It Could Happen Here - Years of Lead Paint
Episode Date: September 18, 2025The gang compare and contrast the Years of Lead to current brainrotted form of political violence in the United States from assassinations, conspiracy theories, and state sponsored doxing. Sources:&nb...sp; https://www.cawshinythings.com/i-was-promised-a-more-aesthetically-pleasing-cyberpunk-dystopia/ https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/italian-neofascism-and-years-lead-closer-look https://libcom.org/article/giuseppe-pinelli-death-anarchist https://libcom.org/article/analysis-autonomia-interview-sergio-bologna https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/terrorism2ed/chpt/ordine-nuovo https://www.britannica.com/event/Bologna-train-station-bombing-of-1980 https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy/Terrorism#ref929858 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/16/us/tyler-robinson-charges.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mU8.jooL.UUL_fH4KQcdy https://www.404media.co/doj-deletes-study-showing-domestic-terrorists-are-most-often-right-wing/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I'm not Robert Evans. I'm not going to start this episode with a horrible noise.
Welcome to It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart with me today.
Mia Wong, James Stout. I'm Garrison Davis. We have never, as a society, been this years of lead paint as we are now. Oh, my God.
Yeah, it's not great. Speaking of things falling apart, the lead paint in my room is crumbling and it's probably doing things to my brain. Wonderful. Love this, love this. So, okay, a lot of this episode is going to be about the Charlie Kirk assassination and everyone's reaction to it.
everyone sort of losing their minds.
But I think that the place that we want to start is with a little bit about the concept of
the years of lead paint, which was developed by friend of the show Vicki Osterwald, to
explain something.
I feel like almost everyone's forgotten about, which was right after Trump got elected,
there was that car bomb outside of a Trump hotel that was like a Tesla that was a right
winger who was trying to get everyone to, like, do the purge.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
The cyber truck, uh, former Greenboro.
guy.
Yeah, and this is the kind of thing that you would have seen in the original years of lead.
So, people who don't know what the original years of lead was, because this is becoming a thing that people are using to understand what's going on now, and I think there are problems with that that we'll get to.
But the original years of lead are this period from, I mean, that there's, you know, you can, you can start it in a couple different places, but like roughly sort of like,
the 60s to the 80s, like early mid-80s in Italy that are this period of really,
it really intensifies in the 70s, this really, really intense period of political violence in
Italy. It is largely a right-wing reaction to this massive series of uprisings in Italy.
I mean, the whole 60s in Italy are a time of incredible sort of turmoil and left-wing uprising.
there's, I mean, I think there's
first-factor occupations are like 65
but there's the massive
factor occupations in 1968
which are sort of a global phenomenon
but then
also the next year there is an advance
called and I, this is literally the term
for it, the hot autumn of 69
which
I'm not even gonna
really, I am. Nice.
Yeah, which was this massive
like a second series of
like, you know, workers taking over
factories and starting like factory councils and like there are so many communist factions that like
the communist faction that's doing this stuff they have mutated to a point where they're almost
effectively anarchists so this is what's called the autonomists and this becomes like a major
influence on like american anarchism later and in response to the fact that these people
very nearly on multiple occasions like very nearly take italy a combination of right-wing
fascist groups and organizations inside of and sort of parallel to the Italian government
develop this thing called the strategy of tension which and I think this will to some extent
sound familiar in terms of what's what's happening right now which is this strategy of using
terrorist attacks and using political violence to sow this like fear and panic and chaos that
would cause people to turn to the state for safety and cause people to turn specifically to
a stronger, like, more fascist and then eventually just a straight-up fascist state that would
permanently destroy the left and, you know, like, restore the power of the Nazis, et cetera,
et cetera. Well, I mean, not recently these people. Italian fascists. The OG fascists. Well, and also
neo-fascist, too, because they're, these people are very weird. Italians. Yeah, these people are
Italian. Yeah, yeah, many such cases. One of the big opening things is that the Piazza Fontana
bombing, which is this massive bombing that kills a 19 people, injures an unbelievable number of people,
and it is immediately blamed on anarchists.
There's an anarchist named Guseppe Pinelli,
who he's among like 80 anarchists who arrested almost immediately.
He, like, somehow falls out of a four-story window of a police building
while he was being interrogated.
The Italian state, which will go on to admit a lot of the shit that it did,
maintains to this day that he just got tired and fell out the window himself.
I'm going to let you try your own conclusions about how you think this guy died.
I mean, a lot of,
A lot of anarchists are lazy.
I can see that happening.
Yeah.
There is a good play that I took part in during high school
called Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Foe.
Yeah.
Which you can enjoy.
This is the most, like, James Backstory Moment you've ever seen before.
It's so good.
This is wild.
Yeah.
Whoa.
Someone update the I-C-H-Wiki page.
Don't do that.
No, stop.
New James backstory.
This is great.
Yeah, in my theater era.
Who did you play?
I can't remember.
It was 20 years ago.
You should have remembered.
I know.
It was very fun.
We had a good soundtrack.
It was very enjoyable for me and my friends.
And I'm sure all eight people who watched it also had a wonderful time.
So in less fun times, so this bombing was actually carried out by a group called Ordiné Nouveau, which is, it's literally new order.
Fascist groups only have.
foreign names.
And this is a group that was
aided by a combination of
Italian intelligence and this thing called
Gladio, which was this American
network, sort of stay behind
network in case of a Soviet invasion.
Yeah. That had all of these weapons, cash
is placed around the country that's eventually sort of repurposed
into these fascist terror cells.
And they do a lot of these, right? They do a lot
of bombings, and they
mostly blame the left for them.
Probably the most famous one is the Bologna train
bombing, which killed, like, 80 people, injured a huge number of other people, which was done
by a kind of, like, another fascist group, right?
This is also a period where, like, there is a real left-wing violence, right?
The left is doing, like, well, one of the things they did, they kidnap bosses and have, like,
show trials of bosses all the time.
They love doing this.
Factory bosses.
Just like in The Dark Night Rises by Marxist historian Christopher Nolan.
Oh, God.
I thought you were going to say just like cancel culture
but just like
just like what the rights doing right now
for anyone who posts about Charlie Kirk
yeah but there was also stuff like like for example
Lota Continua which is a leftist group of
staggering complexity
I like killed the police officer
who was interrogating Guseppe Penelli
so you know like there are left wing assassinations
a group called the Red Brigades
kidnaps the former Prime Minister of Italy
Aldomoro, see every other episode where I've yelled about this.
They had been heavily infiltrated and were sort of being manipulated by a number of
intelligence organizations that if I started listing them right now, you would think I was insane.
But the important thing about this period, right?
And this eventually works.
It does destroy the left.
But the important thing about the structure of this in the actual years of lead is that
these are concrete groups, right?
They are shifting.
They are flowing.
People move between them.
But actual organized facts.
in a legitimate armed struggle.
I mean, the Red Brigades are literally organized
in a military fashion, right?
With, like, units and command structure.
But this is also true of, like,
this is also true of the fascists, right?
Yes, yeah, you're very very much.
And it's also true of group, I mean, you know,
like, obviously, like, autonomy and the sort of, like,
anarchist-e communist factions are looser,
but, like, they're still, they still are, like, organized
and they're rooted in a whole bunch of different kinds of struggles.
And the strategy of tension
is being deliberately managed by Italian intelligence
and by American intelligence and by a bunch of other sort of like state groups.
And this is not at all what we're dealing with right now.
Not even close.
Yeah.
The Charlie Kirk assassination is neither a guy who was part of like some Marxist group,
nor was it a guy who's like a CIA agent or something.
It's just a guy.
It's a guy who goes on Discord.
Reddit Gamer Discord political violence.
Yeah.
These are decentralized acts being fueled by sort of radicalization,
but they're not like active intelligence operations.
I mean, some of them aren't even fueled by radical.
Like, even the word radicalization here is sometimes a mis-over.
This one in particular is like not that really.
A degree, it seems like a degree of like personal motivation
based on his relationship with his roommate,
as well as this general like Gen Z sort of nihil.
that allows you to do a pretty wild act like this. I think specifically in this case,
you know, it's like existential violence manifesting an incredibly political action from someone
who otherwise isn't like overtly political. Yeah. This guy's not a leftist. It's definitely
not a gropeer, as I've been trying to argue for for days now. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, what he did
certainly is, is political, even though he's not, you know, card-carrying, you know, communist or, you know,
anti-imperialist, like the guy who
assassinated the two Israeli embassy
staffers was, right? Which is kind of the only
arguably like left-wing
assassin we've like seen
in the past, I don't know, 10 years
in the United States, is the
guy who killed the two Israeli embassy
staffers. Every other
assassin or attempted assassin would not
accurately be described as like left wing
in orientation, including
someone like Luigi Mangione
who is... Yeah, very much not.
Basically a teapot,
gray tribe libertarian.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's also worth noting that, like, from the state end, these, like, this is not
something that was, like, deliberately unleashed by the state, except in the sense of, like,
well, some people would argue otherwise.
Right.
Yeah, but they're wrong.
Right.
That's the issue.
You know, like, like, if, like, the last time we saw something that you could argue even
sort of look like that is, like, there is genuinely something kind of suspicious about
the way that a whole bunch of the most famous Black Lives Matter activists who weren't
the ones in the NGOs suddenly turned up dead, that's the closest thing, right? And that's
not even a like, we know they did this. That's a like there's, that was, that was over a decade
ago. Yeah, right. This is a long time ago. And, you know, and I, and I would argue it's important
in that it's part of the same series of uprisings that like all of this fascist stuff is a response
to, right? Sure. It's a response to Ferguson. It's a response to 2020. But, like, that structure,
which is the structure that a lot of people are using to analyze this of just purely in American
years of lead doesn't really work because we're dealing with something way weirder and way
less concrete. Which is why we're calling it something else. The years of lead paint because these
people are just like. Because it is not the result of this large scale like deep state orchestration
nor these legitimate organized fashions. Everyone is simply brain rotted. Yeah. Yeah. To, to
trust, right? In the 20th century, the prevailing concept of how the left would change the world
was through the violent capture of state institutions, or in the case of the anarchist, I guess,
less so. But, you know, if we look at like this communist idea of revolution. Yeah, how's that
anarchist revolution going, buddy? Well, I mean, these guys are 30 years after the Spanish revolution,
right? Like, some of them have seen anarchists hold whole cities and hold off the country's army.
It's not out of the realm of possibility for them.
That concept of revolution, I mean, it does exist.
It exists with people with like anime, Twitter, avatar still.
But like, for the most part, that concept of revolution is not that relevant in 21st century leftist political organizing.
And so, like, it cannot be the same because the nature of the thing that the struggle, it's not the same on the left.
There isn't even a legitimate left in the United States, like in any meaningful sense.
sense. Yeah, I mean, there exists, like, and I guess it's like, I don't want to call it
incoherent, but like a lot of the left exists, the people going hardest on the left are
going hardest on the internet, I guess this is what I want to say. This is nothing like post-68
Italy. We've seen a nice, nice, like, resurgence of like union organizing, and that's like the
most realistic manifestation of the left. And mutual aid organizing. I will also say we did
have, this band from 2011
to 2020 was like a really massive
period of
like really large-scale street
movement in a way that
really terrified
these people.
Like 2014, specifically
Ferguson and 2020
really truly
rattled the psychology
of all of the people
who are like
currently running this country
in that it demonstrated that like
oh damn there could be a world
we're like we're not
automatically the superior race
and we're not like treated like that
because it's fucking bullshit
and people were willing to fight for that
but also like
yeah no like we don't have the kind of like
organizational logistical capacity that like any of these
things had and it's not clear
to me that you
like you won't yet
things that look like that anymore
yeah like as much as
like the right wing YouTube podcast fear wants to make
it the case. First of all, there was not like an organized revolutionary left in the US, not a
serious one. And secondly, like, the organized revolutionary left that existed in 20th century
relied on a network that was international and that sometimes and not always had its roots in
Soviet, I guess, foreign policy, right? That also does not like, as much as a YouTube world
which is it to be the case, China is not sending people little yellow hardhats to go out in
Portland and get mad at the feds being there. That's just not the case. Yeah.
Here's an advert for hard hats, which you have to buy on your own, because China is not sending
them to you.
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This is in regards to the death of Colleen Slimmer.
She just started going off on me, and I hit her.
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On a cold January day in 1995,
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paint. Speaking of lead paint, and in some ways the conspiratorial elements of the years of lead,
there is no shortage of conspiratorial thought permeating across the entire spectrum of American politics
in ways that I've never really seen at this scale before, which isn't saying much because, you know, I'm not
however old James is, but I have been aware of it, but, but, but. Oh, fuck me. But I have been,
monitoring extremist politics for a...
A decent section of time.
Mainly the past like seven years,
the past like five or so years professionally.
We're going to have to watch another video
because of this whole section of the podcast, Garrison.
I hope you know.
I'm actually multiple months late
for my workplace arrest training.
I can see why.
Oh my God.
But it's pretty bad.
just the total rejection of reality and the separation of truth and reality as coherent concepts.
And we've seen this and some of people's responses across the political spectrum to the release of alleged text messages between the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk and their roommate, which was released in the indictment that dropped on Monday, which shows the alleged shooter explaining to their roommate what they did and how they did it and in part why.
We'll talk more about this in executive disorder, these actual messages and what they contain,
but people's reaction to them, both on the left and right, have been pretty wild.
Matt Walsh is arguing that these messages were scripted between the roommate and the shooter
as a way to absolve the transgender roommate, referring to this strategy as being influenced by Breaking Bad?
What?
It's a, it's a, so Breaking Bad is a television show, an American television show released around 2008.
Uh-huh.
I'm not going to explain Breaking Bad.
Garrison, do you remember that?
Oh my God, you were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Walsh is, Matt Walsh is comparing this to something that Walter White did during, during Breaking Bad,
saying that this feels like a strategy that these two people cooked up by watching too much TV,
which, in fact, it just shows that it is Matt Walsh who watches too much TV, but the fact that this is the first thing.
he thinks of. But it's not just Walsh. Communists, anti-imperialists, people on the left are spreading a
completely unfounded assertion that this text exchange between the roommate and the alleged shooter
was quote-unquote obviously written by an FBI agent. Posts like this are receiving tens of thousands
of likes across platforms. Yeah. It's such a misunderstanding of how state craft works and how like
the legal system works that people, communists really think.
that this state of Utah could orchestrate
and convincingly,
convincingly orchestrate
completely fake text exchanges.
Like, that's just simply not how our legal system works.
And you have people, like, Hassan,
spreading this sort of stuff.
Quote, half of the right thinks the messages are fake
because it doesn't implicate the trans person.
The other half thinks the shooter is a patsy
because it was Israel that killed Charlie Kirk.
I will say the text messages are too perfectly plugging holes,
for the investigators. Unnatural.
Like, come on.
Come on. Come on, guys.
This is...
Yeah.
Like, I don't even know what to, like, argue with...
Like, there's no way to argue against people who believe in this in any kind of real way.
Yeah, right. Like, how do you...
Someone who has rejected facts. Like, how do you bring them back?
They have to argue in court that the alleged shooter actually did the shooting, right?
That's what they're trying to establish.
Yeah.
This is the evidence that will be...
read upon as evidence.
To introduce the text messages in court, the DA will have to prove their authenticity
through chain of custody and metadata.
The reason why they were released now is because they were included in the indictment
laying out the charges against Tyler Robinson.
Robinson might use some odd words, but he was raised Mormon, and all of this just
tracks at a face level to me.
He's explaining his actions to the person that he loves
and instructs them to delete the messages.
He doesn't think that these are going to come back to hurt him.
And this isn't just Patel's FBI saying this.
This is the work of local police and state of Utah police
in the state of Utah court.
And this rejection of evidence, not what the evidence argues,
just the base evidence itself follows a week of debate
regarding this shooter's political orientation,
which me and Robert already discussed in an episode earlier this week.
And I understand people's intensity around this issue, especially framing it in this
years-of-led concept, right, of the right using this to majorly crack down on trans people
and on the left, which, yeah, they're going to try to do.
But trying to argue at this point that he's a gropeer is just so faulty and trying to
argue that these text messages are faked somehow similarly is just so faulty and is so
detach from how this situation actually happened and how it fits in to the current dynamic of
political violence in the United States. On that topic, a few days ago, Fox News's The Five,
was debating if they needed more information to definitively say that the shooter was on, quote,
unquote, the left. Greg Gutfield went on about how high-profile liberal and left-wing figures
aren't being assassinated by people on the right and wrote off the murder of the
of Minnesota House Speaker, Melissa Hortman, and her husband.
We don't need more information.
Really?
Yes, we don't need it.
What is interesting here is why is only this happening on the left and not the right?
That's all we need to know.
There's absolutely no cognitive...
What about Melissa Hortman that we just talked about?
Melissa Horsman.
Did you know her name before it happened?
None of us did.
None of us were spending every single day talking about Mrs. Hortman.
I never heard of her until after she died.
So she doesn't matter?
Don't play that bullshit with me.
You know what I'm saying is there was no demonization amplification about that woman before she died.
It was a specific crime against her by somebody who knew her.
You could bring up Josh Shapiro, but then you will not bring up, for example, that that was a pro-Palestine person.
So don't use your, what about this?
The fact of the matter is the both sides argument not only doesn't fly, we don't.
care. We don't care about your both sides argument. That shit is dead. For one thing, there is
no cognitive dissonance on our side. On your side, your beliefs do not match reality. So you're
coming up with these rationalizations like, what about this or what about that? We're not doing
that because we saw it happen. We saw a young, bright man assassinated and we know who did it.
So if you look at like left-wing violence or violence targeting right-wing figures,
even just like the past two years, right?
There's the two attempted Trump assassinations,
which the right frames as left-wing violence,
though the first Trump shooter did not have left-wing politics.
They had more of the psychological profile of a school shooter
who was looking to do something to get into history books
and came from a conservative upbringing.
This person was not a leftist, right?
But this is still targeting a right-wing figure,
so it's framed in this same conversation.
The United Healthcare assassination, similarly, right?
This wasn't a left-wing person who did this,
but targeting a CEO on a healthcare topic
associates it with the left
or with progressive stances around healthcare.
There's the arson against Josh Shapiro's home.
The guy who did this had a mixture of like a pro-Trump background,
but with pro-Palestine motivations.
The most clear example would be the murder
of two Israeli embassy staffers,
and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
With the healthcare stuff,
like we should probably point out
that Trump also ran on like
medicine is too expensive, right?
Like it costs too much
to get the pills you need to stay alive.
Like that has been a cornerstone of his platform too.
It can be framed as like a populist sentiment.
It's a populist stance.
Yeah.
Not necessarily a leftist one.
So that's the political background
that these people on the right
are like coming from, right?
Like that's how they see this.
That's like this spike in left wing violence
that they're seeing refers to this collection of acts.
Now, for media has reported that a few days after Charlie Kirk's assassination,
the Department of Justice removed from their website a National Institute of Justice
research study showing a white supremacist and far-right violence far outweighs any other
type of terrorism or domestic violent extremism.
Quote, since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated
homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including,
including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.
In the same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.
So this study has been scrubbed from the website to follow in line with Trump and the rights general talking points about this spike in left-wing violence.
I think in part, the right would view explicit white supremacist, neo-nobesist, neo-non.
Nazi linked violence as like separate from like, you know, conservative or even some like far
right violence. They don't understand the, the linkage from, you know, explicit white supremacist
mass shootings and, you know, make America great again, right? That's something that they would
like reject as as a legitimate coupling. In Congress today, Cash Patel claimed to have no
idea who did then roof was, for example. Correct. And like what he was about. A lot of them just
aren't aware of this stuff. And it's not just this National Institute of Justice study. These findings
are incredibly consistent across multiple studies. The notably not left-wing Cato Institute found
very similar results. In their analysis of 620 politically motivated murders since 1975,
excluding 9-11, most political violence comes from the right. They counted 391 murders from the right,
and 65 from the left. I can link that below to get a better look at their actual methodology
and what they count as right-wing, what they count as left-wing violence.
But these stats simply don't matter to the right in a lot of cases.
Many average rightists will just reject these results altogether, say that the study is faked or had faulty methodology.
But others might frame it as, even if this data is true, it doesn't match the current trend of escalating left-wing violence, specifically targeted left-wing violence, not just mass shootings.
Here's another clip from Fox's The Five.
I understand why people are saying, what about this and what about this?
Because if you have to face the underlying fact to this, your life is going to fall apart
because you're going to realize you're not the good guys.
If you sat around and you defended the mutilation of children, you're not the good guys.
If you sat 600, 700 cases of harassment against Republicans and you said, but what about
this?
What about this?
And then you see this murder after calling somebody a fashion.
You, fascist, you realize maybe I'm not the good guy.
That is a hell of a realization to deal with.
So therefore, therefore, you have to grasp at rationalizations.
You don't have to do that, Jessica.
They do.
I don't believe you're part of that group, but why the hell do you have to mimic and echo that crap to us?
He was a patsy.
That guy was a patsy.
He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct-to-consumer nihilism, the trans cult.
And you know that.
If you can decide that biology is false, you can agree that you,
that murder is okay and that humanity is expendable.
How you cannot see that alone and see that for what the evil it is without having to attach
all of these other things is beyond me.
His explicit claim that we should just like flag is that it's not, he's not necessarily
talking about leftists as a whole.
He's specifically talking about people who accept that trans people are people,
a bit of being and like that the existence of trans people.
people leads to this nihilism, I guess.
Well, yeah, I mean, they see the existence of trans people as, like, a result of this nihilist
culture, right?
Yeah.
Well, he seemed to put the causal hour the other way, though, in that.
He seemed to suggest that the nihilism comes from accepting trans people.
I guess I don't fully agree that that's how he's saying it.
I think they view it as it's both causal, but also a symptom.
I think they play it kind of both ways and showing how it's more so just like,
the result of this like breakdown in in like a moral fabric right which is then
breaking down moral decline this like notion of reality which is why you know transness is such
an existential threat to the right wing world view in like many senses but that's that's another
topic i i do find it interesting how quick these people are just to completely discount right
wing mass shootings right and i think one one key difference in talking about you know left wing violence
versus right-wing violence, it seems, in almost all their examples here, they're talking about
assassinations, targeted against specific people. Most right-wing violence in these, like,
statistics from like Cato and the National Institute of Justice are mass shootings, right? The number
of individual people might not be that different, but the kill count for right-wing and specifically
like white supremacist attacks are so much higher. I don't think it's the actual numbers that matter
to these people. It's their proximity to being the recipient of such violence that really freaks them
out. For these commentators, the likelihood of them being in a black church when a white supremacist
mass shooting happens is Slimtona. Right? Like, that's never going to happen to these people.
But being the victim of targeted violence against a high profile figure is, to them, it seems like
an increasing possibility. And that really freaks them out. Obviously, this type of attack
directly affects their political class in a way that a far-right mass shooting does not.
I think that is influencing the way that they're talking about this, you know, quote-unquote spike in left-wing violence.
We're going to go on an ad break and then return to talk about J.D. Vance's temporary takeover of the Charlie Kirk show
and how his rhetoric is affecting this general debate on political violence.
I'm Jorge Ramos.
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Together we're launching The Moment, a new podcast about what it means to live through a time, as uncertain as this one.
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This is a tape recorded statement.
The person being interviewed is Krista Gail Pike.
This is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer.
She started going off on Eve and I hit her.
I just hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her.
On a cold January day in 1995,
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We let people languish in prison for decades,
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How does someone prove that they deserve to live?
We are starting the recording now.
Please state your first and last name.
Krista Pike.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life,
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is Ed. Everyone say hello, Ed.
Hello, Ed.
I'm from a very rural background myself.
My dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin.
So, like, it's not like...
What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?
I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago.
I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different.
On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear.
On 22nd of July 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family.
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A new podcast called Wisecrack, where stand-up comedy and murder takes center stage.
Available now.
Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved.
Until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls.
came forward with a story.
I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know.
A story that law enforcement used to convict six people
and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.
Through sheer persistence and nerve,
this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
My name is Maggie Freeling.
I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer,
and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to be.
find.
I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that
y'all said it.
They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.
They made me say that I poured gas on her.
From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system
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America, y'all better work the hell up.
Bad things happens to good.
people in small towns.
Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
are back. On Monday, September 15th, Vice President J.D. Vance hosted the Charlie Kirk show
from his office in the White House complex. The vice president, sitting down, hosting a private
citizens radio talk show. The show's intro has clips from Charlie's studio with signs that read
BigGov sucks. Warning, does not play well with liberals. To introduce the show, J.D. Vance says
that, quote, we have to talk about this incredibly destructive moment of left-wing extremism
that has grown up over the last few years. We're going to talk about how to dismantle that
and how to bring real unity, unquote. His first guest was Stephen Miller.
Van said he wanted to talk to Miller about, quote, all the ways we're trying to figure out
how to prevent this festering violence that you can see from the far left becoming even
more and more mainstream. We have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller
and J.D. Vance, they're going to go after constitutionally protected speech.
And no, we're going to go after the NGO network that fomence, facilitates, and engages in
violence. That's not okay. Violence is not okay in our system, and we want to make it less
likely that that happens. Walk me through at a high level, like what you and I have been
working on, what the whole administration has been working on, to try to make sure that we don't
reward and promote this craziness. Yes, so it's an excellent question. I said this before,
And, but it bears repeating, the last message that Charlie sent me was, I think it was just the day before we lost him, which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-ling organizations that are promoting violence in this country.
And I will write those words onto my heart and I will carry them out.
The NGO network.
Yep.
Yeah, this is, this has been a thing with them for a while.
It has.
There was supposed to be a series of executive orders that were drafted earlier this year, specifically targeting Democrat funding platforms like Act Blue and environmental NGOs that it was reported that Trump was about to sign. And then they kind of disappeared. This was around like April to May. And this has been something that they obviously have been wanting to do. But for one reason or another, haven't followed through on yet. But now are talking about this as.
an impending policy that the Trump administration is going to enact.
I think some of their fascination with NGOs comes from the Trump administration's
first term when NGOs were very successful in bringing suits that delayed or prevented
some of the policies that the Miller faction of the Trump administration would have liked to
implement. Yeah. And then I think the other angle of this is just the pure anti-Semitism angle
that partly when they're saying NGOs, they mean NGOs,
and partly when they're saying NGOs, they mean Jews.
And it's great.
It's...
I mean, very often, the specific focus was on Heas, right?
Highest Hebrew immigrant aid society who...
I mean, we see this in the tree of life shooting, for instance, in 2018, right?
This has been with us for some time on the right.
I'm going to play another clip where they outline more strategies
for clamping down on left-wing violence.
And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.
So let me explain a bit of what that means.
So I've got 30 seconds.
So be quick, Stephen.
The organized docks and campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging this design to trigger inside violence.
violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast
domestic terror movement. And with God is my witness, we are going to use every resource we have
at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify,
disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American
people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name. So in their discussion of taking
down this big doxing network, they also inadvertently and ironically, describe this.
the doxing campaign that the right is currently doing at a far larger scale and with way more
institutional backing than any antif or left-wing doxing has looked like targeting people
making posts in support of Charlie Kirk's assassination or people making jokes about Charlie Kirk
in the wake of his assassination. With a doxing website listing thousands of quote-unquote
Charlie's murderers, which are actually just people who have made posts about the death of Charlie
Kirk. This is building off the Canary Mission Strategy used against pro-Palestinian activists,
which has been adopted by the State Department for Immigration Enforcement and Judging Visa Applications.
This is the actual, like, organized, state-backed, institutionally backed, doxing campaign that
exists right now in this country. It's not your average Torch Antifa chapter doing this at scale.
Now it's the right, with the mechanism of state encouraging them, backing them, and tons of money.
being funneled into an organized operation to actually impact, like, state policy on who gets
allowed in the country.
On that note, Mark Rubio has talked about denying visa applications for people who celebrate
the death of Charlie Kirk.
We are not in the business of inviting people to visit our country who are going to be
involved in negative and destructive behavior, okay?
So why should, if I invite someone, if we invite someone to visit the United States of America,
as a student, as a tourist, as whatever, then they have a different, the standard they should be
held to is very high. We shouldn't be bringing people into this country. We should not be giving
visas to people who are going to come to the United States and do things like celebrate the
murder, the execution, the assassination of a political figure. We should not, and if they're already
here, we should be revoking their visa. So now there's an organized campaign to not only try to deport
and revoke visas or deny visas to people, quote unquote, celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk,
but also get citizens here fired from their jobs and disrupt their life.
Just two years ago, Elon Musk tweeted, quote,
if you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform,
Twitter, we will fund your legal bill, no limit, please let us know, unquote.
What's different about the rights use of these tactics is the merger of like the right-wing
non-government organization like activist apparatus with the ruling conservative guns.
government. Like, the Dems in the left have, have never done this before. There's never been
this coordination between the actual democratic establishment and, like, the far left. That's
never happened. Like, Palestine crackdowns started under Biden. Biden's DOJ prosecuted many
2020 George Floyd uprising cases. Federal assistance in the domestic terrorism investigation
into Cop City started under Biden. As for, quote-unquote, organized riots and street violence,
right-wing street violence has been encouraged and coordinated with Trump and the Trump administration.
Stand back and stand by.
The stop-the-steel protests leading to January 6th, which Trump played a large part in making happen.
And then Trump pardoned all the participants.
Yeah, like it's pretty clear.
The mayor of Minneapolis taking a knee is not on the same level as Trump pardoning all the January 6, quote unquote, insurrectionists.
At the end of Vance's two-hour long episode, he reiterated on the topic of doxing and harassment campaigns and political violence.
Here's another clip.
I wrote a story in the Nation magazine about my dear friend Charlie Kirk.
Now, the Nation isn't a fringe blog.
It's a well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.
George Soros' Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation, and many other wealthy titans of the American Progressive Movement.
The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.
But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that.
he never uttered those words. He made an argument against affirmative action as a policy. He
criticized a specific Supreme Court justice as an individual. He never said anything about black
women as a group. He made an argument for judging people of all races and backgrounds by their
own individual merits. The very evidence she provides, this hack of a writer, shows that she
lied about a dead man. And yet, she wrote it, an esteemed magazine published it, it made it through
the editors, and of course, liberal billionaires rewarded that attack. Now, of course, even if Charlie
had uttered those words, it wouldn't mean that he deserved his fate, but consider the level of
propaganda at work. Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight and well-funded institutions of the
left lied about what he said so was to justify his murder. This is soulless and evil. But I was
struck not just by the dishonesty of this smear, but by the glee over a young husband's and young
father's death. Quote, she says, he was an unrepentantant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and
misogynist. The nation wrote, who often wrapped his bigotry.
in Bible verses.
There's a lot to break down there.
First of all, the president of the nation,
not the country, the magazine,
the Nation magazine, has stated that
they in fact do not receive money
from George Soros or the Open Society Foundation.
Vance's gesturing to left-wing billionaires
carries three parentheses around that term.
Second of all,
let's play the actual clip
of Charlie talking about brain-pronger.
processing power.
Joy Reed and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative
action picks.
We would have been called the racist.
But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us.
They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really
seriously.
You had to go steal a white person slot to go be taken.
So he just happens to be talking about three black women
and state that they do not have the brain processing power to do their jobs
and that they stole a white man's spot to get in the position they are in now.
An opinion writer for The Washington Post was fired this week
for sharing this quote on Twitter which replaced the names of the three women he's talking about
with just black women.
Did she share it like in between quotation marks if it was a direct quotation?
She did share it as if it was a direct quotation.
All right, okay, I see.
So I'm going to read this from the email that they sent to this writer firing her.
This writer is a black woman.
Among other requirements, the company-wide social media policy mandates that all employees' social media postings be respectful and prohibits posting that disparage people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics.
The policy also reminds employees that everything they post is reflective of the company and should not affect the integrity of the post-journalism.
you're posting some blue sky, which identify you as a post columnist, about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, do not comply with our policy.
For example, you posted, refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face and performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is not the same thing as violence.
And part of what keeps America violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness, and absolution for white men who espoused hatred and violence.
so this is explicitly a they think that reverse racism is real and that saying that and talking
about white people as a class of people in the U.S. that are responsible for things is in fact
racism that is that is the argument that the post the Washington Post is making in the email
where they fire her which is like that reverse racism shit even like three years ago was like
a pretty fringe right wing
like that was a
not originally like a Nazi thing
right
and this is now
being used by
like the Washington Post
to fire their own writers
for writing
really incredibly
reasonable things
about Charlie Kirk
to close
Charlie Kirk's episode
and to close our episode
J.D. Vance
talked about
before we can have
any national unity
we must like Charlie
tell the truth
Unity, real unity, can be found only after climbing the mountain of truth.
And there are difficult truths we must confront in our country.
One truth is that 24% of self-described, quote, very liberals, believe it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent,
while only 3% of self-described very conservatives agree.
3% is too many, of course.
Another truth is that 26% of young liberals believe political violence is sometimes justified.
And only 7% of young conservatives say the same, again, too high a number.
In a country of 330 million people, you can, of course, find one person of a given political persuasion
justifying this or that or almost anything.
But the data is clear.
people on the left are much
likelier to defend and celebrate
political violence. This is not
a both sides problem. If both sides have a problem,
one side has a much bigger
and malignant problem, and that is the truth
we must be told.
So these stats are from a recent
U-gov survey, where 24% of
very liberals say it's okay to be happy with the murder of a political
opponent, and 26% of young liberals
say sometimes political violence is justified
3 to 7% of young conservatives.
The study also found that Democrats and Republicans
are more likely to say that political violence
is a big problem after attacks on members
of their own party.
Of course, this polling is going to be heavily influenced
by whatever recent events just happened.
That's going to change people's stated opinion
on these questions.
Yeah.
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk,
67% of Republicans said that political
violence is a very big problem.
58% of Democrats agreed.
After the assassination of Melissa Hortman,
56% of Democrats said it's a very big problem.
Only 44% of Republicans agreed.
After the assassination attempt on Josh Shapiro,
44% of Democrats, 37% of Republicans.
Wait, Josh Shapiro wasn't assassinated, right?
They tried to ban his house.
Well, yeah, they're counting that as an attempted assassination.
Oh, okay, I see.
After the attempted assassination on Donald Trump,
51% of Republicans said political balance is a very big problem,
46% of Democrats. And after the attacks on Paul Pelosi,
53% of Democrats said political violence is a very big problem,
compared to 31% of Republicans.
These stats are very fluid and absolutely changed,
depending on whatever current events were current at the time,
whatever just happened.
We're going to talk about this more in a bit,
but I think the way that we frame cheering on,
political violence. Also, massively varies based on what you count as political violence.
Is the police killing count as political violence? If so, that's going to majorly affect the way
we think about this question. Here's Vance, again, talking about Trump's assassination and
the pyramid that supports political violence. Now any political movement, violent or not violent,
is a collection of forces. It's like a pyramid that stacks on top, one support on top of
the other. That pyramid's got a foundation of donors, of activists, of journalists, now of social
media influencers, and of course, of politicians. Not every member of that pyramid would commit a
murder. In fact, over 99% I'm sure would not. But by celebrating that murder, apologizing for
it, and emphasizing not Charlie's innocence, but the fact that he said things some didn't like,
even to the point of lying about what he actually said,
many of these people are creating an environment
where things like this are inevitably going to happen.
Bansing goes on to talk about how people yelled at him and his family
when he visited Disneyland
and discusses how after Charlie's death,
one of his friends and a senior White House staffer
had left-leaning operatives in his neighborhood,
passing out leaflets, telling people what he looked like
and where he lived, and quote,
encouraging neighbors to harass him or, God forbid, do worse.
While he was mourning his dead friend,
he and his wife had to worry about the political terrorists
drawing a big target on his home he shares with his own children.
Are these people violent? I hope not.
But are they guilty of encouraging violence?
You damn well better believe it.
We can thank God that most Democrats don't share these attitudes,
and I do, while acknowledging that something has gone very wrong
with a lunatic fringe, a minority,
but a growing and powerful minority on the far left, unquote.
Vance goes on to state that he seeks no unity with the far left.
There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics.
There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder.
There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend.
friend. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination. And there is no
unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers,
who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck
because he spoke words with which they disagree. Did you know that the George Soros Open Society
Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that
disgusting article, justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax
treatment? They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer, and how do they reward
us by setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years?
On September 13th, Fox News Morning host Brian Kilmead endorsed euthanizing homeless people
with, quote, involuntary lethal injection
or something just kill them.
Billions of dollars to mental health
and the homeless population,
a lot of them don't want to take the programs,
a lot of them don't want to get the help
that is necessary.
You can't give them a choice.
Either you take the resources
that we're going to give you
or you decide that you're going to be locked up in jail.
That's the way it has to be now.
Or involuntary lethal injection or something.
I just kill them.
Brian, why did it have to get to this point?
Right.
I would say this.
We're not voting.
for the right people. In North Carolina, wake up.
Just kill them.
Jesus.
A Fox News host advocating the killing
of homeless people. And he didn't get fired
from this. He apologized a few
days later, but he's not getting fired from
his job for this. Open,
openly advocating the death
of homeless people.
Yeah. Murder. And I think
it's worth noting whatever we're having a discussion
about political violence that two days
after Charlie Kirk was shot,
ice just killed a guy in Chicago who was driving away from their intent to detain him
he was driving away pretty slowly and there's video of it now they pulled out their guns and they
killed him and you know all of these people who are the people who ordered ice into this city
right who are directly responsible for for the deaths of this man who was also a single father
Actually, well, no, Kirk was not a single father, but this guy was and was just murdered in cold blood by ice, right?
This is not considered political violence by sort of either liberals or conservatives, right?
Because they don't think that political violence can be done by the state.
And this is also part of how you get to the situation now where you can be like, well, the state should just murder homeless people.
And that's not considered political violence because it's the state doing it and because they don't think homeless people are people.
yeah i mean to broaden that statement slightly or take a different angle on it right like there is a complete
bipartisan and consensus that we should kill hundreds of people a year crossing our southern border
because that supposedly serves as a deterrent from other people coming which it doesn't but that's
not seen as political violence no they just murdered three more people on a boat like leaving
venezuela a few days ago yeah yeah as vans ended the charlie kirk show episode he advocated that
listeners find and call the employers of people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death to join a
TPUSA chapter or to run for office. But I promise you that we will explore every option to bring
real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they
don't like what they say. But you have a rule too. Civil society, Charlie understood this well,
is not just something that flows from the government.
It flows from each and every one of us.
It flows from all of us.
So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder,
call them out in hell, call their employer.
We don't believe in political violence,
but we do believe in civility.
And there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.
The idea of the fusion of the state with civil society
is really notable there like that that's not what civil society is right that is a concept
that is inherently totalitarian that the civil society should flow downstream from the state
and the movement it's this fusion between the two that the right has deployed so successfully
which has increased their ability to actually like rule yeah i mean that's that's that's what
fascism does right like that that's franco that's hitler like that is textbook that's like the
point of the brown shirts yeah or like the women's movement in
Spain, right, to give a more civil society example. They're not like a, they're not like a state
police agency. They're a civil society organization explicitly run by the state for its agenda.
So to return to the years of lead paint idea that opened this episode, what I'm observing right now
across the political ocean is this flattening of tactics. As I've discussed on the show before
in the Blunon episodes, the right Trojan hoarse political conspiracism into acceptable political
discourse, which the left is now embracing, liberals and the left. And you can see this with people's
reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination and theories about the alleged shooter. So the left is
embracing conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the right is adopting and accelerating political cancel
culture style doxing. The key difference here is on the right, these actions have state backing
and coordination or serve to maintain state power. For example, there's types of political violence that
get cheered on by the right, such as deportations and the cheering on of police after officer-involved
shootings. Back the Blue keeps alignment with state power. Same thing with cheering on or encouraging
violence against BLM protesters that supports the state structure. And advocating or celebrating
the deaths of protesters gets viewed very differently than the targeted assassinations that have
happened the past year. And now of the past few days, Trump has discussed
once again, designating Antifa and other groups as domestic terror organizations
and bringing RICO charges against Code Pink activists who screamed at him at a restaurant in D.C. a few weeks ago.
Do you plan on designating Antifa finally a domestic terror organization?
Well, it's something I would do, yeah. If I have support from the people back here,
I think we'd start with Pam, I think. But I would, if you give me, I would do that,
100%, and others also, by the way, but Antifa is terrible.
Are there other groups that you communicate?
There are other groups, yeah, there are the groups.
We have some pretty radical groups, and they got away with murder.
And also, I've been speaking to the Attorney General about bringing Rico against some of the
people that you've been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of
dollars for agitation.
These aren't protests.
These are crimes, what they're doing, where they're throwing bricks at cars of ice and
border patrol.
I want to close by, you know, we've seen the sort of repercussions that people have had,
not even for like celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, but for like being like, wait, this guy
fucking sucks.
And this whole, you know, this whole argument about civility and, I mean, the vice president
of the United States is making, right?
I want to read this quote from Matt Walsh.
As you're recording this, this is from Tuesday, September 16th.
This was left-wing LGBT terrorism.
there was never much doubt. Now there is none at all. All left-wing
terror networks must be crushed. All of the terrorists and their helpers and funders must be
arrested, prosecuted, and put to death. So, and there have been absolutely
zero consequences for, again, Matt Walsh calling for this whole
network of people that he imagines exists being
executed. That's their endgame, right? It is to destroy the concept of free speech
in order to preserve, quote, unquote, free speech, right? In order to sort of, quote,
unquote end political violence. They want to carry out, you know, mass political killings of their
opponents. Coordinated at a state level with state resources. Yeah. Yeah. And the state involvement
makes it okay. That makes it a moral action, not the actions of some like unhinged terrorist.
Yeah. And this is a really significant problem for the way that we think about political violence,
because this is something that's true for both liberals and conservatives that they think that the state
is the appropriate arbiter for this kind of political violence, which is how Obama,
can do a drone strike on a 16-year-old American citizen and kill him in cold blood because Obama
had political disagreements with his father, right? And how this isn't treated as something that's
fine by a huge portion of liberals. And this is one of the things that's going to allow if these
people are successful, and I don't know that they will be. But if they can be, that's going to be why.
well that is how we at the show understand the years of lead paint or the current
2025 September era of the years of lead paint there's phantoms everywhere there's
conspiracies everywhere and nowhere and the specter of political violence is around every
corner it could happen here is a production of cool zone
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