Speaker 1: Fo Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could
Speaker 2: happen here a podcast about things falling apart. And you know, folks,
Speaker 2: season one of this, if you listened way back in
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, we focused a lot on my fears about
Speaker 2: a massive coming civil conflict in the United States, you know,
Speaker 2: along the lines of a civil war, but sort of
Speaker 2: based around my experiences in civil conflicts in Ukraine and
Speaker 2: Iraq and Syria a number of other parts of the
Speaker 2: world prior to twenty twenty. And one of the reasons
Speaker 2: I'm bringing this up right now is because you know,
Speaker 2: what I experienced with the fighting in Isis in Iraq
Speaker 2: was kind of instrumental in me understanding how conflict looked
Speaker 2: in the modern era and how the United States was
Speaker 2: closer to a conflict like that, then I think a
Speaker 2: lot of folks would, normally, especially people who are kind
Speaker 2: of obsessed with the idea of a civil war, as
Speaker 2: two big armies in gray and blue marching at each other,
Speaker 2: we're willing to kind of to contend with. And when
Speaker 2: I was starting that reporting over there, you know, taking
Speaker 2: my first trips to Iraq, one of the first things
Speaker 2: that I did was watch every Isis beheading video and
Speaker 2: some of the Al Qaida in Iraq beheading videos prior
Speaker 2: to that, not as a voyeuristic thing, but because I
Speaker 2: felt like if I was going to take myself and
Speaker 2: another person into that situation, the responsible thing to do
Speaker 2: was make myself very informed of what the stakes were.
Speaker 2: And I'm bringing this all up not because we're talking
Speaker 2: about the Middle East today, because we are talking about
Speaker 2: a beheading video, probably the first beheading video directly tied
Speaker 2: to the US CO Cuncture war that I can I
Speaker 2: can name, and I'm gonna throw to Garrison Davis now.
Speaker 3: All right, So last week, I believe most of this
Speaker 3: went down. On January thirtieth, a thirty two year old
Speaker 3: man named Justin Mohan shot his father in the head
Speaker 3: with a handgun he bought the day previously, and then
Speaker 3: used a kitchenknife and machete to allegedly again this is
Speaker 3: all a quote unquote allegedly allegedly yes to allegedly.
Speaker 2: Alleged by him in the video that he recorded, Yes
Speaker 2: cut off his father's head in a bathtub.
Speaker 3: He put it in a pot, and then recorded a
Speaker 3: video which he posted publicly onto YouTube. It was about
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes long titled Moan's Militia Called to Arms for
Speaker 3: American Patriots, where he ranted about a number of things
Speaker 3: and mostly called for the killing of federal employees. He fled.
Speaker 3: I think he went a slightly upstate towards a National
Speaker 3: Guard training camp and then was arrested a few hours
Speaker 3: later after his mother found the severed head and body
Speaker 3: of her husband in the house that they all lived
Speaker 3: in together. This is one of the most bizarre acts
Speaker 3: of extremist violence that I've come across in terms of
Speaker 3: like the amount of research I've done to this, and
Speaker 3: I think it kind of points at a this trend
Speaker 3: of extremist acts of violence done by people who have
Speaker 3: a lot of content on the internet, not just like
Speaker 3: posting manifestos, but like are positioning themselves as some form
Speaker 3: of like alternative content creator. This guy had a lot
Speaker 3: of music, had a lot of self published books. In
Speaker 3: lieu of leaving like a complete single manifesto, we get
Speaker 3: these just years of writing and like artistic creations that
Speaker 3: now live on archive dot org as kind of ghosts
Speaker 3: of this guy's presence.
Speaker 2: And I think what's interesting about that is that shift
Speaker 2: between between and I think the christ Church shooter is
Speaker 2: probably like the KT boundary of this particular evolutionary shift
Speaker 2: from like the norm would be that you would produce
Speaker 2: a specific manifesto as an act, like a political act,
Speaker 2: as part of whatever of active violence you carried, and
Speaker 2: the goal was both to inspire other people to act
Speaker 2: and to, you know, partly just to frame yourself as
Speaker 2: something besides alone maniac. And I think one of the
Speaker 2: things that's really interesting about this shift to an increasing
Speaker 2: number of these people representing what they're doing in fiction
Speaker 2: in some way or in some other kind of creative
Speaker 2: endeavor is that it sort of mirrors the idea that like,
Speaker 2: in our culture, the thing that people most want to
Speaker 2: be is some sort of like influencer content creator, Like
Speaker 2: that's the top desired job among like a lot of
Speaker 2: gen Z kids, and it's also just increasingly like the
Speaker 2: thing that people creatively want to see themselves as, and
Speaker 2: so like, I think this fits into this trend of violence,
Speaker 2: that is that is foreshadowed by someone, not by a
Speaker 2: work of like political thought, you know, which you may
Speaker 2: not want to think of a manifesto as that, but
Speaker 2: that is what it is, but is preceded instead by art.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think I'll talk about a few kind
Speaker 3: of semi similar or at least other cases that have
Speaker 3: some curious linkages, probably close to the end of the episode,
Speaker 3: but I have some writing here prepared about the about
Speaker 3: the beheading video itself, and then a few other kind
Speaker 3: of random stuff about the art that he's made, and
Speaker 3: Robert will probably fill in some useful gaps because Robert
Speaker 3: acquired a very special piece of literature recently.
Speaker 2: So the night that this went down, as soon as
Speaker 2: I found out this guy had written not just a book,
Speaker 2: but multiple books, I was like, well, I kind of
Speaker 2: want to read these, and I know they're going to
Speaker 2: get pulled by tomorrow and Amazon will probably Amazon can
Speaker 2: just take back the kindle books that you buy from them,
Speaker 2: So I ordered a hard copy of the book that
Speaker 2: seemed like the most meaningful to him. It's called The
Speaker 2: Second Messiah, King of Earth by Justin Mohen. It is
Speaker 2: distressingly thick, like four hundred and fifty pages or so.
Speaker 2: It is so much book. And the weird thing about it,
Speaker 2: I've read through a chunk of it, and we will
Speaker 2: be getting to some of it. It's not badly written,
Speaker 2: and I want to be clear, I'm not saying that
Speaker 2: like he's a good writer in the commercial sense, or
Speaker 2: that he's a good writer in that like he's a
Speaker 2: skilled artist. I'm saying that, like it's clear writing. You're
Speaker 2: always sure what he's trying to say. When he depicts
Speaker 2: the vinces happening. Those events are crazy, but like he's
Speaker 2: they're clearly depicted, which is interesting to me. And yeah,
Speaker 2: we will be hearing about more of that in part too.
Speaker 2: But I have learned a decent amount about him from
Speaker 2: this book, The Second Messiah King of Earth.
Speaker 3: So let's get into that fifteen minute video. He starts
Speaker 3: by holding up what is alleged to be his father's
Speaker 3: head inside a plastic bag. He holds up for a
Speaker 3: few seconds and then starts talking. Now, my my initial
Speaker 3: reaction to this video is just how unremarkable most of
Speaker 3: this rant is. There's like calling for killing federal employees,
Speaker 3: which is like the one thing people do that.
Speaker 4: But also you can hear so.
Speaker 3: Many of the sentiments that he talks about from Fox
Speaker 3: News contributors, from popular right wing podcast hosts, and even
Speaker 3: sitting politicians. They also talk about how quote America is
Speaker 3: rotting from the inside out as far left woke mobs
Speaker 3: rampage are once prosperous cities, turning them into lawless zones.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 3: Yeah, use that term a lot, lawless zones. That's that
Speaker 3: he's The term probably comes up like about ten times
Speaker 3: across this whole video.
Speaker 2: And I want to I think we need to start
Speaker 2: before we get further into this with the elephant in
Speaker 2: the room, which is like a lot and what a
Speaker 2: lot of people say about this guy, Well, this man
Speaker 2: was mentally ill, and that is absolutely the case. You know,
Speaker 2: I add the disclaimer whenever we talk about mental illness
Speaker 2: and mass shootings, people who are mentally ill, people who
Speaker 2: are schizophrenic are not more likely to do this kind
Speaker 2: of violence than anybody else. But that said, when they
Speaker 2: do it, they're also not necessarily less responsible. And what
Speaker 2: I mean by that is a person can be mentally
Speaker 2: ill and engage in a shooting, and that doesn't mean
Speaker 2: you shouldn't pay attention to what they are or another
Speaker 2: act of violence. That doesn't mean you don't pay attention
Speaker 2: to why they're saying they did it. The fact that
Speaker 2: this guy is clearly I believe, schizophrenic does not mean
Speaker 2: that his reasons for doing this are immaterial, because most
Speaker 2: people who have whatever mental illness this guy did have
Speaker 2: do not cut their dad's head off. So the fact
Speaker 2: that he is justifying it with this very boilerplate set
Speaker 2: of right wing culture war grievances is meaningful. And it's
Speaker 2: meaningful because absent that influence in his life, perhaps he
Speaker 2: either doesn't carry out an act of violence or it's
Speaker 2: at least a very different looking one, And so I
Speaker 2: think that is important to just get out to upfront.
Speaker 3: He certainly had years of experiencing paranoia, some conspiratorial thinking,
Speaker 3: but specifically the ayre directed towards his own conception of
Speaker 3: the federal government and how it is leading to society
Speaker 3: decay is what sparked this act of violence and is
Speaker 3: why he called for copycat killings. So yes, inside this rant,
Speaker 3: justin Mohan talks about taxes, inflation, and an economy that
Speaker 3: no longer serves American citizens. He mentions how the traitorous
Speaker 3: Biden regime is sending over American troops to fight in
Speaker 3: a doomed war in the Russian winter, leaving America defenseless
Speaker 3: against a quote fifth column army of illegal immigrants invading
Speaker 3: our southern border to strike Americans on our own soil. Unquote.
Speaker 3: That's another term he uses a lot, fifth column. Yeah,
Speaker 3: probly says it like four or five times.
Speaker 2: And that's a very old term. That's a term that
Speaker 2: you would hear in a lot of John Birch materially
Speaker 2: the middle of the last century, you know.
Speaker 3: So Moan identified himself as quote the commander of America's
Speaker 3: National Network of Militias, also known as Moan's Militia, which
Speaker 3: seems to be mostly a delusion. He had no known
Speaker 3: connections to actual militias in his state or any other states.
Speaker 3: This seemed to be an idea that he got into
Speaker 3: his own head. He then ordered all quote militias and
Speaker 3: patriots across the country to quote hunt down and murder
Speaker 3: every federal employee on site, and to sieze all courthouses, FBI,
Speaker 3: i rs, and federal law enforcement offices, to kill and
Speaker 3: capture all border patrol, US marshals, federal agents and judges
Speaker 3: and quote, torture them for information and publicly execute them
Speaker 3: for betraying the country unquote. He had this, really, he
Speaker 3: had this line that stuck out to me. I didn't copy.
Speaker 3: This is a long video. I did not copy every
Speaker 3: single thing he said. He also is this is one
Speaker 3: line he included, earn your place in heaven by sending
Speaker 3: a traitor to hell early with just the cold, like,
Speaker 3: very like emotionless way.
Speaker 4: He said. That kind of stuck with me.
Speaker 2: Yes, and that is not a belief that you have
Speaker 2: to go to a guy experiencing mental health crisis to
Speaker 2: find you can hear shades of this all over fucking Twitter,
Speaker 2: among other places.
Speaker 3: Can you hear this if you listen to certain right
Speaker 3: wingers give public comment like yeah, in your local city
Speaker 3: council like it's not.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 3: Moan asked that police, veterans, and National Guard join the fight,
Speaker 3: or else cities like Philadelphia will turn into lawless zones
Speaker 3: like Portland and San Francisco. He also asked local militias
Speaker 3: to be his own personal security force so that federal
Speaker 3: employees do not try to arrest him.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: He said that state governments should be left alone unless
Speaker 3: they intervene. In his revolution, quote, the federal government is
Speaker 3: the enemy. Then Mohne declared that quote, Joe Biden is
Speaker 3: no longer in power. I am now officially the acting
Speaker 3: president under martial law unquote. He ordered military generals to
Speaker 3: not deploy US troops against US militias and instead join
Speaker 3: their fight to defend the constitution.
Speaker 2: It would be fun if the constitution worked that way,
Speaker 2: if like they'd put that in back in seventeen eighty seven,
Speaker 2: like oh yeah, and if you know, if martial law
Speaker 2: is declared. He's not around yet, but there's going to
Speaker 2: be this guy just in Mode. He's a charge. So
Speaker 2: this is one thing that I'm still slightly confused on. Well,
Speaker 2: there's a few things that are obviously confusing. It seems confusing.
Speaker 3: But Mode offered a one million dollar bounty on a
Speaker 3: number of high level federal US employees and one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand dollars for every federal judge and even docksed one
Speaker 3: in Pennsylvania. He claimed to currently have ten million dollars
Speaker 3: to exhaust on these bounties, and that is not that's.
Speaker 4: Just not true. Yes, definitely not.
Speaker 3: Man constantly can plain about how he's in a poor
Speaker 3: financial situation as a result of a number of factors.
Speaker 3: He does not have ten million dollars. Now, he ordered
Speaker 3: all non military federal employees to resign before ending up
Speaker 3: like his father. Now, his father was an employee at
Speaker 3: the US Army Corps of Engineers for most twenty years.
Speaker 3: He resigned, I think like last year or a few
Speaker 3: years back. It's interesting he called for specifically non military
Speaker 3: federal employees to resign. He was very pro military. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure if his father working for the US Army
Speaker 3: Corps Engineers exactly that fits in to his ideology here.
Speaker 3: But we're not laying out a clear line of thinking.
Speaker 2: Obviously it is. This is just slightly off topic. But
Speaker 2: it's never not fascinating to me how strong the feeling
Speaker 2: of emotional attachment to the US military is, Like that
Speaker 2: even this guy would be like, this guy who was
Speaker 2: so clearly deranged and violent about this kind of thing
Speaker 2: would be like but they're the exception, Like there's obviously
Speaker 2: still basically good. It's just interesting to me, what else
Speaker 2: is interesting to me. Garrison is where our money comes from.
Speaker 2: And you know where our money comes from.
Speaker 4: The Federal Reserve.
Speaker 2: Yes, actually we are sponsored entirely, entirely by the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 2: So please, I mean literally, anything you do will I
Speaker 2: guess help the Federal Reserve. So go exist in capitalism
Speaker 2: and we're.
Speaker 3: Back speaking of another federal agency. One agency that Moan
Speaker 3: addressed directly was calling for the Postal Service to suspend
Speaker 3: all services split from the federal government or else he
Speaker 3: will not be able to offer protection. And Jesus Christ, no,
Speaker 3: that's negotiating with the Postal Service.
Speaker 4: That's very funny. I mean, this is serious, but that
Speaker 4: is kind of funny. This guy is into Nazi. He's
Speaker 4: not a Nazi.
Speaker 3: He is a He's an extremist. He is a he
Speaker 3: is a conservative extremist.
Speaker 2: He does repeatedly in his book, by the way, also
Speaker 2: talk about like racism being bad like that is like
Speaker 2: very much a consistent through line.
Speaker 3: But some of this like kill your local postman type
Speaker 3: stuff certainly reflects a strain of extrememist, neo Nazi thinking.
Speaker 3: That particularly James Mason's stuff from the eighties. Yes, so
Speaker 3: he also said quote if the media spreads lives with
Speaker 3: this revolution, I authorize the targeting of news stations, their
Speaker 3: owners and employees general kind of conservative, anti anti news,
Speaker 3: anti journalist rhetoric.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: The hunting, capturing, and killing of America's federal employees will
Speaker 3: not stop until americans demands are met and the network
Speaker 3: of America's traders is wiped out unquote. Now, some of
Speaker 3: these demands that he called for includes closing the borders,
Speaker 3: mass deportation of immigrants that have entered under the Biden regime,
Speaker 3: ceasing all human trafficking of children and sex slaves, which
Speaker 3: is obviously already illegal, canceling all public debt, an end
Speaker 3: to the Federal Reserve, restore Congress's right to print interest
Speaker 3: free money. Oh, and and ceasing all of the quote
Speaker 3: woke and gender ideology propaganda in the schools unquote. So
Speaker 3: we have a weird mix of like very like libertarian
Speaker 3: stuff like the federal reserve, interest free money, and then
Speaker 3: other more popular conservative stuff around like the border, and
Speaker 3: then this thing about woke and gender ideology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's even a little like nessah Jesra stuff in
Speaker 2: there too, about like the whole like allow the government
Speaker 2: to print interest free money again, like that's that's it's
Speaker 2: interesting that that's mixed in tomatoe as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know, it's a it's a curious collection
Speaker 3: of political thought. Now, traders to the country included not
Speaker 3: just federal employees, but also quote bribed members of the
Speaker 3: deep state, labor racketeers of the prison industrial complex, and
Speaker 3: globalist leaders of assorted industries unquote. Now there's there's a
Speaker 3: lot to unpacked there. Bribe members of the deep state.
Speaker 3: I think it doesn't need any explanation. But Moan had
Speaker 3: this idea that labor unions were working with corporations to
Speaker 3: make straight white males have a hard time to find jobs,
Speaker 3: so they would so that they would always be unemployed,
Speaker 3: and unemployment leads to people being arrested and sent to
Speaker 3: prison as a way to fund the court system. So
Speaker 3: this is what he means by labor racketeers of the
Speaker 3: prison industrial complex. It's that labor unions are colluding with
Speaker 3: the government and businesses to keep certain sects of the
Speaker 3: population unemployed to fill up prisons. Now, in terms of
Speaker 3: globalist leaders of assorted industries, he specifically was talking about
Speaker 3: big tech companies that commit tax evasion. He claimed that
Speaker 3: he used to work for Microsoft and witnessed massive time eccivation.
Speaker 3: I have not looked into that.
Speaker 4: I don't believe he will definitely do. Like, yeah, they
Speaker 4: all do.
Speaker 2: It's not I don't think they break the law because
Speaker 2: they have whole departments of people who are there to
Speaker 2: make sure that at least they're not breaking the law
Speaker 2: enough that it will matter. But like whatever, I mean again,
Speaker 2: some of this does.
Speaker 4: Some of all.
Speaker 2: Grievances like this come from real things, like the corporations
Speaker 2: like Microsoft that are tremendously wealthy do not pay their
Speaker 2: fair share and in fact do a great deal to
Speaker 2: allide their tax burden. He's just like, yeah, It's one
Speaker 2: of the frustrating things about this is how all of
Speaker 2: this actual malfeasance feeds into these delusions and feeds into
Speaker 2: the conspiratorial narratives of the people that take advantage of
Speaker 2: people like justin Yep.
Speaker 3: He said that Marshal Law will continue as long as
Speaker 3: Americans support him and until America is secured enough to
Speaker 3: hold a legitimate election, and that Moan would authorize police
Speaker 3: a military to use any force necessary to take back
Speaker 3: because the city is from quote fifth column extremist organizations
Speaker 3: such as the lgbt community, the BLM movement, and terrorist
Speaker 3: organizations like Antifa.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 3: This is where he went on a whole Antifa rant,
Speaker 3: saying Antifa is a part of the Federal government's systematic,
Speaker 3: top down, globalist and communist takeover of America. Moan stressed
Speaker 3: the importance of capturing alive quote one of the key
Speaker 3: players involved in this treason, or else they will never
Speaker 3: be able to discover the entire network of evil. Unquote.
Speaker 3: So Moan blamed Antifa, BLM, and the LGBTQ community for
Speaker 3: stoking a division to create a race war and religious war.
Speaker 3: It's it's just it's it's it's it's hard to hold
Speaker 3: to hold the justification of your You're accusing people of
Speaker 3: stoking division as you're holding up the severed head of
Speaker 3: your father. Like, there's just that a complete disconnect here.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: The government has disallowed any peaceful solution. Violence is the
Speaker 3: only solution to the Fed government's treason and the actions
Speaker 3: of their fifth column terrorist organizations like Antifa. This is
Speaker 3: an ideological and spiritual war unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very similar in some ways to what McVeigh was saying, right, Like,
Speaker 2: this is the only way to communicate with the government.
Speaker 2: It's the only language that they understand.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then lastly, he kind of closes this video with
Speaker 3: a further look into some of his own political delusions.
Speaker 3: He said that before the twenty twenty elections, electors and
Speaker 3: campaign contributors from both parties said that they saw Justin
Speaker 3: Mohan as the best candidate for the president of America.
Speaker 3: He's thirty two years old. He was like twenty eight
Speaker 3: back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: I could have been the first unanimously elected president, but
Speaker 3: I was betrayed by the FBI, federal courts, and my
Speaker 3: own family because there are people that believe I am
Speaker 3: the Messiah, which goes against the government's satanic communist ideology.
Speaker 2: Quick note, if all of those groups didn't want you
Speaker 2: to be president, how would you have been elected unanimously
Speaker 2: or would the FBI have been like, well, now that
Speaker 2: he's on the ballot, we got to vote for the guy.
Speaker 3: So after saying there are many people that believe I
Speaker 3: am the Messiah, he then said, quote, I would never
Speaker 3: compare myself to Jesus Christ, unquote, which is not true.
Speaker 3: He has many times.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he sure has.
Speaker 2: You know, most notably in the title of his book
Speaker 2: The Second Messiah, King of Earth by Justin Mohan. Yeah,
Speaker 2: although that is about his self insert character who he
Speaker 2: says lives a life identical to his named Buster moon.
Speaker 4: Buster moon Uh huh.
Speaker 3: And then I will do the last little bit about
Speaker 3: this video. Quote, if there is a federal employee in
Speaker 3: your family, make it your New Year's resolution to kill
Speaker 3: them in order to protect your own children unquote home
Speaker 3: and then Moan followed that by quoting from Matthew ten
Speaker 3: twenty one. This is a verse in the New Testament.
Speaker 3: Brothers and sisters will betray one another and have you
Speaker 3: each other put to death. Parents will betray their own children,
Speaker 3: and children will turn against their parents and have them
Speaker 3: killed unquote.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because I've heard that sided before, and usually
Speaker 2: it was in like older conspiracies of the New World Order,
Speaker 2: and like, yeah, that's what they believed the evil anti
Speaker 2: Christ you win regime was going to do to them.
Speaker 2: It's fun to hear someone be like, that's what we
Speaker 2: have to kill the families of the people who are.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's what he's actually saying. He's saying
Speaker 3: like he's talking about how he is felt betrayed by
Speaker 3: his own family and by the government.
Speaker 2: Oh gotcha, Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: This points to like this massive disconnect in his own head.
Speaker 3: This is the betrayal he's talking about. He is he
Speaker 3: is using this verse as a reference to like the
Speaker 3: end times, but he's saying like, this is the betrayal
Speaker 3: that we're seeing and in response, now we have to
Speaker 3: do this. So on, I'm going to quote from ABC
Speaker 3: News here. So, the US Marshall Service investigated Moan in
Speaker 3: August or twenty twenty three after he allegedly made a
Speaker 3: threat against a U. S. District Court judge. The case
Speaker 3: was closed that same month. He was reported to police
Speaker 3: pretty frequently for his bizarre behavior in his own neighborhood,
Speaker 3: like sitting on manhole covers and staring at houses for
Speaker 3: hours on end. Now Mon has held CONSPIRATORI and anti
Speaker 3: government views for at least seven years and attempted to
Speaker 3: recruit people to join his Moan's militia on Reddit and Discord,
Speaker 3: though no one seemed to join, and then at least
Speaker 3: one Discord server threw him out because of his repeated
Speaker 3: recruitment attempts and after fleeing home after he posted that video,
Speaker 3: he drove more than one hundred miles north and broke
Speaker 3: into the Pennsylvania National Guard base with a gun, and
Speaker 3: then was arrested after he was tracked there on his
Speaker 3: cell phone. There is a song that Justin wrote about
Speaker 3: three years ago about being arrested after being tracked on
Speaker 3: his cell phone after doing violence against his family.
Speaker 2: You think he would have like not had a cell
Speaker 2: phone on him, given that he was aware of that
Speaker 2: as a risk.
Speaker 3: But I don't know if he was really thinking large
Speaker 3: like yeah, if you watch the video, like he like
Speaker 3: he thinks National Guard is going to like join him, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he's not.
Speaker 4: He's not thinking about it that way.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I believe mon is published at this point
Speaker 3: nine books. I'm going to read from his his Amazon
Speaker 3: about page. Justimona is the author of seven books now nine,
Speaker 3: and a musician of three albums and one single. His
Speaker 3: life story is unbelievable and there may not be enough
Speaker 3: words to describe him, but one may begin to understand
Speaker 3: his complexity and experiences through his art. He only wishes
Speaker 3: to bring positive change to the world. Now I will
Speaker 3: I will talk about some of those some of those
Speaker 3: other books after we take a quick ad break here
Speaker 3: and learn about some important messages from our sponsors.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So justin Mohan's bibliography, here we go. So I think
Speaker 3: Robert has one of his books, The Second Messiah, King
Speaker 3: of Earth. Yeah, there is many other books he's published,
Speaker 3: including a.
Speaker 4: Book Startling Number.
Speaker 3: A book called The Pink, a book called Poems I
Speaker 3: Wrote Well Stoned, a collection of poems they will burn,
Speaker 3: this book, The Punishing America's Coming Bloody Revolution, The Kingdom
Speaker 3: of Darkness, dark Ages of the Future, a collection of
Speaker 3: short stories, and finally, The Revolution Leader's Survival Guide. How schools, workplaces,
Speaker 3: and social norms kill the genius inside us.
Speaker 2: All not bad at titling, you know, so pretty pretty effective.
Speaker 2: Good good for SEO.
Speaker 4: I'm on board.
Speaker 3: Let's start with that last book here, The Revolution Leader's
Speaker 3: Survival Guide. It targets the quote constraints against education, creativity,
Speaker 3: and human progress throughout history unquote, and the book is
Speaker 3: mostly about Mohan's own inability to find a high paying
Speaker 3: enough job after college. This is a reoccurring trend in
Speaker 3: a lot of his books, including I Believe the one
Speaker 3: that Robert has. Mon complains about student loans, how America's
Speaker 3: education system is faulty, and talks about being bullied in
Speaker 3: school as a kid. I'm going to quote from the
Speaker 3: book subscription. The author views the world on the brink
Speaker 3: of either a golden age of world peace and space colonization,
Speaker 3: or instead a second dark age of global wars and
Speaker 3: depopulation within the next couple of decades, if not sooner.
Speaker 3: Included within the book is a transcript of a letter
Speaker 3: Justin Mohan wrote to Donald Trump, warning that if America
Speaker 3: does not go under some great changes, Moan himself will
Speaker 3: have to lead a peaceful revolution. In another book titled
Speaker 3: The Kingdom of Darkness, published on May thirteenth, twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: it's a novel about Satan and fallen angels becoming quote
Speaker 3: trapped inside Earth's slowliest creatures after being banished from heaven.
Speaker 3: He has a whole bitch of other like fantasy and
Speaker 3: sci fi type books like aliens space exploration, a weird
Speaker 3: collection genre. In a pamphlet he self published on Amazon
Speaker 3: in August of twenty twenty titled America's Coming Bloody Revolution,
Speaker 3: The small book contains two chapters, one titled why a
Speaker 3: violent revolution is inevitable and a second titled How revolution
Speaker 3: can be successful, Moan wrote, quote, Americans will have to
Speaker 3: weigh what is worse allowing themselves to lose freedom and
Speaker 3: independence or killing their own family members, teachers, workers, bosses, judges,
Speaker 3: elected leaders, and other older generations unquote. This is where
Speaker 3: we get a lot of predictive writing around what he's
Speaker 3: going to be doing. Mohne described older generations as quote
Speaker 3: traders who wished to to take away the freedom and
Speaker 3: independence that comes with America democracy and free market capitalism.
Speaker 3: Which leads me then to the book that Robert has,
Speaker 3: The Second to Messiah, which was published in January of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty. It's about a man named Buster Moon who
Speaker 3: moves from Ohio to Colorado and quote painfully learns the
Speaker 3: dark secret of Colorado from everything containing satanic cults, the
Speaker 3: Democratic Party, and the Cold War. Now we will get
Speaker 3: more into this book, specifically in a later episode. I'm
Speaker 3: going to read a little bit from the back cover.
Speaker 3: The only thing more absurd in this fiction book is
Speaker 3: the fact that it's loosely based on the life of
Speaker 3: author and musician Justin Mohan, whose four years stay in
Speaker 3: Colorado caused multiple lawsuits changed the possible outcome of the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty US presidential election by exposing three presidential candidates
Speaker 3: as corrupt, which forced them to drop out of the race.
Speaker 3: We have more of these presidential delusions that he was
Speaker 3: talking about at the end of his beheading video here,
Speaker 3: and in terms of how this mirrors, like I said,
Speaker 3: we'll learn more about this book later, but I will
Speaker 3: talk now some about his actual personal life, which will
Speaker 3: then become slightly reflect did in the book, like going
Speaker 3: to Colorado Springs. He graduated from Penn State with a
Speaker 3: business management degree and sued the federal government multiple times
Speaker 3: for letting him take out student loans that he was
Speaker 3: forced to pay back. The most recent case was last year,
Speaker 3: where he sued for ten million dollars because despite getting
Speaker 3: a degree with the loans, he was unable to quote
Speaker 3: find a satisfactory job as an over educated white man
Speaker 3: to repay the loan, claiming that he was a victim
Speaker 3: of affirmative action and reverse discrimination unquote. In a previously
Speaker 3: dismissed lawsuit against the Department of Education, he alleged that
Speaker 3: they neglectfully and fraudulently induced him to borrow money to
Speaker 3: pay for his education without sufficiently warning him of the
Speaker 3: possibility that he would face a difficult job market and
Speaker 3: could be unable to pay back his student loan. So
Speaker 3: Mohan did move to Colorado, just like Buster Moon about
Speaker 3: ten years ago, eventually getting a job at Progressive Insurance,
Speaker 3: but was fired in twenty seventeen for kicking down a
Speaker 3: door and quote breaking the company's code of conduct. Moan
Speaker 3: then sued Progressive in twenty nineteen for not receiving PROMI
Speaker 3: motions because he was a man. In his Violent Revolution pamphlet,
Speaker 3: Man claims that he was a victim of discrimination from
Speaker 3: quote being a top performing, over educated, and overqualified male
Speaker 3: employee unquote, and in that same pamphlet, Mohan wrote that
Speaker 3: his educational, employment and legal issues are evident that there
Speaker 3: is quote no peaceful solution for the youth to escape
Speaker 3: debt based enslavement, unemployment, and ultimately imprisonment. He compared his
Speaker 3: experience to quote the Soviet unions feared goolog prison labor
Speaker 3: system and in which entire states and countries were essentially
Speaker 3: turned into concentration camps. Mohan wrote that educators and parents
Speaker 3: who quote knowingly lie, brainwash and dumb down their youth
Speaker 3: unquote must be killed to prevent the spread of quote
Speaker 3: globalized communism. And corporate agendas. This is where we have
Speaker 3: an interesting combination of like anti communism fears but also
Speaker 3: anti corporatism that you see in some sects of like
Speaker 3: libertarian conservatism.
Speaker 4: You sure do.
Speaker 3: He claims that communism is like a virus and that
Speaker 3: America must treat it like a virus. Quote the only
Speaker 3: logical way to do so is for every American born
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety one or later to kill anyone born
Speaker 3: before nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 4: Unquote. Well now he's cooking, Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: back on board. I'm back on board. You know, this
Speaker 4: could work. So it just so happens. Said that was
Speaker 4: the year that he was born. Uh huh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Logical logical point to divide it on. I'd respect it
Speaker 2: more if he'd been born earlier, you know. But so
Speaker 2: I already mentioned some of his music. It had similar
Speaker 2: predictive elements of he was doing art in almost like
Speaker 2: in practice of what he was then going to later
Speaker 2: do in person in terms of carrying of violence, as
Speaker 2: well as just evident of kind of delusional and paranoid thinking.
Speaker 2: He has a song about being gang stocked. He has
Speaker 2: a song about I Think like a girlfriend who broke
Speaker 2: up with him. He has songs talking about how it's
Speaker 2: okay to kill communists and how we're overall seeing a
Speaker 2: decline in American society. So that that is most of
Speaker 2: what I have to say about Justin Moune. I could
Speaker 2: certainly say a whole lot more now on top of
Speaker 2: my research onto him himself. I also wanted to look
Speaker 2: at the sort of online chatter that neo Nazis and
Speaker 2: other extremists were saying, and I put together, hey, a
Speaker 2: large catalog of telegram conversations about Justin Moune, watching the
Speaker 2: spread of certain conspiracy theories around this incident, and just
Speaker 2: to see what their overall take was. Will I will
Speaker 2: paraphrase my eighty page research document here by saying, it
Speaker 2: seems most Nazis and other white supremacists or far right
Speaker 2: extremists thought that the Justin Moone incident was quote fake
Speaker 2: and gay unquote. They tend to keep up with these
Speaker 2: these thought fluencers, really glad that they're kidding some of
Speaker 2: their side.
Speaker 3: Many other far right extremists took this to be a syop. Sure,
Speaker 3: they thought it was an attempt to push forward this
Speaker 3: anti militia bill. That's being talked about as well as
Speaker 3: distract from the crisis at the southern border. Certain white
Speaker 3: pharmacists were upset that he used the phrase to Judeo
Speaker 3: Christian values because they are anti Semitic and Justin Moone
Speaker 3: did not seem to be consciously anti Semitic. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: had we had. These conspiracy theories travel everywhere, from standard
Speaker 3: kind of neo Nazi telegram accounts to more conservative Boomer
Speaker 3: Mega type stuff as well, mostly picking up on the
Speaker 3: on the on the anti militia angle, how this is
Speaker 3: probably a syop from the deep state to push forward
Speaker 3: this anti militia bill. Some people thought thought they were
Speaker 3: very clever in realizing this was a syop because they
Speaker 3: thought justinmone was thirty three years old. And there's this
Speaker 3: conspiracy theory around the number thirty three in a lot
Speaker 3: of these circles, the conspiracies around how the number thirty
Speaker 3: three is used a lot in like mass shooting incidents.
Speaker 3: Now it's not this is just pattern recognition, but also
Speaker 3: mon isn't thirty three, he's thirty two. So great, great
Speaker 3: work there. And there's specifically one telegram channel that found
Speaker 3: a prop head I believe on Etsy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like a prop severed head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we started seeing this spread all over Twitter, conservative
Speaker 3: news sites. How this has to be fake because look
Speaker 3: we found we found the fake head they used, which
Speaker 3: is quite simply not the severed head that Justin Moan's
Speaker 3: holding up in the video. I don't think it's really
Speaker 3: much useful else to say about these conspiracy theories, but yeah,
Speaker 3: they certainly were kind of laughing along at some of
Speaker 3: like the gang Stocker e elements, thinking, you know, some
Speaker 3: people obviously thought he was based and cool for actually
Speaker 3: doing some of the ideological things that these Nazis believe in.
Speaker 3: Others thought it was it's just fun to make fun
Speaker 3: of a guy, so they decided it was a syop. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that is That is most of what I had to
Speaker 3: say about Justin Mohan.
Speaker 2: Well, this has been quite an inspiring journey. We are
Speaker 2: going to have more to say about Justin and finally
Speaker 2: get into his book, The Second Messiah, King of Earth,
Speaker 2: which is and in a way become my Bible. I
Speaker 2: think I may I may keep this in my apocalypse
Speaker 2: go bag, so I can do like a book of
Speaker 2: Eli with this thing. If the world ends, just be
Speaker 2: wandering alone across the wasteland telling everybody about this man's book.
Speaker 4: I guess.
Speaker 3: Finally, the last thing I'll say is that this reminds
Speaker 3: me of two recent incidents. We had one mass shooting
Speaker 3: done by a Nazi in Denver, Colorado, and he previously
Speaker 3: wrote and made short films depicting the murder that he
Speaker 3: would then do. We also had the Highland Park shooting
Speaker 3: on July fourth a few years back. Who the person
Speaker 3: who did that created a lot of music online in
Speaker 3: this very like I would say the Highland Park music
Speaker 3: was much more in like the Schizowave genre of extremist content.
Speaker 3: I think the stuff, the stuff that Justin Mohan is
Speaker 3: producing is honestly more like the stuff that schizo wave
Speaker 3: is like parodying, Like Justin Moans was a lot more
Speaker 3: like sincere, less less ironic.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: It was, it was, it was.
Speaker 3: It was just like taking at face value these two
Speaker 3: instances I was reminded of just because of how much
Speaker 3: those acts of violence were predated by artistic expressions of
Speaker 3: the later thing that they would end up doing. And yeh,
Speaker 3: in Mohane's case, it's exactly the same. He has written
Speaker 3: about killing family members, He's written about the exact way
Speaker 3: he would be arrested and tracked down writing that goes
Speaker 3: back like four or five years. This is there's so
Speaker 3: many people online who have exact who are in this
Speaker 3: same scenario, who are putting out this type of writing.
Speaker 3: No one knows who they are. Moan had like five
Speaker 3: listeners on Spotify. These people are unknown, and every once
Speaker 3: in a while one of them decides that writing about
Speaker 3: it isn't enough and they actually do it in the
Speaker 3: real world. And it's just this, it's this interesting trend
Speaker 3: of these people like almost like hyperstitioning these own acts
Speaker 3: of violence by making art that predates it, almost in
Speaker 3: some form of like preparation.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And we talked about hyperstition as a concept a
Speaker 2: bit in last weeks Behind the Bastards, but it is
Speaker 2: it is a term for essentially the methods and ways
Speaker 2: by which things that are fictional become real. And it
Speaker 2: can be kind of as esoteric as the idea of
Speaker 2: like preparing the way for a godlike AI by like
Speaker 2: spreading belief and that sort of thing, or it can
Speaker 2: be as direct, like as this as somebody envisioning the
Speaker 2: acts they're going to carry out in fiction and then
Speaker 2: carrying out those acts for real, like it on an
Speaker 2: individual level, what you're doing when you're doing this is
Speaker 2: you're kind of you are preparing yourself mentally for the
Speaker 2: thing that you're going to do. And when I would
Speaker 2: sort of lecture and talk about what to how to
Speaker 2: know something is like a real threat versus somebody saying
Speaker 2: shit on the internet, because that's obviously that's a real
Speaker 2: problem when we talk about this, there's a huge quantity
Speaker 2: of people saying stuff that could be them presaging like
Speaker 2: an act of violence, and you simply can't go after everything.
Speaker 2: One of the key things for me always is what
Speaker 2: have they gone and done anything in the real world.
Speaker 2: So for example, if a guy has like been going
Speaker 2: out and like egging homeless people or like lighting their
Speaker 2: shit on fire, and is also talking about murdering homeless people,
Speaker 2: well that's probably a guy who's going to do something
Speaker 2: right because he's actively going out in the real world
Speaker 2: and taking steps. He's prepping himself. And I think this
Speaker 2: kind of work. When somebody's written a whole novel about
Speaker 2: their murder fantasies, obviously that's not a thing you can
Speaker 2: invest your convict on, but like nor should it be.
Speaker 2: But that is somebody who is doing more than bullshitting online.
Speaker 2: That's somebody who has a fixation that they clearly can't
Speaker 2: get over, and those do sometimes lead to violence. And
Speaker 2: so yeah, I think I think it's really valid to
Speaker 2: look at this as not just a couple of incidents
Speaker 2: that are troubling, but as evidence of a troubling trend.
Speaker 4: Yep, all right, well that does a frustrating comment. Yeah,
Speaker 4: all right.
Speaker 3: Please do not earn your place in heaven by sending
Speaker 3: a trader to hell early. It does not need to
Speaker 3: work out very well.
Speaker 4: No, earn your place in heaven. Uh.
Speaker 2: I don't actually have a joke to finish this episode with.
Speaker 2: Don't don't commit murder?
Speaker 5: Bye?
Speaker 2: Oh, Welcome back to Podcast Man Sad, Bad People, the
Speaker 2: podcast about bad people that make the podcast Man Sad.
Speaker 2: I'm the podcast Man Robert Evans, and my co host
Speaker 2: today is our friend Garrison Davids. Garrison, how are you
Speaker 2: doing good? I thought it was one of my better intros.
Speaker 3: It was unfortunately quite good for a topic about it's
Speaker 3: abensively deranged shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, So obviously this is part two of our
Speaker 2: series on Justin Mohan, the author of our first politically.
Speaker 3: The author first, just as author better known for his
Speaker 3: other work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think people should know that. When you make
Speaker 2: that joke, as you did the other week on Behind
Speaker 2: the Bastards Too, you are referring to a mathematics paper
Speaker 2: that cites the Unibomber's other published mathematic theories. Is like
Speaker 2: better known for his other work mailing bombs to people?
Speaker 4: Oh, pretty funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like the Unabomber, Justin Mohan is deeply accomplished,
Speaker 2: as in all he's written more books than I have.
Speaker 4: Well, yes, that is true.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure if you want to be writing the
Speaker 3: types of books that Justin is but yeah.
Speaker 4: No, but but he did write them, and you get
Speaker 4: credit for that. Sure.
Speaker 2: So this was, as you stated last episode, published in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, and I I need to start with the
Speaker 2: cover of this thing, because it's it's something else.
Speaker 4: We see, not a good cover.
Speaker 2: No, it is taken. He appears to have taken it
Speaker 2: or someone else took it from of him very close
Speaker 2: up at a rest stop. And this is relevant because
Speaker 2: rest stops play a critical critical role in some of
Speaker 2: his beliefs about the world and some of his theories
Speaker 2: about things that have happened to us. Yes, rest stops
Speaker 2: are happening places for Justin Mohan. Okay, he is looking
Speaker 2: behind him, He's like slightly disheveled. He's got like his
Speaker 2: shirt open weirdly down like a button further than.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm basically gang stocking vibes here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very much. Again, we'll explain gang stocking in
Speaker 2: a second. But the pictures him, he's like looking behind
Speaker 2: his shoulder. There's like two big lights behind him in
Speaker 2: the distance in this photo, clearly taking it a rest stop.
Speaker 2: And then there are like cartoon text bubbles over his
Speaker 2: shoulder next to the lights that say get his picture, Hey,
Speaker 2: there he is, and then like cartoon action bubbles that
Speaker 2: say snap, snap, that I think are supposed to represent
Speaker 2: people taking photos taking pictures.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, okay this.
Speaker 2: As soon as I saw this, I had the same
Speaker 2: reaction you had, which is like, oh, this is some
Speaker 2: gang stocking shit. And if you're not aware of gang stocking,
Speaker 2: gang stocking is kind of an er web two point
Speaker 2: zero conspiratorial belief system. I don't know if a conspiracy
Speaker 2: theory is even really the right way to frame it.
Speaker 2: Gang Stalking is people who have I think these are
Speaker 2: generally people with schizophrenia, and one of the things that
Speaker 2: you can experience with schizophrenia is both this kind of
Speaker 2: overwhelming sense of paranoia and also the stereotypical hearing voices right,
Speaker 2: and some people become convinced that they are being followed.
Speaker 2: You know, this is something that has happened probably as
Speaker 2: long as that it has existed, that they are being
Speaker 2: like tracked, that they are people who are listening in
Speaker 2: on their thoughts. You hear variations of it. With the
Speaker 2: internet and digital communities, A chunk of people experiencing this
Speaker 2: started forming communities online, and I don't know the exact
Speaker 2: I don't know if anyone has sort of like sketched
Speaker 2: out how this happened in time, but the belief they
Speaker 2: ended up at is that certain people are what are
Speaker 2: called targeted individuals within the community, and those people are
Speaker 2: being stalked at all times by large numbers of generally
Speaker 2: government spies. Now when I say government spies, they are
Speaker 2: not envisioning like a James Bond type operator. They believe
Speaker 2: these are the regular people in the street around them,
Speaker 2: like people in their neighborhood. Their neighbors are all spies
Speaker 2: and are all stalking them all the time. And you
Speaker 2: can watch hours of videos. These people will often film
Speaker 2: eight hours of their life at a stretch, and you
Speaker 2: can see them just like angrily shouting at their window
Speaker 2: at like some dude walking past their house or whatever,
Speaker 2: or like a car. You like see that blue cars
Speaker 2: past three times, and that wouldn't happen if this wasn't
Speaker 2: like that. And it's so one of the things that like,
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that gang Stocking is kind of
Speaker 2: interesting and valuable to study if you're interested in, like
Speaker 2: how we got to our present moment of like reality
Speaker 2: collapse in the United States, is that this is an
Speaker 2: example of kind of feelings that have been associated with
Speaker 2: certain mental illnesses. I'm not going to say it's just schizophreny,
Speaker 2: but certain mental illnesses bring about severe bouts of paranoia
Speaker 2: and a feeling that you are being stalked right or
Speaker 2: people who are listening in on your thoughts or whatever.
Speaker 2: Because of the way digital communities work, a number of
Speaker 2: people experiencing this were able to not just get together
Speaker 2: and share their experiences, but convince each other that they
Speaker 2: were not the result of an illness and are in
Speaker 2: fact the result of a conspiracy. And they have now
Speaker 2: built a mythos around that conspiracy, and it has led
Speaker 2: to killings before. People have killed folks they believed were
Speaker 2: stalking them over gang stalking delusions. It's been happening for years.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that was the first thing that occurred to
Speaker 2: me when I saw this cover. And you can find
Speaker 2: other art that Moan put out where it's like real
Speaker 2: pictures of him and then fake art of like ghostly
Speaker 2: figures stalking him with cameras and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: A few months before he released his book, he put
Speaker 3: out a song that's I called the Justin's Stalkers about
Speaker 3: being gang stocked.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again, gangstock is not a political conspiracy theory
Speaker 2: other than that you have to believe the government's evil,
Speaker 2: but don't we all right, So it's very accessible.
Speaker 3: There's certain gangstalking people who think they're like the Freemasons
Speaker 3: are stocking here, like the Illuminati is stalking.
Speaker 4: It's like random Antifa, you know.
Speaker 2: And sure, yeah, shit gets grafted on as a result
Speaker 2: of politics, but it did not inherently start as something
Speaker 2: that was like a political thing, just kind of out
Speaker 2: of this very ex filesy because the nineties is really
Speaker 2: when this starts to form. I think late nineties.
Speaker 3: And it's spread like wildfire are on. Like early Internet culture,
Speaker 3: people were able to convince each other or like yeah,
Speaker 3: have have their alreadies, like like a small delusion be
Speaker 3: strengthened and grown stronger by other people in this community,
Speaker 3: all kind of encouraging each other.
Speaker 2: And I think it's relevant too that it's kind of
Speaker 2: a Web two point zero early Web two point oh phenomenon,
Speaker 2: because I don't think you get the same thing, and
Speaker 2: I'm not going to say that what you would get
Speaker 2: would be any healthier, but from the social media, because
Speaker 2: the way most social media works is everyone's kind of
Speaker 2: in a big pit together, and this was really the
Speaker 2: result of a kind of community that was closed to outsiders,
Speaker 2: that wasn't really being watched by people who weren't drawn
Speaker 2: to it, building a culture in people like really, it
Speaker 2: takes a lot of time for that to happen. Obviously,
Speaker 2: YouTube is also a big place where this has grown,
Speaker 2: but I think after it had its roots established that
Speaker 2: was a bit of a digression. But I think it
Speaker 2: is kind of necessary because this is definitely that is
Speaker 2: definitely where justin comes out of you know, like that
Speaker 2: is very clear to me. All of this is kind
Speaker 2: of rooted fundamentally in Gang Stocking. I think that's like
Speaker 2: the foundational keystone belief in what has become his like
Speaker 2: conspiratorial milieu. So into the book itself, the first page,
Speaker 2: after the page that lets us all know Kindled direct
Speaker 2: publishing this responsible for this thing, says book Love.
Speaker 4: Kindles right publish it.
Speaker 3: Thanks, Amazon the best place to find all of the
Speaker 3: wild extra.
Speaker 4: Otherwise, never never.
Speaker 2: Make They've they've really done us all a solid. This
Speaker 2: book is dedicated to those who know who the real
Speaker 2: enemy is and can still laugh even in the worst situations. Hope,
Speaker 2: I don't know what I have that describes me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's great. So there are ten chapters in this thing.
Speaker 2: They are long chapters. Chapter one is thirty two pages,
Speaker 2: Chapter two is almost sixty pages, Jesus. Chapter three is
Speaker 2: like another sixty pages, like fifty pages for five. Yeah,
Speaker 2: these are like long, long chapters. And yeah, it's about
Speaker 2: four hundred and fifty pages.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 2: So chapter one opens and I'm just gonna read you
Speaker 2: actually a decent little chunk here. So it starts with
Speaker 2: like him talking to his parents, But why leave Buster,
Speaker 2: You're a hometown hero, Missus Moon said. Missus Moon in
Speaker 2: her late fifties, paced back and forth on the hardwood
Speaker 2: floor of the living room. Yeah, Buster, you're popular. You
Speaker 2: were at the top of your class in high school,
Speaker 2: you were a star athlete. You can end up mayor
Speaker 2: of this town someday. Why don't you stay around here
Speaker 2: where everyone knows you and see what happens. You'll have
Speaker 2: to start a new elsewhere, mister Moon said. And obviously,
Speaker 2: Buster Moon is are the actual justin Mohan And we're
Speaker 2: talking about his parents, and when we talk about mister Moon,
Speaker 2: this is his dad who he.
Speaker 4: Murdered and beheaded. Just you know, keep that in mind.
Speaker 2: Mister Moon, in his early sixties, sat on a couch
Speaker 2: in the living room watching television. A black and white
Speaker 2: episode of The Twilight Zone was on. The sound on
Speaker 2: the TV was muted. That's the point. I want to
Speaker 2: start anew I want to meet new people, or at
Speaker 2: least not associate with the people I grew up with
Speaker 2: and went to school with my whole life. They're all
Speaker 2: going nowhere in town, and they'll take me down with them.
Speaker 2: And we get a little more of that where like
Speaker 2: he's talking about why he wants he's not happy here.
Speaker 2: There's no future for him. What's interesting to me is
Speaker 2: why he depicts and we don't know that this is
Speaker 2: accurate to his experience with his parents. But also I
Speaker 2: don't necessarily think it is not, because what he depicts
Speaker 2: his parents as saying is he shouldn't do this because
Speaker 2: it's danger Leaving home is dangerous. You can't be safe
Speaker 2: on your own in a new place or in the city,
Speaker 2: and you will inevitably get murdered or have something horrible happen.
Speaker 2: He puts these words in his dad's mouth right after
Speaker 2: he like, first his mom tells him, like, you're gonna
Speaker 2: die if you move out, and then he puts this
Speaker 2: in his dad's mouth, Yeah, you're going to get kidnapped,
Speaker 2: addicted to heroin, and sold into a sex trafficking rink.
Speaker 2: Then five years from now, we'll find pictures of you
Speaker 2: bound and gagged on some Russian website where you're up
Speaker 2: for sale. So that's his dad, and then his mom ads,
Speaker 2: why do you think your older siblings stayed within Ohio
Speaker 2: when they moved out. It's dangerous out of state without
Speaker 2: your family. So maybe that's just him putting words.
Speaker 4: In their mouth.
Speaker 2: But like, I have heard stuff like that from people
Speaker 2: that is not an uncommon thing to express, especially among
Speaker 2: conservative families. Cities are dangerous, people are getting human trafficked
Speaker 2: all the time. It's not safe to be out on
Speaker 2: your own.
Speaker 3: And those are some things he talked about in his
Speaker 3: beheading video. And yeah, I know that after he had
Speaker 3: to move back home from Colorado after losing his job,
Speaker 3: he did move back in with his parents in Pennsylvania. Yep,
Speaker 3: he does have an older sister that just ran in
Speaker 3: other things. I know his actual personal life and how
Speaker 3: they could maybe tie in.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, yeah, And then you know, a little
Speaker 2: bit later, as this argument goes on, there is a
Speaker 2: note where his mom's like, maybe it would be for
Speaker 2: the best if we took you to a psychiatrist. Buster,
Speaker 2: you don't seem to be thinking straight.
Speaker 4: Interesting. Unclear to me if.
Speaker 2: They did, but I think that does kind of suggest
Speaker 2: that was a thing his parents suggested often. And then
Speaker 2: his dad says, yeah, you're talking crazy, Buster. If someone
Speaker 2: doesn't mug you when you step out of the car,
Speaker 2: you'll end up running out of money and being homeless,
Speaker 2: and then you'll get put in prison for panhandling, trespassing
Speaker 2: or stealing food and ended up making prison love to
Speaker 2: Bubba the butcher, and that has the feeling of something
Speaker 2: that he heard before. That that's pretty specific, like that
Speaker 2: sounds like something somebody was told and is kind of
Speaker 2: repeating here. You know, I don't know that, but that
Speaker 2: is very much the feel it has. And there's a
Speaker 2: couple other bits where it's like, I could see this
Speaker 2: being something you heard from your very conservative family or
Speaker 2: elsewise picked up in the media. Because there's another point
Speaker 2: where his dad is like, you'll be all alone and
Speaker 2: they know exactly how much money you have. It's all digital.
Speaker 2: You can't beat the system. You can't beat dot dot dot.
Speaker 2: And then in italics the machine missus Moon shot a
Speaker 2: white eyed glance.
Speaker 4: At mister Moon.
Speaker 2: Huh, what do you mean, buster said, Mister Moon shook
Speaker 2: his head. Oh, nothing, you'll have to find out for yourself.
Speaker 2: And then at this point a cow screams. That's how
Speaker 2: he describes the cow as screaming. And then their dog
Speaker 2: barks and they all run outside. It's clear that something
Speaker 2: has gone wrong, and mister Moon says, aw, hell not again,
Speaker 2: those cult fucking commie bastards. He grabs a shotgun and
Speaker 2: there they find the ex sanguinated and skinned corpse of
Speaker 2: the family cow outside in the.
Speaker 3: Yard because they're at like a farm in Ohio, I believe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're at like the family. So he thinks at
Speaker 2: first that this hide as a carpet. Then Buster realized
Speaker 2: the carpet had black and white spots like a cow
Speaker 2: and was hide material. The cow had been completely exsanguinated,
Speaker 2: as the livestock industry would call an animal drained of blood.
Speaker 2: The cow's eyes were missing, the bones were strewn in
Speaker 2: a perfect circle around the cowhide in an almost ritualistic
Speaker 2: or ceremonial manner, with a skull at the top of
Speaker 2: the circle. Will twelve would be on a clock about
Speaker 2: the same time it was. Then there was not one
Speaker 2: drop of blood near the scene.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 2: Now, when I brought up x files earlier, that's kind
Speaker 2: of why, because that's x files stuff.
Speaker 3: That's a very x files opening up. The Twilight Zone
Speaker 3: was playing on the TV in the room in the scene.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 2: This is all obviously, by the way, if you listen
Speaker 2: to a lot of or read a lot of like
Speaker 2: this particularly kind of turn of the last century UFO stuff,
Speaker 2: a lot of it focuses on animals being exanguinated, right,
Speaker 2: cows killed in these like weird fashions. Now he is
Speaker 2: talking about a ritual murder. And also the timing doesn't
Speaker 2: work out because they hear the cow run outside and
Speaker 2: it's been completely skin and excite. But well, I think
Speaker 2: what's important is it's like you get an idea of
Speaker 2: like this didn't come into his mind unbidden. Right, the
Speaker 2: term exsanguinated as referred to a cow's corpse had not
Speaker 2: come into his mind and bidden. That's evidence of like
Speaker 2: the kind of media diety had.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: I mean he was born in nineteen ninety one, that's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's prime growing up with the XPS.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, yeah. I mean I'm not that much older
Speaker 2: than him, and that was definitely a big part of
Speaker 2: my childhood.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But you know what could be a big part of
Speaker 2: your childhood retroactively.
Speaker 3: The products that can make your life better.
Speaker 4: That's right, That's right.
Speaker 2: Garrison time is a flat circle, and that means that
Speaker 2: if you buy products that advertise on our show today,
Speaker 2: anything bad that happened in your childhood can be healed.
Speaker 2: So here's the at.
Speaker 5: Ah.
Speaker 2: We're back and we're reading from the Second Messiah, King
Speaker 2: of Earth by our friend justin Mohan.
Speaker 3: So it opened with what I would describe probably as
Speaker 3: it's probably some kind of satanic ritual.
Speaker 4: I'm guessing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we get a little more about what his
Speaker 2: dad thinks here, because the next thing, you know, but
Speaker 2: his dad starts crying and Buster tries to comfort him,
Speaker 2: and his dad says, a cow that waits nearly a time, Well,
Speaker 2: look the spelling's not perfect. A cow that weighs nearly
Speaker 2: a ton gets completely drained of blood, and its bones
Speaker 2: and organs are taken out perfectly, without one drop of
Speaker 2: blood being spilled. And it all happens right here in
Speaker 2: the middle of this field and less than an hour,
Speaker 2: maybe even in just a couple of minutes. It's the
Speaker 2: fifth cow this has happened to you this season, and Betsy
Speaker 2: was my best cow. We just won't be able to
Speaker 2: make a profit this year.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: He starts to cry, and then he says, don't tell
Speaker 2: your mother I told you this, but you're right to
Speaker 2: leave this place and go far away. There's nothing for
Speaker 2: you here, and in fact, there's nothing for anyone here.
Speaker 2: So at this point Buster's like, hey, don't say that, dad.
Speaker 2: You know we've still got a farm, it'll be okay,
Speaker 2: and his dad says, oh, buster, soon you will learn
Speaker 2: if you move out west on your own. There is
Speaker 2: an evil in this world which has found its way
Speaker 2: into this country, to every country. It is an ugly evil.
Speaker 2: Nearly all the family farms in this state and plenty
Speaker 2: of other states have seen the same trend in the
Speaker 2: past twenty years or so, a trend none of us
Speaker 2: have seen before, unexplainable tragedies. Livestock gets mutilated or disappears,
Speaker 2: crops get infested with bugs and disease, and then all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, the farm is taking a financial loss,
Speaker 2: the farm shrinks, and eventually the family goes bankrupt or
Speaker 2: their land is bought out by a big corporation. More
Speaker 2: farmers have committed suicide in the past decade than any
Speaker 2: other profession and I can't blame them.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: That ties into some very real and very powerful conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories that this is a lot of this ties into
Speaker 2: like Bill Gates stuff, you know, the idea he has
Speaker 2: bought up a bought a bunch of farmland and among
Speaker 2: conspiratorial sex he has bought all the farmland and China's
Speaker 2: buying all of it or China and Bill Gates are
Speaker 2: buying it together, and they want to because they want
Speaker 2: to control the food supply and take out the ability
Speaker 2: of Americans to feed themselves. Right Like, this is a
Speaker 2: This is something he picked up from right wing media.
Speaker 2: This is not an invention of his for this book.
Speaker 2: This is probably something he was either raised to believe
Speaker 2: or came to believe fairly early in life because of
Speaker 2: what other people around him were saying. This is common stuff.
Speaker 2: He has put a twist on it, but this is
Speaker 2: not coming out of nowhere. So after this, he basically
Speaker 2: tries to talk his dad and like, hey, can't you
Speaker 2: call the FBI or the police, serve you survey them
Speaker 2: to catch whoever's doing this? And his dad says, other
Speaker 2: farmers have tried, they just lose all their money faster,
Speaker 2: and the police and an FBI have investigated, But how
Speaker 2: could they stop something like this from happening out of nowhere.
Speaker 2: I've sold more than half the acres of the Moon
Speaker 2: family farm over the past three years alone, and we
Speaker 2: can still barely stay afloat. There's no fighting it. It's
Speaker 2: too secretive, it's too consptantant, it's too well orchestrated. It's
Speaker 2: just too evil. But why is this happening, Why is
Speaker 2: the government letting America's farms get unfairly taken over? Well,
Speaker 2: as my father once told me, if you want to
Speaker 2: take over a country, you have to gain control of
Speaker 2: their food supply. Remember, my father was an immigrant from
Speaker 2: Germany and he fled the Nazis with your grandmother, who
Speaker 2: was a Jew, to come to America. He used to
Speaker 2: always say, there are the Germans, there are the Russians,
Speaker 2: and then there are the Germans from Russia, and they
Speaker 2: all came to America for the same reason land.
Speaker 3: And this is that is Justin's family history, which is
Speaker 3: also yeah, why some Nazis on telegram did not like him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's very much not a Nazi. And at the
Speaker 2: same time there's elements of like what he's saying here
Speaker 2: that like, yeah, the Germans from Russia that moved here
Speaker 2: very much John Birch, stuff that like a fifth column
Speaker 2: of communists from Europe have moved here and are trying
Speaker 2: to change this country. So the conversation ends, he goes
Speaker 2: to sleep. He wakes up the next morning to like
Speaker 2: leave his family forever to start a new life out west,
Speaker 2: and he starts by going out to the farm, taking
Speaker 2: out his pipe and his last bit of marijuana, a
Speaker 2: few green buds that he says to himself, perfectly calculated,
Speaker 2: and then he smokes his last bowl of marijuana, which
Speaker 2: I'm sure he did regularly and certainly did not help.
Speaker 3: His So Justin Mohan did have a medical marijuana card
Speaker 3: that he had to give up on January twenty ninth
Speaker 3: to go the handgun that he would then later use
Speaker 3: one day later to kill his father.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I guess good that he had to give up his
Speaker 2: medical marijuana card first. Yeah, that's keeping people saying yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: really stop the problem. So he says goodbye to his
Speaker 2: parents and he gets on the road, right they seem.
Speaker 2: He actually does not describe his dad as being very
Speaker 2: mean in this He's pretty sympathetic in the book. But interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is interesting. But you know, a few years went
Speaker 2: by between this one and between him killing his father.
Speaker 2: So why when I brought up earlier that highway rest
Speaker 2: stops are a major part of this book, that's because
Speaker 2: of what comes next. So he crosses from Ohio into
Speaker 2: Indiana and he sees a rest area approaching Hmm, got
Speaker 2: a piss and wouldn't mind a snack, Buster said. He
Speaker 2: pulls off the highway. He gets into a parking lot,
Speaker 2: and he describes most of the men and women wore overalls,
Speaker 2: flannel shirts, and straw hats walking in and out of
Speaker 2: the building to and from the parking lot. A few
Speaker 2: people stood off to the sides of the building in
Speaker 2: parking lot. In a grass area, a few men were
Speaker 2: urinating outside near the trees. An old man was squatting
Speaker 2: at the tree line taking a shit. I've never been
Speaker 2: to I've been to a lot of rest drops. I've
Speaker 2: actually not seen that happening at a rest stop. But
Speaker 2: this is to set up something that's happening at the
Speaker 2: rest stop, which he learns about when he goes into
Speaker 2: the bathroom. And it turns out to be a bad
Speaker 2: decision because as soon as he stands at the urinal,
Speaker 2: he hears someone behind him saying.
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, that's real nice.
Speaker 2: Just look at that. You want to try it? Another
Speaker 2: voice whispered. Buster eyed with one eyebrow and raised towards
Speaker 2: the stall on his left four legs stood in the stall,
Speaker 2: and then he hears people snorting drugs and a bit
Speaker 2: of white powder falls to the floor. And a guy
Speaker 2: falls down and then is like, oh shit, that's good.
Speaker 2: How much for an ounce I think they're selling. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure if it's supposed to be fentanyl or cocaine, Yeah,
Speaker 2: something like that. And then they realize he's listening to
Speaker 2: them do cocaine or whatever in the rest stop bathroom.
Speaker 2: Hold on a sec, I think someone's in here listening
Speaker 2: to us. The other person whispered, should we kill him?
Speaker 2: The first person whispered, at which point he fleets.
Speaker 4: The rest stop. Yeah, quick escalation.
Speaker 2: This is like such a like to take into a
Speaker 2: humorous degree, but such a like oh what what the
Speaker 2: Fox News viewing set thinks about? Like everything outside of
Speaker 2: their suburbs.
Speaker 3: Justin did not grow up in Ohio. He grew up
Speaker 3: in Pennsylvania. I think his family lived about an hour
Speaker 3: north of Philadelphia, So he grew up in a very
Speaker 3: like suburban area outside of a big city. And that
Speaker 3: all kind of grafts onto this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes sense. Now, there's an interesting bit here
Speaker 2: when he's outside of I guess they decided not to
Speaker 2: chase him out of the bathroom, but he's still walking
Speaker 2: around the rest stop, and we get a little like
Speaker 2: gang stalking bit here, people stared at Buster and kept
Speaker 2: glancing at him, and he wondered why he didn't look
Speaker 2: or dress too differently. And he was barely out of
Speaker 2: Ohio than he realized everyone was with someone else, nobody
Speaker 2: else was alone except him, And like, that's a delusion.
Speaker 2: That's the kind of delusion leads to gangstik because number one,
Speaker 2: I guarantee you there were other alone people that every
Speaker 2: rest stop he ever went to. But also like people
Speaker 2: don't pay attention to that sort of thing. That is
Speaker 2: a voice in his head telling him to hyper focus
Speaker 2: on this.
Speaker 4: So he gets.
Speaker 2: Freaked out by this. He describes himself having a panic attack. Right,
Speaker 2: He describes like having a panic attack about the fact
Speaker 2: that he's alone out here. Now it seemed as though
Speaker 2: more people were glancing at him, even talking about him,
Speaker 2: as if they sensed his feeling of vulnerability emanating from
Speaker 2: his chest like sharp smelling fresh blood. So he finishes
Speaker 2: eating and he gets back on the highway and he
Speaker 2: drives for a bit more until he crosses he passes
Speaker 2: Indiana and gets into Illinois, and then we have another
Speaker 2: rest stop scene. This is like he spends a lot
Speaker 2: of time on rest stops and this is I'm going
Speaker 2: to need you're accult knowledge here, Garrison, so you can
Speaker 2: let me know if he gets.
Speaker 4: This stuff right.
Speaker 2: So, as he's like walking through the rest stop area,
Speaker 2: he sees that, like there's a poster on the wall
Speaker 2: that says, this cabin was once an outpost for trading
Speaker 2: with the Native Americans, used during the Civil War to
Speaker 2: store guns and ammunition. Then he walks to another glass
Speaker 2: casing on the adjacent wall and he reads the poster
Speaker 2: inside considered haunted by locals after peg and witches lived
Speaker 2: in the cabin who were later burned at the stake
Speaker 2: for witchcraft. Abandoned for over one hundred years before being
Speaker 2: restored as a rest area. So that's to set the scene.
Speaker 2: And then he goes like gets himself some food or something,
Speaker 2: and as he's looking outside at the surrounding forest, he
Speaker 2: sees one hundred yards into the forest there are tiki
Speaker 2: torches lit and it's four oh one pm in the afternoon.
Speaker 2: What the fuck do they have torches lit in the
Speaker 2: forest for if it's not going to be dark for
Speaker 2: another two hours, Buster said, So he walks in and
Speaker 2: he sees a few individuals dressed like vagabonds, dancing slowly
Speaker 2: in circles around the fire, with their arms spread out
Speaker 2: waving in the air. Buster quietly climbed through some bushes
Speaker 2: to get a quiet closer look. There were two men
Speaker 2: and a woman, all in dirty torn robes, dancing within
Speaker 2: a circle of lit candles and tiki torches. One male
Speaker 2: and female danced inside the circle, chanting and murmuring words
Speaker 2: which Buster couldn't make out. The other male was kneeling
Speaker 2: on the ground inside the circle, carving up pumpkin A
Speaker 2: picture lay in front of him in a bed of flowers. Please,
Speaker 2: spirits of nature and beyond, except this pumpkin carving and
Speaker 2: our sacrifices on this day of sam Hayne, in remembrance
Speaker 2: of our deceased loved ones, please ease their passage into
Speaker 2: the other world. Okay, how's that sounding so far? Garrison?
Speaker 4: Is that real?
Speaker 3: Is this supposed to be around Halloween? Is this supposed
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 2: It's unclear, but based on the fact that it day
Speaker 2: ends at six pm?
Speaker 3: Probably yes, Oh yeah, okay, well yeah, I mean, dancing
Speaker 3: around a fire is certainly uh certainly fire rest stop.
Speaker 2: Sure, all right, Well, let's get to the let's get
Speaker 2: to them finishing the ritual. So next a woman screams
Speaker 2: the magic words ayaka, I don't know. Looked it up,
Speaker 2: couldn't find anything.
Speaker 3: That doesn't sound familiar to me either, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: So she screams.
Speaker 2: And then another female emerged from behind a tree with
Speaker 2: a donkey by a leash in one hand and a
Speaker 2: stick carrying a decorated horse's skull on the other. The
Speaker 2: horse's skull had read ornaments in its eye sockets and
Speaker 2: a sheet draping over its head. She danced into the
Speaker 2: center of the circle of candles with the others. The
Speaker 2: man who was kneeling picked up a long curved sword
Speaker 2: from the ground and stood up. Let the sacrifice of
Speaker 2: this ass please the spirits of nature.
Speaker 4: The man yelled, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, this is probably a little bit more
Speaker 3: intense than your average wiccan soven ritual.
Speaker 2: But sure, yeah, yeah, I don't know an ass. That's
Speaker 2: a unique sacrifice story. Usually it's like a cow or
Speaker 2: a chicken or something. But uh huh, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: So he raises the sword above his head. No buster
Speaker 2: yelled heehaw, the donkey whine. The donkey got scared and
Speaker 2: jerked away, just as the man swung the sword. Slush
Speaker 2: blood spurted upwards and outwards. Ah, the female yelled. The
Speaker 2: female fell to her knees, and the donkey ran away
Speaker 2: from the forest. Her seffered arm, still.
Speaker 4: Holding onto the leech.
Speaker 2: The female raised her bleeding stump. You idiot, you cut
Speaker 2: off my arm, she said, Well, the donkey got scared.
Speaker 2: The man said, Now, what are we going to eat?
Speaker 2: The woman said. The three others glanced at each other,
Speaker 2: then looked at the woman on the ground with one arm. No,
Speaker 2: don't even think about it, she said. The man holding
Speaker 2: the sword raised it high up on his head again. Ah,
Speaker 2: she screamed. Ah, Buster screamed. The woman held her remaining
Speaker 2: arm up just as the man swung down the sword.
Speaker 2: The sword cut her hand in half from top to
Speaker 2: bottom between the middle finger and ring finger, slicing all
Speaker 2: the way down her forearm. Now that's that's not where
Speaker 2: I expected this passage to go. But it gets better
Speaker 2: because they all realize Buster's there at this point and
Speaker 2: give up on their plans to eat this woman, who
Speaker 2: they have now hacked at twice, and instead she and
Speaker 2: all of them start charging Buster, and he describes it
Speaker 2: as they all turned directly towards Buster and began ranning
Speaker 2: towards him. Even the woman with one arm, which was
Speaker 2: divided in half like a lobster claw, ran towards Buster,
Speaker 2: her arm flapping in halves as she sprinted towards him.
Speaker 4: That is interesting, writing, Yeah, that's I didn't call that coming.
Speaker 4: I love that. Yeah, she got lobster afied. Yeah, that's
Speaker 4: a very eventful saw one.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Huh uh huh. I don't think that actually happened to Buster.
Speaker 4: I don't think that. I don't believe.
Speaker 3: On Justin's move from Pennsylvania to Colorado, he stumbled across
Speaker 3: a pagan ritual where they dismembered a woman and gave
Speaker 3: her a lobster claw.
Speaker 2: I do suspect that maybe he saw someone walking their
Speaker 2: dog near a rest stop and filled in the.
Speaker 4: Rest That is certainly possible. Speaking of dog shit, you
Speaker 4: know what's not dog shit? These ads? Uh huh, that's right,
Speaker 4: these ads.
Speaker 3: Aren't we sponsored by like the state of Ohio or something?
Speaker 2: Huh oh, yeah, then in that case we probably should
Speaker 2: just move on. Ah, we are back and having a
Speaker 2: really good time learning some more about our old friend
Speaker 2: Justin moan So Garrison. At this point, he flees from
Speaker 2: the wickanists and their de handed friend, and he gets
Speaker 2: back on the road again. Doesn't seem to call the
Speaker 2: police over this, but I guess they probably were in
Speaker 2: on it too. What could the police have done about
Speaker 2: people dismembering a woman directly next to a crowded highway
Speaker 2: rest stop? So he decides he gets to Saint Louis
Speaker 2: he needs to find a place to eat. He finds
Speaker 2: a cheap Italian restaurant and he parallel parked at the curb.
Speaker 2: Buster walked inside the restaurant into the counter. A small
Speaker 2: man stood beside the counter with a thick Italian accent.
Speaker 4: I make a good bye for you like you find
Speaker 4: on the East coast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, West coast. And then he uses a slur
Speaker 2: for gay people stuff. Okay, no, good thank you. Buster
Speaker 2: said you ain't a slur, are you? The man said no, sir,
Speaker 2: Buster said you sure you don't don't want us some
Speaker 2: pineapples on this with no red sauce, all white and
Speaker 2: a cheesy stuffed crust.
Speaker 4: Huh. And then he calls him a slur again no
Speaker 4: very stereotypical, but also big in an Italian chef character.
Speaker 3: Here, you know, I actually I actually ate at an
Speaker 3: Italian restaurant in Saint Louis last year. I was not
Speaker 3: accosted for being gay.
Speaker 4: But that's good. That's good. Did your guy have a
Speaker 4: comedic Italian accent?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 4: I think I was being served by a lesbian. Actually, okay,
Speaker 4: well that's probably why. That's probably why. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So buster tells him that he just wants a plain pizza,
Speaker 2: and the pizza man is willing to serve him, but
Speaker 2: he does use the slur again. At this point, two
Speaker 2: men barged into the restaurant wearing long black pea coats,
Speaker 2: black pants and shoes and black fedoras.
Speaker 4: Already paid my space. Here we go. This is this
Speaker 4: is what I was signing up for.
Speaker 5: This is rough.
Speaker 4: Stops are fine, this is what I wanted. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: already paid my dues.
Speaker 2: Boys, the man behind the counter said. The man behind
Speaker 2: the counter spun pizza dough in one hand. Look pet
Speaker 2: tony unpazzo cone pizza, one man said. The other man
Speaker 2: in the fedora laughs. The old fool thinks we're here
Speaker 2: to collect dues. So what the hella do you want
Speaker 2: a fucking pizza for?
Speaker 4: And he just keeps using that he can't he cannot
Speaker 4: mention pizza with that, dropping a slur. I am, I'll
Speaker 4: tell you what.
Speaker 2: I'm not sympathetic towards this Italian man's plight. Both men
Speaker 2: and Fedoras laughed hysterically and turned towards Buster. They lifted
Speaker 2: their pea coats and revealed Thompson's submachine guns. They can't
Speaker 2: tell me guns.
Speaker 4: Those are so much more expensive than modern crime guns.
Speaker 4: Why are they spending thirty three hundred this? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, where?
Speaker 2: Oh it's good stuff, like in Chicago, baby, in Saint Les,
Speaker 2: of course, Chicago.
Speaker 4: Come on, Lewis, let's so you real here. The men
Speaker 4: never explain why they're killing this guy. But as Buster's eyes,
Speaker 4: yeah yeah, these are the These are the LGBT police.
Speaker 2: So they they open fire. They each empty one hundred
Speaker 2: bullets towards the man behind the counter. Then they turned
Speaker 2: to leave. You saw nothing, kid, nothing got it? The
Speaker 2: man said, I didn't see shit. Buster said, oh my god,
Speaker 2: So the bigoted pizza man has been shot full of
Speaker 2: holes and honestly, I'm fine, just leaves and goes back
Speaker 2: to his car.
Speaker 4: He finds, what a fascinating thing to include the story.
Speaker 2: Like it's He's making a lot of choices here. I
Speaker 2: wish I could ask him about some of his process,
Speaker 2: like why did the pizza man have to be stereotypically Italian?
Speaker 2: Why did the gangsters have to carry a gun that
Speaker 2: has been outdated for nearly one hundred years. Anyway, he
Speaker 2: goes to a cheap Asian restaurant next, and again parallel
Speaker 2: parks at the curve. He really wants us to know
Speaker 2: that he can parallel park. This is this is something
Speaker 2: he's made a point of several times.
Speaker 4: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Oh no, Garrison, I'm not not excited to try to
Speaker 2: read you. The next line, a small man stood behind
Speaker 2: the counter with a thick Chinese accent.
Speaker 4: Nope, nope, nope, you can do Italian.
Speaker 2: I am not gonna try this. What's important, you know,
Speaker 2: is that he says the same thing as the Italian man.
Speaker 2: I make it racistly, but he says, I'll make you
Speaker 2: good food like you get on the East coast, no
Speaker 2: West coast. And then he also uses the same slur.
Speaker 2: And then he asks several more times about it and
Speaker 2: repeatedly calls him a slur. I don't understand why they
Speaker 2: are both the same person, but the same two men
Speaker 2: in long black pea coats fedoras come in and then
Speaker 2: they shoot this guy repeatedly.
Speaker 3: Huh yeah, yeah, that's actually more interesting than this whole
Speaker 3: instant gets repeated, just a slightly different cultural backing.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 2: It is compelling, right, and again the guys like you
Speaker 2: saw nothing, But then they're like, oh, hey, aren't you
Speaker 2: the same kid from the other restaurant where we just
Speaker 2: machine gun demand and Buster, showing admirable bravery here, says, yeah,
Speaker 2: what's going on. I'm just trying to find something to eat,
Speaker 2: and the mafia man very nicely explains, Oi, kid, every
Speaker 2: restaurant in Saint Louis is owned by the same gang.
Speaker 2: That's why they all say the same script when you
Speaker 2: walk in. But we're taking over their racket and we're
Speaker 2: taking over their restaurant business in Saint Louis.
Speaker 4: So that's why both the Chinese man and the Italian
Speaker 4: man said the same things. Is they have a script.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, huh yeah, that's compelling. That is compelling. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So so Buster stops at a gas station to get
Speaker 2: a pre made tuna sand which, which, to be honest,
Speaker 2: seems like the decision to make after after going two
Speaker 2: of these. Yeah, so he winds up driving again through
Speaker 2: the countryside, he approaches Columbia, in between Saint Louis and
Speaker 2: Kansas City, and he asks a guy if he can
Speaker 2: use a public restroom. Yes, sir, just take this here key,
Speaker 2: witches so you can get in the door. The man
Speaker 2: held a key up towards Buster.
Speaker 4: Hau.
Speaker 2: The man laughed odd way to write laughter, not how
Speaker 2: laughter sounds. Buster walked up to the man and took
Speaker 2: the key.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 2: Buster said, we'll say, mister, you're not from around here?
Speaker 2: Is yeah, I don't recognize you. The man said, no,
Speaker 2: I'm just passing through. Buster said, you're making your way
Speaker 2: to Kansas City. Yes, sir, well you better be careful.
Speaker 2: There are abandons on that bridge that goes over the
Speaker 2: Missouri Rivers sometimes at night. Now that's not true.
Speaker 3: But also I did run into bandits on my okay, okay,
Speaker 3: on my road trip through through Kansas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, it's been a couple of years for me.
Speaker 4: Yeah Saint Louis, Yeah, no, it was. It was intense.
Speaker 2: So Buster's like, that's great. I'm gonna use the bathroom anyway,
Speaker 2: and the man says, I'll be watching you, and so
Speaker 2: Buster says, okay, maybe I won't go, and then the
Speaker 2: man yells, I was gonna suck your dick. So I
Speaker 2: think we've gotten a good picture of, h what's going
Speaker 2: on with this guy. I'm not really sure why he
Speaker 2: It's interesting, like even the absurdity does have kind of
Speaker 2: its roots, and you can see some of these this
Speaker 2: like everybody is programmed, like saying the same script or whatever,
Speaker 2: like they're the Like that's why these interactions seem weird
Speaker 2: to me, is that like, this isn't real people talking
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 4: These are people reading from a script. It's all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can kind of tie it all back to
Speaker 2: some of the delusional thinking I want cities.
Speaker 4: Are these like lawless zones?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, there's bandits on the road and people just
Speaker 2: getting machine gunned in there in their restaurants.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this book ends. One of the last chapters about
Speaker 2: this is the FBI and the CIA electrocuting Buster and
Speaker 2: asking him questions. They're making him specifically, they want him
Speaker 2: to tell them their sins, right.
Speaker 4: Because he's the second Messiah.
Speaker 2: Because he's the second Messiah, so one of the masks,
Speaker 2: and they seem to know everything about his entire life, right,
Speaker 2: which is again kind of ties back to the delusion.
Speaker 2: So one of them is like, what about the time
Speaker 2: you were drunken through a punching a guy who wasn't
Speaker 2: looking during a group fight in college? Not really sure
Speaker 2: what a group fight in college is, but we can
Speaker 2: move right past that. What about all the cigarettes you've smoked,
Speaker 2: an acid you've taken, and mushrooms in ecstasy and all
Speaker 2: the other drugs you did. I only did them a
Speaker 2: couple of times. It's not like I'm an addict. Still
Speaker 2: serious damage to the body and putting your life at risk.
Speaker 2: CIA is very concerned about his overall health.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the CIA famously on the edge about usings like
Speaker 3: at Las.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this goes on for a while, and then the
Speaker 2: CIA agent leaves and FBI agents put him into a
Speaker 2: black suv and drive him to Andrews Air Force Base.
Speaker 2: The FBI agent's Wheelbuster onto an air Force one and
Speaker 2: air Force one jet also air force is one word,
Speaker 2: and got on board with him. Then the jet took off.
Speaker 2: By the time the jet landed in Moscow, Russia, Buster
Speaker 2: no longer shook constantly, but every once in a while
Speaker 2: he had a full body jerk. The FBI agents wheeled
Speaker 2: him off the plane two Russian FSB agents waited on
Speaker 2: the bottom of the ramp. The FBI agents nodded to
Speaker 2: the FSB agents, who nodded back. Then THEBI agents got
Speaker 2: back on board the jet. The FSB agents wheeled Buster
Speaker 2: to a black rectangular suv and put him inside. Then
Speaker 2: they drove to the Kremlin. Buster sat in a wheelchair
Speaker 2: in the Krimlin. He was motionless, stared off into the
Speaker 2: distance at nothing, and his jaw hung. Suddenly, his entire
Speaker 2: body jerked, then he went back to being still. The
Speaker 2: President of Russia walked up to Buster. King Moon there
Speaker 2: is an uprising for more food in several parts of
Speaker 2: Southeast Asia. The President of Russia said, gohea. Buster chuckled,
Speaker 2: But do you recommend Zig Global Communist Confederation Due to
Speaker 2: your majesty, the President of Russia said, go ha ha.
Speaker 2: Buster chuckled. Buster stared off into the distance, sill genocide.
Speaker 2: The President of Russia said, yeah, heh, I love that.
Speaker 2: Buster smiled. The President of Russia turned around to face
Speaker 2: representatives countries all over the world.
Speaker 4: Kills them all.
Speaker 2: Orders directly from the King of Earth, the President of
Speaker 2: Russia said, Fighters, jets and bombers from the United Global
Speaker 2: Force of China, Russia, America, and Europe, flew over Southeast Asia,
Speaker 2: dropping bombs in every country, destroying every main city, burning
Speaker 2: forests and villages, and killing hundreds of millions of people.
Speaker 4: And that's how the book ends.
Speaker 3: So I am fascinated about this middle chunk, yeah, where
Speaker 3: he's align where he goes to Colorado and uncovers a
Speaker 3: satanic conspiracy involving the Democratic Party. But that end bit
Speaker 3: kind of got me thinking about there was all of
Speaker 3: these like like all these like artistic things he was
Speaker 3: doing that was almost preparing himself to do an act
Speaker 3: of violence against a family member. But as much as
Speaker 3: that was the future he was building for himself, you
Speaker 3: also mentioned that he was being transported around by the FBI,
Speaker 3: and like, I wonder how much that was a part
Speaker 3: of the future he was building for himself. Like now
Speaker 3: that he's arrested at an National Guard base, he's now
Speaker 3: being taken from place to place by government officials. He's
Speaker 3: constantly now surrounded by Feds, Like he has he has
Speaker 3: built the reality for himself that now he is actually
Speaker 3: always watched by the government because he's been arrested for
Speaker 3: doing this things Like he's he has created this fantasy
Speaker 3: world that he can now live in forever. Yeah, whether
Speaker 3: he goes to trial, he's probably gonna I if his
Speaker 3: defense is smart, they'll do some sort of insanity defense.
Speaker 3: He'll be sent to a psychiatric place. Like he's now
Speaker 3: always going to be watched. He is being moved around
Speaker 3: by government agents, like he is living the thing that
Speaker 3: he was writing about. And I find that that that
Speaker 3: second half of like him being caught also a compelling
Speaker 3: like a compelling thing that he was preparing himself for.
Speaker 2: And it it I mean he is he expresses repeatedly
Speaker 2: variations of like because the FBI and the CIA are
Speaker 2: constantly in this book and also like constantly just like
Speaker 2: people coming into his life around him, which again is
Speaker 2: part of this illusion. But also you can see how
Speaker 2: a lot of these common right wing tropes about like
Speaker 2: everything is infiltrated by the Feds January sixth, with the
Speaker 2: Federal op and stuff, how this is also going to
Speaker 2: feed into the delusions of a guy like this right
Speaker 2: like he's very much this is very much ripped from
Speaker 2: the headlines, and that you can see how things he
Speaker 2: was encountering and like conspiracy culture and popular media grafted
Speaker 2: themselves on to the delusions that he had. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: can also see I turned randomly to a page I
Speaker 2: haven't gotten to yet in this book two sixty and
Speaker 2: the first line I saw in the middle of the
Speaker 2: page is, let's fucking kill them and then eat them
Speaker 2: a midget and a wheelchair, yelled, holding an RPG.
Speaker 4: So there's quite a lot in this book. All right, Well,
Speaker 4: well then.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the line of good taste and is, Like,
Speaker 2: I think it's I don't think we'll keep going back
Speaker 2: to this. I felt justified and like, well, I want
Speaker 2: to know what's in this thing once. It seems kind
Speaker 2: of bad to keep doing that, this guy who murdered
Speaker 2: people's book. But man, there's a lot in here.
Speaker 3: Oh, and there is a use in understanding how these
Speaker 3: people think and under unpacking the sorts of large, large
Speaker 3: swaths of of content that that people that are doing
Speaker 3: these mass acts of violence or very targeted acts of
Speaker 3: violence have been leaving online because it allows you to
Speaker 3: actually get a better look at overarching patterns. Specifically, his
Speaker 3: songs for Me are very very evident of that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like they're very similar to a lot of stuff you
Speaker 3: were you were reading the book, like he has the
Speaker 3: The song about him being tracked on his phone is
Speaker 3: called they Came for Justin Moan. Yeah, they found him
Speaker 3: all alone, they tracked him on his phone. He talks
Speaker 3: about the student loans that he couldn't pay off, the
Speaker 3: payments made him grown, money controlled his life. They wanted
Speaker 3: him to die just like this, all all of just
Speaker 3: all this stuff. They said he was God. They came
Speaker 3: for Justin Moan.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, it's well, it's it's it's not to like laugh
Speaker 3: at him necessarily, No, it's it's about actually understanding this
Speaker 3: and yeah, this is all fucked up. So a part
Speaker 3: of a coping mechanism is kind of laughing at some
Speaker 3: of the more ridiculous elements, but it is it is
Speaker 3: an attempt to actually understand this, this growing trend in
Speaker 3: American culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you can't just like and this is the
Speaker 2: thing that the right often once it wants to do
Speaker 2: with this, is like, well this is just a mental
Speaker 2: illness problem, and like, no, it's not like you have
Speaker 2: to understand it's American culture. Yeah, what's going into people's heads,
Speaker 2: even if they also have, you know, are are mentally ill.
Speaker 2: What's going into their heads? What they believe about the world,
Speaker 2: influences how they act on those delusions, and the nature
Speaker 2: of those delusions.
Speaker 3: This is what happens to your brain when it entirely
Speaker 3: becomes corrupted by the culture of war like this is.
Speaker 3: This has now taking over his entire method of things.
Speaker 3: This is the only way you can see the world.
Speaker 3: And there's people who are paid to get people to
Speaker 3: be like this like this is.
Speaker 5: This is.
Speaker 3: People's whole job is to get more and more people
Speaker 3: to only think in these terms. And this is one
Speaker 3: of the results of that of that effort by elements
Speaker 3: of the American right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, anyway, it's bad.
Speaker 3: That'll be a good book to explain to a young
Speaker 3: child in fifty years. Why why is this on your bookshelf?
Speaker 4: Well, let me tell you. They've just in mode.
Speaker 2: If I ever have a kid, Garrison, this will be
Speaker 2: the first book they rate.
Speaker 4: No, that's that's probably bad idea. Well, let's uh, let's
Speaker 4: be done. Let's let's go away.
Speaker 7: Goodbye, Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here,
Speaker 7: your favorite daily podcast about the studied dissolution of society as.
Speaker 5: We know it.
Speaker 7: I'm your guest host, Molly Conger, joined once again by
Speaker 7: our friend Garrison.
Speaker 3: Hello, happy to look at the abyss once again.
Speaker 7: Yeah, try not to ruin your day too bad today,
Speaker 7: So Garrison, today I want to talk to you about
Speaker 7: some terrible guys that I know you're already pretty familiar with.
Speaker 7: The Goyam Defense League the GDL. The GDL, there's sort
Speaker 7: of a loose network of neo Nazi trolls, best known
Speaker 7: for their anti Semitic flyers, headed up by a failed
Speaker 7: rapper named John Minnedeo who calls himself Handsome Truth.
Speaker 8: Handsome Handsome Truth.
Speaker 7: So there's this sort of core cast of characters in
Speaker 7: Minnedeo's orbit that shows up in person, mostly in Florida
Speaker 7: and Georgia, but the group's real strength is online. They
Speaker 7: have this decentralized network of thousands of followers nationwide who
Speaker 7: are encouraged to download and print the anti Semitic flyers
Speaker 7: and distribute them in their areas. It's not a new model,
Speaker 7: right like the Klan has been doing this for decades,
Speaker 7: and National Alliance was big into this in the early aughts.
Speaker 8: But that's what they do.
Speaker 7: Right in the news every few weeks, you know, your
Speaker 7: local news wherever it is that you live, you know
Speaker 7: somebody left these racist flyers on everyone's front lawn, and
Speaker 7: I know you and I have talked about doing an
Speaker 7: episode in the future about the sort of counter productive
Speaker 7: responses to these in person demonstrations, the flying and the
Speaker 7: banner drops. There's a new law in Florida and a
Speaker 7: proposed law in Georgia that are sort of allegedly aimed
Speaker 7: at countering anti Semitism, but are going to have some
Speaker 7: sort of counterproductive knock on effects. And I hope we
Speaker 7: can get to that at a later date. But today
Speaker 7: I want to talk to you about a little project
Speaker 7: some GDL members have going on the side called the
Speaker 7: City Council Death Squad?
Speaker 3: Are they going you around in Gilding City Council members,
Speaker 3: because that's kind of what it sounds like.
Speaker 8: It does sound like, that's kind of that's the energy here.
Speaker 7: They haven't done that yet, yes, But Garrison, how would
Speaker 7: you feel if I told you a former Juggalo calling
Speaker 7: himself Scottie big Balls trying to trying to destroy the
Speaker 7: thing I love most, which is civic engagement in municipal government.
Speaker 3: I have such complicated feelings of Juggalos.
Speaker 7: Oh God, No, I want to be clear I'm not
Speaker 7: slandering the Juggalo community here, right, Like mister big Ball's
Speaker 7: got his hatchetman tattoo covered up with a big snake
Speaker 7: holding a gun a couple of years ago, So he's
Speaker 7: no longer god that there's a cool name for their community.
Speaker 7: He's no longer a part of the Juggalo community. I
Speaker 7: don't think the Juggalos would buy this kind of behavior.
Speaker 3: Generally, not. They are kind of semi cool.
Speaker 7: No, I'm off for chicken hunting, I don't. I don't
Speaker 7: think they abide No, I by just by a happenstance,
Speaker 7: you know. Icps not my cup of tea. No, no, shade,
Speaker 7: it's not my cup of tea. But I did see
Speaker 7: them perform at the Lincoln Memorial a couple of years ago,
Speaker 7: and it was the most polite crowd I've ever experienced
Speaker 7: at a live music event.
Speaker 8: So hats off to the Juggalos.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: Now, if you're a city council meeting enthusiast like myself,
Speaker 7: you may already be aware of the rash of racist
Speaker 7: zoom bombings disrupting meetings around the country over the last
Speaker 7: nine months or so. Remote participation in meetings became nearly
Speaker 7: ubiquitous during the pandemic, and the opportunity to make a
Speaker 7: public comment without having to devote an entire evening to
Speaker 7: sitting in an uncomfortable chair at city hall has made
Speaker 7: civic engagement more accessible for all kinds of people right,
Speaker 7: not just because of contagion, but remote participation benefits everybody,
Speaker 7: like parents who are managing a bedtime routine by the
Speaker 7: time the public hearing opens at eight PM, or sure
Speaker 7: don't work in nine to five, or people without reliable transportation.
Speaker 7: So it's been a boon for local democracy, but it's
Speaker 7: also created a unique opportunity for people who want to
Speaker 7: ruin that. So last year, Scotty big Balls Mister big Balls,
Speaker 7: the online pseudonym for a self described not see named
Speaker 7: Harley Ray Petero Junior, started a group he calls the
Speaker 7: City Council Death Squad organizes online to find government meetings,
Speaker 7: mainly city and county council meetings all over the country
Speaker 7: that allow public comment by a zoom, and then it
Speaker 7: coordinates those members to sign up for speaking slots, crowding
Speaker 7: out actual community members who are trying to speak on
Speaker 7: you know, like actual matters of local concern, and when
Speaker 7: the members of the group get through, the calls follow
Speaker 7: a couple of predictable paths. Sometimes the caller just starts
Speaker 7: screaming slurs.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: It's just as soon as they connect, it's just screaming
Speaker 7: the N word over and over and over and over
Speaker 7: and over again until someone can hit the button to
Speaker 7: cut it off. Sometimes they do what they call the
Speaker 7: slow roll, where they start off trying to sound like
Speaker 7: a real caller. You know, they'll say, like, you know,
Speaker 7: I have concerns about zoning in my neighborhood, or I
Speaker 7: you know, I think we should pay the police more,
Speaker 7: and then it veers abruptly into some kind of bizarre
Speaker 7: antisemitic conspiracy theory about crime or nine to eleven or
Speaker 7: advocating for public lynchings.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, where they it's like, spend a
Speaker 3: few minutes eating up the city council time, and then
Speaker 3: to curtail it with some unh hinge ramble.
Speaker 7: Right, and then yell slurs yes, yes, yes. And another
Speaker 7: favorite of the group is a call format where they
Speaker 7: pretend to be gay or Jewish themselves and then ascribe
Speaker 7: to themselves various traits associated with bigoted stereotypes of the girl.
Speaker 4: Okay, okay, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 7: John Benedeo has participated a few times himself, and he
Speaker 7: loves this one. He pretends to be a gay Jewish
Speaker 7: person named Tammy and then says some pretty outrageous things. Sure,
Speaker 7: I bet the callers give themselves inside joke names like
Speaker 7: Rudy Hess or Sadie n word, which, when you say
Speaker 7: it out loud, sounds like say the N word, So
Speaker 7: it's like a Seymour Butts kind of thing. It's like
Speaker 7: Bart calling most tavern except it's Nazis.
Speaker 3: Wow, very very clever, on the cutting edge of comedy.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Or they'll name themselves after a mass shooter, like Dylan
Speaker 7: Rue for Andraspravic or you know, sometimes it's like a
Speaker 7: deep cut, like a more obscure killer whose name might
Speaker 7: not arouse suspicion right off the bat, like Jim Adkisson,
Speaker 7: a man who shot eight people at a Unitarian church
Speaker 7: in Knoxville in two thousand and eight during a children's
Speaker 7: production of the musical Annie because he was angry about
Speaker 7: the church's liberal teachings. So you know, those good jokes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is all like kind of like old like
Speaker 3: old school kind of chan humor. It's it's not even
Speaker 3: that popular anymore because it's kind of just out of vogue.
Speaker 3: You're kind of you're kind of outing yourself as like
Speaker 3: a bit of like a not an actual boomer, but
Speaker 3: like it's become a boomer fied this type of humor.
Speaker 3: It's not really this sort of thing that younger, more
Speaker 3: hip neo Nazis are into. They they have, they have,
Speaker 3: they have moved on, they have other other horizons of
Speaker 3: bad jokes.
Speaker 7: So ruining everybody's good time by shouting a racial slur
Speaker 7: is hardly an innovation. But this particular operation has a
Speaker 7: discernible origin point. In May of twenty twenty three, Potero,
Speaker 7: that's mister big Balls, if you've forgotten already and friends
Speaker 7: showed up in person to a Sacramento City council meeting
Speaker 7: to show their support for Ryan Massano. If you're from
Speaker 7: the Sacramento area, you probably know him. Masano, a former
Speaker 7: Proud Boy with several failed runs for office under his belt,
Speaker 7: already had a long history of being disruptive in public meetings.
Speaker 7: In twenty eighteen, he's removed from chambers during a Valejo
Speaker 7: City Council meeting after saying the city was quote infested
Speaker 7: with homosexuals, and refusing to be called to order by
Speaker 7: the mayor the meeting of the same body in twenty
Speaker 7: twenty two, he was picked up and carried out after
Speaker 7: refusing to end his remarks at the end of his time.
Speaker 7: So in twenty twenty three, he's attending every meeting of
Speaker 7: the Sacramento City Council. This has been going on for
Speaker 7: almost two months. He shows up, he gets up, he
Speaker 7: makes his homophobic, racist, and antisemitic remarks, but he's keeping
Speaker 7: with the rules of the meeting and they're letting him
Speaker 7: make his statements.
Speaker 8: But people aren't happy about it. So activists are shooting
Speaker 8: to show up to the meetings.
Speaker 7: People are showing up with banners, people are booing him,
Speaker 7: people are showing up to counter this, and so he
Speaker 7: puts out a call for backup. So at this at
Speaker 7: this point that Petero shows up with two masked associates
Speaker 7: and a man named Jeffrey Perene, who, like Massano, was
Speaker 7: a proud boy with a failed school board run to
Speaker 7: his name at that time. In twenty twenty three, Parene
Speaker 7: had recently been arrested outside the home of a youth
Speaker 7: pastor after publicly calling for others to join him in
Speaker 7: going to the pastor's home during a school board meeting
Speaker 7: that had to be adjourned because of Parene's disruptive behavior.
Speaker 7: So we're seeing a pattern emerging here, right, Like at
Speaker 7: this point, we've got two proud boys who keep getting
Speaker 7: kicked out of meetings and failing to run for school board.
Speaker 7: These are people who are seeing the value in kicking
Speaker 7: up some kind of disturbance at a meeting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this was like during a time where school
Speaker 3: board meeting disruptions were very popular. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of like far right influencers trying to convince their followers
Speaker 3: to run for school boards. This was kind of a
Speaker 3: very particular cultural moment in like twenty twenty two to
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three.
Speaker 7: So they show up to this meeting to support Massano.
Speaker 7: Doesn't go well. One of the guys throws a Hitler salute.
Speaker 7: People react angrily, there's a bit of a scuffle, It devolves,
Speaker 7: and the council ends up going into recess and clearing
Speaker 7: the chambers entirely. Everybody has to leave. You just can't
Speaker 7: be in here too much yelling. Everybody's mad nobody gets arrested,
Speaker 7: but everybody has to leave, and the council ended up
Speaker 7: continuing the meeting without the public's presence. So I think
Speaker 7: there was a hearing that night on an ordinance involving
Speaker 7: homelessness that people had showed up to speak on and
Speaker 7: they weren't allowed to do that. Now council continues their business,
Speaker 7: but nobody can be there. And Patera's alliance with Masano
Speaker 7: didn't last. They actually butted heads almost immediately over optics.
Speaker 7: Massano preferred to make his long winded speeches that at
Speaker 7: least in his mind, were more palatable to the listener
Speaker 7: and might more effectively spread his message and potentially red
Speaker 7: pill the listeners. Who's actually angry that Potero's troll forward
Speaker 7: tactic of just shouting slurs and obscenities was actually resulting
Speaker 7: in avenues for public comment being closed off. In September
Speaker 7: of twenty twenty three, he wrote, either out of ignorance
Speaker 7: or deliberate sabotage, the GDL has no idea what they're doing.
Speaker 7: So he was mad right because he was doing this
Speaker 7: thing where every week he was showing up Megan's comment
Speaker 7: and because of the different strategy of disruption that was
Speaker 7: getting harder for him. Masano, for his part, continues his
Speaker 7: one man battle against the Sacramento City Council. He's still
Speaker 7: doing that. Oh, okay, He's a lone wolf out there
Speaker 7: in Sacramento. But Petero saw the potential and trolling on
Speaker 7: a larger scale, okay, almost immediately, he branched out. Over
Speaker 7: the next few months, it developed into an organized trolling machine,
Speaker 7: targeting meetings across the country, covering at least seventeen states,
Speaker 7: from Alaska to Maine, Idaho, Wyoming, Georgia, Virginia. They're all
Speaker 7: over the place, often hitting the same city repeatedly, and
Speaker 7: in some cases showing up in person with flyers or banners,
Speaker 7: either before or after the zoom bombing. After targeting meetings
Speaker 7: in the city of Walnut Creek, California, the group hung
Speaker 7: a racist banner in the area. Councilor Kevin Wilk commented
Speaker 7: on the banner in the press, and the following week
Speaker 7: the meeting was hit again, with members specifically addressing Wilk,
Speaker 7: the locality's first Jewish city councilor, asking him how he
Speaker 7: liked it. In a later stream, Potero laughed about that
Speaker 7: personalized follow up saying that pissed him off, so I
Speaker 7: had to.
Speaker 8: Rub it in.
Speaker 7: After targeting the city of Wooster, Massachusetts, the group didn't
Speaker 7: just flyer. They mailed homophobic materials to the homes of
Speaker 7: several councilors, including two nuen, the state's first openly non
Speaker 7: binary elected official. And it isn't even just regular city
Speaker 7: council meetings. Some of the targeted meetings are incredibly boring
Speaker 7: governmental bodies like the Morristown, New Jersey Board.
Speaker 8: Of Zoning Appeals.
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
Speaker 7: When PETERO posted a clip of their racist calls into
Speaker 7: that meeting, a group member posted the board chairs home
Speaker 7: address and the replies.
Speaker 8: They've also and this doesn't even fit the pattern. I
Speaker 8: think they just got the bug.
Speaker 7: But they've posted several composition videos of the group disrupting
Speaker 7: AA meetings.
Speaker 4: All right, that's interesting.
Speaker 9: I think that.
Speaker 7: I think they just got into the idea of making
Speaker 7: praying phone calls. So they target addiction support groups, often
Speaker 7: geared towards members of the LGBTQ community.
Speaker 4: So okay, all right, yeah, just.
Speaker 7: Doing like homophobic attacks on people who are trying to
Speaker 7: get sober.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 3: They're just like finding any any meeting they can and
Speaker 3: just spamming this thing.
Speaker 8: I don't know that they have other hobbies.
Speaker 3: Yes, this seems like a lot of time between keeping
Speaker 3: up on zoning board meetings and whatever local AA call
Speaker 3: in there is. It seems seems to be a bit
Speaker 3: uh childish and time consuming, right.
Speaker 7: I mean this is it takes a lot of time,
Speaker 7: and Potero is pretty clear about that. You know, he
Speaker 7: runs these online spaces where he's organizing. He's you know,
Speaker 7: making lists of meetings that they should check out. He's
Speaker 7: complaining about how, you know, sometimes you have to wait
Speaker 7: for hours while they're just doing like regular government stuff.
Speaker 7: You have to just like wait for it to be
Speaker 7: your turnity all the N word. It's time consuming.
Speaker 4: Do you know what isn't time consuming?
Speaker 7: Spending your harder in cash on the products and services
Speaker 7: that support this show.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: We make it fast, easy and reliable by listening to
Speaker 3: these products and services. Okay, we are back talking about
Speaker 3: the Goyam Defense League, the GDL. So we were just
Speaker 3: discussing how they were spending a lot of time disrupting
Speaker 3: a lot of meetings with their little call in campaign.
Speaker 7: Right, and it's tempting to dismiss this behavior as Oh,
Speaker 7: it's just trolling, right, they're just trolls.
Speaker 8: Sure, it's like this is so juvenile.
Speaker 4: How bad can it be? It's just people calling in, right, But.
Speaker 7: This has real world consequences, and they know that. They
Speaker 7: revel in the reactions to their behavior. They're fully aware
Speaker 7: of and celebrate the destruction that it leaves in its wake.
Speaker 7: When the city of Portland suspended virtual public comment, commenters
Speaker 7: in the group called it a big effing win when
Speaker 7: there's other media coverage of cities who have limited or
Speaker 7: even ended public comment altogether. The headlines are posted triumphantly
Speaker 7: in the group, often captured only with loll comments like
Speaker 7: the calls will continue until the Jews leave and shut
Speaker 7: it down for the win and never let them regroup
Speaker 7: arrest no comfort given literal the replies to posts about
Speaker 7: city after city ceding ground to this harassment.
Speaker 3: So it's not just causing little inconveniences, it is actually
Speaker 3: shutting down city's ability to hold public comment and for
Speaker 3: the public to actually speak on issues that are affecting
Speaker 3: them and their city.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 7: So, there have been meetings that, you know, when this occurs,
Speaker 7: the meeting itself, that particular meeting just ends everyone just
Speaker 7: leaves because they can't continue, or you know, the meeting
Speaker 7: does continue, but they stop taking public comment, or they
Speaker 7: change their policies and procedures to limit public comment moving forward.
Speaker 7: So this is having real effects that are you know,
Speaker 7: living on in these cities even after they moved on.
Speaker 7: Group members suggest using burner phones and fake number generators
Speaker 7: to avoid being caught or blocked. Potero has written online
Speaker 7: that he's been quote banned on multiple devices, but I
Speaker 7: have some tactics to prevent them from stopping me. Patero
Speaker 7: noted on a recent stream that the ADL's estimate of
Speaker 7: over one hundred and thirty disruptions is short changing them,
Speaker 7: insisting they've done at least three times that many, sometimes
Speaker 7: hitting dozens of meetings per week, and they're not just
Speaker 7: doing it right. It's not just the act of doing
Speaker 7: it that is the thrill to them. They then cut
Speaker 7: the clips and then post them online for everyone to enjoy.
Speaker 7: They're cutting promos and making highlight reels of their favorite moments.
Speaker 7: There are compilations grouped by genre of hate right. There's
Speaker 7: videos combining all the best moments of homophobia, all the
Speaker 7: best moments of anti semitism. There are these promo videos
Speaker 7: set to that sort of ugly electronic fash wave music
Speaker 7: that they all love so much?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: The promo videos have titles like this is our meeting
Speaker 7: now or We're jacking your shit.
Speaker 3: So these are being shared on like bitchu and Odyssey
Speaker 3: and Telegram.
Speaker 7: I'm guessing yeah, they're they're you know, GDL, they're on
Speaker 7: They're on every platform that's opened to people like them, right, okay,
Speaker 7: and following that GDL model, right, they're they're posting these
Speaker 7: these videos and getting money. They're accepting donations to continue
Speaker 7: doing this. And then on the anniversary of Kristall Knocked,
Speaker 7: they targeted a planning commission in the Crescent City, California,
Speaker 7: entitled the video CCDs goes Chrystall Knocked on Crescent City. Right,
Speaker 7: So it's it's just a joke, right, They're not really
Speaker 7: doing Christall Knocked, but they're using the language of this
Speaker 7: sort of genocidal violence.
Speaker 3: And it's like monetized. They're like making money off of it.
Speaker 7: They are making those donos, as they say it. After
Speaker 7: a recent ADL article about the operation, Patero posted, fuck
Speaker 7: the ADL, We'll give those caselers something to covetch about
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty four, and his wife Haley reposted that,
Speaker 7: adding you think he's playing.
Speaker 8: He lives for this. Yes, they don't work, They really
Speaker 8: do live for this.
Speaker 3: It does sound like this is like the most important
Speaker 3: thing happening in their life, which is one quite sad.
Speaker 3: That also shows that they have a lot of time
Speaker 3: to dedicate to pulling off stuff like this.
Speaker 8: Time that they should be dedicating to parenting.
Speaker 3: Honestly, well, I don't know if you want them around
Speaker 3: their kids. Honestly, the more time they spend away from
Speaker 3: their children is probably better.
Speaker 8: God damn.
Speaker 7: During the zoo bombing in October, an official in Saucelito, California,
Speaker 7: voice support for just cutting off the calls over objections
Speaker 7: from other members of council that this could get them sued,
Speaker 7: saying he would quote take the lawsuit if these people
Speaker 7: can even get organized enough to sue us. And while
Speaker 7: the group has made no progress on actually filing any
Speaker 7: legal action there or anywhere else, they haven't forgotten it.
Speaker 7: Just last week the group expressed an interest in seeking
Speaker 7: some kind of retribution for that comment, saying they may
Speaker 7: need a little visit, and the group is raising money
Speaker 7: to start traveling to meetings in person. Fundraiser on the
Speaker 7: platform of choice for right wing extremists, give Send Go,
Speaker 7: has already raised one thousand dollars in donations to fund
Speaker 7: travel and lodging for the group members to travel to
Speaker 7: city council meetings for in person disruptions. On their weekly
Speaker 7: live streams, Viewers can donate directly in the stream. On
Speaker 7: the stream, Potero thanks viewers for donations, often in the
Speaker 7: amount of fourteen dollars and eighty eight cents.
Speaker 4: Hey yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah.
Speaker 7: They they live for the memes, reminding them that every
Speaker 7: donation goes directly towards funding their IRL activism, getting them
Speaker 7: offline and inter real life traveling around the country to
Speaker 7: engage in racial harassment in person. He also says the
Speaker 7: donations fund a side project called postcard Waffen.
Speaker 4: The nota SEENI way wait wait wait.
Speaker 3: Wait wait wait wait say that one bird time, just
Speaker 3: a little slower postcard waffen.
Speaker 4: They love to add postcard waffen.
Speaker 8: They love to add waffen to things. Right, that's just
Speaker 8: the German word for weapon.
Speaker 7: So this this is weaponized mailings, and this is the
Speaker 7: nickname they've given to the work of mailing hateful materials
Speaker 7: directly to the homes of the elected officials who preside
Speaker 7: over the meetings they disrupt. This seems like a sort
Speaker 7: of targeted harassment kind of campaign.
Speaker 3: Sure, target harassment, intimidation. There's some with the other like mentions.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like veiled threats. These types of neo
Speaker 3: Nazis are not averse to actually doing violence on people.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there's there's like a a pleasant threat implied
Speaker 3: with these with this, with this sort of rhetoric and activity.
Speaker 7: And because the decentralized nature of the GDL, and I
Speaker 7: think this is something we can talk about in a
Speaker 7: later episode about kind of what they're up to these days.
Speaker 7: Is they don't have communication with or control over all
Speaker 7: of the people who are consuming this content, So they
Speaker 7: may not plan to follow up with these people in
Speaker 7: a manner that would be criminal, but they're encouraging people
Speaker 7: to think that that's an option and that sure has ramifications. Sure,
Speaker 7: So this isn't just annoying prank calls. It's an organized
Speaker 7: effort to ruin local democracy, to make meetings unproductive and unbearable,
Speaker 7: to intimidate and humiliate local government employees, and elected officials
Speaker 7: to make your city council chambers and intimidating an uncomfortable
Speaker 7: place for you, closing off that avenue for you to
Speaker 7: address and engage with your local government, and to take
Speaker 7: away options for actually engaging with local government by forcing
Speaker 7: cities to limit public comment. And we can't seed that
Speaker 7: ground to them.
Speaker 3: Ah man, that is I mean, I don't know. There's
Speaker 3: just been so many instances with city council meetings and
Speaker 3: various other kind of these big public forms, especially school
Speaker 3: board meetings, where like they are like discussing extremely important
Speaker 3: stuff around like trans people and forming policies that impact people.
Speaker 3: And I know a lot of people do actually end
Speaker 3: up going out to these and talking about their experiences
Speaker 3: and why proposed laws or ordinances would be so harmful,
Speaker 3: and just removing that option, whether or not you believe
Speaker 3: in like the electoral process TM, removing that option from
Speaker 3: people to actually speak on their own experiences does have
Speaker 3: like real consequences.
Speaker 7: Even if even if you're not a big believer in
Speaker 7: it being a meaningful political action to engage with your
Speaker 7: local government. I think we can all agree that it's
Speaker 7: not okay for Nazis to make it unsafe for anyone
Speaker 7: to do that. Yeah, you know who won't seed ground
Speaker 7: to the nazis trying to take over your local school board.
Speaker 3: The products and services sets, the forth this podcast, I hope.
Speaker 3: So it depends capitalism is u is quite strong.
Speaker 4: But we'll see how this develops.
Speaker 3: Okay, we are back. So this is this is kind
Speaker 3: of depressing, Molly.
Speaker 4: What what? Uh huh ah?
Speaker 8: What is to be done?
Speaker 4: What is to be done?
Speaker 8: Garrisoned?
Speaker 7: Yes, So unfortunately a lot of the obvious solutions here
Speaker 7: are bad ones.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: The response that a lot of cities have had is that, well,
Speaker 7: they're just going to eliminate remote public comment altogether.
Speaker 8: You just can't participate remotely anymore, which.
Speaker 3: Hurts people who are like disabled, hurts people who have
Speaker 3: tough things with scheduling, parents, people who work at certain hours.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, yeah, like most people can't spend six hours
Speaker 7: sitting at city hall on a Monday night.
Speaker 8: Most people can't.
Speaker 7: And so having remote participation was really it opened up
Speaker 7: local democracy to people with all kinds of life situations, right,
Speaker 7: And that's what happened here in my own city of Charlottesville.
Speaker 7: CCDs targeted us last October, and in response, the mayor
Speaker 7: eliminated remote participation in all meetings. We didn't get to
Speaker 7: revisit that. That's just how it works now. So they've
Speaker 7: moved on. But now my entire city of over fifty
Speaker 7: thousand people lives with the consequences of that action, and
Speaker 7: we're left with a less accessible local democracy. They'd rather
Speaker 7: prevent anyone from calling in than have to deal with
Speaker 7: deciding whether they can do anything about it when someone
Speaker 7: abuses that process. And there's some really basic steps that
Speaker 7: cities can take right off the bat, like without even
Speaker 7: overthinking it or getting into the legal complications of the
Speaker 7: First Amendment. Cities like Lin would Walkhington responded to their
Speaker 7: CCDA zoom bombing by adding a few basic layers of
Speaker 7: security to their virtual meetings, like requiring commenters to sign
Speaker 7: up the day before. So this group is organized in
Speaker 7: a private telegram chat, and so like one person gets
Speaker 7: into a meeting and just drops the link into the chat,
Speaker 7: and so everyone just clicks that link. But if you
Speaker 7: make it so everyone has to have a unique sign
Speaker 7: in link that they signed up for with a real
Speaker 7: email address the day prior, that makes a little bit
Speaker 7: harder to.
Speaker 8: Coordinate a dog pile.
Speaker 7: Sure you know it isn't hard to make a fake
Speaker 7: or temporary email address to sign up to get the link.
Speaker 7: But if sometimes just adding one extra step is discouraging
Speaker 7: enough that they'll pick somebody else this week. But this
Speaker 7: behavior is escalating, right, and making it a little bit
Speaker 7: harder to get into the zoom isn't going to solve
Speaker 7: the problem.
Speaker 8: It's going to keep happening.
Speaker 7: And you can only make a public meeting so secure
Speaker 7: without actually locking out the public. Elected officials are understandably
Speaker 7: concerned about the legal ramifications of dealing with these kinds
Speaker 7: of calls. With some exceptions, they can't prevent someone from
Speaker 7: speaking based only on the content of the speech. I
Speaker 7: actually found a two thousand and six letter. I guess
Speaker 7: in two thousand and six, the LA City Council asked
Speaker 7: their city attorney. I need to do a little research
Speaker 7: on what was going on in two thousand and six
Speaker 7: in La. But the LA City Council asked the city attorney,
Speaker 7: can we make a rule that people can't say racial
Speaker 7: slurs in here?
Speaker 3: Which seems like an okay rule, like I don't know.
Speaker 7: The answer was no, Legally, you can't limit speech based
Speaker 7: on its content, right, because these are public forums put
Speaker 7: on by the government. I mean, it's what's called a
Speaker 7: designated public forum, but we don't. They can't limit speech
Speaker 7: based on its content, right, But what they can do
Speaker 7: is have rules of decorum. Their city attorney pulled some
Speaker 7: language directly from a Ninth Circuit Court opinion that's in California,
Speaker 7: So it's a federal Court of appeals that covers that
Speaker 7: part of California. White versus City of Norwalk, and that
Speaker 7: decision upheld a city ordinance that authorized the legislative body
Speaker 7: to remove individuals who uttered quote personal, impertinent, slanderous, or
Speaker 7: profane remarks if the remarks disrupted, disturbed, or otherwise impeded
Speaker 7: the conduct of the meeting. So it's not just that
Speaker 7: your remarks were nasty, it's that your behavior was disruptive.
Speaker 7: The way that these remarks were delivered was interfering with
Speaker 7: the conduct of the meeting. So the meeting is disrupted
Speaker 7: because council is prevented from accomplishing its business in a
Speaker 7: reasonably efficient manner. The court further wrote, indeed, such conduct
Speaker 7: may interfere with the rights of other speakers, and that's
Speaker 7: what's happening here, right that these disruptions are not only
Speaker 7: not your right. You don't have a right to disrupt
Speaker 7: the meeting, but that behavior also fundamentally infringes on everyone
Speaker 7: else's rights to have the meeting. It keeps the meeting
Speaker 7: from being conducted, and it's interfering with the conduct of
Speaker 7: the government's business. So if they open a public forum,
Speaker 7: anyone can speak in the public forum, and you can't
Speaker 7: cut them off because of the content.
Speaker 8: Of their speech.
Speaker 7: But that doesn't mean there's no legal way to put
Speaker 7: limits on public comment. If the rule is content neutral
Speaker 7: and serves a legitimate government interest, the government can pose
Speaker 7: some restrictions on your speech, right like requiring a permit
Speaker 7: for a parade is a limit on speech, or saying
Speaker 7: you can't yell in a courtroom is a limit on
Speaker 7: your speech. But it's not a violation of your First
Speaker 7: Amendment rights to say you can't disrupt a trial. But
Speaker 7: more importantly, and the risk of getting too boring, right,
Speaker 7: like a meeting is not a sidewalk there is. This
Speaker 7: is not just any public place where you're speaking. This
Speaker 7: is a meeting where business is being conductive. There's a
Speaker 7: legitimate and compelling government interest in the ability to conduct
Speaker 7: the meeting, and so the rules that they can make
Speaker 7: in this space can vary state by state. You know,
Speaker 7: some states do or don't allow you to limit speakers
Speaker 7: to residents, or they can or can't limit the topics
Speaker 7: that are Germane. So it's going to vary a little bit.
Speaker 7: But the courts have repeatedly upheld, not just in the
Speaker 7: Norwalk case, the ability of a council to adopt a
Speaker 7: content neutral rule and use that rule to cut off
Speaker 7: or remove speakers who are disruptive. And honestly, I have
Speaker 7: to say, I think any city attorney worth assault knows this.
Speaker 7: This is day one stuff. If your whole job, well
Speaker 7: not your whole job, but your job on Monday nights
Speaker 7: whenever the meeting is, is to provide legal advice to
Speaker 7: a city council on how they're conducting their business. You
Speaker 7: know this because disruptive behavior during a meeting isn't some
Speaker 7: brand new phenomenon. But it's kind of remarkable. What I
Speaker 7: watched like a hundred clips of this happening right and
Speaker 7: over and over and over again.
Speaker 8: You see these city attorneys saying.
Speaker 7: Like, oh, we're powerless here, we're powerless here. We don't
Speaker 7: want to get sued, there's nothing we can do, and
Speaker 7: that's not true, and they know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I've seen people get escorted out of
Speaker 3: chambers for being disruptive in city council meetings before. Like
Speaker 3: they it happens relatively frequently. It's not like an uncommon,
Speaker 3: brand new occurrence.
Speaker 7: Right, I mean, I've seen that discretion applied appropriately and fascistically.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, it happens, but over and over and over again
Speaker 7: in these situations, you see these city attorneys, the city
Speaker 7: councils saying.
Speaker 8: Like, I guess we just have to let them do it.
Speaker 7: A commenter in one of the Sacramento meetings from last
Speaker 7: summer actually pointed out that, you know, she was saying
Speaker 7: to her city council, you had no hesitation removing black
Speaker 7: members of the public from this room when they were
Speaker 7: angry that your cops murdered Stefan Clark. So why are
Speaker 7: you so nervous about infringing on the free speech rights
Speaker 7: of literal Nazis? Like someone who's just in here screaming
Speaker 7: the N word? Why is that worthy of more breathing
Speaker 7: room and something? You know, as a resident of the
Speaker 7: city of Charlottesville who watches our local government pretty carefully.
Speaker 7: Something we've found over and over again here is that
Speaker 7: if fear of litigation is your starting point for making
Speaker 7: decisions on how to govern, you're going to make cowardly, dangerous,
Speaker 7: stupid decisions every time, and you're probably gonna get sued anyway.
Speaker 7: So make the choice to protect people. Get good legal advice. Sure,
Speaker 7: consult with your city attorney, Consult the case law.
Speaker 8: Don't be reckless.
Speaker 7: But if you're faced with the opportunity to make a
Speaker 7: decision that text people, a decision that serves the public good,
Speaker 7: a decision that aligns with the values you claim to hold,
Speaker 7: but might result in someone filing a lawsuit against you
Speaker 7: that they're not going to win anyway, don't err on
Speaker 7: the side of shielding yourself from nuisance litigation at the
Speaker 7: expense of the public.
Speaker 8: Don't just look at us in shrug. Your hands are
Speaker 8: not tied here.
Speaker 7: And if you're not comfortable making that kind of decision,
Speaker 7: get off the diis. I mean, I'm not a city attorney,
Speaker 7: but that would be my advice, right, And so again,
Speaker 7: I think the bottom line here is that we can't
Speaker 7: seed this ground. The end result here can't be well
Speaker 7: local government just isn't a place where we can safely
Speaker 7: and meaningfully engage with elected officials on the issues that matter. Right,
Speaker 7: that can't be the answer here. Don't wait until this
Speaker 7: is happening where you live to react to this, right
Speaker 7: like it could happen here. It is happening in a
Speaker 7: lot of places. You know, if you're inclined to do so,
Speaker 7: you know, show up, engage, speak your mind on local issues.
Speaker 7: Don't wait for your city hall to become a battleground
Speaker 7: to show up to counter right wing inflows. Right like,
Speaker 7: don't just react to reactionaries. Stake out that ground now,
Speaker 7: that's our space. Right, make it clear that people are
Speaker 7: engaged and that they insist on their right to engage,
Speaker 7: so that your city council can't say, well, people aren't
Speaker 7: really making public comments anyway, we just won't have it.
Speaker 7: And let make sure that they know that you will
Speaker 7: not accept the death of local democracy at the hands
Speaker 7: of some Weasley paradox of tolerance bullshit about letting Nazis
Speaker 7: dominate our spaces.
Speaker 3: I know there's been other people who've been like talking
Speaker 3: about and pointing out these instances of GDL zoom bombing
Speaker 3: and shutting down these meetings, But there certainly has been
Speaker 3: less discussion of this being a deliberate tactic that GDL
Speaker 3: is doing specifically to actually like shutting down the democratic process,
Speaker 3: like it has been so focused on, just like the
Speaker 3: trolling and the spreading of anti Semitic rhetoric, which are
Speaker 3: big problems, but I think there's been a little bit
Speaker 3: less of a focus on the actually looking at this
Speaker 3: as a deliberate tactic being employed to remove people's ability
Speaker 3: to engage democratically in the city or school board or
Speaker 3: wherever they live. And I think viewing it as a
Speaker 3: deliberate tactic like that like you've been talking about, but
Speaker 3: both gets like a better look at how these neo
Speaker 3: Nazis are trying to organize. But also it's a more
Speaker 3: holistic approach towards why is this happening, And it can
Speaker 3: allow you to look at this as more of a
Speaker 3: tactical decision less than just kind of random trolling slurs XD,
Speaker 3: which it can be kind of reduced to, which is
Speaker 3: at the very least incomplete way of looking at this phenomenon,
Speaker 3: if not just kind of wholly inaccurate.
Speaker 7: I mean, I don't want to give them too much credit,
Speaker 7: right like they didn't have a brainstorming session where they
Speaker 7: were thinking about ways to contribute to the death of democracy.
Speaker 8: I think that's sort of a phenomenon.
Speaker 7: That occurred as a result of their actions that they
Speaker 7: then saw and appreciated. Right They don't understand it, but
Speaker 7: I don't think they intended it from the outset. But
Speaker 7: at this point it's hard to deny that that is
Speaker 7: something they're doing on purpose.
Speaker 3: And that's just been an interesting trend with the GDL specifically,
Speaker 3: especially considering the legislation trying to crack down on political flying,
Speaker 3: which we might talk about at a later date. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it's been a interesting watching the GDLs as political FORCET, yes,
Speaker 3: is like annoying and bad in the rhetoric they spread,
Speaker 3: but also they've had this interesting ability to just either
Speaker 3: affect legislation or like shut down people's ability to engage
Speaker 3: with politics in their local area in a few notable ways.
Speaker 7: So it's important to sort of sit for a minute
Speaker 7: before you react to people like this, Right, Like you
Speaker 7: were talking about that legislation that's going to end up
Speaker 7: infringing on a lot of people's political speech, right, Like,
Speaker 7: you can't just react to the troll. You have to
Speaker 7: sort of think about the context in which this is
Speaker 7: occurring and make a reasonable choice about how to react
Speaker 7: so you don't end up giving them what they want
Speaker 7: basically right, because they love the attention.
Speaker 8: They love the attention.
Speaker 7: Every time they do this, it ends up on the
Speaker 7: local news. People are talking about it, people are repeating
Speaker 7: their message, and you don't need to give them that.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you Molly for putting this together. This has
Speaker 3: been very enlightening, if slightly upsetting, but that is kind
Speaker 3: of it's kind that's kind of the entire bit we
Speaker 3: do here. That's sort of the show. Huh. Where can
Speaker 3: people find your work online?
Speaker 7: You can find me on Twitter. I will never call
Speaker 7: it x socialist dog mom. And in keeping with the
Speaker 7: spirit of this episode, most of what I use my
Speaker 7: Twitter account for is live tweeting my local city government meetings.
Speaker 7: I've been doing that for god seven years now, so
Speaker 7: this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 7: I love engaging with municipal government.
Speaker 4: Fantastic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've attended more city council meetings the last year
Speaker 3: than I have ever before in my life. It has
Speaker 3: certainly been an experience a lot of wacky, wacky and
Speaker 3: unusual things happen in city council meetings.
Speaker 7: Thank you Garrison so much for joining me today, and
Speaker 7: hopefully we can bring listeners something even worse someday soon.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, stay tuned for more breaking Goham Defense League
Speaker 3: news find Dark.
Speaker 4: Hey everyone, this is it could happen here and I'm
Speaker 4: your guest host, Matt Leeb. I'd say most of you
Speaker 4: probably know me from Robert and Sophie's podcast Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 4: which you know I've become kind of notorious for the
Speaker 4: time that I use a jar Jar Bank soundboard during
Speaker 4: a series about doctor Mangela. Yeah, I don't have that
Speaker 4: soundboard with me today. Sorry. Fewer of you might know
Speaker 4: me from having the world's only Sopranos Slash the Wire
Speaker 4: rewatch podcast pod Yourself a Gun. But the fewest of
Speaker 4: you might know me from my brand new podcast, Bad Hasbara,
Speaker 4: the world's most moral podcast, in which me and some
Speaker 4: of my other anti Zionist or non Zionist Jewish friends
Speaker 4: and our other friends and our other guests guests who
Speaker 4: you know you've maybe heard, like Charine here, we have
Speaker 4: casual conversations about Israeli propaganda and Israeli propagandists. For some
Speaker 4: of you, this might be your first time hearing the
Speaker 4: word has bara, and that's why the homies at cool
Speaker 4: Zone Media invited me here today. So this episode is
Speaker 4: all about has balalah aka Israel's public relations and propaganda machine,
Speaker 4: and I am thrilled to be joined by my friend
Speaker 4: and one time cat sitter, churene Uness Hi Scheren.
Speaker 9: Hi, Matt. What an intro. Yeah, I'm excited to learn
Speaker 9: more about this. Actually, also excited to know how you
Speaker 9: properly say hasbara, because I don't know I say it right.
Speaker 4: But lah, Yeah, it's yeah, that's I mean, sound in
Speaker 4: the yeah, the law, you know, within with the throat
Speaker 4: has bah.
Speaker 9: You heard it here first.
Speaker 4: Yes, you heard it here first. I'm not I'm not
Speaker 4: the greatest at doing you know, Israeli accents or whatnot.
Speaker 4: So throughout this podcast, I'm probably going to be butchering
Speaker 4: a lot of Hebrew words. Uh and uh you know,
Speaker 4: just you're just gonna have to deal with it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and that's totally fine. That's just part of the game.
Speaker 9: I've pronounced every every name I've ever said on this.
Speaker 4: Show, So yeah, yeah, I mean you should hear me
Speaker 4: trying to pronounce Arabic names like I can't do it.
Speaker 4: It's I mean, I attempt, Yes, that would if there's
Speaker 4: any that happened in this episode, please, But before we
Speaker 4: get into talking about has Bah blah, I want to
Speaker 4: start with a quick story, Sarin. Are you familiar with
Speaker 4: the Birthright Trip?
Speaker 9: Yes, I am.
Speaker 4: It was one of those things where I was very
Speaker 4: excited to one day do the Birthright Trip and I
Speaker 4: didn't really even question. I knew, like you know, it
Speaker 4: was a little bit, you know, they were trying to
Speaker 4: whine and dine me to go there and you know,
Speaker 4: maybe move or whatnot. But I didn't know how much
Speaker 4: they wanted me to move there until I went. So
Speaker 4: for me, my Birthright trip is kind of why I'm
Speaker 4: here today talking about Hasbara. It's why I started a
Speaker 4: freaking podcast about it. It's when I first started clocking
Speaker 4: Israeli propaganda. So I went in January twenty twelve. If
Speaker 4: you don't know Birthright, it's pretty much a two weeks,
Speaker 4: all expenses paid trip for young Jews from all over
Speaker 4: the world to go to the Holy Land, reconnect with
Speaker 4: their Jewish roots, float in the dead seat. It is
Speaker 4: a it is a propaganda tour of apartheid state. And
Speaker 4: you know, I'm not going to get too much into
Speaker 4: the history of Birthright, you know and all the like
Speaker 4: far right wing funders like Sheldon Adelson and stuff. There's
Speaker 4: like not enough time for that. But I'm mentioning it
Speaker 4: because it was the first time I saw how hasbara
Speaker 4: was more than just propaganda, and how in my opinion,
Speaker 4: it more closely resembles like indoctrination, and the organizers at
Speaker 4: Birthright did like a masterful job of this. Like I
Speaker 4: went on a trip of American Jews who were like me,
Speaker 4: like they were like secular from mixed or like intermarried families,
Speaker 4: non bar mitzvud. It was all like other Matt Leib
Speaker 4: type Jews, like ethnic Jews, right, And I realized this.
Speaker 4: I think it was like day two of the trip.
Speaker 4: One of the Israeli tour guides literally gave us a
Speaker 4: bar mitzvah, like all at the same time we had
Speaker 4: a group bar mitzvah. Yeah, And they did it by
Speaker 4: saying like Okay, well now bab mitzvah. It just means
Speaker 4: you're a man. Now, everyone here is a man. Now,
Speaker 4: choose an Israeli name, and which was like for me,
Speaker 4: I remember feeling a little you know, I was like, wait,
Speaker 4: there's supposed to be a theme party and fucking like yeah,
Speaker 4: I supposed to yeah, DJ, my dad's gonna buy me
Speaker 4: a car, or at least me a like a Honda,
Speaker 4: Like I thought it was more than that, at the
Speaker 4: very least I thought I would have to like memorize
Speaker 4: a tour portion. But no, you just go to Israel
Speaker 4: and you know, a tour guy does it for you,
Speaker 4: so like it really works though, like you really you
Speaker 4: go there being like, you know, I'm European Jew, and
Speaker 4: you leave this and you're like I invented falafel. So
Speaker 4: the Hasbara highlight of the trip for me was this
Speaker 4: like mega like birthright mega event. It was in Jerusalem
Speaker 4: and a huge arena in which they had like Israeli speakers, donors, rappers,
Speaker 4: and there was like a there were rappers at one
Speaker 4: point who just started rapping about things that they claim
Speaker 4: Israel invented, like iPhone, computer chips and like the cherry tomato,
Speaker 4: which was you know, like you And by the way,
Speaker 4: a not insubstantial amount of the trip was spent telling
Speaker 4: us about how Israel invented the cherry tomato. Like we
Speaker 4: went to places like you know, farms and stuff where
Speaker 4: they showed us this like drip irrigation. Multiple people were
Speaker 4: just like, man, we invented the cherry tomato. Here can
Speaker 4: you believe it? And I was like, this seems like
Speaker 4: a lot of effort for just this one particular thing,
Speaker 4: which may or may not be true. But yeah, So
Speaker 4: the headliner of the mega event of that night, the
Speaker 4: cherry tomato on top, if you will, was a speech
Speaker 4: by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu. Straight up,
Speaker 4: the Prime Minister of Israel was the headline speaker of
Speaker 4: this birthright event and an arena filled with like twenty
Speaker 4: thousand teens and like early twenty somethings, which was kind
Speaker 4: of like amazing, Like you know, listen, here's the thing
Speaker 4: I knew Benjamin netnya who like I knew enough about
Speaker 4: Israeli politics to know that, like he was a fucking
Speaker 4: right winger and bad. But like I have to admit,
Speaker 4: even I, you know, as a twenty six year old
Speaker 4: who kind of was starting to get like woke on Palestine,
Speaker 4: you know, so to speak, Like even I was like
Speaker 4: kind of like, whoa this is. I'm a little charmed,
Speaker 4: a little honored to see the Prime minister here. He
Speaker 4: took time out of his busy schedule of doing crimes,
Speaker 4: probably to address us. And you know, I actually found
Speaker 4: the speech of that night. I actually have some clips
Speaker 4: from it that I want to play.
Speaker 9: That is incredible, that's great.
Speaker 4: So yeah, he was, he was like casual, he was
Speaker 4: off the cuff.
Speaker 6: They wrote a speech for me. I'm not going to
Speaker 6: read it.
Speaker 4: Like he even did a little bit of crowd work.
Speaker 6: Anyone here named Rachel.
Speaker 4: So that right there is what we in the Jewish
Speaker 4: community call rachel profiling. That's when you just star in
Speaker 4: front of a group of Jews and you ask whose
Speaker 4: name to Rachel. Shout out to Rachel Blumenthal for telling
Speaker 4: me that joke. In college. It was it was like
Speaker 4: a crash course in Hesbara. Like he told us we
Speaker 4: were from Israel at one point.
Speaker 6: You all come from great countries, great countries. Did you
Speaker 6: all come from here? All of you? That's your birthright?
Speaker 4: He was telling us that. Like you know, once again,
Speaker 4: it was everything they invented, phone, you know, the cell phone, ships,
Speaker 4: blah blah blah. He was telling us to make aliat
Speaker 4: to Israel, which means to you know, move to return,
Speaker 4: to come back. You know. Essentially what he was vying
Speaker 4: for was like move to Israel and start a family.
Speaker 4: It's very like sex based, like the way it works.
Speaker 4: The big thing I took away was him telling us
Speaker 4: that he wanted us to go back home and tell
Speaker 4: people the truth about Israel.
Speaker 6: But the most important battle that we have to find
Speaker 6: is the battle for the truth. And all of you
Speaker 6: can become ambassadors for the truth and ambassadors for Israel.
Speaker 4: And of course you know, he then proceeded to tell
Speaker 4: us what the truth about Israel was.
Speaker 6: Go back your respective countries and tell the truth about Israel.
Speaker 6: Only way to fight a lives who tell the truth.
Speaker 6: Tell him about a country where people are free, free
Speaker 6: to initiate, free to work, free to speak. It's a
Speaker 6: country where you can criticize the Prime Minister although he
Speaker 6: never makes mistakes. This is a country which has in
Speaker 6: which Arabs have full right something they've been denied in
Speaker 6: all the vast lands around us. And a woman in
Speaker 6: this country can sit anywhere she wants. That's our position.
Speaker 6: This is a free country.
Speaker 4: So him going up there telling me that what he
Speaker 4: wants from me is to go back home and be
Speaker 4: an ambassador for Israel and tell the truth about Israel.
Speaker 4: You know, it was the first time I realized that
Speaker 4: he was giving me a job to do. And this
Speaker 4: is a job that I think a lot of Jewish
Speaker 4: people who may be listening to this podcast can relate
Speaker 4: to the job of telling the truth about Israel and
Speaker 4: the job of you know, stopping the slander that is
Speaker 4: out there about Israel in the media and on the
Speaker 4: internet and press and all that stuff. And it was
Speaker 4: the first time I realized that, like, oh, part of
Speaker 4: the hasbara isn't just you know, some government thing. It's
Speaker 4: like my job. My job is to is to tell
Speaker 4: the truth. And he said something in that clip, the
Speaker 4: only way to fight allies with the truth. And so
Speaker 4: I am going to follow his advice. That's what I'm
Speaker 4: going to do, Shreen. I'm going to tell people the
Speaker 4: truth about Israel. And I think it's time to do it.
Speaker 4: So let's get into it. Let's talk about the truth.
Speaker 4: Let's get into talking about hasbara. What is it? What
Speaker 4: is it? And so loosely, hasbara is it's a modern
Speaker 4: Hebrew word derived from the word las bier hasbier meaning
Speaker 4: to explain or explanation. I say loosely because it's kind
Speaker 4: of a made up word. So, you know, a lot
Speaker 4: of words in modern Hebrew are sort of made up words. Remember,
Speaker 4: Hebrew is like an ancient liturgical language, and modern Hebrew
Speaker 4: was created by like Jewish linguist nerds who wanted to
Speaker 4: revive the language to be a spoken one, and that's
Speaker 4: how you got modern Hebrew, which is fine, there's nothing
Speaker 4: wrong with reviving a dead language. But because of that,
Speaker 4: a lot of the words in modern Hebrew are kind
Speaker 4: of inventions. So, according to Mosaic Magazine, has bara is
Speaker 4: strictly a twentieth centuryism. You won't find it in Eliezer
Speaker 4: Benu Huda's a monumental Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew,
Speaker 4: whose second volume, in which Hasbara appears only as the
Speaker 4: first word of hasbarat Panim, was published in nineteen oh two.
Speaker 4: So it's not something that you see in kind of
Speaker 4: like the original beginnings of you know, the creation of
Speaker 4: modern Hebrew. Like colloquially, hisbara like refers to like media
Speaker 4: pr branding, mud slinging. It's kind of a like a
Speaker 4: sort of like catch all term for general propaganda used
Speaker 4: to create a narrative based on Israeli government talking points
Speaker 4: meant for a foreign, usually American or just generally Western audience.
Speaker 4: People who deal in hasbara are called has barists has baristas,
Speaker 4: which is fun's that's true. Yeah, yeah, I mean listen,
Speaker 4: has barista, I think gives gives it a little bit
Speaker 4: more flair. You know, kind of imagine someone kind of
Speaker 4: like making you coffee, but instead of coffee, it's they
Speaker 4: make you lies.
Speaker 9: Nope, I'm not gonna do that.
Speaker 10: Sorry, I like it. I wish I never was born. Okay, Well,
Speaker 10: so there's all sorts of like has bars. Like some
Speaker 10: of them have like official positions within the Israeli government,
Speaker 10: such as the head of the IDF Spokesperson's unit, Daniel Hagari,
Speaker 10: who you might remember is the guy from that video
Speaker 10: taken at the you know, the children's hospital, you know,
Speaker 10: in Gaza, and he's like pointing at what he thought
Speaker 10: was a list of his Israeli hostages, but was like
Speaker 10: literally just a calendar didn't have any names. It was
Speaker 10: just he was pointing at days of the week thinking
Speaker 10: they were names, because that's what a calendar has. And
Speaker 10: also it's so fucking weird that they can't read Arabic, Like, yeah,
Speaker 10: you're in the Middle East, you are the spokesperson.
Speaker 9: I think something interesting about how Hebrew was revived as
Speaker 9: well is that a lot of words were taken from Arabic.
Speaker 9: A lot of words are very similar to Arabic. So
Speaker 9: it's like even more funny that they would they can't
Speaker 9: even read the language that they kind of took a
Speaker 9: lot of words from.
Speaker 4: But I'm saying that, like, yeah, in Israel, it's almost
Speaker 4: like the appropriation is just part of the process of
Speaker 4: the cleansing, you know, just like stealing something, saying it's
Speaker 4: ours and then not even being able to identify an
Speaker 4: Arabic word that you yourself say so, yeah, so there's him.
Speaker 4: Then there's like everyone if you've been on Twitter, you've
Speaker 4: seen a lot of Alon Levy who he's His official
Speaker 4: title is the official Israeli government spokesperson, and that's through
Speaker 4: the basically the office of the Prime Minister. He's a
Speaker 4: British guy, like he raises his eyebrows. It's like the meme,
Speaker 4: you know, like he goes like, oh, that's what he's
Speaker 4: famous for. Then there's a lot of these like non
Speaker 4: governmental like Israeli Civil Society, haspara organizations like Stand with
Speaker 4: Us or like a PAK, the Washington Institute for Near
Speaker 4: East Policy, the Anti Defamation League, Christians United for Israel,
Speaker 4: the Israel on Campus Coalition. I mean, there are tons
Speaker 4: of them, tons of them. And then of course there's
Speaker 4: people who are just in it for the love of
Speaker 4: the game, like celebrities, artists, you know, actors, you know,
Speaker 4: who make like Israel public advocacy part of their thing.
Speaker 4: It's a fascinating world filled with ghouls and goblins. So
Speaker 4: the word his bara itself, interestingly is hasbara. So early
Speaker 4: Zionists had no problem calling their pr campaigns and like
Speaker 4: they're branding for a Jewish state and Palestine propaganda. They
Speaker 4: would say, it's we got to do propaganda, because in
Speaker 4: the early twentieth twentieth century, the term was generally considered
Speaker 4: to be neutral, like people said they were doing propaganda
Speaker 4: when they were doing propaganda. Once the word became a pejorative,
Speaker 4: they created the word has borrow, which is a nicer
Speaker 4: sounding word with more neutral connotations. And although it's now
Speaker 4: used as a pejorative by critics of Israel and me
Speaker 4: and stuff, the word is still used to this day
Speaker 4: in Israel. It is still a fairly neutral sounding word.
Speaker 4: There are has Borrow workshops sponsored by Israel. They have
Speaker 4: has Barra Fellowships. That's the name of the fellowship. Like
Speaker 4: you can get merch that says has bar A Fellowship
Speaker 4: on it. And the reason is because it doesn't translate.
Speaker 4: The word isn't translate to propaganda. It just means to explain,
Speaker 4: which is you know, seems innocent enough. It's not about
Speaker 4: doing propaganda. It's not about they don't call themselves liars.
Speaker 4: They're not saying I'm going to lie. They say they're
Speaker 4: merely just explaining. And I found this speech from the
Speaker 4: Middle East Policy Council that goes into depth about what
Speaker 4: has Bar is beyond. Just like propaganda, quote has Bar
Speaker 4: links information warfare to the strategic efforts of the state
Speaker 4: to bolster the unity of the home front, ensure the
Speaker 4: support of allies, disrupt efforts to organize hostile coalitions, determine
Speaker 4: the way issues are defined by the media, the intelligentsia,
Speaker 4: the social networks. Established parameters of politically correct discourse, de
Speaker 4: legitimize both critics and their arguments, and shape the common
Speaker 4: understanding and interpretation of the results of international negotiations. So
Speaker 4: behind this term is a large, well funded information warfare
Speaker 4: apparatus dedicated to shaping Israeli discourse in the media and
Speaker 4: the government and academic insutions everywhere. And they use all
Speaker 4: of the tools in their toolbox to silence criticism of Israel,
Speaker 4: and what they can't silence, they soften. Sometimes it's through
Speaker 4: coordinated letter writing campaigns. Sometimes it's harassment. Sometimes it's dosing.
Speaker 4: You know, people have been docked. So before I continue,
Speaker 4: I want to address that uncomfortable feeling you had when
Speaker 4: I talked about like Israel and the media. I want
Speaker 4: to say that is that is not to say that
Speaker 4: Israel or the Israel Lobby or Zionists quote control the media,
Speaker 4: all right, So they do not. That's why hasbara exists,
Speaker 4: you know, That's why the Israel lobby exists. If they
Speaker 4: controlled the media, they wouldn't have groups like Camera, for example,
Speaker 4: constantly day in and day out, harassing the New York
Speaker 4: Times and CNN and PBS to get them to talk
Speaker 4: about Israel correctly. Okay, So it's important when people hear
Speaker 4: these criticisms of Israel that they don't try to see
Speaker 4: them as like otherizing Israel or like you know a
Speaker 4: lot of people, they get uncomfortable because a lot of
Speaker 4: these things will match old anti Semitic tropes. But it's
Speaker 4: important to remember that these lobbying groups exist in Israel.
Speaker 4: They exist in the gun lobby, in the big oil lobby.
Speaker 4: This is not unique to Israel. The unique thing about
Speaker 4: it is how willing the American public is and the
Speaker 4: West in general is to letting themselves be live to
Speaker 4: That's why I'm interested in it. But let's talk about
Speaker 4: Camera real quick, because this is a recent thing that happened.
Speaker 4: Some news happened recently about the New York Times and
Speaker 4: their connection to CAMERA. This is from a recent article
Speaker 4: in The Intercept. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Speaker 4: Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, was founded in nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: two in response to what it claims was anti Israel
Speaker 4: bias in the Washington Post reporting on the Israeli invasion
Speaker 4: of Lebanon. Since its inception, CAMERA has successfully lobbied for
Speaker 4: hundreds of corrections in major media outlets seeking to streamline
Speaker 4: a pro Israel line in news reports and editorials. It
Speaker 4: is mere journalists whose work it disagrees with and launched
Speaker 4: boycott campaigns against news organizations it believes are not responding
Speaker 4: with enough deference to its requests. So the way this
Speaker 4: group operates is that they go through any and every
Speaker 4: article about Israel, looking for sentences, looking for terms, definitions,
Speaker 4: anything they disagree with, and lobby for corrections to be issued.
Speaker 4: Camera doesn't do this quietly. They openly brag about it
Speaker 4: on their website. Like recently, Camera successfully lobbied The New
Speaker 4: York Times to issue a correction removing the word occupation
Speaker 4: from an article, and they wrote this on their website.
Speaker 4: Quote the ask slipped for their New York Times reporters
Speaker 4: Kum Hamas stenographers this week when they absolutely neglected to
Speaker 4: done down Hamas's preferred language before passing off the terror
Speaker 4: organization's talking points as original reporting. Take notice of the
Speaker 4: framing of The New York Times and their mask slipping
Speaker 4: and their reporters as being stenographers for Hamas. This is
Speaker 4: like quite the accusation, given that The New York Times
Speaker 4: is like has and continues to have coverage described as
Speaker 4: biased in favor of Israel Like. According to an Intercept analysis,
Speaker 4: it was found that in the first six weeks of
Speaker 4: the war, New York Times consistently delegitimized Palestinian deaths and
Speaker 4: cultivated a gross imbalance in coverage to pro Israeli sources
Speaker 4: and voices. So the exact opposite of what Camera is
Speaker 4: claiming is the truth here. You know, this is this
Speaker 4: is actually a famous hes bar A tactic. It is
Speaker 4: the I am rubber, you are glue tactic. And it's
Speaker 4: really something to see it in action, Like I don't know,
Speaker 4: suring if you've seen how often you've like read some
Speaker 4: pro Israeli voices, you know, has Baris online and heard
Speaker 4: them say stuff that you're like, I know for a fact,
Speaker 4: the exact opposite of this thing is true, you know
Speaker 4: what I mean?
Speaker 9: Yeah, every accusation is a confession. It feels like that
Speaker 9: is true all the time when it comes to the stuff.
Speaker 9: And also the intercept article is very good. I'll put
Speaker 9: in the description for those who to read the whole thing.
Speaker 9: I'm glad you mentioned that because I didn't know that
Speaker 9: much about Camera until I read that article, and I
Speaker 9: was just like, what, like, of course I knew that
Speaker 9: that was a thing that was that was done like
Speaker 9: they would change words. Recently, The New York Times was
Speaker 9: like a decline of death or life. Like they use
Speaker 9: the word decline to describe.
Speaker 4: To describe what was happening in Gaza. They decided the
Speaker 4: articles headline was going to be like death's actually declining in.
Speaker 9: Gaza exactly, and like the standard ones are always there,
Speaker 9: like blast or conflict or whatever it is. Those are
Speaker 9: unfortunately so normal now. But to see it all laid
Speaker 9: out by the Intersect was really I'm really glad I
Speaker 9: did that article so it will be in the description,
Speaker 9: and I'm glad you mentioned it. But it does go
Speaker 9: back to the idea that every accusation is a confession.
Speaker 9: I think that's something to remember every time you see
Speaker 9: a headline.
Speaker 4: It's true, and it's something that you know. It's almost
Speaker 4: become a cliche online because I've seen it so many
Speaker 4: times people saying that, and I think it's important to
Speaker 4: remember that this is sort of the tactic of hesbara.
Speaker 4: Like what makes hesbara particularly notable and like often hilarious
Speaker 4: is that it doesn't merely just spin narratives, but it
Speaker 4: inverts them to essentially make like an alternate reality. It's
Speaker 4: not just that has bara is information warfare. Has Bara
Speaker 4: is straight up info wars like Alex Jones level shit
Speaker 4: the same way. Alex Jones will run the same like
Speaker 4: fantastical paranoid thread to every major news event that happens
Speaker 4: in order to reinforce his worldview and prove that he's
Speaker 4: right and everyone else is wrong. You know, Like that's
Speaker 4: Israel does this, but with like far more money and
Speaker 4: far greater success, and it kind of makes sense why
Speaker 4: they're successful at it, Like Alex Jones Info Wars shit
Speaker 4: like praise on white Christian paranoia that like the Blacks
Speaker 4: are trying to take away our guns so they can
Speaker 4: make our children trans or whatever, like total fantasy in
Speaker 4: saying shit that you have to be like already far
Speaker 4: right wing to believe, well, like Israeli info Wars praise
Speaker 4: on a much more grounded in reality paranoia that of
Speaker 4: anti Semitism, Like anti Semitism, it's historical, it's evil, it's pervasive,
Speaker 4: it's pernicious. Like this kind of paranoia makes sense, and
Speaker 4: not just for Jews, but like for anyone of conscience,
Speaker 4: anyone who has empathy, you know, like that they understand
Speaker 4: anti Semitism is bad and needs to be fought, and
Speaker 4: that makes Hasbara very effective. You know, people want to
Speaker 4: support Israel because people want to support the Jewish people
Speaker 4: and they want to fight anti Semitism. And when the
Speaker 4: IDF dismantles a children's hospital and says we had to
Speaker 4: do it to stop Pomas. Look, here's a list of hostages.
Speaker 4: People want to believe them. It's like Molder from the
Speaker 4: X Files, like I want to believe, which is the
Speaker 4: same impulse as Alex Jones believers. Essentially, like you don't
Speaker 4: want Sandy Hook to be a possibility. You want it
Speaker 4: to be a conspiracy to take your guns away. You
Speaker 4: want those children to be secretly actors pretending to be dead.
Speaker 4: So like when Israel says we aren't killing children, we're
Speaker 4: killing hamas, people want to believe that.
Speaker 9: And yeah, let's just say hate that you compared Fox
Speaker 9: Mulder to the like you dragged him into this and
Speaker 9: I'll get over it.
Speaker 4: But I'm sorry to you know, to bring him into
Speaker 4: this conversation. But you know, I'm just saying, Molder, if
Speaker 4: he wants to believe that stuff, what else does he
Speaker 4: want to believe? You just hope, you really hope and
Speaker 4: pray that he's not going to fall for the hasbara,
Speaker 4: but he might know you really don't, and it's like,
Speaker 4: you know, it's his bar is effective because it gives
Speaker 4: you something like a nice, legitimate sounding explanation for why
Speaker 4: Israel needed to do something that you might usually think
Speaker 4: is bad. Like that's how it's worked for decades, in
Speaker 4: the same way that hesbara serves to explain things for
Speaker 4: you to basically take the Israeli government at its word,
Speaker 4: that's kind of how it works. It gives you a
Speaker 4: believable explanation and not only sounds like kind of real,
Speaker 4: but you know, conforms to your personal beliefs. And yeah,
Speaker 4: but speaking of personal beliefs, if there's one thing, oh,
Speaker 4: let's see if I can do this. If there's one
Speaker 4: thing I'd love to believe in, it's commerce. And so yes,
Speaker 4: I mean listen, people will have to make money somehow,
Speaker 4: so it looks like we have some products and services
Speaker 4: that we have to sell. And yeah, when they sell
Speaker 4: you these these products and services, please believe them when
Speaker 4: they say how good they are. And we are back.
Speaker 4: So we were talking about hespara and how you know,
Speaker 4: the explanations conform to your personal beliefs. The interesting thing
Speaker 4: about asbara is that they have different types of hespara
Speaker 4: for a wide range of personal beliefs. It's not one
Speaker 4: size fits all. It depends on who you are. There's
Speaker 4: a conservative version and there's a liberal version like Israel.
Speaker 4: Israel has been very successful and their ability to brand
Speaker 4: themselves is both a liberal democracy and a outpost for
Speaker 4: Western values fighting the Muslim hordes. Usually these strategies have
Speaker 4: been like pretty separated, right, you know, like you can't
Speaker 4: claim you can't do them at the same time, it'll
Speaker 4: sound weird. It's like Israel is the only gay friendly,
Speaker 4: climate conscious, feminist democracy and that's why we got to
Speaker 4: do genocide. Like that doesn't that doesn't sound right. Like
Speaker 4: you tell the city dwelling liberal elites about the gay stuff,
Speaker 4: you tell the conservative Christians about the Western civilization stuff.
Speaker 4: That's kind of how it works. The basic conservative hissbara
Speaker 4: doesn't actually interest me all that much because it's I
Speaker 4: don't know, they don't have to work that hard at
Speaker 4: getting conservatives to be okay with killing Muslims. You know,
Speaker 4: it's like Muslims Arabs, you know, they they're they're fully
Speaker 4: willing to You don't even have to like couch it
Speaker 4: in something.
Speaker 9: No, that's just what happens to us.
Speaker 4: That's it's fine, right, And it's interesting too because like
Speaker 4: this idea of of you know, being a Western outpost,
Speaker 4: an outpost for Western values is not like that is
Speaker 4: very much falling into the almost the whiteness thing of
Speaker 4: Europeans where you kind of like because Jews, like European
Speaker 4: Afy Semitism wasn't about how Jews had Western values. It
Speaker 4: was about how Jews represented this other, this this thing
Speaker 4: that you know, they don't they didn't share values. There
Speaker 4: were some weird other thing and you know, this was
Speaker 4: not the the charge of anti Semitism in Europe. And
Speaker 4: now with like Israeli propaganda towards you know that's aimed
Speaker 4: towards conservative Westerners, they're like, no, no, we're the most Western,
Speaker 4: like we're so Western that we're gonna be the ones
Speaker 4: who are on the front lines stopping the evil, you know,
Speaker 4: Arab ports. And yeah, but it's like the that's interesting,
Speaker 4: you know in some aspects, but it's the liberal stuff.
Speaker 4: Sureen liberal hasbara is where the lies get so wild,
Speaker 4: Like that's the stuff that I grew up with.
Speaker 9: You know, yeah, no, it really the pink washing in
Speaker 9: particular is like one of yes, it's just they're they're
Speaker 9: so egregious in their use of using like the gay
Speaker 9: struggle for their own agenda. It's really really gross.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's and it's weird at how effective it
Speaker 4: is or how effective it has been for so long,
Speaker 4: because it is something that I think. I think it's
Speaker 4: kind of like the first stop on the Hasbaratri. You know,
Speaker 4: when you are hearing someone kind of like talking about
Speaker 4: why we need to stand with Israel, they will start
Speaker 4: right there with the you know, the pro gay rights stuff.
Speaker 4: And it's like, the reason I find it interesting is
Speaker 4: like Israel's so effectively been able to like brand itself
Speaker 4: as representing and supporting all these positive liberal traits. Well,
Speaker 4: well a lot of it is just not true. Like,
Speaker 4: for example, liberals are pro LGBT rights, right, you know,
Speaker 4: they they love gays, they love gay rights, and that's
Speaker 4: a good thing, of course, and yet gay marriage is
Speaker 4: illegal in Israel. It is illegal. It's also a mixed
Speaker 4: faith marriages are also illegal in Israel. They will recognize
Speaker 4: those marriages, but they will not perform them. You cannot
Speaker 4: get gay married, you cannot get interfaith married in Israel.
Speaker 4: If you're there performed abroad then and they will recognize them.
Speaker 4: That's kind of the loophole. Also, by the way, Palestinians
Speaker 4: from the West Bank or Gaza who Mariyan Israeli citizen
Speaker 4: cannot then get Israeli citizenship through that marriage. You also
Speaker 4: can't get Israeli citizenship if you marry in Israeli and
Speaker 4: you are from a quote enemy state that read Arab.
Speaker 4: If you want to know what the enemy states are,
Speaker 4: they mean Arabs. So you know, I don't know. Liberals
Speaker 4: should hate that. They should look at that and be like, well,
Speaker 4: I don't like that, you'd think, right. Another example, like
Speaker 4: liberals love democracy and they hate racism, yet believe Israel
Speaker 4: when they say they are a democracy, because they'll be like,
Speaker 4: we have you know, twenty percent Arab Muslim population, you know,
Speaker 4: two million and all with the right to vote. Meanwhile,
Speaker 4: they're like ignoring the five point three million Palestinians who
Speaker 4: are currently living in the West Bank and Gaza under
Speaker 4: military control by Israel. Like this is a situation was
Speaker 4: which has explicitly been called apartheid by most major human
Speaker 4: rights organizations, you know, human Rights Watch and it's the International,
Speaker 4: the International Federation for Human Rights, and even including Human
Speaker 4: Rights orgs in Israel, yesh Din and but sell them.
Speaker 4: They have all called this an apartheid state, and apartheid
Speaker 4: to you know, to be clear, is racist and I'm
Speaker 4: against it, yes, and I think most liberals would say
Speaker 4: they're against it. Don't you think sharam like something you
Speaker 4: would hope. So that's kind of like part of the
Speaker 4: thing with the liberal You're like, I don't like bad people, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: but you know it's it's once again, it's this thing
Speaker 4: where we're willing to be like, oh, they say they're
Speaker 4: a democracy, and therefore I believe it, and I think
Speaker 4: it's you know, you have to remember that like Israel's
Speaker 4: got like a caveat for all this stuff. It's usually
Speaker 4: they'll say, you know, their credentials are touted with this
Speaker 4: like in the Middle East, the most gay friendly in
Speaker 4: the Middle East, or the only democracy in the Middle East.
Speaker 4: But like, once again, that kind of only serves to
Speaker 4: implicitly condemn those enemy states you know, filled with Arabs,
Speaker 4: is being racist and backwards and homophobic and anti democratic
Speaker 4: and therefore unworthy of liberal sympathies. So it's you know,
Speaker 4: you liberals will look at it and they'll go like, well,
Speaker 4: I mean compared to Iraq, and you know they of course,
Speaker 4: it's like forgetting why the Middle East is the way
Speaker 4: the Middle East is. You know, they they will there's
Speaker 4: a complete like vacuum, like everything exists in a vacuum
Speaker 4: when it comes to American imperialism. So you don't but
Speaker 4: you just want to believe that Arabs are backwards people
Speaker 4: rather than looking at any kind of like Western imperial complicity.
Speaker 9: But also like reinforcing this like racist backwards stereotype also
Speaker 9: like dehumanizes Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians to such a
Speaker 9: degree where people can't overlook genocide. Now, you know, like
Speaker 9: it's all.
Speaker 4: Part of that, it's all part of that.
Speaker 9: Yes, they're different, they're not like us. They don't like
Speaker 9: gay people, they don't women stand up or whatever the
Speaker 9: fuck it is. It's just like it's it really is
Speaker 9: infuriating because you wonder, like how can this happen? It's
Speaker 9: because of little stuff like this that's not very little
Speaker 9: when it's all together, and it just reinforces this like
Speaker 9: barbaric trope, and then people just go on their go
Speaker 9: about their lives being okay with genocide because today these
Speaker 9: people are human anymore.
Speaker 4: Right, you look at this like as part of a
Speaker 4: pattern of like the delegitimization of the Arab being. In
Speaker 4: a way, it's like all of this is a pattern
Speaker 4: of like, what are things we can say about Arabs
Speaker 4: in order to make them so far from us that
Speaker 4: you just don't care if they live or die? Or
Speaker 4: more so you you more, you're more willing to believe
Speaker 4: that the people who are like us, the Israelis, are
Speaker 4: the ones telling the truth that they're you know, they're
Speaker 4: the ones who have the empathy. They're the ones who
Speaker 4: you know, let women you know, sit wherever they want,
Speaker 4: whatever the fuck that meant from BB's speech, But like,
Speaker 4: you know, they're more like me Arabs. I don't know them,
Speaker 4: and I guess, you know, if they say they're bad,
Speaker 4: they're bad. You know, it's it's just part of it.
Speaker 4: And I think what pisses me off about it is
Speaker 4: the liberal willingness to believe it. And I think it's like,
Speaker 4: I don't know, it's fascinating to me because especially right now,
Speaker 4: in the last you know, four months or so of
Speaker 4: this brutal incursion into Gaza, it's like so clearly illustrates
Speaker 4: why people on the left fucking hate liberals. You know,
Speaker 4: they're just so easy to manipulate if you know the
Speaker 4: right words. You know, like if it were any other group,
Speaker 4: if it were any other group instead of Jewish nation nationalists,
Speaker 4: like if it were Christian nationalists, they'd be like clearly
Speaker 4: condemning it, clearly. Like liberals have such a facile identity
Speaker 4: and race essentialism that they either excuse the crimes committed
Speaker 4: by the Jewish state because Israel asked them to do
Speaker 4: it and they want to be like good allies or whatever,
Speaker 4: or they ignore them because well, it's not my place
Speaker 4: to say I'm not Jewish. I feel like I should like,
Speaker 4: like they're just so squishy it like it. It kind
Speaker 4: of reveals the modern American liberal for what they are,
Speaker 4: which is like a tiny baby whose self perception is
Speaker 4: at the root of their ideology.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: And it's just it's important to remember that Europeans doing
Speaker 4: atrocities to indigenous populations has always come with the gift
Speaker 4: wrapping of these savages don't share our values. It's always
Speaker 4: been like that. So when you see an Israeli soldier
Speaker 4: flying a Pride flag in the rubble of a raised
Speaker 4: Palestinian city. Like just remember that's not liberation, that is
Speaker 4: regular ass by the book colonialism, same shit, you know
Speaker 4: what I mean?
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, I mean I still am loving the description
Speaker 9: of an American liberal as a tiny baby.
Speaker 4: There are little babies. There's little tiny babies. You got,
Speaker 4: They've got they can only hold like one sort of
Speaker 4: political critique in their mind at once, and you know,
Speaker 4: if they choose this kind of like identity essentialism, then
Speaker 4: it's so much easier to just kind of go like, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, I don't really think it's my place to
Speaker 4: talk about this right now exactly.
Speaker 9: It's just it's cowardly and like in retrospect, they're probably
Speaker 9: going to change their story about what their stance was,
Speaker 9: like you know what I mean, And it's just yes,
Speaker 9: it's really infuriating, and I think it is important to
Speaker 9: remember that what you're watching is reel Do and what
Speaker 9: it has done for the past seventy five years, over
Speaker 9: seventy five years, is just colonialism, and it was described
Speaker 9: that way since the beginning. But that was that was
Speaker 9: really Thank you for explaining all of that, Matt.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know there will be more, uh. In
Speaker 4: part two, we'll get down to some of these myths.
Speaker 4: We'll get down to the way in which hasbar kind
Speaker 4: of works to invert narratives to a degree that you know,
Speaker 4: are almost so shocking that you have trouble believing the
Speaker 4: historical truth and are more comfortable believing the ahistorical fiction.
Speaker 4: But surine, what do we do now? Plugs? Or yeah?
Speaker 4: What do I say?
Speaker 9: Commercial breaks? That's the end of part one. You did
Speaker 9: a great job.
Speaker 4: Thank you. That's listen. I've never guess hosted a thing
Speaker 4: here on cool Zone Media, but I'm very happy too.
Speaker 4: And if you like you know me obviously you know,
Speaker 4: listen about as Barrow, the World's Most Moral podcast. If
Speaker 4: you like me and my wife, we're going to be
Speaker 4: at the Sacramento Punchline March seventeenth at seven pm. That's
Speaker 4: a Sunday. We're headlining together. I mean, you know, co headlining.
Speaker 4: So I'll go up, she'll go. But it's really good.
Speaker 4: It's a really good show. We did it in San Francisco.
Speaker 4: Is so much fun. Please come out to it March seventeenth.
Speaker 4: That's Sunday, March seventeenth, Sacramento Punchline. Come see Matt Leeb
Speaker 4: Francisca Hearing.
Speaker 9: Where can people follow you don't know, they should if.
Speaker 4: You don't know, at matt Leeb on Twitter, at mett
Speaker 4: leib jokes on Instagram, and uh yeah, check me out.
Speaker 4: I'll post all the dates and stuff over there, and
Speaker 4: all the podcasts over there too.
Speaker 9: Awesome.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, great job.
Speaker 11: Okay, goodbye, bye, Hey everyone, welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 4: I am your guest host, Matt Leeb back again with
Speaker 4: Charene Unis. What's up, Cheren?
Speaker 9: Nothing? This this is, this is this is what's no?
Speaker 9: I happy to happy to be back. Hopefully you guys
Speaker 9: listen to part one already of math. Yeah, really cool
Speaker 9: little series we got going on here. But if you
Speaker 9: haven't listened to that first, and then we're continuing this.
Speaker 4: Haspara this journey. Yeah, this Hasbara train stops for no Man. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So this is part two of this series about Hisbara
Speaker 4: once again. Hesbara is basically just means to explain, and
Speaker 4: we're talking about Israeli propaganda and beyond not just propaganda,
Speaker 4: but so much more so. We're going to talk a
Speaker 4: little bit about the myths about Israel that have kind
Speaker 4: of like gained a foothold in Western public consciousness to
Speaker 4: a degree that it's like not just a foothold, but
Speaker 4: it's just kind of things that we commonly think are facts.
Speaker 4: So like, if you grew up in Zionism, which is
Speaker 4: like if you don't know that's a political ideology that
Speaker 4: birth the state of Israel, you have probably heard a
Speaker 4: lot of your teachers, your rabbis, your friends, your family,
Speaker 4: your Israeli friends, your Israeli family talking about how it's
Speaker 4: your responsibility to explain Israel to the people, and growing
Speaker 4: up you don't actually know that what you're doing is propaganda,
Speaker 4: Like you think you're just you know that you know
Speaker 4: more than most people because everyone else is getting their
Speaker 4: information from anti Semites. You know, you think like you've
Speaker 4: got the real scoop and that most people are just
Speaker 4: you know, born ignorant and biased against Jews. And you
Speaker 4: don't have to be Jewish to have been exposed to espara.
Speaker 4: Chances are that if you grew up in the West,
Speaker 4: you probably hold several views about Israel that are the
Speaker 4: result of decades long pr campaigns. So what I'm going
Speaker 4: to do now is a lightning round of myth busting.
Speaker 4: This is just like real quick getting into some of
Speaker 4: the I don't know some of the most pervasive things
Speaker 4: that I think each one could be an entire episode.
Speaker 4: But you know, listen, this is your guys, pot this
Speaker 4: isn't my podcast. I can't just take it away from you.
Speaker 4: So I'm just going to do a lightning round with you.
Speaker 4: Are you ready, Sharen?
Speaker 9: Oh, bored? Ready, Let's do it.
Speaker 4: Okay. Israel is not a land without a people for
Speaker 4: a people without land. Okay, there were people there. I
Speaker 4: don't know if you know that Palestinians were there and
Speaker 4: seven hundred and fifty thousand were expelled in nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 4: This whole conflict has not been going on for hundreds
Speaker 4: of years. It is very very modern, and it has
Speaker 4: nothing to do with an ancient religious rivalry. So when
Speaker 4: someone says, oh, they've been killing each other for thousands
Speaker 4: of yet, no, no, not even a little no, that
Speaker 4: is not a thing. Israel quote lives in a tough
Speaker 4: neighborhood and it must act tough to survive. That is
Speaker 4: just regular ass racism and orientalism. The idea that they
Speaker 4: just you know, you have to be tough, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, listen, a tough neighborhood is very much that
Speaker 4: is translated for an American a white American audience. You
Speaker 4: know what I mean, what is a tough neighborhood. It's
Speaker 4: one with a lot of people of color. Here's another one.
Speaker 4: There are plenty of Arab states. Why can't they just
Speaker 4: go there again? This is a weird, racist, dehumanizing thing
Speaker 4: to tell someone whose house you just bulldozed, like where
Speaker 4: you know, whenever you see them, like doing a big
Speaker 4: zoom ount where they go, Like there's only one Jewish
Speaker 4: state and there's all these Arab states. You know, it's
Speaker 4: like no, no, no, personally, what happened here? Don't don't
Speaker 4: you know? It's like you guy had house, Army took house,
Speaker 4: moved him to other area. That is wrong, period. You
Speaker 4: can't just say go to another Arab country. That's that's
Speaker 4: just racism. Here's another one. It's too complicated. No, it
Speaker 4: is not. Switch the rolls in your head. Use your
Speaker 4: brain for a second. Switch the roles of Jews and
Speaker 4: Palestinians in your head, and you'll have an easier time
Speaker 4: condemning the side that has powerful government and army whose
Speaker 4: crimes include genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and religious slash.
Speaker 4: Racist settler terrorism. That is not complicated. If it were
Speaker 4: the Jews who lived in Gaza getting bombed mercilessly, you
Speaker 4: would not have a problem saying what was happening was genocide.
Speaker 4: You just wouldn't just do that in your head. All right,
Speaker 4: here's another one. Zionism is an indigenous rights movement. No,
Speaker 4: it's fucking not. It's not. It is a settler colonialist movement.
Speaker 4: That is something that was made explicitly clear by the
Speaker 4: creators of modern Zionism. They not only talked about like
Speaker 4: settling and colonizing Palestine, but they referred to the Arab
Speaker 4: occupants there as the indigenous population. They they said indigenous
Speaker 4: they God, it just pisses me off. And also the
Speaker 4: indigenous argument is like, way, I just hate it in
Speaker 4: general when people go back and forth about who is
Speaker 4: indigenous there, because it's so academic. It's like it's dehumanizing
Speaker 4: and it obfuscates the whole thing because once again it
Speaker 4: is just Palestinians being like, I want to be able
Speaker 4: to vote, I want to have my house back. I
Speaker 4: literally have the key to my house. And yes, many
Speaker 4: of them literally still have the keys to their house.
Speaker 4: All right, there's there's so many, there's so many goddamn
Speaker 4: myths and propaganda that I just like that. I started
Speaker 4: a podcast about it. That's that's that's why. But like
Speaker 4: much of the stuff that you take for granted as
Speaker 4: fact is not only a historic but like wildly so.
Speaker 4: Like the IDF outnumbered the Arab States armies during the
Speaker 4: war forty eight. That is literally they say the opposite
Speaker 4: in the you know, nineteen forty eight story of the
Speaker 4: creation of Israel. It's like un created Israel. All the
Speaker 4: Arab states attacked. That is not actually what happened were
Speaker 4: not just that all the Arab states attacked, but that
Speaker 4: Israel and the IDEF overcame this gigantic horde of Arab armies.
Speaker 4: The Arab armies that were in this fight are far
Speaker 4: fewer than have been reported. You know, they say it's
Speaker 4: like seven, it was more like four, and only three
Speaker 4: of them. Only one of them had any sort of
Speaker 4: like modern military capabilities. The rest were not really armies.
Speaker 4: And also they outnumbered the IDEF outnumbered these armies in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty seven. Here's another one. Israel attacked first in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty seven. It was a preemptive strike, like famously
Speaker 4: and yet the you know, once again, the narrative around
Speaker 4: the nineteen sixty seven Six Day War is that, you know,
Speaker 4: Israel mining its own business and then Egypt along with
Speaker 4: the people Arabs. Yeah, evil Arabs attacked. The Israeli army
Speaker 4: struck first. That is a fact that they talk about.
Speaker 4: And there's it's also very very much disputed as to
Speaker 4: whether or not the Egyptian army was going to attack
Speaker 4: at all. But you know, there's no room for that
Speaker 4: narrative because it, you know, fucks up the the glorious
Speaker 4: story of what became the occupation of the West Bank
Speaker 4: and Gaza. Another one a whod Barack absolutely did not
Speaker 4: offer the Palestinians estate during Oslo. He did not, Nor
Speaker 4: did he offer ninety six percent of the West Bank.
Speaker 4: And no, Israel did not invent the fucking cherry tomato.
Speaker 4: Wait they did it. No, they did not. There was
Speaker 4: a Haaretz article about it where they're like, no, we didn't.
Speaker 4: Why do we keep saying this we didn't do that?
Speaker 9: Oh my god, that's so funny. No, I mean, so
Speaker 9: many of these talking points are some of the main
Speaker 9: arguments that Zionist will use to be like, well, they
Speaker 9: rejected this and this is what happened here, and it's
Speaker 9: just like these are all incorrect. You just like regurgitating Hasbara.
Speaker 4: Right, And it's because that his Bara has been so
Speaker 4: widely repeated and so often that it just kind of
Speaker 4: sinks in Huberac did not offer them a state in
Speaker 4: terms of what you would consider the definition definition of
Speaker 4: a state to be, you know, and that is autonomy,
Speaker 4: that is sovereignty. They were not offering them sovereignty. They
Speaker 4: weren't offering ninety six percent of the land. They had
Speaker 4: taken such a large percentage of the of it, and
Speaker 4: what they were offering was inn even smaller percentage of
Speaker 4: what they had already taken. And they the thing they
Speaker 4: were offering again, not a state, not a state, not
Speaker 4: a sovereign autonomous state. But you know, this is things
Speaker 4: people are willing to believe. And that's just that's the
Speaker 4: whole thing. And again I prefer to say it's the
Speaker 4: I am rubber, you are a glue tactic, but you
Speaker 4: know it's the same shit.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: His Bara likes to invert the victim and the victimizer.
Speaker 4: And the reason is simple. They know that the West
Speaker 4: is much more willing to believe that Jews are the
Speaker 4: victims and Arabs are oppressors.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: It's just it's playing on Western guilt and complicity in
Speaker 4: Europe during the Holocaust, and it's playing on kind of
Speaker 4: liberal sympathies in general. And honestly, it's playing on well,
Speaker 4: who do you know if you're in the West. If
Speaker 4: you're in the West, you know some Jews, maybe you
Speaker 4: don't know Arabs. The Arabs you do know are on
Speaker 4: TV doing bad, you know, And that is one of
Speaker 4: the reasons for the effectiveness of it. And in terms
Speaker 4: of like the inversion of everything, Like I think my
Speaker 4: favorite example is the is the map, So like Israel
Speaker 4: will often point to a map of the entire mina
Speaker 4: region like Middle East North Africa, and they'll highlight all
Speaker 4: of the Arab countries in green and Israel in blue
Speaker 4: to show that like, oh, Israel just a tiny is
Speaker 4: it just a tiny strip of land. It's just a
Speaker 4: small bean, you know, surrounded by big green Arab monsters,
Speaker 4: and I want to kill Israel like that. Hezbara map will
Speaker 4: like often include the West Bank and the Gaza strip
Speaker 4: in green as well, and it's a way to frame
Speaker 4: the West Bank in Gaza is not just being like this,
Speaker 4: you know, particular thing. They will be like, No, these
Speaker 4: are part of the giant invading Arab green monster, because
Speaker 4: what they're trying to do is show the power imbalance
Speaker 4: is being completely inverted from the reality here, you know,
Speaker 4: and anyone, anyone who knows you know, or anyone who's
Speaker 4: like watched the news, knows that it's ridiculously false to
Speaker 4: claim that Israel is somehow the less powerful agent here,
Speaker 4: you know, like you you don't have to have a
Speaker 4: PhD to plainly see the disproportionate power imbalance. Like there's Israel,
Speaker 4: a modern, you know, well armed military, cutting edge technology,
Speaker 4: backing and funding of the world's most powerful state, most
Speaker 4: powerful superpower, the United States, and then there is Hamas.
Speaker 4: That doesn't make Hamas the good guys or whatever I'm saying,
Speaker 4: it's just a clear indication of the power imbalance. You know,
Speaker 4: there is a clear power imbalance. And I think, like
Speaker 4: to what you were saying, the last one hundred plus
Speaker 4: days have made it perfectly clear that for all the
Speaker 4: talk of like the Arab States supporting Palestinians, like, it's
Speaker 4: clear Israel could literally genocide Palaestinians in broad daylight in
Speaker 4: the Arab states who do nothing. There's no giant Arab
Speaker 4: green monster that is protecting the Palestinian like the Palastinians.
Speaker 4: Only Arab comrades right now are the Houthis in Yemen
Speaker 4: and Hasbollah in Lebanon, both of which are non government
Speaker 4: militant organizations. They are not like, it is not the
Speaker 4: state of Yemen who is supporting the Palaestinians. It's not
Speaker 4: the state of Lebanon. It is these militant states within
Speaker 4: states pretty much. And yeah, so it's like you have
Speaker 4: to remember when Israel claims were just they were a
Speaker 4: small state the size of New Jersey, you know, in
Speaker 4: a tough neighborhood, and trying to make you know, the
Speaker 4: West Bank and Gaza look like the spear's tip of
Speaker 4: an Arab invasion. You have to remember that's not the case.
Speaker 4: The truth of it is is like you want to
Speaker 4: talk about how small Israel is, look how small the
Speaker 4: Gaza strip is, and that you know alone to like
Speaker 4: look at that pick sure, to know they are surrounded
Speaker 4: and to see that there's no way out. That I
Speaker 4: think changes the narrative for people. And it's a narrative
Speaker 4: that the Israelis don't like to show. They don't like
Speaker 4: to show the West Bank, and you know, in terms
Speaker 4: of how it is cut into cantons that are basically
Speaker 4: everything is surrounded by Israeli settlements in Israeli military.
Speaker 9: They took the best agricultural lands for themselves, you know
Speaker 9: what I mean, Like they really And also I think
Speaker 9: talking about seeing the Gaza on a map, it's really
Speaker 9: infuriating to me because I feel like in the last
Speaker 9: couple of months more people have seen what Gaza looks
Speaker 9: like on a map than ever before. And we see
Speaker 9: how fucking small it is, and it's described as being
Speaker 9: five miles at one point, like from the sea to
Speaker 9: the whatever, and it's still not enough able, you know,
Speaker 9: it's to the wall, literally to the wall. But like
Speaker 9: it's just even seeing how mini school it is is
Speaker 9: still not enough for people to be like, oh, thirty
Speaker 9: thousand people dying in this little strip of land.
Speaker 4: We should think about that, right, Yeah, No, I mean no,
Speaker 4: it's it is it is. My point is basically to
Speaker 4: dispel the idea that, like the Hesbara has been Israel,
Speaker 4: small therefore deserves support and people standing with it because small,
Speaker 4: because it's small, scary because baby puppy because a little
Speaker 4: little you know, please help, and that visual is just
Speaker 4: such a it's such a gross lie. And you know,
Speaker 4: you've anything to make the Palestinians, you know, seem bigger
Speaker 4: than they are is helpful for Israel. And that's why
Speaker 4: they do it. You know, this is this is a
Speaker 4: way to invert the victim and the victimizer. And it's
Speaker 4: clear as day. Other things that are clear as day,
Speaker 4: these products and services that we're going to be selling.
Speaker 4: So stick around, we'll be right back and we're back again.
Speaker 4: People in the West, by and large, prefer the Israeli explanation.
Speaker 4: They're fine living in this alternate reality. And you know,
Speaker 4: people believe it for like a variety of reasons. Some
Speaker 4: people because they were raised to believe it, some people
Speaker 4: because they just want to believe it. But I think
Speaker 4: mostly most people in the West just don't really care
Speaker 4: enough about like Palestinians to like look into it, like
Speaker 4: they're you know, they're just it's one of many news
Speaker 4: stories too. I think a lot of people it's easy
Speaker 4: to put in a box and to be honest, you know,
Speaker 4: like wouldn't that be nice to be able to compartmentalize
Speaker 4: like it would for me. Shit, it would make me
Speaker 4: way less stressed if I could just not care. And
Speaker 4: that's not to like call out anyone who doesn't care,
Speaker 4: because I do think that it is absolutely human and
Speaker 4: valid to have some things that you just don't have
Speaker 4: emotional capacity to care about. I think my issue is
Speaker 4: not whether or not people are, like, you know, supporting
Speaker 4: Palisine on their social media or whatnot. My issue is
Speaker 4: whether or not they're just going to allow themselves to
Speaker 4: be manipulated and then end up defending the indefensible because
Speaker 4: of it. Like if you're if you're not going to
Speaker 4: say nothing, don't do hasbara. That's my that's my feeling
Speaker 4: about it. But yeah, you know, people want to put
Speaker 4: in a box. Beyond that, I think there's also no
Speaker 4: incentive for a lot of people to believe in it.
Speaker 4: In fact, even question who are the victims and the
Speaker 4: victimizers in the whole Israeli Palestine quote unquote conflict, like
Speaker 4: it brings up a dark, twisted irony that most people
Speaker 4: don't even want to entertain. You know, people don't want
Speaker 4: to think about that stuff. And it also it people
Speaker 4: worry about whether or not they're going to get in trouble.
Speaker 4: And that brings me to another part of this speech
Speaker 4: I found from the Middle East Policy Council about haspara quote.
Speaker 4: It also seeks to actively inculcate canons of political correctness
Speaker 4: in Domesican foreign media and audiences that will promote self
Speaker 4: censorship by them. It strives thereby to decrease the willingness
Speaker 4: of audiences to consider information linked to politically unacceptable viewpoints,
Speaker 4: individuals and groups, and to inhibit the circulation of adverse
Speaker 4: information and social networks. It focuses on limiting the receptivity
Speaker 4: of audiences to information. So Hasbar is fucking Orwellian, that is,
Speaker 4: I think one of the things that interests me about
Speaker 4: it a lot is how Orwellian it is. You know,
Speaker 4: it goes beyond mere branding when the Israeli government and
Speaker 4: pro Israel institutions like so effectively mold the parameters of
Speaker 4: what is and isn't politically correct, not just like in
Speaker 4: their own country, but in other countries in the West.
Speaker 4: Like think about the self censorship that you the listener
Speaker 4: do around this issue. Think about the times you wanted
Speaker 4: to say something but didn't because you didn't know the
Speaker 4: exact right way to say it, you know, like how
Speaker 4: how to put it, And like, think about the times
Speaker 4: that you were reading something critical of Israel by someone
Speaker 4: you trust and agree with, and one sentence or one
Speaker 4: word or one turn of phrase triggered you into questioning
Speaker 4: not validity of the thing you were reading, but like
Speaker 4: the nature of the person who wrote it. Think about
Speaker 4: your reaction to me saying these things about Israel, and
Speaker 4: about how you felt when Sharen made a lot of
Speaker 4: these points on some other episode of this podcast, you know,
Speaker 4: like think about why that changes things for you. And
Speaker 4: like there was a time where I was also uncomfortable
Speaker 4: and like I would only feel comfortable at hearing criticism
Speaker 4: and doing criticism of Israel in the presence of other Jews,
Speaker 4: Like it had to be in a you know, private
Speaker 4: all Jewish Facebook group or in like in person or
Speaker 4: through text messages. Like I was so suspicious of the
Speaker 4: secret motives of non Jewish people criticizing Israel, right, Like,
Speaker 4: like someone could literally say something that I one hundred
Speaker 4: percent agreed with, something that I myself had said, and
Speaker 4: then I would still get this icky feeling from them
Speaker 4: saying it, like yeah, but why are they saying it
Speaker 4: like why do you care? Like that is probably Hasbara's
Speaker 4: greatest success to relegate the issue of Palestinian human and
Speaker 4: civil rights to a niche subject that is best talked
Speaker 4: about in private and only by Jews. So I mean, Sarene,
Speaker 4: I know that, Like for you, you've got you get
Speaker 4: shipped for this, you know, I do.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I feel like I'm done qualifying in my real
Speaker 9: life especially and also just like in work. I'm done
Speaker 9: qualifying whether or not something I say is or is
Speaker 9: not whatever, because I'm if I'm even entertaining the idea
Speaker 9: that criticizing Israel is anti Semitic, that's like feeding the fire.
Speaker 9: I don't want to even bring that into I don't
Speaker 9: want to associate that religion and of course the state
Speaker 9: of Israel. And I feel like the more we have
Speaker 9: those disclaimers, the more it's conflated. And I've definitely, I mean,
Speaker 9: I've had a lot of anti Zionist Jewish people on
Speaker 9: the show, almost almost to like show people that like,
Speaker 9: listen to these people with actual experience.
Speaker 4: Yes, and that's not to it's not to you know,
Speaker 4: say you shouldn't. None of this is me saying like, hey,
Speaker 4: you shouldn't listen to anti Zionist Jews or whatnot, or
Speaker 4: just like you know, like or you shouldn't be discerning
Speaker 4: about who you're getting your information for, because yeah, there
Speaker 4: are Nazis who are you know, wrap themselves in the
Speaker 4: guise of being anti Israel or like you know, anti
Speaker 4: occupation or whatnot. That none of this is putting down
Speaker 4: anyone for being discerning or being careful, but it's to
Speaker 4: say that like Hasbara has quite an effect on even
Speaker 4: the most conscious of people. Like making zion and Judaism
Speaker 4: synonymous and like practically indistinguishable is like one of his
Speaker 4: Bar's like greatest achievements, presenting Jewish support of Israel as
Speaker 4: monolithic save for like a few cranks you know, who
Speaker 4: are the exception that proved the rule. You know, like
Speaker 4: non Jews don't want to criticize criticize Israel because they
Speaker 4: don't want to upset their Jewish friends, or they don't
Speaker 4: want to be labeled an anti Semite. You know. It's like,
Speaker 4: you know, after the large public outcry about Israel's brutal
Speaker 4: response to the homosterous attacks of October seventh, there was
Speaker 4: a big push among his Bars to frame all Jews
Speaker 4: of the world as feeling abandoned by the left and
Speaker 4: abandoned by their friends. You had people like Brett Gelman,
Speaker 4: Oh my god, from a stranger walking dumps, I hate
Speaker 4: him so much. Oh my god, fucking Wooly Willie over
Speaker 4: here going on Instagram being like, hey, fake woke former friends,
Speaker 4: and like he gave a speech at the like Stand
Speaker 4: with Israel March that was something like the Jews don't
Speaker 4: need you, like presenting the you know, the idea of
Speaker 4: people criticizing Israel, or like not wanting at the very
Speaker 4: least not wanting the complete obliteration of Palestinians in Gaza,
Speaker 4: framing that as like, oh, well, all the Jews want that,
Speaker 4: you know, like his whole thing of being like the
Speaker 4: Jews don't need you, as if he and Israel represented
Speaker 4: all Jews, like presenting the Jews of the world as
Speaker 4: a monolith, as if non Zionist or anti Zionist Jews
Speaker 4: don't even exist, as if we all felt this way,
Speaker 4: Like you don't want to hate Jews, do you? Of course,
Speaker 4: if you don't, then you gotta let Israel do whatever
Speaker 4: the hell it wants.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 9: I think what really bothers me about him, I mean
Speaker 9: everything bothers me about him. But like people like him,
Speaker 9: they'll sometimes preface what they're saying with, hey, I care
Speaker 9: about Palestinians and then continue on their their whatever tirade.
Speaker 9: There's ionis bullshit, and it's like, it's just it really
Speaker 9: boggles my mind because I think he thinks he's a
Speaker 9: good person. I really think that he believes he's a
Speaker 9: good person, when really he's just a piece of shit
Speaker 9: that does not see a huge group of people as
Speaker 9: human beings.
Speaker 4: Yes, does not see people as human. And this is
Speaker 4: something that you I think that anyone who's like a
Speaker 4: self described liberal or leftist or whatever would be able
Speaker 4: to easily recognize in any other situation. But it's just
Speaker 4: it's it's it's clouded in this particular situation because of
Speaker 4: this conflation, because you are willing to believe that Jews
Speaker 4: are sort of a mono like monolithically agree with Israel.
Speaker 4: Like they may be like a little bit like liberal
Speaker 4: Zionists or whatnot, but mostly you know, they all love Israel,
Speaker 4: and that is is is not true, and it's it's
Speaker 4: a way of like more so, it feeds into the
Speaker 4: continuing conflation. It feeds into this hasbara that Israel represents
Speaker 4: all Jews, and I am telling you right now it doesn't.
Speaker 4: And I don't think I'm telling anyone something they don't
Speaker 4: already know. Like I think people know, Zionism is not Judaism.
Speaker 9: I think you've said that many times on this podcast,
Speaker 9: trust me.
Speaker 4: Yea, at this point you should know.
Speaker 9: If you don't know that by now, please.
Speaker 4: Yes, learn it now. But like you know, Jews, both
Speaker 4: inside and outside of Israel, have a diverse range of
Speaker 4: views about the Israeli government. That's not to say that
Speaker 4: Jews in Israel do not, for the most part, you know,
Speaker 4: support the government at least or support the project of Zionism.
Speaker 4: But that is like, to me, that's to be expected.
Speaker 4: It's to be expected that it's like fucking nine to eleven,
Speaker 4: you know. I it weird to not expect the kind
Speaker 4: of racist jingoism that you saw like after nine to eleven,
Speaker 4: you know, in fucking America. And I feel like that
Speaker 4: was the majority of people. Was that kind of like
Speaker 4: like seething anti Arab hatred. And I'm not excusing it,
Speaker 4: but what I'm saying is that Jews have a diverse
Speaker 4: range of views inside and outside of Israel, and a
Speaker 4: lot of it includes wanting a ceasefire. And that's why
Speaker 4: you see it in these Jewish organizations that are trying
Speaker 4: to end the occupation. They're trying they are openly critiquing Israel,
Speaker 4: that are calling Zionism racism. You see it, and you
Speaker 4: see it because they because we're honestly trying to change
Speaker 4: this narrative. We're trying to stop people from believing this
Speaker 4: lie that the Jewish people are synonymous with the state
Speaker 4: of Israel.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I think that's why Jewish and I mean
Speaker 9: I've said this many times as well, but Jewish antaisionists
Speaker 9: are like a very integral part of the movement to
Speaker 9: liberate Palestine because it's again, it's not a Palestinian issue,
Speaker 9: it's not a Muslim issue. It's it's a very human
Speaker 9: issue to care about people not being fucking genocided.
Speaker 4: Yes, another thing that's pretty clear is how good the
Speaker 4: products are that we sell here at Cool Zone. So
Speaker 4: let's stick around, listen to these ads and we'll be
Speaker 4: right back. And we're back. So I want to say
Speaker 4: to everyone listening, I understand that the impulse to treat
Speaker 4: the subject of Israel with more caution and care. Is
Speaker 4: rooted in respect for the Jewish people and a desire
Speaker 4: to stand firmly against anti Semitism, and that is that
Speaker 4: is a good thing. I encourage that one hundred percent
Speaker 4: you respecting Jewish people and wanting to stand firmly against
Speaker 4: anti Semitism, wanting to fight it with every fiber of
Speaker 4: your being. You are correct and feeling that way, and
Speaker 4: I want to encourage it. And I also need you
Speaker 4: to understand that it's for that very reason that I
Speaker 4: urge people to speak out about Israel, because I believe
Speaker 4: Israel and there has Baris mouthpieces and the project of
Speaker 4: political Zionism are inherently anti Semitic, and not in like
Speaker 4: the semantic sense where it's like Arabs are also semi
Speaker 4: So it's an argument I've heard. I'm not talking about that.
Speaker 4: I'm talking about anti Jewish, specifically anti Jewish. They actively
Speaker 4: work to create fear amongst diaspora Jews, make us distrust
Speaker 4: our friends, our neighbors, our co work, our fellow Jews.
Speaker 4: Even they tell us that, you know, they tell Jews
Speaker 4: that unless they support Israel, they are not real Jews,
Speaker 4: you know, or they are self hating Jews. They use
Speaker 4: our past traumas against us. They re traumatize us and
Speaker 4: manipulate us like it's classic abuser shit. It is, it
Speaker 4: is abuse. It's it's cult shit too, and they even
Speaker 4: deal in Nazi revisionism. And it's it's so important to
Speaker 4: point this out because you see the way that they,
Speaker 4: the Israeli government uses the Nazi you know, accusation in
Speaker 4: order to do a genocide. I mean you see constantly,
Speaker 4: you know, in the last three four months, videos from
Speaker 4: the IDF showing, you know, an iPad they found in
Speaker 4: a teen girls bedroom, and you know, they open it
Speaker 4: up and there's the wallpaper of the iPad is is
Speaker 4: Hitler's face. And you look at that, and you're supposed
Speaker 4: to go, oh my god, I can't I can't believe that,
Speaker 4: and you forget to question what the fuck an Israeli
Speaker 4: soldier is doing in a seventeen year old girls bedroom.
Speaker 4: Why is it blown up? And why why is he
Speaker 4: going through her stuff like that? You stop looking at
Speaker 4: what is actually happening, and you start looking at what
Speaker 4: the Hasbaris want you to look at. They want you
Speaker 4: to see the Hitler thing and go like, oh man,
Speaker 4: this is a whole society of little Hitlers, and I
Speaker 4: you know, I look at that and I see the
Speaker 4: way they cynically use that. While at the same time,
Speaker 4: you know, Benjamin net Yahoo has been pushing this line
Speaker 4: claiming that the Holocaust was essentially the Palestinian's idea. I mean,
Speaker 4: this is something that has been gaining more and more
Speaker 4: traction in like sort of this new Israel Palestine, like
Speaker 4: a historical narrative that's been pushed about, like you know,
Speaker 4: the Mufti and is and Hitler meeting up together and
Speaker 4: being like, have you ever thought about killing the Jews?
Speaker 4: And Hitler was like, I never thought about that before.
Speaker 4: That's so smart. Wow, thank you Palestinians. Like total bullshit,
Speaker 4: totally revising, like trying to do fucking like I don't
Speaker 4: know apology of for literally, Hitler is anti Semitic. I
Speaker 4: don't care how you slice it. It is. And that's
Speaker 4: something that the Israeli government deals in. They deal in
Speaker 4: anti Semitism all the time. I mean, essentially, Israel tells
Speaker 4: the world that Jews are a third column, loyal to
Speaker 4: Israel first and foremost, and tells Jews that our home
Speaker 4: isn't our home. They say this to us, and you
Speaker 4: know that due to our traditions and our blood, you know,
Speaker 4: we are just merely guests in any other place. This
Speaker 4: is like an old racist worldview from a previous century,
Speaker 4: filled with blood and soil fascism, you know, and like
Speaker 4: for me, like growing up in a mixed secular family,
Speaker 4: you know, where I'm like, yeah, I'm like culturally Jewish
Speaker 4: and I'm ethnically Jewish, but I'm like a blood jew essentially,
Speaker 4: you know, like and as like the very fact of
Speaker 4: me having Jewish blood was used by fascists to murder
Speaker 4: us during the Holocaust. Now under Israel's Law of Return,
Speaker 4: that very same Jewish blood is being used by fascists
Speaker 4: as a passport to allow me to move to Israel
Speaker 4: and displace an entire Palestinian family if I choose to, like,
Speaker 4: you know, being religiously Jewish doesn't have anything to do
Speaker 4: with my ability to do this, and my blood is
Speaker 4: my passport to you apartheid. That's why I choose to
Speaker 4: talk about this stuff. You know, if you're going to
Speaker 4: use my blood to make me complicit in crimes, the
Speaker 4: crimes of your state, then I'm gonna have something to
Speaker 4: say about it. You know. So my final piece of
Speaker 4: haspara has to do with something that has been said
Speaker 4: over and over again by countless Zionis, including the current
Speaker 4: President of these United States of America, Joe Biden. Folks,
Speaker 4: were there no Israel, there wouldn't be a Jewish the
Speaker 4: world was safe. The idea that the state of Israel
Speaker 4: alone can keep the Jewish people safe is an insane
Speaker 4: piece of haspara. It is a total, utter anti Semitic bullshit.
Speaker 4: A Jewish state does not and cannot keep Jewish people safe.
Speaker 4: Tying the fate of the Jewish state to the Jewish
Speaker 4: people is a recipe for fucking disaster. The Jewish people
Speaker 4: are a nation that has lasted thousands of years. Nations
Speaker 4: meaning like a people with a common origin, history, language, culture, customs,
Speaker 4: and religion and or religion. You know, it can be
Speaker 4: any of those things. And for a long long time
Speaker 4: we were one of many stateless nations that existed. And
Speaker 4: that's not to say that, you know, Israel shouldn't exist
Speaker 4: or whatever. But more importantly, what I'm saying is that
Speaker 4: Jews should exist, whether they happen to be located anywhere,
Speaker 4: like wherever they are, Jews should should exist. The existence
Speaker 4: of the state of Israel, to me is not the question,
Speaker 4: and that is not what Israel claims to do. They ensure,
Speaker 4: they claim to ensure the existence of the Jewish people,
Speaker 4: but they do not. All they do is try to
Speaker 4: bolster the existence of their state. And it should not
Speaker 4: be common thought that the existence of Israel and the
Speaker 4: existence of Jews are the same thing is I can
Speaker 4: personally think of nothing more dangerous for any people than
Speaker 4: to tie their entire survival to something as impermanent as
Speaker 4: a fucking state. And that is the truth about Israel.
Speaker 4: So you know, all this to say that I'm a
Speaker 4: I guess I'm an anarchist. Now there's one thing that
Speaker 4: you know, getting into the whole Israel palasine thing will
Speaker 4: do to you. It turns you very quickly into someone
Speaker 4: who believes the existence of states is the problem. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: so that's that's me. That's how I feel about stuff.
Speaker 9: I'm so glad you did this series for us. Where
Speaker 9: can't people hear you do the same thing? But what
Speaker 9: by yourself? With other people?
Speaker 4: You can? You can hear me? Do you know these
Speaker 4: talking about Israel and stuff? On my new podcast, bad
Speaker 4: has Bara, The world's most moral podcast. It's a it's
Speaker 4: a comedy podcast about hilarious Israeli propaganda that I that
Speaker 4: I find that are you know, listeners find and you know,
Speaker 4: I have on my friends like Charine, I had you on,
Speaker 4: I had an on, I had all sorts of great
Speaker 4: anti Zionist Jews and some really amazing Palestinian guests. Or
Speaker 4: at least by the time this comes out, I assume
Speaker 4: those episodes will have come out. I you know, I
Speaker 4: don't know when those are coming out. But anyways, I've
Speaker 4: only been doing the podcast for a month and it's
Speaker 4: it's been a lot of fun. It's been cathartic, and
Speaker 4: it's been hard, and it's definitely been you know, like
Speaker 4: caused some stress in my life because you know, looking
Speaker 4: for this content you have to dig through a lot
Speaker 4: of really horrific shit. So yeah, check out bad as
Speaker 4: Bara or you know, check me out met leave jokes
Speaker 4: on Instagram, and go to sacrament Know punchline March seventeenth, Sunday,
Speaker 4: seven pm, Me and my wife, my wife. Just if
Speaker 4: you're in teeny we're gonna be co headlining there, So
Speaker 4: get your tickets now. Link in the notes. Yay no
Speaker 4: thank you so much.
Speaker 9: I really enjoy your podcast, the most SPORL podcast, I
Speaker 9: would say in the.
Speaker 4: World for sure. Thank you for you know, give me
Speaker 4: the opportunity to talk about this. And you know, I
Speaker 4: promise you that the show, The Badass Bar Show is funny.
Speaker 4: I swear to god, it's funny.
Speaker 9: It's very cathartic. You are you're correct in that. It's
Speaker 9: very cathartic to just like event with your friends and
Speaker 9: people think the same things as you, especially if you're
Speaker 9: surrounded by someone or people that are kind of purposely
Speaker 9: ignorant or whatever.
Speaker 4: You know. So, yeah, when you're surrounded by people who
Speaker 4: don't want to either don't want to engage with this
Speaker 4: at all, or I'm mad at you for even partially
Speaker 4: engaging with it, it's nice to find the people that
Speaker 4: you know in love and like to joke around with
Speaker 4: and be like, we're we're not crazy, right exactly, and
Speaker 4: then we go, yeah, we're not, and then we have
Speaker 4: a good time. Yeah, check that out, and thank you
Speaker 4: and thank you to everyone. A cool zon media.
Speaker 9: Yay, Yeah, go follow Matt, Go see Matt and his
Speaker 9: uh my crush his wife, don't tell her, and yeah
Speaker 9: they're they're really doing the work and I really appreciate
Speaker 9: both of you guys just being really outspoken always, and
Speaker 9: so yeah, follow their lead, keep talking about Palestine. There's
Speaker 9: still a fucking genocide happening. And that's the episode.
Speaker 4: All right, bye everyone, Hi Pree Palestine pre Palestine.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 8: It Could Happen here as production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 9: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 9: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 9: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 9: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 9: Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.