Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, and I
Speaker 1: have some bad news for you all. Kind of at
Speaker 1: the start of this episode, starting in like twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: kind of late, you know, early pandemic period, I started
Speaker 1: chatting with a good friend of mine, Cormack McCarthy, about
Speaker 1: bringing one of his books to life and the way
Speaker 1: he'd always intended, which was by having me read Blood
Speaker 1: Meridian in my award winning Boston accent in its entirety.
Speaker 1: We finished, you know, kind of our discussions right before
Speaker 1: he tragically passed earlier this year. Sophie and I recorded
Speaker 1: the whole thing. We were about to release it as
Speaker 1: a surprise, but we've, as a result of the writers
Speaker 1: and now the actors strike in solidarity, decided to delete
Speaker 1: the entirety of Boston Blood Meridian. So you know, I'm
Speaker 1: very sorry. I know a lot of you were looking
Speaker 1: forward to this, and all I can say is that
Speaker 1: if you want to do something about this and force
Speaker 1: us to release it. David Zoslov's home address is Beverly Hills, California,
Speaker 1: So you know, I don't I'm not telling you to
Speaker 1: do anything. Just just think about it. That's where his
Speaker 1: sixty five million dollar Beverly Hills mansion is also loupe me.
Speaker 2: Into this weird crime you're doing right now, Sophie.
Speaker 1: It's not a crime because the mansion that he bought
Speaker 1: used to belong to the other Robert Evans, so I'm
Speaker 1: allowed to read it on air.
Speaker 2: There is no other Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: You are. Thank you. It is thank you, Sophie, speaking
Speaker 1: of other people who are the only example of their kind.
Speaker 1: Sarah Marshall, Hello, Actually this.
Speaker 3: God, It's true. We're both doppelgangers.
Speaker 1: We are both doppelgangers. It is interesting that we both
Speaker 1: have a famous person who utilized our name that is
Speaker 1: involved in Hollywood.
Speaker 3: It is, and it's also weird to be the real person,
Speaker 3: the non Hollywood person.
Speaker 1: You are the real version.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and yet I'm the other one.
Speaker 1: Every time I come across a copy of that movie
Speaker 1: at a red box, I kick it. So I'm doing
Speaker 1: my part.
Speaker 3: You are doing your part. That's all I ask for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you are. You are one of the most accomplished
Speaker 1: podcasters in the biz. A real uh. I was going
Speaker 1: to like give you a nickname based on a famous podcaster,
Speaker 1: but most of them are terrible people. Actually, I'm a
Speaker 1: real Margan. Yeah, no, you you do some of the
Speaker 1: best podcasts in the business, and you also live in Portland, Oregon.
Speaker 1: How are you doing today? Yeah, I'm so good.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is an all Portland show, which I love.
Speaker 3: I especially love it when I meet people who say,
Speaker 3: do you live in New York or LA? And I
Speaker 3: say Portland. It's like the third secret answer always, Oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is.
Speaker 3: They say oh. And then they say and where are
Speaker 3: you from? And you say Portland and they say, oh.
Speaker 1: See that's different because there are that this is Portland's
Speaker 1: a little weird to me in that and that like,
Speaker 1: unlike all of the other West Coast cities, you ask
Speaker 1: anyone where they're from, and it's anywhere about the West Coast,
Speaker 1: but in Portland some people actually come from here, which
Speaker 1: is surprising to me.
Speaker 3: It's a I mean, it's a great city to stick
Speaker 3: around in. I feel like Pittsburgh is the same way.
Speaker 3: It's like, I don't know, and it's you have a
Speaker 3: really nice quality of life here. I think.
Speaker 4: I like it.
Speaker 3: The Yeah, I'm so happy you like it. It's killing And
Speaker 3: I was just juicing a watermelon before we started, because
Speaker 3: it is watermelon tyme. There are little signs for Hermerston
Speaker 3: melons up in our streets where you can go buy
Speaker 3: them from a truck, and uh, it's watermelon time.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty happy I had watermelon for lunch, Thank you
Speaker 2: so much.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I'm extremely hungover right now, So a watermelon sounds great.
Speaker 1: I do. And I'm sorry for telling you this, Sarah,
Speaker 1: but uh, the AI will will be able to take
Speaker 1: your line where you said that you were just juicing
Speaker 1: a watermelon and turn that into a conversation with Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan about steroids.
Speaker 3: So I do we have to deal with that?
Speaker 4: We all have to deal with that apparently, whereas I
Speaker 4: call I was just gonna say, apparently you only get
Speaker 4: paid for one day of your work and then they'll
Speaker 4: use it forever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's yeah, they juice, yeah, and then they throw
Speaker 3: you away.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Joe Rogan, or as I call him, the guy from
Speaker 3: news radio.
Speaker 1: The guy from news radio. Yeah, it's good because we
Speaker 1: all needed as shorthand that we could use to simultaneously
Speaker 1: refer to Joe Rogan and Andy Dick. These are great
Speaker 1: jokes for three percent of our audience.
Speaker 3: What is it also that like? And here's a joke
Speaker 3: for that three percent as well. I can't believe that
Speaker 3: podcast that has truly changed American society. Oh yeah, has
Speaker 3: come from a news radio alum, and that it wasn't
Speaker 3: Dave Foley, who I think solid if he had that
Speaker 3: size of a following, I would be okay with that,
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would have been okay with Phil Hartman having
Speaker 1: that big of a following.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Phil Hartman is alive and Joe Rogan
Speaker 3: is you know the other one.
Speaker 1: I was just gonnay, wouldn't it be nice if Phil
Speaker 1: Hartman was alive? But yeah, that does really complete it
Speaker 1: the wish. Speaking of tragedy, how do you feel about kidnapping, Sarah.
Speaker 3: I'm always ready to talk about a kidnapping, as is
Speaker 3: my anxiety brain at one in the morning when I'm
Speaker 3: on Wikipedia. So this is much better than that.
Speaker 1: That's good because we're kind of our subject for this
Speaker 1: week is pretty focused on the anxiety brain and how
Speaker 1: it relates to paranoid conspiracy theories about kidnapping, because it
Speaker 1: turns out that's a real problem, and we're going to
Speaker 1: start by talking about kind of the deadliest manifestation of
Speaker 1: that problem. On June's sixteenth, twenty and twenty three. Phoebe
Speaker 1: Howard coppis a forty eight year old woman from Tompkinsville, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: flew to El Paso, Texas to hang out with her boyfriend.
Speaker 1: Upon arrival, she got into an Uber driven by a
Speaker 1: fifty two year old man named Daniel Piedre Garcia. His
Speaker 1: niece later described him as a hard working and funny
Speaker 1: guy who had an instinctive ability to lift other people
Speaker 1: up when he was in a bad mood. Piedros was
Speaker 1: the sole breadwinner for his family and had started driving
Speaker 1: for Uber after recovering from an injury at a previous job.
Speaker 1: He started driving copas to her boyfriend's place. She was
Speaker 1: not familiar with El Paso. She had been won there
Speaker 1: two times before, and she got spooked because she saw
Speaker 1: a sign for Juarez, Mexico, which convinced her, for some reason,
Speaker 1: that she was about to be kidnapped and trafficked across
Speaker 1: the border. Now, El Paso, if you've never been, is
Speaker 1: the sister city or sibling city or whatever to Juarez.
Speaker 1: They're effectively suburbs of each other, right Like Juarez and
Speaker 1: El Paso are basically the same city with a border
Speaker 1: in between them. So seeing signs for Juarez while you're
Speaker 1: in El Paso. Not a weird experience, but Copas are
Speaker 1: all over the place. It's content, yeah, because it's right there.
Speaker 3: Very pretty city.
Speaker 1: It's a great city. We'll talk about that. But Copas
Speaker 1: gets freaked out, so she pulls a handgun from her
Speaker 1: purse and she shoots Piedra in the head from behind
Speaker 1: the vehicle, which was not particularly close to any of
Speaker 1: the entrances to Mexico. Not that that really matters, but
Speaker 1: she's going to make claims about this slid to a
Speaker 1: stop and impacted a freeway barrier. Copas texted a picture
Speaker 1: to her boyfriend and then she called nine to one one. Now,
Speaker 1: this story, when it happened, because she kills him, goes
Speaker 1: viral for several reasons. Obviously, it's at the intersection of
Speaker 1: a bunch of salient issues in US politics. You've got immigration,
Speaker 1: you've got the border, you've got gun control, you've got racism.
Speaker 1: But it's also a story that could kind of be
Speaker 1: briskly described as part of the now expansive Karen goes
Speaker 1: crazy genre, right where you've got like a woman who
Speaker 1: reacts in some sort of aggressive or violent way because
Speaker 1: you know of shit that people would kind of could
Speaker 1: kind of like sum up in that way. When the
Speaker 1: story broke on Twitter before much was known about it,
Speaker 1: many of the posts that I saw just kind of
Speaker 1: casually assumed that Copus was a white, suburban woman because
Speaker 1: that was the picture of the person who would do
Speaker 1: something like this that most jibed with their pre existing assumptions,
Speaker 1: and kind of the again assumption was that she was
Speaker 1: probably a strong right winger who would imbibe a lot
Speaker 1: of racist propaganda about the border. Now, as I'm going
Speaker 1: to talk about, we don't have super clear information about
Speaker 1: like what sort of info ecosystem she existed in, but
Speaker 1: Copus is a black woman, and from what I can
Speaker 1: get about her socioeconomic status, she seems to have been
Speaker 1: kind of broadly middle class. You know, she's a grandmother.
Speaker 1: There was not anything I found her social media, and
Speaker 1: there was nothing in it that would make you think
Speaker 1: she was not posting about guns, She was not posting
Speaker 1: paranoid conspiracies about the border or about any of this stuff.
Speaker 1: Like it was like a weirdly normal thing, like like
Speaker 1: social media profile from everything forty eight. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: know someone who had a kid and young and became
Speaker 1: a grandma pretty young. But you know, there was nothing
Speaker 1: in it that like set off. I do this all
Speaker 1: the time, right, like I used to for a living,
Speaker 1: when you know, mass shootings and stuff would be done,
Speaker 1: scrape shit on the people who had committed the shooting
Speaker 1: to talk like try to figure out like what had
Speaker 1: been going on with them prior to making that decision,
Speaker 1: and copus. I don't. There's nothing that's I would consider
Speaker 1: a warning sign in her publicly available information. The most
Speaker 1: recently updated post on her Facebook before killing Piedras was
Speaker 1: a profile pick from February seventeenth, and in general, most
Speaker 1: of the activity on her Facebook was just like occasionally
Speaker 1: updating her portrait. What update she did post We're all
Speaker 1: super normal. There's an update from March of twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two that's just a video of her dancing with her
Speaker 1: grandkid with the text Tatum's birthday dance. He loves dancing
Speaker 1: with his Gigi. Love him and it's one of those
Speaker 1: because I got to this, I don't know, maybe a
Speaker 1: day or two after the shooting. The comments on there
Speaker 1: are it's this weird thing that you get with the
Speaker 1: internet where like somebody does something terrible and then people
Speaker 1: find their anadyne social media posts and start like commenting
Speaker 1: on it. So the first couple of comments on this
Speaker 1: year old post are like family member being like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's so cute, you know, you and the kid are
Speaker 1: so cute. And then it becomes like a bunch of
Speaker 1: weirdos posting like your family member is a murderer, like
Speaker 1: fuck this lady she killed somebody, which is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean she did kill some buddy, and I broadly agree, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck her, because that's bad. You shouldn't shoot people in
Speaker 1: the back of the head.
Speaker 3: It's so true. You're always saying that.
Speaker 1: I'm always saying that, But it's a I do. I
Speaker 1: can't not find it kind of unsettling to like hop
Speaker 1: on these pictures of a lady and her grandkid and
Speaker 1: just be like, fuck you for killing a guy. And
Speaker 1: it's like not just fuck you for killing a guy,
Speaker 1: but like, hey, person who is a family member of
Speaker 1: this person, like your your relative is is a bad person.
Speaker 1: That's a strange impulse. I guess I feel like it's weird.
Speaker 3: It's strange to have that technology available to us and
Speaker 3: all of all of the things that lets us do Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's weird kind of like right below that
Speaker 1: first post your your kin is a murderer post is
Speaker 1: another comment from somebody who told one of Kopus's relatives
Speaker 1: visit her in prison while she is alive lol, l
Speaker 1: passo another type of jail, she will get it lol,
Speaker 1: which I think it meant like El Paso has Another time,
Speaker 1: it's a reference to like the death penalty, right that,
Speaker 1: like hm, which is true, but like also I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: Like again, what she did is bad. I like you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be able to do that and just like walk
Speaker 1: away from it obviously, but like it's weird to just
Speaker 1: be like, hey, family members of this person who murdered
Speaker 1: a guy, like your your relative might get the chair,
Speaker 1: Like that's such a strange thing.
Speaker 3: And the ease of being able to do that without
Speaker 3: leaving your house is yeah, very dangerous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's there was another someone else posted, like
Speaker 1: you know, commenting like had scraped her her details enough
Speaker 1: to figure out that she was like a home designer
Speaker 1: for a living and like noted gleefully she'll have to
Speaker 1: decorate her new cell home cell with scrap, maybe using
Speaker 1: toilet paper and then.
Speaker 3: All prison fantasies are just never sit right right, no
Speaker 3: matter what somebody did. It's just like, Okay, calm down,
Speaker 3: because like using prison as a way of fantasizing about
Speaker 3: revenge reveals the whole thing being what it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's fascinating because this person starts by
Speaker 1: being like, ha ha, she was a home designer and
Speaker 1: now she'll be designing a cell and then in the
Speaker 1: middle of the post is like, oh, I take it back.
Speaker 1: She was a case worker, which is I feel like
Speaker 1: someone other than me, you could like there's so much
Speaker 1: to say about America and just sort of analyzing the
Speaker 1: decision this person made to like real time fact check
Speaker 1: while she was making her post without like editing or
Speaker 1: changing it, Like there's so much there. I don't know
Speaker 1: what to say about it. But it's like I feel
Speaker 1: it's like Finnigan's Wake. We're like somewhere trapped in that
Speaker 1: post is like the secret to the madness of the
Speaker 1: United States. Yeah, but I.
Speaker 3: Just need someone to write a dissertation on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Kids in college who are listening to this podcast,
Speaker 1: there you go like that's that's a free one for you.
Speaker 1: And it is like we're talking about how like kind
Speaker 1: of weird this is, but at the same time, it's
Speaker 1: not weird, right, This is just like you, like anyone
Speaker 1: who's not unfamiliar with the Internet knows like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like public facing social media for somebody who does
Speaker 1: something terrible, this is going to happen to it, right,
Speaker 1: That's just the way the world works. So you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's weird, but it's not weird. As far
Speaker 1: as Copus goes, the closest we get to anything that
Speaker 1: reveals like what kind of ideology might have made her
Speaker 1: shoot a stranger in the back of the head while
Speaker 1: he was driving her down the highway is a lecture,
Speaker 1: a quote or a clip from a lecture that she
Speaker 1: posted on her Facebook. And the lecture is by a
Speaker 1: guy named T. D. Jakes who's an American non denominational
Speaker 1: megachurch preacher. And it's like a kind of very patriarchal,
Speaker 1: traditional little like thing. He's talking about how like a
Speaker 1: woman is like salt, you know, she makes everything better,
Speaker 1: including like she makes men who are like shitty better,
Speaker 1: and that's like the job of a woman, right. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's obviously like it's toxic, but it's not. Also, this
Speaker 1: isn't like a like Tdjake Saint Jordan Peterson, Right, this
Speaker 1: is a guy you walk into any maybe even never
Speaker 1: heard of him, but you walk in any fucking bookstore
Speaker 1: in the United States and there's Tdjke's books and shit
Speaker 1: like he is an incredibly popular megachurch preacher. So I
Speaker 1: wouldn't there's nothing in here that I would call like
Speaker 1: a warning sign. The most actual, like like kind of
Speaker 1: thing that we get that might suggest some toxicity in
Speaker 1: her in her personal life comes from the fundraiser that
Speaker 1: her family posted on Gibson to Go after she got arrested.
Speaker 1: It reads, or it starts, our daughter, who is an
Speaker 1: attractive forty eight year old African American woman, is being
Speaker 1: detained in El Paso, Texas at the El Paso County
Speaker 1: Detention Center because of the charge of her shooting a
Speaker 1: Hispanic male. Now that's a little weird, right who I
Speaker 1: heard her? Her family? Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, our daughter who is in a track.
Speaker 1: Who is an attractive Okay, that's that's weird. That's a
Speaker 1: little lot and.
Speaker 3: Rule write that sentence for them the grave to do it. Yeah, expensive, God.
Speaker 1: That's straight. That's a bit peculiar right now. Yes, the
Speaker 1: post goes on to claim, and there's no evidence for this,
Speaker 1: that she asked the driver to stop numerous times and
Speaker 1: he refused to stop, and then he engaged the child locks,
Speaker 1: which is why she decided to shoot him. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: again peculiar that, like they describe her as attractive, What
Speaker 1: we can say safely, giving given the known facts of
Speaker 1: the case, is that Phoebe Copis was a pretty normal
Speaker 1: seeming person from the outside who probably, i mean, it's
Speaker 1: probably accurate to say had a distinctly irrational fear of
Speaker 1: being kidnapped, and that fear was exacerbated by her proximity
Speaker 1: to Mexico. Coppus has spoken out since her arrest through
Speaker 1: her lawyer, to claim that she demanded Piedras pull over
Speaker 1: and let her out, and that he told her he
Speaker 1: was taking her to affair in Juarez. Again, there's zero
Speaker 1: evidence of this, and the police report states the defendant
Speaker 1: never called for police or emergency services to report her
Speaker 1: being in any immediate danger prior to shooting the complaining witness.
Speaker 1: The defendant took a photo of the complaining witness after
Speaker 1: he was shot and sent it to her boyfriend via
Speaker 1: text message prior to calling nine to one one. Copus's lawyer,
Speaker 1: Matthew Koasick, has claimed that the media that Copus had
Speaker 1: been ingesting had contributed to the mindset that she was
Speaker 1: in when she carried out the shooting. From Yahoo News quote,
Speaker 1: he said that his client was in fear of her
Speaker 1: life because of her knowledge of violence and kidnappings and
Speaker 1: Warez and seeing highway signs on US fifty four showing
Speaker 1: exits Touarez. During the hearing, Kozik showed news articles reporting
Speaker 1: on violence and Warez, including stories about drug cartels and kidnappings.
Speaker 1: He also showed photos where the shooting happened in traffic
Speaker 1: signs showing the highway led to Warez. So, like, that's
Speaker 1: what her defense is going to rest on. And I
Speaker 1: think there's a degree to which, like, I don't think
Speaker 1: that's a good defense, but it's it is accurate that
Speaker 1: if you are like somebody who engaged, like who consumes
Speaker 1: mainstream news media, most of what you hear about Wjuarez
Speaker 1: is kidnappings and murders, right, most of what you hear
Speaker 1: about the US border is kidnappings and murders. Now I
Speaker 1: can remember like fucking fifteen years ago. I was on
Speaker 1: a road trip and we like were in El Paso
Speaker 1: and crossed over to Warez to get lunch, and when
Speaker 1: we came back, the border patrol guy was so suspicious
Speaker 1: of us that he like stripped our car down like
Speaker 1: took every like like almost to like the fucking metal
Speaker 1: because he was like, nobody stops in Warez for lunch.
Speaker 1: It's the most dangerous city on Earth. And it's like,
Speaker 1: man like, yeah, if you're fucking doing weirdo, like if
Speaker 1: you're doing certain things, it's dangerous, but like it's also
Speaker 1: a place just a lot of people live. You can
Speaker 1: go get lunch in Warez. The cartels aren't coming for
Speaker 1: you there, you know, Like but it is like that's
Speaker 1: just how people think about the city, which is peculiar
Speaker 1: to me. But I yeah, I started kind of looking
Speaker 1: into the media surrounded kidnap surrounding kidnappings in the United
Speaker 1: States because it was one of those things I felt
Speaker 1: like there had to be something peculiar there that like
Speaker 1: would set someone like Phoebe Copus off, Like there had
Speaker 1: to be even if we don't have, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of evidence from her info diet. When I started like
Speaker 1: looking into just kind of going on the big the
Speaker 1: major social media apps, looking up like what kind of
Speaker 1: the trending stories involving kidnapping or human trafficking was, you
Speaker 1: start to like see some patterns, and one of the
Speaker 1: patterns is that kidnapping related content is among the most
Speaker 1: reliable ways to go viral on the Internet right now.
Speaker 1: If you start looking for kid tiktoks using kidnapping, using
Speaker 1: human trafficking, you'll see a bunch that have multiple million views.
Speaker 1: And if particularly, one of the things that keyed me
Speaker 1: in is like I would see some weirdo who would
Speaker 1: do something like take a clip from a made for
Speaker 1: TV movie about a kid getting kidnapped and then like
Speaker 1: put an a AI voiceover over it to be talking
Speaker 1: about like here's you know, how kidnappings happen, and that
Speaker 1: video would have like four million views and everything else
Speaker 1: in their channel would be like ten twenty thousand, right,
Speaker 1: So it's like, oh, this is like a reliable way
Speaker 1: to get follows and to get views is like putting
Speaker 1: kidnapping shit out there.
Speaker 3: AI have voice that they use in like movie summary
Speaker 3: accounts and also stuff like that where it's like the
Speaker 3: girl is walking down the streets, the girls her by
Speaker 3: the wrist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've seen exactly the ones I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: So I started looking into this and it kept getting
Speaker 1: weirder and weirder. So one TikTok that I found in
Speaker 1: my research was from the account TV moments, which has
Speaker 1: two hundred and forty four thousand followers and fourteen point
Speaker 1: three million likes, and it mostly posts clips from news
Speaker 1: stories with on screen text summaries, stuff like triple homicide
Speaker 1: suspect and appears in court with the text heartbreaking story
Speaker 1: and read above it, or titles like child abducted from
Speaker 1: Berkeley home, American kidnapped walking dog in Mexico, and this
Speaker 1: video that I'm about to show our Sophie's about to
Speaker 1: show you, which is posted April second, used as a
Speaker 1: clip from news Nation, which is a news network that
Speaker 1: is kind of like a mild conservative bent and here's
Speaker 1: here's how it sounds.
Speaker 6: Forty thousand dollars reward is being offered to help find
Speaker 6: an American woman who went missing in Mexico. This new
Speaker 6: reward comes four months after that she was snatched into
Speaker 6: a van in broad daylight, and now her family in
Speaker 6: California is calling for authorities to finally bring her home.
Speaker 6: News Nation correspondent jorgeban Tura joining us live in El
Speaker 6: Paso tonight. Orgey, we're learning that this was a targeted attack.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's right, Natasha. We have new images of an
Speaker 7: American woman, Michael de Leon Barber, showing her alleged kidnapping
Speaker 7: in Mexico in November or last year. The FBI says
Speaker 7: she was walking her dog from the gym and at
Speaker 7: this kidnapping is most likely targeted. She was actually walking
Speaker 7: in the Kailisco state in Mexico. The FBI is asking
Speaker 7: for the public's help and fighting and they're offering up
Speaker 7: to forty thousand dollars for information leading up to her recovery. Now,
Speaker 7: FBI investigators believe that her attack was targeted and we're
Speaker 7: still waiting for more information on that.
Speaker 1: So you listen to that and it's clear this is
Speaker 1: again it's like a targeted abduction. But the actual like
Speaker 1: media like everything that's like written in text on the clip,
Speaker 1: everything in the titling of the clip is just an
Speaker 1: American was kidnapped in Mexico. The actual story here is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this person was kidnapped specifically because of who she was.
Speaker 1: This was not random. They weren't just like looking for
Speaker 1: a lady, like. They were looking for this woman because
Speaker 1: of like a family connection, right like, which is the
Speaker 1: thing that happens. And that's how most, very very rarely
Speaker 1: are people abducted at random anywhere in the world. It's
Speaker 1: not a super common kind of crime. But this would
Speaker 1: have been, I think, kind of one of the most
Speaker 1: recent stories that COPUS might have encountered relating to El Paso.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a big deal, and it sets
Speaker 1: off up this kind of idea that like Americans are
Speaker 1: getting randomly picked up off the street right at the border. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the reality is that El Paso in particular is one
Speaker 1: of the safest cities in the United States. It's the
Speaker 1: fourth safest large city in the US. It has extremely
Speaker 1: low rates of violence and property crime. But that's not
Speaker 1: what people think when they hear about it because of
Speaker 1: the reliability of content that involves kidnapping in the border
Speaker 1: going viral. Every aspect of this story is tied in
Speaker 1: with the fact that for more than a century, the
Speaker 1: United States has been engaged in a kind of perpetual
Speaker 1: moral panic over our border with Mexico. And it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that like this is, you know, people
Speaker 1: have been kind of like broadly positive about some of
Speaker 1: the ways that the RITE has performed poorly at the
Speaker 1: ballot box in the last couple of elections. But one
Speaker 1: area in which they're like conservative propaganda in particular has
Speaker 1: been undoubtedly successful is at creating a sense of fear
Speaker 1: in behalf of the majority of this country about the border.
Speaker 1: An NPR pool from last year showed that more than
Speaker 1: half of Americans perceived that there was an invasion going
Speaker 1: on at the southern border. Support for immigrants has broadly
Speaker 1: declined over the last four to six years. And it's,
Speaker 1: you know, again, all of this is kind of playing it.
Speaker 1: It's kind of cooking into the stew of whatever was
Speaker 1: going on in this woman's head when she decided to
Speaker 1: shoot that guy. The fact that Texas recently made permitless
Speaker 1: concealed carry legal also certainly played a role. And there's
Speaker 1: something else that I suspect might have contributed, which is
Speaker 1: that for the last eight years or so, false stories
Speaker 1: have been spreading with increasing regularity about random people being
Speaker 1: targeted by kidnappers or robbers. These primarily spread today on
Speaker 1: TikTok and Facebook, that's where most of the stuff comes from.
Speaker 1: But also this kind of brand of content has been
Speaker 1: going on and been spreading in this country since well
Speaker 1: before the birth of the internet. You might remember, Sarah,
Speaker 1: because you and I are both old. Like the stories
Speaker 1: about like hook handed killers in the backseat of cars, right,
Speaker 1: Like do you hear did you hear that as a kid?
Speaker 1: You ever hear that? Like? Yeah, these tales about like
Speaker 1: people waiting in the seats of cars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I encountered it, I think, yeah, because there's like
Speaker 3: I think I'm more encountered at secondhand through other forms
Speaker 3: of media. But like, yes, there's definitely a lot of
Speaker 3: hook handed men to go around. I know there's a
Speaker 3: great hook hand story in Adventures in Babysitting, Yes to
Speaker 3: Settle is it handsome John Pruitt?
Speaker 1: Yeah, great film also, and it's one of those things
Speaker 1: like I can remember. I'm sure that, like, particularly just
Speaker 1: because of aspects of our culture, young women get like
Speaker 1: more of these kind of warning stories. You should always
Speaker 1: be aware people might be there to abduct you. But
Speaker 1: like when I did my driving and I went to
Speaker 1: like driving school to like get my my my license. Uh,
Speaker 1: one of the things they taught us was that anytime
Speaker 1: you're going back to your car, you should check underneath
Speaker 1: it to see if someone's there. Like that's that was
Speaker 1: just like a thing in driving school, like there might
Speaker 1: be people waiting under your car to attack you.
Speaker 3: How many confirmed cases do we have of this that
Speaker 3: aren't cape fear.
Speaker 1: I have not come across a single one saying it's
Speaker 1: just cape fear. It's just yeah, it's I'm sure it's
Speaker 1: just the result of a fucking Oh god, now I've
Speaker 1: forgotten his you know the cape fear guy. Oh yeah, Maxicus,
Speaker 1: Stephen Stephen Cape. Well, I was going to say Stephen King.
Speaker 1: It's just like Stephen King funding all of the driving
Speaker 1: schools in this country, Like, no, you have to warn people.
Speaker 3: The Miko Hughes. Uh, the Miko Hughes Driver's exam pavilion. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's also that also, I mean there's so many of these.
Speaker 3: But one I remember making the rounds when I was
Speaker 3: in high school was like women should not wear overalls
Speaker 3: or a long ponytails or braids because if you have
Speaker 3: a long pony, Sophie, you're fucked, by the way, And
Speaker 3: so yeah, a long ponytail and yeah, long brain.
Speaker 1: That's why I shaved my head, stop me from I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna get kidnapped now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, because if the kidnappers, it's like when you
Speaker 3: go to the pumpkin pack to get a pumpkin, they
Speaker 3: want to handle, yeah, and it's like if you don't
Speaker 3: give them a braid to grab onto, you'll be safe.
Speaker 2: And it's like, I'm fucked. That's the that's my only hairstyle, Sarah,
Speaker 2: I'm so screwed.
Speaker 3: It's amazing you've made it this far.
Speaker 2: Honestly, well for more than just that reason.
Speaker 1: But yes, it's very it's very funny because, like again,
Speaker 1: I think probably the majority of times when people get
Speaker 1: advice like this, it is like women being warned about
Speaker 1: the dangers of the world. I have also, especially when
Speaker 1: my beard was longer, I would just like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm going to like a I'm like a gun range
Speaker 1: or something, and some guys like you know, if you
Speaker 1: don't shave that, you know, when a fight, somebody will
Speaker 1: like pull that to control you and get control in
Speaker 1: a man. How many fights are you getting it? Are
Speaker 1: you scrapping with dudes like that? Like I've been in
Speaker 1: more fights than most people, just because like I'm a
Speaker 1: public person, who gets assaulted on the streets sometimes and
Speaker 1: I don't get in enough fights to be concerned about
Speaker 1: my beard getting bolled, Like that's not.
Speaker 3: A beard length. Then the fascist way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then the then the fucking Nazis of one. It's
Speaker 1: so like that this kind of like it's this. It's
Speaker 1: this interesting mix of like true crime brain and tactical
Speaker 1: brain that have like created something. And again I think
Speaker 1: this is relative, you know, relating to the murder that
Speaker 1: Cope is carried out, but like these two things cooking
Speaker 1: together to this like you have to always be on
Speaker 1: like be ready for danger, and also being ready for
Speaker 1: danger means being perpetually armed and prepared to do violence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's cool.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The story that went around at a different middle school
Speaker 4: than mine that somebody had been kidnapped and it was
Speaker 4: really scary, but they were okay, that was a lie
Speaker 4: that didn't happen.
Speaker 3: But everybody exciting.
Speaker 4: But everybody knew about it and then liked and then
Speaker 4: like into early adulthood, I brought it up to somebody
Speaker 4: and they were like, that was literally just them trying
Speaker 4: to scare the shit out of everybody to not talk
Speaker 4: to strangers.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, cool.
Speaker 3: Wow, Well, what a great information what a great misinformation campaign?
Speaker 1: Love that? Yeah, for us, it is great, Sarah, And
Speaker 1: we're going to talk more about kind of the prehistory
Speaker 1: of America's paranoia of getting kidnapped, Americans paranoia over getting
Speaker 1: kidnapped by strangers. But when it comes to the modern
Speaker 1: kind of kidnapping panic that I think played into this murder,
Speaker 1: that that is sort of sweep it continuing to sweep
Speaker 1: through social media right now. I can trace the origins
Speaker 1: of it back to twenty fifteen, which is it when
Speaker 1: rumors started spreading on so social media, namely Facebook, that
Speaker 1: car thieves had cooked up a new tactic for like
Speaker 1: getting people right. Text from one relevant story reads, car
Speaker 1: thieves are always trying to find new schemes for getting
Speaker 1: into your car to steal your valuables. You may have
Speaker 1: heard reports of tech devices used to enter your car,
Speaker 1: but some thieves are using a less intricate method. There
Speaker 1: have been a rash of robberies using, of all things,
Speaker 1: a penny or a nickel. How are they using a
Speaker 1: coin to enter your car? Whether your car? Basically, the
Speaker 1: idea is that like if you see a penny or
Speaker 1: a nickel in like slid into the door handle of
Speaker 1: your car. It's like evidence that a car thief is
Speaker 1: trying to like break in, right, And they are.
Speaker 3: So bored, aren't they?
Speaker 1: They're bored in their dumb as fuck Sarah, Like it's
Speaker 1: so fucking again, I'm a very paranoid person because people
Speaker 1: like have attacked me and threatened to murder me. Right, Like, so,
Speaker 1: like I have a grenade launcher sitting next that's not
Speaker 1: part of the paranoia. That was just that's just a
Speaker 1: recreational grenade launcher. But like, right, and I don't like
Speaker 1: obsess over this kind of shit. It's because it's stupid,
Speaker 1: because like that's the initial version of this is that
Speaker 1: like thieves were you know, if if there was a
Speaker 1: coin in the door of your car, I meant that
Speaker 1: a thief was trying to disable your remote locking systems.
Speaker 1: This does not really work, right, Like you can't actually
Speaker 1: disable a car's remote locking system like realistically this way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were a couple of cars a while ago that
Speaker 1: had like a specific sort of problem that allowed something
Speaker 1: similar to this to work, but it was never like
Speaker 1: a widespread thing. And because it like I don't know,
Speaker 1: because that was such a silly thing. The the theory,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Conspiracy theory isn't what. I don't know
Speaker 1: what to call these things. But so it starts off
Speaker 1: with like this is evidence that someone has tried to
Speaker 1: get into your car, and then it evolves to instead
Speaker 1: of they're using sticking pennies or whatever in your car
Speaker 1: to disable the locks, it's a way to mark which
Speaker 1: vehicles have goodies so that they can steal from them later.
Speaker 1: And like, why then just do it now? Why not?
Speaker 1: Just breaking news again? I had my car broken into
Speaker 1: not all that long ago, back in I mean this
Speaker 1: was in San Francisco, but like a bunch of shit
Speaker 1: jacked from it. Because that's say, if you park with
Speaker 1: anything in a car in San Francisco and walk away,
Speaker 1: your car will be broken into and within seconds. But
Speaker 1: it's also like nobody's like marking your car for later.
Speaker 1: They see shit, they break a window, they grab it right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the way that.
Speaker 3: Everyone has a master plan. Everyone is moriarty out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like fucking rings of people marking. And it's
Speaker 1: also like if you actually think logically about it, that
Speaker 1: are they marking it and like following it home to
Speaker 1: get your fucking purse, Like.
Speaker 3: What, why that's shopping all day?
Speaker 1: None of it makes any sense. And Snopes looked into
Speaker 1: all of these kind of because there's a number of variations,
Speaker 1: and they found no evidence that like this was like
Speaker 1: people sticking pennies into car doors, was a factor in
Speaker 1: any sort of crime. They talked to like service departments
Speaker 1: at dealerships who were like, yeah, lock don't work that way.
Speaker 1: They talk to police departments who are like, we've never
Speaker 1: heard you know of any sort of tactics like this
Speaker 1: being spread among car burglars. And in an article at
Speaker 1: the time, they tied this myth back to certain myths
Speaker 1: that had spread back in like the eighties and nineties
Speaker 1: through what were then called Chaine letters. Sarah, again, I apologize,
Speaker 1: but like you and I are both ancient, you know.
Speaker 3: A certain age we make terrifying sounds when we got
Speaker 3: up from squattish.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's right. Yeah, we're a thousand years old. We
Speaker 1: have seen the birth of time itself, and so we
Speaker 1: remember Chaine letters. Like our gin Z listeners are like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck is a chain letter?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And it's funny because again I don't remember receiving Shane letters,
Speaker 3: but I remember them being something with like that everyone
Speaker 3: made jokes about and that there's not a cultural literacy
Speaker 3: around in the nineties.
Speaker 1: I was, you know, even from like cause I was
Speaker 1: mostly the same way where it was a thing that
Speaker 1: like my mom and her sisters and stuff they would
Speaker 1: talk about, my older cousins with talk about. I remember
Speaker 1: one specific time we got a chain letter and it
Speaker 1: was like shown to me because they were starting to
Speaker 1: get rarer in the early nineties. It was shown to
Speaker 1: me as like a look at this isn't this funny.
Speaker 1: Look at this weird thing that we got, and we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about what chain letters were, because really
Speaker 1: what we're seeing when we look at a chain letter
Speaker 1: is the birth of meme culture. It goes back surprisingly far,
Speaker 1: but it all relates very directly to the shit spreading
Speaker 1: on TikTok and Facebook. But you know what else relates
Speaker 1: to misinformation spreading on the internet. Oh, advertising, because advertising
Speaker 1: is what makes disinformation profitable. So Sarah Sophie, here's some ads.
Speaker 1: Oh great, we're back and we're about to start talking
Speaker 1: about chain letters. So chain letters, as I've talked about, like,
Speaker 1: there's the I didn't really I never really thought about
Speaker 1: this before. I started researching this. But the more I
Speaker 1: got into it, the more I realized, like, oh, like
Speaker 1: everything that's happened that's happens today, that's happened for the
Speaker 1: last twenty years on the internet in terms of like
Speaker 1: what we call meme culture was sort of preceded by
Speaker 1: chain letters, and in fact an interesting aspect like the
Speaker 1: chain letters are like they are letters that would back
Speaker 1: in the day would arrive in your mailbox, and there
Speaker 1: were a mix of like forward this, you know the
Speaker 1: next ten ten people that you know, in order to
Speaker 1: not get bad luck. Sometimes they were like here's a
Speaker 1: story about like a bad thing that's happened, or like
Speaker 1: here's a you know, a thing to be worried about.
Speaker 1: You know, forward this so that your friends know about
Speaker 1: this danger, about these crimes, you know about this thing
Speaker 1: that murderers do or whatever. Like there's a variety of
Speaker 1: different kind of like chain letters over the years. One
Speaker 1: of the things I didn't realize until I got into
Speaker 1: this is that geneticists, like scientists and researchers teaching genetics
Speaker 1: use chain letters in there because you can apply some
Speaker 1: of the same algorithms that you apply to like calculating
Speaker 1: mutations in genetics to the way chain letters alter over time.
Speaker 1: There's a surprising amount of stuff about it. Like it's
Speaker 1: a really good way to talk about because over time,
Speaker 1: both like people would alter chain letters in order to
Speaker 1: make them more relevant, but also just mutations would occur
Speaker 1: because like a lot of chain letters were initially handwritten
Speaker 1: and then they'd get mimeographed, and then after a time
Speaker 1: it would get so messy that you'd type up a
Speaker 1: fresh version and you'd introduce changes. So like it was actually,
Speaker 1: like it is a pretty good way going over Like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's eighty years worth of like related chain letters, and
Speaker 1: we can sort of track the alterations over time in
Speaker 1: the same way that we look at the way that
Speaker 1: mutations get introduced into into a genetic sequence. I didn't
Speaker 1: realize that it's not really relevant to the story, but
Speaker 1: it's kind of cool.
Speaker 3: But it's so great. Yeah, yeah, I'm so glad to
Speaker 3: know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like a surprising amount of like scientific studies
Speaker 1: on how durable it actually is to use chain letters
Speaker 1: for this purpose. Yeah, cool stuff. So I found a
Speaker 1: contemporary casual history of chain letters on Slate, and there's
Speaker 1: a couple of other places that have done similar sort
Speaker 1: of again casual histories, and they generally tie the birth
Speaker 1: of the chain letter back to Europe, generally England and
Speaker 1: the United States starting in the seventeen hundreds, right, kind
Speaker 1: of when we both have the origins of a relevant
Speaker 1: or of a reasonably reliable postal service, you know which
Speaker 1: kind of starts to happen in the late seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and when we have a printing press so that people
Speaker 1: like obviously, right, you can both print letters and copy
Speaker 1: them sort of semi reliably, and you can send them places.
Speaker 1: That said, again, this is what you get in the
Speaker 1: casual histories when you really dig into it and you
Speaker 1: find the chain letter like like the chain letter nerds,
Speaker 1: I guess you'd call them the obsessives, they kind of
Speaker 1: bristle ats starting to get in the seventeen hundreds. Argument
Speaker 1: is that it goes back much much further, and this
Speaker 1: is where things go off the rails a little bit.
Speaker 1: The most detailed analysis of the history of this art
Speaker 1: form that I have found comes from an independent researcher
Speaker 1: named Daniel W. Van Arsdale. Starting in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: he started collecting huge numbers of chain letters and posting
Speaker 1: them on his private website, which is a thing people
Speaker 1: don't really have anymore. His website is down, but it's
Speaker 1: still you can find it on the wayback Machine. And
Speaker 1: it's very much like a late nineties, early two thousands, Like,
Speaker 1: here's this maniac who is obsessed with chain letters, and
Speaker 1: I'd agree that probably no one else in history ever was.
Speaker 1: And he wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of words.
Speaker 1: He read like God knows how many of these letters
Speaker 1: he like categorized them and graphed them and anyway he
Speaker 1: splits chain letters into He's probably the number one expert
Speaker 1: on the concept of chain letters to ever stand for.
Speaker 1: No one knows. I don't, Okay, someone probably knows. I
Speaker 1: assume this man is dead.
Speaker 2: I think I think it's Daniel Waybacks.
Speaker 1: There's no way this guy is alive still, but I
Speaker 1: love him. But this is what this is what social
Speaker 1: media has taken from us, Right. You used to get
Speaker 1: crazy people who would build websites dedicated to their obsession,
Speaker 1: and you could learn so much from those websites. And
Speaker 1: now everybody just argues about race science on Twitter. It's
Speaker 1: it's so much worse these today. Ted the Caver, you
Speaker 1: know exactly exactly we used to have ted the caver God.
Speaker 1: What a glorious time. So our buddy Van Arsdale in
Speaker 1: his in his Maniac website splits chain letters into several
Speaker 1: broad categories. One category is what he calls letters from Heaven.
Speaker 1: These are letters that people claim were written or channeled
Speaker 1: via God or an angel or some other divine being.
Speaker 1: And like generally either like you know, this letter will
Speaker 1: protect you if you send it to X number of people.
Speaker 1: These became particularly and in Europe, starting in World War
Speaker 1: One and then again in World War Two. You would
Speaker 1: send them to like there were primarily things like you'd
Speaker 1: have families who were their kids were overseas and they
Speaker 1: were worried about them, and they would get a letter
Speaker 1: being like this will protect your son if you send
Speaker 1: this to X you know number right whatever. Oftentimes there
Speaker 1: was a kind of a scam involved, where like you
Speaker 1: wouldn't just have to forward the letter, you'd send a
Speaker 1: donation to a central area and you'd forward the letter
Speaker 1: to ten random people or whatever. And you know, folks
Speaker 1: are superstitious. They're kind of when you're waiting for your
Speaker 1: to know if your son got killed with the psalm,
Speaker 1: you're kind of out of your mind a little bit,
Speaker 1: you know, like with worry.
Speaker 3: That's a normal thing all consumer base.
Speaker 1: Really Yeah, yeah, it's a great it's great business to
Speaker 1: be and is what I'm saying. The other major kind
Speaker 1: of chain letter is the the good luck chain letter,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a more secular version of the
Speaker 1: letter from Heaven right where it's instead of like I'm
Speaker 1: an angel and here's how you can protect your loved one,
Speaker 1: it's more like this letter is good luck if you
Speaker 1: replicate it and you pass it on, and sometimes also
Speaker 1: if you send money to somebody. Right, these are kind of,
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, what most chain letters, you know, for two
Speaker 1: hundred years or so in the West like kind of
Speaker 1: fell into. But Van Harsdale argues that the origin of
Speaker 1: the chain letters starts a lot older than the printing press,
Speaker 1: than the postal service, and even potentially than Christianity. One
Speaker 1: example that he picks out that he this is what
Speaker 1: he says, is like kind of the earliest example that
Speaker 1: you can find of chain letter like content is from
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Bet you weren't
Speaker 1: expecting us to go there?
Speaker 3: I never am. Yeah, it turns out Brendan Fraser had
Speaker 3: it in his hands.
Speaker 1: He did. He did, And like in Brendan Fraser's classic
Speaker 1: film The Mummy, I am now going to read from
Speaker 1: the Book of the Dead.
Speaker 3: So, oh boy, here's what's here to good run.
Speaker 1: Here's a passage that Van Harsdale and I actually think
Speaker 1: he's probably right about this, that he considers to be
Speaker 1: this is kind of an example of a precursor sort
Speaker 1: of content to what you got with these Chane letters.
Speaker 1: The man who shall make a picture of the things
Speaker 1: which are to the north of the hidden House of
Speaker 1: the Twat shall find it of great benefit to him,
Speaker 1: both in heaven and on earth. And he should who
Speaker 1: knows it shall be among the spirits near Raw. And
Speaker 1: he who recites the words of Isis and Sarah shall
Speaker 1: repulse Epep and Amin Tet, and he shall have a
Speaker 1: place on the boat of Raw, both in heaven and
Speaker 1: upon the earth. The man who knows not this picture
Speaker 1: shall never be able to repulse the serpent nehra Rah.
Speaker 1: So it's like both you have to you know that
Speaker 1: in order to avoid being, you know, punished by these
Speaker 1: evil spirits, you have to recite these specific words, and
Speaker 1: you have to share them with other people. Right, and
Speaker 1: if you don't. Someone who hasn't seen this is vulnerable
Speaker 1: to this, right you could. It's that same idea, right like,
Speaker 1: where there's this here's this thing that you've now been
Speaker 1: informed of, and you both have to be aware of
Speaker 1: it and also spread it to other people otherwise you
Speaker 1: will suffer in some way. You know.
Speaker 3: It's so fun how it's like the opposite of a
Speaker 3: curse like we got in The Evil Dead, where it's
Speaker 3: like don't read the words, and this is like read
Speaker 3: the words, or read them tall your friends.
Speaker 1: Please do read them to everyone, otherwise you're fucked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some serpent skun. I'm not an ancient Egyptian expert, but
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty obvious, like, oh, yeah, that is
Speaker 1: there is an element of what people were getting with
Speaker 1: these like chain letters that is present in this ancient
Speaker 1: religious text and it.
Speaker 3: Comment and subscribe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like comment and subscribe to avoid the serpent nararrah.
Speaker 1: So Van Arsdale likewise notes that some early Buddhist sutras
Speaker 1: promise good luck or spiritual benefits for reproducing specific pieces
Speaker 1: of text. Quote and this is from Van Arsdale's website.
Speaker 1: The world's oldest example of printing are Dahrani or magical
Speaker 1: incantations printed in Japan between seven sixty four and seven
Speaker 1: seventy during the reign of the Empress Shatoku. A total
Speaker 1: of over one million copies of or different Dahrani are
Speaker 1: from the from the Great Durrani Sutra of the Spotless
Speaker 1: and Pure Light were printed to be placed in one
Speaker 1: million pagodas built at the command of Shautoku. In this sutra,
Speaker 1: it has stated that if a person we were to
Speaker 1: build several million small pagodas and place copies of Dorani
Speaker 1: in them, that person's life would be lengthened, evil karma
Speaker 1: would be expunged, and rebels or enemies would be vanquished.
Speaker 1: So again, back in the day, you had to be
Speaker 1: emperor to like indulge in in chain letter culture like
Speaker 1: you know today you could just send a bunch of
Speaker 1: letters to your friends and family, or you know, you
Speaker 1: could in the eighties when people sent letters. But back
Speaker 1: in seven seventy you had to be the emperor, so
Speaker 1: you could build a million pagodas to put the message in.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you're gonna get killed by rebels.
Speaker 3: See an influencer do that? Today the million go to Chela.
Speaker 1: Mister beast needs to make a million pagodas or he's
Speaker 1: gonna get murdered. Yeah, and back in the so these Dhrani,
Speaker 1: this is again a very early printing process. They would
Speaker 1: have been mate printed using copper plates. And it's it's
Speaker 1: light that prior to the advent of kind of traditional
Speaker 1: printing presses, this sutra would have been among, if not
Speaker 1: the most widely produced piece of text in history. Many
Speaker 1: of these small pagodas that and this didn't just happen
Speaker 1: in Japan. There were kind of variants of this all
Speaker 1: throughout Asia, where like basically, if you're the king, you
Speaker 1: want to make a bunch of pagodas with a specific
Speaker 1: message in them in order to avoid bad luck befalling you.
Speaker 3: Right, incredible, Again, that's not that different from a chain letter. Really,
Speaker 3: no more labor intensive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's much more labor intensive, although it is
Speaker 1: other people's labor. Right. I also find it interesting that, like,
Speaker 1: again a lot of like modern chain letters were stuff
Speaker 1: like you know, if you spread this, you know you
Speaker 1: won't get fired, you won't lose your job, or you'll
Speaker 1: get a raise at work or something, Whereas with emperors
Speaker 1: it's like if you spread this, it is saying you'll
Speaker 1: lose your You won't lose your job, but it's like
Speaker 1: rebels won't overthrow you and murder you.
Speaker 3: The stakes have decreased a little bit.
Speaker 1: The stakes decreased slightly. That Yeah. The commonality here though,
Speaker 1: is that it's it's kind of relying on the paranoia
Speaker 1: and fear of a comfortable person generally that they will
Speaker 1: become less comfortable, you know, if like they don't follow
Speaker 1: these instructions, and there's a degree of like follow like
Speaker 1: this is a everyone's always especially like and this is
Speaker 1: a thing that like, you know, we can talk about
Speaker 1: what wealth does and doesn't do, but the way in
Speaker 1: which the super rich act and the paranoia that is
Speaker 1: kind of ever present in their lives is proof that
Speaker 1: like when you're one of the people who like gets
Speaker 1: God's hits God's Great Roulette Wheel and winds up with
Speaker 1: millions and millions of dollars, you're still always worried that
Speaker 1: something is going to take it from you. And likewise,
Speaker 1: just everyone feels that way, right, Like, if you're precarity
Speaker 1: is is a is an inherent aspect of humanity, right,
Speaker 1: even if you're not in a precarious situation, just the
Speaker 1: fear that like, you know, my kid could die oversee
Speaker 1: in the war, or I could get cancer or whatever.
Speaker 1: Life is random and that's scary, and all of these things.
Speaker 1: The kind of commonality between all of these things and
Speaker 1: chain letters is like it offers you sort of a
Speaker 1: feeling of protection from the inherent randomness of life. Right yeah,
Speaker 1: the first recognizable chain letters started to spread from the
Speaker 1: fifteen hundreds on across Europe. It actually does go back
Speaker 1: further than the casual slate histories of chain letters seem
Speaker 1: to say. And there were basically ponzi schemes, right like
Speaker 1: you would be asked to pay money to whoever's name
Speaker 1: was on top of the list in order to avoid
Speaker 1: bad luck, and then you would like erase the name
Speaker 1: on the letter, usually the handwritten letter that you'd received,
Speaker 1: and then like add your own name to the list
Speaker 1: and send it on to other people, and like, you know, honestly,
Speaker 1: that's how cryptocurrency pretty much works, right Like this this
Speaker 1: is again these are not like we keep inventing fancier
Speaker 1: ways to do the same thing over and over again.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, to be fair, when you re skin an
Speaker 3: old scam, people really get into it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it always works anyway. Uh. You know what else
Speaker 1: is a long and successful scam?
Speaker 2: Capitalism?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, advertising capitalism. Whatever.
Speaker 2: Here you go, man, I hope it's a raging coin ad.
Speaker 1: So do I. Oh, we are back a good times, Sarah.
Speaker 1: Do you have any cryptos, you big crypto fan?
Speaker 3: I have zero crypto. My deal with new ideas is
Speaker 3: to wait them out for twenty years. Yeah, until the
Speaker 3: storm has passed, and that really serves me.
Speaker 7: Well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I took kind of a mixed version of it
Speaker 1: where I didn't get any cryptocurrency, but I do have
Speaker 1: a full back tattoo of the bitcoin load.
Speaker 3: I have a back tattoo of a board ape. So
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, us, you have famously been been in on
Speaker 1: the ground floor of the Board eight yacht club. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: They're doing wealthy.
Speaker 3: Days, I will tell you though, speaking of new scams,
Speaker 3: and I have not really confessed this before. I did
Speaker 3: back in the Goop days follow twenty sixteen. We're all
Speaker 3: little nuts. I bought a jade egg and I used
Speaker 3: it and I liked it, and then I read about
Speaker 3: how because they have a hole drilled in them and
Speaker 3: are porous, they can give you know, horrible bacterial infections
Speaker 3: or whatever, and then I stopped using it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is why. You know, I have
Speaker 1: some friends who are into sounding, which is a thing
Speaker 1: if you have a penis where you like put a
Speaker 1: long and rigid rod into your penis. But they all
Speaker 1: use like titanium rods and stuff, right or gla, you know,
Speaker 1: stuff that's that's non.
Speaker 3: For us, which does what is that meant to do?
Speaker 7: Though?
Speaker 1: Look, I'm not into sounding personally. It's a thing you like,
Speaker 1: people can look that up at home for themselves. But
Speaker 1: it apparently feels afternoon.
Speaker 3: Okay, I would not guess that that felt good, But
Speaker 3: what do I know? I was really thinking when you
Speaker 3: said that word that you like, lay your penis on
Speaker 3: a drum that someone is playing. But that's what that's
Speaker 3: more what I would do if.
Speaker 1: I I mean that that you were taking the sound
Speaker 1: part very literally.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. It's fascinating actually anyway, So just like crypto
Speaker 1: evangelists have to had to pretend that they were building
Speaker 1: a new global currency system that was like more equitable,
Speaker 1: you know, and that they were trying to take power
Speaker 1: from war mongering governments or whatever. Early scam chain letter
Speaker 1: operators had to dress up schemes that were fundamentally about
Speaker 1: taking advantage of greed as selfless acts of charity. And
Speaker 1: here's a quote from Van Harsdale's website. An eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: eight letter solicits dimes for the education of the poor
Speaker 1: whites in the region of the Cumberlands. This letter states
Speaker 1: it as an adaptation of a previous solicitation and acts
Speaker 1: that four copies be sent to friends for compliance. You
Speaker 1: will receive the blessing of him who was ready to
Speaker 1: die for us. This is the earliest known chain letter.
Speaker 1: An eighteen eighty nine example let an American an American
Speaker 1: college student solicited dimes and ten copies. This letter claims
Speaker 1: to be self terminating. Recipients were asked to increment a
Speaker 1: generation count at the top of the letter until it
Speaker 1: reached some preset maximum, at which time the chain was
Speaker 1: to stop. This practice continued at least through nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: but a few years after a chain letter was launched
Speaker 1: only those circulated which had the inflated maxim We have
Speaker 1: two examples of a solicitation for used postage stamps to
Speaker 1: build a children's ward in Australia. The first is from
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred and is number one hundred and seventy three
Speaker 1: of one hundred and eighty maximum. The second highly modified
Speaker 1: was still in circulation ten years later and is number
Speaker 1: three seventy five a full eighty maximum. Right, so you
Speaker 1: see what people are doing where they're saying like this
Speaker 1: isn't a scam, you know, will terminate this is certain
Speaker 1: point when the money has been raised. And there was
Speaker 1: this understanding that if you made it feel like you
Speaker 1: were closer to the end of the chain letters circulation,
Speaker 1: that that would get more people to respond. So everyone
Speaker 1: would just lie and like pretend like you were. You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter if you're one seventy three of one
Speaker 1: eighty or three seventy five of four eighty. But that's
Speaker 1: just the way the decided human beings.
Speaker 3: Work, right, I mean NPR does that in the pledge drive,
Speaker 3: and it seems sort for them as well.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, again, all of these are examples of like like
Speaker 1: long stage, like just this is just how humans be,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, I bought the grenade launcher in my
Speaker 1: room because I was worried they were going to run
Speaker 1: out of these grenade launchers. You know, it's an old
Speaker 1: police one. You can see them in.
Speaker 3: Riot respect police action.
Speaker 7: I did.
Speaker 1: It's funny, this is unrelated. But because a grenade launcher
Speaker 1: is not legally a firearm or any other kind of weapon,
Speaker 1: they just FedEx them right to your door. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like by a wig or whatever, right, Like it's
Speaker 1: completely uncontrolled. I want to get the.
Speaker 3: Grenade launcher account for these ads. I mean, yeah, what
Speaker 3: could be more convenient?
Speaker 1: I would very happily sell grenade launchers on this show.
Speaker 1: Nobody commits crimes with grenade launchers. You know, they're they're
Speaker 1: purely the.
Speaker 3: Stasive weapon to use it would know, right, you can't
Speaker 3: take one with you into an uber That's right, That's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So anyway, this is this is this is my
Speaker 1: free ad for grenade launchers. Early chain letters were made
Speaker 1: by people who often legitimately wanted to spread a religious message.
Speaker 1: Other examples of the art form seem to have been
Speaker 1: local kind of citizen journalism, almost right in an era
Speaker 1: where newspapers weren't super common. People being like, hey, here's
Speaker 1: this problem, you know, like we have poor whites in
Speaker 1: the Cumberlands. Let's raise money for them or whatever goodness.
Speaker 1: But once the telegram and reliable postal service started to
Speaker 1: enable the mass transmission of these letters for the first time.
Speaker 1: Things very quickly got out of hand and they came
Speaker 1: purely vehicles of like separating folks from their money. And
Speaker 1: this happened in the US and Britain before basically anywhere else.
Speaker 1: In London, a popular kind of chain letter was called
Speaker 1: the peripatetic Contribution Box, and it was a mix of
Speaker 1: all these kinds of impulses. The basic idea was that
Speaker 1: each person who received the letter would send a dime
Speaker 1: to the originator and make three copies of the letter,
Speaker 1: asking friends to do the same thing. One of these
Speaker 1: letters was sent by the Bishop of Bedford in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight to raise money for a destitute women's own
Speaker 1: during the Jack the Ripper slayings and so it it's
Speaker 1: this kind of thing where like women are being murdered.
Speaker 1: There's this. This is the first famous crime spree, right,
Speaker 1: this is the first mass media crime spree, right, the
Speaker 1: first crime spree that like newspapers in like the early
Speaker 1: news media have like adopted and are covering. And so
Speaker 1: he's he's like hitching in order to try to raise
Speaker 1: money for a women's shelter. He's basically hitching onto the
Speaker 1: fame of the jack the ripper slangings, and it helped
Speaker 1: make it like you can contribute positively to solving like
Speaker 1: stopping these murders if you donate money and it works,
Speaker 1: like this is the first example of that I've ever
Speaker 1: found of that kind of tactic working. It went so
Speaker 1: viral that the bishop was receiving sixteen thousand letters a week,
Speaker 1: like he couldn't deal with the mass of Like that's
Speaker 1: a lot today, right, Like if you're getting you yeah,
Speaker 1: like mister Beast couldn't pull that off, you know, Bishop Beast, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Bishop Beast. And it's like, from what I haven't found
Speaker 1: any evidence that this guy was a scammer. He was
Speaker 1: just like, oh, people are concerned about poor women in
Speaker 1: London because of these murders. I will use that concern
Speaker 1: to try to like fund a women's shelter. And it
Speaker 1: just worked. And because it works so well, scammers see opportunity.
Speaker 1: They're like, wait a second, all these people are sending
Speaker 1: dimes to this bishop ass motherfucker because it's like raise
Speaker 1: money for this What if we send copycat letters claiming
Speaker 1: to be the bishop but with a different address. Perhaps
Speaker 1: we can get some of those sweet sweet dimes, and
Speaker 1: so like an unknown number of people make money off
Speaker 1: of this. But also just as an accident, other bishops
Speaker 1: in towns that have similar names start receiving coins because
Speaker 1: like people are dumb, right, like yeah, wild.
Speaker 3: Sit just to go to the artful dodger.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's quite quite fun. Across the pond.
Speaker 1: American conmen and fundraisers alike also paid attention to what
Speaker 1: was happening. They like, see this go down in London,
Speaker 1: are like, well, shit, this seems like we can make
Speaker 1: a lot of money. Here's a quote from an article
Speaker 1: that article that Enslate that I was talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: During the eighteen nineties, chain letter fundraising proliferated for everything
Speaker 1: from a bike path in Michigan to a consumptive railroad telegrapher.
Speaker 1: By July eighteen ninety eight, the New York World was
Speaker 1: pre printing chain letter forms to fundraise for a memorial
Speaker 1: for Spanish American War soldiers. Do not break the chain,
Speaker 1: which will result in honoring the memory of the men
Speaker 1: who sacrificed their lives, it shided. Upon seeing what the
Speaker 1: world's proprietor had rot his rivals at the New York
Speaker 1: Sun were blunt in their assessment. Pulitzer is insane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had good reason to scoff. Earlier that year, a
Speaker 1: seventeen year old Red Cross volunteer in Long Island, Natalie Shank,
Speaker 1: had contrived a chain to provide ice for troops in Cuba,
Speaker 1: causing thirty five hundred letters at a time to pour
Speaker 1: into the tiny post office of Babylon, New York. We
Speaker 1: did not consider what patriotic Americans are capable of, the
Speaker 1: girl's mother fretted to the breast. Yeah, this is like
Speaker 1: a common thing with chain letters, like people starting them,
Speaker 1: especially in the era where they weren't always common. Some
Speaker 1: people would like start them to try to raise money
Speaker 1: for causes. It's always this like, well, now suddenly we
Speaker 1: have created like a massive logistical problem for our town
Speaker 1: in the postal service, and don't know what to do.
Speaker 1: No one, this is like nineteen dot right, nobody can
Speaker 1: handle thirty five hundred letters like.
Speaker 3: It was like a Buster Keaton movie too, like the
Speaker 3: mail clerk trying to keep up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have destroyed our town's ability to be connected
Speaker 1: to the because, as I mentioned earlier, chain letters made
Speaker 1: a huge comeback in World War One, both because of
Speaker 1: superstitious families who would do kind of anything in order
Speaker 1: to feel like they were protecting their kid, and for
Speaker 1: stranger reasons. Pro German Americans used chain letters to raise
Speaker 1: money for the war effort, and this was eventually the
Speaker 1: New York Times attacked this as a plot to clog
Speaker 1: the US mail. Sometimes you'll see people report that, like
Speaker 1: there was a German scheme to clog the mail. For
Speaker 1: what I've come across, I'm not sure if there was
Speaker 1: actually a plot or it's just that, like anytime one
Speaker 1: of these went viral, it caused a logistical problem. It
Speaker 1: was like a bomb going off in the post office.
Speaker 1: By eighteen ninety nine, this had all become enough of
Speaker 1: a problem that the US Postal Service had declared dime
Speaker 1: chain letters a violation of lottery laws, and they started
Speaker 1: regulating shit right where. They're like, this is this is
Speaker 1: a lottery, Like you're running an a legal lottery and
Speaker 1: you have to stop. We can't handle this.
Speaker 3: But what are the soldiers on their ice?
Speaker 1: But what of the soldiers in their ice? The boys
Speaker 1: in Cuba. Look, if you want to support our brave
Speaker 1: troops in Cuba, running that torture prison. Send fifty dollars
Speaker 1: to me and Sophie. Sophie's what's what's our home address?
Speaker 1: Do we have a PO box yet for people to
Speaker 1: send us money for the boys in Cuba?
Speaker 4: It's one eight five two h or never telling you.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I guess Ron DeSantis won't get his ice
Speaker 1: as he as he as he does a war crime.
Speaker 1: If he doesn't work, it's tragic. So eighteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: the postal services like this shit has to stop, like
Speaker 1: we cannot handle all of the fucking dime cons you
Speaker 1: people are running. And so con artists got around this
Speaker 1: by sending letters by hand, like dropping letters in mailboxes
Speaker 1: and saying, don't send those through the postal service. It
Speaker 1: won't work the magic, you won't get the good luck.
Speaker 1: You need to send the dime and like drop it
Speaker 1: off at this location. And this actually worked better than
Speaker 1: you'd think. One chain letter factory because this obviously, like
Speaker 1: as with breaking into cars and shit, became the purview
Speaker 1: of organized crime, right because it's much more efficient in
Speaker 1: the capitalist sense if you like have an organization that's
Speaker 1: putting out chain letters and reaping money. One chain letter
Speaker 1: factory in Toledo, Ohio had one hundred and twenty five
Speaker 1: full time employees making these things when it was shut
Speaker 1: down by the Feds by the mail cops.
Speaker 3: Double job being a mail cop or being also being
Speaker 3: a chain letter writer. I mean, were they writing them
Speaker 3: by hand? They have little typewriters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was type would I mean, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think it would have been time, although I think
Speaker 1: some of them they did do by hand just because
Speaker 1: like that was the thing that worked best, you know,
Speaker 1: might have been. Now, as I've gone over this history,
Speaker 1: you've probably noticed that the history of chain letters this
Speaker 1: isn't totally This seems pretty familiar as people who have
Speaker 1: like grown up on the internet, right, Like there's there's
Speaker 1: all of this. These these things are spreading in a
Speaker 1: kind of a similar way to how disinformation and shit
Speaker 1: and cons spread on the internet. Right. You start with
Speaker 1: questionably accurate stories of disasters and tragedies around the world.
Speaker 1: Then you move to a call to action, either to
Speaker 1: like try to get money for something or to spread
Speaker 1: various beliefs about the world, and then you kind of
Speaker 1: the way in which you tend to get people to
Speaker 1: spread stuff and get people interested is to share often
Speaker 1: false stories of horrific violence or stuff like kidnapping, right,
Speaker 1: shit that people are are inherently drawn to. And as
Speaker 1: a result of this, kind of the earliest sort of
Speaker 1: chain letter meme that is kind of directly in the
Speaker 1: in the chain of evolution to the stuff that we've
Speaker 1: been started this episode talking about, are chain letters that
Speaker 1: would warn recipients about knife wielding murderers hiding in the
Speaker 1: backseats of cars to murder in of dying women. These
Speaker 1: started to spread in the eighties and nineties, and once
Speaker 1: once email became a thing, one of the first things
Speaker 1: that would spread through email were copies of this specific
Speaker 1: chain letter. And I'm going to read one early modern
Speaker 1: example of this letter. A friend stopped at the Pay
Speaker 1: at the Pump gas station to get gas. Once she
Speaker 1: filled her gas tank, and after paying at the pump
Speaker 1: and starting to leave, the voice of the attendant inside
Speaker 1: came over the speaker. He told her that something had
Speaker 1: happened with her card and that she needed to come
Speaker 1: inside to pay. The lady was confused because the transaction
Speaker 1: showed complete and approved. She relayed that to him and
Speaker 1: was getting ready to leave, but the attendant once again
Speaker 1: as urged her to come into pay or there'd be trouble.
Speaker 1: She proceeded to go inside and started arguing with the
Speaker 1: attendant about his threat. He told her to calm down
Speaker 1: and listen carefully. He said that while she was pumping gas,
Speaker 1: a guy slipped into the backseat of her car on
Speaker 1: the other side, and the attendant had already called the police.
Speaker 1: She became frightened and looked out in time to see
Speaker 1: her car door open and the guys slip out. The
Speaker 1: report is that the new gang initiation thing is to
Speaker 1: bring a woman, bring back a woman and or her car.
Speaker 1: One way they're doing this is crawling under women's cars
Speaker 1: where they'll pump it while they're pumping gas, or at
Speaker 1: grocery stores in the nighttime. The other way is slipping
Speaker 1: into unattended cars and kidnapping the woman. Please pass this
Speaker 1: on to other women, young and old alike. Be extra
Speaker 1: careful going into and from your car at night. If
Speaker 1: at all possible, don't go alone. This is real exclamation point.
Speaker 1: Exclamation point. The messages number this is real exclamation That's
Speaker 1: how you know it's real exclamation point. It then ends
Speaker 1: with the message number one always in caps. Lock your
Speaker 1: car doors even if you're gone for just a second.
Speaker 1: Number two, check underneath your car when approaching it for
Speaker 1: re entry, and checking the back before getting in. Number three,
Speaker 1: always be aware of your surroundings and of other individuals
Speaker 1: and your general vicinity, particularly at night. Send this to
Speaker 1: everyone so your friends can take precaution. And guys, all caps.
Speaker 1: You tell any woman you know about this. Thanks.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I just want to point out that
Speaker 4: the thiks is not in caplocks and I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: No, it's like you need it. Thanks hm. I do
Speaker 1: also again, Nowadays, because tactical influencers are such a thing,
Speaker 1: men and women are being urged to be worried about
Speaker 1: kidnapping gangs. But back in the day this was a
Speaker 1: more genteel time. So men, nobody's gonna steal you in
Speaker 1: your car to get initiated into a gang. But you
Speaker 1: gotta warn the brons in your life.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I love how you know, because obviously
Speaker 3: the unspoken thing here is sexual menace in a you know,
Speaker 3: in a racist way, because we're talking about gang members
Speaker 3: quote unquote.
Speaker 5: But like, you gotta steal a woman in the gang,
Speaker 5: any woman, Yeah, any woman, any woman and her car
Speaker 5: or maybe just her car. I don't know, like you know,
Speaker 5: just puts something and then it's like just thinking about
Speaker 5: being the woman at the gang initiation and he's like
Speaker 5: five strangers, Like there's flow from the AMPM and here's
Speaker 5: Jessica from the craft store.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so funn com and ground.
Speaker 1: See, we and Oregon were up until recently immune to
Speaker 1: this kind of thing because nobody gets to pay at
Speaker 1: the pump. You know. Gas station attendancy saved us from
Speaker 1: these kidnapping gangs.
Speaker 3: Were the safest people in America. Really, that's the right
Speaker 3: danger zone in these stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody gets kidnapped in Oregon because of the noble
Speaker 1: gas station attendant. So the Internet had two initial impacts
Speaker 1: on how chain letter content spread. The first was that
Speaker 1: it allows a geometric expansion, obviously, and the number of
Speaker 1: people you can reach with a letter, right, there's just
Speaker 1: no comparison. The second is that it allowed exact copies
Speaker 1: to spread indefinitely, which put an end to researchers being
Speaker 1: able to like study heredity with these things to an
Speaker 1: extent or at least altered it, right, because it just
Speaker 1: changes the way in which shit mutates. For a while,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties, it seemed as if the Internet
Speaker 1: might lead to a stagnation for this kind of message,
Speaker 1: but social media provided impetus for a new generation of
Speaker 1: to make slight adjustments on existing messages in order to
Speaker 1: build online followings or take advantage of roobs. We see
Speaker 1: this in pieces of pieces of this in QAnon and pizzagate.
Speaker 1: The way conspiracy theories snowball over time due to the
Speaker 1: participation of huge numbers of people, and this brings me
Speaker 1: back to today's bullshit conspiracy theories about kidnapping. God knows
Speaker 1: how many iterations we've seen at this point, but the
Speaker 1: most pernicious family of myths all focus around the idea
Speaker 1: that kidnappers stage some sort of item in a victim's car.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the idea is that this is being done to
Speaker 1: mark them. Other times it's that when the person stops
Speaker 1: to remove the item, you know, a shirt that's been
Speaker 1: left on the hood of their car or a piece
Speaker 1: of cheese. In one version of it, criminals will leap
Speaker 1: out of a nearby video to vehicle to grab them
Speaker 1: right they're trying to distract it. You got to be
Speaker 1: always be ready, keep a hand on your gun at
Speaker 1: all times, you know, if you see a shirt on
Speaker 1: your car, just start shooting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, cute for a later the America.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's how I That's what I always say. It's
Speaker 1: worth noting that the specific kind of kidnappings that Phoebe
Speaker 1: Copis and so many other people today are obsessed with
Speaker 1: do not happen essentially, right. Obviously, you can find freak
Speaker 1: examples of strangers being kidnapped by strangers, but nearly all
Speaker 1: trafficking victims and these are all wind up being trafficking
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories. Right, that's why they're trying to kidnap women, right,
Speaker 1: you know, like that's that's how it always happens. The
Speaker 1: vast majority of trafficking victims know their attacker. They are
Speaker 1: usually related to their attacker, right, or to their trafficker,
Speaker 1: I should say, trafficking people being forced into slavery or
Speaker 1: what like slavery, particularly like sex slavery. This is not
Speaker 1: a thing that happens that strangers due to strangers in
Speaker 1: the United States. This is a thing that like parents
Speaker 1: due to their kids, or like a guardian. Well, it
Speaker 1: is usually either a parent who's trafficking the kid for money,
Speaker 1: generally as a result of like a drug addiction, or
Speaker 1: like a single parent who someone comes into their life
Speaker 1: and then traffics their kid. It's nearly always someone that
Speaker 1: the child knows. Right, That's just like the way that
Speaker 1: trafficking works, and it's the same thing with like when
Speaker 1: adults are trafficked, it is nearly always it's either people
Speaker 1: who are migrants coming to this country being trafficked in
Speaker 1: order to like work on farms and shit or otherwise
Speaker 1: do labor for very little to know money, or it
Speaker 1: is when it's sex trafficking, it's like people being trafficked
Speaker 1: by you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, by family members. The vast
Speaker 1: majority of trafficking victims are adolescents or teenagers. Sixty to
Speaker 1: sixty seven percent of trafficking victims in the US are
Speaker 1: fifteen to seventeen years old. A huge number of them
Speaker 1: are LGBT or gender non conforming because, like one thing
Speaker 1: that often brings people into trafficking, they are young, they
Speaker 1: do not have resources, like financial resources. They are kicked
Speaker 1: out of their homes because they are queer, and they
Speaker 1: are then forced at some point into the set trade
Speaker 1: by somebody that they trust, right, Like, that is when
Speaker 1: it happens. This is how it actually occurs statistically.
Speaker 3: No, Robert, the market value of middle aged women is
Speaker 3: four thousand dollars a pound.
Speaker 1: No, No, it's all like forty five year old women
Speaker 1: getting kidnapped at Target. That's how it happens. Well, but
Speaker 1: you could also see, like, right, it's the kind of
Speaker 1: people who fall for this shit are the kind of
Speaker 1: people who believe in like grooming conspiracy theories overwhelmingly, and
Speaker 1: they don't want to hear No, it's the queer kids
Speaker 1: that you're spreading conspiracies about are the ones in danger
Speaker 1: of being trafficked. They want to hear like, no, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm in danger. I have a reasoned, like all of
Speaker 1: this fear that is ever present in me me, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's these dangerous Yeah, these dangerous looking kids who are
Speaker 1: going to threaten me. The fear that is ever present
Speaker 1: in my life, because human beings more or less can't
Speaker 1: exist without anxiety has a cause. And it's the dangerous,
Speaker 1: you know, weird looking kids around me who are going
Speaker 1: to kidnap me by putting cheese on my car. And
Speaker 1: it's one of those things we started this episode talking
Speaker 1: about Phoebe Copas. But if you do what I have
Speaker 1: been doing, and you spend hours and hours coming through
Speaker 1: viral Facebook and TikTok posts about like kidnapping conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: In every one of them, you will find people talking
Speaker 1: about their guns. A representative example comes from an article
Speaker 1: I found twenty seventeen article published by Channel fourteen News,
Speaker 1: an Amarillo, Texas station, and the title of the article
Speaker 1: was woman find shirt on car, warning goes viral and
Speaker 1: obviously one of these And right in the I found
Speaker 1: a Facebook post that was like twelve thousand shares and
Speaker 1: one of the first responses was a user going, I
Speaker 1: keep my pistol in grabbing distance everywhere I go, Like, no,
Speaker 1: people are not getting traffic this way.
Speaker 3: What is the shirt going to do to you? Aside
Speaker 3: from remind you of your dead lever? Jake Schillen Hall.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The idea again is that like you put these
Speaker 1: kidnapping gangs are putting shirts, and then you'll take your
Speaker 1: hand off your gun to go put the take a
Speaker 1: shirt off your car, and that's when they jump out
Speaker 1: and get you.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 3: That is the thing about these so stupid, right, is
Speaker 3: that it's like you'll you'll in the split second year distracted,
Speaker 3: which you can't afford to lose, they'll snatch you. And
Speaker 3: the idea of having to be that hyper vigilant. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's fascinating how we're just like selling PTSD basically, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's we know it all too.
Speaker 1: Well and you like it's. One of the things that
Speaker 1: makes this pernicious is that, like, no one will tell
Speaker 1: you need to be less aware out in public. Right,
Speaker 1: No one's going to say, like, when you get traveled
Speaker 1: to a new city and hop in the uber, maybe
Speaker 1: just zone out on your phone. Right, everyone will say, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good to be, you know, aware, But the version
Speaker 1: that gets transmitted primarily is like, you need to always
Speaker 1: be hyper vigilant because you are permanently in danger of
Speaker 1: being kidnapped and sold into fucking taken ass movie slavery.
Speaker 3: Right, I always be ready to stop someone with Dudley force. Yeah,
Speaker 3: a fun way to live.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you need to be the Liam Neeson you know,
Speaker 1: to protect yourself from weirdly Algerian kidnapping gangs. If I'm
Speaker 1: remembering that movie.
Speaker 3: Properly knows yea Mason who we now know once well
Speaker 3: you know, if you know, you know.
Speaker 1: If you know you know? Anyway, although we can talk
Speaker 1: about his appearance in Atlanta. But this is all outside
Speaker 1: of the point. We're gonna keep talking about, specifically how
Speaker 1: these kidnapping conspiracy theories have started and mutated, and how
Speaker 1: this all ties into some other particularly toxic aspects of
Speaker 1: American culture. By the time these episodes come out, I
Speaker 1: will have an article up on my substack, Shatterszone. You
Speaker 1: can just find it by typing that in about specifically
Speaker 1: the way in which kidnapping and trafficking as key phrases
Speaker 1: have become like super reliable ways to go viral. On
Speaker 1: TikTok there's a lot of like weird fuck, So there's
Speaker 1: this fucking weird. I don't know how to describe this,
Speaker 1: but I find it deeply unsettling. One of the first
Speaker 1: things I found and I was looking to Phoebe Copis.
Speaker 1: I decided, after I was reading about her, I want
Speaker 1: to see what people are like saying about this on TikTok.
Speaker 2: Oh, does that really scary video you sent me?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I find this This is like a type of
Speaker 1: content where they they've got to take a picture of
Speaker 1: her and they use it to make an AI video
Speaker 1: of her. Of like Phoebe the woman who murdered that
Speaker 1: guy and have her relating the story of her killing
Speaker 1: a guy in like an AI version of her voice
Speaker 1: and an AI version of her face speaking. It is horrible.
Speaker 1: It's like, Sarah, I'm not a moral panic person. I
Speaker 1: don't think TikTok is in. I don't think TikTok's any
Speaker 1: more toxic than any other form of social media. But
Speaker 1: I also think all social media should be made illegal
Speaker 1: and the people who run these companies pushed into the sea,
Speaker 1: like I hate it.
Speaker 3: I hate it all too much technology. I think that
Speaker 3: was the last thing I needed to hear before moving
Speaker 3: in next door to JD. Sally.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yes, yes, yeah, let's all build. Look, if
Speaker 1: you're listening to the show, buy a cabin in rural Montana,
Speaker 1: learn how to Okay, Actually this is I'm doing a
Speaker 1: unibomber thing again. See, this is why, this is why
Speaker 1: we gotta we gotta stop, Sarah. You gotta you got
Speaker 1: anything to plug besides being the unibomber.
Speaker 3: I mean that's really the main project I'm working on.
Speaker 3: I do a show called You're Wrong About We've talked
Speaker 3: about human trafficking on it, and I it is like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's incredible to me the magic that
Speaker 3: that word has, the spell that it casts over people.
Speaker 3: It's like and it feels like it's taken the place
Speaker 3: that the phrase white slavery had and like I don't
Speaker 3: know this this time one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and white slavery is I didn't get into this
Speaker 1: for it for this, but like, yeah, if we were
Speaker 1: to like really dig into that history, because like that
Speaker 1: was in the eighteen hundreds and stuff like, it was
Speaker 1: like a very easy way to to get people riled up.
Speaker 1: Like it's all like shady fucking yellow journalism types have
Speaker 1: always known that, like, yeah, if you make white people
Speaker 1: feel like they're about to get abducted off the street,
Speaker 1: because they're always I think a lot of it goes
Speaker 1: does go back to you know, you think about like
Speaker 1: the emperor in Japan, like he's like, wow, I was
Speaker 1: born to rule this land, but I also still, despite
Speaker 1: all my power in my armies, feel scared all the time.
Speaker 1: And that's just like a thing that people feel. I'm
Speaker 1: going to go make all of these pagodas to like
Speaker 1: spread this because I feel like if I spread this,
Speaker 1: like this book says, if I spread this specific chunk
Speaker 1: of text, then nothing bad will happen to me. The
Speaker 1: rebels will never come into my palace or whatever. And
Speaker 1: you know, then it gets translated to like, wow, I'm
Speaker 1: a white person in the eighteen nineties. Things are great,
Speaker 1: we roll the entire world. But yet I'm scared all
Speaker 1: the time. There must be gangs of brown people waiting
Speaker 1: to kidnap me. And then you know, today it's too Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm a sub urban American, you know, the most fortunate
Speaker 1: kind of person who has ever existed in the history
Speaker 1: of the planet. Right, I am unfathomably safe and secure.
Speaker 1: Yet I'm scared all the time. There must be a
Speaker 1: reason for it, and it turns out that's the most
Speaker 1: profitable thing to to cash it on.
Speaker 3: It's I really, it's I have not thought of it
Speaker 3: this way before. But I love your summary that like
Speaker 3: people just feel scared because that's what we are and
Speaker 3: what victual we are. We feel right, and of course
Speaker 3: we are, like we were born to be scared. It's
Speaker 3: how we've survived this line to the extent that we
Speaker 3: have to just be like overly prone to freaking out
Speaker 3: and then and then the but then it's like, once
Speaker 3: you're in a place of relative prosperity and safety. Right,
Speaker 3: it becomes like a vestigial or like there's things to
Speaker 3: feel scared about, you know, and he personally whatever you're
Speaker 3: doing with your life. But like that, this is also
Speaker 3: why we have like our great summer movies where it's
Speaker 3: like living a normal life and then you have to
Speaker 3: fight a dinosaur or a magic truck or whatever else
Speaker 3: Steven Spielberg has thought up for us.
Speaker 1: I do love that you gave Steven Spielberg credit for
Speaker 1: the Stephen King book about the possessed evil truck.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, think a different truck. Yeah, they both they
Speaker 3: each got a truck.
Speaker 1: Ah. The Stevens, they've got they've got a direct line
Speaker 1: to our Amigdala's The Stevens.
Speaker 7: We do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a good stuff. I mean, I feel like again,
Speaker 1: for every like powerful impulse in human beings, there's like
Speaker 1: the good version of tweaking it and the evil version.
Speaker 1: The evil version is obviously spreading conspiracy theories about kidnapping.
Speaker 1: The good version is being Stephen King and just doing
Speaker 1: mountains of cocaine and writing novels that people love.
Speaker 3: And some of which you don't remember evidently.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking about this recently with regards to
Speaker 3: the Satanic Panic, because you know, I think about a
Speaker 3: lot and how it feels like one of the aspects
Speaker 3: of the Satanic Panic is that if you have a
Speaker 3: religion that forbids you horror media, you can't watch horror movies,
Speaker 3: you can't consume scary stuff except you know, yeah, if
Speaker 3: you just can't have horror fiction, then like it's going
Speaker 3: to show up in your religion. It's going to show
Speaker 3: up in chick tracts and sermons and your beliefs about
Speaker 3: what's actually happening, because it has to come up somewhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is why, like the horror movie, like, people
Speaker 1: who are actually into horror, right, tend to be like
Speaker 1: the healthiest folks because they find it out healthy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love horror and it certainly makes me much
Speaker 3: healthier than I would be otherwise.
Speaker 1: This is why John Carpenter is the ideal person, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's there, you go, perfect man.
Speaker 3: That's why Sophie and I are seeing The wicker Man
Speaker 3: later today. Yes, the paragons of health.
Speaker 1: Yeah, paragons of health. And you can be a paragon
Speaker 1: of health if you listen to Sarah Marshall's podcast. You're
Speaker 1: wrong about.
Speaker 3: It's sure you will be.
Speaker 1: You will be. That will solve your problem.
Speaker 3: People listen to it.
Speaker 1: All of the fear that you is ever present in
Speaker 1: your life. It'll go away the instant you start listening
Speaker 1: to Sarah's podcast, so True. Check that out. Another way
Speaker 1: you can make the ever present feeling of anxiety that
Speaker 1: is really just the death motive in your life never
Speaker 1: leaving you is by subscribing to Sophie what is our
Speaker 1: thing called? Where people don't get ads?
Speaker 4: You can subscribe to Cooler z of Media are a
Speaker 4: every subscription channel exclusively an Apple podcast Android version coming
Speaker 4: very soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone who gives us, however many dollars a month
Speaker 1: that costs your son won't die at the soalm. You
Speaker 1: know that that's the only way to protect him. If
Speaker 1: you've got a son, those German machine guns are aiming
Speaker 1: at him right, this is the only way to save him.
Speaker 1: And give us three dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do not let her eat that cheese and warn
Speaker 3: her and.
Speaker 4: Warn her about that car cheese.
Speaker 1: The episode that's part one.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 2: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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