It Could Happen Here Weekly 118

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Fo Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could

(00:27):
happen here a podcast about things falling apart. And you know, folks,
season one of this, if you listened way back in
twenty nineteen, we focused a lot on my fears about
a massive coming civil conflict in the United States, you know,
along the lines of a civil war, but sort of
based around my experiences in civil conflicts in Ukraine and

(00:49):
Iraq and Syria a number of other parts of the
world prior to twenty twenty. And one of the reasons
I'm bringing this up right now is because you know,
what I experienced with the fighting in Isis in Iraq
was kind of instrumental in me understanding how conflict looked
in the modern era and how the United States was

(01:09):
closer to a conflict like that, then I think a
lot of folks would, normally, especially people who are kind
of obsessed with the idea of a civil war, as
two big armies in gray and blue marching at each other,
we're willing to kind of to contend with. And when
I was starting that reporting over there, you know, taking
my first trips to Iraq, one of the first things

(01:30):
that I did was watch every Isis beheading video and
some of the Al Qaida in Iraq beheading videos prior
to that, not as a voyeuristic thing, but because I
felt like if I was going to take myself and
another person into that situation, the responsible thing to do
was make myself very informed of what the stakes were.
And I'm bringing this all up not because we're talking

(01:50):
about the Middle East today, because we are talking about
a beheading video, probably the first beheading video directly tied
to the US CO Cuncture war that I can I
can name, and I'm gonna throw to Garrison Davis now.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
All right, So last week, I believe most of this
went down. On January thirtieth, a thirty two year old
man named Justin Mohan shot his father in the head
with a handgun he bought the day previously, and then
used a kitchenknife and machete to allegedly again this is
all a quote unquote allegedly allegedly yes to allegedly.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Alleged by him in the video that he recorded, Yes
cut off his father's head in a bathtub.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
He put it in a pot, and then recorded a
video which he posted publicly onto YouTube. It was about
fifteen minutes long titled Moan's Militia Called to Arms for
American Patriots, where he ranted about a number of things
and mostly called for the killing of federal employees. He fled.
I think he went a slightly upstate towards a National

(02:58):
Guard training camp and then was arrested a few hours
later after his mother found the severed head and body
of her husband in the house that they all lived
in together. This is one of the most bizarre acts
of extremist violence that I've come across in terms of
like the amount of research I've done to this, and

(03:20):
I think it kind of points at a this trend
of extremist acts of violence done by people who have
a lot of content on the internet, not just like
posting manifestos, but like are positioning themselves as some form
of like alternative content creator. This guy had a lot
of music, had a lot of self published books. In

(03:42):
lieu of leaving like a complete single manifesto, we get
these just years of writing and like artistic creations that
now live on archive dot org as kind of ghosts
of this guy's presence.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
And I think what's interesting about that is that shift
between between and I think the christ Church shooter is
probably like the KT boundary of this particular evolutionary shift
from like the norm would be that you would produce
a specific manifesto as an act, like a political act,
as part of whatever of active violence you carried, and

(04:16):
the goal was both to inspire other people to act
and to, you know, partly just to frame yourself as
something besides alone maniac. And I think one of the
things that's really interesting about this shift to an increasing
number of these people representing what they're doing in fiction
in some way or in some other kind of creative

(04:37):
endeavor is that it sort of mirrors the idea that like,
in our culture, the thing that people most want to
be is some sort of like influencer content creator, Like
that's the top desired job among like a lot of
gen Z kids, and it's also just increasingly like the
thing that people creatively want to see themselves as, and

(04:57):
so like, I think this fits into this trend of violence,
that is that is foreshadowed by someone, not by a
work of like political thought, you know, which you may
not want to think of a manifesto as that, but
that is what it is, but is preceded instead by art.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, so I think I'll talk about a few kind
of semi similar or at least other cases that have
some curious linkages, probably close to the end of the episode,
but I have some writing here prepared about the about
the beheading video itself, and then a few other kind
of random stuff about the art that he's made, and

(05:36):
Robert will probably fill in some useful gaps because Robert
acquired a very special piece of literature recently.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
So the night that this went down, as soon as
I found out this guy had written not just a book,
but multiple books, I was like, well, I kind of
want to read these, and I know they're going to
get pulled by tomorrow and Amazon will probably Amazon can
just take back the kindle books that you buy from them,
So I ordered a hard copy of the book that
seemed like the most meaningful to him. It's called The

(06:08):
Second Messiah, King of Earth by Justin Mohen. It is
distressingly thick, like four hundred and fifty pages or so.
It is so much book. And the weird thing about it,
I've read through a chunk of it, and we will
be getting to some of it. It's not badly written,
and I want to be clear, I'm not saying that
like he's a good writer in the commercial sense, or

(06:31):
that he's a good writer in that like he's a
skilled artist. I'm saying that, like it's clear writing. You're
always sure what he's trying to say. When he depicts
the vinces happening. Those events are crazy, but like he's
they're clearly depicted, which is interesting to me. And yeah,
we will be hearing about more of that in part too.
But I have learned a decent amount about him from

(06:53):
this book, The Second Messiah King of Earth.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
So let's get into that fifteen minute video. He starts
by holding up what is alleged to be his father's
head inside a plastic bag. He holds up for a
few seconds and then starts talking. Now, my my initial
reaction to this video is just how unremarkable most of
this rant is. There's like calling for killing federal employees,

(07:20):
which is like the one thing people do that.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
But also you can hear so.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Many of the sentiments that he talks about from Fox
News contributors, from popular right wing podcast hosts, and even
sitting politicians. They also talk about how quote America is
rotting from the inside out as far left woke mobs
rampage are once prosperous cities, turning them into lawless zones.

Speaker 4 (07:43):
Unquote.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, use that term a lot, lawless zones. That's that
he's The term probably comes up like about ten times
across this whole video.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
And I want to I think we need to start
before we get further into this with the elephant in
the room, which is like a lot and what a
lot of people say about this guy, Well, this man
was mentally ill, and that is absolutely the case. You know,
I add the disclaimer whenever we talk about mental illness
and mass shootings, people who are mentally ill, people who
are schizophrenic are not more likely to do this kind

(08:13):
of violence than anybody else. But that said, when they
do it, they're also not necessarily less responsible. And what
I mean by that is a person can be mentally
ill and engage in a shooting, and that doesn't mean
you shouldn't pay attention to what they are or another
act of violence. That doesn't mean you don't pay attention
to why they're saying they did it. The fact that

(08:35):
this guy is clearly I believe, schizophrenic does not mean
that his reasons for doing this are immaterial, because most
people who have whatever mental illness this guy did have
do not cut their dad's head off. So the fact
that he is justifying it with this very boilerplate set
of right wing culture war grievances is meaningful. And it's

(08:56):
meaningful because absent that influence in his life, perhaps he
either doesn't carry out an act of violence or it's
at least a very different looking one, And so I
think that is important to just get out to upfront.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
He certainly had years of experiencing paranoia, some conspiratorial thinking,
but specifically the ayre directed towards his own conception of
the federal government and how it is leading to society
decay is what sparked this act of violence and is
why he called for copycat killings. So yes, inside this rant,
justin Mohan talks about taxes, inflation, and an economy that

(09:32):
no longer serves American citizens. He mentions how the traitorous
Biden regime is sending over American troops to fight in
a doomed war in the Russian winter, leaving America defenseless
against a quote fifth column army of illegal immigrants invading
our southern border to strike Americans on our own soil. Unquote.
That's another term he uses a lot, fifth column. Yeah,

(09:53):
probly says it like four or five times.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
And that's a very old term. That's a term that
you would hear in a lot of John Birch materially
the middle of the last century, you know.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
So Moan identified himself as quote the commander of America's
National Network of Militias, also known as Moan's Militia, which
seems to be mostly a delusion. He had no known
connections to actual militias in his state or any other states.
This seemed to be an idea that he got into
his own head. He then ordered all quote militias and
patriots across the country to quote hunt down and murder

(10:27):
every federal employee on site, and to sieze all courthouses, FBI,
i rs, and federal law enforcement offices, to kill and
capture all border patrol, US marshals, federal agents and judges
and quote, torture them for information and publicly execute them
for betraying the country unquote. He had this, really, he

(10:48):
had this line that stuck out to me. I didn't copy.
This is a long video. I did not copy every
single thing he said. He also is this is one
line he included, earn your place in heaven by sending
a traitor to hell early with just the cold, like,
very like emotionless way.

Speaker 4 (11:05):
He said. That kind of stuck with me.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yes, and that is not a belief that you have
to go to a guy experiencing mental health crisis to
find you can hear shades of this all over fucking Twitter,
among other places.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
Can you hear this if you listen to certain right
wingers give public comment like yeah, in your local city
council like it's not.

Speaker 5 (11:31):
So.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Moan asked that police, veterans, and National Guard join the fight,
or else cities like Philadelphia will turn into lawless zones
like Portland and San Francisco. He also asked local militias
to be his own personal security force so that federal
employees do not try to arrest him.

Speaker 6 (11:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
He said that state governments should be left alone unless
they intervene. In his revolution, quote, the federal government is
the enemy. Then Mohne declared that quote, Joe Biden is
no longer in power. I am now officially the acting
president under martial law unquote. He ordered military generals to
not deploy US troops against US militias and instead join

(12:09):
their fight to defend the constitution.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
It would be fun if the constitution worked that way,
if like they'd put that in back in seventeen eighty seven,
like oh yeah, and if you know, if martial law
is declared. He's not around yet, but there's going to
be this guy just in Mode. He's a charge. So
this is one thing that I'm still slightly confused on. Well,
there's a few things that are obviously confusing. It seems confusing.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
But Mode offered a one million dollar bounty on a
number of high level federal US employees and one hundred
thousand dollars for every federal judge and even docksed one
in Pennsylvania. He claimed to currently have ten million dollars
to exhaust on these bounties, and that is not that's.

Speaker 4 (12:55):
Just not true. Yes, definitely not.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
Man constantly can plain about how he's in a poor
financial situation as a result of a number of factors.
He does not have ten million dollars. Now, he ordered
all non military federal employees to resign before ending up
like his father. Now, his father was an employee at
the US Army Corps of Engineers for most twenty years.
He resigned, I think like last year or a few

(13:20):
years back. It's interesting he called for specifically non military
federal employees to resign. He was very pro military. I'm
not sure if his father working for the US Army
Corps Engineers exactly that fits in to his ideology here.
But we're not laying out a clear line of thinking.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Obviously it is. This is just slightly off topic. But
it's never not fascinating to me how strong the feeling
of emotional attachment to the US military is, Like that
even this guy would be like, this guy who was
so clearly deranged and violent about this kind of thing
would be like but they're the exception, Like there's obviously

(14:00):
still basically good. It's just interesting to me, what else
is interesting to me. Garrison is where our money comes from.
And you know where our money comes from.

Speaker 4 (14:09):
The Federal Reserve.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yes, actually we are sponsored entirely, entirely by the Federal Reserve.
So please, I mean literally, anything you do will I
guess help the Federal Reserve. So go exist in capitalism

(14:35):
and we're.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Back speaking of another federal agency. One agency that Moan
addressed directly was calling for the Postal Service to suspend
all services split from the federal government or else he
will not be able to offer protection. And Jesus Christ, no,
that's negotiating with the Postal Service.

Speaker 4 (14:55):
That's very funny. I mean, this is serious, but that
is kind of funny. This guy is into Nazi. He's
not a Nazi.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
He is a He's an extremist. He is a he
is a conservative extremist.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
He does repeatedly in his book, by the way, also
talk about like racism being bad like that is like
very much a consistent through line.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
But some of this like kill your local postman type
stuff certainly reflects a strain of extrememist, neo Nazi thinking.
That particularly James Mason's stuff from the eighties. Yes, so
he also said quote if the media spreads lives with
this revolution, I authorize the targeting of news stations, their
owners and employees general kind of conservative, anti anti news,

(15:43):
anti journalist rhetoric.

Speaker 4 (15:45):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
The hunting, capturing, and killing of America's federal employees will
not stop until americans demands are met and the network
of America's traders is wiped out unquote. Now, some of
these demands that he called for includes closing the borders,
mass deportation of immigrants that have entered under the Biden regime,
ceasing all human trafficking of children and sex slaves, which

(16:07):
is obviously already illegal, canceling all public debt, an end
to the Federal Reserve, restore Congress's right to print interest
free money. Oh, and and ceasing all of the quote
woke and gender ideology propaganda in the schools unquote. So

(16:28):
we have a weird mix of like very like libertarian
stuff like the federal reserve, interest free money, and then
other more popular conservative stuff around like the border, and
then this thing about woke and gender ideology.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah, there's even a little like nessah Jesra stuff in
there too, about like the whole like allow the government
to print interest free money again, like that's that's it's
interesting that that's mixed in tomatoe as well.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah, yeah, you know, it's a it's a curious collection
of political thought. Now, traders to the country included not
just federal employees, but also quote bribed members of the
deep state, labor racketeers of the prison industrial complex, and
globalist leaders of assorted industries unquote. Now there's there's a
lot to unpacked there. Bribe members of the deep state.

(17:14):
I think it doesn't need any explanation. But Moan had
this idea that labor unions were working with corporations to
make straight white males have a hard time to find jobs,
so they would so that they would always be unemployed,
and unemployment leads to people being arrested and sent to

(17:35):
prison as a way to fund the court system. So
this is what he means by labor racketeers of the
prison industrial complex. It's that labor unions are colluding with
the government and businesses to keep certain sects of the
population unemployed to fill up prisons. Now, in terms of
globalist leaders of assorted industries, he specifically was talking about
big tech companies that commit tax evasion. He claimed that

(17:57):
he used to work for Microsoft and witnessed massive time eccivation.
I have not looked into that.

Speaker 4 (18:03):
I don't believe he will definitely do. Like, yeah, they
all do.

Speaker 2 (18:07):
It's not I don't think they break the law because
they have whole departments of people who are there to
make sure that at least they're not breaking the law
enough that it will matter. But like whatever, I mean again,
some of this does.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
Some of all.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Grievances like this come from real things, like the corporations
like Microsoft that are tremendously wealthy do not pay their
fair share and in fact do a great deal to
allide their tax burden. He's just like, yeah, It's one
of the frustrating things about this is how all of
this actual malfeasance feeds into these delusions and feeds into

(18:41):
the conspiratorial narratives of the people that take advantage of
people like justin Yep.

Speaker 3 (18:47):
He said that Marshal Law will continue as long as
Americans support him and until America is secured enough to
hold a legitimate election, and that Moan would authorize police
a military to use any force necessary to take back
because the city is from quote fifth column extremist organizations
such as the lgbt community, the BLM movement, and terrorist

(19:07):
organizations like Antifa.

Speaker 4 (19:09):
Unquote.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
This is where he went on a whole Antifa rant,
saying Antifa is a part of the Federal government's systematic,
top down, globalist and communist takeover of America. Moan stressed
the importance of capturing alive quote one of the key
players involved in this treason, or else they will never
be able to discover the entire network of evil. Unquote.
So Moan blamed Antifa, BLM, and the LGBTQ community for

(19:36):
stoking a division to create a race war and religious war.
It's it's just it's it's it's it's hard to hold
to hold the justification of your You're accusing people of
stoking division as you're holding up the severed head of
your father. Like, there's just that a complete disconnect here.

Speaker 4 (19:54):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
The government has disallowed any peaceful solution. Violence is the
only solution to the Fed government's treason and the actions
of their fifth column terrorist organizations like Antifa. This is
an ideological and spiritual war unquote.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah, very similar in some ways to what McVeigh was saying, right, Like,
this is the only way to communicate with the government.
It's the only language that they understand.

Speaker 6 (20:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
And then lastly, he kind of closes this video with
a further look into some of his own political delusions.
He said that before the twenty twenty elections, electors and
campaign contributors from both parties said that they saw Justin
Mohan as the best candidate for the president of America.
He's thirty two years old. He was like twenty eight

(20:40):
back in twenty twenty.

Speaker 4 (20:42):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
I could have been the first unanimously elected president, but
I was betrayed by the FBI, federal courts, and my
own family because there are people that believe I am
the Messiah, which goes against the government's satanic communist ideology.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Quick note, if all of those groups didn't want you
to be president, how would you have been elected unanimously
or would the FBI have been like, well, now that
he's on the ballot, we got to vote for the guy.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
So after saying there are many people that believe I
am the Messiah, he then said, quote, I would never
compare myself to Jesus Christ, unquote, which is not true.
He has many times.

Speaker 4 (21:20):
Yeah, he sure has.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
You know, most notably in the title of his book
The Second Messiah, King of Earth by Justin Mohan. Yeah,
although that is about his self insert character who he
says lives a life identical to his named Buster moon.

Speaker 4 (21:36):
Buster moon Uh huh.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
And then I will do the last little bit about
this video. Quote, if there is a federal employee in
your family, make it your New Year's resolution to kill
them in order to protect your own children unquote home
and then Moan followed that by quoting from Matthew ten
twenty one. This is a verse in the New Testament.
Brothers and sisters will betray one another and have you

(22:00):
each other put to death. Parents will betray their own children,
and children will turn against their parents and have them
killed unquote.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
It's interesting because I've heard that sided before, and usually
it was in like older conspiracies of the New World Order,
and like, yeah, that's what they believed the evil anti
Christ you win regime was going to do to them.
It's fun to hear someone be like, that's what we
have to kill the families of the people who are.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
I don't think that's what he's actually saying. He's saying
like he's talking about how he is felt betrayed by
his own family and by the government.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Oh gotcha, Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
This points to like this massive disconnect in his own head.
This is the betrayal he's talking about. He is he
is using this verse as a reference to like the
end times, but he's saying like, this is the betrayal
that we're seeing and in response, now we have to
do this. So on, I'm going to quote from ABC
News here. So, the US Marshall Service investigated Moan in

(23:00):
August or twenty twenty three after he allegedly made a
threat against a U. S. District Court judge. The case
was closed that same month. He was reported to police
pretty frequently for his bizarre behavior in his own neighborhood,
like sitting on manhole covers and staring at houses for
hours on end. Now Mon has held CONSPIRATORI and anti
government views for at least seven years and attempted to

(23:21):
recruit people to join his Moan's militia on Reddit and Discord,
though no one seemed to join, and then at least
one Discord server threw him out because of his repeated
recruitment attempts and after fleeing home after he posted that video,
he drove more than one hundred miles north and broke
into the Pennsylvania National Guard base with a gun, and

(23:42):
then was arrested after he was tracked there on his
cell phone. There is a song that Justin wrote about
three years ago about being arrested after being tracked on
his cell phone after doing violence against his family.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
You think he would have like not had a cell
phone on him, given that he was aware of that
as a risk.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
But I don't know if he was really thinking large
like yeah, if you watch the video, like he like
he thinks National Guard is going to like join him, Yeah,
he's not.

Speaker 4 (24:08):
He's not thinking about it that way.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
So yeah, I believe mon is published at this point
nine books. I'm going to read from his his Amazon
about page. Justimona is the author of seven books now nine,
and a musician of three albums and one single. His
life story is unbelievable and there may not be enough
words to describe him, but one may begin to understand

(24:32):
his complexity and experiences through his art. He only wishes
to bring positive change to the world. Now I will
I will talk about some of those some of those
other books after we take a quick ad break here
and learn about some important messages from our sponsors.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
So justin Mohan's bibliography, here we go. So I think
Robert has one of his books, The Second Messiah, King
of Earth. Yeah, there is many other books he's published,
including a.

Speaker 4 (25:11):
Book Startling Number.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
A book called The Pink, a book called Poems I
Wrote Well Stoned, a collection of poems they will burn,
this book, The Punishing America's Coming Bloody Revolution, The Kingdom
of Darkness, dark Ages of the Future, a collection of
short stories, and finally, The Revolution Leader's Survival Guide. How schools, workplaces,

(25:35):
and social norms kill the genius inside us.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
All not bad at titling, you know, so pretty pretty effective.
Good good for SEO.

Speaker 4 (25:44):
I'm on board.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Let's start with that last book here, The Revolution Leader's
Survival Guide. It targets the quote constraints against education, creativity,
and human progress throughout history unquote, and the book is
mostly about Mohan's own inability to find a high paying
enough job after college. This is a reoccurring trend in
a lot of his books, including I Believe the one

(26:07):
that Robert has. Mon complains about student loans, how America's
education system is faulty, and talks about being bullied in
school as a kid. I'm going to quote from the
book subscription. The author views the world on the brink
of either a golden age of world peace and space colonization,
or instead a second dark age of global wars and

(26:27):
depopulation within the next couple of decades, if not sooner.
Included within the book is a transcript of a letter
Justin Mohan wrote to Donald Trump, warning that if America
does not go under some great changes, Moan himself will
have to lead a peaceful revolution. In another book titled
The Kingdom of Darkness, published on May thirteenth, twenty twenty,

(26:48):
it's a novel about Satan and fallen angels becoming quote
trapped inside Earth's slowliest creatures after being banished from heaven.
He has a whole bitch of other like fantasy and
sci fi type books like aliens space exploration, a weird
collection genre. In a pamphlet he self published on Amazon
in August of twenty twenty titled America's Coming Bloody Revolution,

(27:12):
The small book contains two chapters, one titled why a
violent revolution is inevitable and a second titled How revolution
can be successful, Moan wrote, quote, Americans will have to
weigh what is worse allowing themselves to lose freedom and
independence or killing their own family members, teachers, workers, bosses, judges,

(27:35):
elected leaders, and other older generations unquote. This is where
we get a lot of predictive writing around what he's
going to be doing. Mohne described older generations as quote
traders who wished to to take away the freedom and
independence that comes with America democracy and free market capitalism.

(27:58):
Which leads me then to the book that Robert has,
The Second to Messiah, which was published in January of
twenty twenty. It's about a man named Buster Moon who
moves from Ohio to Colorado and quote painfully learns the
dark secret of Colorado from everything containing satanic cults, the
Democratic Party, and the Cold War. Now we will get
more into this book, specifically in a later episode. I'm

(28:21):
going to read a little bit from the back cover.
The only thing more absurd in this fiction book is
the fact that it's loosely based on the life of
author and musician Justin Mohan, whose four years stay in
Colorado caused multiple lawsuits changed the possible outcome of the
twenty twenty US presidential election by exposing three presidential candidates
as corrupt, which forced them to drop out of the race.

(28:43):
We have more of these presidential delusions that he was
talking about at the end of his beheading video here,
and in terms of how this mirrors, like I said,
we'll learn more about this book later, but I will
talk now some about his actual personal life, which will
then become slightly reflect did in the book, like going
to Colorado Springs. He graduated from Penn State with a

(29:04):
business management degree and sued the federal government multiple times
for letting him take out student loans that he was
forced to pay back. The most recent case was last year,
where he sued for ten million dollars because despite getting
a degree with the loans, he was unable to quote
find a satisfactory job as an over educated white man
to repay the loan, claiming that he was a victim
of affirmative action and reverse discrimination unquote. In a previously

(29:29):
dismissed lawsuit against the Department of Education, he alleged that
they neglectfully and fraudulently induced him to borrow money to
pay for his education without sufficiently warning him of the
possibility that he would face a difficult job market and
could be unable to pay back his student loan. So
Mohan did move to Colorado, just like Buster Moon about
ten years ago, eventually getting a job at Progressive Insurance,

(29:51):
but was fired in twenty seventeen for kicking down a
door and quote breaking the company's code of conduct. Moan
then sued Progressive in twenty nineteen for not receiving PROMI
motions because he was a man. In his Violent Revolution pamphlet,
Man claims that he was a victim of discrimination from
quote being a top performing, over educated, and overqualified male
employee unquote, and in that same pamphlet, Mohan wrote that

(30:14):
his educational, employment and legal issues are evident that there
is quote no peaceful solution for the youth to escape
debt based enslavement, unemployment, and ultimately imprisonment. He compared his
experience to quote the Soviet unions feared goolog prison labor
system and in which entire states and countries were essentially
turned into concentration camps. Mohan wrote that educators and parents

(30:37):
who quote knowingly lie, brainwash and dumb down their youth
unquote must be killed to prevent the spread of quote
globalized communism. And corporate agendas. This is where we have
an interesting combination of like anti communism fears but also
anti corporatism that you see in some sects of like
libertarian conservatism.

Speaker 4 (30:56):
You sure do.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
He claims that communism is like a virus and that
America must treat it like a virus. Quote the only
logical way to do so is for every American born
in nineteen ninety one or later to kill anyone born
before nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 4 (31:12):
Unquote. Well now he's cooking, Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm
back on board. I'm back on board. You know, this
could work. So it just so happens. Said that was
the year that he was born. Uh huh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Logical logical point to divide it on. I'd respect it
more if he'd been born earlier, you know. But so
I already mentioned some of his music. It had similar
predictive elements of he was doing art in almost like
in practice of what he was then going to later
do in person in terms of carrying of violence, as
well as just evident of kind of delusional and paranoid thinking.

(31:46):
He has a song about being gang stocked. He has
a song about I Think like a girlfriend who broke
up with him. He has songs talking about how it's
okay to kill communists and how we're overall seeing a
decline in American society. So that that is most of
what I have to say about Justin Moune. I could
certainly say a whole lot more now on top of

(32:06):
my research onto him himself. I also wanted to look
at the sort of online chatter that neo Nazis and
other extremists were saying, and I put together, hey, a
large catalog of telegram conversations about Justin Moune, watching the
spread of certain conspiracy theories around this incident, and just

(32:26):
to see what their overall take was. Will I will
paraphrase my eighty page research document here by saying, it
seems most Nazis and other white supremacists or far right
extremists thought that the Justin Moone incident was quote fake
and gay unquote. They tend to keep up with these
these thought fluencers, really glad that they're kidding some of

(32:49):
their side.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
Many other far right extremists took this to be a syop. Sure,
they thought it was an attempt to push forward this
anti militia bill. That's being talked about as well as
distract from the crisis at the southern border. Certain white
pharmacists were upset that he used the phrase to Judeo
Christian values because they are anti Semitic and Justin Moone

(33:12):
did not seem to be consciously anti Semitic. Yeah, and
had we had. These conspiracy theories travel everywhere, from standard
kind of neo Nazi telegram accounts to more conservative Boomer
Mega type stuff as well, mostly picking up on the
on the on the anti militia angle, how this is
probably a syop from the deep state to push forward

(33:35):
this anti militia bill. Some people thought thought they were
very clever in realizing this was a syop because they
thought justinmone was thirty three years old. And there's this
conspiracy theory around the number thirty three in a lot
of these circles, the conspiracies around how the number thirty
three is used a lot in like mass shooting incidents.
Now it's not this is just pattern recognition, but also

(33:55):
mon isn't thirty three, he's thirty two. So great, great
work there. And there's specifically one telegram channel that found
a prop head I believe on Etsy.

Speaker 4 (34:04):
Yeah, like a prop severed head.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
Yeah, we started seeing this spread all over Twitter, conservative
news sites. How this has to be fake because look
we found we found the fake head they used, which
is quite simply not the severed head that Justin Moan's
holding up in the video. I don't think it's really
much useful else to say about these conspiracy theories, but yeah,
they certainly were kind of laughing along at some of
like the gang Stocker e elements, thinking, you know, some

(34:31):
people obviously thought he was based and cool for actually
doing some of the ideological things that these Nazis believe in.
Others thought it was it's just fun to make fun
of a guy, so they decided it was a syop. Yeah,
that is That is most of what I had to
say about Justin Mohan.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
Well, this has been quite an inspiring journey. We are
going to have more to say about Justin and finally
get into his book, The Second Messiah, King of Earth,
which is and in a way become my Bible. I
think I may I may keep this in my apocalypse
go bag, so I can do like a book of
Eli with this thing. If the world ends, just be

(35:10):
wandering alone across the wasteland telling everybody about this man's book.

Speaker 4 (35:16):
I guess.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
Finally, the last thing I'll say is that this reminds
me of two recent incidents. We had one mass shooting
done by a Nazi in Denver, Colorado, and he previously
wrote and made short films depicting the murder that he
would then do. We also had the Highland Park shooting
on July fourth a few years back. Who the person
who did that created a lot of music online in

(35:39):
this very like I would say the Highland Park music
was much more in like the Schizowave genre of extremist content.
I think the stuff, the stuff that Justin Mohan is
producing is honestly more like the stuff that schizo wave
is like parodying, Like Justin Moans was a lot more
like sincere, less less ironic.

Speaker 5 (35:57):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (35:58):
It was, it was, it was.

Speaker 3 (35:59):
It was just like taking at face value these two
instances I was reminded of just because of how much
those acts of violence were predated by artistic expressions of
the later thing that they would end up doing. And yeh,
in Mohane's case, it's exactly the same. He has written
about killing family members, He's written about the exact way
he would be arrested and tracked down writing that goes

(36:20):
back like four or five years. This is there's so
many people online who have exact who are in this
same scenario, who are putting out this type of writing.
No one knows who they are. Moan had like five
listeners on Spotify. These people are unknown, and every once
in a while one of them decides that writing about
it isn't enough and they actually do it in the
real world. And it's just this, it's this interesting trend

(36:42):
of these people like almost like hyperstitioning these own acts
of violence by making art that predates it, almost in
some form of like preparation.

Speaker 4 (36:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
Yeah, And we talked about hyperstition as a concept a
bit in last weeks Behind the Bastards, but it is
it is a term for essentially the methods and ways
by which things that are fictional become real. And it
can be kind of as esoteric as the idea of
like preparing the way for a godlike AI by like

(37:17):
spreading belief and that sort of thing, or it can
be as direct, like as this as somebody envisioning the
acts they're going to carry out in fiction and then
carrying out those acts for real, like it on an
individual level, what you're doing when you're doing this is
you're kind of you are preparing yourself mentally for the
thing that you're going to do. And when I would

(37:39):
sort of lecture and talk about what to how to
know something is like a real threat versus somebody saying
shit on the internet, because that's obviously that's a real
problem when we talk about this, there's a huge quantity
of people saying stuff that could be them presaging like
an act of violence, and you simply can't go after everything.

(38:00):
One of the key things for me always is what
have they gone and done anything in the real world.
So for example, if a guy has like been going
out and like egging homeless people or like lighting their
shit on fire, and is also talking about murdering homeless people,
well that's probably a guy who's going to do something
right because he's actively going out in the real world

(38:21):
and taking steps. He's prepping himself. And I think this
kind of work. When somebody's written a whole novel about
their murder fantasies, obviously that's not a thing you can
invest your convict on, but like nor should it be.
But that is somebody who is doing more than bullshitting online.
That's somebody who has a fixation that they clearly can't
get over, and those do sometimes lead to violence. And

(38:42):
so yeah, I think I think it's really valid to
look at this as not just a couple of incidents
that are troubling, but as evidence of a troubling trend.

Speaker 4 (38:54):
Yep, all right, well that does a frustrating comment. Yeah,
all right.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Please do not earn your place in heaven by sending
a trader to hell early. It does not need to
work out very well.

Speaker 4 (39:06):
No, earn your place in heaven. Uh.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
I don't actually have a joke to finish this episode with.
Don't don't commit murder?

Speaker 5 (39:14):
Bye?

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Oh, Welcome back to Podcast Man Sad, Bad People, the
podcast about bad people that make the podcast Man Sad.
I'm the podcast Man Robert Evans, and my co host
today is our friend Garrison Davids. Garrison, how are you
doing good? I thought it was one of my better intros.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
It was unfortunately quite good for a topic about it's
abensively deranged shit.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah yeah, So obviously this is part two of our
series on Justin Mohan, the author of our first politically.

Speaker 3 (40:08):
The author first, just as author better known for his
other work.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah, I think people should know that. When you make
that joke, as you did the other week on Behind
the Bastards Too, you are referring to a mathematics paper
that cites the Unibomber's other published mathematic theories. Is like
better known for his other work mailing bombs to people?

Speaker 4 (40:34):
Oh, pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, And like the Unabomber, Justin Mohan is deeply accomplished,
as in all he's written more books than I have.

Speaker 4 (40:44):
Well, yes, that is true.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
I'm not sure if you want to be writing the
types of books that Justin is but yeah.

Speaker 4 (40:50):
No, but but he did write them, and you get
credit for that. Sure.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
So this was, as you stated last episode, published in
twenty twenty, and I I need to start with the
cover of this thing, because it's it's something else.

Speaker 4 (41:04):
We see, not a good cover.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
No, it is taken. He appears to have taken it
or someone else took it from of him very close
up at a rest stop. And this is relevant because
rest stops play a critical critical role in some of
his beliefs about the world and some of his theories
about things that have happened to us. Yes, rest stops
are happening places for Justin Mohan. Okay, he is looking

(41:30):
behind him, He's like slightly disheveled. He's got like his
shirt open weirdly down like a button further than.

Speaker 4 (41:37):
Yeah, I'm basically gang stocking vibes here.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Yeah, it's very much. Again, we'll explain gang stocking in
a second. But the pictures him, he's like looking behind
his shoulder. There's like two big lights behind him in
the distance in this photo, clearly taking it a rest stop.
And then there are like cartoon text bubbles over his
shoulder next to the lights that say get his picture, Hey,
there he is, and then like cartoon action bubbles that

(42:01):
say snap, snap, that I think are supposed to represent
people taking photos taking pictures.

Speaker 4 (42:04):
Yeah, yeah, okay this.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
As soon as I saw this, I had the same
reaction you had, which is like, oh, this is some
gang stocking shit. And if you're not aware of gang stocking,
gang stocking is kind of an er web two point
zero conspiratorial belief system. I don't know if a conspiracy
theory is even really the right way to frame it.
Gang Stalking is people who have I think these are

(42:27):
generally people with schizophrenia, and one of the things that
you can experience with schizophrenia is both this kind of
overwhelming sense of paranoia and also the stereotypical hearing voices right,
and some people become convinced that they are being followed.
You know, this is something that has happened probably as
long as that it has existed, that they are being

(42:47):
like tracked, that they are people who are listening in
on their thoughts. You hear variations of it. With the
internet and digital communities, A chunk of people experiencing this
started forming communities online, and I don't know the exact
I don't know if anyone has sort of like sketched
out how this happened in time, but the belief they

(43:08):
ended up at is that certain people are what are
called targeted individuals within the community, and those people are
being stalked at all times by large numbers of generally
government spies. Now when I say government spies, they are
not envisioning like a James Bond type operator. They believe
these are the regular people in the street around them,

(43:28):
like people in their neighborhood. Their neighbors are all spies
and are all stalking them all the time. And you
can watch hours of videos. These people will often film
eight hours of their life at a stretch, and you
can see them just like angrily shouting at their window
at like some dude walking past their house or whatever,
or like a car. You like see that blue cars
past three times, and that wouldn't happen if this wasn't

(43:49):
like that. And it's so one of the things that like,
one of the reasons that gang Stocking is kind of
interesting and valuable to study if you're interested in, like
how we got to our present moment of like reality
collapse in the United States, is that this is an
example of kind of feelings that have been associated with
certain mental illnesses. I'm not going to say it's just schizophreny,

(44:10):
but certain mental illnesses bring about severe bouts of paranoia
and a feeling that you are being stalked right or
people who are listening in on your thoughts or whatever.
Because of the way digital communities work, a number of
people experiencing this were able to not just get together
and share their experiences, but convince each other that they
were not the result of an illness and are in

(44:31):
fact the result of a conspiracy. And they have now
built a mythos around that conspiracy, and it has led
to killings before. People have killed folks they believed were
stalking them over gang stalking delusions. It's been happening for years.
So yeah, that was the first thing that occurred to
me when I saw this cover. And you can find
other art that Moan put out where it's like real
pictures of him and then fake art of like ghostly

(44:52):
figures stalking him with cameras and stuff.

Speaker 4 (44:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
A few months before he released his book, he put
out a song that's I called the Justin's Stalkers about
being gang stocked.

Speaker 6 (45:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yeah, and again, gangstock is not a political conspiracy theory
other than that you have to believe the government's evil,
but don't we all right, So it's very accessible.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
There's certain gangstalking people who think they're like the Freemasons
are stocking here, like the Illuminati is stalking.

Speaker 4 (45:20):
It's like random Antifa, you know.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
And sure, yeah, shit gets grafted on as a result
of politics, but it did not inherently start as something
that was like a political thing, just kind of out
of this very ex filesy because the nineties is really
when this starts to form. I think late nineties.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
And it's spread like wildfire are on. Like early Internet culture,
people were able to convince each other or like yeah,
have have their alreadies, like like a small delusion be
strengthened and grown stronger by other people in this community,
all kind of encouraging each other.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
And I think it's relevant too that it's kind of
a Web two point zero early Web two point oh phenomenon,
because I don't think you get the same thing, and
I'm not going to say that what you would get
would be any healthier, but from the social media, because
the way most social media works is everyone's kind of
in a big pit together, and this was really the
result of a kind of community that was closed to outsiders,

(46:12):
that wasn't really being watched by people who weren't drawn
to it, building a culture in people like really, it
takes a lot of time for that to happen. Obviously,
YouTube is also a big place where this has grown,
but I think after it had its roots established that
was a bit of a digression. But I think it
is kind of necessary because this is definitely that is
definitely where justin comes out of you know, like that

(46:33):
is very clear to me. All of this is kind
of rooted fundamentally in Gang Stocking. I think that's like
the foundational keystone belief in what has become his like
conspiratorial milieu. So into the book itself, the first page,
after the page that lets us all know Kindled direct
publishing this responsible for this thing, says book Love.

Speaker 4 (46:54):
Kindles right publish it.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
Thanks, Amazon the best place to find all of the
wild extra.

Speaker 4 (47:00):
Otherwise, never never.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Make They've they've really done us all a solid. This
book is dedicated to those who know who the real
enemy is and can still laugh even in the worst situations. Hope,
I don't know what I have that describes me. Yeah,
it's great. So there are ten chapters in this thing.
They are long chapters. Chapter one is thirty two pages,

(47:23):
Chapter two is almost sixty pages, Jesus. Chapter three is
like another sixty pages, like fifty pages for five. Yeah,
these are like long, long chapters. And yeah, it's about
four hundred and fifty pages.

Speaker 6 (47:36):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
So chapter one opens and I'm just gonna read you
actually a decent little chunk here. So it starts with
like him talking to his parents, But why leave Buster,
You're a hometown hero, Missus Moon said. Missus Moon in
her late fifties, paced back and forth on the hardwood
floor of the living room. Yeah, Buster, you're popular. You
were at the top of your class in high school,

(47:57):
you were a star athlete. You can end up mayor
of this town someday. Why don't you stay around here
where everyone knows you and see what happens. You'll have
to start a new elsewhere, mister Moon said. And obviously,
Buster Moon is are the actual justin Mohan And we're
talking about his parents, and when we talk about mister Moon,
this is his dad who he.

Speaker 4 (48:17):
Murdered and beheaded. Just you know, keep that in mind.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Mister Moon, in his early sixties, sat on a couch
in the living room watching television. A black and white
episode of The Twilight Zone was on. The sound on
the TV was muted. That's the point. I want to
start anew I want to meet new people, or at
least not associate with the people I grew up with
and went to school with my whole life. They're all
going nowhere in town, and they'll take me down with them.
And we get a little more of that where like

(48:41):
he's talking about why he wants he's not happy here.
There's no future for him. What's interesting to me is
why he depicts and we don't know that this is
accurate to his experience with his parents. But also I
don't necessarily think it is not, because what he depicts
his parents as saying is he shouldn't do this because
it's danger Leaving home is dangerous. You can't be safe

(49:03):
on your own in a new place or in the city,
and you will inevitably get murdered or have something horrible happen.
He puts these words in his dad's mouth right after
he like, first his mom tells him, like, you're gonna
die if you move out, and then he puts this
in his dad's mouth, Yeah, you're going to get kidnapped,
addicted to heroin, and sold into a sex trafficking rink.
Then five years from now, we'll find pictures of you

(49:24):
bound and gagged on some Russian website where you're up
for sale. So that's his dad, and then his mom ads,
why do you think your older siblings stayed within Ohio
when they moved out. It's dangerous out of state without
your family. So maybe that's just him putting words.

Speaker 4 (49:38):
In their mouth.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
But like, I have heard stuff like that from people
that is not an uncommon thing to express, especially among
conservative families. Cities are dangerous, people are getting human trafficked
all the time. It's not safe to be out on
your own.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
And those are some things he talked about in his
beheading video. And yeah, I know that after he had
to move back home from Colorado after losing his job,
he did move back in with his parents in Pennsylvania. Yep,
he does have an older sister that just ran in
other things. I know his actual personal life and how
they could maybe tie in.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
But yeah, yeah, yeah, And then you know, a little
bit later, as this argument goes on, there is a
note where his mom's like, maybe it would be for
the best if we took you to a psychiatrist. Buster,
you don't seem to be thinking straight.

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Interesting. Unclear to me if.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
They did, but I think that does kind of suggest
that was a thing his parents suggested often. And then
his dad says, yeah, you're talking crazy, Buster. If someone
doesn't mug you when you step out of the car,
you'll end up running out of money and being homeless,
and then you'll get put in prison for panhandling, trespassing
or stealing food and ended up making prison love to
Bubba the butcher, and that has the feeling of something

(50:49):
that he heard before. That that's pretty specific, like that
sounds like something somebody was told and is kind of
repeating here. You know, I don't know that, but that
is very much the feel it has. And there's a
couple other bits where it's like, I could see this
being something you heard from your very conservative family or

(51:09):
elsewise picked up in the media. Because there's another point
where his dad is like, you'll be all alone and
they know exactly how much money you have. It's all digital.
You can't beat the system. You can't beat dot dot dot.
And then in italics the machine missus Moon shot a
white eyed glance.

Speaker 4 (51:26):
At mister Moon.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Huh, what do you mean, buster said, Mister Moon shook
his head. Oh, nothing, you'll have to find out for yourself.
And then at this point a cow screams. That's how
he describes the cow as screaming. And then their dog
barks and they all run outside. It's clear that something
has gone wrong, and mister Moon says, aw, hell not again,
those cult fucking commie bastards. He grabs a shotgun and

(51:49):
there they find the ex sanguinated and skinned corpse of
the family cow outside in the.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
Yard because they're at like a farm in Ohio, I believe.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Yeah, they're at like the family. So he thinks at
first that this hide as a carpet. Then Buster realized
the carpet had black and white spots like a cow
and was hide material. The cow had been completely exsanguinated,
as the livestock industry would call an animal drained of blood.
The cow's eyes were missing, the bones were strewn in
a perfect circle around the cowhide in an almost ritualistic
or ceremonial manner, with a skull at the top of

(52:20):
the circle. Will twelve would be on a clock about
the same time it was. Then there was not one
drop of blood near the scene.

Speaker 4 (52:26):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Now, when I brought up x files earlier, that's kind
of why, because that's x files stuff.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
That's a very x files opening up. The Twilight Zone
was playing on the TV in the room in the scene.

Speaker 4 (52:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
This is all obviously, by the way, if you listen
to a lot of or read a lot of like
this particularly kind of turn of the last century UFO stuff,
a lot of it focuses on animals being exanguinated, right,
cows killed in these like weird fashions. Now he is
talking about a ritual murder. And also the timing doesn't
work out because they hear the cow run outside and
it's been completely skin and excite. But well, I think

(52:59):
what's important is it's like you get an idea of
like this didn't come into his mind unbidden. Right, the
term exsanguinated as referred to a cow's corpse had not
come into his mind and bidden. That's evidence of like
the kind of media diety had.

Speaker 6 (53:10):
Right.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
I mean he was born in nineteen ninety one, that's like, yeah,
that's prime growing up with the XPS.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Oh absolutely, yeah. I mean I'm not that much older
than him, and that was definitely a big part of
my childhood.

Speaker 4 (53:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
But you know what could be a big part of
your childhood retroactively.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
The products that can make your life better.

Speaker 4 (53:30):
That's right, That's right.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Garrison time is a flat circle, and that means that
if you buy products that advertise on our show today,
anything bad that happened in your childhood can be healed.
So here's the at.

Speaker 5 (53:53):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
We're back and we're reading from the Second Messiah, King
of Earth by our friend justin Mohan.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
So it opened with what I would describe probably as
it's probably some kind of satanic ritual.

Speaker 4 (54:05):
I'm guessing.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Yeah, yeah, we get a little more about what his
dad thinks here, because the next thing, you know, but
his dad starts crying and Buster tries to comfort him,
and his dad says, a cow that waits nearly a time, Well,
look the spelling's not perfect. A cow that weighs nearly
a ton gets completely drained of blood, and its bones
and organs are taken out perfectly, without one drop of
blood being spilled. And it all happens right here in

(54:27):
the middle of this field and less than an hour,
maybe even in just a couple of minutes. It's the
fifth cow this has happened to you this season, and Betsy
was my best cow. We just won't be able to
make a profit this year.

Speaker 4 (54:37):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
He starts to cry, and then he says, don't tell
your mother I told you this, but you're right to
leave this place and go far away. There's nothing for
you here, and in fact, there's nothing for anyone here.
So at this point Buster's like, hey, don't say that, dad.
You know we've still got a farm, it'll be okay,
and his dad says, oh, buster, soon you will learn
if you move out west on your own. There is
an evil in this world which has found its way

(54:58):
into this country, to every country. It is an ugly evil.
Nearly all the family farms in this state and plenty
of other states have seen the same trend in the
past twenty years or so, a trend none of us
have seen before, unexplainable tragedies. Livestock gets mutilated or disappears,
crops get infested with bugs and disease, and then all
of a sudden, the farm is taking a financial loss,

(55:19):
the farm shrinks, and eventually the family goes bankrupt or
their land is bought out by a big corporation. More
farmers have committed suicide in the past decade than any
other profession and I can't blame them.

Speaker 4 (55:29):
Now.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
That ties into some very real and very powerful conspiracy
theories that this is a lot of this ties into
like Bill Gates stuff, you know, the idea he has
bought up a bought a bunch of farmland and among
conspiratorial sex he has bought all the farmland and China's
buying all of it or China and Bill Gates are
buying it together, and they want to because they want
to control the food supply and take out the ability

(55:52):
of Americans to feed themselves. Right Like, this is a
This is something he picked up from right wing media.
This is not an invention of his for this book.
This is probably something he was either raised to believe
or came to believe fairly early in life because of
what other people around him were saying. This is common stuff.
He has put a twist on it, but this is

(56:12):
not coming out of nowhere. So after this, he basically
tries to talk his dad and like, hey, can't you
call the FBI or the police, serve you survey them
to catch whoever's doing this? And his dad says, other
farmers have tried, they just lose all their money faster,
and the police and an FBI have investigated, But how
could they stop something like this from happening out of nowhere.
I've sold more than half the acres of the Moon

(56:34):
family farm over the past three years alone, and we
can still barely stay afloat. There's no fighting it. It's
too secretive, it's too consptantant, it's too well orchestrated. It's
just too evil. But why is this happening, Why is
the government letting America's farms get unfairly taken over? Well,
as my father once told me, if you want to
take over a country, you have to gain control of
their food supply. Remember, my father was an immigrant from

(56:56):
Germany and he fled the Nazis with your grandmother, who
was a Jew, to come to America. He used to
always say, there are the Germans, there are the Russians,
and then there are the Germans from Russia, and they
all came to America for the same reason land.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
And this is that is Justin's family history, which is
also yeah, why some Nazis on telegram did not like him.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Yeah, he's very much not a Nazi. And at the
same time there's elements of like what he's saying here
that like, yeah, the Germans from Russia that moved here
very much John Birch, stuff that like a fifth column
of communists from Europe have moved here and are trying
to change this country. So the conversation ends, he goes
to sleep. He wakes up the next morning to like

(57:39):
leave his family forever to start a new life out west,
and he starts by going out to the farm, taking
out his pipe and his last bit of marijuana, a
few green buds that he says to himself, perfectly calculated,
and then he smokes his last bowl of marijuana, which
I'm sure he did regularly and certainly did not help.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
His So Justin Mohan did have a medical marijuana card
that he had to give up on January twenty ninth
to go the handgun that he would then later use
one day later to kill his father.

Speaker 4 (58:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
I guess good that he had to give up his
medical marijuana card first. Yeah, that's keeping people saying yeah, yeah,
really stop the problem. So he says goodbye to his
parents and he gets on the road, right they seem.
He actually does not describe his dad as being very
mean in this He's pretty sympathetic in the book. But interesting, Yeah,
which is interesting. But you know, a few years went

(58:31):
by between this one and between him killing his father.
So why when I brought up earlier that highway rest
stops are a major part of this book, that's because
of what comes next. So he crosses from Ohio into
Indiana and he sees a rest area approaching Hmm, got
a piss and wouldn't mind a snack, Buster said. He
pulls off the highway. He gets into a parking lot,

(58:52):
and he describes most of the men and women wore overalls,
flannel shirts, and straw hats walking in and out of
the building to and from the parking lot. A few
people stood off to the sides of the building in
parking lot. In a grass area, a few men were
urinating outside near the trees. An old man was squatting
at the tree line taking a shit. I've never been
to I've been to a lot of rest drops. I've
actually not seen that happening at a rest stop. But

(59:14):
this is to set up something that's happening at the
rest stop, which he learns about when he goes into
the bathroom. And it turns out to be a bad
decision because as soon as he stands at the urinal,
he hears someone behind him saying.

Speaker 4 (59:24):
Oh, yeah, that's real nice.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
Just look at that. You want to try it? Another
voice whispered. Buster eyed with one eyebrow and raised towards
the stall on his left four legs stood in the stall,
and then he hears people snorting drugs and a bit
of white powder falls to the floor. And a guy
falls down and then is like, oh shit, that's good.
How much for an ounce I think they're selling. I'm
not sure if it's supposed to be fentanyl or cocaine, Yeah,

(59:48):
something like that. And then they realize he's listening to
them do cocaine or whatever in the rest stop bathroom.
Hold on a sec, I think someone's in here listening
to us. The other person whispered, should we kill him?
The first person whispered, at which point he fleets.

Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
The rest stop. Yeah, quick escalation.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
This is like such a like to take into a
humorous degree, but such a like oh what what the
Fox News viewing set thinks about? Like everything outside of
their suburbs.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
Justin did not grow up in Ohio. He grew up
in Pennsylvania. I think his family lived about an hour
north of Philadelphia, So he grew up in a very
like suburban area outside of a big city. And that
all kind of grafts onto this.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Yeah, it makes sense. Now, there's an interesting bit here
when he's outside of I guess they decided not to
chase him out of the bathroom, but he's still walking
around the rest stop, and we get a little like
gang stalking bit here, people stared at Buster and kept
glancing at him, and he wondered why he didn't look
or dress too differently. And he was barely out of
Ohio than he realized everyone was with someone else, nobody

(01:00:53):
else was alone except him, And like, that's a delusion.
That's the kind of delusion leads to gangstik because number one,
I guarantee you there were other alone people that every
rest stop he ever went to. But also like people
don't pay attention to that sort of thing. That is
a voice in his head telling him to hyper focus
on this.

Speaker 4 (01:01:12):
So he gets.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Freaked out by this. He describes himself having a panic attack. Right,
He describes like having a panic attack about the fact
that he's alone out here. Now it seemed as though
more people were glancing at him, even talking about him,
as if they sensed his feeling of vulnerability emanating from
his chest like sharp smelling fresh blood. So he finishes
eating and he gets back on the highway and he

(01:01:33):
drives for a bit more until he crosses he passes
Indiana and gets into Illinois, and then we have another
rest stop scene. This is like he spends a lot
of time on rest stops and this is I'm going
to need you're accult knowledge here, Garrison, so you can
let me know if he gets.

Speaker 4 (01:01:50):
This stuff right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
So, as he's like walking through the rest stop area,
he sees that, like there's a poster on the wall
that says, this cabin was once an outpost for trading
with the Native Americans, used during the Civil War to
store guns and ammunition. Then he walks to another glass
casing on the adjacent wall and he reads the poster
inside considered haunted by locals after peg and witches lived
in the cabin who were later burned at the stake

(01:02:12):
for witchcraft. Abandoned for over one hundred years before being
restored as a rest area. So that's to set the scene.
And then he goes like gets himself some food or something,
and as he's looking outside at the surrounding forest, he
sees one hundred yards into the forest there are tiki
torches lit and it's four oh one pm in the afternoon.
What the fuck do they have torches lit in the

(01:02:32):
forest for if it's not going to be dark for
another two hours, Buster said, So he walks in and
he sees a few individuals dressed like vagabonds, dancing slowly
in circles around the fire, with their arms spread out
waving in the air. Buster quietly climbed through some bushes
to get a quiet closer look. There were two men
and a woman, all in dirty torn robes, dancing within
a circle of lit candles and tiki torches. One male

(01:02:54):
and female danced inside the circle, chanting and murmuring words
which Buster couldn't make out. The other male was kneeling
on the ground inside the circle, carving up pumpkin A
picture lay in front of him in a bed of flowers. Please,
spirits of nature and beyond, except this pumpkin carving and
our sacrifices on this day of sam Hayne, in remembrance
of our deceased loved ones, please ease their passage into

(01:03:14):
the other world. Okay, how's that sounding so far? Garrison?

Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
Is that real?

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
Is this supposed to be around Halloween? Is this supposed
to be.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
It's unclear, but based on the fact that it day
ends at six pm?

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
Probably yes, Oh yeah, okay, well yeah, I mean, dancing
around a fire is certainly uh certainly fire rest stop.

Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
Sure, all right, Well, let's get to the let's get
to them finishing the ritual. So next a woman screams
the magic words ayaka, I don't know. Looked it up,
couldn't find anything.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
That doesn't sound familiar to me either, but yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:03:50):
So she screams.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
And then another female emerged from behind a tree with
a donkey by a leash in one hand and a
stick carrying a decorated horse's skull on the other. The
horse's skull had read ornaments in its eye sockets and
a sheet draping over its head. She danced into the
center of the circle of candles with the others. The
man who was kneeling picked up a long curved sword
from the ground and stood up. Let the sacrifice of
this ass please the spirits of nature.

Speaker 4 (01:04:13):
The man yelled, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
Well, you know, this is probably a little bit more
intense than your average wiccan soven ritual.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
But sure, yeah, yeah, I don't know an ass. That's
a unique sacrifice story. Usually it's like a cow or
a chicken or something. But uh huh, I appreciate that.
So he raises the sword above his head. No buster
yelled heehaw, the donkey whine. The donkey got scared and
jerked away, just as the man swung the sword. Slush

(01:04:42):
blood spurted upwards and outwards. Ah, the female yelled. The
female fell to her knees, and the donkey ran away
from the forest. Her seffered arm, still.

Speaker 4 (01:04:51):
Holding onto the leech.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
The female raised her bleeding stump. You idiot, you cut
off my arm, she said, Well, the donkey got scared.
The man said, Now, what are we going to eat?
The woman said. The three others glanced at each other,
then looked at the woman on the ground with one arm. No,
don't even think about it, she said. The man holding
the sword raised it high up on his head again. Ah,
she screamed. Ah, Buster screamed. The woman held her remaining

(01:05:15):
arm up just as the man swung down the sword.
The sword cut her hand in half from top to
bottom between the middle finger and ring finger, slicing all
the way down her forearm. Now that's that's not where
I expected this passage to go. But it gets better
because they all realize Buster's there at this point and
give up on their plans to eat this woman, who

(01:05:36):
they have now hacked at twice, and instead she and
all of them start charging Buster, and he describes it
as they all turned directly towards Buster and began ranning
towards him. Even the woman with one arm, which was
divided in half like a lobster claw, ran towards Buster,
her arm flapping in halves as she sprinted towards him.

Speaker 4 (01:05:54):
That is interesting, writing, Yeah, that's I didn't call that coming.
I love that. Yeah, she got lobster afied. Yeah, that's
a very eventful saw one.

Speaker 6 (01:06:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:06:06):
Huh uh huh. I don't think that actually happened to Buster.
I don't think that. I don't believe.

Speaker 3 (01:06:14):
On Justin's move from Pennsylvania to Colorado, he stumbled across
a pagan ritual where they dismembered a woman and gave
her a lobster claw.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
I do suspect that maybe he saw someone walking their
dog near a rest stop and filled in the.

Speaker 4 (01:06:29):
Rest That is certainly possible. Speaking of dog shit, you
know what's not dog shit? These ads? Uh huh, that's right,
these ads.

Speaker 3 (01:06:41):
Aren't we sponsored by like the state of Ohio or something?

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
Huh oh, yeah, then in that case we probably should
just move on. Ah, we are back and having a
really good time learning some more about our old friend

(01:07:05):
Justin moan So Garrison. At this point, he flees from
the wickanists and their de handed friend, and he gets
back on the road again. Doesn't seem to call the
police over this, but I guess they probably were in
on it too. What could the police have done about
people dismembering a woman directly next to a crowded highway

(01:07:26):
rest stop? So he decides he gets to Saint Louis
he needs to find a place to eat. He finds
a cheap Italian restaurant and he parallel parked at the curb.
Buster walked inside the restaurant into the counter. A small
man stood beside the counter with a thick Italian accent.

Speaker 4 (01:07:44):
I make a good bye for you like you find
on the East coast.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
Yeah, no, West coast. And then he uses a slur
for gay people stuff. Okay, no, good thank you. Buster
said you ain't a slur, are you? The man said no, sir,
Buster said you sure you don't don't want us some
pineapples on this with no red sauce, all white and
a cheesy stuffed crust.

Speaker 4 (01:08:08):
Huh. And then he calls him a slur again no
very stereotypical, but also big in an Italian chef character.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
Here, you know, I actually I actually ate at an
Italian restaurant in Saint Louis last year. I was not
accosted for being gay.

Speaker 4 (01:08:25):
But that's good. That's good. Did your guy have a
comedic Italian accent?

Speaker 6 (01:08:31):
No?

Speaker 4 (01:08:31):
I think I was being served by a lesbian. Actually, okay,
well that's probably why. That's probably why. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
So buster tells him that he just wants a plain pizza,
and the pizza man is willing to serve him, but
he does use the slur again. At this point, two
men barged into the restaurant wearing long black pea coats,
black pants and shoes and black fedoras.

Speaker 4 (01:08:50):
Already paid my space. Here we go. This is this
is what I was signing up for.

Speaker 5 (01:08:56):
This is rough.

Speaker 4 (01:08:56):
Stops are fine, this is what I wanted. Yeah, I
already paid my dues.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Boys, the man behind the counter said. The man behind
the counter spun pizza dough in one hand. Look pet
tony unpazzo cone pizza, one man said. The other man
in the fedora laughs. The old fool thinks we're here
to collect dues. So what the hella do you want
a fucking pizza for?

Speaker 4 (01:09:19):
And he just keeps using that he can't he cannot
mention pizza with that, dropping a slur. I am, I'll
tell you what.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
I'm not sympathetic towards this Italian man's plight. Both men
and Fedoras laughed hysterically and turned towards Buster. They lifted
their pea coats and revealed Thompson's submachine guns. They can't
tell me guns.

Speaker 4 (01:09:40):
Those are so much more expensive than modern crime guns.
Why are they spending thirty three hundred this? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:09:48):
Yeah, where?

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
Oh it's good stuff, like in Chicago, baby, in Saint Les,
of course, Chicago.

Speaker 4 (01:09:59):
Come on, Lewis, let's so you real here. The men
never explain why they're killing this guy. But as Buster's eyes,
yeah yeah, these are the These are the LGBT police.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
So they they open fire. They each empty one hundred
bullets towards the man behind the counter. Then they turned
to leave. You saw nothing, kid, nothing got it? The
man said, I didn't see shit. Buster said, oh my god,
So the bigoted pizza man has been shot full of
holes and honestly, I'm fine, just leaves and goes back

(01:10:37):
to his car.

Speaker 4 (01:10:38):
He finds, what a fascinating thing to include the story.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Like it's He's making a lot of choices here. I
wish I could ask him about some of his process,
like why did the pizza man have to be stereotypically Italian?
Why did the gangsters have to carry a gun that
has been outdated for nearly one hundred years. Anyway, he
goes to a cheap Asian restaurant next, and again parallel

(01:11:05):
parks at the curve. He really wants us to know
that he can parallel park. This is this is something
he's made a point of several times.

Speaker 4 (01:11:11):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:11:12):
Oh no, Garrison, I'm not not excited to try to
read you. The next line, a small man stood behind
the counter with a thick Chinese accent.

Speaker 4 (01:11:20):
Nope, nope, nope, you can do Italian.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
I am not gonna try this. What's important, you know,
is that he says the same thing as the Italian man.
I make it racistly, but he says, I'll make you
good food like you get on the East coast, no
West coast. And then he also uses the same slur.
And then he asks several more times about it and
repeatedly calls him a slur. I don't understand why they

(01:11:45):
are both the same person, but the same two men
in long black pea coats fedoras come in and then
they shoot this guy repeatedly.

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
Huh yeah, yeah, that's actually more interesting than this whole
instant gets repeated, just a slightly different cultural backing.

Speaker 4 (01:12:04):
It is.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
It is compelling, right, and again the guys like you
saw nothing, But then they're like, oh, hey, aren't you
the same kid from the other restaurant where we just
machine gun demand and Buster, showing admirable bravery here, says, yeah,
what's going on. I'm just trying to find something to eat,
and the mafia man very nicely explains, Oi, kid, every

(01:12:25):
restaurant in Saint Louis is owned by the same gang.
That's why they all say the same script when you
walk in. But we're taking over their racket and we're
taking over their restaurant business in Saint Louis.

Speaker 4 (01:12:36):
So that's why both the Chinese man and the Italian
man said the same things. Is they have a script.
Oh wow, huh yeah, that's compelling. That is compelling. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
So so Buster stops at a gas station to get
a pre made tuna sand which, which, to be honest,
seems like the decision to make after after going two
of these. Yeah, so he winds up driving again through
the countryside, he approaches Columbia, in between Saint Louis and
Kansas City, and he asks a guy if he can
use a public restroom. Yes, sir, just take this here key,

(01:13:14):
witches so you can get in the door. The man
held a key up towards Buster.

Speaker 4 (01:13:18):
Hau.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
The man laughed odd way to write laughter, not how
laughter sounds. Buster walked up to the man and took
the key.

Speaker 4 (01:13:26):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Buster said, we'll say, mister, you're not from around here?
Is yeah, I don't recognize you. The man said, no,
I'm just passing through. Buster said, you're making your way
to Kansas City. Yes, sir, well you better be careful.
There are abandons on that bridge that goes over the
Missouri Rivers sometimes at night. Now that's not true.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
But also I did run into bandits on my okay, okay,
on my road trip through through Kansas.

Speaker 4 (01:13:50):
Yeah, okay, it's been a couple of years for me.
Yeah Saint Louis, Yeah, no, it was. It was intense.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):
So Buster's like, that's great. I'm gonna use the bathroom anyway,
and the man says, I'll be watching you, and so
Buster says, okay, maybe I won't go, and then the
man yells, I was gonna suck your dick. So I
think we've gotten a good picture of, h what's going
on with this guy. I'm not really sure why he

(01:14:19):
It's interesting, like even the absurdity does have kind of
its roots, and you can see some of these this
like everybody is programmed, like saying the same script or whatever,
like they're the Like that's why these interactions seem weird
to me, is that like, this isn't real people talking
to me.

Speaker 4 (01:14:36):
These are people reading from a script. It's all.

Speaker 2 (01:14:37):
Yeah, you can kind of tie it all back to
some of the delusional thinking I want cities.

Speaker 4 (01:14:42):
Are these like lawless zones?

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
Yes, yes, there's bandits on the road and people just
getting machine gunned in there in their restaurants.

Speaker 4 (01:14:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
So this book ends. One of the last chapters about
this is the FBI and the CIA electrocuting Buster and
asking him questions. They're making him specifically, they want him
to tell them their sins, right.

Speaker 4 (01:15:01):
Because he's the second Messiah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):
Because he's the second Messiah, so one of the masks,
and they seem to know everything about his entire life, right,
which is again kind of ties back to the delusion.
So one of them is like, what about the time
you were drunken through a punching a guy who wasn't
looking during a group fight in college? Not really sure
what a group fight in college is, but we can
move right past that. What about all the cigarettes you've smoked,

(01:15:23):
an acid you've taken, and mushrooms in ecstasy and all
the other drugs you did. I only did them a
couple of times. It's not like I'm an addict. Still
serious damage to the body and putting your life at risk.
CIA is very concerned about his overall health.

Speaker 3 (01:15:35):
Yeah, the CIA famously on the edge about usings like
at Las.

Speaker 5 (01:15:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
So this goes on for a while, and then the
CIA agent leaves and FBI agents put him into a
black suv and drive him to Andrews Air Force Base.
The FBI agent's Wheelbuster onto an air Force one and
air Force one jet also air force is one word,
and got on board with him. Then the jet took off.
By the time the jet landed in Moscow, Russia, Buster

(01:16:01):
no longer shook constantly, but every once in a while
he had a full body jerk. The FBI agents wheeled
him off the plane two Russian FSB agents waited on
the bottom of the ramp. The FBI agents nodded to
the FSB agents, who nodded back. Then THEBI agents got
back on board the jet. The FSB agents wheeled Buster
to a black rectangular suv and put him inside. Then
they drove to the Kremlin. Buster sat in a wheelchair

(01:16:23):
in the Krimlin. He was motionless, stared off into the
distance at nothing, and his jaw hung. Suddenly, his entire
body jerked, then he went back to being still. The
President of Russia walked up to Buster. King Moon there
is an uprising for more food in several parts of
Southeast Asia. The President of Russia said, gohea. Buster chuckled,
But do you recommend Zig Global Communist Confederation Due to

(01:16:45):
your majesty, the President of Russia said, go ha ha.
Buster chuckled. Buster stared off into the distance, sill genocide.
The President of Russia said, yeah, heh, I love that.
Buster smiled. The President of Russia turned around to face
representatives countries all over the world.

Speaker 4 (01:17:01):
Kills them all.

Speaker 2 (01:17:02):
Orders directly from the King of Earth, the President of
Russia said, Fighters, jets and bombers from the United Global
Force of China, Russia, America, and Europe, flew over Southeast Asia,
dropping bombs in every country, destroying every main city, burning
forests and villages, and killing hundreds of millions of people.

Speaker 4 (01:17:18):
And that's how the book ends.

Speaker 3 (01:17:22):
So I am fascinated about this middle chunk, yeah, where
he's align where he goes to Colorado and uncovers a
satanic conspiracy involving the Democratic Party. But that end bit
kind of got me thinking about there was all of
these like like all these like artistic things he was
doing that was almost preparing himself to do an act

(01:17:44):
of violence against a family member. But as much as
that was the future he was building for himself, you
also mentioned that he was being transported around by the FBI,
and like, I wonder how much that was a part
of the future he was building for himself. Like now
that he's arrested at an National Guard base, he's now
being taken from place to place by government officials. He's

(01:18:04):
constantly now surrounded by Feds, Like he has he has
built the reality for himself that now he is actually
always watched by the government because he's been arrested for
doing this things Like he's he has created this fantasy
world that he can now live in forever. Yeah, whether
he goes to trial, he's probably gonna I if his
defense is smart, they'll do some sort of insanity defense.

(01:18:26):
He'll be sent to a psychiatric place. Like he's now
always going to be watched. He is being moved around
by government agents, like he is living the thing that
he was writing about. And I find that that that
second half of like him being caught also a compelling
like a compelling thing that he was preparing himself for.

Speaker 2 (01:18:46):
And it it I mean he is he expresses repeatedly
variations of like because the FBI and the CIA are
constantly in this book and also like constantly just like
people coming into his life around him, which again is
part of this illusion. But also you can see how
a lot of these common right wing tropes about like
everything is infiltrated by the Feds January sixth, with the

(01:19:08):
Federal op and stuff, how this is also going to
feed into the delusions of a guy like this right
like he's very much this is very much ripped from
the headlines, and that you can see how things he
was encountering and like conspiracy culture and popular media grafted
themselves on to the delusions that he had. Yeah, you
can also see I turned randomly to a page I

(01:19:31):
haven't gotten to yet in this book two sixty and
the first line I saw in the middle of the
page is, let's fucking kill them and then eat them
a midget and a wheelchair, yelled, holding an RPG.

Speaker 4 (01:19:41):
So there's quite a lot in this book. All right, Well,
well then.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
I don't know what the line of good taste and is, Like,
I think it's I don't think we'll keep going back
to this. I felt justified and like, well, I want
to know what's in this thing once. It seems kind
of bad to keep doing that, this guy who murdered
people's book. But man, there's a lot in here.

Speaker 3 (01:20:04):
Oh, and there is a use in understanding how these
people think and under unpacking the sorts of large, large
swaths of of content that that people that are doing
these mass acts of violence or very targeted acts of
violence have been leaving online because it allows you to
actually get a better look at overarching patterns. Specifically, his

(01:20:27):
songs for Me are very very evident of that. Yeah,
Like they're very similar to a lot of stuff you
were you were reading the book, like he has the
The song about him being tracked on his phone is
called they Came for Justin Moan. Yeah, they found him
all alone, they tracked him on his phone. He talks
about the student loans that he couldn't pay off, the

(01:20:48):
payments made him grown, money controlled his life. They wanted
him to die just like this, all all of just
all this stuff. They said he was God. They came
for Justin Moan.

Speaker 4 (01:21:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):
Anyway, it's well, it's it's it's not to like laugh
at him necessarily, No, it's it's about actually understanding this
and yeah, this is all fucked up. So a part
of a coping mechanism is kind of laughing at some
of the more ridiculous elements, but it is it is
an attempt to actually understand this, this growing trend in
American culture.

Speaker 2 (01:21:22):
Yeah, because you can't just like and this is the
thing that the right often once it wants to do
with this, is like, well this is just a mental
illness problem, and like, no, it's not like you have
to understand it's American culture. Yeah, what's going into people's heads,
even if they also have, you know, are are mentally ill.

(01:21:43):
What's going into their heads? What they believe about the world,
influences how they act on those delusions, and the nature
of those delusions.

Speaker 3 (01:21:51):
This is what happens to your brain when it entirely
becomes corrupted by the culture of war like this is.
This has now taking over his entire method of things.
This is the only way you can see the world.
And there's people who are paid to get people to
be like this like this is.

Speaker 5 (01:22:06):
This is.

Speaker 3 (01:22:06):
People's whole job is to get more and more people
to only think in these terms. And this is one
of the results of that of that effort by elements
of the American right.

Speaker 4 (01:22:18):
Yeah, anyway, it's bad.

Speaker 3 (01:22:24):
That'll be a good book to explain to a young
child in fifty years. Why why is this on your bookshelf?

Speaker 4 (01:22:32):
Well, let me tell you. They've just in mode.

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
If I ever have a kid, Garrison, this will be
the first book they rate.

Speaker 4 (01:22:38):
No, that's that's probably bad idea. Well, let's uh, let's
be done. Let's let's go away.

Speaker 7 (01:22:45):
Goodbye, Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here,
your favorite daily podcast about the studied dissolution of society as.

Speaker 5 (01:23:07):
We know it.

Speaker 7 (01:23:08):
I'm your guest host, Molly Conger, joined once again by
our friend Garrison.

Speaker 3 (01:23:11):
Hello, happy to look at the abyss once again.

Speaker 7 (01:23:16):
Yeah, try not to ruin your day too bad today,
So Garrison, today I want to talk to you about
some terrible guys that I know you're already pretty familiar with.
The Goyam Defense League the GDL. The GDL, there's sort
of a loose network of neo Nazi trolls, best known
for their anti Semitic flyers, headed up by a failed

(01:23:37):
rapper named John Minnedeo who calls himself Handsome Truth.

Speaker 8 (01:23:41):
Handsome Handsome Truth.

Speaker 7 (01:23:43):
So there's this sort of core cast of characters in
Minnedeo's orbit that shows up in person, mostly in Florida
and Georgia, but the group's real strength is online. They
have this decentralized network of thousands of followers nationwide who
are encouraged to download and print the anti Semitic flyers
and distribute them in their areas. It's not a new model,
right like the Klan has been doing this for decades,

(01:24:04):
and National Alliance was big into this in the early aughts.

Speaker 8 (01:24:07):
But that's what they do.

Speaker 7 (01:24:08):
Right in the news every few weeks, you know, your
local news wherever it is that you live, you know
somebody left these racist flyers on everyone's front lawn, and
I know you and I have talked about doing an
episode in the future about the sort of counter productive
responses to these in person demonstrations, the flying and the
banner drops. There's a new law in Florida and a
proposed law in Georgia that are sort of allegedly aimed

(01:24:29):
at countering anti Semitism, but are going to have some
sort of counterproductive knock on effects. And I hope we
can get to that at a later date. But today
I want to talk to you about a little project
some GDL members have going on the side called the
City Council Death Squad?

Speaker 3 (01:24:45):
Are they going you around in Gilding City Council members,
because that's kind of what it sounds like.

Speaker 8 (01:24:52):
It does sound like, that's kind of that's the energy here.

Speaker 7 (01:24:54):
They haven't done that yet, yes, But Garrison, how would
you feel if I told you a former Juggalo calling
himself Scottie big Balls trying to trying to destroy the
thing I love most, which is civic engagement in municipal government.

Speaker 3 (01:25:11):
I have such complicated feelings of Juggalos.

Speaker 7 (01:25:13):
Oh God, No, I want to be clear I'm not
slandering the Juggalo community here, right, Like mister big Ball's
got his hatchetman tattoo covered up with a big snake
holding a gun a couple of years ago, So he's
no longer god that there's a cool name for their community.
He's no longer a part of the Juggalo community. I
don't think the Juggalos would buy this kind of behavior.

Speaker 3 (01:25:32):
Generally, not. They are kind of semi cool.

Speaker 7 (01:25:36):
No, I'm off for chicken hunting, I don't. I don't
think they abide No, I by just by a happenstance,
you know. Icps not my cup of tea. No, no, shade,
it's not my cup of tea. But I did see
them perform at the Lincoln Memorial a couple of years ago,
and it was the most polite crowd I've ever experienced
at a live music event.

Speaker 8 (01:25:56):
So hats off to the Juggalos.

Speaker 4 (01:25:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:26:01):
Now, if you're a city council meeting enthusiast like myself,
you may already be aware of the rash of racist
zoom bombings disrupting meetings around the country over the last
nine months or so. Remote participation in meetings became nearly
ubiquitous during the pandemic, and the opportunity to make a
public comment without having to devote an entire evening to
sitting in an uncomfortable chair at city hall has made

(01:26:21):
civic engagement more accessible for all kinds of people right,
not just because of contagion, but remote participation benefits everybody,
like parents who are managing a bedtime routine by the
time the public hearing opens at eight PM, or sure
don't work in nine to five, or people without reliable transportation.
So it's been a boon for local democracy, but it's

(01:26:41):
also created a unique opportunity for people who want to
ruin that. So last year, Scotty big Balls Mister big Balls,
the online pseudonym for a self described not see named
Harley Ray Petero Junior, started a group he calls the
City Council Death Squad organizes online to find government meetings,

(01:27:02):
mainly city and county council meetings all over the country
that allow public comment by a zoom, and then it
coordinates those members to sign up for speaking slots, crowding
out actual community members who are trying to speak on
you know, like actual matters of local concern, and when
the members of the group get through, the calls follow
a couple of predictable paths. Sometimes the caller just starts

(01:27:22):
screaming slurs.

Speaker 4 (01:27:23):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:27:24):
It's just as soon as they connect, it's just screaming
the N word over and over and over and over
and over again until someone can hit the button to
cut it off. Sometimes they do what they call the
slow roll, where they start off trying to sound like
a real caller. You know, they'll say, like, you know,
I have concerns about zoning in my neighborhood, or I
you know, I think we should pay the police more,
and then it veers abruptly into some kind of bizarre

(01:27:44):
antisemitic conspiracy theory about crime or nine to eleven or
advocating for public lynchings.

Speaker 3 (01:27:50):
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, where they it's like, spend a
few minutes eating up the city council time, and then
to curtail it with some unh hinge ramble.

Speaker 7 (01:28:01):
Right, and then yell slurs yes, yes, yes. And another
favorite of the group is a call format where they
pretend to be gay or Jewish themselves and then ascribe
to themselves various traits associated with bigoted stereotypes of the girl.

Speaker 4 (01:28:15):
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:28:17):
John Benedeo has participated a few times himself, and he
loves this one. He pretends to be a gay Jewish
person named Tammy and then says some pretty outrageous things. Sure,
I bet the callers give themselves inside joke names like
Rudy Hess or Sadie n word, which, when you say
it out loud, sounds like say the N word, So

(01:28:39):
it's like a Seymour Butts kind of thing. It's like
Bart calling most tavern except it's Nazis.

Speaker 3 (01:28:44):
Wow, very very clever, on the cutting edge of comedy.

Speaker 6 (01:28:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:28:49):
Or they'll name themselves after a mass shooter, like Dylan
Rue for Andraspravic or you know, sometimes it's like a
deep cut, like a more obscure killer whose name might
not arouse suspicion right off the bat, like Jim Adkisson,
a man who shot eight people at a Unitarian church
in Knoxville in two thousand and eight during a children's
production of the musical Annie because he was angry about

(01:29:09):
the church's liberal teachings. So you know, those good jokes.

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
Yeah, this is all like kind of like old like
old school kind of chan humor. It's it's not even
that popular anymore because it's kind of just out of vogue.
You're kind of you're kind of outing yourself as like
a bit of like a not an actual boomer, but
like it's become a boomer fied this type of humor.
It's not really this sort of thing that younger, more

(01:29:36):
hip neo Nazis are into. They they have, they have,
they have moved on, they have other other horizons of
bad jokes.

Speaker 7 (01:29:46):
So ruining everybody's good time by shouting a racial slur
is hardly an innovation. But this particular operation has a
discernible origin point. In May of twenty twenty three, Potero,
that's mister big Balls, if you've forgotten already and friends
showed up in person to a Sacramento City council meeting
to show their support for Ryan Massano. If you're from
the Sacramento area, you probably know him. Masano, a former

(01:30:09):
Proud Boy with several failed runs for office under his belt,
already had a long history of being disruptive in public meetings.
In twenty eighteen, he's removed from chambers during a Valejo
City Council meeting after saying the city was quote infested
with homosexuals, and refusing to be called to order by
the mayor the meeting of the same body in twenty
twenty two, he was picked up and carried out after

(01:30:30):
refusing to end his remarks at the end of his time.
So in twenty twenty three, he's attending every meeting of
the Sacramento City Council. This has been going on for
almost two months. He shows up, he gets up, he
makes his homophobic, racist, and antisemitic remarks, but he's keeping
with the rules of the meeting and they're letting him
make his statements.

Speaker 8 (01:30:47):
But people aren't happy about it. So activists are shooting
to show up to the meetings.

Speaker 7 (01:30:51):
People are showing up with banners, people are booing him,
people are showing up to counter this, and so he
puts out a call for backup. So at this at
this point that Petero shows up with two masked associates
and a man named Jeffrey Perene, who, like Massano, was
a proud boy with a failed school board run to
his name at that time. In twenty twenty three, Parene

(01:31:12):
had recently been arrested outside the home of a youth
pastor after publicly calling for others to join him in
going to the pastor's home during a school board meeting
that had to be adjourned because of Parene's disruptive behavior.
So we're seeing a pattern emerging here, right, Like at
this point, we've got two proud boys who keep getting
kicked out of meetings and failing to run for school board.
These are people who are seeing the value in kicking

(01:31:35):
up some kind of disturbance at a meeting.

Speaker 3 (01:31:38):
Yeah, and this was like during a time where school
board meeting disruptions were very popular. There was a lot
of like far right influencers trying to convince their followers
to run for school boards. This was kind of a
very particular cultural moment in like twenty twenty two to
twenty twenty three.

Speaker 7 (01:31:56):
So they show up to this meeting to support Massano.
Doesn't go well. One of the guys throws a Hitler salute.
People react angrily, there's a bit of a scuffle, It devolves,
and the council ends up going into recess and clearing
the chambers entirely. Everybody has to leave. You just can't
be in here too much yelling. Everybody's mad nobody gets arrested,
but everybody has to leave, and the council ended up

(01:32:18):
continuing the meeting without the public's presence. So I think
there was a hearing that night on an ordinance involving
homelessness that people had showed up to speak on and
they weren't allowed to do that. Now council continues their business,
but nobody can be there. And Patera's alliance with Masano
didn't last. They actually butted heads almost immediately over optics.
Massano preferred to make his long winded speeches that at

(01:32:39):
least in his mind, were more palatable to the listener
and might more effectively spread his message and potentially red
pill the listeners. Who's actually angry that Potero's troll forward
tactic of just shouting slurs and obscenities was actually resulting
in avenues for public comment being closed off. In September
of twenty twenty three, he wrote, either out of ignorance
or deliberate sabotage, the GDL has no idea what they're doing.

(01:33:02):
So he was mad right because he was doing this
thing where every week he was showing up Megan's comment
and because of the different strategy of disruption that was
getting harder for him. Masano, for his part, continues his
one man battle against the Sacramento City Council. He's still
doing that. Oh, okay, He's a lone wolf out there

(01:33:22):
in Sacramento. But Petero saw the potential and trolling on
a larger scale, okay, almost immediately, he branched out. Over
the next few months, it developed into an organized trolling machine,
targeting meetings across the country, covering at least seventeen states,
from Alaska to Maine, Idaho, Wyoming, Georgia, Virginia. They're all
over the place, often hitting the same city repeatedly, and

(01:33:45):
in some cases showing up in person with flyers or banners,
either before or after the zoom bombing. After targeting meetings
in the city of Walnut Creek, California, the group hung
a racist banner in the area. Councilor Kevin Wilk commented
on the banner in the press, and the following week
the meeting was hit again, with members specifically addressing Wilk,
the locality's first Jewish city councilor, asking him how he

(01:34:08):
liked it. In a later stream, Potero laughed about that
personalized follow up saying that pissed him off, so I
had to.

Speaker 8 (01:34:15):
Rub it in.

Speaker 7 (01:34:17):
After targeting the city of Wooster, Massachusetts, the group didn't
just flyer. They mailed homophobic materials to the homes of
several councilors, including two nuen, the state's first openly non
binary elected official. And it isn't even just regular city
council meetings. Some of the targeted meetings are incredibly boring
governmental bodies like the Morristown, New Jersey Board.

Speaker 8 (01:34:38):
Of Zoning Appeals.

Speaker 4 (01:34:40):
Oh wow.

Speaker 7 (01:34:42):
When PETERO posted a clip of their racist calls into
that meeting, a group member posted the board chairs home
address and the replies.

Speaker 8 (01:34:50):
They've also and this doesn't even fit the pattern. I
think they just got the bug.

Speaker 7 (01:34:54):
But they've posted several composition videos of the group disrupting
AA meetings.

Speaker 4 (01:35:01):
All right, that's interesting.

Speaker 9 (01:35:04):
I think that.

Speaker 7 (01:35:04):
I think they just got into the idea of making
praying phone calls. So they target addiction support groups, often
geared towards members of the LGBTQ community.

Speaker 4 (01:35:14):
So okay, all right, yeah, just.

Speaker 7 (01:35:16):
Doing like homophobic attacks on people who are trying to
get sober.

Speaker 4 (01:35:19):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (01:35:20):
They're just like finding any any meeting they can and
just spamming this thing.

Speaker 8 (01:35:26):
I don't know that they have other hobbies.

Speaker 3 (01:35:27):
Yes, this seems like a lot of time between keeping
up on zoning board meetings and whatever local AA call
in there is. It seems seems to be a bit
uh childish and time consuming, right.

Speaker 7 (01:35:40):
I mean this is it takes a lot of time,
and Potero is pretty clear about that. You know, he
runs these online spaces where he's organizing. He's you know,
making lists of meetings that they should check out. He's
complaining about how, you know, sometimes you have to wait
for hours while they're just doing like regular government stuff.
You have to just like wait for it to be
your turnity all the N word. It's time consuming.

Speaker 4 (01:36:00):
Do you know what isn't time consuming?

Speaker 7 (01:36:04):
Spending your harder in cash on the products and services
that support this show.

Speaker 4 (01:36:08):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (01:36:08):
We make it fast, easy and reliable by listening to
these products and services. Okay, we are back talking about
the Goyam Defense League, the GDL. So we were just

(01:36:29):
discussing how they were spending a lot of time disrupting
a lot of meetings with their little call in campaign.

Speaker 7 (01:36:36):
Right, and it's tempting to dismiss this behavior as Oh,
it's just trolling, right, they're just trolls.

Speaker 8 (01:36:41):
Sure, it's like this is so juvenile.

Speaker 4 (01:36:44):
How bad can it be? It's just people calling in, right, But.

Speaker 7 (01:36:46):
This has real world consequences, and they know that. They
revel in the reactions to their behavior. They're fully aware
of and celebrate the destruction that it leaves in its wake.
When the city of Portland suspended virtual public comment, commenters
in the group called it a big effing win when
there's other media coverage of cities who have limited or
even ended public comment altogether. The headlines are posted triumphantly

(01:37:07):
in the group, often captured only with loll comments like
the calls will continue until the Jews leave and shut
it down for the win and never let them regroup
arrest no comfort given literal the replies to posts about
city after city ceding ground to this harassment.

Speaker 3 (01:37:24):
So it's not just causing little inconveniences, it is actually
shutting down city's ability to hold public comment and for
the public to actually speak on issues that are affecting
them and their city.

Speaker 6 (01:37:37):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:37:37):
So, there have been meetings that, you know, when this occurs,
the meeting itself, that particular meeting just ends everyone just
leaves because they can't continue, or you know, the meeting
does continue, but they stop taking public comment, or they
change their policies and procedures to limit public comment moving forward.
So this is having real effects that are you know,

(01:37:58):
living on in these cities even after they moved on.
Group members suggest using burner phones and fake number generators
to avoid being caught or blocked. Potero has written online
that he's been quote banned on multiple devices, but I
have some tactics to prevent them from stopping me. Patero
noted on a recent stream that the ADL's estimate of
over one hundred and thirty disruptions is short changing them,

(01:38:19):
insisting they've done at least three times that many, sometimes
hitting dozens of meetings per week, and they're not just
doing it right. It's not just the act of doing
it that is the thrill to them. They then cut
the clips and then post them online for everyone to enjoy.
They're cutting promos and making highlight reels of their favorite moments.
There are compilations grouped by genre of hate right. There's

(01:38:42):
videos combining all the best moments of homophobia, all the
best moments of anti semitism. There are these promo videos
set to that sort of ugly electronic fash wave music
that they all love so much?

Speaker 4 (01:38:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:38:53):
The promo videos have titles like this is our meeting
now or We're jacking your shit.

Speaker 3 (01:38:57):
So these are being shared on like bitchu and Odyssey
and Telegram.

Speaker 7 (01:39:01):
I'm guessing yeah, they're they're you know, GDL, they're on
They're on every platform that's opened to people like them, right, okay,
and following that GDL model, right, they're they're posting these
these videos and getting money. They're accepting donations to continue
doing this. And then on the anniversary of Kristall Knocked,

(01:39:21):
they targeted a planning commission in the Crescent City, California,
entitled the video CCDs goes Chrystall Knocked on Crescent City. Right,
So it's it's just a joke, right, They're not really
doing Christall Knocked, but they're using the language of this
sort of genocidal violence.

Speaker 3 (01:39:38):
And it's like monetized. They're like making money off of it.

Speaker 7 (01:39:42):
They are making those donos, as they say it. After
a recent ADL article about the operation, Patero posted, fuck
the ADL, We'll give those caselers something to covetch about
in twenty twenty four, and his wife Haley reposted that,
adding you think he's playing.

Speaker 8 (01:39:58):
He lives for this. Yes, they don't work, They really
do live for this.

Speaker 3 (01:40:04):
It does sound like this is like the most important
thing happening in their life, which is one quite sad.
That also shows that they have a lot of time
to dedicate to pulling off stuff like this.

Speaker 8 (01:40:14):
Time that they should be dedicating to parenting.

Speaker 3 (01:40:16):
Honestly, well, I don't know if you want them around
their kids. Honestly, the more time they spend away from
their children is probably better.

Speaker 8 (01:40:26):
God damn.

Speaker 7 (01:40:27):
During the zoo bombing in October, an official in Saucelito, California,
voice support for just cutting off the calls over objections
from other members of council that this could get them sued,
saying he would quote take the lawsuit if these people
can even get organized enough to sue us. And while
the group has made no progress on actually filing any
legal action there or anywhere else, they haven't forgotten it.

(01:40:49):
Just last week the group expressed an interest in seeking
some kind of retribution for that comment, saying they may
need a little visit, and the group is raising money
to start traveling to meetings in person. Fundraiser on the
platform of choice for right wing extremists, give Send Go,
has already raised one thousand dollars in donations to fund
travel and lodging for the group members to travel to
city council meetings for in person disruptions. On their weekly

(01:41:12):
live streams, Viewers can donate directly in the stream. On
the stream, Potero thanks viewers for donations, often in the
amount of fourteen dollars and eighty eight cents.

Speaker 4 (01:41:20):
Hey yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 8 (01:41:22):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:41:22):
They they live for the memes, reminding them that every
donation goes directly towards funding their IRL activism, getting them
offline and inter real life traveling around the country to
engage in racial harassment in person. He also says the
donations fund a side project called postcard Waffen.

Speaker 4 (01:41:40):
The nota SEENI way wait wait wait.

Speaker 3 (01:41:41):
Wait wait wait wait say that one bird time, just
a little slower postcard waffen.

Speaker 4 (01:41:48):
They love to add postcard waffen.

Speaker 8 (01:41:50):
They love to add waffen to things. Right, that's just
the German word for weapon.

Speaker 7 (01:41:54):
So this this is weaponized mailings, and this is the
nickname they've given to the work of mailing hateful materials
directly to the homes of the elected officials who preside
over the meetings they disrupt. This seems like a sort
of targeted harassment kind of campaign.

Speaker 3 (01:42:09):
Sure, target harassment, intimidation. There's some with the other like mentions.
You know, it's like veiled threats. These types of neo
Nazis are not averse to actually doing violence on people.
So yeah, there's there's like a a pleasant threat implied
with these with this, with this sort of rhetoric and activity.

Speaker 7 (01:42:29):
And because the decentralized nature of the GDL, and I
think this is something we can talk about in a
later episode about kind of what they're up to these days.
Is they don't have communication with or control over all
of the people who are consuming this content, So they
may not plan to follow up with these people in
a manner that would be criminal, but they're encouraging people

(01:42:50):
to think that that's an option and that sure has ramifications. Sure,
So this isn't just annoying prank calls. It's an organized
effort to ruin local democracy, to make meetings unproductive and unbearable,
to intimidate and humiliate local government employees, and elected officials
to make your city council chambers and intimidating an uncomfortable
place for you, closing off that avenue for you to

(01:43:10):
address and engage with your local government, and to take
away options for actually engaging with local government by forcing
cities to limit public comment. And we can't seed that
ground to them.

Speaker 3 (01:43:20):
Ah man, that is I mean, I don't know. There's
just been so many instances with city council meetings and
various other kind of these big public forms, especially school
board meetings, where like they are like discussing extremely important
stuff around like trans people and forming policies that impact people.
And I know a lot of people do actually end

(01:43:42):
up going out to these and talking about their experiences
and why proposed laws or ordinances would be so harmful,
and just removing that option, whether or not you believe
in like the electoral process TM, removing that option from
people to actually speak on their own experiences does have
like real consequences.

Speaker 7 (01:44:01):
Even if even if you're not a big believer in
it being a meaningful political action to engage with your
local government. I think we can all agree that it's
not okay for Nazis to make it unsafe for anyone
to do that. Yeah, you know who won't seed ground
to the nazis trying to take over your local school board.

Speaker 3 (01:44:20):
The products and services sets, the forth this podcast, I hope.
So it depends capitalism is u is quite strong.

Speaker 4 (01:44:28):
But we'll see how this develops.

Speaker 3 (01:44:39):
Okay, we are back. So this is this is kind
of depressing, Molly.

Speaker 4 (01:44:44):
What what? Uh huh ah?

Speaker 8 (01:44:47):
What is to be done?

Speaker 4 (01:44:49):
What is to be done?

Speaker 8 (01:44:50):
Garrisoned?

Speaker 7 (01:44:50):
Yes, So unfortunately a lot of the obvious solutions here
are bad ones.

Speaker 4 (01:44:54):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:44:54):
The response that a lot of cities have had is that, well,
they're just going to eliminate remote public comment altogether.

Speaker 8 (01:45:00):
You just can't participate remotely anymore, which.

Speaker 3 (01:45:02):
Hurts people who are like disabled, hurts people who have
tough things with scheduling, parents, people who work at certain hours.

Speaker 7 (01:45:09):
Yeah yeah, yeah, like most people can't spend six hours
sitting at city hall on a Monday night.

Speaker 8 (01:45:13):
Most people can't.

Speaker 7 (01:45:14):
And so having remote participation was really it opened up
local democracy to people with all kinds of life situations, right,
And that's what happened here in my own city of Charlottesville.
CCDs targeted us last October, and in response, the mayor
eliminated remote participation in all meetings. We didn't get to
revisit that. That's just how it works now. So they've

(01:45:36):
moved on. But now my entire city of over fifty
thousand people lives with the consequences of that action, and
we're left with a less accessible local democracy. They'd rather
prevent anyone from calling in than have to deal with
deciding whether they can do anything about it when someone
abuses that process. And there's some really basic steps that
cities can take right off the bat, like without even
overthinking it or getting into the legal complications of the

(01:45:58):
First Amendment. Cities like Lin would Walkhington responded to their
CCDA zoom bombing by adding a few basic layers of
security to their virtual meetings, like requiring commenters to sign
up the day before. So this group is organized in
a private telegram chat, and so like one person gets
into a meeting and just drops the link into the chat,
and so everyone just clicks that link. But if you

(01:46:18):
make it so everyone has to have a unique sign
in link that they signed up for with a real
email address the day prior, that makes a little bit
harder to.

Speaker 8 (01:46:26):
Coordinate a dog pile.

Speaker 7 (01:46:27):
Sure you know it isn't hard to make a fake
or temporary email address to sign up to get the link.
But if sometimes just adding one extra step is discouraging
enough that they'll pick somebody else this week. But this
behavior is escalating, right, and making it a little bit
harder to get into the zoom isn't going to solve
the problem.

Speaker 8 (01:46:45):
It's going to keep happening.

Speaker 7 (01:46:46):
And you can only make a public meeting so secure
without actually locking out the public. Elected officials are understandably
concerned about the legal ramifications of dealing with these kinds
of calls. With some exceptions, they can't prevent someone from
speaking based only on the content of the speech. I
actually found a two thousand and six letter. I guess

(01:47:06):
in two thousand and six, the LA City Council asked
their city attorney. I need to do a little research
on what was going on in two thousand and six
in La. But the LA City Council asked the city attorney,
can we make a rule that people can't say racial
slurs in here?

Speaker 3 (01:47:19):
Which seems like an okay rule, like I don't know.

Speaker 7 (01:47:23):
The answer was no, Legally, you can't limit speech based
on its content, right, because these are public forums put
on by the government. I mean, it's what's called a
designated public forum, but we don't. They can't limit speech
based on its content, right, But what they can do
is have rules of decorum. Their city attorney pulled some
language directly from a Ninth Circuit Court opinion that's in California,

(01:47:47):
So it's a federal Court of appeals that covers that
part of California. White versus City of Norwalk, and that
decision upheld a city ordinance that authorized the legislative body
to remove individuals who uttered quote personal, impertinent, slanderous, or
profane remarks if the remarks disrupted, disturbed, or otherwise impeded

(01:48:07):
the conduct of the meeting. So it's not just that
your remarks were nasty, it's that your behavior was disruptive.
The way that these remarks were delivered was interfering with
the conduct of the meeting. So the meeting is disrupted
because council is prevented from accomplishing its business in a
reasonably efficient manner. The court further wrote, indeed, such conduct
may interfere with the rights of other speakers, and that's

(01:48:29):
what's happening here, right that these disruptions are not only
not your right. You don't have a right to disrupt
the meeting, but that behavior also fundamentally infringes on everyone
else's rights to have the meeting. It keeps the meeting
from being conducted, and it's interfering with the conduct of
the government's business. So if they open a public forum,
anyone can speak in the public forum, and you can't

(01:48:50):
cut them off because of the content.

Speaker 8 (01:48:52):
Of their speech.

Speaker 7 (01:48:52):
But that doesn't mean there's no legal way to put
limits on public comment. If the rule is content neutral
and serves a legitimate government interest, the government can pose
some restrictions on your speech, right like requiring a permit
for a parade is a limit on speech, or saying
you can't yell in a courtroom is a limit on
your speech. But it's not a violation of your First
Amendment rights to say you can't disrupt a trial. But

(01:49:14):
more importantly, and the risk of getting too boring, right,
like a meeting is not a sidewalk there is. This
is not just any public place where you're speaking. This
is a meeting where business is being conductive. There's a
legitimate and compelling government interest in the ability to conduct
the meeting, and so the rules that they can make
in this space can vary state by state. You know,

(01:49:36):
some states do or don't allow you to limit speakers
to residents, or they can or can't limit the topics
that are Germane. So it's going to vary a little bit.
But the courts have repeatedly upheld, not just in the
Norwalk case, the ability of a council to adopt a
content neutral rule and use that rule to cut off
or remove speakers who are disruptive. And honestly, I have

(01:50:00):
to say, I think any city attorney worth assault knows this.
This is day one stuff. If your whole job, well
not your whole job, but your job on Monday nights
whenever the meeting is, is to provide legal advice to
a city council on how they're conducting their business. You
know this because disruptive behavior during a meeting isn't some
brand new phenomenon. But it's kind of remarkable. What I

(01:50:21):
watched like a hundred clips of this happening right and
over and over and over again.

Speaker 8 (01:50:25):
You see these city attorneys saying.

Speaker 7 (01:50:26):
Like, oh, we're powerless here, we're powerless here. We don't
want to get sued, there's nothing we can do, and
that's not true, and they know that.

Speaker 3 (01:50:33):
Yeah, I mean, I've seen people get escorted out of
chambers for being disruptive in city council meetings before. Like
they it happens relatively frequently. It's not like an uncommon,
brand new occurrence.

Speaker 7 (01:50:47):
Right, I mean, I've seen that discretion applied appropriately and fascistically.

Speaker 4 (01:50:51):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:50:52):
Absolutely, it happens, but over and over and over again
in these situations, you see these city attorneys, the city
councils saying.

Speaker 8 (01:50:58):
Like, I guess we just have to let them do it.

Speaker 7 (01:51:02):
A commenter in one of the Sacramento meetings from last
summer actually pointed out that, you know, she was saying
to her city council, you had no hesitation removing black
members of the public from this room when they were
angry that your cops murdered Stefan Clark. So why are
you so nervous about infringing on the free speech rights

(01:51:22):
of literal Nazis? Like someone who's just in here screaming
the N word? Why is that worthy of more breathing
room and something? You know, as a resident of the
city of Charlottesville who watches our local government pretty carefully.
Something we've found over and over again here is that
if fear of litigation is your starting point for making
decisions on how to govern, you're going to make cowardly, dangerous,

(01:51:44):
stupid decisions every time, and you're probably gonna get sued anyway.
So make the choice to protect people. Get good legal advice. Sure,
consult with your city attorney, Consult the case law.

Speaker 8 (01:51:56):
Don't be reckless.

Speaker 7 (01:51:57):
But if you're faced with the opportunity to make a
decision that text people, a decision that serves the public good,
a decision that aligns with the values you claim to hold,
but might result in someone filing a lawsuit against you
that they're not going to win anyway, don't err on
the side of shielding yourself from nuisance litigation at the
expense of the public.

Speaker 8 (01:52:15):
Don't just look at us in shrug. Your hands are
not tied here.

Speaker 7 (01:52:18):
And if you're not comfortable making that kind of decision,
get off the diis. I mean, I'm not a city attorney,
but that would be my advice, right, And so again,
I think the bottom line here is that we can't
seed this ground. The end result here can't be well
local government just isn't a place where we can safely
and meaningfully engage with elected officials on the issues that matter. Right,

(01:52:41):
that can't be the answer here. Don't wait until this
is happening where you live to react to this, right
like it could happen here. It is happening in a
lot of places. You know, if you're inclined to do so,
you know, show up, engage, speak your mind on local issues.
Don't wait for your city hall to become a battleground
to show up to counter right wing inflows. Right like,
don't just react to reactionaries. Stake out that ground now,

(01:53:05):
that's our space. Right, make it clear that people are
engaged and that they insist on their right to engage,
so that your city council can't say, well, people aren't
really making public comments anyway, we just won't have it.
And let make sure that they know that you will
not accept the death of local democracy at the hands
of some Weasley paradox of tolerance bullshit about letting Nazis

(01:53:27):
dominate our spaces.

Speaker 3 (01:53:30):
I know there's been other people who've been like talking
about and pointing out these instances of GDL zoom bombing
and shutting down these meetings, But there certainly has been
less discussion of this being a deliberate tactic that GDL
is doing specifically to actually like shutting down the democratic process,
like it has been so focused on, just like the

(01:53:52):
trolling and the spreading of anti Semitic rhetoric, which are
big problems, but I think there's been a little bit
less of a focus on the actually looking at this
as a deliberate tactic being employed to remove people's ability
to engage democratically in the city or school board or
wherever they live. And I think viewing it as a

(01:54:12):
deliberate tactic like that like you've been talking about, but
both gets like a better look at how these neo
Nazis are trying to organize. But also it's a more
holistic approach towards why is this happening, And it can
allow you to look at this as more of a
tactical decision less than just kind of random trolling slurs XD,

(01:54:33):
which it can be kind of reduced to, which is
at the very least incomplete way of looking at this phenomenon,
if not just kind of wholly inaccurate.

Speaker 7 (01:54:43):
I mean, I don't want to give them too much credit,
right like they didn't have a brainstorming session where they
were thinking about ways to contribute to the death of democracy.

Speaker 8 (01:54:52):
I think that's sort of a phenomenon.

Speaker 7 (01:54:54):
That occurred as a result of their actions that they
then saw and appreciated. Right They don't understand it, but
I don't think they intended it from the outset. But
at this point it's hard to deny that that is
something they're doing on purpose.

Speaker 3 (01:55:08):
And that's just been an interesting trend with the GDL specifically,
especially considering the legislation trying to crack down on political flying,
which we might talk about at a later date. But yeah,
it's been a interesting watching the GDLs as political FORCET, yes,
is like annoying and bad in the rhetoric they spread,
but also they've had this interesting ability to just either

(01:55:32):
affect legislation or like shut down people's ability to engage
with politics in their local area in a few notable ways.

Speaker 7 (01:55:40):
So it's important to sort of sit for a minute
before you react to people like this, Right, Like you
were talking about that legislation that's going to end up
infringing on a lot of people's political speech, right, Like,
you can't just react to the troll. You have to
sort of think about the context in which this is
occurring and make a reasonable choice about how to react
so you don't end up giving them what they want

(01:56:01):
basically right, because they love the attention.

Speaker 8 (01:56:05):
They love the attention.

Speaker 7 (01:56:06):
Every time they do this, it ends up on the
local news. People are talking about it, people are repeating
their message, and you don't need to give them that.

Speaker 3 (01:56:15):
Well, thank you Molly for putting this together. This has
been very enlightening, if slightly upsetting, but that is kind
of it's kind that's kind of the entire bit we
do here. That's sort of the show. Huh. Where can
people find your work online?

Speaker 7 (01:56:30):
You can find me on Twitter. I will never call
it x socialist dog mom. And in keeping with the
spirit of this episode, most of what I use my
Twitter account for is live tweeting my local city government meetings.
I've been doing that for god seven years now, so
this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart.
I love engaging with municipal government.

Speaker 4 (01:56:51):
Fantastic.

Speaker 3 (01:56:54):
Yeah, I've attended more city council meetings the last year
than I have ever before in my life. It has
certainly been an experience a lot of wacky, wacky and
unusual things happen in city council meetings.

Speaker 7 (01:57:07):
Thank you Garrison so much for joining me today, and
hopefully we can bring listeners something even worse someday soon.

Speaker 3 (01:57:15):
Yeah yeah, stay tuned for more breaking Goham Defense League
news find Dark.

Speaker 4 (01:57:36):
Hey everyone, this is it could happen here and I'm
your guest host, Matt Leeb. I'd say most of you
probably know me from Robert and Sophie's podcast Behind the Bastards,
which you know I've become kind of notorious for the
time that I use a jar Jar Bank soundboard during
a series about doctor Mangela. Yeah, I don't have that
soundboard with me today. Sorry. Fewer of you might know

(01:57:58):
me from having the world's only Sopranos Slash the Wire
rewatch podcast pod Yourself a Gun. But the fewest of
you might know me from my brand new podcast, Bad Hasbara,
the world's most moral podcast, in which me and some
of my other anti Zionist or non Zionist Jewish friends

(01:58:19):
and our other friends and our other guests guests who
you know you've maybe heard, like Charine here, we have
casual conversations about Israeli propaganda and Israeli propagandists. For some
of you, this might be your first time hearing the
word has bara, and that's why the homies at cool
Zone Media invited me here today. So this episode is

(01:58:42):
all about has balalah aka Israel's public relations and propaganda machine,
and I am thrilled to be joined by my friend
and one time cat sitter, churene Uness Hi Scheren.

Speaker 9 (01:58:57):
Hi, Matt. What an intro. Yeah, I'm excited to learn
more about this. Actually, also excited to know how you
properly say hasbara, because I don't know I say it right.

Speaker 4 (01:59:07):
But lah, Yeah, it's yeah, that's I mean, sound in
the yeah, the law, you know, within with the throat
has bah.

Speaker 9 (01:59:22):
You heard it here first.

Speaker 4 (01:59:23):
Yes, you heard it here first. I'm not I'm not
the greatest at doing you know, Israeli accents or whatnot.
So throughout this podcast, I'm probably going to be butchering
a lot of Hebrew words. Uh and uh you know,
just you're just gonna have to deal with it.

Speaker 9 (01:59:39):
Yeah, and that's totally fine. That's just part of the game.
I've pronounced every every name I've ever said on this.

Speaker 4 (01:59:46):
Show, So yeah, yeah, I mean you should hear me
trying to pronounce Arabic names like I can't do it.
It's I mean, I attempt, Yes, that would if there's
any that happened in this episode, please, But before we
get into talking about has Bah blah, I want to
start with a quick story, Sarin. Are you familiar with

(02:00:10):
the Birthright Trip?

Speaker 9 (02:00:13):
Yes, I am.

Speaker 4 (02:00:14):
It was one of those things where I was very
excited to one day do the Birthright Trip and I
didn't really even question. I knew, like you know, it
was a little bit, you know, they were trying to
whine and dine me to go there and you know,
maybe move or whatnot. But I didn't know how much

(02:00:35):
they wanted me to move there until I went. So
for me, my Birthright trip is kind of why I'm
here today talking about Hasbara. It's why I started a
freaking podcast about it. It's when I first started clocking
Israeli propaganda. So I went in January twenty twelve. If

(02:00:57):
you don't know Birthright, it's pretty much a two weeks,
all expenses paid trip for young Jews from all over
the world to go to the Holy Land, reconnect with
their Jewish roots, float in the dead seat. It is
a it is a propaganda tour of apartheid state. And
you know, I'm not going to get too much into

(02:01:17):
the history of Birthright, you know and all the like
far right wing funders like Sheldon Adelson and stuff. There's
like not enough time for that. But I'm mentioning it
because it was the first time I saw how hasbara
was more than just propaganda, and how in my opinion,
it more closely resembles like indoctrination, and the organizers at

(02:01:40):
Birthright did like a masterful job of this. Like I
went on a trip of American Jews who were like me,
like they were like secular from mixed or like intermarried families,
non bar mitzvud. It was all like other Matt Leib
type Jews, like ethnic Jews, right, And I realized this.
I think it was like day two of the trip.

(02:02:03):
One of the Israeli tour guides literally gave us a
bar mitzvah, like all at the same time we had
a group bar mitzvah. Yeah, And they did it by
saying like Okay, well now bab mitzvah. It just means
you're a man. Now, everyone here is a man. Now,
choose an Israeli name, and which was like for me,

(02:02:26):
I remember feeling a little you know, I was like, wait,
there's supposed to be a theme party and fucking like yeah,
I supposed to yeah, DJ, my dad's gonna buy me
a car, or at least me a like a Honda,
Like I thought it was more than that, at the
very least I thought I would have to like memorize

(02:02:46):
a tour portion. But no, you just go to Israel
and you know, a tour guy does it for you,
so like it really works though, like you really you
go there being like, you know, I'm European Jew, and
you leave this and you're like I invented falafel. So
the Hasbara highlight of the trip for me was this

(02:03:08):
like mega like birthright mega event. It was in Jerusalem
and a huge arena in which they had like Israeli speakers, donors, rappers,
and there was like a there were rappers at one
point who just started rapping about things that they claim
Israel invented, like iPhone, computer chips and like the cherry tomato,

(02:03:33):
which was you know, like you And by the way,
a not insubstantial amount of the trip was spent telling
us about how Israel invented the cherry tomato. Like we
went to places like you know, farms and stuff where
they showed us this like drip irrigation. Multiple people were

(02:03:54):
just like, man, we invented the cherry tomato. Here can
you believe it? And I was like, this seems like
a lot of effort for just this one particular thing,
which may or may not be true. But yeah, So
the headliner of the mega event of that night, the

(02:04:14):
cherry tomato on top, if you will, was a speech
by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu. Straight up,
the Prime Minister of Israel was the headline speaker of
this birthright event and an arena filled with like twenty

(02:04:36):
thousand teens and like early twenty somethings, which was kind
of like amazing, Like you know, listen, here's the thing
I knew Benjamin netnya who like I knew enough about
Israeli politics to know that, like he was a fucking
right winger and bad. But like I have to admit,

(02:04:59):
even I, you know, as a twenty six year old
who kind of was starting to get like woke on Palestine,
you know, so to speak, Like even I was like
kind of like, whoa this is. I'm a little charmed,
a little honored to see the Prime minister here. He
took time out of his busy schedule of doing crimes,
probably to address us. And you know, I actually found

(02:05:21):
the speech of that night. I actually have some clips
from it that I want to play.

Speaker 9 (02:05:27):
That is incredible, that's great.

Speaker 4 (02:05:30):
So yeah, he was, he was like casual, he was
off the cuff.

Speaker 6 (02:05:34):
They wrote a speech for me. I'm not going to
read it.

Speaker 4 (02:05:41):
Like he even did a little bit of crowd work.

Speaker 6 (02:05:45):
Anyone here named Rachel.

Speaker 4 (02:05:47):
So that right there is what we in the Jewish
community call rachel profiling. That's when you just star in
front of a group of Jews and you ask whose
name to Rachel. Shout out to Rachel Blumenthal for telling
me that joke. In college. It was it was like
a crash course in Hesbara. Like he told us we

(02:06:08):
were from Israel at one point.

Speaker 6 (02:06:11):
You all come from great countries, great countries. Did you
all come from here? All of you? That's your birthright?

Speaker 4 (02:06:23):
He was telling us that. Like you know, once again,
it was everything they invented, phone, you know, the cell phone, ships,
blah blah blah. He was telling us to make aliat
to Israel, which means to you know, move to return,
to come back. You know. Essentially what he was vying
for was like move to Israel and start a family.
It's very like sex based, like the way it works.

(02:06:46):
The big thing I took away was him telling us
that he wanted us to go back home and tell
people the truth about Israel.

Speaker 6 (02:06:56):
But the most important battle that we have to find
is the battle for the truth. And all of you
can become ambassadors for the truth and ambassadors for Israel.

Speaker 4 (02:07:06):
And of course you know, he then proceeded to tell
us what the truth about Israel was.

Speaker 6 (02:07:14):
Go back your respective countries and tell the truth about Israel.
Only way to fight a lives who tell the truth.
Tell him about a country where people are free, free
to initiate, free to work, free to speak. It's a
country where you can criticize the Prime Minister although he
never makes mistakes. This is a country which has in

(02:07:37):
which Arabs have full right something they've been denied in
all the vast lands around us. And a woman in
this country can sit anywhere she wants. That's our position.
This is a free country.

Speaker 4 (02:07:53):
So him going up there telling me that what he
wants from me is to go back home and be
an ambassador for Israel and tell the truth about Israel.
You know, it was the first time I realized that
he was giving me a job to do. And this
is a job that I think a lot of Jewish
people who may be listening to this podcast can relate

(02:08:16):
to the job of telling the truth about Israel and
the job of you know, stopping the slander that is
out there about Israel in the media and on the
internet and press and all that stuff. And it was
the first time I realized that, like, oh, part of
the hasbara isn't just you know, some government thing. It's

(02:08:40):
like my job. My job is to is to tell
the truth. And he said something in that clip, the
only way to fight allies with the truth. And so
I am going to follow his advice. That's what I'm
going to do, Shreen. I'm going to tell people the
truth about Israel. And I think it's time to do it.

(02:09:03):
So let's get into it. Let's talk about the truth.
Let's get into talking about hasbara. What is it? What
is it? And so loosely, hasbara is it's a modern

(02:09:25):
Hebrew word derived from the word las bier hasbier meaning
to explain or explanation. I say loosely because it's kind
of a made up word. So, you know, a lot
of words in modern Hebrew are sort of made up words. Remember,
Hebrew is like an ancient liturgical language, and modern Hebrew

(02:09:46):
was created by like Jewish linguist nerds who wanted to
revive the language to be a spoken one, and that's
how you got modern Hebrew, which is fine, there's nothing
wrong with reviving a dead language. But because of that,
a lot of the words in modern Hebrew are kind
of inventions. So, according to Mosaic Magazine, has bara is

(02:10:09):
strictly a twentieth centuryism. You won't find it in Eliezer
Benu Huda's a monumental Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew,
whose second volume, in which Hasbara appears only as the
first word of hasbarat Panim, was published in nineteen oh two.
So it's not something that you see in kind of

(02:10:30):
like the original beginnings of you know, the creation of
modern Hebrew. Like colloquially, hisbara like refers to like media
pr branding, mud slinging. It's kind of a like a
sort of like catch all term for general propaganda used
to create a narrative based on Israeli government talking points

(02:10:50):
meant for a foreign, usually American or just generally Western audience.
People who deal in hasbara are called has barists has baristas,
which is fun's that's true. Yeah, yeah, I mean listen,
has barista, I think gives gives it a little bit
more flair. You know, kind of imagine someone kind of

(02:11:12):
like making you coffee, but instead of coffee, it's they
make you lies.

Speaker 9 (02:11:17):
Nope, I'm not gonna do that.

Speaker 10 (02:11:18):
Sorry, I like it. I wish I never was born. Okay, Well,
so there's all sorts of like has bars. Like some
of them have like official positions within the Israeli government,
such as the head of the IDF Spokesperson's unit, Daniel Hagari,
who you might remember is the guy from that video

(02:11:40):
taken at the you know, the children's hospital, you know,
in Gaza, and he's like pointing at what he thought
was a list of his Israeli hostages, but was like
literally just a calendar didn't have any names. It was
just he was pointing at days of the week thinking
they were names, because that's what a calendar has. And
also it's so fucking weird that they can't read Arabic, Like, yeah,

(02:12:05):
you're in the Middle East, you are the spokesperson.

Speaker 9 (02:12:08):
I think something interesting about how Hebrew was revived as
well is that a lot of words were taken from Arabic.
A lot of words are very similar to Arabic. So
it's like even more funny that they would they can't
even read the language that they kind of took a
lot of words from.

Speaker 4 (02:12:25):
But I'm saying that, like, yeah, in Israel, it's almost
like the appropriation is just part of the process of
the cleansing, you know, just like stealing something, saying it's
ours and then not even being able to identify an
Arabic word that you yourself say so, yeah, so there's him.
Then there's like everyone if you've been on Twitter, you've

(02:12:47):
seen a lot of Alon Levy who he's His official
title is the official Israeli government spokesperson, and that's through
the basically the office of the Prime Minister. He's a
British guy, like he raises his eyebrows. It's like the meme,
you know, like he goes like, oh, that's what he's

(02:13:08):
famous for. Then there's a lot of these like non
governmental like Israeli Civil Society, haspara organizations like Stand with
Us or like a PAK, the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, the Anti Defamation League, Christians United for Israel,
the Israel on Campus Coalition. I mean, there are tons

(02:13:31):
of them, tons of them. And then of course there's
people who are just in it for the love of
the game, like celebrities, artists, you know, actors, you know,
who make like Israel public advocacy part of their thing.
It's a fascinating world filled with ghouls and goblins. So
the word his bara itself, interestingly is hasbara. So early

(02:13:53):
Zionists had no problem calling their pr campaigns and like
they're branding for a Jewish state and Palestine propaganda. They
would say, it's we got to do propaganda, because in
the early twentieth twentieth century, the term was generally considered
to be neutral, like people said they were doing propaganda
when they were doing propaganda. Once the word became a pejorative,

(02:14:15):
they created the word has borrow, which is a nicer
sounding word with more neutral connotations. And although it's now
used as a pejorative by critics of Israel and me
and stuff, the word is still used to this day
in Israel. It is still a fairly neutral sounding word.
There are has Borrow workshops sponsored by Israel. They have

(02:14:35):
has Barra Fellowships. That's the name of the fellowship. Like
you can get merch that says has bar A Fellowship
on it. And the reason is because it doesn't translate.
The word isn't translate to propaganda. It just means to explain,
which is you know, seems innocent enough. It's not about
doing propaganda. It's not about they don't call themselves liars.

(02:14:55):
They're not saying I'm going to lie. They say they're
merely just explaining. And I found this speech from the
Middle East Policy Council that goes into depth about what
has Bar is beyond. Just like propaganda, quote has Bar

(02:15:16):
links information warfare to the strategic efforts of the state
to bolster the unity of the home front, ensure the
support of allies, disrupt efforts to organize hostile coalitions, determine
the way issues are defined by the media, the intelligentsia,
the social networks. Established parameters of politically correct discourse, de
legitimize both critics and their arguments, and shape the common

(02:15:40):
understanding and interpretation of the results of international negotiations. So
behind this term is a large, well funded information warfare
apparatus dedicated to shaping Israeli discourse in the media and
the government and academic insutions everywhere. And they use all

(02:16:03):
of the tools in their toolbox to silence criticism of Israel,
and what they can't silence, they soften. Sometimes it's through
coordinated letter writing campaigns. Sometimes it's harassment. Sometimes it's dosing.
You know, people have been docked. So before I continue,
I want to address that uncomfortable feeling you had when

(02:16:24):
I talked about like Israel and the media. I want
to say that is that is not to say that
Israel or the Israel Lobby or Zionists quote control the media,
all right, So they do not. That's why hasbara exists,
you know, That's why the Israel lobby exists. If they
controlled the media, they wouldn't have groups like Camera, for example,

(02:16:47):
constantly day in and day out, harassing the New York
Times and CNN and PBS to get them to talk
about Israel correctly. Okay, So it's important when people hear
these criticisms of Israel that they don't try to see
them as like otherizing Israel or like you know a

(02:17:08):
lot of people, they get uncomfortable because a lot of
these things will match old anti Semitic tropes. But it's
important to remember that these lobbying groups exist in Israel.
They exist in the gun lobby, in the big oil lobby.
This is not unique to Israel. The unique thing about
it is how willing the American public is and the

(02:17:32):
West in general is to letting themselves be live to
That's why I'm interested in it. But let's talk about
Camera real quick, because this is a recent thing that happened.
Some news happened recently about the New York Times and
their connection to CAMERA. This is from a recent article

(02:17:53):
in The Intercept. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, was founded in nineteen eighty
two in response to what it claims was anti Israel
bias in the Washington Post reporting on the Israeli invasion
of Lebanon. Since its inception, CAMERA has successfully lobbied for
hundreds of corrections in major media outlets seeking to streamline

(02:18:16):
a pro Israel line in news reports and editorials. It
is mere journalists whose work it disagrees with and launched
boycott campaigns against news organizations it believes are not responding
with enough deference to its requests. So the way this
group operates is that they go through any and every
article about Israel, looking for sentences, looking for terms, definitions,

(02:18:39):
anything they disagree with, and lobby for corrections to be issued.
Camera doesn't do this quietly. They openly brag about it
on their website. Like recently, Camera successfully lobbied The New
York Times to issue a correction removing the word occupation
from an article, and they wrote this on their website.
Quote the ask slipped for their New York Times reporters

(02:19:03):
Kum Hamas stenographers this week when they absolutely neglected to
done down Hamas's preferred language before passing off the terror
organization's talking points as original reporting. Take notice of the
framing of The New York Times and their mask slipping
and their reporters as being stenographers for Hamas. This is

(02:19:27):
like quite the accusation, given that The New York Times
is like has and continues to have coverage described as
biased in favor of Israel Like. According to an Intercept analysis,
it was found that in the first six weeks of
the war, New York Times consistently delegitimized Palestinian deaths and

(02:19:49):
cultivated a gross imbalance in coverage to pro Israeli sources
and voices. So the exact opposite of what Camera is
claiming is the truth here. You know, this is this
is actually a famous hes bar A tactic. It is
the I am rubber, you are glue tactic. And it's

(02:20:09):
really something to see it in action, Like I don't know,
suring if you've seen how often you've like read some
pro Israeli voices, you know, has Baris online and heard
them say stuff that you're like, I know for a fact,
the exact opposite of this thing is true, you know
what I mean?

Speaker 9 (02:20:29):
Yeah, every accusation is a confession. It feels like that
is true all the time when it comes to the stuff.
And also the intercept article is very good. I'll put
in the description for those who to read the whole thing.
I'm glad you mentioned that because I didn't know that
much about Camera until I read that article, and I
was just like, what, like, of course I knew that
that was a thing that was that was done like

(02:20:51):
they would change words. Recently, The New York Times was
like a decline of death or life. Like they use
the word decline to describe.

Speaker 4 (02:20:58):
To describe what was happening in Gaza. They decided the
articles headline was going to be like death's actually declining in.

Speaker 9 (02:21:06):
Gaza exactly, and like the standard ones are always there,
like blast or conflict or whatever it is. Those are
unfortunately so normal now. But to see it all laid
out by the Intersect was really I'm really glad I
did that article so it will be in the description,
and I'm glad you mentioned it. But it does go
back to the idea that every accusation is a confession.

(02:21:26):
I think that's something to remember every time you see
a headline.

Speaker 4 (02:21:29):
It's true, and it's something that you know. It's almost
become a cliche online because I've seen it so many
times people saying that, and I think it's important to
remember that this is sort of the tactic of hesbara.
Like what makes hesbara particularly notable and like often hilarious

(02:21:52):
is that it doesn't merely just spin narratives, but it
inverts them to essentially make like an alternate reality. It's
not just that has bara is information warfare. Has Bara
is straight up info wars like Alex Jones level shit
the same way. Alex Jones will run the same like

(02:22:13):
fantastical paranoid thread to every major news event that happens
in order to reinforce his worldview and prove that he's
right and everyone else is wrong. You know, Like that's
Israel does this, but with like far more money and
far greater success, and it kind of makes sense why
they're successful at it, Like Alex Jones Info Wars shit

(02:22:36):
like praise on white Christian paranoia that like the Blacks
are trying to take away our guns so they can
make our children trans or whatever, like total fantasy in
saying shit that you have to be like already far
right wing to believe, well, like Israeli info Wars praise
on a much more grounded in reality paranoia that of

(02:22:58):
anti Semitism, Like anti Semitism, it's historical, it's evil, it's pervasive,
it's pernicious. Like this kind of paranoia makes sense, and
not just for Jews, but like for anyone of conscience,
anyone who has empathy, you know, like that they understand
anti Semitism is bad and needs to be fought, and

(02:23:19):
that makes Hasbara very effective. You know, people want to
support Israel because people want to support the Jewish people
and they want to fight anti Semitism. And when the
IDF dismantles a children's hospital and says we had to
do it to stop Pomas. Look, here's a list of hostages.
People want to believe them. It's like Molder from the

(02:23:42):
X Files, like I want to believe, which is the
same impulse as Alex Jones believers. Essentially, like you don't
want Sandy Hook to be a possibility. You want it
to be a conspiracy to take your guns away. You
want those children to be secretly actors pretending to be dead.
So like when Israel says we aren't killing children, we're

(02:24:02):
killing hamas, people want to believe that.

Speaker 9 (02:24:05):
And yeah, let's just say hate that you compared Fox
Mulder to the like you dragged him into this and
I'll get over it.

Speaker 4 (02:24:12):
But I'm sorry to you know, to bring him into
this conversation. But you know, I'm just saying, Molder, if
he wants to believe that stuff, what else does he
want to believe? You just hope, you really hope and
pray that he's not going to fall for the hasbara,
but he might know you really don't, and it's like,

(02:24:33):
you know, it's his bar is effective because it gives
you something like a nice, legitimate sounding explanation for why
Israel needed to do something that you might usually think
is bad. Like that's how it's worked for decades, in
the same way that hesbara serves to explain things for
you to basically take the Israeli government at its word,

(02:24:55):
that's kind of how it works. It gives you a
believable explanation and not only sounds like kind of real,
but you know, conforms to your personal beliefs. And yeah,
but speaking of personal beliefs, if there's one thing, oh,
let's see if I can do this. If there's one
thing I'd love to believe in, it's commerce. And so yes,

(02:25:19):
I mean listen, people will have to make money somehow,
so it looks like we have some products and services
that we have to sell. And yeah, when they sell
you these these products and services, please believe them when
they say how good they are. And we are back.

(02:25:48):
So we were talking about hespara and how you know,
the explanations conform to your personal beliefs. The interesting thing
about asbara is that they have different types of hespara
for a wide range of personal beliefs. It's not one
size fits all. It depends on who you are. There's
a conservative version and there's a liberal version like Israel.

(02:26:12):
Israel has been very successful and their ability to brand
themselves is both a liberal democracy and a outpost for
Western values fighting the Muslim hordes. Usually these strategies have
been like pretty separated, right, you know, like you can't
claim you can't do them at the same time, it'll

(02:26:36):
sound weird. It's like Israel is the only gay friendly,
climate conscious, feminist democracy and that's why we got to
do genocide. Like that doesn't that doesn't sound right. Like
you tell the city dwelling liberal elites about the gay stuff,
you tell the conservative Christians about the Western civilization stuff.

(02:26:59):
That's kind of how it works. The basic conservative hissbara
doesn't actually interest me all that much because it's I
don't know, they don't have to work that hard at
getting conservatives to be okay with killing Muslims. You know,
it's like Muslims Arabs, you know, they they're they're fully
willing to You don't even have to like couch it
in something.

Speaker 9 (02:27:19):
No, that's just what happens to us.

Speaker 4 (02:27:21):
That's it's fine, right, And it's interesting too because like
this idea of of you know, being a Western outpost,
an outpost for Western values is not like that is
very much falling into the almost the whiteness thing of
Europeans where you kind of like because Jews, like European

(02:27:44):
Afy Semitism wasn't about how Jews had Western values. It
was about how Jews represented this other, this this thing
that you know, they don't they didn't share values. There
were some weird other thing and you know, this was
not the the charge of anti Semitism in Europe. And
now with like Israeli propaganda towards you know that's aimed

(02:28:07):
towards conservative Westerners, they're like, no, no, we're the most Western,
like we're so Western that we're gonna be the ones
who are on the front lines stopping the evil, you know,
Arab ports. And yeah, but it's like the that's interesting,
you know in some aspects, but it's the liberal stuff.
Sureen liberal hasbara is where the lies get so wild,

(02:28:32):
Like that's the stuff that I grew up with.

Speaker 9 (02:28:34):
You know, yeah, no, it really the pink washing in
particular is like one of yes, it's just they're they're
so egregious in their use of using like the gay
struggle for their own agenda. It's really really gross.

Speaker 4 (02:28:51):
Yeah, and it's and it's weird at how effective it
is or how effective it has been for so long,
because it is something that I think. I think it's
kind of like the first stop on the Hasbaratri. You know,
when you are hearing someone kind of like talking about
why we need to stand with Israel, they will start
right there with the you know, the pro gay rights stuff.

(02:29:15):
And it's like, the reason I find it interesting is
like Israel's so effectively been able to like brand itself
as representing and supporting all these positive liberal traits. Well,
well a lot of it is just not true. Like,
for example, liberals are pro LGBT rights, right, you know,
they they love gays, they love gay rights, and that's

(02:29:39):
a good thing, of course, and yet gay marriage is
illegal in Israel. It is illegal. It's also a mixed
faith marriages are also illegal in Israel. They will recognize
those marriages, but they will not perform them. You cannot
get gay married, you cannot get interfaith married in Israel.
If you're there performed abroad then and they will recognize them.

(02:30:01):
That's kind of the loophole. Also, by the way, Palestinians
from the West Bank or Gaza who Mariyan Israeli citizen
cannot then get Israeli citizenship through that marriage. You also
can't get Israeli citizenship if you marry in Israeli and
you are from a quote enemy state that read Arab.
If you want to know what the enemy states are,

(02:30:24):
they mean Arabs. So you know, I don't know. Liberals
should hate that. They should look at that and be like, well,
I don't like that, you'd think, right. Another example, like
liberals love democracy and they hate racism, yet believe Israel
when they say they are a democracy, because they'll be like,

(02:30:45):
we have you know, twenty percent Arab Muslim population, you know,
two million and all with the right to vote. Meanwhile,
they're like ignoring the five point three million Palestinians who
are currently living in the West Bank and Gaza under
military control by Israel. Like this is a situation was
which has explicitly been called apartheid by most major human

(02:31:09):
rights organizations, you know, human Rights Watch and it's the International,
the International Federation for Human Rights, and even including Human
Rights orgs in Israel, yesh Din and but sell them.
They have all called this an apartheid state, and apartheid
to you know, to be clear, is racist and I'm

(02:31:30):
against it, yes, and I think most liberals would say
they're against it. Don't you think sharam like something you
would hope. So that's kind of like part of the
thing with the liberal You're like, I don't like bad people, right, yeah, yeah,
but you know it's it's once again, it's this thing

(02:31:50):
where we're willing to be like, oh, they say they're
a democracy, and therefore I believe it, and I think
it's you know, you have to remember that like Israel's
got like a caveat for all this stuff. It's usually
they'll say, you know, their credentials are touted with this
like in the Middle East, the most gay friendly in

(02:32:13):
the Middle East, or the only democracy in the Middle East.
But like, once again, that kind of only serves to
implicitly condemn those enemy states you know, filled with Arabs,
is being racist and backwards and homophobic and anti democratic
and therefore unworthy of liberal sympathies. So it's you know,
you liberals will look at it and they'll go like, well,

(02:32:33):
I mean compared to Iraq, and you know they of course,
it's like forgetting why the Middle East is the way
the Middle East is. You know, they they will there's
a complete like vacuum, like everything exists in a vacuum
when it comes to American imperialism. So you don't but

(02:32:54):
you just want to believe that Arabs are backwards people
rather than looking at any kind of like Western imperial complicity.

Speaker 9 (02:33:03):
But also like reinforcing this like racist backwards stereotype also
like dehumanizes Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians to such a
degree where people can't overlook genocide. Now, you know, like
it's all.

Speaker 4 (02:33:15):
Part of that, it's all part of that.

Speaker 9 (02:33:18):
Yes, they're different, they're not like us. They don't like
gay people, they don't women stand up or whatever the
fuck it is. It's just like it's it really is
infuriating because you wonder, like how can this happen? It's
because of little stuff like this that's not very little
when it's all together, and it just reinforces this like
barbaric trope, and then people just go on their go

(02:33:39):
about their lives being okay with genocide because today these
people are human anymore.

Speaker 4 (02:33:45):
Right, you look at this like as part of a
pattern of like the delegitimization of the Arab being. In
a way, it's like all of this is a pattern
of like, what are things we can say about Arabs
in order to make them so far from us that

(02:34:10):
you just don't care if they live or die? Or
more so you you more, you're more willing to believe
that the people who are like us, the Israelis, are
the ones telling the truth that they're you know, they're
the ones who have the empathy. They're the ones who
you know, let women you know, sit wherever they want,

(02:34:34):
whatever the fuck that meant from BB's speech, But like,
you know, they're more like me Arabs. I don't know them,
and I guess, you know, if they say they're bad,
they're bad. You know, it's it's just part of it.
And I think what pisses me off about it is
the liberal willingness to believe it. And I think it's like,

(02:34:57):
I don't know, it's fascinating to me because especially right now,
in the last you know, four months or so of
this brutal incursion into Gaza, it's like so clearly illustrates
why people on the left fucking hate liberals. You know,
they're just so easy to manipulate if you know the

(02:35:20):
right words. You know, like if it were any other group,
if it were any other group instead of Jewish nation nationalists,
like if it were Christian nationalists, they'd be like clearly
condemning it, clearly. Like liberals have such a facile identity
and race essentialism that they either excuse the crimes committed

(02:35:44):
by the Jewish state because Israel asked them to do
it and they want to be like good allies or whatever,
or they ignore them because well, it's not my place
to say I'm not Jewish. I feel like I should like,
like they're just so squishy it like it. It kind
of reveals the modern American liberal for what they are,
which is like a tiny baby whose self perception is

(02:36:06):
at the root of their ideology.

Speaker 6 (02:36:07):
Right.

Speaker 5 (02:36:08):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (02:36:09):
And it's just it's important to remember that Europeans doing
atrocities to indigenous populations has always come with the gift
wrapping of these savages don't share our values. It's always
been like that. So when you see an Israeli soldier
flying a Pride flag in the rubble of a raised

(02:36:29):
Palestinian city. Like just remember that's not liberation, that is
regular ass by the book colonialism, same shit, you know
what I mean?

Speaker 9 (02:36:42):
Oh yeah, I mean I still am loving the description
of an American liberal as a tiny baby.

Speaker 4 (02:36:48):
There are little babies. There's little tiny babies. You got,
They've got they can only hold like one sort of
political critique in their mind at once, and you know,
if they choose this kind of like identity essentialism, then
it's so much easier to just kind of go like, hey,

(02:37:10):
you know, I don't really think it's my place to
talk about this right now exactly.

Speaker 9 (02:37:16):
It's just it's cowardly and like in retrospect, they're probably
going to change their story about what their stance was,
like you know what I mean, And it's just yes,
it's really infuriating, and I think it is important to
remember that what you're watching is reel Do and what
it has done for the past seventy five years, over
seventy five years, is just colonialism, and it was described
that way since the beginning. But that was that was

(02:37:37):
really Thank you for explaining all of that, Matt.

Speaker 4 (02:37:40):
Yeah, and you know there will be more, uh. In
part two, we'll get down to some of these myths.
We'll get down to the way in which hasbar kind
of works to invert narratives to a degree that you know,
are almost so shocking that you have trouble believing the
historical truth and are more comfortable believing the ahistorical fiction.

(02:38:04):
But surine, what do we do now? Plugs? Or yeah?
What do I say?

Speaker 9 (02:38:09):
Commercial breaks? That's the end of part one. You did
a great job.

Speaker 4 (02:38:13):
Thank you. That's listen. I've never guess hosted a thing
here on cool Zone Media, but I'm very happy too.
And if you like you know me obviously you know,
listen about as Barrow, the World's Most Moral podcast. If
you like me and my wife, we're going to be
at the Sacramento Punchline March seventeenth at seven pm. That's

(02:38:34):
a Sunday. We're headlining together. I mean, you know, co headlining.
So I'll go up, she'll go. But it's really good.
It's a really good show. We did it in San Francisco.
Is so much fun. Please come out to it March seventeenth.
That's Sunday, March seventeenth, Sacramento Punchline. Come see Matt Leeb
Francisca Hearing.

Speaker 9 (02:38:53):
Where can people follow you don't know, they should if.

Speaker 4 (02:38:55):
You don't know, at matt Leeb on Twitter, at mett
leib jokes on Instagram, and uh yeah, check me out.
I'll post all the dates and stuff over there, and
all the podcasts over there too.

Speaker 9 (02:39:08):
Awesome.

Speaker 4 (02:39:09):
Oh yeah, great job.

Speaker 11 (02:39:10):
Okay, goodbye, bye, Hey everyone, welcome to it could happen here.

Speaker 4 (02:39:32):
I am your guest host, Matt Leeb back again with
Charene Unis. What's up, Cheren?

Speaker 9 (02:39:41):
Nothing? This this is, this is this is what's no?
I happy to happy to be back. Hopefully you guys
listen to part one already of math. Yeah, really cool
little series we got going on here. But if you
haven't listened to that first, and then we're continuing this.

Speaker 4 (02:39:57):
Haspara this journey. Yeah, this Hasbara train stops for no Man. Yeah.
So this is part two of this series about Hisbara
once again. Hesbara is basically just means to explain, and
we're talking about Israeli propaganda and beyond not just propaganda,

(02:40:20):
but so much more so. We're going to talk a
little bit about the myths about Israel that have kind
of like gained a foothold in Western public consciousness to
a degree that it's like not just a foothold, but
it's just kind of things that we commonly think are facts.
So like, if you grew up in Zionism, which is

(02:40:43):
like if you don't know that's a political ideology that
birth the state of Israel, you have probably heard a
lot of your teachers, your rabbis, your friends, your family,
your Israeli friends, your Israeli family talking about how it's
your responsibility to explain Israel to the people, and growing
up you don't actually know that what you're doing is propaganda,

(02:41:05):
Like you think you're just you know that you know
more than most people because everyone else is getting their
information from anti Semites. You know, you think like you've
got the real scoop and that most people are just
you know, born ignorant and biased against Jews. And you

(02:41:27):
don't have to be Jewish to have been exposed to espara.
Chances are that if you grew up in the West,
you probably hold several views about Israel that are the
result of decades long pr campaigns. So what I'm going
to do now is a lightning round of myth busting.
This is just like real quick getting into some of

(02:41:47):
the I don't know some of the most pervasive things
that I think each one could be an entire episode.
But you know, listen, this is your guys, pot this
isn't my podcast. I can't just take it away from you.
So I'm just going to do a lightning round with you.
Are you ready, Sharen?

Speaker 9 (02:42:06):
Oh, bored? Ready, Let's do it.

Speaker 4 (02:42:07):
Okay. Israel is not a land without a people for
a people without land. Okay, there were people there. I
don't know if you know that Palestinians were there and
seven hundred and fifty thousand were expelled in nineteen forty eight.
This whole conflict has not been going on for hundreds
of years. It is very very modern, and it has

(02:42:30):
nothing to do with an ancient religious rivalry. So when
someone says, oh, they've been killing each other for thousands
of yet, no, no, not even a little no, that
is not a thing. Israel quote lives in a tough
neighborhood and it must act tough to survive. That is
just regular ass racism and orientalism. The idea that they

(02:42:54):
just you know, you have to be tough, you know,
I mean, listen, a tough neighborhood is very much that
is translated for an American a white American audience. You
know what I mean, what is a tough neighborhood. It's
one with a lot of people of color. Here's another one.
There are plenty of Arab states. Why can't they just

(02:43:14):
go there again? This is a weird, racist, dehumanizing thing
to tell someone whose house you just bulldozed, like where
you know, whenever you see them, like doing a big
zoom ount where they go, Like there's only one Jewish
state and there's all these Arab states. You know, it's
like no, no, no, personally, what happened here? Don't don't

(02:43:35):
you know? It's like you guy had house, Army took house,
moved him to other area. That is wrong, period. You
can't just say go to another Arab country. That's that's
just racism. Here's another one. It's too complicated. No, it
is not. Switch the rolls in your head. Use your

(02:44:00):
brain for a second. Switch the roles of Jews and
Palestinians in your head, and you'll have an easier time
condemning the side that has powerful government and army whose
crimes include genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and religious slash.
Racist settler terrorism. That is not complicated. If it were

(02:44:23):
the Jews who lived in Gaza getting bombed mercilessly, you
would not have a problem saying what was happening was genocide.
You just wouldn't just do that in your head. All right,
here's another one. Zionism is an indigenous rights movement. No,
it's fucking not. It's not. It is a settler colonialist movement.

(02:44:46):
That is something that was made explicitly clear by the
creators of modern Zionism. They not only talked about like
settling and colonizing Palestine, but they referred to the Arab
occupants there as the indigenous population. They they said indigenous
they God, it just pisses me off. And also the

(02:45:08):
indigenous argument is like, way, I just hate it in
general when people go back and forth about who is
indigenous there, because it's so academic. It's like it's dehumanizing
and it obfuscates the whole thing because once again it
is just Palestinians being like, I want to be able
to vote, I want to have my house back. I

(02:45:29):
literally have the key to my house. And yes, many
of them literally still have the keys to their house.
All right, there's there's so many, there's so many goddamn
myths and propaganda that I just like that. I started
a podcast about it. That's that's that's why. But like
much of the stuff that you take for granted as
fact is not only a historic but like wildly so.

(02:45:53):
Like the IDF outnumbered the Arab States armies during the
war forty eight. That is literally they say the opposite
in the you know, nineteen forty eight story of the
creation of Israel. It's like un created Israel. All the
Arab states attacked. That is not actually what happened were

(02:46:13):
not just that all the Arab states attacked, but that
Israel and the IDEF overcame this gigantic horde of Arab armies.
The Arab armies that were in this fight are far
fewer than have been reported. You know, they say it's
like seven, it was more like four, and only three
of them. Only one of them had any sort of
like modern military capabilities. The rest were not really armies.

(02:46:37):
And also they outnumbered the IDEF outnumbered these armies in
nineteen sixty seven. Here's another one. Israel attacked first in
nineteen sixty seven. It was a preemptive strike, like famously
and yet the you know, once again, the narrative around
the nineteen sixty seven Six Day War is that, you know,
Israel mining its own business and then Egypt along with

(02:47:00):
the people Arabs. Yeah, evil Arabs attacked. The Israeli army
struck first. That is a fact that they talk about.
And there's it's also very very much disputed as to
whether or not the Egyptian army was going to attack
at all. But you know, there's no room for that

(02:47:23):
narrative because it, you know, fucks up the the glorious
story of what became the occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. Another one a whod Barack absolutely did not
offer the Palestinians estate during Oslo. He did not, Nor
did he offer ninety six percent of the West Bank.

(02:47:44):
And no, Israel did not invent the fucking cherry tomato.
Wait they did it. No, they did not. There was
a Haaretz article about it where they're like, no, we didn't.
Why do we keep saying this we didn't do that?

Speaker 9 (02:48:00):
Oh my god, that's so funny. No, I mean, so
many of these talking points are some of the main
arguments that Zionist will use to be like, well, they
rejected this and this is what happened here, and it's
just like these are all incorrect. You just like regurgitating Hasbara.

Speaker 4 (02:48:16):
Right, And it's because that his Bara has been so
widely repeated and so often that it just kind of
sinks in Huberac did not offer them a state in
terms of what you would consider the definition definition of
a state to be, you know, and that is autonomy,
that is sovereignty. They were not offering them sovereignty. They

(02:48:38):
weren't offering ninety six percent of the land. They had
taken such a large percentage of the of it, and
what they were offering was inn even smaller percentage of
what they had already taken. And they the thing they
were offering again, not a state, not a state, not
a sovereign autonomous state. But you know, this is things

(02:49:02):
people are willing to believe. And that's just that's the
whole thing. And again I prefer to say it's the
I am rubber, you are a glue tactic, but you
know it's the same shit.

Speaker 6 (02:49:11):
You know.

Speaker 4 (02:49:11):
His Bara likes to invert the victim and the victimizer.
And the reason is simple. They know that the West
is much more willing to believe that Jews are the
victims and Arabs are oppressors.

Speaker 6 (02:49:25):
You know.

Speaker 4 (02:49:26):
It's just it's playing on Western guilt and complicity in
Europe during the Holocaust, and it's playing on kind of
liberal sympathies in general. And honestly, it's playing on well,
who do you know if you're in the West. If
you're in the West, you know some Jews, maybe you

(02:49:46):
don't know Arabs. The Arabs you do know are on
TV doing bad, you know, And that is one of
the reasons for the effectiveness of it. And in terms
of like the inversion of everything, Like I think my
favorite example is the is the map, So like Israel

(02:50:06):
will often point to a map of the entire mina
region like Middle East North Africa, and they'll highlight all
of the Arab countries in green and Israel in blue
to show that like, oh, Israel just a tiny is
it just a tiny strip of land. It's just a
small bean, you know, surrounded by big green Arab monsters,

(02:50:29):
and I want to kill Israel like that. Hezbara map will
like often include the West Bank and the Gaza strip
in green as well, and it's a way to frame
the West Bank in Gaza is not just being like this,
you know, particular thing. They will be like, No, these
are part of the giant invading Arab green monster, because

(02:50:52):
what they're trying to do is show the power imbalance
is being completely inverted from the reality here, you know,
and anyone, anyone who knows you know, or anyone who's
like watched the news, knows that it's ridiculously false to
claim that Israel is somehow the less powerful agent here,

(02:51:12):
you know, like you you don't have to have a
PhD to plainly see the disproportionate power imbalance. Like there's Israel,
a modern, you know, well armed military, cutting edge technology,
backing and funding of the world's most powerful state, most
powerful superpower, the United States, and then there is Hamas.

(02:51:37):
That doesn't make Hamas the good guys or whatever I'm saying,
it's just a clear indication of the power imbalance. You know,
there is a clear power imbalance. And I think, like
to what you were saying, the last one hundred plus
days have made it perfectly clear that for all the
talk of like the Arab States supporting Palestinians, like, it's

(02:51:58):
clear Israel could literally genocide Palaestinians in broad daylight in
the Arab states who do nothing. There's no giant Arab
green monster that is protecting the Palestinian like the Palastinians.
Only Arab comrades right now are the Houthis in Yemen
and Hasbollah in Lebanon, both of which are non government
militant organizations. They are not like, it is not the

(02:52:20):
state of Yemen who is supporting the Palaestinians. It's not
the state of Lebanon. It is these militant states within
states pretty much. And yeah, so it's like you have
to remember when Israel claims were just they were a
small state the size of New Jersey, you know, in
a tough neighborhood, and trying to make you know, the

(02:52:40):
West Bank and Gaza look like the spear's tip of
an Arab invasion. You have to remember that's not the case.
The truth of it is is like you want to
talk about how small Israel is, look how small the
Gaza strip is, and that you know alone to like
look at that pick sure, to know they are surrounded

(02:53:02):
and to see that there's no way out. That I
think changes the narrative for people. And it's a narrative
that the Israelis don't like to show. They don't like
to show the West Bank, and you know, in terms
of how it is cut into cantons that are basically
everything is surrounded by Israeli settlements in Israeli military.

Speaker 9 (02:53:27):
They took the best agricultural lands for themselves, you know
what I mean, Like they really And also I think
talking about seeing the Gaza on a map, it's really
infuriating to me because I feel like in the last
couple of months more people have seen what Gaza looks
like on a map than ever before. And we see
how fucking small it is, and it's described as being
five miles at one point, like from the sea to

(02:53:50):
the whatever, and it's still not enough able, you know,
it's to the wall, literally to the wall. But like
it's just even seeing how mini school it is is
still not enough for people to be like, oh, thirty
thousand people dying in this little strip of land.

Speaker 4 (02:54:06):
We should think about that, right, Yeah, No, I mean no,
it's it is it is. My point is basically to
dispel the idea that, like the Hesbara has been Israel,
small therefore deserves support and people standing with it because small,

(02:54:28):
because it's small, scary because baby puppy because a little
little you know, please help, and that visual is just
such a it's such a gross lie. And you know,
you've anything to make the Palestinians, you know, seem bigger

(02:54:50):
than they are is helpful for Israel. And that's why
they do it. You know, this is this is a
way to invert the victim and the victimizer. And it's
clear as day. Other things that are clear as day,
these products and services that we're going to be selling.
So stick around, we'll be right back and we're back again.

(02:55:26):
People in the West, by and large, prefer the Israeli explanation.
They're fine living in this alternate reality. And you know,
people believe it for like a variety of reasons. Some
people because they were raised to believe it, some people
because they just want to believe it. But I think
mostly most people in the West just don't really care

(02:55:51):
enough about like Palestinians to like look into it, like
they're you know, they're just it's one of many news
stories too. I think a lot of people it's easy
to put in a box and to be honest, you know,
like wouldn't that be nice to be able to compartmentalize
like it would for me. Shit, it would make me
way less stressed if I could just not care. And

(02:56:12):
that's not to like call out anyone who doesn't care,
because I do think that it is absolutely human and
valid to have some things that you just don't have
emotional capacity to care about. I think my issue is
not whether or not people are, like, you know, supporting

(02:56:33):
Palisine on their social media or whatnot. My issue is
whether or not they're just going to allow themselves to
be manipulated and then end up defending the indefensible because
of it. Like if you're if you're not going to
say nothing, don't do hasbara. That's my that's my feeling
about it. But yeah, you know, people want to put

(02:56:54):
in a box. Beyond that, I think there's also no
incentive for a lot of people to believe in it.
In fact, even question who are the victims and the
victimizers in the whole Israeli Palestine quote unquote conflict, like
it brings up a dark, twisted irony that most people
don't even want to entertain. You know, people don't want

(02:57:14):
to think about that stuff. And it also it people
worry about whether or not they're going to get in trouble.
And that brings me to another part of this speech
I found from the Middle East Policy Council about haspara quote.
It also seeks to actively inculcate canons of political correctness

(02:57:37):
in Domesican foreign media and audiences that will promote self
censorship by them. It strives thereby to decrease the willingness
of audiences to consider information linked to politically unacceptable viewpoints,
individuals and groups, and to inhibit the circulation of adverse
information and social networks. It focuses on limiting the receptivity

(02:58:00):
of audiences to information. So Hasbar is fucking Orwellian, that is,
I think one of the things that interests me about
it a lot is how Orwellian it is. You know,
it goes beyond mere branding when the Israeli government and
pro Israel institutions like so effectively mold the parameters of

(02:58:25):
what is and isn't politically correct, not just like in
their own country, but in other countries in the West.
Like think about the self censorship that you the listener
do around this issue. Think about the times you wanted
to say something but didn't because you didn't know the
exact right way to say it, you know, like how

(02:58:45):
how to put it, And like, think about the times
that you were reading something critical of Israel by someone
you trust and agree with, and one sentence or one
word or one turn of phrase triggered you into questioning
not validity of the thing you were reading, but like
the nature of the person who wrote it. Think about

(02:59:06):
your reaction to me saying these things about Israel, and
about how you felt when Sharen made a lot of
these points on some other episode of this podcast, you know,
like think about why that changes things for you. And
like there was a time where I was also uncomfortable

(02:59:28):
and like I would only feel comfortable at hearing criticism
and doing criticism of Israel in the presence of other Jews,
Like it had to be in a you know, private
all Jewish Facebook group or in like in person or
through text messages. Like I was so suspicious of the
secret motives of non Jewish people criticizing Israel, right, Like,

(02:59:53):
like someone could literally say something that I one hundred
percent agreed with, something that I myself had said, and
then I would still get this icky feeling from them
saying it, like yeah, but why are they saying it
like why do you care? Like that is probably Hasbara's
greatest success to relegate the issue of Palestinian human and

(03:00:15):
civil rights to a niche subject that is best talked
about in private and only by Jews. So I mean, Sarene,
I know that, Like for you, you've got you get
shipped for this, you know, I do.

Speaker 9 (03:00:32):
Yeah, I feel like I'm done qualifying in my real
life especially and also just like in work. I'm done
qualifying whether or not something I say is or is
not whatever, because I'm if I'm even entertaining the idea
that criticizing Israel is anti Semitic, that's like feeding the fire.
I don't want to even bring that into I don't

(03:00:54):
want to associate that religion and of course the state
of Israel. And I feel like the more we have
those disclaimers, the more it's conflated. And I've definitely, I mean,
I've had a lot of anti Zionist Jewish people on
the show, almost almost to like show people that like,
listen to these people with actual experience.

Speaker 4 (03:01:15):
Yes, and that's not to it's not to you know,
say you shouldn't. None of this is me saying like, hey,
you shouldn't listen to anti Zionist Jews or whatnot, or
just like you know, like or you shouldn't be discerning
about who you're getting your information for, because yeah, there
are Nazis who are you know, wrap themselves in the

(03:01:37):
guise of being anti Israel or like you know, anti
occupation or whatnot. That none of this is putting down
anyone for being discerning or being careful, but it's to
say that like Hasbara has quite an effect on even
the most conscious of people. Like making zion and Judaism

(03:02:01):
synonymous and like practically indistinguishable is like one of his
Bar's like greatest achievements, presenting Jewish support of Israel as
monolithic save for like a few cranks you know, who
are the exception that proved the rule. You know, like
non Jews don't want to criticize criticize Israel because they
don't want to upset their Jewish friends, or they don't

(03:02:23):
want to be labeled an anti Semite. You know. It's like,
you know, after the large public outcry about Israel's brutal
response to the homosterous attacks of October seventh, there was
a big push among his Bars to frame all Jews
of the world as feeling abandoned by the left and
abandoned by their friends. You had people like Brett Gelman,

(03:02:44):
Oh my god, from a stranger walking dumps, I hate
him so much. Oh my god, fucking Wooly Willie over
here going on Instagram being like, hey, fake woke former friends,
and like he gave a speech at the like Stand
with Israel March that was something like the Jews don't
need you, like presenting the you know, the idea of

(03:03:09):
people criticizing Israel, or like not wanting at the very
least not wanting the complete obliteration of Palestinians in Gaza,
framing that as like, oh, well, all the Jews want that,
you know, like his whole thing of being like the
Jews don't need you, as if he and Israel represented

(03:03:32):
all Jews, like presenting the Jews of the world as
a monolith, as if non Zionist or anti Zionist Jews
don't even exist, as if we all felt this way,
Like you don't want to hate Jews, do you? Of course,
if you don't, then you gotta let Israel do whatever
the hell it wants.

Speaker 6 (03:03:49):
You know.

Speaker 9 (03:03:50):
I think what really bothers me about him, I mean
everything bothers me about him. But like people like him,
they'll sometimes preface what they're saying with, hey, I care
about Palestinians and then continue on their their whatever tirade.
There's ionis bullshit, and it's like, it's just it really
boggles my mind because I think he thinks he's a

(03:04:11):
good person. I really think that he believes he's a
good person, when really he's just a piece of shit
that does not see a huge group of people as
human beings.

Speaker 4 (03:04:21):
Yes, does not see people as human. And this is
something that you I think that anyone who's like a
self described liberal or leftist or whatever would be able
to easily recognize in any other situation. But it's just
it's it's it's clouded in this particular situation because of
this conflation, because you are willing to believe that Jews

(03:04:47):
are sort of a mono like monolithically agree with Israel.
Like they may be like a little bit like liberal
Zionists or whatnot, but mostly you know, they all love Israel,
and that is is is not true, and it's it's
a way of like more so, it feeds into the

(03:05:08):
continuing conflation. It feeds into this hasbara that Israel represents
all Jews, and I am telling you right now it doesn't.
And I don't think I'm telling anyone something they don't
already know. Like I think people know, Zionism is not Judaism.

Speaker 9 (03:05:22):
I think you've said that many times on this podcast,
trust me.

Speaker 4 (03:05:25):
Yea, at this point you should know.

Speaker 9 (03:05:28):
If you don't know that by now, please.

Speaker 4 (03:05:31):
Yes, learn it now. But like you know, Jews, both
inside and outside of Israel, have a diverse range of
views about the Israeli government. That's not to say that
Jews in Israel do not, for the most part, you know,
support the government at least or support the project of Zionism.

(03:05:52):
But that is like, to me, that's to be expected.
It's to be expected that it's like fucking nine to eleven,
you know. I it weird to not expect the kind
of racist jingoism that you saw like after nine to eleven,
you know, in fucking America. And I feel like that
was the majority of people. Was that kind of like

(03:06:12):
like seething anti Arab hatred. And I'm not excusing it,
but what I'm saying is that Jews have a diverse
range of views inside and outside of Israel, and a
lot of it includes wanting a ceasefire. And that's why
you see it in these Jewish organizations that are trying
to end the occupation. They're trying they are openly critiquing Israel,

(03:06:35):
that are calling Zionism racism. You see it, and you
see it because they because we're honestly trying to change
this narrative. We're trying to stop people from believing this
lie that the Jewish people are synonymous with the state
of Israel.

Speaker 9 (03:06:53):
Yeah, and I think that's why Jewish and I mean
I've said this many times as well, but Jewish antaisionists
are like a very integral part of the movement to
liberate Palestine because it's again, it's not a Palestinian issue,
it's not a Muslim issue. It's it's a very human
issue to care about people not being fucking genocided.

Speaker 4 (03:07:13):
Yes, another thing that's pretty clear is how good the
products are that we sell here at Cool Zone. So
let's stick around, listen to these ads and we'll be
right back. And we're back. So I want to say

(03:07:43):
to everyone listening, I understand that the impulse to treat
the subject of Israel with more caution and care. Is
rooted in respect for the Jewish people and a desire
to stand firmly against anti Semitism, and that is that
is a good thing. I encourage that one hundred percent

(03:08:06):
you respecting Jewish people and wanting to stand firmly against
anti Semitism, wanting to fight it with every fiber of
your being. You are correct and feeling that way, and
I want to encourage it. And I also need you
to understand that it's for that very reason that I
urge people to speak out about Israel, because I believe

(03:08:29):
Israel and there has Baris mouthpieces and the project of
political Zionism are inherently anti Semitic, and not in like
the semantic sense where it's like Arabs are also semi
So it's an argument I've heard. I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about anti Jewish, specifically anti Jewish. They actively

(03:08:51):
work to create fear amongst diaspora Jews, make us distrust
our friends, our neighbors, our co work, our fellow Jews.
Even they tell us that, you know, they tell Jews
that unless they support Israel, they are not real Jews,
you know, or they are self hating Jews. They use

(03:09:13):
our past traumas against us. They re traumatize us and
manipulate us like it's classic abuser shit. It is, it
is abuse. It's it's cult shit too, and they even
deal in Nazi revisionism. And it's it's so important to
point this out because you see the way that they,

(03:09:37):
the Israeli government uses the Nazi you know, accusation in
order to do a genocide. I mean you see constantly,
you know, in the last three four months, videos from
the IDF showing, you know, an iPad they found in
a teen girls bedroom, and you know, they open it

(03:09:58):
up and there's the wallpaper of the iPad is is
Hitler's face. And you look at that, and you're supposed
to go, oh my god, I can't I can't believe that,
and you forget to question what the fuck an Israeli
soldier is doing in a seventeen year old girls bedroom.
Why is it blown up? And why why is he

(03:10:20):
going through her stuff like that? You stop looking at
what is actually happening, and you start looking at what
the Hasbaris want you to look at. They want you
to see the Hitler thing and go like, oh man,
this is a whole society of little Hitlers, and I

(03:10:41):
you know, I look at that and I see the
way they cynically use that. While at the same time,
you know, Benjamin net Yahoo has been pushing this line
claiming that the Holocaust was essentially the Palestinian's idea. I mean,
this is something that has been gaining more and more
traction in like sort of this new Israel Palestine, like

(03:11:07):
a historical narrative that's been pushed about, like you know,
the Mufti and is and Hitler meeting up together and
being like, have you ever thought about killing the Jews?
And Hitler was like, I never thought about that before.
That's so smart. Wow, thank you Palestinians. Like total bullshit,
totally revising, like trying to do fucking like I don't

(03:11:32):
know apology of for literally, Hitler is anti Semitic. I
don't care how you slice it. It is. And that's
something that the Israeli government deals in. They deal in
anti Semitism all the time. I mean, essentially, Israel tells
the world that Jews are a third column, loyal to

(03:11:55):
Israel first and foremost, and tells Jews that our home
isn't our home. They say this to us, and you
know that due to our traditions and our blood, you know,
we are just merely guests in any other place. This
is like an old racist worldview from a previous century,

(03:12:15):
filled with blood and soil fascism, you know, and like
for me, like growing up in a mixed secular family,
you know, where I'm like, yeah, I'm like culturally Jewish
and I'm ethnically Jewish, but I'm like a blood jew essentially,
you know, like and as like the very fact of
me having Jewish blood was used by fascists to murder

(03:12:37):
us during the Holocaust. Now under Israel's Law of Return,
that very same Jewish blood is being used by fascists
as a passport to allow me to move to Israel
and displace an entire Palestinian family if I choose to, like,
you know, being religiously Jewish doesn't have anything to do
with my ability to do this, and my blood is

(03:12:59):
my passport to you apartheid. That's why I choose to
talk about this stuff. You know, if you're going to
use my blood to make me complicit in crimes, the
crimes of your state, then I'm gonna have something to
say about it. You know. So my final piece of
haspara has to do with something that has been said
over and over again by countless Zionis, including the current

(03:13:23):
President of these United States of America, Joe Biden. Folks,
were there no Israel, there wouldn't be a Jewish the
world was safe. The idea that the state of Israel
alone can keep the Jewish people safe is an insane
piece of haspara. It is a total, utter anti Semitic bullshit.

(03:13:45):
A Jewish state does not and cannot keep Jewish people safe.
Tying the fate of the Jewish state to the Jewish
people is a recipe for fucking disaster. The Jewish people
are a nation that has lasted thousands of years. Nations
meaning like a people with a common origin, history, language, culture, customs,

(03:14:10):
and religion and or religion. You know, it can be
any of those things. And for a long long time
we were one of many stateless nations that existed. And
that's not to say that, you know, Israel shouldn't exist
or whatever. But more importantly, what I'm saying is that
Jews should exist, whether they happen to be located anywhere,

(03:14:33):
like wherever they are, Jews should should exist. The existence
of the state of Israel, to me is not the question,
and that is not what Israel claims to do. They ensure,
they claim to ensure the existence of the Jewish people,
but they do not. All they do is try to
bolster the existence of their state. And it should not

(03:14:54):
be common thought that the existence of Israel and the
existence of Jews are the same thing is I can
personally think of nothing more dangerous for any people than
to tie their entire survival to something as impermanent as
a fucking state. And that is the truth about Israel.

(03:15:18):
So you know, all this to say that I'm a
I guess I'm an anarchist. Now there's one thing that
you know, getting into the whole Israel palasine thing will
do to you. It turns you very quickly into someone
who believes the existence of states is the problem. Yeah, yeah,

(03:15:40):
so that's that's me. That's how I feel about stuff.

Speaker 9 (03:15:45):
I'm so glad you did this series for us. Where
can't people hear you do the same thing? But what
by yourself? With other people?

Speaker 4 (03:15:53):
You can? You can hear me? Do you know these
talking about Israel and stuff? On my new podcast, bad
has Bara, The world's most moral podcast. It's a it's
a comedy podcast about hilarious Israeli propaganda that I that
I find that are you know, listeners find and you know,

(03:16:14):
I have on my friends like Charine, I had you on,
I had an on, I had all sorts of great
anti Zionist Jews and some really amazing Palestinian guests. Or
at least by the time this comes out, I assume
those episodes will have come out. I you know, I
don't know when those are coming out. But anyways, I've

(03:16:34):
only been doing the podcast for a month and it's
it's been a lot of fun. It's been cathartic, and
it's been hard, and it's definitely been you know, like
caused some stress in my life because you know, looking
for this content you have to dig through a lot
of really horrific shit. So yeah, check out bad as
Bara or you know, check me out met leave jokes

(03:16:57):
on Instagram, and go to sacrament Know punchline March seventeenth, Sunday,
seven pm, Me and my wife, my wife. Just if
you're in teeny we're gonna be co headlining there, So
get your tickets now. Link in the notes. Yay no
thank you so much.

Speaker 9 (03:17:15):
I really enjoy your podcast, the most SPORL podcast, I
would say in the.

Speaker 4 (03:17:21):
World for sure. Thank you for you know, give me
the opportunity to talk about this. And you know, I
promise you that the show, The Badass Bar Show is funny.
I swear to god, it's funny.

Speaker 9 (03:17:38):
It's very cathartic. You are you're correct in that. It's
very cathartic to just like event with your friends and
people think the same things as you, especially if you're
surrounded by someone or people that are kind of purposely
ignorant or whatever.

Speaker 4 (03:17:52):
You know. So, yeah, when you're surrounded by people who
don't want to either don't want to engage with this
at all, or I'm mad at you for even partially
engaging with it, it's nice to find the people that
you know in love and like to joke around with
and be like, we're we're not crazy, right exactly, and

(03:18:13):
then we go, yeah, we're not, and then we have
a good time. Yeah, check that out, and thank you
and thank you to everyone. A cool zon media.

Speaker 9 (03:18:19):
Yay, Yeah, go follow Matt, Go see Matt and his
uh my crush his wife, don't tell her, and yeah
they're they're really doing the work and I really appreciate
both of you guys just being really outspoken always, and
so yeah, follow their lead, keep talking about Palestine. There's

(03:18:40):
still a fucking genocide happening. And that's the episode.

Speaker 4 (03:18:45):
All right, bye everyone, Hi Pree Palestine pre Palestine.

Speaker 2 (03:18:53):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 8 (03:18:58):
It Could Happen here as production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 9 (03:19:01):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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