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It's autumn time to get cozy and nothing is cozier than one of Casper's award-winning mattresses. Of course, they've got their most popular mattress. The original hybrid, it's engineered for cool, comfortable sleep. You can get a more restful and more soothing night sleep if it's a little warm in your August with the wave hybrid mattress, which provides more support than foam alone. Or upgrade to the wave hybrid snow mattress with snow technology to give you a full night of cooler sleep if you need to try it to believe it, Casper offers free contactless delivery and a risk. Free Hundred night trial. Discover the Casper difference today at casper.com and use code here 100 for $100 off select mattresses that's code HERE 100. Thatcasper.com for $100 off sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to the arcade open. Here's practical guide to making permaculture happen wherever you are. I am your host for this episode, Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrew ISM, and I'm joined here. With Chris. And James, say hello. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having me. It's like beyond the guest. You're gonna walk us through this? I'm very excited to learn more about it, yes. So I really see it as a as a key component in our restoration of the Earth and so. I find it necessary that regardless of what direction your individual. Proxis is going in, we have. We're looking to specialize or whatever. Couldn't code specialize? I think it's so important to. Think about where your food comes from and think about ways America and enhance and enlarge our food autonomy, especially considering the. Multi layering crises that. You know, compounding these days. Permaculture. Was first coined as a tomb by. Permaculturist Bill Mollison it's a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture, and it's the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. It's a way of integrating landscape and people, providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and other non material needs in a sustainable way. And just to be clear. The concepts, the ideas, the principles that make up human culture. Have existed long before Bill Morrison was born. Have existed in cultures all over the world. Bill Mollison is just someone who was, I guess. Giving it to. Spin for a more modern audience. But these principles, these ideas, are things that have been in practice for thousands of years. 10s of thousands even. From the approach to Land Management and settlement design to. The whole systems thinking approach to Nietzsche which can be seen in a lot of anonymous practices. It has a long history and it's one that's. People who practice human culture today, research human culture, will inevitably uncover in their learning process. However. Bill Mollison Foods coined it in the 1970s. As a response to the oil embargoes, they were taking place at a time. By bringing together the traditional knowledge of. Vasary of indigenous cultures. And combining them with certain modern design and layouts. It created a a movement that is now. Spreading across the world. From every on every continent. Honestly. Weather Puma culture views? The world views systems. It comes with an outlook that. Recognizes that all biological material is a potential energy source. The aim is to try to trap energy on your land and to use that energy the most efficient way before it degrades to create circular economies and cycles of energy. That's. How? For actual sustainable agricultural practice which, unfortunately. Has not been the aim of agriculture, especially industrial agriculture. And Superman culture represents a challenge to that status quo. The ethics of Puma culture are primarily focused on. Care for the Earth not being all living and non living things. Care for all people, thereby promoting self-reliance and community responsibility. They serve. We all have access to the resources necessary for existence and care, for community and specifically Community. That allows us to be. To think of an approach. Our society in a way that benefits all people in all life. Recognizing the community is not just our neighbours. It's not just the people who live in our city or town. It is all the living things that incorporates our surroundings and beyond. The way that human culture approaches design, it's a lot of its emphasis and mimicking how. The natural world would attempt to stabilize. Of course these systems take. Thousands, 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years to fully. Develop and age and. Reach some kind of stable state where public culture seeks to learn from, you know, these old growth forests and these. Elderly ecosystems and. Accelerate that process to establish things that will last generations. To establish species that will provide for the needs of people. Hundreds of years down the line. When it comes to approaching. Permaculture design practically. First things first to recognize is that anybody can take part in Puma culture design. Anybody can take part in constructing these sorts of systems and it can be established. The basic principles can be established regardless of your circumstances, your individual climate, or. Biosphere because the principles. A beast on following what nature was doing anyway. One of the foods principles involves the recognition of. The connections in a location. Seeing that a web is stronger than a single string. Meaning that. All of these different parts, these different moving parts coming together create something stronger than if. Each individual person. Each individual. Creature is trying to move by itself. It also looks at the connection between waste and resources. We are the only old adage that says, you know, one man's trash is another man's treasure. But when it comes to ecosystems? We should really be taking it quite literally, because the waste of one part of the system directly feeds into the resource of another part. Decomposing. Plants and animals directly feed into the fungal networks and. Flourishing. Of the next generation of plants, animals as and in that web, in that network, in that in those connections. We can also recognize for principle too that each element performs multiple functions. If we are, for example, keeping chickens, they can be a source of. Eggs and feathers and protein, of course, but they also produce manure and their daily activity. Helps to aerate the soil and they also provide insect control. Allowing your plans to fool the flourish. Banana trees, they provide bananas, of course. They provide fruit. They also provide starch and mulch and protection and sheet. And they hold water quite well, actually. When I taken a permaculture design course a couple months ago, and one of the things that I had learned from the guy who was running it was that he had told his story and he had done this, this project in Barbados, and in Barbados he was called to. Restore. Sort of like an old sand mine. Because it had run out of sand, well, it's close to running out of sand and so the community that was reliant on that sand mine didn't really have any direction. Because the economy, their local economy, been so reliant on those jobs. When he came in it's just like, and he showed the pictures, it's just very, very barren landscape, very dry, very dusty and I was. Honestly in disbelief that something so dead. So destroy something so devolved could be as radically transformed as he had transformed it. Unfortunately, this is a podcast, not a video or otherwise. I would show you the pictures, but. The transformation was stunning. I wanted the elements that you used to transform that dry landscape into a lush food forest. Was banana trees because surprisingly. Banana trees are very effective, well, unsurprisingly. But our trees are very effective at growing quickly and providing shade to other plans. And so as these other plans are growing up, they have the shaded banana tree to protect them from the harsh sun. And so the banana trees, while they may not be the top dog to the forest in the end, by the time the forest is fully established because banana trees don't get that tall. They still are vital in that early stage in providing that function of sheet that allows the rest of the forest to establish itself. That's really cool. It's very, very, very cool. Actual pictures after, is there like a place people could see them online? Like Instagram they could look up or something? Yes, so. If you go on. Washsamakipumaculture.org. I believe he has the pictures up there. That'll be WESEMEKI pumaculture.org. And if I remember correctly, he has the pictures on there. Yeah. Was it like a sand mine before or something? Yeah, it was a sand mine. Yeah, geez. Wow. It looks like there's no goodness in the soil. And the first one. And then yeah, yeah, at the end and surviving. To go back into the recording aspect. When it came to that project. A large part of it was just getting that life in the soil. So they were taken. They were getting mulch and manure from wherever they could get it. Just to give some life to that soil, they would grow certain, like Hardy, fast growing plants, and then chop them down after they'd grow insufficiently. So they would die right where they lay and provide nutrients to the soil. And that process was what helped to build up that soil even before you started planting the bananas and other stuff. And were they able, like you're saying they were getting some of that stuff wherever they could get it? Like, were they able to get that, that was it like considered a waste product, I guess better people they got it from? And so, like, I know I have chickens and they obviously produce like manure and I'll put some of it in my, like, vegetables so they grow, but I'll just give it to anyone else who wants it. Is that a thing that they were able to do there? Yeah, I think people are donated. And I mean, I would assume at least in Trinidad. I don't know what the case is in Barbados, but in Trinidad, they are Bush trucks which pass every once in a while to collect. Whatever, you know, branches and cut grass and whatever people have put out. From the yard we'll go whatever. So I would assume that they would have asked the Bush truck people to, you know, bring some of that stuff to the site to help out because a lot of people, you know, they just put that in front of the yard waiting for the Bush truck to pass. And so a lot of very good potential sources of like. Ecosystem building, that sort of that so-called waste that really resources gets wasted when it can really soothe a lot of these kinds of projects. Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah, yeah. Something to like. I don't know if you ever read UN documents about, like, stopping climate change. Like they always have a giant section about circular, about circular economy stuff and about sort of. I mean basically doing this stuff and then nothing ever happens and no one ever does it. And so yeah, it's it's really cool that. Like this is the place where those ideas which like. Or if if there's if if we are going to survive as a species with like most of us alive and doing well, we're going to have to do. Sexy getting implemented? Yeah, I'm, I'm kind of reminded just on this sort of topic of I was in Rwanda in like February of 2020. And one of the things that really struck me with this system of agriculture that they've devised, where they have paddies, that they grow rice right, like submerged. And then in there there are living fish and then above them there are like little hutches with rabbits, and I'm so like the rabbit. And the newer helps to fertilize what's growing beneath. And then, like, it's just kind of circular thing where I think they can feed some of the things that they cut off the the the plants to the rabbits. And it's sort of like, and the fish will help keep the water clean. I think they're like filter fish. They can't quite. Yeah. Plants to keep it clean. For the fish, it was fascinating. I was like, this is amazing. Like, they're not as opposed to I grew up on a farm and like, I'm very familiar with some of the larger arable sort of growing, but like. Grains in in the UK and how you're relying on a ton of exogenous inputs, which I was just so impressed with the fact that they devised a system that didn't require those. Exactly, exactly. You really want to, of course, you right, we will have to get external sources, especially in the beginning as you're trying to establish the system, but the aim is really to have the system continuously establishing itself and expanding itself and maintaining itself. Would it be a system that works mostly? Uh, with like a plant based food stuffs. I guess that seems generally to be more sustainable. Yeah, absolutely. I I mean. Man, yeah. It's a really powerful source of of fertilizer. And I think you can keep animals without, you know, eating them. Or using them anyway if you just want to let you know. Because they make good companions and stuff as well. Oh yeah, that's totally but yeah, yeah, I would say a a plant focus system could definitely but and to sort of rhyme or align with principle too, which said that each element performs multiple functions. It's also important to have each function supported by multiple elements, right? So you don't want to get all your food from one source, you want to have a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars. I mean, having all your food coming from one source is basically. What we do now with, you know, these monocultures, with these, this industrial farming that has these fields and fields and fields that are so susceptible to pests and disease that we have to basically drench them with chemicals just to. A lot of to survive because and the same guy who did the course, he explains it me like this, he said that. When there's a system in nature. And it's not. In balance. They basically send out a signal saying 8 this is not in balance, come and fix it. And so these so-called pests, these bugs and stuff, they come to these. Abberations these freaks of nature, these massive fields of crops. And. Recognizing that this is not sustainable. Umm. Establishment and the landscape. They try to try to optimize, right? He calls them, he doesn't call them pests, he calls them optimizers. So if you have for example. Excessive amount of a certain pest in your system. Something's wrong with that system because those so-called pests, those optimizers, are only able to flood your system because they don't have the mechanic. Your system doesn't have the mechanisms in place to keep them in check, so you don't have the fauna, the larger insects and stuff in your system that will keep those pests in check. There's an imbalance in place, and that's something that needs to be rectified, and they're different ways to rectify. Pay on this situation. Another example, and this isn't from the pump coach guy from culture course. Another example was the this I believe someone was talking about the presence of wolves in some of the parks in in the US and how reintroducing those wolves did so much to regulate the rest of the ecosystem, the ripple effects that had on the rest of the ecosystem. Stabilizing the deer populations and stabilizing the Beaver populations and stabilizing all these other different plants and animal species that you would think are not even connected to the wolves, but still their presence played a significant role in maintaining that balance. Yeah, go, go. Watch how wolves change rivers. It's literally 5 minutes and it rules. Yeah, it's amazing. It's just like the concept of rewilding. Is that what, would that be a similar thing? Yeah, yeah. Rewilding is basically. It's permaculture tends to be more focused on sustaining human communities. In you know. In a balance with. The rest of the natural world, whereas rewilding is more focused on helping to rebuild. Ecosystems. Outside of the human sphere. He says I understand it. Yeah, yeah, that makes no sense to me. So with principle 3, which is 3 or three, it was that each function should be supported by multiple elements. You would want to get all your food from one source. You want just want to grow like rows and rows of trees or rows and rows of corn. You want to grow a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars and all these different. Species and variations that would make up like an actual forest. The Food Forest is a approach that's a lot of permaculturists would advocate, and within a food forest you would have, I believe, 7. Media groups. This is sort of seven levels that create a sort of a beneficial system. On the top layer you have the canopy which consists of the large fruits and nut trees. They provide them with seed and they keep the whole area. They'll climb into the area stable. On that second layer you're going to have the low tree layer, which has the dwarf fruit trees. The smaller fruit trees would fall under the canopy. On the third layer you would have the shrub layer where you'd grow, you know your berries and other small you know plants, and below that you have the hibiscus layer where you would grow different hoops and. Spices and things like that. And then below that you have your root vegetables and below that you have, well, you can't really go below the root vegetables, but next to those red vegetables you would want to grow your soil surface crops, your ground cover. Like they're sitting running beans and stuff. That would help to create a ground cover which protects the soil and prevents the establishment of undesirable plants, which we call weeds. I didn't. Finally, the seventh layer is the vertical layer, which consists of the climbers and vines that would establish themselves on the low tree layer on the canopy. So if you have that sort of food forest system in place with all those seven layers, you're not getting each function supported by 1. Other months getting supported by many elements. The same goes for water. You don't want to get all your water source coming from, just. Like the pipes and whatever water the government sends you, you want to have water coming from the rain. If possible, you might want to tap into the water table, or you might want to, depending on your situation. You might have a stream, or you might be on a hill, in which case you'd have water flowing down and you want to find ways to trap that water. And to consume that water so that it's distributed throughout your system, unlike a regular home garden. Part of the aim of a permaculture system is that it just like in nature, it waters itself, it takes care of itself. And so you're going to have to want, you're going to want to have all sorts of different sources of water elements in place to provide that water. Same goes for energy. You would want to get all the energy from one source. You want to combine, you know, human power, animal power, hydroelectricity if possible, solar power if possible. Basically, redundancy is very important, redundancy is very important, and I'll see it again for emphasis. Redundancy is very important. The next principle principle #4 is that you want to approach permaculture with energy efficiency in mind. Particularly your own energy. So on the more practical side of things, if you you might want to do what's my mental my guide had done, which was a zone and sector analysis. So basically you draw like a map of your space. Your old line, your daily patterns and the energies that come from outside your site, like wind and rain and flood and fire and pollution and noise and smells and all those different things. You want to look at how you move through your space, or look at how the sunshine passes over your space. You look at the view. And you want to try to harness those good energies, whether it be the rain or. Wind or whatever it may be the sun and plant accordingly. You don't want to have sun sensitive plans on like the South side of your property of your space wherever the spaces. And you wouldn't want to have plans that need a lot of sun in the shade. You also want to divvy up your space. Once you've, you know, done that map of your face, you want to get up into zones. So I first soon I'll be your immediate living space. The second zone would have an intensive kitchen garden, so I feel this soon. Would be a place of consumption and processing of whatever it is that your system is producing. It doesn't necessarily have to be a house, it could be. A community kitchen, or it can be. Campus club host I don't know. It could be any space that you're using for consumption and process it. The next one is going to be intensive kitchen garden. It's a place where you would want to grow the plants that cycle through more quickly the. Spices and the UBS and the different things that you would use on a regular basis. The next zone. Would want to have its focus on local. Support, community support and surplus. So this zone, the first song is actually technically zone 0, the second zone is zone one and Zone 2, which is that sort of local support space at Orchard is we want to grow your fruit trees, your ornamentals. They want to raise raise animals there, and you basically want it to be a space where you can provide provide for local community, separate and apart from your own produce. Zone 3 would also have the emphasis on production. Zone three of her to be the space where you have your main crops, the crops you spend a lot of time focusing on. Zone 4 would also have a lot of. Investment in. Establishing. A sustainable sort of life cycle for more long term plans and. Zone 5 would be a space of wilderness of. Forest of wildlife corridors. That allow. Species of rewilding even within your mall constructed site. Having your systems split into zones. Helps you to. Reduce the amount of work that you put in, the amount of resources used, the amount of means and unseal need. And it also helps you to boost your yields and to recycle resources most effectively. The 5th principle is. The use of biological resources, natural insecticides, timber. Nitrogen fixes. Whatever the case may be, you want to be using the systems that have evolved to fulfill those rules to fulfill those rules. You, me or me not be afraid of sitting creatures. I myself personally, I don't like frogs or toads, or really I don't like most animals personally. I just don't vibe with them. However, I recognize the importance, right? So frogs and bats and snakes, all of these creatures help to provide like a stable system, whether it be sneaks, dealing with rats or bats, dealing with insects or frogs. Also dealing with insects. You might also want to use companion. Planting as well, like the three sisters method, which is a combination of beans, corn, and God, was the third one, again with squashes, right, and squash, and that would help to establish you know itself and maintain itself. It's sort of like a microcosm of the broader public culture concept, and one that has been in practice hundreds of years. The 6th principle. Is the practice of energy cycling. Chopping sunlight through. Greenhouses? Making the most used basically out of the energy that flows through your system before it leaves your system. Recycling the organic matter that passes through system so that produces no real waste. When I was at this site. At the Permaculture Forest, I witnessed a. Compost toilet for the first time and was immediately grossed out by the concept. However, upon. Being blown away by the product of those compost toilets, I changed my tune very quickly and although I would not, I probably would not use a compost toilet on a regular basis. I think it has some benefit because we're flushing away some some real. Power some real nutritious stuff. Of course, there are risks associated with using human manure, but the process that he had put in place involved using human waste. And then for every certain amount of human waste, you would dump sawdust on top of it. And that sawdust helps to deal with the smell. So much so that I actually didn't smell anything when I opened up those those compost toilets. But it also helps to create that balance between the carbon and the nitrogen. That is required for compost, and so after that, after a tub has been filled, a compost toilet tub has been filled, he seals it up, leaves it for a year to break down, and by the time it comes out it's just like regular soil. However, of course, safety precautions. I believe he only uses it for his orchards, so only like fruit trees and other kinds of trees. I spend a lot of time so far discussing these sort of larger systems. Yeah, you know, I'm basically assuming you have several acres of land like this guy does. I don't have several echos of land. I don't have an inch of land. And I feel like a lot of people listening don't. So there are elements that you can incorporate on the smaller scale, such as group boxes. You can have deep litter beds. You can have. Aquaculture systems. And that's actually one of the things that he chooses to stablished. Which is like a series of aquaculture systems. It's actually one of the main focuses of his project to this tea. But I was quite surprised as to the yield that could be produced from something as simple as a couple pipes put together with some tomato plants growing out of it. So, I mean, don't underestimate yourself or there's peace available to you because. It might not be able to plant a whole forest, but you can. Do a little something. Coming back to the food forest concept, the 8th principle is the use of natural plant succession and stacking. You wanna group plans together that would give a continual production over time and both the short term and long term. And like I established, you want to have those layers in place, the roots, the vines, the trees, etcetera. The 9th principle encourages diversity, encourages polyculture. Which is something that I'm sure you have picked up on by now. The 10th principle is increasing the. Edge within a system by creating unique niches. That. Allow for the more. Rare, the more vulnerable. Corners of life to sustain themselves. And I think that's something that a lot of permaculturists do in terms of establishing their own systems. They have like a special focus or certain passion project for certain species that they just love and want to see flourish. And so they create these niches within their systems that allow. Allow for those creatures to flourish, principally 11. Employers that you observe natural patterns. Nietzsche rarely goes in a straight line. And. You may want to make. That pattern or the be spirals or weaves or branches, whether it be patterns overtime, from you know, the week to the month of the year to repeating patterns in the weather or the seasons. You want to be observing these patterns and adjusting your system continually. The early parts of establishing a permaculture system is. Certainly the most difficult part, but even 5 to 10 years down the line when the system is more established, more self-sustaining, you still want to be. Playing that role of tweaking it as you go along, and I think that's something that more people need to recognize about humanity. We didn't just spring on to hear like some sort of alien parasite leeching off of the youth, right? We, just like every other animal, like every other creature on this planet, have a role to play in the ecosystems we inhabit. Unfortunately, a lot of that activity has been destructive because of how our social economic system has been structured. That's something we offer role in changing. Parts of that. Is recognizing. That. We are stewards, so we we we can be good stewards. We can help to facilitate the flourishing of life. We don't have to be grim Reapers. Upon the systems that we are apart of. And so even as you're late couldn't quote in these long term projects 20 years, 30 years, you're still going to be tweaking and cultivating and hopefully expanding these systems over time. Principal 12 reminds us we got to pay attention to the scale of these systems to long term of these systems recognizing that this is something you want to establish. Generations and finally, principal #13 is B. Positive. Experiment, small, learning from your mistakes. Scale up, bringing more people. Get involved. Get more of your community, of your social circle, of your family, of your affinity group, of whatever the kid is going to be. Get more people involved in imagining. This complex, beautiful, revolutionary project we have a long way to go. But a lot of progress could be made in a short space of time and a lot of projects already going on with this ended mind. I would suggest just going online really and just searching for the different culture projects happening around the world, whether it be the food forests that Jeff, Loretta and is working to establish in Morocco or the permaculture public systems that people are putting in place in Australia and. Or the. Greening the Sahara projects in. The Sahel region across Africa. Or the many small scale projects taking place and large scale projects taking place across the Americas. There's a lot of people putting in this work and there's a large community. Umm. Willing and able to support as you hopefully embark on this journey. That's about it for me. Yeah. That's that's fascinating. And I'm really interested in this stuff. I think, yeah, it's it's massively missing in our discussion about, like, I don't know how to phrase this rightly, but like making a better world just to give it a really broad sort of phrasing. And when we often think about, like, political discourse and when we think about political systems but without food systems, we we really like it. A hierarchy of needs is not satisfied, right? And I think the folks listening can make a really positive change really, really quickly and in their own lives and spaces if they sort of spend some time with this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And it's cool. I think an important too, to reference it like so much of this, like, we're like the person you named this star whose name, I'm sorry, I've forgotten, but like, I think, yeah, it's important to reference that. Like, these are indigenous ways of knowing and doing and being and living. And like you said, they've existed for millennia and like. Going back to that is good as part of a larger sort of way of respecting indigenous cultures and land rights and all the other things we need to do 100%. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter a bonus code. Gabian and place your first wager risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 1-888-532-3500. Piece of the planet I go by the name of Charlemagne the God. And this summer I'm bringing my show back to Comedy Central with a new title and a new podcast. It's called hell of a week. But don't worry, every Friday I'll be keeping that same, calling out the BS energy. So if the news is terrorizing your timeline and causing your anxiety to rise high in gas prices, don't worry, we got you. You could chase down all the crazy stories of the week with some laughs and thought provoking conversation that the Supreme Court want to abort the Constitution. We'll talk about it this Congress. Gonna replace the bald eagle with an AR15. We'll talk about it with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the OJ trial for white people. We'll talk about it and I'm bringing on some of the biggest names in comedy, politics and entertainment to talk about it with me. Plus, catch all the extended interviews, bonus scenes, and filthy language that has to get bleeped out for TV because I hear that Doctor Fauci has a bit of a potty mouth. So be sure to listen to hell of a week with charlamagne the God on the iHeartRadio app, the Black Effect podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of family secrets. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. Since the pod launched three years ago, I've been asked many times, where do you find your guests? My answer everywhere. And we don't just find them. They find us. They find one another, and perhaps most strikingly, they find you. With over 25 million downloads, the importance of both telling and. Hearing secrets is apparent. It turns out. So many of us can relate, and I am so excited to share 10 astonishing news stories with you. Stories of family secrets that emerge from dark, hidden places, as they so often must. Inside every secret is a truth, and you know what they say. The truth will set us free. Listen and subscribe to family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. It could happen. Here is a podcast that you're listening to. And, you know, mostly we talk about problems that you should be aware of. Sometimes we talk about solutions. And today we're kind of going to talk about a solution. Today is one of our famed good news episodes. So everybody, everybody celebrate and also give your name for the folks at home. Yay. Name James? Yay, I'm gayer. Yay, I'm Chris. Wonderful guys. That was perfect. That was that was completely natural, just just like we practiced. So the thing that the thing that is noteworthy and the thing that we're celebrating and also explaining today is that this summer we we're recording this what, like a day into September, 2 days into September. So we are, we are, yeah. What it's September 1st, so we have officially gotten through the summer without a right wing rally in Portland that degenerates into a gigantic brawl. This is the first year that has happened since 2017. So starting in 2017, Patriot Prayer and the Proud boys and other affiliated groups would very regularly and they would do it throughout the year, but particularly during the summers hold protests and marches and these all had different themes they were. The Second Amendment rallies, rally against Marxism, rally in support of the ******* cops, the hymn 2 rally. All sorts of stupid, stupid ******* names. But the main, the main purpose of them all was so that there would be gigantic fist fights between, you know, proud boys and patriot prayer brawlers and anti fascists. That was the reason to hold these events, and they got increasingly gnarly and increasingly violent until everything culminated in the summer of 2020 and this massive Trump caravan through the city with like thousands of trucks. People shooting paintballs and spraying Mace and throwing **** off the back of trucks, and then a patriot prayer member named Aaron Danielson got his *** shot to death by an anti fascist during a somewhat unclear altercation outside of a parking garage. What I can say is that everyone involved was heavily armed. And yeah, after that, uh, there were some more very ugly fights, but an increasing like thing that happened was that there would be gunfire at these protests. And the next year, at an anniversary ******* fistfight thing, a right wing demonstrator fired into a crowd of anti fascists in downtown Fort Portland who returned fire and drove him off. He was arrested. A bunch of there was a big stupid fight at a Kmart in another part of town the same day at abandoned Kmart parking lot that held a massive brawl. And several of them got several of the proud boy types, got real nasty charges from that one after the police, as they generally did, chose not to take any kind of action. And then, you know, things kind of petered out and nothing, there have not been any right wing rallies since there was one mass shooting attack on a weekly racial justice protest in Portland. Earlier this year, where a fascist fired into a crowd of women who were doing corking duty, he killed one woman and he wounded four other people. And. Yeah, uh. He was taken down, shot twice in the hip by a protester who was armed security for that March. And after that there hasn't really been anything. And this is the interesting one of the things that's there's a number of things that are interesting here, but one of them is that this has occurred while proud boy chapters are recording record recruitment. There's more new chapters of the proud boys than there were prior to January 6th, and there have been at least 200 something right wing gatherings around the country with like proud boys and other. Related groups and attendance since January 6th. So nationwide, the kind of rallies that Portland's been saying since 2017 got more common and they didn't happen at all in Portland this year. And that's what we're here to talk about today. I think now there's a couple of things. That are have contributed to the current state of affairs, which I think broadly can be described as the right is kind of scared to do big events in Portland. There have been a couple of like sputtering attempts they drove through town on their way to Washington real quickly as part of this caravan once, but they didn't go through downtown again. It wasn't like one guy did fire at people on a bridge with a handgun, which on a bridge with a handgun, which the police did nothing about, but they're not willing to like hang around. I think there's a few reasons why. They've been scared off #1 they keep getting shot. UM, that has happened several Times Now, #2 the physical resistance to them has been gnarlier as if the fights people have gotten smarter about how they do some aspects of the fighting involving like a lot of property, like spraying paint on people's fancy body armor and **** which is expensive. And then after five years of ignoring it, the state has actually started charging right wing brawlers with felonies, which? Has scared, I think a lot of them off. And yeah, so that's that's kind of where we are now. And I think one of the things people should be paying attention to is what Portland had to do and and both how long it took, but also like what kind of things were involved to actually get to this point. Because other folks are going to need to be willing to do some of the **** people had to do in Portland for years, which includes like ******* strapping on gear and going out to confront these people in the street. Yeah, I think it's really interesting because I just. I know you've written a piece about this for new lines, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be up by the time this this runs. Cool. Yeah, I just read it. It was really good. Reminds me of like when we talk about anti fascism historically, right, we we sort of talk about the high points a lot, and the one that at least I see most people going back to is the battle of Cable St. In London in 1936, which people were probably, I know you've had it in ******** episodes before. Yes. And it's it's very similar thing, right? Like it's a broad *********** coalition of people who are like, we will not let you do this **** in our space and we will physically ******* stop you. And if the police try and protect you, we will stop them doing that as well. There's incidence between most of these fascists and anti fascists, like throughout the 30s and a lot later in British history, but it's a very similar kind of playbook, I guess, right? It's like physical force opposition to fascist gatherings, like not letting them feel safe in your space. Yeah, not letting them feel safe and not letting them go unopposed. Because I mean one of the things that was kind of repeatedly a factor in Portland is that when the anti fascists outnumbered the right from the start and significantly there was a lot less violence on, on the days when that happened. And so it wasn't always a matter of people needing to show up to literally fight. There are times when like a show of force can work. I think a good example of that in recent times and in Texas and the DFW area obviously is a hot point. Four different right wing groups, including the Proud Boys harassing LGBT events, stuff like Drag queen story hours and that sort of thing. And members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club who we've had on the show and and other affiliated groups have been showing up armed in an armor, most recently to protect like a drag brunch that was being counter protested. And you can see like photos of like there's a ******* proud boy with a bat with ******* barbed wire wrapped around it, just saying and they're there and in this like you don't show up with the bat. Wrapped in barbed wire. Unless you're hoping you're going to bash somebody's ******* head in and that guy wound up standing off at the sideline all day long because a bunch of people were there with rifles, I think that guy may not legally be allowed to possess firearms. Yes, I also suspect that guy has a felony record because he also had a night stick. And like several other like mole ninja, like meme tier weapons it was. Yeah, yeah, those say to me and look if I'm if I'm going to be totally fair meme to your weapons. No, no side in this fight. Because for a long time in Portland, there was an individual who would bring a pair of samurai swords every one of those demonstrations, and we're we are talking gas station grade samurai. Yeah. Did they have the, the oil slick effect on them? They must have. They must have. No, he never drew his blades because of course, then he would have had they would have had to taste blood. That's the rule. Yeah, that's illegal. Yeah. Ramification there. Yeah. Also, it's impossible to take the swords out when you have them mounted on your back. Possible, literally possible to take this sort out the tactical back scratch. It's an offensive position, but no, I think it is worth talking about the types of other cities where there have been a sizable amount of far right protests this summer, especially targeted at queer people, and how Portland is one of the cities where that did not happen. I mean we've seen a lot of stuff in Dallas and the Umm Fork people have been doing a pretty good job and both denying the right. Ground to game, but also denying them any of their, like, fight footage that they love to gather. Yeah, yeah. They've they've done a really good job at balancing that aspect, which is very, very challenging. It's very challenging and it takes a lot of discipline. And obviously when we think kind of tactically about what guns mean in this situation like this, they're tools that have upside. The downside of guns is that if things go wrong and everybody's strapped, the potential is for things to go very ******* wrong indeed. The upside is that when you have a line of people. With rifles, the dudes with knives and batons and **** are a hell of a lot less likely to want to start a ******* fight, because it's the the consequences are immediately obvious. You could look at it as kind of like the protest equivalent of of mutually assured destruction of sort of the old Internet, like of of how the US and the Soviet Union managed nuclear tensions. But it it it has been very effective in Dallas for that reason. And I think it's, I think the fact that protests became increasingly. Armed in Portland, and also that there are, by my count, at least three cases of fascists. Being run off or injured or killed by protesters with firearms, that is part of why they they didn't want to do that **** so much anymore. I think that part's important, too, because like, I I think there was a real danger after Rittenhouse that right wing protesters were going to see this and just be like, no, we could just shoot these people, right. Because, you know, you have a situation where suddenly it becomes very clear that the state is not going to prosecute people if, like right wing protesters for shooting people. But, you know, OK, if if the, if the deterrence is not to say, if the difference is if you wanted to get into a gunfight, you're going to lose and get shot. Like that, that I think has been extremely effective in a lot of ways. Yeah, earlier sort of hadn't. I think it's probably worth knowing as well that, like, where it's been effective, it's been effective because it's been organised. And like, I don't wanna use the word discipline because maybe discipline implies the authority that that doesn't exist. But like, there's been some kind of collective restraint in agreement on rules of engagement and stuff. Which, because I've also seen folks try to do this unilaterally, that does not ******* end well. Like, if you're, if you're the one person I've been carrying it expecting the state where that's not legal, like you're just a one person going to prison. Yeah. And obviously, open carry protests only work in states where that can be done legally. Yeah, doing that in Texas is different than doing that in California. Yeah, that's what I'm here to tell you. But yeah, I think it's a, it's a force multiplier, right? Like these guys have. I think especially people on the right have like absorbed so much like of this sort of like there are types of mail as delineated by the Greek alphabet ******** and they've convinced themselves that they are alphas and that they can win a fight. No, James, I've seen more sigmas than Alphas at pro. So many sigmas. I've seen a few epsilons. Man, I didn't know that's a type of mail. I met a real Sigma at an anti mask protest in 2020 who brought his AR and a 60 round drum and bragged that he had 500 rounds loaded into magazines as he as he protested masks in front of the state capital. And it was like the people he was protesting were specifically like about a dozen nurses who were standing around with things like you got. You need those 500 bullets for those unarmed nurses wearing signs telling you to mask. He's ready for when the **** hits the fan. Robert, no. Yeah, I'm guessing. Ohh, I I don't believe I saw a Med kit. I used to try to make a note of it. I will say the right. In the last year I've noticed more Med kits and pictures that I've seen. So good. Good I guess. Yeah. But yeah, like if you are a person who's not like physically enormous or like like I said, these guys have convinced themselves that like, they are somehow like top tier brawlers, even though we've seen the Patriot front videos and they're very funny, like it it's like a force equalizer I guess, right? It allows people to sort of. Enter that space without having to be 500 or like, you know, massive dudes. I don't want to focus too much on specifically firearms because I think that's less important than and not that the primary lesson of Portland, which is what is necessary to stop these people from showing up, is consistent shows of force. And I think one thing that I just kind of always found intellectually interesting is that you know when you when you read about like military strategy, right? For every like guy who's actually kicking in doors. Getting into firefights in the field, you have, you know, nine or ten people behind him who are responsible for logistics, right? That's the only way a modern military works. When you don't have a logistics train set up like that, things go like they did for Russia at the start of the invasion of Ukraine, where you have like hundreds of tanks without fuel and ****. In Portland protests an average of for a large protest. I would say the average was around 1000 people. Now that's a large protest. Often they were smaller, but when you would get these big hyped for a couple of weeks the proud boys are coming to town, you'd easily get 1000 or 2000 people counter protesting and you know it would be probably 10 or 15% who were who were showing up specifically ready to kind of throw down and ready to throw down and also with some experience doing it and a much larger number who were. Some of them were there as medics. Some of them were handing out water or other beverages. They were handing out food. There were people who were there just to yell and chant with signs to like be, you know, moral support. There were people there doing transport, blocking roads, people there doing, you know, Intel and stuff, filming things, people who were there, you know, doing stuff like covering up live streamers, cameras with with bubble wrap sheets or we used to have a band full of people who dressed as bananas. Who would. Yeah, kind of, kind of try to distract and drown out the far right. There was one beautiful individual I saw a couple of times who was in Black bloc, except for they wore a kilt and they carried a pair of bagpipes. And when, like, you would get a couple of fascists approaching a protester and like, trying to get into an argument, he would walk right up and he would just start playing the bagpipe so that they couldn't. Offensive weapon? Yeah, yeah, it was beautiful. But kind of more important than the specific you do need. And I I don't wanna like distract with this. You always need a core of people who are willing and ready to get into a ******* fight when you're doing this kind of activism. But the biggest thing is that people show up consistently. And one of the things Portland had a number of different organizations like pop Mob popular Mobilization that kind of existed to organize less radical, or at least kind of. Not not necessarily less radical. Sometimes people who are just like because of whatever in their life were much less interested in the actual getting into a fight thing, but understood that the more people show up the safer it is and succeeded in ensuring that there was like a larger body of people at all of these events. And that along with more rap groups like Rose City Antifa who kind of particularly earlier in the fights was a big St presence as well as did a lot of research and then other kind of newer and often kind of smaller anti fascist collectives. That would organize people to straight up fight. It was, it was this mix of all of that that allowed it to be that whenever they showed up there was always a group confronting them and it was nearly always larger. And it got to the point at the height of 2020, you know, there was this right wing protest before hand. Nobody quite knew how bad it was going to be. Garrison, you and I got there right as things were starting and it was the the anti fascists were outnumbered kind of at the beginning of the day and things. Really violent. Very quickly. Within an hour or two though about somewhere around 1000 people had showed up on the anti fascist side and were organized and fighting was a very impressive response time. Yeah, and I think it is. It's the actual, it's the. I mean, people use the word like the term diversity of tactics often just to kind of defend actions that are more radical. Yeah, there's the there's the other side of diversity of tactics, which is pulling in all of the background support that creates the the sustainability for more radical actions like showing up and actually being a frontliner to get into fights with proud boys. Then there's all of the other stuff, like whether that's like medics, other support teams of people playing, doing like queer dance parties to push fascists out of areas. All those types of things not only make the environment more sustainable, so people can show up over a longer period of time because they don't get so burnt out because all they're doing is fighting. So I think those actions are another thing that's it's it's worth not just ignoring those and not just discrediting those, because once you have. That type of presence and people know that you're gonna that those are the types of environments that you're able to create when you're outnumbered by fascists and you need to call and need to need to put out a call for support. If you if you have this kind of reputation that can that can help get a lot of people out very quickly and help with the that actually is like popular mobilization that right that's what that's what that actually means. So that's how you can get the anti fascist side to outnumber the fascist side like we saw in 2020. Despite that not being the case. When, when, when, when it started, yeah. And I think because the main thing that ended that fight was the was the anti fascist side just moving as a massive, massive block and just pushing the fascists out of the area. Like there's as soon as the fascist line broke and you have like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in Portland streets directing the the flow of movement. You can't, you can't stop that. The the force. The force is too great and that requires there to be a large amount of people, including people who are. Not going to get into a fist fight with someone three times their size, yeah. I think another thing that that maybe it's important is that like, and it's kind of at the core of anti fascism, right? It's it's it's it's possible for people who have not just different tactics but different opinions like to create this broad based alliance and not get crossed with each other for not agreeing on everything and yeah, or at least stop fighting with. Each other long enough to drive the fascists out. Because Portland by the way, another thing we should acknowledge, the Portland anti Fascist community can be quite messy. There are a lot of different factions and disagreements and there have been a lot of arguments up to the present day. But you know, as a general rule, when the right showed up, people mobilized and and threw down against them, you know, despite the fact that it was a mix of folks who were libs and folks who were radicals and folks who were, you know. Something in between, it was. And again, I don't this was never a particularly clean process, and it didn't have to be. You know, you could point out and and if we had longer, we could point out all number of different, like flaws and shortcomings and like things that were were done that were wrong or unfair to somebody. But what was kind of more important than any of the ways in which the movement was flawed was at the end of the day, that it persisted, that it kept bringing people out and that it kept resisting and that. The right seems to have kind of blinked before the left it here, like that's what matters more than anything about Portland. People felt comfortable enough to continue to come out and it felt worthwhile enough. Yeah, but for the specifically for the anti fascist protests, they were able to create those environments that people that that families were felt totally comfortable coming out to and people felt that it actually was worthwhile like there was. It was it was worth it to take an afternoon out of your day to show up and say no. Yeah. And and if you're able to physically display. No, you can't. You can't come here. Yeah. And that was. You know, obviously when we talk about the difference between doing that against the police as opposed to the right, you know, the police have more in their current form, have like 100 a 150 have. They've had 150 years or so to dig in. You know, it's a harder target. But yeah, I, I think the fact that, Umm, I think the fact that I think one of the strengths of the movement in Portland was that as a general rule, a lot of people who had a pretty diverse set of beliefs all felt. This is a thing I can do and should do. This is worthwhile and important. These people need to be opposed in the streets and that's worth some time out of my very limited ******* free time to go do. And that that is kind of, I think the primary lesson if you want to know what other cities should take from Portland, it's the importance of developing a community like that, a Community information network like that, but also just like a community where people can all kind where. Where people feel like, yes, it is actually it is worthwhile for me to show up and participate in this, right? Like, that's the hard thing is getting across when there's, you know, a book reading at a library that the proud boys are going to show up in protest. It's it's getting getting the message out to people in the area and getting a couple of 100 folks to show up. Because if you can get 200 people to show up to something like that, there's never going to be that many ******* proud boys at the event. It's going to be 30 or 40 of them or or less. Maybe a dozen. And if you're a ******* library and 20, proud boys show up to like, cause a problem and you've got like a dozen kids inside getting rid of a book or some **** or it's a brunch. And yeah, 2030 proud boys show up. You have a huge problem. People could get really hurt. They could get ****** ** heading to their cars. They can get harassed. It's scary. If that number of Power Boy shows up in 100, a 150 people show up to counter them, then suddenly #1 all of the people who are being threatened by the fascists. Get this feeling that like, Oh my God, I'm actually supported by the community that like people are willing to come out and defend me and defend people like me and #2 the proud boys get the feeling that like, **** even even here we're even in Dallas right where we we might be outnumbered. You know, I think because a few other cities where protests have continued and where they haven't, they haven't. In Portland. I think we we've seen a decent amount of activity this year in Salem. Lot of lot and and there have been far right protests in Salem ever since 2017 as well. Yeah and the other place that because because I just because I just did a deep dive into this is there's been a lot of people from the Portland area from Vancouver. Planning to go up to Port Townsend, WA and it's been interesting talking with the people up there about and this is the first time they've really seen a large influx of people and it's it's people who don't. It's and the proud boys who are not comfortable showing up to Portland anymore. But instead they're going to drive 3 hours to go to this small town of 10,000 people. And then watching people in this, in this local area figure out how they're going to respond to this has been super intriguing. There's been a whole bunch of people, there's been affinity. Groups in the area setting up medic trainings for for queer people who live in the town. There's been meetings between bipac groups and like more like gun based queer groups about how they can mutually support each other as the far right descends on their city. And in some cases, you know there was people in certain groups who at at previous protests that's happened the past month. They did not feel comfortable going out to the front lines of this type of thing, but they were able to work with. Other organizers to set up kind of like support, kind of like support like areas and even you kind of kind of like. They described it as like a picnic that's like 1/4 mile away and it creates like a buffer zone in between people who want to go to the front lines and this whole background of people that's supporting you and it's going to help you out if you need anything. So all the various ways that you can, you can incorporate a diversity of strategies and different type of groups into. Countering something that's moving to your city now, just in interesting note, based on how much I've heard people talk about, you know, proud boys coming up from Portland and and and Vancouver, just ending up feeling they have to drive 3 hours to other cities to get, you know, their whatever, whatever they want to do. Yeah, the ideal thing is that they walk away not even beat up as much as demoralized and feeling like it was a waste of time and money. Ideally, they and their gear get covered in ******* paint or something, and they lost six hours of time on a ******* Saturday. And if that kind of happens repeatedly, maybe they'll stop, you know? Which is which is. Again, the goal is for them to. Feel like it's not worth coming out, you know, like, that's what the. Yeah. Like people, it's often said, like, you know, make racists afraid again is a statement you heard a lot, particularly after 2016, but it's a little more complicated than that. It's not purely about fear. It's also it's hopeless. You want to make them hopeless. You want to feel like, make them to feel like there's no ******* point in showing up. And that's the most valuable thing, is a victory condition that's that's above everything else is making them feel like there is no hope for their movement. I think that the most recent as as a time of recording there was there was this protest on the 15th that was a mix of like turfs and then a mix of far right people. There's this guy from Vancouver called the common sense conservative who runs a little like video blog thing that he was organizing some people to go up and I don't know, it's, it's it's there was like 30 people, lots of them from out of state who traveled up as a part of this like turf anti trans side and there was like 3. 100 to 400 people from the local area who showed up and were like, no, you're not gonna do this. And ever since then, there's been a lot of infighting between the turfs and the kind of more far right people because. It sucks. It sucks. It sucks when you have 300 people from the actual city that show up and go no and try to like physically remove you from this space. Yeah. And and I think you can sort of see mirrors of this in like the way leftist like protest work, right where it's like. It it it's it's a lot easier to hold together coalitions when you're winning, and the moment you start losing, the moments things start going wrong. Like all of the infighting comes back and you know the entire movements will just segrate. And this this works the same way on the right if you can, if you can actually beat them consistently a few times, and you can start like holding on long enough for their internal group dynamics to unravel. Like this. This is a way to beat them, yeah? Yeah, well, that's about all I had to say. Not a complicated topic. Anything else? All right. Well, well as. Yeah, anyway, go, go, go yell at a ******* Nazi. Go, go. Damage of fascists body armor by spraying them with paint from a great distance. You know, go go. I don't know, do something else? By. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter a bonus code. Gabian and place your first wager risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. 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Listen to more than a movie American me, that's part of the Michael Duda podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Your amirabad matte coverage already runs in your blood. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. Sisters of the Underground is a new scripted series about fearless women exploring the life and legacy of the Mirabal sisters, Dominican women who were brave enough to challenge decades of oppression. Together, they led their country toward a revolution against Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. Please, please help us has blood on his hands from executive producers Dania Ramirez and Eva Longoria. That's me comes the powerful retelling of this all too relevant narrative. Listen to sisters of the underground as part of Michael Toura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's kyling your written house? Oh, and and are in Argentina's Cultural Center. Yay. Remember Kyle rittenhouse? Remember Remember that night where I spent way too much time online finding that kid's name? And then he was arrested a few hours later, and then he got off after murdering those people? Remember when that happened? I do. So are you saying that you're in some way responsible for what we're going to talk about today? No, this is not on me, because this is one of the most truly cursed things that I have ever seen on the Internet that that that may has ever existed. So I I know people are just learning about this now, but I've known about this for a while because I kind of have a personal obsession with Kyle Rittenhouse for reasons that should be obvious. Uh, yeah, I've been, I've been, I've, I've known about this for a bit. I just have never had a good time to bring it up. But I guess, I guess, I guess we've now found it, which is it's Kyle in time. Yeah. So it's time to talk about these central cultural Kyle Rittenhouse, which exists in Argentina as part of. I think maybe we'll explain a little bit about, like, what the broader context of these centrus is like, what they are if people aren't familiar. And then what the **** this abomination is, is all about, right? So these exist across Latin America more or less. Also, I've seen them in Spain, the Spanish speaking world, but I think that's like a reflective thing going back to Spain. And they're like community spaces. They they they vary hugely, but I've been to different ones. They've nearly always leftist or at least progressive. And their spaces where sometimes people can go and meet, right communities can meet, sometimes they're like. True events talks. You can borrow books often, like they're associated with neighborhood movements or what we might broadly call like anarchism. But some, sometimes it's yeah, explicit, sometimes it's it's not. It's like a Community Center type thing. The closest thing we would have here would probably be like info shops, but those kind of differ based on what what kind of anarchist infoshop you're at. But yeah, they're like community gathering places. You can pick up books or whatever and. This one's a little bit, a little bit odd. Yeah, yeah, because it is very much not leftist. It claims to be Argentina's first openly rightist cultural centre, and it's ran by this guy called Jose Deadman. He is a poster, right? This is the guy who many people will have become aware of today. I've spent most of my day watching his content on the Internet. Good for you. Yeah, it's great. I love. Job. I took three days off, I went camping, and then I just re toxified my brain with this **** immediately. Yeah, and it's OK. So has the dead man, right? The reason that we are interested in him today is a because of his truly cursed posting history and B because the anti terrorist police in Argentina raided the central cultural Carla Rittenhouse, last night. I've got some audio of the raid, which they they wish. We have to we have to play this audio of the race. Yeah, yeah, there were flash bangs, there were, there were guns. There were a lot of guys in plate carriers. Daddy? Well, that's wild. That's just them. That's like the first real time anything related to Kyle Rittenhouse has faced any sort of consequence. That's right, yeah. Based Argentinian cops. Yeah. Well, again, they could only do things that are funny. That's true. And this is. And reading a Kyle Rittenhouse themed Cultural Center is funny. That is very funny. This is extremely funny. Like this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. As they go in, you're going to see some, some of not only like artistically offensive, but really offensive in every way murals. So they're really bad. Yeah they're incredibly bad that the right is not good at street art. No, I mean and this is, this is this is the real problem that they have is a sort of like strategy of like trying to mirror sort of left wing cultural spaces. Is that like as as annoying as like left wing cultural spaces are like right wing cultural spaces are like the worst thing to be and you can possibly imagine because there's nobody like every single one of these people is completely insufferable. And again let let let left wing sort of like social groups always buffered by the fact that they have an incredible number of very talented artists these guys. Like the Donald Trump with a square head is, I don't think you would describe it as as because quality artists who are responsible for the for the murals at the Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Center. Yeah, he did them himself there. There are videos. So do we want to talk about what before we talk, before talking about like why this was rated, what we first talk about like what this actually is and like why it exists? Like like where did this come from? OK, so this comes pretty much out of this. He seems to some of his earlier post about the censorship of Dragon Ball Z like Oh my God yeah, which I will not profess. I've probably it's probably Z, isn't it? It is OK, OK, alright, so I've I've given myself away as a non anime understander at the outset. I don't know why it was censored and he claims that it was. He uses a phase like Femi Bolchi a lot. Femi Bolshe, which I'm guessing is a portmanteau of feminist. Bolshevik. God, you're probably right. Yeah, yeah. So he's definitely an instant. Yes, the feminists are censoring DBZ and this means I need to start a fascist hangout spot. That's that's the journey of this. Yeah, well, more or less, I guess. It seems to really come out of the lockdown. It seems to come out of him being unemployed from March of 2020 and there's a big anti lockdown group in Argentina. Old fuel Solidaria Argentina, which he's part of and that's if you look actually it says like Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Centre and then it has forest, only Daddy written underneath. And so he that seems to be a large part of it. It it opened relatively recently. I was looking for an exact date, but I couldn't find it. But it was within the last year. Yes, it has. It has been within the year. I remember seeing something about this earlier this year. Just to recap some of the art, maybe because they didn't like to strong word paintings. Actually yeah no art. Art requires a few a few things to make it actually art. I I don't think this tough qualifies as art no. But and some of them might genuinely was unable to discern who are they supposed to be. It's really difficult like it's it's it's kind of hard to tell who Trump is and it's Trump's like this is, this is, this is, this is how this is the level of artist we are dealing with here. Yeah trap looks like someone out of Minecraft or something like his head is entirely squared. The width is equal to the height. Uh, yeah, which, but they've they've got. One of the guys I saw was this guy called Malevo. Do people know who he is? I don't know. Perhaps not. OK, this is probably one that we won't include the video of in the podcast, but so he was he went to prison because he tortured leftist as a cop in Argentina in the 70s, right? And then he escapes and in 2008, the cops come to his house to take him back, and instead of going back to Janna live TV in front of his wife and children, he shoots himself and like, they just keep rolling. They're reporters like 5 feet away and they're like, oh, he shot himself in the head. He's down. He's still. And now he's. Immortalized by that looks like a 5 year old. Those finger painting on the walls, this is this is what happens when people follow their leader. Hitler. Yeah, it's true. So there's there's other people there. There's a Javier Milei think he's called. He's like a he's a classic chudd libertarian. He's an Argentine politician. They, of course have a Confederate flag. They have banners from the Argentine Civil War. There's an Imperial Japanese flag. Next to Donald Trump, like, I'm just, I'm just looking at like the front like banner thing or like the front like mural on at the address. Oh. Horrible picture of Kyle Rittenhouse wearing a suit that it looks so funny like. It's the the. The image is just amazing. It's. God, they had they have they? OK, I will say it looks like a druid blindfolded with my left hand. Like it looks so bad. The one thing, OK, I I I think they're well, OK. They're depiction of Bolsonaro, like it's fine. It kind of captures the grotesqueness of him, but like, he's doing finger guns. Yes, your guns on with the Brazilian flag behind them. It's. Remember Remember this started with DBZ. Yeah, Rittenhouse is like giant thing has like what? What is it like the two holes, the the two black circles on his face? I don't like patch, but no, it's not. No, there's like two or three black circles on the inside mineral of Rittenhouse. It looks like he's wearing an eye patch, or like some kind of night vision optic. Maybe also as a Kyle Rittenhouse expert who spent hours combing through the clothing he was wearing. They have his hat completely wrong. They have here, like a reddish pinkish hat. And that's not the hat that he was wearing. He was wearing a tan hat with a with a white back mesh. And the hat was the reason we were able to figure out who he was because it has a little tear in the front and we were able to compare that to get an exact match onto the suspects Facebook profile. So the hat is completely wrong. So already they've they've dropped the ball here on any semblance of accuracy by drawing the completely wrong hat for this picture. It's I'm I'm insulted as someone who. Spent hours figuring out what this guy's name is. I'm, I'm insulted. Yeah, there's all kind of curse stuff. This Abascal the Vox guy from Spain, like anyone who you can think of. He's just like a culture warrior. Is depicted in finger painting style by this guy by Halsey Dubman. So he he came to the attention of the well, actually, he came to the attention of the authorities before. It will shock nobody to find that he has been sending unsolicited images of his genitalia to women for a very long time, so he's been sending out a lot of are you telling me the Dragon Ball Z incel, who started a Kyle Rittenhouse Cultural Center, has been sending out unsolicited **** ****? I wonder if ohh no. What? Maybe. OK, hold on, hold on. I I just. I think, I think I just had a revelation about this guy. Did you just crack this case wide open? Hold on, hold on. I can't wait to hear what you've come up with. I I'm on the edge of edge of my seat, I am thrilled. I on the other hand, I'm on their Facebook page, which is toxic as hell. Yeah, their face, their Facebook's pretty funny. They they they they have a video of a of woman inside. They called, yeah when the woman comes and they're like just to prove it's a woman. People say women don't come here. Like we have a woman who's offering, I think films like a like a like a 5 minute video of this woman sitting inside just so there was proof that there was a woman inside this building. They were so shocked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's very clear that like they had not been expecting it. So he's actually been to jail for gender based online. Violence. I think I figured out how this connects the Dragon Ball Z. My OK, I I'm not 100% sure about this. My guess is that this guy is like a hard line. I've never actually heard this guy's name said out loud. Vic mignogna. Like truther guy. McKenna goes like this. He was a voice actor who was on Dragon Ball Z who, like sexually harassed and assaulted like a **** ton of people. And and in 2019, like, the stuff came out and there was like a. A huge right wing backlash around him and I I really wonder if this is the ******* thing that he was mad about he because that. He was this voice actor that got cancelled because he had his voice actor got cancelled for sexually assaulting people. Yeah, well, so, so Vic tried to like the voice actor Guy tried to sue a bunch of people for defamation and got ******* absolutely owned in court. And then all of the **** that he's been doing for like decades like came out. So it it would not surprise me if this was like part of this got like, if this is part of the thing he was ******* screaming about with Dragon Ball Z being censored by the feminist Bolsheviks, the feminist Bolsheviks. That is not the worst thing I've ever said. This is the worst realization ever had in my life. Yeah, that's pretty great. Yeah. I think a large part of this Cultural Center and the kind of the stuff behind it stems out of a whole bunch of like the anti communist groups that have existed in Argentina for a long time. Yeah yeah yeah his like so all his videos, he has his backpack with like a hammer and sickle with like that. No you know, the circle and line through it and and he he he stages that everywhere with him. OK and he has like some he has like a bunch of anti communist graffiti that he he also you'll see him in his like in his Facebook profile that used to say sometimes antisocial, always anti communist and it had like the yellow and black. Little thing, yeah. And he's he's betrayed. I think the tweet that first, like, announced it betrayed them as like a libertarian ancaps, which, like they have mayhorn we're talking roho like, better dead than red. That's not a ******* ANCAP, but like these people are trying to revoke the era of violence against the left in Argentina in the 1970s, right? Like that's where they're going for here. Yeah, I I think like in in in case people are not aware of this, Argentina had a like a incredibly brutal military data show killed **** ton of people also like went around Latin America training other death squads. They had this group called the AAA, which was a basically a fascist death squad that. Sort of act as a paramilitary for other wings of the state. They killed one people. Eventually they could the government. They're one of the people involved in Operation Condor. They drop people out of helicopters. Also they yeah it was really ******* bad. And and and these anti these like anti communist, basically fascist death squads or some of them fascists. Literally fascist. Yes. Yeah. Like are like fascists are like the style of slogans and propaganda that they're using for the center is in the same vein as that they're carrying that. Addition in Argentina and I think people are familiar with the Nazis. People should also probably somewhat familiar with the I the the whole thing with tons of tons of Nazis fleeing to Argentina and Argentina being very welcoming to a whole bunch of like like like like like German Nazi like like actual like yeah, Nazi Nazis. Like like with the membership card. Nazis. Third Third Reich Nazis. Yeah. So one thing that the that he did one thing. The dead man did, or he, they just posted it as we on their Facebook page with Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. They're they're like these mothers who made this weekly protest. I think it was weekly and they wore white handkerchiefs, right. And they were like, where are our disappeared children? And they sort of mobilized maternity in this way that made it very hard for the state to crack down on them, right. Especially a state which is all about like, quote UN quote, traditional gender roles or whatever you, you want to call it. So these mothers are like held up. That is a great example of peaceful protest, of peaceful protest against dictatorship, right? Of forcing them to acknowledge their crimes. Uh, they're they're they're looked up to by a lot of people all around the world, and he and his Bros went out and vandalized a monument to them. And then posted about it on their Facebook. They pretty openly like we did this. Look at us go so generally pretty much ***** ** **** guy. He claims that the reason he was radicalized by torturous sexual abstinence, which was enforced upon him by the government with the COVID-19 lockdown. Uh-huh. So he's off. So he's claiming to be a vassel and now they didn't sell vosel. That's damn it. I haven't said this in too long. I mean, if it's first on by the government, then it is involuntary, yes. Yeah, OK. I guess. I guess that's OK. So some men choose. I'm gonna stop right here. We don't need to continue this conversation. It actually doesn't matter. No. Yeah, he was. He was unable to find intimacy with the people he wanted to and therefore decided to send them pictures of his penis instead, which then start a Cultural Center themed after Kyle Rittenhouse. That's correct. Yeah, I'm trying to think of like. I I did a lot of stuff on like the aftermath of the Rittenhouse shooting as well. We immediately saw a whole bunch of a big wave of Rittenhouse stuff in the better dead than red and anti Communist action type like memes. And I think that this very much stems out of that tradition as well as the cow Rittenhouse being this like symbol of. Here is a shining example of someone who actually put in the work to kill Communists quote UN quote communists obviously and I think that with with the whole kind of like. Anti Communist death squad framing of this that matches up with a lot of the kind of the memes that were that were circulating in the weeks after the original shooting in Kenosha. And we can see this as like a physical manifestation of that type of memetic messaging. Like this is like a it's a it's a physical version of that of course incorporating into just a larger kind of right wing populist politics you know veering on to fascism and I think that's. But specifically with like the anti Communist action and better dead than red type type memes that were using written house. That is a very a very clear kind of a Nexus point between these two things. You're like, why is someone in Argentina super into cowritten house? It's because of this. We already have this big strain of anti communist stuff inside Argentina. Kyler and House was used memetically in this way. Very easy thing for the right there to use I think. I don't know, I think. James, do you have do you have any other fun facts about this? Yeah, I do. Yeah I do. So there seems to be another guy who does most of the the speaking for them when they speak to the media. He only gives his name once as a Jew like Ju. But then he also claimed wait for it, wait for it because he claims to have Jewish ancestry as well and therefore they can't be anti-Semitic. So very troubling. Maybe I'm pronouncing that wrong, but you know, I I can't think of another way. Only two letters. So extremely troubling. One thing that I did notice, well, it's there's a whole lot of, quote UN quote, gender ideology talk, right, and a lot of cultural Marxism talk. So here's a guy who's extremely online and is parroting these kind of Ben Shapiro American right turf talking points. You can also see like what? One thing that's very funny is there appears to be a punk band called War Pigs who are selling, I think it's figurines. Like World Cup figurines perhaps, which they are selling. Mundial is a word he used and there they seem to be basically pretending to be him online, selling these figurines, pretending they're fundraising for his center. But then they're obviously using the money for their anti fascist efforts. That is incredibly bad. Yeah, shout out to them war pigs. Look him up. Yeah, they yeah, give him some money if you can't buy figurines. So funny. Yeah, it gets so ******* mad about it. He made so many videos about it. And then his parents were like, he talks about them as heroes of the Marxist movement and like leftists and like revolutionaries. So he's 38 now. So his parents will have been young, in the 70s perhaps, but certainly like around in that. In their teens and 20s. And he he talks about like, how his parents were cruel to him and how their supposed Marxists, like, bullied him and how he. He says at one point he has Tourette's and they forced him to do treatments which he claims curtailed his opportunities to meet women. But he only mentioned this once and he he sort of goes off on these weird diversions. Yeah, it's a lot of very basic kind of online incel type stuff. I I wanted to talk a little bit about the sort of trans angle on this too, because I think. So one of the things I think like is not very well known that at some point I will do a full episode on what I find when I'm able to like, get enough stuff together and find people who are like really qualified to talk about it. But Argentina has had one of the world's most powerful trans movements for a long time. And I mean they have stuff there that like, like there, there's there, there is a law that passed. I think. Last year that that like that they have like a hiring quota. So all for public service jobs, there's a 1% hiring quota of people who have to be trans. Like, really? Yeah, they like they they they have stuff that's in Argentina is opposing this **** but like, it doesn't. I don't know. They're kind of losing that battle insofar as like, yeah, you know, people, people have done a really, really good job and fought really, really desperate and sort of horrible battles for decades. But yeah, they're they're they're sort of bearing fruit in really cool ways. Respect. Nice, good job. And So what else do is bearing fruit? Is his posting because he has been? Raided by I I would urge you to watch this video. I'll tweet it so people could find it there as well, but it's a metric **** ton of armed police and and the the reason they're reading him is because he's made like a public threat. Basically he made decisions about 11 1/2 minute video. Notably he says our total to support to the Brazilian hero who tried to create justice for all Argentinians and goes on to talk about this. This is with reference to the assassination attempt that we saw what last week? Yes, so, so, so last week this, this fascist tried to assassinate the Vice President of Argentina. And we're going to get more into this in our upcoming week of content titled Assassination Week, Assassination Week, Assassination Week, upcoming. We're gonna be a whole week of whole week of episodes about assassinations. But in brief, this, this, this happened. And then the people at the Cultural Center made this live stream celebrating the attack and calling the perpetrator. Argentina's Brazilian hero yes, it it it really was just. He also liked tells people to rise up and stuff, like there's some very clear calls to action in there. In the raid they found a mortar shell. And 184 millimetre mortar shell, a drone, and they they've confiscated a bunch of hard drive, which I I do not envy the person who has to go through his phones and hard drives. Lot of **** **** in there. They're gonna see some bowls, they're going to see some pain, but hopefully that person can get some therapy. And this isn't the first, like this isn't the first time that the state has tried to come after them. They actually there were, there were discussions about like denying the crimes. Permitted under the dictatorship. Right. And how he could be prosecuted for that, because that was the thing that they were very clearly doing. So it seemed like he'd kind of been in the crosshairs of progressive legislators in Argentina for a while. And then he went and made this batshit crazy video where he makes calls to violence. He says the left can't ask for nonviolence. He says the left doesn't respect democracy, and he calls the vice president a rat and a murderer and says that it's just a shame that she wasn't blown up. And it's only because the weapon malfunctioned that this hero didn't get to do justice for all Argentines. It should have been the Shinzo Abe guy. Like, I'm sorry. Yeah, look, like he's just he's just built different. Yeah, he's he's built different because he got sabotaged by all of his esoteric Nazism, which we will get more into in the upcoming assassination week. Yep. We just got to record for theme music and then we'll be there. Music, yes. Cut together footage of all of the great assassination. This is going to be half an hour constant assassination college. Yeah. These guys are extremely cursed. There's more curse stuff that they've done that like we probably shouldn't go into, I don't think. Because like I think you could just understand this is a a lonely incel guy who's been on the Internet too much, become more and more radicalized and like, surrounded himself with people who agree and. It's been pretty funny to watch people prank him for a while, like scrolling down their Facebook page. It's very funny to see people consistently like he doesn't seem to be an intellectual giant, but it's also worrying. And obviously he's advocating for violence against people already marginalized. Whenever someone starts taking things that are online out into the physical world, like making basically a monument, like a physical place, it's always concerning. It's always, it's always one of the big. Big red flags. Yeah. And and and I think, like, specifically the fact that he had both a mortar shell and a drone is incredibly alarming. How you don't say, yeah, I just want to say I just want to put that on the record for a second. Yeah, if he'd posted a little bit less, he could have made it into assassination week, but here we are. Cucked by your own posting a tale. A tale as old as time? Yeah, if he stuck to tradition and not posted him, they did also. I just want to know to sell second hand clothes at the center. I don't know why I I don't know what they were going for there, but they did that. They also sell coffee. Really? Yeah. Well, in Argentina and you want some second hand clothes and coffee, I can tell you where not to go. Not don't go to this place because there's odds are you're going to get raided by police when you're there. Yeah, I don't think there's much to displace left now. I think they looks like the door has not recovered from their entry, judging by the fact that they've taped a bin bag over it. In the photos here. Yeah, hopefully someone can squat this place, maybe the war pigs can get it. And just a collection of figurines there that would be based that'd be so sick. Yep, they need money. Just let us know. We'll do a fundraiser. So I hope this is a good lesson in knowing when posting goes too far. Yeah, try try to keep your cringe online if you're going to do it because you don't want to be this guy. No, you certainly do not want to be this guy complaining about Dragon Ball Z and posting that results in the police rating Your Kyle Rittenhouse steamed hangout spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, truly. One of the waiters pivots from online to the streets that I've ever seen this dude probably should have been a long time ago. They're probably worth noting that, like, gender based violence is like the common denominator for people who do other terrible **** and this is not not an example of that. Yeah, who who could have thought that the raging incel misogynist would also have bad politics to keep doing? Femi ********. You have our full support. Indeed. Well, that is it for us today to tune in next week or I think next week, right? Sometime next week, or maybe the week after for our upcoming week of episodes titled Assassination Week. Yep, it's going to be great. Of course not. Not endorsing any political violence or sessions of any kind. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter a bonus code champion. Place your first wager risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. 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Hey, it's Chuck Wicks from love country. Talk to Chuck where we bring you what's really happening in the country music family. We also if you love country, here's the deal. If you love country music, you can be on the podcast. So if you're a fan, got your music, well you can call in anytime you like. I want to talk about this. Hulk Hogan called in season one. He's like Chuck the hulkster. I love your podcast. I mean Jason Aldean, Jimmy Allen, Carly Pierce, Lauren Elena, so many huge stars have been on love country. Talk to Chuck. Season 2 is going to get even better, going to have the same big giant huge stars. But I think it's time. Bring some people in the studio right off the street. You love country music? Fine, come talk to Chuck. That's how cool we are. I'm just saying it. I'm saying it out loud. Listen to new episodes of love Country. Talk to Chuck every Monday and Thursday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Ah, 911 is in a couple of days. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen here, a podcast about 911. Well, as as Garrison said in the intro that we're not using, it's about things falling apart. And boy did that happen on 222 things that fell apart. Yeah. So this was originally going to be a slightly cruder episode than it wound up being, but I'm, I'm just going to. I'm just going to delve into the script. And Chris Garrison, you guys just buckle in because the reason I have you both as guests on this is that you are both too young to remember 9. That's not true. I remember, I remember why. I remember you like 4. Hope so. Yeah, it was four. But I I remember my mom like, so she she was trying to explain the Pentagon, right. And so she has like a coaster on the ground and she's making an airplane with her hand. Is this going into anyway? So as I said, neither of you properly remember 911. I I don't remember 911. I I was at the age where every like moment of it is burnt into my into my brain, as is the reaction. So I wanted you both on this because we're going to talk. About how 911 kind of became a cult and how to maybe how to maybe deal with that. And then we'll be chatting about Glenn Beck's 912 project, which is something I'm sure neither of you are very familiar with now. In its sixth season, the popular cartoon South Park ran an episode in which Jared Fogle, who was at that point just a subway spokesman and not a convicted child molester, came to town and announced the start of a new program to give everyone aids now. He was talking about dietitians and personal trainers to help people lose weight, but everybody heard aids, the disease which led to wacky hijinks. That's the episode. It ends when everyone realizes they've misunderstood Fogel and they all laugh. This leads them to realize that AIDS is finally funny because things that are tragic become funny exactly 22.3 years after they occur. That's the joke in the episode and went on to become a minor little Internet joke that like, you know, once you hit that 22 year point you can laugh about something tragic we are now at like. 21 years in change since September 11th, 2001, and I think, if we're all honest, most of us can admit that we've laughed at a lot of 911 jokes. We're recording this the day the Queen died and people are like, photoshopping her face to be the twin towers, and it's so good. It's quite a time on the old Internet now. I think the first, I think the hardest at least that I ever laughed at a 911 joke. I'm sure it's not the first time was this picture of Trump Tower that was posted to Twitter, like right after he got inaugurated with the text George Bush do Ya Thang. Still an excellent 911 joke. Now, the first person with any kind of platform to make a 911 joke was the recently deceased comedian Gilbert Gottfried. On September 29th, 2001, he took part in a roast of Hugh Hefner at the New York Friars Club. And I'm going to play you the audio of that right now. I have to catch a flight to California. I can't get a direct flight. They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first. Harry came. Very tame jokes, extremely tame joke. Honestly, not a great joke, but it it went on to it was it's probably like 1, maybe the most famous and like kind of stand up history, like bombs. God freedom said himself said that he lost the audience more than anyone else ever has. I think it caused some career problems for him, he later said. There's only like a few weeks after. This was days after. So this is at the Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner on September 29th. Is this is this where too soon is from? Well, yeah, this. I mean, I don't. I don't know that it originated there, but this was the response to him and I think it it's the first time I ever recall hearing someone say that Godfried said that, like, the reason he decided to tell a joke this close to 911 was that he was personally offended by the fact that anything could be too soon to make a joke about it. Said that himself. Said that he lost the audience more than anyone else ever has. I think it caused some career problems for him, he later said. There's only like a few weeks after. This was days after. So this is at the Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner on September 29th. Is this is this where too soon is from? Well, yeah, this. I mean, I don't, I don't know that it originated there, but this was the response to him and I think it it's the first time I ever recall hearing someone say that Godfried said that, like, the reason he decided to tell a joke this close to 911 was that he was personally offended by the fact that anything could be too soon to make a joke about. One of the things that's interesting about this, a little side thing, is that, like after bombing and getting shouted at by the audience, Godfried, like, decided to get them back by telling a particularly long and foul version of the aristocrats. Which is a meta joke about jokes primarily. Anyway. It's basically just being as foul mouthed as you can possibly be to an audience, and that that audio has been lost to time apparently. But boy, you can watch a fun documentary about the aristocrats if you want to learn more about that now. I think the first good actual comedy bit, about 911, came out a little bit after this. This was about two weeks after the day and a couple of months later at like the three month point South Park season 5 aired. And they ran an episode about 9:11. It has been criticized, rightly so, because there's some kind of racist bits of humor in there. Yeah, that's not surprising. That's not surprising. That said, it's also kind of a valuable snapshot of history. For one thing, the A huge part of the episode is just kind of like the Afghan child counterparts to the main characters in the show walking around their town as everyone is murdered by US air strikes. So it's it is not like the IT it it stands kind of an opposition to sort of. The. Kind of like bootlicking responses you got for, for some context, the show The West Wing, which is the favorite show of everybody who runs anything in politics right now, ran an emergency 911 episode like a couple of weeks after the attack, which was the kind of turnaround you didn't do in TV at that point in time. So they put in a ton of effort to have this special 911 episode of The West Wing. That number one in the alternate West Wing universe, there's no 911. There's like some vague like there's basically, basically the episode focuses on like a bunch of. Kids on a tour getting stuck in the White House because it locks down, because some vague terrorist attack thing happens in a fake country they made-up. So when The West Wing needed to talk about Muslims and kind of like the breakout piece of this, well, there's two breakouts. One of them is a very racist retelling of the story of Isaac and Ishmael that explains, like, why Muslims are always so angry all the time. And then the White House press lady CJ Craig goes on a rant about how awesome the intelligence apparatus is and how like, what good people? Uh, CIA agents are. And how, like, the best thing to do for politics sometimes is to have a a guy dressed as a waiter murder somebody with a silenced pistol. Like it was out of its mind. Unhinged. That's the ******* like. So the fact that South Park does an episode that's like, yeah, we're gonna murder a bunch of people in Afghanistan for no reason is like, not a not a bad response, not a bad thing to recognize about that day. The other things that are, like, pretty good or pretty, I think meaningful sort of bits. That episode, it opens with all of the kids at the bus stop wearing gas masks as they stand in line for the bus. There's a piece in that episode that kind of sticks with me today still that I'm going to play for you guys. Feeling cool? Not really. I don't know. I always found that bit fun. So when the school bus arrives, there's a cop on it, searching bags and confiscating items that might be used as weapons. The school classroom doors are reinforced with a massive military grade lock, which resonated more in a time when, like, school shootings weren't a constant thing. And it it kind of hit me because, you know, when this episode came out and I watched it when it came out, I was at middle school Clark Middle School in Plano, TX, and on 9/11 and 912, the attacks. Like the only topic of discussion, uh, that anyone had. And I have this vivid memory of a couple of girls in my U.S. history class weeping because they were scared that Al Qaeda was coming for our schools next. Like, this was a a very real worry for kids that I grew up with. Like Midland TX or something? No it wasn't. It's a big school. But like, I don't, I'm certain that ******* Osama bin Laden had never heard the name Plano, TX, let alone Java thing with like. Anytime a plane was, like, going down, people would point at it and be like, Oh my God, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was definitely a meme. And there was, you know, one of the most famous ones was, uh, this, this video called Triumph dot Avi that started to spread on the something awful forums. That was just footage of the September 11th attacks set to yakety sax. And again, these were all kind of the the, the comedy that that, you know, that South Park put out here and that you saw and stuff like the triumph video were reactions to how ******* seriously everybody else took 911, right? Like, I have to, I have to point out that, like, watching an episode like this or watching something like Trump felt like legitimately transgressive in the days and weeks after 911. Because it was kind of a, as we'll talk about, had turned into kind of like a secular cult. And I think people who were just a few years old then, or born after 911 missed this part of 911. I think you inherited the wars and the intrusions on civil liberties and the creeping fascism, but not the derangement by terror that had preceded it. Like everybody's permanently deranged from 911, but you didn't really get to know. People before that kind of happened and drove a lot of them mad as a kid. It was like a strange and exciting and scary moment. But I I think my parents and I think the people who were kind of in their age range completely lost their minds. And oddly, that that South Park episode has kind of the best depiction of that too. There's a scene in which Stan, who's one of the main characters, they're all like middle school kids, walks into his house and sees his mom, like, lying on the couch, staring blankly ahead. And just, like, weeping, she's surrounded by tissues. She's been crying for days. And as her husband says, she's just been watching CNN for, like, the last eight weeks straight. And that the image of her just kind of like lying on the couch staring at the TV is I I can remember every adult that I knew as a kid doing that. And it it it really did go on for days. Like, people moved around as if they were like, in kind of a shocked stupor. I'm sure there's places where this wasn't the case, but for my family, who were very, very conservative. People and I think for people particularly who live closer to the attacks like it was just this period of like post traumatic stress for the entire country. I think a good amount of research backs up the fact that this it had this kind of and I think it is hard to understand if you weren't there impact on people. I found a Pew Research study that I'm going to quote from now. Our first survey following the attacks went into the field just days after 911, from September 13th to 17th, 2001. A sizable majority of adults said they felt depressed, nearly half said they had difficulty. Concentrating and a third said they had trouble sleeping. It was an era in which television was still the public's dominant news source. 90% said they got most of their news about the attacks from television, compared with just 5% who got their News Online. And the televised images of death and destruction had a powerful impact. Around 9:00 and 10:00, Americans agreed with the statement. I feel sad when watching TV coverage of the terrorist attacks. A sizable majority, 77%, found it frightening to watch, but most did so anyway. Fear was widespread, not just in the days immediately after the attacks. Throughout the fall of 2001, most Americans said they were very 28% or somewhat 45% worried about another attack. When asked a year later to describe how their lives changed in a major way, about half the adults said they felt more afraid, more careful, and more distrustful or more vulnerable as a result of the attacks. And I think you can't separate this because the main people we're talking about here, we're talking about the response to this when we're talking about the people who got to make decisions, it's boomers, right, which is not all that different from how it is today, but even it was. And more so bermers then. And, you know, my parents and the people of their generation are all children of the Cold War. They both grew up, my parents on different military bases. And I can remember, you know, my dad told me stories about doing like, duck and cover drills as a kid, like literally hiding under a desk to get ready for an atomic bomb. His family, like, went out into the countryside during the Cuban Missile Crisis to hide because they were afraid all the cities were going to get nuked. And this is not, these are not uncommon experiences. So you have to think. Like all of the all of the adults were either very close to this. Or had spent most of their formative years, like constantly scared of being murdered by a nuclear weapon. There have been clinical, like studies and stuff that have shown that that fear of nuclear annihilation is a major factor in anxiety. Like I it's not ever been properly, I think explained how much that ****** ** that generation. But what you had is all these people who had spent the first couple of decades of their lives. Living with the sort of Damocles over their heads. And then the war ends, right? The Cold War ends, the USSR falls apart, and suddenly people aren't talking about nuclear warfare for the first time in anybody's memory. And I think for most of that generation, they felt safe. For the first time, there was this kind of celebration that was pretty bipartisan, that capitalism and democracy had triumphed and that, like, this kind of horror that had stalked through their childhood had been defeated. You know when people like Francis Fukuyama? Talked about the end of history. What Fukuyama meant was that liberal democracy was kind of, in his eyes, the end of the evolutionary Rd for states, which is a flawed idea, but the interpretation that I think people like my parents had was that we didn't need to worry anymore, right? Like that. That's the end of history, right? Our way of life had won and we like we. We didn't need to worry. And in 911 happens, and suddenly this decade or so of relief from that all ends in a minute, and all of that fear that they lived with their whole lives came roaring back. With abandon, 911 was like the emotional equivalent of splitting an atom and and the inner yeah that was released by that is going to be used for something, right. I I want to kind of touch on that a little bit because I mean I obviously don't remember the 90s because I wasn't there and it is such a fascinating idea to me of like this time where neoliberalism kind of reached their paradise. Like, like we did it. We could we we we we did the thing, we found the spot and how that, you know, like the edge of chaos theory, how it was built up to this super high point. And then it all because it got so high, it then immediately crumbled. Yeah. And shot down. And there's this thing that one of my favorite writers, grant Morrison, talks about how 911 kind of became this moment where the world of imagination and the world of, like, the lowest material, visceral reality crashed into each other. And he says, quote the the collapse expressed itself in the material world when the Twin towers of the World Trade Center were reduced. To dust by determined extremists. When cement occurred, reality and fiction began their slow collapse into one another. After the fall of the towers, quote UN quote, reality became more fictional and quote UN quote fiction became more realistic. Think plausible, realistic superhero movies like The Dark Knight Films, fake news, deep fakes, AR VR, and the rise of magical thinking. And I would extrapolate that out to like stuff like, you know, Q Anon. And you know the the How just these images that we thought were only viewable in film and television became descended down onto the onto the dirtiest most visceral material plane. And then things that were fake, like this idea like the perfect 90s that's going to be this is going to continue like this forever. That fiction, it felt almost more real, like it, like that that that should have been what's real and it's not anymore. Yeah, it it. Feels like there's an alternate, and I think that's part of why liberals are still so *** **** in love with The West Wing. And by the way, I talk about liberals. My parents, who loved Ronald Reagan more than life itself, watched every episode of that show. They thought it was wonderful. And the Republicans are always portrayed very sympathetically on The West Wing right. It's very much this noble opposition sort of idea. And the the that I I think there's something in that that there's this almost sense that we've been locked out of the right reality and that's that's what you know that's what liberals are constantly harkening back to with with 911 but it's also or with a with stuff like The West Wing but it's also like what conservatives. I think for a while they were looking for that. I think that's what George W Bush promised and failed to deliver. It's what they were hoping to get with Romney. And when that didn't happen, I think part of what's going on with Trump is this desire, part of the desire to burn it all down, is the inability to get back to this imagined, prelapsarian world. If you're talking about the collapse of reality and fiction going into each other, that's what Donald Trump represents. He is this so fictional person that. In order to meet this new world where reality and fiction the same thing, you need somebody that under that, that represents that. So they turned to him because he he was meeting the way they they saw the world was going. The reality and fiction are going into each other. So you're going to get the reality television president who, who, who, who kind of embodies that essence on a very, very visceral level. And I I think that's part of why when you have 911 happened, you have all of this energy released. Both parties kind of come together in this idea that the United States should strike back and that we were at war. It's rightly pointed out by people that particularly the protests against the Iraq war were massive, and they were they were historically large. But President Bush was also the most popular president of our lifetime, briefly. And it's because people were in line behind this idea that we need to hit someone well and and and and I think something that's important about this is completely forgotten. Is that the invasion of Afghanistan? There was like, no protests. There were. There were a few. But yeah, the left imploded. Like, here's I'm going to read a quote from Doug Henwood. This is an attack on us. There is a near certainty that something will be done soon. Clearly, considerable use of force will have to be used to capture these *************. Like 8 Adolph Reid is like talking about how like there's going to have to be military reaction like a bunch of the people from like who like the old school like anti Vietnam War protesters like from SDS or like well we don't oppose all wars we just oppose bad wars. So like here we should go over guys like everyone lost their minds. Well and I want to what I really the core of when I talk about today is why that happened because I, I think there's on particularly kind of some of the more superficial. Left wing analysis of this this idea that like George Bush, did what he did in response because he's like this Christian holy warrior. And there's a couple of reasons people do this, including the fact that he once referred to the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. But as a general rule, what Bush did was not because of his Christianity and had nothing to do with any kind of conflict with Islam. In particular, what it was was the reaction of a group of a kind of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists have belief in the American state. Reacting to an attack on the sanctity of that kind of idea. Yeah. And this is, this is, you know, why all these liberals were on board, at least with, you know, the strike on Afghanistan or attacking Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens, probably. No one embodies like what happened to a lot of the left better than Hitchens. Hitchens was a well known liberal journalist. He wrote an excoriating book about Henry Kissinger, right. He's one of these people who was criticizing the empire, who was attacking it for its excesses, for builds his career on that. And then 911 happens. And the first big thing he does is he puts out a massive column titled Bush's Secularist Triumph, in which he argues that the War on Terror is not a crusade but a battle to keep religion in public power separate. And I want to quote now from a study published in the Journal of Political Theology by William Kavanaugh of DePaul University. It's titled the War on Terror, Secular or sacred. There may be some Christians who think that we are fighting for Jesus, but the battle is being won in the name of secularism. George Bush. They subjectively be a Christian, but he and the US armed forces have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. While the left makes apologies for religious terrorists, the right supports their obliteration to protect our secular state. Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the Liberals have gone AWOL. That's Kavanaugh's summary of a hitchens's article. But like what's going on there is really interesting because Hitchens is proceeding as an apriori assumption that the attack on the Twin Towers is an attempt by a theocracy to take over and destroy a secular state, rather than an attempt to damage economically a military enemy and goaded into a war that would weaken its socially, militarily and economically. Which is exactly what had actually happened. The Liberals that Hitchens attacks, his former allies are basically saying. Don't take the bait. Right? Don't do the thing that he wants you to do because it will. It will lead to the results he wants to achieve. All Hitchens can see is that, like, Muslim extremists are scary and they want to hurt him. As an atheist, religion is doing things that hurt me. Yeah. So I must destroy the people who believe in this thing. Yeah. And it's interesting because everybody, all of the people who are kind of on the side of this civic religion, which is which is why they're responding because they're they're civic religion has been attacked and this strike. All the towers, they all find kind of different ways to justify it. Hitchens is a prominent atheist, so it makes sense that he kind of sees it as a fight against theocracy. If you go through a lot of footage of news anchors in the immediate wake of the attack Garrison, you and I were doing this a couple of nights ago. There were numerous references that the Twin Towers which were a symbol of capitalism and that's why they represent capitalist and American supremacy over capital. It's like, it's like the Americans supremacy of the economic system. Some and like a reified symbol of capitalism, almost like it's like, it's like an idol, too, like, to the God of capital. Yeah, there's a there's a number of different things you can find making this point. But in a column that published on 912, the Washington Post editorial board wrote for three decades, the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center stood as the symbol of American economic might, as powerful an icon for capitalism as the Statue of Liberty is for freedom. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. No, people were just saying this **** the day. Everything that's funny about it is like no one thought this before. Like, these are cheap ******* buildings like the World Trade. Yeah, like a license. Like it's literally you. It's just like license. It's a name that's licensed out. It's like that, you know, but that doesn't because again, what what you by saying this, when they're saying, like for three decades, this was the symbol of American economic might people. And I keep going back to my parents, but I think they represent a lot of Americans saw the defeat of the Soviet Union as being achieved by the US economy, by capitalist right. And and that's the thing that ended history. That's the thing that got them to their neoliberal paradise. It's the thing that saved them from the nukes. And so by taking these towers down, bin Laden basically killed Superman. Right. That's how they're reacting to it, yeah. George Bush and Christopher Hitchens and the Washington Post editorial board, they all saw their support for war not as as, not based in religion. All of them would have denied this right, but Cavanaugh argues that they were motivated primarily by what he calls the civil religion of the United States, which is why I've been using that term. I'm going to quote from his paper again. the United States has its own civil religion, which, though relying on the support of Christians and undoubtedly borrowing much from Christian imagery, transcends mere sectarian religion to unite all Americans on a higher ground. Indeed, this is what makes secularism compatible with civil religion. What Robert Bella calls traditional religion is privatized, while civic rituals revolve around a generic God who underwrites America's identity and purpose in the world. In this sense, Andrew Sullivan is right. This is a religious war. The war, of which 911 was a significant marker, is not extremist and expansionist religion against a peace loving and neutral secularist order. It is, rather, the violent confrontation of Islamist terrorism with the civil religion of American expansionism. That is the evangelical insistence that liberal social order is the only viable kind of social order. It is what Tariq Ali has called the clash of Fundamentalisms. And I think that's important because I think 1 area in which the left really got things wrong and sort of their interpretation of what happens in this. Is seeing it as a clash between kind of Christian fundamentalists, as embodied by George Bush, and Islamic fundamentalists. No, no, no. The people who were leading this country, including Bush but including most of liberals, were America fundamentalists. They were fundamentalists in the idea of the secular American state, and so were my parents. As conservative as they were, my family was never about, you know, Christianity needing to be spread over there. It was about this, this belief in America as something holy and that something holy and sacred had been struck. On September 11th, I will say I. I I I think I don't know. It's it's easy for me to see why people think about this on the left sort of as this Christian holy war. Because like I grew up with a lot of people who like in the wake of this who like really were full on into the crusade thing. Like I had classmates who would talk about how they were going to join the military to kill all Muslims like. There was. I mean, like, I think this is a real thing. Sure. And that's what I mean. That's sort of analytic wrong. That's what that's what Kavanaugh is saying and that it's kind of scaffolded on Christianity. But, like, that's fun. Fundamentally, like the fact that there are some people who are going in there being like, this is finally a religious crusade doesn't mean that's like what the leadership of the country is doing. And as I have to do, I think that's part of why we get Trump and the current Christian extremist surge is that it's a reaction to. How kind of the neocons go with this, because for the Neo cons, this isn't really about. This isn't about Christianity is something you use in this fight, but like, that's not what you're fighting for here. And I think there's there's a good amount of evidence for the fact that Americans identified something as being like holy about the twin towers, particularly after the attack from Kavanaugh's study in public theology, quote. An August 2010 poll found that 56% of Americans regard Ground Zero as sacred ground, and a slightly larger majority opposes construction of a mosque nearby. For this region, a sacred aura surrounds the identity of the nation that was attacked on that day, and the attacks concentrated that sacredness in a particular location. In time, it is not necessary to go back to the more famously evangelical George W Bush to make the link between piety and 911. In his speech at Ground Zero last September 11th, 2010, Barack Obama talked about gathering at this sacred hour on hallowed ground and talked about how those who were not only killed but sacrificed in the attacks. God was invoked, of course, but it was a generic God who belonged to no particular faith because, as Obama made clear, the victims themselves were of many faiths. Yeah, this is, I mean, one of the things that I think. Is interesting if you're actually trying to analyze this and you want to see kind of the degree to which why I think it's important to look at how people treated the space itself as sacred is how actual religion responded in the wake of 911 and how Americans responded to religion in the wake of 911. Because, you know, it says there about 56% of the country see this as like hallowed ground in some way. And I, I think there's evidence that people kind of rose up to defend this civic religion. More than they actually did their real faiths. And this is because primarily the reaction on a on a population basis to September 11th is that religiosity in the United States continued to decline, right? There's a public idea that it led to this, like surge of people coming back to the church and getting religious again, but there's really no demographic evidence to back that up. And I want to quote from an article I found in Christianity Today for a few weeks after 9-11, people packed the pews, but it soon became apparent there was not a great. Awakening or a profound change in America's religious practices. As Frank Newport, Gallup poll editor in chief told the New York Times in November of 2001, Barna Group confirmed that conclusion in 2006. It tracked 19 dimensions of spirituality and beliefs and found none of those 19 indicators were statistically different from pre attack measures. In other words, the 9/11 attacks didn't put American Christians on a trajectory towards more orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer, church attendance, or scripture reading, insofar as we can measure matters of faith. The decline of American religiosity continued apace, spiritually speaking, said Barnes, David Kinneman. It's as if nothing significant ever happened. And that's something evangelicals have had to grapple with ever since the US did not turn back to God demographically. And while hateful attacks against Muslims surged, you have to acknowledge that a lot of those were from people who were more or less secular in the traditional sense. And this is part of why so many of the online atheists set sided with the Alt right in 2015 and 2016, right? It's because there are a lot of those people, while they would have described themselves as an opposition to Christianity as well. They're very much a part of the same civic religion as everybody else, and we're willing to engage in racist attacks against members of religion as a result of that. You know, when when you look at the fact that a majority of Americans saw Ground Zero as sacred and opposed building a mosque because of that, a decent chunk of those people are not Christians who oppose the building of a mosque, right? They're a religious or they're atheist, and they oppose the building of a mosque because they still see Islam as an enemy? Yeah, it's it's interesting. But Americans were not moved to embrace religion by the attacks. And the deterioration of our sense of security that followed. And I think that evangelicals have never been able to actually accept this. A 2013 Barna Group survey found that most Americans, but particularly born again Christians, believe 911 quote, made people turn back to God. And this again has led to kind of a fetishization of the period right after 911. The writer of that Christianity Today article I cited earlier theorizes quote, my first suggestion is what we thought was hope wasn't lost at all, it was less. Christian trust and character and redemption of God than American optimism, coded with not quite biblical bromides, that when there's bad, good will follow. Americans love to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that after a short period of time, sorrow will always turn into joy and suffering, into sanctification. ANS we quote Romans 828, we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, and incorrectly interpret it to mean that everything that happens to us will also somehow work out OK, and I think that they're onto something here, and this really. This goes back to what Cavanaugh was saying about how this civil religion is kind of grafted on over the bones of Christianity, right? And it's it's there's so much part of what's interesting to me here is that well I think it's it's worthwhile that he quotes Romans 828. I have to think that this this belief that Americans have that everything happens for a reason is at least as undergirded by like Disney as it is with Scripture. It's undergirded by the way we tell stories by the way fiction works in our society which is a very a unique to us. Right. Every culture does not tell stories the same way. Well and and I think like. If you want to trace that out too, like, I think that's part of the reason why people are so unbelievably any conspiracy theories here? Yeah. Everything needs to have a reason that it's part of an overarching grand narrative that ties everything together. Yeah. And it obviously, again, I don't want to like underplay. And perhaps we should do an episode of maybe behind the ******** on the reaction of the religious right to 911, which was nuts and it was vicious and horrific. I'm not. I'm not trying to deny that. But I think one of the things that happens in this. Is they grow increasingly infuriated that that is not shared by a majority of the country, that it doesn't bring a religious revival right, that that doesn't follow September 11th. Now, it it is kind of. There's a couple of things that are interesting here. One of them is that the apocalyptic Christian believers, they do have kind of this this in with the Bush administration. We know that at one point a bunch of apocalyptic, like Christian representatives, like people who are kind of heading churches and stuff that believe. There's this belief among certain Christians that you need to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and bring about the end of days and all this stuff. There's a bunch of **** that has to happen in Palestine in order for the apocalypse. Some and they're trying to get US presidents to make it happen. This is why Trump made some of the calls that he made was to deliberately like give those people a win, which is why some of the **** that happened in Jerusalem during the Trump administration was able to happen. All of that stuff is stuff that they went to George Bush, they had a 2 hour meeting with him and Elliott Abrams and a bunch of his staff were these representatives of kind of like the Pentecostal movement tried to get him to carry out this wishlist policy of acts around Israel and Iraq to help. Them bring about the rapture and the Bush administration didn't really do any of that. They have to take the meeting, right? They bring these guys in, they don't give them what they want. It's not until Trump that a lot of these guys get what they want and what you what happens here because you've got this, this death cult Christian group who see this as a crusade and who want to war with Islam. And they're constantly frustrated by the fact that even though he's supposed to be their guy, Bush doesn't go all the way for them, right? And this is part of why his military adventurism. It's criticized effectively by guys like Trump who win the evangelical right, because the evangelicals say, like, well, if we're not going to have a holy war, then, like, what was this stuff? We just wasted a bunch of money and a bunch of treasure and a bunch of young men for nothing over there. And that's part of, like, what Trump wins on. Now, these two factions, these neocons, the guys who wind up, by the way, the guys who are sort of on the civic religion side of the response to 911 are all the people who wind up running the Lincoln project right when you're talking about the Republicans. On that side of things, yeah. And then the part, the folks who break off, the evangelicals, the people who want a holy war, that's who winds up making the core of Trump's support. Yeah. And yeah, and that's a I, I think mostly where I'm going to leave us for today. On 912 next week, we'll have another special episode about Glenn Beck's 912 project that will be kind of the finishing of this. But I want to end because we're talking about why I did this and why I started by talking about jokes about 9:11 is because I think understanding, understanding. The attack on the towers is like an attack on what what had effectively become a God to a lot of Americans, even if they didn't realize it, right, the sanctity of this kind of neoliberal, capitalist order. And it's it's it's it's historic inevitability, right. The fact that that's what was going on, that that that was so dear to people, that justified so much violence, 20 years of of war, of bombings, millions of deaths is part of why, I think. There's a value in joking about 911, which is not to say that what happened wasn't terrible. Three, 3000 and change. Innocent people were murdered in a in a truly horrific way. If you actually sit down and watch the footage, the people falling out of the buildings, it's a nightmare. If you think about stuff like Flight 93, it's it's really stirring. You have these people who one moment they're heading to like see their families or go on a work trip or something on a ******* plane and experience, I'm sure everybody has, where you just like trying to get from A to B and in the space of like a few minutes they have. That all decide they're going to charge a bunch of terrorists, fight and hand to hand combat and then pilot a plane into the ground in order to stop it from killing other people. That's that's powerful stuff. What what I think is important is desacralized it? Because there's nothing sacred about mass murder and there's nothing there's. We shouldn't see what happened. There is anything but what it is, which is a tragic, a tragic act of violence against innocent people, but taking it as like an attack on our soul, as an attack on like our our collective God. When you start to do that again, it it kind of justifies. Any sort of violence, like there's nothing, there's nothing that's off the table and in in the first few years after 911, there was nothing off the table. And we're we're never getting back to the world that we had before, which is ultimately like, what all that violence was about, right? All of everything terrible that was done in the wake of 911 was justified, even if people didn't say it in the desire to get back to where we were in the 90s, right in their heads and their sense of security. I'm not talking about anything as like course as economic projections. I'm talking about in the sense of, like, optimism and basic security. And I think one of the people who got this best in the immediate wake of the attack was Hunter S Thompson, who, you know, was still alive at that point for a couple of years. And he wrote a column. I think it was for ESPN.com because that's who he was writing for in those days. He his career was well past its peak, but he wrote probably the best thing anyone wrote a week after 911, and I'm going to read you the end of that now. We are at war now, according to President Bush. And I take him at his word. He also says this war might last for a very long time. Generals and military scholars that will tell you that eight or ten years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history, which is no doubt true. But history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a lifetime to people who are in their 20s today. The poor ******** of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. This is extremely heavy news. And it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned? We'll never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. Yeah, that is kind of the feeling. Growing up in the early 2000s and not not knowing, not never actually experiencing the 90s, I mean in some ways, you know, 911 feels very similar to me as something like Pearl Harbor. Like they're both things that happened I guess before I was around and it just they created the world that are already existed in like it, never it, never like it. You know it. It never changed the world I was in. It just it just became the world that I was in. For me, 911 is my first memory. Like that is the first thing I remember and. I yeah, we got exactly the world that you would expect from your first memory being 911. Yeah, it's. I mean, again, for me, I think the thing I identify most is that little clip I played from South Park where one of the kids is like, do you remember when everything didn't suck? It was like, not really. So yeah, go out, tell a tasteful joke about 9:11, and try not to worship the state. It doesn't end well. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe, it could happen. Here is the production of cool zone media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for. It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com/sources. Thanks for listening, sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up. Begins the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there. I'm Scott rank, host of the podcast history unplugged. Now, it really is a dream come true to get paid to talk about history without all the stress while still being able to make a living. And I did it with Spreaker from iheart. Not only did they make it super easy to monetize my podcast, but ad revenue is 3 to four times higher with spreaker than with any other host I've worked with. 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