It Could Happen Here Weekly 157

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. 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

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to it could happen here.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Oh god, we have survived another week, and I'm joined
today by Sophie and James to discuss Trump's cabinet picks
and the upcoming potential members of the Trump administration two
point zero. I'm sure some of you have been following
the news and there is some wacky picks in there.
There keeps being even more wacky ones like RFK, which

(00:52):
I didn't even have time to include because by the
time he was announced I basically already wrote too much.
RFK will get his own future episode. But it's pretty
it's pretty safe to assume that RFK in control of
Health and Human Services is pretty bad.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
You don't say, you don't say yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
People are saying it not great to have the world's
weirdest conspiracy theorist of the Kennedy family in charge of
you know, like vaccines and health mandates, and it's gonna
be bad, bad enough that it's that it's its own
episode for the rest of the nominations, mostly like last week, right,
this is going to be covering all the nominations in
the week of the eleventh to the fifteenth of November.

(01:33):
We're going to kind of go through nomination by nomination
and do a brief overview of each of these guys
and why each one could be bad, and some of
them just kind of point to like more general like
neocon picks as well. Trump kind of started off with
some more ordinary picks honestly, like you know, like Mark Rubio,
a Secretary of State. This is this is kind of

(01:55):
a restrained pick for him. Now Rubio is still kind
of converted into being a Trump loyalist like every single
other person we're going to be talking about, and it
is interesting that kind of among all of the Trump appointees,
he has been the most open about his criticisms of Trump,
especially during Trump's first term. The leaked five hundred and
fifty one page a VP vetting document produced by the
Trump campaign outlines Rubio's anti Putin comments, support for the

(02:19):
Miller investigation, his acceptance of the twenty twenty election results,
passed comments that Trump is too dangerous to be trusted
with nuclear codes, and his history of supporting NATO, support
of the Iraq War, and pro military intervention in Iran
and Syria. So some of these positions now kind of
bump up against what Trump's next term is going to

(02:39):
be kind of defined by and like. More recently, Rubio
has moved on from his Tea Party free trade kind
of roots and now advocates for more tariffs on China
and calling the country quote the most advanced adversary America
has ever faced, unquote Basically all of the kind of
foreign policy guys are really big on China. They are

(03:00):
all China hawks. That there's kind of one continuous through
line throughout all these nominations. I guess, James, do you
have any thoughts on mark Rubio for Secretary of State?

Speaker 5 (03:10):
Yeah, Marco Rubio, I don't have a lot of thoughts
with Marko Rubio. I always expecting get All to be
more along the lines of heck, thest like more to
be like culture war commentators. Yeah, like, at least Rubio,
I will say, like, I'd probably disagree with him on
almost everything, but he's he's not going to probably abandon
the YPG and the YPG and SDF in Syria, which

(03:31):
is a good thing. He's he's pretty hawkish on that.
He's not a big out of one fan, So like
that's a good thing. I guess, Like I think as
Secretary of States under Trump, go like it could have
been fucking Tucker Carlson, like that, that's not out of
the realm of possibility.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
At this rate.

Speaker 5 (03:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And uh, it's well, he spends all
his time watching Fox News, right, Like that's what we've
heard that he does. And it's not inconceivable that he
thinks these people are experts because they're presented that way
and that is how he encounters and thus perceives world.
So I guess Rubio and even amongst these picks, he's
probably not the worst, which is wild to be saying.

Speaker 4 (04:06):
So is the review in Mark Rubio could be worse?

Speaker 2 (04:09):
I mean, I guess so.

Speaker 5 (04:11):
I mean that's the review of Mark Rubio's life, isn't
it that that's pretty much how he's gone through the world. Yeah,
I think his parents would agree with us.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Ouch Rubio is no Pete hegseeth Secretary of Defense. Yeah,
which was one of the first picks that like really sharted,
raising some eyebrows.

Speaker 4 (04:28):
Wild pick, wild pick.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (04:31):
Yeah, what he does an a cog tattooed on his bicep.

Speaker 6 (04:34):
Stop sending us that photo over him without a shirt
on perps seen it.

Speaker 5 (04:39):
Yeah, never send us any cabinet member shirtless. I don't
care if it's RFK, I don't care if his head set.

Speaker 6 (04:45):
I don't want to see a nipple I thought I
didn't like it. I don't need to see it again.
Yank you so much.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
I feel like everyone's pretty well aware now that he
has some very questionable Christian nationalist tattoos. Honey, not not
super uncommon. And you know in this for like this
type of like military guy he got.

Speaker 5 (05:03):
The more washed ways out. He got them in his
late thirties.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
That also makes sense. That feels like a very midlife crisis.
Oh no, I'm a Fox and Friends weekend host now
kind of move.

Speaker 5 (05:13):
Yeah, yeah, better up my molon Larbie game.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Now.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
There's a lot to be said about Pete Hank Seth.
He's a Princeton and Harvard graduate who has also claimed
that germs are not real and he has never washed
his hands in the last ten years. Disgusting. Germs are
not real. I can't see them, therefore they're not real.
So that's lovely gross.

Speaker 6 (05:39):
You can't.

Speaker 4 (05:40):
What a fucking idiot, but absolute moron god.

Speaker 3 (05:45):
He's advocated against divorce for families with kids until he
was caught cheating on his second wife with his producer,
fathered a child, and then divorced his wife to Mary,
his coworker many searchcases. In general, he's just very chud
codd right. He has like he has like a grunt
style fashion, Christian nationalist tattoos. He looks like the type
of guy that I would have doxed for fun as

(06:05):
a teenager. Except he just serves on Fox and Friends'
Weekend hosting a team. He served in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq
and Afghanistan and the Army National Guard, and has recently
advocated that women should not serve in combat roles in
the US military.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
I'm straight up.

Speaker 7 (06:22):
Just saying we should not have women in combat roles
hasn't made us more effective, hasn't made us more lethal
has made fighting more complicated. We've all served with women
and they're great. It just our institutions don't have to
incentivize that in places where traditionally not traditionally over human history,
men in those positions are more capable.

Speaker 5 (06:43):
Yes, and well take so much should be happening in
the military.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
He sure does.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
I'm going to read a quote from his book The
War on Warriors, Big Si Whotox say, the Republican Party
by default has become the only party of America. And
if we don't crusade a holy war, a righteous, holy
war for freedom, we're not going to save America.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Unquote.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
In general, a lot of his rhetoric kind of is
this similar Christian nationalist crusade holy war type stuff. This
is like a lot of what he talks about on
podcasts and TV appearances where he is not throwing a
double sided axe at the penus of a West Point
drummer or live TV.

Speaker 5 (07:25):
It was incredible. It was indirect fire. He arcd it
over the target, straight to the dick and balls of
the West Point drama.

Speaker 6 (07:32):
I just feel like, if he's gonna like somebody tell
him what a microscope is, Somebody just tell him what
a microscope is.

Speaker 5 (07:38):
He must have used binoculars at some point in his service,
or some kind of magnified optic right to learn to
see things. I mean, he has a magnified optic tattooed
on his bicep. Actually, he should does good.

Speaker 6 (07:50):
I mean, like, if you're gonna be Secretary of Defense,
at least like, oh.

Speaker 4 (07:55):
Sir, wash your hands.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
Arguably, the most worrying part about Pete as Secretary of
Defense is not the anti handwashing beliefs or the poor
aim for ax throwing. It's that he's basically a lobbyist
for war criminals. Yes, and it was a big part
of the campaign to push Trump to pardon several convicted
war criminals, people who like tortured and murdered prisoners and

(08:21):
ordered soldiers to shoot and kill random, unarmed civilians.

Speaker 6 (08:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
So, especially with this Secretary of Defense role, that's not great.
That he's essentially pro war criminal and justifies it by saying, like,
people don't really understand what it's like to serve in combat.
Sometimes you have to make decisions and blah blah blah
blah blah, all this random stuff not good. Sources within
the government have called him the most unqualified person ever

(08:45):
appointed to this position, which I do I do believe
because this is just a guy that Trump sees on TV.
This is just a TV host. Yeah, this is one
of the more shocking nominations. Yeah, let's move on to
Secretary of Homeland Security. Ugh, this is another odd pick.
Christine Nome, the non border state governor of South Dakota,

(09:08):
who has no experience in the DHS, has never worked
in law enforcement, though she does possess one trademark cop trait.

Speaker 4 (09:17):
Oh yes, oh yes she does.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
And what would that be here, which is shooting and
killing dogs?

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yep, awful person.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
So that is one thing she might bond with our
law enforcement community over.

Speaker 6 (09:29):
Which we all know about because she wrote about it
in her own fucking book.

Speaker 4 (09:34):
Girl.

Speaker 5 (09:35):
Yeah, incriminating herself another cop trait, So true, so true.
She did deploy the South Dakota National Guard to the border,
and I think they used they received private financing for it,
if I remember correctly. Yeah. See, like that's her engagement.
That one again is troubling. So much power the DHS.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
It's such an odd pick.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
All of these picks where I'm talking about, some of
them do seem odd, but not from the point of
view that Trump is basically picking people that one are
like in his constant orbit, like a guy on TV,
but also people that are not like institutionalists.

Speaker 8 (10:07):
Right.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
These aren't like people who like worked their way up
through these government departments to prove their effectiveness, to prove
their legitimacy. They are people that have proven their personal
loyalty to Trump.

Speaker 8 (10:17):
Right.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Trump's first campaign was kind of defined by a whole
bunch of people defecting from him. Right, everyone he's appointed
eventually gotten to beefs with him. People you know left,
wrote books about how bad Trump is. Eventually Trump faced
all these prosecutions. Trump's main concern is like loyalty right now,
So he's picking people that just have proven their own loyalty,

(10:38):
and from that point of view, all of his picks
make sense. Almost everyone picked here at least at some point,
appeared on screen with Trump in his like twenty twenty
four campaign six part documentary. Like all of these guys
so like they were around Trump's orbit from pretty early
on in his campaign now. According to Politico, Christinome was

(10:59):
recommended by twenty six campaign chief Corey Lewandowski, and his
incoming borders are Tom Homan.

Speaker 4 (11:06):
Lewandowski sucks.

Speaker 6 (11:08):
Yes, gonna give him a honorary You suck, Lewandowski.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
Her appointment is evidence of Trump's centralizing power and departmental
influence tightly within the White House. Mark Krekorian, executive director
of the far right Center for Immigration Studies, has postulated
that the immigration branches of DHS will largely be puppeteered
by Stephen Miller and the New Borders are who has
a lot of DHS experience, while NOME could be more

(11:33):
focused on overseeing FEMA, TSA and Secret Service. Another aspect
of Trump just appointing these wildly incompetent people is that
more of these departments can just be run out of
the White House, specifically by his senior advisors and Steven Miller, right, like,
those are the types of people that are going to
be largely overseeing the direction of these departments, while basically

(11:54):
these figureheads just to do their bidding.

Speaker 5 (11:56):
Yeah, I had worried that he would appoint Stephen Miller directly.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
To you, I understand that fear. I think part of
the fear is that he just doesn't have to.

Speaker 5 (12:04):
Yes, I know you're right.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
In fact, Steven Miller can have more power by having
his myths in more departments in his current role, which
we will get to later, But first let's talk about
Tulci Gabbard. That's the appointed Director of National Intelligence, which
is crazy crazy Yeah, Now, like no, Gabbard is shockingly

(12:26):
unqualified and she would be overseeing eighteen intelligence agencies, having
never worked in the intelligence field or served on a
Congressional intelligence committee. Her nomination was first announced by Roger
Stone on info Wars now owned by The Onion owned
the Onion. But that was, like, that was how this
news broke. That kind of also tells you about like

(12:48):
what information channels are getting like funneled down from Trump's team.
If Roger Stone was the first guy to announce it
before Trump even announced it in his like truth socialing.

Speaker 6 (12:58):
It just is she's such a concertspiracy theorists that just
it does kind of make sense.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
She is an anti vaccine conspiracy theorist with a history
of spreading Russian disinformation propaganda during the invasion of Ukraine.
Gabru was also openly pro ASAD in twenty fifteen, secretly
met with Assad in twenty seventeen, and then a year
later Gabard peddled Syrian war crime denial, saying that she
was quote unquote skeptical of intelligence findings that Assad carried
out chemical weapons attacks. While parenting Russian talking points in

(13:26):
February twenty twenty two, she blamed Joe Biden for the
war in Ukraine for not alleviating Russia's fear of Ukraine
possibly joining NATO. I'm going to quote from NBC news quote.
During her twenty twenty presidential bid, Russian state propaganda often
portrayed Gabbard favorably while it demigrated the other Democratic candidates,
including Joe Biden. According to research from the Foreign Policy

(13:46):
Research Institute of Philadelphia based think tank, less than a
month into her presidential campaign, there were at least twenty
Gabbard stories on three major Moscow based English language websites
affiliated or supportive of the Russian government, which celebrated her candidacy.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Unquote.

Speaker 5 (14:02):
That's very funny because twenty Gabbart stories is probably the
net totals that the entire US media wrote throughout her run.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
Like it is widely speculated that Gabbard is a de
facto Russian agent, or at the very least is very
comfortable just spreading Russian propaganda and spreading like pro Putin
and pro Russian talking points.

Speaker 5 (14:20):
Yeah, it could be one of those things where she's
not actually she's like too fucking glowing to be an agent,
and she's in fact just doing this shit voluntarily by accident.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
Like it's certainly possible. I mean the Syrian warcrime denial
and meeting with the sad stuff.

Speaker 5 (14:33):
Yeah, that stuff is pretty glowing.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
And Russia certainly has an invested interest in promoting Gabbard right,
So at the very least, even this isn't intentional on
her part, Russia is very willing to jump on this.
And the fact that she's now going to be the
head of all of our spy agency programs. Uh okay, cool,
sounds great.

Speaker 6 (14:50):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
She also comes from a family of anti gay activists
and is tied to an anti Muslim and anti gay
cult called the Science of Identity. The leader has called
Muslims and Fsler's quote unquote demons. In two thousand and four,
Tulsi herself accused the newspaper The Honolulu of being the
mouthpiece for quote unquote homosexual extremists. Insert joke about mouthpiece

(15:12):
homosexual anyway, Now, Tulsia's family and campaign staff were all
active members of the cult during her twenty twenty presidential campaign,
during which she also produced a list of enemies that
named prominent journalists who were against Tulsia's own history of
war crime denial.

Speaker 5 (15:30):
Amazing. Oh boy, yeah, sorry, we got snubbed there.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Hey, I mean it was twenty nineteen, right, you.

Speaker 5 (15:36):
Know, yeah, I can dream of making.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
We still have a chance of being put on their
list of enemies.

Speaker 5 (15:42):
You know what, Garrison, if we are accused of crimes,
how will we fund defense.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
Through these products and services that support this podcast? That's correct, Okay,
we are back. It's time to talk about who might
be prosecuting a list of political enemies, and that would
be the possible new Attorney.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
General, Matt Gates.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
Oh boy, So Matt Gates is one of these congress
people who has built an outsized reputation through television appearances
and TV news soundbites. He's always quick to jump to
the defense of Trump and advocate for extreme positions within
the party. His behavior displays a desperate need for attention
and willingness to sacrifice his own effectiveness as a congressman
for simply going viral. This performative nature is made a

(16:33):
little bit more uncanny by the bizarre fact that Gates
grew up in the house from the Truman Show, which
his family still owns.

Speaker 5 (16:43):
You, I did not know that.

Speaker 4 (16:44):
I did not know that, But that is what.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, it makes so much sense though.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Look at all of his gambits and bits in Congress,
and if you frame that within someone who was raised
in the Truman Show house, it makes perfect sense.

Speaker 9 (16:59):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
Yeah, he is not necessarily a popular pick among kind
of again, like institutionalists in the Republican Party. The famously
liberal Wall Street Journal ran the headline quote, Matt Gates
is a bad choice for Attorney General. He's a nominee
for those who want the law to be used for
political revenge and it won't end well unquote now. Hours

(17:20):
after this announcement, Gates suddenly resigned from the House, and
Speaker Johnson said that he hopes to work with Governor
DeSantis to fast track a special election to get the
seat filled as early as January.

Speaker 10 (17:33):
I think, out of deference to us, he issued his
resignation letter effective immediately of Congress. That caught us by
surprise a little bit, But I asked him what the
reasoning was and he said, well, you can't have too
many absences. So under Florida state law, there's about an
eight week period to select and fill in a vacancy.

(17:53):
People have asked me all day long, President Trump is
poaching all of your talent.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
Yes, we have an embarrassment of riches here.

Speaker 10 (18:00):
The Republican Conference is full of talented people who are
extraordinary leaders and have great expertise. And everyone in this Congress,
in this conference could serve in a leadership position in
the administration.

Speaker 4 (18:12):
It's so bizarre a little bit.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
But there's one little curious fact about Gates a quick resignation,
well yes, is that this happened just days before a
House Ethics investigation was set to vote on the release
of a report looking into the sex trafficking allegations against
Matt Gates. According to ABC News, the woman at the
center of the DOJ's probe of Representative Matt Gates testified

(18:37):
to the House Ethics Committee that the now former Florida
congressman had sex with her when she was seventeen years old,
to quote ABC quote. The woman's allegation regarding Gates became
part of the investigation following claims by former Seminole County
tax collector Joel Greenberg, a former friend of Gates who
is currently serving an eleven year prison sentence after reaching

(19:00):
a deal with investigators in May of twenty twenty one
in which he pleaded guilty to multiple federal crimes, including
sex trafficking of the woman when she was a miner
and introducing her to other quote unquote adult men who
also had sex with her when she was under age.
The committee also obtained a sworn written statement by Gates's
ex girlfriend where she lists the Florida congressman as one
of the attendees at a party in July twenty seventeen

(19:23):
where drugs were present and which was attended by the
woman who Gates allegedly has sex with when she was
a minor. Some witnesses show venmo payments that they allegedly
received from Gates unquote. So I guess the end goal
of the QAnon movement is just putting a pedophile in
charge of the DOJ serving as attorney general over the

(19:43):
entire country. Also, Gates made a really bad joke a
few years ago, responding to a Twitter post about how
people can be like beautiful.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
At any age.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
Oh yeah, and Gates responded by saying this should be
Florida's state motto, and that tweet.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Is still ugh.

Speaker 5 (19:58):
Wasn't it sexy at anyth It is sexy? It Oh
my god, it's us.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Oh that's so bad.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
But no, Gates isn't super popular even within like large
parts of the party. It's reported from other Congressmen that
he would like walk up to them and like show
them sex tapes he made with people he's like having
sex with.

Speaker 4 (20:18):
He's a fucking creep.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
He's really icky.

Speaker 4 (20:21):
Ew.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Bro.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
There's arguments that like maybe he won't get past like confirmation, right, yeah, yeah.
And here's here's the thing, he might not have to.
Trump is currently working with the Speaker of the House
as well as the new Senate majority leader to possibly
just close Congress and push all these guys through in
recess appointments, so they might not even have to get

(20:44):
past the confirmation process. Now, this still remains to be seen,
and as Matt Johnson said in the clip before, he's
a little worried that Trump just keeps picking congressman, which
is slowly eating away at the House's slim Republican majority.
Johnson said that he as quote unquote begged and pleaded
with Trump to stop coaching House representatives to protect their majority.

(21:06):
At this point, at least five congressmen have been tapped
to serve in the Trump administration, with more expected. Now
Gates might have someone assisting him as Deputy Attorney General
with a little bit more prosecution experience. That is Todd
blanche who is Trump's personal defense lawyer, who earlier this
year oversaw multiple indictments against Trump. So Trump just picked

(21:28):
his own lawyer to be like, yeah, you're like the
second guy in charge. Go help out Gates.

Speaker 5 (21:33):
I know this will be fine.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
The White House Chief of Staff is Susie Wills, who's
as very successful Republican campaign operator. She worked on Rick
Scott's and Ron DeSantis' governatorial campaigns as well as Trump's
twenty twenty four presidential campaign. She's kind of one of
the few like legacy establishment figures that Trump has tapped.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Now.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
Deputy chief of Staff is Steven Miller, the great replacement.
White nationalist and anti immigrant extremist, will be returning to
the White House as Assistant to the President and a
Deputy chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland security advisor.
So he's not just the head of whole ind Security.
He has his pause in multiple little departments and also

(22:13):
is like directly next to the president's ear.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
Now.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
In Trump's first term, Miller was the architect of the
family separation policy, the Muslim ban, and the end of DACA.
Miller has advocated for denaturalization of American citizens and has
called for the use of National Guard troops from Republican
governed states to be deployed in blue states to carry
out in tournament of migrants in military camps and deportations
in states that are uncooperative with Trump's mass deportation plans.

(22:37):
James Jefny things to add here on Stephen Miller. This
is kind of your department.

Speaker 5 (22:41):
Miller is scary because he's actually very effective, Like so
often these right wing kind of plot hinge on these
bizarre legal theories, right, which I would say far from
accepted by mainstream god of jurispudents. Yeah, Miller did very
well at finding antiquated laws that could stick the landing
in the court to do the evil shit he wanted

(23:02):
to do.

Speaker 3 (23:02):
Like the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety something.

Speaker 5 (23:06):
Yeah, yeah, I mean he did that with Title forty two,
which is a law that's designed to stop people with
tuberculosis just walking across the border. Right, And he's successfully
and he planned this before the pandemic. He's successfully used
that to effectively allow border patrol to immediately deport people
without giving them their right to claim asylum. And that
was a policy that Trump did and that Biden continued
till twenty twenty three. Right, Like, Miller is good if

(23:30):
we look at the last term at finding ways to Yeah,
he's effective. He's scarily effective to me.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
He's always been the scariest guy in Trump's orbit.

Speaker 5 (23:39):
Yes, but yeah, because he's competent and like by far,
and he stays out of the limelight for the large
part and that allows him to not have to defend
his evil shit and just get on with doing it.

Speaker 3 (23:47):
When I watched that six part documentary, but the behind
the scenes of Trump's campaign, Seila Miller was in almost
every scene. Yes, he was always like in the background,
always in the background, just just saying things to Trump.
Like he's he is a constant presence there. Yeah, it's
quite frightening. Now moving on, the guy nominated for National
Security Advisor is named Mike Walls. He's a neo Khon.

(24:10):
He's an anti assadist, pro Ukraine. He's advocated to take
the cuffs off Ukraine to allow them to make strikes
further into Russia. He was also the former counter terrorism
advisor to Dick Cheney when when he was VP.

Speaker 4 (24:23):
He's super pro Israel too.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Oh, everyone I list here is pro Israel. Yeah, that's
pretty much.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
This is one of the most like openly pro war guys, right,
someone like this guy who's historically kind of like the
anti Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah, yeah, takes the opposite stance on
almost every single issue. He's he he's a neo Khon,
He's anti Asad, he's anti Putin.

Speaker 5 (24:45):
He's a member of the Kurdish Caucus in Congress. Actually
interesting interesting, Yeah, I mean yeah, I hope he bounces
out some of some of those crazy more like a
sadist sort of or just Trump's natural tendency to see
a strong man in to one and being like, yeah,
you go for it money.

Speaker 9 (25:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
He was the first Green Beret to serve in Congress
and has advocated the use of military intel to combat
drug cartels and co sponsored legislation to authorize the use
of military force against cartels. In Mexico. Great guy.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Another kind of more standard establishment pick, still not good,
but a little bit more standard is CIA director John Ratcliffe.
Briefly served as Director of Natural Intelligence near the end
of Trump's first term and helped to defend Trump during
impeachment hearings. He is more of like a standard pick,
but like everyone else on this list, he has demonstrated
fierce loyalty to Trump. EPA advisor Lee Zelden, a former

(25:40):
New York congressman, no environmental or conservation experience, just an
ordinary anti regulation conservative. After his announcement, Zelman wrote, quote,
we will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry,
to bring back American jobs, and make the US the
global leader of AI unquote, which does not point to

(26:01):
much environmental protection. I'm going to quote from the New Republic.
Zelden voted to cut EPA funding, scrap its chemical risk
assessment program, and block the agency from taking action to
restrict carbon pollution. He missed the twenty seventeen vote on
whether to defund the EPA's criminal law enforcement program, but
voted to prohibit funds from being used for this purpose
the prior year unquote. After going to the R and C.

Speaker 6 (26:23):
His emails were the worst email thread that I got
added to his emails are so unhinged.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Truly the worst thing you have ever done.

Speaker 6 (26:32):
Yeah, Zelden worst emails, so which actually makes sense that
he wants to be a global leader of AI. Yes,
that's probably what all his emails were.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
I mean, it's pretty safe to assume that basically any
progress that we have made on climate very minuscule, will
be immediately undone and we will just make a negative
progress in the next four years with someone like Lee
Zelden in charge of the EPA, which already has very
little regulatory power, but it's about to have a lot less.
Let's discuss borders are Tom Homan, former ICE director. He

(27:05):
oversaw the family separation policy in twenty seventeen and has
since said that American born citizens should be deported with
their family to avoid separating families. He's advocated treating cartels
like foreign terrorist organizations that Trump will used the full
bite of the US Special operations to take out. He
also wrote the border section of Project twenty twenty five, James,

(27:27):
do you have anything to say on our new borders?

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Are?

Speaker 5 (27:30):
It's kind of troubling because again, You've got someone here
who is competent, right, who has worked at high levels
in government. He's an Obama appointee.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
Right, he's worked at ice like forever.

Speaker 5 (27:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, Like when Obama was setting records
for deportations, Homan was doing it, which I think tells
you everything about you know, the shit that we forget
about Obama. But yeah, like again troubling because Homan is
a real hawk on this stuff and has previously been Like,
he was effective at doing family separation, right, and it

(28:00):
wasn't particularly organized, as we've seen, it's difficult for people
to find and reunite the families. They've been doing it
ever since Trump left office. But he was effective at
getting that shit done. And that worries me in terms
of deportations because I will need to scale up massively,
as we spoke about, and like that will require someone
with leadership experience, and he has that. Like then that

(28:21):
is concerning.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Let's talk about some more diplomatic roles For ambassador to
the UN. Trump has named Elise Stephanic, who has no
diplomatic experience but has been extremely vocally pro Israel. She
harshly interrogated university presidents amid campus protests against the genocide
and Gaza, and is consistently advocated against US participation in

(28:45):
the UN and now is going to be the UN
ambassador to quote from the New Republic quote. In a
statement last week, Stefanic harolded Israel's decision to ban the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in
the Near East or UNRA, from operating in Israel, the
West Bank and Gaza, claiming that the seventy four year

(29:07):
old aid program quote instills anti Semitic hate in Palestinians
and houses weapons for terrorists unquote. She's also called on
the United States to defund the refugee program, criticizing the
Biden administration for issuing one billion dollars to UNRA since
twenty twenty one.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Unquote.

Speaker 5 (29:26):
Yeah, this is like a typical talking point of like
right zionists, right that the United Nations is somehow an
arm of Hamas and the UNRAH, the United Nations Refugee
Welfare Agency is actively funneling weapons to Hamas, and like
it's just not true. It's it's an excuse for targeting
AID workers in Gaza.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
The UN already has such little control over any degree
of like enforcement for like humanitarian aid, and having this
person be the US ambassador to UN will make what
little power they have even like diminished. Yes, just last October,
she called for a quote a complete reassessment of US
funding of the United Nations unquote, after calls from the

(30:06):
Palestinian authority to expel Israel from the UN for war
crimes and human rights abuses. Now the ambassador to Israel
is set to be Mike Huckabee, the former governor of
Arkansas and evangelical Christian Zionist. Similarly, he has no diplomatic experience.
I'm going to quote from the Atlantic quote. He has
led religious pilgrimages to Israel and visited the country dozens

(30:28):
of times over the course of several decades. He also
opposes a two state solution to the Israel Palestine conflict
and says that quote there's really no such thing as
a Palestinian unquote. He is really bad. Mike Hkakabee is
really bad. Yeah, that's pretty bad. He has also advocated
for Israel to permanently annex and take control of the

(30:49):
West Bank, and he like legitimately believes in a religious
political ideology to return all Jewish people to the Holy
Land of Israel to trigger the biblical apocalypse resulting in
the death of all Jews.

Speaker 11 (31:00):
My feelings personally, and I'm speaking only as a person,
I think Israel would only be acting on the property
it already owns. I think Israel has titled the Judea
and Samaria. There are certain words I refuse to use.
There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's
Judy and Samaria. There's no such thing as a settlement,

(31:21):
their communities, their neighborhoods, their cities. There's no such thing
as an occupation.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
This is why he believes this. This isn't like out
of care in his heart for Jewish people. It's that
he wants to trigger the apocalypse, and to do this
he needs to both like eliminate all Palestinians, give total
control of the land to Israel, make all Jewish people
live there so that Jesus can come again and do
the wars and blah blah.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff. It's nasty. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
The last diplomatic pick here is Middle East Envoy Steve Whitkoff,
who's a Trump campaign fundraiser and a real estate developer.
He has no diplomatic or foreign policy experience pro Israel.
He'll basically just be assisting in all of the bad
things that everyone else have already named is going to
be doing.

Speaker 6 (32:03):
Wait, sorry, my brain just broke. So so the Middle
East Envoy is just like a real estate investor guy. Yep, yep,
that seems I mean, I mean, yeah, it is it
much better than Jared is going to do peace in
the Middle East like last time.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
Yes, you can look at this similarly to like Jared
Kushner's proposals to like develop what once was Gaza and
just like viewing wars in the Middle East as a
real estate development opportunity. You can see a guy like
this kind of in line with that side of like
the Trump campaign.

Speaker 6 (32:38):
Jared's got to handle it, and we're going to handle
these ad breaks.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
It's time to discuss the elephant in the room.

Speaker 5 (32:57):
God genuinely, but my mind.

Speaker 4 (33:00):
Are we Dojing?

Speaker 2 (33:01):
We are going full Doge.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
So I'm just going to read part of the statement
from Donald Trump announcing this new government agency DOGE. More
on that later quote. I am pleased to announce that
the Great Elon Musk working into conjunction with American patriot
the VEC Ramaswami will lead the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE.

(33:27):
Together these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for
my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut
wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. It will become potentially
the Manhattan Project of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed
about the objectives of DOGE for a long time. To

(33:51):
drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government
Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of government
and will partner with the White House and Office of
Management and Budget to drive large scale structural reform and
create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before. Their
work will conclude no later than July fourth, twenty twenty six.

(34:14):
A smaller government with more efficiency and let's bureaucracy will
be the perfect gift to America on the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Unquote Jesus
christ Man, So this is the new quote unquote government
agency which is not real, right, this is not a
real government agency. Trump just can't create one out of
thin air. And in this statement it does clarify that
they will be providing advice and guidance from outside of government.

Speaker 5 (34:39):
That's pretty funny. This is a children's table. They have
the plastic cutlery.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
It's the children's table.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
Yes, he's He's sending Musk and the VEC off to
the side to have their little fun. They'll make like
a blog post that talks about who to cut, you
know what programs to cut. Vivec specifically talked about like
ending healthcare for veterans, which I'm sure will go over
very well, and they'll submit that to Trump and then
the people in charge of the Office of Management and
Budget will probably throw it in the trash, but.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
We will see.

Speaker 3 (35:07):
I mean, I don't want to understate Musk's general influence
in like Trump's operations, because Musk right now does have
a great deal of influence. I think this doge thing
isn't something to be too worried about.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Though.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Now, as a as a fun side note to kind
of demonstrate the nonsensical nature of this, I'm going to
talk about something that Vivec has proposed. He has said
that a way to cut down a government bureaucracy would
be to make a list of all of the non
elected government employees and fire the ones that have a

(35:39):
Social Security number that starts or ends.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
With an odd number.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
This way, you can automatically cut seventy five percent of
the workforce without having to worry about racial, gender, or
political discrimination. The Vech says, quote, not a thing will
have changed for the ordinary American unquote.

Speaker 5 (35:58):
I think that's gonna work that way.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
This is this is reposing cutting like two million people.
Talking to front of the pod Lex Friedman. He framed
this as a thought experiment, not necessarily a policy proposal,
and said that a more complicated form of this idea
could select to save people with quote the greatest commitment
and knowledge of the constitution unquote. This is goofy, Like

(36:23):
this is fake, Like this isn't this isn't real. He's
not going to cut seventy five percent of the workforce.
You should be more concerned about Schedule F, a policy
that Trump will reinstate that gives him power to remove
government employees at will to select for people that align
with him more ideologically. Like, that's the real thing to
be concerned about in terms of like government staffing. I'm
not much concerned about Vivek here, though. The Washington Post

(36:44):
did report that some Trump advisors have asked Congress for
thirty five to fifty million dollars to fund the DOGE Commission.
The alternative is to raise money from the private sector,
which seems more likely. It's also just very funny to
have like an afficiency department ran by two people, especially
if you're gonna ask to spend fifty to fifty million dollars,

(37:06):
because yeah, I'm sure the best way to improve government
efficiency is to give two billionaires fifty million dollars.

Speaker 5 (37:11):
It's to have two people running it, running an apartment.
That's great, Like that's what we need. Too many.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
Yeah, there's also like a fake department that'll just produce
like a writeup that talks about cutting Social.

Speaker 5 (37:20):
Security, right, and then everyone will throw it in the bin.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
That's all it's going to be.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Musk has also gone to Twitter to try to get
people to send in job applications to work for free,
to like sort to sort through these like these people
that should be cut from federal government. He just wants
people to do work for free. So now you have
people setting in job applications to Twitter. I'm sure that'll
end great for those people. Part of this just feels
kind of like a scheme to like coerce Trump into

(37:46):
allowing the formation of a fake government agency to pump
the value of doge coin. Like, yes, dogecoin did like
boost some value after this announcement, and like this is
very suspicious and like should be maybe illegal because this
could just be like a cryptocurrency scheme, which is very
very likely now despite the kind of goofy nature of
doge and like the idea that this is basically just

(38:08):
Musk of a beck sitting at the kids table to
keep them happy while the adults take care of real business.
I don't want to rush over the influence that Musk
currently has on the Trump admin. Basically since election night,
Musk has essentially been living with Trump at mar A.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Lagos, just like the first buddy. Yes he is.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
He started to call himself first buddy, which makes me
deeply uncomfortable.

Speaker 5 (38:31):
The richest man honest, yeah, first friend with benefits absolutely pathetic.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
Musk is reported to be giving input on staffing decisions
and joining phone calls with foreign leaders on the play
a clip from scenen here.

Speaker 12 (38:44):
Multiple sources tell me tonight that Musk has been seen
at mar A Lago nearly every single day since Donald
Trump won, dining with him on the patio. At times.
Today they were seen on the golf course together. Musk
has been in the room when world leaders have called Trump,
and tonight we've learned he's also weighing in on staffing decisions,
making clear his preference for certain roles. Even publicly. Tonight,

(39:05):
Elon Musk is backing Florida Senator Rick Scott as the
next leader of the Republican Conference to replace Mitch McConnell.
While Musk himself is still not expected to take any
kind of formal position inside Trump's administration, given how complicated
it would be with his companies, what's becoming clearer tonight
is that he doesn't really need to, With one source
telling me Elon Musk is having just as much influence

(39:28):
from the.

Speaker 3 (39:28):
Outside, NBC's reported that a source close to the transition
team has told them that Musk is quote behaving as
if he is co president and making sure that everyone
knows it, and he's sure taking lots of credit for
the president's victory, breaking about America pack and X to
anyone who will listen. He's trying to make President Trump

(39:49):
feel indebted to him, and the President is indebted to
no one unquote, which is a very very fun statement
from a Trump guy.

Speaker 5 (39:58):
It's also not true. Doesn't Trump oh loads of people money?
Like empirically we know this.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Yes, and currently through lawsuits, Trump does out people a
lot of money. But yeah, not that that will matter
at all anymore. In a meeting with House Republicans last Wednesday,
Trump reportedly joked, quote, Elon won't go home. I can't
get rid of him, at least until I don't like him, unquote,
which kind of underscores the running bet pool that we

(40:24):
have here at Colzone Media on when the Trump Musk
falling out will happen, and we will we will keep
up on this story very closely, because I really can't
imagine that that Musk will stay here for too long.
I'm sure he'll stay in some proximity, especially with all
like the government contracts that SpaceX has, but Trump being
like this close to Musk surely will result in some

(40:45):
kind of fallout. And maybe maybe that's opium. Maybe maybe
that's me just fully hopped up on hopium, But I
really see able asm working to our advantage here with
Trump eventually just getting sick of this guy. And I
think part of what Elon's doing here as well, and
other people have postilated this, including Robert is like Elon
can't run for president legally, right and out again, laws

(41:05):
might just completely go out the window here. But because
Elon's on a natural born citizen like Elon can't run
for president, and Elon does want power, So basically Elon's
trying to become as close as he can do President
Trump to be like like this source said co president right.
That's kind of his end goal here is he wants
to be the president and he can't, so this is

(41:26):
as close as he can get. That is most of
the main picks so far. Lastly, I'll mention like three
people who worked on the Trump campaign who will now
be serving as advisors, including danz Cavino, James Blair, and
Taylor Buttowitch. All these guys appeared pretty frequently in the
behind the scenes documentary about Trump's twenty twenty four campaign,

(41:47):
and all three of these guys primarily focused on like
weaponizing anti immigrant claims to get Trump elected. That was
kind of their main focus, especially James Blair. But lastly, lastly,
I do have one more person to mention, the co
chair of Trump's transition team, the former CEO of WWE McMahon.

(42:10):
She is working as the co chair for the transition team.
She is the wife of A Vince McMahon now. She
also served in Trump's first term as head of the
Small Business Administration from twenty seventeen to twenty nineteen after
two failed Senate runs in Connecticut. Now, besides co leading
the President's transition team, McMahon's also the front runner to

(42:30):
lead the Department of Commerce. Now to kind of tie
this back to Matt Gates, she along with her husband,
are also currently being sued for sex trafficking underage boys
in the WWE. The suit alleges that WWE leadership knowingly
allowed an announcer named mel Phillips to groom and molest
the five plaintiffs who were hired as ring boys from

(42:51):
the ages of.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Twelve to thirteen.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
Ring boys basically like people who like help out on
the side for you know, I see, they're kind of
like performative roles. Yeah, so that's pretty fucked up. And
the fact that this whole qute on movement has now
resulted in two people being charged for sex trafficking or
at least investigator for sex trafficking. Being this close to
the Trump orbit, I'm sure, I'm sure we can just
trust the plan and things and things will all things

(43:16):
will all turn out fine. But yeah, that's a little
it's a little Linda McMahon a fun fact there. So
that is all I have to say at this point
about the Trump cabinet picks. There's gonna be more. I know,
RFK is gonna be its own nightmare that we will
get to. Yeah, I guess any closing thoughts, uh, Sophie
or James on this this who's who of the worst

(43:36):
people in the country, who's gone.

Speaker 6 (43:38):
I've come next? And that's basically it, and and not
even that after this first round and then like obviously
he's gonna fucking fire some people.

Speaker 4 (43:49):
Who's he gonna report, who's he gonna replace them with?

Speaker 5 (43:52):
It will be it like Instagrammers by the end of
four years.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
I'm sure he's really just going through all the people
who have like pledged complete loyalty to him, including people
who've like previously been critical but have like turned around
and gotten fully on the Trump train and Like, the
thing that links up all of these names is that
Trump believes that they're not going to turn on him,
because that was the thing that really threw a wrench
in his first administration. And the reason why he's appointing

(44:16):
all these people who are just chronically unqualified, it's because
they need Trump, right, Like, if Matt Gates doesn't become
ag then he's also like out of a job now
because he resigned from Congress, and he'll also probably face
more punishment for his alleged sex trafficking. But if he's
in charge of the entire Justice Department, he's not going
to get anything right. Like, a huge part of Trump
like trying to become president again is to get out

(44:37):
of all of the criminal complaints and indictments that he's
been facing the past year. And now none of those matter.
I'll point you to a Legal Eagle video for like
why none of the convictions will matter, none of the
ongoing cases will matter, All of those trials are now
completely meaningless. He has gotten away with everything. Looking over
this whole list, you see a lot of neo cons

(44:57):
in foreign policy positions and like mega celebrity loyalists in
domestic positions. Which makes a lot of sense for Trump
trying to both like maintain his own power as well
as showing off his kind of hidden neo contendencies. And
this entire cabinet points towards centralizing power with just him

(45:17):
and the White House. Right, these people are not qualified,
So now Trump basically will puppeteer every department and Trump's advisors,
including like Stephen Miller. So this is all about centralizing
power and demanding fierce loyalty. That's what all of these
appointments point towards.

Speaker 5 (45:32):
This is good ending. What a happy show.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Yeah, that is a great ending.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
You know, not all these will have happy endings, because
we're currently facing a pretty rough situation. But we will
have some episodes later on in this week that do
point more towards what you can do to protect yourself
in the coming days, including Molly's episode tomorrow, so stay
tuned for that. But this is just a quick, a
quick rundown on why I don't like every single person
appointed to these positions.

Speaker 13 (46:19):
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, an upcoming
book about the eugenics mom in Texas called the Purifying Knife.

Speaker 14 (46:31):
I'm Stephen Monicelli, an investigative reporter who covers political extremism
in Texas and beyond.

Speaker 13 (46:37):
In the Pitch Start. Just before midnight on August third,
twenty nineteen, Patrick Crusius took off on what would soon
be an infamous journey. The young man from the Dallas
suburb of Allen, Texas, had become obsessed with an idea
that would soon move him to murder.

Speaker 14 (46:54):
That idea had been inspired in part by Renaud Camu,
a French racist and race aged by the growing Muslim
population in Europe. In twenty eleven, Camu had given a
new name to what was actually an old idea with
the publication of his book Legrand Replacement, which translates in
English to the Great Replacement.

Speaker 13 (47:16):
Camu argued that global elites had conspired to replace the white,
culturally superior population of Europe with darker skinned people, who
were mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. He
claimed these elites had opened the door to mass migration,
discouraged white reproduction, and encouraged the newcomers to intermarry with whites.

(47:37):
This racial displacement, Camu asserted, had brought crime and terrorism
to Europe and threatened the very survival of Western culture.

Speaker 14 (47:46):
Camu's idea predated World War Two. The Great Replacement theory
hardly differed from key ideas promoted by eugenicists in Western
Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century
and early twenty century. Eugenicists sought to ensure the survival
of those they believed to be biologically superior. Their methods
included forced sterilization and harsh immigration restrictions. Failure in this mission,

(48:11):
they believed, would lead to white extinction. But Camu's book
enraged and energized a new generation of far right extremists,
not just in his native France but all around the world.

Speaker 13 (48:24):
Camu didn't specifically identify the elite spuzzedly responsible for what
he called a reverse colonization of the European homeland, but
leaders of the international far right quickly filled in the blanks.
The Great Replacement conspiracy theorists insisted had been engineered by
Jews who desired to destroy the Arians, who served as

(48:45):
their only competitors for global control. In the chaos that
would unfold as Europe racially darkened, Jewish people would spuzzly
complete their conquests of the world's politics and finances, and
would enslave and now intellectually backward global workforce.

Speaker 14 (49:02):
Camu's racist fever dream ricocheted around the world and left
behind it a trail of blood. The dread of the
Great Replacement animated a coalition of neo Nazis and other
white supremacists who swarmed to Charlottesville, Virginia, on the night
of August eleventh, twenty seventeen, for a quote Unite the
Right rally protesting the proposed removal of a statue honoring

(49:25):
Confederate General Robert E.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
Lee.

Speaker 14 (49:28):
Carrying tiki torches, with many wearing matching polo shirts and khakis,
the extremists paraded on the grounds of the University of
Virginia campus, chanting white lives Matter and a phrase directly
inspired by Camu's now six year old polemic.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
Why not Why not Jews? Who Jews?

Speaker 13 (49:53):
The next day, one of the racist marchers murdered an
anti racism activist, Heather Hayer Whay. He ran this car
into a crowd of counter protesters. The following year, in
twenty eighteen, a forty six year old white nationalist who
feared a hypothetical Jewish and Muslim plot to take over America,

(50:13):
entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and,
using a long rifle and three semi automatic pistols, sprayed
the congregation with bullets over a period of twenty minutes,
murdering eleven and wounding six. The synagogue had participated in
program to aid migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America,

(50:34):
charity work that prompted the murderer, Robert Bowers, to post
online that such organizations quote like to bring in invaders
that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch
my people get slaughtered.

Speaker 14 (50:48):
The Great Replacement Theory and its online promoters claimed a
high body count in twenty nineteen. On March fifteenth, a
twenty eight year old Australian man, Brendan Terrant, live streamed
his slaughter a face fifty one Muslims and the wounding
of eighty nine others at two mosques in christ Church,
New Zealand. Tarrant authored a seventy four page manifesto which

(51:09):
he emailed to newspapers and television stations, as well as
new Zealand's Prime minister. He repeatedly referred to the Great
Replacement theory and expressed admiration for Anders Brevick, a Norwegian
neo Nazi terrorist who had killed seventy seven people in
twenty eleven because of his hatred for Muslims who have
settled across the European continent. In his manifesto, Tarrant praised

(51:31):
American President Donald Trump as a quote symbol of renewed
white identity and common purpose.

Speaker 13 (51:38):
The murders inspired by the Great Replacement theory were far
from over. A mass shooting claimed three lives and wounded
three others at a synagogue in Powway, California, in April twenty,
twenty nineteen, and three others died in seventeen more suffered
injuries during an attack at the Gilroy Garlick festival in
the same state on July twenty eighth. This was the

(52:00):
heartbreaking worldwide context in which Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas
took a fatal journey just six days after the Illroy massacre.

Speaker 14 (52:09):
Crusius marked his twenty first birthday just the weekend before
the massacre, but for the unemployed young man, it was
not a happy occasion. He had grown up watching his
father's struggle with chemical dependency. High school classmates described him
as withdrawn, and one claimed he had been bullied by
Spanish speaking students. His parents divorced, and he moved to
his grandparents' home in a suburb north of Dallas called Allan,

(52:32):
a town with a median family income of more than
one hundred and twenty one thousand dollars and a history
of white flight. Unemployed, Crusius spent a lot of hours
on eight Chan, an online message board favored by white supremacists.

Speaker 13 (52:48):
Crusius had given himself a grim mission he believed no
one else had the guts to carry out, According to
the Dallas Morning News. Late that Friday evening, he loaded
his humble twenty twelve Honda Civic with his laptop computer,
one thousand rounds Apollo point bullets ear muffs in a
semi automatic civilian version of an AK forty seven he

(53:11):
had ordered online from Romania. The Texas Tribune later reported
that as of twenty nineteen, Romania was exporting nine thousand
AK forty sevens to the United States every year. He
also brought heavily insulated gloves because that rifle, he would
later complain quote overheats massively. After about one hundred shots

(53:32):
or fired in quick succession, the college student sought to
start a war one he thought he wouldn't survive, but
that if others followed his example might save the country.

Speaker 14 (53:44):
Head of his ten hour trek westward across the vast
Texas landscape, Crusius filled his gas tank and pumped himself
with energy drinks. He arrived in El Paso at about
eight am, first parking at a CSE's Pizza, which happened
to be closed. He then cruised around the border city
of Homos, most seven hundred thousand people, where sixty three
percent of the population primarily speaks Spanish at home. He

(54:05):
eventually stopped at the parking lot of a Walmart superstore
nicknamed the Juarez Walmart because of the large number of
customers who shopped there from across the Mexican border. About
three thousand people in all reestimated to be at the
retail outlet when Crusius arrived.

Speaker 13 (54:21):
Crusius walked inside and cased the joint for at least
half an hour. He went back to his civic and
sat for a while in contemplation. Hungry, he went back
into the store, bought an orange, and then, after returning
to his car a second time, gobbled it. He then
posted online a two three hundred and eighty eight word

(54:42):
racist screed called The Inconvenient Truth. At about ten thirty eight,
Crusius stepped out of his car, weapon in hand, and
began massacring Mexicans and Mexican Americans. He described in his
manifesto as quote the invaders.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
This is an NBC News special report. Here's Jose dis Bollard.

Speaker 15 (55:03):
Good afternoon and update now on that deadly shooting near
a busy shopping mall in El Paso, Texas. It happened
at a walmart near Colo Vista Mall this morning about
ten am local time. The scene is about seven miles
from downtown l Paso.

Speaker 14 (55:17):
In about three minutes, Crusius slaughtered twenty three and wounded
twenty two others. In spite of expressing a wish that
he would die in the attack, Crusius surrendered. Police quickly
connected Crusius to his Internet diet tribe, which he opened
by saying he quote supports the christ Church shooter and
his manifesto referring to Brenton Terran Crusius then pivoted to

(55:39):
outrage over Mexican immigration in the United States. Jason Whiteley
of a WFAA in Dallas reported on the manifesto's disturbing content.

Speaker 16 (55:47):
In the letter, the shooter describes himself as a white nationalist,
a right wing extremist consumed by conspiracy theories. In short,
he thinks that white people are being replaced by immigrants
in this country. The letter states this attack is in
response to the Hispanic.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Invasion of Texas.

Speaker 16 (56:07):
They are the instigators, he wrote, not me. I am
simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought
on by an invasion.

Speaker 13 (56:16):
By the time of the El Paso massacre, eighty men,
women and children had been murdered by extremists inspired by
the great Replacement theory in twenty nineteen alone. The carnage
didn't end at Al Paso. On May fourteenth, twenty twenty two,
a white suspect wrote a hateful rant he posted online

(56:36):
before murdering ten and wounding three African Americans in a Buffalo,
New York supermarket. He linked declining white birth rates to genocide.
On May sixth, twenty twenty three, Mauricio Martinez Scarcia, a
Latino white supremacist who embraced neo Nazi ideology, drove from

(56:57):
his Dallas apartment to an outlet mall in Crusius's home
town of Allen, tattooed with a Swaska, garcias shot to
death nine people, including a three year old, and wounded
seven others before being killed by a police officer. Garcia
seemed to be targeting Asians and Asian Americans.

Speaker 14 (57:15):
Throughout this mayhem. The political right has proven eager to
blame everything but the wide open gun laws in places
like Texas, which made it legal for Crusius to mail
order a civilian style AK forty seven. There was no
interrogation of the long history of racism or of repeated
Republican rhetoric depicting immigrants as dangerous, but there were other

(57:36):
convenient excuses. In an interview on the Sunday edition of
Fox and Friends shortly after the Opasser tragedy, Texas Lieutenant
Governor Dan Patrick offered a menu of alternative explanations for
the mass shooting, such as video games. He also suggested
that public schools needed a healthy infusion of theocracy and

(57:56):
reverence for the stars and stripes, and where are we.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
As a country.

Speaker 17 (58:02):
I look at social media, that the violence of just
bullying people on social media every day, and we turn
our head and we allow it. I look at on
a Sunday morning when most of your viewers right now,
half of the country are getting ready to go to church,
and yet tomorrow we won't let our kids even pray
in our schools. We have to look at ourselves as

(58:22):
a nation. That's many factors that go into the shooting,
many factors, and it's not a time to politicize at
the time to look deep inside of who we are
as a country where we no longer salute our flag
or we throw water on law enforcement and thank god
we have law enforcement.

Speaker 14 (58:39):
In recent years, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has described immigration
at the southern border as an invasion that is part
of a democratic plan to quote take over our country
without firing a shot. In response to this alleged plan,
Patrick has said that Texas has a right to defend
itself from the threat of criminal invaders. In a Fox

(59:00):
News interview in twenty twenty four, for.

Speaker 8 (59:03):
All those people who should come here legally processed and vetted,
in that group are hundreds of thousands, thousands, and thousands
of criminals, murderers, molesters, gang members, drug dealers, carjackers, kidnappers,
you name it, they're part of this group and terrorist.

Speaker 13 (59:21):
Patrick Crusius's panic about white genocide and the violent rise
of black and brown people against Western civilization had deep
roots in American culture. The Texas history of segregation, white
flight post September eleventh, Islamophobia, and the backlash to globalization
poison Crusius' particular worldview. But perhaps the biggest factor in

(59:45):
Crusius's murderous rampage was that he was taught to hate
and fear immigrants by the grown ups around him in
the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Speaker 14 (59:53):
But before we get into that, a quick eye break.
The fear of white extinction at the hands of so
called savages dates back to Puritan New England in the
sixteen hundreds. Even as they lethally infected tens of thousands

(01:00:15):
of native peoples with bubonic plague, malaria, measles, smallplocks, and typhus,
English colonizers slew thousands more in wars of conquests that
did not spare the very old, infants, that disabled, or
the unarmed Puritans didn't just kill Native Americans. They often
tortured them first and desecrated their bodies with rituals of humiliation,

(01:00:36):
such as scalping. With each act of genocide, however, the
Puritans projected those war crimes on their victims. One Puritan leader,
William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, warned that
whites were in quote continual danger of the savage people.
A white habit of mind formed that relieved any guilt
the inhabitants of colonial America might feel about their bloodthirsty conquests.

(01:01:00):
The invaders became the defenders of the homeland, the outarmed
became the menace, and the vanquished became the aggressors. In fact,
genocide became an act of self defense.

Speaker 13 (01:01:12):
In the Lone Star State public school students are required
to study Texas history, Crusius would have been fed highly
distorted accounts of the Texas Revolution of eighteen thirty five
to eighteen thirty six, Although the content has improved since
the Civil Rights movement. For the most part, Texas history
textbooks have depicted Mexican soldiers as ruthless killers who, without qualms,

(01:01:37):
shot Anglo soldiers at the Battle of Goliad in Southeast
Texas and the survivors at the Alamo after they surrendered.
These same students were not typically taught that white Texans
massacred six hundred and fifty Mexican soldiers, most of whom
had already cast away their weapons after the Battle of
San Jacinto, the engagement that ended the Texas Revolutionary War.

Speaker 14 (01:02:00):
The late twentieth century, Texas students were also taught that
after the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the
enfranchisemen of African Americans, dangerous chaos reigned. A sort of
racist myth was promoted in textbooks and classroom lectures that Reconstruction,
the state's first brief, failed experiment in multiracial democracy, was

(01:02:22):
actually a tragedy. According to the legend promoted in schoolhouses,
Reconstruction was defined not by increased literacy, improved infrastructure, in
the expansion of black human rights, but instead by political corruption,
wild government overspending, high taxes, out of control crime, and
endemic incompetence. During Reconstruction, children were taught the United States

(01:02:46):
armed African American soldiers who then harassed and assaulted harmless whites,
especially women. In short across the curriculum, white students learned
that whenever black and brown people gained power politically, socially,
or economically, white people have been in mortal peril, a
lesson that implies the need to kill or be killed.

Speaker 13 (01:03:05):
In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, white American school
kids across the country were indoctrinated into accepting eugenics in
their biology classes. They learned that if they didn't produce
large enough families, whites would lose a demographic race to Jews, Italians, Russians,
and other immigrants pouring into the country. A best selling

(01:03:26):
American author in the nineteen twenties, Lothrope Stoddard, warned his
readers that unless trends were reversed racially, superior Nordics, as
he called those from western northern Europe, might have to
fight a war of extermination to stem a deadly tide
of color that when gulf white people worldwide.

Speaker 14 (01:03:45):
El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius grew up in Collin County,
which borders Dallas County on the north. The county's wealth
before the Civil War derived primarily from cotton cultivated by
enslaved labor. During reconstruction, klansmen organized in the county seat
of McKinney to terrorize African Americans into not voting. African
Americans continued to toil as farm labor after reconstruction, and

(01:04:07):
the white population kept them under tight control through occasional
outbursts of homicidal violence. In the summer of eighteen ninety eight,
local whites panicked when between thirty to forty African Americans
from out of town routinely gathered during a rainy season
in hopes to be on hand when the weather cleared
up so they could resume working. Ominous notices began to

(01:04:28):
appear around the town that said quote, mister Negro, don't
let the sun go down on you. On June fifteenth
of that year, klansmen warned black residents that they had
no more than ten days to leave the area. One family,
the Sebroans, became the target of a violent mob of
vigilantes known as white cappers, who arrived at their home
in the middle of the night to punish them for

(01:04:49):
not vacating their home on Main Street. Anticipating the arrival
of the terrorists, Jake Sebrin stood by the door of
his home holding a Winchester rifle. When his assailants realized
he had a gun, they fired into the house. Jake
then attempted to shoot back, but he was unable to
stop the assailants from fatally shooting his pregnant wife, Laura.
The three Sebran children were found screaming and clinging to

(01:05:11):
bed sheets near their mother's bloody body inside their home.
When it was all said and done, white Capper violence
continued for years across the state, targeting both African Americans
and Mexican Americans in an effort to maintain white supremacy.

Speaker 13 (01:05:24):
Thirteen years later, on August eleventh, nineteen eleven, Colin County
authorities arrested a Farmersville man, Commodore Jones, for allegedly flirting
with a white telephone operator. A mob of three hundred
outraged white siezed Jones from police custody, carried him to
the city square, and hanged him from a pole in

(01:05:45):
front of the telephone office. In spite of this bloody history,
Colin County got rich and by the nineteen seventies transformed
into a major urban center. This development correlated with white flight,
as Dallas glacially to come to court order de segregation
beginning in the nineteen sixties and after uprising in response

(01:06:05):
to a Dallas police officer forcing a twelve year old
Latino Santos Rodriguez to play a fatal game of Russian
Roulette in the backseat of a police squad car.

Speaker 14 (01:06:16):
White flight fueled population explosion in Colin County, governed by
conservatives who kept property taxes low compared to those in
the metropolitan center to the south. Corporations followed this population
shift during the half century between the nineteen seventies and
the twenty twenties. Doctor Pepper, Friedo, Lay J. C. Penny, Curing,
Pizza Hut, and the Professional Golfers Association of America, as

(01:06:38):
well as Toyota, planted their corporate headquarters there. However, even
if whites moved to Colin County in the nineteen seventies
to avoid school integration and feared urban unrest, the new
corporations brought with them diverse work forces that include Muslims, Hindus,
and people of color from all around the world. In
two thousand, non Hispanic whites made up slightly more more

(01:07:00):
than eighty one percent of the Colin County population. In
twenty twenty, that number was slightly less than fifty one percent.
Asian Americans and Asian immigrants made up almost seven percent
of the population, while Mexican Americans and immigrants from south
of the Rio Grand represented more than ten percent. All
the ingredients needed were present for a vicious racial backlash.

Speaker 13 (01:07:22):
By twenty thirteen, the right wing in the entire Dallas
Fort Worth area was in full panic mode about immigration.
In twenty nineteen, Texas was believed to have the largest
Muslim population of any state, numbering about four hundred and
twenty two thousand, still less than two percent of the
total state population, but one of the fastest growing religious

(01:07:45):
demographics in the area. Two thirds of that population lives
in the Houston and Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan areas. Muslim
worshippers pray it as many as fifty five mosque in
the Dallas Fort Worth area in the Muslim population north
central Texas is believed to have tripled since twenty ten.

Speaker 14 (01:08:04):
In twenty thirteen, Harry Lrosalieer won election as mayor in
the Collin County city of Plano. Conservatives mocked him at
the time as the quote mayor from Haiti in reference
to his birthplace. When affordable multi family housing was proposed
for the suburb of Plano. Fear quickly spread that black
and brown, low income workers would fill those residences. Signs

(01:08:26):
appeared that said quote, don't Dallas my Plano, referring to
the largely black and brown population in the metropolitan center.
Republican politicians across the Dallas Fort Worth area began to
warn that some of the newcomers plotted to impose quote Sharia,
or Muslim law. The panic stemmed from the practice of
many American mosques offering non binding mediation services employing principles

(01:08:50):
from the Qur'an to couples in troubled marriages to resolve
bitter business disputes between Muslims and so on. Such arbitration
is not legally binding in Muslim practice can't be imposed
on non Muslims because of the First Amendment of the
United States Constitution, which forbids the government from establishing any
sort of religion. Nevertheless, one Plaino State representative, Jeff Leach,

(01:09:11):
in twenty fifteen, introduced an anti Sharia law in the
Texas legislature. His bill failed, but Governor Abbott later signed
a similar law in twenty seventeen. Stay with us through
this ad break to learn more.

Speaker 13 (01:09:35):
Dread about Muslims and Sharia law dominated politics in Irving,
a suburb with a population of about a quarter million
people twelve miles northwest of Dallas from much of twenty fifteen.
In February, then Mayor Beth Van Dyne, who later became
a Trump appointee, characterized a Muslim mediation panel reportedly located

(01:09:56):
in the Islamic center of Irving as an Islamic court.
She introduced a resolution to the Irving City Council supporting
Leech's proposed legislation. It passed five to four, as reported
by a CBS affiliate in Dallas.

Speaker 18 (01:10:11):
Irving Mayor Beth van Dyne has accused local Muslim leaders
in the past of creating their own laws called Sharia law,
and adjudicating that doctrine bypassing the state and federal court system.
Catholic and Jewish faiths also have similar tribunals that are
presided over by faith leaders who act as arbitrators. But

(01:10:32):
the locally mom here in Irving says Islam is being
targeted yet not breaking any law.

Speaker 9 (01:10:39):
They believe that we are trying to supersede the or
state laws.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
And that's not the case.

Speaker 9 (01:10:46):
We work within the boundaries of federal and state law.

Speaker 14 (01:10:50):
Anti Muslim tensions spread across the Dallas Fort Worth area,
ending in tragic violence. Anti Muslim extremists held a deliberately
provocative quote draw the profit art contest in Garland, Texas,
a city of about two hundred and thirty five thousand
just north of Dallas, Knowing that the images of Mohammed
are prohibited by Islam and were likely to inflame the

(01:11:10):
broader Muslim community. Two heavily armed Muslim men took the
bait that day, driving from out of state and arriving
at the scene of the contest on May third. They
then shot a Garland police car before being killed with
return fire.

Speaker 13 (01:11:25):
Little more than four months at the Garland shootings, Irving
police arrested Achmed Mohammed, a Muslim of Sudanese background, on
September fourteenth, twenty fifteen, after the fourteen year old had
brought a digital clock built as a personal science project
to MacArthur High School. Proud of his creation, Mohammed showed

(01:11:46):
the clock to one of his teachers, who subjected the
boy to racial profiling, fearing the clock might be a bomb.
The teacher seized the device and sent Mohammed to the principal,
who then called irving police officers and interrogated the boy
for ninety minutes while his parents were denied access to
their son. Meanwhile, a militia inspired by Irving Mayor Van

(01:12:09):
Dine's alarmist warnings of as Sharia law showed up at
two mosque and the Dallas suburbs, wearing camouflage and mask
and brandishing twelve gage shotguns as a stock worshipper's going
to prayer.

Speaker 14 (01:12:22):
Islamophobia in the Dallas Fort Worth area even extended to
deceased Muslims. The Islamic Association of Collin County had hoped
to establish a thirty five acre burial plot in Farmersville,
a town of about four thousand people. When the Farmersville
Planning and Zoning Commission approved the plan in May twenty
fifteen without assending vote, furious opposition erupted. According to a
CNN report.

Speaker 19 (01:12:44):
Farmersville is about twenty five miles away from Garland, Texas,
where in May police killed two Muslim gunmen who tried
to carry out a deadly attack at a draw The
prophet Mohammed event One resident in Farmersville has even suggested
using pigs to scare away the Muslim group.

Speaker 5 (01:13:01):
Pek and dump pig's blud and pig heads on a float.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
They won't buy the land.

Speaker 13 (01:13:07):
If I had my way, I would outlaw at Islam
in America. Farmersville resident Jack Hawkins declared that Planning Zoning
Commission meeting quote, I would tear down every mosque that
was in this country. That's how I feel about it.
A local Baptist minister suggested that the cemetery would lead
to the establishment of the Madrasa, a Muslim religious school

(01:13:30):
that could become a training ground for extremists. He was
interviewed by CNN.

Speaker 20 (01:13:35):
And I believe I'm a watchman on the wall Ezekiel
thirty three see the incoming danger.

Speaker 19 (01:13:39):
David Meeks is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, which
ironically sits next to a cemetery. He says the cemetery
could bring radical Islam to Farmersville.

Speaker 20 (01:13:49):
I see the expansion of Islam that's going on all
over the world, now's coming to my hometown.

Speaker 2 (01:13:54):
And you see that danger in a cemetery.

Speaker 20 (01:13:57):
Anytime you see the Islamic folks coming into an neighborhood.
I think, in my opinion, I think you can say
we could be less safe in the future than we
are right now.

Speaker 14 (01:14:09):
One hundred opponents of the cemetery crowded into a July fourteenth,
twenty sixteen, city council meeting in Farmersville, with some residents
expressing the fear that Muslim corpses would countaminate the local
water supply. Members of the local Muslim community and of
the Farmersville City Council suffered threats of violence. Facing a
federal lawsuit, the City of Farmersville finally relented and on

(01:14:31):
September twentieth, twenty eighteen, allowed the Islamic Association to move
ahead with purchasing the land needed for their graveyard.

Speaker 13 (01:14:39):
This is the poison air. Patrick Crusius grew up breathing.
He didn't kill because of computer games, because they didn't
pray at schools he attended, because of protest against police violence,
or the collapse of respect for authority. Crusius wrote that
America is rotting quote from the inside out, because of immigration,

(01:14:59):
and that unless why heights took up arms against dark
skinned newcomers, whites could become extinct in his manifesto, Crusius
insisted he embraced the great replacement theory before Donald Trump
became president. One can only wonder how many other self
appointed racial warriors might be inspired of violence by the
twenty twenty four presidential campaign that centered mostly on the

(01:15:22):
purported dangers of what Trump repeatedly called migrant crime, including
the eating of neighbors, cats and dogs in the spread.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
Of deadly diseases.

Speaker 13 (01:15:33):
Trump has even repeated the warnings of early twentieth century
eugenicists about the biological damage he claims immigrants are bringing
bad genes to the United States. He says Trump's incendiary
anti immigrant rhetoric has been compiled by the new site Politico.

Speaker 21 (01:15:50):
Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating
inundation of illegal alience. I said, if you let them in,
it's going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals.
These are stone cold killers. They'll walk into your kitchen,
they'll cut your throat. These are people at the highest

(01:16:13):
level of killing that cut your throat and they won't
even think about it the next morning. These people are
roaming our country. They could go into a restaurant, they
can do whatever they want, and they will.

Speaker 13 (01:16:24):
Kill you because they are wired that way.

Speaker 21 (01:16:28):
These people are animals. Now they'll say, oh, that's a
terrible thing for him to say. No, No, these people
are animals.

Speaker 20 (01:16:33):
It's in their jeens.

Speaker 21 (01:16:35):
And we got a lot of bad jeans in our
country right now.

Speaker 13 (01:16:38):
That tread a white genocide has been nurtured across centuries
of American history and has become one of this country's
major exports.

Speaker 14 (01:16:48):
And with politicians like Donald Trump stoking fear about the
alleged quote enemy within and promoting mass deportations and the
idea of quote remigration, which is a notion with a
deeply fascist history, we are almost certain to see the
great replacement panic continue to boil under the surface of

(01:17:09):
a society with constantly shifting demographics. Ongoing economic insecurity will
feed into this, and the passive acceptance of gun violence
as the price for American freedom will certainly feed into
future racist violence. This is Stephen Monticelli and.

Speaker 13 (01:17:27):
This is Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 22 (01:17:49):
Welcome to It Happened Here, a podcast where it has
happened here. I'm your host Via Wong with Vias Gere. Hello, Ger,
how are you doing this occursive day. Oh, I'm feeling
very healthy. I'm up on my vaccines. I'm doing pretty good.
Just had a nice bowl of cereal. Hell yeah, it's great. Well,
you're doing better than the country is about to be doing.

(01:18:11):
Because this one, this one's bad, folks. So a couple
of days ago, we promised that RFK Junior was getting
his own episode, and he's getting eighty five ninety percent
of his own episode. There's one other guy we're going
to talk about, but unfortunately former presidential candidate Robert F.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
Kennedy. I don't know what the F stands for Fitzgerald.

Speaker 22 (01:18:38):
I'm assuming Fitzgerald. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior has been nominated
by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and
Human Services. I first off need to note that RFK
Junior has been credibly accused of sexual assault, and when
asked for comment by The Washington Post, he said, and
I quote, I said in my announcement speech that I

(01:18:59):
have so many skeletons in my closet that if they
could all vote, I could run for king of the world.

Speaker 2 (01:19:05):
Now, legally, I cannot.

Speaker 22 (01:19:07):
Make an interpretation of how you want to piece together
those sets of facts, but he was accused of it,
and that's what he said when the Washington Post acts
for comment, So you know, that's great.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
Between that and like all the sexual misconduct allegations against
Musk and like everyone else involved in Trump's orbit, Matt
gets Vince McMahon and his wife, the whole like me too.
Era feels kind of dead, and it kind of has
been for a while. But really, the general voting public
does not care at all.

Speaker 2 (01:19:42):
Yeah, it does not seem to. It's very bleak.

Speaker 22 (01:19:45):
That's not even remotely the bleak is part about this appointment.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
Though, So oh no, he's He's that for so many reasons.
Holy shit.

Speaker 22 (01:19:53):
So I think if you are like most people listening
to this, I don't think people tend to have an
understanding of how many fucking departments there are, like under
the Department of Health and Human Services, just how many
different organizations there are. I originally I had listed them
all out, and then I was like, I can't do this.

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):
It's too long to read in the podcast.

Speaker 22 (01:20:16):
So here are the important ones for our purposes. Nic,
this isn't even all the important ones, but here are
some of the important ones. So under the Apartment of
Health and Human Services is, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, the Centers from Medicare and Medicaid Services, the
Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the
Office of Inspector General, and the Office for Civil Rights.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
So we've just put probably the US's.

Speaker 22 (01:20:43):
Most famous anti vaxer in charge of all of these organizations.
And I say, we've just put He still has to
get confirmed, and there is some chance that he doesn't
make it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:52):
I don't know.

Speaker 22 (01:20:54):
It would be much better for everyone on Earth if
he fucking doesn't get appointed.

Speaker 3 (01:20:59):
But it's still very up in the air. Yeah, if
any of these guys are going to get pushed in
through recess appointments, or whether the Senate will just completely
cave to Trump.

Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
Who knows.

Speaker 22 (01:21:10):
Yeah, And I mean, you know, and we'll get to
part of this later. There is real political opposition to
Trump in parts of the Republican Party base, especially the Senate. Yeah,
he is about to fuck with the money. And sometimes
you can do that, and it's fine, and sometimes you can't.
And we simply do not know yet. And so I
think before we get into how again, an anti vaxxer

(01:21:32):
leading the US is like Health Services is going to
just obliterate us all. I think it's actually worth taking
a look at what this means politically in terms of
Trump's base, in terms of sort of the power compositions
of it, because in twenty twenty, the last time he
was running, he had a real problem with the anti
vaxxers because you know, on the one I had Trump

(01:21:54):
like did a bunch of anti vax stuff. On the
other hand, he did spend a bunch of money to
develop the vaccine, and this.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
Pissed off an incredibly large number of people.

Speaker 22 (01:22:03):
You have, like your Alex Jones is yelling about how
he was like tricked into making the vaccine, And there's
a kind of split in his base between the people
who are anti vaxxers and people who think that COVID
was like designed in a lab as a bioweapon. Because
those people in theory, if you're following this coherently, right,
the people who think that COVID was creating a lab
as a bioweapon, you should also want a vaccine then,

(01:22:25):
because that could stop the bioweapon.

Speaker 3 (01:22:26):
Well, unless the bio weapon was invented so that people
would get vaccinated, and the real dangers to vaccines. See me,
you gotta be thinking one step ahead with these people.

Speaker 22 (01:22:36):
But there's another thing too, which is you also have
to simultaneously argue that COVID is pretty mild, because that's
another thing that all these people believe, because you have
to be anti lockdown, and to be anti lockdown, you
have to believe that COVID is mild. So well, the
chain of things you have to believe, and there are like,
I don't know, like a third of the population of
the US believe some variant of like COVID was made

(01:22:57):
in a lab as a bioweapon. It either escaped or
was deployed. It's also mild. And also the vaccine is
trying to kill.

Speaker 2 (01:23:04):
You, So this is bad.

Speaker 22 (01:23:08):
And Trump has kind of papered over this issue with
his base by again just handing all of the fucking
health departments over to RFK Junior. And a sign of
what RFK Junior's tenure is going to look like, assuming
he gets appointed, is that he has been putting together
list of people he wants to head all of these agencies,
and chief on that list is Jay Banachaira, who's he

(01:23:30):
wants to be the head of the National Institute of Health.
Jay is an anti lockdown maniac whose thing was that
he thought that the lockdowns were bad and that we
should have just sent everyone back to work in this
sort of absolute peak of the pandemic before we had vaccines,
and he thought that like only forty thousand people were
going to die because of COVID, and that if you

(01:23:50):
just sent everyone back, everyone would get COVID and this
would create like quote unquote herd immunity and then the
disease would be okay, yeah, yeah, and that's sense right.

Speaker 3 (01:24:01):
That did not happen. We can actually save for sure. Yes,
more than forty thousand people died. It wasn't just a flu.

Speaker 2 (01:24:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 22 (01:24:08):
And also you know there were countries I think Norway
tried this where they tried to like easelock dew restrictions
early and it just killed a bunch of people and
you didn't get an immunity benefit because then the thing
about herd immunity, right, So herd immunity is this concept,
and this is kind of this is important for the
vaccination angle of this. It's this concept that there are
there are some people in a population who medically cannot vaccinated.

(01:24:28):
You know, there's like actual health reasons right for this
that aren't just like anti vax shit. But if enough
of the rest of the population is vaccinated, then it
doesn't matter because there's not because there's enough immunity in
the entire herd that it's hard for the disease to spread.
And the way you're supposed to do this again is
with vaccines, right, But there was a whole crowd of
people who wanted to try to do this not with vaccines,

(01:24:48):
but just by giving everyone COVID. And these are the
people that rf Kids Junior wants to like put in
charge of the nation's health services. Now, political response to
this from our site is also really complicated because you know,
the way that the battles already playing out in the
media is RFK Junior versus Big Pharma. And the problem
is no one likes big pharma unless you're being paid

(01:25:10):
by them, like we don't like big farm. But these
companies suck shit. They're really bad. They're like parts of
the reasons why you can afford your healthcare. But also
the reason they're evil isn't because they make vaccines. And
this is a this is a complicated sort of tension
to manage and if you read a lot of the
media coverage of this. So far, NPR has this just

(01:25:31):
fawning article over RFK Junior. That's like, Oh, he's gonna
like cut through the bureaucratic red tape with his controversial
things and like help treat chronic disease. And no, he's
an anti vaxxer. He's a very hard line anti vaxer.
I also want to read this absolutely insane thing that
he said about COVID being a I'm just going to

(01:25:54):
read this. I don't know how to preface this. COVID nineteen,
there is an argument that is ethnically targeted, COVID nineteen
attacks certain races disroportionately. COVID nineteen is targeted to attack
Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune
are Oscanazi, Jews, and Chinese. Oh, we don't know whether
it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers
out there that show the racial and ethnic different impact.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
Oh oh no, that's that's not what those papers are
trying to say. No, And I will also say this.

Speaker 22 (01:26:24):
One of the things that you can just you know
something very bad is about to happen is when someone
uses the word Chinese and noun you were about to
hear the most racist shit you've ever heard in your
entire life.

Speaker 21 (01:26:34):
Well, not to.

Speaker 2 (01:26:36):
Mention, askansy juice.

Speaker 22 (01:26:38):
Oh yeah, yeah, And so you know, want those actually
whatever which to briefly talk about what those studies were
actually saying. It's like, well, yeah, there were certain communities
that were hit worst by COVID, and there's certain communities
that were hit less by COVID, And that largely has
to do with things like income and how much you're
forced to like go work, read the plague.

Speaker 3 (01:26:54):
Living conditions, class, poverty, where you live, gentrification, there's lots
of aspects.

Speaker 22 (01:27:00):
How strong your anti vax movement is sure, definitely another
one not to mention, just like medicalized racism, which is
a massive problem in the American health care industry.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
Oh yeah, And r f K. Junior not gonna make
that better.

Speaker 3 (01:27:14):
No, I don't have an inkling that's gonna be on
the top of his priorities beyond nationalizing essentially chicken pox
parties instead of vaccines.

Speaker 22 (01:27:23):
Yeah, okay, So r f K Junior has been playing
the world's most obvious shell game with the media, which
the media, I don't know a lot of press outlets
are just sort of rolling over for Trump right now.
And so he's been playing this game where he's been
telling the press, oh, I'm not going to take vaccines
away from everyone, from anyone, and it'll be fine.

Speaker 2 (01:27:41):
And like we know.

Speaker 22 (01:27:43):
That he thinks that vaccines cause autism, Like he just
says this all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:27:48):
He has promoted books about that.

Speaker 17 (01:27:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 22 (01:27:51):
Yeah, So like you know, we know that he is
anti vax, that he spread, he spreads anti vax propaganda.
We know he spent a bunch of money doing this,
specifically also in minority communities. So there's a lot of
dangers here, some of which we're going to get into
more when we go into what specific agencies can.

Speaker 2 (01:28:08):
Sort of fuck with stuff.

Speaker 22 (01:28:09):
But one of the biggest dangers in the very short
term is that he is now in control of what
is effectively the US's medical science apparatus, and he can
use this to spread all of the anti vax horseshit
that has been spreading through like less official channels before this.
I think it's worth remembering that this whole anti vaccine

(01:28:31):
craze started with one guy getting one shitty paper published
in the journal Lancet and the reporting on that in
the media frenzy around that was enough to turn the
active vaccine movement from like ten people into a worldwide
movement that has killed unbelievable numbers of people. And the
reason that's true is because if an official authority tells

(01:28:52):
you like that this vaccine isn't safe, people will believe it.
And he's going to be able to use the National
Institutes of Health to be able to use the CDC,
is going to be able to use the journals that
they publish. He's going to be able to fill these
people with his coronis. It's going to take a lot
of fighting, but he's going to be able to use
this to push anti vaccine bullshit with even just leaving
aside his regulatory abilities, just the ability to like legitimize

(01:29:17):
this complete horseshit as actual science. Is going to do
incoculable damage to this country and is going to do
incolculable damage to the world because also one of the
things that's under Health and Human Services is the is
the US's like international medical and healthcare programs and sort
of prevention programs that we do internationally.

Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
So this is all very bad. Do you know what's
not very bad.

Speaker 3 (01:29:42):
Oh, all of the ads that are gonna play right
after I stopped talking, surely none of them could be
slightly problematic.

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):
And we are back. Okay.

Speaker 22 (01:30:02):
So when I was first writing this in the halcyon
days of last week, right, I had a whole thing
written here about how one of the other effects of
this is not just going to be the attack on vaccines,
It's going to be the destruction of basic virological research, right,
Like our basic research on viruses and on diseases is
going to be destroyed, you know. And this is because
the people that are of Kajunior is surrounding himself with

(01:30:23):
are the Lablik Truther people, and the Lablik Truthers have
convinced themselves to anyone who does any kind of research
with a virus is actually like creating a giant a
bioweapon that can at any moments like a break containment,
and kill the entire population. And you know, so I
was like, okay, I was putting together all this stuff,
and then he just straight up said that when he

(01:30:44):
gets in charge, he's going to go to the NIH
and stop studying infectious diseases for eight years first week.

Speaker 23 (01:30:51):
And I'm going to call all the division heads, and
I'm going to call all the bureau chiefs, and I'm
going to say, we're going to give drug development and
infectious disease a break, a little break, a little bit
of a break for about eight years, and we're gonna
study chronic disease.

Speaker 22 (01:31:11):
He's just saying, straight up, he's gonna try to stop
all infectious disease research for eight years.

Speaker 2 (01:31:16):
Now'll think about diseases. Right.

Speaker 22 (01:31:17):
I talked to a virologist beforehand, who will will rename
nameless for security purposes.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
But their response was, hold on, let me, let me,
let me, let me read this exactly, because it's extremely funny.

Speaker 22 (01:31:31):
I would love if pathogens would decide to give it
a rest for eight years. Sadly, I do not think
pathogens will get the memo because they're random micro organisms.
That the big issue here, right is Okay, so we're
stopping all infectious disease research. Now, you know we're already,
I mean we're still in like we gave up trying
to end for the first pandemic that like that would

(01:31:54):
happen on the Trump meministration, right, we were our solution
to this. And this is also part of The problem
of the decay hay of these institutions, even under Biden,
was that, you know, we gave up trying to stop COVID.

Speaker 2 (01:32:04):
We're we just we just just like maascer, it too
much work. So you're all going to die now, have fun.

Speaker 3 (01:32:09):
Well, luckily there won't be another global pandemic anytime soon,
because these things really only happen once a century.

Speaker 22 (01:32:15):
No, But you know, the content was with this, right
is when the next pandemic hits, we're going to have
an administration that is sort of broadly anti vax who's
everyone around them is anti vaccine, and we're going to
have just destroyed our capacity to do inveectious disease research.

Speaker 3 (01:32:29):
Well and specifically this was this was a joke about
the bird flu.

Speaker 2 (01:32:34):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 22 (01:32:35):
Well the thing is right, so the next one could
be that fucking bird flu strain that's bluing.

Speaker 2 (01:32:40):
But it could be something else too. We don't know,
there could be other ones.

Speaker 22 (01:32:43):
We you know, like if you go into like the
actual sort of causes of these things, which have to
do with things like factory farming and like increasing human
they call it humans zoological contact, but it's like humans
going into places where there weren't people before and there
are a bunch of animals and coming in in like
increasing contact with the animals. Right, that's all stuff that

(01:33:05):
they're driven by by structural elements of the economic system
and like our constant needs to develop land and the
way we've set up our meat agriculture, and that's not
stuff that like rf K Junior gives a shit about
like actually attempting to deal with So instead we're gonna
just do whatever this infectious disease research stop is.

Speaker 2 (01:33:24):
And I think this also aligns with a lot.

Speaker 22 (01:33:26):
Of the stuff that all of that that you know,
Trump's cabinet pointees broadly have been talking about, right, which
is this this desire to just sort of kneecap and
you know, sort of purge the American bureaucracy, you know.
And I've been I've been seeing some very very optimistic
people going like, oh, well, you can't really do a
purge because like what competent people are good?

Speaker 2 (01:33:45):
Are you going to replace them with?

Speaker 3 (01:33:47):
It's like no one, that's the problem. That's the problem.

Speaker 22 (01:33:51):
Three the un replaced with no one, or they're gonna
be replaced with like one of the like hundreds of
millions of weird anti vaccine freaks. These people have found
have like cultivated over like a giant global international network. Right,
they have so many crank doctors.

Speaker 3 (01:34:04):
We're just going to be like governed by like a
conspiracy theory cabinet, which is kind of what it's looking like. Yeah,
you're just going to be governed by the Fox and
Friends weekend host segments team.

Speaker 22 (01:34:16):
And oh boy, yeah, And I will say, you know,
this is all going to be very bad. I do
want to do a little bit of panic calming, which
is I've seen some people freaking out about the potential
of OURCA Junior just sort of destroying the American food
system by just implementing a total ban on fertilizers and pesticides.

(01:34:36):
And could he do that in theory maybe, but that
one I don't think is really likely to happen because
if he does, if he tries to do this, he
is immediately going to face like one of the most
ferocious lobbies in the entire history of American politics, which

(01:34:56):
is the American like I guess you would call him
the farm lobby, but really it's the American big ag
like big agricultural lobby.

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
Yeah, it's the agricultural lobby.

Speaker 6 (01:35:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 22 (01:35:04):
Yeah, And like you are about to face like the
power of fucking Bayer Monsanto.

Speaker 2 (01:35:09):
They are.

Speaker 22 (01:35:10):
They are a ferocious opponent. If you try banning their pesticides,
they're going to come for you. They already hate him
because he's already he's like has sued them over a
bunch of stuff over the years. And the thing about
the combination of companies that make chemicals for stuff and
also the giant farming conglomerates who who run most of
America's food production, is that unlike, for example, the farmer lobby,

(01:35:33):
the farmer lobby is very powerful, but its power is
sort of dispersed over over a broad geographic area. It's
not like centralized very well, which which makes them sort
of weaker in an attempt to like stop RFK Junior.
The thing about the farm lobbies that they're not There
are a lot of plane states. We're just straight up
their senators And it doesn't matter which party you elect.
Your senator is just a cutout for like the agricultural lobby.

Speaker 2 (01:35:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 22 (01:35:54):
And those people work together, right, like they have worked together,
they will work together. They caucus together all the time
in order to get agricultural subsidies and stuff. And these
people are unbelievably powerful. They are united political block in
the Senate, and they can bring the entire US governments
greeching to a halt. So that's not a fight. I

(01:36:15):
don't really think that he can win. But I mean
there's still some kind of chance that he tries to
do something like this. But on that one, and I've
seen a lot of people panicking about it, I think
that one will probably be Okay. That said, we're giving
a guy who one of his big things is that
like the government's been like repressing raw milk, and we're

(01:36:35):
giving this guy control of the FDA.

Speaker 2 (01:36:37):
Oh the raw milk people, Oh my god. Yeah.

Speaker 24 (01:36:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:36:42):
Well, and luckily there's been no FDA related fiascos this year,
which has led to thousands of food recalls that are
incredibly challenging to keep up with. And now the joke
here is that there actually has been massive FDA fuck
ups which actually has led to thousands of food recalls
which actually are pretty challenging to keep up with because

(01:37:03):
oh boy, our whole regulatory state was kind of got
it the past eight years and it is still recovering
and the deregulations have led to massive food foreign illness
failures in the production scene. So yeah, that's that's been happening.
I'm sure one of you has been affected by this.

Speaker 22 (01:37:22):
Yeah, And you know, I think there are some people
who tend to read the way that RFK Junior talks
about like we need eliminate like toxins from the food
supply or whatever, and read that as, oh, he's going
to like try to do more agriculture regulation, and oh,
that brain has been eaten by worms, like that is
his brain is a bunch of conspiracy theories matched together.

(01:37:43):
Like that's not going to be how this plays out,
unfortunately for us. Yeah, and I really think this is
something to keep mindus. Anyone who is treating this guy
as like some kind of serious reformer of US health policy,
do not trust anything that they say, right, Like, keep
notes of what fucking media outlets are saying this right now,
because with RFK Junior, a man who says one absolutely

(01:38:08):
like I said a thing earlier about suspending research for
infectious diseases, right, he said that like Friday, last Friday,
at an anti vaccine conference he was on on like zoom.

Speaker 2 (01:38:19):
He says this shit literally all the time.

Speaker 22 (01:38:21):
And if you're a sort of journalist and you're treating
him as like a semi serious guy and not this
person like you are not sort of qualified for the
task of covering what's going to be happening in this administration.

Speaker 3 (01:38:32):
I mean really, the worst thing about RFK, in my opinion,
is that he has ruined the Kennedy conspiracy search results.
If you google Kennedy conspiracy, it sucks now. Now it's
just RFK conspiracy theory beliefs that he has terrible. It's
ruined one of my great hobbies, which is trying to
find new JFK conspiracies.

Speaker 2 (01:38:56):
You know what else is ruining JFK conspiracies?

Speaker 3 (01:38:59):
Probably the heads because my god, the more time I
have to spend looking at advertisements is less time I
could be reading about how JFK was secretly Okay, we
are back, Mia. I would love to learn more about

(01:39:22):
RFK Junior if possible, or maybe some other random guy
who's also bad.

Speaker 2 (01:39:26):
What else do you have for me here? Oh boy?
We have from here adderall.

Speaker 3 (01:39:32):
Oh wow, one of my favorite prescription drugs. That's not true. Actually,
I'm actually not on stimulants. Everyone thinks just because I
talk fast and sound like this, I probably am on stimulants.
This actually isn't true. This is me completely sober, so
just to imagine how worse it would be if I
was on adderall.

Speaker 22 (01:39:49):
Yeah, So okay, let's do adderall first and we'll talk
about antidepressants. So, okay, if you've had to get adderall
and I'm actually not on it, somewhat miraculously, I don't know,
not raculously whatever, it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
It's not my favorite thing, not being on this.

Speaker 22 (01:40:02):
But you know, if you've tried to attain adderall or
something like viavants or one of the other sort of
treatments for ADHD, you have probably noticed that there's just shortages.
And there's two explanations for the shortage if you read
the stuff the Food and Drug Administration says, They're like, oh,
it's because of labor shortages at drug manufacturing plants, and
that's like not really the reason. The actual thing that's

(01:40:26):
going on here is that so these are technically like
restrict to substances, right, in order to produce substances like this,
the DEA sets like a quota of the amount of
these drugs you were able to produce in a year,
and the DEA became absolutely obsessed with like the fact
that people were like getting hold of other people's adderall
and this made them absolutely lose their fucking minds to

(01:40:46):
start imposing these unbelievably draconian production quotas on these stimulants,
which is why there's been a fucking shortage of them
for like three years now. It's it's worth noting. On
the one hand, you know, the FDA has kind of
been trying to fight the DA on this because the
FDA is looking at this and it's like, okay, so
we just have a bunch of people who have ADHD

(01:41:06):
who can't get their mets, and that can just straight
up destroy your life. Like getting getting taken off of
one of these things immediately is really really bad for you.
And also like not having executive function is real bad.
But we have the mild upside of the fact that
DA isn't technically going to be under OURFK Junior's control.

Speaker 3 (01:41:29):
But is it going to be under Christy Nomes control? Yeah,
it's it's just this department, Okay, so it could maybe gates,
Well maybe maybe gates because we have we have since
learned that that Trump has conceded that that Gates might
might not make it through a Senate confirmation hearing, so

(01:41:49):
we will still see if these recent appointments are actually
gonna happen. Yeah, so we don't know who's going to
be running the Department of Justice.

Speaker 22 (01:41:57):
But comma, what we do know about RFK Junior is
this quote from futurism quote, I'm going to create these
wellness farms so they can go get off legal drugs,
off opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs if
they want to to get off SSRIs, to get off bezos,
to get off adderall, and spend as much time as

(01:42:18):
they need three or four years if they need it,
learning to get reparented, to reconnect with communities. So, as
a lot of people loculic futurism have pointed out, he
is framing this as if it's voluntary. But what this
is is instead of treating people for mental health issues,
you send them to a labor camp to do organic

(01:42:39):
farming for the government. And that's very bad. And it's
also worth noting that these programs are supposed to be
quote unquote voluntary, have this sort of nasty way of
suddenly becoming involuntary at the moment, someone's actually in power.
So the worst possible read of this, like the most
bleak and dystopian read of this, is that this is

(01:42:59):
going to be implemented as a method of solving the
the indescribable human cost of evicting tens of millions of people.
One of the things that will do was just absolutely
obliterate our labor supply for agriculture, right, because it turns
out that the people who actually know how to do
agriculture work is not the white planters who fucking own
the farms.

Speaker 2 (01:43:20):
So this is a thing that could be used to
try to replace that labor. Right.

Speaker 22 (01:43:23):
I I don't know how much I think that specific
one is going to happen. It's unclear how he could
use the power of the state to do this, right,
There's not a direct path.

Speaker 3 (01:43:36):
Yeah, this seems this seems really this seems really goofy.

Speaker 22 (01:43:39):
Frankly, Yeah, like I've seen some panic over it, and
it's like, I, I mean maybe that's a like I
don't know thing that's like a like I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:43:49):
We're in like year six of the Trump of the
second Trump administration, and like.

Speaker 3 (01:43:53):
Yeah, I really don't see how they could even get
anywhere close to the numbers for like a voluntary drug
like rehab program that puts you into like agricultural farm work,
that it's not going to replace any of the missing
farm labor.

Speaker 22 (01:44:06):
No, no, it won't work, right even if you could
do the compulsory labor, thinking there's not just simply aren't
enough people right to do it. And also agricultural labor
is skilled work, right, like, yeah, you actually have to
know what you're doing. But comma, I will mention you know,
as this is kind of this is an unlikely but
technically possible thing to happen. The thing that's more likely

(01:44:27):
to happen is that this is a good time to
mention that one of the organizations that's under how the
Human Services is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,
and there are a lot of ways using this administration
and also just cooperating with the DEA, because again we
have to remember this DEA is just unbelievably pissed off

(01:44:48):
at the thought of like a single person getting their prescription.
So I don't think it will be hard for RFK
Junior to find his allies in the Justice Department to
intensify the crackdown that's already been happening on on things
like on things like adderall and on things like antidepressants,
because you know, there's a whole other range of conspiracy
theories that when we've covered this on the show, right
that I have to do with, like people who think

(01:45:09):
that like, oh, all the all the mass shooters are
on antidepressants or whatever, and that kind of stuff is
that kind of thinking is incredibly powerful, and there's there's
a real chance that we are about to see a
bunch of people who believe that shit suddenly in control
of a bunch of the agencies.

Speaker 2 (01:45:21):
They are supposed to be doing drug regulations.

Speaker 22 (01:45:24):
There are other things that we can see him do.
He's going to have some authority over approving new vaccines,
which is real bad. It's gonna be hard for him
to just like, I don't like, he can't just like
do a vaccine ban. But what he can do is
you can also fuck with people's insurance covering vaccinations, and
he can fuck with like to what extent they're recommended

(01:45:45):
by the government.

Speaker 3 (01:45:46):
This is really upsetting for the potential like HIV vaccine
that's oh like nearing its completion.

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):
We're going to get to that that. Hold on, give it,
give me one second, because we're getting too that.

Speaker 22 (01:45:57):
No, okay, so before we get to the fact that
our FID Junior is an HIV AIDS denialist, we need
to point out one more thing he can do, which
is that he can use the Office of the Inspector
General as a weapon to you know, I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:46:11):
It is the Office of the Inspector General.

Speaker 22 (01:46:13):
And like the regular the legal and regulatory capacities of
the other agencies under Health and Human Services, are they
supposed to be a thing that you can use to
go after drug companies for like making vaccines. No, will
he be able to do it, probably because we are
about to enter a a era of like law fair
and like what is it isn't considered legal? That is

(01:46:36):
going to make the past like eight years seem like
the most functional democratic regime the world has ever seen.
So we're probably going to see that, and we're also
going to see the effects of RFKI Junior's HIV AIDS denihalism.
And this shit is so I don't know if people
even remember this, but there is a whole like one

(01:46:58):
of the earlier kind of anti VACS conspiracy movements was
about HIV not being the cause of AIDS. And it's
been so long since this has been a public thing
that I think most people have sort of forgotten about it.
I think Dave Gruel is probably the most famous one
of these guys, But he was in this camp of
people who thought that like AIDS was cosmy malnutrition. Are

(01:47:20):
arf Kad Junior not in that camp Arkad Junior in
an even worse camp of people who were just like, oh, yeah, no,
it's because like gay people were doing poppers.

Speaker 2 (01:47:28):
That like that's his actual thing, right, he thinks that
you think it was poppers.

Speaker 22 (01:47:32):
Yeah, he thinks it's because of just literally like quote,
the gay lifestyle is why HIV happened. This kind of
shit wiped out in entire generation of query people. Our
best hope here is that he's forgotten about most of
this and is on to more and new, like just
gets sidetracked on his other conspiracies. Then it's just gets

(01:47:54):
obsessed with raw milk or whatever. But yeah, this this
could be really, really fucking bad for if he actually
decides that this is one of the issues he's going
to focus on. Right, He's now in charge a bunch
of the of a bunch of the agencies that like
helps people fucking deal with this, right because agv aids now,
you know, getting it is on a death sentence, Like
you can live, you can live a perfectly functioned normental

(01:48:16):
life as long as you have the right medical care.
And there's as as Garrett was talking about earlier, there's
there is a pretty promising vaccine that could fucking stop
this shit.

Speaker 11 (01:48:26):
Right.

Speaker 22 (01:48:27):
But if this is something that he remembers and he
focuses on, there's a real chance of him using his
power to fuck with it because he is a kind
of homophobic that like up until really two or three
years ago had kind of like mostly vanished from like
the mainstream even from sort of like the heart that
like the homophobes tended to have different homophobia now than
like this shit.

Speaker 3 (01:48:48):
Yeah, so this is like a classic eighties nineties homophobia.

Speaker 2 (01:48:52):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 22 (01:48:53):
And at this point also we need to mention that again,
one of the offices that he's now in charge of
is the Office for Civil Rights the ocr which is
oh cool. We've talked about on our episodes about transpolicy.
He's I don't know, RFK Junior is kind of one
of those people where it's like it's not clear to
me if like his heart's really in the anti trans stuff.
He says all of the most hideous anti transshit, right,
But that's also like it's also a pretty recent position

(01:49:14):
that he's adopted, you mean, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:49:15):
Same thing with Trump. Yeah, but now that might not matter, right.

Speaker 3 (01:49:19):
Sure, I'm just saying that these are more recent changes
from them, Yeah, yeah, to kind of reflect a growing
shift in politics for like the GOP and their and
their base. Yeah, whereas like historically Trump has has felt
fine sexually harassing trans women yep, yep, because of their women,
because of misogyny, you know, yeah anyway, But you know,

(01:49:41):
but our issue here is that the Office of Civil
Rights is the office that you're supposed to that that's
supposed to be the thing that stops discrimination in healthcare.
Oh okay, And in fact, this is the organization that
the Biden administration had just left trans people to the
mercy of where if like if your healthcare got banned,
you were supposed to like submit a complet to the
ocr So like it's not like an incredibly functional agency

(01:50:05):
right now, right, but it's about to get a lot worse.

Speaker 2 (01:50:09):
There's a couple other things that.

Speaker 22 (01:50:10):
I should mention before we close out here that are
I mean, you could do a full episode on in
and of themselves, but there's just so much shit here.
One of them is that he's also like anti fluoride
in drinking water. Yes, yes, yes, Now this is one
where I don't know how much power he's gonna have
to do this because a lot of fluoride stuff is
done at the local level.

Speaker 3 (01:50:28):
Well luckily for our friends of Bortland, and this won't
affect them at all because there already is no fluoride
in your drinking water yep.

Speaker 22 (01:50:35):
So our dental health is just fucked because of this.
He's probably going to use. This is gonna be another
bully pulpit thing where he uses his position to push
anti fluoride shit. And I think the last thing I
want to end on is just one of the like cruel,
petty things that he's probably going to be able to do.
Is one of the like bugbears of the right is
that like people on food stamps aren't eating healthy enough food,

(01:51:00):
and so we're probably gonna see a bunch of these
just really hideous restrictions and of what you can buy
with with snap benefits.

Speaker 2 (01:51:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:51:07):
Well, and the rest of these guys also just want
snap benefits and welfare to also just like go down
the toilet entirely.

Speaker 22 (01:51:13):
So yeah, so they're trying to make them as unusable
as possible. And again it's like okay, so like if
you can only buy like fresh fruit with this and
you live in a food desert, yeah, because you're poor,
what the fuck you?

Speaker 2 (01:51:23):
You know, right, It's just it's just compounding classism.

Speaker 22 (01:51:26):
Yeah, And the general trend of this is things are
either going to get monumentally worse or merely sort of worse.

Speaker 2 (01:51:34):
I do love those two options.

Speaker 22 (01:51:37):
Yeah, when your best chance is your hope, you're hoping
the brain worms ate the part of his brain that
remembered this specific conspiracy, you're in real trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:51:47):
I mean, RFK Junior is so emblematic of like the
type of like democrat, kind of wing nut hippie environmental
guy who then slowly has been pivoting to like the
right wing conspiracy sphere. Like you've seen this with a
lot of like you know, like hippie moms from like
the nineties right who had very like you know, fluoride beliefs,
vaccine beliefs, like all this type of stuff that was

(01:52:08):
kind of more associated with this like kind of like
slightly conspiratorial wing nutty section of like the left, and
how much that entire sphere has been totally eaten by
the right and now it's a pretty like successful and
reliable voting block for them. And this has only become
more of the case under Trump's first term. And now
we are seeing it again with these types of guys

(01:52:30):
not just on like Facebook comments sections, but now actually
like heading up entire departments of state.

Speaker 22 (01:52:36):
Yeah, and it's also worth mentioning that part of the
reason this stuff happens is because it's really profitable the
anti vaccine lobby, and it is a lobby, has an
unbelievable amount of money. You see a lot of people
pivot towards it. I'm going to close this out by
yelling at there's a media organization called grey Zone, which
if you've been involved in anti Palestine activistm you've probably
seen some of their reporting. They are also like pivoted

(01:52:57):
into this kind of anti vaccine stuff. And you know,
you remember remember at the top what I talked about
Jay Badachaira, who's that anti lockdown fanatic who's going to
be in charge of the National Institutes of Health. He
is a guy that, like Grey Zone, interviewed on their
fucking website and put out a bunch of articles in
support of his anti lockdown stuff. Right, And so this

(01:53:19):
is something that we've been seeing for the last four years,
is a lot of people who are supposed to be
leftists pivoting towards his anti vax stuff. Gibidor is another
example of this. Yes, yes, literally purely because it makes
you a lot of money. And now that now these
grifters just have their guy in office, and all of
us are going to have to live with the consequences
of it unless unless we stop this jackass from being

(01:53:41):
put into office, which is not impossible. It's it's it's
not without hope. This guy has a lot of enemies,
both among like the people, and also in corporate America
so h and also.

Speaker 2 (01:53:54):
In the animal kingdom. That's true, that's true. He has
he has many enemies. Families of the dead carcasses he draws.

Speaker 3 (01:54:02):
Around well, and this is the families of the microbials
in those carcasses which have wormed their way literally into
his brain.

Speaker 24 (01:54:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 25 (01:54:34):
Hello, and welcome back to It could Happen Here, a
show that is no longer hypothetical now that it is
happening here. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and today
I just want to talk to you a little bit
about your online security. It's a hot topic right now
for obvious reasons, and this won't be a comprehensive overview
on the subject by any meanings. I'm sure there will

(01:54:56):
be more episodes in the future covering specific angles on
this more depth, but today I just want to touch
on some basics, especially for people who may be asking
themselves some of these questions for the first time. This
is more of a mental framework and a pep talk.
The main message here is don't freak out. I'm not
saying the situation isn't serious for your concerns aren't real.

(01:55:21):
It's very serious, But freaking out is not going to
do you any good. And if you're looking for complicated,
high tech solutions to the very real anxiety that you're
feeling right now, this episode doesn't have it. That's not
what I have for you today. And I know a
lot of people have really specific concerns about apps they
might be using to track their menstrual cycles or fertility.

(01:55:43):
And we're not going to touch on that today because
I think it's a topic that deserves its own episode,
and an episode where I talk to an actual expert.
So I'm hoping to get that out next month. So
what are we talking about? The answer is pretty simple,
calming down and shutting up.

Speaker 2 (01:56:03):
That's right.

Speaker 25 (01:56:04):
It's only Thursday when this airs, but it is always
shut the fuck up Friday in our hearts, because the
main source of the risks you can do something about
is your own mouth. Because here's the thing. I'm not
an expert on digital security. I'm not a computer programmer
or a hacker. I had to call our producer Danil

(01:56:27):
one time because I went to record an episode and
my little recording device said no, and I almost cried.
And it turned out I accidentally slid the little tab
on the data card that locks it. I don't know,
but what I do know a lot about is how
to exploit someone else's lack of digital security. If you're

(01:56:48):
a listener to my show We're Little Guys, you know
that I kind of have a knack for finding out
everything there is to know about a guy. So what
I can offer you is a sort of reverse engineered
guy to stay safe online from someone like me but evil.
I like to tell people that you should be thinking
of your digital security kind of like your health. People

(01:57:12):
are going to have different risk factors, different vulnerabilities, different concerns,
different goals. If you're undocumented or on a student or
work visa, the risks and possible consequences for you are
very different. If you're queer or trans or a person
of color, your risk profile looks different. If you're economically
dependent on family members whose politics don't align with yours,

(01:57:33):
your risk profile is different. If you have a criminal record,
if you work in a field where your political activity
is a significant threat to your continued employment, if you're
running for office, if you have a security clearance, if
you have children or vulnerable family. These are all different vulnerabilities,
and you're going to have specific concerns that are unique
to you. And this isn't meant to address those specific

(01:57:55):
risk scenarios. But just like people who may have different
risk factors when comes to their health, everyone can benefit
from the basics. You know, no matter who you are,
you have to wash your hands, and when it comes
to digital security, a lot of People want to jump
right to the exciting, complicated technical fixes. You know, they
want the Kim Kardashian full body MRI equivalent of being

(01:58:20):
safe online. People want to talk about buying burner phones
and getting a Faraday bag and evading high tech surveillance,
but they're not washing their hands. People love to say
they're going to buy a burner phone. But if you
go to Walmart and you buy a burner phone and
you put your credit card into the machine that is
recording a video of your face, and then you take
that phone home and turn it on inside your house

(01:58:41):
next to your real phone, you've done nothing but waste
your time and money. So we're not talking about solutions
like that. We are talking about is boring, un sexy,
basic stuff that everybody can and should be doing before
they jump into the deep end. If you choose to
go that route, because I'm not saying you should worry
about more advanced threats, I'm just saying you have to

(01:59:03):
start here. So before you can figure out how to
mitigate a risk, you have to nail down what that
risk actually is, what is the outcome that you're hoping
to avoid. There's a lot of anxiety right now about
unknowable possibilities, and it's really easy to get overwhelmed with
the what ifs of a worst case scenario and then

(01:59:25):
you just end up feeling really helpless. And look, yeah,
there are some potential threats here that I don't have
the tools to help you address, But that doesn't mean
you shouldn't be taking the steps that are within your
control right now. You have to fight off that feeling
of helplessness. So what we're talking about here is threat modeling.

(01:59:45):
It gave a little workshop a few months ago about
digital security, and the first thing I asked the group
was what is the bad thing that you were worried
will happen? And most people's answer to that was they're
worried about getting doxed. Okay, that's that's fair, that's a
valid fear, But what do you mean by that? What

(02:00:05):
specifically is the piece of information you are worried someone
will discover? Is it your name, your address where you work?
Is it connecting two pieces of your online identity that
you thought were separate. Docxing can mean a lot of
things to different people at a different contexts, and it
can happen in degrees. Right, Like you know my full

(02:00:28):
legal name. I'm you know, dosed to whatever extent that
means anything. But this could still happen to me. Someone
could still discover a piece of information about me that
I wish they didn't have. And most people can't become
completely anonymous. I can't help you do that, and honestly,
I don't think that should be most people's goals. Don't disappear.

(02:00:53):
I'm not telling you you should disappear. This is just
about figuring out what makes sense for you and what
you can do to nap gate the landscape that you've
chosen to operate in. So, what is the actual negative

(02:01:16):
outcome specifically that is making you feel afraid? What is
the concrete thing that you are thinking about when you
experience that fear. And people's answers tend to be that
they're worried about getting harassed, They're worried about their physical safety,
They're worried about negative fallout at work or at school.
People's fears tend to be about things like getting arrested,

(02:01:38):
getting sued, getting fired, getting hurt, and getting embarrassed. And
so the next question is can you identify the potential
sources for the kinds of harm you're worried about, and
you can sort these into a few primary categories. The
state can harm you. That's the police, the government. You
can get charged with a crime. Institutions can harm you.

(02:02:01):
If you're a student, you can get in trouble at school,
If you have some kind of professional license, people could
file complaints against you. Politicians and organized political groups can
harm you. You know, Marjorie Taylor Green might tweet your
TikTok video or Canary Mission might do a blog post
about where you work. And right wing groups can harm you.
You might get targeted harassment from some Nazi telegram channel.

(02:02:24):
Worst case scenario, maybe you were physically threatened or attacked
by an extremist group. You could get swatted. And then
there's just this sort of wild card of the random
strangers and Internet mobs and the way they factor into
and exacerbate all of the above scenarios. When it comes
to harm from the state, that's beyond what we're talking

(02:02:46):
about with this digital hand washing metaphor. A lot of
the prevention steps you can take today are still going
to help you. They're still worth taking. But at the
end of the day, if the government wants to know
who runs a Twitter account, who drove to a protest,
who supported a movement, who donated money. That's beyond the basics.
Most of what I have direct experience with are just

(02:03:07):
these basic measures that you can take to day to
make it a little bit harder for the average weird
little guy to get into your business. It'll stop the
average online troll, it'll slow down a decent sleuth, but
it's not the kind of stuff that stops a guy
with a warrant. Think of protecting your online identity like
being inside your house. If you have no curtains, someone

(02:03:32):
walking down the street can see you, even if they
didn't go out of their way to look. If you're
putting everything out there with no thought to digital security,
somebody could dox se you without even trying, just like
they would be able to see and through your windows
from the street. Somebody who is a little more curious
about you might walk into your yard. But if you

(02:03:52):
put up a fence, maybe that person will decide this
isn't really worth my time. Somebody who loves peeping in
windows really wants to see you. He's gonna hop your fence, right.
But the average troll will see these barriers and they'll
get bored. But again, curtains, a fence, a locked door,
a guard dog. These don't stop a guy with a warrant.

(02:04:14):
So we're talking about just putting up barriers that slow
down and discourage the average low to mid level weirdo.
In short, do let your Facebook set your accounts to private,
you signal, put a pass code on your phone, say less,
and try to do something about the data brokers. Let's

(02:04:34):
break these down one at a time. I'm sure it's
been talked about on this show before, but I tell
everyone in my life download Signal. Download Signal. It's free,
put it on your phone. It's just an encrypted messaging app,
and I use it by default, pretty much exclusively in
place of regular texting, just because it's easier for me
to have everything in one place. It doesn't collect or

(02:04:56):
store your metadata, it doesn't back up to the cloud,
and you can set all of your conversations to automatically
disappear at whatever time interval you choose. You don't need
text messages from a year ago.

Speaker 2 (02:05:08):
You don't.

Speaker 25 (02:05:09):
Those can never help you, They can only hurt you.
Just let them go and turn off the biometric unlock
on your phone. Whether that's a fingerprint or a face ID.
Turn it off, turn it off. Set a passcode. If
you get arrested and you have your phone on you,
they can use your finger or your face to unlock
it without a warrant. But if you have a passcode,

(02:05:32):
you're a little bit safer. So set a pass code
that's at least six digits long longer if you can
bear it, I know. But when it comes to social media,
you have some choices. You may look at your own
threat model and say, why don't care if everyone can
see what I've posted? And that's okay, right. We all
have different goals and vulnerabilities. And if you're a very

(02:05:53):
public organizer, then yeah, you need public social media. But
if you've been using Facebook for two twenty years, you
probably weren't always very careful about what was on there.
And there are privacy settings now where you can retroactively
set all of your old posts to a new privacy settings.
You should do that start there if you haven't done that,

(02:06:15):
but that still leaves a lot of digital debris. If
you've changed your display name to something more private in
recent years, something that isn't your current legal name, old
posts that other people made about you still have your
old name in them. So if they tagged you ten
years ago, that old name is still a link to

(02:06:36):
your current profile, and you can't control the content that
your friends and family posted years ago. And on the
flip side, if in the end you decide you don't
care what's on your Facebook about you, when you're doing
your threat modeling, consider the people close to you, because
when I'm working at this from the other side, a

(02:06:57):
lot of times I'll find that, you know, the guy
that I'm looking for has done a pretty good job
cleaning up his own digital presence, but his wife, his mom,
his sister, someone in his life as not. So if
there's someone in your life who maybe is at greater
risk than you are, don't be their weak spot. And

(02:07:18):
if you're in a position to do so, talk to
the people in your life about this. Have these conversations
about what are our risks, what are our goals. Let's
do a digital hygiene tech together, because you can build
an impenetrable digital fortress around yourself. But if you're aunt
Kathy is live streaming your baby shower, that didn't do

(02:07:38):
you much good.

Speaker 2 (02:07:39):
And now that more.

Speaker 25 (02:07:40):
People are talking about these kinds of concerns. You can
try broaching the subject with people in your life that
may not have been receptive to it a year ago.
Show your mom how to set our Facebook to private.
Take the time to explain to your less political siblings
why they should think about the ways in which their
social media use might expose someone they care about. Don't

(02:08:03):
just scold them or you say it's reckless that you're
doing this, talk about why so when it comes to
social media, I'm saying delete your Facebook as a sort

(02:08:24):
of shorthand for the general cleanup of the stuff that
you've left online for the last twenty years. Cleaning up
your online presence is the number one thing you can
do right now to thwart the bizarro universe version of
me who is trying to collect every piece of information
about you. Because even if you're careful today, even if

(02:08:47):
you're so smart about it now and you're not putting
anything online that puts you at risk, you weren't always
that careful. We're all guilty of it. People who've been
doing this for a long time, people who know better,
We're all guilty of being a little messy online. It's okay,
there's no shame that you didn't know before. Don't feel silly,
don't feel guilty. Just start cleaning it up today and

(02:09:11):
so to figure out what exactly you might have been
leaving out in the open, one thing you can try
is doxing yourself, or do it with a friend, right,
try doxing each other. So start with a completely clean cash,
do your cookies whatever, Open an incognito browser, Start with
a blank slate, and just google yourself. Google your name,

(02:09:32):
your address, your phone number. Google the usernames that you
currently use on various sites. But google the username you
used in high school. Google your old aim handle, Google
the email address you made when you were twelve.

Speaker 4 (02:09:47):
What comes up?

Speaker 25 (02:09:49):
And is that information you want everybody to have? Probably not.
Start by deleting accounts you don't use anymore. Just wipe
those bad boys right out. Don't need those. A lot
of people have no idea that the ghost of their
old MySpace page still exists online. I've actually used that

(02:10:09):
one fairly recently to confirm the details about a person's
close associates and family members. They hadn't logged into MySpace
since twenty ten. But your top eight lives forever. So
delete or set to privates any account that you don't use,
don't need, or just don't need to be public facing.
Log into every social media site, every forum, every online

(02:10:33):
store where you've ever created an account, and just look
at what's visible. Your online reviews may contain information about
where you live. Your profile on some forum you posted
on in twenty twelve probably has your birthday on it.
And if you're an active Pinterest user, your Pinterest boards
are probably revealing a lot more information about you than

(02:10:53):
you realize, information about your family, your interests, your plans
for the future. People will make Pinterest boards with names
like Jaden's second birthday, and now I know that you
have a son named Jaden whose second birthday party you
were planning last July. That's a real example. So set
these things to private. Change your profile picture to something

(02:11:14):
that isn't your face. Look at your username. Did you
have to put some numbers at the end of that
because the one you wanted was taken? Are those numbers
your birthday? And vary your usernames a little bit. Unless
you have some kind of professional reason for using a
personal brand across every platform, don't use the same username everywhere.

(02:11:34):
Keep separate areas of your life separate. Don't make it
any easier than it needs to be to connect these
different pieces of your digital footprint into one picture of
who you are. Because again I'm not talking about becoming
completely anonymous online. A lot of people need to exist
online as the person that they are. You have a LinkedIn,

(02:11:57):
you do public facing organized. I'm not saying you need
to disappear from online, but if you have accounts that
you don't want connected back to.

Speaker 4 (02:12:07):
Your true identity.

Speaker 25 (02:12:08):
If there are pieces of you that exist that you
don't want side by side, don't connect them. So if
you anonymously run a social media account for an activist group,
don't use it to follow your own real account. Don't
like your boyfriend's posts when you're logged into your anarchist
shit posting account if you don't want it connected to you,

(02:12:29):
don't create overlap. If you post a screenshot from one
social media platform onto another, you know, a screenshot of
a tweet on your Instagram, whatever, be mindful of what's
in that image. Is there a thumbnail of your own
profile picture in there? Does the screenshot show that you
interacted with that post? Because a filled in heart on

(02:12:50):
an Instagram screenshot is something I have used as a
building block for a docs. And maybe you've never posted
anything identifiable on Twitter, but if you're a link to
your Twitter account on Reddit, or are you in a
big discord and you shared one of your own posts
with your friends in there, like hey look at this
bangor tweet I'm going viral. And I say both of

(02:13:11):
those specifically because both of those are specific mistakes that
I have seen people make that were for me a
crucial link between two accounts that connected the dots to
figure out who they were. Use two factor authentication, use
a password manager, use complex passwords, never recycle a password.
Check databases like have I been poned? See what's been

(02:13:34):
leaked about you? And some of that data is out
of your control now, but it's out there and you
can't call it back. But you can change all of
your passwords today. You can download a password manager and
change all of your passwords today, and all of your
passwords should be something different from one another. I'm going
to say it again, change all your passwords. Stop using

(02:13:54):
your dog's name as your password for everything. It was hard,
but I did it, okay. And when you're doing this
digital hygiene check, you know you're googling yourself, you're checking
these breach databases. One of the things you're going to
find is your address, your email address, and your phone number,
and your parents' names and your parents' address. All of

(02:14:16):
these pieces of what you thought were personal private information.
They are bought and sold to data brokers, and these
data brokers put them online on sites that people can
pay to access. Feel like people Finder, True people Search,
White Pages. There's hundreds of them.

Speaker 17 (02:14:34):
Now.

Speaker 25 (02:14:34):
By law, all of these sites have to have a
link on them somewhere where you can ask them to
delete your information. Some of them make it kind of hard,
and it may take weeks for them to actually honor
the request, and you may have to follow up. But theoretically,
if they're operating legally, you do have the ability to
manually clean up how much of your personal information comes

(02:14:57):
up from these data brokers. But I'll be honest with you,
it's whack a mole. You could spend one afternoon a
week for the rest of your life making opt out
requests and following up on them and checking back to
make sure it's really gone.

Speaker 4 (02:15:11):
You can do that.

Speaker 2 (02:15:12):
I used to do that.

Speaker 25 (02:15:14):
But there are also services that will do it for
you for a fee. I think there may be an
episode in the pipeline examining that particular ecosystem and some
more details. So I won't go into the pros and
cons of different services that exist, but if that's something
you're interested in paying for, do some research about it
before you put your money down. But at the end
of the day, I just want you to remember you

(02:15:36):
can't solve this whole problem. That might sound like a
defeatist message, but I think it's healthy. I'm not saying
it's hopeless. I'm saying you have to spend your energy
where it counts. People ask me all the time, you know,
are you worried about this or that specific threat? And
the answer is yeah, probably, Yeah, of course I'm worried.

(02:15:59):
But you can't let that fear overwhelmed you. You know,
if I get fixated on the existence of threats that
are outside of my control, I'll just freak out, and
that makes me less capable of focusing on mitigating the
threats that are within my control. So don't put blinders on,
don't lie to yourself. You know, be realistic, but don't

(02:16:20):
wear yourself out worrying about things that are so far
out of your control that all you have is fear.
So today, now take a deep breath, delete your MySpace
account and talk to your mom about setting all her
old Facebook pictures to private.

Speaker 1 (02:16:57):
What's pew pew in my pew ows? This is Robert
Evans and it could happen here? A podcast about it
happening here? As it seems to be more every week
and when things get worse, one thing that a lot
of folks start talking about is should I buy a gun?
And obviously this is a fraught question and the only
responsible answers to it are very complicated. And so to

(02:17:20):
talk over some very complicated answers, we've got James Stout
and we have in the audience with us the great
Carl Casarta, Carl of en Range TV. Thank you for
coming on to be our resident firearms expert in this
podcast where we try not to be deeply irresponsible.

Speaker 2 (02:17:38):
Yeah, thank you for having me on.

Speaker 9 (02:17:40):
It's always a pleasure to come back to the show,
and people always ask for more collabs, and here we are,
but on a very important topic. And yes, Billy courtion
I have is now is when do you change the
name of the podcast too?

Speaker 19 (02:17:50):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (02:17:50):
No, it's happening here. We're talking with the marketing people.
It done happened here.

Speaker 5 (02:17:57):
Oh shit, it's happening again. It's been happening here.

Speaker 1 (02:18:01):
Yeah, here, it is here now right in this moment.

Speaker 2 (02:18:06):
Be here now it.

Speaker 5 (02:18:09):
Yeah, we got to work out which one seo's best.
But we're on it, Carl, don't worry. We're working on it,
so as I think both of you know, but maybe
listeners don't. Gun sales typically saw before elections as to
ammunition purchases. People are afraid of gun bands has been
traditionally one reason why, and the firearms industry is not
afraid of hyping those up to increase sales in election years,

(02:18:31):
and normally prices increase in line with demand. Like if
you go back to November twenty twenty and look at
the prices of ammunition and guns compared to now, you'll
see how much incredibly high they were. That was for
a number of reasons. But considering inflation, gun prices are
pretty low right now.

Speaker 1 (02:18:47):
You know that is kind of a recurrent thing. For
the most part, is that while everything else gets more expensive,
television and firearms remain affordable.

Speaker 9 (02:18:57):
Yeah, gone gone to the point where they are more
affordable than they've ever been. Uh huh, Yeah, they really
are Air fifteens or I used to talk about this
on air fifteens are essentially cord wood and you can
get a fully fled good to go air fifteen now
for like four to five hundred bucks, to the epistols
for two hundred and fifty bucks.

Speaker 2 (02:19:15):
Yeah, the prices on guns are like through the floor.

Speaker 9 (02:19:17):
And yeah, it's interesting to note that, Like, if you
are a gun manufacturer, a firearms dealer, even if you
don't hype elections, it would be unintelligent of you to
not prep for elections because they're so consistently Yeah, the
Christmas of gun sales.

Speaker 2 (02:19:31):
So this is an instance in which we didn't see that.
It's it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 1 (02:19:34):
I think there's an element because obviously when we talk
I think to people who are not into guns and
talk about how cheap guns have gotten, they're like, well,
that's very bad, and there's definitely downsides to that. But
an upside of that is it does kind of suggest
we are not seeing the degree of panicked hoarding for
a civil war that we have seen at previous points
when gun prices were not as as cratered and AMMO

(02:19:58):
prices were a lot higher, and ammovilla the availability was
a lot lower. Like in some ways that's kind of
an optimistic sign.

Speaker 9 (02:20:04):
Yeah, or the dark side of that is the traditional
prepper air quote is so saturated in guns and ammunition.

Speaker 2 (02:20:09):
Right, but they don't even need another one, right.

Speaker 1 (02:20:12):
Well, that's I think that is where a lot of
people are.

Speaker 3 (02:20:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:20:17):
Also, like capacity really increased in twenty twenty, and I
think they've been pumping out Like it's interesting to look
at like the cost of nine millimeters and five five
six ammunition, which if you're not familiar, are like the
most commonly used defensive ammunition rounds compared to more niche
stuff like that hasn't gone down as much if you're
trying to get three hundred wisdom or something.

Speaker 9 (02:20:39):
The funny thing that, yeah, five five six and nine
milimeters both to defensively add well is just recreationally are
the most common ammunition.

Speaker 2 (02:20:45):
Yeah, by far.

Speaker 9 (02:20:47):
And some of the weird old stuff I like to shoot,
like percussion caps for percussion revolvers. You can't find that
stuff to save your life. That's those through the roof
and expensive. So yeah, they've literally just bunkered down. Cook
intent there and are make five six a nine millimeters
because that's where the.

Speaker 2 (02:21:02):
Demand is and will continue to be.

Speaker 5 (02:21:04):
Yeah, I can't find you can't see it. I have
a little reloading set up here. I can't find shot
gun primus or send powders anyway.

Speaker 1 (02:21:12):
Now, and this is going to be a problem because
if we have another Cowboys and Aliens kind of situation,
what are we going to use? You know, what is
Harrison Ford going to use to save us? Anyway? Nobody
saw that movie? Why am I making that joke?

Speaker 2 (02:21:24):
Let me know, I've got a good stashion. We're all
going to be leaning heavily on carl.

Speaker 5 (02:21:31):
Call for all humanity.

Speaker 1 (02:21:33):
So I think we've gotten a little bit ahead of
our skis here. We should we should start by talking,
because again, I think we've all seen a lot of
people being like, well, I guess I should get a
gun now, as in the wake of Trump's victory. And
I think the first caveat we should give everyone is like,
if you are reacting in a way that is totally
reasonable to this news being depressed, right, if you're somebody

(02:21:53):
who deals with suicidal ideation, if you have been spiraling lately,
if you have been thinking about self harm. If you
are just not in a stable mental place, and especially
if you have no experience with firearms and are not
in a stable mental place, don't go rush to pick
one up now. Look for one thing. I assure you
they will be available in the future. They are not

(02:22:14):
gonna get harder to buy.

Speaker 2 (02:22:17):
No, you know. It mights be of a line from
the movie We.

Speaker 9 (02:22:19):
Were Soldiers, which is actually a pretty pretty good movie
speaking oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (02:22:24):
Not a Gibson.

Speaker 9 (02:22:25):
It was pretty good, And there's a scene where like
the old hardened soldier from Korea World War two in
Korea gets the Vietnam and he's like, he's just got
a pistol, and like everyone's around him saying don't you
want an M sixteen? He goes, don't worry, There'll be
plenty of those laying around if I need one. So right,
kind of that's where we're at in this country.

Speaker 2 (02:22:41):
Don't worry, There'll be plenty laying around if you need one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:22:44):
Yeah, we are not entering a period where that's you know,
I think there are some specific worries where there may
be attempts to restrict specific groups from arming themselves. But
even so, I wouldn't say that elevates it above a threat.
If you are dealing with suicidal ideation, having a gun
is is not a talisman, as our friend tactical girlfriend
often brings up, and you shouldn't treat it as one.

(02:23:06):
And part of what that means is that, like, you
have to model like the threat that you're facing, right
and if you are not in immediate danger, if nobody
is threatening to kill you specifically, you know, then that
may not be the safest thing for you, right and particularly,
I think the other side of it that Carl, you
are much more qualified to talk about with than me,
is that if you are going to buy a firearm,

(02:23:27):
if you want that to be a thing that can
actually protect you in a situation where you are in danger,
where someone is threatening your life, you have to train
with it.

Speaker 2 (02:23:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:23:37):
No, absolutely, I think that not to make to make
light of that at all with that little joke about
that movie, but the reality is we as people humans
in general, all of us are bad at threat modeling.
And that's not to say that the perceived threat that
we're seeing with the results isn't real. Yeah, I think
it is, But that said at the moment, if you're
dealing with some of those issues like you mentioned, or

(02:23:57):
the living situation you're aund, or even the community around right,
isn't one in which a firearm laying around is particularly safe.
Could mean that you're actually inducing more threat and risk
to yourself than what might come in two years. So
that is something we have to think about very carefully.
Can I possess this responsibly? Do I know how to
use it responsibly? Am I in a place not only

(02:24:18):
in my living situation, but my mental state that possessing
this very quick and easy to use lethal device is
safe to have around? Those are questions you should ask
first before worrying about tomorrow.

Speaker 5 (02:24:29):
Right, Yeah, I mean maybe we should address like a
couple of things that Kyle said right off the bat,
Like you said having a firearm lying around, right, One
thing that we should address is like, I know I
recently purchased a new gun safe, but like if you
have ex budget to buy a gun. Robert also mentioned
that without training, your liability with the gun. Right, maybe

(02:24:49):
we can break down if you have one thousand dollars,
you don't need to go out and spend a thousand
dollars on your gun. Right, perhaps it would be better
to save some of that money and put it towards
other things. I think it might make sense to just
break those down for people in case they're not familiar.

Speaker 1 (02:25:06):
Yeah, I think that that might be a good place
to start. Is if you decide number one, I'm in
an emotionally stable place. I either have some specific threats
or I want to be prepared for a future where
those threats are more likely. And let's start with a
budget of one thousand dollars, right, And you know this
is one of the there's going to be people who
can't afford a budget of one thousand dollars and that's
very unfortunate. But this is one of those things that

(02:25:28):
like isn't fair, right, Like guns cost money. Not everyone
has disposable income. But one thousand dollars I think is
a reasonable floor for not just acquiring a firearm, but
like the things you need to be able to start
building proficiency with. It's like, let's talk about that car,
Like what would you do would you advise someone with
a grand who is looking into getting into shooting and

(02:25:49):
also being set up to potentially defend themselves if they
need to.

Speaker 2 (02:25:53):
Right, So this this.

Speaker 9 (02:25:54):
Well, it's such a nuanced question and answer because there's
so many variabilities there, one of which is you have
to understand the living situation you in.

Speaker 2 (02:26:02):
Are you living in a place that is solely your own?
Do you live with roommates, do you have children and
your parents?

Speaker 9 (02:26:07):
I mean, like these things all come into the equation
about how well can you secure this thing should you
acquire it? And so that comes up to do you
need a full bolt into the wall safe? Do you
need something that is locked with cable underneath the bed
that still is reasonably difficult to get into but is
accessible otherwise? Do you have a situation in which you're

(02:26:28):
the only one that could access this and therefore you're
not worried about that? So the first thing you have
to think about is, though I'm taken possession of responsibility
of this, it is a lethal weapon, what am I
going to do to make sure that that doesn't fall
into the wrong hands? Whether there are people that live
within your own structure or outside of it should something
go awright, So you have to consider that. So right
off the bat is what are the situation I'm in

(02:26:50):
and what are the things I need to consider to
make sure this doesn't leak out of my control, because
we've seen in so many instances, especially some of the
horrible spree shootings and such, in which is not the
person to possess the gun, but someone around them that
took it from them and used it for them. Absolutely,
And that's because it wasn't stored well. And so that's
number one. So you're going to think about one, are
you getting a small a pithol or a long arm?

(02:27:11):
And that's a discussion that we had too, but those
two equate. And then depending on which one of those
two you're acquiring determines the kind of safe storage requirements
that also aligned with your current living situation. Of course,
the best thing is a safe bolted to the floor
that only you can get into. But that's not viable
for everyone.

Speaker 1 (02:27:28):
Yeah, right, but it's something right yeah, Yeah. What comes
along with that is you also, this is going to
be true at every stage of this process, you need
to know the laws of your state and maybe even
your local area. Right Like in Oregon we have very
strict safe storage laws, right Like, you can be held
accountable to a higher degree in this state if you
don't secure a weapon and someone gets access to it

(02:27:50):
right now. Obviously, if you have a safe and someone
drills into your safe, you're not liable, right like you
took the actions you could to stop them from being
able to get to your firearms. There's not an expectation
that you have a fortress of solitude or whatever, but
you have to have taken reasonable steps to lock them away, right,
And you know that's going to be different. A lot
of states have absolutely no requirements whatsoever, but you need

(02:28:13):
to be aware of what your local legal situation is.

Speaker 9 (02:28:16):
Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that to the table because myself,
living in Arizona, we have no such rules, and so.

Speaker 2 (02:28:21):
I can essentially you can just keep them on the floor.

Speaker 9 (02:28:24):
I could stab them in my front yard, right I'm
like to put him out in the yard.

Speaker 2 (02:28:28):
We'll see. I had extra rs.

Speaker 1 (02:28:29):
I use him to make a fence cheaper than would
right now, literally cold would now.

Speaker 9 (02:28:35):
So the thing about that is this is again, these
things get more and more complicated over time. But we
don't want to make this conversation impenetrable. But like, the
kind of safe you acquire is important too, and this
is that's a deeper topic than we could ever do
in one video. I'm gonna go ahead and just dovetail
out to a friend of mine, Devian Olaf. He has
a channel he does a lot of video work about

(02:28:56):
gun safe and which ones are good or bad. But
let's just say the chief ninety dollars thing with the
cylindrical key lock, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (02:29:03):
So you've got to be a little better than that.
So I would ask the me, let's go with costs
you're buying.

Speaker 9 (02:29:07):
Let's say in air fifteen, you're probably going to need
to spend and I'm guessing here around two hundred fifty
dollars for a safe that's actually worth a dam.

Speaker 5 (02:29:14):
Yeah, yeah, it's about what I spent recently for little
handguns safe. Yeah, so's let's build on that. Right, Let's
say you've decided that you want a gun and that
it's safe for you to have a gun. I think, Yeah,
the first thing you ought to prioritize is making sure
that no one who for whom it is not safe
gets that gun, which we've addressed right. The second thing

(02:29:35):
that you need to prioritize is that you could use
that gun safely and like you're another liability every time, Yeah,
that you pick up and load that gun, right.

Speaker 1 (02:29:46):
Yes, And part of that is in and maybe I
will have different opinions on this, but I think we're
probably sympatico picking the right type of firearm. I see
a lot of people saying, I am worried I'm going
to get attacked. You know, I've been I've gotten a
death threat. You know, I'm scared, particularly of this group
of you know, Nazis or whatever. So I'm going to

(02:30:06):
buy a handgun. And I will tell you right now,
my opinion is that if you are looking for a
self defense weapon, a handgun probably shouldn't be what you
pick unless you are looking to carry a gun.

Speaker 2 (02:30:19):
Yeah. No, that's a good quote, right.

Speaker 9 (02:30:21):
I carry a handgun because it's unwieldy to walk around
with a fifty BMG.

Speaker 2 (02:30:26):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I cannot.

Speaker 1 (02:30:27):
I cannot take my ar with me in the street, right,
so I keep a nine on me.

Speaker 2 (02:30:32):
You know, handguns are.

Speaker 9 (02:30:33):
The most difficult thing to use skillfully under distress and
duress than any other firearm. And yes, above and beyond that,
they are actually the least fact of it doing the
job you think they're going to do than anything else.

Speaker 1 (02:30:46):
Yeah, yeah, they're a shocking number of people are shot
way more times than you would expect they could survive
with a handgun, right, Like that is just a reality
of the way that they work, because they're much much
less powerful than a rifle. And it's also like I
had a friend a couple of years ago who bought
a snubnose thirty eight, thinking, well, this is simple, I
can't fuck it up. It's a good And I took

(02:31:07):
her out and was like, I'm going to set up
a ten foot target and we'll see how many times
you can hit it with this gun. And she could
not do it one out of five times. And then
I brought out my glock and she was able to
hit it every time.

Speaker 2 (02:31:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:31:21):
And it's because one of those is a much easier
weapon for somebody who is complete a complete novice to
learn how to use functionally, right. And it's not the
snubnose thirty eight.

Speaker 9 (02:31:31):
Yeah, in the roughest of most senses. Typically the smaller
the gun is, the more a professionally you need to
be to use.

Speaker 2 (02:31:39):
It, right.

Speaker 5 (02:31:40):
Yeah, And like with that in mind, you're responsible for
every shot you fire, right training in self defense? What
by fucking accident? Because you don't have to clean your
gun or what have you. Every bullet that leaves that barrel,
it's your fault and every one of theirs is potentially
someone's life. So when you're thinking about buying a and

(02:32:01):
you want to have something where you can a handle
it safely and be discharging and know where that bullet's
going to go.

Speaker 9 (02:32:08):
Yeah, So on that note, this has been asked for
me many times, and we're talking about where all we
are on the same page. It's like when someone asking
me this question and it comes up more than you'd think.
First of all, we're getting past the issue of like
are you safe to own this and safe storage? So
now we're at the point you are buying a gun, right,
so you have to think, oh, what's the threat?

Speaker 2 (02:32:23):
Are we worried.

Speaker 9 (02:32:24):
About three years from now and the potential realities of
a very caustic and dangerous political future. Are you worried
about only home defense? Are you worried about your own
self protection walking down the street, because obviously you're not
going to be well, not obviously, but for the most part,
you're not going to be carry an AR fifteen down
the street. But if you are only worried about your castle,
make a joke about castle doctor, and if you're only

(02:32:44):
worried about your house, inside your house, there is no
reason to be picking a pistol none whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (02:32:51):
Now, I will say that there's a number of folks
in the lefty gun space who will say, so, just
get an AR fifteen. That's not always going to be
practical depending on your loss, right, Like, that is not
something that we can say everyone will be able to do, right, yeah,
but we can say there will be a non handgun
option that will probably be a better fit for you.

Speaker 5 (02:33:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:33:11):
Absolutely, And this is where we see a lot of
people in the gun space. It's kind of weird, like
cultural shifts in those zeitgeist what's the cool defensive thing
of the time. But there's a lot to be said
depending on what you think you're going.

Speaker 2 (02:33:23):
To have to shoot it.

Speaker 9 (02:33:24):
Hopefully never of course, but like, yeah, an AR fifteen
does things like armour piercing in terms of kevlar and
da da da da dah. But for home defense, it
really still is kind of hard to go wrong with
a shotgun in many instances, and that should not be ignored.
You know what else should it be ignored?

Speaker 2 (02:33:39):
Huh?

Speaker 5 (02:33:40):
It's our obligation to pivot to advertisements about every fifteen
minutes on this show.

Speaker 2 (02:33:55):
All right, we're back, Kyle.

Speaker 5 (02:33:56):
You've mentioned that you think a shotguns can be more
effective than NOW fifteen especially. Another thing I would add
is here, in a state like California, the laws regarding
simulartomatic centifire rifles are incredibly confusing. It's extremely easy to
buy something on Amazon and slap it on your gun
and render it a felony.

Speaker 1 (02:34:16):
Yeah, I would generally say, like in most situations, an AR,
if you're new to shooting, it's going to be easier
to figure out. They're very simple, easy to upgrade and modify.
But like, yeah, in California. In a state New York
is similar, it's very easy to commit a felony with
an AR fifteen and not know that you are. And
you don't want to find out that your gun is

(02:34:37):
a felony when you have to use it in self defense.

Speaker 2 (02:34:40):
Right.

Speaker 9 (02:34:41):
This is an instance in which the good old man again,
I'm not trying to I'm not I'm not on team
shotgun here, but when it comes to cross all state lines,
I mean, sure, there's an exception somewhere, but for the
most part, a manually pump activated shotgun, Yeah, is likely
to not run a foul of the law anywhere. Additionally,
through a good chance that if you were to and

(02:35:01):
we have to consider all realities, there's a good chance
that should you need to use it, that when you're
in court trying to defend yourself for using this lethal weapon.
A shotgun doesn't seem to evoke the same concerns, let's say,
from courts and from judges that an ar might and yar.
You know, regardless of how common they are and how
much they proliferate society, there's still those scary rifles. A

(02:35:23):
shotgun does not tend to evoke that same kind of response.
It is most likely legal almost anywhere, and the diversity
of ammunition you can use in it really bridges the
gap from one yard to one hundred yards or more.
But a lot of people that are new to guns,
we'll think, well, shotgun don't need to aim. That is incorrect.
Shotguns need to be aimed as much as any other
long arm. They're just very effective when they actually connect.

Speaker 1 (02:35:45):
Yeah, it's one of those I think because I do change,
like what I am taking with me based on where
I go, and like when I'm in California. I generally like,
if I'm going camping or something, I'll make sure I
have a twelve gage in the car, right, because I'm
not going to try to get whatever this month's gun
laws are, right, you know, like that's just not practical

(02:36:07):
to me. That said, I think because there are a
number of people who will be very frustrated us talking
about shotguns. One thing that they are right about is
there's a different type of training that's necessary with the shotgun,
and they are in some ways more complicated to use
than an AR in part because for every shot, well,
unless it's a semi automatic, like for every shot you're

(02:36:28):
pumping it, right, and like that, there's muscle memory that
has to be built there. Right, it's harder, you know,
maybe a little bit slower to get up to a
level or at least you have to train differently with it.

Speaker 2 (02:36:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:36:40):
The other thing about it is that like it loads
very differently. You know, a shotgun is a completely different
kind of ammunition than an AR has, which all goes
back to the whole like you have to be willing
to train with whatever it is you're going to use
fair enough.

Speaker 5 (02:36:54):
Yeah, See, ideally, like if you're in this position of thinking,
if you can find a friend or failing that, arrange
that will allow you to try different guns. I think
as a novice you're going to pick up if you've
never shot a gun before. I probably wouldn't pick up
a twelve googe shotgun and start peuing away because the
recoil will be quite profound and notable to you. So

(02:37:16):
don't start there. Start with something else.

Speaker 1 (02:37:19):
There's smaller shotguns at twenty gauge, yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:37:21):
And those are fine, especially if you're a smaller statute person.
Even a twenty eight or sixteens are hard to probably
buy defensive ammunition for. But I think if you can,
when you begin that journey, like after the TV ball,
say with Hanggouns, find one that fits your hand. You
probably have no idea what fits you and feels good
if you're just starting out. Yeah, finding someone who is

(02:37:42):
local to you, ideally who has some experience who can
help you along that process, I think, and someone who
you trust, right Like I've been like I have to train.
I have a concealed carry weapons permit in California. The
last time I went to take a course, like from
the outset, I got like xenophobe homophobia, like jokes that

(02:38:02):
I guess the guy who was instructing the course thought
that everyone was in on just like they made me
feel unwelcome and I'm assist white guy. Yeah, but I
think maybe we should address that, Like if you're thinking
getting started, what kind of instruction should you look for?
Where should you look for it? And like what would
you recommend? Maybe other sources to Kyle, Like your YouTube

(02:38:24):
channel has been a great resource for me.

Speaker 9 (02:38:26):
This is this is where we're in the firearms it's
owning a thing doesn't make a community. So there's always
a phrase the gun community. It's not a thing owning.
Owning a thing doesn't make a community. A community is
a group of people that bond together over mutual beliefs
and hopefully care for one another. So there's no firearms community.
But that's the broad scope of people that have been
interested in the topic for the longest doration of time.

(02:38:49):
Has been mostly succeeded to a group that we would
not find ourselves aligned with or comfortable with being around.
And so this is where the community building thing is real,
because the more we build communities and we're hid in
this regards in terms two alternative voices in the firearm space.
But the more we build that community not only online
but amongst one another, the more we're going to have safer,

(02:39:10):
better spaces for us to work together to learn how
to use these things safely and efficiently.

Speaker 2 (02:39:15):
And that is a challenge.

Speaker 9 (02:39:16):
If you walk in sight unseen to a place that
is probably foreign to you in firearms land, sadly at
this time point in time, is a pretty good chance
it's not gonna be something you're gonna be comfortable with.
Quite honestly, just like you mentioned James, like, it's gonna
be that kind of stuff. There's probably gonna be Trump
stuff on the wall, there's probably going you're probably gonna
hear some jokes that are just jokes, but you know

(02:39:37):
they're really not.

Speaker 2 (02:39:37):
Yeah, that's the kind of space that that's filled with.

Speaker 9 (02:39:40):
And so when people come and say, well, who can
I go to to get this training with, I'm like,
that's challenging. There's some options online, there's like Operation Blazing Sword,
There's there's there's the Liberal Gun Club has some training
options as well. But what's better is finding people and
interconnecting with people of like mind around you. If you
can and working together and then actually building a real

(02:40:01):
community that isn't a gun community, and that's where we're
going to find solace and the ability to get better
with this stuff together. Not a great exactly a strong answer,
but if the truth. But if you're going in, if
you're going in just unhindered, you're going to expect it
to be a place that you're probably not going to
be happy with.

Speaker 5 (02:40:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:40:19):
Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. I'd
like you can we talk a little bit more about
training options, like not just because you mentioned Operation Blazing Sword,
I'd like to hear a little more about them, but
also where people could go for like reading and videos
in order to kind of find more information on how
to develop proficiency.

Speaker 2 (02:40:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:40:40):
So okay, So YouTube university doesn't teach you how to
actually like effectively hit targets with something that stiffly that
you can you can't. There's no way to learn that
besides doing it. But in terms of general firearms understanding,
learning some of the history, learning about how guns work,
there are some YouTube resources out there. Tactical Girlfriend, you're
already mentioned, has four years of a legacy of content

(02:41:03):
on her site that a lot of it is focused
on beginner style content. In fact, she just posted a playlist.
He has kind of stopped making videos in general, she
mentioned that a while back, but she still has her
content online and she posted a playlist recently of all
of her how to get going videos one oh one stuff,
and that would kind of be where I'd start with.

Speaker 2 (02:41:22):
Yes, absolutely, my channel in range TV has some of that.

Speaker 9 (02:41:26):
I tend to focus a little bit on the more
esoteric and like next level things, but that's not to
say it's not there as well. So I'm not trying
to sell promote, but I would actually say her playlist
is going to be better than some of my own,
although we have stuff like that on range TV as well.
If you want to open up that dark boy called Reddit,
the Liberal Gun Club has resources on it. If you

(02:41:46):
go there, they have a list of people and local resources.
You can also google the Liberal Gun Club. I'm not
even trying to say anyone doing that is necessarily identifying
as a liberal, but they have gathered lists of statewide
resources as many as they can that are providing training
in regional places. That would be a good place to start.
Operation Blaeding Sword is a subset of that Blake.

Speaker 2 (02:42:06):
I'll I can. I pronounced them that day.

Speaker 9 (02:42:08):
Blake has been on my channel and you'll find him
there in the Liberal.

Speaker 2 (02:42:11):
Gun Club listing. When I think of that, I would say,
go to YouTube.

Speaker 9 (02:42:14):
Hit up Tactical Girlfriend, go to in Rey's TV if
you want to see maybe not one on one but
next level stuff, but a friendly space to you, and
then check out the Liberal Gun Club best I can say,
because they do have a list of resources that they're
gathering across the country.

Speaker 1 (02:42:28):
Yeah, and I think one thing that Tactical Girlfriend talks
about that is acuse because you're right, and I think
this is an important point that, like, you have to
spend time shooting, and you know that costs money in
order to get better, But there is one thing that
you can do that does not cost ongoing money to
get better with a handgun. If you're again looking to

(02:42:48):
carry a gun, which is dry fire training, right, which
is a very useful process of building proficiency, you can
do it. I mean you could do it every day
if you want. It will help. It does not replace
needing to go shoot right, but you can find guides.
Tactical Girlfriend talks about it a lot, but you can
find other guides online, and that is a way that
you can kind of stretch your AMMO budget and gain

(02:43:10):
additional proficiency.

Speaker 9 (02:43:12):
There are even products designed specifically for that. One of
them popul Mind, and there are others like mantis X.
And you make sure your gun is safely unloaded and
your proficient with that part of it. You've put these
devices in and you can actually fire. A dry fire
is firing with no ammunition in the gun. Click at
a target on the wall and it'll teach you things
about like did you pull to the right, did you
push to the list? Did you dip the gun? And
those are very good products that you can use once

(02:43:33):
you buy them. Gets more money, but you could train
proficiently in a safe place without firing live ammunition and
improve your skills quite a bit.

Speaker 2 (02:43:40):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (02:43:41):
Point yep.

Speaker 5 (02:43:42):
Yeah, I would say another organization I would plug his
armed quality, especially if like LGBTQIA people a friends of mine,
very nice people. Perhaps we should go back then to that,
like Rubbitts mentioned dry firing, we'd meant, well, first I
think we need to go to ads James. You're right,

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