It Could Happen Here - Shinzo Abe Killed By Electric Blunderbuss

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Who is Shinzo Abe? How did he die the funniest death of any modern world leader? What does it all mean?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. welcome to it could happen here a podcast that for the first time ever is being recorded on an earth that i no longer have to share with that fascist rap bastard chinzo abe

and with with me with me to celebrate this occasion is garrison davis oh hi hello and james have have we actually have we like introduced you introduced you yet i don't think so no i just pop up talking about 3d printed guns and people who hate butterflies yeah yeah this is this is truly a dark day for democracy i'm saddened by the horrible loss of a great leader, a hero to feminism and women, and I guess a hero to those who defend war crimes. So I guess before we get into one of the funniest things that has happened in maybe 20 years, James, do you want to talk about about who you are? Because you are now one of us and I'm very excited about it. Yeah, I'm one of Yeah, I'm now a podcaster. And so who I am, I am a journalist, I guess, and a historian. And I wrote a book about the first week of the Spanish Civil War. And my PhD is in the history of international anti-fascism and building international anti-fascist alliances through

physical culture, which is very nerdy. But yeah, I love that stuff. What else? I'm British, if that had not been made abundantly clear by my accent. And I live in Southern California. Which means this is now, this episode is a majority Commonwealth episode. Yeah, that's right. Really exciting. We made it. Yeah, we'll be doing the national anthem in a minute here and we'll all just stand up.

So ex-prime minister, kind of, he's not around anymore is he no he is dead as fuck so all right we should i guess we should explain who shinzo abe is yeah um okay if you want a really really long account of what the japanese liberal democratic party is because they are some of the worst people who've ever existed uh go listen to my liberal and democratic yeah how how does how can this be so the the the very short version of this is that the liberal democratic party is a party that was founded by nobusuke kishi who is one of history's worst war criminals uh like personally responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of people in china uh he's the guy who basically he's the guy who was in charge of the economy of the fascist war

machine uh like like in japan during world war ii he was the guy who uh ran like the the the sort of fascist puppet state called manchukuo that was uh run by japan after they conquered it uh real war criminal also just like personally raped a like extremely large number of people uh a thing that like i was almost never discussed when people talk about him yeah real piece of shit almost like like a shockingly high like number yeah like of sex crimes it's wild yeah and he's also i mean he's involved with uh the japanese military sex slave program which you will hear referred to as comfort women and i fuck i were fucking refused to call the comfort women because that is a fucking horrifying euphemism for again a program

of military sex slavery uh he also was one of the people who signed off on uh unit 731 which was japan's chemical weapons testing unit where they fucking like purposely infested infected and tested chemical weapons on prisoners uh yeah he's one of the worst people ever and then he got a bunch of cia backing and some backing from the yakuza because the cia is working with the yakuza in early uh 1950s japan and he's able basically to force all of the other uh conservative like people to join his party and the sort of the merger force all of the other uh conservative like people to join his party and the sort of the merger of the of the liberal party liberal party and the democratic party is now the liberal democratic party this is kishi's party he founded it uh he drags everyone

else into it he does an immense amount of corruption he tries to bring fascism back he narrowly fails uh shinzo abe is his grandson uh the ldp liberal democratic party yeah has yeah it sucks it's like like the families the way that i've been thinking about like how do you explain this to people who don't who don't have like a background in like japanese like war crime stuff is like imagine if like one of hitler's generals had like survived world war ii and then the cia made him they made him the fucking prime minister of germany and then and also he got more fascist because people were saying mean things about his grandpa he's like oh i don't like that they're calling him bad names i'm gonna get more fascist now so like abe abe himself he he he's carried he's been carrying out a lot of the same things

that that kishi was trying to do kishiishi was trying to sort of restore the sort of full fascist power of the police. Abe has been doing a whole bunch of shit of centralizing power in the executive and expanding the police's power to just arrest whoever the fuck they want. So one of the other things about Japan is that, like, legally in their constitution, they can't go to war. And, like, both kishi and abe like this is like their big fucking thing is that they want they want to fully rearm japan they want japan to be able to go to war because they want to do the fucking empire again and you know so this is like yeah abe's been doing that um he also the the thing he's probably most famous for in terms of like the reasons people think he's bad because

he is he's like just actually a monster is he's just like a like unfathomable degree of war crimes denial like he he pulled so japan in in the 90s had admitted that they fucking kidnapped and enslaved like an enormous number of people from japan of people from korea people from china i think they also did they did in the philippines and indonesia too although there's less sort of coverage of that and like turn them into military sex slaves did things to them that are like i fucking unspeakable um and so the japanese government in the 90s had admitted they did this and apologized for it and abe was like no fuck that uh that's that's wrong he's also a part of this group called uh nippon kagai which is like a fascist group and okay so this this is this is according to a u.s congressional report what they believe quote

japan should be applauded for liberating much of east asia from western colonial powers that the 1946 1948 tokyo war crimes tribunals were illegitimate and that the killings by japanese troops through the 1937 nanjing massacre were exaggerated or fabricated oh boy uh they also openly yeah yeah yeah they also so they're nudging denialists they're uh they're they're sex slave denialists uh they openly call for the restoration of the monarchy and the institution of shinto as a state religion. Abe, like, has continually said that the sex slaves, like,

did it, were there voluntarily. He does another thing. But Hillary Clinton just tweeted that Prime Minister Abe was a champion of democracy and a firm believer that no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if you leave women behind.

Well, you know. She tweeted that! Look, look, to be fair, to be fair, to be fair, both Abe and Nobusuke Kishi did in fact believe in using women to fuel the economy, just not in that way. Yeah. He also, there's another thing that,

so probably the most famous, most controversial thing was, so there's this shrine called the um yasukuni shrine which is it's the shrine that's dedicated to soldiers who like died serving the japanese emperor and in in this so there's this thing called the book of souls that has like lists of names right of just like the other people who died and 1068 of the people who were of the people in that book are people who were convicted of war crimes and there are also uh 14 class a war criminals who either died or were executed who are considered martyrs there and uh abe fucking like visited there and like prayed and shit and this pissed off everyone this is like there are lots of people who have

gotten mad at me already for celebrating abe's death and i my my my official line on this is if abe didn't want me to celebrate his fucking death maybe he shouldn't have celebrated the lives of the people who killed my fucking family so uh fuck them yeah so he's not not not a great dude he's real bad yeah problematic dude so the the other thing we should mention too before we go into sort of like the details of the shooting is that there is an election actually but but but by the time this episode drops i think the election will have happened um where there is a real chance that the liberal democratic party is going to sort of like just fucking sweep it because the liberal democratic party immediately starts blaming the left for this uh there's a whole bunch of i mean just absolutely horrifying stuff where

they're blaming uh korean people who live in uh live in japan which if you know anything about japanese history uh when that stuff starts happening like in in 1923 after the kanto earthquake uh a bunch of people just started blaming koreans for the whole thing and they fucking literally exterminated almost the entire korean population in several major japanese cities and so this stuff is very scary uh it's possible this is going to set off a like a an incredible right-wing Japanese politics and there's a chance that this this this could be the actual thing that like full-on triggers japan like we are being and you know going back into sort of just being a pure fascist empire so this is not yeah that that part is really bad

the motivation for the assassination is still at least at time of recording still slightly unclear very unclear according according to some politicians and news media we do know the suspect is hideo kojima so that you can you can infer a little bit based on so yeah there's there's like french politicians and a greek news channel who are using pictures of video game developer hideo kojima and passing them off as the shooting suspect yeah which is really funny it is funny pictures of kojima like inside like a russian like communist hat fucking thing pictures of him wearing a joker shirt and standing in front of a che Guevara picture very funny and they're using this as proof that it's by a left-wing terrorist and it's actually video game developer hideo kojima it's yeah so in terms of in terms of like i guess what we know about the actual shooter um

we don't know that much is a 42 year old guy who was a a former veteran of the uh of the japanese self-defense force he was he was a navy guy which i guess partially explains why he can shoot a gun um but yeah the details are really murky what we've got at time of recording is the japanese police saying that it wasn't because of a political thing and that it was because of a group that he was that abe was a member of who the fuck knows what that means. That can mean any number of things. I, I'm not going to speculate live on here because I,

I don't know. Uh, yeah, but also it was extremely funny. And we should, we should talk about the weapon that was, yeah, this is why this is one of the reasons why it's extremely funny. And we i'm probably gonna hand this over to james because james is a bit a bit more of an

expert in this type of uh diy weaponry so what great what the fuck is going on with this homemade gun yeah this shit yeah this shit is fucking this shit this is crazy um yeah it's extremely funny it's extremely funny that all these people with 50 000 followers on twitter who quote unquote do osin like immediately uh label this a 3d printed gun which it's not it does not look this gun no this gun is being held together with duct tape like that is that that is the kind of weapon that we are dealing with here this is this is a homemade gun like held together with fucking duct tape it is extremely it is like he he got blown up by an

electric blunder bus it is yeah it's like there could very well be 3d printed parts in like around it but yeah it is but it's not it's not looking it's it's not like it's not like an fgc9 or anything um no it's it's a weird like electronic pipe duct taped together shotgun yeah it's i think perhaps if people don't understand we should like break down how firearms work broadly and then how this one works specifically sure right so like and there's no reason why you should be familiar with this but like you need something to explode something to make it explode and something to go out the end and a way to make sure it only goes in one direction right uh so what this character has done is seemingly it's yeah it's like a blunderbuss or a musket

in that it seems to be like muzzle loaded from the front uh and uh yeah i'm looking at it now and it really is just covered in duct tape uh i tweeted a picture of it it's a yeah this shit is uh it's very old-fashioned he seems to have made his own powder too like it was very very smoky which you can do i'm not gonna tell you how to do it but uh it's a thing that that is possible and so essentially from what i'm seeing here it looks like it's like a piezoelectric ignition which then ignites this homemade powder that he had uh and then he's put something in a shotgun means it doesn't have rifling right so it doesn't impart spin on the projectile so he's basically got two pipes uh a piezo electric igniter some homemade powder and then he could have put nails in there he could have put a cast

lead ball uh anything bolts and this wasn't the only homemade weapon he had when police raided his house he had a whole bunch of stuff that is that look it looks out of like it looks like it's out of like fallout or something it is like there was one like blunderbuss that had nine different barrels all duct taped together it's like exposed wiring exposed circuit boards like it's it's like it's extremely janky yeah it's like i'm not entirely sure that the uh the nine barrel one the central barrel isn't touched by the by the structural duct tape and i'm not sure that it wouldn't have moved in one direction or the other when he fired it it's really incredible yeah i think there's a there's like a yoga i can't see what he's put something on the he's made a butt

stock with that one so like he can shoulder it i guess and i don't know if that's like a piece of tire or what but yeah yeah this is not a precision weapon wooden boards but there's like some type of like reflect it looks almost like a smartphone's attached to some of the wiring or like i wonder if that's what it is there's some like reflective screen that looks like it's an electronic control box, which could just be an old smartphone or something. Yeah, I wondered if he could, because that's what you use for an improvised explosive device, right?

It's a cell phone to actuate it. So it could be that maybe he had a plan to just put it near where Abe was going to be and then call it and then have it go off a bit. That would be... Well, I mean... No, this is a much better this is a much better assassination it has the stock so i'm guessing i'm guessing he would be

planning to hold it because otherwise there's no reason to put the buttstock there um true yeah but who knows like this guy's operating on a different level we uh we have no way to know what he was thinking at least at least at least not at the moment what he was thinking was i want to kill shinzo abe with my pipes and planks and he did it he's exactly whatever you think of him this man did successfully kill shinzo abe with a gun held together by duct tape it's yeah it's pretty impressive like i i think the other thing about this is kind of impressive a he so so he there were there were two barrels on it that each fired and he he managed to hit him from like a pretty good distance away like we don't have there's there's no video that directly well at least not that's out yet that like directly

shows the shooter we have a lot of video because abe is giving a speech right and so we have a bunch of video of like filming abe and it's and because of where it is coming from off screen like that was a pretty good distance and as best i can tell he only hit abe i don's and because of where it is coming from off screen like that was a pretty good distance and as best i can tell he only hit abe i don't i don't think i haven't seen any reports of anyone else getting hit so i remarkably impressed that is actually that is actually kind of slightly surprising yeah there was there was no one else hit it's like he just got the guy he was yeah that is that is genuinely pretty rare in assassinations like basically like a homemade blunderbust cannon yeah it's like surprisingly surprisingly controlled and accurate yeah i've just found a picture of it with the uh cyberpunk 27 2077 logo underneath it

which is pretty great oh that rules yeah this does rule. Yeah, he did manage to cause... He could have just put a large, massive lead ball in it, I guess. Yeah, whatever, because he didn't even shoot him. I don't think it was one thing... The one thing I could say that we know about the ammo was that there were a bunch of... A bunch of the reports about the injuries that he suffered were talking about he got hit in the back, but there were also holes bunch of, like, a bunch of the reports about the injuries that he suffered

were talking about, like, he got hit in the back, but there were also holes in his neck. So, my guess is that from that,

it was multiple. There was a lot of blood from a lot of different places. Yeah. My guess is it wasn't one thing then, but I don't know. The other thing

that's kind of interesting about this is, like, the extent to which, well, okay, so, like,

he was, like, Abe was, like, very clearly dead. Like dead like people people had like reported him at the scene as having no vitals and they were like yeah his heart stopped and and they they helicoptered him to like what tokyo yeah it's all about tokyo but the the japanese government did a very good job of making sure the press had like no information and so there was just like it was like many many many hours where they were like pretending that he wasn't dead and like wouldn't confirm that he was dead and he's like this this

man is clearly dead as shit like he he has gotten blown up by a blunderbuss like in the back his neck's gone his like i mean he's not gone like his neck his neck's been shot his heart has stopped and they just sort of like keep it there for for a a pretty impressively long time and that's the other thing yeah we we know very little about what happened and why um the the press has been keeping the government's been keeping a very tight lid on information about the shooting so far 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 Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. line is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building

things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. offline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looks so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit. The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.

From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I guess we want to pivot into the gun control side of this. Sure. I guess, okay, so the- I mean, like, there was a mayor shot a few years ago in Japan, right? Yeah, in 2007, a Yakuza guy shot the mayor of Nagasaki.

So, like, there's been a lot of people, like, journalists, people who are, like, supposedly Japan experts, who are like, oh, this is really rare in Japanese culture. It's like, no, it's not. People get assassinated, like, Japan has a very low rate of gun violence. But of that gun violence, the number of politicians that get assassinated is, like, unbelievably high. And, you know, I mean, have been there have been a lot of i mean like abe's like grandfather nozuki kishi like got stabbed right after he left office like and he only didn't die because the the the guy who stabbed him claimed that he wasn't trying to kill him he was just stabbing him which is one of the weirdest things i've ever heard which

i don't know i i i suspect some yakuza bullshit was going on there but yeah like i japan has assassinations um it there's there's this weird thing where people think japan is this place that's like like no violence happens like it's a completely orderly society it's like all this all this like weird stuff they made up about famously pass the fist to japan yeah it's like like this this is a country like this is a country where people like like even in like the 70s and like even through the 80s people would charge like army convoys with sticks and like fight them like this is a country that like like people they they they have a sort of ape shit switch like... Yeah, they have their fair share of like cults

that do acts of violence like this. They have their fair share of political extremists that do acts of violence like this. And like everywhere else in the world, stuff just happens sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is interesting that like Japan

has extremely strict gun control, right? Licenses, tests, background checks, prohibitions on most people owning and carrying. But it's kind of interesting that this is more of a First Amendment question, I guess, in American terms, right? If you're on the internet enough, I'm sure it looks like this person has just googled how to make gun and uh like this is what came up and so i think it's kind of fascinating that that

uh that this person has been like aside from their possible connections to any criminal networks but like i know the yakuza were selling guns to people in myanmar pretty recently so they have access to this yeah yeah and like and the the the mayor who got whacked by yakuza guy like if the yakuza is gonna do like i don't know if yakuza is gonna do a killing like they they like they they have access to weapons they would use a real gun they would use the duct tape together okay so like probably but also like i wouldn't completely rule it out because i wouldn't rule out them just finding some guy and doing this thing the FBI does. And it's like, hey, you're going to go do an attack now.

Like, it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if they did that as like a plausible and ideal thing. But like, we don't know. I still don't think we can rule out that Hideo Kojima is the mastermind behind this. And it's all it's convoluted enough to be a Kojima plot. I know, right? It's just a ploy to be a kojima i know right it is it's just a ploy to plug his next game um just have to add a few like nonsense names to all the people involved like blunderbustman and then it's just it's it's easy easy but yeah it's fascinating that this

person was seemingly like maybe had other plans or had tried several other craft firearms and settled on this one. But yeah, they have access to a lot of pipes, that's for sure. 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.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

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

the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here toing the stories of the brilliant writers behind them black lit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words

to life listen to black lit on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast did you guys see the yakuza guy who was uh arms dealing to myanmar no no oh for fucking wild uh so he he was like extensively stung by the feds so this guy uh he was yakuza he was part of a like a ongoing sting operation for like several years where he was selling like basically um like trading guns for drugs i'm trading guns to buy drugs he was selling to a couple of groups in myanmar he was uh to groups in like the tamil region uh and a couple of other people and he uh he was at least one of the people he thought was a buyer was actually a fed and they've captured all of these amazing conversations where they call the guns like cake and ice cream and like one of the uh one of the things in the uh in the criminal complaint it's a picture of him

just with like a um a law like an anti-tank weapon and he's just like giving it like the v sign and he's wearing these like yellow aviators and a leather jacket like the way they arrested him was at a steakhouse i think either in new york or new jersey but like they uh they lured him into a steakhouse meeting and then he got busted by the feds but yeah these guys were trafficking like serious stuff like surface to air missiles and things because they have access to some pretty heavy equipment yeah that's a that's a pretty old like the yakuza has been sort of like i don't know how you describe it like a kind of like para arm of the japanese state in a lot of

ways for a very very long time like there are there have been like yakuza people with basically special forces training um they at they at one point like kidnapped and killed the empress of korea as part of like a thing to like justify starting a war so they are they're very well hooked up i i i don't know it's still unclear to me because like that's the obviously everything again like they're very well hooked up i i i don't know it's still unclear to me because like that's the obviously everything again like they're the the ldp has a lot of yakuza connections because kind of okay partially kind of everything is yakuza connections but partially also because the yakuza were like a sort of founding like political block of the

ldp in the first place so who knows like ldp people have gotten like attacked by yakuza people before it could be that it could be something else we sort of just don't know yet um yeah yeah there's nothing identifying this guy like i'm just looking at a picture of him and there's nothing particularly sort of identifying his clothing or anything like that yeah I guess that's the death of Shinzo Abe extremely funny rest in peace critical support to Hideo Kojima and all of the

other freedom fighters oh I guess we could talk a little bit about the international response to this yeah because people have no idea what's ethnic yeah I mean like so like all the americans are sort of like are doing all american liberals are doing like oh my god he was a good guy it's like no it wasn't this guy was a monster um okay i i will say this both the chinese and

the korean embassies are being surprisingly diplomatic about it as in no one they haven't no one has actively insulted him yet i social media wise politically that's a good move for like inter-country relations yeah but like i okay like i try japanese relationships with korea with south korea or no and north korea are really bad and a lot of the reason why they're really bad is specifically because of chanzu wabe and because of all of his bullshit yeah so they're obviously happy but they're not gonna like rub it well i mean it's it's not clear to me that they wouldn't have done this if this had happened in like the 2010s like it's like these guys really hate each other um yeah i there's been some sort of like people i don't know people are trying to do a taiwan angle on this because abe is like a taiwan supporter but i i i don't yeah i don't think there's actually

that much the people want this to have much more geopolitical like significance that it probably actually will um yeah yeah well it's meantime, fascist is dead. That's always funny. It happened. Yeah. It did, in fact, happen here. Well, it happened over there, but you know what I mean. It could happen here. Statistically, we are about due based on these...

Yeah, to be fair. Yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't need to resort to the duct tape model in America. No, with the amount of firearms here, it is sometimes a little surprising how little stuff like this actually happens. There's obviously a lot of work that goes into preventing it, but still,

sometimes it's kind of shocking. Yeah, I think if you look at the last 20 years, I think more Japanese politicians have been assassinated than American politicians. I'm trying to think of an American politician. It's weird because there's a lot more American politicians and a lot more guns.

They killed when they went after Gabby Giffords they killed someone, I think. But I don't I'm trying to think of anyone else other than that. Not in recent memory memory the guy who shot Reagan is now touring yeah but he didn't even

kill him that's not even an assassination that's just an assassination attempt like a very botched one yeah crossover between John Hinckley and Hideo Kojima impossible that will be the game I'm just going to keep referring to the suspect and Hideo Kojima it's possible that will be the game

I'm just gonna keep referring to the suspect as Hideo Kojima it's worth noting that uh like he did have armed guards there were uh armed guards present that you can see their guns in their holsters as they take down the the person who shot him uh but they uh they were not on their a game that day yeah that you can see in the video there's like one of the guys is i think trying to like get a bulletproof briefcase in between abe and the guy and just doesn't work he just it just doesn't it just fails completely they had one job yeah like they operation meat shield they weren't just on they weren't just not on their A-game.

They completely failed at their own big shot. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not like the guy even tried to run away. He just stood there and got arrested. Yeah, yeah. He did not really put up much of a fight. Yeah.

Yeah, no, he didn't. Yeah, he went down pretty fast i guess he went with like this small again maybe to conceal it because it looks like he was pretty close yeah that is that is very likely well a very dark day for democracy um dark day for feminism um as hillary clinton said uh anyway yeah luckily they have rahm emanuel as ambassador to japan to comfort Clinton said. Anyway. Yeah, luckily they have Rahm Emanuel as ambassador to Japan to comfort them in this difficult time. Look, the LDP are the only people on Earth who actually deserve

Rahm Emanuel. So, look, if you didn't want to have to deal with Rahm Emanuel, you shouldn't have taken all that CIA money. This is now their curse. Well, I'm sure we'll talk more about these types of homemade weapons and all that kind of stuff in the future because it is it is interesting and you know places where places where like actual firearms are hard are harder to get we're seeing

more and more shit like this popping up yeah yeah and that'll that will definitely be worth be worth getting into along with 3D printed weapons. All right. Yeah. Anything else to add? Or does that do it? Yeah, I think that's a wrap. All right. Well, follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia.

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