It Could Happen Here - The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch: How to Build a Haven, Part 3: The Unicorns

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Gare and James talk about the background of some of the unicorns and their lives in the valley since the siegeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast

for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. The Ranch in July 2022 is a very different place to the one I visited in March of 2021. For one thing, it's not so cold that my water bottle freezes every night, but more notably, there's less tension in the air and no one's wearing a plate carrier. Not everyone who was there for the siege stayed. Some of them had only been visiting, or they'd found other places to live since then, but Penny, Kat, Jen and Jay have been constant on the ranch since 2020. Something I've struggled with so far is giving a sense of just what a welcoming and

friendly place the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch is. It's a thing I haven't really stopped thinking about since I first visited, and a thing that a lot of folks have been looking for for a very long time. Even in the worst times of the siege, when Penny and Jay barely slept, when Aldo was out running off chud with guns, or when Paul and I were sat up all night absolutely destroying the Costco snack melange that Penny had prepared for us, people always seemed to be laughing. When we sat down to talk about the siege, we started off by laughing. It's a difficult topic and it was a scary time but i guess it's easier to laugh about it a year later when you know everyone's okay well let's go over everyone's

legal names date of birth social security number maybe your um four digit what firearms owned legally or otherwise yeah list of fears that sort of thing any kinks lots we'll run past 45 minutes i sure listed kinks i don't have but we don't want this to be just a story about the worst week the ranch ever had we want it to be a story about a community that overcame adversity and is thriving that community extends way beyond the dome which unicorns call home, and even beyond the valley that they live in. But we should start with that valley. Because even at the peak of the siege, it seems like most people were on the unicorn's side. Or at least, they just wanted to leave them alone. It was because of warnings from other people in the valley that they knew to patrol their perimeter at night. Had they not been there, this might be a very different story.

A year later, everyone in the valley values the unicorns being there. During the few days we spent there this summer, we visited neighbours for drinks, we went into town for donuts and coffee, and dropped in on Jordan, the Tribune publisher, at his ranch. It's not that there's unicorns of pariahs sitting up in their house surrounded by guns and afraid of what's coming next. They're active members of the community,

and they're very welcome. There was a time when this community wasn't as friendly to queer people. But they've always been here. I spoke to Penny about this last year, while we drove to the recycling centre in the next county to recycle wet-lift cans. Yeah, like, we're doing the same thing y'all are doing. Like, you should not pick up on that. to the recycling centre in the next told to shut up our whole life.

So we're definitely like, fuck you were queer. And they don't like that. Like, yeah, that makes good old boys uncomfortable. And I get it. Also,

fuck you. Yeah, no, we're going to be who we are. We're living the way we want to. If you can hang two Trump flags and a Confederate flag from the back of your truck and drive down Main Street

screaming fucking horrible, hateful things and feel perfectly justified in doing that, I'm going to just be queer. I'm going to go ahead and be as loud as I want to be. Obviously, you think it's okay to have personal expression Yeah, like that's freedom of speech right there, right? You really really think it's okay

So I'm gonna go ahead and take you up on that Yeah, well that's what they keep saying to us right it's like well you don't have to be in our face about it I'm just living. Like, I'm not like, you know, I'm not coming into your home and humping your couch. Like, I'm just being alive. It can be easy, especially if you only connect with rural places through the media, to see cities as queer spaces and the countryside as unfriendly to queer people. While politics in rural America can be pretty bad,

it's never really been true that queer people don't belong there. The unicorns pointed this out. Historically, if you know anything about history, like country spaces are queer fucking spaces. Like we're the ones out here doing the actual work while fucking old fucking cis white men just collect money from doing shitty ranching that damages animals, damages the earth, and fucking does not build community or help anybody but themselves. Queer integration into country spaces is so fucking important because we bring heart and empathy and all these things that capitalism is stripped out of these areas.

We bring that back and we've always fucking been here like fuck off real cowboys were constantly fucking constantly they fucked a lot each other and they were mostly like black and brown people yeah yeah it wasn't white the west was not white and by the way like we have said this before and we'll say it again nature is inherently queer and we fucking belong here like we fucking belong wherever the fuck we go like that is a queer space uh there is no like hard line that country spaces are for cis people fuck that like we belong here we've always been here and we're really good at it. After the siege and its coverage, everyone knows that the unicorns are low-tier queer icons, but they're only part of the local queer community, and they have other folks over

for game nights once a week. They told us one story about Pride Month in Westcliffe this year, and thankfully it didn't involve the ATF. There was a really adorable, during Pride Month, we went to Family Dollar, There was a really adorable, uh, during pride month, we went to family dollar, uh, which is like one of the few stores in town. And, um, I guess we were talking to the manager who was checking us out and, uh, and, uh, he mentioned like, oh yeah, like I have like, I have a gay and a trans work in here. Like, uh, you know, I love y'all, you know? And it was, it was very, it was a little, a little embarrassing, but, but the heart was there you know and i was like oh you just outed two of your employees i mean you didn't say who but but the point is like like even family dollar in middle of nowhere west cliff has two queer employees like you know yeah

we're everywhere queer people had always been in the valley but it had become harder to share who they were with their neighbors in recent decades. They never stopped existing, but they stopped being safe. Yeah, I mean- We're connecting with a lot of queer people that have lived here for a long time. Yeah, the fact that a community is so hostile that their queer community has to be closeted does not mean that the queer community isn't here. It just means that a lot of assholes are here. Don't Ask, Don't Tell, an institutional version of closeting,

is something that Penny is very familiar with. She was in the army as a cavalry scout while the policy was still in place. If you're not familiar, Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a military policy that was in place from 1994 until 2011. Under the policy, anyone who wasn't straight was to remain in the closet, and in theory, they were protected from discrimination. But if they came out as gay or bi or trans or otherwise queer, they could be discharged. Queer people were not even allowed to talk about anything related to their queerness, because doing so, quote, would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability. boyfriend and a girlfriend when I was in the military. And I definitely was like, this is my

best friend-o in Germany. And he comes over and sometimes spends the night because we're best friend-os. I don't know. It was really, really damaging. It was just really, really damaging to 100% not be able to be yourself.

But then also be able to leave post and have a secret life where you were yourself you know like and then when you go out with the guys like there's always those weird moments where you like do run into other gay locals that you have like known and like you've had deep conversations with in other contexts and just have to be like no like don't don't talk to me like we don't know each other um which is i'm sure damaging for them you know like that can't be fucking normal like i don't know that's weird and then on the throw on top of that that you're also a girl like you know what i mean like so you're pretending to be a gay man who's straight sometimes around

certain people. Um, but really you're a gay, you're a bisexual woman, um, pre-surgery and with the wrong, um, hormones. And so it just ends up being a soup of just like compartmentalization to the point where you just like forget people. And then they show back up and you're like, oh, yeah, like you're from this quadrant of my life. Like, I don't know. It's not healthy. Yeah. It doesn't do good things. Don't Ask, Don't Tell had pretty devastating consequences for the mental health of thousands of service people. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 20% of trans people have served in the military, over twice the rate of cisgender people.

But until very recently, they weren't even allowed to do so openly. Not being able to be yourself with people that you're expected to risk your life for isn't really conductive to good morale or indeed, quote, the unit cohesion that is the essence of military capability. There's no doubt that being familiar with guns, something they gained from military experience, did help the unicorns. But it's not the only thing that helped them. Sometimes, especially on Twitter where things seem to get reduced to simple terms to fit into the discourse of the day,

the tenacious unicorn ranch story has been reduced to a story about guns. Undoubtedly, guns are a part of the story, but they would have been useless without community and solidarity. That is something that the unicorns at the ranch have taken to heart. A year later, they're doing mutual aid work with the Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation, driving truckloads of donations to them every few months, and using their internet presence to get donations. If we want to look at this story as an example of anarchism in action, then it's important to remember that if we want a world where the state is not the only entity with the ability to do violence, then we should also want a world where it's not the only entity responsible for caring

for people with unmet material needs. Alongside ranch work, Penny and Jay also make ends meet by working construction jobs on local buildings. Something that George from the Sentinel is very proud of, and that other local residents are beginning to regret, is that Custer County doesn't have a building code. Here's a snippet of his conversation with TL about that. And one example, TL, is that this county is so free, we don't even have building codes. If you want to live here, you can build yourself a shack with twigs and live in it. You know, that's the way it is here in my little burg in Texas, too. Yeah, so... Do you really need them? Do you really need them?

I mean, that's something I think should be attacked in other ways, but go ahead. But that's one of the things that make Custer County and one of the reasons I moved to this one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, building goals basically cause housing prices to become unreachable for the middle class. The problem with this conservative utopian vision is that it has resulted in a lot of residents getting ripped off by less than upstanding builders and now left with their homes falling apart. That's where Penny and Jay can step in and make a decent side income drywalling and finishing buildings that, while often are not very old, are already crumbling. Like we've always said, this community is 99% awesome. And that has held true. We do

contracting work because there are no building codes in Custer County, as opposed to what like the libertarian ideal of no building codes is. It actually just means that there's a bunch of shoddy houses that need repaired constantly. And we have construction skills. So we're in people's homes repairing them and doing work for the actual people of the county daily. We frequent businesses up here because we're all about local support. We build community. Gleefully, we build community.

Like, we really enjoy it up here. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters...

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.

This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your

podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. You look like a little angel. I mean, you look 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. González 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 Gonzá Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The community now is a little smaller than when James first visited. The community now is a little smaller than when James first visited. Currently, five people live at the ranch full-time, but they still have a couple of trailers open to trans folks in need of a safe place to stay, or, you know, visiting journalists. Looking for a safe place to stay is how Jay first came to the ranch. Like a lot of us, she had a difficult time at the start of the pandemic.

The world was changing, and it seemed in May of 2020 that America was as well. For a lot of people with less progressive parents, the BLM uprising presented a difficult choice between family and community. Jay was one of those people that had to face that choice. So basically I was living in Dallas, working retail, living in my car when the pandemic started. And so I was furloughed. Luckily, Texas is actually surprisingly good about unemployment. So I, youloughed. Luckily, Texas is actually surprisingly good about unemployment. So I had that. My parents are retired from the military around there.

And when the BLM uprisings happened, I did some things. some things and basically my parents were like uh you either can stay here or and not be associated with antifa or you know you you can't stay here if you're associated with antifa and so i was like okay i'm i guess i'm leaving then which is fine um there was a lot of tension there anyways. It wasn't good for me. So because of the unemployment, I was like, okay, I for once have some resources. I'm already living in my car. I can just kind of travel around for a bit. Why not? um i think i just posted on twitter like uh trans commune win you know as as probably most queer people have and uh one of my permaculture mutuals actually was like hey have you heard of this place it's not far from you and posted a link to i think it was the vice article yeah yeah and uh i sent I sent a message with a bunch of questions about it

and making sure it wasn't transmedicalists or anything like that. Which is always what you want to see when somebody contacts the ranch about coming up. I way prefer an in-depth breakdown and a lot of questions to I'll just show up and figure it out. In case you're not familiar with what a transmedicalist is, we'll let Paul ask that question for you. And we're going to play this not to make Paul look bad. We're playing it for you because I think it's important to see what

kind of space the ranch is. It's not one where you can't get things wrong. It's one where you can ask if you don't know something. And because everyone there had shown that they were willing to risk life and limb for one another, they assume that you're asking it because you care about them and you want to know how to say things in a way that won't hurt anyone. What the fuck is a transmedicalist?

Someone who thinks that so primarily, oh, well. So this does not describe any of us, but a transmedicalist is someone who first and foremost thinks that all trans people should be on hormones, all trans people should have surgery, all trans people should strive towards.

Or you're not trans. And they don't believe in anything but the gender binary as well. So basically, if you don't want to transition directly from a male to a female, or directly from a female to a male, you're not a real trans person. They think those trans people are making it worse for other trans people. You're not allowed to be non-binary. Okay, so that was my next question. Are non-binary people... Yeah, they hate hate those people they think they're faking so but like do they say they're not trans and yes yeah different group

they often call them trans trenders because it's like a popularity contest they think okay so yeah okay sorry yeah and those people suck jay has found a home at the ranch now. And just like everyone else there, she's a part of the family which takes care of one another. It was actually really funny because Jay showed up and the assumption I thought was that she was going to stay for a little bit and then you just didn't leave and it was great. It wasn't a problem. It was like, oh, it's Jay's thing. It was very natural.

It works out. This is exactly what a lot of queer people talk about online. This is exactly what, you know, a lot of queer people talk about online, which is. Yeah. Well, and Jay brought a passion that we hadn't seen with a lot of people that had come up. A lot of people had come up with this, like, yeah, we'll just see what it is or whatever.

But Jay came up with like knowledge about theory and like had studied and was really like conscientiously a part of this project, which was huge, I mean, for me. Part of what Jay has been able to help with is organizing the moving of animals to different pastures. James was at the ranch last year when they were replacing their old fence and planning out their fields. I'll tear down this ratty- ass fence and this back fence here as we build the new kind of structure for the girls out in that field when we're doing the fence heightening.

crease but we're also we'll fence off the driveway and then the girls watch the babies and mamas will actually get access all the way down the driveway and up this hill a little bit hey babies come on um and uh yeah we'll just structure our fields a little bit better and then the girls will have two pastures which is kind of huge we can rotate them into yes you can start actual permaculture or is it permaculture i mean it's regenerate in this context it's like regenerative agriculture thank you that's what i was looking for you know you can also like permaculture people do it too you know yeah but but what we're doing is we're it's both really we'll be doing both okay yeah so you can use either jays are experts Okay. There's definitely an industry like, oh, regenerative agriculture is the new thing,

but it's still capitalism and it's still exploitative. But there are also people doing real regenerative agriculture. Yeah. Talking with Jay, it's very evident just how passionate they are about these topics and how things like biodiversity and regenerative and permaculture processes tie into many aspects of the ranch itself.

The capitalist project is homogenization and simplification. The entire goal is things like monocrops. The entire goal is the gender binary and controlling the reproduction of labor. Controlling cis women and queer gender expression is a big part of that like you can't have those things and have a capitalist environment white supremacist environment where you can extract from the earth and from labor that is such a key component of this whole like you know western project or whatever you want to call it and nature doesn't care nature is queer nature like nature just exists fungi have thousands of sexes and

genders yeah and that's fine in fact that's mandatory in fact like the part of the point of nature is biodiversity because that is the most effective method for actually iterating and testing what works and surviving and surviving yeah and and we're bimodal by the way not binary like and you know if you need to look that up you can go ahead and do that yeah and permaculture in particular uh you know some one big problem with permaculture in particular, you know, some one big problem with permaculture is there's a lot of white people who use the practices and don't acknowledge that it all comes from indigenous cultures. It all comes from indigenous life ways. And they make a lot of money by not saying that not, you know, so that's important to address. Permaculture has its, you know so that's important to address uh permaculture has its you know value

but if you're not learning from indigenous people and giving back to indigenous people you're doing it wrong 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. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. 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 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. Just because the immediate threat of armed men breaking into the ranch has gone away, doesn't mean that they still don't have to be careful. In April of 2021, after the siege was over, the then-sheriff Shannon Byerly claimed that one of his deputies went to the ranch to ask questions about a road traffic accident that one of the ranchers had been involved in. He claimed the deputy was met by armed and

uncooperative ranchers who barred the deputy from entering. Body cam video obtained by Reuters, thanks to a Public Records Act request, shows nothing of the sorts. The deputy met a single person, not visibly armed, who was polite and courteous. In subsequent interviews, Byerly acknowledged that he had been mistaken in his account. But we'll let you hear Jay's account of the events that day. So my Chevy Blazer had been sitting over the winter. It had a bad alternator. And I finally like we finally got, you know, the money together fixed to replace the alternator. looked it over everything seemed fine um and i was going back to texas to grab some stuff and bring it back um and went around a

apparently black ice corner and it i'm pretty sure what happened was my tire popped around like go i was only going like 35, 40 because there's ice. It was early in the morning. Yeah, it was like 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning or something like that. And I'm pretty sure what happened was my tire popped, and then my blazer proceeded to tumble. You had a rollover. Rollover, yeah, into the uh luckily not a ditch or anything just

on the left the south left side of the road and so i called penny and uh got picked up yeah we take care of our own we're not gonna call the cops it was um it only was you no reason and and then i was like okay let me look at towing around the area let me see and the towing the local towing company which is just like a small family owned one guy thing one guy basically um they on their facebook like business page they said they opened at like nine or ten or something like that so i was like okay so i'm it's gonna be on the side of the road until then that's fine i'll call and i'm going to go to sleep until then because i was just in a rollover you're probably concussed like yeah probably whiplashed at least totally

and then so i was in my trailer and i suddenly in my pjs and suddenly get a call from dispatch and they're like there's a deputy at your gate uh you know can you go blah blah blah so i was like okay i take took a vehicle down in your pjs in my pjs i didn't i didn't have a pistol in the car or on me and um i basically just you know as you do with cops as any sane human does i answer to the extent that you're legally required to be polite but also like i'm not going to invite you on i'm not going to be your friend you don't need to be you're not my friend yeah um but you answered questions and he he yeah he you know he did the usual like you know were you were you drinking and i was like it's like five o'clock

in the morning like it's like six o'clock in the morning like it's like six o'clock right now like yeah i was going back i was driving back to texas to pick up stuff i was starting a road trip that's not when you like get blitzed like i don't know yeah yeah and uh so he gave me his card and left and i was like okay that's you know that's fine that was weird but and it was weird to me too that like they apparently have some kind of relationship with this towing guy yeah where because they didn't even ask me like hey do you want it to this place yeah um they just towed it before they even contact me And so either you bring the title over to sign it over to the towing person, or you pay him like $400 or $500 to bring it back here.

So that's what actually happened. But then for some reason, the local sheriff started telling a very different account of what took place outside the unicorns driveway so that was the start that was the actual incident then by early the sheriff started getting interviewed and in those interviews he would say they there was six of them they met us at the gate armed were extremely hostile to the point where my my sheriff felt fear for his life and had to retreat back we don't know he might have felt fear for his life but he also said we don't go there anymore but he said on record we don't go there anymore because

it's too scary oh my god and so that is setting us up to be killed that is setting us up to be murked by police it's like you know this is kiwi farm says this all the time yeah this is tranny waco yeah and that is the setup for it to become that and so because then now all of his deputies are just ready to shoot us on site because we're dangerous. A reporter from Reuters was looking into the incident and heard the conflicting stories from the sheriff and the unicorns, but she thought of an easy fix to definitively know what happened. She just FOIA'd the body cam footage, which proved unequivocally that they were lying their fucking ass off.

And we were telling the truth uh and byerly retired this year i don't know well and she when she foiled it she went back oh god yeah and byerly was like can i remove my comments from because she she asked she she like i don't know if it was a follow-up interview you have any additional comments and his additional comments were, can you please remove my previous statements from the record? And she said no. And she emphatically said no and then published it internationally. This wasn't the first suspect incident regarding the local sheriffs. When Paul was at the ranch in the immediate aftermath of the original siege, he witnessed cops hanging out with a group of people who were actively harassing

the ranch. I was here for a week and at one point there was like 15 to 20 cars at Chud Ranch, which it's up to you to release that location. We just call it Chud Ranch. The Ranch of Chuds.

You can see it from the ranch. You can see it from here. And, um, there were two sheriff's deputies sitting at the curb the entire time as those cars pulled in there. Yup. They were protecting our harassers.

Yeah. Well, they were sitting there side by side talking to each other while the cars pulled in there. You probably said, have said this before. And I just don't, didn't remember.

Yeah. I mean, it must've been 20 of them. So the other end of that is then when uh it got publicized the sheriff then said oh we don't we don't know anything about it like they didn't contact us we didn't yeah they said they tried to they couldn't verify the the statements made in the media about threats against the ranch these were just hanging out at the fascist well and they were super snooty about it. They made it sound like, well, the St. Unicorn Ranch clearly doesn't want to be

part of our community, so why would we help them? That seemed to be the implication. Sheriff Byerly, who spoke at a 2015 Oath Keepers rally, has since resigned as sheriff. But for understandable reasons, the unicorns still don't

dial 911 when they feel in danger. Instead, they reach out to Paul, to Aldo, and a network of community members who helped with their security both online and on the ground. They also routinely train with firearms, and have added a much more serious fence to the property than the one that the intruders climbed over in 2021. Right after James and I's most recent visit this past summer, Kiwi Farms started being in the news a lot more due to a campaign attempting to take it down, but as the hate forum entered the discourse again, the unicorns had started noticing cars driving past the ranch repeatedly, something that Paul, Aldo, and James observed during the

siege. And now, in just the past few weeks, trans people have been killed in a nightclub just an hour away from their house, just a few miles away from the bar where we met them this past summer to celebrate Jay's birthday. Tomorrow, we'll talk about what those threats mean for the ranch and where they are now. 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 slash sources. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno 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 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. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.