It Could Happen Here Weekly 50

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Welcome to the coort open.

(00:27):
Here is practical guy to make it Puma culture happen
wherever you are. I am your host for this episode,
Andrew of the YouTube channel andreis Um. I'm joined here
with Chris and Jeames lou Hello. Hi, thanks for having us,

(00:52):
Thanks having me the guest. Well, you're gonna walk us
through this. I'm very excited to learn more about it. Yes,
so I really see it as a as a key
component in our restoration of the earth. And so I
find it necessary that regardless of what direction your individual

(01:14):
practice is going in, we're we're looking to specialize or whatever,
couldn't quote specialized. I think it's still important to think
about where food comes from and think about way as
that we can enhanced and in large our food autonomy,
especially considering the multi layering crises that you know compounding

(01:38):
these days. Puma culture was first coined as a tomb
by puma culturist Bill Mollison. It's a portmanteau of permanent
agriculture and permanent culture, and it's the conscious design and
mainstenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems MS which have a diversity,

(02:01):
stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. It's a way of
integrating landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and
other material and other non material needs in a sustainable way.
And just to be clear, the concepts, the ideas, the
principles that make up puma culture have existed long before

(02:26):
Bill Morrison was born, have existed in cultures all over
the world. Bill Molson is just someone who has, I
guess given it a spin for a modern audience. But
these principles, these ideas are things that have been in
practice for thousands of years, tens of thousands, even from

(02:51):
the approach to land management and settlement designed to the
whole systems thinking approach to nature which can be seen
in a lot of animals practices. It has a long history,
and it's one that people who practice Puma culture today
research Puma culture will inevitably uncover in their learning process. However,

(03:18):
Bill Morrison first coined in the nineties seventies as a
response to the oil embargoes they were taking place at
the time. By bringing together the traditional knowledge of vastery
of indigenous cultures and combining them with certain modern design
and layouts, it created a movement that is now um

(03:45):
spreading across the world from every on every continent. Honestly,
the way that Puma culture views um the world the
views systems. It comes with an outlook that recognizes it
all biological material is a potential energy source. The aim

(04:06):
is to try to trap energy on your land and
to use that energy the most efficient way before a
degrede to create circular economies and cycles of energy. That
how for actual sustainable agricultural practice, which unfortunately has not

(04:27):
been the aim of agriculture, especially industrial agriculture, and Superma
culture represents a challenge to that status cool. The ethics
of Puma culture are primarily focused on care for the earth,
that being all living and on living things, care for
all people, there by promoting self reliance and community responsibility,

(04:52):
the sort of we all have access to the resources
necessary for existence and care for community, and specifically communit
t that allows us to be to think of an
approach our society in a way that benefits all people
in all life, recognizing the community is not just our neighbors,

(05:15):
it's not just the people who live in our city
or town. It is all the living things that incorporate
our surroundings and beyond. The way that puman culture approaches
um design, it's a lot of his emphasis and mimicking
how the natural world would attempt to stabilize. Of course,

(05:40):
these systems take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,
even millions of years two fully develop and age and
reach some kind of stable state. But public culture seeks
to learn from you know, these old growth forests and
these healthily ecosystems, and accelerate that process to establish things

(06:06):
that will last generations, to established spaces that will provide
for the needs of people hundreds of years down the line.
When it comes to approaching pumic culture design practically, first
things first to recognize is that anybody can take part

(06:28):
in pumic culture design. Anybody can take part in constructing
these sources of systems, and it can be established. The
basic principles can be established regardless of your circumstances, your
individual climate or biosphere, because the principles are based on

(06:49):
following what nature was doing anyway. One of the first
principles involves the recognition of the connections in a local
Asian seeing that a web is stronger than a single string,
meaning that all of these different parts, the different moving parts,

(07:10):
coming together create something stronger than if each individual person,
each individual creature trying to move by itself. It also
looks at the connection between waste and resources. We all
on the old adage just says, you know, one man's
trash is another mantas of treasure, but when it comes

(07:32):
to ecosystems, we should really be taking it quite literally,
because the waste of one part of the system directly
feeds into the resource of another part. Decomposing plants and
animals directly feed into the fungal networks and flourishing of

(07:55):
the next generation of plants, animals, as and in at
web in that network. In those connections, we can also
recognize for principle too, that each element performs multiple functions.
If we are for example, keeping chickens. They can be
a source of eggs and feathers and protein, of course,

(08:19):
but they also produced mania, and their daily activity helps
to aerate the soil. And they also provide insect control um,
allowing your plans to food and flourish banana trees. They
provide bananas, of course, they provide fruit. They also provide

(08:39):
starch and mulch and protection and shade, and they hold
water quite well. Actually, when I had taken a puma
culture design course a couple of months ago, one of
the things that I had learned from the guy who
was running it was that he had told his story
and he had done this this project in Barbarous and
in Barbado was he was called to restore sort of

(09:05):
like an old sand mine um because it run out
of sand. Well, it's close running out of sand. And
so the community that was reliant in that sand mine
didn't really have any direction um because their economy, their
local economy, been so reliant on those jobs. When he
came in, it's just like and he showed the pictures,
it's just very very barren landscape, very dry, very dusty,

(09:31):
And I was honestly in disbelief that something so dead,
so destroyed, something so devolved, could be as radically transformed
as he had transformed it. Unfortunately, this is a podcast,
not a video, or otherwise I would show you the pictures.
But the transformation was stunning. I want of the elements

(09:56):
that he had used to transform that dry lands ape
into a lush food forest was banana trees, because surprisingly,
banana trees are very effective. Well, unsurprisingly, banana trees are
very effective at growing quickly and providing shade to other plants,

(10:19):
and so as these other plants are growing up, they
have the shaded banana tree to protect them from the
harsh sun and to the banana trees. While they may
not be the top doors to the forest in the end,
by the time the forest is fully established, because banana
trees don't get that tall, they still vital in that
early stage in providing that function of shade that allows

(10:41):
the rest of the forest to establish itself. That's really cool.
It's very very very cool. Which all pictures after, it's
like a place people could see them online like Instagram,
they could look up or something. Yes, so um, if
you go on Wassamaki Puma culture dot org. I believe

(11:05):
he has the pictures up there that'll be w E
S E M A k I Puma culture dot org.
And if I remember correctly, he has the pictures on there. Yeah,
was it like a sand mine before or something? Yeah,
it was a sand mine. Yeah, jeez, wow, it looks

(11:27):
like there's no goodness in the soil and the first
one and then yeah, yeah, to go back into the
recording aspect when it came to that project, a large
part of it was just getting that life in the soil.
So they were taken. They were getting mulch and manua

(11:49):
from wherever they could get it, just to give some
life for that soil. They would grow sitting like hardy,
fast growing plants and then chopped them down after they'd
grow in sufficiently so they would die right where they
lay and provide nutrients to the soil. And that process

(12:09):
was what helps to build up that soil even before
you started planting the bananas and other stuff. And were
they able like you're saying, they were getting some of
that stuff wherever they could get it, like, and were
they able to get that that was it like considered
a waste product? I guess better people they got it from,
and so like I know, I have chickens and they

(12:29):
obviously produced like manure, and I'll put some of it
in my like vegetables to the grow. But I'll just
give it to anyone else who wants it. It is
that a thing that they were able to do there? Yeah,
I think people are donated UM. And I mean I
would assume at least in turn, I don't know what
the cases in Barbados, but in turn that they are

(12:52):
bush trucks which pass every once in a while to
collect whatever, you know, branches and cut grass and whatever
people have puts out um from their yard will go whatever.
So I would assume that they would have asked the
bush truck people to you know, bring some of that

(13:12):
stuff to the site to help out, because a lot
of people, you know, they just put that in front
of the yard waiting for the bush struck to pass.
And so a lot of very good potential sources of
like UM ecosystem building, that sort of that so called
waste really resources gets wasted when it could really see UM,

(13:35):
a lot of these kinds of projects. Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah, yes,
something that like I don't know if if you ever
read UN documents about like stopping climate change. Like they
always have a giant section about circular about circular economy stuff,
but about sort of I mean, basically doing this stuff
and then nothing ever happens and no one ever does it,

(13:58):
and so yeah, it's it's really cool all that, like
this is a place where those ideas which like are
if there's if we are going to survive as a
species with like most of us alive and doing well,
we're going to have to do exactly. I'm I'm kind
of reminded just on this sort of topic of I

(14:21):
was in Rwanda and February, and one of the things
that really struck me with this system of agriculture that
they've devised where um, they have patties that they grow
rice right like submerged, and then in there there are
living fish and then above them they are like little
hutches with rabbits and I'm so like the rabbit manure

(14:45):
helps to fertilize what's growing beneath, and then like it's
this kind of circular thing where I think they can
feed some of the things that they cut off the
plant to the rabbits and it's sort of like and
the fish will help keep the water clean. I think
that like filter fish, I can't quite a plan to
keep it clean for the fish. It was fascinating. I
was like, this is amazing, Like they're not as opposed

(15:07):
to I grew up on a farm and I'm very
familiar with some of the larger arable sort of grain,
but like grains in the UK, and how you're relying
on a ton of exogenous inputs, which I was just
so impressed with the fact that they devised a system
that didn't require those exactly exactly you really want to.

(15:29):
Of course you might, we will have to get external sources,
especially in the beginning as you're trying to establish the system,
but the aim is really to have this system continuously
establishing itself and expanding itself and maintaining itself. Yeah, would
it be a system that works mostly with like a

(15:52):
plant based food stuff, so I guess that seems generally
to be more sustainable. Absolutely. I mean, man Ya's a
really powerful source of fertilizer. And I think you can
keep animals without you know, eating them or using them
anyway if you just want to, you know, because they

(16:15):
make good companions and stuff as well. Yeah, but yeah, yeah,
I would say a plant focus system could definitely but
and to sort of rhyme or aligned with principle too,
which said that each element performs multiple functions. It's also
important to have each function supported very multiple elements. Right,

(16:38):
So you don't want to get all your food from
one source. You want to have a mix of trees
and roots and short crops and cultivates. I mean having
all your food coming from one sources. Basically what we
do now with you know, these mono cultures, with these
this industrial farming that has these fields and fields and
fields that are so susceptible to pests and disease that

(17:04):
we have to basically drench them with chemicals just a
lot to survive. Because and the same guy who did
the course, he explains it me like this. He said
that when there's a system in nature and it's not
in balance, they basically send out a signal saying, eight,

(17:26):
this is not in balance, come and fix it. And
so these so called pests, these bugs and stuff, they
come to these aberrations, these freaks of nature, these massive
fields of crops, and recognizing that this is not sustainable

(17:46):
um establishments in the landscape, they try to try to optimize. Right,
he calls them. He doesn't call them pests. He calls
them optimizers. So if you have, for example, uh, excessive
amount of a certain pest in your system, something's wrong

(18:07):
with that system because those so called pests, those optimizers
are only able to flood your system because they don't
have the mechanism. System doesn't have the mechanisms in place
to keep them in check. So you don't have the fauna,
the larger insects and stuff in your system that will
keep those pests in check. There's an imbalance in place,

(18:30):
and that's something that needs to be rectified, and there
different ways to rectified depend on this situation. Another example,
and this isn't um from the pooma culture poom culture course.
Another example was the this I believe someone was talking
about the presence of wolves in some of the parks
in in the US and how reintroducing those wolves did

(18:54):
so much too regulate the rest of the ecosystem, the
ripple effects that had an arrest the ecosystem UM stabilizing
the day of populations and stabilizing UM the beaver populations,
and stabilizing all these other different plants and animal species
that you would think are not even connected to the wolves,

(19:15):
but still their presence creating a significant rule in maintaining
that balance. Yeah. Go go watch how wolves change rivers.
It's literally five minutes and it rules. Yeah, it's amazing.
It's just like the concept of rewilding. Is that what
would that be a similar thing? Yeah? Yeah, rewilding is

(19:36):
basically it's puma culture had to be more focused on
sustaining human communities in you know, in a balance with
the rest of the natural world, whereas rewilding is more
focused on helping to rebuild ecosystems outside of the human

(20:01):
sphere at He says, I understand it. Yeah, yeah, that
makes no sense to me. So with principle three, which
was three or rate, was that each function should be
supported by multiple elements. You would want to get all
your food from one source. You just want to grow
like rows and rows of trees or rows and rows
of corn. You want to grow a mix of trees

(20:24):
and roots and short crops and cultivars and all these
different species and variations that would make up like an
actual forest. The food forest is approach that a lot
of prima culturists would advocate, and within a food forest,
you would have I believe seven major groups. This sort

(20:50):
of seven levels that creator sort of a beneficial system.
On the top layer, you have the canopy, which consists
of large fruits and nut trees. They provide the most
shade and they keep the whole area they'll climb into
the area stable. On that second layer, you're gonna have
the low tree layer, which has the dwarf fruit trees.

(21:13):
The smaller fruit trees would fall under the canopy. On
the third layer, you would have the shrub layer where
you would grow you know, your berries and other small
you know plants. And below that you have the ubecious
layer where you would grow different houbs and spices and
things like that. And then below that you have your

(21:35):
root vegetables, and below that you have well, you can
really go below the roof vegetables, but next to those
three vegetables, you would want to grow your soil surface crops,
your ground cover um like they're sitting running beans and stuff.
That would help to create a groundcover which protects the
soil and prevents the establishment of undesirable plants, which we

(21:58):
quote wheats. And then finally the seventh layers, the poutical layer,
which consists of the climbers and vines. It would establish
themselves on the low tree layer and the canopy. So
if you have that sort of food forest system in
places all those seven layers, you're not getting each function
supported by one element to getting it supported by many elements.

(22:20):
The same goes for water. You want to get all
your water source coming from just like the pipes and
whatever water the government sent you, you want to have
water coming from the rain. If possible, you might want
to tap into the water table, or you might want
to depending on your situation. You might have extreme or

(22:41):
you might be on a hill, in which case you'd
have water flowing down, and you want to find ways
to trap that water and to consive that water so
that is distributed throughout your system. Unlike regular home garden.
Part of the aim of a puma culture um system
is that it just like in nature, it waters itself,

(23:04):
it takes care of itself, and so you're going to
have to want You're gonna want to have all sources
of different sources of water elements in place to provide
that water. The same goes for energy. You would want
to get all the energy from one source. You want
to combine you know, human power, animal power, hydro electricity

(23:27):
if possible, soul of power if possible. Basically, redundancy is
very important. Redundancy is very important, and I'll see it
again for emphasis. Redundancy is very important. The next principle,
principle number four, is that you want to approach puma

(23:49):
culture with energy efficiency in mind, particularly your own energy.
So on the more practical side of things, if you
you might want to do what my mentor my guide
had done, which was a zone and sector analysis. So basically,
you draw like a map of your space. You outline

(24:10):
your daily patterns and the energies that come from outside
your site, like wind and rain and flood and fire
and pollution and noise and smells and all these different things.
You want to look at how you move through your space.
Want look at how the sunshine passes over your space.
You want to look at the view and you want
to try to harness those good energies, whether it be

(24:33):
the rain or wind or whatever it maybe the sun
and plant. Accordingly, you don't want to have sun sensitive
plants on like the south side of your property of
your space wherever the spaces, and you wouldn't want to
have plants to eat a lot of sun in the shade.

(24:57):
You also want to divvy up your space. Once you've
you know, on that map of you space, you're wanted
to get up into zoons. So I first zone not
be your immediate live in space. The second zone would
have an intensive kitchen garden sorry first soon it would
be a place of consumption and processing of whatever it
is that your system is producing. It doesn't necessarily have

(25:20):
to be a house. It could be uh community kitchen,
or it can be uh campus clubhouse. I don't know.
It could be any space that you're using for consumption
and processing. The next zone is going to be intensive
kitchen garden. It's a place where you would want to
grow the plants that cycle through more quickly, UM, the

(25:44):
spices and the herbs and the different things that you
would use on a regular basis. The next zone I
would want to have its focus on local support, community
support and surplus. So this zone UM, the first zone
is actually technically zone zero. The second zonner Zone one
as a Zone two, which is that sort of local

(26:06):
support space that orchard is we want to grow, UM,
your fruit trees, your ornamentals, UM, I want to raise
raise animals there and you basically wanted to be a
space where you can provide for the local community, separate
and apart from your own produce. Zone three would also

(26:28):
have the emphasis on production. Zone three probably the space
where you have your main crops, the crops you spend
a lot of time focusing on. Zone four would also
have a lot of investment in establishing a sustainable sort
of life cycle um for more long term plants, and

(26:51):
Zone five would be a space of wilderness, of forest
of wildlife, orridors that allow spaces of free wilding even
within your mall constructed site. Having your system split into

(27:13):
zones helps you to reduce the amount of work that
you put in, the amount of resources use, the amount
of maintenance you'll need, and it also helps you to
boost to yields and to recycle resources most effectively. The
fifth principle is the use of biological resources natural insecticides, timber,

(27:39):
nitrogen fixers, whatever the case may be, you want to
be using the systems that have evolved to fulfill those rules.
To fulfill those rules, you may or may not be
afraid of certain creatures. I myself, personally, I don't like
frogs or toads or really I don't like most animals personally,

(28:04):
I just survide with them. However, Comma, I recognize the
importance right, So frogs and bats and snakes, all of
these creatures helped provide like a stable system, whether it
be a snakes dealing with um crats or bats stealing
with insects, or frogs also dealing with insects. You men

(28:25):
want to use companion planting as well, um like the
three sisters method, which is a combination of beans, corn,
and what's the three one again with squashes, right, and
squash and that would help to establish you know itself
and maintain itself. It's sort of like a microcosm of
the Bronda Puber culture concept and one that has been

(28:47):
in practice funititive years. The sixth principle is the practice
of energy cycling. Trapping sunlight through greenhouses is making the
most used basically out of the energy that flews through
your system before it leaves your system, recycling the organic

(29:09):
matter that passes three system so that produces no real
waste um. When I was at the site at the
Puma Culture forest, I witnessed compost toilet for the first
time and was immediately grossed up by the concept. However,

(29:31):
Comma upon being blown away by the product of those
compost toilets, I changed my tune very quickly. And although
I would not I probably would not use a compost
toilet on a regular basis. I think it has some benefit, um,
because we're flushing away some some real power, some real

(29:53):
nutrition stuff. Um. Of course, there are risks associated with
using human mania, but the process that he had put
in place involved using human waste um. And then for
every certain amount of human waste, you dump sawdust on
top of it. And that sawdust helps to deal with
the smell um so much so that I actually didn't

(30:15):
smell anything when I opened up those those compost toilets.
But it also helps to create that balance between the
carbon and the nitrogen that is required for compost. And
so after that, after a tub has been filled compost toy,
the toub has been filled, he seals it up, leaves
it for a year to break down, and by the

(30:37):
time it comes out it's just like regular soil. However,
of course safety prequestions, I believe he only uses it
for his orchards, so only like fruit trees and other
kinds of trees. I spent a lot of time so
far discussing these sort of larger systems where you know,
I'm basically assuming you have several acres of land like

(30:58):
this guy does. I don't have several leakers of land.
I don't have an inch of land um, and I
feel like a lot of people listening don't. So there
are elements that you can incorporate on the small scale,
such as grew boxes. You can have deep litter beds,

(31:19):
you can have aquaculture systems, and that's actually one of
the things that he Foost established um which is like
a series of aquaculture systems, and it's actually one of
the main focuses of his project to this day. But
I was quite surprised as to the yield that could
be produced from something as simple as a couple of

(31:40):
pipes put together with some to me to plants grown
out of it. So I mean, don't underestimate yourself or
this pace available to you, because it might not be
able to plant to whole forest, but you can do
a little something. Coming back to the food forest concept,

(32:01):
the eighth principle is the use of natural plant succession
and stack. It you are a group plants together, they
would give a continuing production over time and both the
short term and long term. And like I established, you
want to have those layers in place, the roots, divines,
the trees, etcetera. The ninth principle encourages diversity, encourages poly culture,

(32:27):
which is something that I'm sure you would have picked
up on by now. The tenth principle is increasing the
edge within a system by creating unique niches that allow
for the more rare, the more vulnerable corners of life

(32:51):
to sustain themselves. And I think that's something that a
lot of pum and culturists do in terms of establishing
their own systems. They have like a special food cocus,
certain passion project to certain species that they just love
and want to see flourish, and so they create these
niches within their systems that allow allow for those creatures
to flourish. Principal eleven employers that you observe natural patterns.

(33:18):
Nature rarely goes in a street line, and you may
want to make that pattern, whether be spirals or waves
or branches, whether it be patterns over time from you know,
the week to the month of the year to repeating
patterns in the weather or the seasons. You want to

(33:41):
be observing these patterns and adjusting system continually. The early
parts of establishing a puma culture system is certainly the
most difficult part. But even five to ten years down
the line, when the system is more established, more sell sustaining,

(34:01):
he still want to be playing that role of tweaking
it as you go along. And I think that's something
that more people need to recognize about humanity. We didn't
just spring on to hear like some sort of alien
parasite leaching off of the youth, right, We just like
every other animal, like every other creature on this planet,

(34:22):
have a role to play in the ecosystems we inhabit. Unfortunately,
a lot of that activity has been destructive because of
how all socio economic system has been structured. But that's
something we have a role and changeing. And part of
that is recognizing that we are stewards. We we we

(34:43):
can be good stewards. We can't help to facilitate the
flourishing of life. We don't have to be grim reapers
upon the systems that we are a part of. And
so even as you're late, couldn't quote in these long
term projects twenty years, thirty years, you're still going to

(35:04):
be tweaking and cultivating and hopefully expanding these systems over time.
Principles twelve reminds us we gotta pay attention to the
scale of these systems, to the long term of these systems,
recognizing that this is something you want to establish over generations.
And finally, Principle number thirteen is be positive experiments small,

(35:30):
learning from your mistakes, scale up, bringing more people, get involved,
get more of your community, of your social circle, of
your family, of your affinity group, of whatever the case
is going to be, get more people involved. Um in
imagining this complex, beautiful revolutionary project, we have a long

(35:56):
way to go, but a lot of prom as could
be made in a short space of time, and a
lot of projects already going on. With this ended mind,
I would sugg just going online really and just switching
for the different Pooma culture projects happening around the world,
whether it be the food forests that Jeff law Turner
is working to establish in Morocco, or the puma culture

(36:21):
Pumablitz systems that people are putting in place in Australia
and or the greening the Sahara projects in the Sahel
region across Africa, or the many small skill projects taking
place and large scale projects taking place across the America's
there a lot of people putting in this work, and

(36:42):
there's a large community, um willing and able to support
as you hopefully embark upon this journey. That's about it
for me. Yeah, that's that's fascinating and I'm really interesting
is that. I think, Yeah, it's it's massively missing in

(37:03):
our discussion about like I don't know how to phrase
this rightly, but like making a better world, just to
give it a really broad sort of phrasing. And when
we often think about like political discourse and when we
think about political systems, but without food systems, we really

(37:23):
like the hierarchy of needs is not satisfied, right, And
I think that folks listening can make a really positive change,
really really quickly and in their own lives and spaces
if they sort of spend some time with this stuff. Yeah, absolutely,
and it's cool. I think, um an important to to

(37:44):
reference that like so much of this like we're like
the person you named a start who's name I'm sorry
I've forgotten, but like, um, I think, yeah, it's important
to a reference that these are indigenous ways of knowing
and doing and being and living and like you said,
they've existed for millennia and like going back to that,
it's good as part of the largest sort of way

(38:07):
of respecting indigenous cultures and land rights and all the
other things we need to do. Ah, it could happen.

(38:28):
Here is a podcast that you're listening to, and you know,
mostly we talk about problems that you should be aware of.
Sometimes we talk about solutions, and today we're kind of
going to talk about a solution. Today is one of
our famed good News episodes. So everybody, everybody celebrate and
also give your name for the folks at home. Yea,

(38:50):
I'm James, Yay, I'm Gare, Yeah, I'm Chris. Wonderful. That
was perfect. That was that is completely natural, just just
like we practiced. Um. So the thing that the thing
that is noteworthy and the thing that we're celebrating and
also explained today, is that this summer we were recording

(39:12):
this what like a day into September, two days into September, UM,
so we are we are. Yeah, it's September one. So
we have officially gotten through the summer um without a
right wing rally in Portland that degenerates into a gigantic brawl.
This is the first year that has happened since two
thousands seventeen. So starting in two thousand seventeen, Patriot Prayer

(39:36):
and the Proud Boys and other affiliated groups would vary
regularly and they would do it throughout the year, but
particularly during the summers, um hold protests and marches, and
these all had different themes. They were the Second Amendment rallies,
rally against Marxism rally and support of the fucking cops,
the hymn to rally, all sorts of stupid, stupid fucking

(39:57):
names um. But the main problem, the main purpose of
them all was so that there would be gigantic fist
fights between you know, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer brawlers
and anti fascists. That was the reason to hold these events,
and they got increasingly gnarly and increasingly violent, until everything
culminated in the summer of this massive Trump caravan through

(40:18):
the city with like thousands of trucks, people shooting paintballs
and spraying mace and throwing shipped off the back of trucks,
and then a Patriot Prayer member named Aaron Danielson got
his ass shot to death by an anti fascist during
a somewhat unclear altercation outside of a parking garage. What
I can say is that everyone involved was heavily armed.

(40:40):
UM and yeah. After that there were some more very
ugly fights. But UM, an increasing like thing that happened
was that there would be gunfire at these protests. And
the next year UM, at an anniversary fucking fistfight thing,
a right winged administrator fired into a crowd of anti

(41:02):
fascists in downtown for Portland, who returned fire and drove
him off. He was arrested. UM. A bunch of there
was a big stupid fight at a kmart in another
part of town the same day debandoned kmart parking lot
that held a massive brawl and several of them got
Several of the proud boy types got real nasty charges
from that one. After the police, as they generally did,

(41:25):
chose not to take any kind of action. UM and
then you know, things kind of peat it out, UM
and nothing. There have not been any right wing rallies since.
There was one mass shooting attack on a weekly racial
justice protest in Portland earlier this year, UM, where a
fascist fired into a crowd of women who were doing
corking duty. Um he killed one woman, um, and he

(41:49):
wounded four other people and um, yeah, he was taken down,
shot twice in the hip by a protester who was
armed security for that march. And after that there hasn't
really been anything. And this is the interesting one of
the things that There's a number of things that are
interesting here, but one of them is that this has
occurred while Proud Boy chapters are recording record recruitment. There's

(42:13):
more new chapters of the Proud Boys than there were
prior to January six, and there have been at least
two hundreds something right wing gatherings around the country with
like Proud Boys and other affiliated groups in attendance since
January six. UM, So nationwide, the kind of rallies that
Portland's been sing since got more common, and they didn't
happen at all in Portland this year. And that's what

(42:34):
we're here to talk about today. I think there's a
couple of things that are have contributed to the current
state of affairs, UM, which I think broadly can be
described as the right is kind of scared to do
big events in Portland. There have been a couple of
like sputtering attempts. They drove through town on their way
to Washington real quickly as part of this caravan once,

(42:56):
but they didn't go through downtown again. It wasn't like
one guy did fire it people on a bridge with
a handgun, which the police did nothing about. But they're
not willing to like hang around. And I think there's
a few reasons why they've been scared off. Number One,
they keep getting shot UM. That has happened several times now. UM.
Number Two, the physical resistance to them has been gnarlier

(43:17):
as of the fights. UM, people have gotten smarter about
how they do some aspects of the fighting, involving like
a lot of property, like spraying paint on people's fancy
body armor and ship, which is expensive. And then after
five years of ignoring it, UM, the state has actually
started charging right wing brawlers with felonies, which has scared

(43:38):
I think a lot of them off. UM. And yeah,
so that's that's kind of where we are now. And
I think one of the things people should be paying
attention to is what Portland's had to do and and
both how long it took, but also like what kind
of things were involved to actually get to this point,
Because other folks are going to need to be willing
to do some of the ship people had to do

(43:58):
in Portland for years, which includes like fucking strapping on
gear and going out to confront these people in the street. Yeah.
I think, Um, it's really interesting because I just I
know you've written a piece about this for New Lines
recurring Me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'll be up by the
time the ser this runs cool. Um, yeah, I just
read it. I thought it was really good. Um. It

(44:20):
reminds me of like when we talk about anti fascism historically, right,
We we sort of talked about the high points a lot,
and the one that at least I see most people
going back to is the Battle of Cable Street in
London in six which people will probably I know you've
had it in Bastards episodes before, yes, and it's it's
very similar thing, right, Like it's a broad intersexual coalition

(44:41):
of people who are like, we will not let you
do this ship in our space, and we will physically
fucking stop you, and if the police try and protect you,
we will stop them doing that as well. There's incidents
between most of these fascists and anti fascists, like throughout
the thirties and a lot later in British history. But
it's a very similar kind of play book, I guess right.
It's like physical force opposition to fascist gatherings and not

(45:04):
letting them feel safe in your space. Yeah, not letting
them feel safe and not letting them go unopposed, because
I mean, one of the things that was kind of
repeatedly a factor in Portland is that when the anti
fascists out numbered the right from the start, and significantly
there was a lot less violets on on the days
when that happened, um, And so it wasn't always a

(45:27):
matter of people needing to show up to literally fight.
There are times when like a show of force can work,
and I think a good example of that in recent
times in Texas in the DFW area obviously is a
hot point for different right wing groups, including the Proud
Boys harassing LGBT events stuff like drag Queen Story Hours
and that sort of thing, and members of the elm
Fork John Brown Gun Club who we've had on the

(45:48):
show and and other affiliated groups have been showing up
armed in an armor, most recently to protect like a
drag brunch um that was being counter protested. You can
see like photos of like here's a proud boat with
a bat with fucking barbed wire wrapped around it, and
there there and in this like, you don't show up
with the bat wrapped in barbed wire unless you're hoping

(46:09):
you're gonna get to bash somebody's fucking head in. And
that guy wound up standing off at the sideline all
day long because a bunch of people were there with rifles.
I think that guy may not legally be allowed to
possess firearms. Yes, I also suspect that guy has a
felony record because he also had a nightstick and like
several other like more ninja like meamed here weapons. It

(46:31):
was yeah, yeah, say to me and look if if
I'm going to be totally fair, meme to your weapons. No,
no side in this fight. Because for a long time
in Portland, there was an individual who would bring a
pair of Samurai sorts everyone stations and we're we are
talking gas station grade samurai. Did they have the oil

(46:52):
slick effect? They must have, they must have. No, he
never drew his blades because of course then he would
have had they would have had to taste. That's the rule. Yeah,
that's the legal ramification that also it's impossible to take
the swords that when you have them mounted on your back,
it's literally possible to take the tactical back screen. It's

(47:14):
an offensive position. But no, I think it's worth talking
about the types of other cities where there have been
a sizeable amount of far right protests this summer, especially
targeted at queer people, um, and how Portland is one
of the cities where that did not happen. I mean,
we've seen a lot of stuff in Dallas, and the
people have been doing a pretty good job and both

(47:37):
denying the right ground to gain but also denying them
any of their like fight footage that they love to gather.
They've they've done a really good job at balancing that aspect,
which is very, very challenging. It's very challenging and it
takes a lot of discipline. And obviously, when we think
kind of tactically about what guns mean in a situation
like this, they're tools that have up. The downside of

(47:59):
guns is that if things go wrong and everybody is strapped,
the potential is for things to go very fucking wrong. Indeed, Um,
the upside is that when you have a line of
people with rifles. The dudes with knives and batons and
ship are a hell of a lot less likely to
want to start a fucking fight because it's the the
consequences are immediately obvious. You could look at it as

(48:20):
kind of like the protest equivalent of mutually assured destruction
of sort of the old like of of how the
US of the Soviet Union managed nuclear tensions. Um. But
it it. It has been very effective in Dallas for
that reason. And I think it's I think the fact
that protests became increasingly armed in Portland and also that

(48:41):
there are by my account at least three cases of
fascists uh being run off or injured or killed by
protesters with firearms. That is part of why they didn't
want to do that ship so much anymore. M hmm.
I think part it's important too, because, like I I

(49:03):
think there was a real danger after written House that
right wing protesters We're gonna see this and just be like, no,
we can just shoot these people, right, because you know,
you have a situation where suddenly becomes very clear that
the state is not going to prosecute people if like
right wing protests for shooting people. But you know, okay,
if if the if the desterrance is not to say,
if the insurance is if you get here to get
into a gunfight, you're gonna lose and get shot like that,

(49:25):
that I think has been extremely effective in a lot
of ways. Yeah, early so sort of hadn't. I think
it's probably worth noting as well that like where it's
been effective, it's been effective because it's been organized and
like I don't want to use the word discipline because
maybe discipline imply the authority that that doesn't exist. But
like there's been some kind of collective restraint in agreement

(49:46):
on rules of engagement and stuff, which because I've also
seen folks try to do this unilaternally, that does not
fucking end well, Like if you're if you're the one
person I've been carrying and expecting the state where that's
not legal, like you're just to one person going to prison. Yeah,
and obviously open carry protests only work in states where
that can be done legally. Yeah, doing that in Texas

(50:09):
is different than doing that in California. Yeah, That's what
I'm here to tell you. But yeah, I think it's
a it's a force multiplier, right, Like these guys have
I think especially people on the right have like absorbed
so much like this sort of like there are types
of male as delineated by the Greek alphabet bollocks, and
they've convinced themselves that they are Alpha's and they can

(50:30):
win a fight. Now, James, I've seen more Sigmas than
Alpha's protest so many sigmas. I've seen a few epsilons, Man,
I don't know that's the type of male. I met
a real Sigma at an anti mask protest in who
brought his a r in a sixty round drum and
brag that he had five hundred rounds loaded into magazines

(50:52):
as he as he protested masks in front of the
state capital. And it was like the people he was
protesting were specifically like about a dozen nurses who were
standing around. Let's say, it was like, you got do
you need those five bullets for those unarmed nurses? Where
signs telling it a mask he's ready for when the
ship hits the fan romic, I'm guessing. Oh, I I

(51:14):
don't believe I saw a med kit. I used to
try to make a note of it. I will say
the right. In the last year, I've noticed more med
kits and pictures that I've seen so good good, I
guess yeah. But yeah, like if you are a person
who's not like physically enormous or like, like I said,
these guys have convinced themselves that like they somehow like
top tier brawlers, even though seen the Patriot Front videos

(51:36):
they're very funny, like it's like a false equalizer. I
guess right. It allows people to sort of enter that
space without having to be massive dudes. I don't want
to focus too much on specifically firearms because I think
that's less important than and not that the primary lesson
of Portland, which is what is necessary to stop these

(51:58):
people from showing up, is consist shows of force. And
I think one thing that I just kind of always
don't intellectually interesting is that you know, when you when
you read about like military strategy, right, um, for every
like guy who's actually kicking indoors getting into firefights in
the field, you have you know, nine or ten people

(52:18):
behind him who are responsible for logistics, right Um. That's
the only way in modern military works. When you don't
have a logistics train set up like that, things go
like they did for Russia start of the advansion, where
you have like hundreds of tanks without fuel and ship UM.
When in Portland protests, an average for a large protest,

(52:38):
I would say the average was around a thousand people.
Now that's a large protest. Often they were smaller. But
when you would get these big hyped for a couple
of weeks the Proud Boys are coming to town, you'd
easily get a thousand or two thousand people counter protesting,
and you know it would be probably ten or fiftcent
who were who were showing up specifically ready to kind
of throw down um and ready to throw and also

(53:00):
with some experience doing it, and a much larger number
who were Some of them were there as medics, some
of them were handing out water or other beverages, they
were handing out food. Uh. There were people who were
there just to yell and chant with signs to like
be you know, moral support. There were people they're doing
transport blocking roads. UM. People they're doing you know, UM
intel and stuff, filming things UM. People who were there,

(53:24):
uh you know doing stuff like um covering up live
streamers cameras with with bubble rap sheets. Or we used
to have a band full of people who dressed as
bananas who would kind of kind of try to distract
and drown out the far right. There was one beautiful
individual I saw a couple of times who was in
black block, except for they wore a kilt and they
carried a pair of bagpipes. And when, like you would

(53:45):
get a couple of fascists approaching a protester and like
trying to get into an argument, he would walk right
up and he would just start playing the bagpipes so
that they couldn't have an offensive. Yeah. Yeah, it was beautiful, um,
but kind of more important than the specific you do
need and I don't want to like distracted this. You
always need a core of people who are willing and
ready to get into a fucking fight when you're doing

(54:06):
this kind of activism. But the biggest thing is that
people show up consistently. Um. And one of the things
Portland's had a number of different organizations like pop Mob,
Popular and more Mobilization that kind of existed to organize
less radical um or at least kind of and not

(54:27):
not necessarily less radical. Sometimes people who were just like
because of whatever in their life, were much less interested
in the actual getting into a fight thing, but understood
that the more people show up the safer it is,
and succeeded in ensuring that there was like a larger
body of people at all of these events, and that
along with more rat groups like Rose City Antifa, who

(54:47):
kind of particularly earlier in the fights, was a big
street presence as well as did a lot of research,
and then other kind of newer um and often kind
of smaller anti fascist collectives that would organize people to
straight up fight. It was it was this mix of
all of that that allowed it to be that whenever
they showed up, there was always a group confronting them,
and it was nearly always larger um. And it got

(55:11):
to the point at the height of you know, there
was this right wing protest before time hand, nobody quite
knew how bad it was going to be. Garrison. You
and I got there right as things were starting, and
it was the anti fascists were outnumbered kind of at
the beginning of the day, and things got really violent
very quickly. Within an hour or two though, about somewhere

(55:33):
around a thousand people had showed up on the anti
fascist side and we're organized and fighting. It was a
very impressive response time. Yeah, and I think it is
it's the actual it's the I mean people used the
word like the term to diversity of tactics often just
to kind of defend actions that are more radical. Um.
And there's the there's the other side of diversity of tactics,

(55:56):
which is pulling in all of the background support that
creates This is the sustainability for more radical actions like
showing up and actually being a frontliner to get into
fistfights with proud boys. Then there's all of the other stuff,
like whether that's like medics, other support teams, people playing
doing like queer dance parties to push fascists out of areas.

(56:16):
All those types of things not only make the environment
more sustainable, so people can show up over a larger
period of time because they don't get so burnt out
because all they're doing is fist fighting. Um. So I
think those actions are another our thing. That's it's it's
worth not just ignoring those and not just discrediting those,
because once you have that type of presence and people

(56:36):
know that you're gonna that, those are the types of
environments that you're able to create when you're outnumbered by
fascists and you need to call and need to need
to put out a call for support if you if
you have this kind of reputation that can that can
help get a lot of people out very quickly and
help with the That actually is like popular mobilization that right,
that that's what that's what that's what that actually means.

(56:58):
So that's how you can get at the anti fascist
side to outnumber the fascist side, like we saw in
um despite that not being the case. When when when
when it started? Yeah? And I think because the main
thing that ended that fight was the was the anti
fascist side just moving as a massive, massive block and

(57:20):
just pushing the fascists out of the area. Like there's
as soon as the fascist line broke and you have
like hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of people in Portland
streets directing the flow of movement, you can't you can't
stop that. The force. The force is too great, um.
And that requires there to be a large amount of people,
including people who are not gonna get into a fist

(57:42):
fight with someone three times their size. Yeah. I think
another thing, um that that maybe it's important is that
like and it's kind of at the core of anti fascism, right,
It's it's it's possible for people who have done just
different tactics, but different opinions, like to create this broad
based alliance and not get a cross with each other

(58:03):
for not agreeing on everything. And yeah, or at least, um,
stop fighting with each other long enough to drive the
fascists out. Because Portland's, by the way, another thing we
should acknowledge, the Portland anti fascist community can be quite messy. Um.
There are a lot of different factions and disagreements, and
there have been a lot of arguments up to the

(58:24):
present day. But you know, as a general rule, when
the right showed up, people mobilized and and threw down
against them. You know, despite the fact that it was
a mix of folks who were libs and folks who
were radicals and folks who were you know, um something
in between. Um it was And again I don't this

(58:46):
was never a particularly clean process, and it didn't have
to be. You know, you could point out and and
if we had longer, we could point out all number
of different like flaws and shortcomings and like things that
we're done, that we're wrong or unfair to somebody. But
what was kind of more important than any of the
ways in which the movement was flawed was at the
end of the day, that it persisted, that it kept

(59:07):
bringing people out, and that it kept resisting, and that
the right seems to have kind of blinked before the
left did. Here, like that's what what matters more than
anything about Portland's people felt comfortable enough to continue to
come out and it felt worthwhile enough. But for the
anti specifically for the anti fascist protests, they were able
to create those environments that people that that families were

(59:29):
felt totally comfortable coming out to UM and people felt
that it actually was worthwhile, Like there was it was
it was worth it to take an afternoon out of
your day to show up and say no, and and
and if you're able to physically display no, you can't,
you can't come here. Yeah, And that was um. You know,

(59:49):
obviously when we talked about the difference between doing that
against the police as opposed to the right, you know,
the police have more in their current form hundred and
fifty have had a hundred and fifty years or so
to dig in. You know, Um, it's a harder target.
But yeah, I think the fact that um, I think
the fact that one of the strengths of the movement

(01:00:11):
in Portland was that as a general rule. A lot
of people who had a pretty diverse set of beliefs
all felt this is a thing I can do and
should do. This is worthwhile and important. These people need
to be opposed in the streets, and that's worth some
time out of my very limited fucking free time to
go do um and that That is kind of I

(01:00:33):
think the primary lesson if you want to know what
other cities should take from Portland's, it's the importance of
developing a community like that, a community information network like that,
but also just like a community where people can all
kind of where where people feel like, yes, it is
actually it is worthwhile for me to show up and

(01:00:55):
participate in this right Like. That's the hard thing is
getting across When there's, um, you know, a book reading
at a library, the Proud Boys are going to show
up in protest. It's it's getting getting the message out
to people in the area and getting a couple of
hundred folks to show up, Because if you can get
two hundred people to show up to something like that,

(01:01:17):
there's never gonna be that many fucking Proud Boys at
the event. It's gonna be thirty or forty of them
or less. Maybe a dozen. And if you're a fucking
library and twenty proud boys show up to like cause
a problem, and you've got like a dozen kids inside
getting read a book or some shit, or it's a brunch,
and yet thirty proud boys show up, you have a
huge problem. People would get really hurt. They could get

(01:01:38):
fucked up heading to their cars, they can get harassed.
It's scary if that number of Proud Boys shows up
and a hundred a hundred and fifty people show up
to counter them. Um, then suddenly number one, all of
the people who are being threatened by the fascists get
this feeling that like, oh my god, I'm actually supported
by the community, that like people are willing to come
out and defend me and defend people like me. And

(01:02:00):
number two, the proud boys get to feel it like
fuck even even here, we're even in Dallas right where
we we might be outnumbered. You know, I think because
a few other cities where protests have continued and where
they haven't, they haven't in Portland, I think yet we've
we've seen a decent amount of activity this year in Salem,
um a lot of blood and there have been far

(01:02:22):
right protests in Salem ever since seen as well. Yes.
And the other place that because because I just because
I just did a deep dive into this is there's
been a lot of people from the Portland area from
Vancouver UM planning to go up to port towns in
Washington and it's been interesting talking with the people up
there about this is the first time they've really seen

(01:02:45):
a large influx of people. And it's it's people who
don't it's the proud boys who are not comfortable showing
up to Portland anymore, but instead they're going to drive
three hours to go to this small town of ten
thousand people. UM. And then watching people in this in
this low laria figure out how they're going to respond
to this has been super intriguing. There's been a whole
bunch of people. There's been affinity groups in the area

(01:03:08):
setting up medic trainings for for queer people who live
in the town. UH. There's been meetings between bipoc groups
and like more like gun based queer groups about how
they can mutually support each other as the far right
descends on their city. UM. And in some cases, you know,
there was people in certain groups who at at previous

(01:03:30):
protests that's happened the past month. They did not feel
comfortable going out to the front lines of this type
of thing, but they were able to work with other
organizers to set up kind of uh like support kind
of like uh support like areas and even kind of
kind of like they described it as like a picnic
that's like a quarter mile away and it creates like
a buffer zone in between people who want to go

(01:03:51):
to the front lines and this whole background of people
that's supporting you and it's gonna help you out if
you need anything. Um So, all the various ways that
you can, you can incorporate a diversity of strategies and
different type of groups into countering something that's moving to
your city. Now. Um just an interesting note based on
how much I've I've heard people talk about you know,

(01:04:13):
proud boys coming up from Portland and and and Vancouver
just ending up feeling they have to drive three hours
to other cities to get you know there whatever whatever
they want to do. Yeah, the ideal thing is that
they walk away not even beat up as much as
demoralized and feeling like it was a waste of time

(01:04:34):
and money. Ideally, they in their gear, get covered and
fucking paint or something, um, and they lost six hours
of time on a fucking Saturday. And if that kind
of happens repeatedly, maybe they'll stop, you know, which is
which is again the goal is for them to uh
feel like it's not worth coming out, you know, like

(01:04:56):
that's what like people. It's often said like, you know,
make racists a freight again is a statement you heard
a lot, particularly after But it's a little more complicated
than that. It's not purely about fear. It's also it's hopeless.
You want to make them hopeless. You want to feel
make them to feel like there's no fucking point in
showing up. And that's the most valuable thing, is a

(01:05:17):
victory condition. That's that's above everything else, is making them
feel like there is no hope for their movement. I
think that the most recent as as a time of recording,
there was there was this protest on the UM that
was a mix of like turfs and then a mix
of far right people. There's this guy from Vancouver called

(01:05:37):
the Common Sense Conservative who runs a little like video
blog thing um that he was organizing some people to
go up and I don't know, it's it's it's there
was like, yeah, it's like thirty people, lots of them
from out of state who traveled up as a part
of this, like Turf Anti transside, and there was like
three hundred to four hundred people from the local area
who showed up and we're like, no, you're not gonna

(01:06:00):
to this of And ever since then there's been a
lot of infighting between the Turfs and the kind of
more far right people because it sucks. It sucks that
you have three people from the actual city that show
up and go no and try to like physically remove
you from this space. And I think you can sort

(01:06:20):
of see mirrors of this and like the way left,
just like protest work right where it's like it's it's
a lot easier to hold together coalitions when you're winning,
and the moment you start losing, the moment things start
going wrong, like all of the infighting comes back and
you know the entire movement will just tostegrate. And this
this works the same way on the right if you
can if you can actually beat them consistently a few times,

(01:06:43):
and you can start like holding on long enough for
their their internal group dynamics to unravel. Like this, this
is a way to beat them. Yeah, yep. Um, well
that's about all I had to say, not a complicated
topic anything else, all right? Well, well as uh yeah, anyway,

(01:07:05):
go up, go go yellow the fucking Nazi. Um, go
go damage a fascists body armor by spraying them with
paint from a great distance. You know, go go. Uh,
I don't know, do something else? Uh? By what's kyling?

(01:07:39):
Your Written House? Oh? In in our in our Centenius
Cultural Center. Ya remember Kyle written House. Remember Remember that
night where I spent way too much time online finding
that kid's name, and then he was arrested a few
hours later, and then he got off after murdering these people.

(01:07:59):
Remember when that happened. I do. So you're saying that
you're in some way responsible for what we're going to
talk about today. No, this is not. This is one
of the most truly cursed things that I have ever
seen on the internet that that man has ever existed.
So I know people are just learning about this now,

(01:08:19):
but I've known about this for a while because I
kind of have a personal obsession with Kyle Rittenhouse for
reasons that should be obvious. Um uh yeah, I've been,
I've been. I'ven't about this for a bit. I just
have never found a good time to bring it up.
But I guess, I guess, I guess we've now found it,
which is it's Kyle in time. Yeah, it's time to

(01:08:41):
talk about the central cultural Kyle Rittenhouse, which exists in Argentina.
As part of I think maybe we'll explain a little
bit about like what the broader contact of these central sits,
like what they are if people aren't familiar, and then
what the fuck this abomination is all about? Right? So

(01:09:02):
these exist across Latin America more or less. Also, I've
seen him in Spain, the Spanish speaking world, but I
think that's like a reflective thing, going back to Spain.
And they're like community spaces. They they're very hugely but
I've been two different ones. They've nearly always left this
or at least progressive, and their spaces where sometimes people

(01:09:23):
can go and meet, right, communities can meet. Sometimes they're
like cultural events, talks, you can borrow books. Often like
their associated with neighborhood movements or what we might broadly
call like anarchism. But sometimes it's yeah, explicit, sometimes it's
it's not. It's like a communally center type thing. The

(01:09:45):
closest thing we would have here would probably be like
info shops, but those kind of differ based on what
kind of anarchist infoshop you're at. Um. But yeah, they're
like like community gathering places you can pick up books
or whatever. And this one's a little bit a little
bit odd. Yeah, yeah, because it is very much not
left if it claims me, Argentina's first openly right, it's

(01:10:08):
cultural center, and it's run by this guy called Josse
a dead Man. He is a poster, right, This is
the guy who many people will have become aware of today.
I have spent most of my day watching his content
on the internet. Good for you, it's great, and I
love my job. I took three days off, I went camping,

(01:10:31):
and then I just retoxified my brain with this ship immediately. Yeah,
it's okay, So obviously dead Man right. The reason that
we are interested in him today is a because of
his truly cursed posting history and be because the anti
terrorist police in Argentina raided the Central Court rittenhouse last night.

(01:10:56):
I've got some audio of the raid which they went.
We have to we have to play the studio of
the race. Yeah, yeah, there were flashbangs, So we're there
were guns. There were a lot of guys in plate carriers.

(01:11:20):
That's wild. Just the that's like the first real time
anything related to cal Writon House has faced any sort
of consequence, that's right, Yeah, based Argentinean cops. Well, again,
they can only do things that are funny, that's true.
And this is and raiding a Kylendhouse themed cultural center

(01:11:42):
is funny, is very funny. This is extremely funny, Like,
this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
As they go in, you're going to see some some
of not only artistically offensive, but really offensive in every
way murals. So they're really bad, Yeah, very incredibly bad.
The right is not good at street art, no, I mean,

(01:12:05):
and this is this is this is the real problem
that they have. As is sort of like strategy of
like trying to mirror sort of left wing cultural spaces.
Is that like as as annoying as like left wing
cultural spaces are like right wing cultural spaces are like
the worst thing to be and you can possibly imagine
because there's nobody like every single one of these people
is completely insufferable. And again, let left left left wing
sort of like social rude, but it's always buffered by

(01:12:26):
the fact that they have an incredible number of very
talented artists. These guys like the Donald Trump with the
squad head is I don't think you would describe it
as as as quality artists. Responsible for the for the
murals at the Kyle Written House Cultural Center, Yeah, he
did them himself. There their videos. So do we want

(01:12:46):
to talk about what before? We before talking about like
why this was rated? Wan to talk about like what
this actually is and like whysts like like where did
this come from? Okay? So this comes pretty much out
of this. He seems to some of his earlier posts
about centership of Dragon Ball Z like oh my god, yeah,

(01:13:07):
which I will not profess. I've probably it's probably Z,
isn't it? Okay? Okay, alright, so I've I've given myself
away as a non anime understander at the outset. I
don't know why it was censored, and he claims that
it was. He uses a phase like Femi bolshi a
lot Femi bolshe which I'm guessing is a portmanteau of

(01:13:30):
feminist in Bolshevik, and he is a card. You're probably right, Yeah,
so he's definitely an in. So, yes, the feminists are
censoring DBZ and this means I need to start a
fascist hangout spot. Yeah, that's that's the journey of this. Yeah,
well more or less, I guess it seems to really

(01:13:53):
come out of the lockdown. It seems to come out
of him being unemployed from March. There's a big anti
lockdown group in Argentina called fuerts Ony Dadda Argentina, which
he's part of. And that that's if you look. Actually
it says like Carl written House Cultural Center, and then
it has fuess ony Daddia written underneath um, and so

(01:14:16):
that seems to be a large part of it. It
opened relatively recently. I was looking for an exact date,
but I couldn't find it. But it is within the
last year, Yes it has. It has been within the year.
I remember seeing something about this earlier this year. Um,
just to recap some of the art, maybe because it
didn't like art's a strong word, paintings depictures. Yeah, art

(01:14:42):
requires a few a few things to make it actually art.
I don't think the stuff qualifies as as art. No,
but and some of them I genuinely was unable to
discern who are they supposed to be? It's really difficult,
Like it's it's kind of hard to tell who Trump
is and it's Trump. This is this is this is
this is how. This is the level of artists we're

(01:15:04):
dealing with. Your Yeah, trap looks like someone out of
Minecraft or something like. His head is entirely square. The
width is equal to the height. Yeah, which, but they've
they've got One of the guys I saw was this
guy called Malvo. Do people know who he is? Perhaps not? Okay,
this is probably one that we won't include the video
of in the podcast. But so he was. He went

(01:15:26):
to prison because he tortured leftists as a copy in
Argentina in the seventies, right, and then he escaped and
in two thousand and eight, the cops come to his
house to take him back, and instead of going back
to Jaila Live TV in front of his wife and children,
he shoots himself. Like they just keep rolling, the reporters
like five feet away and they're like, oh, he shoves

(01:15:46):
up in the head. He's down, and now he's immortalized
by Yeah. That looks like a five year old in
cells finger painting on the walls. This is this is
what happens when people follow their leader. Alert. Yeah, it's true.
So there's there's other people there. There's Heavier Malay. I

(01:16:08):
think he's called he's like he's a classic chud libertarian.
He's an Argentine politician. They of course have a Confederate flag.
They have banners from the Argentine Civil War. There's an
imperial Japanese flag. Yeah, next to Donald Trump, like the
kind of I'm just looking at like the front like

(01:16:29):
banner thing or like the front like mural at the
editor's horrible horrible picture of Kyle Rittenhouse wearing a suit
that it looks so funny. It's like it's the the
the image is just amazing. It's god they have they

(01:16:53):
have Okay, I will say it looks like I drew
it blindfolded with my left hand. Like it looks so bad.
The one thing, okay, I I think they're well, okay.
Their depiction of Bollsonaro, like it's fine. It kind of
captures the grotesqueness of him. But he's doing finger guns
guns with the Brazilian flag behind him. Remember remember this

(01:17:17):
started with DVZ. Here, Yeah, written houses like giant thing
has like what what is it? The two holes, the
two blacks on his face eyepatch, But no, it's not.
It's like two or three black circles on the inside
mineral of written house. It looks like he's wearing an eyepatch,

(01:17:38):
like some kind of night vision optic. Maybe also as
a Kyler written House expert who spent hours coming through
the clothing he was wearing. They have his hat completely wrong.
They have here like a reddish pinkish hat. That's not
the hat that he was wearing. He was wearing a
tan hat with with a white back mesh. Um and

(01:17:58):
the hat was the reason were able to figure out
who he was because it has a little tear in
the front and we were able to compare that to
get an exact match onto the suspects Facebook profile. Um,
so the hat is completely wrong. So already they've they've
dropped the ball here on any semblance of accuracy by
the completely rung hat for this picture. It's I'm insulted.

(01:18:21):
As someone who spent hours figuring out what this guy's
name is, I'm insulted. Yeah, there's all kind of cursed stuff.
This Abascale, the box guy from Spain, like anyone who
you can think of he's just like a culture warrior
is depicted in finger painting style by this guy by

(01:18:42):
Hosy death Man. So he he came to the attention
of the author well, actually he came to the attention
of the authorities before. It will shock nobody to find
that he has been sending untolisted images of his genitalia
to women for a very long time. So he's been
sending got a lot of are you telling me? The
dragon ball z in Cel, who started a Kyle written

(01:19:05):
host cultural center, has been sending out unsolicited dick fix.
I wonder if what Okay, hold on, hold on, I
just I think I think I just had a revelation
about this guy. Did you just crack this case wide open?
Hold on, hold on, Yeah, I can't wait to hear
what you've come out with. I am on the edge

(01:19:26):
of edge of my seat. I am thrilled. All right,
I only have to hand them on their Facebook page,
which is toxic as hell. Yeah, their face. Their Facebook
is pretty funny. They have a video of a woman
in the side of the culture yea. When the woman
comes in there, like just to prove it's a woman.
People say women don't come here like we have a woman.

(01:19:48):
They've filmed like of like a like a five minute
video of this woman sitting inside, just so there was
proof that there was a woman inside this building. Yeah,
they were so shocked. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's very clear
that like they had not been expecting it. So he's
actually been to jail for gender based online violence. I
think I figured out how this connects Dragon ball Z.

(01:20:10):
My Okay, I'm not a percent sure about this. My
guess is that this guy is like a hard line. Um,
I've never actually heard this guy's names out loud. Vic
Mignagna like truth or guymig Vagot is like this. He
was a voice actor who was on Dragon ball Z
who like sexually harassed and assaulted like a ship ton

(01:20:32):
of people. Um, And in twenty nineteen, like the stuff
came out and there was like a huge right wing
backlash around him, And I really wonder if this is
the fucking thing that he was mad about. He was
this voice actor that got canceled because his favorite voice
actor got canceled for sexually Celtic people. Yeah, well so

(01:20:54):
so Vic tried to, like the voice actor guy tried
to sue a bunch of people for defamation and got
fucking apps lutely owned in court, and then all of
the ship that he'd been doing for like decades like
came out. So it would not surprise me if this
was like part of this guy, like if this is
part of the thing he was sucking screaming about with
dragon ball Zy being censored. But the feminist Bolsheviks, Yeah,

(01:21:16):
that's the worst thing I've ever said. This is the
worst organization ever had in my life. Yeah, that's a
kind of I think a large part of this cultural
center and the kind of the stuff behind it stems
out of a whole bunch of like the anti communist
groups that have existed in Argentina for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
his like so all his videos he has his backpack

(01:21:37):
with like a hammer and sickle with like that no
you know, the circling line through it. And he then
that he stages that everywhere with him, and he has
like something he has like a bunch of anti communist
graffiti that he also you'll see him in his h
like in his Facebook profile it used to say sometimes

(01:21:58):
anti social always anti communist, and it had like the
yellow and black little thing and yeah, and he's he's betrayed.
I think the tweet that first announced it betrayed them
as like libertarian and caps, which like they have like
better dead than red. That's not a fucking ang cap.

(01:22:20):
But like these people are trying to revoke the era
of violence against the left in Argentina in the nineteen seventies, right,
Like that's where they're going for here. Yeah, I think
like in case people are not aware of this, Argentina
had a like an incredibly brutal military data show killed
the ships on people. Also like went around Latin America
trading other death squads. They had this group called the

(01:22:40):
Triple A, which was basically a fascist death squad that
sort of actor as a pre military for other wings
of the state. They killed one of people. Eventually they
kill the governments. Um, they're one of the people involved
in Operation Condor. They drop people at helicopters. Also they yeah,
it was really fucking bad. And and and these anti
these like anti communists they basically fascist death squads or

(01:23:04):
some of them fascist literally fascist. Yes, are like the
style of slogans. The propaganda that they're using for this
center is in the same vein as that they're carrying
that tradition in Argentina, and I think people are familiar
with the Nazis. People should also probably probably somewhat familiar
with the the the whole thing with tons of tons

(01:23:27):
of Nazis fleeing to Argentina um and Argentina being very
welcoming to a whole bunch of like like like like
like German Nazi like actual like Nazi Nazis, like like
with membership God, not Third Reich Nazis. Yeah. So one
thing that the that he did, one thing that dead
man did or he they posted as we on their

(01:23:49):
Facebook page with last mathday's dela plaza da mio. They
are like these mothers who made this weekly protest I
think it was weekly, and they wore white handkerchiefs, right,
and they were like where are I disappeared children? And
they sort of mobilized maternity in this way that made
it very hard for the state to crack down on them, right,
especially a state which is all about like quote unquote

(01:24:09):
traditional gender roles or whatever you want to call it. Um.
So these mothers are like held up as a great
example of peaceful protest, of peaceful protests against dictatorship, right
of forcing them to acknowledge their crimes. They're they're looked
up to by a lot of people all around the world,
and he and his bros went out and vandalized a

(01:24:30):
monument to them and then posted about it on their
Facebook like pretty openly, like we did this, look at
us go so generally pretty much piece of ship guy.
And he claims that the real he was radicalized by
torturous sexual abstinence, which is enforced upon him by the
government with the COVID nineteen lockdown. Aha, So he's claiming

(01:24:55):
to be a var cell and not an him cell
or c that's have said this too long, I mean,
and if it's first on by the government, then it
is involuntary. Yes, yeah, okay, I guess I guess some
men right here. We don't need to continue the conversation.

(01:25:16):
It actually doesn't matter. No, he was unable to find
intimacy with the people he wanted to and therefore decided
to send them pictures of his penis instead and then
start a cultural center themed after Kyle Rittenhouse. That's correct. Yeah,
I'm trying to think of like I did a lot

(01:25:37):
of stuff on like the aftermath of the Written House
shooting as well, and we immediately saw a whole bunch
of a big wave of written House stuff in the
better Dead than Read and anti communist action type like memes,
And I think that this very much stems out of
that tradition as well, at the cow written House being
this like symbol of here is a shining example of

(01:25:57):
someone who actually put in the work to kill communists
quote un communists obviously. Um. And I think that with
with the whole kind of like anti communist death squad
framing of this, that matches up with a lot of
the kind of the memes that we're that we're circulating
in the weeks after the original shooting in Kenosha, And
we can see this as like a physical manifestation of

(01:26:19):
that type of mimetic messaging, like this is like a
it's a it's a physical version of that of course
incorporating into just a larger kind of right wing populist politics,
uh you know, veering onto fascism um. And I think
it's but specifically with like the anti communist action and

(01:26:40):
better Dead than Red type type memes that were using
written House, that is a very a very clear kind
of uh nexus point between these two things, Like why
is someone in Argentina super into Cowritten House. It's it's
because of this we already have this big strain of
anti communist stuff inside Argentina. Kyle and how was used
me medically in this way? Very easy thing for the

(01:27:03):
right there to use. I think, I don't know. I think, Um, James,
do you have Do you have any other fun facts
about this? Yeah? I do, Yeah, I do. So there
seems to be another guy who does most of the
speaking for them when they speak to the media. He
only gives his name once as do like ju, but

(01:27:24):
then he also wait for it because he claims to
have Jewish ancestry as well, and therefore they can't be
anti Semitic. So very troubling. Maybe I'm pronouncing that wrong,
but you know, I can't think of another way. It's
only two letters, so extremely troubling. One thing that I
did know is what is there's a whole lot of

(01:27:44):
quote unquote gender ideology talk right, and a lot of
cultural Marxism talk. So here's a guy who's extremely online
and is parenting these kind of Ben Shapiro American Right
talking points. You can also like One thing that's very
funny is there appears to be a punk band called

(01:28:04):
war Pigs who are selling I think it's figurines, like
World Cup figurines preps which they are selling. Mundy, it's
the word he used. They seem to be basically pretending
to be him online selling these figurines, pretending their fundraising
for his center, but then they're obviously using the money
for their anti fascist efforts. That is incredibly bad. Shout

(01:28:27):
out to them, war Pigs, look him up. Yeah, they
give him some money if you can buy so funny.
He gets so fucking mad about it. He made so
many videos about it. And then his parents were like
he talks about them as heroes of the Marxist movement
and like leftists and revolutionaries. So he's thirty eight now,

(01:28:51):
so his parents will have been young in the seventies
perhaps but certainly certainly like around in the period in
their teens and tw empties. And he talks about like
how his parents recruel to him, and how the supposed
Marxists like bullied him, how he he says at one
point he has Tourette's. They forced him to do treatments,

(01:29:14):
which he claims curtails his opportunities to meet women. But
he only mentioned this once and he sort of goes
off on these weird diversions. Yeah, it's a lot of
very basic kind of online and cell type stuff. I
want to talk a little bit about the sort of
trans ale on this too, because I think so one
of the things I think like is not very well
known that at some point I will do a full

(01:29:36):
episode on when I find when I'm able to like
get enough stuff together and find people who are like
really qualified to talk about it. But Argentina has had
one of the world's most powerful trans movements for a
long time. And I mean they have stuff there that
like like there, there's there, there is a law that
passed um I think last year or that that like

(01:30:01):
that they have like a hiring quota, so all for
public service job, there's a one percent hiring quota of
people who have to be trans. Like. Yeah, they're like
they they have stuff. They're like they have done stuff
there that is like like not even like on the
agenda for like any other like trans woven I've ever seen.
So Yeah, they're they're they're very strong, they're very well organized,

(01:30:24):
and the government has sort of like has done like
a bunch of like genuinely very good, like pro trans stuff,
like under the pressure of this movement, and I think
that I think like in that context, I think his
this fact that he's obsessed with like gender critical ship
makes a lot of soundse because that's you know, that's
like one of the sort of right wing things in
Argentina is opposing this ship. But like it doesn't. I

(01:30:46):
don't know, they're kind of losing that battle insofar as
like you know, people people have done a really really
good job and fought really really desperate and sort of
horrible battles for decades. But yeah, they're they're they're sort
of bearing fruit in really cool way. Is respect nice
good job, and so what else is bearing fruit is

(01:31:06):
his posting because he has been rated by I would
urge you towards this video. I'll tweet it so people
can find it there as well. But a metric ship
ton of our police. And the reason they're rating him
is because he's made like a public threat. Basically he
made this say. It's about eleven and a half minute video. Notably,

(01:31:28):
he says our total to support to the Brazilian hero
who tried to create justice for all Argentinians and goes
on to talk about this. This is with reference to
the assassination attempt that we saw what last week, Yes,
so so so last week this this fascist tried to
assassinate the vice president of Argentina. And we're going to

(01:31:49):
get more into this in our upcoming week of content
titled Assassination Week. Assassination Upcoming, We're gonna be a whole
week of whole week of episodes about fascinations. Um. But
in brief, this this, this happened, and then the people
at the Cultural Center made this livestream celebrating the attack

(01:32:10):
and calling the perpetrator Argentina's Brazilian hero. Yes, it really
was just he also like tells people to rise up
and stuff like, there's some very clear course direction in there.
In the raid, they found a mortar shell and one
eight four minument a mortar shell, a drone, and they

(01:32:32):
they've confiscated a bunch of hard drive which I do
not envy the person who has to go through his
phones and hard drives. There. They're going to see some balls,
they're going to see some pain, but hopefully that person
can get some therapy. And this isn't the first like,
this isn't the first time that the state has tried

(01:32:52):
to come after them. They actually there there were discussions
about like denying the crimes committed under the day Tater
ship and how he can be prosecuted for that, because
that was the thing that they were very clearly doing.
So it seemed like he'd kind of been in the
crosshairs of progressive legislators in Argentina for a while, and

(01:33:13):
then he went and made this batchet crazy video where
he makes calls to violence. He says the left can't
ask for non violence. He says the left doesn't respect democracy,
and he calls the vice president a rat and a
murderer and says that it's just a shame that she
wasn't blown up and it's only because the weapon malfunctioned
that this hero didn't get to do justice for a

(01:33:34):
largent times, I should have been the guy like I'm sorry. Yeah, look,
we're like, he's just he's just built different. Yeah, she's
he's built different because he got sabotaged by all of
his esoteric Nazi or something, which we will get more
into in the upcoming assassination week. Yep, we just got

(01:33:55):
to record the theme music and then we'll be there.
He cut together footage of all of the great assassination.
This is gonna be half an hour constant assassination college. Yeah,
these guys are extremely curse that there's more curse stuff
that they've done that like we probably shouldn't go into.

(01:34:16):
I didn't think because I think you could just understand
this is a lonely in so guy who's been on
the Internet too much become more and more radicalized and
like surrounded himself with people who agree. And it's been
pretty funny to watch people prank him for a while,
like scrolling down their Facebook page. It's very funny to
see people consistently like he doesn't seem to be an

(01:34:38):
intellectual giant. But it's also worrying and obviously he's advocating
for violence against people. Wouldn't emoginized. Whenever someone starts taking
things that are online out into the physical world, like
making basically a monument like a physical place, Um, it's
always concerning. It's always it's always one of the big

(01:35:00):
big red flags. Yeah, and I think, like specifically, the
fact that he had both a mortar shell and a
drone is incredibly alarming. You don't say, yeah, I just
want to say, I just want to put that all
the record for a second. Yeah, if he'd posted a
little bit less, you're going to have made it into
assassination week. But here we are, and they cocked by

(01:35:22):
your own posted tail tail is all this time. Yeah,
if he'd stuck to tradition and not posted him, they did. Also,
I just want to sell secondhand clothes at the center.
I don't know why. I don't know what they were
going for there, but they did that. So coffee really Yeah,
well in Argentina and you want some secondhand clothes and coffee,

(01:35:44):
I can tell you where not to go. Don't go
to this place because these odds are you're gonna get
rated by police when you're there. Yeah. I didn't think
there's much of dis place left now. I think it
looks like the door has not recovered from their entry,
judging by the fact that they've taped bin bag for
it in the photos here. Yeah, hopefully someone can squat
this place. Maybe the war pigs can get it and

(01:36:05):
just toast a collection of figurines there that would be based.
That would be so sick. Yeah, they need money, just
let us know. We'll do a fundraiser. So I hope
this is a good lesson in knowing when posting goes
too far. Yeah, try try to keep your cringe online
if you're going to do it, because you don't want

(01:36:27):
to be this guy. No, you certainly do not want
to be this guy complaining about track and Bolz and
posting that results in the police raiding your car and
house steamed hangout spot. Yeah just yeah, truly one of
the weirdest pivots from online to the streets that I've
ever seen. This dude probably should have been jail a

(01:36:48):
long time ago. They probably worth noting that, like gender
based violence is like the common denominator for people who
do add terrible ship, and this is not not an
example of that. Yeah. Who who could have thought that
the raging and cell misogynist would also have bad politics? Yeah,
to keep doing Fammi Boushi ship, you have a full support. Indeed,

(01:37:11):
Well that isn't for us today. To tune in next
week I think next week, right next week or maybe
the week after for our upcoming week of episodes titled
Assassination Week. Yeah, it's gonna be great. Of course, not
not endorsing any political violence, assassinations any kinds. AH nine

(01:37:44):
eleven is in a couple of days. I'm Robert Evans.
This is it could have happened here a podcast about
nine eleven. Um well, as as Garrison said in the
intro that we're not using it's about things falling apart,
and boy did that happen on two things that fell apart? Yeah?
Um yeah. So this was originally going to be a

(01:38:06):
slightly cruder episode than it wound up being. But I'm
just gonna I'm just gonna delve into the script and uh,
Chris Garrison, you guys just buckle in, because the reason
I have you both as guests on this is that
you are both too young to remember nine That's not true.
I remember, I remember, I remember. Were you like four?

(01:38:27):
I hope so yeah, I was four. But I remember
my mom like so she she was trying to explain
the Pentagon, right, and so she has like a coaster
on the ground and she's making an airplane with her
hand is just going into anyway. So, as I said,
neither of you properly remember nine eleven. I don't remember it.

(01:38:49):
Love it. I I was at the age where every
moment of it is burnt into my into my brain,
as is the reaction so I wanted you both on
this because we're gonna talk about how nine eleven kind
of became a cult um and how to maybe how
to maybe deal with that, and then we'll be chatting
about Glenn Beck's nine twelve project, which is something I'm

(01:39:11):
sure neither of you are very familiar with. Now. In
its sixth season, the popular cartoons South Park ran an
episode in which Jared Fogel, who was at that point
just a subway spokesman and not a convicted child molester,
came to town and announced the start of a new
program to give everyone AIDS. Now, he was talking about
dietitians and personal trainers to help people lose weight, but

(01:39:32):
everybody heard AIDS the disease, which led to wacky hijinks.
That's the episode. It ends when everyone realizes they'd misunderstood
Fogel and they all laugh. Uh. This leads them to
realize that AIDS is finally funny, because things that are
tragic become funny exactly twenty two point three years after
they occur. That's the joke in the episode, and went
on to become a minor little internet joke that, like,

(01:39:54):
you know, once you hit that twenty two year point,
you can laugh about something tragic. We are now at
like twenty one year and change since September eleventh, two
thousand one, and I think if we're all honest, most
of us can admit that we've laughed at a lot
of nine eleven jokes. We're recording this the day the
Queen died, and people are like photo shopping her face
to be the Twin Towers, and it's so it's quite
a time on the old Internet. Now. I think the first,

(01:40:17):
I think the hardest, at least, that I ever laughed
at a nine eleven joke. I'm sure it's not the
first time was this picture of Trump Tower that was
posted to Twitter like right after he got inaugurated, with
the text George Bush do you thing? Um, it's still
an excellent nine eleven joke. Now, the first person with
any kind of platform to making a nine eleven joke
was the recently deceased comedian Gilbert Gottfried. On September twenty nine,

(01:40:40):
two thousand one, he took part in a roast of
Hugh Hefner at the New York Friars Club, And I'm
gonna play you the audio of that right now. I
have to catch up flight to California. I can't get
a direct flight. They said they had to stop at
the Empire State Building Park there. Extremely tamed joke. Honestly

(01:41:01):
not a great joke. UM, but it went onto it
was It's probably like maybe the most famous and like
kind of stand up history like bombs. Um. God Freed
and said himself said that he lost the audience more
than anyone else ever has. UM. I think it caused
some career problems for him. Um. He later said, like

(01:41:21):
a few weeks after. This was days after. So this
is at the Friar's Club roast of Hugh Hefner on
September twenty nine. Is this work too soon? It's from UM? Well, yeah,
this I mean, I don't I don't know that it
originated there, but this was the response to him. Um,
and I think it's the first time I ever recall
hearing someone say that. Godfried said that like the reason

(01:41:44):
he decided to tell a joke this close to nine
eleven was that he was personally offended by the fact
that anything could be too soon to make a joke about. UM.
One of these is interesting about this. A little side
thing is that like after bombing and getting shouted at
by the audience. Godfried, like decide did to get them
back by telling a particularly long and foul version of
the Aristocrats, which is a meta joke about jokes primarily anyway. Um,

(01:42:09):
it's basically just being as foul mouthed as you can
possibly be to an audience. Um. And that that audio
has been lost to time apparently, But boy, you can
watch a fun documentary about the Aristocrats if you want
to learn more about that now. I think the first
good actual comedy bit about nine eleven came out a
little bit after this. This was about two weeks after
the day and a couple of months later, at like

(01:42:32):
the three month point, South Park season five aired, uh,
and they ran an episode about nine eleven. Um. It
has been criticized, rightly so because there's some kind of
racist bits of humor in there. Surprising, that's not surprising. Um.
That said, it's also kind of a valuable snapshot of history.
For one thing, The huge part of the episode is

(01:42:53):
just kind of like the Afghan child counterparts to the
main characters in the show, walking around their town as
everyone is ordered by US air strikes. UM. So it's
it is not like the it stands kind of an
opposition to sort of the kind of like bootlicking responses
you got for For some context, the show The West Wing,
which is the favorite show of everybody who runs anything

(01:43:14):
in politics right now, ran an emergency nine eleven episode
like a couple of weeks after the attack, which was
the kind of turnaround you didn't do in TV at
that point in time. So they put in a ton
of effort to have the special nine eleven episode of
The West Wing. Um that number one in the alternate
West Wing universe, there's no nine eleven. There's like some
vague like there's basically basically the episode focus on like

(01:43:37):
a bunch of kids on a tour getting stuck in
the White House because it locks down because some vague
terrorist attack thing happens in a fake country they made up.
So when the West Wing needed to talk about Muslims,
um and kind of like the breakout piece of this, well,
there's two breakouts. One of them is a very racist
retelling of the story of Isaac and Ishmael that explains
like why Muslims are always so angry all the time, um.

(01:44:00):
And then the White House Press Lady c J. Craig
goes on a rant about how awesome the intelligence apparatus
is and how like what good people uh CIA agents are,
and how the best thing to do for politics sometimes
is to have a guy dressed as a waiter murder
somebody with a silence pistol like it was out of
its mind, unhinged. That's the fucking like. So the fact

(01:44:22):
that South Park does an episode that's like, yeah, we're
gonna murder a bunch of people in Afghanistan for no
reason is like, not a not a bad response, not
a bad thing to recognize about that day. Um, the
other things that are like pretty good or pretty I
think meaningful sort of bits in that episode. It opens
with all of the kids at the bus stop wearing
gas masks as they stand in line for the bus.

(01:44:45):
There's a piece in that episode that kind of sticks
with me today still, um that I'm gonna play for
you guys. I don't know, I always found that bit fun.
So when the school bus arrives, there's a cop on
its searching bags and confiscating items that might be used
as weapons. The school classroom doors are reinforced with a

(01:45:05):
massive military grade lock, which resonated more in a time
when like school shootings weren't a constant thing. Um, And
it it kind of hit me because, you know, when
this episode came out and I watched it when it
came out, I was at middle school, Clark Middle School
in Plano, Texas, and on nine eleven and twelve, the
attacks were like the only topic of discussion that anyone had.

(01:45:27):
And I have this vivid memory of a couple of
girls in my US history class weeping because they were
scared that al Qaeda was coming for our schools next. Um,
Like this was a very real worry for kids that
I grew up with, what like Midland, Texas or something. No,
it was, indeed, it's a big school. But like I'm
certain that fucking Osama bin Laden had never heard the

(01:45:48):
name plane o Texas, let alone the Joatha thing with
like anytime a plane was like going down, people will
point at it and be like, oh my god, yeah yeah,
um No, that was definitely a meme. And there was,
you know, one of the most famous ones was this
this video called Triumph Dot a v I that started

(01:46:11):
to spread on the Something Awful forums That was just
footage of the September eleventh attacks set to yakety sacks um.
And again, these were all kind of the comedy that
that you know, that South Park put out here and
that you saw, and stuff like the Triumph video were
reactions to how fucking seriously everybody else took nine eleven right.

(01:46:34):
Like I have to, I have to point out that
like watching an episode like this or watching something like
Trump felt like legitimately transgressive in the days and weeks
after nine eleven, because it was kind of a as
we'll talk about, had turned into kind of like a
secular cult um. And I think people who were just
a few years old then or born after nine eleven
missed this part of nine eleven. Um. I think you

(01:46:56):
inherited the wars and the intrusions on civil liberties and
the creeping fast is um, but not the derangement by
terror that had preceded it, Like everybody's permanently deranged from
nine eleven, But you didn't really get to know people
before that kind of happened and drove a lot of
them mad. As a kid, it was like a strange
and exciting and scary moment. But I think my parents

(01:47:18):
and I think the people who were kind of in
their age range um completely lost their minds, and oddly
that that South Park episode has kind of the best
depiction of that too. There's a scene in which stand
who is one of the main characters they're all like
middle school kids, walks into his house and sees his
mom like lying on the couch staring blankly ahead UM

(01:47:38):
and just like weeping. She's surrounded by tissues. She's been
crying for days, UM and as her husband says, she's
just been watching CNN for like the last eight weeks straight.
And the the image of her just kind of like
lying on the couch staring at the TV is I
can remember every adult that I knew as a kid
doing that, and it it really did go on for days,

(01:47:59):
like people moved moved around as if they were like
in kind of a shocked stupor. I'm sure there's places
where this wasn't the case, UM, But for my family,
who were very very conservative people, and I think for
people particularly who lived closer to the attacks, like it
was just this period of um like post traumatic stress
for the entire country. I think a good amount of

(01:48:20):
research backs up the fact that this it had this
kind of and I think it is hard to understand
if you weren't there impact on people. I found a
Pew Research study that I'm gonna quote from now. Our
first survey following the attacks went into the field just
days after nine eleven. From September seventeen, two thousand one,
A sizeable majority of adults said they felt depressed. Nearly
half said they had difficulty concentrating, and a third said

(01:48:41):
they had trouble sleeping. It was an era in which
television was still the public's dominant news source. Said they
got most of their news about the attacks from television,
compared with just five percent who got their news online,
and the televised images of death and destruction had a
powerful impact. Around nine and ten Americans agreed with the
statement I feel sad when watching t the coverage of
the terrorist attacks. A sizable majority found it frightening to watch,

(01:49:05):
but most did so anyway. Fear was widespread, not just
in the days immediately after the attacks, but throughout the
fall of two thousand one. Most Americans said they were
very percent or somewhat forty five percent worried about another attack.
When asked a year later to describe how their lives
changed in a major way, about half the adults said
they felt more afraid, more careful, and more distrustful or

(01:49:25):
more vulnerable as a result of the attacks. And I
think you can't separate this because the main people were
talking about here when we're talking about the response to this,
when we're talking about the people who got to make decisions,
it's boomers, right, which is not all that different from
how it is today, but even it was even more
so boomers then. And you know, my parents and the
people of their generation are all children of the Cold War.

(01:49:47):
They both grew up, my parents on different military bases,
um and I can remember, you know, my dad told
me stories about doing like duck and coverage rills as
a kid, like literally hiding under a desk to get
ready for an atomic bomb. His family like went out
into the countryside during the Cuban missile crisis to hide
because they were afraid all the cities we're going to
get nuked. And this is not These are not uncommon experiences.

(01:50:10):
So you have to think, like all of the all
of the adults were either very close to this period
or had spent most of their formative years like constantly
scared of being murdered by a nuclear weapon. Um, there
have been clinical like studies and stuff that have shown
that that fear of nuclear annihilation is a major factor
and anxiety like it's not ever been properly I think

(01:50:32):
explained how much that fucked up that generation. But what
you had is all these people who had spent the
first couple of decades of their lives living with the
sort of damocles over their heads. And then the war ends, right,
the Cold War ends, the USSR falls apart, and suddenly
people aren't talking about nuclear warfare for the first time
in anybody's memory. Um, And I think for most of

(01:50:55):
that generation they felt safe for the first time. There
was this kind of celebration that was pretty bipartisan, that
capitalism and democracy had triumphed, and that like this kind
of horror that had stalked through their childhood had been defeated.
When people like Francis fuki Yama talked about the end
of history, what Fukiyama meant was that liberal democracy was

(01:51:15):
kind of, in his eyes, the end of the evolutionary
road for states, which is a flawed idea, But the
interpretation that I think people like my parents had was
that we didn't need to worry anymore. Right, like that
that's the end of history, right, our way of life
had one and we like we we didn't need to worry.
And in nine eleven happens and suddenly this decade or
so of relief from that all ends in a minute,

(01:51:38):
and all of that fear that they lived with their
whole lives came roaring back with abandoned. Nine eleven was
like the emotional equivalent of splitting an atom. And and
the Internet that was released by that is going to
be used for something, right. I want to kind of
touch on that a little bit, because I mean, I
obviously don't remember the nineties because I wasn't there, and
it is such a fascinating idea to me, like this

(01:51:59):
time where neoliberalism kind of reached their paradise, like like
we didn't we could we we we we did the thing,
We found the spot and how that you know, talk
about like the edge o chaos theory, how it was
built up to the super high point and then all
because because it got so high and then immediately crumbled,
um and shot down and there's this thing that um.

(01:52:19):
One of my favorite writers, Granat Morrison, talks about how
nine eleven kind of became this moment where the world
of imagination and the world of like the lowest material
visceral reality crashed into each other. Um, and he says
a quote. The collapse expressed itself in the material world

(01:52:40):
when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were
reduced to dust by determined extremists. When cement occurred, reality
and fiction began their slow collapse into one another. After
the fall of the towers, quote unquote, reality became more fictional,
and quote unquote fiction became more realistic, I think, plausible, realistic,
superhero of movies like The Dark Knight films, fake news,

(01:53:03):
deep fakes, a r VR and the rise of magical thinking. Um.
And I would extra plate that out to like stuff
like you know Q and on UM and you know
the how just these images that we thought were only
viewable in film and television um became descended down onto

(01:53:24):
the onto the dirtiest, most visceral material plane. UM. And
then things that were fake like this idea like the
Perfect nineties, It's gonna be this is gonna continue continue
like Diever that fiction. Uh, it felt almost more real,
like it like that that that should have been what's
real and it's not me more. Yeah, it feels like
there's an alternate and I think that's part of why

(01:53:45):
liberals are still so goddamn in love with the West wing.
And by the way I talked about liberals, my parents,
who loved Ronald Reagan more than life itself, watched every
episode of that show. They thought it was wonderful. And
the Republicans are always portrayed very sympathetically on the West wing. Right,
it's very much this noble opposition sort of idea um
and uh, the the that I think there's something in

(01:54:08):
that that there's list almost since that we've been locked
out of the right reality. And that's that's what you know,
That's what liberals are constantly harkening back to with with
nine eleven. But it's also or with with stuff like
the West Wing. But it's also like what conservatives. I
think for a while they were looking for that. I
think that's what George W. Bush promised and failed to deliver. Um.

(01:54:31):
It's what they were hoping to get with Romney and
when that didn't happen. I think part of what's going
on with Trump is this desire, part of the desire
to burn it all down is the inability to get
back to this imagined if you're talking about the collapse
of reality and fiction going into each other, that's what
Donald Trump represents. He is this so fictional person that

(01:54:54):
in order to meet this new world of reality and
fiction the same thing, you need somebody that under that,
that rep sense that. Um. So they turned to him
because he was meeting the way they saw the world
was going, that the reality infection are going into each other.
So you're going to get the reality television president who
who who? Who kind of embodies that essence on a

(01:55:16):
very very visceral level. And I think that's part of
why when you have nine eleven happen, you have all
of this energy released. Both parties kind of come together
in this idea that the United States should strike back
and that we were at war. It's rightly pointed out
by people that particularly protests against the Iraq war were massive,

(01:55:37):
and they were, they were historically large. But President Bush
was also the most popular president of our lifetime briefly,
and it's because people were in line behind this idea
that we need to hit someone well. And and I
think something that's important about this that's completely forgotten is
that the invasion of Afghanistan. There was like no protests.
There were there were a few, but like the left imploded,

(01:56:00):
like here's I'm going to read a quote from Doug Henwood.
This is an attack on us. There is a near
certainty that something will be done soon. Clearly considerable use
of force will have to be used to capture these
motherfucker's um like Adolph read He's like talking about how
like there's gonna have to be military reaction. Like a

(01:56:21):
bunch of the people from like who like the the
old school, like anti Vietnam War protesters like from STS
are like, well, we don't oppose all wars, we just
opposed bad wars. So like here we should go in vadive.
Guess like everyone lost their minds. Well, and I want
to what I really the core of when I talk
about today is why that happened. Because I think there's

(01:56:42):
on particularly kind of some of the more superficial left
wing analysis of this, this idea that like George Bush
did what he did in response because he's like this
Christian holy warrior um. And there's a couple of reasons
people do this, including the fact that he once referred
to the invasion of Iraq as a crusade, but as
a general rule, what Bush did was not because of

(01:57:03):
his Christianity and had nothing to do with any kind
of conflict with his Lam. In particular. What it was
was the reaction of a group of a kind of fundamentalists,
fundamentalists of belief in the American state, reacting to an
attack on the sanctity of that kind of idea um.
And this is this is you know why all these

(01:57:25):
liberals were on board at least with you know, the
strike on Afghanistan or attacking Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens. Probably no
one embodies like what happened to a lot of the
left better than Hitchens. Hitchens was a well known liberal journalist.
He wrote an excoriating book about Henry Kissinger. Right, he's
one of these people who was criticizing the Empire, who
was attacking it for its excesses. For builds his career

(01:57:47):
on that, and the nine eleven happens. And the first
big thing he does is he puts out a massive
column titled Bush's Secularist Triumph, in which he argues that
the war on terror is not a crusade but a
battle to keep rely Gin in public power. Separate, and
I want to quote now from a study published in
the Journal of Political Theology by William Kavanaugh of DePaul University.

(01:58:07):
It's kindled the war on terror secular or sacred. There
may be some Christians who think that we are fighting
for Jesus, but the battle is being one in the
name of secularism. George Bush may subjectively be a Christian,
but he and the US Armed forces have objectively done
more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic
community combined and doubled. While the left makes apologies for

(01:58:28):
religious terrorists, the right supports their obliteration to protect our
secular state. Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It
is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that
only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly
smashed the hold of clergy on the state. We are
now in the middle of another such war and revolution,
and the liberals have gone a wall. That's Kavanaugh's summary

(01:58:50):
of Hitchens is article, but like, what's going on there
is really interesting because Hitchens is proceeding as an a
priori assumption that the attack on the Twin Hours is
an attempt by a theocracy to take over and destroy
a secular state, rather than an attempt to damage economically
a military enemy um and goat it into a war

(01:59:10):
that would weaken it socially, militarily and economically, which is
exactly what had actually happened. The liberals that Hitchens attacks
is former allies are basically saying, don't take the bait right,
don't do the thing that he wants you to do,
because it will it will lead to the results he
wants to achieve. All Hitchens can see is that, like
Muslim extremists are scary and they want to hurt him

(01:59:31):
as an atheist, religion is doing things that hurt me,
So I must destroy the people who believe in this city. Yeah.
And it's interesting because everybody, all of the people who
are kind of on the side of this civic religion,
which is which is why they're responding, because there they're
civic religion has been attacked and this strike on the towers.
They all find kind of different ways to justify it.

(01:59:53):
Hitchens is a prominent atheist, so it makes sense that
he kind of sees it as a fight against theocracy.
If you go through a lot of footage of news
anchors in the immediate wake of the attack. Garrison, you
and I were doing this a couple of nights ago.
There were numerous references that the Twin Towers, which were
a symbol of capitalism, and that they represent capitalist and
American supremacy over capital It's like it's it's it's like

(02:00:16):
the American supremacy of the economic system and and and
like a reified symbol of capitalism almost like it's like
it's like an idol to like to the god of capital. Yeah,
there's a there's a number of different things you can
find making this point. But in a column that published
on nine twelve, uh, the Washington Post editorial Board wrote,

(02:00:37):
for three decades, the Twin Towers of New York's World
Trade Center stood as the symbol of American economic might,
as powerful an icon for capitalism as the Statue of
Liberty is for freedom exactly exactly. That's yeah, yeah, it's amazing. No,
people were just saying this ship the day. You ever
think that's funny about it. It's like no one thought
this before. Like these are cheap fucking buildings, like the

(02:00:59):
World Trades Yeah, like a license, Like it's literally It's
just like license is a nameless license out. It's like that,
you know, But that doesn't because again, what what you
by saying this when they're saying like, for three decades,
this was the symbol of American economic might. People and
I keep going back to my parents, but I think
they represent a lot of Americans saw the defeat of

(02:01:20):
the Soviet Union as being achieved by the US economy,
by capitalist right, and and that's the thing that ended history.
That's the thing that got them to their neo liver paradise.
It's the thing that saved them from the nukes. And
so by taking these towers down, bin Laden basically killed Superman. Right,
That's how they're reacting to it. Um. George Bush and

(02:01:41):
Christopher Hitchens and the Washington Post editorial board, they all
saw their support for war not as as not based
in religion. All of them would have denied this right, Um.
But Kavanaugh argues that they were motivated primarily by what
he calls the civil religion of the United States, which
is why I've been using that term. I'm gonna quote
from his paper again. The United States has its own
civil religion, which, though relying on the support of Christians,

(02:02:02):
and undoubtedly, borrowing much from Christian imagery, transcends mere sectarian
religion to unite all Americans on a higher ground. Indeed,
this is what makes secularism compatible with civil religion. What
Robert Bella calls traditional religion is privatized, while civic rituals
revolve around a generic God who underwrites America's identity and
purpose in the world. In this sense, Andrew Sullivan is right.

(02:02:25):
This is a religious war. The war of which nine
eleven was a significant marker, is not extremist and expansionist
religion against a peace loving and neutral secularist order. It
is rather the violent confrontation of Islamist terrorism with the
civil religion of American expansionism, that is, the evangelical insistence
that liberal social order is the only viable kind of

(02:02:46):
social order. It is what Tarik Ali has called the
clash of fundamentalisms. And I think that's important because I
think one way area in which the left really got
things wrong in sort of their interpretation of what happens
in this period of seeing it as a lash between
kind of Christian fundamentalists as embodied by George Bush and
Islamic fundamentalists. No, no, no. The people who were leading

(02:03:08):
this country, including Bush, but including most of the the Liberals,
were America fundamentalists. They were fundamentalists in the idea of
the secular American state, and so were my parents. As
conservative as they were, my family was never about you know,
Christianity needing to be spread over there. It was about
this this belief in America as something holy and that
something holy and sacred had been struck on September eleven.

(02:03:32):
I will say I I think, I I don't know,
it's easy for me to see why people think about
this on the left sort of as this Christian holy war,
because like I grew up with a lot of people
who like in the wake of this, who like really
were full on into the crusade thing. Like I had
classmates would talk about how they were going to join

(02:03:53):
the military to kill a Muslims. Like there was like
I think this is a real thing. Sure, and that's
what I mean, that's sort of analytic wrong, that's what
that's what Kavanaugh saying, and that it's kind of scaffolded
on Christianity. But like that's fun fundamentally, like the fact
that there are some people who are going in there
being like this is finally religious crusade, doesn't mean that's

(02:04:14):
like what the leadership of the country is doing, and
as I have to do. I think that's part of
why we get Trump and the current Christian extremist surge
is that, uh, it's a reaction to how kind of
the neo cons go with this, because for the neo cons,
this isn't really about this isn't about Christianity is something
you use in this fight, but like, that's not what

(02:04:36):
you're fighting for here. Um. And I think there's there's
a good amount of evidence for the fact that Americans
identified something as being like holy about the Twin Towers,
particularly after the attack. UM from Kavanaughs study in Public
Theology Quote and August to thousand ten of poll found
that fifty six percent of Americans regard Ground zero as

(02:04:57):
sacred ground, and a slightly larger majority opposes construction of
a mosque nearby. For this region, a sacred aura surrounds
the identity of the nation that was attacked on that day,
and the attacks concentrated that sacredness in a particular location
in time. It is not necessary to go back to
the more famously evangelical George W. Bush to make the
link between piety and nine eleven. In his speech at

(02:05:17):
Ground Zero last September eleventh, two thousand ten, Barack Obama
talked about gathering at this sacred hour on hallowed Ground
and talked about how those who were not only killed
but sacrificed in the attacks. God was invoked, of course,
but it was a generic God who belonged to no
particular faith, because, as Obama made clear, the victims themselves
were of many faiths. Yeah, this is I mean one

(02:05:39):
of the things that I think is interesting if you're
actually trying to analyze this and you want to see
kind of the degree to which why I think it's
important to look at how people treated the space itself
is sacred, is how actual religion responded in the wake
of nine eleven, and how Americans responded to religion in
the wake of nine eleven, because you know, it says

(02:06:01):
they're about fifty six percent of the country. See, this
is like hallowed Ground in some way. Um. And I
think there's evidence that people kind of rose up to
defend this civic religion more than they actually did their
real faiths. Um. And this is because primarily the reaction
on a on a population basis to September eleven, is
that religiosity in the United States continued to decline. Right,

(02:06:24):
There's a public idea that it led to this like
surge of people coming back to the church and getting
religious again, but there's really no demographic evidence to back
that up. And I want to quote from an article
I found in Christianity Today. For a few weeks after
nine eleven, people packed the pews, but it soon became
apparent there was not a great awakening or a profound
change in America's religious practices, as Frank M. Newport Gallop Pole,

(02:06:46):
editor in chief, told The New York Times in November
of two thousand one. Barnard Group confirmed that conclusion in
two thousand six, attract nineteen dimensions of spirituality and beliefs
and found none of those nineteen indicators were statistically different
from pre attack measures. In other words, that not eleven
attacks didn't put American Christians on a trajectory towards more
orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer, church attendance,

(02:07:09):
or scripture reading. And so far as we can measure
matters of faith, the decline of American religiosity continue to
pace spiritually speaking, said barn As David Kinneman. It's as
if nothing significant ever happened, and that's something evangelicals have
had to grapple with ever since the US did not
turn back to God demographically. And while hateful attacks against

(02:07:29):
Muslims surged, you have to acknowledge that a lot of
those were from people who were more or less secular
um in the traditional sense. And this is part of
why so many of the online atheists set Uh sided
with the al right in two thousand fifteen, in two
thousand sixteen, right, it's because there are a lot of
those people Um, while they would have described themselves as
an opposition to Christianity as well, were very much a

(02:07:52):
part of the same civic religion as everybody else. And
we're willing to engage in racist attacks against members of
religion as a result of that. You know, when when
you get the fact that a majority of Americans saw
ground zero was sacred and opposed building a mosque because
of that, a decent chunk of those people are not
Christians who opposed the building of a mosque, Right, they're
a religious or their atheist, and they opposed the building

(02:08:13):
of a mosque because they still see Islam as an enemy. Yeah,
it's uh, it's interesting, but Americans were not moved to
embrace religion by the attacks UM and the deterioration of
our sense of security that followed, and I think that
Evangelicals have never been able to actually accept this. A
two thousand thirteen Barner Group survey found that most Americans,

(02:08:33):
but particularly born again Christians, believe nine eleven quote made
people turn back to God, and this again has led
to kind of a fetishization of the period right after
nine eleven UM. The writer of that Christianity Today article
I cited earlier theorizes quote. My first suggestion is what
we thought was hope wasn't lost at all. It was
less Christian trust and character and redemption of God than

(02:08:55):
American optimism, coded with not quite biblical bromides that when
there's bad, good will follow. Americans love to believe that
everything happens for a reason, and that after a short
period of time, sorrow will always turn into joy and
suffering into sanctifications. We quote Romans we know that in
all things God works for the good of those who
love him, and incorrectly interpreted to mean that everything that

(02:09:16):
happens to us will also somehow work out, Okay, And
I think that they're onto something here, and this really
that this goes back to what Kavanaugh was saying about
how this civil religion is kind of grafted on over
the bones of Christianity, right, Um, and it's it's there's
so much. Part of what's interesting to me here is
that well, I think it's it's worthwhile that he quotes Romans.

(02:09:39):
I have to think that this, this belief that Americans
have that everything happens for a reason, is at least
as undergirded by like Disney as it is with scripture.
It's undergraded by the way we tell stories, by the
way fiction works in our society, which is a very
unique to us. Right, Every culture does not tell stories
the same way. Well, and I think, like, if you

(02:10:00):
want to trace that out to like, I think that's
part of the reason why people are so unbelievably any
conspiracy theories here. Yeah, if everything needs to have a reason,
that it's part of an overarching grand narrative that ties
everything together. Yeah, And it's obviously again I don't want
to like underplay and perhaps we should do an episode

(02:10:20):
maybe behind the bastards on the reaction of the religious
right to nine eleven, which was nuts and it was
vicious and horrific. I'm not I'm not trying to deny that,
but I think one of the things that happens in
this period is they grow increasingly infuriated that that is
not shared by a majority of the country, that it
doesn't bring a religious revival, right, that that doesn't follow

(02:10:42):
September eleven. Um. Now, it is kind of there's a
couple of things that are interesting here. Um. One of
them is that, uh, the apocalyptic Christian believers, they do
have kind of this this in with the Bush administration.
We know that at one point a bunch of apocalyptic
like Christian representatives, like people who are kind of heading

(02:11:03):
churches and stuff that believe there's this belief among certain
Christians that you need to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem
and bring about the end of days and all this stuff.
There's a bunch of ship that has to happen in
Palestine in order for the apocalypse to come, and they're
trying to get us presidents to make it happen. This
is why Trump made some of the calls that he
made was to deliberately like give those people a win, um,

(02:11:25):
which is why some of the ship that happened in
Jerusalem during the Trump administration um was able to happen.
All of that stuff is stuff that they went to
George Bush. They had a two hour meeting with him
and Elliott Abrams and a bunch of his staff were
these representatives of kind of like the Pentecostal movement. Tried
to get him to carry out this wish list policy
of acts around Israel and Iraq to help them bring

(02:11:46):
about the rapture, and the Bush administration didn't really do
any of that. They have to take the meeting, right,
They bring these guys in, they don't give them what
they want. It's not until Trump that a lot of
these guys get what they want. And what you what
happens here. You've got this this death cult Christian group
who see this as a crusade and who want to
war with Islam, and they're constantly frustrated by the fact

(02:12:09):
that even though he's supposed to be their guy, Bush
doesn't go all the way for them, right, and this
is part of why his military adventurism gets criticized effectively
by guys like Trump. Who win the evangelical right, because
the evangelicals say, like, well, if we're not going to
have a holy war, then like what was this stuff?
We just wasted a bunch of of money and a
bunch of treasure and a bunch of young men for

(02:12:30):
nothing over there. Um. And that's part of like what
Trump wins on. Now, these two factions, these neo cons,
the guys who wind up, by the way, the guys
who are sort of on the civic religion side of
the response to nine eleven are all the people who
wind up running the Lincoln project right when you're talking
about the Republicans on that side of thing. And then
the part the folks who break off the evangelicals, the

(02:12:52):
people who want to holy war, that's who winds up
making the core of Trump's support. Um. And yeah, And
that's I think mostly where I'm going to leave us
for today. On nine twelve. Next week we'll have another
special episode about Glenn Beck's nine twelve project that will
be kind of the finishing of this. But I want
to end because we're talking about why I did this

(02:13:13):
and why I started by talking about jokes about nine
eleven is because I think understanding understanding the attack on
the towers as like an attack on what what had
effectively become a god to a lot of Americans, even
if they didn't realize it. Right, the sanctity of this
kind of neoliberal capitalist order, and it's it's it's um,

(02:13:35):
it's historic inevitability. Right. The fact that that's what was
going on, that that that was so dear to people,
that justified so much violence, twenty years of war, of
bombing's millions of deaths is part of why I think
there's a value in joking about nine eleven, which is
not to say that what happened wasn't terrible. Three three

(02:13:56):
thousand and change innocent people were murdered um in a
in a truly horrific way. If you actually sit down
and watch the footage the people falling out of the buildings,
it's a namare. If you think about stuff like Flight
ninety three, it's it's really stirring. You have these people
who one moment they're heading to like see their families
or go on a work trip or something. You're on
a plane experience, I'm sure everybody has, where you're just

(02:14:17):
like trying to get from A to B and in
the space of like a few minutes. They have to
all decide they're going to charge a bunch of terrorists,
fight in hand to hand combat, and then pilot a
plane into the ground in order to stop it from
killing other people. That's that's powerful stuff. Um. What what
I think is important is de sacralizing it, because there's
nothing sacred about mass murder um, and there's nothing there's

(02:14:42):
we shouldn't see what happened, there is anything but what
it is, which is a tragic um, a tragic act
of violence against innocent people. But taking it as like
an attack on our soul, as an attack on like
our our collective god. Um. When you start to do
that again, it kind of justifies any sort of violence,

(02:15:05):
like there's nothing, there's nothing that's off the table, and
in in the first few years after nine eleven, there
was nothing off the table. Um, And we're never getting
back to the world that we had before, which is
ultimately like what all that violence was about. Right, all
of everything terrible that was in the wake of nine
eleven was justified, even if people didn't say it. In

(02:15:26):
the desire to get back to where we were in
the nineties, right in their heads and their sense of security.
I'm not talking about anything is like courses, economic projections.
I'm talking about in the sense of like optimism and
basic security. And I think one of the people who
got this best in the immediate wake of the attack
was Hunter S. Thompson, who you know, was still alive
at that point for a couple of years, and he

(02:15:46):
wrote a column. I think it was for ESPN dot com,
because that's who he was writing for in those days.
His career was well past its peak, um, but he
wrote probably the best thing anyone wrote a week after
nine eleven. I'm going to read you the end of that.
Now we're at war now, according to President Bush, and
I take him at his word. He also says this

(02:16:07):
war might last for a very long time. Generals and
military scholars that will tell you that eight or ten
years is actually not such a long time in the
span of human history, which is no doubt true. But
history also tells us that ten years of martial law
and a wartime economy are going to feel like a
lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The
poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation

(02:16:27):
Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans
who will grow up with the lower standard of living
than their parents enjoyed. This is extremely heavy news and
it will take a while for it to sink in.
The twenty two babies born in New York City while
the World Trade Center burned, will never know what they missed.
The last half of the twentieth century will seem like
a wild party for rich kids compared to what's coming now.

(02:16:48):
The party's over, folks. Yeah, that is kind of the
feeling growing up in the early two thousand's and not
not knowing, not never actually experiencing the nineties. Yeah, some ways,
you know, nine eleven feels very similar to me as
something like Pearl Harbor, Like they're both things that happened

(02:17:08):
I guess before I was around, and it just they
created the world that already existed in like it never
it never like it, you know, it never changed the
world I was in. It just became the world that
I was in. For me, nine eleven is my first memory,
Like that is the first thing I remember, And yeah,

(02:17:31):
we got exactly the world that you would expect from
your first every reading nine eleven. Yeah, it's um, I
mean again, for me, I think the thing I identify
most is that little clip I played from South Park
where one of the kids is like, do you remember
when everything didn't suck? It's not really um, So yeah,

(02:17:54):
go out, um, tell a tasteful joke about nine eleven,
and try not to worship the state. It doesn't end well. Hey,
we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the universe. It Could
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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(02:18:14):
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Thanks for listening.