It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 56

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

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You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello and welcome to It Could Have Been Here. This is Shereen, and today is going to be the start of a little series about Libya. Why Libya, you may ask? Well, I wanted to learn about Libya. So selfishly, I thought, why not record myself learning about Libya? And maybe y'all can learn along with me. I think there are so many countries right now that are in a state of unrest or turmoil or instability. And it's really important to know how we got here, know what those countries went through to reach this state of unpredictability

and unease. So we're going to start with Libya today. There are so many other countries I want to do this with, but I really love history and I love knowing the context of a country. So hopefully by the end of this, we'll reach present day news about Libya and we'll have a foundation to talk about Libya in the future from a place of knowing. Let's go to 74 BC, all the way back to 74 BC. The Romans conquered Libya and held control until 643 AD. In 643 AD, Ahmed ibn al-As conquered Libya and spread Islam across northern Africa. He was the Arab commander who led the Muslim conquest of Egypt and is regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Egypt because he introduced Islam to the country. He also served

as its governor in 640 to 646 AD and again from 658 to 664 AD. He founded a new city just north of the Roman fort of Babylon called Fustat. Today, the mosque of Amr ibn al-As still marks the site of this city. He is a highly respected figure for Muslims. Now let's fast forward to the 16th century, when Libya became part of the Ottoman Empire. At this point, the Ottoman Empire had accumulated a huge amount of territory and continued to do so. In 1643 AD, the Ottoman Empire was at its largest extent. Go look at a map, it is a lot. It's known as one of history's most powerful empires, and it grew from a Turkish stronghold in Anatolia into a vast state that at its peak reached as far north as Vienna, Austria, as far east as the Persian Gulf,

as far west as Algeria, and as far south as Yemen. It is a huge swath of land and the Ottoman Empire on its own deserves many episodes. I think it's a very fascinating part of history, but we'll get there another time. Now let's jump ahead centuries to the early 1900s at the start of World War I. So this whole time, all these centuries between the 16th century and the early 1900s, the Ottoman Empire was in control of Libya and a lot of other territories surrounding it. But at the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was already in decline. The Ottoman army met with a disastrous defeat in the Italio-Turkish War that was between 1911 and 1912 and the Balkan Wars between 1912 and 1913 and both of these defeats resulted in the Ottomans being driven out of North Africa

and nearly out of all of Europe. The Ottoman Empire officially ended in 1922 when the title of Ottoman Sultan was eliminated. Again, this was only a century ago, 1922. We think everything happened so long ago, but a century isn't that long. And I feel like maybe the word empire makes something seem very far away, but it really wasn't. And maybe this is just a little prequel to me talking with the Ottoman Empire in a future episode. Who knows if that'll ever happen. Stay tuned, I suppose. Anyway, Turkey was declared a republic on October 29th of 1923 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who was an army officer, founded the Independent Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire deserves many episodes on its own, as I said, but let's go back to Libya for today. There was a stretch of time preceding the fall

of the Ottoman Empire when Libya was under Italian rule. It started between 1911 and 1912 when Italy seized Libya from the Ottomans. Omar al-Muhtar then began a 20-year insurgency against Italian rule. In the 1920s, Libyan resistance grew as the Senussi dynasty joined in alongside the Muqtad campaign. Just a quick little thing about the Senussi dynasty. It was a Muslim political-religious tariqa, which means a Sufi order, and a clan in colonial Libya and the Sudan region founded in Mecca in 1837 by the Grand Senussi, aka Senussi al-Kabir, the Algerian Muhammad ibn Ali al-Senussi. Senussi was concerned with what he saw as both the decline of Islamic thought and spirituality and the weakening of Muslim political integrity. I bring this up to

note that by the 1920s, this dynasty had been around for nearly a century, and so when it joins the Libyan resistance alongside the Muqtad campaign, it seems very significant. But in 1931, Italy broke the resistance through a combination of major armed operations and concentration camps for the rebel population. Al-Muqtad is captured and executed. camps for the rebel population. Al-Muqtad is captured and executed. In 1934, Italy unites the provinces as the colony of Libya and steps up Italian migration as part of an eventual plan for the incorporation of Libya into a greater Italy. In 1942, the Allies oust Italians from Libya, which was then divided into three sections. There was Tripolitania in the northwest, Fezan in the southwest, and Cyrenaica in the east. The French took control of Fezan,

and the British took control of the remaining Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. In 1951, Libya becomes independent under King Idris el-Sanousi, and in 56, it grants two American oil companies a concession of some 14 million acres. In 61, King Idris, who was now in power for a decade, opened a 104-mile pipeline, which links its important oil fields in the interior to the Mediterranean Sea, and this makes it possible to export Libyan oil for the very first time. I don't know, but that last sentence of being able to export Libyan oil for the first time seems like the beginning of the end for me. Again, how do we get here? This is how. Anyway, let's continue from the 1960s, which introduced the Gaddafi era. In 1969, King Idris was deposed in a military coup led by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He pursues a pan-Arab agenda by attempting to form mergers with several Arab countries

and also introduces state socialism by nationalizing most economic activity, including the oil industry. In 1970, Libya orders the closure of a British airbase in Tarbuk and the giant U.S. Wheelers Air Force base in Tripoli. Property belonging to Italian settlers is also nationalized. In 1971, the National Referendum approves the proposed Federation of Arab Republics, the FAR, which was comprised of Libya, Egypt, and Syria. However, the FAR never really takes off. And in 73, Colonel Gaddafi declares a cultural revolution, which includes the formation of people's committees in schools, hospitals, universities, workplaces, and administrative districts. And then Libyan forces proceed to occupy the Ya'uzu Strip in northern Chad.

In 1975, Gaddafi writes and publishes The Greek Book, which was a short book setting out the political philosophy of, you guessed it, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. It is said to have been inspired in part by The Little Red Book, a.k.a. quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Little Red Book, aka quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. An English translation was issued by the Libyan People's Committee, and a bilingual English-slash-Arabic edition was issued in London by Martin, Brian, and O'Keefe in 1976. During the Libyan Civil War, copies of this book were burned by anti-Qaddafi demonstrators. In Libya, according to British author and former Greater London Council member George Tremlett, Libyan children spent two hours a week studying this book as part of their curriculum. Excerpts were broadcast every day on television and radio, and its slogans were also

found on billboards and painted on buildings in Libya. This book was everywhere. And internationally, by 1993, lectures and seminars on the Green Book had been held at universities and colleges in France, Eastern Europe, Colombia, and Venezuela. On a state visit to Libya in 2008, socialist Bolivian president Evo Morales cited the Green Book as a major influence on his political beliefs and policies. The Green Book rejects both capitalism and communism, as well as representative democracy. Instead, it proposes a type of direct democracy overseen by the General People's Committee, which allows direct political participation for all adult citizens. It also talks about the crucial importance of complete freedom of speech.

There's also a paragraph in the book about abolishing money that is similar to a paragraph in Frederick Engel's Principles of Communism. Gaddafi wrote, The final step is when the new socialist society reaches the stage where profit and money disappear. It is through transforming society into a fully productive society and through reaching in production a level where the material needs of the members of society are satisfied. On that final stage, profit will automatically disappear and there will be no need for money. As far as the reception of this book goes though, it wasn't great. U.S. Ambassador David Mack called the book quite jumbled, with various ideas including, quote,

a fair amount of xenophobia wrapped up in a strange mixture. When I told my mom I was researching Libya, she immediately mentioned this book to me, and she couldn't stop cracking up. She's still in disbelief that a leader wrote something like this and then forced his entire country to read it and basically praise him for it. So that was entertaining to watch, I will say that. But anyway, five years later in 77, Gaddafi declares a people's revolution, changing the country's official name from the Libyan Arab Republic to the great socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamharia. He sets up revolutionary committees, and this heralds the start of institutionalized chaos, economic decline, the abuse of authoritarian power, and general arbitrariness.

This is a good place to take a little break. So, BRB. Okay, we're back. Before the break, we talked about Gaddafi declaring a people's revolution and how ultimately all of this led to a lot of chaos and decline and the abuse of authoritarian power. So three years later, in 1980, Libyan troops intervene in the civil war in northern Chad. This is where the U.S. decides to insert itself because it always does. In 1981, the Libyan army has a confrontation with the U.S. The U.S. shoots down two Libyan aircraft, which it said challenged its warplanes over the Gulf of Cerda, which was claimed by Libya as its territorial water. In 1984, a British policewoman was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London while anti-Qaddafi protests were taking place.

Because of this, the UK breaks off diplomatic relations with Libya entirely. But of course, the United States isn't finished yet. It never is. In 1986, the U.S. bombs Libyan military facilities as well as residential areas of Tripoli and Benghazi, killing 101 people. They also bombed Gaddafi's house, which killed his adopted daughter. The U.S. said that these raids were in response to the alleged Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by U.S. military personnel. Just a small tangent about the reported killing of Gaddafi's adopted daughter, Hanna Gaddafi. This has been something that's drawn quite the controversy over the years. Apparently, Hanna may not have died, or the adoption may have been

posthumous, or he may have adopted a second daughter and given her the same name after the first one died. After the Gaddafi family residence, which was in the Bab al-Aziza compound in Tripoli, was taken by rebels, the New York Times reported evidence, complete with photographs, of Hannah's life after her declared death, when she became a doctor and worked in a Tripoli hospital. Her passport was reported as showing a birth date of November 11, 1985, making her six months old at the time of the U.S. raid. In August of 2011, the Daily Telegraph reported on the finding of dental records relating to a Hannah Gaddafi. This report, which also cites a 1999 spotting of Hana by Chinese officials,

cites an unnamed Libyan government spokesman as stating that Gaddafi had adopted a second daughter and named her Hana in honor of the first one who had been killed in the 1986 raid. In September 2011, the claim that Hana had been killed in the 1986 bombing was further disputed when a video recorded in 1989 by Gaddafi's cameraman, Muhammad Ali, was obtained by the Daily Telegraph. In the video, Muammar Gaddafi and other members of the Gaddafi family refer to her by her name while playing football at a campsite. Hanna is rumored to have fled to Algeria with her mother and three siblings. That is some absurd shit, and I wanted to bring it up because it's such a crazy controversy that probably needs more digging into. But yeah,

let's go back to Libya now. As I mentioned, in 1986, the U.S. bombed Libya and killed 101 people. And again, the United States said that these raids were in response to the alleged Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by US military personnel. This will become important later on. But anyway, this takes us to December of 1988 and the Lockerbie plane bombing. Pan Am Flight 103 was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via a stopover in London and another stopover in New York City. On December 21st of 1988, while the aircraft was in flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, it was destroyed by a bomb that had been planted on board, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members in what became known as the Lockerbie bombing. Large sections of the aircraft crashed into a residential street in Lockerbie, which killed 11 residents. With a total of 270 fatalities, it is the deadliest terrorist attack

in the history of the United Kingdom. This bombing, this terrorist attack, will come into play later, similar to the disco bombing. So it's very significant and also just a terrible thing that happened. And I didn't know about this being the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the UK. So just a good, important history here.

So in 1989, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania and Tunisia formed the Arab Maghreb Union, or simply the Maghreb Union, in an effort to promote cooperation and economic integration in a common market. It is a political union and economic union trade agreement aiming for economic and future political unity among Arab countries and states that are located primarily in the Maghrib in North Africa. It was envisioned initially by Muammar Gaddafi as a super state. The Maghrib is basically the name for Northwest Africa, which includes the western part of North Africa and the Arab world. Following a three-year joint investigation of the Lockerbie bombing by the FBI and the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary,

a.k.a. the Territorial Police Force responsible for Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, until April 1st, 2013, after this joint investigation with them and the FBI, arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals in November of 1991. for two Libyan nationals in November of 1991. In response to this, in 1992, the UN imposes sanctions on Libya in an effort to force it to hand over for trial two of its citizens that were suspected of involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, one of whom, of these people,

was a government employee. More on this later, as we go on. In 1994, Libya returns the Aouzou Strip to Chad, which they had been occupying since 1973. In 1995, Gaddafi expels around 30,000 Palestinians in protest of the Oslo Accords between the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, and Israel. A quick refresher here. There are two Oslo Accords that make up the Oslo Accords. The first Oslo Accord was signed in Washington, D.C. in 1993, and the second one was signed in Tabia, Egypt in 1995. They marked the start of the Oslo Process, which was a supposed peace process

aimed at achieving a peace treaty based on Resolution 242 and Resolution 338 of the United Nations Security Council and at fulfilling the, quote, right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The Oslo process began after secret negotiations in Oslo, Norway, and resulted in both the recognition of Israel by the PLO and the recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and as a partner in bilateral negotiations. The vast majority of Arabs and Arab countries disagreed with the Oslo Accords because they viewed it as defeat, as a surrender. My mom explained to me that a lot of Arabs didn't like or trust Yasser Arafat, who was the PLO leader during the Oslo peace process. A lot of people still don't like him, to be honest, and much of this dislike

stemmed from his signing of the Oslo Accords. He died in 2004 at the age of 75. We'll talk more about Gaddafi's relationship to Arafat and how this changed after they also record in our next episode. But for now, I'm going to leave you here. Have a good day. Goodbye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

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

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back it could happen here it's me again it's shereen and we're going to continue our discussion of libya uh that we started yesterday and um yeah i hope it's been interesting and i hope it continues to be interesting because i'm not going to stop. Okay, we left off our last episode after we talked about the Oslo Accords, about how a lot of people distrusted and didn't like Yasser Arafat, who was the PLO leader during the Oslo Accords, or the Oslo Peace Process, rather. Mahmoud Gaddafi was one of those people that disagreed

with signing the accords because he viewed it as a surrender, as a defeat, and because of this, in 1995, Gaddafi expelled around 30,000 Palestinians in protest at the Oslo Accords between the PLO, aka the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Israel. So, I do think it's notable to mention that before Oslo, Gaddafi was on good terms with Arafat. In 1992, Arafat was on a plane en route to Tunisia, and he was accompanied by his bodyguards and some assistants. The flight was scheduled to land in the Kharfa Oasis airfield southeast of Libya to refuel. However, intense sandstorms impeded the vision of the pilots who were forced to adjust the flight route. One hour and 40 minutes after takeoff, the control tower in the Libyan capital received the following message. Special flight Khartoum to Tunis cannot land. We fly on to Assara. We will attempt an emergency landing. Five minutes later, the plane disappeared from Libyan radar screens and wireless telecommunications were off. A state of emergency was declared. International media outlets immediately reported

the Arafat's plane had disappeared in the Libyan desert. For approximately 15 hours, it was thought that the plane had crashed and that Arafat had died. It turned out, however, that the plane hit a sand dune in the Libyan desert and Arafat was thrown a distance of 30 meters. The two pilots and the mechanic perished in this accident and all the passengers were found wounded but alive, including Arafat. I bring this up only to mention that I found a photo of Arafat recovering in a hospital after this crash covered in band, and Gaddafi is at his bedside. They're even holding hands in the photo. But that didn't matter to Gaddafi after Oslo, which he viewed again as a sort of betrayal to the Arab world. So back to 1995, when Gaddafi

expels about 30,000 Palestinians in protest of Atafat signing the Oslo Accords. Gaddafi urged other Arab countries to follow his example and send home all Palestinians to expose what he said was Israel's plan to create a Palestinian state in name only. Speaking at a makeshift camp in the desert near the border with Egypt, Gaddafi told a crowd of thousands that his expulsion of thousands of Palestinians was the greatest service to the aims of establishing a Palestinian homeland. In the speech, he said, the Zionist plan is to create a Palestine without Palestinians, he said, adding that other Arab countries are taking part in the Zionist plan by allowing the Palestinians to stay in their land. He very publicly criticized Arafat's signing of the accords with Israel and handing over authority

in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. His speech continued, saying, Overnight they told us that Israel was no longer the enemy we knew. They said the Palestinian cause was over, and because Libya believes them, it has asked the Palestinians to return to their home. So a little bit passive-aggressive there, or maybe overtly aggressive. Nonetheless, he disagreed with the Oslo Accords and with Arafat, and a lot of other Arab countries did also. In 1999, Gaddafi handed over the two Lockerbie suspects for trial at Camp Zeiss in the Netherlands after protracted negotiations and UN sanctions. The UN sanctions were suspended and diplomatic relations with the UK was restored after the suspects were handed over for trial.

In January 2001, the Netherlands finds one of the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing, al-Maghrahi, guilty and sentences him to life imprisonment. He was freed in 2009 on compassionate release grounds before dying of cancer in 2012. The other suspect, Fahima, is found not guilty and freed after the trial. In January 2002, Libya and the U.S. say they held talks to mend relations after years of hostility over what the Americans termed as Libya's sponsorship of terrorism. A year later, in January 2003, Libya is elected chairman of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, despite opposition from the U.S. and human rights groups. In August of 2003, seven months after this, Gaddafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing in a letter to the UN Security Council, and Libya signed a deal worth

$2.7 billion and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained that he had never given the order for the attack. Acceptance of responsibility was part of a series of requirements laid out by a UN resolution for sanctions against Libya to be lifted. Libya said it had to accept responsibility due to Maghrahi's status as a government employee. In September of 2003, a month later, the UN Security Council votes to lift sanctions, and in December of that same year, Libya said it will abandon programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. At this point, Gaddafi has been in power for many, many decades. And similar to other dictators, he developed a cult of personality and his pictures were seen all over the country with his quotes. Remember the green book? Yes, that book. He had been in power for so long, and this book was still distributed and praised, and he stayed in power like most dictators do. In March of 2004, British Prime Minister Tony

Blair visits Libya, and this is the first such visit since 1943. Gaddafi was clearly working on a return to respectability for Libya, and in August of 2004, Libya agreed to pay $35 million to compensate the victims of the bombing in a Berlin nightclub in 1986. and killed 101 people and said that these raids were in response to the alleged Libyan involvement of this bombing of a Berlin disco that was frequented by U.S. military personnel. Fast forwarding to where we currently are in 2004, Libya has agreed to pay $35 million to compensate these victims. This is a good place to take our first little break. Don't go anywhere. to take our first little break. Don't go anywhere. BRB. Okay, we're back. We're now in January of 2005, and Libya's first auction of oil and gas exploration licenses heralds the return of U.S. energy companies for the first time in more than 20 years. In February of 2006, at least 10 people are killed in clashes with police in Benghazi and part of a wave of

international protests by some Muslims who are angered by a Danish newspaper's cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Three months later, in May of 2006, the U.S. says it is restoring full diplomatic ties with Libya. And in 2008, a lot of things happened in 2008. First, Libya took over the one-month rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, marking a huge step returning to respectability after decades as a pariah of the West. Libya and the U.S. also signed an agreement committing each side to compensate all victims of bombing attacks on the other citizens. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi apologizes to Libya for damage inflicted by Italy during the colonial era, and they sign a $5 billion investment deal by way of compensation. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes a historic visit in

2008, the highest level U.S. official to visit Libya since 1953. Rice says relations between the U.S. and Libya have entered, quote, a new phase. In February of 2009, Gaddafi is elected chairman of the African Union by leaders meeting in Ethiopia. He sets out the ambition of the United States of Africa, even embracing the Caribbean. In June of that year, in 2009, Gaddafi pays his first state visit to Italy, Libya's former colonial ruler and trading partner. What a plot twist! Wow, who would have thought, a century prior. In 2010, Russia agrees to sell Libya weapons in a deal worth 1.8 billion dollars. The deal is thought to include fighter jets, tanks, and air defense systems. The European Union and Libya sign an agreement designed to slow illegal migration. That same

year, British oil company BP confirms it is about to begin drilling off of the Libyan coast. In 2011, you start to see the seeds of an anti-Qaddafi uprising, and Libyans rose up against the rule of Qaddafi and many took up arms. You might know that 2011 marked the beginning of many Arab springs in many countries, including Libya, and I guess this is also a good time to remind you that Qaddafi was always a dictator and ruled with fear, as dictators do. A lot happened in 2011. In February, inspired by revol revolt in other Arab countries, especially neighboring Egypt and Tunisia, violent protests break out in Benghazi and spread to other cities, leading to escalating clashes between security forces and anti-Qaddafi

rebels. The government's security forces responded by opening fire on the protesters. As an initially peaceful protest movement transformed into a fully fledged armed uprising against his 42-year rule, Gaddafi pledged to chase down the cockroaches and the rats who had taken up arms against him, quote, inch by inch, room by room, home by home, alleyway by alleyway, person by person. A brutal conflict began, with pro-Qaddafi forces indiscriminately shelling civilian areas, arresting thousands of protesters and others suspected of supporting the opposition, holding many in secret detention, and carrying out summary executions. In March of 2011, the UN Security Council authorizes a no-fly zone over Libya

and airstrikes to protect civilians, over which NATO assumes command. In the months that follow, Libyan rebels initially capture territory but are then forced back by better-armed pro-Gaddafi forces. In July, the International Contact Group on Libya formally recognizes the main opposition group, the National Transitional Council, the NTC, as the legitimate government of Libya. In August 2011, Gaddafi goes into hiding after rebels swarm into his fortress compound in Tripoli. Let's take our second break here, and we'll come back and talk more about what happened in 2011, because it seems like it's the year that never ended. BRB. And we're back. So, as I mentioned before the break, in August of 2011, Gaddafi went into hiding after the rebels swarmed his fortress compound in Tripoli.

In September, the Afghan Union joins 60 countries which have recognized the NTC as the new Libyan authority. On October 20th, 2011, Gaddafi is captured and killed as rebel fighters take his hometown of Sirte. After airburst bombs are fired from a NATO warplane, incinerating dozens of Gaddafi fighters, Gaddafi and other survivors are nearby a walled villa compound, and soon thereafter, they try to escape through the fields and two drainage pipes underneath a major road nearby. to escape through the fields and two drainage pipes underneath a major road nearby. That is where the Masrata militaries found them. Masrata is a city in Libya, by the way. When militia fighters found Gaddafi in his inner circle hiding next to the drainage pipes, one of his bodyguards threw a hand grenade at them. And this hand grenade bounced off the concrete wall and exploded in the midst of the leadership circle,

killing Gaddafi's defense minister, Abu Bakr Yunus. Yes, that actually happened. You had to have been there. This explosion sprayed shrapnel that wounded Gaddafi and others, according to the survivors of the incident whom the Human Rights Watch interviewed. Gaddafi was immediately set upon by Masrata fighters who literally wounded him with a bayonet in his butt and then began pummeling him with kicks and blows. By the time Gaddafi was loaded into an ambulance and transported to Masrata, his body appeared lifeless. It remains unclear whether he died from this violence, the shrapnel wounds, or from being shot later, as some have claimed. Ultimately, he died, is the point.

In that same morning of October 20th, Masrata militia members separately apprehended Muammar Gaddafi's son, Mustahim. He was in charge of the military defense of Sirte and had led the doomed convoy, and he tried to flee from the scene of the fighting. Three days later, the NTC declared Libya to be officially liberated, and they announced plans to hold elections within eight months. In November 2011, Saif al-Islam, the fugitive son of former Libyan leader Ramon Gaddafi, is captured, becoming the last key Gaddafi family member to be seized or killed. Between January and March of 2012, clashes erupt between former rebel forces in Benghazi in a sign of discontent with the NTC. The NTC, again, stands for National Transitional Council. So Benghazi-based NTC officials campaign to re-establish autonomy for the region, further increasing tension with the NTC in Tripoli. In August, this transitional government hands power to the General National

Congress, which was elected in July. There's still significant unrest among civilians during this time in regards to inept leadership, and in February of 2014, protests erupt in response to the General National Congress's refusal to disband after the decided-upon mandate expires. In May of 2014, the Libyan National Army Renegade General Khalifa Haftar launches a military assault that includes airstrikes against militant Islamist groups in Benghazi, and he tries to seize the parliament building, accusing the Prime Minister, at the time Prime Minister Ahmed Maiteg, of being enthralled to Islamist groups. In June, Prime Minister Mateg resigns after the

Supreme Court rules his appointment illegal. A new parliament is chosen in elections, but the election is marred by a low turnout attributed to security fears and boycotts, and the Islamists suffer heavy defeat. Fighting breaks out between forces loyal to the outgoing GNC and the new parliament. In July of 2014, the UN staff pulls out, and the embassy shut down, and foreigners are evacuated as the security situation deteriorates. Among all of this fighting, the Tripoli International Airport is also largely destroyed. Ansar al-Sharia, which was a Salafist Islamist militia and Al-Qaeda-aligned group that advocated for the implementation of Sharia law across Libya, seizes control of most of Benghazi at this time. Later that year, in October of 2014, the UN envoy to Libya, Bernardina Leone, proposed a national unity government for Libya, and this new government was to be led by the presidential council of Fayez

el-Sarraj as prime minister and three deputies from the country's eastern, western, and southern regions, as well as two ministers. UN Security General Ban Ki-moon visits Libya during this time to continue the UN-brokered talks between the new parliament and the government based in Tarbuk and Islamist Libya-da militias holding Tripoli. The UN says that hundreds of thousands of civilians are displaced by these clashes. And this takes us to 2015, but I think we're going to stop for today because a lot happens in 2015 and I'd rather not split it up into two episodes so that's where i'm gonna leave you guys for today and uh you'll hear me tomorrow if you want to goodbye welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum,

Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and 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.

Hello and welcome back to it could happen here you are listening to shereen and our last installment of our little libya series we're just going to jump right back in our last episode ended off in 2014 in libya when the un security general Ban Ki-moon visited Libya to continue UN-brokered talks between the new parliament that was assigned and the government base in Tobruk and the Islamist Libya Don militias that were holding Tripoli. At this time, the UN says that hundreds of thousands of civilians have been displaced by clashes. The Islamic State extremist militia then seizes control of the port of Derna in eastern Libya. In January of 2015, the Libyan army and Tripoli-based militia alliance declare a partial ceasefire after UN-sponsored talks in Geneva. In February of 2015, Egyptian jets bomb Islamic State targets in Derna, a day after the group there released a video showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians.

The Libyan army offensive to retake Dirna in March of that year fails to dislodge the group. The Islamic State establishes control over the port city of Sirte, which is halfway along the coast between Tripoli and Benghazi. Tripoli and Benghazi. In July of 2015, a Tripoli court sentences Gaddafi's son, Sayyaf al-Islam, and eight other former officials to death for the crimes committed during the 2011 uprising against his father. He is later freed by an armed group. In January of 2016, the UN announces a new Tunisia-based interim government, but neither Tobruk nor Tripoli parliaments agree to recognize its authority. Libyan politician Fayez al-Sarraj is now the chairman of the Presidential Council of Libya and Prime Minister of the Government of National Accord. The Islamic State group attacks Ras al-Nuf oil terminal and threatens to move on to Brega and Tobruk. In September of 2016, the Libyan National Army of Khalifa Haftad,

who was described as a renegade general, seizes key oil export terminals in East Libya. Haftad is a Libyan-American politician, military officer, and the commander of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army. A year and a half prior, on March 2nd, 2015, he was appointed commander of the armed forces loyal to the elected legislative body, the Libyan House of Representatives. In December of 2016, pro-government forces oust Islamic State militants from the coastal town of Sirte, which they had seized 18 months previously.

In July 2017, the Islamic State is ejected from Benghazi after three years of fighting. A year later, in July 2018, Khalifa Haftar claims that his forces are fully in control of Derna, the last Islamic stronghold in the east and the only city in the region thus far outside his control. In April of 2019, the Haftar Libyan National Army advances on Tripoli, sparking clashes with the forces of the internationally recognized Government of National Accord. In June of 2020, the UN-backed government drives Haftar forces out of Tarhuna, which was their last stronghold in the west of the country near Tripoli. At this point, Fayez el-Saraj had been Prime Minister of the west of the country near Tripoli. At this point, Fayez S. Sarraj had been

Prime Minister of the Government of National Accord since its installment in 2015 as part of a UN-led political agreement. Fighting was occurring between Sarraj's loyalists and those who opposed him, and Sarraj stated that he would be stepping down from his position by the end of October of 2020. This came after a month of protests in Tripoli. On October 31st of 2020, however, al-Sarraj rescinded his decision to resign. But after the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, he transferred his powers on March 15th of 2021. So in March of 2021, Abdul Hamid al-Dabiba took over as Prime Minister of the GNA, the UN-backed Government of National Accord in Tripoli. In the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum procedure for choosing a unified executive authority to lead into the December 21 Libyan general election, Mohamed al-Manfi ran on a joint ticket with Abdul Hamid alabiba as prime minister and Musa al-Qoni and

Abdullah al-Lafi as members of the presidential council. Al-Manfi serves as head of state. Human Rights Watch reported that hundreds of residents in the Libyan town of Tarhuna were abducted or reported missing between 2014 and 2020 after the local Al-Qani militia, known as the Qaniyat, took control of the town in 2015. Residents reported that the militia often abducted, detained, tortured, killed, and disappeared people who opposed them or were suspected of doing so. Some said that the militia also seized private property and stole their money. After the armed conflict in June of 2020, there was a discovery of mass graves in the town of Tarhuna. Libyan authorities said they had retrieved more than 200 bodies

from more than 555 mass graves as of October of last year. Additionally, as of October of last year, the International Organization for Migration, the IOM, estimated there were almost 400,000 internally displaced people in Libya, including 300,000 people displaced since the beginning of the April 2019 conflict in Tripoli and the surrounding areas. The displaced include many of the 48,000 former residents of the town of Tawarqa, who in 2011 were driven out by armed groups predominantly from Misrata because of their support for the former Gaddafi government. Despite reconciliation agreements with Misrata authorities, they have been deterred from returning by the massive and deliberate

destruction of the town and its infrastructure between 2011 and 2017, predominantly by militias from Misrata and the scarcity of public services by the GNA. To describe the election process in Libya as a clusterfuck would be an understatement. And as far as the most recent election or the attempt for the most recent election in 2021, various postponements have resulted from disputes about fundamental rules governing the election, including the voting timetable, the eligibility of the main candidates, and the eventual powers of the next president and the parliament. So registration for the presidential candidates opened on November 7th of last year and lasted until November 22nd.

In this time, several people registered their candidacy, including Saif al-Aslam Gaddafi, the son of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the Libyan National Army, Adaf Naid, the chairman of the Ihla Libya party, and the current prime minister Abd al-Hamid Dibayba. These men all registered their candidacy in November of last year, and in total, 96 men and two women registered as candidates. A preliminary list of 73 presidential candidates was released by the HNEC, the High National Election Commission, on November 24th. 25 candidates were disqualified from the election, including Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and a bunch of others that I'm not going to say their names because I haven't said them yet and you don't need to know. But ultimately, Gaddafi and a bunch of other people were disqualified under Article 10.7 of the electoral law for having been convicted of a crime. Gaddafi was also disqualified under Article 17.5 for not providing

a certificate showing a clean criminal record. Another candidate, Zaidan, was disqualified under Article 10.2 for having more than one nationality and under Article 11 for not having 5,000 supporters. According to the electoral law, any appeals against the disqualifications are to be decided by the judiciary. On November 28, the Tripoli Appeals Court rejected the candidacy of current Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dubaiba after accepting two appeals against his bid. The first appeal was filed by three presidential candidates as well as two Libyan Political Dialogue Forum members, while the second appeal was filed by presidential candidate Fatih Beshara. On November 30th, Libyan Field Marshal, aka Renegade General Khalifa Haftar, was disqualified

from the presidential election after the Zawiya Court of First Instance accepted an appeal against his candidacy. On December 1st, four candidates were disqualified by the HNEC, including Dibayba, and they were placed back on the ballot by the Tripoli Court of National Appeal. On December 2nd, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was placed back on the ballot after the Sabha Court of Appeal accepted his appeal against his disqualification from the list of candidates. See? Clusterfuck understatement. see clusterfuck understatement and then on december 6th khalifa hafdad returned to the presidential election after the tripoli court of appeal rejected a november 30 ruling by the lower zawiya court let's take our first break for the love of god uh brb and we're back and i don't believe in god but anyway days before the first round was scheduled to take place,

the election was already up in the air, with no official list of candidates presented to the public and no formal campaigning underway. On December 22nd, the Parliament of Libya confirmed the postponement. The chairman of the election committee said, After consulting the technical, judicial, and security reports, we inform you of the impossibility of holding the elections on the date of 24 December 2021, provided for by the electoral law. And in this statement, he didn't give a new date.

The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States urged Libya to set a new date for the delayed presidential election quickly. The HNEC insisted that the House of Representatives is responsible for setting a new date. The Speaker of the House of Representatives said the election committee responsible for overseeing elections must set a definitive date for postponed presidential and legislative polls by the end of January of 2022, like several months ago. The UN's special advisor on Libya, Stephanie Williams, who has pursued a new election date, told the AP that it was still, quote, very reasonable and possible for the country's 2.8 million voters to cast their ballots by June of 2022, which would be in line with the UN-brokered roadmap. On January 23rd of 2022, Interim Prime Minister Abdel Dabeba called for a constitution to be established before holding the delayed presidential and parliamentary elections.

A month later, on February 22nd, Dabeba announced a plan to hold the elections in June of 2022. He later proposed holding the elections at the end of 2022. So, he just keeps on postponing it it because why not? You're in power. You don't want to give it up. Sure. In July of 2022, the prime minister, the interim prime minister, Abdul Hamid Bayba, made an unexpected alliance with his former enemy, the eastern warlord, renegade general Khalifa Haftar, in a bid to cement a fragile ceasefire and end a month-long oil blockade. Less than three years ago, Haftar's self-styled Libyan National Army besieged Tripoli in a failed attempt to capture the capital. But in this unexpected alliance, in a highly symbolic

gesture, the Libyan National Army's chief of staff, al-Nadouri, was invited to visit the city for talks. The prospect of Dubaiba and Haftar burying their differences was really welcomed by the UN as it was struggling to maintain a ceasefire that had ended a previous six-year civil war in 2020. However, barely a month later, after this extended reconciliation, supposedly, on August 27th of this year, deadly clashes occurred in Libya's capital between militias backed by its two rival administrations, portending to a return to violence amid a long political stalemate. In these clashes, at least 23 people were killed and more than 140 people were wounded in the fighting, according to the health ministry. Six hospitals were hit and ambulances were unable to reach areas affected by the clashes, and the ministry said that these effectively are war crimes and they condemn these actions. The escalation threatens to shatter the relative calm, relative calm, take that with a

grain of salt, whatever you want that to mean, Libya has had for most of the past two years. As we know, after listening to me talking for all of these millions of minutes, Libya was sent into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Rahm al-Gaddafi in 2011. Obviously, Gaddafi was also bad, not saying that, but if things were already chaotic during Gaddafi and before Gaddafi, taking him out in the way that he was taken out only led to more chaos, so the instability only got worse. The clashes that are happening pitted the Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade militia, led by Hathoum Tajouri, against another militia allied with Abdel Ghani El-Kilki, who was an infamous warlord known as Ghaniwa.

This is according to local media. Prime Minister Dubeyba's government, which is based in Tripoli, claims that the clashes broke out when one militia fired at another. The fighting, however, is highly likely part of an ongoing power struggle between interim PM Dubeyba and his rival Prime Minister Fatih Beshara, who is operating from the coast city of Sirte. Both Dubeyba and Beshara are backed by militias, and the latter was mobilizing in recent weeks to try to enter Tripoli to dislodge his rival. An attempt in May by Beshar to install his government in Tripoli triggered clashes that ended with his withdrawal from the capital. The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Richard Norland,

urged for de-escalation before, quote, things get worse. And he also urged for the Libyan parties to agree on an early date for elections. Prime Minister Dubeva's hold on power is very precarious. In July of this year, protests erupted in nine cities against corruption and power cuts. Dbeba was originally installed again as a temporary prime minister to run the country until the elections were due last December. But he hasn't given up that power, because power is a disease. And when those elections were canceled amid constitutional arguments, he obviously decided to stay in power. And this is despite Libya's parliament demanding that he step down.

So as we've learned in this brief history of this country, Libya has been wracked with internal divisions and intermittent civil war conflict since the armed uprising of 2011 of the longtime dictator Gaddafi, and while international efforts to bring rival administrations together in a unity government succeeded in early 2021, this only created a fragile peace. The proliferation of weapons and autonomous militias, flourishing criminal networks, the interference of regional powers, and the presence of extremist groups have all contributed to the country's persistent lack of physical security. More than a decade of violence has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and human rights conditions have steadily deteriorated. The ceasefire I mentioned earlier was due to an

occurrence in 2016 when forces loyal to Khalifa al-Ghawil attempted a coup d'etat against Fayez al-Sharaj and the presidential council of the GNA. So in 2020, the Joint Libyan Military Commission that represented the LNA and the GNA, they reached a permanent ceasefire agreement in all areas of Libya. The agreement was effective immediately, and it required that all foreign fighters leave Libya within three months while a joint police force would patrol disputed areas. And the first commercial flight between Tripoli and Benghazi took place that same day. On March 10th of 2021, an interim unity government was formed and it was slated to be in power, as we know, until the presidential election, but it's still

in power now. So when I'm talking about those peaceful quote-unquote two years, I'm talking about this time between this permanent ceasefire in 2020 and now. And despite improvements following the ceasefire that was brokered in October of 2020, political and military violence has remained common. Human rights violations are widespread, and this includes unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary detentions. These conditions are further affected by the presence of various armed groups, thousands of foreign mercenaries, a large migrant population, and mass internal displacement. And so Libya has been in a tumultuous state since the start of the Arab Spring-related Libyan crisis of 2011. The crisis resulted in the collapse of the Libyan-Arab Jamharia and the killing of Muammar Gaddafi amidst the First Civil War of Libya and the foreign military intervention. The crisis was deepened by the factional violence in the aftermath

of the First Civil War, and this resulted in the outbreak of the Second Civil War that happened in 2014. The control over the country is currently split between the House representatives in Tobruk and the Government of National Unity in Tripoli, and their respective supporters, as well as various jihadist groups and tribal elements controlling parts of the country. And as we've learned, the violent protests are continuing to go on today, and the country remains in a state of unrest, to say the least. But I think this information is a good foundation to serve as a starting point if we talk about Libya going forward, to really understand how this country came to be so unstable, because like most countries that are experiencing upheaval, it's usually because of a lot of

different powers vying for control, international powers intervening, and just a lot of clusterfucky stuff that results in clusterfuckiness. So that's where we're going to end for today. I hope this was informative and I hope you appreciate some of the history. I definitely do. So, yeah. Until next time, go drink some water and stay hydrated and go pet a dog. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. 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. You should never say how i mistook one party consent laws on a recording rabbit it's okay it's with a president so it can't be that bad yeah

um shouldn't have done that to jimmy carter dude well he's never recovered man yeah you can see it in his eyes when he tries to rebuild those houses. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where one of us committed a crime against Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States. That might actually get us in trouble with the Secret Service, but you know what? It's happening. It's happening, James. They're going to have to figure out which one it was. Yes. They're going to have to figure out which one it was.

Yes. And that, of course, second voice, James Stout, who might wind up in Guantanamo for this because he's not a U.S. citizen. But I feel pretty safe, and I feel like our guest for today is pretty safe. And I would like to introduce Stephen Monticelli. Stephen, you work for and are an editor at Protean Magazine. You've written for The Rolling Stone. You've written for a bunch of people, Dallas Voice, a number of different news websites, magazines, and you have been spending a big chunk of the last year or so in the streets in Dallas reporting on the escalating series of, well, hopefully not escalating.

I guess time will tell on that, but the series of right wing, I don't even want to, I don't want to dignify them by calling them protests, but like right wing organized attempts to intimidate and spark violence at LGBT events in the DFW area. And some of the left-wing protest counter against that, which has involved groups like the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, who we've had on the show a few

times, and has involved groups of armed leftists kind of in opposition to groups of armed right wingers. Now, Stephen, the specific reason we're talking today is you were just the other day part of a panel put on by the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank titled Domestic Extremism and Political Violence, the Threat to Liberty. Your fellow panelists were Mike German. FBI agent who went undercover against the far right and now works for the Brennan Center, and Christopher Viles, who is a professor of English and a director of American Studies at the University of Connecticut and wrote the U.S. Anti-Fascism Reader. Now, this was interesting for a number of reasons. Kind of in the lead up to this event, the Cato Institute published a graphic that showed a number of domestic armed organizations. And so in the same graphic, you had groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, as well as groups like Yellow

Peril Tactical and the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association. Prior to the event, this sparked a bit of frustration from the left and some people suspecting that this was going to be kind of geared towards attacking left-wing, uh, armed groups and smearing them, you know, as violent extremists in the same way that the proud boys are, uh, that is not what happened. Um, and I'm going to open the floor up to you, Steven, thank you for being on the show. Hey, thanks for having me. And I'm glad that this is not sort of a criticism session that I'm going to be sitting with y'all on in terms of my participation with a – I hesitate to even use the word libertarian because of the historical definition of the term. But conservative libertarian, whatever, big L versus small L. Yeah, we can call them a right libertarian think tank.

They're Rothbardists, right? Like literally founded by Rothbard. Yeah, they love them some Rothbard. Didn't they like excommunicate him or something though at some point? Okay. I'm not deep on the lore. No.

One thing, if you're doing my favorite meme with the two hands meeting in the middle, left libertarians and right libertarians have excommunicating members of their groups. Definitely as a common point. Murray Rothbard is on an island in exile. Murray Rothbard and Murray Bookchin united in cancellation. So, yeah, I guess I'm not being canceled which is is good um and so yeah they had reached out to me uh in september about being on this panel and i had mentioned um the other guests

and frankly i was intrigued because uh you know if people want to pay attention to the growing threat of fascism i think that's pretty neat yes and it seemed like an opportunity to do the thing that glenn greenwald claims that he does when he goes on tucker carlson which is like reaching out to an audience that doesn't already agree with the things that i think um because he just goes on because they're pals and they already all agree so So I digress. I thought it was maybe an interesting forum. And I was really interested to hear from the other panelists in particular, because I had looked at what Mike German had written after his service in the FBI, and as well as the author of the Anti-Fascist Handbook. And I thought, well, if Cato has invited all three of us,

it's not going to go too off the rails in terms of, you know, sort of the false equivalency problems or it just becoming a session to bash on groups that aren't really the part of the problem. Interestingly enough, the primary amount of bashing that went on was Mike German, Interestingly enough, the primary amount of bashing that went on was Mike German, former FBI agent, repeatedly, viciously criticizing the police and the FBI for their complicity with far right street movements. Yeah. Mike's been pretty consistent. I spoke with him for like a couple of years, and I'm sure you people are probably aware of his presence by now. But he's been pretty consistent on bashing the feds for failing to act on white supremacy for decades.

And it's very, there's a number of reasons this is interesting that we'll be getting back into. But I really do recommend people take a listen to this conversation between y'all, among other things. There's some good history in there. We'll talk about a couple of things that got introduced that I don't 100% agree with, but there's some good history in there. We'll talk about a couple of things that got introduced that I don't 100% agree with, but there's some good history in there. And I think more to the point, you get a lot of updates from your reporting in Dallas and a lot of kind of summaries of that, which I find very valuable

and think will be valuable to people who have maybe been following it less. And then also, it's really interesting to get Mike's perspective as someone, he was in, it was late 80s, early 90s. He was doing a lot of undercover stuff in the West coast and in neo-Nazi movements. And so hearing him discuss the way in which the FBI's programs targeted at the far right work and don't work was really interesting to me. Oh, absolutely. That was the sort of the side of the story that I knew the least about.

Christopher Viles, the professor, the guy who wrote the handbook, you know, I think he provided a very important set of historical information that kind of helped iron out some of the issues in terms of the inconsistencies, which I think we can dive into a little bit, or rather inaccuracies that kind of got slipped by and we weren't really able to address in the course of the conversation. But hearing him just put it so bluntly kind of took the wind out of me in a good way where I was like, I don't have anything else to add here. No notes. have anything else to add here uh no notes um because he really made the point that yes uh some of these organizations were canned in glove with police officers at the local level even at the federal level he's witnessed it he has a number of experiences that he cited where the fbi is basically saying uh do not talk about your cases involving white supremacists and these similar type of groups because there are people in the agency who are sympathetic. And I think that's kind of why I ended up on the panel, because in part, the story that I've been covering around here with this harassment campaign over the past few months of LGBTQ groups and events. around here with this harassment campaign over the past few months of lgbtq groups and events part of the story is that policing has not really done anything to prevent uh you know this

incitement and harassment from continuing and occasionally turning violent not in the sense of weapons being used other than bear mace so far but in the sense the physical violence and you know slurs and violent threats being hurled at people um so i i think that mike's points for really timely and and well said and frankly he's the kind of person that they needed to come from because otherwise they just kind of get smacked away as a leftist talking point by people who probably have some internal biases or prejudices that prevent them from engaging with it when it comes from the wrong person in the wrong way. And there were a number of interesting kind of discussions happening. One thing that I was happy about is that while the initial framing i think there was a lot of fear that all of these left-wing groups

were going to get lumped in with groups that have to put it bluntly tried to overthrow democracy we should point out that that's how the fbi does do it right like yeah they for instance they'll group white supremacists with like black identity groups as racial identity extremists report statistics that way like that that's that's how the feds see this but yeah they didn't which is which is good it's like a form of obfuscation uh to do so and um you know why would they do that well maybe there's a few reasons they might do that uh especially if you ask someone like Mike. And, you know, it's such a blind spot for obvious ideological reasons for so many people involved.

Mike, you know, being a former Fed, walked through kind of like, well, it makes sense to me, given the fact that law enforcement is not able to be trusted in a lot of instances, and often is working hand in glove with these far right groups that want to harm marginalized people, that they would seek to arm themselves. And that prompted from the fellow who was actually kind of the organizing the event, Patrick Eddington, who's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, him to point out, and he was, I would have to say, broadly fair. And generally, he seemed a little bit kind of, he had this attitude you get sometimes around libertarians where he was like, there was a moment where he was like, well, I'm glad some on the left have finally started accepting the second amendment and stuff like that. But he had a moment where he expressed a

concern, which was his fear about the possibility that if you keep having these events, at some point you're going to have two groups of people who are armed shoot at each other. Which is, we've been right up to that line. You have had exchanges of fire. Just thinking in Portland, you had a moment where a single right-wing individual with a handgun fired into a group of people, thankfully didn't hit any. Two people in the anti-fascist side fired back and forced him to flee. You had a moment earlier

this year in Portland where a right winger shot into a group of unarmed people doing traffic security, killed a 61-year-old woman, wounded, I think, five other people, and then was shot and stopped by a leftist. You obviously had a proud boy, well, a member of Patriot Prayer shot and killed during an altercation, but not an exchange of fire. The only person who fired was the person who killed that individual. So none of those are quite two groups of people with guns exchanging fire in a sustained way. None of those even entirely approach kind of what happened at Greensville, but they're all on that spectrum. And while I think this guy, there's a degree to which he's kind of spooked at seeing leftists with guns, I do think that that's a reasonable

thing to be concerned with because when, and if we hit that point, it's going to be an inflection moment for, I think the entire country. Right. Right. I think the reality is that most normal people, whatever you want to use the word to describe them,

people who aren't brain poisoned and plugged into the internet and know about all these things uh or or having to deal with them and are affected by them in real life uh they might see these groups and just cast them all under the same umbrella um you know there's a good meme i chuckled at that came out afterwards where it had the slide showing um all the groups the right-wing groups and the left-wing groups, sort of armed groups in the United States and then replacing them all with just domestic cleaning products. Like, yes, they all have something in common. They have weapons and they're armed to some degree.

But beyond that, they all have distinctions and we shouldn't draw an equivalency. And I think, you know, Mike did a very elegant job of drawing that distinction where he says, these people not only have a right to defend themselves, but they probably have a good reason to given all of these things. He was basically writing the lyrics to Rage Against the Machine song. And I was a little astonished by that and he made a very clear

point to say like yeah there are people who are aggressors and there are people who aren't we can find a distinction in that and if we're just now getting concerned about this violence well maybe we should ask why we've had such a big blind spot for so long and he got right to the core of it it's these ideologies deeply baked into our institutions of white supremacy right supremacy uh basically all the way back to colonization and uh you know dealing with that is necessary for us to deal with the broader problem and and i think he he was very clear to say like the things that were required to get to that point of like a potential shootout would be a total breakdown in policing. Yes.

And so he played place the blame at the feet of the police. that people feel the need to do this because if they just focused on the crimes that proud boys commit in the dallas area uh you know basically minor assaults and stuff they would trace it back to the people that are committing them and they would cut down on these escalations yeah the same people are the ones that show up to these events time and time again it's worth like robert you talk about like an inflection point, right? And we spoke about, like, failures in policing too. I think part of the reason that we see things as super-duper exceptional right now

is the way that we teach history in schools here. And part of the things we don't teach are, like, this has happened before, right? Like the Battle of Hayes Pond being a paramount example. If we look at the like the standoff at wounded knee or the second battle of wounded knee or whatever you want to call it and uh like throughout the civil rights movement right um there's a book uh by rob williams about a contemporary book about the use of firearms in the civil rights movement that

people can read and like all of this stuff did happen then and this same tension that we're feeling now about like a society pulling itself apart and will lead to a civil war also happened then. And people felt this then too. And we, well, the progress was made at that time. We didn't of that, specifically the violence and the use of guns from our discussion of the civil rights movement sometimes leads us to see what's happening now is like really particularly exceptional. And it's not like, yeah, it's always been the case that marginalized folks have resorted to the same tools that are used to oppress them to defend themselves. And why wouldn't they? Right. Like Mike said, like Steve said, there's a very good and clear reason for oppressed people to want to defend themselves and why wouldn't they right like like mike said like steve said there's a very good and clear reason for oppressed people to want to defend themselves in their communities the only analog that we were able to bring up in the conversation is like the pink um

pink panthers pink panther patrol which was you know something that a lot of people don't know about and we did get a little bit of opportunity to discuss, you know, the black Panthers and how community defense is a different set of reasons for arming yourself and having knowledge of the second amendment and all those sorts of things. Then, you know, going outside another event hosted by an organization, you have no interest in belonging to wearing your guns on your body to send a message. That's a very menacing form of free speech. States that also involved large groups and communities, particularly in cities of Black Americans taking up arms and defending themselves, and was fairly enormous in its death toll. Hundreds and hundreds of people were killed.

It's really a pretty nightmarish moment in history. But it's the thing when you have groups, and we're about to have someone on from Yellow Apparel Tactical, when you have groups that are specifically organizing and saying like we are organizing we are teaching skills for people to become armed because we are afraid that we and people like us will be victimized it's stuff like the red summer that they're directly looking at it's not theoretical you know yeah your friend carl um from in range tv has some good videos about a lot of these different things if people are interested in looking them up yeah um and i think probably we should bring

on our next guest for tonight uh and and steven will be staying on as well uh snow from yellow peril tactical snow do you want to introduce yourself and your organization for folks who may not be as uh as familiar with this stuff as we are? We briefly covered y'all a little bit earlier in this. Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Snow. My pronouns are she or they. And I am one of the many members of Yellow Peril Tactical.

low peril tactical. We are a collective of leftist Asian Americans under the shared ideology of being anti-authoritarian. And we talk about all sorts of things, but particularly how to develop firearm skills and also community defense and the occasional shit post. And first question, just because we're talking about this Cato Institute thing that Stephen was on. Have you had a chance to listen to that yet? Since y'all. I watched it twice. I have four pages of notes.

Oh yeah. Let's go. Yeah. Why don't we start here? Yeah. Go off. You know, okay.

Like the chat was lit when we first saw that we were mentioned, we were like, wow, we fucking made it. Because originally, we started as a shitpost account. And then we were like, oh, people actually care. And this is just one of those moments where I don't know, it felt like really surreal that Kato would even give a fuck about us. Uh, cause we do all of this in our free time, you know, this is like, nobody pays us. Right. Um, and so we had a lot of skepticism going into it. Um, and in a sense, uh, we're a bit on the defensive kind of preparing for a lot of false equivalence rhetoric um and a lot of just like i don't know maybe like orientalism as well um just given the history of how like westerners have viewed asian culture um but ultimately like the consensus has been that we were pleasantly surprised of how balanced it was i thought overall it was very intriguing and I got some good quotes written down, but I don't know if you want to go into those now

or later or what. Can we start with having, I really want to like anchor this in having you explain what community defense means, like so people can understand why and then we can go from what people said on you. Yeah. So earlier y'all were talking about like um the 1919 riots

and actually reminded me of like the pacific coast race riots of 1907 oh god yeah a bunch of communities were like murdering and committing violence against um asian people right and 1907 was not that long ago um and in a sense it never has gone away um and you know i think um chris vile said it like put it nicely when he was like you know in the backdrop of a lot of anti-asian violence um it's just that it's been a lot more prevalent um among asians specifically that doesn't stop you know like boba liberalism, identity politics from happening where there's not like a grand vision of like what's going on at large. But we know that like our communities are under attack and the cops don't give a fuck about us. And if anything,

they just make it worse most of the time. And so it's truly up to us because, you know, cops don't prevent crime. They come after and they fuck it up. And it's not something that has come easily to me personally. around thinking like if I just avoid going out late at night if I am always walking with a buddy if I just you know spend 20 minutes looking for a closer parking spot it'll prevent me from being harmed and ultimately like that's just me being in denial and part of it another realization is like being strapped. I conceal carry every day. That's not going to deter someone from attacking me because of how I look. Without doxing myself, I just look alternative, right? And knowing that that puts me at risk has never deterred me from wanting to express myself with how I look, but I know the risks. because never deterred me from wanting to express myself with how I look, but I know the risks and that doesn't stop people from me. But part of it is like, I'm not going down without a fucking fight. Like my ancestors have come too fucking far. We kicked out the French, we kicked out the U S

right. Uh, and now I'm in their turf. I've infiltrated the wire, but that doesn't mean, but you know, it, it doesn't mean that it's going to stop them from harming us. And, you know, we know that we can't live in a fever dream where every single fascist on this planet will be gone. But at the very least, my life goal is to make them think twice. I'm scared a little bit. It's interesting because you bring up sort of what I think is a really good point, which is that like, even if you're in your day-to-day life, the fact that you're carrying a gun isn't going to stop somebody from starting, you know, an interaction with you that could turn violent because you just

look the way that you look. I do want to talk a little bit about what's kind of the opposite thing. And it's sort of part of why I think folks were a little on edge when this event got announced and, you know, that graphic came out that had, as we've discussed, yellow apparel tactical alongside, you know, these other groups. And there's one of the things that kind of results from the way gun culture works is that there's a very recognizable kind of uniform that you see particularly. You've seen it with the Boogaloo Boys. You see it with groups like the Proud Boys. It's the thing where you've got a plate carrier, a belt, an AR, some other kind of long gun, helmets, and usually other tactical gear

on it. And this outfit, so to speak, has kind of evolved over time. It really is a result of the war on terror. And it's both an aesthetic choice, and there's a huge number of companies that exist, particularly on the right, to provide people with aesthetic options for kind of having all of this gear that are sort of ideologically simpatico with them. But it's also just actually a – well, some of this stuff is less practical than others, but the basics of the getup exist because it's what worked, right? There's – one of the things people noted when the Taliban took back over in Afghanistan is that all of their special operations guys were dressed the same way that U.S. fighters dress because it's just what works.

You see the same outfits on Ukrainian and Russian spec ops guys. organizing and going out in the world armed as part of a public event is that to people who are not familiar with what's going on, it can be hard to tell them apart sometimes. And that is, that strikes me as a thing that the left particularly needs to deal with, because both in kind of in the media and also out in the field, you don't want to be mistaken for groups like the Proud Boys. And Stephen, I want to start kind of with you here, because I think your reporting has always done a really good job of kind of making that difference clear, if you kind of have any thoughts on that. And then we'll go back to you, Snow. I think that's a really interesting problem, the proliferation of tactical aesthetics and the ideological sort of turn in the production of weaponry

and accessories. I mean, there's like a goddamn tactical 88 set of franchises, which is making me lose my mind for a number of reasons. Yeah. And that is a real distinct thing that i see all the time around here and and i think there's subtle things that groups do to try to distinguish themselves obviously are patches but in order to see a patch you have to be close enough to someone in order to even find it legible so then okay have flags. But then you also have to know what these flags

are. Something that some groups around here have done when they're, you know, sort of protecting an LGBTQ event is they'll have flags affiliated with the LGBTQ movement. But once again, you have to know what those are. And more and more people know what those are these days. So that's a way in order to distinguish themselves. But it still takes a second for you to see a group of armed people, and then process, you know, exactly all of these sort of semiotic markers of who they are and what they're doing. Because if they have a different set of those things, it can be a very different set of conclusions that you can walk away from if you identify them. And in Texas, the right does love carrying these flags and wearing these patches.

So it makes it very clear who has consistently shown up to these events. of normal people, if a group of armed people are leading a protest is to kind of be like, what the heck, double take, maybe they won't start filming it because it's the craziest thing that they've seen that week. And ultimately, you know, they have to kind of know some contextual clues in order to even make these distinctions, particularly when you're talking about groups like, you know, John Brown clubs or yellow peril, where you're there's concerns around OPSEC or InfoSec, and you don't want to necessarily reveal your identities, because you're already a part of a group that's facing violence at a disproportionate rate. And maybe you're, you know, potentially targeted by

the FBI at a disproportionate rate, like the former FBI officer, interestingly noted during the Cato conversation, that yeah, you may have an even harder time sort of distinguishing yourself and making it known who you are. So it's an interesting challenge. I don't know if I have sort of any lessons from it other than that, you know, these classic signifiers also seem to work. Sometimes they're kind of kitschy or, um, you know, seem ridiculous, but it's kind of the same thing. Like you said about the spec ops stuff, like it's been used for centuries. Um, stuff like this has been used for a long time because it works because you immediately can comprehend

is this person with a gun here to kill me or to protect me yeah yeah that's that's really interesting because i i obviously i have a complicated history with flags but there's few better ways to to inform other people about what a group of folks is doing than having one um yeah as long as you're not conducting an ambush and that's an offensive maneuver and then suddenly you know it's like as long as you're not conducting an ambush and that's an offensive maneuver. And then suddenly, you know, it's like, as long as you're cool with being like, we're here. Yeah. And this is what we're doing.

A flag is exactly the thing that you might want. y'all's social media and y'all's kind of forward face is both unapologetically focused on firearms, focused on training, and also feels completely different from any of the sort of right-wing kind of groups that focus on some of this. Even when you're doing stuff that's like videos of people shooting and training. Do you want to talk? I mean, just anything in general on this subject that you've felt, but that's something I've always particularly noticed about y'all. Yeah, so thank you. We try really hard. You should see the group chat. But it's something that, you know, when historically Asians represented in firearms culture tend to be conservative folks who fit

within the norm or you know proximity to whiteness and that's something that we are not at all interested in um and we know that comes at a risk that's why one of the reasons why our identifiable tattoos or clothing and our faces are always blurred one because we don't want cult of celebrity around individuals um but two it's like part of that is a lot of folks generally but especially on the right will kind of have this very grandiose uh i don't know uh I don't know, buffered sense of legitimacy just because they have cool, you know, video editing. They have like the nicest guns. They have a lot of guns. And our thing is like, you don't need all that. What you do need is to train with what you got. And our target audience are folks who don't know shit about firearms or just getting into it and need

somewhere reputable to go. And we take that very seriously. Because I only got into firearms like two years ago. And so that is fresh in my memory. And I know very well what that's like, and how intimidating it could be. So a lot of our work is to try to demystify it, intimidating it could be. So a lot of our work is to try to demystify it and really break it down to a way that like, it doesn't like, we don't make people feel like they have to be at a certain level already to even enter into the firearms world. Like we want to meet people where they're at and encourage people to like, you know, do our drill of the month and like, tell us your score and then do it next month and tell us how you did better. And so it's really encouraging people to like you know do our drill of the month and like tell us your score and then do it next month and tell how tell us how you did better and so it's really encouraging people to get better on an individual basis we encourage people to go out with their friends but we also try to throw

in like community international solidarity with our fundraisers in there too so it's we try to do a lot of different things but at the end of the day, like if we help just even a handful of shooters get better at defending themselves or their community, like it's all worth it. Uh, thank you. Now I want to ask next, and I'll, I'll ask you both again, kind of same question. Where do you see the armed left moving, particularly in this next year as we kind of get through our last or start, go through our last blessed year before the 2024 election? What are some things that, that are on your radar? What are some things that you're sort of expecting to see?

What are some things that you're worried about seeing? A lot. It's a big quiet, try to keep it to a year right yeah but yeah you know i like i i worry a lot i try not to get too caught up in it because life will surprise you you know um but i think ultimately like where i live we are facing down a really tight governor race in which if the Republican candidate wins, a lot of work that has been put to, you know, codify abortion rights, workers rights, things like that will be reversed by this governor. And it's something that a lot of people are worried about, myself included. are worried about, myself included. And where I live, even within city limits, there are white supremacist flags, Confederate flags, even just like a couple miles from my house. And so there's a lot of fear around that becoming even more emboldened, even though we managed to fight back a lot and deterred. It doesn't mean that they're not taking this moment,

the right, the fast, right. To restrategize and to recalibrate what they want to do next. And so it kind of feels like we're in the calm before the storm. Oh man. Not like the J six storm. That's not what I mean,

but like genuinely what it will actually look like. Because I don't think it's going to be. I don't think there's going to be like, you know, we meet at the football field and we have like our drummers out and like our little pipe players out. And then we have a battle. It's going to be like urban like warfare is what I think. And a lot of other people think that, too. And you just throw in climate change as a treat. Like we don't know what the literal climate is going to be like. And so it really just feels like there's multiple fronts right now. But it seems like climate change or the fascists will kill me before my smoking habit will. And a lot of people think that too. my smoking habit well. And a lot of people think that too. Yeah. I mean, I do anecdotally know a lot of people who justify their cigarette use with like, look, there's wildfires all around my house.

I'm not worried about the Marlboros. It is October and the city of Portland is blanketed in smoke. I don't know if the cigarettes are going to get me. Stephen, did you want to go next? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the fact that a shitposting account gained some traction, maybe there's hope yet.

I don't know. Shitposting will save us in the end. It's another one on the board for shitposting. Let's put it that way. So looking forward to, what are we dealing with? Well, Texas is deep in it right now. We're one of the sort of laboratories of fascism in the United States at the moment.

Sort of a spear tip of a lot of really bad stuff uh really just like you know codifying in the state oppressive things uh things that they just talk about in other states um and so yeah if our governor's race uh basically it doesn't either you know kind of split things uh because our lieutenant governor uh runs independently of the governor and you know the house is a whole other thing yeah if it goes uh far right um which a ton of money has been spent billions and billions from people in the industry that's primarily responsible for destroying the planet are pushing that to make it happen and so if that all works their way then yeah we're probably

going to get some uh seriously bad laws uh really bad state-sponsored violence uh a variety of forms and yeah people are already thinking to themselves, like, do I want to live in this state anymore? But that's also basically what the extreme people on the right want is to either just get rid of these people one way or another. And so some people don't want that. Obviously, some people don't have a choice to leave because it's expensive to move and they may be tied to their families and other sorts of things so uh i don't like to predict the future because history is we keep pumping shells into it and it keeps getting back up and uh it's just gonna happen and i don't really know exactly i

just uh i'm very thankful that there are people and groups in my state that are trying to protect vulnerable people um and people working to hopefully make it not super bad um so i think like the optimistic view is that it won't be all totally terrible horrible but it'll be still kind of same same yeah um you know yes yeah that's kind of like how i see broad speaking you know the big projection cone otherwise um i'm not sure yeah shit's gonna be fucked up but at least we'll have friends. Hopefully it'll be wavy and it'll be about the friends that we make along the way. Yeah.

I was going to make that joke. Okay. Do either of you have anything else you'd like to talk about or, or, or bring up or say before we kind of bring this to a close? I guess I'm just like, I was kind of surprised how uh decent that the panel went um you know the anti-fascist coalition can be broad because it is a sort of anti thing it's

not necessarily positivist but you know maybe that's another episode to describe you know why it's important to also perhaps have a positivist message yeah along with what you're trying to do in response to fascism um and you know like more discussions like this hopefully will happen and i think they could be improved by like not all four panelists being white dudes that would probably be helpful um as a thought yeah uh well anything else yeah that that was actually the first thing i wrote on my my note page is that it was for for what i should have said that earlier so wow you know never too late now i'm just playing But I think one thing I want to add is like, similar to what you were saying, Stephen was kind of like, what is the pro positive thing? And ultimately, like,

to me, it's like the city that I live in, there's a lot of decentralized mutual aid groups that got a lot of people through the pandemic and still provide daily relief to people consistently, like I'm in like a million fucking signal chats where people post a need and it gets met eventually um and it's like i'm pro that mutual aid and like it's something that i mean maybe it's the only thing that will really get us through whatever's to come um and that's just like pro community building um and coalition building whatever that looks like in your community maybe if we want to talk about mutual aid you can i know you guys do a lot of fundraisers i think that's a really cool thing certainly distinguishes you from a lot of

other gun clubs um so maybe do you want to talk about a couple of those maybe plug those you know i would plug our forward patches but we just sold out of the second batch it's a it is we didn't think people would care that much um especially the first round and so the second round we only ordered 100 and it's sold out in a day those are supporting the resistance in myanmar right yes. People are getting them by donating directly to Liberate Myanmar. And then someone sends them a cool forward patch. And it's one of many fundraisers we've done. We recently have done a couple for folks in Ukraine. We helped them fund an ambulance out there. I can't remember the Instagram handle right now. We've also done a bunch for like a group in Portland, for example, Black and Beyond the Binary. I think we've done

two actually for Liberate Myanmar. But it's just something that, you know, we don't do this for money. And we also want to support other groups doing things that we support um especially like popular fronts that are fighting back against authoritarian regimes um and hoping that you know if shit hits the fan here that people will do that for us too um because we really value international solidarity and you know as corny as it is we're you know we're like we got us you know we fund us not george soros but um you know it's something that brings us joy to be able to help and um as mostly anarchists we really believe that like we are all that we have and we can't wait for someone else to set to you know a benefactor to come and save us because that shit's just not going to happen.

Yeah, that's great. Where can folks find you on the interweb? They want to follow along? You can find us on Instagram at yellow.peril.tactical. You have to spell it out, I think, because I think we're shadow banned right now. Our Twitter, regrettably, is yptactual. we also have a website just yellow peril tactical.com

we just took it so no one else could um but that's where you can mainly find us uh we are primarily on instagram um but most of our stuff is on twitter if you really want to see a shit post go on twitter uh we recently got into it with this person in oregon over the gun control measure um and let me tell you it was a hoot but also a little like maddening because this guy yeah this guy actually ties into how we opened the episode because he was he's a local liberal uh thought leader guy who uh saw two pictures of people with guns one of them being fascists and one of them being one of y'all and was like clearly these are the same thing um it was a good time uh vote no on 114 in my opinion uh if you're in the state of Oregon. But we'll talk about that at a later point. Stephen, you want to plug your first off, obviously, really good work on the panel. I want to plug that for folks, because I think it is really worth a listen.

listen um as everyone is here said there's a lot of good historical information in there and uh and and your contributions are invaluable so folks can check that out if you just google cato institute domestic extremism and political violence you'll find it and uh how else can people find you steven you can also find me on twitter um i will make sure that my handle is there. It's at Steve Vanzetti, S-T-E Vanzetti, as in the, you know, one of the two that got killed by the state unjustly because it's anti-Italian discrimination. So I digress. You can find me there. Uh, Protean is obviously something that I work with and I would say, check that out as well. It's at Protean mag, uh, that has a website, proteanmag.com. Um, and anything else that you want to know about me,

you can either find, uh, on Twitter or Google. There's really only like two guys named Steven Monticelli in the entire state, United States. And the other one's like a CPA in his sixties. So that's just not that one. And yeah, you can find me there. Excellent.

Well, I'm glad we got to end on a Sacco and Vanzetti reference and yeah, everybody go help somebody. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal tales from the shadows 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. Could it happen here? I don't know, but I get paid whether or not we find an answer to that question. This has been the introduction to the podcast. I'm Robert Evans. Hello, everyone else. Hello. Hello. Good morning, afternoon. This is Garrison. We have Shereen, and we also have our friend Prop from Hood Politics here. Hello, greetings. What's up, y'all? Talk to me nice.

I fully respect the transparency about, like, well, you get paid regardless. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Whether or not we learn if it could happen here. Here's the thing. When I used to teach high school, which, believe it or not, I did, taught ninth graders, we was, like, maybe eight years apart at the time. And there was at one point and I taught inner city and it was,

it was at one point I, I got this idea from one of my like like mentor teachers where I was like, okay, check this out. So I made, you remember overhead transparencies? Oh God. Yeah, I do for sure. So I made one of my check it was like i'm just gonna put this because i'm just gonna put this up here because like y'all can do your work or not you know what i'm saying like i get paid either way yeah i get paid either way i care that's why i show up and i try so hard, you know, but you're not hurting me by whatever rebellion you're practicing here. Like this,

this is, school ends at three o'clock at three Oh five. I forgot everything you said to me, you know, so you're not hurting me. Now, if you want to make me earn this then let's get busy you know and it was like no man you're gonna earn this i was like all right let's go you know i was a great teacher so it worked do you know i mean i may have turned off a few people but i don't know that you know what i'm saying do you know what does hurt me prop what hurts you oh god garrison

the the mainstreaming of anti-semitic rhetoric um so wow wow no you did a good job there garrison great work you know what you know what put putting in for a commendation for you you're gonna get a little trophy from the company for that one hey homie that was trophy garrison that was yeah so that's varsity bro that was varsity fam you know unfortunately today we're gonna be talking about uh con kanye west there's a lot of elements to this topic of discussion between the media's coverage of what's happened isn't it ye now Garrison I don't know it's yay okay yeah

prop you don't sound happy I'm so glad prop is here the thing is like at some point probably now I am I have refused to talk about same yeah you know uh and specifically even covering it you know on the pod but it's definitely time to be like you know whose man's

is this um yeah like come on somebody come get somebody come get your man's here you know i'm saying um yeah there's a lot of different kind of parts of this between how the media's been covering it the past month, his own history of attention-grabbing spectacle, the whole mental health side of things. There's religion, his uptick in anti-Semitic comments, and how the right's been reacting. There's a lot of stuff based on a few not great statements.

And a lot of interesting things have revolved around him. Just pick your favorite subversive artist from 15 years ago. And then picture that person doing this the guy's just like oh yeah come on my favorite subversive artist from 15 years ago might have been dave chappelle you know my face my favorite subversive artist from 15 years ago was probably Steve from Blue's Clues. Hey, Steve remains solid. Yeah, he's a hero. Oh, wait, no.

I'm now seeing on Deadline that he has recently embraced white nationalism. Oh, God, not Steve. He said the 14 words. Got an 88 tattooed on the back of his head next to the blue paw print. Oh, dear. Wow. That's a joke.ve is fine he's he's kidding that didn't happen yeah but yeah absolutely because you're like and knowing all of it's it is and i hope i'm not i hope i'm not co-opted this whole show but it's it is the tyra banks clip from america's top model where it's like we fought we believe we all believed in you just furious like we

god yeah damn it we believed in you you know yeah yeah and as the perspective of like a younger person who wasn't really around for i I guess, when Kanye was better. Or the old Kanye. This stuff has not been surprising to me because I've only been watching him the past, like, decade. And that's kind of what we're going to talk about. I would, it would probably be fair to call me, like, a casual knower of Kanye, but I'm much older than you, Garrison. And so I remember George Bush doesn't care about black people, which was like. That's the height of old Kanye.

That seems accurate. That was the high water point to where we were like, he's for the generation. This is a new breed. Because, but what's ill is like, it was obviously a sign of his manicness. Right. Looking back. In retrospect. In retrospect, it was like, oh, he was in a manic episode.

I mean, and the other thing is that he really just has a history of basic contrarianism. So he'll oppose George W. Bush because that's the contrarian thing to do at the moment post 9-11. Everyone was very pro Obama so instead he's going to be pro Trump because he's going to try to be that subversive element and that's definitely been a pattern throughout his career

it just sucks to see it go ahead I'm not an expert on his music I wasn't particularly a fan but the thing I know that everyone talks about is the motherfucker sampled blood on the leaves like and now that's a but also at the time it was like wow this is you know he's he's he's he's trying to say something and now there's a degree to which it's like well was that just the most contrarian like attention getting move he could be making right yeah i don't know and like what you said prop like initially when

this when the when the t-shirt stuff was happening at paris fashion week i really did not want to talk about this because i thought it was just another one of kanye's publicity stunts kind of in line with his mega hat and trump appearances from a few years ago and i didn't want to like play into the media cycle of just amplifying these stunts that kanye does which i think kind of feeds into and encourages this kind of behavior. But then Kanye went on Tucker and started posting on the internet and things have gotten a lot worse since then. And now I feel like it actually is, we should now actually talk about this because there's some interesting things going on.

And ideally we could talk about it in a way that's actually useful and that we can gain insight from and not just you know highlighting the bigoted and unhinged things that a public figure has said so and i think kind of feigning shocker surprisement at his recent actions and behavior and statements is mostly not useful like as opposed to just like clearly condemning bigotry and anti-semitism and doing like deplatforming and also upon this upon the news of the t-shirt stunt and the white lives matter stuff and anti-semitism i i was not actually really surprised because i kind of saw this as a natural evolution of the logical progression of the type of bit that kanye has been doing particularly for the past five years and that's kind of the angle that we're going to approach this with

I think we should probably start by talking about the types of alignments Kanye's had over the course of his career towards Christianity and how that kind of reached the peak in 2019 so you can see the kind of earliest hints of this type of thing in a song like

Jesus Walks in 2004 and then he kind of does some cool stuff we get to the album yeezus which kind of revolves around self like deification i never expected to hear you say yeezus awesome okay so which is which is a pretty good album. It's before he gets actually into Christ. It's more like God as a spiritual force that you can interact with and you can align yourself with. Can I fill in the Jesus Walks area? Yeah, absolutely.

Like, important context about kanye one is understanding how the south side of chicago is you know and what it's like to be black there's like you're not how do i say this church is as normal as dinner yeah our community, specifically in the south side of Chicago. Of course, your daddy's a deacon. Of course, your mom teaches Sunday school. Of course, the most hardened of criminals will stop and talk to Mother Johnson when they see her on the side of the road because she was your Sunday school teacher. And you still come every Sunday. Like, it's just such a part.

So the Christian idea is such a part, an integral part of our community. And of course, of his community, because he's just one of us, you know, that of course he's going to do a song called Jesus Walks, you know? Of course, and of course he actually probably the a song called jesus walks you know um of course and of course he actually probably the whole time believed he was a christian you know because of because we all are you know saying like and um unless you come from like the foi or like nation of islam stuff situation like specifically just with black people we're just we just went to church you know so and all of our all of our musicians you take the greatest musicians of any of our times they used to be

choir singers they used to be in the worship band like we just it's just a part of our life you know so so for him to do that was not strange no what was strange was him thinking it was unique well that was the part that was so weird about like why you think this is there's like you know yeah there's the aspect of thinking that some of like the gospel type stuff he was doing was unique which yeah maybe was unique for me on such a large platform but it was not new. And the other thing that is different is that there is a difference

between the type of like black church that you're talking about and white Christian evangelical born again ideology around conversion, which is what he starts getting into in the late 2000s. Yeah, what he became, you know what I'm saying? But that's not, that's why I was like, let me give it, so that's why like at first,

and I'm speaking as somebody who also came from like a very person of color experience with Christianity and then finding, you know, sort of white evangelicalism and thinking because we're using the same words that we're talking about the same thing yeah and then you about five minutes sitting at that table you're just like oh oh y'all different yeah just kind of like make the little peace out sign and let me slide out because clearly we don't believe the same things you know i mean i i first found your music as i was kind of me and my family were exiting evangelicalism yeah um and that was a very useful kind of step that was still

using some familiar language but it was like going in a better direction yeah that's dope you know yeah yeah um so i think the next kind of notable thing is the more gospel-esque album life of pablo uh allegedly inspired by the life of the biblical paul and there's the song ultra ultra light beam uh which features contemporary gospel superstar kirk franklin and chance the rapper who's also a very open christian yeah uh then he ghani has a few years of dealing with mental health stuff. He gets hospitalized. He comes out of the hospital and then in April, he, some, somewhere around 2016, he kind of endorses Trump, kind of. But then in April, but then in April, 2018,

West sends out a series of tweets expressing admiration for Trump, including that he felt he was his brother and they both have quote, dragon energy. Hilarious. People like Chance the Rapper initially came to West's defense, saying that black people don't have to be Democrats, which he later apologized for. And a lot of tweets that were up that are now gone. Yes. One of the kind of worst inclinations of where things are kind of going was a fucking TMZ interview, which was supposed to be about Kanye's support of Trump. But then he went on to make some pretty gross comments about black people choosing to be enslaved.

I don't think people necessarily understand what happened last week with the Make America Great Again hat. What are you trying to do with the message you're sending? Well, it was really just my subconscious. It was a feeling I had. People, we're taught how to think. We're taught how to feel. We don't know how to think for ourselves. We don't know how to feel for ourselves.

People say feel free, but they don't really want us to feel free. And I felt a freedom in, first of all, just doing something that everybody tells you not to do. I just love Trump. When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years, that sounds like a choice. Like, you was there for 400 years and it's all of y'all? You know, like, it's're we're mentally in prison i like the word prison because slavery goes to to direct to the uh idea of blacks it's like slavery holocaust holocaust jews uh slavery is blacks so prison is something that unites us as one race

blacks and whites being one race uh that we're one we're with a human race and fun fact like van who stood up to him i think to this day especially among like uh black media figures he's as far as i can remember like one of the only that confronted him in the moment boldly didn't mince his words you could tell he was like almost weeping because i mean that's the way i felt watching it where it was just like oh what are you what are you saying like it's just it's just so hurtful because you're like you can't believe like come on man like drop the act, bro. Now we're all suffering. It's almost like I get it. We get it.

Looking back, yeah, even College Dropout, that record was just him being, now we used to think it was revolutionary. No, it's just him being a contrarian. I don't have to go to college. Now I know, oh, man, it wasn't as deep as I thought it was. Yeah. But in the moment. Yeah, at the moment, you're like-

He's like a fucking genius like this is dope yeah dark trusted fantasy was like the most amazing album i had ever heard up to that point right brilliant and even that as you guys are talking there's like sprinkles of religious stuff in that one and a lot of his stuff yeah he just takes it one step too far because i just remember thinking like oh this guy's a musical genius and then when you see that genius kind of turn on itself, it's just disappointing. But yeah, shout out Van for like confronting him and directly saying you're wrong. This hurts. And I can't believe you say that.

And you owe your community an apology. That was pretty dope. Yeah. So after that incident, he took to Twitter.com to clarify slash defend slash double down on his slavery comments, talking about being mentally enslaved and how it's, we need to, you know,

this is just an example, like, and how his comments were just an example of, of free thought. It's just an idea. And once again, I'm being attacked for presenting new ideas. And then he ended this kind of tweet thread with a fake Harriet Tubman

quote saying I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves, which is not a real Harriet Tubman quote. No, that doesn't seem like a thing she would say at all. All the tweets were later deleted, but

it was kind of doubling down on some of the same rhetoric. And then allegedly some of the TMZ staffers have also now come out and said that he said some anti-Semitic things during the interview that were cut out. Now, that's not verified, and TMZ is obviously not a great source. But just an interesting note on him possibly saying some other things that people thought were kind of weird and just thought that we may as well just cut this out because it doesn't seem super relevant at the time. Anyway, so around the same time in 2018, Kanye befriended someone named Candace Owens, who was at the time the communications director for the far-right group Turning Point USA, led by man with face too small for his head, Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, led by man with face too small for his head, Charlie Kirk.

Kanye tweeted that he loved the way Candace Owens thinks. Candace Owens basically makes all of her money by being paid by rich conservative white men to say that racism isn't a problem anymore. Days after

his Candace Owens tweet, when there was the mega hat wearing tmz visit he was accompanied by to tmz by candace owens uh that's something that a lot of people uh miss is that know that owens is owens is a core vector point for all of the stuff around kanye and much of kanye's rhetoric in this vein of like slavery being thought to control a lot of that directly comes from owens that that that's the talking points that yeah his free thinking yeah all of those talking points come directly from owens which come from her being paid by the coke brothers um and then obviously west solidified his position in the pro-trump

camp with the heavily publicized white house visit in late October of 2018, where Kanye gave like a 10 minute long monologue while wearing the mega hat. I love this guy right here. Let me give this guy a hug. I love this guy right here. That's really nice. And that's from the heart. I didn't want to put you in that position, but that's from the heart i didn't want to put you in that position but that's from the heart these are like the intersections that are being vectored in this scenario in this thing is like like i said like i i didn't i did not want to cover this but now that it's like it's clearly necessary to do just for, even for this context, like there's a certain, I, I save, I save the word coon. Like a coon is not something you throw around. Like that's to me, it's the, yeah, it is. I, it's for, as far as a black person or me as somebody who works in justice and stuff like that, it is the worst thing I can call you.

You know what I'm saying? So like I saved that term and it's because of the same reason why it's hard for the totality of the black community to ever really fully disavow somebody. It's because of our history of collective suffering like our we've survived because of our communal protection of each other so even when somebody is losing it it's just like baby just come home baby okay listen no he had a bad day you know i mean you just you want so much to protect them because you understand how much internalized like self-hate and racism, how much you internalize that stuff, you know, so you just want so bad, so bad to be like, okay, Candace, let's turn the cameras off. Like, you getting your money, right? That's what we doing, right? You just, come on, you could tell us. You just, if you getting your money, just tell us, you know, it's like, you know, nah, fam, you don't really believe this, do you? You know? And, and then we get to be like, baby, don't get your money like that. Like, don't, don't get your money based on our suffering. Like you, cause you're thinking that there's no, there's no way, there's no way this is really you,

you know? And so, so, so when you put those two together,'s like like why did it take us so long to disavow r kelly why did it take us so long to just why is chris brown still a star you know i'm saying it's because it's it's because of that it's just you don't ever want it like you gotta save you gotta save coon you gotta save that for when you really mean it you know what i mean uh i for me personally i'm like i i just i don't pull that word out often yeah and then there's moments when you're just like i don't know what else to call this like i just you if you if you are selling your own people out for the purpose of making money that's coon that's coonery like i don't and it's just hard for me to say it but anyway go on tell us more about candace owens

the girl that sued the girl that sued her uh school sued her school board for racism she sure did yeah she sure did we'll get back to owens in a bit. By the time 2019 started, this is when Kanye went public about his born-again conversion to Christianity and kind of his full pivot towards the, I guess, mostly kind of untapped mainstream Christian rap market, which is kind of, I'm going to try to frame some of his decisions here as being more monetarily driven than what a lot of people assume. Because I can totally understand these as business choices, especially coming after the Trump visit. His state of alignment with Trump and

friendship with Candace Owens handed him a partially alienated fan base, accompanied by a new wave of fans from right-wing christian evangelicals to alt-right you know turning point usa daily wire type supporters and then by the beginning of 2019 west kind of tamped down on some of his explicit uh trumpian political persona type stuff and in its place came this weekly pseudo-christian gathering known as the sunday service just like a weekly mostly invite only choir packed music gathering that changes locations

every week sometimes at properties owned by kanye sometimes at churches outdoors all all around the country yeah see and this is this is where things get uncomfortably, start to get uncomfortably culty. This is where things get quite culty. Yeah. And it's like, and don't get it, like, let me not, let me not cap. They were objectively dope. Like, as music's concerned. Hey. These are objective, and that's the hard part about Kanye, where it's just like, this shit is dope, though.

Look, you go back a couple of decades, that was not untrue of People's Temple, right? True. They had great artists. They put on great music. That was a big part of their appeal in addition to the fact, yeah. And Kanye, for some reason, hired a lot of extremely talented people to lead up those programs. Yeah, a lot of legendary gospel singers, you know, and very recognizable names. And again, given that his history and context, and then the context is just Black people in general,

part of it felt like at the time, okay, he's trying to return to his roots. It's like, this is what you grew up in. And you realized, like, maybe you've gone too far. Maybe it's like, this is what you grew up in. And you realized, like, maybe you've gone too far. Maybe it's like, I'm so far into this Hollywood world. You know, I'm starting to like, so I'm like, I'm going to do my best to like, like anyone does. Like, let me return back to what I know was the safest moment in my life. And it was Sunday services. So it's like, so I gave him the benefit. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because it's like, that's what we all do.

You return home, you start praying again. You know what I'm saying? I would totally believe that if it weren't for the fact that he tried to trademark the term Sunday service. Right? Like, once you start doing that, you're like, huh, I wonder what's actually going on here. Yeah. Like, once you start doing that, you're like, huh, I wonder what's actually going on here. Wait a minute. Yeah. Like, performers and attendees had to sign NDAs and adhere to a strict dress code that changed every week.

The service featured gospel-inspired remixes of classic songs from different genres and also straight choir-led gospel tunes with the occasional biblical servant, often given by, like, a white guy in his 30s or sometimes kanye yeah um it's it's it's probably mostly known for attracting celebrities to come and then also playing at coachella in 2019 yeah well there's nothing wrong with coachella so yeah nothing nothing nothing ever bad's happened at coachella there They're just normal booking promoters that are just looking at numbers and saying these people will buy tickets. I know I showed this to you, Garrison. Prop, have you

ever seen the movie Marjo? No, I have not. There's a couple of, it's about the evangelical movement right at the start of the religious right. Okay. You know, the Falwell days and everything.

Uh-huh. And there's a couple of moments that show an early megachurch with a majority black congregation and incredible singers and incredible music acts. And then a bunch of like old white people running things and taking all the money. I don't know. Sounds familiar. Yeah, it makes me think about that a little bit. I don't know entirely.

Yeah. And the thing is, like I said, you know, obviously as a fan of the show, you know, I'm familiar, you know, Garrison, with your history. And even you describing your history of church is just like god it's just not my experience like that wasn't the church we were in because i was just in a whole different tradition yeah so when you when you come across and i like i can't stress this enough when you come across you know the nashville of it all the like the ccm of it all like in in and these bigger you know suburban mega white churches i like you again you think you're saying the same thing

like you you just it's this weird like and i know one of the things for me was like and then uh oscar grant happened do you know i mean and then Oscar Grant happened. Do you know what I mean? And then Mike Brown happened. And then I'm like, and then you realize like, oh yeah, no, we're not. We're not. And then that begins, then you start questioning your own background. Like, dude, well, like, well, what did we believe when we was kids? You know what I'm saying? And then looking at the Sunday, looking at the Sunday service, I was like, yo, this is, this is youth group. That's what we did in youth group. You just, you know, you get a good singer and they remix a Jodeci song and just put praise in it. You know what I'm saying? I'm like, oh, this is, you're just singing a pop song and you're just

giving it Christian words. This isn't clever. Like, you know, we we've we've been doing this you know and and but then like like yeah like same thing like once you exit that like you know that subculture and you start like breathing the air and you're just like oh so you so you're telling me muslims don't have horns and aren't you know i'm saying going to immediately going to hell it's not like that oh yeah turns out they're just wonderful human beings that believe beautiful things then you start looking back you're going damn maybe i was kind maybe i did kind of drink that kool-aid you know but yeah and we're talking about you know when we're talking about how kind of the white suburban church can be sometimes saying the same words but

also be very different we'll be talking about joel osteen in a little bit oh god oh yes oh yes oh yes the smile impressed like i'm telling you dog like you just you just and then yeah once you once once the veil comes off and you realize like the way these people are talking to you and for me it was like oh shit you use the same the same words you're using about my experience you're using about the queer community same words you're using about my experience you're using about the queer community absolutely yeah you're using about the trans community and then you start going oh shit oh okay oh it's on now you know i'm saying now you're like oh okay nah i'm cool on all this let me let me go let me go to ethiopia you know let me see what y'all think about this you know but yeah anyway yeah that that that aspect and then i mean i'm i'm rambling because it's such it's so close to

home this kanye shit is so close to home that like you're like because i can see how you'd fall for it is what i'm trying to say sure i could see how he'd fall for it you know kind of at the height of his sunday service stuff in 2019 is when kanye started openly talking about his born again conversion to christianity um i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna quote a fox news article quote yay must be born again kanye west and kim Kardashian shared their Christian faith in a big way over this weekend. Adam Tyson, a pastor from Southern California, told Fox News recently that he's been leading West in a Bible study for months now. And would, quote, teach from God's word about how salvation is only by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Great.

Cutting edge journalism by Fox News. I also reform Calvinist talk. Yeah. This is always interesting and I guess meaningless because they don't have to be consistent. But I can remember when Kanye said what he said about George Bush after Katrina and the degree to which Fox News treated him like a fucking ghoul. Yeah. Like the incarnation of Satan. Yeah, some of the cruelest and most racist shit I ever saw on Fox News

was focused around that. But no, now he's publicly praying. So he's back on our side. We're all good. That clip was around the time of ringtones. It was my ringtone. You know what I'm saying? George Bush doesn't care about black ringtones it was my ringtone i'm saying george bush doesn't care about black people that was my ringtone one of those things fucking somebody needed to say it

somebody needed to say it somebody needed to say it yo and then when you see out like out of y'all remember this but george george bush did a post like presidential interview and they asked him like what was your like lowest point in yeah when you're president he was like when kanye said i didn't care about black people i was like not the multiple invasions wow not not the two times you invaded foreign countries yeah none of that none of the war crimes like none of that oh cool when yay said you ain't care about black people that is i i gotta say though that's also kind of because i i remember when he said that how happy everybody was just because it was nice to see george bush sad but it's also kind of another harbinger of well that's maybe too much

cultural power for for one man to handle one man should have all that exactly exactly we got there robert we got there yes good work yeah because it definitely added reference i knew how to make yes it definitely added to kanye's cachet because it was like bro you you did it you took down a president yeah you know the last rapper to take down a president feel bad yes the last rapper to take down a president was Eazy-E and Ice-T like it took a long time before we could get somebody like Eazy-E we're talking about you know the jerry curl juice dripping on the white house like that's that's Eazy-E you know what I mean and then you know with body counting cop killer from Ice-T like that was the last time anybody was able to take out a president you know so i'm like you didn't you in the annals of history now fam

that's what we thought at least yeah so i think i think stuff like that made him think he's like he transcended blackness the same way like oj thinks he has you know what i mean i think that mentality plays in my opinion a lot into into the Messiah complex that he has. Clearly has, yeah. After the Kim Kardashian baptism and the Adam Tyson Bible study groups, Kanye started talking much more openly about the evangelical-style born-again conversion that he had in 2019. born-again conversion that he had in 2019. While at the biggest megachurch in the country, based out of Houston, Texas, Kanye talked about his recent conversion to Christianity to the 16,000 people president at the church's regular Sunday service.

Kanye declared that he no longer cares for fame and money, but is only in the service of God. And in conversation with the celebrity pastor Joel Osteen at the church, Kanye said, quote, The only superstar is Jesus. And I know that God has been calling me for a long time, and the devil has been distracting me for a long time. Here's a pro tip. The only time you'll ever hear someone say, I no longer care for money, it's because they're rich as God. Yes.

Right, because they have enough of it. Yes. You have more than you could spend. In a radio interview, Kanye went into more detail about his conversion, saying that he began reading the Bible during his 2016 hospitalization for mental health issues and started, quote, writing and copying out Bible verses. Uh-oh. Which is not...

Listen, y'all. I don't want to be just like blatantly anti-bible but if you're in the hospital for mental issues they probably should let people they should not let you access any religious text at all like no any, the story is, it is standard inner city church talk. Like this is par for the course. You're like, look, dude, you know, you go up and you give your testimony and testimony service. You know, I was, listen, I was outside. I was doing all the gangs. I was with all the girls.

And then one day I was high, you know, I was in nine gangs and I was, and I was at a four day binger. And I just looked up and I said, God, if you could get me out of this, you know, and then over in the corner, I saw a Bible. Like it's, it's standard, you know? Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I, it's, there's so much about it that's standard also just to evangelicals. Again, I brought up the whole I no longer care about money. But every one of these rich megachurch pastors who is making hundreds of millions of dollars a year will have speeches where they're like, I don't care. The money means nothing to me.

It's all for God. Everything. Like, he's the only real star up here. Like, it's all very again if you're i think this hit people like a brick who aren't familiar haven't had experience particularly with like strains of southern christianity yeah but the way kanye's been talking makes a lot of sense but it's also i think that chunk of people were all flummoxed by the black Israelism stuff, which I'm guessing we're going to talk about later. The Hebrew-Israelite stuff?

You sure? Yeah, that's more Northeast and Midwest. The Hebrew-Israelite stuff. Alright, let's go. A lot to say there. A lot of thoughts. Around this time in 2019 is when Kanye announced that he's no longer making secular

music, which is a term I heard a lot as a kid. Yeah, I bet you did. Secular music. Secular music. You listen to secular music? Absolutely not. No. No way.

That's worldly, man. No. Absolutely not. Yes, worldly. When's the last time I heard the phrase worldly? Yes. Yeah. That's worldly.

You're up there. I'm in the world, not of the world. That's right. That's right. In and out of it baby so this led to his late 2019 album jesus is king it's objectively it's a good album um it is it's also borderline christian dominionist in some themes um the very first words on the album are god is king we are the soldiers um and that song ends with the army of god and we are the truth um so you know that that goes into the into ideas about like the kingdom of god we're the soldiers and so in this idea there's there's

like there's this battle between the antagonism against the godly community from the forces of spiritual darkness. And, you know, shout out and woo-woos and there-there's for every Christian rapper of the world who had this guy make one record and then cover everybody's charts. So now no one cares about y'all. You've been serving at these, like, you know, Camp Canna-Cucks, you know, rapping to these 12-year- old white kids and trying to get your trying to get your albums out and then this fool kanye just cleans up your whole subgenre he had the uh pretty funny song in my opinion closed on sunday you my chick-fil-a which i think is funny now that is that's actually pretty good but the man is talented no one's

arguing about it it's also probably sincere because that song ends with Jesus listen and obey so like it's you know um no it's it's it's a it's it's funny it's like that it is there's this there's this like with hip-hop you know as a rapper there's this like fine line between clever bars and dad jokes like it's real you you you gotta teeter on that and i was like yo you are dancing on that on that border with this one you know so evangelicals kind of embraced kanye in this period some were obviously skeptical based on him being a black person and his gen in his general past but overall a lot of a lot of people were happy to have kind of to use him as a token figure almost yep um we love kanye in in a in a guardian piece titled

kanye west is spreading the gospel of white evangelicals, Malaika Havali writes, quote, like other black conservatives, the rapper and designer downplays racism while promoting bootstrap virtue signaling. While signifying black cultural and religious traditions, his album is peppered with samples of black church staples like James Cleveland's God Is. West advances the gospel of white evangelicals. Although he has challenged conventions in nearly every aspect of his artistic life, Kanye West has been

born again as a conservative. And that whole article is a really good piece kind of going into how specifically the type of thing he's engaging with is distinct from the black church tradition and is just like joel osteen shit um and then hill song of it all exactly exactly do you cover

hills are we gonna talk about hill song at all i don't have anything of hill song in this script this script is already too long it might it might need to be a two-parter at this point i think we'll probably do hill song on btb at some point yeah yeah hillsong was a big part of my childhood yeah hillsong is a big part of the whole fascism thing it's a yeah my childhood i really feel like i really feel like just as just secular just just the idea of just like secular like academia anybody who studies culture i feel like the effects of something like a hill song is always siloed into this like study of religion you know what i mean this is just this day but like really the cultural societal impact global like of something like a hill song stretches so far past just a theological or religious thing i think i don't think people really understand like

the influence something like a hill song would have and just like any other thing it's like you know i soiree'd in there so i met some cool people there you know i'm saying i'm cool cool homies you know i mean there's some stuff that I was just like, all right, yeah, nah, y'all weirdos, but, you know, but generally, it's like, I mean, yeah, like, you, DMX went to Hillsong, New York, you know what I'm saying, like, so, just the, the, the, the type of influence over so much of the even just pop music it's like y'all understand like like top you know number top 40 pop songs were actually written by their worship band like just stuff like that like the the effects of something like a hill song i feel like is is is grossly under under reported and underrated another Another interesting note.

So University of Virginia professor Ashen Crawley wrote for NPR saying, quote, Kanye West has used the concept of salvation to disallow thoughtful engagement with his politics. Which I think is an interesting sidebar to kind of everything we've talked about, especially with his more evangelical stuff coming directly after his Trump stuff. Now, obviously, I don't know what's going on inside Kanye's head, nor can I judge his sincerity of faith.

But I can certainly see the business aspect of Browning yourself as basically the first extremely mainstream Christian rap artist in 2019. I can see from a business perspective what happened in 2018 with his politics. I can see how this may have been a gamble that he took. So throughout 2020, after his Sunday service kind of era, Kanye was kind of running for president, but like not really.

It mostly seems to be a publicity thing. His campaign obviously did not result in him becoming the main president, but it did result in his wife divorcing him in favor of Pete Davidson. The most notable aspect of his campaign is in July, at a rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, Kanye broke down in tears as he claimed that him and his wife had discussed aborting their first child. This allegedly

left his wife mortified and, quote, deeply worried over Kanye's mental state, which eventually led to their divorce in 2021. Kanye continued and continues to focus on abortion, but he continued to talk about that throughout his, quote-unquote campaign.

And in interviews later that September, he said that God revealed to him, quote, the black genocide that is abortion. God revealed that to him. Is this the same lie? Yeah. I'll say this. I don't have a lot of nice things

or a lot to say at all about Kim Kardashian. But one of the first thing I thought back when he got institutionalized during his mental health outbreak is like, oh, people actually care about him. Like he actually has people in his life who love him and are making him seek help, which a lot of very famous people who have, you know, psychotic episodes and stuff don't have that, right? No one around them is willing to be critical enough to be like, you need help right now. Yeah. It does seem like she really tried to help. Yeah, it's crazy to think that on our 2020 bingo card that the adult in the room was going to be kim kardashian yeah like i would have not predicted that you know her her actions in the marriage make sense to me yes yeah yeah

so with all of that context this finally leads us to our main topic of discussion oh boy oh we haven't got there yet conge's recent actions comments linked to white supremacy and anti-semitism so this most recent circus started at the beginning of october during paris fashion week where conge literally hand in hand with far-right media personality candace owens debuted his new line of t-shirts while wearing a long sleeve that read white lives matter now this this the slogan is obviously in response to blm um but the more formal like white lives matter movement is it is like an explicitly neo-nazi group tied to the aryan resistance society the national socialist movement and the loyal white White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

So, it's like the actual group is explicitly Nazis, but obviously the slogan is not... It's easy to come up with the slogan, White Lives Matter. It's not like, that's not like, where did he get that from? Come on.

So, Kanye's promotion of the slogan was obviously celebrated by many neo-fascist online celebrities. Nick Fuentes of America First forwarded the post saying that, quote, anti-white racism and White Lives Matter are now mainstream. This is an unambiguous win. And then Tucker was very quick to do a segment on his show where he wondered what the T-shirt was really about. Oh, my God. Days ago during Fashion Week in Paris, West, accompanied by his friend Candace Owens, unveiled a T-shirt that read simply White Lives Matter.

The response from the fashion industry and international media was instantaneous and uniform. Shock, horror, rage. There is no excuse for this, thundered the New York Times. West is legitimizing extremism, shrieked Rolling Stone, etc., etc. What was strikingly missing from the coverage, however, was any explanation for why West did this. What was the t-shirt about? No one seemed to think to ask him, much less to listen to what he had to say. Instead, the enemies of his ideas dismissed West, as they have for years, as mentally ill. Too crazy to take seriously. Look away. Ignore him. He's a mental patient. There's nothing to see here. I don't know who's to say. Who's to say, really? I'm surprised all the All Lives Matter people weren't in such an uproar about that yeah i wonder why i

wonder why um the next monday kanye wrote on instagram quote everyone knows that black lives matter was a scam now it's over you're welcome unquote this is this is this is direct this is like direct candace owens shit in a way that we'll explain later um but so a few days after kanye and models for his new uh uh yeezy lineup donned the white lives matter t-shirts at paris fashion week he himself made an appearance um to quote rolling stone on the show where white lives matter the most Tucker Carlson's Fox News show Tucker Carlson tonight honestly solid solid turn of phrase that's dope yeah that's that's a good way to write that yeah nailed it good thank you thank you comrade Rolling Stone so you made reference to the white

lives matter t-shirt which you brought out at Paris fashion week. Why did you do that and what did it mean? You know, I do certain things from a feeling. I just channel the energy. It just feels right. It's using a gut instinct, a

connection with God and just brilliance. You know, like if you ask like Tanya Harding how she did the triple flip or the triple spin, she was in so much practice that when it was time for her to skate in a competitive format, it just happened. Like it happened outside of practice. It happened in the real format. And that happened. Like it happened outside of practice. It happened in the real format. And that's what's happening. God is like preparing us for the real battles. And we are in a battle with the media.

Like the majority of the media has a godless agenda. Oh, that's brilliant. So in the clip, he talks about this idea coming to him as like a feeling um this is basically the same explanation that he gave for wearing the mega hat it's like a spontaneous gut instinct or feeling the the spontaneous decision to make to make model and sell overpriced printed t-shirts. He also said that about like wearing a kilt. I remember for one of the records, he said he had that feeling over that he was going to do it in Chicago

because he wanted to set young black men free. So he was going to wear a kilt. He also said when he was going to run for president that it just happened in the shower. And he just started laughing and he was like, I'm run for president i'm gonna be the president i don't like not believe him that these exactly come like come this way like exactly like yeah that probably but it's funny to frame the decision to like do these very planned out things as just a single like gut gut moment of spontaneous instinct because making and

producing t-shirts takes like it's like a process and he talked about this as if he decided to do this like right before going on stage at paris fashion week which like yeah no like this was like a decision that you made and you then took steps to execute um so and then in that section of the interview, Kanye did go on to dismiss the assertion that his behavior is the result of any mental health issues. Then in a segment talking about Lizzo and body positivity, Tucker and Kanye had this exchange referencing body weight being demonic and a part of, quote, black genocide. It's actually clinically unhealthy. And for people to promote that, it's demonic.

Can I ask? I've noticed this also. Why do you think they would want to promote unhealthiness among the population? It's a genocide of the black race. They want to kill us in any way they can. Kanye then goes on to talk about like abortion also being black genocide, which he has been talking a lot about in the past few weeks. that yeah that that Lizzo clip like man it's that was like

just like I mean like I can only wait I can only think of like vulgar phrases to describe it where it's just like just kick me in my balls dude like i'm we're already on the ground just that's what if it just felt like a ball stomp or it's just

like you don't have to come on man you're all you're down bad bro like really i got nothing man like why are you gonna why are you saying that like it's exhausting yeah that's what i'm trying to say it's exhausting we just like that's what I'm trying to say. It's exhausting. We just like, why are you saying that, man? Yeah, all of the con gay coverage is exhausting. And feeding into it as media spectacle only encourages this type of unhealthy behavior. And it does not help.

Like, it doesn't help to be a regular person on social media, having strangers interact with you in a weird way, let alone if you're one of the most famous people in the world. It's not healthy. Facts. I'm going to quote from New Republic, and this is kind of about his White Lives Matter shirt and his initial Tucker Carlson appearance. than a troll, another tiresome and mediocre provocation to stir up attention by using a contrarian slogan that until now was mostly associated with far-right white supremacists. West has, in recent years, made more waves with his efforts to trigger the libs than he has with his music. White Lives Matter is a slogan associated with hate groups, but he got what he sought, attention and amplification from Republicans and right-wing media.

West earned a sit-down with Fox News on Tucker Carlson tonight to talk about his boy Trump and the response he has received to his overall mega-ification. Carlson was hardly alone in celebrating West for not only rejecting Black Lives Matter, but promoting the same sense of white grievance and victimization that he has trumpeted on his Fox News program for years. The Republican House Judiciary Committee Twitter account spent hours slobbering over the interview, taking a victory lap of sorts for its new generation of edgelords. And a tweet from the Judiciary GOP account is still up that just reads, The judiciary GOP account is still up that just reads Kanye period, Elon period, Trump period, which my God, if that's the state of the Republican Party, like. Is this your king? Yeah.

So at first, Kanye appeared to relish in the t-shirt controversy, writing on Instagram that, my one t-shirt took all the attention. After the t-shirt incident, Adidas said that they were placing its lucrative sneaker deal under review. The previous month, Kanye exited his deal with The Gap. And, you know, several contemporaries of Kanye did push back on this shit that he was pulling. Including rapper Sean Diddy Combs, who condemned the design in a video on Instagram.

And said, don't wear the shirt, don't buy the shirt, don't play with the shirt, this is not a joke. And what happened next took things to a new level of grotesqueness. West spent the next few days spewing anti-Semitic vitriol online. First on Instagram, where Kanye posted screenshots from a private message exchange between him and Combs, where he suggested that Combs was being controlled by Jewish people,

saying, I'm going to use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me. So obviously not great playing into basic jokes. While clearly being influenced by right-wing thought. Yeah. Yes. By fossil fuel billionaires, essentially. But yeah, playing not great playing right into the kind of ideas that jewish people like control into the entertainment industry and

like have direct influence on what people's you know basic anti-semitism stuff um so soon after this his instagram account was suspended and then after he was locked out of his account kanye decided to rejoin twitter.com after a two-year hiatus and was welcomed back by elon musk saying welcome welcome back friend um minutes minutes later minutes after elon's welcoming of elon of Elon, minutes later, after Elon's welcoming of Kanye West, Kanye tweeted, I'm a bit sleepy tonight, which is a weird way to open this tweet, by the way. I'm a bit sleepy tonight.

Okay. But when I wake up, I'm going DEATHCON3 on Jewish people. Jewish people in all caps. The funny thing is that I can't actually be anti-Semitic because black people are actually Jew. Also, you guys toyed... God, say the whole word. Jewie?

That was a TV joke. That wasn't Garrison being... Anyway, whatever. that was a that was a tv joke that wasn't garrison being anyway whatever you guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone who are whoever opposes your agenda with a follow-up tweet saying who do you think created cancel culture which uh well that's also okay i i do want to stop at that that is a much deeper nazi reference you might guess. There's a book called The Culture of Critique. There was a deep understanding among the OG Nazis back in the 20s and 30s that literary criticism, that like the idea of sort of cultural criticism, that these were all Jewish plots in order to like, you know, it's actually similar to a lot of what the right says today, in order to like make white people feel bad and shamed about their culture. Nazis today, there's a book called The Culture of Critique or A Culture of Critique that's about the same thing.

This is actually a really deep idea. Robert, are you saying that the cultural Marxists at the Frankfurt School invented political correctness to undermine Western civilization? No, I'm saying that yes, but I'm also saying in a deeper sense that the Jews invented the concept of feeling bad about bad things in order to make white people

feel bad about conquering the world, which was the original. That's the OG shit. Before we water this shit down. Before it becomes cultural Marxism, back when it's good old-fashioned cultural bolshevism yes cultural bolshevism so that's the os1 version yeah yeah exactly that's the that's the i don't know it's the iphone one that's the sidekick you know i'm saying you want

you're on the blackberry racism yeah that's. So this is basically a lot of like textbook anti-Semitism mixed in with some black Hebrew Israelite shit about, you know, being the true chosen people of God. Kind of akin to like the if people listen to the show, they'll they might be familiar with like the Nazi Christian identity idea of white Christians white christians being the real israelites everybody want to be a real israel here yeah it started so we get the start of black israelism in the northeast and to the midwest i think it's kansas and new york city are two of the big early cities in the 1890s and it's like it's number one anti-semitic from the start an awful lot of it is based around like a hatred of jewish people um but it's also this like idea that there's x number 13 lost is tribes of israel and then the black people are the lost is tribes of israel and so there would be mixes of like taking actual elements of like hebrew religious worship and uh mixing them in with kind of weirder stuff anyway it's it has a long history it is concentrated like the part of

this like if you have ever spent time in like new york yeah like philly or whatever you have run into black israelites on the street like there it's it's a thing that you will encounter um there's not a ton of them i think most estimates like 20 or 30 000 yeah but they're they're very vocal yeah the the the phrase now with like most of the hebrew israelites is like the two children of israel are the black latino and the so-called native american or this yeah so it's just this idea and here's where here's where it gets tantalizing and complicated. And I'm saying this as a black man, you know, is you open your Bible and at the back of every Bible got a map. And you looking at it and you going, well, this is where the shit take place right so you're like well how come y'all only teaching us about europeans you only talking about every painting

got these white people everybody you just like nah this don't this shit don't make sense this can't be it and then i'm getting i'm getting deep cuts here it's like you and then you get into the book of acts where it's supposed to be the bible like where the gospel spreads and the first time they leave the first time they leave israel is stephen meeting an ethiopian he's meeting this ethiopian eunuch and the ethiopian ghost of where where was moses when mo this other back in the exodus story where was moses where did moses go when he fled when he fled uh egypt he went to midian he went to ethiopia so you're like this shit took place in africa right and at the time we you still believe

like the sinai peninsula that's north africa you know so you're like these are brown skin people why is your narrative and everything you tell me about white people so if you still believe if you were still sort of like in awe of the story and the person this like this subversive you know socialist you know anti-imperialistic empire anti-empire character of Jesus that, you know, your Arab and Muslim friends still understand as, you know, as Isa, as like a person, then you're like, yo, we might be talking about the same man here, and he was as brown as us. So, and if you're like, and if you're like, you're like, dude, the gospel went south. hit we hit in ethiopia there's axiom the first christian city like at some point you like the shit didn't go north until 400 years

later so you you just draw this conclusion that like if you're gonna box me out my only response if you're gonna box me out of all of the clear history that took place among brown-skinned people then i'm gonna be like i have no choice but to be like well fuck y'all not a true israel over here and if you read again if you you can't not possibly be black and read the book of exodus and be like well shit that's us you know i'm saying you can't pop like how do you not see it you know so so it's it's so alluring especially again when you go to the when the white pastor talking about like well your poverty is your choice and hey well you know and your reformed Calvinist person was like well that

was the Lord's divine will you were you know you were divinely ordained you know to be suffering people and at least at least you got the gospel because you were a slave maybe god was sovereign you like fuck that that can't possibly be the god i'm reading about in this book you know so you're like okay well i guess you know i'm saying and then it's like i'm i'm ranting on this because i feel like like it's especially for this audience to really understand that context you this this street in a lot of ways like it became like this street religion it gives these young men dignity you know i'm saying you're offering them a sense of history and importance and dignity and and an order that

we you usually just get from the streets you You know what I'm saying? It's not happening in Sunday school because at church, that's just old black, that's just old women singing these hymns in the big hats. It's like, I'm not getting that sort of like, that masculine hit, if you will. You know what I'm saying? So like this, a lot of this faith, like it really, it attracts young men because it's like, it's like we, it's like we needed that order. We needed somebody to like come and like we it's like we needed that order we needed somebody to like come and like be a little more military about us but then tie this longer history because if the only history you hear about yourself is your oppression for somebody to be like nah you the

chosen people of god you're gonna be like well hell yeah you know and then again like i can't stress this enough part of this is in reaction to what white evangelical did by trying to erase brown people from the history, you know what I'm saying, it's like, I'm, I can't, I'm like, that's clear, he clearly, your picture is Michelangelo's boo thing of, of, that's, that's an Italian man, like, that can't possibly be the dude in these books you know so you like i i i mean he was jesus was black like i'll like you just that's your only conclusion and you like and these people are saying yeah you're right absolutely and you're like well well shit i'll rock with y'all you know and it's it's it's definitely unclear what the extent of Kanye's belief

and stuff around black Hebrew Israelite type stuff is. He still has a lot of the evangelical type stuff going on in what he's saying. So he could have just picked up these types of things from cultural osmosis. We'll hear a little bit more about what he has to say about this in the next episode. But we're going to have to,

I'm going to have to call it there. Yep, that's going to be a day. Join us after the weekend for a special part two on the feed talking about more of the same thing, but getting slightly worse. And it turns out when you get kicked off Twitter, that doesn't stop you from saying bad things. You just start saying them at other places. So anyway, yeah, that's that.

Bye. Very impressed, Garrison. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbroth. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of rife. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.