Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome to it could happen here.
Oh god, we have survived another week, and I'm joined today by Sophie and James to discuss Trump's cabinet picks and the upcoming potential members of the Trump administration two point zero. I'm sure some of you have been following the news and there is some wacky picks in there. There keeps being even more wacky ones like RFK, which I didn't even have time to include because by the time he was announced I basically already wrote too much.
RFK will get his own future episode. But it's pretty it's pretty safe to assume that RFK in control of Health and Human Services is pretty bad.
You don't say, you don't say yeah.
People are saying it not great to have the world's weirdest conspiracy theorist of the Kennedy family in charge of you know, like vaccines and health mandates, and it's gonna be bad, bad enough that it's that it's its own episode for the rest of the nominations, mostly like last week, right, this is going to be covering all the nominations in the week of the eleventh to the fifteenth of November.
We're going to kind of go through nomination by nomination and do a brief overview of each of these guys and why each one could be bad, and some of them just kind of point to like more general like neocon picks as well. Trump kind of started off with some more ordinary picks honestly, like you know, like Mark Rubio, a Secretary of State. This is this is kind of
a restrained pick for him. Now Rubio is still kind of converted into being a Trump loyalist like every single other person we're going to be talking about, and it is interesting that kind of among all of the Trump appointees, he has been the most open about his criticisms of Trump,
especially during Trump's first term. The leaked five hundred and fifty one page a VP vetting document produced by the Trump campaign outlines Rubio's anti Putin comments, support for the Miller investigation, his acceptance of the twenty twenty election results, passed comments that Trump is too dangerous to be trusted with nuclear codes, and his history of supporting NATO, support of the Iraq War, and pro military intervention in Iran
and Syria. So some of these positions now kind of bump up against what Trump's next term is going to be kind of defined by and like. More recently, Rubio has moved on from his Tea Party free trade kind of roots and now advocates for more tariffs on China and calling the country quote the most advanced adversary America has ever faced, unquote Basically all of the kind of foreign policy guys are really big on China. They are all China hawks. That there's kind of one continuous through
line throughout all these nominations. I guess, James, do you have any thoughts on mark Rubio for Secretary of State?
Yeah, Marco Rubio, I don't have a lot of thoughts with Marko Rubio. I always expecting get All to be more along the lines of heck, thest like more to be like culture war commentators. Yeah, like, at least Rubio, I will say, like, I'd probably disagree with him on almost everything, but he's he's not going to probably abandon the YPG and the YPG and SDF in Syria, which is a good thing. He's he's pretty hawkish on that. He's not a big out of one fan, So like
that's a good thing. I guess, Like I think as Secretary of States under Trump, go like it could have been fucking Tucker Carlson, like that, that's not out of the realm of possibility.
At this rate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And uh, it's well, he spends all his time watching Fox News, right, Like that's what we've heard that he does. And it's not inconceivable that he thinks these people are experts because they're presented that way and that is how he encounters and thus perceives world. So I guess Rubio and even amongst these picks, he's probably not the worst, which is wild to be saying.
So is the review in Mark Rubio could be worse?
I mean, I guess so.
I mean that's the review of Mark Rubio's life, isn't it that that's pretty much how he's gone through the world. Yeah, I think his parents would agree with us.
Ouch Rubio is no Pete hegseeth Secretary of Defense. Yeah, which was one of the first picks that like really sharted, raising some eyebrows.
Wild pick, wild pick.
Yeah.
Yeah, what he does an a cog tattooed on his bicep.
Stop sending us that photo over him without a shirt on perps seen it.
Yeah, never send us any cabinet member shirtless. I don't care if it's RFK, I don't care if his head set.
I don't want to see a nipple I thought I didn't like it. I don't need to see it again. Yank you so much.
I feel like everyone's pretty well aware now that he has some very questionable Christian nationalist tattoos. Honey, not not super uncommon. And you know in this for like this type of like military guy he got.
The more washed ways out. He got them in his late thirties.
That also makes sense. That feels like a very midlife crisis. Oh no, I'm a Fox and Friends weekend host now kind of move.
Yeah, yeah, better up my molon Larbie game.
Now.
There's a lot to be said about Pete Hank Seth. He's a Princeton and Harvard graduate who has also claimed that germs are not real and he has never washed his hands in the last ten years. Disgusting. Germs are not real. I can't see them, therefore they're not real. So that's lovely gross.
You can't.
What a fucking idiot, but absolute moron god.
He's advocated against divorce for families with kids until he was caught cheating on his second wife with his producer, fathered a child, and then divorced his wife to Mary, his coworker many searchcases. In general, he's just very chud codd right. He has like he has like a grunt style fashion, Christian nationalist tattoos. He looks like the type of guy that I would have doxed for fun as a teenager. Except he just serves on Fox and Friends'
Weekend hosting a team. He served in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan and the Army National Guard, and has recently advocated that women should not serve in combat roles in the US military.
I'm straight up.
Just saying we should not have women in combat roles hasn't made us more effective, hasn't made us more lethal has made fighting more complicated. We've all served with women and they're great. It just our institutions don't have to incentivize that in places where traditionally not traditionally over human history, men in those positions are more capable.
Yes, and well take so much should be happening in the military.
He sure does.
I'm going to read a quote from his book The War on Warriors, Big Si Whotox say, the Republican Party by default has become the only party of America. And if we don't crusade a holy war, a righteous, holy war for freedom, we're not going to save America.
Unquote.
In general, a lot of his rhetoric kind of is this similar Christian nationalist crusade holy war type stuff. This is like a lot of what he talks about on podcasts and TV appearances where he is not throwing a double sided axe at the penus of a West Point drummer or live TV.
It was incredible. It was indirect fire. He arcd it over the target, straight to the dick and balls of the West Point drama.
I just feel like, if he's gonna like somebody tell him what a microscope is, Somebody just tell him what a microscope is.
He must have used binoculars at some point in his service, or some kind of magnified optic right to learn to see things. I mean, he has a magnified optic tattooed on his bicep. Actually, he should does good.
I mean, like, if you're gonna be Secretary of Defense, at least like, oh.
Sir, wash your hands.
Arguably, the most worrying part about Pete as Secretary of Defense is not the anti handwashing beliefs or the poor aim for ax throwing. It's that he's basically a lobbyist for war criminals. Yes, and it was a big part of the campaign to push Trump to pardon several convicted war criminals, people who like tortured and murdered prisoners and ordered soldiers to shoot and kill random, unarmed civilians.
Yeah.
So, especially with this Secretary of Defense role, that's not great. That he's essentially pro war criminal and justifies it by saying, like, people don't really understand what it's like to serve in combat. Sometimes you have to make decisions and blah blah blah blah blah, all this random stuff not good. Sources within the government have called him the most unqualified person ever appointed to this position, which I do I do believe because this is just a guy that Trump sees on TV.
This is just a TV host. Yeah, this is one of the more shocking nominations. Yeah, let's move on to Secretary of Homeland Security. Ugh, this is another odd pick. Christine Nome, the non border state governor of South Dakota, who has no experience in the DHS, has never worked in law enforcement, though she does possess one trademark cop trait.
Oh yes, oh yes she does.
And what would that be here, which is shooting and killing dogs?
Yep, awful person.
So that is one thing she might bond with our law enforcement community over.
Which we all know about because she wrote about it in her own fucking book.
Girl.
Yeah, incriminating herself another cop trait, So true, so true. She did deploy the South Dakota National Guard to the border, and I think they used they received private financing for it, if I remember correctly. Yeah. See, like that's her engagement. That one again is troubling. So much power the DHS.
It's such an odd pick.
All of these picks where I'm talking about, some of them do seem odd, but not from the point of view that Trump is basically picking people that one are like in his constant orbit, like a guy on TV, but also people that are not like institutionalists.
Right.
These aren't like people who like worked their way up through these government departments to prove their effectiveness, to prove their legitimacy. They are people that have proven their personal loyalty to Trump.
Right.
Trump's first campaign was kind of defined by a whole bunch of people defecting from him. Right, everyone he's appointed eventually gotten to beefs with him. People you know left, wrote books about how bad Trump is. Eventually Trump faced all these prosecutions. Trump's main concern is like loyalty right now, So he's picking people that just have proven their own loyalty, and from that point of view, all of his picks
make sense. Almost everyone picked here at least at some point, appeared on screen with Trump in his like twenty twenty four campaign six part documentary. Like all of these guys so like they were around Trump's orbit from pretty early on in his campaign now. According to Politico, Christinome was recommended by twenty six campaign chief Corey Lewandowski, and his incoming borders are Tom Homan.
Lewandowski sucks.
Yes, gonna give him a honorary You suck, Lewandowski.
Her appointment is evidence of Trump's centralizing power and departmental influence tightly within the White House. Mark Krekorian, executive director of the far right Center for Immigration Studies, has postulated that the immigration branches of DHS will largely be puppeteered by Stephen Miller and the New Borders are who has a lot of DHS experience, while NOME could be more
focused on overseeing FEMA, TSA and Secret Service. Another aspect of Trump just appointing these wildly incompetent people is that more of these departments can just be run out of the White House, specifically by his senior advisors and Steven Miller, right, like, those are the types of people that are going to be largely overseeing the direction of these departments, while basically these figureheads just to do their bidding.
Yeah, I had worried that he would appoint Stephen Miller directly.
To you, I understand that fear. I think part of the fear is that he just doesn't have to.
Yes, I know you're right.
In fact, Steven Miller can have more power by having his myths in more departments in his current role, which we will get to later, But first let's talk about Tulci Gabbard. That's the appointed Director of National Intelligence, which is crazy crazy Yeah, Now, like no, Gabbard is shockingly unqualified and she would be overseeing eighteen intelligence agencies, having never worked in the intelligence field or served on a
Congressional intelligence committee. Her nomination was first announced by Roger Stone on info Wars now owned by The Onion owned the Onion. But that was, like, that was how this news broke. That kind of also tells you about like what information channels are getting like funneled down from Trump's team. If Roger Stone was the first guy to announce it before Trump even announced it in his like truth socialing.
It just is she's such a concertspiracy theorists that just it does kind of make sense.
She is an anti vaccine conspiracy theorist with a history of spreading Russian disinformation propaganda during the invasion of Ukraine. Gabru was also openly pro ASAD in twenty fifteen, secretly met with Assad in twenty seventeen, and then a year later Gabard peddled Syrian war crime denial, saying that she was quote unquote skeptical of intelligence findings that Assad carried
out chemical weapons attacks. While parenting Russian talking points in February twenty twenty two, she blamed Joe Biden for the war in Ukraine for not alleviating Russia's fear of Ukraine possibly joining NATO. I'm going to quote from NBC news quote. During her twenty twenty presidential bid, Russian state propaganda often portrayed Gabbard favorably while it demigrated the other Democratic candidates,
including Joe Biden. According to research from the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia based think tank, less than a month into her presidential campaign, there were at least twenty Gabbard stories on three major Moscow based English language websites affiliated or supportive of the Russian government, which celebrated her candidacy.
Unquote.
That's very funny because twenty Gabbart stories is probably the net totals that the entire US media wrote throughout her run.
Like it is widely speculated that Gabbard is a de facto Russian agent, or at the very least is very comfortable just spreading Russian propaganda and spreading like pro Putin and pro Russian talking points.
Yeah, it could be one of those things where she's not actually she's like too fucking glowing to be an agent, and she's in fact just doing this shit voluntarily by accident.
Like it's certainly possible. I mean the Syrian warcrime denial and meeting with the sad stuff.
Yeah, that stuff is pretty glowing.
And Russia certainly has an invested interest in promoting Gabbard right, So at the very least, even this isn't intentional on her part, Russia is very willing to jump on this. And the fact that she's now going to be the head of all of our spy agency programs. Uh okay, cool, sounds great.
Cool.
She also comes from a family of anti gay activists and is tied to an anti Muslim and anti gay cult called the Science of Identity. The leader has called Muslims and Fsler's quote unquote demons. In two thousand and four, Tulsi herself accused the newspaper The Honolulu of being the
mouthpiece for quote unquote homosexual extremists. Insert joke about mouthpiece homosexual anyway, Now, Tulsia's family and campaign staff were all active members of the cult during her twenty twenty presidential campaign, during which she also produced a list of enemies that named prominent journalists who were against Tulsia's own history of war crime denial.
Amazing. Oh boy, yeah, sorry, we got snubbed there.
Hey, I mean it was twenty nineteen, right, you.
Know, yeah, I can dream of making.
We still have a chance of being put on their list of enemies.
You know what, Garrison, if we are accused of crimes, how will we fund defense.
Through these products and services that support this podcast? That's correct, Okay, we are back. It's time to talk about who might be prosecuting a list of political enemies, and that would be the possible new Attorney.
General, Matt Gates.
Oh boy, So Matt Gates is one of these congress people who has built an outsized reputation through television appearances and TV news soundbites. He's always quick to jump to the defense of Trump and advocate for extreme positions within the party. His behavior displays a desperate need for attention and willingness to sacrifice his own effectiveness as a congressman
for simply going viral. This performative nature is made a little bit more uncanny by the bizarre fact that Gates grew up in the house from the Truman Show, which his family still owns.
You, I did not know that.
I did not know that, But that is what.
Yeah, it makes so much sense though.
Look at all of his gambits and bits in Congress, and if you frame that within someone who was raised in the Truman Show house, it makes perfect sense.
Wow.
Yeah, he is not necessarily a popular pick among kind of again, like institutionalists in the Republican Party. The famously liberal Wall Street Journal ran the headline quote, Matt Gates is a bad choice for Attorney General. He's a nominee for those who want the law to be used for
political revenge and it won't end well unquote now. Hours after this announcement, Gates suddenly resigned from the House, and Speaker Johnson said that he hopes to work with Governor DeSantis to fast track a special election to get the seat filled as early as January.
I think, out of deference to us, he issued his resignation letter effective immediately of Congress. That caught us by surprise a little bit, But I asked him what the reasoning was and he said, well, you can't have too many absences. So under Florida state law, there's about an eight week period to select and fill in a vacancy. People have asked me all day long, President Trump is poaching all of your talent.
Yes, we have an embarrassment of riches here.
The Republican Conference is full of talented people who are extraordinary leaders and have great expertise. And everyone in this Congress, in this conference could serve in a leadership position in the administration.
It's so bizarre a little bit.
But there's one little curious fact about Gates a quick resignation, well yes, is that this happened just days before a House Ethics investigation was set to vote on the release of a report looking into the sex trafficking allegations against Matt Gates. According to ABC News, the woman at the center of the DOJ's probe of Representative Matt Gates testified to the House Ethics Committee that the now former Florida congressman had sex with her when she was seventeen years old,
to quote ABC quote. The woman's allegation regarding Gates became part of the investigation following claims by former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, a former friend of Gates who is currently serving an eleven year prison sentence after reaching a deal with investigators in May of twenty twenty one in which he pleaded guilty to multiple federal crimes, including sex trafficking of the woman when she was a miner and introducing her to other quote unquote adult men who
also had sex with her when she was under age. The committee also obtained a sworn written statement by Gates's ex girlfriend where she lists the Florida congressman as one of the attendees at a party in July twenty seventeen where drugs were present and which was attended by the woman who Gates allegedly has sex with when she was a minor. Some witnesses show venmo payments that they allegedly
received from Gates unquote. So I guess the end goal of the QAnon movement is just putting a pedophile in charge of the DOJ serving as attorney general over the entire country. Also, Gates made a really bad joke a few years ago, responding to a Twitter post about how people can be like beautiful.
At any age.
Oh yeah, and Gates responded by saying this should be Florida's state motto, and that tweet.
Is still ugh.
Wasn't it sexy at anyth It is sexy? It Oh my god, it's us.
Oh that's so bad.
But no, Gates isn't super popular even within like large parts of the party. It's reported from other Congressmen that he would like walk up to them and like show them sex tapes he made with people he's like having sex with.
He's a fucking creep.
He's really icky.
Ew.
Bro.
There's arguments that like maybe he won't get past like confirmation, right, yeah, yeah. And here's here's the thing, he might not have to. Trump is currently working with the Speaker of the House as well as the new Senate majority leader to possibly just close Congress and push all these guys through in recess appointments, so they might not even have to get
past the confirmation process. Now, this still remains to be seen, and as Matt Johnson said in the clip before, he's a little worried that Trump just keeps picking congressman, which is slowly eating away at the House's slim Republican majority. Johnson said that he as quote unquote begged and pleaded with Trump to stop coaching House representatives to protect their majority. At this point, at least five congressmen have been tapped
to serve in the Trump administration, with more expected. Now Gates might have someone assisting him as Deputy Attorney General with a little bit more prosecution experience. That is Todd blanche who is Trump's personal defense lawyer, who earlier this year oversaw multiple indictments against Trump. So Trump just picked his own lawyer to be like, yeah, you're like the second guy in charge. Go help out Gates.
I know this will be fine.
The White House Chief of Staff is Susie Wills, who's as very successful Republican campaign operator. She worked on Rick Scott's and Ron DeSantis' governatorial campaigns as well as Trump's twenty twenty four presidential campaign. She's kind of one of the few like legacy establishment figures that Trump has tapped.
Now.
Deputy chief of Staff is Steven Miller, the great replacement. White nationalist and anti immigrant extremist, will be returning to the White House as Assistant to the President and a Deputy chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland security advisor. So he's not just the head of whole ind Security. He has his pause in multiple little departments and also is like directly next to the president's ear.
Now.
In Trump's first term, Miller was the architect of the family separation policy, the Muslim ban, and the end of DACA. Miller has advocated for denaturalization of American citizens and has called for the use of National Guard troops from Republican governed states to be deployed in blue states to carry out in tournament of migrants in military camps and deportations in states that are uncooperative with Trump's mass deportation plans.
James Jefny things to add here on Stephen Miller. This is kind of your department.
Miller is scary because he's actually very effective, Like so often these right wing kind of plot hinge on these bizarre legal theories, right, which I would say far from accepted by mainstream god of jurispudents. Yeah, Miller did very well at finding antiquated laws that could stick the landing in the court to do the evil shit he wanted to do.
Like the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety something.
Yeah, yeah, I mean he did that with Title forty two, which is a law that's designed to stop people with tuberculosis just walking across the border. Right, And he's successfully and he planned this before the pandemic. He's successfully used that to effectively allow border patrol to immediately deport people without giving them their right to claim asylum. And that was a policy that Trump did and that Biden continued
till twenty twenty three. Right, Like, Miller is good if we look at the last term at finding ways to Yeah, he's effective. He's scarily effective to me.
He's always been the scariest guy in Trump's orbit.
Yes, but yeah, because he's competent and like by far, and he stays out of the limelight for the large part and that allows him to not have to defend his evil shit and just get on with doing it.
When I watched that six part documentary, but the behind the scenes of Trump's campaign, Seila Miller was in almost every scene. Yes, he was always like in the background, always in the background, just just saying things to Trump. Like he's he is a constant presence there. Yeah, it's quite frightening. Now moving on, the guy nominated for National Security Advisor is named Mike Walls. He's a neo Khon.
He's an anti assadist, pro Ukraine. He's advocated to take the cuffs off Ukraine to allow them to make strikes further into Russia. He was also the former counter terrorism advisor to Dick Cheney when when he was VP.
He's super pro Israel too.
Oh, everyone I list here is pro Israel. Yeah, that's pretty much.
This is one of the most like openly pro war guys, right, someone like this guy who's historically kind of like the anti Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah, yeah, takes the opposite stance on almost every single issue. He's he he's a neo Khon, He's anti Asad, he's anti Putin.
He's a member of the Kurdish Caucus in Congress. Actually interesting interesting, Yeah, I mean yeah, I hope he bounces out some of some of those crazy more like a sadist sort of or just Trump's natural tendency to see a strong man in to one and being like, yeah, you go for it money.
Yeah.
He was the first Green Beret to serve in Congress and has advocated the use of military intel to combat drug cartels and co sponsored legislation to authorize the use of military force against cartels. In Mexico. Great guy.
Another kind of more standard establishment pick, still not good, but a little bit more standard is CIA director John Ratcliffe. Briefly served as Director of Natural Intelligence near the end of Trump's first term and helped to defend Trump during impeachment hearings. He is more of like a standard pick, but like everyone else on this list, he has demonstrated fierce loyalty to Trump. EPA advisor Lee Zelden, a former New York congressman, no environmental or conservation experience, just an
ordinary anti regulation conservative. After his announcement, Zelman wrote, quote, we will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry, to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI unquote, which does not point to much environmental protection. I'm going to quote from the New Republic. Zelden voted to cut EPA funding, scrap its chemical risk assessment program, and block the agency from taking action to
restrict carbon pollution. He missed the twenty seventeen vote on whether to defund the EPA's criminal law enforcement program, but voted to prohibit funds from being used for this purpose the prior year unquote. After going to the R and C.
His emails were the worst email thread that I got added to his emails are so unhinged.
Truly the worst thing you have ever done.
Yeah, Zelden worst emails, so which actually makes sense that he wants to be a global leader of AI. Yes, that's probably what all his emails were.
I mean, it's pretty safe to assume that basically any progress that we have made on climate very minuscule, will be immediately undone and we will just make a negative progress in the next four years with someone like Lee Zelden in charge of the EPA, which already has very little regulatory power, but it's about to have a lot less.
Let's discuss borders are Tom Homan, former ICE director. He oversaw the family separation policy in twenty seventeen and has since said that American born citizens should be deported with their family to avoid separating families. He's advocated treating cartels like foreign terrorist organizations that Trump will used the full bite of the US Special operations to take out. He also wrote the border section of Project twenty twenty five, James, do you have anything to say on our new borders?
Are?
It's kind of troubling because again, You've got someone here who is competent, right, who has worked at high levels in government. He's an Obama appointee.
Right, he's worked at ice like forever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, Like when Obama was setting records for deportations, Homan was doing it, which I think tells you everything about you know, the shit that we forget about Obama. But yeah, like again troubling because Homan is a real hawk on this stuff and has previously been Like, he was effective at doing family separation, right, and it wasn't particularly organized, as we've seen, it's difficult for people to find and reunite the families. They've been doing it
ever since Trump left office. But he was effective at getting that shit done. And that worries me in terms of deportations because I will need to scale up massively, as we spoke about, and like that will require someone with leadership experience, and he has that. Like then that is concerning.
Let's talk about some more diplomatic roles For ambassador to the UN. Trump has named Elise Stephanic, who has no diplomatic experience but has been extremely vocally pro Israel. She harshly interrogated university presidents amid campus protests against the genocide and Gaza, and is consistently advocated against US participation in the UN and now is going to be the UN
ambassador to quote from the New Republic quote. In a statement last week, Stefanic harolded Israel's decision to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East or UNRA, from operating in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, claiming that the seventy four year old aid program quote instills anti Semitic hate in Palestinians
and houses weapons for terrorists unquote. She's also called on the United States to defund the refugee program, criticizing the Biden administration for issuing one billion dollars to UNRA since twenty twenty one.
Unquote.
Yeah, this is like a typical talking point of like right zionists, right that the United Nations is somehow an arm of Hamas and the UNRAH, the United Nations Refugee Welfare Agency is actively funneling weapons to Hamas, and like it's just not true. It's it's an excuse for targeting AID workers in Gaza.
The UN already has such little control over any degree of like enforcement for like humanitarian aid, and having this person be the US ambassador to UN will make what little power they have even like diminished. Yes, just last October, she called for a quote a complete reassessment of US funding of the United Nations unquote, after calls from the Palestinian authority to expel Israel from the UN for war
crimes and human rights abuses. Now the ambassador to Israel is set to be Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and evangelical Christian Zionist. Similarly, he has no diplomatic experience. I'm going to quote from the Atlantic quote. He has led religious pilgrimages to Israel and visited the country dozens of times over the course of several decades. He also opposes a two state solution to the Israel Palestine conflict and says that quote there's really no such thing as
a Palestinian unquote. He is really bad. Mike Hkakabee is really bad. Yeah, that's pretty bad. He has also advocated for Israel to permanently annex and take control of the West Bank, and he like legitimately believes in a religious political ideology to return all Jewish people to the Holy Land of Israel to trigger the biblical apocalypse resulting in the death of all Jews.
My feelings personally, and I'm speaking only as a person, I think Israel would only be acting on the property it already owns. I think Israel has titled the Judea and Samaria. There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's Judy and Samaria. There's no such thing as a settlement, their communities, their neighborhoods, their cities. There's no such thing as an occupation.
This is why he believes this. This isn't like out of care in his heart for Jewish people. It's that he wants to trigger the apocalypse, and to do this he needs to both like eliminate all Palestinians, give total control of the land to Israel, make all Jewish people live there so that Jesus can come again and do the wars and blah blah.
Blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff. It's nasty. Yeah.
The last diplomatic pick here is Middle East Envoy Steve Whitkoff, who's a Trump campaign fundraiser and a real estate developer. He has no diplomatic or foreign policy experience pro Israel. He'll basically just be assisting in all of the bad things that everyone else have already named is going to be doing.
Wait, sorry, my brain just broke. So so the Middle East Envoy is just like a real estate investor guy. Yep, yep, that seems I mean, I mean, yeah, it is it much better than Jared is going to do peace in the Middle East like last time.
Yes, you can look at this similarly to like Jared Kushner's proposals to like develop what once was Gaza and just like viewing wars in the Middle East as a real estate development opportunity. You can see a guy like this kind of in line with that side of like the Trump campaign.
Jared's got to handle it, and we're going to handle these ad breaks.
All right, we are back.
It's time to discuss the elephant in the room.
God genuinely, but my mind.
Are we Dojing?
We are going full Doge.
So I'm just going to read part of the statement from Donald Trump announcing this new government agency DOGE. More on that later quote. I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk working into conjunction with American patriot the VEC Ramaswami will lead the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE. Together these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut
wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. It will become potentially the Manhattan Project of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of DOGE for a long time. To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of government and will partner with the White House and Office of Management and Budget to drive large scale structural reform and
create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before. Their work will conclude no later than July fourth, twenty twenty six. A smaller government with more efficiency and let's bureaucracy will be the perfect gift to America on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Unquote Jesus christ Man, So this is the new quote unquote government agency which is not real, right, this is not a real government agency. Trump just can't create one out of
thin air. And in this statement it does clarify that they will be providing advice and guidance from outside of government.
That's pretty funny. This is a children's table. They have the plastic cutlery.
It's the children's table.
Yes, he's He's sending Musk and the VEC off to the side to have their little fun. They'll make like a blog post that talks about who to cut, you know what programs to cut. Vivec specifically talked about like ending healthcare for veterans, which I'm sure will go over very well, and they'll submit that to Trump and then the people in charge of the Office of Management and Budget will probably throw it in the trash, but.
We will see.
I mean, I don't want to understate Musk's general influence in like Trump's operations, because Musk right now does have a great deal of influence. I think this doge thing isn't something to be too worried about.
Though.
Now, as a as a fun side note to kind of demonstrate the nonsensical nature of this, I'm going to talk about something that Vivec has proposed. He has said that a way to cut down a government bureaucracy would be to make a list of all of the non elected government employees and fire the ones that have a Social Security number that starts or ends.
With an odd number.
This way, you can automatically cut seventy five percent of the workforce without having to worry about racial, gender, or political discrimination. The Vech says, quote, not a thing will have changed for the ordinary American unquote.
I think that's gonna work that way.
This is this is reposing cutting like two million people. Talking to front of the pod Lex Friedman. He framed this as a thought experiment, not necessarily a policy proposal, and said that a more complicated form of this idea could select to save people with quote the greatest commitment and knowledge of the constitution unquote. This is goofy, Like this is fake, Like this isn't this isn't real. He's not going to cut seventy five percent of the workforce.
You should be more concerned about Schedule F, a policy that Trump will reinstate that gives him power to remove government employees at will to select for people that align with him more ideologically. Like, that's the real thing to be concerned about in terms of like government staffing. I'm not much concerned about Vivek here, though. The Washington Post did report that some Trump advisors have asked Congress for thirty five to fifty million dollars to fund the DOGE Commission.
The alternative is to raise money from the private sector, which seems more likely. It's also just very funny to have like an afficiency department ran by two people, especially if you're gonna ask to spend fifty to fifty million dollars, because yeah, I'm sure the best way to improve government efficiency is to give two billionaires fifty million dollars.
It's to have two people running it, running an apartment. That's great, Like that's what we need. Too many.
Yeah, there's also like a fake department that'll just produce like a writeup that talks about cutting Social.
Security, right, and then everyone will throw it in the bin.
That's all it's going to be.
Musk has also gone to Twitter to try to get people to send in job applications to work for free, to like sort to sort through these like these people that should be cut from federal government. He just wants people to do work for free. So now you have people setting in job applications to Twitter. I'm sure that'll end great for those people. Part of this just feels kind of like a scheme to like coerce Trump into allowing the formation of a fake government agency to pump
the value of doge coin. Like, yes, dogecoin did like boost some value after this announcement, and like this is very suspicious and like should be maybe illegal because this could just be like a cryptocurrency scheme, which is very very likely now despite the kind of goofy nature of doge and like the idea that this is basically just Musk of a beck sitting at the kids table to keep them happy while the adults take care of real business. I don't want to rush over the influence that Musk
currently has on the Trump admin. Basically since election night, Musk has essentially been living with Trump at mar A.
Lagos, just like the first buddy. Yes he is.
He started to call himself first buddy, which makes me deeply uncomfortable.
The richest man honest, yeah, first friend with benefits absolutely pathetic.
Musk is reported to be giving input on staffing decisions and joining phone calls with foreign leaders on the play a clip from scenen here.
Multiple sources tell me tonight that Musk has been seen at mar A Lago nearly every single day since Donald Trump won, dining with him on the patio. At times. Today they were seen on the golf course together. Musk has been in the room when world leaders have called Trump, and tonight we've learned he's also weighing in on staffing decisions,
making clear his preference for certain roles. Even publicly. Tonight, Elon Musk is backing Florida Senator Rick Scott as the next leader of the Republican Conference to replace Mitch McConnell.
While Musk himself is still not expected to take any kind of formal position inside Trump's administration, given how complicated it would be with his companies, what's becoming clearer tonight is that he doesn't really need to, With one source telling me Elon Musk is having just as much influence from the.
Outside, NBC's reported that a source close to the transition team has told them that Musk is quote behaving as if he is co president and making sure that everyone knows it, and he's sure taking lots of credit for the president's victory, breaking about America pack and X to anyone who will listen. He's trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him, and the President is indebted to no one unquote, which is a very very fun statement from a Trump guy.
It's also not true. Doesn't Trump oh loads of people money? Like empirically we know this.
Yes, and currently through lawsuits, Trump does out people a lot of money. But yeah, not that that will matter at all anymore. In a meeting with House Republicans last Wednesday,
Trump reportedly joked, quote, Elon won't go home. I can't get rid of him, at least until I don't like him, unquote, which kind of underscores the running bet pool that we have here at Colzone Media on when the Trump Musk falling out will happen, and we will we will keep up on this story very closely, because I really can't imagine that that Musk will stay here for too long.
I'm sure he'll stay in some proximity, especially with all like the government contracts that SpaceX has, but Trump being like this close to Musk surely will result in some kind of fallout. And maybe maybe that's opium. Maybe maybe that's me just fully hopped up on hopium, But I really see able asm working to our advantage here with
Trump eventually just getting sick of this guy. And I think part of what Elon's doing here as well, and other people have postilated this, including Robert is like Elon can't run for president legally, right and out again, laws
might just completely go out the window here. But because Elon's on a natural born citizen like Elon can't run for president, and Elon does want power, So basically Elon's trying to become as close as he can do President Trump to be like like this source said co president right. That's kind of his end goal here is he wants to be the president and he can't, so this is as close as he can get. That is most of
the main picks so far. Lastly, I'll mention like three people who worked on the Trump campaign who will now be serving as advisors, including danz Cavino, James Blair, and Taylor Buttowitch. All these guys appeared pretty frequently in the behind the scenes documentary about Trump's twenty twenty four campaign, and all three of these guys primarily focused on like weaponizing anti immigrant claims to get Trump elected. That was
kind of their main focus, especially James Blair. But lastly, lastly, I do have one more person to mention, the co chair of Trump's transition team, the former CEO of WWE McMahon. She is working as the co chair for the transition team. She is the wife of A Vince McMahon now. She also served in Trump's first term as head of the Small Business Administration from twenty seventeen to twenty nineteen after
two failed Senate runs in Connecticut. Now, besides co leading the President's transition team, McMahon's also the front runner to lead the Department of Commerce. Now to kind of tie this back to Matt Gates, she along with her husband, are also currently being sued for sex trafficking underage boys in the WWE. The suit alleges that WWE leadership knowingly allowed an announcer named mel Phillips to groom and molest the five plaintiffs who were hired as ring boys from the ages of.
Twelve to thirteen.
Ring boys basically like people who like help out on the side for you know, I see, they're kind of like performative roles. Yeah, so that's pretty fucked up. And the fact that this whole qute on movement has now resulted in two people being charged for sex trafficking or at least investigator for sex trafficking. Being this close to the Trump orbit, I'm sure, I'm sure we can just trust the plan and things and things will all things will all turn out fine. But yeah, that's a little
it's a little Linda McMahon a fun fact there. So that is all I have to say at this point about the Trump cabinet picks. There's gonna be more. I know, RFK is gonna be its own nightmare that we will get to. Yeah, I guess any closing thoughts, uh, Sophie or James on this this who's who of the worst people in the country, who's gone.
I've come next? And that's basically it, and and not even that after this first round and then like obviously he's gonna fucking fire some people.
Who's he gonna report, who's he gonna replace them with?
It will be it like Instagrammers by the end of four years.
I'm sure he's really just going through all the people who have like pledged complete loyalty to him, including people who've like previously been critical but have like turned around and gotten fully on the Trump train and Like, the thing that links up all of these names is that Trump believes that they're not going to turn on him, because that was the thing that really threw a wrench
in his first administration. And the reason why he's appointing all these people who are just chronically unqualified, it's because they need Trump, right, Like, if Matt Gates doesn't become ag then he's also like out of a job now because he resigned from Congress, and he'll also probably face more punishment for his alleged sex trafficking. But if he's in charge of the entire Justice Department, he's not going
to get anything right. Like, a huge part of Trump like trying to become president again is to get out of all of the criminal complaints and indictments that he's been facing the past year. And now none of those matter. I'll point you to a Legal Eagle video for like why none of the convictions will matter, none of the ongoing cases will matter, All of those trials are now
completely meaningless. He has gotten away with everything. Looking over this whole list, you see a lot of neo cons in foreign policy positions and like mega celebrity loyalists in domestic positions. Which makes a lot of sense for Trump trying to both like maintain his own power as well as showing off his kind of hidden neo contendencies. And this entire cabinet points towards centralizing power with just him
and the White House. Right, these people are not qualified, So now Trump basically will puppeteer every department and Trump's advisors, including like Stephen Miller. So this is all about centralizing power and demanding fierce loyalty. That's what all of these appointments point towards.
This is good ending. What a happy show.
Yeah, that is a great ending.
You know, not all these will have happy endings, because we're currently facing a pretty rough situation. But we will have some episodes later on in this week that do point more towards what you can do to protect yourself in the coming days, including Molly's episode tomorrow, so stay tuned for that. But this is just a quick, a quick rundown on why I don't like every single person appointed to these positions.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, an upcoming book about the eugenics mom in Texas called the Purifying Knife.
I'm Stephen Monicelli, an investigative reporter who covers political extremism in Texas and beyond.
In the Pitch Start. Just before midnight on August third, twenty nineteen, Patrick Crusius took off on what would soon be an infamous journey. The young man from the Dallas suburb of Allen, Texas, had become obsessed with an idea that would soon move him to murder.
That idea had been inspired in part by Renaud Camu, a French racist and race aged by the growing Muslim population in Europe. In twenty eleven, Camu had given a new name to what was actually an old idea with the publication of his book Legrand Replacement, which translates in English to the Great Replacement.
Camu argued that global elites had conspired to replace the white, culturally superior population of Europe with darker skinned people, who were mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. He claimed these elites had opened the door to mass migration, discouraged white reproduction, and encouraged the newcomers to intermarry with whites. This racial displacement, Camu asserted, had brought crime and terrorism to Europe and threatened the very survival of Western culture.
Camu's idea predated World War Two. The Great Replacement theory hardly differed from key ideas promoted by eugenicists in Western Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twenty century. Eugenicists sought to ensure the survival of those they believed to be biologically superior. Their methods included forced sterilization and harsh immigration restrictions. Failure in this mission,
they believed, would lead to white extinction. But Camu's book enraged and energized a new generation of far right extremists, not just in his native France but all around the world.
Camu didn't specifically identify the elite spuzzedly responsible for what he called a reverse colonization of the European homeland, but leaders of the international far right quickly filled in the blanks. The Great Replacement conspiracy theorists insisted had been engineered by Jews who desired to destroy the Arians, who served as
their only competitors for global control. In the chaos that would unfold as Europe racially darkened, Jewish people would spuzzly complete their conquests of the world's politics and finances, and would enslave and now intellectually backward global workforce.
Camu's racist fever dream ricocheted around the world and left behind it a trail of blood. The dread of the Great Replacement animated a coalition of neo Nazis and other white supremacists who swarmed to Charlottesville, Virginia, on the night of August eleventh, twenty seventeen, for a quote Unite the Right rally protesting the proposed removal of a statue honoring Confederate General Robert E.
Lee.
Carrying tiki torches, with many wearing matching polo shirts and khakis, the extremists paraded on the grounds of the University of Virginia campus, chanting white lives Matter and a phrase directly inspired by Camu's now six year old polemic.
Why not Why not Jews? Who Jews?
The next day, one of the racist marchers murdered an anti racism activist, Heather Hayer Whay. He ran this car
into a crowd of counter protesters. The following year, in twenty eighteen, a forty six year old white nationalist who feared a hypothetical Jewish and Muslim plot to take over America, entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and, using a long rifle and three semi automatic pistols, sprayed the congregation with bullets over a period of twenty minutes,
murdering eleven and wounding six. The synagogue had participated in program to aid migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, charity work that prompted the murderer, Robert Bowers, to post online that such organizations quote like to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.
The Great Replacement Theory and its online promoters claimed a high body count in twenty nineteen. On March fifteenth, a twenty eight year old Australian man, Brendan Terrant, live streamed his slaughter a face fifty one Muslims and the wounding of eighty nine others at two mosques in christ Church, New Zealand. Tarrant authored a seventy four page manifesto which he emailed to newspapers and television stations, as well as
new Zealand's Prime minister. He repeatedly referred to the Great Replacement theory and expressed admiration for Anders Brevick, a Norwegian neo Nazi terrorist who had killed seventy seven people in twenty eleven because of his hatred for Muslims who have settled across the European continent. In his manifesto, Tarrant praised American President Donald Trump as a quote symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.
The murders inspired by the Great Replacement theory were far from over. A mass shooting claimed three lives and wounded three others at a synagogue in Powway, California, in April twenty, twenty nineteen, and three others died in seventeen more suffered injuries during an attack at the Gilroy Garlick festival in the same state on July twenty eighth. This was the heartbreaking worldwide context in which Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas took a fatal journey just six days after the Illroy massacre.
Crusius marked his twenty first birthday just the weekend before the massacre, but for the unemployed young man, it was not a happy occasion. He had grown up watching his father's struggle with chemical dependency. High school classmates described him as withdrawn, and one claimed he had been bullied by
Spanish speaking students. His parents divorced, and he moved to his grandparents' home in a suburb north of Dallas called Allan, a town with a median family income of more than one hundred and twenty one thousand dollars and a history of white flight. Unemployed, Crusius spent a lot of hours on eight Chan, an online message board favored by white supremacists.
Crusius had given himself a grim mission he believed no one else had the guts to carry out, According to the Dallas Morning News. Late that Friday evening, he loaded his humble twenty twelve Honda Civic with his laptop computer, one thousand rounds Apollo point bullets ear muffs in a semi automatic civilian version of an AK forty seven he had ordered online from Romania. The Texas Tribune later reported that as of twenty nineteen, Romania was exporting nine thousand
AK forty sevens to the United States every year. He also brought heavily insulated gloves because that rifle, he would later complain quote overheats massively. After about one hundred shots or fired in quick succession, the college student sought to start a war one he thought he wouldn't survive, but that if others followed his example might save the country.
Head of his ten hour trek westward across the vast Texas landscape, Crusius filled his gas tank and pumped himself with energy drinks. He arrived in El Paso at about eight am, first parking at a CSE's Pizza, which happened to be closed. He then cruised around the border city of Homos, most seven hundred thousand people, where sixty three
percent of the population primarily speaks Spanish at home. He eventually stopped at the parking lot of a Walmart superstore nicknamed the Juarez Walmart because of the large number of customers who shopped there from across the Mexican border. About three thousand people in all reestimated to be at the retail outlet when Crusius arrived.
Crusius walked inside and cased the joint for at least half an hour. He went back to his civic and sat for a while in contemplation. Hungry, he went back into the store, bought an orange, and then, after returning to his car a second time, gobbled it. He then posted online a two three hundred and eighty eight word racist screed called The Inconvenient Truth. At about ten thirty eight, Crusius stepped out of his car, weapon in hand, and
began massacring Mexicans and Mexican Americans. He described in his manifesto as quote the invaders.
This is an NBC News special report. Here's Jose dis Bollard.
Good afternoon and update now on that deadly shooting near a busy shopping mall in El Paso, Texas. It happened at a walmart near Colo Vista Mall this morning about ten am local time. The scene is about seven miles from downtown l Paso.
In about three minutes, Crusius slaughtered twenty three and wounded twenty two others. In spite of expressing a wish that he would die in the attack, Crusius surrendered. Police quickly connected Crusius to his Internet diet tribe, which he opened by saying he quote supports the christ Church shooter and his manifesto referring to Brenton Terran Crusius then pivoted to
outrage over Mexican immigration in the United States. Jason Whiteley of a WFAA in Dallas reported on the manifesto's disturbing content.
In the letter, the shooter describes himself as a white nationalist, a right wing extremist consumed by conspiracy theories. In short, he thinks that white people are being replaced by immigrants in this country. The letter states this attack is in response to the Hispanic.
Invasion of Texas.
They are the instigators, he wrote, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.
By the time of the El Paso massacre, eighty men, women and children had been murdered by extremists inspired by the great Replacement theory in twenty nineteen alone. The carnage didn't end at Al Paso. On May fourteenth, twenty twenty two, a white suspect wrote a hateful rant he posted online before murdering ten and wounding three African Americans in a Buffalo, New York supermarket. He linked declining white birth rates to genocide.
On May sixth, twenty twenty three, Mauricio Martinez Scarcia, a Latino white supremacist who embraced neo Nazi ideology, drove from his Dallas apartment to an outlet mall in Crusius's home town of Allen, tattooed with a Swaska, garcias shot to death nine people, including a three year old, and wounded seven others before being killed by a police officer. Garcia seemed to be targeting Asians and Asian Americans.
Throughout this mayhem. The political right has proven eager to blame everything but the wide open gun laws in places like Texas, which made it legal for Crusius to mail order a civilian style AK forty seven. There was no interrogation of the long history of racism or of repeated Republican rhetoric depicting immigrants as dangerous, but there were other
convenient excuses. In an interview on the Sunday edition of Fox and Friends shortly after the Opasser tragedy, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick offered a menu of alternative explanations for the mass shooting, such as video games. He also suggested that public schools needed a healthy infusion of theocracy and reverence for the stars and stripes, and where are we.
As a country.
I look at social media, that the violence of just bullying people on social media every day, and we turn our head and we allow it. I look at on a Sunday morning when most of your viewers right now, half of the country are getting ready to go to church, and yet tomorrow we won't let our kids even pray in our schools. We have to look at ourselves as
a nation. That's many factors that go into the shooting, many factors, and it's not a time to politicize at the time to look deep inside of who we are as a country where we no longer salute our flag or we throw water on law enforcement and thank god we have law enforcement.
In recent years, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has described immigration at the southern border as an invasion that is part of a democratic plan to quote take over our country without firing a shot. In response to this alleged plan, Patrick has said that Texas has a right to defend itself from the threat of criminal invaders. In a Fox News interview in twenty twenty four, for.
All those people who should come here legally processed and vetted, in that group are hundreds of thousands, thousands, and thousands of criminals, murderers, molesters, gang members, drug dealers, carjackers, kidnappers, you name it, they're part of this group and terrorist.
Patrick Crusius's panic about white genocide and the violent rise of black and brown people against Western civilization had deep roots in American culture. The Texas history of segregation, white flight post September eleventh, Islamophobia, and the backlash to globalization poison Crusius' particular worldview. But perhaps the biggest factor in Crusius's murderous rampage was that he was taught to hate and fear immigrants by the grown ups around him in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
But before we get into that, a quick eye break. The fear of white extinction at the hands of so called savages dates back to Puritan New England in the sixteen hundreds. Even as they lethally infected tens of thousands of native peoples with bubonic plague, malaria, measles, smallplocks, and typhus, English colonizers slew thousands more in wars of conquests that did not spare the very old, infants, that disabled, or
the unarmed Puritans didn't just kill Native Americans. They often tortured them first and desecrated their bodies with rituals of humiliation, such as scalping. With each act of genocide, however, the Puritans projected those war crimes on their victims. One Puritan leader, William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, warned that whites were in quote continual danger of the savage people.
A white habit of mind formed that relieved any guilt the inhabitants of colonial America might feel about their bloodthirsty conquests. The invaders became the defenders of the homeland, the outarmed became the menace, and the vanquished became the aggressors. In fact, genocide became an act of self defense.
In the Lone Star State public school students are required to study Texas history, Crusius would have been fed highly distorted accounts of the Texas Revolution of eighteen thirty five to eighteen thirty six, Although the content has improved since
the Civil Rights movement. For the most part, Texas history textbooks have depicted Mexican soldiers as ruthless killers who, without qualms, shot Anglo soldiers at the Battle of Goliad in Southeast Texas and the survivors at the Alamo after they surrendered.
These same students were not typically taught that white Texans massacred six hundred and fifty Mexican soldiers, most of whom had already cast away their weapons after the Battle of San Jacinto, the engagement that ended the Texas Revolutionary War.
The late twentieth century, Texas students were also taught that after the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisemen of African Americans, dangerous chaos reigned. A sort of racist myth was promoted in textbooks and classroom lectures that Reconstruction, the state's first brief, failed experiment in multiracial democracy, was
actually a tragedy. According to the legend promoted in schoolhouses, Reconstruction was defined not by increased literacy, improved infrastructure, in the expansion of black human rights, but instead by political corruption, wild government overspending, high taxes, out of control crime, and endemic incompetence. During Reconstruction, children were taught the United States armed African American soldiers who then harassed and assaulted harmless whites,
especially women. In short across the curriculum, white students learned that whenever black and brown people gained power politically, socially, or economically, white people have been in mortal peril, a lesson that implies the need to kill or be killed.
In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, white American school kids across the country were indoctrinated into accepting eugenics in their biology classes. They learned that if they didn't produce large enough families, whites would lose a demographic race to Jews, Italians, Russians,
and other immigrants pouring into the country. A best selling American author in the nineteen twenties, Lothrope Stoddard, warned his readers that unless trends were reversed racially, superior Nordics, as he called those from western northern Europe, might have to fight a war of extermination to stem a deadly tide of color that when gulf white people worldwide.
El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius grew up in Collin County, which borders Dallas County on the north. The county's wealth before the Civil War derived primarily from cotton cultivated by enslaved labor. During reconstruction, klansmen organized in the county seat of McKinney to terrorize African Americans into not voting. African Americans continued to toil as farm labor after reconstruction, and the white population kept them under tight control through occasional
outbursts of homicidal violence. In the summer of eighteen ninety eight, local whites panicked when between thirty to forty African Americans from out of town routinely gathered during a rainy season in hopes to be on hand when the weather cleared up so they could resume working. Ominous notices began to appear around the town that said quote, mister Negro, don't let the sun go down on you. On June fifteenth of that year, klansmen warned black residents that they had
no more than ten days to leave the area. One family, the Sebroans, became the target of a violent mob of vigilantes known as white cappers, who arrived at their home in the middle of the night to punish them for not vacating their home on Main Street. Anticipating the arrival of the terrorists, Jake Sebrin stood by the door of his home holding a Winchester rifle. When his assailants realized
he had a gun, they fired into the house. Jake then attempted to shoot back, but he was unable to stop the assailants from fatally shooting his pregnant wife, Laura. The three Sebran children were found screaming and clinging to bed sheets near their mother's bloody body inside their home. When it was all said and done, white Capper violence continued for years across the state, targeting both African Americans and Mexican Americans in an effort to maintain white supremacy.
Thirteen years later, on August eleventh, nineteen eleven, Colin County authorities arrested a Farmersville man, Commodore Jones, for allegedly flirting with a white telephone operator. A mob of three hundred outraged white siezed Jones from police custody, carried him to the city square, and hanged him from a pole in front of the telephone office. In spite of this bloody history, Colin County got rich and by the nineteen seventies transformed
into a major urban center. This development correlated with white flight, as Dallas glacially to come to court order de segregation beginning in the nineteen sixties and after uprising in response to a Dallas police officer forcing a twelve year old Latino Santos Rodriguez to play a fatal game of Russian Roulette in the backseat of a police squad car.
White flight fueled population explosion in Colin County, governed by conservatives who kept property taxes low compared to those in the metropolitan center to the south. Corporations followed this population shift during the half century between the nineteen seventies and the twenty twenties. Doctor Pepper, Friedo, Lay J. C. Penny, Curing, Pizza Hut, and the Professional Golfers Association of America, as
well as Toyota, planted their corporate headquarters there. However, even if whites moved to Colin County in the nineteen seventies to avoid school integration and feared urban unrest, the new corporations brought with them diverse work forces that include Muslims, Hindus, and people of color from all around the world. In two thousand, non Hispanic whites made up slightly more more
than eighty one percent of the Colin County population. In twenty twenty, that number was slightly less than fifty one percent. Asian Americans and Asian immigrants made up almost seven percent of the population, while Mexican Americans and immigrants from south of the Rio Grand represented more than ten percent. All the ingredients needed were present for a vicious racial backlash.
By twenty thirteen, the right wing in the entire Dallas Fort Worth area was in full panic mode about immigration. In twenty nineteen, Texas was believed to have the largest Muslim population of any state, numbering about four hundred and twenty two thousand, still less than two percent of the total state population, but one of the fastest growing religious demographics in the area. Two thirds of that population lives
in the Houston and Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan areas. Muslim worshippers pray it as many as fifty five mosque in the Dallas Fort Worth area in the Muslim population north central Texas is believed to have tripled since twenty ten.
In twenty thirteen, Harry Lrosalieer won election as mayor in the Collin County city of Plano. Conservatives mocked him at the time as the quote mayor from Haiti in reference to his birthplace. When affordable multi family housing was proposed for the suburb of Plano. Fear quickly spread that black and brown, low income workers would fill those residences. Signs appeared that said quote, don't Dallas my Plano, referring to the largely black and brown population in the metropolitan center.
Republican politicians across the Dallas Fort Worth area began to warn that some of the newcomers plotted to impose quote Sharia, or Muslim law. The panic stemmed from the practice of many American mosques offering non binding mediation services employing principles from the Qur'an to couples in troubled marriages to resolve
bitter business disputes between Muslims and so on. Such arbitration is not legally binding in Muslim practice can't be imposed on non Muslims because of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which forbids the government from establishing any sort of religion. Nevertheless, one Plaino State representative, Jeff Leach, in twenty fifteen, introduced an anti Sharia law in the Texas legislature. His bill failed, but Governor Abbott later signed
a similar law in twenty seventeen. Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.
Dread about Muslims and Sharia law dominated politics in Irving, a suburb with a population of about a quarter million people twelve miles northwest of Dallas from much of twenty fifteen. In February, then Mayor Beth Van Dyne, who later became a Trump appointee, characterized a Muslim mediation panel reportedly located in the Islamic center of Irving as an Islamic court. She introduced a resolution to the Irving City Council supporting
Leech's proposed legislation. It passed five to four, as reported by a CBS affiliate in Dallas.
Irving Mayor Beth van Dyne has accused local Muslim leaders in the past of creating their own laws called Sharia law, and adjudicating that doctrine bypassing the state and federal court system. Catholic and Jewish faiths also have similar tribunals that are presided over by faith leaders who act as arbitrators. But the locally mom here in Irving says Islam is being targeted yet not breaking any law.
They believe that we are trying to supersede the or state laws.
And that's not the case.
We work within the boundaries of federal and state law.
Anti Muslim tensions spread across the Dallas Fort Worth area, ending in tragic violence. Anti Muslim extremists held a deliberately provocative quote draw the profit art contest in Garland, Texas, a city of about two hundred and thirty five thousand just north of Dallas, Knowing that the images of Mohammed are prohibited by Islam and were likely to inflame the broader Muslim community. Two heavily armed Muslim men took the bait that day, driving from out of state and arriving
at the scene of the contest on May third. They then shot a Garland police car before being killed with return fire.
Little more than four months at the Garland shootings, Irving police arrested Achmed Mohammed, a Muslim of Sudanese background, on September fourteenth, twenty fifteen, after the fourteen year old had brought a digital clock built as a personal science project to MacArthur High School. Proud of his creation, Mohammed showed the clock to one of his teachers, who subjected the boy to racial profiling, fearing the clock might be a bomb.
The teacher seized the device and sent Mohammed to the principal, who then called irving police officers and interrogated the boy for ninety minutes while his parents were denied access to their son. Meanwhile, a militia inspired by Irving Mayor Van Dine's alarmist warnings of as Sharia law showed up at two mosque and the Dallas suburbs, wearing camouflage and mask and brandishing twelve gage shotguns as a stock worshipper's going to prayer.
Islamophobia in the Dallas Fort Worth area even extended to deceased Muslims. The Islamic Association of Collin County had hoped to establish a thirty five acre burial plot in Farmersville, a town of about four thousand people. When the Farmersville Planning and Zoning Commission approved the plan in May twenty fifteen without assending vote, furious opposition erupted. According to a CNN report.
Farmersville is about twenty five miles away from Garland, Texas, where in May police killed two Muslim gunmen who tried to carry out a deadly attack at a draw The prophet Mohammed event One resident in Farmersville has even suggested using pigs to scare away the Muslim group.
Pek and dump pig's blud and pig heads on a float.
They won't buy the land.
If I had my way, I would outlaw at Islam in America. Farmersville resident Jack Hawkins declared that Planning Zoning Commission meeting quote, I would tear down every mosque that was in this country. That's how I feel about it. A local Baptist minister suggested that the cemetery would lead to the establishment of the Madrasa, a Muslim religious school that could become a training ground for extremists. He was interviewed by CNN.
And I believe I'm a watchman on the wall Ezekiel thirty three see the incoming danger.
David Meeks is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, which ironically sits next to a cemetery. He says the cemetery could bring radical Islam to Farmersville.
I see the expansion of Islam that's going on all over the world, now's coming to my hometown.
And you see that danger in a cemetery.
Anytime you see the Islamic folks coming into an neighborhood. I think, in my opinion, I think you can say we could be less safe in the future than we are right now.
One hundred opponents of the cemetery crowded into a July fourteenth, twenty sixteen, city council meeting in Farmersville, with some residents expressing the fear that Muslim corpses would countaminate the local water supply. Members of the local Muslim community and of
the Farmersville City Council suffered threats of violence. Facing a federal lawsuit, the City of Farmersville finally relented and on September twentieth, twenty eighteen, allowed the Islamic Association to move ahead with purchasing the land needed for their graveyard.
This is the poison air. Patrick Crusius grew up breathing. He didn't kill because of computer games, because they didn't pray at schools he attended, because of protest against police violence,
or the collapse of respect for authority. Crusius wrote that America is rotting quote from the inside out, because of immigration, and that unless why heights took up arms against dark skinned newcomers, whites could become extinct in his manifesto, Crusius insisted he embraced the great replacement theory before Donald Trump
became president. One can only wonder how many other self appointed racial warriors might be inspired of violence by the twenty twenty four presidential campaign that centered mostly on the purported dangers of what Trump repeatedly called migrant crime, including the eating of neighbors, cats and dogs in the spread.
Of deadly diseases.
Trump has even repeated the warnings of early twentieth century eugenicists about the biological damage he claims immigrants are bringing bad genes to the United States. He says Trump's incendiary anti immigrant rhetoric has been compiled by the new site Politico.
Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal alience. I said, if you let them in, it's going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals. These are stone cold killers. They'll walk into your kitchen, they'll cut your throat. These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and they won't even think about it the next morning. These people are
roaming our country. They could go into a restaurant, they can do whatever they want, and they will.
Kill you because they are wired that way.
These people are animals. Now they'll say, oh, that's a terrible thing for him to say. No, No, these people are animals.
It's in their jeens.
And we got a lot of bad jeans in our country right now.
That tread a white genocide has been nurtured across centuries of American history and has become one of this country's major exports.
And with politicians like Donald Trump stoking fear about the alleged quote enemy within and promoting mass deportations and the idea of quote remigration, which is a notion with a deeply fascist history, we are almost certain to see the great replacement panic continue to boil under the surface of a society with constantly shifting demographics. Ongoing economic insecurity will feed into this, and the passive acceptance of gun violence as the price for American freedom will certainly feed into
future racist violence. This is Stephen Monticelli and.
This is Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to It Happened Here, a podcast where it has happened here. I'm your host Via Wong with Vias Gere. Hello, Ger, how are you doing this occursive day. Oh, I'm feeling very healthy. I'm up on my vaccines. I'm doing pretty good. Just had a nice bowl of cereal. Hell yeah, it's great. Well, you're doing better than the country is about to be doing.
Because this one, this one's bad, folks. So a couple of days ago, we promised that RFK Junior was getting his own episode, and he's getting eighty five ninety percent of his own episode. There's one other guy we're going to talk about, but unfortunately former presidential candidate Robert F.
Kennedy. I don't know what the F stands for Fitzgerald.
I'm assuming Fitzgerald. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior has been nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. I first off need to note that RFK Junior has been credibly accused of sexual assault, and when asked for comment by The Washington Post, he said, and I quote, I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.
Now, legally, I cannot.
Make an interpretation of how you want to piece together those sets of facts, but he was accused of it, and that's what he said when the Washington Post acts for comment, So you know, that's great.
Between that and like all the sexual misconduct allegations against Musk and like everyone else involved in Trump's orbit, Matt gets Vince McMahon and his wife, the whole like me too. Era feels kind of dead, and it kind of has been for a while. But really, the general voting public does not care at all.
Yeah, it does not seem to. It's very bleak.
That's not even remotely the bleak is part about this appointment.
Though, So oh no, he's He's that for so many reasons. Holy shit.
So I think if you are like most people listening to this, I don't think people tend to have an understanding of how many fucking departments there are, like under the Department of Health and Human Services, just how many different organizations there are. I originally I had listed them all out, and then I was like, I can't do this.
It's too long to read in the podcast.
So here are the important ones for our purposes. Nic, this isn't even all the important ones, but here are some of the important ones. So under the Apartment of Health and Human Services is, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers from Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Inspector General, and the Office for Civil Rights.
So we've just put probably the US's.
Most famous anti vaxer in charge of all of these organizations. And I say, we've just put He still has to get confirmed, and there is some chance that he doesn't make it.
I don't know.
It would be much better for everyone on Earth if he fucking doesn't get appointed.
But it's still very up in the air. Yeah, if any of these guys are going to get pushed in through recess appointments, or whether the Senate will just completely cave to Trump.
Who knows.
Yeah, And I mean, you know, and we'll get to part of this later. There is real political opposition to Trump in parts of the Republican Party base, especially the Senate. Yeah, he is about to fuck with the money. And sometimes you can do that, and it's fine, and sometimes you can't. And we simply do not know yet. And so I think before we get into how again, an anti vaxxer leading the US is like Health Services is going to
just obliterate us all. I think it's actually worth taking a look at what this means politically in terms of Trump's base, in terms of sort of the power compositions of it, because in twenty twenty, the last time he was running, he had a real problem with the anti vaxxers because you know, on the one I had Trump like did a bunch of anti vax stuff. On the other hand, he did spend a bunch of money to develop the vaccine, and this.
Pissed off an incredibly large number of people.
You have, like your Alex Jones is yelling about how he was like tricked into making the vaccine, And there's a kind of split in his base between the people who are anti vaxxers and people who think that COVID was like designed in a lab as a bioweapon. Because those people in theory, if you're following this coherently, right, the people who think that COVID was creating a lab as a bioweapon, you should also want a vaccine then, because that could stop the bioweapon.
Well, unless the bio weapon was invented so that people would get vaccinated, and the real dangers to vaccines. See me, you gotta be thinking one step ahead with these people.
But there's another thing too, which is you also have to simultaneously argue that COVID is pretty mild, because that's another thing that all these people believe, because you have to be anti lockdown, and to be anti lockdown, you have to believe that COVID is mild. So well, the chain of things you have to believe, and there are like, I don't know, like a third of the population of the US believe some variant of like COVID was made in a lab as a bioweapon. It either escaped or
was deployed. It's also mild. And also the vaccine is trying to kill.
You, So this is bad.
And Trump has kind of papered over this issue with his base by again just handing all of the fucking health departments over to RFK Junior. And a sign of what RFK Junior's tenure is going to look like, assuming he gets appointed, is that he has been putting together list of people he wants to head all of these agencies, and chief on that list is Jay Banachaira, who's he wants to be the head of the National Institute of Health.
Jay is an anti lockdown maniac whose thing was that he thought that the lockdowns were bad and that we should have just sent everyone back to work in this sort of absolute peak of the pandemic before we had vaccines, and he thought that like only forty thousand people were going to die because of COVID, and that if you just sent everyone back, everyone would get COVID and this would create like quote unquote herd immunity and then the disease would be okay, yeah, yeah, and that's sense right.
That did not happen. We can actually save for sure. Yes, more than forty thousand people died. It wasn't just a flu.
Yeah.
And also you know there were countries I think Norway tried this where they tried to like easelock dew restrictions early and it just killed a bunch of people and you didn't get an immunity benefit because then the thing about herd immunity, right, So herd immunity is this concept, and this is kind of this is important for the vaccination angle of this. It's this concept that there are there are some people in a population who medically cannot vaccinated.
You know, there's like actual health reasons right for this that aren't just like anti vax shit. But if enough of the rest of the population is vaccinated, then it doesn't matter because there's not because there's enough immunity in the entire herd that it's hard for the disease to spread. And the way you're supposed to do this again is with vaccines, right, But there was a whole crowd of people who wanted to try to do this not with vaccines,
but just by giving everyone COVID. And these are the people that rf Kids Junior wants to like put in charge of the nation's health services. Now, political response to this from our site is also really complicated because you know, the way that the battles already playing out in the media is RFK Junior versus Big Pharma. And the problem is no one likes big pharma unless you're being paid by them, like we don't like big farm. But these
companies suck shit. They're really bad. They're like parts of the reasons why you can afford your healthcare. But also the reason they're evil isn't because they make vaccines. And this is a this is a complicated sort of tension to manage and if you read a lot of the media coverage of this. So far, NPR has this just fawning article over RFK Junior. That's like, Oh, he's gonna like cut through the bureaucratic red tape with his controversial
things and like help treat chronic disease. And no, he's an anti vaxxer. He's a very hard line anti vaxer. I also want to read this absolutely insane thing that he said about COVID being a I'm just going to read this. I don't know how to preface this. COVID nineteen, there is an argument that is ethnically targeted, COVID nineteen attacks certain races disroportionately. COVID nineteen is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune
are Oscanazi, Jews, and Chinese. Oh, we don't know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic different impact.
Oh oh no, that's that's not what those papers are trying to say. No, And I will also say this.
One of the things that you can just you know something very bad is about to happen is when someone uses the word Chinese and noun you were about to hear the most racist shit you've ever heard in your entire life.
Well, not to.
Mention, askansy juice.
Oh yeah, yeah, And so you know, want those actually whatever which to briefly talk about what those studies were actually saying. It's like, well, yeah, there were certain communities that were hit worst by COVID, and there's certain communities that were hit less by COVID, And that largely has to do with things like income and how much you're forced to like go work, read the plague.
Living conditions, class, poverty, where you live, gentrification, there's lots of aspects.
How strong your anti vax movement is sure, definitely another one not to mention, just like medicalized racism, which is a massive problem in the American health care industry.
Oh yeah, And r f K. Junior not gonna make that better.
No, I don't have an inkling that's gonna be on the top of his priorities beyond nationalizing essentially chicken pox parties instead of vaccines.
Yeah, okay, So r f K Junior has been playing the world's most obvious shell game with the media, which the media, I don't know a lot of press outlets are just sort of rolling over for Trump right now. And so he's been playing this game where he's been telling the press, oh, I'm not going to take vaccines away from everyone, from anyone, and it'll be fine.
And like we know.
That he thinks that vaccines cause autism, Like he just says this all the time.
He has promoted books about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, So like you know, we know that he is anti vax, that he spread, he spreads anti vax propaganda. We know he spent a bunch of money doing this, specifically also in minority communities. So there's a lot of dangers here, some of which we're going to get into more when we go into what specific agencies can.
Sort of fuck with stuff.
But one of the biggest dangers in the very short term is that he is now in control of what is effectively the US's medical science apparatus, and he can use this to spread all of the anti vax horseshit that has been spreading through like less official channels before this.
I think it's worth remembering that this whole anti vaccine craze started with one guy getting one shitty paper published in the journal Lancet and the reporting on that in the media frenzy around that was enough to turn the active vaccine movement from like ten people into a worldwide movement that has killed unbelievable numbers of people. And the reason that's true is because if an official authority tells you like that this vaccine isn't safe, people will believe it.
And he's going to be able to use the National Institutes of Health to be able to use the CDC, is going to be able to use the journals that they publish. He's going to be able to fill these people with his coronis. It's going to take a lot of fighting, but he's going to be able to use this to push anti vaccine bullshit with even just leaving aside his regulatory abilities, just the ability to like legitimize
this complete horseshit as actual science. Is going to do incoculable damage to this country and is going to do incolculable damage to the world because also one of the things that's under Health and Human Services is the is the US's like international medical and healthcare programs and sort of prevention programs that we do internationally.
So this is all very bad. Do you know what's not very bad.
Oh, all of the ads that are gonna play right after I stopped talking, surely none of them could be slightly problematic.
And we are back. Okay.
So when I was first writing this in the halcyon days of last week, right, I had a whole thing written here about how one of the other effects of this is not just going to be the attack on vaccines, It's going to be the destruction of basic virological research, right, Like our basic research on viruses and on diseases is
going to be destroyed, you know. And this is because the people that are of Kajunior is surrounding himself with are the Lablik Truther people, and the Lablik Truthers have convinced themselves to anyone who does any kind of research with a virus is actually like creating a giant a bioweapon that can at any moments like a break containment,
and kill the entire population. And you know, so I was like, okay, I was putting together all this stuff, and then he just straight up said that when he gets in charge, he's going to go to the NIH and stop studying infectious diseases for eight years first week.
And I'm going to call all the division heads, and I'm going to call all the bureau chiefs, and I'm going to say, we're going to give drug development and infectious disease a break, a little break, a little bit of a break for about eight years, and we're gonna study chronic disease.
He's just saying, straight up, he's gonna try to stop all infectious disease research for eight years.
Now'll think about diseases. Right.
I talked to a virologist beforehand, who will will rename nameless for security purposes.
But their response was, hold on, let me, let me, let me, let me read this exactly, because it's extremely funny.
I would love if pathogens would decide to give it a rest for eight years. Sadly, I do not think pathogens will get the memo because they're random micro organisms. That the big issue here, right is Okay, so we're stopping all infectious disease research. Now, you know we're already, I mean we're still in like we gave up trying to end for the first pandemic that like that would happen on the Trump meministration, right, we were our solution
to this. And this is also part of The problem of the decay hay of these institutions, even under Biden, was that, you know, we gave up trying to stop COVID.
We're we just we just just like maascer, it too much work. So you're all going to die now, have fun.
Well, luckily there won't be another global pandemic anytime soon, because these things really only happen once a century.
No, But you know, the content was with this, right is when the next pandemic hits, we're going to have an administration that is sort of broadly anti vax who's everyone around them is anti vaccine, and we're going to have just destroyed our capacity to do inveectious disease research.
Well and specifically this was this was a joke about the bird flu.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah.
Well the thing is right, so the next one could be that fucking bird flu strain that's bluing.
But it could be something else too. We don't know, there could be other ones.
We you know, like if you go into like the actual sort of causes of these things, which have to do with things like factory farming and like increasing human they call it humans zoological contact, but it's like humans going into places where there weren't people before and there are a bunch of animals and coming in in like
increasing contact with the animals. Right, that's all stuff that they're driven by by structural elements of the economic system and like our constant needs to develop land and the way we've set up our meat agriculture, and that's not stuff that like rf K Junior gives a shit about like actually attempting to deal with So instead we're gonna just do whatever this infectious disease research stop is.
And I think this also aligns with a lot.
Of the stuff that all of that that you know, Trump's cabinet pointees broadly have been talking about, right, which is this this desire to just sort of kneecap and you know, sort of purge the American bureaucracy, you know. And I've been I've been seeing some very very optimistic people going like, oh, well, you can't really do a purge because like what competent people are good?
Are you going to replace them with?
It's like no one, that's the problem. That's the problem.
Three the un replaced with no one, or they're gonna be replaced with like one of the like hundreds of millions of weird anti vaccine freaks. These people have found have like cultivated over like a giant global international network. Right, they have so many crank doctors.
We're just going to be like governed by like a conspiracy theory cabinet, which is kind of what it's looking like. Yeah, you're just going to be governed by the Fox and Friends weekend host segments team.
And oh boy, yeah, And I will say, you know, this is all going to be very bad. I do want to do a little bit of panic calming, which is I've seen some people freaking out about the potential of OURCA Junior just sort of destroying the American food system by just implementing a total ban on fertilizers and pesticides.
And could he do that in theory maybe, but that one I don't think is really likely to happen because if he does, if he tries to do this, he is immediately going to face like one of the most ferocious lobbies in the entire history of American politics, which is the American like I guess you would call him the farm lobby, but really it's the American big ag like big agricultural lobby.
Yeah, it's the agricultural lobby.
Yeah.
Yeah, And like you are about to face like the power of fucking Bayer Monsanto.
They are.
They are a ferocious opponent. If you try banning their pesticides, they're going to come for you. They already hate him because he's already he's like has sued them over a bunch of stuff over the years. And the thing about the combination of companies that make chemicals for stuff and also the giant farming conglomerates who who run most of America's food production, is that unlike, for example, the farmer lobby, the farmer lobby is very powerful, but its power is
sort of dispersed over over a broad geographic area. It's not like centralized very well, which which makes them sort of weaker in an attempt to like stop RFK Junior. The thing about the farm lobbies that they're not There are a lot of plane states. We're just straight up their senators And it doesn't matter which party you elect. Your senator is just a cutout for like the agricultural lobby.
Yeah.
And those people work together, right, like they have worked together, they will work together. They caucus together all the time in order to get agricultural subsidies and stuff. And these people are unbelievably powerful. They are united political block in the Senate, and they can bring the entire US governments greeching to a halt. So that's not a fight. I don't really think that he can win. But I mean there's still some kind of chance that he tries to
do something like this. But on that one, and I've seen a lot of people panicking about it, I think that one will probably be Okay. That said, we're giving a guy who one of his big things is that like the government's been like repressing raw milk, and we're giving this guy control of the FDA.
Oh the raw milk people, Oh my god. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and luckily there's been no FDA related fiascos this year, which has led to thousands of food recalls that are
incredibly challenging to keep up with. And now the joke here is that there actually has been massive FDA fuck ups which actually has led to thousands of food recalls which actually are pretty challenging to keep up with because oh boy, our whole regulatory state was kind of got it the past eight years and it is still recovering and the deregulations have led to massive food foreign illness failures in the production scene. So yeah, that's that's been happening.
I'm sure one of you has been affected by this.
Yeah, And you know, I think there are some people who tend to read the way that RFK Junior talks about like we need eliminate like toxins from the food supply or whatever, and read that as, oh, he's going to like try to do more agriculture regulation, and oh, that brain has been eaten by worms, like that is his brain is a bunch of conspiracy theories matched together. Like that's not going to be how this plays out, unfortunately for us. Yeah, and I really think this is
something to keep mindus. Anyone who is treating this guy as like some kind of serious reformer of US health policy, do not trust anything that they say, right, Like, keep notes of what fucking media outlets are saying this right now, because with RFK Junior, a man who says one absolutely like I said a thing earlier about suspending research for infectious diseases, right, he said that like Friday, last Friday, at an anti vaccine conference he was on on like zoom.
He says this shit literally all the time.
And if you're a sort of journalist and you're treating him as like a semi serious guy and not this person like you are not sort of qualified for the task of covering what's going to be happening in this administration.
I mean really, the worst thing about RFK, in my opinion, is that he has ruined the Kennedy conspiracy search results. If you google Kennedy conspiracy, it sucks now. Now it's just RFK conspiracy theory beliefs that he has terrible. It's ruined one of my great hobbies, which is trying to find new JFK conspiracies.
You know what else is ruining JFK conspiracies?
Probably the heads because my god, the more time I have to spend looking at advertisements is less time I could be reading about how JFK was secretly Okay, we are back, Mia. I would love to learn more about RFK Junior if possible, or maybe some other random guy who's also bad.
What else do you have for me here? Oh boy? We have from here adderall.
Oh wow, one of my favorite prescription drugs. That's not true. Actually, I'm actually not on stimulants. Everyone thinks just because I talk fast and sound like this, I probably am on stimulants. This actually isn't true. This is me completely sober, so just to imagine how worse it would be if I was on adderall.
Yeah, So okay, let's do adderall first and we'll talk about antidepressants. So, okay, if you've had to get adderall and I'm actually not on it, somewhat miraculously, I don't know, not raculously whatever, it's not.
It's not my favorite thing, not being on this.
But you know, if you've tried to attain adderall or something like viavants or one of the other sort of treatments for ADHD, you have probably noticed that there's just shortages. And there's two explanations for the shortage if you read the stuff the Food and Drug Administration says, They're like, oh, it's because of labor shortages at drug manufacturing plants, and
that's like not really the reason. The actual thing that's going on here is that so these are technically like restrict to substances, right, in order to produce substances like this, the DEA sets like a quota of the amount of these drugs you were able to produce in a year, and the DEA became absolutely obsessed with like the fact that people were like getting hold of other people's adderall and this made them absolutely lose their fucking minds to
start imposing these unbelievably draconian production quotas on these stimulants, which is why there's been a fucking shortage of them for like three years now. It's it's worth noting. On the one hand, you know, the FDA has kind of been trying to fight the DA on this because the FDA is looking at this and it's like, okay, so we just have a bunch of people who have ADHD who can't get their mets, and that can just straight
up destroy your life. Like getting getting taken off of one of these things immediately is really really bad for you. And also like not having executive function is real bad. But we have the mild upside of the fact that DA isn't technically going to be under OURFK Junior's control.
But is it going to be under Christy Nomes control? Yeah, it's it's just this department, Okay, so it could maybe gates, Well maybe maybe gates because we have we have since learned that that Trump has conceded that that Gates might might not make it through a Senate confirmation hearing, so we will still see if these recent appointments are actually gonna happen. Yeah, so we don't know who's going to be running the Department of Justice.
But comma, what we do know about RFK Junior is this quote from futurism quote, I'm going to create these wellness farms so they can go get off legal drugs, off opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs if they want to to get off SSRIs, to get off bezos, to get off adderall, and spend as much time as they need three or four years if they need it, learning to get reparented, to reconnect with communities. So, as a lot of people loculic futurism have pointed out, he
is framing this as if it's voluntary. But what this is is instead of treating people for mental health issues, you send them to a labor camp to do organic farming for the government. And that's very bad. And it's also worth noting that these programs are supposed to be quote unquote voluntary, have this sort of nasty way of suddenly becoming involuntary at the moment, someone's actually in power.
So the worst possible read of this, like the most bleak and dystopian read of this, is that this is going to be implemented as a method of solving the the indescribable human cost of evicting tens of millions of people. One of the things that will do was just absolutely obliterate our labor supply for agriculture, right, because it turns out that the people who actually know how to do agriculture work is not the white planters who fucking own the farms.
So this is a thing that could be used to try to replace that labor. Right.
I I don't know how much I think that specific one is going to happen. It's unclear how he could use the power of the state to do this, right, There's not a direct path.
Yeah, this seems this seems really this seems really goofy.
Frankly, Yeah, like I've seen some panic over it, and it's like, I, I mean maybe that's a like I don't know thing that's like a like I don't know.
We're in like year six of the Trump of the second Trump administration, and like.
Yeah, I really don't see how they could even get anywhere close to the numbers for like a voluntary drug like rehab program that puts you into like agricultural farm work, that it's not going to replace any of the missing farm labor.
No, no, it won't work, right even if you could do the compulsory labor, thinking there's not just simply aren't enough people right to do it. And also agricultural labor is skilled work, right, like, yeah, you actually have to know what you're doing. But comma, I will mention you know, as this is kind of this is an unlikely but
technically possible thing to happen. The thing that's more likely to happen is that this is a good time to mention that one of the organizations that's under how the Human Services is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and there are a lot of ways using this administration and also just cooperating with the DEA, because again we have to remember this DEA is just unbelievably pissed off at the thought of like a single person getting their prescription.
So I don't think it will be hard for RFK Junior to find his allies in the Justice Department to intensify the crackdown that's already been happening on on things like on things like adderall and on things like antidepressants, because you know, there's a whole other range of conspiracy theories that when we've covered this on the show, right that I have to do with, like people who think that like, oh, all the all the mass shooters are on antidepressants or whatever, and that kind of stuff is
that kind of thinking is incredibly powerful, and there's there's a real chance that we are about to see a bunch of people who believe that shit suddenly in control of a bunch of the agencies.
They are supposed to be doing drug regulations.
There are other things that we can see him do. He's going to have some authority over approving new vaccines, which is real bad. It's gonna be hard for him to just like, I don't like, he can't just like do a vaccine ban. But what he can do is you can also fuck with people's insurance covering vaccinations, and he can fuck with like to what extent they're recommended by the government.
This is really upsetting for the potential like HIV vaccine that's oh like nearing its completion.
We're going to get to that that. Hold on, give it, give me one second, because we're getting too that.
No, okay, so before we get to the fact that our FID Junior is an HIV AIDS denialist, we need to point out one more thing he can do, which is that he can use the Office of the Inspector General as a weapon to you know, I mean.
It is the Office of the Inspector General.
And like the regular the legal and regulatory capacities of the other agencies under Health and Human Services, are they supposed to be a thing that you can use to go after drug companies for like making vaccines. No, will he be able to do it, probably because we are about to enter a a era of like law fair and like what is it isn't considered legal? That is going to make the past like eight years seem like the most functional democratic regime the world has ever seen.
So we're probably going to see that, and we're also going to see the effects of RFKI Junior's HIV AIDS denihalism. And this shit is so I don't know if people even remember this, but there is a whole like one of the earlier kind of anti VACS conspiracy movements was about HIV not being the cause of AIDS. And it's been so long since this has been a public thing that I think most people have sort of forgotten about it.
I think Dave Gruel is probably the most famous one of these guys, But he was in this camp of people who thought that like AIDS was cosmy malnutrition. Are arf Kad Junior not in that camp Arkad Junior in an even worse camp of people who were just like, oh, yeah, no, it's because like gay people were doing poppers.
That like that's his actual thing, right, he thinks that you think it was poppers.
Yeah, he thinks it's because of just literally like quote, the gay lifestyle is why HIV happened. This kind of shit wiped out in entire generation of query people. Our best hope here is that he's forgotten about most of this and is on to more and new, like just gets sidetracked on his other conspiracies. Then it's just gets obsessed with raw milk or whatever. But yeah, this this could be really, really fucking bad for if he actually decides that this is one of the issues he's going
to focus on. Right, He's now in charge a bunch of the of a bunch of the agencies that like helps people fucking deal with this, right because agv aids now, you know, getting it is on a death sentence, Like you can live, you can live a perfectly functioned normental life as long as you have the right medical care. And there's as as Garrett was talking about earlier, there's there is a pretty promising vaccine that could fucking stop this shit.
Right.
But if this is something that he remembers and he focuses on, there's a real chance of him using his power to fuck with it because he is a kind of homophobic that like up until really two or three years ago had kind of like mostly vanished from like the mainstream even from sort of like the heart that like the homophobes tended to have different homophobia now than like this shit.
Yeah, so this is like a classic eighties nineties homophobia.
Yeah. Yeah.
And at this point also we need to mention that again, one of the offices that he's now in charge of is the Office for Civil Rights the ocr which is oh cool. We've talked about on our episodes about transpolicy. He's I don't know, RFK Junior is kind of one of those people where it's like it's not clear to me if like his heart's really in the anti trans stuff.
He says all of the most hideous anti transshit, right, But that's also like it's also a pretty recent position that he's adopted, you mean, yeah.
Same thing with Trump. Yeah, but now that might not matter, right.
Sure, I'm just saying that these are more recent changes from them, Yeah, yeah, to kind of reflect a growing shift in politics for like the GOP and their and
their base. Yeah, whereas like historically Trump has has felt fine sexually harassing trans women yep, yep, because of their women, because of misogyny, you know, yeah anyway, But you know, but our issue here is that the Office of Civil Rights is the office that you're supposed to that that's supposed to be the thing that stops discrimination in healthcare.
Oh okay, And in fact, this is the organization that the Biden administration had just left trans people to the mercy of where if like if your healthcare got banned, you were supposed to like submit a complet to the ocr So like it's not like an incredibly functional agency right now, right, but it's about to get a lot worse.
There's a couple other things that.
I should mention before we close out here that are I mean, you could do a full episode on in and of themselves, but there's just so much shit here. One of them is that he's also like anti fluoride in drinking water. Yes, yes, yes, Now this is one where I don't know how much power he's gonna have to do this because a lot of fluoride stuff is done at the local level.
Well luckily for our friends of Bortland, and this won't affect them at all because there already is no fluoride in your drinking water yep.
So our dental health is just fucked because of this. He's probably going to use. This is gonna be another bully pulpit thing where he uses his position to push anti fluoride shit. And I think the last thing I want to end on is just one of the like cruel, petty things that he's probably going to be able to do.
Is one of the like bugbears of the right is that like people on food stamps aren't eating healthy enough food, and so we're probably gonna see a bunch of these just really hideous restrictions and of what you can buy with with snap benefits.
Yeah.
Well, and the rest of these guys also just want snap benefits and welfare to also just like go down the toilet entirely.
So yeah, so they're trying to make them as unusable as possible. And again it's like okay, so like if you can only buy like fresh fruit with this and you live in a food desert, yeah, because you're poor, what the fuck you?
You know, right, It's just it's just compounding classism.
Yeah, And the general trend of this is things are either going to get monumentally worse or merely sort of worse.
I do love those two options.
Yeah, when your best chance is your hope, you're hoping the brain worms ate the part of his brain that remembered this specific conspiracy, you're in real trouble.
I mean, RFK Junior is so emblematic of like the type of like democrat, kind of wing nut hippie environmental guy who then slowly has been pivoting to like the
right wing conspiracy sphere. Like you've seen this with a lot of like you know, like hippie moms from like the nineties right who had very like you know, fluoride beliefs, vaccine beliefs, like all this type of stuff that was kind of more associated with this like kind of like slightly conspiratorial wing nutty section of like the left, and how much that entire sphere has been totally eaten by the right and now it's a pretty like successful and
reliable voting block for them. And this has only become more of the case under Trump's first term. And now we are seeing it again with these types of guys not just on like Facebook comments sections, but now actually like heading up entire departments of state.
Yeah, and it's also worth mentioning that part of the reason this stuff happens is because it's really profitable the anti vaccine lobby, and it is a lobby, has an unbelievable amount of money. You see a lot of people pivot towards it. I'm going to close this out by yelling at there's a media organization called grey Zone, which if you've been involved in anti Palestine activistm you've probably seen some of their reporting. They are also like pivoted
into this kind of anti vaccine stuff. And you know, you remember remember at the top what I talked about Jay Badachaira, who's that anti lockdown fanatic who's going to be in charge of the National Institutes of Health. He is a guy that, like Grey Zone, interviewed on their fucking website and put out a bunch of articles in support of his anti lockdown stuff. Right, And so this is something that we've been seeing for the last four years, is a lot of people who are supposed to be
leftists pivoting towards his anti vax stuff. Gibidor is another example of this. Yes, yes, literally purely because it makes you a lot of money. And now that now these grifters just have their guy in office, and all of us are going to have to live with the consequences of it unless unless we stop this jackass from being put into office, which is not impossible. It's it's it's
not without hope. This guy has a lot of enemies, both among like the people, and also in corporate America so h and also.
In the animal kingdom. That's true, that's true. He has he has many enemies. Families of the dead carcasses he draws.
Around well, and this is the families of the microbials in those carcasses which have wormed their way literally into his brain.
Yeah.
Hello, and welcome back to It could Happen Here, a show that is no longer hypothetical now that it is happening here. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and today I just want to talk to you a little bit about your online security. It's a hot topic right now for obvious reasons, and this won't be a comprehensive overview
on the subject by any meanings. I'm sure there will be more episodes in the future covering specific angles on this more depth, but today I just want to touch on some basics, especially for people who may be asking themselves some of these questions for the first time. This is more of a mental framework and a pep talk. The main message here is don't freak out. I'm not saying the situation isn't serious for your concerns aren't real. It's very serious, But freaking out is not going to
do you any good. And if you're looking for complicated, high tech solutions to the very real anxiety that you're feeling right now, this episode doesn't have it. That's not what I have for you today. And I know a lot of people have really specific concerns about apps they might be using to track their menstrual cycles or fertility. And we're not going to touch on that today because I think it's a topic that deserves its own episode, and an episode where I talk to an actual expert.
So I'm hoping to get that out next month. So what are we talking about? The answer is pretty simple, calming down and shutting up.
That's right.
It's only Thursday when this airs, but it is always shut the fuck up Friday in our hearts, because the main source of the risks you can do something about is your own mouth. Because here's the thing. I'm not an expert on digital security. I'm not a computer programmer or a hacker. I had to call our producer Danil one time because I went to record an episode and my little recording device said no, and I almost cried. And it turned out I accidentally slid the little tab
on the data card that locks it. I don't know, but what I do know a lot about is how to exploit someone else's lack of digital security. If you're a listener to my show We're Little Guys, you know that I kind of have a knack for finding out everything there is to know about a guy. So what I can offer you is a sort of reverse engineered guy to stay safe online from someone like me but evil. I like to tell people that you should be thinking
of your digital security kind of like your health. People are going to have different risk factors, different vulnerabilities, different concerns, different goals. If you're undocumented or on a student or work visa, the risks and possible consequences for you are very different. If you're queer or trans or a person of color, your risk profile looks different. If you're economically dependent on family members whose politics don't align with yours,
your risk profile is different. If you have a criminal record, if you work in a field where your political activity is a significant threat to your continued employment, if you're running for office, if you have a security clearance, if you have children or vulnerable family. These are all different vulnerabilities, and you're going to have specific concerns that are unique to you. And this isn't meant to address those specific
risk scenarios. But just like people who may have different risk factors when comes to their health, everyone can benefit from the basics. You know, no matter who you are, you have to wash your hands, and when it comes to digital security, a lot of People want to jump right to the exciting, complicated technical fixes. You know, they want the Kim Kardashian full body MRI equivalent of being
safe online. People want to talk about buying burner phones and getting a Faraday bag and evading high tech surveillance, but they're not washing their hands. People love to say they're going to buy a burner phone. But if you go to Walmart and you buy a burner phone and you put your credit card into the machine that is recording a video of your face, and then you take that phone home and turn it on inside your house next to your real phone, you've done nothing but waste
your time and money. So we're not talking about solutions like that. We are talking about is boring, un sexy, basic stuff that everybody can and should be doing before they jump into the deep end. If you choose to go that route, because I'm not saying you should worry about more advanced threats, I'm just saying you have to start here. So before you can figure out how to mitigate a risk, you have to nail down what that risk actually is, what is the outcome that you're hoping
to avoid. There's a lot of anxiety right now about unknowable possibilities, and it's really easy to get overwhelmed with the what ifs of a worst case scenario and then you just end up feeling really helpless. And look, yeah, there are some potential threats here that I don't have the tools to help you address, But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be taking the steps that are within your control right now. You have to fight off that feeling
of helplessness. So what we're talking about here is threat modeling. It gave a little workshop a few months ago about digital security, and the first thing I asked the group was what is the bad thing that you were worried will happen? And most people's answer to that was they're worried about getting doxed. Okay, that's that's fair, that's a valid fear, But what do you mean by that? What specifically is the piece of information you are worried someone
will discover? Is it your name, your address where you work? Is it connecting two pieces of your online identity that you thought were separate. Docxing can mean a lot of things to different people at a different contexts, and it can happen in degrees. Right, Like you know my full legal name. I'm you know, dosed to whatever extent that means anything. But this could still happen to me. Someone could still discover a piece of information about me that
I wish they didn't have. And most people can't become completely anonymous. I can't help you do that, and honestly, I don't think that should be most people's goals. Don't disappear. I'm not telling you you should disappear. This is just about figuring out what makes sense for you and what you can do to nap gate the landscape that you've chosen to operate in. So, what is the actual negative
outcome specifically that is making you feel afraid? What is the concrete thing that you are thinking about when you experience that fear. And people's answers tend to be that they're worried about getting harassed, They're worried about their physical safety, They're worried about negative fallout at work or at school. People's fears tend to be about things like getting arrested,
getting sued, getting fired, getting hurt, and getting embarrassed. And so the next question is can you identify the potential sources for the kinds of harm you're worried about, and you can sort these into a few primary categories. The state can harm you. That's the police, the government. You can get charged with a crime. Institutions can harm you. If you're a student, you can get in trouble at school, If you have some kind of professional license, people could
file complaints against you. Politicians and organized political groups can harm you. You know, Marjorie Taylor Green might tweet your TikTok video or Canary Mission might do a blog post about where you work. And right wing groups can harm you. You might get targeted harassment from some Nazi telegram channel. Worst case scenario, maybe you were physically threatened or attacked
by an extremist group. You could get swatted. And then there's just this sort of wild card of the random strangers and Internet mobs and the way they factor into and exacerbate all of the above scenarios. When it comes to harm from the state, that's beyond what we're talking about with this digital hand washing metaphor. A lot of the prevention steps you can take today are still going
to help you. They're still worth taking. But at the end of the day, if the government wants to know who runs a Twitter account, who drove to a protest, who supported a movement, who donated money. That's beyond the basics. Most of what I have direct experience with are just these basic measures that you can take to day to make it a little bit harder for the average weird
little guy to get into your business. It'll stop the average online troll, it'll slow down a decent sleuth, but it's not the kind of stuff that stops a guy with a warrant. Think of protecting your online identity like being inside your house. If you have no curtains, someone walking down the street can see you, even if they
didn't go out of their way to look. If you're putting everything out there with no thought to digital security, somebody could dox se you without even trying, just like they would be able to see and through your windows from the street. Somebody who is a little more curious about you might walk into your yard. But if you put up a fence, maybe that person will decide this isn't really worth my time. Somebody who loves peeping in windows really wants to see you. He's gonna hop your fence, right.
But the average troll will see these barriers and they'll get bored. But again, curtains, a fence, a locked door, a guard dog. These don't stop a guy with a warrant. So we're talking about just putting up barriers that slow down and discourage the average low to mid level weirdo. In short, do let your Facebook set your accounts to private, you signal, put a pass code on your phone, say less, and try to do something about the data brokers. Let's
break these down one at a time. I'm sure it's been talked about on this show before, but I tell everyone in my life download Signal. Download Signal. It's free, put it on your phone. It's just an encrypted messaging app, and I use it by default, pretty much exclusively in place of regular texting, just because it's easier for me to have everything in one place. It doesn't collect or store your metadata, it doesn't back up to the cloud, and you can set all of your conversations to automatically
disappear at whatever time interval you choose. You don't need text messages from a year ago.
You don't.
Those can never help you, They can only hurt you. Just let them go and turn off the biometric unlock on your phone. Whether that's a fingerprint or a face ID. Turn it off, turn it off. Set a passcode. If you get arrested and you have your phone on you, they can use your finger or your face to unlock it without a warrant. But if you have a passcode, you're a little bit safer. So set a pass code that's at least six digits long longer if you can bear it, I know. But when it comes to social media,
you have some choices. You may look at your own threat model and say, why don't care if everyone can see what I've posted? And that's okay, right. We all have different goals and vulnerabilities. And if you're a very public organizer, then yeah, you need public social media. But if you've been using Facebook for two twenty years, you probably weren't always very careful about what was on there.
And there are privacy settings now where you can retroactively set all of your old posts to a new privacy settings. You should do that start there if you haven't done that, but that still leaves a lot of digital debris. If you've changed your display name to something more private in recent years, something that isn't your current legal name, old posts that other people made about you still have your
old name in them. So if they tagged you ten years ago, that old name is still a link to your current profile, and you can't control the content that
your friends and family posted years ago. And on the flip side, if in the end you decide you don't care what's on your Facebook about you, when you're doing your threat modeling, consider the people close to you, because when I'm working at this from the other side, a lot of times I'll find that, you know, the guy that I'm looking for has done a pretty good job cleaning up his own digital presence, but his wife, his mom,
his sister, someone in his life as not. So if there's someone in your life who maybe is at greater risk than you are, don't be their weak spot. And if you're in a position to do so, talk to the people in your life about this. Have these conversations about what are our risks, what are our goals. Let's do a digital hygiene tech together, because you can build
an impenetrable digital fortress around yourself. But if you're aunt Kathy is live streaming your baby shower, that didn't do you much good.
And now that more.
People are talking about these kinds of concerns. You can try broaching the subject with people in your life that may not have been receptive to it a year ago. Show your mom how to set our Facebook to private. Take the time to explain to your less political siblings why they should think about the ways in which their
social media use might expose someone they care about. Don't just scold them or you say it's reckless that you're doing this, talk about why so when it comes to social media, I'm saying delete your Facebook as a sort of shorthand for the general cleanup of the stuff that you've left online for the last twenty years. Cleaning up your online presence is the number one thing you can do right now to thwart the bizarro universe version of me who is trying to collect every piece of information
about you. Because even if you're careful today, even if you're so smart about it now and you're not putting anything online that puts you at risk, you weren't always that careful. We're all guilty of it. People who've been doing this for a long time, people who know better, We're all guilty of being a little messy online. It's okay, there's no shame that you didn't know before. Don't feel silly,
don't feel guilty. Just start cleaning it up today and so to figure out what exactly you might have been leaving out in the open, one thing you can try is doxing yourself, or do it with a friend, right, try doxing each other. So start with a completely clean cash, do your cookies whatever, Open an incognito browser, Start with a blank slate, and just google yourself. Google your name, your address, your phone number. Google the usernames that you
currently use on various sites. But google the username you used in high school. Google your old aim handle, Google the email address you made when you were twelve.
What comes up?
And is that information you want everybody to have? Probably not. Start by deleting accounts you don't use anymore. Just wipe those bad boys right out. Don't need those. A lot of people have no idea that the ghost of their old MySpace page still exists online. I've actually used that one fairly recently to confirm the details about a person's close associates and family members. They hadn't logged into MySpace
since twenty ten. But your top eight lives forever. So delete or set to privates any account that you don't use, don't need, or just don't need to be public facing. Log into every social media site, every forum, every online store where you've ever created an account, and just look at what's visible. Your online reviews may contain information about where you live. Your profile on some forum you posted on in twenty twelve probably has your birthday on it.
And if you're an active Pinterest user, your Pinterest boards are probably revealing a lot more information about you than you realize, information about your family, your interests, your plans for the future. People will make Pinterest boards with names like Jaden's second birthday, and now I know that you have a son named Jaden whose second birthday party you were planning last July. That's a real example. So set these things to private. Change your profile picture to something
that isn't your face. Look at your username. Did you have to put some numbers at the end of that because the one you wanted was taken? Are those numbers your birthday? And vary your usernames a little bit. Unless you have some kind of professional reason for using a personal brand across every platform, don't use the same username everywhere.
Keep separate areas of your life separate. Don't make it any easier than it needs to be to connect these different pieces of your digital footprint into one picture of who you are. Because again I'm not talking about becoming completely anonymous online. A lot of people need to exist online as the person that they are. You have a LinkedIn, you do public facing organized. I'm not saying you need to disappear from online, but if you have accounts that you don't want connected back to.
Your true identity.
If there are pieces of you that exist that you don't want side by side, don't connect them. So if you anonymously run a social media account for an activist group, don't use it to follow your own real account. Don't like your boyfriend's posts when you're logged into your anarchist shit posting account if you don't want it connected to you,
don't create overlap. If you post a screenshot from one social media platform onto another, you know, a screenshot of a tweet on your Instagram, whatever, be mindful of what's in that image. Is there a thumbnail of your own profile picture in there? Does the screenshot show that you interacted with that post? Because a filled in heart on an Instagram screenshot is something I have used as a
building block for a docs. And maybe you've never posted anything identifiable on Twitter, but if you're a link to your Twitter account on Reddit, or are you in a big discord and you shared one of your own posts with your friends in there, like hey look at this bangor tweet I'm going viral. And I say both of those specifically because both of those are specific mistakes that I have seen people make that were for me a crucial link between two accounts that connected the dots to
figure out who they were. Use two factor authentication, use a password manager, use complex passwords, never recycle a password. Check databases like have I been poned? See what's been leaked about you? And some of that data is out of your control now, but it's out there and you can't call it back. But you can change all of your passwords today. You can download a password manager and change all of your passwords today, and all of your
passwords should be something different from one another. I'm going to say it again, change all your passwords. Stop using your dog's name as your password for everything. It was hard, but I did it, okay. And when you're doing this digital hygiene check, you know you're googling yourself, you're checking these breach databases. One of the things you're going to find is your address, your email address, and your phone number,
and your parents' names and your parents' address. All of these pieces of what you thought were personal private information. They are bought and sold to data brokers, and these data brokers put them online on sites that people can pay to access. Feel like people Finder, True people Search, White Pages. There's hundreds of them.
Now.
By law, all of these sites have to have a link on them somewhere where you can ask them to delete your information. Some of them make it kind of hard, and it may take weeks for them to actually honor the request, and you may have to follow up. But theoretically, if they're operating legally, you do have the ability to manually clean up how much of your personal information comes up from these data brokers. But I'll be honest with you,
it's whack a mole. You could spend one afternoon a week for the rest of your life making opt out requests and following up on them and checking back to make sure it's really gone.
You can do that.
I used to do that.
But there are also services that will do it for you for a fee. I think there may be an episode in the pipeline examining that particular ecosystem and some more details. So I won't go into the pros and cons of different services that exist, but if that's something you're interested in paying for, do some research about it before you put your money down. But at the end of the day, I just want you to remember you can't solve this whole problem. That might sound like a
defeatist message, but I think it's healthy. I'm not saying it's hopeless. I'm saying you have to spend your energy where it counts. People ask me all the time, you know, are you worried about this or that specific threat? And the answer is yeah, probably, Yeah, of course I'm worried. But you can't let that fear overwhelmed you. You know, if I get fixated on the existence of threats that are outside of my control, I'll just freak out, and that makes me less capable of focusing on mitigating the
threats that are within my control. So don't put blinders on, don't lie to yourself. You know, be realistic, but don't wear yourself out worrying about things that are so far out of your control that all you have is fear. So today, now take a deep breath, delete your MySpace account and talk to your mom about setting all her old Facebook pictures to private.
What's pew pew in my pew ows? This is Robert Evans and it could happen here? A podcast about it happening here? As it seems to be more every week and when things get worse, one thing that a lot of folks start talking about is should I buy a gun? And obviously this is a fraught question and the only responsible answers to it are very complicated. And so to talk over some very complicated answers, we've got James Stout and we have in the audience with us the great
Carl Casarta, Carl of en Range TV. Thank you for coming on to be our resident firearms expert in this podcast where we try not to be deeply irresponsible.
Yeah, thank you for having me on.
It's always a pleasure to come back to the show, and people always ask for more collabs, and here we are, but on a very important topic. And yes, Billy courtion I have is now is when do you change the name of the podcast too?
Oh?
No, it's happening here. We're talking with the marketing people. It done happened here.
Oh shit, it's happening again. It's been happening here.
Yeah, here, it is here now right in this moment.
Be here now it.
Yeah, we got to work out which one seo's best. But we're on it, Carl, don't worry. We're working on it, so as I think both of you know, but maybe listeners don't. Gun sales typically saw before elections as to ammunition purchases. People are afraid of gun bands has been traditionally one reason why, and the firearms industry is not afraid of hyping those up to increase sales in election years,
and normally prices increase in line with demand. Like if you go back to November twenty twenty and look at the prices of ammunition and guns compared to now, you'll see how much incredibly high they were. That was for a number of reasons. But considering inflation, gun prices are pretty low right now.
You know that is kind of a recurrent thing. For the most part, is that while everything else gets more expensive, television and firearms remain affordable.
Yeah, gone gone to the point where they are more affordable than they've ever been. Uh huh, Yeah, they really are Air fifteens or I used to talk about this on air fifteens are essentially cord wood and you can get a fully fled good to go air fifteen now for like four to five hundred bucks, to the epistols for two hundred and fifty bucks.
Yeah, the prices on guns are like through the floor.
And yeah, it's interesting to note that, Like, if you are a gun manufacturer, a firearms dealer, even if you don't hype elections, it would be unintelligent of you to not prep for elections because they're so consistently Yeah, the Christmas of gun sales.
So this is an instance in which we didn't see that. It's it's kind of interesting.
I think there's an element because obviously when we talk I think to people who are not into guns and talk about how cheap guns have gotten, they're like, well, that's very bad, and there's definitely downsides to that. But an upside of that is it does kind of suggest we are not seeing the degree of panicked hoarding for a civil war that we have seen at previous points when gun prices were not as as cratered and AMMO prices were a lot higher, and ammovilla the availability was
a lot lower. Like in some ways that's kind of an optimistic sign.
Yeah, or the dark side of that is the traditional prepper air quote is so saturated in guns and ammunition.
Right, but they don't even need another one, right.
Well, that's I think that is where a lot of people are.
Yeah.
Also, like capacity really increased in twenty twenty, and I think they've been pumping out Like it's interesting to look at like the cost of nine millimeters and five five six ammunition, which if you're not familiar, are like the most commonly used defensive ammunition rounds compared to more niche stuff like that hasn't gone down as much if you're trying to get three hundred wisdom or something.
The funny thing that, yeah, five five six and nine milimeters both to defensively add well is just recreationally are the most common ammunition.
Yeah, by far.
And some of the weird old stuff I like to shoot, like percussion caps for percussion revolvers. You can't find that stuff to save your life. That's those through the roof and expensive. So yeah, they've literally just bunkered down. Cook intent there and are make five six a nine millimeters because that's where the.
Demand is and will continue to be.
Yeah, I can't find you can't see it. I have a little reloading set up here. I can't find shot gun primus or send powders anyway.
Now, and this is going to be a problem because if we have another Cowboys and Aliens kind of situation, what are we going to use? You know, what is Harrison Ford going to use to save us? Anyway? Nobody saw that movie? Why am I making that joke?
Let me know, I've got a good stashion. We're all going to be leaning heavily on carl.
Call for all humanity.
So I think we've gotten a little bit ahead of our skis here. We should we should start by talking, because again, I think we've all seen a lot of people being like, well, I guess I should get a gun now, as in the wake of Trump's victory. And I think the first caveat we should give everyone is like, if you are reacting in a way that is totally reasonable to this news being depressed, right, if you're somebody who deals with suicidal ideation, if you have been spiraling lately,
if you have been thinking about self harm. If you are just not in a stable mental place, and especially if you have no experience with firearms and are not in a stable mental place, don't go rush to pick one up now. Look for one thing. I assure you they will be available in the future. They are not gonna get harder to buy.
No, you know. It mights be of a line from the movie We.
Were Soldiers, which is actually a pretty pretty good movie speaking oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Not a Gibson.
It was pretty good, And there's a scene where like the old hardened soldier from Korea World War two in Korea gets the Vietnam and he's like, he's just got a pistol, and like everyone's around him saying don't you want an M sixteen? He goes, don't worry, There'll be plenty of those laying around if I need one. So right, kind of that's where we're at in this country.
Don't worry, There'll be plenty laying around if you need one. Yeah.
Yeah, we are not entering a period where that's you know, I think there are some specific worries where there may be attempts to restrict specific groups from arming themselves. But even so, I wouldn't say that elevates it above a threat. If you are dealing with suicidal ideation, having a gun is is not a talisman, as our friend tactical girlfriend often brings up, and you shouldn't treat it as one.
And part of what that means is that, like, you have to model like the threat that you're facing, right and if you are not in immediate danger, if nobody is threatening to kill you specifically, you know, then that may not be the safest thing for you, right and particularly, I think the other side of it that Carl, you are much more qualified to talk about with than me, is that if you are going to buy a firearm, if you want that to be a thing that can
actually protect you in a situation where you are in danger, where someone is threatening your life, you have to train with it.
Yeah.
No, absolutely, I think that not to make to make light of that at all with that little joke about that movie, but the reality is we as people humans in general, all of us are bad at threat modeling. And that's not to say that the perceived threat that
we're seeing with the results isn't real. Yeah, I think it is, But that said at the moment, if you're dealing with some of those issues like you mentioned, or the living situation you're aund, or even the community around right, isn't one in which a firearm laying around is particularly safe. Could mean that you're actually inducing more threat and risk to yourself than what might come in two years. So that is something we have to think about very carefully.
Can I possess this responsibly? Do I know how to use it responsibly? Am I in a place not only in my living situation, but my mental state that possessing this very quick and easy to use lethal device is safe to have around? Those are questions you should ask first before worrying about tomorrow.
Right, Yeah, I mean maybe we should address like a couple of things that Kyle said right off the bat, Like you said having a firearm lying around, right, One thing that we should address is like, I know I recently purchased a new gun safe, but like if you have ex budget to buy a gun. Robert also mentioned that without training, your liability with the gun. Right, maybe we can break down if you have one thousand dollars, you don't need to go out and spend a thousand
dollars on your gun. Right, perhaps it would be better to save some of that money and put it towards other things. I think it might make sense to just break those down for people in case they're not familiar.
Yeah, I think that that might be a good place to start. Is if you decide number one, I'm in an emotionally stable place. I either have some specific threats or I want to be prepared for a future where those threats are more likely. And let's start with a budget of one thousand dollars, right, And you know this is one of the there's going to be people who can't afford a budget of one thousand dollars and that's very unfortunate. But this is one of those things that
like isn't fair, right, Like guns cost money. Not everyone has disposable income. But one thousand dollars I think is a reasonable floor for not just acquiring a firearm, but like the things you need to be able to start building proficiency with. It's like, let's talk about that car, Like what would you do would you advise someone with a grand who is looking into getting into shooting and also being set up to potentially defend themselves if they need to.
Right, So this this.
Well, it's such a nuanced question and answer because there's so many variabilities there, one of which is you have to understand the living situation you in.
Are you living in a place that is solely your own? Do you live with roommates, do you have children and your parents?
I mean, like these things all come into the equation about how well can you secure this thing should you acquire it? And so that comes up to do you need a full bolt into the wall safe? Do you need something that is locked with cable underneath the bed that still is reasonably difficult to get into but is accessible otherwise? Do you have a situation in which you're the only one that could access this and therefore you're
not worried about that? So the first thing you have to think about is, though I'm taken possession of responsibility of this, it is a lethal weapon, what am I going to do to make sure that that doesn't fall into the wrong hands? Whether there are people that live within your own structure or outside of it should something
go awright, So you have to consider that. So right off the bat is what are the situation I'm in and what are the things I need to consider to make sure this doesn't leak out of my control, because we've seen in so many instances, especially some of the horrible spree shootings and such, in which is not the person to possess the gun, but someone around them that took it from them and used it for them. Absolutely, And that's because it wasn't stored well. And so that's
number one. So you're going to think about one, are you getting a small a pithol or a long arm? And that's a discussion that we had too, but those two equate. And then depending on which one of those two you're acquiring determines the kind of safe storage requirements that also aligned with your current living situation. Of course, the best thing is a safe bolted to the floor that only you can get into. But that's not viable for everyone.
Yeah, right, but it's something right yeah, Yeah. What comes along with that is you also, this is going to be true at every stage of this process, you need to know the laws of your state and maybe even your local area. Right Like in Oregon we have very strict safe storage laws, right Like, you can be held accountable to a higher degree in this state if you don't secure a weapon and someone gets access to it
right now. Obviously, if you have a safe and someone drills into your safe, you're not liable, right like you took the actions you could to stop them from being able to get to your firearms. There's not an expectation that you have a fortress of solitude or whatever, but you have to have taken reasonable steps to lock them away, right,
And you know that's going to be different. A lot of states have absolutely no requirements whatsoever, but you need to be aware of what your local legal situation is.
Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that to the table because myself, living in Arizona, we have no such rules, and so.
I can essentially you can just keep them on the floor.
I could stab them in my front yard, right I'm like to put him out in the yard.
We'll see. I had extra rs.
I use him to make a fence cheaper than would right now, literally cold would now.
So the thing about that is this is again, these things get more and more complicated over time. But we don't want to make this conversation impenetrable. But like, the kind of safe you acquire is important too, and this is that's a deeper topic than we could ever do in one video. I'm gonna go ahead and just dovetail out to a friend of mine, Devian Olaf. He has a channel he does a lot of video work about
gun safe and which ones are good or bad. But let's just say the chief ninety dollars thing with the cylindrical key lock, isn't it.
So you've got to be a little better than that. So I would ask the me, let's go with costs you're buying.
Let's say in air fifteen, you're probably going to need to spend and I'm guessing here around two hundred fifty dollars for a safe that's actually worth a dam.
Yeah, yeah, it's about what I spent recently for little handguns safe. Yeah, so's let's build on that. Right, Let's say you've decided that you want a gun and that it's safe for you to have a gun. I think, Yeah, the first thing you ought to prioritize is making sure that no one who for whom it is not safe
gets that gun, which we've addressed right. The second thing that you need to prioritize is that you could use that gun safely and like you're another liability every time, Yeah, that you pick up and load that gun, right.
Yes, And part of that is in and maybe I will have different opinions on this, but I think we're probably sympatico picking the right type of firearm. I see a lot of people saying, I am worried I'm going to get attacked. You know, I've been I've gotten a death threat. You know, I'm scared, particularly of this group of you know, Nazis or whatever. So I'm going to
buy a handgun. And I will tell you right now, my opinion is that if you are looking for a self defense weapon, a handgun probably shouldn't be what you pick unless you are looking to carry a gun.
Yeah. No, that's a good quote, right.
I carry a handgun because it's unwieldy to walk around with a fifty BMG.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I cannot.
I cannot take my ar with me in the street, right, so I keep a nine on me.
You know, handguns are.
The most difficult thing to use skillfully under distress and duress than any other firearm. And yes, above and beyond that, they are actually the least fact of it doing the job you think they're going to do than anything else.
Yeah, yeah, they're a shocking number of people are shot way more times than you would expect they could survive with a handgun, right, Like that is just a reality of the way that they work, because they're much much less powerful than a rifle. And it's also like I had a friend a couple of years ago who bought a snubnose thirty eight, thinking, well, this is simple, I can't fuck it up. It's a good And I took her out and was like, I'm going to set up a ten foot target and we'll see how many times
you can hit it with this gun. And she could not do it one out of five times. And then I brought out my glock and she was able to hit it every time.
Right.
And it's because one of those is a much easier weapon for somebody who is complete a complete novice to learn how to use functionally, right. And it's not the snubnose thirty eight.
Yeah, in the roughest of most senses. Typically the smaller the gun is, the more a professionally you need to be to use.
It, right.
Yeah, And like with that in mind, you're responsible for every shot you fire, right training in self defense? What by fucking accident? Because you don't have to clean your gun or what have you. Every bullet that leaves that barrel, it's your fault and every one of theirs is potentially someone's life. So when you're thinking about buying a and you want to have something where you can a handle it safely and be discharging and know where that bullet's going to go.
Yeah, So on that note, this has been asked for me many times, and we're talking about where all we are on the same page. It's like when someone asking me this question and it comes up more than you'd think. First of all, we're getting past the issue of like are you safe to own this and safe storage? So now we're at the point you are buying a gun, right, so you have to think, oh, what's the threat?
Are we worried.
About three years from now and the potential realities of a very caustic and dangerous political future. Are you worried about only home defense? Are you worried about your own self protection walking down the street, because obviously you're not going to be well, not obviously, but for the most part, you're not going to be carry an AR fifteen down
the street. But if you are only worried about your castle, make a joke about castle doctor, and if you're only worried about your house, inside your house, there is no reason to be picking a pistol none whatsoever.
Now, I will say that there's a number of folks in the lefty gun space who will say, so, just get an AR fifteen. That's not always going to be practical depending on your loss, right, Like, that is not something that we can say everyone will be able to do, right, yeah, but we can say there will be a non handgun option that will probably be a better fit for you.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And this is where we see a lot of people in the gun space. It's kind of weird, like cultural shifts in those zeitgeist what's the cool defensive thing of the time. But there's a lot to be said depending on what you think you're going.
To have to shoot it.
Hopefully never of course, but like, yeah, an AR fifteen does things like armour piercing in terms of kevlar and da da da da dah. But for home defense, it really still is kind of hard to go wrong with a shotgun in many instances, and that should not be ignored. You know what else should it be ignored?
Huh?
It's our obligation to pivot to advertisements about every fifteen minutes on this show.
All right, we're back, Kyle.
You've mentioned that you think a shotguns can be more effective than NOW fifteen especially. Another thing I would add is here, in a state like California, the laws regarding simulartomatic centifire rifles are incredibly confusing. It's extremely easy to buy something on Amazon and slap it on your gun and render it a felony.
Yeah, I would generally say, like in most situations, an AR, if you're new to shooting, it's going to be easier to figure out. They're very simple, easy to upgrade and modify. But like, yeah, in California. In a state New York is similar, it's very easy to commit a felony with an AR fifteen and not know that you are. And you don't want to find out that your gun is a felony when you have to use it in self defense.
Right.
This is an instance in which the good old man again, I'm not trying to I'm not I'm not on team shotgun here, but when it comes to cross all state lines, I mean, sure, there's an exception somewhere, but for the most part, a manually pump activated shotgun, Yeah, is likely
to not run a foul of the law anywhere. Additionally, through a good chance that if you were to and we have to consider all realities, there's a good chance that should you need to use it, that when you're in court trying to defend yourself for using this lethal weapon. A shotgun doesn't seem to evoke the same concerns, let's say, from courts and from judges that an ar might and yar. You know, regardless of how common they are and how
much they proliferate society, there's still those scary rifles. A shotgun does not tend to evoke that same kind of response. It is most likely legal almost anywhere, and the diversity of ammunition you can use in it really bridges the gap from one yard to one hundred yards or more. But a lot of people that are new to guns, we'll think, well, shotgun don't need to aim. That is incorrect. Shotguns need to be aimed as much as any other
long arm. They're just very effective when they actually connect.
Yeah, it's one of those I think because I do change, like what I am taking with me based on where I go, and like when I'm in California. I generally like, if I'm going camping or something, I'll make sure I have a twelve gage in the car, right, because I'm not going to try to get whatever this month's gun laws are, right, you know, like that's just not practical to me. That said, I think because there are a number of people who will be very frustrated us talking
about shotguns. One thing that they are right about is there's a different type of training that's necessary with the shotgun, and they are in some ways more complicated to use than an AR in part because for every shot, well, unless it's a semi automatic, like for every shot you're pumping it, right, and like that, there's muscle memory that has to be built there. Right, it's harder, you know, maybe a little bit slower to get up to a level or at least you have to train differently with it.
Right.
The other thing about it is that like it loads very differently. You know, a shotgun is a completely different kind of ammunition than an AR has, which all goes back to the whole like you have to be willing to train with whatever it is you're going to use fair enough.
Yeah, See, ideally, like if you're in this position of thinking, if you can find a friend or failing that, arrange that will allow you to try different guns. I think as a novice you're going to pick up if you've never shot a gun before. I probably wouldn't pick up a twelve googe shotgun and start peuing away because the recoil will be quite profound and notable to you. So don't start there. Start with something else.
There's smaller shotguns at twenty gauge, yeah.
And those are fine, especially if you're a smaller statute person. Even a twenty eight or sixteens are hard to probably buy defensive ammunition for. But I think if you can, when you begin that journey, like after the TV ball, say with Hanggouns, find one that fits your hand. You probably have no idea what fits you and feels good
if you're just starting out. Yeah, finding someone who is local to you, ideally who has some experience who can help you along that process, I think, and someone who you trust, right Like I've been like I have to train. I have a concealed carry weapons permit in California. The last time I went to take a course, like from the outset, I got like xenophobe homophobia, like jokes that I guess the guy who was instructing the course thought that everyone was in on just like they made me
feel unwelcome and I'm assist white guy. Yeah, but I think maybe we should address that, Like if you're thinking getting started, what kind of instruction should you look for? Where should you look for it? And like what would you recommend? Maybe other sources to Kyle, Like your YouTube channel has been a great resource for me.
This is this is where we're in the firearms it's owning a thing doesn't make a community. So there's always a phrase the gun community. It's not a thing owning. Owning a thing doesn't make a community. A community is a group of people that bond together over mutual beliefs and hopefully care for one another. So there's no firearms community. But that's the broad scope of people that have been interested in the topic for the longest doration of time.
Has been mostly succeeded to a group that we would not find ourselves aligned with or comfortable with being around. And so this is where the community building thing is real, because the more we build communities and we're hid in this regards in terms two alternative voices in the firearm space.
But the more we build that community not only online but amongst one another, the more we're going to have safer, better spaces for us to work together to learn how to use these things safely and efficiently.
And that is a challenge.
If you walk in sight unseen to a place that is probably foreign to you in firearms land, sadly at this time point in time, is a pretty good chance it's not gonna be something you're gonna be comfortable with. Quite honestly, just like you mentioned James, like, it's gonna be that kind of stuff. There's probably gonna be Trump stuff on the wall, there's probably going you're probably gonna hear some jokes that are just jokes, but you know they're really not.
Yeah, that's the kind of space that that's filled with.
And so when people come and say, well, who can I go to to get this training with, I'm like, that's challenging. There's some options online, there's like Operation Blazing Sword, There's there's there's the Liberal Gun Club has some training options as well. But what's better is finding people and
interconnecting with people of like mind around you. If you can and working together and then actually building a real community that isn't a gun community, and that's where we're going to find solace and the ability to get better with this stuff together. Not a great exactly a strong answer, but if the truth. But if you're going in, if you're going in just unhindered, you're going to expect it to be a place that you're probably not going to be happy with.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. I'd like you can we talk a little bit more about training options, like not just because you mentioned Operation Blazing Sword, I'd like to hear a little more about them, but also where people could go for like reading and videos in order to kind of find more information on how to develop proficiency.
Yeah.
So okay, So YouTube university doesn't teach you how to actually like effectively hit targets with something that stiffly that you can you can't. There's no way to learn that besides doing it. But in terms of general firearms understanding, learning some of the history, learning about how guns work, there are some YouTube resources out there. Tactical Girlfriend, you're already mentioned, has four years of a legacy of content on her site that a lot of it is focused
on beginner style content. In fact, she just posted a playlist. He has kind of stopped making videos in general, she mentioned that a while back, but she still has her content online and she posted a playlist recently of all of her how to get going videos one oh one stuff, and that would kind of be where I'd start with.
Yes, absolutely, my channel in range TV has some of that.
I tend to focus a little bit on the more esoteric and like next level things, but that's not to say it's not there as well. So I'm not trying to sell promote, but I would actually say her playlist is going to be better than some of my own, although we have stuff like that on range TV as well. If you want to open up that dark boy called Reddit, the Liberal Gun Club has resources on it. If you go there, they have a list of people and local resources.
You can also google the Liberal Gun Club. I'm not even trying to say anyone doing that is necessarily identifying as a liberal, but they have gathered lists of statewide resources as many as they can that are providing training in regional places. That would be a good place to start. Operation Blaeding Sword is a subset of that Blake.
I'll I can. I pronounced them that day.
Blake has been on my channel and you'll find him there in the Liberal.
Gun Club listing. When I think of that, I would say, go to YouTube.
Hit up Tactical Girlfriend, go to in Rey's TV if you want to see maybe not one on one but next level stuff, but a friendly space to you, and then check out the Liberal Gun Club best I can say, because they do have a list of resources that they're gathering across the country.
Yeah, and I think one thing that Tactical Girlfriend talks about that is acuse because you're right, and I think this is an important point that, like, you have to spend time shooting, and you know that costs money in order to get better, But there is one thing that you can do that does not cost ongoing money to get better with a handgun. If you're again looking to carry a gun, which is dry fire training, right, which is a very useful process of building proficiency, you can
do it. I mean you could do it every day if you want. It will help. It does not replace needing to go shoot right, but you can find guides. Tactical Girlfriend talks about it a lot, but you can find other guides online, and that is a way that you can kind of stretch your AMMO budget and gain additional proficiency.
There are even products designed specifically for that. One of them popul Mind, and there are others like mantis X. And you make sure your gun is safely unloaded and your proficient with that part of it. You've put these devices in and you can actually fire. A dry fire is firing with no ammunition in the gun. Click at a target on the wall and it'll teach you things about like did you pull to the right, did you
push to the list? Did you dip the gun? And those are very good products that you can use once you buy them. Gets more money, but you could train proficiently in a safe place without firing live ammunition and improve your skills quite a bit.
That's good.
Point yep.
Yeah, I would say another organization I would plug his armed quality, especially if like LGBTQIA people a friends of mine, very nice people. Perhaps we should go back then to that, like Rubbitts mentioned dry firing, we'd meant, well, first I think we need to go to ads James. You're right, Rubbit should go back to Chumba Casino.
Yeah, so dry fire at the wall and think of trump a casino or just download an operator from neural link that you got from Melong. Yep, that's right, that's right. Our primary sponsors a rain ship.
All right, we're back. So we've had a discussion about training, safe storage, and a little bit about like what to look at firearms wise. But I want to go back to that third one because you are marketed at so heavily when you're trying to buy a firearm, right, and the likelihood of you getting misinformation. Right, we all know smaller statute people who have been given yeah as snubnose
thirty eight a gun that's entirely inappropriate for them. Caw what like if you could maybe go through like each major category, right, if we do hanggun, shotgun, semi automatic rifle, maybe one that is compatible with ar band states, and one that's you know, yeah, you're in real America.
There are some options like the ares SCR that are basically AR fifteen's that are a lot easier to keep in compliance in a state like California, but they are also more than twice as expensive as like a budget AR fifteen right, Like, which is not to say it's impossible to have a budget AR fifteen that is in
comp lot in compliance with California law. It's just I am not going to take on the responsibility of telling you how to do that legally, because when I lived in California, I was only about eighty percent sure that I was in compliance.
With the law.
If you're in California, my advice would be to go to a shop and buy the gun complete. Yes, don't piece it together off the internet.
That's good at good advice.
Oh well, if you're a new gun owner, don't piece to get anything together because the knowledge to make something reliable that you've put together from bits and pieces is not a good idea. You want something that's got to I mean literally, you want something from a quote unquote reputable manufacturer but has a warranty.
Like, let's just be that.
Don't even start with trying to put something together. Yeah, yeah, so let's just go ahead and start with pistol. So the challenge there is like, of course, it would be very nice to be able to buy like four of them, because you can train with the twenty two and practice with this. But let's go with the constraint that we had earlier of this thousand dollars and you're going to buy a pistol and with it you plan to train, get better, be proficient, but also maybe have to use it for self defense.
You really want to stick with a nine millimeter.
I mean there are smaller guns like three eighties and such like that, but we're getting into specialist guns. Yeah, is what I'm going to say here across the board. When I recommend something, it's going to be the opposite of specialist. It's going to be the most bland, boring possible thing.
Yeah.
And when it comes to that, and I know that everyone like. But it's a nine milimeter probably a glock Yep. The glock nineteen is a relatively reasonably sized gun. The seventeen's a little bigger the nineteens. In this nice middle ground, it is carriable, it's small enough to be concealed should you have the right to do so, but it's big enough to be viable for being reasonably accurate with with not extensive amounts of training, but enough training to be to get good.
Yeah. And it's a.
Bunch around the nine millimeters magazine that just playing works Yep.
Yeah, yep.
If you're on a tight digit I will say that cops are always you can find trade in police clocks pretty cheap. Cops don't shoot very much. You can sometimes get some pretty good deals on those.
Yep. That's it.
I'm revealing a little bit of future history of what's going on in range. We're doing a video in a couple of weeks. There is a strange trade imbalance between us and never mind the politics.
Yeah, Turkey and they are.
Making some really high end, well made guns. There is a glock clone from Turkey that I can't vouch for yet, but this is the kind of where we're at in the gun space. This thing is interchangeable with all glock parts and the guns.
Like two hundred and fifty bucks.
Oh well, you can't be.
We don't know.
Yeah, I'm not saying go buy that, but I'm saying we're going to do a review of it. The point is there are glocks and glocklike things that can get the price down.
Yeah.
Right, And so you're looking at you know, if you get a jit Ar for five hundred bucks, you know a budget not a nine millimeter handgun. Because even if with not counting that one, there are other budget options that are in the three hundred ish dollar range. You just have to look around a bit. And I should also note buying used with a firearm is not like buying used with electronics. If a gun is well maintained, it will outlast you. Yeah right, there are some parts
that will need replacing from time to time. Right, Your springs and stuff are going to age faster than other things. And like barrels, you can shoot out, but it takes quite a bit of shooting to shoot a barrel, you know, smooth, right, So it's never a bad to consider like finding, like you said, like a police trade in or something like that, like that could be a great way to save money.
Absolutely.
So when it comes to a pistol, we're talking about buying just one pretty much boil it down to a nine millimeter yep. That is probably a polymer frame gune, not some big heavy steel thing. A glock is the is like the de facto. But there are others.
I mean, there's there's hks, there's rugers.
Yeah, I like SIGs, but they're priceier.
Yeah yeah.
Yeah.
The thing about glock is block's been around forever. It's the standard finding accessorizing, buying magazines or even getting repairs done to a block is ubiquitous across the country. If you get a glock, you'll be able to deal with it, fix it, do whatever you want to it straight up.
And what has helped me a lot in general is, you know, I have my carry gun, I have my home defense firearm, and then I have bought built a couple of firearms from the ground up. And I would certainly, as you said, I would never have started there. But because I had the extra money doing that means that has given me so much deeper of an understanding of what goes wrong when things do go wrong with a
gun and how to fix it. Like I've replaced every part on my carry gun at this point, right like over time, and it's like given me a much deeper level of understanding if just like mechanically, how these things function. You know, building an AR fifteen was the same process. And I'm really I do find that valuable. Obviously it's throwing more money at the problem two totally.
So the other advantage of nine milimeter, which is reasonably cheap defeat and shoot, he reasonably cheap to practice with.
For those of you that don't know anything about guns.
He will typically practice with what's called FMJ bulkpack ammunition. Yeah, nine milimeters one hundred and fifteen grain. It's just a bullet that's got a copper jacket on it, and that's your practice AMMO. And then for Carrie, should you be carrying it, you'll probably want to carry something that's specifically designed to be defensive ammunition. They'll be far more expensive
per box. But once you get to the point of yes, I am ready safe and capable to carry this, you're going to want to pick something gold dots spear gold dots are a HaLow point designed to specifically be for self defense. But make sure the gun you've chosen works reliably with that defensive ammo, because even though it works one hundred percent with that FMJ, it may not work with the defensive amil y'all might have to play with a little bit.
Yeah, we should also know when you are buying AMMO online, which is not going to be legal in every state, but most people will be able to do this. It pays to be careful. There is a lot of stuff that is sketchier out there and there can be consequences. I have had a firearm, I have had like a handgun blow up in my hand as a result of getting ammunition that I had not shot before. This was
in fact turkish. I think it was because I think it was a hot load, but it's possible that it was the result of a bullet be a squib and that then jammed in the barrel and then another round
came in after it. I generally have been pretty good at checking to make sure there's a hole in the paper with each shot, which is something you should be making sure of like when you're shooting, because get if you shoot around that like does not have enough powder behind it, right, if you get a bad round, it can jam in the barrel, and then the second round can cause the barrel to burst. This is also why
we always wear eye protection. But when looking at ammo, if you think this looks like good AMMO and it's cheap, look online. Add like reddit to the name. See what other people say about it, right, Like, see if you can find anything written about that. If other usually other people, if it's like a less reliable manufacturer will have said I've had a bad experience with this ammunition. Do your diligence right the first time you're shooting a new kind of cheap target AMMO.
That that being said, like there's a lot of names that almost anyone that's never owned a gun before, we'll recognize names like Remington, right, Winchester. Yes, these are That's not to say that they don't make mistakes too, but like, if you're going to go buy a Winchester bulk pack of ammunition, you are bombing at least what is generally considered consumer level reliable AMMO.
If you're buying it absolutely crazy, Bob's reloading shack right, you don't know that was what because it's a lot of the sketchy stuff isn't even a manufacturer. It's like AMMO that you may not notice immediately it's like, oh wow, this seems really cheap, and then it'll say in small letters remanufactured right, which means somebody has reloaded it, reloaded AMMA. And like, you know, you can reload AMMO and have it be perfectly good ammunition, but do you know who reloaded this AMMO?
Right?
I will tell you, as a person that shoots a lot and has been doing it for decades, I personally, even with all that, I will never fire remanufactured ammunition.
I want to deal with crazy Bob's weird Badnesday. Yes, yes, crazy Bob's Bad Wednesday.
It's a great Yeah. Yeah, we've addressed a pistol, right, like I want to dress lunguns. And then you mentioned a couple of things call which you should also address, which are like accessories. A Rubbitt mentioned ie protection. So let me let me.
Add one more piece to the pistol and we'll move on.
The thing now, the whizbang thing now is every pistol has a red dot site on it. A red dot site is essentially an electro optical box that sits on the top of the slide and you look through it to aim and it projects a red dot like almost like a laser dot if you're not familiar with.
It, to aim with.
For the most part, I'm not saying you shouldn't have one because they're cool, But for the most part, a person getting into this specifically for self defense does not need one of those. You don't need to spend three hundred dollars on a red dot. The iron sights that come on any of these guns should be sufficient for most purposes, So don't get into I need that. Yeah, if that's something you want later, think about it. But it's not a requirement.
Now that said, if a gun has one on it, I don't agree with people who say, like, you can't learn to shoot on a red dot. I think that that's now you should. You will need to look up because it may not be sighted, how to site it right, because it like red dots are a thing like you need to dial them in right, and there is a way to do that. Again, you can find guides to this online, just like you can find guides like mounting a scope on a rifle. These are complex mechanical tasks.
A red dot less so than a scope. But you can't just buy a gun with a red dot on it and trust that that red dot points out where the bullet's going to go. That's not how they work. Absolutely.
My point being is if you gave me, you said, this person here needs to be able to hit a target fifteen yards.
Away, you've got one hour.
I would not be messing by giving them a red dot. I would give them with something with iron sights and just get them through the task.
If that's what I go where I'm going with that, Yeah, I think that's perfectly reasonable. Yeah, I prefer like now that I know what I'm doing to use my red dots and stuff, but I also pretty regularly shoot with iron sights in part because I like it, Like it's it's enjoyable mechanically, and it's kind of how I learned.
Yeah, or don't get me wrong, it is better.
Yeah.
Yeah, it also have another level of complexity and it's more to go wrong, Like if you're installing that yourself, it's annoying and it's easy to mess up and then you're upset.
And yeah.
Yeah, let's move on to long guns. Like one thing that we should mention that you might buy an AR, specifically an AR actually and find that it comes with no sighting systems at all. Yes, and so that's the thing to build into your budget. So let's talk about like what to get for your budget in the long gun category.
Calf.
Yeah, so when we go to long guns, we talk about rifles and shotguns. Let's stick with rifles for now, I'm assuming so in that regard, this is this is the thing where like actually have a video on my channel about the NFA, which is the National Firearms Act, which is regulate it's a lot of like machine guns and stuff. But this also occur to across many gun control laws, they're frequently ablest, and the things that they pust the most rescriptions on are the things that are
actually most capable. And that means that means Air fifteens in their general guys with a pistol grip and a red dot site which we just mentioned for pistols and a thirty round magazine is the thing that is going to be the most I could get anyone. I tell you, anyone capable of hitting it a target at fifty yards within a four hour training session with a red dot side at Air fifteen and a good magazine, it's a
good ammunition. Air fifteens are light, low recoil. They're loud because of the five five six, but they're light, low recoil guns that almost any one of most body structure can handle. Now there's exceptions, of course, if you have specific physical challenges that's another discussion.
But if almost anyone tiny.
To large can handle a basic Air fifteen, and it is the gun that is most focused on for gun control. Ironically, this is like California where they take away things that make it more functional, like no pistol grip or reduce your magazine capacity because they're trying to diminish the functionality
of the gun. But the reality is the reason they're doing that is because that is the gun that is most functional for most people, and it is therefore the one that almost anyone can handle pretty well with the smallest.
Amount of training.
Yeah.
Yes, And I think there's a good point there in if I were coaching someone who is buying an AR that has no you know, does not have iron sights on it at all, you are it is much easier to learn how to site in and use a red dot on an AR than learning how to adjust the site the iron sights on an AR fifteen. Right, Like, not that you can't learn that that you should again, you have to, you can watch a video on it, but it's much more intuitive to set up a red dot in that way.
This is actually where I would flip flop. If you're with the pistol, don't concern yourself too much of the red dot. If you're going with an AIR fifteen, concern.
Yourself with the release. Get a red dot to the opposite. Yeah.
Yeah, unless you were like in the Marines or something, and you know how to dial in your irons, right, And even then, you're gonna have a better time with a red dot.
Yeah, yeah, totally once, and a red dot is very intuitive.
So one of the things that people are familiar with firearms, but when you bring up a long arm, there's multiple points of contact to the person shooting the gun. When you bring up a pistol, you probably have two hands on it and you're pushing your arms out almost like you're like making a triangle. When you're using a long arm like an air fifteen, there's a butt stock on your shoulder, your cheek is on the actual comb which
is the base of the stock. Your other hand your support hand it's holding the gun up on the front of it. You have a minimum of three points of contact with a red dot. That makes it very stable and easy to get reliable hits. And the red dot means you can keep both eyes open, don't need to
worry about the idiosyncrasies of focusing on a front site. Essentially, if it's neuro meaning the dot is regulated to where the gun hits, and you put the dot on the thing and press the trigger without doing something like jerking the gun, you'll hit the target.
And so that's why that matters.
Yeah, so what sort of budge each people be looking at and like, would you be comfortable recommending, like even brands that they should look at.
It all comes down the cost when it comes to AIR fifteen. So you can spend as much money as you want. The reality is I have a video on the channel. Never mind if you like or just like the company. They're one of the ones that really pushed the lower cost products out there. PSA it stands for Palm Models pal Metal State Armory. You can go there and get your branded Trump lower but at the same time, you can get an AR fifteen for like four hundred bucks.
Yeah, and like in the gun space, you're you're not going to find someone to buy who is spotless and selling guns in large numbers cheaply.
Yeah, Like that's not so like. So so for four hunderd bucks are around there. From PSA, you can get a traditional what's called an M four. It's essentially a sixteen inch car beam. It won't have any sighting system on it, so expect to throw another two hundred bucks ish onto a reasonable red dot site on that. So for around the six hundred dollars, you're gonna get a gun that's going to weigh seven pounds, but it's gonna have low recoil and you're gonna have something that's for
the most part, reasonably reliable. Is it the best of the comp is the best of the best. No, but it's reasonably lightweight. It is well manufactured. I've done videos about them on my channel. They've worked just fine. And so for a foreigner ish for the gun of the two hundred, for the sighting system, a couple mags, you could get out of the door for under seven hundred dollars with everything probably under that, maybe under six hundred even if you're careful.
Oh but let me plug one thing.
If you've got lots and lots more money, double that you get what would Starner do carbon which I designed. It'll be half the weight and super reliable from Katie Arms.
But I love mine.
Doesn't bring any money to me. I'm just saying.
The point I'm making here is you can get something good enough, and if you've got more money, there is better out there that are lighter, more reliable guns.
But you don't need to is my point.
I'm not trying to sell anything here.
Yeah, they are one of the few manufacturers who offer like a California Compliance Solution check out, which is nice for California people.
Yes, yes, so that can be a really beneficial thing to you in terms of, you know, not having it the something that you're scared about.
California Compliant will probably mean no flash hider, no pistol grim, and a fixed magazine at least at this point in time.
You can have the removabal magazine if you don't have the flash height of the pistol grip and the collapsing stock.
So okay, all.
Right, Well, if you can buy it from them ready to go, there's I know, there's also magazine capacity requirements or in so maybe you have.
To buy like a couple ten round bags or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, obviously thirty round bags are better than ten round bags, and for mostly if you live in a place like California, do not worry too much about that. If you get a little proficiency on that, a couple ten round bags will do a lot.
And to be honest, in self defense shootings, the odds are load that you will be firing that many rounds right now. If you're in a self defense shooting where you do need more bullets than that, there's really nothing that can replace having those bullets you know available.
But yeah, don't get reptrondiacs on it like it's not something you can change.
The fact that you only have a ten round magazine does not mean that you can't become proficient.
Yeah, and I don't want anyone here to think that I'm saying you shouldn't. You should be able to got six ye round magazine. As far as I'm concerned, places like California to have these restrictions have them statistically speaking, and I don't know if these this date has changed. Most self defense shootings happen within three yards, three seconds, three shots fired.
Yeah, yep, yeah, yep. I think it's really good to remember that when you are seeing some YouTube they tell you you need to be able to have thirty rounds in five five hundred yards.
I don't go downtown without my backpack and my SBRD three hundred black at with six thirty round magazine accessible.
In conservative man scat of cities.
Yeah yeah, I carry an RPG and I take the little safety cap off because I like to live that way.
Yeah yeah, yeah, dangerously. Now my clothing is made out of debt cord. I just wear nothing but debt cord. Wherever I go, we're all going down.
At least you take some people with you.
It's all city blocks, the.
Self defense mantad in.
But let me say one more thing about long arms.
Another thing you'll see from people that are new in the space, depending on what they've seen or what they've consumed.
This is going to get some hate. Don't bother with AK, Yeah, just don't.
This is the United States of America, and this country believes in the air fifteen. And what that boiled down to is they're everywhere.
They're prolific.
The parts are here, the repairs here, they're well manufactured. When you stray from that course to something like an AK, you're first of all, you're losing aeronomics.
But that's a different problem.
You're dealing with an unknown quantity of problems.
You get an air fifteen. That's what's in this country. It's what's prolific. If you were in if you were in somewhere war torn Africa, get your AK here.
I'll say this about the war torn AK countries because I've been in three countries where the primary arm is an AK M right like a kind of AK right Siri, Ukraine, in Iraq. In all three of those countries, every soldier who knew their stuff, who was proficient and had the option chosen AR platform. If they could get one hundred percent of the time, they're just better fire arms.
Yeah, that's been my experience as well.
They look cool, but but but don't go yeah, just get an air fore Yeah.
Like I love my ak's, but they're they're range fun toys, right like. Yeah, So let's talk about.
Accessorizing, which again is much easier with ais and aks. Like, what other stuff do you need to build into your budget? If you've not shot before, you might not know that you need a pro ipro sling, maybe haulster.
Well, we'll start with the firearms accessories, right, So with the pistol. First of all, we talked about safe storage, so that's already off the table. With the pistol, if you plan to carry it, you need a good reliable holster and a good reliable gun belt. Good lord, Yes, depending on how you want to carry it, that'll determine the kind of holster. If you want an outside the waistband, which means it sits outside your belt, that's one thing.
If you're carrying it concealed, you're probably going to want on an inside the waistbund which.
Goes between your belt and your body.
Again under the level of training there, because when you're drawing from that, things can go wrong.
Sure, and that's where people tend to shoot themselves. So that's what you needed to be very cautious of.
H But with a pithtol typically you're gonna want probably an extra magazine or two. It may come with one, depending on what you bought. A quality gun belt and a quality holster.
Now what about what about a forty four derringer and an ankle holster on each ankle, right like that seems like the ideal solution. Anytime you're in danger. You just got a squat right down there, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, no.
Get real low, yeah, especially when you've been pushed pushed onto your back by the mob and you're there on that scene and you're pulling it out of your ankleholester.
Yeah right, no, no, no, just get a wire around the trigger and attach it to your toes so that you can squeeze your toes and fire detention.
What you need is the belt buckle revolver from North American UMS.
Yeah, that is great. Yeah. No, from that freaking movie, the vampire movie Quinn Tarantino.
Oh geez, still that's still done.
God yeah, no, before the pin belt, a magazine or two extra it might come with them, and a quality holster. Now, the obvious question is what's a quality holster, And the obvious answer is there's too many out there to be able to offer you that answer right now. Probably something polymer if it's going to be outside the waistband. And this will be another one that'll get people fired up. Generally, avoid the surpa holsters unless you really want to have
a lot of training. Surple holsters are one that have a little button on the side that allows the gun to come out if you're not trained well or have the wrong gun in it. It also allows you to accidentally shoot yourself quite easily as well.
Yeah, best avoided. That's a very good point. And also one thing I will note is there's a danger that a lot of people aren't aware of with leather, which is that leather holsters. Now, there are some leather holsters that have like a trigger area reinforced with kaidex, which is, you know, a rigid, plasticky substance. But if it's not in time, those can start to like get weaker and warn in such a way that it can also cause it to press the trigger when you holster it. Like
that's a thing that has happened to people. So I generally think you want whatever you want the trigger guard to be rigid and not something that's going to like warp and be malleable around the trigger. Right, Like the whole point is that it stops the trigger from fire.
Yes, this you want to avoid that. How about with the with the long dens, Like, what are you going to need to budget for those? And then other things like for shooting Germany that you'll need if you don't already have then.
So when it comes to the long arm, we already said if you're going to get an air fifteen, you're going to want to stick some sort of red odd side on it. The lowest cost ones that are the unbelievably bomb proof are a Chinese company called Hollow Song. Hell, yeah, I have a hollow Sun from twenty seventeen that is still works just fine.
I love my hollow Suns.
Yeah, my hollow Sun's been bounced down a asshall road and it still works fine.
So it's the opposite of a fail sun a hollow sun.
So you can pick up red dot hollows on those can go in. You can get those sometimes sometimes that low is like one hundred and fifty bucks.
Yeah, so you'll need a red dot site.
A sling is nice, not required, especially if you're going to be using within the premises of your property. You probably don't need to worry about that. It Also, slings can cause issues like get caught on things or on things in your house or even tangle you up, So that's a training issue. So sling is iffy. An extra
magazine or two. And if you're planning on needing to use this for a defensive purpose inside of your home or structure or at night, it's not the worst thing in the world to throw on a flashlight.
Yeah, yes, especially if it's like a defensive firearm like it's your home defense gun or a carry gun like a flashlight. And also if you're I think it's generally a good idea if you're going to carry a carry firearm with a flashlight, have another flashlight that's not on a gun, because one thing you should never do is use your gun flashlight to look at just random shit.
That you need a flash light.
Bark, you come home at night in the dark, you forgot, you forgot, you can't find which key is the right.
Yeah, you're using gun. Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that.
Don't do that. That's a pretty good list of accessories set. Make sure you have a lad, air and eye protection as well.
So we're gonna go all the safety side of things. You need proper shooting glasses. That means not the glasses that you picked up for readers at Walgreen. If they're shooting glasses can be as cheap as nine bucks, all the way up to hundreds of bucks.
You can get them at the sporting good store.
But they're designed with the kind of plastic to be able to take shrapnel or hits from pieces of fragments that are high velocity.
They're meant for that. So ten dollars shooting glasses, yes, you need. Yes. Hearing protection. Those can be squishy earplugs you put in your ear, or they can be over the head. Moths do not ever shoot guns except in the most critical conditions or situations without eye protection and hearing protection, because that's the kind of stuff where you lose an eye and every time you fire that gun, you lose and hearing every.
Time, yes, yes, and like for the really because obviously most like it hurts to shoot a firearm without hearing protection. Like you can get away with shooting a gun without EyePro every time, but the one time, right, which is why I really emphasize eye protection. It's easy to convince yourself I don't need to have it on right now?
You do, yeah, like, because that's the day that it does the thing.
Yes, yes, guns do fuck up, for lack of a better term, and you really don't want your eye unprotected if they do.
Yeah, it's it's a bad day, absolutely, and so but you on the safety side of eye protection and hearing protection, it can be as cheap as ten dollars shooting glasses and a bottle of the squishy earplugs.
You're gonna be in there for twenty bucks. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't have to be expensive. Make sure you have it and make sure you use it.
But you know what, before you do any of this, you know what's a smart thing to do. Go take a class from Stop the Bleed and learn how to use turn a kIPS and medical gear. Yeah, and have that around anyway, before you ever buy a gun, go do that.
Yes, a mess. That's the most important thing you could do for anyone.
Yeah, yes, And that, as you said, should be a priority before getting the firearm. And if you have the money to get and train a gun, you have no excuse for not having an individual first aid kit an IFAC and the knowledge of how to use it.
Right, And I think Stop the Bleed classes are usually free. You can look it up and stop the Bleed dot com or dot org.
Google it. Take a class that's chasy.
How to use a tourniquet, use how to use a bandage, have an ifact as was just mentioned, which can be a pretty simple kit.
Ye.
And as you said, Robert, if you can afford a gun, you can afford that and have that with you on the range anytime you're shooting, because as you said, guns can fuck up. They usually don't, but if they do, you're gonna want that IFAC and that IFAC and that training might just help your neighbor one day when they get.
In a car accident or whatever.
I regularly make the decision not to carry my gun with me places. Right, you know, I'm going to go out and get drunk tonight I don't need if I have a firearm onde me when I'm drunk. But you know what I always have is the I fact right every single time. You know, because number one drunk with an IFAC, I'm no.
I might, I'm.
Probably less effective, but I'm not going to endanger anyone. You're just like, hey, buddy, I think you need a parn kit. He's like, no, give me here. Google said, this goes around the neck.
But once again, a.
Sotoppable class on an IPAC is more likely to serve you or your community more than any gun ever will.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's a great place. I would say that if you are going down this pathway and you're looking to join openly leftist gun organizations, there are several, right, John Brown Gun Club, Socialist Rifle Association, We've had those people on a show before. Be cautious when you're doing that, and keep an eye on things because that could be something that might get you into into trouble in the long run. So it's something to be aware of.
Yeah, it might be good to just put a holder on joining a new organization until we're a few months into this.
Thing coming up next year.
Maybe I have an idea about what kind of things might be safe and what kind of things might be less safe.
Definitely no, But none of that stops you from using signal, building community and learning how to use a firearm properly.
Right at meeting people, yes, and like training with them, you know, and taking getting training, building proficiency. Absolutely, all of that is legal and will remain legal. Just don't start if anyone ever talks to you about let's make a militia, do that. It's time to leave that conversation, right because, among other things, at this point there's a good chance they're the FBI.
If you live in Michigan, do not.
Yeah yeah, this podcast brought to you by co Intel pro.
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's great.
But I mean it's a tough challenge.
So the other thing you can do is also, once you've got your basic proficiency up and you know that you are safe in terms of handling things, let me throw this out there too. It doesn't have to be any specific one. Although remember you're going into a space that may not be political.
Your comfortable place.
A good place to build up skill is to go shoot matches competitions.
Yeah, for the most part, it's business oriented. You'll see.
You'll hear some stupid comments here or there, depending on what match you're at, but the reality is you're not there for that. You're there to get better with your gun on a course of fire that they put up for you. Pay your ten bucks or twenty bucks and learn how to shoot better in those conditions. And that's another space to once the basic trainings out of the way, don't go to a match the b training. Use the match to help increase your skill after you've gotten training.
But those matches can be a place to really help you out a lot. And there's a lot of them around and those are easier to find than almost anything.
Yep, practice scores where you can lick them up if you're into that kind of thing. Excellent, Thanks very much for joining us, Kyle. Do you want to very briefly plug your YouTube channel. Where can people find you?
Well?
Sure, and thank you for having me on the show. It's always a treat. I really appreciate it. It's always great to be able to just to hang out with you both do it more often. You can find my work It's in Range TV. You can find my website at range dot tv. I'm distributed decentralize a multiple platforms, a predominant one being YouTube. Cover everything from civil rights history, human rights to firearms to from old West flintlocks up to the most modern machine guns across the channel. Some
of it is instructional, some of its history. And I've got a cool video dropping tomorrow, in fact, well tomorrow based on when we're recording this on the Opium Wars and how Britain and China's firearms technology discrepancy caused Hong Kong to be owned by Britain. That's the kind of stuff I do on my channel, So check that out. And if you want to find matches that are going to be a place that is truly an inclusive space, we do run matches called Brutality Matches.
You can find them at brutalitymatches dot org.
They're not monthly, we have run a couple of them across the country, but I can guarantee you that's the space you will feel comfortable because we make.
It that way. Awesome.
Yeah, thanks Cole.
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat Death of the Universe.
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