all this stuff in the show notes. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Cool. Cool.

Yeah. It's do programming imperialism. Just, just together, together words. Sorry. My brain is just not working. The words are smashed together. There's no space. There we go. I did it. Yeah, well, I think that's going to be all for us today. Thank you so, so much for joining us. today um thank you so so much for joining us thank you for having me i really appreciate this and hopefully you know this will just have help more people to sort of like understand what's going on there and sort of the history of the uc and uh as well as you know maybe shine some light on the abe assassination and uh you know the more people who know about this the better i think um so i really appreciate being on here because you guys have a pretty big platform so that means a lot to me yeah and i'm

i'm really i'm really really glad that that you came on for this because i don't know like it's it's really like it's really easy to like cover stuff like this and just never actually sort of like get to the human like the actual human impact of it yeah yeah and so yeah i'm really glad i was able to talk to you thank you i yeah i'm glad i was able to talk to you because that it was fun it was fun it was informative and um getting the word out we're doing it we're doing the thing yeah yeah feels good welcome i'm daniel won't you join me at the fire and dare. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where Garrison Davis is fine with violence against dogs. Yeah, right as you said that, Anderson barked, by the way. Wow. Wow. Cancelable. Cancelable.

Deathly allergic to dogs. But they love you so much. So if people were going to pick an assassination method for me, just get a whole bunch of dog dander and rub it on my pillow, and I'll be dead the next morning. I've seen you get rubbed on by a bunch of dogs, and you've never died yet.

No. Yeah, that's true. You get uncomfortable, and you have to use your inhaler, but I just ignore that. You get uncomfortable, and you have to use your inhaler. Robert's like, that's great. I'm super thrilled with that outcome. You know what other outcome I'm thrilled with?

Oh, good. Great intro. Sick transition. So we are talking about the assassination of Alexanderlexander duken's daughter hell yes it's it's a it's a it's kind of a wild story there's a lot of weird things going on we still don't know much about what actually happened um there's a lot of conflicting theories a lot of experts who are saying different quote unquote experts who are saying different things uh quote unquote experts, who are saying different things. It's wild. But I have a little write-up here that we're going to go through based on what I assume

everyone's questions will be about this assassination. First thing, probably before we get into Alexander Dugan's daughter, I guess it's probably worth clarifying who Alexander Dugan is. Because to understand the nature of this assassination and possible motives, it's important to know who he is as a person. So I know we've talked about Dugin on the show before, kind of briefly, but Alexander Dugin is a Russian traditionalist,

neo-fascist political theorist. Some people call him a philosopher. I think that's being a little generous. That's so many fun things in a row in that description. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was, uh, born in 1962 into a high ranking military family and a Dugan spent his early

years as an anti-communist dissident in the collapsing Soviet union. He joined various, a dissident, ultra nationalist, occult, anti-Semitic, and fascist groups or collectives that sprung up during the last two decades of the Soviet Union. In the 90s, he was one of the founders of the Russian National Bolshevik Party, which he left in the late 90s because the party was not fascist enough. So he left the political party, he helped start because it had too many of the Bolshevik parts of the National Bolshevik Party. He kind of carries on some of the traditionalist political philosophy from 20th century esoteric fascist writers like Julius Savola,

whose book on pagan imperialism, Dugan, translated into Russian. Just as a brief bit of context for people, now, you know, fascism and communism are portrayed as in strict opposition to each other. But if we're going back to the 20s and 30s, a lot of these guys had a lot of things in common. There were times where the Communist Party of Germany and the Nazis would fight the cops together. There were people in the Nazi Party who were more or less national Bolsheviks in terms of their political outlook. Yeah.

And they were all murdered on the Night of Long Knives. Like the Nazi Party had a left wing that it purged. Anyway, this is just like this is not coming out of nowhere. This isn't a new development. Well, and the thing with Dugin is that he really is, does carry on that type of red-brown alliance idea with a lot of his politics of bringing together some of the more harder fascists with some people who are more like authoritarian communists. And we see that with the National Bolshevik Party. At this point, Dugin is probably most known for his influence on contemporary Russian politics, the neo-Eurasianism ideology, his writing on the multipolar world theory, and his fourth political theory about the ascension of Russia as the world's traditionalist political power,

and usurping the kind of political dominance of the United States. Dugin's Neo-Eurasianism is described by Anton Shakhoslav, an Eastern European far-right scholar, as, quote, a form of fascist ideology centered on the idea of revolutionizing the Russian society and building a totalitarian, Russian-dominated Eurasian empire that would challenge and eventually defeat its eternal adversary represented by the United States and its Atlanticist allies, thus bringing about a new golden age of global political and cultural illiberalism. Unquote. of global political and cultural illiberalism unquote so it's it's very centered in just being against the ideas of liberalism and being against like globalist liberalism like actual like globalization um and still carrying over a lot of influences from esoteric writers like julia savola in terms of like it's anti-modern anti-liberal uh politics based in like traditional anti-multicultural right like this yeah yeah

yeah a lot of if you've ever seen someone screaming about like globo homo or something like that's probably one of these guys yeah and that that dugan's daughter actually in her last ever interview talks about that a little bit and we're global homo yes no this is yeah like the like like there's there's there's a lot of people in the u.s who like see this shit and like mistake it for anti-imperialism and it's like basically because like they've lost the ability to like conceive of an empire that isn't the u.s britain or france and even that sort of tenuous and it's like guys like from a lot of these questionable accounts you get the attitude that like well only the united states is capable of being imperialism which is then just then just

say you're anti-us just say you're anti the united states because you're not anti-imperialism because let me tell you something there's been a lot of empires in history controversial statement from robert evans yeah quite quite a few different empires over time they are not all america probably worth like pointing out that russia as it exists is an empire right it's just a contiguous one it's it's one that that joined by land, not separated by seas, doesn't stop it being an empire. Yes. As we can see with them trying to expand into Ukraine, which is heavily influenced itself by some of the theory that Dugin was writing from the 90s up until now. And then kind of in reference to Dugin's influence on contemporary russian politics especially since russia's so far failed invasion of ukraine dugan is often referred to as quote-unquote putin's brain

or quote-unquote putin's rasputin um and while he is certainly very well connected and has and and while he is certainly well connected and has quite a bit of influence in Russia and the global far-right movement in general, the degree to which he holds significant power in the decisions that Putin makes is definitely heavily contested among actual political experts. We think some of the whole Putin's brain and Putin's like Rasputin thing is a little bit overemphasized sometimes Dugin's never held office Dugin Dugin's never we don't even have a picture of Dugin and Putin

together like we don't even know if they've actually like been in the same room we don't know if they're the same person yes Dugin and Putin are the same person yes that's correct, Chris. The thing that is important to know about Putin as regards Dugan, because again, as Garrison said,

not trying to make a statement here about the degree to, like saying that he is or is not any kind of influence, but Vladimir Putin has been doing this, has been working towards where he is now for decades and is a guy who has had a view of the world for decades that he's worked towards making real. And it's not a view of the world that you need to be, Dugan's an esotericist. You do not need to think esoterically to understand what Vladimir Putin is doing.

He wants to reunite the Russian imperial project that fell apart when the Soviet Union did, to reunite the Russian imperial project that fell apart when the Soviet Union did, using violence and whatever other means he can do, which is why he's gone, done what he's done in Georgia. It's why he's done doing what he's doing in Ukraine. This is not like complicated. Understanding Putin's motivations is not hard. You know, I think a lot of people have kind of leaned into that Putin's brain thing, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, because in Dugin's seminal 1997 book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin lays out his vision to divide the world up

and calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances, while all in heavy opposition to Ukraine as a sovereign state. And a lot of Dugin's writing has been about trying to reconquer Ukraine and absorb it into Russia. Yeah, and he's a useful guy. But yeah, again, sorry. In an article from The Guardian that I was using for... It's one of the sources for this episode.

They claim that the Foundations of Geopolitics was a very popular book in the Russian General Staff Academy, and kind of was one of the things that shifted Dugin from like a weird esoteric dissident to actually becoming a more influential and prominent pillar of the conservative establishment inside Russia. As Dugan's writing evolved, started to emphasize less the more esoteric elements, his writing did get more popular in Russia. But at this point, he is stronger as a symbol, less so than having actual personal influence over decision-making.

You know what does have influence over your decision making? They have influence over your decision making. The subliminal messages that we've been placing inside our ads for the past three years that leads, that has been an esoteric project of my

design to influence you to buy these products and services. That's right, James. I'm trying to. I think we have a couple of different esoteric projects. I'm not sure what y'all says. I'm trying to get people to bring the Subaru Baja back. That was the Subaru car that had a little truck bed in the back.

It was the Subaru car slash truck. Oh my god. I was going to combine car and truck into one word, but I realized where that was taking me. It is a cuck. It is a cuck it's my second favorite cuck um yeah why don't they call it the subaru cuck and i would buy one immediately yeah the subaru cuck yeah yeah please buy please buy a subaru cuck. Enjoy these adverts. And we're back. All right.

So let's, I think it's now actually time to talk about the, the actual casualty, this assassination, which is not Alexander Dugan. It is instead Daria Dugina. Daria dead Gina, more like it. Yes. So she was, she was, Uh, Daria Dedgina, more like it. Yes. Because she's... Because she's dead, Garrison. She was born on December 15th, 1992.

Wow. Daria herself was a Russian journalist and far-right activist who was very vocal in support of the... Let's put journalist in quotes there. Well, I mean, yeah, she did work for a number of journalism outlets, not only in Russia, including in France. Like, she did work for a number of journalism outlets, not only in Russia, including in France. She was a journalist. She did work. It wasn't very good. She's a bad person. But she worked for a few French outlets. She was very vocal in support of the invasion of Ukraine in accordance with her father's political theories. She studied at the Moscow State University,

specializing in the political philosophy of late Neoplatonism. So you already know she's going to be really annoying. If anyone even tries to describe that degree program to me, I might hit them. Like, absolutely no. We have in that one sentence alone laid out justification for

assassination. Okay, come on. I think that's a bit too far. No, I'm gonna say right now, I bought property with land so that when people say the word Neoplatonism around me, I can get rid of the body.

So, here's some fun facts about uh about daria um she played the flute um she was she was in her she was in a band i think in college uh called dayson may refuse uh which was an electronic music band now um i bet her shit did actually rock it probably did slap um i mean like and this and this was when she was less of a fascist actually um now uh just in terms of something that kind of an interesting note here uh so days in uh translates to uh here being which was which is one of alexander dugan's favorite favorite favorite terms. It's related to the philosophical concepts

exposed by Martin Heidegger. Expoused. Yes. So it's just a little nerdy reference to both her father. I guess she was probably exposed to the phrase via her father, but it's a Heidegger reference. So she named her electronic music band off of off of heidegger if you're in it you need to kill her ghost now which is pretty funny yeah yeah if you're in a band with a

heidegger reference leave that band now but but yeah when she when she was in university her friends say she actually she actually wasn't really into her dad or her dad's politics. Her friends talk about that when she was in university, she really liked Guy Debord. She was interested in some of the more French... Oh, the situationist. Yeah. Guy Debord,

just quickly, is like a lot of popular stuff on the left now, shit like Crime Think, but also stuff like Adbusters is influenced by guy deborah yeah i mean also like the the the french revolution in 18 in uh 1968 why was it 1848 yeah but yeah i was sure to tell you guy deborah was arrived for 120 years yeah and never aged he was also i will say this is a thing a lot of people don't know about Debord, was influential in the development of war games and is part of the intellectual tradition that gave us Warhammer 40,000.

That actually makes a lot of sense. It makes complete sense, yeah. But yeah, so she was into stuff like that inside university. Like situationism. Was she a situationist? Yeah. No. She must have been if she likes to board, right?

I don't think she would have described herself as that. But that was the types of stuff that she liked talking about. And that was the types of groups that she was involved with. She never talked about her father. And her father was already a very popular person at this time, specifically inside russian universities but she she was she did not jive with that type of stuff um and then by by the end of her kind of time in university she started shifting more towards what her friends describe as orthodoxy

um i would say it's like she's just more towards her father's traditionalist stuff i'm not sure what exactly caused this shift to happen um but here's a quote from one of her friends, quote, it was strange, because before that she not shown any interest in him, and her father had no influence on her. And that's strange. It's so yeah, something by the by the end, she by the by the end of her time in university, and she got, and by the time she was out of university, she actually just became an activist with the international Eurasianism movement of Dugan, and began to arrange lectures for her father, and became a very active supporter of his. And then after that, she started writing for state-run news outlets like RT and running parts of her father's website, where she was then listed as his press secretary and started to appear at the events of the Eurasian movement as a speaker as well. So she shifted in the last probably 10, 15 years. Yeah, past like 10 years,

she was shifting more towards her father, even though when she was in her 20s, she was more into some of the French leftist stuff. That doesn't surprise. Number one, it's pretty normal for young people to rebel against their parents in that era and be interested in stuff outside of it. And like, I think there's a couple of different ways this could have gone,

but a thing that makes total sense to me is that she's rebellious. She explores some things. The primary thing she learns is that life out there is hard and like making a living on your own

and completely, like is difficult. And her dad has a lot of influence and she can make a lot of money working for him. And so back she goes. Yep. I don't know.

I don't know the woman. She lost a lot of her friends over this because when she started doing stuff with her dad her friends who are like situations people are like no fuck that we're not gonna hang out with you if you're gonna like yeah it seems like a response yeah it's it's it's kind of actually a bummer like i i only i only i only got to this part of her life um a few days ago when i was doing the research. And this is actually something I stumbled upon later into my research for this episode. Because I was mostly focused on, like, the actual assassination part. And when I found this, I was like, oh, that's actually kind of sad.

Yeah, that is sad. Yeah, I will say, I don't know if this is at work here. But there is a thing in, like like there is a current in the french ultra left like after 68 like going into the 70s and 80s that gets like really fucking weird and kind of goes fascist based around it's it's a long story but there's there's a whole thing about a guy who was like sort of involved in the ultra left circles who was like i i think he'd been in uh he'd been in a concentration camp but he'd been in one of the ones that like wasn't an extermination camp and he started doing like holocaust denial and there's like this whole

fucking thing where like a bunch of these people like great kind of went really like went really fucking weird the rest of people like the rest of the ultra leftist owned them and like they like were kind of involved a bunch of the sort of like the like founding the French neo-fascism so it's not like it's not a path that like has never happened before yeah that's not coming out of nowhere especially when your father is who he is that's not

surprising so when she started so yeah in the past few years she started acting as her father's press secretary scheduling events for him. She was doing more writing on her own in various outlets, including state-run outlets, but also outlets in other countries, but definitely shifting more towards the kind of traditionalist Eurasianism side of politics. Earlier this year, she was sanctioned by both US and UK authorities under accusations

that she was significantly contributing to online disinformation around Russia's invasion. And in an interview just a few months before her death, Daria expressed pride that both she and her father had been targeted by Western sanctions. She kind of wore it as like a badge of honor. Anti-imperialism, that's what it is. In its filing, the UK Office of Financial Sanctions called Dugina a frequent, high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russia invasion of Ukraine

on various online platforms. Cool. And to get a sense of how she actually politically described herself in the months before her death, in an interview from May of 2022, she described herself as, quote, a political observer of the international Eurasianist movement and an expert in international relations. My field of activity is in the analysis of European politics and geopolitics. Okay. It is clear that the globalist movement is over and the end of liberalism has come.

The end of liberal history, unquote. Oh, wow. Backwards Fukuyama. And guess what she thinks is going to replace liberal history. Yeah, I have some theories. It's orthodox, traditionalist, Russian fascism. Yeah. traditionalist russian fascism yeah um she in that same interview she described the war in ukraine as quote a clash between globalist and eurasian civilization unquote i'll let i'll let my

friends in kiev know what they are that's great they'll be excited by that yeah yeah it is it is one of the things that's been sort of interesting to me about this whole thing is like okay so do dugan sort of comes out of like like like Russian national bullshit isn't to some extent, right? But then like, if you look at the propaganda about Ukraine, it's like, okay, these people are all these people are all Nazis, but like, also they're communists and also they're gay. And it's like, thing is like you know do people like dugan and dugina while being absolutely fascists can can pretend to be against nazis for various reasons um dugina definitely uh is and and dugan as well are are pretty homophobic um and they they view gayness as a sign of like degenerate liberalism so like but like they definitely walk that line between the, like, but you know,

that's the thing. A lot of the like red, red, brown Alliance or national Bolshevik type things do is walk that line and how they, how they try to present their, you know, cultural beliefs or too heavily based in traditionalism versus their,

uh, versus their beliefs on like fascism and communism. Um, but anyway, we, uh, let's see. And in, versus their beliefs on fascism and communism. But anyway, let's see. In her last ever interview, which took place on the day of her death, Dugina said that, quote, Western- Just like Biggie, by the way.

I don't know who that is. Oh my God. Oh no! God damn it. Garrison. God damn it. We need to. Oh no! Garrison. God damn it. We need to stop. Everyone needs to stop. Alright, we're doing a biggie episode next.

Garrison, you have your homework for this week. Please come back next week and do better. In her last ever interview, she said that, quote, Western totalitarianism has come to an end, and a special military operation is, it seems to me, the last nail in the coffin of this world hegemon. of a person into a homosexual,

unquote, as well as veganism and freeganism are tools with which the West is trying to fragment society and reduce its population. Freeganism. My friends who dumpster dived so they could buy more drugs 15 years ago were part of

a conspiracy to fragment society. It's not that cocaine was expensive and the fucking Trader Joe's didn't lock its dumpster. It's that, okay, awesome. So yeah, so those were the views that she espoused hours before dying. So talking about the conversion of a person into a homosexual, transgender people,

freeganism as being the things that are destroying the west to be clear all of these things are based and should in fact destroy the west yeah if the if the thing that finally kills capitalism is dumpster diving teens i will be thrilled but i i just don't see it happening uh so before we get to the actual deed, let's set the stage for where this event took place and where everything went down. So it's August 20th, a Saturday. Alexander Dugin and Daria Dugina are attending this festival just outside of Moscow, where Dugin's making a planned appearance at. And he gave a lecture that Saturday evening at this festival.

Now, the festival is called the Tradition, quote-unquote. Tradition is what everything calls it. So, I wonder what the festival's about, huh? I'm sure it's just appreciation of the headline song from the play Fiddler on the Roof. It's best sung by

Zero Mostel. Look it up. Seriously, look it up. It's an incredible performance. That must have been it, right? So the Tradition Festival is billed as a patriotic cultural festival and family event

for art, literature and music lovers. dance no traditional dance this is the lamest thing i've ever heard so it's basically it's it's this traditionalist kind of quasi fascist like art festival for people who like neoplatonism um is what it actually is um it it takes place in Tsarkov manner. It's this big estate about 12 miles away from Moscow. The tradition festival is supported by the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism for the Moscow region,

among a few other kind of sponsors. And both Daria and her father were special guests at this year's festival. In an interview, a colleague of Dugina's said that the conversation topics at the festival between Dugin, his daughter, and other tradition festival attendees, they said this in an interview, quote, we talked about the Russian idea, the empire, and the cultural war, unquote. So that's just like the regular conversations

you're having at this festival to give you a sense of like what this thing actually is. And the blast that did kill Dugin's daughter happened shortly after Dugina left the tradition festival at the estate where her father had given a lecture just hours previous. Do you know who won't blow up?

I don't want to say that. Look, I'm going to say right now, if you are planning to assassinate a member of the dugan family and want spot to sponsor our podcast we're on board i think we're fine with that actually yeah there's a discounted tier for those yeah yeah actually we'll do it for free just give us a name because we are free guns and we're tearing down society this is this is part of our radical freegan identity uh this is this is this is what i'm going to do in between stealing old pumpkin spice coffee from the trader joe's dumpster unbelievable i'm i i will do it i will do a traditionalism to because pumpkin spice coffee is destroying the west we have to kill it yeah robert robert and

daniel fucking love the pumpkin spice It's amazing It's disgusting It's not for me Degenerate liberalism in the form of pumpkin spice coffee Has to end I do not enjoy it in any way shape or form I don't want to yuck you a yum I'm happy that Robert enjoys his coffee Thank you

I would like to yuck you a yum Robert Oh my god Here's an ad break You know what? Yes. We are back. I'm going to open up with a quote from... Oh, I love quotes. From the bomb. Boom.

I don't know what that is. Oh, the bomb? Kablooey, yeah. Mr. Bomb, when you exploded... What's going through your head, then? What are you thinking about? Parts of Daria Degina. We actually...

Great. Too much? No, no, perfect. We're finishing Assassination Week. To actually justify some of our kind of glee at this happening, because Dugan's a horrible person. And so is his daughter. They're both trash. Yeah, fuck them. assassination week to actually to actually justify some of our kind of glee at this happening because dugan's a horrible person i'm gonna read his daughter they're both trash yeah yes i am going

to read a quote from uh peter uh sour in the guardian quote on saturday night the violence that the ultra nationalist russian thinker alexander dugan has propagandized for decades suddenly entered his own life when his daughter was killed in a car bomb on the outskirts of moscow and i think that's a really important thing that like he's made his entire career off of doing violence on other people and and promoting uh like genocides on people that he doesn't like there there are people i know who are dead because of the war that he and his daughter urged to happen. It's the same thing as when every single fucking neocon ghoul dies, no one should feel bad about them at all.

They dedicated their entire lives to having another country be invaded and having all these people kill their lives destroyed. So fuck them. People killed, their lives destroyed. So fuck them. But yeah, the violence that he's fetishized and propagandized for decades has actually entered his life for the first time now. And that's funny. So after giving a talk at the festival,

Dugan and his daughter were due to leave the venue together in the same car. If only. But at the last minute, Dugan decided to travel separately and take different vehicles. He was tipped off by the CIA. According to a friend and family.

Now, because at the last minute he did decide to take another vehicle, this actually has spawned a lot of conspiracy theories. Which we'll kind of get into a bit later, but this is what happened. They were going to leave together and at the last minute they decided to take separate vehicles. theories um which we'll kind of get into it a bit later but but this this is what happened is that they were they were they were going to leave together and at last minute they decided to

take separate vehicles um five minutes later while do you know was driving a toyota land cruiser on the highway oh see now that makes that's a little bit of a tragedy that is a tragedy that's a fine car it didn't deserve to end that way yeah Yeah. Why couldn't it have been a Ford? Robert, sometimes sacrifices are necessary for the cause. I'm going to put that Land Cruiser on a flag. Let's all pour one out for comrade Toyota Land Cruiser. You served us well. You made the ultimate sacrifice.

So that mankind might be free to go off-roading. So as she was driving this Toyota Land Cruiser on the highway, a bomb exploded in her car, killing her immediately and sadly ripping the vehicle apart. Witnesses say debris was thrown all over the road as the toyota land cruiser immediately lost control and crashed into a fence and engulfed in flames no there's incredible stuff yeah i mean a really solid assassination it is it's one of the better executed ones especially for a car bomb.

Yeah, for a car bomb. It's one of the most impressive car bomb attacks that has ever happened. Yeah, I haven't recently seen a car bomb that's... Yeah. That car bomb killed nobody but yeah, that was quite a car bomb. It was a big boom.

We thought that fucker was an airstrike at first. Yeah, that was a large carbon. So eyewitnesses called the fire brigade, but by the time they arrived, the entire car was up in flames and firefighters only found one badly burnt corpse in the remains of the vehicle. So investigators say an explosive device planted under the car went off and the vehicle caught fire.

This happened about 12 miles west of Moscow near the village of... Oh, boy. You don't need to try that. Nobody needs to know. Bolshar... Valim... Valzemy. Valzemy?

Valzemy. Okay. Valzemy. Near the village of Bolshar Velzimi at around 9.30pm local time investigators do believe the bombing was quote premeditated and

oh really wasn't one of those casual spur of the moment guys just walking down the street with a bomb see Stugina driving her why not she didn't buy the explosive edition guys just walking down the street with a bomb see Stugina driving hmm why not it wasn't a vehicle error

this was a bomb there was a bomb planted under no no absolutely not a Ford or a Chevy a Pinto sure yeah if a fucking F-150 goes up like that I'm blaming Ford but no this must have been a bombing.

So the bomb was placed under the car on the driver's side. Now, a friend of the family named Andrei Krasnov, who's also the head of the Russia Horizon social movement, was one of the first ones to confirm the reports of Daria's death, but also said that the bomb could have actually been intended for her father. was one of the first ones to confirm the reports of Daria's death, but also said that the bomb could have actually been intended for her father. And he gave this quote to media, quote, this was the father's vehicle.

Daria was driving another car, but she took his car today while Alexander went in a different way. He returned, he was at the site of the tragedy. As far as I understand, Alexander or probably them together were the target unquote. Now this is, this is just speculation actually. From what I can tell, there is actually more evidence suggesting the car was indeed registered to

Daria Dugina. I, we, I, I don't believe it is her father's car. There was some of the vehicle registration was leaked by a Russian opposition

news site in Russia who is not state funded. It leaked the car registration. It was registered to Daria, not Alexander Dugin. But it is very likely that Dugan may have been a target as well. Like, extremely likely. It's hard to say. Now, in one of the

funniest parts of the assassination, footage posted on Telegram appears to show Mr. Dugan walking up to the site of the crash and in shock with his mouth just gaping open and hands on his head like he's in this surprised meme face. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. He's walking up to the site of the crash

like, oh! It's very funny. That is the sound of the face he's walking up to the side of the crash like oh it's very that is that is that that's the sound of the face he's making is oh um we we love to see a wizard in distress uh so sad wizard so the attack happened on Saturday, and then come Monday, the Federal Security Service, or the FSB, said that the murder has been solved come the next Monday. And this is not true. This is what we call a lie. From the FSB.

Yes. That's really disappointing. An untruth, yeah. Wow. From the RussianB. Yes. That's really disappointing. An untruth. Yeah, that's... Wow. From the Russian FBI. No. No. No intelligence services ever told a lie.

They're not... That's disappointing. So, yes. According to the FSB, the attack was mastermind by the Ukrainian secret services and carried out by an Azov Ukrainian national

named Natalia Volk who fled to... Oh, Volk! Last name Volk. Yeah, we're pinning the crime on Johnny Racist. Volk. Oh, Volk. Wow. Last name Volk. Yeah. Yeah, we're pitting the crime on Johnny Racist. Keith Hitlerfan did it again.

Who fled to Estonia. Estonia. That's Estonia. Estonia following the killing. So Russia's FBS did a very brief investigation. FSB. Yes, sorry. Um, so Russia, Russia's FBS did a very brief investigation. Yes. Sorry. Russia, Russia's FSB did a very brief investigation, claimed that it was this female Ukrainian

citizen, um, and that, and that, uh, she fled the next day, which was Sunday. Uh, Ukraine says, uh, nah, uh, not really. Um, yeah, that is basically mean basically you do that ukraine has made uh so yeah ukraine's really good at that noise actually it's one of those things i i would not be surprised obviously if ukraine did it and they have the people responsible or some of their network are still in country of course you you make a a denial but if ukraine did it and they were out of the country i can't imagine why they wouldn't be like, yeah, man, we fucking did it. We're at war.

I'll read the actual statement. So a Ukrainian official dismissed the accusations of Ukraine's involvement in the incident. do with this because we are not a criminal state which is the russian federation and even less a terrorist state said uh michelio podialak uh who is an advisor to president uh zielinski so yeah i mean maybe ukraine obviously denies involvement in this um there's a bunch of people it could be could be ukraine could be the cia could be the CIA. It could be Ukraine and the CIA. It could be the FSB or the GRU. A lot of people have theorized all of those things. Yeah, there's really no way to know. A lot of people could have done this.

Are we going to get into the person who detonated the bomb or the car they used driving behind? We don't know what actually happened i'm going to get to some of this a bit later but some of the actual mechanisms that caused it to happen are still unclear because the because the fsb has not like given us any definitive evidence on how this thing actually worked but the head of the uh the donetsk People's Republic, they issued their own statement on Telegram saying, vile villains, the terrorists of the Ukraine. Scoundrels.

So they're just doing a Cobra Commander. That's awesome. You know what? Vile villains, the terrorists of the Ukrainian regime trying to eliminate Alexander Dugin, blew up his daughter in a car. We cherish the memory of Daria. She is a real Russian girl. That's their statement.

I love that they end it with, she was a real Russian girl. As if that makes it worse. That like if they'd blown her up some other way it would not have been as vile but in a car i just love that they end it with she was a real russian girl yeah yeah it's like pinocchio it's very funny so some some politicians and experts quote-unquote experts have said that himself may have orchestrated the bombing with little to no evidence in support of that theory there was a british member of parliament said that putin may have targeted dugan over recent criticisms made against his government which i find to be very uh yeah putin's gotten rid of a shitload of guys who used to be close to him lately and he didn't use car

bombs for yeah he pushed about windows yeah they commit suicide they get sick you know yeah a lot of uh many historians or like you know extremism kind of researchers are definitely kind of eyeing up the the fsb um sure it's you know it's but it's it's really it's it's really unclear there was um uh people proposed that like this this attack was orchestrated to kind of create a wave of needed anger in russia six months into their failed invasion yeah how'd that work for them ruslan a trad a security researcher in the in the u.s think tank atlantic council proposed that uh the the uh the fsbB or other Russian state kind of apparatuses could have been involved, saying that's evident

that the murder of Dugina created a wave of needed anger in Russia and that, quote, Dugin is now mostly a symbol, not an instrument for the state. His role in the creation of current Kremlin mythology for Eurasia and the so-called Russian world has already ended

and he can be sacrificed currently the russian army needs victories and a patriotic flame so they're kind of he's proposing that he was it was like this like symbolic sacrifice that like if we sacrifice this figure that means this thing people will be willing to like keep on fighting the ukrainians literally have literally bombed and struck inside russia at this point and killed 50 000 plus of their children you would think that would be enough to make the russians angry like blowing up this weirdo's daughter isn't going to be the thing that galvanizes the nation well to be clear though this is the kind of dumb shit the atlantic

council would be advocating for yes absolutely stupid atlantic council shit yes yeah and now one of the one of the funnier explanations that our theories being posited is by former russian state deputy uh ilia ponomorov um who is now uh in in so in an appearance on his Russian language opposition TV channel in Kiev, alleged that Dugino was killed by Russian partisans from a previously unknown anti-Putin terrorist group dubbed the National Republican Army, and that both Dugin and his daughter were targets. And according to this guy, the group authorized him to issue their manifesto via his telegram channel um and this group is entirely made up this is not real this is this is like this like this like it's like former russians this is like this this former russian official

turned this like ukrainian lib guy who claims that it's this secret anti-putin liberal terrorist group no that contacted him and and secret this was this was their first ever attack that's good that they're going public as this new terrorist group and i'm gonna i'm gonna say this is the only one of these theories that is abs that i don't believe. Like, this assassination is a lot like what happened to Epstein, where everyone who brings up a theory has some other reason for having that theory, and so I don't trust anything anyone says about it.

But every theory about how he might have died is plausible, right? Like, all of these are plausible. Yeah, I don't care what the Atlantic Council has to say, but yeah, it could have been the FSB. I don't care about what the Russian Council has to say, but yeah, it could have been the FSB. I don't care about what the Russian government has to say, but yeah, it could have been the Ukrainians. But definitely was not liberal terrorist groups first bombing.

No, this is the thing. What if the single thing where you can instantly tell that someone is lying about what happened in a bombing is when they say a previously unknown group like this happens constantly it's so hard to bomb things yeah yeah like so um sergey samleny is a german political uh expert with particular focus on russia and eastern europe yeah he definitely has made a lot of statements talking about how Kremlin's version of events is definitely, he says, totally fake and absolutely out of the scale of possibility in terms of blaming it on this, this one Ukrainian Azov fighter who infiltrated Russia. And well, well, so the FSB has produced, quote unquote, evidence in support of this theory

of saying that this Ukrainian citizen who arrived in Russia in July with her daughter rented an apartment in the same building as Dugina's and spied on her. Easy time to enter Russia as a Ukrainian, by the way, July of this year. Yes. With your child. With your child. With your child, rented an apartment in the same building as Dugan's daughter, so specifically as Dugan's daughter, and spied

on her in like the month before the killing. The FSB released a purported passport photo of the Ukrainian citizen, as well as footage that allegedly showed her in Russia, with many people, including Ukrainian officials and kind of data analysts and like disinformation researchers, pointing out the well as a footage that allegedly showed her in russia with many people including ukrainian officials and kind of data analysts and like disinformation researchers pointing out the

various ways that the document seems forged or digitally fabricated um and some laney also says that this national republican army group is completely made up uh because like there's there's no way that there could be a terrorist group like this who's like an actual group active that's not infiltrated by the by the fsb right now um just like he's like you're not like not like people can do individual acts of terrorism but to have like a like a big group like this comprised of like former russian officials he's like that's just impossible it's just, that's just impossible. That's just not, that's just not going to happen. Yeah. No, I agree with all of that. Honestly, one reason why someone involved in the Russian security state is plausible

is because this was such a good bombing. It was very good. It's, I'm leaning, whoever it is, because the CIA is also like, I'm leaning towards... It's a state actor. Because fucking bombs are hard to make. They almost...

Close to 0% of the time when an independent terrorist group makes a bomb does it work the way it's meant to. And this wasn't even ignition-based. This blew up as she was driving on the highway. In a remote area. people have theorized it was yeah like it could it could have been like heat activated it's it could have had like a timer based on ignition stuff but like whatever mechanism that got to blow that got it to blow up

is more complicated than your average car bomb and it was way more successful than your average car bomb so it's like it's it's bizarre how good they were at doing this. Yeah. And like, I think it's worth mentioning, like, okay. Like there was a time where you could just,

if you needed to make up car bomb, like you could hire a guy who would teach you how to make a car bomb. Like we don't live in that era anymore. Like, like in the seventies, you could plausibly do that. Right. Although if that's the kind of training you want to offer for people to help try to take out Alexander, again, sponsor our podcast.

Yeah, our podcast sponsored by Becca Valley 2, Becca Harder. one source here that the FSB claimed that the bomb was either made of or equivalent to 500 grams of TNT, which is what? No, that seems like a bit much. Which is complete bullshit.

That's like what you'd use in Oregon to get rid of a whale. But that's just one of the statements that the FSB has made on this, that it's 500 grams of TNT, which is just not true. That's just not how bombs work. So now we're going to close off here by talking about the aftermath and the televised funeral, because it's kind of funny.

So family, friends, dozens of colleagues and acquaintances of Daria Dugina got together live on TV on the, the Tuesday after, after, after her death to bid their final farewell to the quote unquote journalist killed in the car bomb attack outside of Moscow.

That's quoting from TASS, one of the, one of the Russian state-funded media outlets. I'm going to read a quote from Alexander Dugin, who, this is something he said on the televised funeral, quote, she had no fear, really. And the last time we talked was at the festival Tradition. She said, Daddy, I feel like a warrior.

I feel like a hero. I want to be with my country. I want to be on the light side of the force. She's with a lot of Russian people now. She's with about 50,000 or so other Russians right now. I just love that, like, do you think that his daughter walked up to her and said, Daddy, I want to be on the light side of the force. She's, like, in her mid-30s.

Like, what the fuck? I mean, a significant chunk of her body mass was converted into light. I just said that. I don't know. I just think it's a really funny thing that Dugan was saying on the televised funeral. It's just a bizarre quote. He also said that he wanted to bring up his daughter the way that he saw the ideal person to be saying, quote,

the first words that we taught her as a child were Russia, our state, our people, and our empire, unquote. Which again, none of this is true. Like, he's just bullshitting, but it's just like a weird thing to say at your daughter's

funeral. Nah, you gotta look, look, he got a daughter, it's like any other kind of investment, right? Like, and since she's been exploded, you gotta get as much as you can. Like, really, it's like wringing out a towel, you know? You gotta just get as much as you can. Like really, it's like wringing out a towel, you know,

uh, you, you gotta just make that last little bit count. And then, uh, Vladimir Putin, uh, a few days after, after the assassination signed a decree to,

uh, to award her with the order of courage post posthumously. So she, she did, she did explode courageously. So she, she did, she did explode courageously. So yeah, that is, that, that's the assassination of Dugan's daughter. It's wild because we don't really actually know. We don't, we don't really know who actually did it.

We don't know much about the actual event. We're unsure of the actual, the actual, like ignition of the bomb, how the bomb actually operated, who actually did it. I mean, obviously, whether Dugan himself was a target or was specifically Daria Dugina. Now, obviously, this was heavily planned based off of her and Dugan's schedule, right? Because they were both openly going to be this yeah but that's cultural festival anyone could have access to yeah yeah but like you know like it it did require like you know people were tracking their movements being like oh dugan's gonna be at this festival on this day um so like

it's there is a lot of like background work that went into this and it's fascinating that we just we actually know very little about who who may have done this and how and how the bomb actually um operated the primary clue we have is just how good the bomb was which which means one way or the other a nation state actor probably but that does not really narrow it much so yeah that was uh that was again one of the assassinations that happened shortly after we planned assassination week yeah yeah yeah i feel like oh my god after it's what like man like it easily our most successful pr campaign yeah one of our best bits today it's it's just so wild to think of like how close dugan was to dying because remember like he he was planning to leave in

that same car and then at the last minute decided to take separate vehicles. So was he behind her when it went off? Yeah, yeah. That's why we got that great photo. Of him walking up to the site. Ooh! Yeah, we should point this out too. If it had actually been 500 grams of TNT,

that bomb would have still been exploding when he walked up to it. We would have a picture of him going, oh god and then just his face would explode but no i mean like a lot of conspiracy theories have popped up being like well dugan was supposed to be in that car and then he left last minute maybe he was in on it maybe like maybe you know the russian state told him this was gonna happen and he and he just let it happen and it was doing it for like this pr thing and And who knows? Maybe Dugan did know that this was going to happen.

There's no way to – you're just speculating at that point. You're just creating theories in your own head. But it is kind of funny that Dugan almost was in that car and then wasn't. And that is at the very least an interesting aspect of this assassination um but it's no evidence for one specific thing right yeah it could just be like oh i i'm gonna make a stop somewhere on my way back home right like so i'm gonna take this i'm gonna take this other vehicle like there's so many other possible reasons for why he may have switched cars um but it is it's it's another it is another like thing to that that the people are are turning into various theories yeah the thing i'll say

about that is like you have to have a lot of faith in your bomb maker to drive behind a car bomb like intentionally like you've got to be really like and i i don't know either that or you really hate your daughter in a way that's very reckless. Yeah, but you could just like turn off the highway or something or like, oh no, my car broke down. No, you need to make sure that bitch goes down. Driving right behind.

You gotta drop her. You gotta press the big plunger into the box. Yeah. Well, at least we're ending on a high note. Yeah, after, after, after. Yeah.

I do like that we started we started Assassination Week with a car bomb started we started assassination week with a car bomb yeah and we're ending it with a car bomb 500 grams of tnt she declared the nearest church no doubt it's like poetry it's like poetry it rhymes and i want to be on the light side of the force quote fine one of the according to dugan one of the last things daria dugan said i want to be on the light side of the force. Somebody, if there were real journalists left in the world, somebody would reach out to George Lucas and just try to get a quote. And you're not, don't email him.

It's like, just go to a mall near Skywalker Ranch and wait until he goes to the Sparrow. You'll find him. All right, we're done. That does it for us today uh check under your driver's side uh door if you're alexander dugan imagine imagine if he wasn't like if

if if he wasn't involved or wasn't aware of this he is going to be looking over his shoulder like non-stop now yeah it's a man who's never getting into a car he hasn't like shimmied under he's gonna have to look under every car he gets into it's awesome. This is a man who's never getting into a car he hasn't like shimmied under. He's gonna have to look under every car he gets into. It's so funny. We love to

see it. Anyway, ta-ta. Alright, we're done. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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