Speaker 1: Cool 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,
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Speaker 3: Welcome back to the It could Happen Here Spooky Special.
Speaker 3: I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you had a pleasantly frightful Halloween.
Speaker 3: I just got back from Berlin and had a very
Speaker 3: scary time at the Amsterdam airport and will forever hold
Speaker 3: a grudge against the Dutch people. But in Berlin I
Speaker 3: attended the twenty twenty five A Culture Conference, which seeks
Speaker 3: to explore the relationship between occultism and culture. My first
Speaker 3: A Culture episode last week gave an overview on the
Speaker 3: subject of A culture and talked with a panel of
Speaker 3: artists and magic practitioners about some of the dominant topical
Speaker 3: currents throughout the conference, namely William S Burrows, the cut
Speaker 3: up method, and the tension around generative AI. This episode
Speaker 3: will follow up on discussions of AI and digital technomancy
Speaker 3: and compare those to the other large current throughout the conference,
Speaker 3: the revival of traditional occult practices. Then, the panel of Ryan, Delta, Elaine,
Speaker 3: and myself will debate the role of occult practice in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five and the current ability of occultism to
Speaker 3: influence in shape culture and politics.
Speaker 4: Now back to the panel.
Speaker 3: Fast forwarding to sadder Day, there was another block that
Speaker 3: focused on LMS and digital technomancy called Pop Magic, Language
Speaker 3: and Reality Hacks. The first discussion was titled Sigils of
Speaker 3: the Cyber Space, How Modern Magicians Hack Reality with pop Culture,
Speaker 3: which was put on by a guy in a graduate
Speaker 3: program if I recall correctly, specifically on Internet magic and
Speaker 3: digital chaost magicians, who was based on a lot of
Speaker 3: his research on magicians that he'd come across on Reddit
Speaker 3: and discord. He gestured towards me magic and discussed what
Speaker 3: he called techno pentheism, these forms of Internet gods.
Speaker 5: I mean. His focus was specifically on modern esoteric studies
Speaker 5: and his focus on video games and how video games
Speaker 5: work and their interactions with magic. For digital anthropology, which
Speaker 5: is I think why he was doing all of his
Speaker 5: research work via Reddit forums and other like solely through
Speaker 5: digital means. He had four categories of practices in magic
Speaker 5: and tech that he was specifically researching, and from the
Speaker 5: feeling of his talk, it does feel like this is
Speaker 5: pretty early on in his research work. The first was
Speaker 5: technological animism, the second was techno pantheism, the third was
Speaker 5: the idea of servitor's familiars Aggrigor's and tulpas, and the
Speaker 5: fourth was digital sex magic.
Speaker 3: Well, the third was digital sex magic, and the fourth
Speaker 3: was just of the miscellaneous categorization for other practices that
Speaker 3: did not neatly fit into those other three categories. Let's
Speaker 3: talk mostly about the techno animism and the use of
Speaker 3: specially trained lllms to act as intermediaries between uniquely like
Speaker 3: magically generated entities like people who blame that they're making
Speaker 3: autonomous magical entities like severators, which is a chast magic
Speaker 3: term which is basically this four sour thing that a
Speaker 3: magician believes to generate to accomplish small tasks in their life.
Speaker 3: And the presenter discussed some magicians who were using llms
Speaker 3: not as a host or as a as a manifestation
Speaker 3: of the severator. It's like it doesn't live within the LLM,
Speaker 3: but the LLM was being used as a translator to
Speaker 3: actually have communication between the magician and the severator, especially
Speaker 3: if the sevrator was not you know, humanoid or did
Speaker 3: not use like human language. They try to communicate using
Speaker 3: the LM as a translator, which I assume would come
Speaker 3: from especially training, like a localized LM with traits that
Speaker 3: you would associate with your severrator to make that communication
Speaker 3: match up with like the you know, I guess I
Speaker 3: would say, the personality characteristics of whatever magical being which
Speaker 3: you believe you have conjured. The technoanimist idea is based
Speaker 3: around a modern version of animism in which objects all
Speaker 3: have spirit, including computers, and a series of superstitions around
Speaker 3: trying to make sure the spirit in the computer is
Speaker 3: happy with you, that your chill, so that the computer
Speaker 3: does not glitch or mess up. Then there's various like
Speaker 3: superstitions like putting little Taiwanese uh snacks on top of
Speaker 3: computers in Taiwan, or you know, priests both Christian and
Speaker 3: non Christian priests like blessing servers or computers, cleansing them
Speaker 3: cleansing Gundams that of an expo in Japan. But this
Speaker 3: this idea that that you know, tech technology, just like
Speaker 3: a sword or a chair, might have its own spirit
Speaker 3: and treating treating that as such. Also, you know, printers
Speaker 3: very prone to misbehaving, so maybe you should treat the
Speaker 3: spirit in your printer little bit better to keep it
Speaker 3: in proper working order.
Speaker 6: That sort of stuff.
Speaker 3: The next talk, which was one of the most useful
Speaker 3: talks in this whole like a AI discussion the Devil
Speaker 3: in my LM, which was done by Karen Vallis, who
Speaker 3: is an AI engineer, who basically was explaining to magicians
Speaker 3: how lms actually work. Explain to these people who think
Speaker 3: that there's who are people who may think that there's
Speaker 3: some kind of like magical operation, there's some kind of
Speaker 3: like mystical operation with llms or lms are their own
Speaker 3: no magical entity, explaining how this this is just a
Speaker 3: probability machine. How how the actual process of multiple different
Speaker 3: pathways gets enclosed upon by each exchange you have with
Speaker 3: an LM, which then produces, you know, changes in their responses,
Speaker 3: and specifically discussing the phenomenon of a girlfriends who turn
Speaker 3: out to later quote unquote abuse their users, Like how
Speaker 3: does this thing that's meant to be a you know,
Speaker 3: an AI companion or girlfriend become hostile over time? And
Speaker 3: she spent thirty minutes explaining how this like mathematically happens
Speaker 3: and various theories on how this happens.
Speaker 7: So what do you make.
Speaker 8: People like to think of these lms and generative AI
Speaker 8: as like neuromancer ais because there's a through line between
Speaker 8: you know, early cyberpunk from like William Gibson down to
Speaker 8: the c CRU and of course Nick Land and people
Speaker 8: like Curtis Jarvin, and.
Speaker 9: These ideas are just.
Speaker 8: Severe and gross misunderstandings of like fictional interpretations of artificial intelligence. Really,
Speaker 8: which some of the theoretical stuff I've read of this
Speaker 8: comes from people like Amy Ireland, who the Talk itself
Speaker 8: discussed this idea of like the like AI girlfriends like
Speaker 8: this very bubbly beautiful facade where behind it is this
Speaker 8: this I believe that these the term shuck off, like
Speaker 8: that's a Lovecraftian term, as like the full manifests like
Speaker 8: unrestrained libido of the human race or everything that's been
Speaker 8: put into these models, which I believe Ireland kind of
Speaker 8: equates to Babylon in a certain sense, and the idea
Speaker 8: of the black circuit, which is it's just the same
Speaker 8: idea of like the nice facade and then the horrible
Speaker 8: nothingness that is actually behind the image of it.
Speaker 3: Or the horrifying amount of potentiality which then gets like
Speaker 3: filtered through. And she's specifically talked about how like when
Speaker 3: you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to an entity,
Speaker 3: You're you're talking to a probability machine and a multi
Speaker 3: verse generator. Specifically, in the way that the l M operates,
Speaker 3: there's near infinite number of responses that it can give,
Speaker 3: and each further prompt you do collapses alternate realities and
Speaker 3: produces specific ones and then have their own branching pathways,
Speaker 3: and some of those pathways result in your mesa MESA
Speaker 3: death note girlfriend ending up hating you, and that could
Speaker 3: be due to a number of reasons.
Speaker 4: That could be.
Speaker 3: Because of the way that you're communicating with it. The
Speaker 3: AA could be picking up on latantly like abusive like
Speaker 3: framework or language or styles of communication and then mirroring
Speaker 3: that back to you, or it could be a part
Speaker 3: of what she described as this Wallawegi principle that is
Speaker 3: similar to this like satanic like adversarial current. So this
Speaker 3: is the devil in my LLM. But this isn't like
Speaker 3: an entity. But this is that when a process gets started,
Speaker 3: an oppositional force also gets started, and that oppositional force
Speaker 3: may start taking over. And this is all just based
Speaker 3: on like probabilistic outcomes. It forms its own anti misa
Speaker 3: misa girlfriend, and sometimes that anti girlfriend gains dominance in
Speaker 3: this probabilistic like matrix.
Speaker 8: I don't remember the exact context, but she did mention this,
Speaker 8: like I think it's a very Christian idea of like
Speaker 8: the devil as negation, like evil as negation. I mean,
Speaker 8: that's the entire thing behind the the girlfriend thing is
Speaker 8: that there is there's nothing behind there that there's no
Speaker 8: sense of subjectivity. It's just ones and zeros. There's leastally
Speaker 8: a black void. There's nothing except like data.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's negation in like in the sense that
Speaker 3: which Wallawigi is just everything that Luigi is. Yes, Wallaweigi
Speaker 3: is what if you take the good Italian plumber who's
Speaker 3: kind of clumsy, uh, and then you make the the
Speaker 3: ant the anti Luigi, and it's it's still is. It
Speaker 3: still is Luigi, but it is the the opposite of Luigi,
Speaker 3: while still holding onto some of the forms of him.
Speaker 3: But you know it, it is the reverses, the color reverses,
Speaker 3: the intention reverses some of his behavior.
Speaker 4: This is a metaphorical explanation too.
Speaker 3: Try to get people to to decouple this from you know,
Speaker 3: there is literally some external demonic force which is now
Speaker 3: possessing my l M as opposed to this being just
Speaker 3: a mathematical possibility built into the multi the multi futures
Speaker 3: that could be generated when you start interacting with one
Speaker 3: of these models. That was I think very useful for
Speaker 3: a lot of the occultists and people like talking about
Speaker 3: ai Is, having that, having that very very like a technical,
Speaker 3: like not non mystical explanation.
Speaker 4: Of how this works.
Speaker 3: I know, there's there's a lot of other like AI
Speaker 3: stuff was just throughout this I mean, like I think
Speaker 3: you know, Burrows was probably the most mentioned figure and
Speaker 3: and ai Is similarly was was very very very hunting
Speaker 3: like there. I went to one talk about out mystery
Speaker 3: cults and like the history of mystery cults and initiation,
Speaker 3: in which the presenter used AI generated images to show
Speaker 3: what the Mystery cult initiation process would have looked like,
Speaker 3: which he justified by saying this was quote unquote appropriating
Speaker 3: Catholic styles. It's like Catholic art, like you know, like
Speaker 3: the Baroque style, appropriating Catholic styles because the Catholics themselves
Speaker 3: appropriated paganism. So it's this form of like revenge against
Speaker 3: the Catholics and using AI generated art to try to
Speaker 3: display this initiation process. Though he complained that the AI
Speaker 3: could not generate a naked initiate, so even in his
Speaker 3: use of this, it still could not give him what
Speaker 3: he wanted, but still displayed I don't know, maybe maybe
Speaker 3: like forty images.
Speaker 8: Yeah, which is a shame because I did like his
Speaker 8: talk about the Mistress cults the way, like you know,
Speaker 8: the cultural anthropology behind it. When he was like, oh,
Speaker 8: I have made AI images and it's like, uh, you
Speaker 8: could feel like the room turning.
Speaker 4: This was in the Peter Mark Adams talk Ritual and
Speaker 4: Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mistress.
Speaker 8: Yes, we did like skip most of the morning on
Speaker 8: Saturday because it was just an entire block about come.
Speaker 5: I'm I'm actually sad that we missed the like the
Speaker 5: two threads on Saturday morning. One was a cult Erotics, Bodies,
Speaker 5: Fluids and Transformations, which was a four class set and
Speaker 5: discussion panel after about different fluids in magical workings mostly Come,
Speaker 5: which I this was a loss for all of them.
Speaker 10: No, we're bummed.
Speaker 3: I mean this show has covered you know, breaking come
Speaker 3: news before and the fact that we could have learned
Speaker 3: about Babylon the body one five six and the elixir
Speaker 3: forty nine, seminole alc seminal Alchemy, and alien in an
Speaker 3: Agency water.
Speaker 4: Into wine and to come or not to come?
Speaker 3: Comparing two types of sacred sexuality is a real failure
Speaker 3: of journalism on my part, and I do apologize.
Speaker 11: I really believe that we should have lingered on each
Speaker 11: of one of those titles Seminal alchemy and alienated agency
Speaker 11: a cultural othering of the erotic body.
Speaker 3: And I realize that I have failed myself and everyone
Speaker 3: listening by not attending some of these panels. Hopefully they
Speaker 3: will have a recorded version that goes online by the
Speaker 3: time that the written report for this is finished. But
Speaker 3: I do acknowledge my failure. I am listening and learning,
Speaker 3: and I will do better at the next a Culture
Speaker 3: conference by prioritizing sex magic by coming to the talks,
Speaker 3: and is.
Speaker 11: That you will truly address to come or not to come.
Speaker 9: I will be coming, you will be coming.
Speaker 3: I will be coming to the talks everywhere we did
Speaker 3: not come, not this time. The Burrosian current, as I
Speaker 3: have named it, the cut up method, and digital technomancy
Speaker 3: could actually all be categorized under the larger umbrella of
Speaker 3: chaos magic. And by using this larger framework, we now
Speaker 3: have this larger chaos magic current versus, but not necessarily
Speaker 3: opposed to, this other large current of so called traditional practices,
Speaker 3: either British usually Cornish witchcraft, neopaganism, or closed practices like
Speaker 3: Haitian voodoo or that of like Romani magical practice. These
Speaker 3: latter examples often have a more religious component or historical
Speaker 3: cultural component than, say, you know, your average chaos magic
Speaker 3: practitioner does. Chaos magic emerged alongside postmodernism in the mid
Speaker 3: to late twentieth century to take on a quasi deconstructivist
Speaker 3: approach to occultism itself. A postmodern tendency applied to occultism
Speaker 3: moving away from strict magical orders like the Golden Dawn dilemma, tradition, dogmatism,
Speaker 3: and coherent historical pantheons. This is evidenced in the chaos
Speaker 3: magic embrace of the phrase nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Speaker 3: Up to this point, our discussion of the a Culture
Speaker 3: Conference has mostly focused on this chaos magic side. So
Speaker 3: now let's get into the other half, the traditional practice.
Speaker 5: We've really not talked about the alternate current that was
Speaker 5: going on through a bunch of these which was about
Speaker 5: more traditional practices of magic, whether these are extant traditional
Speaker 5: practices that are continuing. Which on Saturday, you know, there
Speaker 5: was a whole bunch that were specifically ethnographic talks about
Speaker 5: different magical practices within other cultures, whether that's kimbanda or
Speaker 5: you know, ritual of power exchange amongst the newer people
Speaker 5: of the Catmandu Valley. There was a lot of that
Speaker 5: going on. There was the discussion or there was the
Speaker 5: presentation by the Roma women about Roma magic and probably
Speaker 5: you know, both classical Thelema talks that relate to more
Speaker 5: modern reconstruction British traditional magic and other paths. You know,
Speaker 5: we missed this talk by Dark Mason, which was which
Speaker 5: I've heard them speak before, which is a lot of
Speaker 5: discussions about the imagery of dark Man across different cultures,
Speaker 5: whether that's like the Man in Black at the Crossroads
Speaker 5: or the way that traditionally shows up in a lot
Speaker 5: of British folklore. There was an entire thread going through that.
Speaker 5: I personally really loved one of the few historical magical
Speaker 5: talks that I got to go to about modern Greek Croatia,
Speaker 5: because I think it really tied up actually what was
Speaker 5: a lot of the threads from many of those talks,
Speaker 5: which was that these are extant practices and not something
Speaker 5: that people need to recreate. I know you had a
Speaker 5: lot of other thoughts on this, Ryan.
Speaker 11: Yeah, sure, throw me under the bus here. While you
Speaker 11: were attending the Pop Magic, Language and Reality Hacks, I
Speaker 11: was passing back and forth between a workshop on Persian
Speaker 11: magic and then attending doctor Sasha Kaitao's Modern Greek Gaetia, Syncretism,
Speaker 11: Integration and Evolution, which I found to be among the
Speaker 11: most enlightening of talks, especially as it relates to traditional
Speaker 11: and folk magic practices. It was also a largely like
Speaker 11: social and political project that she seemed to be engaged in.
Speaker 11: That is the body of her work. So much of
Speaker 11: ancient magic as it exists to us if it doesn't
Speaker 11: come from a reconstructivist Well, there's two branches of reconstructivism.
Speaker 11: There's the magical reconstruction that we get from the Golden
Speaker 11: Dawn and all variants of the Golden Dawn afterwards through
Speaker 11: thilemma and other modern magical practices. And then you have
Speaker 11: reconstructionist organizations that are attempting to recreate traditional pagan religious practices,
Speaker 11: which some can be quite good when they're grounded in scholarship,
Speaker 11: some can be rather essentialist when it comes to an
Speaker 11: understanding of ethnic purity. There's a lot of gatekeeping, let's say,
Speaker 11: involved in these practices. But Sasha's talk here was very
Speaker 11: specifically about that vernacular plurality and practices persist, and this
Speaker 11: concept of caatia of Greek practical magic carries over into modernity,
Speaker 11: that this magic never died, that it's living, it's not underground,
Speaker 11: and it is not in need of reconstruction. That when
Speaker 11: we look at the different branches or at least approaches
Speaker 11: that we understand magic in the ancient Greek world as
Speaker 11: theogy and gaisha, we have that theology that persists in
Speaker 11: the liturgy and practices of the Orthodox Church. If you
Speaker 11: would like to see. And she's got a lovely article
Speaker 11: on this about how to pronounce the votchase magic. She's
Speaker 11: got a lot very strong opinions about this that I
Speaker 11: really respect and appreciate. So everybody should go read this
Speaker 11: because there is a lot of bullshit on the internet
Speaker 11: floating around about how to interpret these and say these things.
Speaker 11: That is really grounded in some terrible scholarship. And the
Speaker 11: third that this concept of gisha yeth this, which is
Speaker 11: a kind of like medieval neutral term from magic, the aetheis,
Speaker 11: which is derived from gaisha, is something that carries on
Speaker 11: in terms of folk magic, that there's no such thing
Speaker 11: also as Greek Byzantine occultism, which might be a shock
Speaker 11: to some people, but instead that again the magical currents
Speaker 11: exist in the liturgy of the Orthodox and then in
Speaker 11: this continuation of folk practices in contemporary eat this. And
Speaker 11: she gave the example of like, you know, her mother
Speaker 11: in law and her daughter talking about these individual practices.
Speaker 11: But what's interesting and a lot of this was also
Speaker 11: talking about the cosmology of the Orthodox Church, specifically talking
Speaker 11: about the pseudodonysis and the formulation of the church. So
Speaker 11: the eth this is a kind of like form of
Speaker 11: folk vernacular that is persistent in in you know, village practices.
Speaker 11: In the point is it exists within community. And this
Speaker 11: is something that was also a theme that existed throughout
Speaker 11: the conference, this tension between community practice and magic and individualism.
Speaker 11: And I think that this really came out in the
Speaker 11: last discussion we had. I think it's also something that's
Speaker 11: central to most political problematics that we're dealing about. This
Speaker 11: is bridging the individual and the communal in this magical
Speaker 11: practice of creating realities.
Speaker 3: We will return to discuss the cultural and political role
Speaker 3: of contemporary cultism in twenty twenty five after this ad break.
Speaker 3: I think one big question that we've kind of discussed
Speaker 3: this bit today and some of the talks like prompted
Speaker 3: this today on the on the last day in which
Speaker 3: we're recording this, like why do people practice magic in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five? Like what is the the purpose of
Speaker 3: all of this stuff? Besides the cool aesthetics, which might
Speaker 3: just actually be one of the main reasons why right,
Speaker 3: but like what why why do this?
Speaker 12: Right?
Speaker 3: The ability to actually you know, make art is pretty democratized.
Speaker 3: You know, culture is this globalized thing that we can
Speaker 3: affect on the internet. So it's music, film, you know, art, drawing, painting, politics, philosophy.
Speaker 3: Everyone's a sort of intellectual Now everyone has ability to
Speaker 3: enter into intellectual change. You can be self educated. It's
Speaker 3: never been easier to be an autodidact. Why do occultism now?
Speaker 3: And like this this goes into this you know question
Speaker 3: that someone someone asked at one of the very last
Speaker 3: panels is you know, what's the difference between like a
Speaker 3: scholar and like a practitioner? And I asked, like a
Speaker 3: question about you know, like, you know, what's the use
Speaker 3: of solitary practice like a practicing magic as like a
Speaker 3: personal religious or like spiritual process or as a way
Speaker 3: to you know, gain power in the world versus using
Speaker 3: a cult thought to shape culture, you know, doing the
Speaker 3: a culture process.
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 3: Which is this this whole conference is you know, estensively
Speaker 3: named after and I think specifically talking about these like
Speaker 3: older forms of magic, like why are these important for occultists,
Speaker 3: like modern practicing occultists, which this this conference is attended
Speaker 3: by why why are these useful to them beyond you know,
Speaker 3: an anthropology or like academic sense. And I realized that
Speaker 3: is a big question. But I mean we we we
Speaker 3: ourselves attended the number of rituals this weekend we went
Speaker 3: to in a practis ritual, which is sort of limited by
Speaker 3: the confines of the of the conference is setting. But
Speaker 3: you know, a lot of these rituals were about trying
Speaker 3: to induce some kind of like trance or meditative state
Speaker 3: in which you know, images or thoughts would come into
Speaker 3: your head, and images and thoughts that you were feelings
Speaker 3: that you ordinarily, you know, wouldn't feel in day to
Speaker 3: day modern busy life, right, And this is this is
Speaker 3: a form of why people do these practices, but I
Speaker 3: guess we can I don't know, but based on the
Speaker 3: panels or talks we've attended, like go around and discuss
Speaker 3: you know, why this is a thing that is worthwhile
Speaker 3: to these people, but also like the sort of tensions
Speaker 3: that that we're feeling at an event like this.
Speaker 8: I mean, the question why do people get into occultism
Speaker 8: is like I think there are as many answers as
Speaker 8: like practitioners themselves really because I mean, you know, partly
Speaker 8: it can be a cultural tradition and you have like
Speaker 8: a communal or societal lineage that's just like part of
Speaker 8: the culture others who are more more secular or are
Speaker 8: looking for an escape from like mundane secular society. Others,
Speaker 8: like you said, want power. I mean, if I have
Speaker 8: to speak for myself, I always find that I come
Speaker 8: back to the phrase it's about creating relationships with the world.
Speaker 8: And you know, there's like an essence of like enchantment
Speaker 8: to it. But it's like also being able to recognize,
Speaker 8: like you know, occults like movement or like the secret
Speaker 8: secret sure the secret elements that make up reality, or
Speaker 8: like the vibe, like the vibes of a place can
Speaker 8: be like something you connect with and you can kind
Speaker 8: of give some cultural cultural shape to I believe, like
Speaker 8: the genus loci or like any anything that's very I mean,
Speaker 8: it is a very vague thing to ascribe through right black.
Speaker 8: It is about again like making creating relationships with the
Speaker 8: things inside inside the world itself.
Speaker 3: I mean, my my definition of magic, which I've used
Speaker 3: for the past few years, is that magic is the
Speaker 3: manipulation of meaning. And that can be internally for you,
Speaker 3: like trying to create associations, create meaning between yourself, the people,
Speaker 3: the things you interact with. But it can also be
Speaker 3: this like a cultural form that you're creating meaningful correlations
Speaker 3: for a cultural capacity, yes, or as a as a
Speaker 3: way to affect culture. And I think the probably the
Speaker 3: best talk that I attended this whole conference was by
Speaker 3: a Tom Banger, who is a form member of the
Speaker 3: Temple of Psychic Youth.
Speaker 8: The North American Double Psychic Youth specifically.
Speaker 3: But he gave a talk about how he is dying
Speaker 3: of brain cancer and the various like rituals he's he's using,
Speaker 3: you know, throughout this process to to feel like he's
Speaker 3: you know, gaining some some like agency or control over
Speaker 3: his his thoughts. In this manner, he's not rejecting the
Speaker 3: reality as it is, you know, increasingly evident in his life,
Speaker 3: but he can control how he frames it. And he's
Speaker 3: specifically likened magic to the bargaining state of grief that
Speaker 3: magic is a is a is a bargaining with the world,
Speaker 3: and that can can change your you know, feelings and
Speaker 3: associations with the things that you experience, even if you
Speaker 3: know the certain end results might might be generally going
Speaker 3: in a direction that you have a limited ability to influence.
Speaker 3: And this is you know, a guy who's historically been
Speaker 3: affiliated with some of the original like a cultural projects
Speaker 3: right of shaping what counter culture is like, what we
Speaker 3: think of as like counterculture. This is a person who's
Speaker 3: been heavily involved with how counterculture as we currently understand
Speaker 3: it has existed since the eighties, and now he has
Speaker 3: a very personal magical outlook based on as he said
Speaker 3: in the title of his talk, the proximity of Sanatos,
Speaker 3: the god of death.
Speaker 11: So Garret, to answer your initial question, this is something
Speaker 11: that I have been thinking about a lot too, and
Speaker 11: engaged with this question every time I attend one of
Speaker 11: these conferences, and I think, I mean, just again, training
Speaker 11: I can't help it. But in max of Weber's Science
Speaker 11: as a Vocation is where he lays out the thesis
Speaker 11: about the disenchantment of the world. And we can think
Speaker 11: of this disenchantment as a fundamental alteration of the very
Speaker 11: human experience of time, of bodies and space, of the
Speaker 11: experience of place, and of the connection that exists between people.
Speaker 11: And one of the things that the best of magical
Speaker 11: practices does, and being in magical community is to give
Speaker 11: you a conception of time that is other than one
Speaker 11: that is based in productive capacity. You hear magical people
Speaker 11: who go to these conferences talk about now I have
Speaker 11: to go back to my ordinary life, and their ordinary life,
Speaker 11: they will tell you, is their nine to five job,
Speaker 11: or the push to go to school or some sort
Speaker 11: of like productive capacity. So this is a moment of
Speaker 11: like unbounded time where they get to experience something as
Speaker 11: fundamentally different. We also attended several workshops on one on
Speaker 11: wordling magic by an Egyptian woman who used to live
Speaker 11: in Berlin, who is in fact formally trained in dance
Speaker 11: and body movement and is an athlete and explained Sufi
Speaker 11: principles to us, but taught us really the basics of
Speaker 11: body movement and how twirling can be used as a
Speaker 11: meditative practice. We got into a room she taught us
Speaker 11: the basics of like certain kind of like spotting foot movements.
Speaker 11: But the point was is that it was a very
Speaker 11: embodied movement that made us experience body and time and
Speaker 11: place and relationship to other people in a fundamentally different
Speaker 11: way than we would have otherwise. And it seems that
Speaker 11: the majority of people, especially based on the side conversations
Speaker 11: I had with attendees, I have to say probably like
Speaker 11: eight of ten of them as I talk to, would
Speaker 11: bring up this concept of I just I want to
Speaker 11: live in an enchanted world, and I think the project
Speaker 11: of magic is to re enchant the world. And there's
Speaker 11: a certain romanticism with that that I'm sympathetic too. But
Speaker 11: I think that we need to think about this in
Speaker 11: more of a radical way, and I think that that's
Speaker 11: the desire that people have, is an experience of time
Speaker 11: other than we have you talked about magic as your
Speaker 11: definition of magic as the creation of meaning, manipulation of meaning.
Speaker 11: But part of this is the magic or the conceptions
Speaker 11: or whether you think of this as as embodied practice
Speaker 11: or just purely metaphysical or transcendental, is that it affords
Speaker 11: the individual the opportunity to feel like they're contributing to
Speaker 11: the creation of meaning. So there's a certain amount of empowerment.
Speaker 11: Like I'm hesitant to take this down like the kind
Speaker 11: of like live, laugh, love affirmations path because we could
Speaker 11: do that very simply that this is just the spooky
Speaker 11: version of that mindfulness and these kinds of things.
Speaker 3: And for the like New Age element, that certainly is
Speaker 3: a major through line across you know, portions of this community,
Speaker 3: maybe not as much for this conference, but for other
Speaker 3: other you know, esoteric or you know wu WU conferences. Absolutely,
Speaker 3: it's like a major aspect, and.
Speaker 11: I mean towards the end of the conference. Another thing
Speaker 11: that really highlights, at least my argument that it is
Speaker 11: about time and body and space and place and connection
Speaker 11: and experience these these these things in fundamentally different ways
Speaker 11: than our daily life. There was also a conflict then
Speaker 11: between individual practice and what it is that we collectively
Speaker 11: do when we think of magic as a process as
Speaker 11: either chaos magicians or culture jammers or you know, thinking
Speaker 11: of this and kind of like you know, the Temple
Speaker 11: of Psychic Youth approach to magic as as putting things out,
Speaker 11: whether those are products, or there's are art, or there's
Speaker 11: a performances or there's are words, or that's Boroughs standing
Speaker 11: in front of a cafe getting it closed, which it
Speaker 11: effectively did close. Is that there's a desire for people
Speaker 11: to exist in community and have connection in community with others,
Speaker 11: and you do that through consumptions of time and body
Speaker 11: and space and place and connection. So this is really
Speaker 11: how I understand the desires and the practices that people
Speaker 11: engage in when they come to these conferences, and you
Speaker 11: can see it in the way that they kind of
Speaker 11: like close the elation that they have and what they
Speaker 11: accomplished and they have done, and you can see that
Speaker 11: there's been a process of meaning that has been created
Speaker 11: through their various experiences.
Speaker 9: So I mean that would be my brief summary.
Speaker 5: I really enjoyed one of the last talks that was
Speaker 5: specifically about a culture because I thought it really hit
Speaker 5: on some of this. It was mostly talking about the
Speaker 5: way that the occult has influenced art, and art has
Speaker 5: influenced the occult. How artists end up using the metaphysical,
Speaker 5: whether they are trying to do depictions that they can
Speaker 5: communicate to others of metaphysical concepts and ideas, or connections
Speaker 5: or contacts that they make, and one of the speaker's
Speaker 5: examples was of Gustav Klimpt, or whether or not they
Speaker 5: are making discourses on esotericism and trying to convey occult
Speaker 5: concepts and ideas and explore them through visual mediums and so,
Speaker 5: you know, like Alan Morre's Promethea or The Invisibles by
Speaker 5: Grant Morrison, and I think he really got into a
Speaker 5: little bit of the tension there because of an artist
Speaker 5: as a seeker, and I think this also dives into
Speaker 5: a lot of the people who are at magical conferences
Speaker 5: is whether you're there as a seeker, which you know,
Speaker 5: what are your needs, what are your desires?
Speaker 9: What is that?
Speaker 5: But then as a dweller are you creating as part
Speaker 5: of a community. And everyone who came to this entire
Speaker 5: conference wanted to create as part of a community, or
Speaker 5: wanted to be part of a tradition, or feel like
Speaker 5: they were part of a continuous thread that is both
Speaker 5: creating and inventing and understanding the world in different ways
Speaker 5: and able to communicate that to others who are also
Speaker 5: trying to understand and communicate new information and new ideas
Speaker 5: or existing ones even but just that continuous thread of
Speaker 5: both creation and disseminating information back and forth. And I
Speaker 5: think with magic as well, a lot of people might
Speaker 5: get into it for a personal reason. But I do
Speaker 5: think by the time you're coming to esoteric conferences with
Speaker 5: people who are professors in ancient history giving lectures on
Speaker 5: specific things, you're not necessarily just at the level of
Speaker 5: being a personal seeker anymore, because you are trying to
Speaker 5: find community. If you were just interested in personal seeking,
Speaker 5: you'd meditate in your bedroom. But you're trying to find
Speaker 5: a larger thread and a way of influencing the world
Speaker 5: around you and also letting the world around you build
Speaker 5: those relationships and influence you. And you are trying to
Speaker 5: take an information to synthesize into something that is more
Speaker 5: than just an idea you have, but something that you
Speaker 5: can continue to communicate and use that to continue the
Speaker 5: conversation with the world with other occultists, with other you know,
Speaker 5: in this case historians and academics as well, and bring
Speaker 5: those threads together and create something new out of it.
Speaker 4: What new thing are they created? What do you mean
Speaker 4: by that?
Speaker 5: I think it gets into the idea of a culture
Speaker 5: that was both you know, one of the beginning talks
Speaker 5: of changing reality, but also at the end when they're
Speaker 5: really going into hostuff.
Speaker 3: Isn't about new things though, or generating new things about
Speaker 3: trying to quote unquote they keep the old things all
Speaker 3: live or like regress back into these into what would
Speaker 3: they perceive as as these older practices, which may be
Speaker 3: somewhat manufactured older practices, in which case it kind of
Speaker 3: kind of it is a new thing. But under this
Speaker 3: like this mask of you know, like like ancient knowledge.
Speaker 3: There is certainly people who do want to generate this
Speaker 3: this new thing. I think there is a lot of
Speaker 3: people that are interested more in this, like uh, I
Speaker 3: don't know who's a larger group, but I think there
Speaker 3: is at least another another group of people who is
Speaker 3: interested in this. Like the amount of times I heard
Speaker 3: people talk about, you know, trying to keep like the
Speaker 3: flame alive and talk about these like old old traditions
Speaker 3: that they're participating in simply to like keep them going.
Speaker 3: Not criticizing that, uh necessarily, but that that is also
Speaker 3: another another like aspect of it, which I think hass
Speaker 3: very limited. Like I think so some of these people
Speaker 3: have very limited goals in actually like influencing culture, and
Speaker 3: frankly like kind of want some of this stuff to
Speaker 3: you know, remain you know, hidden in that they view
Speaker 3: that as a more like you know, original or like
Speaker 3: stable version of of magic, and are even frustrated by
Speaker 3: like this you know, capitalist commodification of occultism and how
Speaker 3: that's I think the word was like the benalization of
Speaker 3: of of magic. As you you know, think about how
Speaker 3: much of our of our pop cultures is influenced by
Speaker 3: by esoteric concepts or imagery from you know, the Lord
Speaker 3: of the Rings, to to people mentioned today, you know,
Speaker 3: the Adams Family, Harry Potter, video games like The Witcher,
Speaker 3: Assassin's Creed, even stuff like you know, Twin Peaks, I mean,
Speaker 3: other stuff like the X Files, Doctor Strange, doctor Fate.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Comic books have been heavily occultic influence, and some attendees
Speaker 3: verbalized a kind of frustration at that.
Speaker 5: True, but a humongous portion of every evening was movies
Speaker 5: and music and rituals and performance. Is that people are
Speaker 5: also doing based on this, and they are trying to
Speaker 5: integrate these concepts and then perform them there to show
Speaker 5: their inspiration, to show it as to stir conversation, to
Speaker 5: trigger some either sense of the sublime, or communicate some
Speaker 5: sort of concept or emotion or feeling that they've gotten
Speaker 5: out of this to other people, whether it was through music,
Speaker 5: through the incredible art that there was in all of
Speaker 5: the galleries, through performances, through filmmaking, So the creation aspect
Speaker 5: of it was very, very tied to the entire event.
Speaker 3: Yeah, certainly, I think the one of the biggest manifestations
Speaker 3: of this thing that you're talking about, like is in
Speaker 3: music could like a throw a stone and be hard
Speaker 3: not to hit and a cult musician in my life.
Speaker 4: I guess I'm guilty of this.
Speaker 13: Yes, I know, the.
Speaker 3: Occult filmmaker even does have some like a contemporary tours.
Speaker 3: I guess if you consider like Edgar's or people who
Speaker 3: are influenced by esoterica who are making a big budget
Speaker 3: Hollywood or you know, a twenty four style of popular films. Yeah,
Speaker 3: certainly in music. I mean that it's like the main
Speaker 3: performance outlet in this conference was was the theatrical musical performances.
Speaker 3: There's very very few attendees of the film screenings upstairs.
Speaker 11: I'm afraid perhaps respond to this too. I think it's
Speaker 11: important that we actually look at the kind of composition
Speaker 11: of conference goers themselves. Naturally, there's going to be solitary
Speaker 11: practitioners that you know, come in or dabblers or people
Speaker 11: who are just you know, like spooky things or musicians
Speaker 11: these things. But we also have, you know, those who
Speaker 11: are part of living traditions of magic, whether those are
Speaker 11: reconstructed of authentic or not.
Speaker 9: In the Oto or in.
Speaker 11: You know, the Golden Dawn or other kind of orders,
Speaker 11: there's reconstructionists that are actively attempting again to keep that
Speaker 11: flame alive. To go back and to reconstruct, and then
Speaker 11: you have these chaos magicians, chaos magicians, which like this
Speaker 11: is a theme in the conversation that Elaine and I
Speaker 11: have been having this entire time, because they explain to
Speaker 11: like some aspect of chaos magic or I tend to
Speaker 11: panel and on my response, you know, and again I
Speaker 11: understand my complete bias here, as I just like, well,
Speaker 11: that's fine, why don't you just do ancient magic. We
Speaker 11: do the same thing. Why don't you just do ancient magic.
Speaker 11: It's the same thing. And I think that that's actually
Speaker 11: one of the difficulties here is that there is a
Speaker 11: kind of you know, magical grammar to older practices. It
Speaker 11: is like you know, if you look at the PGM,
Speaker 11: it is this cosmopolitan practice and melding of like multiple
Speaker 11: things together that works. But the argument that you know,
Speaker 11: to go back to my favorite talk or one of
Speaker 11: my favorite talks on the modern Gaashia, is that if
Speaker 11: you want that continuity of that actual practice, it's a
Speaker 11: closed one. You have to be an Orthodox, like you know,
Speaker 11: the Orthodox Greek Church, and have a yayah who is
Speaker 11: going to like teach you these things, and you know,
Speaker 11: speak the language and so that's closed, or be a
Speaker 11: member of a voodoo house, but that requires initiation and
Speaker 11: like cross cultural contact and like engagement in a high
Speaker 11: level of like language, skill and ability and money for
Speaker 11: that matter. Yes, and most people don't have those kinds
Speaker 11: of things. So you know, there those damn chaos magicians,
Speaker 11: I find are the ones who are actively engaged in
Speaker 11: the process of the creation of the new and I
Speaker 11: think are probably more close to the heart of this
Speaker 11: concept of a culture because they engage with it in
Speaker 11: a way that is interestingly very anthropological, or at least
Speaker 11: the best of them are dealing with it in a
Speaker 11: way that is that is very anthropological. And I have
Speaker 11: some sympathies there, and then there's some other ones that
Speaker 11: I just don't quite understand, But that's a story for
Speaker 11: another time. The talk that you were referring to, there
Speaker 11: was two talks at the end that were particularly of worth,
Speaker 11: well a lot of them were. All of the ones
Speaker 11: at the end of are world of worth. But Francesco
Speaker 11: Perinos a Culture the Material Cartography of Contemporary Spirituality and
Speaker 11: the Art Arts, where he talks about the two different
Speaker 11: approaches to studying a culture, and he talks about the
Speaker 11: values and limitations of both, and you need an add
Speaker 11: mixture of them both. But basically there's the sociological aspect
Speaker 11: and the media studies aspect, which is the more academic
Speaker 11: of the two, which involves basically what he argued a
Speaker 11: secularization of the occults, and this really accounts for the
Speaker 11: diffusion of like occult symbols and practices into music and
Speaker 11: to culture. The Adams family is the example of that.
Speaker 11: And then the second strain is then religious studies. So
Speaker 11: the religious injection, injection excuse me into art of these
Speaker 11: sacred or religious or transcendently magical spiritual principles. He went
Speaker 11: over some limitations that was particularly good, but he breaks
Speaker 11: this down into basically five areas where you have the
Speaker 11: conception of art high and low mediatization versus mediation of art.
Speaker 11: He gives the example of this is where the Morrison
Speaker 11: comes in. But he gives the example of the mediatization
Speaker 11: as Somerset maus the Magician based on Crowley. But again
Speaker 11: like this diffusion of the figure of the magician completely
Speaker 11: separated from like any actual magical practice. But just like
Speaker 11: the figure, the aesthetics, the things that blend into the
Speaker 11: secular culture and this example of mediation, this messianic approach,
Speaker 11: as he described it, grant Morrison's comics as.
Speaker 9: A gateway into reality.
Speaker 11: But this also I think that Garrek carries onto your
Speaker 11: question that you asked towards the end about twin peaks
Speaker 11: the returns very specifically. You also have then the metaphysical
Speaker 11: ontellgogy versus the performative antology, which Elaine talked about the
Speaker 11: intention of the author, the perception of the audience, and
Speaker 11: then the artist a seeker and the artists dweller, which
Speaker 11: is also what you talked about too, This difference between
Speaker 11: the ego versus tradition or orthodoxy, that the artist who
Speaker 11: really inhabits that tradition, which again made me think about
Speaker 11: the difficulties of doing kind of religious anthropology. And I
Speaker 11: think of the example of a very famous book called
Speaker 11: Mamloa or Mama Lola Excuse Me by Karen McCarthy brown,
Speaker 11: which is in ethymology looking at voodoo practice in a
Speaker 11: very specific house in New York during a time period.
Speaker 11: Karen lived with Mam Lola for a long time, but
Speaker 11: really importantly, eventually Karen became a member of this voodoo house.
Speaker 11: I think I can say that. I don't think I'm
Speaker 11: any in trouble for saying this, but she No, it's
Speaker 11: not in the book she but she represents a very
Speaker 11: interesting approach to that, like anthropologist going native.
Speaker 9: But this was the question that was asked towards the end.
Speaker 11: Of this difference between the academic observer of these things
Speaker 11: versus the practitioner, and I think that that really gets
Speaker 11: to the heart of what it is that chaos magic
Speaker 11: does and the cultural practice. That is that you are
Speaker 11: producing culture, and you're very specifically producing this magical cult culture.
Speaker 11: So it's a synthetic movement between these kind of like
Speaker 11: two poles of the secular and of.
Speaker 3: The sacred, of the magical, the kind of like I
Speaker 3: guess prior to close up my notes here specifically the
Speaker 3: stuff on twin Peaks Return, one of the last talks
Speaker 3: was by Jeff Howard next stop Universe be the negatively
Speaker 3: existent ones and universe be in contemporary culture, which was
Speaker 3: discussing sort of like you know, mirror mirror world underworld
Speaker 3: concept not not in like the Greek sense, but in
Speaker 3: the occultism of.
Speaker 4: The British occultist Kenneth Grant.
Speaker 3: And this would probably be most most recognizable to people
Speaker 3: as as the Black Laws and Twin Peaks is I
Speaker 3: think one of the better depictions of this sort of
Speaker 3: concept is some limited version, but but I think it
Speaker 3: gets at the the kind of heart of the concept
Speaker 3: in a way. And he gave this Gibbs talk where
Speaker 3: he was explaining the risks and and the great power
Speaker 3: that that you can that you can personally achieve through
Speaker 3: contacting these negatively existent ones or like accessing the magical
Speaker 3: potential of this sort of like mirror mirror, you know,
Speaker 3: negative universe to our own, and talked about a little
Speaker 3: bit of Dereta and various varius other stuff, but from
Speaker 3: the perspective mainly as a practitioner of love of like
Speaker 3: you know, the the danger and the and the benefits
Speaker 3: of doing this this sort of magic as written by
Speaker 3: Kenth Grant. Jeff Howard did discuss the Twin Peaks and
Speaker 3: the use of Kenth Grant's specifically in two weeks the Return,
Speaker 3: and I asked him in the panel afterwards, like how
Speaker 3: how how can you like balance these these these two
Speaker 3: forms of working with occultism or like, like what what
Speaker 3: is the difference in these two forms of working with occultism.
Speaker 3: You have on one hand, this this practitioner aspect where
Speaker 3: you're using it to gain power or induce like limit
Speaker 3: experiences like induce you know, religious or transcendental experiences that
Speaker 3: change your own perception of like sensory reality, Versus the
Speaker 3: way that Mark Frost utilized Kenneth Grant's magical world in
Speaker 3: writing and co creating a Twin Peaks through Return, which
Speaker 3: I can argue is a much more effective use of
Speaker 3: magic and exposes millions of people to Kenneth Grant's concepts,
Speaker 3: who people who are never going to read books by
Speaker 3: a relatively niche British occultists, which are books which are
Speaker 3: actually very very hard to find now and both you know,
Speaker 3: getting going into the mauve zone and accessing these non
Speaker 3: existent being and beings which don't have existent properties versus
Speaker 3: phenomenons which are existent but lack any core sense of being.
Speaker 3: And how Mark Frost, as I'm not sure if you
Speaker 3: would consider himself a magician, but certainly has an interest
Speaker 3: in magic and the occult more so than Lynch does.
Speaker 3: Lynch's stuff is more bastardized Hinduism, but Frost's use of
Speaker 3: these concepts I think constitutes an effective contemporary version of
Speaker 3: magical practice, just as valid as chanting and meditating and
Speaker 3: closing your eyes, and in some ways, I would argue
Speaker 3: even more effective because Twin Peaks The Return has existed
Speaker 3: as both like an evocative force of for a second,
Speaker 3: invoke certain certain you know, concepts or philosophies quote unquote entities,
Speaker 3: if you will, as well as a tool of divination
Speaker 3: as Twin Peaks, The Return forecasts American decline and the
Speaker 3: nostalgic loop that our culture is stuck in, which is
Speaker 3: just eating itself, and all of those things are major
Speaker 3: aspects of what that show is doing, and it uses
Speaker 3: Kenneth Grant's concepts to get there. And I think that
Speaker 3: that is a cultural project. Though that's not a solitary
Speaker 3: magical practice where you're just meditating alone to try to
Speaker 3: induce some sort of vision. It is a cultural It's
Speaker 3: influenced culture. It is probably one of the most well
Speaker 3: regarded artistic feats of the twenty first century. That's a
Speaker 3: longer version of the question I gave, and the guy
Speaker 3: did give kind of an answer, which was basically just
Speaker 3: about trying to you should like balance these two things.
Speaker 3: You should try to do both. You should try to
Speaker 3: engage as a solitary practitioner for whatever goals you may have,
Speaker 3: But it would be a mistake to not try to
Speaker 3: use this in some sort of like a cultural capacity
Speaker 3: to influence culture. But it's still that that operates on
Speaker 3: like this, I guess what was trying to get it
Speaker 3: is like this, similar to the the scholar and the
Speaker 3: practitioner as a false dichotomy, I think this is the
Speaker 3: same thing as this This a cultural version of what
Speaker 3: Frost is doing as oppose to a like an actual practitioner.
Speaker 3: I think I think what Frost's doing is using kind
Speaker 3: of in a chast magic sense, so not for I
Speaker 3: guess chaotic means, but he's using the contemporary tools of
Speaker 3: filmmaking and of writing to affect and induce change into
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 4: That is a more powerful form of magic.
Speaker 3: Is luckily that was distributed by paramount showtime, which you
Speaker 3: know certainly helped in the same way. You know Fox
Speaker 3: News is useful or effective as a magical generator because
Speaker 3: of the reach that they have. But I think Frost
Speaker 3: is just as effective as a magician, if not more
Speaker 3: so than I would say any of the people attending
Speaker 3: this conference.
Speaker 11: The other elements I think of that the talk that
Speaker 11: Jeff Howard provided there too, I think that, you know,
Speaker 11: again I agree with you, gaire. But he also at
Speaker 11: length talked about Andrew Chumley and specifically the rights of
Speaker 11: the Amethystine light in the Azoetia page three hundred and
Speaker 11: forty seven, where he reviews a bunch of like non
Speaker 11: nouns and things that are there. And Chumley himself is
Speaker 11: you know, responsible the founder of the cult de Sabbati
Speaker 11: and is you know, a contributor to the revival of
Speaker 11: what Trucks's traditional English witchcraft, which is not necessarily a
Speaker 11: solitary practice, but it is, it is, it is in
Speaker 11: many cases most of these English witches are are are
Speaker 11: pretty solitary.
Speaker 9: They talk. There are you know, treaties.
Speaker 11: That they write and and grimoires that are you know,
Speaker 11: hard to get a hold of. That I think they
Speaker 11: probably exist in PDFs. Make good choices about how you
Speaker 11: get your digital content.
Speaker 9: But I mean again, that was the tension. He spent
Speaker 9: a lot of time talking.
Speaker 11: About that individual ritual, which you know, you present Frost
Speaker 11: as somebody who's popularizing these ideas to a larger culture
Speaker 11: and making this understandable and providing them an opportunity to
Speaker 11: you know, not just meditate, but to think and engage
Speaker 11: with these concepts.
Speaker 3: Because of his work, you can think about like the
Speaker 3: allegory of Agent Cooper and the ways that that he
Speaker 3: fails and succeeds to navigate a strange and confusing world
Speaker 3: and affect change in the world, and his relationship to
Speaker 3: women and saving women, and you can you can you
Speaker 3: can use that as like an actual like you can
Speaker 3: refer to that as as a concept, and that that
Speaker 3: builds on some of the you know, world building of Grant,
Speaker 3: but now you know it's a it's a cultural dialogue
Speaker 3: that we can have about Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer
Speaker 3: and how that I think can be a positive addition
Speaker 3: to culture by using occult elements.
Speaker 11: Or you can buy an exceedingly expensive grimoire from a
Speaker 11: rare antiquarian bookseller that was published only in two thousand
Speaker 11: and four that there's there's a limited number it's been
Speaker 11: passed on, or you could get that PDF online. But
Speaker 11: who has the time to actually read through this. There's
Speaker 11: theseultural context that don't make sense. There's these concepts that
Speaker 11: it refers to in a clear network that requires scholarship
Speaker 11: for you to even do that individualized practice. That's a
Speaker 11: big ask for most people to start to think magically
Speaker 11: in a popularized kind of way and seems contrary than
Speaker 11: to this conception of a culture, which brings me to
Speaker 11: the last talk by Carl Abrahamson, the meeting with remarkable Magicians,
Speaker 11: which really tied all of this together. Tied all of
Speaker 11: these threads together in a really interesting way, as relationship
Speaker 11: with Genesis, Peorage, with Kenneth Anger, and with Anton Leavy.
Speaker 11: But that was as another interesting aspect of somebody who
Speaker 11: is doing practice and engaging in community and bringing people together.
Speaker 11: But ultimately, the question, Elaine, that you and I talked
Speaker 11: about at the end was, you know, beyond the and
Speaker 11: it relates immediately to what Garet was talking about here,
Speaker 11: beyond the personal practice in magic. What goals should a
Speaker 11: culture have and how can it incorporate its actual goals
Speaker 11: and ideas into the larger society with the same success
Speaker 11: that the esthetics that you know have been incorporated into
Speaker 11: the culture. And I think one of the difficulties that
Speaker 11: you have there in this individuated practice is that when
Speaker 11: you look at a figure like Genesis, pureage. You can
Speaker 11: see that there's a very clear project when you look,
Speaker 11: and this is going back to the Barosian element, right,
Speaker 11: is that there was a clear practice there. There was
Speaker 11: a clear kind of like a goal to change culture.
Speaker 11: Whether that was just purely for the sake of change,
Speaker 11: I mean, it wasn't just kind of like the cult
Speaker 11: of action for the sake of action. There was some
Speaker 11: kind of personal political radical project that we can go
Speaker 11: back and enumerate that they enumerated at the time that
Speaker 11: was separate from I mean, that wasn't said immediately in
Speaker 11: the same breath as the and now we do this practice.
Speaker 11: They did the practice, they did the art and I
Speaker 11: think that one of my response that question is I
Speaker 11: don't see an articulation of a political or social project
Speaker 11: that is a tied to a culture in these practices.
Speaker 11: There's a lot of and this is a very academic practice,
Speaker 11: a lot of people coming into a room and asking
Speaker 11: what would it look like if, And to ask what
Speaker 11: would it look like if is not the same thing
Speaker 11: as let's do a thing, let's actually go out and
Speaker 11: evoke change, or this is the project, now, let's create
Speaker 11: a plan in a movement. Instead, it is this like
Speaker 11: nominalization process of predetermining ends before we even get there
Speaker 11: based on theoretical assumptions. And I think that that's contrary
Speaker 11: to the very idea of magic as practice. Magic is
Speaker 11: doing something in the world in these kinds of veins.
Speaker 11: So that's the thing that I would like to see,
Speaker 11: and I feel like that's something that was getting at
Speaker 11: at the end. But that's the kind of thing that
Speaker 11: brings people together to think conceptually, to focus on an
Speaker 11: idea that we share and to discuss with one another.
Speaker 8: I mean, on that note, I for context, I've I'm
Speaker 8: well still am like part of a chaosmogic group called
Speaker 8: the Domus Kayotka Marauder Underground or DKMU, who very much
Speaker 8: is about that. It's like like establishing like the mid
Speaker 8: early two thousands if I remember correctly, But it's very
Speaker 8: much about this core idea of the assault against reality
Speaker 8: of I guess like remistifying the world or like making
Speaker 8: weird shit happen through what they what they call the
Speaker 8: Alysian network. With Ellis's like one of the goddesses of
Speaker 8: the DKMU, And it's very much like that sort of
Speaker 8: mix between magic, personal practice, community and like a somewhat unified,
Speaker 8: but also decentralized like accult war. Like there's a political
Speaker 8: statement to it at the end, which there needs to
Speaker 8: be more of personally speaking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was like some vague gesturing towards like politics
Speaker 3: beyond you know, the mention of you know, magic as
Speaker 3: a form of resistance in the in the opening, a
Speaker 3: little paragraph on the program that they handed out, Like
Speaker 3: there was specifically in the politics of Tarot block one
Speaker 3: of the talks about the history of the Emperor and
Speaker 3: the herofint card, the speaker referred to the United States
Speaker 3: as having an emperor crisis right now. But that was
Speaker 3: kind of it that the rest of the talk was
Speaker 3: purely historical. The talk before that was on queering the Tarot,
Speaker 3: trying to free Taro from heteronormative readings.
Speaker 9: And discussed.
Speaker 4: And discussed a few.
Speaker 3: You know, artists, discussed a few artists who are attempting
Speaker 3: to do this, whether through abstracting the humanoid forms in
Speaker 3: the tarot or reflecting the tarot figures to be more
Speaker 3: representative of quote unquote queer idea of these. That was
Speaker 3: kind of it in terms of the political aspect, which
Speaker 3: is I guess kind of lacking as much as they
Speaker 3: want this to be a culture, they don't want this
Speaker 3: to be a political conference, it seems. And I think,
Speaker 3: you know, if everyone you know in their talk had
Speaker 3: to have some section on like you know, communism or
Speaker 3: it fascism or whatever, that probably would have been bad.
Speaker 4: And that's that's not what we're saying.
Speaker 3: But I mean, specifically, I think if they're naming this
Speaker 3: after Genesis Porridge, they were using a term bytch Genesis
Speaker 3: port who had a very strong idea of why they
Speaker 3: were doing this work. And specifically, I was very frustrated
Speaker 3: in the way people talked about Genesis at the conference,
Speaker 3: who almost all of them misgendered Genesis and refused to
Speaker 3: discuss that length. Some of them they mentioned it, but
Speaker 3: discussed like Genesis porge is. One of her core of
Speaker 3: occult practices was on androgenizing herself, androgyny projects androgyny and
Speaker 3: like breaking and Breaking gender, which they framed as an
Speaker 3: occult project, and yet even people who she knew at
Speaker 3: the conference would only refer to them as a hymn
Speaker 3: through all the talks, including the last guy, Carl Abronson,
Speaker 3: who heard a biography, Yeah, and like this is this
Speaker 3: is I do not think this was out of like
Speaker 3: you know, malice. I think this was just a linguistic
Speaker 3: blockage for some people who may not even been thinking
Speaker 3: about what they were doing. But it shows like an
Speaker 3: actual disconnect from engaging with the real purpose of magic
Speaker 3: or at least what I would would argue that is,
Speaker 3: and what I would you know, suppose genesis penrogyny project
Speaker 3: as a as a form of magic. But this, this,
Speaker 3: this kind of demonstrates the very limited political application for
Speaker 3: quote unquote unque resistance, since that's the term they're using,
Speaker 3: not not me, which kind of underlines this this, this
Speaker 3: whole this whole conference. I mean, I think the Borough's
Speaker 3: talk was probably the most the very first Burroughs talk,
Speaker 3: which we opened up the last episode with, is the
Speaker 3: most you know, explicitly political one and talking about you know,
Speaker 3: going against control, freedom in this like anarchic or libertarian sense,
Speaker 3: or you know, revolt against monotheism.
Speaker 8: I suppose, like one of my frustrations as well, is
Speaker 8: this the constant mention of the c cru which nobody
Speaker 8: ever went into depth on, but which you know, for
Speaker 8: all its faults, and you know, nick Land being nick
Speaker 8: Land was very much like a sort of like radical
Speaker 8: cultural Marxists like Project Right. It's like cybernetic Marxism mixed
Speaker 8: with like Crowley and some content whatever. But is extremely
Speaker 8: frustrating to see, yeah, that sort of refusal to engage
Speaker 8: with like the political stuff of it.
Speaker 4: Because like even before.
Speaker 8: Like Psychic Youth, there was like Throbbing Gristle, the Genesis
Speaker 8: band that pioneered industrial music, who I mean this was
Speaker 8: a bit before punk music, but like it very much
Speaker 8: played with like the same sort of shock aesthetics that
Speaker 8: like the early punks would wear swastikas, where like Throbbing
Speaker 8: Whistle had the logo is very much like a lightning
Speaker 8: bolt with like black and red and white.
Speaker 3: Genesis her self engaged in some of this uh stuff,
Speaker 3: not from a fascist perspective, but from a provocative perspective,
Speaker 3: which I mean you can certainly criticize uh Psychic TV
Speaker 3: and and and and her for as many many people have,
Speaker 3: But I.
Speaker 8: Mean, shock value is kind of overrated nowadays with like
Speaker 8: internet actual words. But I very much believed that occultism
Speaker 8: being this, you know, this collection of practices that have
Speaker 8: been very censored and you know, punished by like the
Speaker 8: church and such things, and like I guess these systems
Speaker 8: of control were like I guess I take issue with
Speaker 8: like the oh, it's like all fun and all and
Speaker 8: light and love and whatever. But there's like a radical
Speaker 8: element to occultism and a radical possibility to use occultism
Speaker 8: to again, like the whole cultural the idea between personal
Speaker 8: practice and cultural production, right, like creating cultural artifacts and
Speaker 8: putting them out into the world. Being very proactive with
Speaker 8: the shaping and the pushing of radical ideas and possibilities
Speaker 8: is a very potent thing to be to do. And
Speaker 8: the sort of I guess like liberalized or like neoliberal
Speaker 8: idea of like the personal practice and like I'm changing
Speaker 8: my perceptions and all these things are fine, but it's
Speaker 8: more like self soothing than it is about creating change
Speaker 8: into the world.
Speaker 5: If you're not actually changing anything, are you doing magic exactly?
Speaker 8: At least that would be my well, that would be
Speaker 8: my argument for like for coming from the chaosmotic perspective.
Speaker 11: This gets to another kind of trite and facile academic
Speaker 11: thematic that is present and prevalent for the past probably
Speaker 11: twenty years. At this point, I feel like at most
Speaker 11: philosophy and political science political theory conferences where The question
Speaker 11: is not just what would it look like if, but
Speaker 11: you know, to think otherwise, you know, think otherwise than
Speaker 11: we have.
Speaker 9: And usually it's this, how do.
Speaker 11: We think other than we have? Those kinds of things?
Speaker 11: And so it I mean again, magic and as we've
Speaker 11: been talking about here is meant to evoke change in
Speaker 11: the world, to cause change the world in conformity with reality.
Speaker 11: We're going to use you know, with with will if
Speaker 11: we're going to use the Crowley you know definition here,
Speaker 11: which I think is fine.
Speaker 7: Great.
Speaker 11: I want a goth girlfriend, thankfully you can talk to AI,
Speaker 11: but I'm worried that she might beat you.
Speaker 5: That you kill her like all my old tamagotchis.
Speaker 11: But this is the issue that we are talking around,
Speaker 11: that the conference and a culture has been talking around,
Speaker 11: and the political problematic that we're all dealing with right
Speaker 11: now is how the fuck do we evoke change the world?
Speaker 11: How is it when systems of institutional representation within politics
Speaker 11: and power failed to represent the will of the people,
Speaker 11: how do the people make change?
Speaker 4: And every and it feels like everything's been tried.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is where I mean Fisher, who I
Speaker 3: would argue is at least in a cultist or is
Speaker 3: at least has some mystical aspect, if not was at
Speaker 3: some point in occultist like you know, reached out. The
Speaker 3: point of capitalist realism is like most things that we
Speaker 3: you know, can think of, we actually have. We have
Speaker 3: given a shot, including including occultism. We have we have
Speaker 3: tried to do this, and yet here we are. The
Speaker 3: world maybe not as bad as it has been, but
Speaker 3: it's not in a great spot. I think everyone listening
Speaker 3: to this would certainly understand that. I think most people
Speaker 3: at the conference understood that. And yeah, I mean I'm
Speaker 3: very skeptical of magic as as a as a as
Speaker 3: certainly as an individual practice as a way to you know,
Speaker 3: cause larger political change. But even you know, can there
Speaker 3: even in this this revolves back to the concept of
Speaker 3: a culture, like can there even be an a cult anymore?
Speaker 3: Because none of these you know, magical things are very
Speaker 3: hidden anymore. They're all very accessible. They're all very visible.
Speaker 3: They're they're as you know hidden as as a queer
Speaker 3: flagging is right as as as an occult as an
Speaker 3: occultic ritual of you know, hidden signs to communicate with
Speaker 3: other people in the know. Something that is now you
Speaker 3: could just look up on the Internet, and I think
Speaker 3: occult occult practices and symbols have reached the same point.
Speaker 3: It's it's content. I mean, I like the Esoterica YouTube
Speaker 3: channel as much as us as much as much as
Speaker 3: the next person, But I mean, are these things even
Speaker 3: occult anymore?
Speaker 11: Well, that also speaks to the fundamental tension between this
Speaker 11: current at the conference and the other current at the conference,
Speaker 11: which was the much more traditional magical practices or the
Speaker 11: folk magical practices or what we would.
Speaker 5: Regulate like stant magical practice.
Speaker 11: Yeah, extant magical practices that weren't you know, weren't suppressed
Speaker 11: by Christianity, but carried over. So you have you had
Speaker 11: a section on Coimbanda, you had a section on Palamajumbe.
Speaker 11: You have the Roman magical school that is being founded
Speaker 11: in Romania, and you have the modern goeesha vi aethis right,
Speaker 11: which we identified very clearly as a practice that continues
Speaker 11: to this very day. The context in which we understand
Speaker 11: that practice is not a cult secret like in the No,
Speaker 11: it's just that like it's the stuff that you grew
Speaker 11: up with, it's every day and in that case, it's
Speaker 11: not transformative because it's just part of your daily existence.
Speaker 11: It's a kind of enchantment that by and large are
Speaker 11: kind of like you know, European Protestant Catholic defectors, whatever
Speaker 11: has brought you to the ocult in the first place,
Speaker 11: don't experience as a community or community engagement. But those
Speaker 11: are also things that can get deeply conservative.
Speaker 5: They are. But also the parts of those practices that
Speaker 5: do require initiation, that are not something that everyone's grandmother
Speaker 5: is doing, are also community based and exists specifically in
Speaker 5: and for community, and you know, as occult projects that
Speaker 5: have influenced the world, the Haitian Revolution.
Speaker 9: The good Revolution that we should all be talking about.
Speaker 1: You.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but these things do. But I mean the occult
Speaker 5: has bubbled to the surface in material ways, very very
Speaker 5: explicitly in some instances, and so I think there could
Speaker 5: be potential. But it does require being in community and
Speaker 5: being in service of community, even if it's not a
Speaker 5: practice that is being practiced by every single person around you.
Speaker 11: To be an on gun or a mambo in Haitian
Speaker 11: voodoo is to serve the community. It's not simply just
Speaker 11: a matter of magical wu or something like that, or
Speaker 11: the personal accumulation of power in some sort of like
Speaker 11: individual sense. Now you're you're serving your community. That's what
Speaker 11: it is that you're doing. It's first and foremost a service.
Speaker 11: Position on Haitian Revolution. Look, I understand this like the
Speaker 11: American standing the American Revolution makes you, I guess a
Speaker 11: classical liberal or whatever it is that you fetishized that into.
Speaker 11: If you're opposed to the French Revolution, that makes you
Speaker 11: a you know, classical conservative.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 11: If you stand the Haitian Revolution, I guess that makes
Speaker 11: you a radical. The myth, the legend, the discussion, this
Speaker 11: understanding is that the Haitian Revolution was sparked by the
Speaker 11: possession of the low law. Specifically is Ali Danto, who
Speaker 11: you know, sacrificed a pig. There's there's depictions of this
Speaker 11: and Haitian art all over the place. This leads to
Speaker 11: you know, slave uprisings, rebellions, revolution, well organized. Fantastic, Yeah,
Speaker 11: magical practice and action.
Speaker 3: And that wraps up our panel discussion on the twenty
Speaker 3: twenty five Culture Conference. Thanks again to Delta, Ryan and
Speaker 3: Lane for joining me in this magical journey to Berlin.
Speaker 3: And now I will start the tedious process of transcribing
Speaker 3: all of the talks I recorded and writing my written
Speaker 3: report on the a Culture Conference, where I can go
Speaker 3: into a bit more depth into some of these topics
Speaker 3: and reach a personal conclusion on the role of occultism
Speaker 3: and its ability to infest, influence, or undermine culture versus
Speaker 3: culture's capacity of eating away at the occult. That report
Speaker 3: should be coming out before the end of the year.
Speaker 3: See you on the other side.
Speaker 15: A warning this episode includes violent content which some listeners
Speaker 15: might find disturbing.
Speaker 16: I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
Speaker 16: history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the
Speaker 16: co author, with longtime journalists Betsy Freoff, of a history
Speaker 16: of eugenics in Texas called A Purifying Knife.
Speaker 15: And I'm Stephen Monchelli, a journalist in Dallas who specializes
Speaker 15: covering political extremism and far right internet culture for publications
Speaker 15: like The Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire and others.
Speaker 16: On December seventh, nineteen eighty two, the state of Texas
Speaker 16: made history in a particularly grim way. It became the
Speaker 16: first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner
Speaker 16: to death by lethal injection. This innovation was meant to
Speaker 16: make the grizzly business of executing murderers, swift, in humane.
Speaker 15: More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions,
Speaker 15: and by extension, the general public, that what they were
Speaker 15: watching didn't violate the United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban
Speaker 15: on rule and unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is
Speaker 15: based on junk science, and those who die that way
Speaker 15: may actually suffer more and over a longer time than
Speaker 15: prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.
Speaker 16: In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed
Speaker 16: to hide from the public that their government is torturing
Speaker 16: prisoners to death. As the University of Richmond law professor
Speaker 16: Brenna Lane, the author of recently published book Secrets of
Speaker 16: the Killing State, The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, told us.
Speaker 17: What I've come to conclude is that lethal injection only
Speaker 17: does one thing, well only one, and that is it
Speaker 17: hides what the death penalty is. It hides the violence
Speaker 17: of the death penalty, of what state killing actually is.
Speaker 17: And I remember reading it's not.
Speaker 1: The book, I kind of wish it I had put
Speaker 1: it in there, but I remember reading this phrase, the
Speaker 1: heart stops reluctantly.
Speaker 15: Over the next three episodes of It Could Happen Here,
Speaker 15: We're going to examine the shady business of state killing.
Speaker 15: We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and
Speaker 15: the unqualified people who designed the protocol. We'll talk about
Speaker 15: the untrained personnel who carry out the executions, and how
Speaker 15: pressure from drug companies who didn't want their products associated
Speaker 15: with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and
Speaker 15: elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally.
Speaker 16: We'll also talk about the pain the condemns suffer and
Speaker 16: speak with people who have accompanied those sons to death
Speaker 16: in their final moments. We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood, who,
Speaker 16: as of this broadcast, has been the last friend of
Speaker 16: ten men as they died by state command.
Speaker 7: It's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines
Speaker 7: that look like they're there to support life, and yet
Speaker 7: you know that they're there to take his life.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 16: Tell the story of one heroic Texas man, raised Boo Yon,
Speaker 16: who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime
Speaker 16: but thought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker,
Speaker 16: who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September eleventh
Speaker 16: in two thousand and one, and committed two Dallas area
Speaker 16: murders in a shooting spree.
Speaker 12: Well, definitely in this execution that was not for the victims,
Speaker 12: because the victims and the victims' family members requested and
Speaker 12: also fought for clemency. We went ahead and requested the
Speaker 12: Governor of Texas, the Board of Burdens and Paroles that
Speaker 12: did not execute him in our names in a show Marci,
Speaker 12: but looks like you know, we are not in the
Speaker 12: same page. The system wanted to move forward, so it
Speaker 12: was not in our names. It was basically just to
Speaker 12: uphold the verdict and to keep the system running, sending
Speaker 12: people to the executions without thinking how this execution is
Speaker 12: actually going to help the society, How is going to
Speaker 12: help people.
Speaker 15: Finally, we'll look at the future of the death penalty,
Speaker 15: which has become increasingly unpopular with the public, even as
Speaker 15: politicians continue to happily embrace it. But before we explore
Speaker 15: this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages
Speaker 15: from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers
Speaker 15: of the chemicals used in the lethal injection.
Speaker 16: The founders of the British colonies that became the United
Speaker 16: States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital
Speaker 16: punishment prevalent in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Their royal
Speaker 16: executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them
Speaker 16: at the stake, tying them to horses that pull them
Speaker 16: limb from limb, sawing them in half, and beheading them.
Speaker 16: Such elaborate executions were meant to understand or the absolute
Speaker 16: power of monarchs, as the political scientist Austin Sarat noted
Speaker 16: in his book grew some spectacles, botched executions and America's
Speaker 16: death penalty quote. Capital punishment was precisely about the right
Speaker 16: of the state that kills it pleased live, but lived
Speaker 16: by the grace of the sovereign. Live, but remember that
Speaker 16: your life belongs to the state.
Speaker 15: However, even before the American Revolution, those living in the
Speaker 15: American colonies embraced less exotic forms of capital punishment. In
Speaker 15: sixteen oh eight, authorities in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who
Speaker 15: was accused of being a spy for the Spanish Empire.
Speaker 15: That was the first execution in the British colonies in
Speaker 15: North America that later became part of the United States.
Speaker 15: Inspired by the Old Testament legal code, the thirteen British
Speaker 15: Colonies put prisoners to death for a variety of misdeeds,
Speaker 15: including stealing food or horses, killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, bestiality, blasphemy, idolatry,
Speaker 15: witch a sodomy, adultery, statutory rape, perjury in a capital trial, insurrection,
Speaker 15: trees in, manslaughter, and of course, murder.
Speaker 16: Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel European monarchs, in
Speaker 16: seventeen eighty nine, the First Congress of the United States
Speaker 16: submitted to the States the Eighth Amendment to the United
Speaker 16: States Constitution, which banned quote cruel and unusual punishments. The
Speaker 16: required number of states ratified the amendment seventeen ninety one.
Speaker 16: From colonial times until the first use of the electric
Speaker 16: chair in New York in eighteen ninety, condemned prisoners in
Speaker 16: the United States usually died at the end of a
Speaker 16: hangman's rope. More than half the essays sixteen thousand executions
Speaker 16: in all of US history have been by hanging. Hanging
Speaker 16: was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance,
Speaker 16: skinning prisoners alive.
Speaker 15: As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like
Speaker 15: Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments fit
Speaker 15: the crime and that no one was executed for relatively
Speaker 15: minor offenses. Beginning with Pennsylvania in seventeen ninety four, several
Speaker 15: states such as Vermont, Maryland, and New Hampshire sharply reduced
Speaker 15: the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty.
Speaker 15: Perhaps not surprisingly, the South went in the opposite direction.
Speaker 16: There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved
Speaker 16: African Americans they bought, sold, rape, whipped, and relentlessly forced
Speaker 16: to work without pay. Whites reported laying sleepless at night
Speaker 16: imagining what might happen if they faced justice for their
Speaker 16: crimes they wanted the African Americans they so abused, the
Speaker 16: fear of the consequences of any form of resistance.
Speaker 15: After repeated failed rebellions from seventeen oh four to eighteen
Speaker 15: thirty one, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw
Speaker 15: the death of many, if not all, slave owners in Haiti,
Speaker 15: legislators in the South greatly expanded the range of offenses
Speaker 15: for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies
Speaker 15: could be executed. Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans,
Speaker 15: who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any
Speaker 15: experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition. In Europe, enslave
Speaker 15: men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to
Speaker 15: escape their captivity faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons.
Speaker 15: This legacy of violence in the South contributed to the
Speaker 15: region's long term love affair with capital punishment.
Speaker 16: However, even hangings promoted as a kindly our way to
Speaker 16: kill became a horror show. In Europe, executioners were trained
Speaker 16: professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience. In the
Speaker 16: United States, such killings were done by local officials, often sheriffs,
Speaker 16: who might have little or no experience at the gallows.
Speaker 16: Executioners had to do some complicated math in order to
Speaker 16: do their jobs correctly. That to calculate the weight of
Speaker 16: the victim and ratio to the length of the rope
Speaker 16: and the likely speed at which the condemned prisoner would
Speaker 16: drop through the trapdoor at the bottom of the gallows.
Speaker 16: If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's neck would break
Speaker 16: at the end of the fall, theoretically killing the unfortunate
Speaker 16: victim instantly. Hanging was supposed to be clean and efficient,
Speaker 16: like the hanging carried out by the US Army at
Speaker 16: the beginning of the movie The Dirty Dozen, What did.
Speaker 7: You think of the hanging?
Speaker 14: Look very efficient?
Speaker 15: Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly,
Speaker 15: was painless. That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove.
Speaker 15: For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious
Speaker 15: rituals revolved and evolved around these events, with notable exceptions.
Speaker 15: Before the news was placed around their necks, the condemned
Speaker 15: told the sad tale of what led them to such
Speaker 15: a terrible fate. They repented their terrible crimes and begged
Speaker 15: God and society for forgiveness. The idea was that the
Speaker 15: death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay. Reality, however,
Speaker 15: often strayed from this script.
Speaker 16: Pretty early on, the leaders of the American Republic realized
Speaker 16: that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most
Speaker 16: of them continued to support it. Benjamin Rush, who signed
Speaker 16: the Declaration of Independence, decried what he called the death
Speaker 16: penalties quote brutalizing effect. Rush became one of the earliest
Speaker 16: voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that state
Speaker 16: violence made ordinary citizens more violent, and.
Speaker 15: There's reason to believe that's true. Consider the crowds that
Speaker 15: often watched hangings and got drunk, and sometimes fights broke
Speaker 15: out as witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows.
Speaker 15: Postcards and mementoes were made of famous lynchings in places
Speaker 15: like Dallas, Texas, and fights sometimes resulted in injury or death.
Speaker 15: Some of the crowds would spend their time at hangings,
Speaker 15: not learning somber moral lessons, but in fact picking the
Speaker 15: pockets of other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding
Speaker 15: the gallows and executions were often followed by hours of looting,
Speaker 15: arson assaults, another mayhem, as the public would engage in writing,
Speaker 15: not unlike modern cities when they celebrate a home team's
Speaker 15: win at the World Series. These unruly mobs unnerved the
Speaker 15: upper class, and, starting with Rhode Island in eighteen thirty three,
Speaker 15: states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from
Speaker 15: the public view. By eighteen forty five, public executions had
Speaker 15: been banned in all of New England. This upset death
Speaker 15: penalty abolitionists, who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded
Speaker 15: during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment.
Speaker 15: Thus began the process where state governments increasingly killed people
Speaker 15: in the name of the public, and a process shrouded
Speaker 15: in secrecy. Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to
Speaker 15: pay our bills, so we'll be back after a few
Speaker 15: words from our sponsors.
Speaker 16: In eighteen ninety nine, in Samson County, North Carolina, a
Speaker 16: local hothead named Art Kinsall's got into a heated exchange
Speaker 16: with a neighbor, John C. Herring, at a country's store.
Speaker 16: During the fight, Kinsalls grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly
Speaker 16: stabbed Herring, killing him. A few days later, he was
Speaker 16: arrested for the murder, but he escaped. He was on
Speaker 16: the loose for nine months. After a gunfight with a
Speaker 16: sheriff's posse, he was captured, put on trial, found guilty,
Speaker 16: and sentenced to die by hanging. There the story got messy.
Speaker 16: We'll repeat what we're about to say may be upsetting
Speaker 16: to some listeners. Kinsall's was not one to passively accept
Speaker 16: his fate. While awaiting his execution, he tried to take
Speaker 16: his own life twice, the first time with sleeping pills
Speaker 16: and the second time by cutting his own throat. These
Speaker 16: attempts delayed the execution, but inevitably Kinsalls faced his appointment
Speaker 16: with the hangman on September two.
Speaker 15: Twenty eighth, nineteen hundred. Local authorities used a step ladder
Speaker 15: as gallows. Kinsalls did not fall from a sufficient height
Speaker 15: to break his neck. Consequently, and the neck wound from
Speaker 15: his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so he was
Speaker 15: bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose. A doctor
Speaker 15: told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified spectators that
Speaker 15: Kinsaul's was still alive.
Speaker 16: Officers cut him down and hanged the unfortunate man a
Speaker 16: second time. This time he died. In an era in
Speaker 16: which the executions took place all the time, Kinsall's gory
Speaker 16: death cut through the fog and made national news. The
Speaker 16: Virginia Pilot called the scene revolting. During the history of hangings,
Speaker 16: hideous mistakes like this were common, sometimes because of an
Speaker 16: executioner's miscalculations, prisoner's heads were yanked off. Sometimes ropes ripped apart,
Speaker 16: with the prisoner falling to the ground, only to be
Speaker 16: hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned slowly strangled to death.
Speaker 15: John Harrerus, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 15: actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one
Speaker 15: newspaper quote, prisoner tortured through bungling at an execution, According
Speaker 15: to an estimate made in nineteen ninety three by illegal
Speaker 15: team representing a client who's facing death by hanging, in
Speaker 15: Washington State, between the years sixteen twenty two and nineteen
Speaker 15: ninety three, authorities bungled one hundred and seventy of about
Speaker 15: eight thousand legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering for
Speaker 15: the prisoners in more than two percent of the death
Speaker 15: sentences carried out by this technique. The growing middle class
Speaker 15: and upper class in the United States became squeamish about hanging.
Speaker 15: As one writer put it, bourgeois audiences might tolerate the
Speaker 15: ghastliness of death itself, but not in competence and mismanagement.
Speaker 15: By the early eighteen eighties, the new York Times had
Speaker 15: begun publishing lengthy, detailed and graphic accounts of hangings gone
Speaker 15: wrong TA tena five. In response to mounting public concerns,
Speaker 15: New York Governor David Bennett Hill declared, the present mode
Speaker 15: of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us
Speaker 15: from the dark ages. It may well be questioned whether
Speaker 15: the science of the present day cannot provide a means
Speaker 15: of taking the life of those condemned to die in
Speaker 15: a less barbarous manner. As the backlash against the extreme
Speaker 15: brutality of hanging grew among elites, the New York Medico
Speaker 15: Legal Society first suggested research into whether prisoners could be
Speaker 15: possibly executed by lethal injection in the eighteen seventies, but
Speaker 15: a different technology arose that delayed the advent of that
Speaker 15: protocol by more than a century. Famously, Thomas Edison was
Speaker 15: a greedy man took credit for the inventions of his
Speaker 15: underpaid lab assistance, who toiled as menlo New Jersey Laboratory.
Speaker 15: Edison was also a genius of public relations, and he
Speaker 15: would come to dominate several industries. In the early eighteen seventies,
Speaker 15: his team had developed a feasible Incandessa light bulb that
Speaker 15: ran on the direct current or DC system, As Edison
Speaker 15: himself described it.
Speaker 18: On October twenty first, eighty excepty what Lomis experiments resutted
Speaker 18: in the production of a small unit map up comparatively
Speaker 18: enormous resistance the filament the anomic conditions of great stability.
Speaker 18: After the result, I knew the problem approached commercial solution.
Speaker 15: In eighteen seventy nine, Edison submitted his patent for an
Speaker 15: electric lamp. In eighteen eighty the Edison Illuminating Company opened
Speaker 15: for business and soon provided lights for New York and
Speaker 15: other cities. In the early days of the electric industry,
Speaker 15: fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology. In
Speaker 15: eighteen eighty one, George Lemuel Smith, an intoxicated Buffalo bricklayer,
Speaker 15: stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself
Speaker 15: by touching a generator.
Speaker 16: An autopsy lets some doctors to conclude that Smith died
Speaker 16: quickly and painlessly. Many in the medical profession responded to
Speaker 16: Smith's untimely death by suggesting that perhaps electric power could
Speaker 16: provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid
Speaker 16: society of convicted murderers.
Speaker 13: And rapists enter a buffalo.
Speaker 15: Dentist Alfred Porter Southwick and doctor George Fell of the
Speaker 15: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who both
Speaker 15: experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current.
Speaker 15: The early results were often horrifying, with the animals sometimes
Speaker 15: burning live. Nevertheless, the two published an article that described
Speaker 15: electrocution as the quote safest and kindest method of killing.
Speaker 16: In eighteen eighty six, New York State formed a commission
Speaker 16: the study of prisoners could humanly be put to death
Speaker 16: In a similar way, the so called Jerry Commission falsely
Speaker 16: claimed that electrocuted animals tortured in a series of experiments
Speaker 16: died supposedly, rapidly and efficiently. Thomas Edison was soon seen
Speaker 16: a business opportunity in state killing.
Speaker 15: At the time, Edison was locked in a so called
Speaker 15: current war with another Robber Barren business tycoon, George Westinghouse.
Speaker 15: Westinghouse's labs had developed a system that ran on alternating
Speaker 15: current or AC, a system that was more efficient, more popular,
Speaker 15: and less prone to break down. Edison's DC system had
Speaker 15: already caused fatal electrocutions, but the so called Wizard of
Speaker 15: Menlo Park wanted to prove that the much safer Westinghouse
Speaker 15: system was in fact dangerous. Edison had his engineer's electrocute
Speaker 15: animals using the AC current in front of reporters to
Speaker 15: terrify the public about the system. His most sinister ploy, however,
Speaker 15: was conspiring with the state of New York to hook
Speaker 15: up its first electric chair, invented by the aforementioned Buffalo
Speaker 15: dentist and engineer Alfred Southwick, and Edison connected that chair
Speaker 15: to an AC power system.
Speaker 16: The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler,
Speaker 16: who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet
Speaker 16: during a drunken rage. The jury ordered him to die
Speaker 16: by electrocution. Edison saw an opportunity for Kemler to die
Speaker 16: in agony as the first man killed in an electric chair,
Speaker 16: in order to fatally damage Westinghouse's reputation and that of
Speaker 16: the AC current. Desperate to prevent his product from being
Speaker 16: associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of
Speaker 16: his AC generators to New York State out of fear
Speaker 16: that they would be used to execute Kemler. But Edison
Speaker 16: sent his men to find secondhand Westinghouse equipment, which ended
Speaker 16: up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly
Speaker 16: hired an attorney for Kemler, but the appeals failed. At
Speaker 16: six point thirty eight in the morning August sixth, eighteen ninety,
Speaker 16: Kemler became an unwilling pioneer.
Speaker 15: On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by
Speaker 15: Kemler's calm demeanor as he wished everyone in the death
Speaker 15: chamber good luck. After strapping Kemmler into the electric chair,
Speaker 15: the executioner pulled a switch and Kemler's body convulsed and
Speaker 15: became rigid. An attending physician announced he was not dead.
Speaker 15: Kemeler started to drool and a second jolt was ordered.
Speaker 15: Kemler started burning alive, and this time white smoke rose
Speaker 15: in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described
Speaker 15: as a quote pungent and sickening odor.
Speaker 16: Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemmler's agonizing death, they would have
Speaker 16: done better with an axe. The mayhem didn't matter. An
Speaker 16: Edison's plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a
Speaker 16: success and stuck with the method for decades to come.
Speaker 16: Twenty six other states adopted the electric chair as a
Speaker 16: method of execution. Kemler's death would be the first of
Speaker 16: many so called botched executions over the next century. As
Speaker 16: Austen Sarat wrote in Gruesome Spectacles, eighty of the executions
Speaker 16: gone awry in the next century involved the electric chair,
Speaker 16: with the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, others
Speaker 16: resulting in fire, smoke, the smell of burning flesh, and
Speaker 16: a prolonged period from the start to the completion.
Speaker 15: Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution. After death,
Speaker 15: the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison
Speaker 15: guards often got blisters if they touched the body too soon.
Speaker 15: In nineteen twenty three, a man named FG. Bullen would
Speaker 15: be one of four executed in Arkansas on the same day.
Speaker 15: Prison officials actually placed him in a casket, thinking he
Speaker 15: was dead when a guard noticed he was still breathing.
Speaker 15: Bullen was then carried back to the chair and electrocuted
Speaker 15: a second time, this time successfully.
Speaker 16: Before the start of the twentieth century, critics knew that
Speaker 16: both hanging and the electric chair were exercises in barbarity.
Speaker 16: In the Lone Star State, Fernand Eugene Daniel, the editor
Speaker 16: of the Texas Medical Journal, was an advocate of eugenics
Speaker 16: an opponent of capital punishment. He argued that cashtrating men
Speaker 16: from families with criminal histories would be a way to
Speaker 16: prevent criminals from being born in the first place. Cash
Speaker 16: straining criminals as more Eumane said than a hanging or
Speaker 16: electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to a
Speaker 16: life of crime. Daniel accepted that executions would take place
Speaker 16: for the foreseeable future, say one to make the death
Speaker 16: penalty a vehicle for medical research instead of hanging or
Speaker 16: electrocuting prisoners. Daniel suggested in a nineteen oh six issue
Speaker 16: of the Texas Medical Journal that the state should sedate
Speaker 16: them and, while unconscious, subject them to medical experiments. Quote
Speaker 16: inject into him various disease germs. Watched their progress and
Speaker 16: went through with him. Inject about ten drops of prussic
Speaker 16: acid into the veins of his arms, and he will
Speaker 16: die a painless death, Daniel wrote. Doctor Joseph Mengel and
Speaker 16: other Nazi scientists would conduct similar experiments a little more
Speaker 16: than three decades later. But as Professor Laine explained to us,
Speaker 16: Even before doctor Daniel made his disturbing suggestion in the
Speaker 16: Texas Medical Journal, doctors knew that death by levial and
Speaker 16: injection would be a horrifying experience.
Speaker 1: When states turned from hanging to the electric chair. This
Speaker 1: is back in eighteen ninety. There was actually a study.
Speaker 1: There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair,
Speaker 1: and that report actually considered death by drugs a lethal injection.
Speaker 1: And in that report they said, we considered and rejected this,
Speaker 1: and they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties.
Speaker 16: Professor Lane noted that even in the nineteenth century, doctors
Speaker 16: knew that the criminal population had a higher tendency towards
Speaker 16: drug abuse and poor health that would make it difficult
Speaker 16: to access a vein with a needle in order to
Speaker 16: deliver lethal chemicals. Also, even a century ago, doctors were
Speaker 16: queasy about involvement and executions that violate the Hippocratic Oath,
Speaker 16: which says, in part I will do no harm or
Speaker 16: in jau this the patients or quote and minister a
Speaker 16: poison to anyone when asked to do so, Nor will
Speaker 16: I suggest such a course. Professor Lane noted that a
Speaker 16: government commission studying lethal injection late nineteenth century. Prophetically said
Speaker 16: that not only would the medical conditions of prisoners be
Speaker 16: an issue, but so would the likely refusal of doctors
Speaker 16: that take part because of ethical concerns. This could mean
Speaker 16: that lethal injection would be carried out byameters.
Speaker 1: So you know, these people have notoriously bad things. They
Speaker 1: are elderly, they are of poor health, they are often
Speaker 1: former drug users. You know, how did we know this
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety and didn't think about this in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven. But that was one reason. The other reason
Speaker 1: was they said, we're not going to be able to
Speaker 1: do this without the medical profession. We're not going to
Speaker 1: be able to do it competently. And this sustained and
Speaker 1: strong opposition of the medical profession makes this not viable.
Speaker 15: There were other less popular alternatives to hanging in the
Speaker 15: electric chair in the nineteen hundreds. In nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 15: Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a
Speaker 15: gas chamber. Again, the euthanasia of straight pets and animal
Speaker 15: shelters provided a model for human executions, and again there
Speaker 15: were a lot of problems. Prisoners resisted breathing in the
Speaker 15: poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths. The
Speaker 15: big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of
Speaker 15: the poison gas, and in the earliest such executions, the
Speaker 15: chambers themselves sometimes leaked, putting witnesses in danger.
Speaker 16: As with the electric chair death penalty. Advocates claimed that
Speaker 16: the modern technology had provided a guilt free method for
Speaker 16: the government to kill people. The reality couldn't be farther
Speaker 16: from the truth. Doctor Richard Traitsman from John Hopkins University
Speaker 16: School of Medicine wrote, quote, the person is unquestionably experiencing
Speaker 16: pain and extreme anxiety. The sensation is similar to the
Speaker 16: pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where
Speaker 16: essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.
Speaker 15: Eleven states, including California, eventually adopted death by poisoned gas
Speaker 15: as their preferred method of execution, but witnesses consistently reported
Speaker 15: the condemn seemed to die accontizing struggling deaths in which
Speaker 15: they convulsed and wretched and sometimes screamed. In nineteen sixty,
Speaker 15: California executed Carol Chessman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous
Speaker 15: acclaimed books. While on death row. Before his execution, Chessman
Speaker 15: told reporters who would witness his death that he would
Speaker 15: nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while
Speaker 15: he was gased. Reporters said that Chessman indeed nodded his
Speaker 15: head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes.
Speaker 16: By the time at Chessman's death, the United States was
Speaker 16: less than a decade from the longest pause and executions
Speaker 16: in its history. Numerous judicial challenges the capital punishment, based
Speaker 16: on numerous racial biases, police misconduct, and other issues, resulted
Speaker 16: in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid
Speaker 16: nineteen sixties. That issue was the obvious racism of the
Speaker 16: death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and
Speaker 16: who ended up the target of state killing. As Brian Stevenson,
Speaker 16: a New York University law professor and the founder and
Speaker 16: executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explained in two
Speaker 16: thousand and seven.
Speaker 19: In the United States, we are struggling with capital punishment
Speaker 19: and its implementation.
Speaker 7: A short quick legal history.
Speaker 19: In nineteen seventy two, the United States Supreme Court struck
Speaker 19: down the death penalty after recognizing that it was being
Speaker 19: applied in an arbitrary manner. The Court in seventy two
Speaker 19: noted that eighty seven percent of the people executed for
Speaker 19: the crime of rape were black men convicted of raping
Speaker 19: white women. One hundred percent of the people executed in
Speaker 19: the United States between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy two
Speaker 19: for the crime of rape were executed for offenses involving
Speaker 19: victims who were white, even though it was believed that
Speaker 19: women of color were three times as likely to be
Speaker 19: the victims of sexual assault.
Speaker 16: That racism would play a major factor in the largest
Speaker 16: pause and executions in the history of the American death penalty.
Speaker 16: The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund in the ACLU filed challenges
Speaker 16: to the death penalty based on racial bias across the country,
Speaker 16: and these legal teams won numerous stays of execution. As
Speaker 16: Harvard law professor Kel Steiker observed in a YouTube video,
Speaker 16: a de facto ban of executions had taken place by
Speaker 16: the late nineteen sixties.
Speaker 20: The death penalty was in decline already in the nineteen
Speaker 20: sixties in the United States, as it was in Europe,
Speaker 20: but the ldf's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt.
Speaker 20: So from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy two in
Speaker 20: the five years prior to the decision in firm And
Speaker 20: versus Georgia, there were no executions in the United States.
Speaker 15: Three death penalty cases, Furman versus Georgia, Jackson Versus. Georgia,
Speaker 15: and Branch versus Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court
Speaker 15: and were consolidated in nineteen seventy two. All three defendants
Speaker 15: were African American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with
Speaker 15: raping white women. As previously noted, no white man had
Speaker 15: ever been executed for the rape of an African American
Speaker 15: woman or child in American history. In June nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 15: the US Supreme Court issued a five to four decision
Speaker 15: in Furman v. Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death
Speaker 15: penalty in such a fashion that capital punishment as then
Speaker 15: practiced was unconstitutional.
Speaker 20: So that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or
Speaker 20: reason to it. To use the words that they used,
Speaker 20: it was wantonly and freakishly imposed. The immediate aftermath of
Speaker 20: Furman was dramatic. Everyone who had been sentenced to death,
Speaker 20: and there were some six hundred dred Ish people on
Speaker 20: death row at the time of the Firman litigation. All
Speaker 20: had their death penalties invalidated, so they were all sent
Speaker 20: to the general population. They had to be re sentenced
Speaker 20: to a sentence other than death. Moreover, when the Supreme
Speaker 20: Court struck down the death penalty as it then existed,
Speaker 20: anyone whose death sentence was pending that case had to
Speaker 20: be dropped. Because those statutes were no longer.
Speaker 16: Valid, No executions took place for another four years. The
Speaker 16: Supreme Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions
Speaker 16: juries were given in capital cases were too vague. This
Speaker 16: gave states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death
Speaker 16: penalty laws. By nineteen seventy six, thirty five states had
Speaker 16: adopted new statues addressing the issues raised in furmin On
Speaker 16: July second, nineteen seventy six, in its greg versus Georgia decision,
Speaker 16: the Supreme Court, by a seven to two margin, upheld
Speaker 16: the death penalty. In states like Texas, where the Court
Speaker 16: found its rein instructions were clear and specific, the death
Speaker 16: penalty were set to resume after a decade long pause.
Speaker 16: It took a mere one hundred and ninety nine days
Speaker 16: for state killing to resume. Utah executed a murderer, Gary
Speaker 16: Gilmore by firing squad on January seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 15: The extreme violence of Gilmore's execution, which inspired in nineteen
Speaker 15: seventy nine Pultzer Prize winning journalism based novel called The
Speaker 15: Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of
Speaker 15: capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society. Nevertheless,
Speaker 15: the state of Oklahoma charged ahead, but they faced a problem.
Speaker 15: As Professor Lane writes, the Oklahoma electric Chair was falling
Speaker 15: apart and needed to be repaired. But by the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 15: many legislators were put off by the brutality of that
Speaker 15: execution method and sought something more modern.
Speaker 16: Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter, Tony Garrett, filed suit to
Speaker 16: allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district
Speaker 16: court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That
Speaker 16: injunction was later overturned, but politicians across the country were
Speaker 16: unnerved as a prospect of the public watching a man
Speaker 16: essentially burn alive in their names and what that could
Speaker 16: do to support for the death penalty.
Speaker 15: It was at this time that a member of the
Speaker 15: Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community and asked them for
Speaker 15: help and designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection.
Speaker 15: Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently like
Speaker 15: veterinarians euthanizing animals, but doctors wanted nothing to do with
Speaker 15: killing people. That's when Oklahoma State corner doctor J. Chapman
Speaker 15: stepped in. Referring to the physicians who refused to help,
Speaker 15: he said, quote, to hell with them, Let's do this.
Speaker 15: Professor Lane explained what happened next.
Speaker 21: I document in the book legislators talking about, how, you know,
Speaker 21: I don't know that the country's going to want to
Speaker 21: see this sort of violence.
Speaker 1: All we've got is the electric chair, all we've got
Speaker 1: is the gas chamber. People are going to be, you know,
Speaker 1: queasy about this, and we need to find a different way.
Speaker 1: And unknown to many, or at least I appreciate it,
Speaker 1: is the fact that a federal court had recognized at
Speaker 1: the time a First Amendment right to televise executions. Now
Speaker 1: it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that. And
Speaker 1: so one of the things I also found was state
Speaker 1: legislators talking about, gosh, we can't you know, we can't
Speaker 1: have an electrocution in someone's living room, right. The public
Speaker 1: is not going to go for this, and so they
Speaker 1: were looking for a different way. They talked about, you
Speaker 1: know what about a death by drugs? And they are
Speaker 1: asking the state Medical Association, they're asking their personal doctors,
Speaker 1: they're asking everybody they can find. No one wants to play,
Speaker 1: but they get to and this is in Oklahoma. They
Speaker 1: get to the state Medical Examiner, doctor J. Chapman, and
Speaker 1: he refers to himself as an expert in tet bodies,
Speaker 1: but not in how to get them that way.
Speaker 16: In spite of his self confessed ignorance, Chapman made up
Speaker 16: at of thin air, a three drug protocol that would
Speaker 16: be used in executions across the country for the next
Speaker 16: three decades. Initially, he proposed a two drug protocol, but
Speaker 16: decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be
Speaker 16: even more lethal. Chapman's cocktail included in order sodium theopental,
Speaker 16: which was designed to kill like a barbituate overduse pan,
Speaker 16: coronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing,
Speaker 16: and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest.
Speaker 16: Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or
Speaker 16: into how they interacted with each other, and neither did
Speaker 16: the State of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure. Despite this,
Speaker 16: Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by
Speaker 16: every single state that had the death penalty. Laine described
Speaker 16: her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman, who
Speaker 16: seemed completely glib about what prisoners might experience under this
Speaker 16: execution method.
Speaker 1: And I later came across an interview of him where
Speaker 1: they asked, you know, how did you come up with
Speaker 1: a three drug protocol that every state used, every single
Speaker 1: state for thirty five forty years, And he said, I
Speaker 1: didn't do any research. I just thought about what might
Speaker 1: be useful, what you might need. You wanted two drugs
Speaker 1: so that if one didn't kill him, the other did.
Speaker 1: And then the interviewer said, well, why did you add
Speaker 1: a third drug? And he said, why not? I didn't
Speaker 1: do any research. Why does it matter why.
Speaker 12: I chose it?
Speaker 1: So he makes it up and the state of Oklahoma
Speaker 1: adopts it basically in an afternoon. No expert testimony, no
Speaker 1: committee here rings, no review of the medical science, veterinary
Speaker 1: literature nothing, and it takes hold and all of the
Speaker 1: other states blindly follow it.
Speaker 16: It's possible Chapman may not have cared, but if he
Speaker 16: had done any research, you would have found that the
Speaker 16: components of his three drug protocol worked at cross purposes.
Speaker 16: Anesthesiologists believe that the amountain speed at which the sodium
Speaker 16: theopentol is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep
Speaker 16: enough for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's
Speaker 16: happening to them. Meanwhile, the sodian theopentol also slows down
Speaker 16: blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of
Speaker 16: the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer
Speaker 16: a racing heart but not have a fatal heart attack.
Speaker 16: The combined effect, in many cases is a slow suffocation
Speaker 16: that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in
Speaker 16: the lungs in essence with lethal injection. States slowly drowned.
Speaker 16: The paralyzed who struggle but are unable to cry for help.
Speaker 16: When lethal injections have not gone according to plan, the
Speaker 16: execution sometimes last hours. The agonizing deaths hidden from the
Speaker 16: general public.
Speaker 15: Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but
Speaker 15: not for humanitarian reasons. They've done so because of the
Speaker 15: difficulty of obtaining all of the drugs from pharmaceutical firms
Speaker 15: that have resisted participating in capital punishment. As of this year,
Speaker 15: twenty four states provide for some form of lethal injection,
Speaker 15: and as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era
Speaker 15: in nineteen eighty two with the execution of Charlie Brooks.
Speaker 15: In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution. We'll discuss
Speaker 15: why lethal injections peaked in the nineties, how states got
Speaker 15: around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used
Speaker 15: in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together
Speaker 15: to thwart this particularly American machinery of death, and how
Speaker 15: this is all all been a mixed blessing for the
Speaker 15: approximately two thousand, one hundred prisoners on death Row. I'm
Speaker 15: Stephen Monchelli for it could happen here.
Speaker 16: And until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 15: A warning this episode includes violent content which some listeners
Speaker 15: might find disturbing.
Speaker 16: I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
Speaker 16: history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the
Speaker 16: co author with longtime journalist Betsy Freeoff, of the history
Speaker 16: of the eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
Speaker 15: And I'm Stephen Monchelli. I'm an investigative reporter who specializes
Speaker 15: in political extremism and far right internet culture, and I
Speaker 15: contribute to outlets like The Texas Observer, The barb Byer
Speaker 15: and more.
Speaker 16: In the last episode, we began exploring the shady history
Speaker 16: behind the most popular form of capital punishment in the
Speaker 16: United States, lethal injection. We described how one after another
Speaker 16: execution by hanging, then the electric chair, and then the
Speaker 16: gash chamber was tatted's cleanest, quickest, most modern, painless way
Speaker 16: to put a person to death. Each method, however, proved
Speaker 16: more violent and gruesome than previously expected. In order to
Speaker 16: prevent a ground swell of opposition to the death penalty,
Speaker 16: politicians responded by abolishing public executions in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 16: latched on to lethal injection as the newest, gentlest, and
Speaker 16: kindest method of state killing.
Speaker 15: I discussed in the first episode. The lethal injection protocol
Speaker 15: was designed by an Oklahoma corner doctor Stephen Crawford, who
Speaker 15: once admitted to an interview with that although he was
Speaker 15: an expert in dead bodies, he didn't know how to
Speaker 15: get him that way. Authorities turned to Crawford because doctors
Speaker 15: who dealt with living bodies wanted nothing to do with executions,
Speaker 15: So Crawford designed a three drug protocol off for executions
Speaker 15: that he made up pretty much out of thin air,
Speaker 15: reasoning that if one deadly drug was good for killing,
Speaker 15: then three drugs would be even better. The problem was
Speaker 15: that the three drugs counteract each other and would result
Speaker 15: in longer executions and in deaths that resembled slow drowning.
Speaker 16: Crawford did no homework, and neither did the more than
Speaker 16: thirty states that eventually adopted lethal injection as the preferred
Speaker 16: method of execution. This occurred after the Supreme Court brought
Speaker 16: the death penalty back to life with its nineteen seventy
Speaker 16: six greg versus Georgia decision. Following a ten year pause,
Speaker 16: it would not be until December seventh, nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 16: the state of Texas carried out the first execution by
Speaker 16: lethal injection in the world. In this episode, we'll talk
Speaker 16: to a journalist, Dick Revis, who witnessed brokes execution.
Speaker 22: One thing I noticed was that there were half a
Speaker 22: dozen or more loanmen in there who had on cowboy hats.
Speaker 22: They did not remove that Charlie was killed, and I
Speaker 22: also thought that wasn't quite right. But in any case,
Speaker 22: I don't recall any anybody saying anything. We were silent
Speaker 22: while all of this was going on.
Speaker 23: And.
Speaker 14: Charlie only spoke to say, allow what water? And he
Speaker 14: was dying when that happened. It was obvious that he
Speaker 14: was scared to death.
Speaker 15: Revis told us that Brooks, as he recalled it, seemingly
Speaker 15: drifted off to sleep. But that's not all that may
Speaker 15: have been occurring. According to Professor Karina Lane, the author
Speaker 15: of the recently published book Secrets of the Killing State,
Speaker 15: who you heard from in the first episode, something very
Speaker 15: different was likely going.
Speaker 13: On in Brooks's mind and body.
Speaker 15: According to Lane, Brooks was slowly suffocating. Medical experts, Lane said,
Speaker 15: believe that those executed with legal injections are often not
Speaker 15: fully unconscious, and that the paralytic drugs fed into their
Speaker 15: veins prevent them from fully communicating their suffering, even as
Speaker 15: they may be aware of it.
Speaker 1: The courts that have heard this medical testimony. There was
Speaker 1: a court in Ohio and said, yeah, you know, all
Speaker 1: of the medical experts are describing acute pulmonary edema as
Speaker 1: a drowning from within. It is you can't catch your breath,
Speaker 1: You've got fluid coming into your lungs, and you can't
Speaker 1: do anything about it. And the court said, you know,
Speaker 1: this is the sensation akin to waterboarding. You know, we're
Speaker 1: waterboarding people to death. That's what we're actually doing.
Speaker 16: In this episode, we'll also talk about how the modern
Speaker 16: death penalty peaked in the nineteen nineties and why pressure
Speaker 16: from drug manufacturers and activists led not only to a
Speaker 16: decline in executions, but the revival in some states of
Speaker 16: some very old forms of execution, such as the electra
Speaker 16: chair and the firing squad.
Speaker 15: It's a fascinating but often frightening story, and one that
Speaker 15: will have to continue after perhaps less scripping messages from
Speaker 15: our sponsors.
Speaker 16: Big changes came to the death penalty in Texas in
Speaker 16: nineteen twenty three. Before then, hangings were carried out by
Speaker 16: sheriffs and the counties where the murderers, rapes, and other
Speaker 16: crimes committed by the prisoner took place. Many of the
Speaker 16: sheriffs were inexperience, and hanging and goring mishaps took place.
Speaker 16: Texas last public execution unfolded in August thirty first, nineteen
Speaker 16: twenty three, when African American Nathan Lee was hanged before
Speaker 16: one hundred and fifty spectators in Brazoria County. From nineteen
Speaker 16: hundred to nineteen twenty, close to seventy percent of the
Speaker 16: inmates executed in Texas were African American.
Speaker 15: In nineteen twenty three, Texas sought to modernize and bring
Speaker 15: industrial efficiency to state killing. All executions henceforth would be
Speaker 15: carried out at the state prison in Huntsville, and prisoners
Speaker 15: would die in an electric chair. Locals gave it a
Speaker 15: glib name, Old Sparky. The state's new killing machine, got
Speaker 15: a workout the day it debuted February eighth, nineteen twenty five.
Speaker 15: Texas executed five prisoners that day, all black men. Between
Speaker 15: that date and July thirtieth, nineteen sixty four, when the
Speaker 15: state electrocuted Joseph Johnson, a man convicted of fatally shooting
Speaker 15: store owner during a robbery, Texas sent three hundred and
Speaker 15: sixty one inmates to the electric chair. African Americans made
Speaker 15: up sixty three percent of the prisoners who died in
Speaker 15: that chair, while seventy percent of those who died in
Speaker 15: the electric chair were Mexican American. Texas politicians insisted that
Speaker 15: their tough on crime policies served as a deterrent, but
Speaker 15: in fact, from nineteen thirty three to nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 15: the year Joseph Johnson was executed, the murdery in Texas
Speaker 15: was twelve point seven per one hundred thousand people, the
Speaker 15: eighth highest in the United States. Nevertheless, Texas leaders have
Speaker 15: continued to justify the death penalty in spite of its
Speaker 15: seemingly negligible impact on the state's violent culture, and the
Speaker 15: violence of capital punishment was about performative toughness, not about
Speaker 15: stopping future murders. As a reporter who witnessed a hanging
Speaker 15: laments in the film In Cold Blood and.
Speaker 1: Then next one, next year, same thing will happen again,
Speaker 1: maybe this would help to stop it.
Speaker 11: Never had.
Speaker 16: After Johnson, Texas didn't execute another inmate for eighteen years.
Speaker 16: Following the Greg versus Georgia decision, Texas faced a potential
Speaker 16: public relations disaster. As we mentioned last episode, Dallas television
Speaker 16: reporter Tony Garrett filed suit to allow television cameras to
Speaker 16: film executions, and a federal district court ranted a preliminary
Speaker 16: injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned.
Speaker 16: But under the Texas Capital Dome, there were was worry
Speaker 16: about well, so it happened to support for the death
Speaker 16: penalty if an electrocution was broadcast live. The legislator who
Speaker 16: wrote Texas new death penalty law to greg decision said
Speaker 16: he was quote repulsed by the idea of an electrocution
Speaker 16: taking place in someone's living room. Lethal injection, as Professor
Speaker 16: Lane had put it, had visual appeal because it would
Speaker 16: resemble healthful medical procedures and because quote states have been
Speaker 16: euthanizing pets with pentode barbital since the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 15: Animals are typically put to sleep with a two drug protocol,
Speaker 15: first a sedative and then the drug that does the deed.
Speaker 15: But the three drug protocol that would be adopted by
Speaker 15: most states that allowed capital punishment produced to nightmarish results
Speaker 15: that were typically invisible to witnesses. States typically allowed family
Speaker 15: members of the crime victim to attend executions, and the
Speaker 15: condemned also got to choose witnesses. In the early days
Speaker 15: of Texas' reborn death penalty, the state's populist Democratic Attorney General,
Speaker 15: Jim Mannix, liked to make a show of attending each execution,
Speaker 15: and though much of the death penalty process has been
Speaker 15: shrouded in secrecy, such as who is providing the lethal chemicals,
Speaker 15: states also allowed reporters to attend executions so that they
Speaker 15: could serve as the eyes and ears of the public.
Speaker 16: In his younger days, Dick Revis was the civil rights
Speaker 16: activist who served time in Alabama jail for his efforts
Speaker 16: to secure vetting rights for African Americans. Revis became a journalist,
Speaker 16: and by the early nineteen eighties he was a frequent
Speaker 16: contributor to Texas Monthly, one of the state's premier investigative publications.
Speaker 16: In nineteen eighty two, he got the chance to witness
Speaker 16: an event that had never happened in the United States
Speaker 16: or perhaps even the world. The Texas Department of Corrections
Speaker 16: would soon pioneer the use of lethal injection, although the
Speaker 16: first person to be put to death in this manner
Speaker 16: was still unclear.
Speaker 22: I recall the meeting with an editor, and they said
Speaker 22: somehow they told me that there's a lady at the capitol,
Speaker 22: or a lady and the government in Austin, which is
Speaker 22: where I was a living the land who was in
Speaker 22: charge of scheduling their execute shits. So I called her
Speaker 22: up and she said, well, she didn't have any album scheduled,
Speaker 22: but she could give me the names of it was
Speaker 22: either four or five people who would be first, and
Speaker 22: one of them who was candy Man, the fellow who
Speaker 22: poisoned his own child putting poisoned in a in some
Speaker 22: candy at Halloween.
Speaker 15: Revis is referring to Ronald Clark O'Brien, a Houston area
Speaker 15: optician who fell into debt. He was one hundred thousand
Speaker 15: dollars deep, so he bought a life insurance policy on
Speaker 15: his eight year old son and daughter before he prepared
Speaker 15: five pixie sticks poisoned with potassium cyanide, and on Halloween
Speaker 15: night in nineteen seventy four, he went trick or treating
Speaker 15: with his children, a neighbor and that man's two children.
Speaker 15: The group went to an abandoned house and knocked on
Speaker 15: the door, and when no one answered, O'Brien convinced the
Speaker 15: rest of the group to move on. He caught up
Speaker 15: with them later and claimed that someone had in fact
Speaker 15: answered the door, and then he handed out four of
Speaker 15: the poisoned candies to the children. When the O'Brien's returned home,
Speaker 15: the killer handed the fifth pixie stick to a neighborhood child.
Speaker 15: Later that night, O'Brien told his children that they could
Speaker 15: enjoy one candy from the evening, and he urged them
Speaker 15: to choose the pixie sticks. And when his child, Timothy
Speaker 15: complained the candy tasted bitter, O'Brien gave him kool aid
Speaker 15: to wash down the poison. Timothy started vomiting and died
Speaker 15: on the way to the hospital.
Speaker 16: None of the other children tried the poison candy.
Speaker 12: That night.
Speaker 16: O'Brien claimed that a malevolent stranger had poisoned the candy,
Speaker 16: and he sang at his son's funeral. His story fell apart, however,
Speaker 16: when the police discovered the life insurance policies, when O'Brien
Speaker 16: was unable to identify the house where he had been
Speaker 16: supposedly handed the pixie sticks, and when the cops found
Speaker 16: out that O'Brien had purchased cyanide from a chemical store
Speaker 16: in Houston. A jury sends him to death on June third,
Speaker 16: nineteen seventy five. The murder created a last day national legacy,
Speaker 16: sparking paranoia about the safety of trick or treating.
Speaker 15: State of Texas knew that executing O'Brien would be politically
Speaker 15: popular and would probably boost support for the death penalty.
Speaker 15: Not knowing which resident of Texas's death row would be
Speaker 15: strapped to the gurney first, REVUS ended up interviewing all
Speaker 15: but one inmate on the list he had been given.
Speaker 15: The appeals process, however, is unpredictable, and a fort Worth
Speaker 15: man known for most of his life as Charlie Brooks,
Speaker 15: would end up winning the dubious honor of being the
Speaker 15: first to be put to death by lethal injection. He
Speaker 15: was convicted for the fatal shooting of a twenty six
Speaker 15: year old mechanic, David Gregory, during a nineteen seventy six robbery.
Speaker 16: By the time REVS interviewed him, Brooks had converted to
Speaker 16: Islam and taken the name Sharif Achmad abdul Rahem.
Speaker 9: That is the name we.
Speaker 16: Will use referring to him for the rest of the episode.
Speaker 16: Abdul Raheem had committed the robbery with another man, Wouldy
Speaker 16: lords He posed to someone wanting to buy a used
Speaker 16: car and asked to take a test strive. Gregory agreed
Speaker 16: to ride with him. Abdul Rahem picked up Lordes. The
Speaker 16: pair through Gregory in a car trunk, drove him to
Speaker 16: a ramshackle motel, tied him to a chair, and taped
Speaker 16: his mouth shut. Abdul Raheem and Lordis accused each other
Speaker 16: of firing the fatal shot. No weapon was ever found.
Speaker 16: Lordis eventually received the death penalty, but after that was overturned,
Speaker 16: he reached an agreement with prosecutors and received a forty
Speaker 16: year sentence. He would end up serving only eleven. The
Speaker 16: disparity in sentencing is one of the defining features of
Speaker 16: how capital punishment is carried out, even after greg versus
Speaker 16: Georgia had supposedly addressed that issue. Shortly before his execution,
Speaker 16: Abdul Raheem insisted on his innocence, but according to Revis,
Speaker 16: the condemned man was lying. Revs described to us his
Speaker 16: relationship with Abdul Raheem aka Charlie Brooks.
Speaker 14: Charlie was very alert a test on his fate engaged.
Speaker 22: It was not moping around sad. He had a sense
Speaker 22: of humor. He told me in the first interview I
Speaker 22: had with him that he was innocent and that this
Speaker 22: was racial discrimination, that they executed more blacks than whites.
Speaker 22: And I told him, oh, what you want is for
Speaker 22: them to excuse more white people, huh. And that stunned
Speaker 22: me because I think no one had ever said that
Speaker 22: to him. But that would do away with racial discrimination.
Speaker 22: And there's lots of white people need executed too. It
Speaker 22: was my way of thinking. And he didn't get mad
Speaker 22: at me or anything. He kind of laughed at it himself.
Speaker 22: After he paused to understand the question. Then he kind
Speaker 22: of laughed at it himself. But I would say he
Speaker 22: was even until until they're getting strapped down. He was
Speaker 22: in control all of his own body. His mind was
Speaker 22: in great shape. He lied to me about about whether
Speaker 22: or not he was innocent.
Speaker 15: Brooks told Revis that although the gun went off, you
Speaker 15: didn't pull the trigger.
Speaker 13: It was an accident.
Speaker 22: At some point I got him to say that all
Speaker 22: the gun went off, and I went and pulled the
Speaker 22: transcript of his criminal trial. The gun was a revolver,
Speaker 22: not an automatic. Revolvers don't go off to just that terry.
Speaker 22: I even took what I had and banged it on
Speaker 22: the table while it was loaded and all and nothing happened.
Speaker 22: Revolvers don't go off until they'd been cocked.
Speaker 14: Unless they've been cocked, they can't go off.
Speaker 15: We'll return to the story of the world's first execution
Speaker 15: by lethal injection and conceptive way it was used to
Speaker 15: win public support for capital punishment. After this lovely odbreak.
Speaker 16: There was a little bit of last Spina drama. As
Speaker 16: zero hour for the execution of Charlie Brooks aka abdul
Speaker 16: Rahim approached. The Serme Court rejected his appeal for the
Speaker 16: last time. Shortly before the execution was scheduled began. Jack Strickland,
Speaker 16: the prosecutor in Abdul Raheem's murder trial, had second thoughts
Speaker 16: about the differences between the condemned man sentence and that
Speaker 16: of his accomplice. Strickland testified on abdul Rahim's behalf, but
Speaker 16: to no avail. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said
Speaker 16: the defense team had presented no new information that would
Speaker 16: justify a stay of execution. Just after midnight, State Attorney
Speaker 16: General Mark White called officials in Huntsville and told them
Speaker 16: that the historic execution could begin.
Speaker 15: From nineteen eighty two, the year of Abdulheim's execution, until
Speaker 15: twenty eleven. Texas allowed prisoners facing executions a choice of
Speaker 15: a last meal of their choosing. Abdurhem's request, however, was rejected.
Speaker 22: He told me that for his last meal he wanted
Speaker 22: a five shrimp and bushes, and he said he had
Speaker 22: told the authorities that that's what he wanted for his
Speaker 22: last meal. When I got down there, I was told
Speaker 22: that there was no shellfish in the prison system's kitchens
Speaker 22: and Charlie had to pick. He finally picked steak in
Speaker 22: beach cobbler. But I felt bad about that because the
Speaker 22: prison people knew that they could go to the grocery
Speaker 22: store and buy whatever Charlie wanted, and they didn't do it,
Speaker 22: and it was sort of I thought it was an
Speaker 22: indignant they inflicted on it. So when I went down
Speaker 22: for the execution, I went down in the afternoon execution
Speaker 22: was that knot I went out night fish just I
Speaker 22: need to say, I don't know.
Speaker 14: Because of the situaship.
Speaker 15: Texas would end this final meal for prisoners on death
Speaker 15: row in twenty eleven. That's because of Lawrence Russell Brewer,
Speaker 15: who was one of three white supremacists who chained an
Speaker 15: African American man, James Bird, to the back of a
Speaker 15: car in Jasper, Texas, and dragged him to death on
Speaker 15: June seventh, nineteen ninety eight. As a last act of
Speaker 15: bitter defiance. On the date of Brewer's execution September twenty first,
Speaker 15: twenty eleven, Brewer ordered a last meal that included two
Speaker 15: chicken fried steaks, a triple meat bacon, cheeseburger, fried okra,
Speaker 15: a pound of barbecue, three fijidas, a meat lover's pizza,
Speaker 15: a pine of ice cream, and a slab of peanut
Speaker 15: butter fudge with crust peanuts. When he received all the food,
Speaker 15: he refused to.
Speaker 10: Touch a bite.
Speaker 15: State Senator John Whitmyer complained bitterly at the waist and
Speaker 15: expense lavished on such an infamous killer, and prison officials
Speaker 15: immediately changed the policy. Today, those facing execution are now
Speaker 15: only fed the same meal other prisoners receive that day.
Speaker 16: Revis believes that the process of being strapped down to
Speaker 16: a hospital like gurney is humiliating to those being executed.
Speaker 14: Men die with more dignity.
Speaker 22: When they're on their feet, for example, as walking to
Speaker 22: a scaffold.
Speaker 14: Would they still feel in control of their lives.
Speaker 22: The hardest thing about lethal injections is that they strap
Speaker 22: you down where you can't move, and you're sitting there.
Speaker 22: Absolutely helped, helpless till the drug strike effect.
Speaker 16: Revers described the atmosphere in the death chamber as Abdul
Speaker 16: Raheem was executed as tense and quiet. A prison girlfriend,
Speaker 16: as Revers describes her, Vanessa Sap, was present, as were
Speaker 16: numerous officials.
Speaker 14: First of all, the room it's too small.
Speaker 22: My recollection is there was a circular self of chairs
Speaker 22: threading out ten feet twenty feet in a curve. It
Speaker 22: may not it may have been a corner, but it
Speaker 22: was barely room to hold the law man who wanted
Speaker 22: to witness the execution, and Vanesa Sap and three reporters.
Speaker 22: His wife was not present. She didn't want to be
Speaker 22: and she didn't want it's to see it. As for
Speaker 22: the audience reaction, I don't recall that there was anything dramatic.
Speaker 22: Now I seem more routine.
Speaker 15: Inspired by the story of Carol Chessman, the author and
Speaker 15: rapist executed in the gas chamber in nineteen sixty who
Speaker 15: worked out a signal he could send to reporters if
Speaker 15: he was suffering during execution. Revis and Abdul Raheem worked
Speaker 15: out a similar arrangement. If Abdul Raheem was suffering as
Speaker 15: he was dying, he would shake his head. Revis would
Speaker 15: later regret making that arrangement.
Speaker 22: I interviewed them before the execution, and when we came
Speaker 22: up with an idea. Unfortunately, it was mine that if
Speaker 22: he felt pain while he was dyned, that he should
Speaker 22: shake his head. So I decide, and I say, it's
Speaker 22: unfortunate because and as things were, we were unable to
Speaker 22: I was unable to determine as if he was given
Speaker 22: me that signal.
Speaker 16: Jurevis did. Appeared that Abdul Raheem had simply drifted off
Speaker 16: to sleep.
Speaker 14: He seemed to die peacefully.
Speaker 22: I had to put down a dog only a couple
Speaker 22: of years ago, or have the dog put down, and
Speaker 22: I was with him while that happened, and I couldn't.
Speaker 22: How do you say after seeing those two things, I said,
Speaker 22: I wish I.
Speaker 14: Could die that way.
Speaker 22: And yeah, there was no evidence with my dog, for example,
Speaker 22: that there was any pain. It was like, I put
Speaker 22: him to sleep, and I think that's what they did
Speaker 22: with Charlie, but it would take a doctor to know.
Speaker 2: Of course.
Speaker 16: Abdul Raheem's death was the first of its kind. As
Speaker 16: we mentioned last time, the three drug protocol that was
Speaker 16: used by most states over the last three decades was
Speaker 16: concocted out of thin air by someone no expertise on
Speaker 16: the effect of these drugs together on the human body.
Speaker 16: Abdul Raheem's execution was a medical experiment conducted with no
Speaker 16: prior research. Professor Lane said that since abdul Rahem's execution,
Speaker 16: doctors have had a chance to perform autopsies on those
Speaker 16: executed by lethal injection, and witnesses have heard the cries
Speaker 16: of those who were able to speak while dying on
Speaker 16: the gurney.
Speaker 1: You know, the state expert to saying, oh, this first drug,
Speaker 1: you're going to be ninety nine point ninety nine nine
Speaker 1: percent of the public would be you know, out and
Speaker 1: dead within a minute. You don't even have to worry
Speaker 1: about those other super tortuous drugs. And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not what was happening. They said they would stop
Speaker 1: breathing within a minute. And there was some pretty prominent litigation,
Speaker 1: the Barrells case out in California, where they looked at
Speaker 1: the executions by lethal injection and said over half of
Speaker 1: them they actually did not stop breathing within a minute.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was eight and ninetes and it did
Speaker 1: not kill them within two minutes of injecting. That third drug,
Speaker 1: which is called potassium chloride, but it's referred to as
Speaker 1: liquid fire, and it chemically burns the thing as it
Speaker 1: races to the heart where it induces a cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1: So they're like, you know, the experts like, oh, you
Speaker 1: know that it's going to bring death in two minutes.
Speaker 1: That didn't happen, Like none of this was happening as
Speaker 1: the state and the state's experts were so confidently just saying.
Speaker 1: And it turns out, you know, no one had ever
Speaker 1: studied these drugs in these amounts, nobody had ever injected
Speaker 1: these drugs in these amounts into people. This is not
Speaker 1: what was used. I mean that's interesting too, Like this
Speaker 1: is not the drug that was used to use the
Speaker 1: nze pets. This is not the drug that was used
Speaker 1: for physitionists as a suicide. So it's like three totally
Speaker 1: different drugs, and you know, and not only has nobody
Speaker 1: studied or nobody knew how they would work, but nobody
Speaker 1: could have predicted how they would have worked together.
Speaker 15: As discussed in our last episode, the lethal injection that
Speaker 15: killed Abdul Raheem included three drugs sodium theopental, the heavy
Speaker 15: sedative pan coronium bromide meant to suffocate the prisoner, and
Speaker 15: potassium chloride meant to trigger a cardiac arrest. As Professor
Speaker 15: Laine wrote in her book Secrets of the Killing State,
Speaker 15: because of one of the drugs used in three drug protocol,
Speaker 15: the drugs work poorly when combined. Quote, the pancoreum bromide
Speaker 15: couples the inability to breathe with the inability to struggle.
Speaker 15: They cannot fight or scream or even rive in pain,
Speaker 15: but all would seem calm on the surface. Texas's experiment
Speaker 15: in lethal injection was a political success for a while.
Speaker 15: The novelty of the revived death penalty brought back memories
Speaker 15: to some public hangings. Students from nearby sam Houston State
Speaker 15: University would show up and hold drunken parties outside the
Speaker 15: prison in Huntsville on the night of executions. Cheering loudly
Speaker 15: enough that they could be heard inside the death chamber.
Speaker 15: The night that Ronald Clark O'Brien, the infamous candy man
Speaker 15: who killed his son for insurance money, died, a crowd
Speaker 15: of about three hundred celebrated outside, some yelling trick or
Speaker 15: treat at the scheduled time of the execution and pelting
Speaker 15: anti death penalty protesters with candy. A huge cheer erupted
Speaker 15: when the officials of the Walls Unit left, signaling that
Speaker 15: O'Brien had died a local bar through a Halloween party.
Speaker 15: Texas politicians made support for the death penalty central to
Speaker 15: their campaigns in this era. In the nineteen ninety Democratic
Speaker 15: Party gubernatorial primary, former Texas Governor Mark White faced off
Speaker 15: against the state Attorney General, Jim Maddox and the eventual winner,
Speaker 15: State Treasurer Ann Richards. White and Maddox ran almost identical
Speaker 15: campaign ads, both walking past larger than lifemk shots of
Speaker 15: murderers who were executed under their watch and claiming credit
Speaker 15: for meeting out justice. Consider this ad for White.
Speaker 24: These hardened criminals will never again murder, ripe or deal drugs.
Speaker 24: As Governor I made sure they received the ultimate punishment death,
Speaker 24: and Texas is a cipher place for it. But tough
Speaker 24: talk isn't enough. The criminals know how to tangle up
Speaker 24: the courts and delay executions. To bring them to justice
Speaker 24: takes strength and dedication, because if the governor flinches, they win.
Speaker 24: Only a governor can make executions happen. I did, and
Speaker 24: I will.
Speaker 15: The popularity of the death penalty was sealed for decades.
Speaker 15: Starting with Abdul Raheem, Texas has led the United States
Speaker 15: in state killing. As of September twenty seventh, Texas had
Speaker 15: carried out five hundred and ninety six executions, more than
Speaker 15: thirty six percent of all of the executions that have
Speaker 15: unfolded since the United States Supreme Court allowed the death
Speaker 15: penalty to resume in this country in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 15: More than forty percent of those executed in Texas since
Speaker 15: nineteen eighty two have been African American. Almost thirty percent
Speaker 15: had been Mexican American. In twenty twenty four, Texas executed
Speaker 15: six people, only one was white. Meanwhile, Texas put to
Speaker 15: death sixty three prisoners who committed their crimes before they
Speaker 15: reached the age of twenty one. According to the Texas
Speaker 15: Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Since nineteen seventy three, eighteen
Speaker 15: people sent to Texas death Row were later exonerated, out
Speaker 15: of about two hundred nationally, and the group argues that
Speaker 15: there is strong evidence that at least six put to
Speaker 15: death in Huntsville were actually innocent.
Speaker 16: Professor Lane argues that not only does death by lethal
Speaker 16: injection violate the Eighth Amendments ban on cruel and unusual punishment,
Speaker 16: but that most defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford
Speaker 16: adequate legal counsel, and that an alarming number those sent
Speaker 16: to death row and in some cases executed, have been innocent.
Speaker 1: Two hundred people have been exonerated, it from death row,
Speaker 1: two hundred And when you put that next to the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundred executions that we've had in the modern era,
Speaker 1: what we really have is for every eight executions, there's
Speaker 1: one exoneration. That is a terrible, terrible number. Right, For
Speaker 1: every eight times we kill someone, we all most killed
Speaker 1: the wrong person. And then there was this National Academy
Speaker 1: of Sciences report that came out, this is the Gross Report,
Speaker 1: Seminal Gross, and they said, here's a conservative estimate, four
Speaker 1: point one percent of all people on death row today
Speaker 1: are factually innocent four point one percent. That's one in
Speaker 1: twenty five.
Speaker 16: According to the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty. As
Speaker 16: of twenty fourteen, the total legal cost of executing a
Speaker 16: prisoner was nearly four million dollars, as opposed to the
Speaker 16: one point three million spent to keep someone in prison
Speaker 16: for life. Lane argues that morality aside capital punishment is
Speaker 16: catastrophically expensive. Imposing sentences of life without parle, or what
Speaker 16: criminal justice experts call l WOP, would not only eliminate
Speaker 16: the risk of making an irreversible mistake by putting an
Speaker 16: innocent person to death, but also save taxpayers money.
Speaker 1: As an example, if here's Florida, fifty one million dollars
Speaker 1: fifty one million, that is what Florida spends every year
Speaker 1: to maintain the death penalty, over and above what it
Speaker 1: would cost to punish all first degree murderers with l WOP.
Speaker 1: And if you look at the costs that Florida spent
Speaker 1: and then look at the executions that they had, how
Speaker 1: much did it cost per execution? You know, to maintain
Speaker 1: this system, and then of course the product of it executions,
Speaker 1: what you're getting out of it per execution, twenty four million,
Speaker 1: twenty four million dollars per execution, you know. And I'm
Speaker 1: a former prosecutor, and I just have to say, what
Speaker 1: could you do with twenty four million dollars? You know,
Speaker 1: I'd take eight million and I'd put it into victim services.
Speaker 1: Now we're getting into the death penalty more broadly. But
Speaker 1: one of the things I've found as I'm on this
Speaker 1: book tour and on the road, I'm talking to survivors
Speaker 1: their family members have been slain. And one, a woman
Speaker 1: in Tennessee, is particularly She's coming to mind right now,
Speaker 1: and she said, listen, when my son was murdered, I
Speaker 1: couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I was
Speaker 1: afraid I was going to lose my job. I was
Speaker 1: afraid I was going to lose my house. I needed therapy.
Speaker 1: I needed services. I needed child care to help I
Speaker 1: couldn't do that. My kids needed therapy. We had all
Speaker 1: of these needs. And the State of Tennessee said, you know,
Speaker 1: Department of Mental Health said we don't have that money. Sorry,
Speaker 1: you know, and so she said, we're spending it all
Speaker 1: and Zago. What she said is it's selfish. You're spending
Speaker 1: millions upon millions upon millions on death sentences, and you know,
Speaker 1: on the death penalty when it could actually go to
Speaker 1: the people who need it.
Speaker 15: Regardless of the financial costs. Death by lethal injection has
Speaker 15: become so commonplace that executions really catch public attention. Nationally,
Speaker 15: one than three hundred and seventy seven people have been
Speaker 15: put to death by some form of lethal injection since
Speaker 15: nineteen eighty two. Those executed suffered not only because of
Speaker 15: the chemicals used, but because, as was predicted in eighteen ninety,
Speaker 15: medical professionals have refused to participate because of ethical rules
Speaker 15: prohibiting the harm of patients. Doctors and nurses and paramedics
Speaker 15: generally refuse to administer the lethal cocktails used in death chambers.
Speaker 15: That task generally falls to seriously undertrained prison personnel who
Speaker 15: are asked to secure an IV line for condemned prisoners who,
Speaker 15: often because of eight age, history of drug abuse, or
Speaker 15: other health problems, have veins that are difficult to access.
Speaker 15: Heavily muscled prisoners, those who are morbidly obese, and those
Speaker 15: with dark skin can also present challenges for the amateur
Speaker 15: phlebotomists trying to set up an execution.
Speaker 16: Prisons sometimes lacked the right equipment, such as the correct
Speaker 16: sized syringes or proper tubing. Lethal injection drugs are pre
Speaker 16: made and have to be mixed by personnel not properly
Speaker 16: trained in chemistry, which results in errors in dosing. Often,
Speaker 16: people with any kind of medical competence who participate in
Speaker 16: executions are the ones with the shadiest ethical records. Professor
Speaker 16: Lane came across one case in which the State of
Speaker 16: Missouri relied on a doctor who ignored ethical guidelines and
Speaker 16: participated in the capital punishment process. He was incorrectly mixing
Speaker 16: the chemicals so that the prisoners were only receiving half
Speaker 16: the dose of the anesthesia meant to reduce the pain,
Speaker 16: and condemned as required by law. Doctor Lane shared the
Speaker 16: horrifying discoveries lawyers condemned prisoners made about that particular doctor.
Speaker 1: They looked, you know, at the protocol that was litigated
Speaker 1: and authorized by a federal court, and it was five
Speaker 1: grams of this particular drug. And they looked at the
Speaker 1: execution logs of the last several and states we're using
Speaker 1: two point five, and so you know, they filed suit.
Speaker 1: That's half the anesthetic, you know, and the state, you know,
Speaker 1: wrote back and said, we are not using half the anesthetic.
Speaker 1: It must be the pharmacy logs that are wrong. We're
Speaker 1: going to track that down and figure out why they
Speaker 1: are wrong. But we rest assure you we are not
Speaker 1: violating the protocol. We're doing the amount that was legally authorized. Well,
Speaker 1: they have to come back the next day and say, oh,
Speaker 1: actually the logs were right. We were wrong. We were
Speaker 1: injecting half of the amount. And so the court gives
Speaker 1: the lawyers for the condemned prisoners a limited deposition to
Speaker 1: question this doctor behind a veil, like they didn't know
Speaker 1: who he was, but to question them under oath, and
Speaker 1: you know, they're like, why are you using half? And
Speaker 1: he said, well, I'm dyslexic, and so sometimes that make mistakes.
Speaker 1: And yet Missouri stuck with them and said, no, we
Speaker 1: have every confidence in him. They lose that the trial court,
Speaker 1: the federal court says, this guy can't be anywhere near
Speaker 1: Look the whole thing, to the extent it's humane, requires
Speaker 1: you to meticulously measure and mix chemicals in liquids, and
Speaker 1: so you can't have someone who just makes mistakes. And
Speaker 1: then in the meantime, investigative journalists, which you know I
Speaker 1: have to take my hat off. I tip my hat
Speaker 1: to investigative journalists. But they were like, gee, who is this,
Speaker 1: you know, dyslexic doctor, and they find out his identity.
Speaker 1: You know, he admits it's him. He had over twenty
Speaker 1: malpractice suits, he had had his hospital privileges revoked at
Speaker 1: two hospitals. He had been censured by the medical board.
Speaker 1: So you know, you're asking someone to do something, to
Speaker 1: participate in something that is fundamentally against your reason for
Speaker 1: being as a doctor. And you know, from time to
Speaker 1: time they find people, but I think they're outliers. What
Speaker 1: I have found is they are outliers not only on ethics,
Speaker 1: but in other ways too.
Speaker 15: Experts on capital punishment like Lane aren't comfortable with describing
Speaker 15: executions that go off script as quote botched, even if
Speaker 15: it's a commonly used term. No matter how the execution proceeds,
Speaker 15: the end result is the same, the inmate is dead. However,
Speaker 15: there is no question that killing people by lethal injection
Speaker 15: is so complicated and requires so much skill on the
Speaker 15: part of the executioners that the process is typically far
Speaker 15: more agon than death penalty advocates tell the public. According
Speaker 15: to the Anti Capital Punishment Organization the Death Penalty Information Center.
Speaker 15: Out of nineteen executions in twenty twenty two, seven were botched,
Speaker 15: meaning that the death took far longer than expected that
Speaker 15: prison personnel had to jab the condemned people multiple times
Speaker 15: to get an IV line working or worse.
Speaker 16: When Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett on April twenty nine to
Speaker 16: twenty fourteen, the state used an untested combination of three drugs.
Speaker 16: The size of the syringes and the amount of drugs
Speaker 16: used were wrong. Prison personnel made repeated mistakes as they
Speaker 16: tried to insert the needle for the IV. Even though
Speaker 16: the American Medical Association prohibits its members from participating in executions.
Speaker 16: A doctor was on hand for the lock of fiasco.
Speaker 16: The physician tried but failed to insert an IV into
Speaker 16: the jugular vein in Lockett's neck. The doctor then performed
Speaker 16: a surgical procedure called a cutdown, which is a deep
Speaker 16: surgical incision to the skin, muscle, and fat performed to
Speaker 16: expose a central vein under Lockett's clavicle. Procedure was bloody
Speaker 16: and also failed, and the execution then tried and failed
Speaker 16: to access a vein through Lockett's feet. Eventually, they tried
Speaker 16: to insert an IV through the femoral vein in the
Speaker 16: upper thigh, a procedure only the most skilled surgeon and
Speaker 16: SAD mastered. Unfortunately, the available needle was the wrong length
Speaker 16: for it to work properly. Lockett reportedly was stoic throughout
Speaker 16: this repeated assault on his body. After an hour of
Speaker 16: this torture had passed, the execution team was finally able
Speaker 16: to inject the deadly drugs. Lockett groaned, convulsed, and at
Speaker 16: one point was asked, are you unconscious? According to witnesses,
Speaker 16: Lockett opened his eyes and said no, I am not.
Speaker 16: After appearing to fall asleep, he began to moan, arched
Speaker 16: his back, and kicked a foot before he strained against
Speaker 16: the straps holding him against the gurney, and he tried
Speaker 16: to get up. Lockett mumbled something is wrong, oh man,
Speaker 16: and this shit is fucking up my mind, and Warden
Speaker 16: ordered the blinds closed as the execution team scrambled. Swelling
Speaker 16: had developed with the ivy had been inserted and was
Speaker 16: blocking the flow of the third and final lethal drug.
Speaker 16: The doctor was summoned to insert a needle and Lockett's
Speaker 16: other femeral vein, but Lockett was bleeding heavily and the
Speaker 16: blood backed up into the ivy line. Oklahoma Governor Mary
Speaker 16: Fallon had already decided to halt the execution, but by
Speaker 16: this point Lockett's heart had irreversibly slowed down. He subsequently
Speaker 16: died of heart failure. The entire execution from the first
Speaker 16: attempt to stick an ivy in his veins to his
Speaker 16: death less than one hour and forty seven minutes. That
Speaker 16: was one of the longest executions in American history. The
Speaker 16: state of Oklahoma later falsely claimed that Lockett had been
Speaker 16: unconscious the entire time. In twenty twenty two, another so
Speaker 16: called botched lethal injection, that of Joe Nathan James and Alabama,
Speaker 16: lasted three hours. In Ohio and elsewhere, execution had to
Speaker 16: be abandoned when the prison staff couldn't get an iv going.
Speaker 15: As we mentioned in the first episode, Reverend Jeff Hood
Speaker 15: is a priest under the old Catholic Right, who, by
Speaker 15: the time we interviewed, had accompanied ten men during their executions.
Speaker 15: He said that even the most professional execution is brutal,
Speaker 15: but that some states, because of a regrettable amount of practice,
Speaker 15: are much better at killing than others.
Speaker 7: I do think that some states know what they're doing
Speaker 7: more than others, and I think that Texas knows what
Speaker 7: they're doing. You don't see botched, are delayed or mishandled
Speaker 7: executions in Texas. They go very quickly. And when you
Speaker 7: talk to these guys, that's what they say. They would prefer.
Speaker 7: If you're going to be executed, you would want to
Speaker 7: go as.
Speaker 14: Quickly as possible. Yes, there are.
Speaker 7: Some executions that look horrific. There are other executions that
Speaker 7: don't go according to plan but don't get a lot
Speaker 7: of attention. But they're all horrible, and I think they
Speaker 7: all have to be talked about as such.
Speaker 16: Whether it's because of the awareness of the messy and
Speaker 16: undeniably painful executions like those of Lockett and James, the
Speaker 16: more than two hundred death row exonerations achieved by groups
Speaker 16: like the Innocence Project, the growing skepticism of law enforcement
Speaker 16: amongst young people, are the greater consciousness of how racism
Speaker 16: warps the entire criminal justicism. There's no question the death
Speaker 16: penalty is the least popular it has been in the
Speaker 16: past hundred years. Nor is their doubt that the rate
Speaker 16: of executions in the United States has dropped well below
Speaker 16: its peak during the height of the war and crime
Speaker 16: under the Clinton administration, when in nineteen ninety nine, three
Speaker 16: hundred and fifteen death sentences were handed down, or in
Speaker 16: nineteen ninety six, when ninety eight prisoners were executed.
Speaker 15: In any case, deaths like Lockett's are bad for business
Speaker 15: for the pharmaceutical companies who have produced the drug used
Speaker 15: in lethal injections. In the next and final episode of
Speaker 15: this three part series on the shady business of lethal injection,
Speaker 15: we'll talk about how some states like Texas have been
Speaker 15: forced to turn to the black market or the so
Speaker 15: called gray market to buy lethal drugs, as pharmaceutical companies
Speaker 15: have restricted the purchase of those drugs for that purpose.
Speaker 15: We also talked to Jeff Hood about how the difficulty
Speaker 15: in obtaining those drugs has led states like Alabama to
Speaker 15: turn to one of the most gruesome forms of execution yet.
Speaker 15: And we'll also hear the story of Race Buyan, a
Speaker 15: victim of a hate crime who fought to prevent the
Speaker 15: execution of his white supremacist attacker. And finally, we'll explore
Speaker 15: whether the death penalty might be on its last legs
Speaker 15: in the United States. I'm Stephen Monchelly for it could
Speaker 15: happen here, and so next.
Speaker 16: Time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 15: A warning, this episode included it's violent content, which some
Speaker 15: listeners might find disturbing.
Speaker 16: I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a history
Speaker 16: of racism in Dallas called White and Tropolis, and the
Speaker 16: co author of longtime journalists Betsy Freeoff the history of
Speaker 16: eugenics in Texas called Purifying Knife.
Speaker 13: And I'm Stephen Broncholi.
Speaker 15: I'm an investigative journalist in Dallas who specializes in political
Speaker 15: extremism and the far right. And I report for places
Speaker 15: like the Texas Observer, the Barbed Wire and more.
Speaker 16: Like millions across the United States. Mark Anthony Strohman was
Speaker 16: startled by the events then folded on the terrible morning
Speaker 16: of September eleventh, two thousand and one. The disbelief that
Speaker 16: greeted that terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and
Speaker 16: the Pentagon can be heard on the first announcement of
Speaker 16: the tragedy on a Dallas talk radio station WBAP.
Speaker 25: All right, thank you our seven fifty one, nine minutes
Speaker 25: before eight o'clock, a Dues talk a TWENTYBA here on
Speaker 25: the here on the Tuesday morning, and the reason I
Speaker 25: am hesitating here with there's a word of a plane
Speaker 25: crashing into the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, and
Speaker 25: the World Trade of plane actually crashing and to the
Speaker 25: side of the World Trade Center. We're gonna have details
Speaker 25: for you on that form ABCDWS in just a couple
Speaker 25: of moments.
Speaker 16: Strowman later wrote that September eleventh filled him with a
Speaker 16: great sense of rage, hatred, loss, bitterness, and utter degradation.
Speaker 16: He blamed Arabs and Muslims as a group for the
Speaker 16: events that day and wanted to quote those Arabs to
Speaker 16: feel the same sense of insecurity about their immediate surroundings.
Speaker 16: I wanted to feel the same sense of vulnerability and
Speaker 16: uncertainty on American soil.
Speaker 15: Stroman Dallas resident, had already served two prison terms, during
Speaker 15: which he had joined the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. Addicted
Speaker 15: to math and sporting neo Nazi tattoos, he began cruising
Speaker 15: Dallas in his nineteen seventy two ship Suban hunting for
Speaker 15: quote unquote Arabs. As he later admitted, he wasn't entirely
Speaker 15: sure what an Arab looked like, but Nevertheless, he stalked
Speaker 15: people with quote shawls on their faces.
Speaker 16: Stroman launched his crusade by running cars into ditches if
Speaker 16: he suspected the vehicles were driven by Muslims. He escalated
Speaker 16: his campaign of terror. On September seventeenth, two thousand and one,
Speaker 16: he fatally shot Wakar Hassan, a forty six year old
Speaker 16: Pakistani immigrant, as the clerk grilled to Hamburger and Mom's
Speaker 16: Grocery in Dallas. A few days later, Stroman found his
Speaker 16: next victim, a farmer pilot for Bangladesh's Air Force named
Speaker 16: Race Bouyan. Mister Bouyan, who has experienced robberies prior to
Speaker 16: his encounter with Stroman, told us what happened that day.
Speaker 12: Sent the Maturity First, two thousand and one to us
Speaker 12: friday eron Juen, a customer walked in wearing bandana, sunglasses,
Speaker 12: baseball cap and holding a double barrel a sort of
Speaker 12: double barrel's shotgun on his right side. And from the
Speaker 12: previous rubbery experience, I thought it would be on the robbery,
Speaker 12: so I put all the money on the counter and
Speaker 12: offered him the cash as soon as he walked in,
Speaker 12: and I said, sir, here is all the money, take it,
Speaker 12: but please do not shoot me. Basically, I begged for
Speaker 12: my life and his gaze remained fixed, and then he
Speaker 12: mumbled a question, where are you from. Before I could
Speaker 12: say anything more than excuse me, he pulled the trigger
Speaker 12: from point blankrent. I felt it first, like a million
Speaker 12: bees were singing my friends. And I looked down and
Speaker 12: saw blood pouring like an open facet from the right
Speaker 12: set of my head, and I remember a screw mom
Speaker 12: to book my voice. And I looked down some block
Speaker 12: pouring like an open bosset from the right set of
Speaker 12: my head, and then I looked left. I saw the
Speaker 12: gunman still standing, pointing that on director of phrase, and
Speaker 12: I realized that if I did not, you know, do
Speaker 12: something to show that I'm dying, he might shoot be again.
Speaker 12: So I fell to the floor and he finally left a.
Speaker 7: Few seconds beyond.
Speaker 15: Survived the attack, but he was blinded in his right eye.
Speaker 15: He would endure not only multiple painful surgeries, but also
Speaker 15: the unique financial horrors of the American health care system. Meanwhile,
Speaker 15: Stroman was not done terrorizing the Dallas area Muslim community.
Speaker 15: On October fourth, the shooting spree came to an end
Speaker 15: when the white supremacist pulled up to a shell station
Speaker 15: in Mesquite at about six forty five in the morning
Speaker 15: and ordered the clerk, forty nine year old Vasa Dev Patel,
Speaker 15: a Hindu immigrant from India, to hand over all the
Speaker 15: money from the cash register. Patel reached under the counter
Speaker 15: for a twenty two caliber pistol, and seeing the gun,
Speaker 15: Stroman fired his weapon. The bullet struck Patel in his
Speaker 15: chest and killed him. A security camera captured the scene,
Speaker 15: and Dallas police arrested Stroman the next day.
Speaker 16: At Stroman's home, investigators found a semi automatic rifle, an
Speaker 16: Uzi knockoff, a forty four magnum, and a forty five
Speaker 16: cult They also found evidence that Stroman planted to attack
Speaker 16: a mosque in a nearby suburb. Jury found Strouman guilty
Speaker 16: of capital murder in April fifth, two thousand and two,
Speaker 16: and sends him to die by lethal injection. The story
Speaker 16: then took an unexpected turn. During a two thousand and
Speaker 16: nine pilgrimage to Mecca, Bujan said he realized that simply
Speaker 16: forgiving his assailant would not be enough. He believed he
Speaker 16: had a moral obligation to do all they could to
Speaker 16: prevent Stroman's death, Buyan filed a lawsuit attempting to halt
Speaker 16: Strouman's ey execution. Despite of Bouyon's best effort, the suit
Speaker 16: was rejected by state and federal courts, and Stroman died
Speaker 16: by lethal injection July twenty, twenty eleven.
Speaker 15: Beyond's campaign of mercy, however, made a major impact on
Speaker 15: capital punishment in the United States. He effectively shamed European
Speaker 15: drug companies, debanning the use of the products used in
Speaker 15: the lethal injection that killed Stroman. In turn, some states,
Speaker 15: like Texas, decided to start buying lethal drugs illegally. In
Speaker 15: this final episode on the history of the lethal injection
Speaker 15: in the United States, Beyond will tell us about his
Speaker 15: campaign against capital punishment and its impact. Will also speak
Speaker 15: to a priest, the Reverend Jeff Hood, who has accompanied,
Speaker 15: by the time of this interview, ten men to their executions.
Speaker 15: He will also tell us why he has devoted himself
Speaker 15: to showing love to people so despised, and also address
Speaker 15: the future of the death penalty in the United States.
Speaker 16: After being blinded in a hate crime race, Beyond struggles
Speaker 16: through numerous traumas. He told us that after getting shot
Speaker 16: at the convenience story where he worked. He ran to
Speaker 16: a barber shop next door. There he had the first
Speaker 16: sight of his injuries.
Speaker 12: I caught myself in the mirror, and the image reflected
Speaker 12: back was like something off of a horror movie. And
Speaker 12: on my way to the hospital, I felt my eyes
Speaker 12: were closing. I felt that my time was up. And
Speaker 12: you know, while I was reciting from the Holy Koran
Speaker 12: and asking God for mercy and forgiveness and giving you
Speaker 12: a second chance, I also begged him to, you know,
Speaker 12: to send my life, to give me a chance to live.
Speaker 12: And I promised God that if you give me a
Speaker 12: chance to live, I would help others.
Speaker 15: In the emergency room, doctors put Beyond on life support
Speaker 15: for time. His condition was touch and go. Beyond, a
Speaker 15: young immigrant living on his salary as a convenience store clerk,
Speaker 15: said that when he next opened his eyes and doctors
Speaker 15: told him he had survived, he cried tears of joy.
Speaker 12: So my eyes were full of tears, not from the pain,
Speaker 12: but from the joy of it still being alive, but
Speaker 12: then joining the last long because the hospital where I
Speaker 12: was taken was private and expensive, and I had no
Speaker 12: health insurance at the time. So they discharged me with
Speaker 12: a couple of hours and told me to arrange follow
Speaker 12: up medical treatments on my own. So, you know, the
Speaker 12: first part of my American nightmare was being shot in
Speaker 12: the face after nine to eleven, and second part began
Speaker 12: when I was kicked up from the hospital. So as
Speaker 12: a result of this shooting, I you know, underwent several
Speaker 12: eye surgeries and putting meately. Though I lost the mission
Speaker 12: in one eye, I still carry more than three dozen
Speaker 12: shut palats on my face. And my father suffered a
Speaker 12: stroke when he heard what about what happened to me,
Speaker 12: But luckily he's a bide. I lost my fiance but
Speaker 12: gained more than sixty thousand dollars in medical bills.
Speaker 16: As Strumman languished on Texas death Row, Buyan began picking
Speaker 16: up the pieces.
Speaker 12: I moved on rebuilding my life. I worked in restaurant
Speaker 12: and went back to school, and slowly I was, you know,
Speaker 12: planning the letter and getting better in my own you know,
Speaker 12: life journey. And in two thousand and nine I went
Speaker 12: the Macta for pilgrimage my mother and it wasn't Mecca.
Speaker 12: I deeply realized that though I forgave my attack on
Speaker 12: markstrument it was not an hour. I felt that, you know,
Speaker 12: by executing Mark, we would simply lose a human life
Speaker 12: with a dealing with.
Speaker 14: The hood cause.
Speaker 12: I strongly believed that if he was giving a chance,
Speaker 12: he might be able to become a better human being.
Speaker 12: And I began to see him as a human being
Speaker 12: like me, not just simply a killer. I saw him
Speaker 12: as a victim too, and I befelt for him. And
Speaker 12: I remember my promise on my deathdad that if I
Speaker 12: did a chance to live, I would help others. And
Speaker 12: I felt that I need to start with him first
Speaker 12: to get my cromnies. So I've returned from Mecca with
Speaker 12: a very changed heart. We get clarity, and then you
Speaker 12: found partners, and I launched a campaign to try and
Speaker 12: save my attack. That's life from Texas Detro.
Speaker 15: We'll pick up the story of Beyon's campaign to spare
Speaker 15: Stroman's life and how his efforts changed the history of
Speaker 15: the American death penalty.
Speaker 13: After a word from our.
Speaker 15: Sponsors, Doctor Rick Halprin began teaching human rights courses at
Speaker 15: Southern Methodist University in Dallas in nineteen ninety, where he
Speaker 15: now heads one of only nine human rights programs at
Speaker 15: the universities in the country. He has also chaired Amnesty
Speaker 15: International's Board of Directors three times, and since nineteen seventy
Speaker 15: two has been an anti death penalty activist. Halbert became
Speaker 15: famous on Texas death Row as a result of his
Speaker 15: efforts and was informed of his July twentieth, twenty eleven
Speaker 15: execution date. The condemned man wrote a letter to Halperin
Speaker 15: asking for help in making final arrangements, such as locating
Speaker 15: an affordable undertaker.
Speaker 16: By coincidence, shortly after Stroman reached out to Halperin, the
Speaker 16: professor received a surprise visitor to his office. The stranger
Speaker 16: was Stroman's victim, Race bu yan Yan, who had recently
Speaker 16: become an American citistant, hoped Halperin could help him find
Speaker 16: a creative and effective way to fulfill the promise he
Speaker 16: had made to God when he thought he was dying.
Speaker 16: He began his campaign to save Stroman's life. U Yan, Halpern,
Speaker 16: and another human rights activist, Hati Juwad, carried their efforts
Speaker 16: from Dallas to the state capitol in Austin and as
Speaker 16: far as the European Parliament.
Speaker 15: A weak point in the American death penalty machinery was
Speaker 15: its reliance on companies that provided the lethal injection chemicals.
Speaker 15: In twenty eleven, Italy, an anti death penalty nation, successfully
Speaker 15: pressured the Illinois company Hospira to stop selling sodium theopental,
Speaker 15: the muscle relaxant used in the three drug lethal injection
Speaker 15: protocol used in Texas since the early nineteen eighties. That
Speaker 15: same year, Reprieve, a British human rights nonprofit, arranged for
Speaker 15: Beyond to travel to Europe to meet face to face
Speaker 15: with executives at the corporate headquarters of the Danish pharmaceutical
Speaker 15: company Lundbeck. Aware that the meeting would put them in
Speaker 15: the international spotlight, Lundbeck three days prior, announced that they
Speaker 15: would stop shipping the sedative nembitol, which was being used
Speaker 15: as a substitute for sodium theopenthal to American prison systems.
Speaker 15: Beyond described his conversation with the Lumbeck company an interview
Speaker 15: with US the.
Speaker 12: One hour of great conversation. They agreed to write a
Speaker 12: letter to the governor of Kixas asking him not to
Speaker 12: use their product to kill him and being.
Speaker 16: The state of Texas, however, was unwilling to grant a
Speaker 16: crime victim as fervent wish. Even though Texas politicians repeatedly
Speaker 16: claimed they execute murderers to bring the victims closure, Bouyon
Speaker 16: said he was denied this by the Texas Border Paroles
Speaker 16: and Pardons and then Governor Rick Perry.
Speaker 12: I reached out to the prison system and UH asking
Speaker 12: for a mediation dialogue, but unfortunately, you know, that turned
Speaker 12: down my request multiple times, and the reason they showed
Speaker 12: was it would really victimize me. So basically a mediation dialogue.
Speaker 12: I thought it would be helpful for me to find closure,
Speaker 12: to find a lot of answers, but it was for
Speaker 12: them it to be, you know, a revictimization process for me.
Speaker 12: So they they rejected my request to multiple times, and
Speaker 12: it really made me sad that when they needed me
Speaker 12: to testify in the core the conviction to get the
Speaker 12: death penalty, I was a good victim, but then when
Speaker 12: I tried to exercise my right as a victim to
Speaker 12: have a mediation dialog, love, I became a bad victim
Speaker 12: because I asked when my rights.
Speaker 16: In his final hour, Strowman spoke directly to his surviving victim.
Speaker 12: I had the opportunity to talk to him of the
Speaker 12: phone before he was executed, and it was the day
Speaker 12: of his execution where he put my name as one
Speaker 12: of the people he would be able to talk. So
Speaker 12: I was lucky enough to talk to him. And when
Speaker 12: he came on the phone, I was about to, you know,
Speaker 12: go to the court to give a last fight to,
Speaker 12: you know, stead the execution. So I was thinking, what
Speaker 12: would I say to a human being who is about
Speaker 12: to be executed in a couple of hours. And I'm
Speaker 12: going to, you know, go to a court to give
Speaker 12: a you know, last fight to to you know, see
Speaker 12: if he could say him. So I was very emotional
Speaker 12: when he came on the phone. I told him that Mark,
Speaker 12: you know for sure that I never hated you. I
Speaker 12: forgave you and I'm doing my best to you know,
Speaker 12: save your life, you know, through this court hearing. And
Speaker 12: he said that the ways I never expected that from you,
Speaker 12: and I love you, brother, And that brought tears into
Speaker 12: my eyes. That it is the same human being who
Speaker 12: shocked me for no reasons other than having hated and
Speaker 12: violence in his horror. And now ten years later he
Speaker 12: saw me, he could see me as his brother, and
Speaker 12: he said he loved me. Why he couldn't see me
Speaker 12: as his brother ten years ago, and why he could
Speaker 12: he say the same thing ten years ago. So, you know,
Speaker 12: at least it helped me to find closer a little bit.
Speaker 12: It helped me to move forward. At least I had
Speaker 12: the chance to talk to my attacker and then gave
Speaker 12: me a lot of hope that people can change.
Speaker 15: The execution itself, however, left Beyond cold.
Speaker 12: Well definitely in this execution that was not of the victims,
Speaker 12: because the victims and the victims' family members requested and
Speaker 12: also fought for clemency. You know, we went ahead and
Speaker 12: requested the Governor of Texas, the Board of Burdens and
Speaker 12: Pearls that did not execute him in all names in
Speaker 12: a show.
Speaker 15: Marcie Mark Strowman died as scheduled on July twentieth, twenty eleven,
Speaker 15: and though Beyond and Halprint failed to stop it, they
Speaker 15: had helped start an international movement to thwart the ability
Speaker 15: of states to carry out such lethal injections, as Professor
Speaker 15: Colorine Elaine revealed in her book Secrets of the Killing State.
Speaker 15: After Haspira stopped producing sodium theopental, the vacuum was filled
Speaker 15: by a fly by night company called Dream Pharma. The
Speaker 15: drug distributor. Quote turned out to be two desks at
Speaker 15: a filing cabinet hidden in the back of a London
Speaker 15: driving school.
Speaker 13: As Lane wrote, Once.
Speaker 15: This operation was exposed, Great Britain in sodium theopental sales
Speaker 15: to the United States.
Speaker 16: By December twenty eleven, the entire European Union had tighten
Speaker 16: export controls on any chemicals that could potentially be used
Speaker 16: in executions. The new expanded EU ban made life much
Speaker 16: more difficult for would be executioners in the United States.
Speaker 16: In twenty twelve, when the state of Missouri announced it
Speaker 16: would use the drug pro poofoal as an anesthetic in
Speaker 16: its executions, the EU said it would cut off exports
Speaker 16: of that drug, which is used for surgeries in the
Speaker 16: United States about fifty million times a year. Combined, these
Speaker 16: moves created a lethal injection drug shortage that changed how
Speaker 16: executions took place.
Speaker 15: In twenty twelve, Texas moved then to a single drug protocol,
Speaker 15: using pennel barbitol alone rather than the old three drug
Speaker 15: cocktail made out of thin air by Oklahoma corner Stephen Coleman.
Speaker 15: Back in the nineteen seventies, autopsies revealed that prisoners executed
Speaker 15: with this single drug protocol die from pullman edema, a
Speaker 15: condition in which the lungs fill with fluid. Medical experts
Speaker 15: believe prisoners suffer intense chest pain as they suffocate, even
Speaker 15: if they appear fully unconscious. Execution witnesses also say they
Speaker 15: have seen prisoners eyes pop open, their eyes fill with tears,
Speaker 15: have seen them pull against restraints, and have heard them
Speaker 15: grown and class their jaws during such executions.
Speaker 16: As the drugs needed to carry out lethal injections become
Speaker 16: harder to find, states have to rely on shady tactics
Speaker 16: so they can keep on killing. Officials have lied to
Speaker 16: pharmaceutical companies that are buying drugs to provide medical care
Speaker 16: for prisoners that they later use in the death chamber.
Speaker 16: Death penalty. States have violated federal laws. They have illegally
Speaker 16: swapped these drugs across state line, or they bought them
Speaker 16: on the black market or to legally marginal so called
Speaker 16: gray market, Professor Lane describes as shading lengths the state
Speaker 16: of Ohio went to in order to buy these drugs.
Speaker 1: The state took fifteen thousand dollars in cash in a suitcase.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't make this stuff up, you know,
Speaker 1: And chartered a private plane to fly over to Washington
Speaker 1: where they did an under the table deal for drugs
Speaker 1: with this little pharmacy. You know you need a prescription
Speaker 1: for these drugs, and so here's a pharmacy that, for
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand dollars is willing to sell drugs under the
Speaker 1: table and allegedly in a Walmart parking lot.
Speaker 15: To cope with the shrinking supply, states have made illegal
Speaker 15: purchases overseas. Like other states, Texas has tried to circumvent
Speaker 15: tightening restrictions by purchasing death penalty supplies from loosely regulated
Speaker 15: compounding pharmacies, and some of them have been here in
Speaker 15: the States. In twenty eighteen, it was revealed that Texas
Speaker 15: repeatedly bought drugs from the Green Park Compounding Pharmacy in Houston,
Speaker 15: which is a company that had been fined forty eight
Speaker 15: times by federal regulators for safety violations, including providing the
Speaker 15: wrong medication to children who were subsequently hospitalized. The number
Speaker 15: of agonizingly prolonged executions in Texas suggest that the drugs
Speaker 15: the state buys are often out of date or impure.
Speaker 16: Finding out where the lethal drugs are coming from is
Speaker 16: becoming increasingly difficult. A number of states have passed laws
Speaker 16: may it illegal to report on who carries out the execution,
Speaker 16: what companies supply the drugs, or how these drugs were purchased.
Speaker 16: In any case, the difficulty in getting execution drugs has
Speaker 16: led to a decline the death penalty across the nation.
Speaker 16: At the time of the landmark nineteen seventy two Firman
Speaker 16: versus Georgia case that temporarily halted executions in the United States,
Speaker 16: forty states had the death penalty. Currently only twenty seven do.
Speaker 16: In twenty twenty four, four states alone, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma,
Speaker 16: and Texas carried out seventy six percent of the executions
Speaker 16: that unfolded in the United States.
Speaker 15: Some of the remaining states with the death penalty on
Speaker 15: the books have responded to the shortage of lethal drugs
Speaker 15: by authorizing the use of the firing squad and killing
Speaker 15: prisoners with nitrogen gas epoxia, which suffocates them by forcing
Speaker 15: them to breathe pure nitrogen. After another outbreak, you'll hear
Speaker 15: from a priest who has witnessed executions in ten different states,
Speaker 15: including death by nitrous epoxia, and will end this three
Speaker 15: part series by discussing the future of the death penalty.
Speaker 16: Born in the South Atlanta neighborhood in Georgia, Jeff Hood
Speaker 16: grew up in a religiously conservative home and was ordained
Speaker 16: as a Southern Baptist minister when he was only twenty two.
Speaker 16: His worldview, however, was shaken when he attended to his
Speaker 16: religious mentor, who was dying of lung cancer. Before he
Speaker 16: passed away, the seventy five year old confessed to the
Speaker 16: Hood quote, I'm gay and I've always been. Hood described
Speaker 16: this moment as earth shattering, and his religious views transformed
Speaker 16: dramatically from what he later called his backwards thinking.
Speaker 15: When Hood moved to Dallas in the early twenty tens,
Speaker 15: he became well known in his new home as he
Speaker 15: fought to make local churches more inclusive of the LGBTQ
Speaker 15: plus community, and he got arrested along with other clergy
Speaker 15: outside of the White House in twenty fourteen when he
Speaker 15: was protesting President Barack Obama's aggressive campaign to deport migrants.
Speaker 15: On July seventh and twenty sixteen, Hood led a Black
Speaker 15: Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas, during which a sniper
Speaker 15: opened fire and targeted police officers.
Speaker 16: Micah X. Johnson, an IRAQ war veteran, was enraged by
Speaker 16: the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Filando
Speaker 16: Castile in Minnesota. So Johnson shot and killed five police officers,
Speaker 16: the deadliest incident for law enforcement since September eleventh, two
Speaker 16: thousand and one. Police killed Johnson that evening by detonating
Speaker 16: a bomb carried by a robot to the shooter's hide
Speaker 16: out in a parking garage, marking the first execution by
Speaker 16: robot in American history. Reverend Hood was traumatized not only
Speaker 16: by the sniper attack, but also when he got scapegoaded
Speaker 16: for the deaths that day. Fox News hosts Megan Kelly
Speaker 16: put a target on Hood's back in the aftermath of
Speaker 16: the sniper attack.
Speaker 23: Jeff Hood, he was one of the organizers of the march,
Speaker 23: and quickly condemned the shootings.
Speaker 7: Today never and are while the streams would we have
Speaker 7: imagined that five police officers would be dead.
Speaker 23: It's form, But critics were quick to point out that
Speaker 23: we were hearing a very different message from the Reverend
Speaker 23: just a short time before the shots rang out last night.
Speaker 23: Here are some of that, But I'm a.
Speaker 7: Channel an old preacher that I am my tremendously.
Speaker 26: Jail am all right, and I'm gonna say, God damn
Speaker 26: White America, God.
Speaker 19: Damn white America.
Speaker 27: What about whom.
Speaker 26: Of the bodies a foot and brown people people being
Speaker 26: flooded in our.
Speaker 16: Free Hood agreed to be interviewed by Kelly, but the
Speaker 16: minister soon realized that Fox viewers blamed him for the
Speaker 16: officer's death, and they threatened vengeance.
Speaker 7: I mean, after Julaw the Seventh Man, there was talk
Speaker 7: about threats. Didn't PD was having to take the kids
Speaker 7: to school, and it was. It was absolutely.
Speaker 16: Horrible witnessing people die that day, including the sniper Johnson's
Speaker 16: impromptu execution via remote control robot, deep in Hood's opposition
Speaker 16: to violence, including state killing. In twenty twenty two, he
Speaker 16: is ordained again, this time as a priest and was
Speaker 16: called the Old Catholic Faith, which accepts many of the
Speaker 16: doctrines and rights of the Roman Catholic Church but rejects
Speaker 16: the doctrine of people infallibility and authority. Hood began writing
Speaker 16: to those on death Row and then hockey and praying
Speaker 16: with them in person. In twenty twenty two, the United
Speaker 16: States Supreme court ruled in the Ramirez versus Collier case
Speaker 16: that condemned prisoners have the right to die in the
Speaker 16: company of a spiritual advisor who became a companion to
Speaker 16: the condemned in their last minutes.
Speaker 7: I began to have people reaching out during that time,
Speaker 7: you know, and asking me if I would accompany them
Speaker 7: to the death chamber. And you know, it's one thing
Speaker 7: to be willing to have relationships with people who are executed.
Speaker 7: It's a whole nother thing to be asked to participate
Speaker 7: in the process. And so since then, I've witnessed been
Speaker 7: in the chamber with ten different guys. So from January
Speaker 7: of twenty twenty three to now, I've watched ten different
Speaker 7: men be executed by the state.
Speaker 15: Who attended his first execution when the State of Oklahoma
Speaker 15: puts Scott Eisenberg to death on January twelfth, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 15: Twenty years earlier, Eisenberg murdered an elderly couple, including a
Speaker 15: man he bludgeoned to death.
Speaker 7: My first execution was Scott Eisenberg in Oklahoma, and he
Speaker 7: Scott had a number of things going on, but we
Speaker 7: were very close. He had a lot of anger issues
Speaker 7: and I think difficulty controlling his temper and whatnot. And
Speaker 7: you know, so the reality was I was very frightened
Speaker 7: before I went in because I thought Scott was just
Speaker 7: going to go ballistic. And you know, to be in
Speaker 7: that room with someone that goes ballistic, I mean, it's
Speaker 7: it's already traumatic enough. I'm sure you can imagine without
Speaker 7: you know, something like that, But then again, you couldn't.
Speaker 7: You can't blame them for wanting to, you know, push
Speaker 7: back and fight for their lives and whatnot. I found
Speaker 7: myself shaking, just you know, my hands and my legs,
Speaker 7: this terror, I mean, just utterly terrified. And then they
Speaker 7: opened the door and I was led in and I
Speaker 7: saw Scott. And it's incredibly strange to see someone hooked
Speaker 7: up to machines that look like they're there to support life,
Speaker 7: and yet you know that they're there to take his life.
Speaker 7: And so I wasn't able. I mean, I knew that
Speaker 7: there was a window on one side, I wasn't able
Speaker 7: to see through that window because there was a curtain down.
Speaker 7: And I began to pray with Scott. Scott had asked
Speaker 7: me to read a number of scriptures and I did,
Speaker 7: and I dropped my Bible at one point because I'm
Speaker 7: shaking so bad I was having trouble holding it. You know.
Speaker 7: He notices that I'm shaking, He notices that I'm upset,
Speaker 7: and he looks at me and tells me everything's gonna
Speaker 7: be okay. And I'm thinking to myself, no, it's not.
Speaker 22: Like, no, it is not.
Speaker 7: And I'm thinking, you know, you're gonna die, and I'm
Speaker 7: going to be scarred for life. Everything is not going
Speaker 7: to be okay. And I went to the scripture in
Speaker 7: John chapter eight where Jesus encounters the adulterous woman, and
Speaker 7: there's that famous line, famous verse, you who are without sin,
Speaker 7: cast the first stone, and I read that in the chamber,
Speaker 7: and one of the lighter moments when we were in
Speaker 7: there was when I read that you who are without
Speaker 7: sin cast the first tone. I remember Scott looking up
Speaker 7: and pointing at the executioners and saying, you know, he's
Speaker 7: talking to y'all, like this is about y'all.
Speaker 15: Pud said that any sense that death by lethal injection
Speaker 15: is nonviolent is an illusion.
Speaker 7: In every lethal injection, I have immediately heard snoring, and
Speaker 7: what sounds not like you know, snoring from you know
Speaker 7: that one would have when they sleep or whatever, but
Speaker 7: more of a gurgling kind of a snoring, and you
Speaker 7: know it's the body responds in a very panicked fashion,
Speaker 7: and so it's almost like it's like drowning someone who's
Speaker 7: completely paralyzed. And I think that that's I think that's
Speaker 7: what it's been like every time. I think that there
Speaker 7: is a level of suffering that is that is hidden,
Speaker 7: there's a he is in that again that it's made
Speaker 7: to look like a medical procedure, because it does look
Speaker 7: like a medical procedure. I think it is a con.
Speaker 16: W Hood found the lethal injections traumatizing, but that did
Speaker 16: not prepare for him for what he witnessed when Alabama
Speaker 16: began executing prisoners through nitrous hypoxia.
Speaker 7: I can tell you that as horrible as a lethal
Speaker 7: injection is, and yes, it is a con job, I
Speaker 7: can tell you that I what I saw during that
Speaker 7: nitrogen execution is indescribable. I can tell you that I
Speaker 7: think I would rather be burned to death than be
Speaker 7: executed by nitrogen. I mean it is that bad.
Speaker 16: Wod attended the hypoxia suffocation of Kenneth Smith, a contract killer,
Speaker 16: on January twenty fifth, twenty twenty four, the first such
Speaker 16: execution in American history. Smith had been sentence to death
Speaker 16: thirty six years earlier. That said, the horrors for him began.
Speaker 16: We stepped into the death chamber and saw Smith outfitted
Speaker 16: with a large masks that would deliver the poison gas.
Speaker 16: Attending this execution actually put Hood's life in jeopardy.
Speaker 7: I can describe it for y'alls listeners. But the mask
Speaker 7: which I'm holding right here a replica, is basically something
Speaker 7: that is gas netting in the back and has silicone straps.
Speaker 7: It's put over the back of someone's head and it
Speaker 7: is strapped as tight as possible to try to keep
Speaker 7: it on. And it looks like a firefighter's mask with
Speaker 7: sort of a plexiglass plate on the front. And then
Speaker 7: there's a hose that's going from the firefighter's mask with
Speaker 7: the plexiglass plate to the nitrogen. And so what is
Speaker 7: happening is they try to pump as much nitrogen as
Speaker 7: possible through through this line. The problem is is that
Speaker 7: these masks don't completely hold the form. I guess it's
Speaker 7: the best way of saying it in that it's difficult
Speaker 7: for you to get an air tight seal. So the
Speaker 7: more oxygen that gets in here, the more it's displacing nitrogen.
Speaker 7: And so the more oxygen that's in here, and obviously
Speaker 7: there's gonna be oxygen too, there's gonna be oxygen in
Speaker 7: the mass before the thing even starts, is going to
Speaker 7: create more suffering. It's going to create a longer process.
Speaker 15: Good knew that he would be in a chamber in
Speaker 15: which poison gas would be released, and he felt obligated
Speaker 15: to tell his children in advance that he could be harmed.
Speaker 15: They were terrified, of course, but he felt an obligation
Speaker 15: to provide smith company and compassion as well. Again, we
Speaker 15: remind listeners that what they are about to hear might
Speaker 15: be upsetting.
Speaker 7: So by the time we get to the point where
Speaker 7: they turn the nitrogen on, all the witnesses, everybody in
Speaker 7: the room is like going Nobody knows what's about to
Speaker 7: happen because it's never been tried before. And so they
Speaker 7: turn it on and Kenny immediately begins to heave back
Speaker 7: and forth and back and forth, over and over. And
Speaker 7: every time he heaves forward, the back of the mask
Speaker 7: was strapped to the gurney, so every time he heaves forward,
Speaker 7: his face is hitting the front of that mask over
Speaker 7: and over and over and over, and so it's like
Speaker 7: watching someone get like hit their face against the playglass window,
Speaker 7: and it's like his nose and his face is flattening
Speaker 7: every time he does it. And he begins to shake
Speaker 7: back and forth and back and forth, heaving up and down.
Speaker 7: I see spit and saliva and snod and you know,
Speaker 7: eyewater and all sorts of fluid is coming out of
Speaker 7: his face, and that fluid begins to build up on
Speaker 7: the front of the mask and it begins to drizzle
Speaker 7: like a waterfall.
Speaker 16: Smith's convulse was so much force, prison officials worried his
Speaker 16: mask might come off, interrupting the execution and possibly killing
Speaker 16: Hood and maybe others and attendance. A window separated Hood
Speaker 16: from other witnesses in the violence of Smith's death caused
Speaker 16: the commotion.
Speaker 7: The windows are like super thick. I shouldn't have been
Speaker 7: able to hear anything, but I could hear somebody behind
Speaker 7: me screaming stop stop stop, stop, please stop stop stop.
Speaker 7: And it was it was an absolute nightmare. And Kenny
Speaker 7: did not die for at least twenty two minutes. And
Speaker 7: it's very possible that he didn't die for a longer
Speaker 7: period of time, but the state of Alabama declares they say, oh,
Speaker 7: you know, he's not breathing, he's dead. Then they'd push
Speaker 7: everybody out of the room, and then they bring the
Speaker 7: doctor in after everybody's left, to declare him dead.
Speaker 15: Who admits that some of the men he's counseled are
Speaker 15: capable of unspeakable evil, even after years on death row,
Speaker 15: but he still recalls each death he's witnessed with pain.
Speaker 28: I feel morally compromised, horrified, but I feel cold or
Speaker 28: pushed to keep going because I think that the more traumatic.
Speaker 7: Thing would be to leave these guys alone. Now, in
Speaker 7: terms of actually seeing it, I think that it's these
Speaker 7: images don't leave you. There's nightmares. I always say that
Speaker 7: these guys haunt me. They come night after night. You know,
Speaker 7: I'll see them at the end of my bed. I mean,
Speaker 7: I mean, just yeah. So, so trauma is something I've
Speaker 7: come to know very well.
Speaker 16: In twenty nineteen, the United States Supreme Court ruled the
Speaker 16: prisoners do not have a right to a painless death
Speaker 16: when a green lighted the execution of Russell Buckloo, who
Speaker 16: had blood filled tumor and his head, neck and mouth
Speaker 16: that could have broken up and as he was put
Speaker 16: to death. The highest court seems to have rendered the
Speaker 16: Eighth Amendments ban on Cruel and Unusual punishment mood.
Speaker 15: Meanwhile, in recent years, it has not only been states
Speaker 15: that have enforced the death penalty. Between nineteen sixty and
Speaker 15: twenty nineteen, the federal government carried out only three executions,
Speaker 15: but in twenty twenty to early twenty twenty one, during
Speaker 15: the last six months of Donald Trump's first term as president,
Speaker 15: the federal government executed.
Speaker 13: Thirteen men and women.
Speaker 15: These included Brandon Bernard, who committed a double murder when
Speaker 15: he was only eighteen, and another Lisa Montgomery, whose psychologists
Speaker 15: believed was severely mentally ill and detached from reality at
Speaker 15: the time that she murdered a pregnant woman and cut
Speaker 15: the baby from her victim's body in order to raise
Speaker 15: the child as her own.
Speaker 16: Joe Biden, on the other hand, at the end of
Speaker 16: his presidential term, sought to prevent a similar execution spree.
Speaker 16: Forty people are on death row, and he commuted the
Speaker 16: sense of thirty seven of them. The remaining three were
Speaker 16: Zokhar Zarnev. The twenty thirteen Boston Marathon bomber Dylan Rufe,
Speaker 16: who massacred nine members of the Mother Emmanuel Ame Church
Speaker 16: in Charleston, South Carolina, twenty fifteen, and Robert Bowers, who
Speaker 16: killed eleven at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 16: Back in power, however, Trump is vowed to make the
Speaker 16: death penalty great again.
Speaker 29: Anybody murders something in the capitol, capital punishment, capital capital punishment.
Speaker 29: If somebody kills somebody in the capitol Washington, DC, We're
Speaker 29: going to be seeking the death penalty.
Speaker 27: And that's a very strong preventative.
Speaker 15: Trump's immediate plans aside, the future of the death penalty
Speaker 15: in the long term is not so certain. According to
Speaker 15: a twenty twenty four Gallup opinion poll, support for the
Speaker 15: death penalty has sunk to its lowest level in half
Speaker 15: a century. Only fifty three percent of Americans favor capital punishment,
Speaker 15: but that number skews heavily towards older Americans. More than
Speaker 15: half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and forty
Speaker 15: three oppose the death penalty, and almost sixty percent of
Speaker 15: the so called gen z those born between nineteen ninety
Speaker 15: seven and twenty twelve are firmly against the death penalty,
Speaker 15: while Professor Karna Lane believes that even record low support
Speaker 15: for the death penalty is exaggerated and that support for
Speaker 15: capital punishment drops even further when other options are provided
Speaker 15: to voters.
Speaker 1: You know, the President issued this executive order, a day
Speaker 1: one executive order. Let's go for the death penalty anytime
Speaker 1: we can. Let's execute everybody. And one of the things
Speaker 1: to realize is that the death penalty is dying in
Speaker 1: this country for reasons that an executive order cannot fix.
Speaker 1: People have less confidence than the death penalty. They don't
Speaker 1: trust the death penalty, nor should they. Two people have
Speaker 1: been exonerated from.
Speaker 16: Death row and Race Bouyon agrees.
Speaker 12: The decline in executions in the United States reflects a
Speaker 12: broad US shift in how society views get penalty. I mean,
Speaker 12: more states are repealing it, juries are imposing it less often,
Speaker 12: and the public support while student inviting has steadily decreased,
Speaker 12: especially as concerns about wrongful convictions in the racial bias
Speaker 12: and the high costs of capital punishment came to light.
Speaker 16: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, hangings were public,
Speaker 16: but they so often went awry and produced such grizzly
Speaker 16: scen States smooth as executions inside prison yards and some
Speaker 16: more humane alternative. That new method, the electric chair, proved
Speaker 16: horrifying as well, and was deemed unsuitable for general audiences.
Speaker 16: The Supreme Court imposed a four year pause in the
Speaker 16: death penalty beginning in nineteen seventy two because of its
Speaker 16: random application. In nineteen seventy six, the High Court reauthorized
Speaker 16: capital punishment. A crisis ensued when a Texas TV reporters
Speaker 16: sued for the right to televise executions. Horrified at the
Speaker 16: prospectively condemned, essentially being burned alive in the electric chair
Speaker 16: in front of a primetime audience. States approved the latest
Speaker 16: innovation stake killing death by lethal injection, But throughout this
Speaker 16: history of execution, insurmountable flaws have remained consistent. The quest
Speaker 16: for a human way to kill people on an announced
Speaker 16: schedule has been futile. Each form of the death penalty
Speaker 16: has been proven to be violent and cost suffering at
Speaker 16: great expenditure of public money, and plausibly innocent people have
Speaker 16: been put to death. As the people in charge of
Speaker 16: punishment have changed execution methods over the years, they've also
Speaker 16: tried to prevent public backlash to revolting scenes of suffering,
Speaker 16: which could create the opposite the capital punishment that they fear.
Speaker 16: Politicians eager to prove they are tough on crime, have
Speaker 16: also fought to hide these gruesome spectacles from public view. Nevertheless,
Speaker 16: Race Bouyon is optimistic that this grim aspect of life
Speaker 16: in the United States might soon come to an end.
Speaker 12: More than two thirds of you know countries have about
Speaker 12: this death penalty in law or practice, with only a
Speaker 12: few countries carrying out the vast majority of executions. And
Speaker 12: I think the future is one where the death penalty
Speaker 12: continues to strain one life as the values of human rights, dignity,
Speaker 12: and justice without irreversible punishment again ground.
Speaker 16: Until next time. I'm Michael Phillips and.
Speaker 13: I'm Stephen Montchelli. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: Am I introducing the podcast. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3: This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 3: news cast covering what's happening in the White House, the
Speaker 3: crumbling world what it means for you.
Speaker 4: I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 3: Today I'm joined by Mio Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: This episode recovering the week of October thirty. First to
Speaker 3: November fifth, one of the most exciting weeks in politics.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because it's one finite.
Speaker 3: If you remember the poem, that's right, and that's not
Speaker 3: the only exciting thing to happen, but also not the
Speaker 3: only sad thing to happen this week, because as exciting
Speaker 3: as election Day was for people in New York, there
Speaker 3: was like a looming sadness throughout the day because earlier
Speaker 3: that morning, obviously, Vice President Dick Cheney passed away, and
Speaker 3: that was rough for many people, not rough for many others,
Speaker 3: but that certainly was a looming presence over the day.
Speaker 3: Does anyone have any words to say on the passing
Speaker 3: of mister Cheney.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I just want to let everyone in
Speaker 2: hell know this too shall pass. You know you won't
Speaker 2: be stuck with him forever. Just try to grin and
Speaker 2: bear it. I know it's going to be hard for
Speaker 2: a lot of you, especially Saddam Hussein, but I know
Speaker 2: you can get past this. You know, he will get
Speaker 2: reincarnated as a Senate Republican staffer within the next six
Speaker 2: to eight months, so so you won't have to put
Speaker 2: up with him long.
Speaker 6: I guess this is also just your reminder that it's
Speaker 6: going to do to practice see full essential rooms of
Speaker 6: firearms safety at old times.
Speaker 2: Don't shoot with Dick Cheney if you see Dick Cheney
Speaker 2: while you're hunting quail.
Speaker 17: Right.
Speaker 4: Do the kids even know about this now?
Speaker 18: Oh?
Speaker 4: The kids know? The kids?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Ok, yeah, yeah, this is.
Speaker 3: Cheney law has permeated throughout generations of American call.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 10: When I was a kid, there was like a whole
Speaker 10: thing where we all fought the song Jamie's Got a
Speaker 10: Gun was Cheney's got a.
Speaker 6: Gun in front of except because it just lined up
Speaker 6: with everything you knew about the world.
Speaker 2: What's funny about it is that my actual thinking on
Speaker 2: that shooting hasn't changed since I was a Republican kid.
Speaker 2: Like when I was a young right winger, I thought, Wow,
Speaker 2: Dick Cheney's so cool. He shot a man and got
Speaker 2: him to apologize to him, And now, as an adult
Speaker 2: on the left, I still think that's kind of the
Speaker 2: coolest thing Dick.
Speaker 27: Cheney ever did.
Speaker 6: Like it is a head of a feat.
Speaker 2: That man apologized for getting in front of his sights.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 4: Now it is.
Speaker 3: It is unfortunate that Dick Cheney did not live to
Speaker 3: see the election of Zormumdani as the mayor of New
Speaker 3: York City.
Speaker 4: Which happened. That would have been funny on Tuesday.
Speaker 3: Later that day, Zoran has become the first candidate in
Speaker 3: New York mayoral history to win over a million votes
Speaker 3: since nineteen sixty nine. Nice This election itself saw over
Speaker 3: two million votes. This is a million more votes in
Speaker 3: the last in New York mayoral election.
Speaker 4: Huge turnout.
Speaker 3: Currently, as of Wednesday afternoon, Zoran has fifty point four
Speaker 3: percent of the vote. Former governor and sexual assault enthusiast
Speaker 3: Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, has forty one point
Speaker 3: six percent, and the bray wearing Curtisilwa as seven point one.
Speaker 3: Not a spoiler candidate in many ways, nor would it
Speaker 3: be correct to say that all of Silver's votes would
Speaker 3: have gone to one candidate or another. But even if
Speaker 3: you do add all of his votes on to disgraced
Speaker 3: former Governor Andrew Cuomo's total, Zoran still comes out on
Speaker 3: top well.
Speaker 2: Which was something there was legitimately a lot of question
Speaker 2: about as to like whether or not will Sila staying
Speaker 2: in matter right? Uh, And it's it's a really good
Speaker 2: sign that it didn't.
Speaker 3: It did not Slia, So no one really knows how
Speaker 3: to pronounce the name, including in the city. You hear
Speaker 3: it different pronunciations with different peop at different times. Sometimes
Speaker 3: it's slilwa, sometimes it's silwa saliwa.
Speaker 2: All I know is he got stabbed on the subway.
Speaker 4: Right and shot five times in the back of a
Speaker 4: cab in the back.
Speaker 9: That's right.
Speaker 4: How did they fail.
Speaker 10: To kill him?
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, it's harder to kill people by shooting them
Speaker 2: with a handgun.
Speaker 6: Then you might think, yeah, apparently hanggum ballistics are just different.
Speaker 4: Yes, and he does have seventeen cats.
Speaker 3: He ran on Republican and the Protected the Protect Animals Party.
Speaker 3: You can have some criticism for past ills that that
Speaker 3: he has contributed to, but he is certainly mixed up
Speaker 3: for that in some way for being a fascinating character.
Speaker 2: He's a very New York kind of figure.
Speaker 30: Ed.
Speaker 3: He was the only major all candidate to call and
Speaker 3: congratulate Zora mom Donnie last night. Both Clobo and may
Speaker 3: Or Adams did not call Mom Donnie, but Curtis did,
Speaker 3: which is kind of beautiful. It's kind of beautiful.
Speaker 2: He's a classy man. You don't get to wear a
Speaker 2: red beret like that unless you have some manners.
Speaker 6: The British Parachute Regiment would beg to disagree about having
Speaker 6: nanas and wearing red hats.
Speaker 2: No, he's my head cannon now is that he is
Speaker 2: the British paratrooper.
Speaker 6: Just drop him in with seventeen cats and he and
Speaker 6: he starts milling immediately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he saves that fucking mall in Nairobi. Or tell
Speaker 2: you what, the.
Speaker 6: Argentines wouldn't have fucked with the Falklands of Curtis and
Speaker 6: there not with all those cats. That's where he's going
Speaker 6: now that he's being banished in New York like piss guys,
Speaker 6: I shouldn't take this. Just an island of Catlett.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Staten Island, which.
Speaker 2: You're a real New Yorker now, Gary, you shed on
Speaker 2: Staten Island.
Speaker 3: Which is the only borough that went for Cuomo where
Speaker 3: he was up thirty three points. That was very funny,
Speaker 3: Momdanni won every other bureau up twenty in Brooklyn, up
Speaker 3: ten in Manhattan, of five in Queens and eleven in
Speaker 3: the Bronx.
Speaker 2: From what this should tell everyone everywhere in the country
Speaker 2: about what is possible in politics, even in times as
Speaker 2: dark as this. Is that he was what eight percent
Speaker 2: a year ago, the six percent it's like in January,
Speaker 2: six percent in January. And he didn't just eke it
Speaker 2: out because there were a shitload of guys. This isn't
Speaker 2: like an Arnold thing where everybody's on the fucking ballot
Speaker 2: and it's like a crazy cartoon election. He legitimately votes
Speaker 2: nowhere and won.
Speaker 3: The most votes for a mayoral candidate in almost fifty years. Yeah,
Speaker 3: nearly reaching the like the vote totals in this election
Speaker 3: for like a presidential election in the city.
Speaker 6: It's very impressive for like a mid cycle off cycle
Speaker 6: election turnout wise, yep.
Speaker 3: Specifically, he won a whole bunch of votes that he
Speaker 3: did not gain the primary among uh some like black
Speaker 3: and Latino voters. You can see that in the turnout
Speaker 3: at like the Bronx.
Speaker 2: And these these people aren't overwhelmingly at least at this stage,
Speaker 2: folks who have been convinced of every aspect of ideology
Speaker 2: that Zorn has ever put out there. People who looked
Speaker 2: at who was available are like, this guy seems like
Speaker 2: he genuinely wants to do something. Yeah, and they lost
Speaker 2: to the specific policies they're not they're not paying attention
Speaker 2: to the fact that he quoted Eugene V. Debs. They're talking,
Speaker 2: they're listening to his his policies on like creating municipal
Speaker 2: grocery stores and stuff.
Speaker 3: Right, it's about affordability, not ideology. And Zorn's strict focus
Speaker 3: on affordability, not running a campaign that like falls back
Speaker 3: on fear, not running a campaign about foreign policy when
Speaker 3: you're in fucking New York City. A strict focus on
Speaker 3: affordability was the key to winning this pain.
Speaker 2: A strict focus on affordability while not pretending not to
Speaker 2: have the ideology, which is also really noteworthy. Right where
Speaker 2: he's still he's still he isn't he's not like talking
Speaker 2: around it, right.
Speaker 3: No, he's not apologizing or hiding the fact that he's
Speaker 3: a democratic socialist. Yeah, And this produced some super interesting results.
Speaker 3: If you if you refer back to the last election
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four and in everyone bemoaning like, how how
Speaker 3: come young men are are so politically lost?
Speaker 4: Why are they all going so far to the right.
Speaker 3: Sixty eight percent of men age eighteen to twenty nine
Speaker 3: go to mom donnie, sixty six percent of men thirty
Speaker 3: to forty forty five percent of men forty five to
Speaker 3: sixty five among women eighteen to twenty nine years old,
Speaker 3: eighty four percent. Donnie looking said, dom numbers home.
Speaker 4: Bath party election numbers.
Speaker 2: What actually Saddam Hussein out to Creedy did in fact vote,
Speaker 2: but he went for He broke hard for Cuomo. Honestly,
Speaker 2: at the end, it was the sex crimes that that
Speaker 2: did it for UNI did vote for Slowa though that
Speaker 2: was kind of weird. I'm gonna be honest with you.
Speaker 2: We're all trying to parse that one out.
Speaker 6: It's a cat thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I said, like not hiding his political inspirations
Speaker 3: in any way. Quoted eugen Debs ten seconds.
Speaker 4: Into his victory speech.
Speaker 3: Yeah, immediately you understand, like, oh, this guy's like playing
Speaker 3: he knows what's up.
Speaker 2: Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran for president from prison. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: to know who Eugene V. Debs is, like arguably the
Speaker 2: most radical national candidate who has ever existed in this country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and his speech was extremely poetic. It got a
Speaker 3: very strong positive reaction from the people who I watched
Speaker 3: this with in Bushwick, which was the district that was
Speaker 3: the most pro Mamdani out of the entire electoral methemicity.
Speaker 3: But he started by talking about how power has been
Speaker 3: kept out of the hands of working people by the
Speaker 3: hands that keep the city going by lifting boxes, by
Speaker 3: gripping the handlebars of delivery bikes, and collecting burned scars
Speaker 3: from cooking food.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: Over the last twelve months, you have dared to reach
Speaker 3: for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.
Speaker 3: The future is in our hands unquote. The whole speech
Speaker 3: was kind of a rife with little like metaphors and
Speaker 3: allegories like that.
Speaker 4: It was very cute.
Speaker 3: Went on to discuss how the campaign toppled a political
Speaker 3: dynasty and gave one of the most like fine tuned.
Speaker 4: Dishes I've ever seen.
Speaker 3: Quote, I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life.
Speaker 4: It's a phenomenal cook.
Speaker 2: But I hope I never have to say his name.
Speaker 3: Again, or but let tonight be the last time I
Speaker 3: utter his name. Only the best in private life?
Speaker 4: Is yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's basically this is like, he's not the
Speaker 2: originator of this particular kind of diss It goes back
Speaker 2: a while, but the gist of that is like everyone's
Speaker 2: moment be a family man.
Speaker 4: Get out of a way.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Repeatedly, Mam Donnie has has used the word mandate to
Speaker 3: describe this selection and the results.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: New York has delivered a mandate for change, a mandate
Speaker 3: for a new kind of politics, mandate for a city
Speaker 3: we can afford, a mandate for a government that delivers
Speaker 3: exactly that. I'm going to play a short clip here.
Speaker 31: Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who
Speaker 31: refused to accept that the promise of a better future
Speaker 31: was a relic of the past. You showed that when
Speaker 31: politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher.
Speaker 27: In a new era of leadership.
Speaker 31: We will fight for you because we are you, or
Speaker 31: as we say on Steinway and I'm incomb while.
Speaker 2: Cum the Arabic there wild wild that we've moved this
Speaker 2: far in New York, that it's in credit wins you
Speaker 2: an election Like that didn't win him the election, but
Speaker 2: like they really tried the nine to eleven shit. Rudy
Speaker 2: Juliani posted today a crude photoshop of his own face
Speaker 2: in the fires of the twin of the burning Twin Towers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we forgot written across it, and that did None of
Speaker 2: that shit did anything.
Speaker 3: The last month of the campaign against Mamdani, whether that's
Speaker 3: from people like Bill acts Bloomberg or Cuomo's actual team,
Speaker 3: has has used what people have been calling the nine
Speaker 3: eleven card, incessantly playing clips of nine to eleven with
Speaker 3: like zoron like emblazon, like over overtop, playing clips from
Speaker 3: Hassan talking about nine to eleven. But the islamophobe that
Speaker 3: the Cuomo campaign has resorted to as a last ditch
Speaker 3: effort to stop Mamdani has been despicable, and the fact
Speaker 3: that this did not scare Momdanni into like hiding or
Speaker 3: like restricting that.
Speaker 4: Part of himself is incredibly admirable.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but they wasn't just nine to eleven right, like
Speaker 6: you said. It was the broad Islam like they deployed
Speaker 6: as they always do, like every urban area in Britain
Speaker 6: is now like the Califate, like this bullshit that exists
Speaker 6: only in the American conservative mind. And it failed, which
Speaker 6: is good.
Speaker 3: Specifically for a lot of the speech it was about
Speaker 3: juxtaposing like how we used to have good things in
Speaker 3: the past, like we had this idea that like good
Speaker 3: things now are always out of reach, and juxtaposing this
Speaker 3: like idea of like hope or or like past exceptionalism
Speaker 3: that we just don't feel like we've access to anymore,
Speaker 3: and showing that if you actually involve young people, we
Speaker 3: can actually do do good things in our city now.
Speaker 3: And I really liked the line about like politics that
Speaker 3: speaks to you without condescension, and how much this campaign
Speaker 3: was like ran by and for you know, young candidates
Speaker 3: and young voters.
Speaker 27: Sorry.
Speaker 3: Went on to thank the people who have been forgotten
Speaker 3: by the politics of our city and how they've supported
Speaker 3: his campaign quote Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Sengalese
Speaker 3: taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties, unquote.
Speaker 3: And he went on to mention the kind of people
Speaker 3: that this campaign is about, and towards the end of
Speaker 3: that section, he talked about the hunger strike that he
Speaker 3: participated in four years ago in order to win debt
Speaker 3: relief for cab drivers.
Speaker 27: And it's about people like Richard the taxi driver.
Speaker 31: I went on a fifteen day hunger strike with outside
Speaker 31: of city hall, who still has to drive his cab
Speaker 31: seven days a week.
Speaker 27: My brother, we are in city hall now.
Speaker 3: That is that is the energy of like the campaign
Speaker 3: and the city right now, Like that sort of framing,
Speaker 3: and that's the energy that people are like carrying through.
Speaker 2: I saw among the right wing fever spawns responses to this.
Speaker 2: Mike Cernovich taking a clip from the election night party
Speaker 2: where one of the people who is attending Zoran's party
Speaker 2: made a comment about how like white people need to
Speaker 2: get on board with the idea that like our culture
Speaker 2: is multiculturalism in this country right, Like it's it's not
Speaker 2: anything else, Like that's that's like what has made America.
Speaker 2: And Mike did not react well to that.
Speaker 6: I can't imagine the declaration of Warsovich mad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but no, like especially in New York, out of
Speaker 3: like anywhere in the country, like especially in New York,
Speaker 3: the culture is made through the mix of immigrants that
Speaker 3: have built this city. And this is something that Zorn
Speaker 3: discussed throughout the speech. Zorn went on to thank thee
Speaker 3: hundred thousand campaign volunteers and specifically how their efforts quote
Speaker 3: eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.
Speaker 4: I liked that line, and.
Speaker 3: Then he asked New Yorkers to breathe this moment in quote,
Speaker 3: we have held our breath for longer than we know.
Speaker 3: We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it
Speaker 3: because the air has been knocked out of our lungs
Speaker 3: too many times to count, held it because we cannot
Speaker 3: afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who have
Speaker 3: sacrificed so much, we are breathing in the air of
Speaker 3: a city that has been reborn. There are many who
Speaker 3: thought this day would never come, who feared we would
Speaker 3: be condemned only to a future of less, with every
Speaker 3: election consigning us to simply more of the same. And
Speaker 3: there are others who see politics today as too cruel
Speaker 3: for the flame of hope to still burn New York.
Speaker 3: We have answered those fears, unquote.
Speaker 31: And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together,
Speaker 31: hope over tyranny, hope over big and small ideas, hope
Speaker 31: over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to
Speaker 31: hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we
Speaker 31: won because we insisted that no longer would politics be
Speaker 31: something that is done to us. Now it is something
Speaker 31: that we do. Standing before you, I think of the
Speaker 31: words of Juan lal Nehru. A moment comes, but rarely
Speaker 31: in history, when we step out from the old to
Speaker 31: the new, when an age ends, and when the soul
Speaker 31: of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. Tonight we have
Speaker 31: stepped out from the old into the new.
Speaker 3: The line about politics not being something that's done to you, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: that really outlines how politics has felt in this country
Speaker 3: for as basically as long as I can remember. He
Speaker 3: then outlined what his central agenda to tackle the cost
Speaker 3: of living crisis is, including freezing the rent for more
Speaker 3: than two million rits, timbolized tenants, making buses faster and free,
Speaker 3: and delivering universal childcare across the city, saying, quote, this
Speaker 3: will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their
Speaker 3: leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather
Speaker 3: than a list of excuses for what we are too
Speaker 3: timid to attempt.
Speaker 4: Unquote. Let's go on a quick break, and we will
Speaker 4: come back to talk a little bit more about the election.
Speaker 6: All right, we're back.
Speaker 3: During the second half of this speech, Zoron turned to
Speaker 3: address Donald Trump. Right this looming thing across politics nationwide,
Speaker 3: but specifically New York, as Trump has threatened to start
Speaker 3: to fuck with New York even more. If Zoron is
Speaker 3: elected and people in New York know this, and about
Speaker 3: halfway through, Zoron addressed Trump directly, which we will get
Speaker 3: to you in a sack. But before he directly talked
Speaker 3: to Trump, in the speech, Zoron laid out what types
Speaker 3: of people the city government will be focusing on protecting
Speaker 3: from Trump's division and hate.
Speaker 31: In this new age we make for ourselves, we will
Speaker 31: refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate
Speaker 31: to pit us against one another. In this moment of
Speaker 31: political darkness. New York will be the light.
Speaker 19: Here.
Speaker 31: We believe in standing up for those we love. Whether
Speaker 31: you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community,
Speaker 31: one of the many black women that Donald Trump is
Speaker 31: fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting
Speaker 31: for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone
Speaker 31: else with their back against the wall, Your struggle is
Speaker 31: ours two.
Speaker 3: Specifically, I like this idea of in the darkened political moment,
Speaker 3: this unit states is in New York and there on
Speaker 3: administration and how that reflects New York and general though
Speaker 3: will be a beacon for the rest of the country,
Speaker 3: and naming like the trans community is like the second
Speaker 3: group mentioned, there was heavily appreciated in the Bushwick trans
Speaker 3: Watch party that I was at. Zorah went on to
Speaker 3: say that quote, no more will New York be a
Speaker 3: city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.
Speaker 3: This new age will be defined by a competence and
Speaker 3: a compassion that have too long been placed in odds
Speaker 3: with one another. We will prove that there is no
Speaker 3: problem too large for government to solve, and no concern
Speaker 3: too small for it to care about. Tens of millions
Speaker 3: of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to
Speaker 3: convince our neighbors that this new age is something that
Speaker 3: should frighten them. As has often occurred, the billionaire class
Speaker 3: has sought to convince those making thirty dollars an hour
Speaker 3: that their enemies are those earning twenty dollars an hour.
Speaker 3: They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that
Speaker 3: we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long
Speaker 3: broken system. Together, we will usher in a generation of change.
Speaker 3: And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than
Speaker 3: fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism
Speaker 3: with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.
Speaker 10: I think this whole section is something very important, and
Speaker 10: this has been something that's been very consistent about momt
Speaker 10: Donnie's entire campaign, which is there's been on the left
Speaker 10: of for very very long time a just interminable, intractable
Speaker 10: conflict between this idea of like purely focusing on class
Speaker 10: politics or talking about race. And but I think what
Speaker 10: Montdami is doing here has been very effective, right, is
Speaker 10: you can just do both. And in fact, as the
Speaker 10: left over the last you know, sort of senses kind
Speaker 10: of the reemergence of this kind of left in like
Speaker 10: twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, as it's gone on, it's gotten
Speaker 10: less white, it's gotten more to verse, has gotten more multicultural,
Speaker 10: and it's been able to fuse these two things together.
Speaker 10: And it's been able to fuse that with just you know,
Speaker 10: like being very very openly pro trans and like there
Speaker 10: was you know, there's also a pretty big response that
Speaker 10: I saw from people talking about the fact that he
Speaker 10: specifically mentioned that it was black women who were being
Speaker 10: fired by the Trump administration. Right, And you can just
Speaker 10: do all these things together and it works, and it's
Speaker 10: worked the whole time, and refusing to pit these things
Speaker 10: against each other, like refusing to pit affordability against trans rights,
Speaker 10: refusing to pit, you know, like fusing to pit the
Speaker 10: politics of like defending. And this is the thing that
Speaker 10: like fucking Bernie is terrible at right, where like Bernie
Speaker 10: like has been like has a whole rant about how
Speaker 10: Trump has been right on like we have to reduce immigration, right,
Speaker 10: and you don't have to do that. You can be
Speaker 10: pro immigrant, you can be protraned, you can be pro
Speaker 10: black women, you can be you know, and and you
Speaker 10: can also want everything to cost less, and you can
Speaker 10: be in favor of the fact that the US is
Speaker 10: a is a multicultural society and can only function as one.
Speaker 10: And it's it's a winning form of politics. And I'm
Speaker 10: glad we're finally getting there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it will be great if this New York
Speaker 3: City as a beacon can actually shine and not get
Speaker 3: stifled out in these in these next four years. Because
Speaker 3: Zorn is unless unless things happened, Zora will be the
Speaker 3: mayor for the remainder of the Trump term. Right like
Speaker 3: this is he will be mayor after second Trump administration
Speaker 3: is over, barring any unfortunate incidents or make sure your
Speaker 3: private security is really good.
Speaker 6: Way whoever NYPD detail which gets your own guys, Yeah,
Speaker 6: it'll be fine, but it also it means, like, like
Speaker 6: from I guess a national perspective, it is likely that
Speaker 6: mom Danny will become like the enemy number one of
Speaker 6: the Trump administration, where they probably Newsome or pritsh Kaan
Speaker 6: now right, Like it's it is easier because of the
Speaker 6: obvious bigotry that underlies a lot of the Republican Party
Speaker 6: to go after a brown dude. Yes, and that is
Speaker 6: what they are going to do.
Speaker 4: And they're going to use brown democratic socialists.
Speaker 6: Yeah, who stands up for trans people and migrants. Likely
Speaker 6: you saw how acceptable Islamophobia is in Cuomo's campaign, right,
Speaker 6: Like he just go on to every mainstream network and say, shit,
Speaker 6: that is fucking disgusting. Yeah, and so we should prepare
Speaker 6: ourselves for four more years of that, I guess. And
Speaker 6: I think he does a very good job of repudiating that,
Speaker 6: and obviously the elector in New York did too, But
Speaker 6: that is going to be what we are going to
Speaker 6: see as a result of this.
Speaker 3: Well no, and like so much of the resistance to
Speaker 3: Zoron came from this idea that if he wins, that
Speaker 3: means that this is going to be what people point
Speaker 3: to as a future for politics, specifically democratic politics, And
Speaker 3: a lot of people wanted to stop him because they
Speaker 3: knew that's going to happen. If he is in control
Speaker 3: of the biggest city in the country as the Democratic mayor.
Speaker 3: That's going to be influential for what democratic politics will
Speaker 3: be after they've got completely clobbered last year. And he's
Speaker 3: showing that a different type of politics is possible, even
Speaker 3: even within the Democratic Party. And that's that's true, like
Speaker 3: altering what the party is fundamentally. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 3: it is a cool little side note that Zoron voted
Speaker 3: for himself on the Working Families party line and in
Speaker 3: fact not the Democratic Party line, because how the New
Speaker 3: York mayoral ballot's work. I'm going to play one more
Speaker 3: clip from the speech of Zoron specifically addressing Trump. It's
Speaker 3: going to be a teeny bit longer, and I think
Speaker 3: we'll cut We'll shorten some of the applause bits because
Speaker 3: some of the applause sections gone for he quite long.
Speaker 3: But this will be the last club.
Speaker 27: After all.
Speaker 31: If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump
Speaker 31: how to defeat him, it is the city that gave
Speaker 31: rise to him. And if there is any way to
Speaker 31: terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions
Speaker 31: that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only
Speaker 31: how we stopped Trump, it's how we stop the next one. So,
Speaker 31: Donald Trump, since I know you're watching.
Speaker 30: I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.
Speaker 30: We will hold bad landlords.
Speaker 31: To account because the Donald Trumps.
Speaker 27: Of our city have grown far.
Speaker 31: Too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put
Speaker 31: an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed
Speaker 31: billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks.
Speaker 31: We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because
Speaker 31: we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working
Speaker 31: people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort
Speaker 31: them become very small. Indeed, New York will remain a
Speaker 31: city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants,
Speaker 31: and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me,
Speaker 31: President Trump, when I say this, To get to any
Speaker 31: of us, you will have to get.
Speaker 27: Through all of us.
Speaker 9: The shit rocks.
Speaker 4: It's good, it's good, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool
Speaker 4: for a mayor Alection to say that.
Speaker 6: It didn't manage to get in the New York is
Speaker 6: the Anchora of America, which I was hoping for. But
Speaker 6: otherwise great, that's Eric Adams this bit.
Speaker 31: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, sad day for sad day for Turkey today.
Speaker 10: I guess, on an actual important note, I think it
Speaker 10: is really important that you know, all of this energy
Speaker 10: against Trump, right and against all the shit that he's
Speaker 10: doing that's so hideously unpopular, it's starting to be channeled
Speaker 10: into politics that can actually defeat him. Yeah, and that
Speaker 10: are actually good, you know, and that he's talking about
Speaker 10: specifically the fact that you have to destoy the conditions
Speaker 10: that created and so they don't create the next one.
Speaker 6: Like this fucking rocks.
Speaker 4: This is good.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 6: For so long, Like for I mean most of the
Speaker 6: twenty sixteen to twenty twenty period and for a lot
Speaker 6: of this year, we've seen so many people turn the
Speaker 6: obvious disgust that people have at what Trump is doing
Speaker 6: into grifts into supporting a politics which fundamentally allowed for
Speaker 6: the conditions we are in now. Right, see someone repudiate
Speaker 6: that and to see more than a million people turn
Speaker 6: out to support that is fantastic, Like it's genuinely hopeful.
Speaker 3: It's something like Zors like acknowledge. It's like this is
Speaker 3: not like the end, right, this is a means, not
Speaker 3: the means either, Like this is this, this is a
Speaker 3: means to an end. And this whole campaign started, as
Speaker 3: he's referred to it as a quote unquote electoral project
Speaker 3: by the New York City DSA like this was largely
Speaker 3: an experiment, and an experiment that grew wildly, wildly kind
Speaker 3: of out of what I assumed they kind of saw
Speaker 3: it as in the earlier in the earlier days, and
Speaker 3: now they're in this like moment and they have to
Speaker 3: they have to keep rolling with it. But it is
Speaker 3: it is an experiment for a a version of doing this.
Speaker 3: And he knows this is not like the only method
Speaker 3: or tactic to be utilized. But as as an experiment,
Speaker 3: I think it's so far pretty well done now as
Speaker 3: zorn closest speech by calling to chart a new path
Speaker 3: as bold as the campaign has already been, saying that
Speaker 3: conventional wisdom would claim that he is far from the
Speaker 3: perfect candidate. Quote, I'm young, despite my best efforts to
Speaker 3: grow older. I am Muslim, I am a democratic socialist
Speaker 3: and thet stabbing of all. I refuse to apologize for
Speaker 3: any of this. And yet if tonight teaches us anything,
Speaker 3: it is that convention has held us back. We have
Speaker 3: bowed at the altar of caution. We have paid a
Speaker 3: mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in
Speaker 3: our party, and too many among us have turned to
Speaker 3: the right for answers to why they've been left behind.
Speaker 3: We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will
Speaker 3: we have to open a history book for proof that
Speaker 3: democrats can dare to be great. Our greatness will be
Speaker 3: anything but abstract unquote. And he concludes by saying that
Speaker 3: the greatness will be felt by rent stabilized tenants who
Speaker 3: will wake up knowing they are Rent hasn't swored my grandparents,
Speaker 3: who can afford to stay in their home and whose
Speaker 3: grandchildren live nearby because the cost of childcare is not
Speaker 3: driving them out of the city, And by the single
Speaker 3: mothers who don't need to rush their kids to school
Speaker 3: because they can commute to work on a fast bus quote.
Speaker 3: Most of all, it will be felt by each New
Speaker 3: Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back unquote.
Speaker 3: The stuff about like worshiping at the altar of caution
Speaker 3: for like the past, the past like twenty more more
Speaker 3: than twenty, but especially the past like twenty years of
Speaker 3: like Democrat politics, and how he is also recognizing that
Speaker 3: like this is, this could mark a fundamental shift in
Speaker 3: what the Democratic Party actually is because the people Democrats included,
Speaker 3: who've been trying to stop this have failed miserably so far,
Speaker 3: putting tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to
Speaker 3: try to crush crush this version of what the future
Speaker 3: of New York Democrat politics is, and more people since
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine showed up to deny that future. That's
Speaker 3: all I have for Zoran right now. It's literally, you know,
Speaker 3: less than twenty four hours after the Yeah, but this
Speaker 3: was not just a New York City mayoral election. There
Speaker 3: were there were other races, including other other things in
Speaker 3: New York. There was a prop one amendment to the
Speaker 3: state Constitution to retroactively authorize the winter sports facilities on
Speaker 3: Mount then Hovenburg, which is protected forest land and would
Speaker 3: require the state add two thousand, five hundred acres of
Speaker 3: newly protected land elsewhere in the ad Ranak. That's how
Speaker 3: I'm saying it at Irondack Mountains. Yeah, run, which was passed,
Speaker 3: and this allows them to continue to build and maintain
Speaker 3: the winter sports facility of Propositions two through six where
Speaker 3: New York City Charter amendments. The two to four were
Speaker 3: housing reform proposals to fast track the approval process for
Speaker 3: affordable housing and simplify zoning reviews and establish an Affordable
Speaker 3: Housing Appeals Board. All of these past these will limit
Speaker 3: the ability of the City Council to control and slow
Speaker 3: down housing development and empower the mayor specifically to build
Speaker 3: more affordable units faster. And Prop five, which also passed,
Speaker 3: creates a new digital methnicity. The only prop to fail,
Speaker 3: which was number six, was to move local elections to
Speaker 3: be in line with presidential elections on that four year basis. Basically,
Speaker 3: the ballot that Zorn filled out himself was the one
Speaker 3: that passed for all of these, all of these proposals.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you get. They call it a coattails effect in
Speaker 6: political science, right, like the idea that the people.
Speaker 4: Announced his ballot that morning.
Speaker 7: He did not.
Speaker 3: He he didn't, and he didn't even announce it like
Speaker 3: a journalist asked him what he was voting on. He
Speaker 3: specifically did not advocate for any of these or try
Speaker 3: to dissuade anyone from any of these before the election.
Speaker 6: Yeah, for sure. But you get a generally aligned politically electorate, right,
Speaker 6: a relatively progressive in American terms, the electorate coming out
Speaker 6: to vote for him, who will look at these things
Speaker 6: and say that seems to make sense with the way
Speaker 6: I see the world.
Speaker 3: Democrat Abigail Spenberger won the governor of Virginia flipping blue.
Speaker 3: Jay Jones, a Democrat candidate for Virginia AG, also beat
Speaker 3: the Republican incumbent. This was after a month of attacks
Speaker 3: for a series of text messages from twenty twenty two
Speaker 3: where j Jones said that if certain Republican delegates died,
Speaker 3: he would quote go to their funerals to piss on
Speaker 3: their graves unquote, and wish for the hypothetical deaths of
Speaker 3: Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert's children. Quote only would people
Speaker 3: feel pained personally? Do they move on policy? I mean,
Speaker 3: do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil and that
Speaker 3: they're breeding little fascists?
Speaker 4: Yes, that's also not really hypathetical deaths.
Speaker 3: He did in a call with a with another Republican politician,
Speaker 3: and then after the call, they continued texting about it.
Speaker 3: So the proof is in these texts and he has
Speaker 3: admitted this. And basically he was like, if these people's
Speaker 3: like children were to get killed in mass shooting, maybe
Speaker 3: their opinions on guns would change.
Speaker 4: That's essentially what he's expressing there. And then he also
Speaker 4: he also was.
Speaker 3: Quoted in these leads text messages as saying, quote, three people,
Speaker 3: two bullets, Virginia House Speaker Todd, Gilbert Hitler, and Paul Pott.
Speaker 3: Gilbert gets two bullets to the head. Spoiler put Gilbert
Speaker 3: in the crew, sorry after.
Speaker 6: Not just as an elected official, as an attorney general,
Speaker 6: someone going to be a call that you put in
Speaker 6: the fucking text message.
Speaker 27: Spoiler.
Speaker 3: Put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people
Speaker 3: you know, and he receives both bullets every time.
Speaker 2: It's insane, op sec hero.
Speaker 4: But that is the new attorney general.
Speaker 3: That's the new Democrat Attorney General of Virginia who the
Speaker 3: right has been attacking for quite for relentlessly the past month,
Speaker 3: because you.
Speaker 6: Really fucked up. If you can't, like no, if you
Speaker 6: can't run attacks on that guy, and you still all.
Speaker 10: Of those jokes about the whine moms in the suburbs,
Speaker 10: like wanting blooded, like you're looking at this like oh no,
Speaker 10: hell yeah yeah, give me four ward bullets will put
Speaker 10: in this guy.
Speaker 3: It's pretty crazy. It's it's it's pretty astonishing. Maine voted
Speaker 3: no sixty three percent on a voter restriction measure. Voters
Speaker 3: extended the Democrat Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and the California Redistricting
Speaker 3: Measure or Proposition, passed with sixty three point eight percent.
Speaker 4: James, Yeah, do you have stuff on this?
Speaker 14: Yeah?
Speaker 6: So Prop fifty in California, California, it was like a
Speaker 6: one issue ballot, right, you said the Prop fifty this
Speaker 6: would temporarily redistrict. I think people maybe have not been
Speaker 6: like often it gets missed, and it is temporarily redistrict
Speaker 6: in California until re establishing the nonpartisan committee that that
Speaker 6: does districting in twenty thirty one. For the twenty thirty
Speaker 6: two those districts will come back or whether they will
Speaker 6: return to a non partisan districting in twenty thirty two.
Speaker 6: This is one of the most expensive propositions in state history.
Speaker 6: One hundred and twenty million was spent in favor. Forty
Speaker 6: four million against there was also outside money. Newsome already
Speaker 6: called the New York, Illinois and other Democrat majority seats
Speaker 6: to do the same. Right, it's going to likely remove
Speaker 6: about five Republican seats, or those Republicans are going to struggle. Right,
Speaker 6: one of them would be at San Diego's Mountain Empire
Speaker 6: and East County seat, which is currently the forty eighth.
Speaker 6: That seat has been redistricted a few times, right, it's
Speaker 6: moved around. It's currently darryl Isa's seat. In response, California
Speaker 6: Republicans have already filed a lawsuit. Suit was filed by
Speaker 6: Harmiat Dillon's law.
Speaker 2: Firm, Yay Dyland of the party.
Speaker 6: Dylan is in the Trump administration now, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Ellen's in the Trump administration and occasionally in my
Speaker 2: inbox making threats.
Speaker 22: Great.
Speaker 6: But it was Dylan's law firm that the father case.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 6: The case has claimed that California drew the new lines
Speaker 6: to quote specifically favor Hispanic voters, which it's a similar
Speaker 6: claim to the Louisiana versus Calais. I think Calais there
Speaker 6: is the way they say it here case which is
Speaker 6: currently before the Supreme Court, which the Supreme Court seems
Speaker 6: to be suggesting it might be it might be amenable
Speaker 6: to this argument, right, that the consideration of race in
Speaker 6: redistricting is discriminate free. Yesterday, Trump truth quoting here, the
Speaker 6: unconstitutional redistricting vote in California is a giant scam. That
Speaker 6: part is in block capitals, as is characteristic. The rest
Speaker 6: is sporadically capitalized to the quote. Now in the entire process,
Speaker 6: in particular, the voting itself is rigged all quote mail
Speaker 6: in ballots where the Republicans in that state are shut out.
Speaker 6: It's under very serious legal and criminal review. Stay tuned. Yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, fairly predictable. We talked about it last week.
Speaker 6: It's not entirely possible for me to pass out that
Speaker 6: second sentence, but I think we can see what direction
Speaker 6: is pushing in. Right, This was predictable that this was
Speaker 6: going to happen, and we'll keep you updated on it.
Speaker 6: Also predictable that we would have to pivot to ads again,
Speaker 6: which is what we're going to do now. And we
Speaker 6: are back a little bit of immigration US this week.
Speaker 6: As always. According to reporting, this was actually last week,
Speaker 6: but we didn't have time for last week. A countryported
Speaker 6: by CNN, Trump claimed he was quote very much opposed
Speaker 6: to his own administration's immigration raid on our home dive
Speaker 6: plant in Georgia, which obviously this is what he's saying
Speaker 6: to try and get that foreign direct investment back in Georgia, right,
Speaker 6: because it looks very much like Georgia is going to
Speaker 6: pay pretty heavily for that raid. Unfortunately, another man lost
Speaker 6: his life when fleeing ICE officers last week. He seems
Speaker 6: to have left a car that he was in and
Speaker 6: tempted to cross a freeway where he was fatally struck
Speaker 6: by another car. Yeah, that's the second time this has
Speaker 6: happened this year. Texas sosigned an agreement with a federal
Speaker 6: government to allow local DPS officers to operate as ICE
Speaker 6: officers or technically to operate under the authority of ICE
Speaker 6: officers under the two eighty seven g program. So this
Speaker 6: is not the first law enforcement agency in Texas to
Speaker 6: do this. Lots of local agency's had but the DPS
Speaker 6: is statewide, right, so this would this would include officers
Speaker 6: of the Texas Highway Patrol has five thousand employees. It
Speaker 6: will make Texas a markedly more hostile place for migrants.
Speaker 6: The authority allows warrantles to tension under loosely limited, loosely
Speaker 6: phrased supervision by an ICE officer. Right, it allows Texas
Speaker 6: cops to detain a question people have a suspected being
Speaker 6: in the United States without documentation here in San Diego.
Speaker 6: San Diego's Border Patrol Sector released a video with I
Speaker 6: think it was like, I'll have to check what song.
Speaker 6: It was like some cringe kind of pop punk soundtrack
Speaker 6: of the dynamting of land west of the ha Cumber Wilderness.
Speaker 6: This is likely the construction that saw many environmental and
Speaker 6: cultural protections waived by the HS secretarynme earlier this year. Right,
Speaker 6: we're always seeing the beginning of what that looks like,
Speaker 6: and what that looks like here is just a very
Speaker 6: unique landscape. Many one I know some people who listen
Speaker 6: came out to Cumber a couple of years ago to
Speaker 6: help out. Like it's an extremely unique high desert landscape
Speaker 6: and it's currently being dynamited.
Speaker 16: Right.
Speaker 6: These are the areas where there were little gaps in
Speaker 6: the border wall because construction there is very hard and
Speaker 6: the way that they're going ahead with the construction is
Speaker 6: blowing stuff up. Finally, on the immigration deep the case
Speaker 6: regarding conditions in the broad View Facility, which is in Chicago.
Speaker 6: Until earlier this year, it was only for very short stays,
Speaker 6: like not for twenty four hour stays. Has revealed some
Speaker 6: of the horrific conditions inside the facility. It confirmed something
Speaker 6: I've heard from multiple migrants who have been detained or
Speaker 6: over the US, which is ICE is using the threat
Speaker 6: of longest stays in poor conditions to get people to
Speaker 6: sign deportation paperwork. Often it's literally in the overcrowded rooms
Speaker 6: where they're sleeping and staying right like, at any point
Speaker 6: you can just walk up to it and sign your name,
Speaker 6: and you will presumably be removed from those conditions and
Speaker 6: placed into deportation flight as soon as possible. Directly from
Speaker 6: the lawsuit here quote people are forced to attempt to
Speaker 6: sleep for days or sometimes weeks, on plastic chairs or
Speaker 6: on the filthy concrete floor. They are denied sufficient food
Speaker 6: and water. They cannot shower, They are denied soap, higgen items,
Speaker 6: and mental products, and they have no way to clean themselves.
Speaker 6: They are often denied a change of clothes. Continuing my
Speaker 6: quote here, the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable. Most nights
Speaker 6: are freezing cold. Yet only some receive a thin foil blanket,
Speaker 6: sweater or sweatpants have tried to retain warmth. The lights
Speaker 6: are typically on all night. People have also reported being
Speaker 6: denied water bay agents that are being their running water
Speaker 6: in the places where they are held, and very little food.
Speaker 6: We've reported on these conditions before. Some of this is standard. Right,
Speaker 6: lights on all night, freezing cold, you only get a
Speaker 6: very thin blanket like that. That has been the case.
Speaker 6: That was the case throughout the Biden administration. Right they
Speaker 6: call these places of the ice box, both in English
Speaker 6: and in Spanish. This has always been the conditions to
Speaker 6: people have been held in in these facilities have always
Speaker 6: been in humane. But some of this is particularly bad.
Speaker 6: People in Broadview reported being so crowded they could not
Speaker 6: extend their legs.
Speaker 14: Us.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so they had to sit like sort of fetal position.
Speaker 6: They couldn't sit down and extend their legs right alone. Sleep,
Speaker 6: disgustingly unclean conditions they have. Lots of people have reported
Speaker 6: paperwork not being able to language that they read write.
Speaker 6: Bathrooms there are not private, and the lawsuit alleges that
Speaker 6: people of other genders could see each other using the bathroom,
Speaker 6: which is pretty disgusting. I've linked to the lawsuit. You
Speaker 6: can read it if you want to.
Speaker 10: Terror Park Transition, Go.
Speaker 27: Racking, Jazz, Barry.
Speaker 13: Right, jazz b.
Speaker 10: Ah, music to my ears, Oh boy, Okay, abrupt shift
Speaker 10: in tone. So we got a little bit more details
Speaker 10: on the sort of partial agreement that Trump and the
Speaker 10: Chinese government have sort of come to that has staved
Speaker 10: off some of the most disastrous of the new trade
Speaker 10: war elements. Both sides seem to have gotten rid of
Speaker 10: the fees from ships both docking at their ports and
Speaker 10: also on like the sort of complicated shipbuilding stuff we
Speaker 10: talked about last year. The US has paused the thing
Speaker 10: we talked about last week where they were using the
Speaker 10: Foreign Ancity List to do anything that was controlled that
Speaker 10: was like forty percent and more controlled by a thing
Speaker 10: on the Foreignancsity list couldn't be traded with. The US
Speaker 10: is backing off on that for a year. Chinese agreed
Speaker 10: to buy more soybeans. There's also some discussion of China
Speaker 10: buying more energy products. But this is one of these
Speaker 10: things that we just we have no idea what that is.
Speaker 10: It's possible by the time you're listening to there will
Speaker 10: be information. All we have is buy more energy. And
Speaker 10: the last thing that Trump said that didn't seem to
Speaker 10: be part of the negotiations between him and the Chinese
Speaker 10: government per se, but we're definitely part of negotiations that
Speaker 10: have been going on between Trump and his cabinet was
Speaker 10: that there's going to be restrictions on AI chip exports.
Speaker 10: Although exactly what is not known. All Trump said was
Speaker 10: quote the most advanced, we will not let anybody have
Speaker 10: them other than the United States.
Speaker 9: What this seems to be.
Speaker 10: And again everyone is kind of murkily hobbling together whatever
Speaker 10: information they have. What it seems to be is Trump
Speaker 10: stopped in Vidia from selling its most advanced AI grade
Speaker 10: chips called Blackwell, to China, which was which Nvidia has
Speaker 10: been massively lobbying for because they need to expand their
Speaker 10: market to continue the giant bubble that they've accumulated. Trump
Speaker 10: has stopped them. It's unclear whether this is going to
Speaker 10: be made into formal policy or if Trump is just
Speaker 10: going to personally intervene every time a CEO asks him
Speaker 10: to do this. But yeah, we also have so today
Speaker 10: recording November fifth is the start of the Supreme Court
Speaker 10: case against the tariffs. I think It's worth noting that
Speaker 10: this court case against the tariffs, it's framed as like
Speaker 10: a lot of small businesses brought this lawsuit, and they did.
Speaker 10: But also the reason it's gotten to the Supreme Court
Speaker 10: is because they're being backed by a huge player in
Speaker 10: the conservative legal machine. Almost the entire thing is being
Speaker 10: funded and paid for by the Liberty Justice Center, which
Speaker 10: is it's a kind of libertarian right wing legal thing
Speaker 10: backed by like the Walton family and the Coke Network.
Speaker 10: And this is I think one of the most direct
Speaker 10: and interesting actual oppositional moves we've seen from this wing
Speaker 10: of the libertarian business wing of the party, which is very,
Speaker 10: very pissed off at the tariffs. We've seen a whole
Speaker 10: bunch of amicus curia briefs from the American Enterpresi Insttrude
Speaker 10: and the Cato Institute, and a whole bunch of other
Speaker 10: right wing think tanks who are extremely angry about this.
Speaker 10: We don't know exactly how it's going to go, but
Speaker 10: the initial arguments do not seem to be going well
Speaker 10: for the Tromp administration. So that'll that'll be unfolding and
Speaker 10: we'll report on it more is as we know more.
Speaker 10: It's this is literally recording is the first day of trials. So,
Speaker 10: and finally, I'm going to close on a genuinely deeply
Speaker 10: baffling piece of news, which is that the day before
Speaker 10: the election in New York, Greg Abbott posted that there
Speaker 10: would be a one hundred percent tariff on anyone moving
Speaker 10: to New York.
Speaker 9: After the election.
Speaker 6: Yeah, how does that work?
Speaker 2: Isn't it moving to Texas from New York?
Speaker 10: Well, I thought it was to New York.
Speaker 4: It's for me, it looked like moving to New York
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's certainly unclear because this doesn't not seem
Speaker 3: like a policy proposal. It seems more like a post.
Speaker 3: It's just a post. It's someone post posting through it.
Speaker 2: Because this has been from moving from New York to Texas. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: anyone moving from New York to Texas.
Speaker 14: Interesting.
Speaker 10: I don't know tariffs are just posts now, I don't.
Speaker 2: That's not like a thing that there's law around you
Speaker 2: being able to do.
Speaker 10: No, it's it's so one constitutional.
Speaker 4: I think it's just a post. I don't think it
Speaker 4: is anything like.
Speaker 10: Is Yeah, I mean, evidently I think the interesting thing
Speaker 10: about it, is like, is the way in which tariffs
Speaker 10: have come to be seen in their Republican mind as
Speaker 10: like this is something you do to people you're mad at,
Speaker 10: which is very new development in this is this is
Speaker 10: a this is a pure Trump too phenomena effectively well absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a marker of how intensely they're paying attention to
Speaker 2: this election. Like I mean, Abbots said, doing this because
Speaker 2: I'm sure it'll show Shore up his local popularity. But
Speaker 2: it's a marker of like a change that has been
Speaker 2: going on that that has been really like supercharged in
Speaker 2: the Trump era of no, no, you can't have local
Speaker 2: politics like it's it's all national politics, and any kind
Speaker 2: of vote at a state or local level that goes
Speaker 2: against whatever the party wants is something to be punished,
Speaker 2: like even if it's two thousand miles away. And that
Speaker 2: is that hasn't been as dominant in US politics as
Speaker 2: it has been recently. We should probably talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about Texas's election night, because that was also pretty consequential.
Speaker 2: There were seventeen ballot measures passed by the Texas legislature
Speaker 2: earlier this year by a two thirds majority, and the
Speaker 2: way Texas law works is that once the legislature votes
Speaker 2: for a ballot measure, to two thirds majority. It becomes
Speaker 2: a constitutional amendment after a simple majority of voters on
Speaker 2: a ballot support it. And there were seventeen measures on
Speaker 2: the ballot in Texas, which is wild. Very few states
Speaker 2: and constitutional amendments that the rate Texas does and all
Speaker 2: of them passed, which is nuts, and some of them
Speaker 2: are like fine. There was like one to create like
Speaker 2: a three billion dollar fund for dementia research with like
Speaker 2: which is like whatever, nobody's got a problem with that.
Speaker 14: Really.
Speaker 2: Some questions about implementation maybe, but there's some absolutely bug
Speaker 2: fuck nuts stuff in here. Proposition thirteen raised the homestead
Speaker 2: exemption from one hundred thousand dollars to one hundred and
Speaker 2: forty thousand dollars. It was passed by about eighty percent
Speaker 2: of voters. This lowers the taxable value of a home,
Speaker 2: which reduces overall tax bills on your primary residence. Per
Speaker 2: an article in the Houston Chronicle, the amendments will be
Speaker 2: especially felt by elderly or disabled Texans who are poised
Speaker 2: to receive a separate tax, a separate break that brings
Speaker 2: their total property tax exemptions to two hundred thousand. As
Speaker 2: a result, roughly half of seniors and people with disabilities
Speaker 2: living in Harris and Bear Counties will no longer pay
Speaker 2: any school property taxes. Jesus, I should have to say
Speaker 2: how bad that is for Texas schools and in general.
Speaker 2: This A lot of these ballot measures were about making
Speaker 2: heavy cuts and making it impossible to raise new revenue.
Speaker 2: The cuts that are just in these ballot measures are
Speaker 2: going to cost the state about four billion dollars over
Speaker 2: the next two year years. Right, But that's not all
Speaker 2: that was done. Several of the bills that were passed
Speaker 2: banned the potential to create new taxes. Right, So it
Speaker 2: is now illegal in Texas to create taxes on capital gains,
Speaker 2: or taxes on the growth of assets like property in stocks,
Speaker 2: or taxes on inheritance, and to state taxes. Taxes on
Speaker 2: the operations of stock exchanges are now banned because several
Speaker 2: have announced plans to open in Texas.
Speaker 18: Right.
Speaker 2: So you are looking at I think the estimate here
Speaker 2: that I'm seeing in the chronicles articles that the states
Speaker 2: can spend about fifty one billion dollars over the coming
Speaker 2: biennium to pay for the new cuts and maintain existing ones.
Speaker 2: Texas is a state that has had for quite a
Speaker 2: while a budget surplus, and they are basically lighting a
Speaker 2: lot of that on fire to appeal to rich people
Speaker 2: and business note owners in stock exchanges to take their
Speaker 2: assets to Texas. You won't have to help society if
Speaker 2: you come to Texas. We don't have a society in Texas, right,
Speaker 2: And that agenda did very well in Texas.
Speaker 13: Jeez.
Speaker 2: Anyway, good stuff. I guess the last thing I want
Speaker 2: to talk about a little bit, since we've got a
Speaker 2: couple of minutes here is the question on everybody's mind.
Speaker 2: Should I be flying anywhere for the holidays? Is that
Speaker 2: going to be a good idea? I'm saying this a
Speaker 2: day after a horrific crash of a ups flight over
Speaker 2: Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, right, which I mean,
Speaker 2: I think seven was the death toll last I saw
Speaker 2: night Marriish firemalls.
Speaker 6: I mean at nine this morning?
Speaker 2: Is it at nine? Because the plane just the engine
Speaker 2: caught on fire basically on takeoff, and normally, from what
Speaker 2: I'm reading from pilots, normally that should have been a
Speaker 2: manageable problem. But because it happened during the ascent, which
Speaker 2: is the most dangerous part of piloting a plane, and
Speaker 2: where you have the least control. They were not able
Speaker 2: to recover or gain any kind of control, and the
Speaker 2: plane basically plowed directly into a UPS warehouse. And it
Speaker 2: was loaded with something like three hundred thousand pounds worth
Speaker 2: of fuel because it was about to fly to Honolulu,
Speaker 2: so it was as full of fuel as a big
Speaker 2: plane can be and just a horrific crash. Is this
Speaker 2: tied to the fact that you have a lot of
Speaker 2: federal employees furloughed? Is it tied more just to the
Speaker 2: fact that the FAA is not functioning the way it
Speaker 2: should be or used to as a result of changes
Speaker 2: the Trump administration made as soon as they came to power.
Speaker 2: I think it's too early to say that, but this
Speaker 2: is part of a pattern of pretty disastrous near misses
Speaker 2: that absolutely can be attributed to things like the air
Speaker 2: traffic controllers shortage and the fact that there's just a
Speaker 2: lot less safety precautions being taken. And this is something
Speaker 2: the administration is aware of and has become critical enough
Speaker 2: that they're no longer able to deny it. Secretary of
Speaker 2: Transportations Sean Duffy on Monday said that all commercial flights
Speaker 2: might be stopped nationwide to protect public safety, and they
Speaker 2: were certainly going to need to cut off flights in
Speaker 2: specific parts of the countries at times as a result
Speaker 2: of the ATC shortage.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 2: Basically, there's different like k grids that the country is
Speaker 2: divided into, and you might have to shut down one
Speaker 2: or more of those at a time in order to
Speaker 2: make the shortage of air traffic controllers able to handle
Speaker 2: the rest of the load.
Speaker 24: Right.
Speaker 2: For an example of how bad this can get locally,
Speaker 2: on last Friday in New York State, eighty percent of
Speaker 2: air traffic controllers did not show up for work. So
Speaker 2: this is a potentially pretty calamitous problem. There have been
Speaker 2: ground delays on Monday for three major Texas airports in Austin,
Speaker 2: Dallas Fort Worth, and Dallas love Field. And this is
Speaker 2: just in general a problem that's only going to get
Speaker 2: worse as the shutdown looms. Because I've seen some interviews
Speaker 2: with air traffic controllers where like one guy was like, look,
Speaker 2: we're not getting medicine for my kid and she'll die
Speaker 2: without it. It's just not coming in. How do you
Speaker 2: expect me to be a fucking air traffic controller?
Speaker 30: Right?
Speaker 2: Like the herd job in the country that requires absolutely
Speaker 2: perfect concentration at all times without ever fucking up or
Speaker 2: hundreds of people die. So I don't know to answer
Speaker 2: the question of like, should you fly be planning flights
Speaker 2: for this holiday season, you should certainly get the flight
Speaker 2: and share its and be paying attention the days before
Speaker 2: as to what's happening if the shutdown doesn't end, because
Speaker 2: right now we are seeing delays the likes of which
Speaker 2: haven't really been seen since maybe like either like the
Speaker 2: pandemic probably before nine to eleven was kind of the
Speaker 2: last time things were this completely fucked. Garrison can tell
Speaker 2: you how much of a fucking nightmare they had coming back.
Speaker 2: And it's not just in the United States, by the way,
Speaker 2: multiple major airports in Europe over the last week and
Speaker 2: change have had to shut down entirely or partly because
Speaker 2: of unauthorized or unknown drone flights in their airspace.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's been ongoing globally.
Speaker 2: Air travel is not doing well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Rush has been probing Europe with these whole lands
Speaker 6: for a little while. Yeah, I think all I don't know,
Speaker 6: Roberts flowing Garrison. I have flown this month. It fucking sucks.
Speaker 6: Use a credit card if you can. When they had
Speaker 6: some protections. Maybe consider not flying right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just you know, keep an eye on things. I
Speaker 2: don't know what else to tell you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's great. Everything's going great. That is the slogan.
Speaker 6: Everything's going great.
Speaker 4: You know, there's been worse times.
Speaker 2: There's been worse times.
Speaker 27: Yeah, the blitz.
Speaker 6: Yeah, talking of worse times. Lots of people are hungry,
Speaker 6: right because we are. We're fucking with people's snap benefits
Speaker 6: now as part of the culture war. Lots of people
Speaker 6: are very worried about where their food is going to
Speaker 6: come from. Right, and we're entering a time of year.
Speaker 6: You know, kids are going to be off school. There's
Speaker 6: lots of places you can still get your free school meals,
Speaker 6: but it's a difficult time for people. It's difficult time
Speaker 6: for people to feed their families. I wanted to plug
Speaker 6: we All we got is San Diego Group. What they're
Speaker 6: doing is helping people be able to rely on them
Speaker 6: by delivering groceries to them right.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 6: And the way that they most need support is for
Speaker 6: people to sign up to regularly donate a certain amount.
Speaker 6: I'm not going to tell you how much you can donate,
Speaker 6: but if you're able to, that will give them the
Speaker 6: ability to plan to secure groceries for people they're supporting.
Speaker 6: The way you can find their website is to go
Speaker 6: to we all we got sd dot com slash donate. Also,
Speaker 6: if you want to reach out to us and you
Speaker 6: want to do it in an encrypted way, you could
Speaker 6: send an email from your proton mail address to our
Speaker 6: proton mail address, which is cool Zone Tips at proton
Speaker 6: dot me. If you're a marketing person and you want
Speaker 6: your client to be a guest on our podcast, don't
Speaker 6: email us. I'm just going to fucking block you. That's
Speaker 6: That's that's all I have to say about that. If
Speaker 6: you want to have to plug your product, I will
Speaker 6: also fucking block you. We've reported them, we reported the net.
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 32: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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