It Could Happen Here Weekly 36

and it, by goodness, it continues to I'm Robert Evans. Um, Sophie, my producer just noted to me that we should probably uh introduce Sharene Lanna units since you've recently joined the team and have been on several episodes, and we just kind of rolled with it. Sharine, Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait what are you? Who are you? Where are you? When are you? Those are a lot of

questions as I can't answer. You are a frequent ghost on guest Um your producer with I heart you're on the show, ethnically ambiguous with Anna Hosnia and um you are our our our bud, I am your bud, thank you? Yeah joined published Yeah, poet a filmmaker a depressed person. You know, I took all the boxes. U helped Sophie

bury that body the other year. That was between us. Yeah, I don't know why we need to put that on Mike, between you and lake Mead m Okay, Well everyone's going to know where that body is, so you're gonna find it soon anyway. But yeah, I it's really fun to talk to you all. So it's nice that we can record me doing it now for work. Cool. That's Is that a good intro? Yeah, that is a good intro.

I'm really excited to have sharing on our team. It's uh something that we've been hoping that would happen for a while now, and we just feel very fortunate to have her voice as part of our as part of our very tight knit group. And um, you're welcome, listeners, hucks.

I feel very honored to be a part of such a small, tight knit group, especially because everyone I'm not even saying this to Fish please, but everyone here is much smarter than me, and so I've been learning a lot and I don't do nearly as much research as y'all do. So I hope to be the like a a someone representing the audience that knows nothing, you know what I mean? Like, that's my role here is to really give people, to let people be seen who have

their heads empty like mine. So representation matters. Well, I feel like we had empty headed represented when I joined the team. But fair enough, what are we? What is are? Who are we today? What are we doing today? Where are we today? Chris, you're the president of this episode? Oh no, wait, that's bad. All right, so I'm gonna I think I think I have to assassinate myself as

the way this works. But yeah, we're legally actually, yeah that that I think next episode, I assassinate myself this episode, I'd get on elected or something. But yeah, we're we're we're talking about sort of two convergent paths of how we got to like the most recent disaster but the most recent well this isn't even the most recent disaster anymore, but I how how how we got to the place where review weade is about to die? And you know,

there's two threads. And tomorrow we'll be talking about the terrorism, but today we'll be talking I say, we mostly we shoene, but yeah, we're gonna be talking about how the sort of like half a century long electoral movement that got us to this place. Yeah, it's really interesting because I mean some of it is self explanatory and some of it isn't that I think interesting to go back in time and really figure out how we got where we are.

So I think it's pretty obvious that like Republicans use the abortion issue to forge coalitions with like right wing and fundamentalist Christian voters, but Democrats are also using it to attract woman voters, and it seems like neither party will risk modifying the rigid position that it has for fear of alienating those who the abortion issue has helped attract. Because it feels like it's this just we're at a

stand still. It's not solvable. But it's actually when you look at the history, it's pretty I don't know, it kind of makes sense how we landed here. And every presidential candidate or any kid in general will present these countries issues with like a sense of urgency, especially this issue, but it really feels like they're just using it to attract voters and then it gets ignored. Um, but how did how did how did abortion become a part of

an issue in America? The polarization of the parties on this issue really started in the nineteen seventies and UM party leaders just started moving farther and farther apart on the issue. And a lot of scholars say that this is a combination of like grassroots activism and also established also just political strategy. So in nineteen seventies, UH, the politicians used on abortion, it didn't break down on along

knee party lines. Republican president Gerald Ford, he opposed Roe v. Wade, but the first lady was an abortion rights supporter, and then his vice president Rockefeller, he presided over the repeal of abortion restrictions in New York UM and UH. In Congress, Republican Republicans voted against abortion about the same rate as Democrats, So there wasn't a huge black and white, good evil kind of thing going on UM. And it started to

change in the seventies. So during his presidential campaign in seventy two, Nixon began striking out anti abortion position are staking out anti abortion positions as part of a state strategy to appeal to Catholic voters and other social conservatives, and after he won with the majority of Catholic votes, Republican strategists began using the same tactics in Congress, and they were forging coalitions with evangelical groups around opposition to abortion.

And it was really the larger effort to make the Republican Party painted as this like pro family to help mobilize like socially conservative voters that really value this idea of this like traditional and quotes family. So it might have been both grassroots organizing, but I think both of these efforts really focused around this idea of this traditional quote unquote like Christian good family, um. And I think that's still the a lot of the intention today is

to really promote that. And why abortion is wrong is because it kind of goes against this idea of what a family should look like or how families should act like in particular how mother should act. Um. So yeah, thoughts, Yeah, I mean, like I definitely think we see that um everywhere. That type of propaganda, uh is you know there obviously and then there in like the like oh this is like hidden in type thing. But yeah, I mean Chris has talked about that quite a bit on certain things.

So maybe Chris would be best to to deep dive on that a little bit. Yeah, I mean I think there's there's there's a there's a couple of things that have been like like are perculating around this time too, which is also like this is this is a period of like really intense feminist monibilization. And this is also a period where, you know, the one of the sort of rights driving issues had been integration, like like a

opposing integration and like promoting segregation. And by this period they've like they've basically lost that and so they need like something right, and like that's something winds up being this vision of this sort of like of this like

very specifically white Christian patriarchal family. And and I think it's also interesting that, like, you know, if you look at the initial abortion stuff is largely yeah, it's like okay, if Republicans are targeting Catholics, right, And the reason they're targeting Catholics because Evangelicals particularly like haven't quite figured out what they think about this yet and this kind of like family stuff and I don't know it ties into this this whole sort of this attempt to get evangelicals

into politics for the first time or not to the first time, but they've kind of been out of it for a while like on this sort of like while the rapture is coming, so like what's the point of

dealing with like this impire like secular politics thing. And yeah, they get sort of roped back into it by the polarization of abortion and by making like by by by making abortion in the family this incredibly sort of central part of what the Republican platform is, and by sort of like you know, like attempting to destroy the kind of like more moderate like Rockefeller liberal wing of the Republican Party who just like get stomped don't exist anymore. Yeah. No,

that's a good point. And um, I think it's interesting because I feel like we see a lot of candidates go back and forth and issues now, but it even started. I mean, that's been going on since forever because politics are all scamp But Ronald Reagan really illustrates the shift. Um because when he was a governor of California and sixty seven he signed a law that loosened abortion restrictions. But in his nine presidential campaign he called for the

appointment of anti abortion judges. So he's just really I mean, just like any political candidate, he's going with the tides.

He's trying to get elected, he's not really no one has actual morals that they stand on um, and only after or nineteen doesn't show that more Democrats than Republicans we're supporting access to abortion, because before then it was pretty pretty much, even if not just a little bit, Uh yeah, it was mainly honestly split over whether or not you were fucking Catholic, right, Like that was the

primary determining factor. Yeah. Yeah, And I think that there's an interesting thing there too, because a lot of you know, because it's like the anti abortion people see Reagan as like their guy, but he gets into office and he's like not as strong on it as they wanted. And well we'll get into some of what that leads to next episode. But yeah, this this was like fundamentally, when you're looking at like the anti abortion movement, it's a

it's a Christian nationalist power grab. And at that point they had just figured out the strategy. So it was good enough that they were able to help get Reagan into office, but it was not consolidated enough that Reagan really felt the need to do much more than pay it up service. You know. Yeah, We'll just an example of everyone campaigning on something that they know, we'll get them voted and then kind of ignoring it once they're

in office because like it served its purpose. Um, I think there's there's another interesting thing that's going on here with that too, which is that at this point, so this is this is sort of the John of like Jerry Farroll in the more Majority And Okay, if you want to hear me talk about this for a really long time, don't listen to my episode of the Moon Eyes and how Reverend Moon also was a huge part

of this. But there's like this giant shift in like the technology of recruiting voters where this this is where you start getting mailing list organizing. This is where you start getting like, you know, enormous list of people to

to call for fundraisers. Is where you start like you know, this is where you start basically getting like the weird Facebook letter like chain mail things that we have now, but like they were just like mail people like scare stories about like here's like an actual baby they planned parenthood killed and that That's what I was saying by like the obvious things propaganda wise, But yeah, I think that it's also like things on TV, things in movies. Yeah, like uh yeah, they kind of try to pull out

the heart strings of some invisible heart they think people have. UM. But then even like like TV commercials things that like the traditional family that like, yeah, the nuclear white Christian family is like the default basic family and anything that

strays from that is abnormal. Um, it's still the case now. Honestly, I think, yeah, calls for diversity or like putting a black friend in the show still you know what I mean, it's not really Yeah, I have eventually I will do the entire rant that I have on this, but like, like this, this is the thing that like this is a powerful enough force that like, for example, if you look at like every Asian American movie in the US, the entire plot of every Asian American movie is trying

to repair is a family, like in an Asian family trying to become the white Christian nuclear family but having problems with it because they're having family issues that get resolved and then having problems with it because they're Chinese. Yeah, and it's like it's it's just like warping sort of like yeah, like structural basis of society that like it's like a black hole that like like it tears the

fabric of reality and pulls everything else into it. You know, I have the same gripe with a lot of there's in general, like movies and TV shows about marginalized people with a least from people. It always seems like the crux of the problem is cultural and overcoming whatever issue the culture is having to to disrupt this perfect white Christian life that is presented as the ideal. But going

back to abortion, Sorry, no, don't, don't appologize. I would love to rant about this with you on another episode. You know what won't disrupt the white Christian hegemonic culture

in the United States capitalism the products as well. Actually, it eventually will, because the nature of extractive capitalism, an endless growth, will inevitably alter the world in ways that makes the lifestyles that those kind of people harken back to in their propaganda fundamentally untenable and impossible to exist on any kind of scale. But I don't know what my point was here. Here's some here's some fucking ads. Oh, we're back, We're back. Let's go to the late eighties,

early nineties. So the ladies, both Republicans and Democrats at this point, they were trying to appeal to the center for a while so they can remain as appealing to voters as possible. Um. Mary Zigler is a law professor at Florida State University who has studied the history of

abortion and the abortion debate. And she wrote in the The Washington Post that the ES and the early two thousands, for instance, many abortion opponent and they devoted their energy to supporting incremental restrictions like a ban on dilation or extraction, which is a technique for abortions later in pregnancy that

opponents call partial birth abortion. UM. And this restriction was eventually passed at the federal level in two thousand and three, and it's far less sweeping than the heart heartbeat bills that many Republican voters favor today, which banned abortions as you know at six weeks UM. But Democrats, meanwhile, they were somewhat like equivocal on the abortion debate during this time period. Uh. Bill Clinton in his campaign he famlessly said that abortions should be quote safe, legal, and rare.

Hillary Clinton used the same language when she was running in two thousand and eight too. Yeah, you really did, just absolutely cowardly. Yeah, like we support it, but also don't don't do it yeah like yeah. And obviously more recently both sides of the abortion debate, they've come to seek broader change. Among abortion rights supporters, there's been an

increasing awareness of reproductive justice. And this term was actually coined in and it described an approach focus not just on the legal right to abortion, but on safe, affordable access to a range of reproductive health care as well as the ability the ability to parent children safely. Um. And it was in the nineties that a lot of organizations started to be formed to help support this, to

help UH, abortion rights justice like kind of take form. Um. Sister Song, which is the Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective was formed, and it was by sixteen organizations of women of color that formed these four mini communities. They were largely made up of Native American, African American, Latina, and Asian American communities. And they recognize that we have

the right and responsibility to represent ourselves and our communities. UM. And I think this is important to note only because I don't think women of color get enough credit for

really like leading the the the fight to get reproductive rights. UM. I feel like a lot of I mean, I can shoot on white feminism all day, trust me, UM, but especially when it comes to this, a lot of white women are like heralded as like I don't know these um political heroes, when really, most of the time, with most issues when it comes to this, UH, women of color in the background doing most of the work. UM.

That's another episode. UM. But Sister Song defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we do have in safe and sustainable communities. So it puts a lens on the emphasis of affordability of abortions as well as on the legal status that it needs to have to even be safe and affordable. UM. Because the right of abortion means very little when we can't afford healthcare that

we need. UM. And this is something that Kimberly Inis maguire said, she's the executive director of Unite for Reproductive Gender Equity called URGE. UM. This isn't a rights group focused on young people. UM. So there's a lot of things that emerged during this more recent time that came focused on more the justice aspect versus just the right to have it, because it does doesn't do much if we have the right, and yet um, it's still inaccessible.

So in the last five years, reproductive justice activists have campaigned to repeal the High Amendment, which was first passed in nineteen seventies six, and it bars federal funding for most abortions. It restricts Medicaid coverage for abortions, and the amendment makes it difficult for many low income Americans to pay for the procedure. The opponents of the High Amendment

have had some successes. In twenty seventeen and twenty nineteen, Democrats and Congress introduced the Each E A. C. H. Woman Act, which would repeal HIDE and allow Medicaid to cover abortions. UM. But Democratic candidates have campaigned to repeal HIDE as well. During her presidential run in Hillary Clinton called for the repeal of HIDE, and the whole Democratic Party followed suit. Um, which is something that would have been unthinkable in the years when her and her husband

were calling for abortion to be quote unquote rare. So things have progressed a little bit again, I think unfortunately, though most of it is for following the trends versus actual morals. But that's my opinion. UM. But on Hide, UM, Uh, it feels like what has changed in the last five years is that a community of people UM, led by young people women of color, decided that the status quo was not good enough. So again it's just people in

the background doing most of the work. UM. And at same time, abortion rights activists have been working to reduce stigma around abortion and to present the procedure as a normal part of medical of medical coverage UM. In response to efforts to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, activists and ordinary people shared stories of their abortions under the hashtag shout your Abortion. So the left party, the Democratic Party,

is definitely leaning now obviously to be abortion positive. UM. But I also think it's definitely used as a way to attract voters more than anything else. And UM yeah, I mean with our current president right now, we all know he's Biden has had a mixed rested on abortion, which is like very a good a good representation of

just how flip floppy politicians can be. Because when he was in the Senate and seventy three, he was the thirty year old practicing Catholic who concluded that the Supreme Court went too far on abortion rights in the Row case. He told an interview or the following year that a woman shouldn't have the soul right and say to what should happen to her body. That's a quote, the soul right to say what should happened to her body. She

doesn't think women should have that. And by the time he left the Vice President's mansion in seventeen, he was seventy four years old, and he argued a far different view that government doesn't have the right to tell other people that women can't control their body. Um. Which is interesting because he not only was very vocal about being anti abortion, but like he uh used like in he crafted the Binded Amendment to ban the use of foreign

aid for biomedical research related to abortion. So he was not only like vocal about it, he actually tried to push it back. And he repeatedly voted for the Tide Amendment that prohibited the use of federal funds for abortions, including medicaid. As I said, and both of these policies remain in place today despite efforts by Democrats to end the ban on the use of federal funds. Here's one thought that I have and again I I continue to be an advocate and don't take this the wrong way.

We should learn from the right and how they made the progress they did with abortion. There are lessons there, and one of those lessons is that when you make something into the kind of issue that can get a politician elected, um, they will not actually pursue that issue if it's difficult, unless you create true believers and put them into politics. Right, Reagan got elected in part on abortion.

Reagan didn't really do much about it. It was it was diligent periods of time of not just like putting people in politics who believed in the cause, but also of applying brutal pressure to elected leaders over decades who didn't confirm, firm, or conform. And we don't have that

kind of time with like let's say climate change. But the same basic tactics need to be followed, which is, you need to be vicious when you when your leaders, when the people you elect don't move on these issues, Um, you need to be vicious and like a concerted and organized and like you need to come down on them like the hammer of fucking God. You know. I think that's that's how you win. But I think that's the biggest difference with Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats unfortunately

are far more cowardly in voicing what they want. Even even now, Biden is pro abortion quote unquote, but he hasn't even said the word abortion out loud ever. He's like he put it in a statement in a tweet, the fact that there's a website, there's a web there's a website that is called has Biden said abortion yet? And there's just a big no on it right now? Obviously. Um. But he has like cast this evolution of his views as a like like wrestling with his teaching of his

faith or whatever. Um. But it's obviously more it reflects a political calculation more than his views of fucking religion. Um. And in for example, he said, I'm prepared to accept that at the moment that the athe moment of conception, there's human life and being. But I'm not prepared to say that to other god fearing non god fearing people have a different view. Heard nothing do Caward Joseph Robinette,

motherfucking Biden? What risting fun does that mean? Yeah? He also has quote has been quoted to say that this issue is the um like the most difficult thing he's had to wrestle with as a Catholic kind of thing. He's definitely made it this. I think he needs to overcome or whatever the ship. It's a religion, right, sure, it's a religion, and your religion has been at the very least. What I'll say about the Catholics is they did not adopt this as like a venal political strategy,

which the evangelical right did, like they've been. The Catholic Church has been consistent on this for a minute now, So I get why somebody who is legitimately a believing Catholic would have to struggle with this. But the way you what what you what you say, if you're actually not like a fucking if you're not being a fucking goober about it, Um, what you say is, hey, uh, this is tough for me because of my faith, But this is the United States of America, and my faith

does not dictate what other people get to do. And so I support the right to access to a portion that's right. Please can? I mean, I only want to bring that up because I just think the Democratic Party has conducted themselves in a really howardly way when it comes to stuff like this versus Republicans are so outright, even like volatilely trying to tell you how they feel. But yeah, that's that. Where do we go from here? I don't know. Um yeah, the world is the world.

It's certainly assuring. And uh, we'll be back tomorrow, Chris Water. What's our focus tomorrow? Tomorrow we're going to look at the other side of how they got abortion, other than like sort of running it as an electoral issue, which is they did a an amount of terrorism that is so large that like most of the people talking about the terrorism missed most of the terrorism. Yeah, it takes a minute to list speaking of terrorism, I I just wanted to Sorry, there is post role ads, but if

you're listening to them, that's a choice. Blood. Hey, we always support people making the choice to listen to our wonderful advertisers like the Washington State Highway Patrol and lately Taser. Oh yeah, they've been running. Look we didn't. We don't approve that. We're getting them removed. But it is funny. Can I get a taser first? Or that is that? Not what that is? Um? I mean, Sharine, we can expense you with taser. Oh ship great, I'll send a

list of what I want perfect. Okay, fine, it happened here. The thing that happened here was at anti abortion terrorism at High and Christopher Wong. I'm posting this. We're doing this really speedy with me, Sharne, Robert Garrison, and Sophie. Hi. Yeah, Hi, don't feel too speedy. I mean this is a yeah, we're we're we're going through the interests. We can get to the we can get to the content fast. Get to the meat. Yeah, let's get to the fucking meat.

Let's get to the sandwich portion of the I don't know what I'm doing. We're talking about terrorism, Sophie, your

favorite thing first save the day. So okay, well, we've we've talked about sort of abortion as a as a legal issue, but running parallel to the sort of legal electoral pain against abortion was a wave, a systemic campaign of terror that ranged Trevor from you know, sort of individual personal humiliation and terrorization of individual women seeking abortion to like nail bombs and blowing abortion provider's heads off

with shotguns. Um. Yeah, so it's it's extremely bad, obviously, but I think there's a tendency among people who look at antibustion violence is sort of like isolated from its historical text, which is that, Okay, the American right has always ruled by terror from like literally its earliest extermination campaigns against addition as people who like whose land they stole to, you know, the sort of horrific psychological abuse and violence inflicted against slaves on their own plantation, who

there's an entire history of like denying abortion people to slaves for numerous reasons. So you know, there's no reason really to expect that anti abortion militants like wouldn't be violent.

And I think it's worth noting that that the tactics of of the sort of militant wing of the anti abortion movements, which are things like our arson bombings and assassination are these these are the key tactics of the of the segregationist movement when they're finding against integration and you know, low and behold, like as as abortion becomes the political glue for the right, after they sort of okay, well they sort of lose the fight over integration, they

lose the ability to legally says like that you can't do integration, but a lot of the sort of factors aggregation like still exists. But yeah, like as I do that like you still see you know, you see a new generation of sort of right wing militants like taking the tactics of the old right wing militants and using them to kill people, which is to add, yeah, for the for the record, yes that is our official position.

But we're taking up bold stands here radicals. So I think we should start with someone who was not killing people, because I think it's it's useful to see the sort of like the arc of of how this movement goes. So John O'Keefe was a Catholic anti war protester. He his thing was okay, so he's anti abortion, right, but he wants to fuse like the anti nuclear anti war movements with the anti abortion movements sort of in the

wake of Roe v. Wade. And this doesn't work because the anti war and the answer nuclear movements are like driven by leftist and feminists and they're like no, like funk Off, like we're not gonna like we want people to have abortions, so you know, but but he he he still is like dead set that there should be

this sort of like direct actually against abortion clinics. And he managed to convince this convince this like quicker peace activist named Charles Fager to like teach the anti abortion movement the sort of like techniques of like the civil rights movements and do like no violence ofilius obedience, and so people like like in the in the early seventies, like as az Row like is happening, people start like changing themselves to abortion clinics, and you know, like, I

think this is if you've been around the left long enough, like these are tactics I think you'd recognize. But these these are very very different campaigns. Then you're sort of like changing yourself to a tree like the And the biggest difference is like the the extent to which the focus is just purely on terrorizing people. So I'm going to read a would have like what these protests actually look like? Um from the book Living in the Crosshairs,

The Untold Stories of Anti Abortion Terrorism. The protesters stand at the entrance to the clinics parking lot and badger the patients. When they come in, they get screamed at. The protesters write down their license plates, they send them cards, they make phone calls to their homes. Protesters also swarm clinics and harass the people who work there. Those window blinds. Christina, who's works at a clinic, explained while pointing at the huge windows that surround the conference table in one of

her clients. You pull them down, you can look through them, and you could find the protesters at the windows looking in. And Krista, who's the person who's talking about this, like she describes like the like these protesters would walk up to her and like say her kids names, you know. In order to get like the doctor into this clinic who is doing the abortions, like they have to smuggle

him in like that. He can't park in the parking lot because the abortion protesters will get to him, so they have to they have to like smuggle him in in in Christa's car. And like even then people follow them constantly, Like the doctors and nurses have to like change the roots to work every day. They have these

like decoys they have to use. Um. Like yeah, and if for the record, I've gotten reports from folks who work for abortion access organizations saying they are now in multiple states using drones to follow people as they leave the Jesus their their license playing numbers. Yeah that God, that makes sense. But it's yeah, like these people like Krista, the person I was talking about, Like she she had to transfer her kids to a private school that like knew what her job was so that her kids wouldn't

get harassed. And like, well, we'll come back to this sort of quote unquote non violent stuff later, but like even in it's sort of like non violent face. This is a terror campaign, like the the the goal of this is to terrorize everyone involved, like stalking them, by intimidating them, by harassing them, to get them to not do abortions anymore, making patients or people that want to wortion is too afraid to get them, and people that

provide them too afraid to provide them. Yeah. Yeah, and but you know this doesn't really work in the seventies, and but by time you shoot the eighties, it starts to get really violent. Um in nice and eight two or is this guy named Donnie Ben don Benny Anderson. It is two nephews, Matt and Wayne Moore carry out the first anti abortion, the first action of this this

right wig anti abortion. Also they're like really anti gay, Like they they have a thing later on where they like they have this giant celebration for like the Saudia's beheading too gay dudes, three gay dudes, Like they're they're horrible. Yeah, this this network is called the Army of God. And oh these guys they're that sounds relier, Yeah, they're they're this very actually in some ways like they're they were very sort of quintessentially modern terrorist organization and that like

they don't they don't have like a command structure. It's not even so much essentialized cells. It's just like people just sort of can freely affiliate to it. And like he used his name to carry out attacks. And the first one of these is it's it's this guy Johnny

Benny Anderson. He kidnaps Dr Hector Zavalos and his wife Jean and originally, like the their their plan is to kill them, um don Benny Anderson like he but what he writes about it is that he has been talking to God and he has been talking to art Change, to the archangel Michael, and they have commanded him to go and kill this person. And eventually, like negotiators fortunately are able to talk them down, and like the doctor makes this like tells him like yeah, no, no no, I'm

not gonna do abortions anymore. That they let them go. But yeah, I think, like, like like it is important to note that, like among people who are like this hardcore and and this isn't you know, And I said, like, there are people a lot of people who are more moderate than this, Like the the whole sort of talking to God thing like that is not uncommon. No, that

is like very good. No, these are all people who in their churches will like say a bunch of gibberish words and tell everyone each other that they're speaking in like the secret language of God that God has like speak into their brains, speaking in tongues. Yes, yeah, so like and yeah, like and I think I think like there's some tendency to like, like I've seen I've seen people trying to write this office of people who are

mentally ill. It's like no, no, no, no, no no. These are desearching, so they don't believe in a different world than you do, and they're willing to use violence to make their world real. Yeah, and the letter that they write, I like, why while they're holding these people captives, says quote, those who truly love God would kill the baby killers. And it turned out later that they've been

funding their activities by robbing abortion clinics. And actually that's no, that's the thing that doesn't that I don't think I've ever seen any of the like, like I don't think this doesn't get included in like the list of terrorist things people do against abortion clinis. But they get robbed a lot, Like there's like a lot of these builitians are just robbing abortion clinics to to fund their stuff.

Um and and this is again like the thing you have to keep in mind when you're trying to an it like, if you literally believe the things that these people literally believe, this is the only moral thing to do. Yeah, if they're if there were just trying like getting their heads, if there were an organization literally murdering babies every single day, this would be the right thing to do. That's like

you have to actually like they're not crazy. They fundamentally exist in a world that is as different from from the one you live in as the world in a fucking Marvel comic. Like it's it's it's just another reality that they exist within. Yeah, and like you get sort of like you get like like I don't know, you're called like people who are trying to play the centrist ango who were like oh, like people on the left don't understand that. It's like it's not about autonomy for them.

They literally believe they're killing babies. And it's like that doesn't like a no, but like yeah, like yeah, the fact that they literally believe that abortion is killing children, the only thing that does is make them more fanatical and more militants. And it's like, yeah, like I used to sort of believe, like I used to believe that, like, oh, black people don' understand they really think they're killing babies thing.

And then I went to college and I like read started reading about the history of genocides, and I started reading about like what how how common it is for people who commit genocides to literally believe that if they don't do this genocide, that the people that genocide and you

you are going to kill them. And it was like oh, oh no, no, that that actually that just makes you more likely to do violence, Like it's and yeah, you know, and this this goes exactly how to expect in fact that the and this is one of the other things that they're very effective about, which is each attack like

radicalizes more people to start doing attacks. So remember remember John O'Keefe, the guy who was doing the non violent stuff, Like he starts questioning whether non violence is like the right tactic and he never like bombs anything, but he likes stops condemning violence in public. And this this goes

really really really badly really quickly. Um, the Army of God publishes this, like it's initially a very clandestine thing, but they published this manual about how to attack abortion clinics, but has stuff from like like pouring concrete overheating pipes, how to make bombs. Um, they have this thing that the antibortion people do a lot, which is pouring bucolic acid, which smells like it is the thing that makes vomits

smell bad. Like you you can you can smell like two parts per ten million like of this thing like in a room and they'll they'll take like a syringe and they'll inject it into a facility and like like one drop of this stuff is enough that like you can smell it like months later, there's no way to like easily clean it. And eventually like they're pouring gallons of this stuff like into abortion clinics into the ventilation system. Yeah, yeah, it's there are more than a hundred of these attacks

today to like it. They've they've done this a lot. Yeah. By n four, this whole thing goes into overdrive. UM, I'm going to read a quote from from the book Armored for Life, The Army of God and anti abortion terror. In the United States, the National Abortion Federation identifies thirty incidents of arson or bombing in nine four, exceeding the

previous seven years combined. The series of bombings included, but was not limited to, the offices of the National Abortion Fund and the Americans Civil Liberties Union in Washington, d C. As well as abortion clinics in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The signature of the Army of God was also found in a subsequent clinic bombing in Saratosa, Florida. Um. One of the other things that they do that is that is great, is so they have to have a declaration

of war that the Army of God sends. They also like like specifically send a death threat to Harry Blackman, who was the black Man was who was the guy who wrote the Supreme Court justice who wrote Roe v. Wade, which is like, you know, this is a fun thing if you've been like the whole discourse cycle. But oh,

we shouldn't protest that these houses. Like yeah, man, a terrorist group like threatened to kill the jestice who wrote this thing, like and and that guy, um, the guy who wrote that eventually carried out like this enormous bombing campaign where he started strapping like twenty pounds like liquid pro pain tanks to dumpowder bombs and blowing up clinics with them. And this stuff spread start spreads like wildfire.

People start using the Army of God's bomb recipes to attack clinics in other ways like yeah, we talked, We've talked about so of the other campaign stuff that they use. Um and and this this starts to like a lot of the people who wind up in the full on terrorism stuff where like people who used to be like non violent protesters. So Shelley Shelley Shannon, who who had previously been like a non violent protester like goes violent and two and starts doing these like fautric acid attacks

and then she graduates to arson. She attacks seven clinics, offices and health centers. And these aren't like when I say attacks, like this isn't like they threw a ball off at it. Like she is making napalm and like detonating napalm bombs like inside of these clinics, it is, do they even care if people are inside or so?

It's weird. Initially they're they're targeting empty buildings, but they're like they're like working themselves up to it, and like they they start to be they you could read this in their writing like they they're working themselves up to a point where they're like, Wow, Okay, if there was a person in this building, we don't really care, and yeah, yeah, and but I see two the Army of God like specifically in it in its manual, like as justification for

killing people, m and lo and behold. One year later after this is one of the other strategies to use what what what What was their justification they're killing It's like, well, they're killing babies and have to have a bunch of Bible verses that they sit and they're like, now we can kill people because they're killing babies. It's great. It's

that's that's truly like in writing to horrify. Yeah, and like like literally the next year there's all these they start doing this thing where they put wanted posters with like an abortion doctor's name in them like like literally like stuff out of like a like a Battled West movie, and they'll have like their name and like where they live and like that fact that they're a doctor and say they kill babies, and uh so you know, in in in in in three, these posters go up for

this doctor named Dr David Gunn and he's one day walking back to his car when he gets shot three times in the back by Michael Griffin and he he dies, and he is the first that David Gunn is the first abortion provider to be killed, and he is not going to be the last. Yeah, so this immediately and the moment someone does it, like it opens the floodgates

and suddenly everyone is doing it. And so you know, this makes people like Shelly Shannon and who we talked about like setting off napalm bombs, who until this point has only like bombed anti buildings, Like she starts like considering killing people and a few months later she shoots Dr George Tiller. And if you're thinking to yourself, hold on weight, I thought Dr George Tiller was killed in

two thousand and nine and not, you are right. Shelley's assassination attempts like she shot him like in both arms, but he survived to be murdered a a decade and a half later. Um, Meanwhile, there's this guy named Paul Hill who's just like a like abortion clinic like protester, right. He he emerges in like the national media scene because he's he's like the he's like the guy who will go on TV and defends Michael Griffin killing killing a doctor, and they just let him do this. He does the

whole fucking talk show circuits. They just let him do this to defend on Life TV. He's on all of the mainstream networks to defend killing abortion doctors. And he does it again with Shelly Shannon's attempt to kill George Chiller. And a year later, uh, Paul Hill walked up to Dr Joe Britten Britten and blew his head off with the shotgun wounds. His wife turns around and then killed an abortion uh like at clinic escort named James Barrett.

Like they had this guy on TV fucking every night saying that like calling the saying that killing abortion doctors is justified, and then he fucking kills he blew an abortion doctor's head off with a shotgun the next year. Well, and uh yet I don't think I'm what's exciting is that I'm sure that when there are more attacks uh by pro choice oriented people, at no point will anyone get brought on TV network to say anything. But but asked that cops get more money to crack down on them. Yeah,

it's like just the media a symmetry. She was awful. We're gonna talk about this more in a bit because it gets even worse. Um So that that's a year. In ninety four, there's a gunman named John Scali the Third who walks into a building and murders Shannon Loney, who is a social worker in anti abortion like she's she's an anti abortion and an anti child debrief advocate who's working at Plant Parenthood, and he just walks and shoots her. She shoots at a bunch of the doctors

and the patients and luckily they all survived. But then he goes to another clinic and he kills social worker Leanne Nichols, who was like working at the front desk there, and he's eventually arrested. He gets away with both of these ones, but then he goes and tries to shoot up a third clinic, and that one finally like he gets arrested for. But like and the other thing is like the third clinic that he shoots at, Like that's a clink that already had already been bombed, is a

clink that they've been protest that for years. And he's you know, he goes there and he shoots at these these people and he kills two more people, and yeah, and it's you know, and they just like keep doing this. And one of the sort of incredibly grotesque things is that like, Okay, so the Army of God has this.

They have a website, right, and their website has these these things they called the Prisoners of Christ, who are like people who are like it's like prisoners of conscience but like Christ, who they like celebrate and they're like raise funds for. And one of the ways they do this is they have this thing called the White Rose Banquet, which is like one of the most offensive names I've

ever seen for an organization. That's it's named after the White Rose Society, which is just like Christian anti Nazi like nonviolent resistance group who's like leaders were all killed

by Hitler for opposing Hitler. And they they're thing is like, well, okay, so the abortion is the is the new Holocaust, and so you know they have this banquet that's like in support of these terrorists and they at the first one of these, they released this thing called the Nuremberg File Project, which was this like it was this archive of like abortion providers. It has like their names, has their addresses

as photos, it has their phone numbers. Um. They target like they and it's not just like doctors, right, they target clinic staff, the target security guards, stark at anyone who's who's around there, and that they have like these like lists of different categories of people. So first, if you're still alive, your name will be in like bolded black. If you've been wounded, your name will be grade like

great out. And then if you die, there's like if you get killed or you die, there's a strike through through it. So this is this is a killed list they've assembled. And this is just like going around the internet. There's enormous numbers of people who like providers who are who are put on this and they also like the White Rose siety, Like at this banker, they start putting out wanted posters with like a thousand dollar rewards for closing a clinic and for like convincing a doctor to

stop giving abortions. And because these people are just like like I can on emphasis is enough like literal monsters in the night. The auction off the gun that Shelly Shannon used to kill George Chiller, that's like a fundraising thing. Yeah, and uh, there's a number of things you think about that.

One of that is one of them is the fact that the local police department absolutely had to be um involved in that because normally murder weapons don't go back anyone that they're destroyed, um, which means the police were like, yeah, we absolutely want you guys to be able to auction

this gun on cool stuff. The fear tactics they would be like, of course they would work if your whole if your name is on this list and you have a family and you you know what I mean, Like it's I will say that there is an interesting thing with this where like a lot of some of a lot of people who like get targeted by this stuff, like it just pisces them off and they get even more committed to it, which is like incredibly rad but also like Jesus Christ, they just they have these abortion

provider kill lists, and people on this list get killed. It's encouraged, like the people are encouraging to kill them. And like they do this in the open, like there are like literally like Christian radio stations will like they will be they'll they'll do this thing where like they'll they'll they'll start listing like like like by name and the addresses of like where the abortion providers dear them are and then start talking about the biblical verses to

justify killing them. And then they will literally say on the radio, go kill this person. And they could just do this. No one stopped them ever. They just got away with this for for decades and decades. So one of one of the other. I think this bombing is famous, but I don't think the reason why it happened is famous. Um so there's a guy Eric Rudolph. Oh yeah, it was was wondering whenday we're gonna talk about Rudolf? Yeah yeah, so that's right now. So so Eric Rudolph is most

famous for nail bombing the Atlanta Olympics. He yeah, he put he was hundreds of peace yeah, yeah, he entered people, he kills killing killed one. Yeah, it was more Special Forces guy, right, yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, And he says that his commander and the ar Assault Regiment taught him how to make bombs like out of out of like scrap stuff. So he like yeah, so so okay, so and he does in nine ninety six, he doesn't get caught, right this this this guy, this guy detonated a nail

bomb at the fucking Olympics. As that a year later. Oh, don't worry, we're gonna We're gonna a year later. This twice next year. The next year he sets off a bunch of bombs, and he sets off a bomb at an abortion clinic. And this is like this, this is a double tap bomb. There is a there is a bomb in a trash can behind that that's that's designed to kill the first responders. Um, this is seven people. And then in seven and it kills the police officer.

Actually it doesn't, Oh I didn't, but yeah, kills the police officer. Yeah. And then like the next one, he bombs in Atlanta nightclub and win six people. I'm sorry specifically, yeah, he bombed, he bombs, I bought, he bombs a gay bar. Um and there were that one he also like in the adjacent parking lot, because again he was trying to kill the first responders that the police find a bomb and defuse it before it can go off. And again they still don't get this guy the not until two

thousand three. The next year, he bombs another rebortion clinic with a nail bomb. In this kind just good time, he kills a security guard named Robert Sanderson, and like permanently injures a nurse name Emi Leon's, who was like Emily Leon's who was he was left like half blind and like permanently made by the fact that again he set off a fucking nail bomb and he was not caught.

He he was not he was not caught for a while. Yeah, And I want to stop here and talk about like how the bombing stuff has carried in the media, right, um, as best I could tell, and I went to look for this. No anarchist has killed someone with a bomb in the US for a hundred years. Like Coral Marx was closer to seeing the moon landing, then a baby born today is of seeing an anarchist kill someone THEOS with the bomb. And yet anarchism everywhere is so constantly

associated with bombs. Meanwhile, the anti abortion freaks. Fucking they bombed the nineties six Olympics with a nail bomb. And he on when he was in his trial, he released to benifesto talking about how deadly force is justified against people who operate abortion clinics. He talks, he talks about the whole a whole munch of like whole bunch of anti gay stuff, whole bunch of anti abortion stuff, like and he's like he's given them like like on his

trial just used to like read his manifesto. It's pretty it's pretty wild. Where all the pro life activists when it comes to taking life. That's interesting. Well, but I mean that's that's the thing though. They're all they're all in favor of of like they see, Yeah, they're arguing that it's self defense or it's defensive. These these these babism not the well defensive, those who can't defend themselves. What they'll talk about it is entirely within them, the

moral universe within they operate. It's it is entirely consistent.

It's one of those things. Whenever like liberals will be like, why don't they do this or why don't they that's not pro life and it's like, well, because the word doesn't mean the same thing to you, it does well, and the guy's doing this terror because you will occasionally you'll get some I mean, some of the pro life people oppose this because I think it's bad optics, right, But apparently it's not bad optics because again, like, who

are the people who get fucking remembered as bombers? Like, and I want to I want to read a quote from from the FBI. This is this is this is from from the book Armed for Life. In In nineteen eighty four, the year with the highest abortion clinic bombings to date, FBI Director William Webster went on television and informed the public, quote, Bombing a bank or a post office is terrorism. Bombing an abortion clinic is not an

active terrorism because the objective is social. Is social and anti abortion violence, and I don't believe it currently meets our definition of terrorism. Reagan's called Reagan called the anti abortion it's worse, okay, Reagan called called the bombings. The abortion clinic bombing is quote anarchist activities, Like the fucking they are blowing up abortion clinics and we're still getting

fucking blamed for it, Like Jesus Christ. I don't know a lot about anything, and so this is a lot of this is used to me, which is wild that I'm hearing about a lot of this for the first time. How have I not known about this? They bombed the Olympics and know what talks about it? Actually, like I was just losing my mind the whold like it's it's bad and it's it's still happening. It's not. It's just like three people were killed and nine people were injured

an attacked on a planned parenthood clinic in Colorado. Back in um there has been over at least at least at least eleven murders tied to anti abortion uh like like action. I guess six attempted murders, at least forty two bombings, two hundred arsons, and then thousands and thousands

of more like assaults and random random incidents. We should also point out here when we're talking about the murder counts, murder count is lower vet it actually is because the murder count doesn't count to people who like the Americans, like specifically the Americans who went to Canada to shoot abortion doctors and the Americans who went to Australia to shoot abortion doctors, both of which happened, and threats against

abortion providers have increased exponentially just since just since, like they have more than quadrupled, Like this is it's constant. It's been escalating at such a at such a rate that every year's data is insufficient for talking about the current period. Like it's it's you can't you can't even talk about it because all of the data is so inaccurate. Now, that's how fast this stuff is accelerating. And and like there's there's a few other things that like like we

should mention when we talked about statistics. So one of the reason is the reason the death toll is like quote unquote only eleven is because bomb making is really hard and a lot of these bombs don't go off.

So for example, in Canada, a worker right a clinic discovered a bomb with two pounds of nails in it that quote how to destructive capability of a hundred feet um and you know, and also like I should put this out like okay, so like they they there's a lot of abortion doctors who are killed like outside of

their clinics. But also there's a guy named James Copp who who shot He shot like four doctors and he shot them like in their homes like with with with with an s KS, like in their homes through their windows. And he he killed Dr Barrett Slippian in the nineties and like and you know and like it. They like they keep doing stuff like this, Like in two thousand and one. I don't know if I wonder how many people actually remember this. Uh, there was this huge anthrax scare.

What was an anthwstor like that people were like they were later they were anthract attacks. People were like mailing

people letters with anthrax in it. And so right as this is happening, um, a guy named Clay Wagner since eight hundred letters signed by the RB of God with fake anthrax, the plan players heard clinics in seventeen states and these antis packets like it's not just like flower, right, these antis packets have BT in it, which is there's a pesticide that is so similar to anthrax at the

package just texted tested positive. And so all of these people, these eight eight hundred clinics who opened these letters like thought they were going to die because they opened they opened a letter. There was White Potter in it it said it was anthrax, and then it tested positive for anthrax. And like to this day, a bunch of abortion clinics like have like like the when when they're like when they open their mail, they have they have like a special room that is like sealed off so that if

they open the mail, they open a chemical weapon. Only the person reading the mail will die. Great, that's the side of a good system. Yeah. They also a lot of planned parenthoods have something kind of similar set up with the receptionist, where basically the way it's set up is that if there's a mass shooter, the receptionist can

like seal off everyone but them. Yeah, it's like a thing that you know you're getting into if you're in a plant, if you if you're in that gig, it's like someone might come in and I might have to die to try and stop them from getting to everyone else. It's it's bad. I mean, just just from there was a hundred increase in reports of assaults and batteries uh inside and outside clinics. Um there was double the amount of death threats from and things have not gotten better since.

So we're just waiting for all that new data to come in because oh boy, Yeah. And I think there's another thing when we need to keep in mind with this data is that there's so much stuff doesn't get reported. All of those numbers are low, every single one of them is normally low. And there was a bunch of other stuff that is people do that just never gets

talked about. Um, well, okay, so I think before we get into that, I do want to talk about the most famous abortion provider who got murdered, which is Dr George Tiller, who is like a genuinely incredibly heroic figure who he was keep doing it after the first time you were shot, Like you would be a hero if you did it up until you got shot. Going after like he got shot. He's a clinic got bombed. There was an entire Yeah he's clinic up bomb What was

the other one? Yeah, he he was, he was one of the he was I think he was actually I don't know if it was that anthrax threat or like a different anthrax threat, but like people people like he

kept getting anthrax threats. Um that there was this thing called Operation Rescue, which is I guess that there's still version of us around, but they are these like they do these like giant like non violent severe disit obedience campaigns were like thousands of people will will will will show up to a place and they'll like change themselves the buildings, and they'll like prevent anyone from getting in,

and they'll like terrorize everyone around there. And his office is one of the is one of the ones that was targeted NET ninety one, which is like in there like that they had this big campaign called Operation Rescue. It was targeting like him specifically. And there is one fun story in this which is they tried this in Minneapolis next ninety three, but they got their as escape by a bunch of anarchists and had to all run away,

which was extremely funny. But yeah, like I'm the The other thing that that's important with with Tiller specifically is the extent to which the right wing media is like like culpable in this um like Tiller, like Bill O'Reilly specifically, is constantly yelling about Tiller. He calls Tiller the baby killer. He uses him of running a a operating a death mill, executing baby is about to be born, and destroying fetuses

for just about any reason right up until birthdate. H he want one of his rants, he he literally says like right before, well not like pretty close to when Tiller has assassinated. Uh quote, if I could get my hands on Tiller, well you know, can't be vigilantes, can't do that. It's just a figure of speech. But despicable. Oh my god, it doesn't get worse? Does it get worse? No? Wow? So he's just like this is just like the ship that that he's that that he's being subjected to by

the media. And then oh lo and behold he gets murdered. You know what, doesn't I don't know, I have nothing to say. Doesn't do uh coordinated you know what would be dope. Here here's what I'll say. You know, it would be dope if when somebody came to shoot George Tiller that person had gotten a shot repeatedly. That would have been cool. M that would have been neat. But anyway,

here's ads and we're back with more horrifying stuff. Um. Yeah, so there's a lot of focus I think, you know, there's been a lot of media coverage recently about this just because like you know, as as a reaction to the incredibly bad faith like, oh, look at the sanctity of of people protesting at the Supreme Court. It's like they blew people's heads office shotguns. But you know, and like that's good, and I'm really glad there's there's more

media reporting about this. But I want to talk about you know, there's there's an incredible focus here on the shootings and bombings, and like there's good reason for that, But I want to talk about some other ship that the force birth fanatics do because it's horrifying. It doesn't

get talked enough about enough. Um. So, one of the people who gets interviewed in Living in the cross Hairs, which is a great book by the way, it's it's about I mean, okay, I don't agree with all of its policy recommendations, but it's a book like interviewing like abortion providers about their experiences. One of the people they

interview is this guy named Rodney Smith, who's an abortion doctor. Um, and I'm just gonna eat the stuff that they do to this guy because it's okay, So protesters show up to his son's wedding. Um, they burn his house and his farm down, They burns to death, They kill their dog, their cats, and all of their possessions. Yeah. From the book, help Kill Babies can you tell me that the cats, Yeah, we will imagine script did this. Yeah, everyone would lose

their minds. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna read a quote about this from this book. Someone mailed a letter postmarked the morning of the fire justifying killing the animals on Rodney's farm because Rodney quote murdered little children. However, the letter was untraceable. Wow. They do this ship all the fucking time, and it never gets reported. Because the reason never gets reported is because when when, when, when this this the city comes to investigate, They fucking destroyed

the entire scene of the crime. They showed the entire scene of the crime so thoroughly that when the fire marshal showed up the day after, they tried to arrest um. They tried to arrest Rodney Smith Smith for evidence tampering because I thought that he had done it right. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow. And and let's less lest you

think this is the end of the ship. That that that that this guy goes through, right, Like they when they find out he's like going to like a conference, or like they find out he's staying in a hotel. That they do these campaigns where like they'll they'll do these mass columns to the hotel saying, hey, there's this person here, and if you don't kick them out, like we're going to protest all your branches. He get kicked

out of hotels. Um, he gets attacked by an anti abortion protester in the chambers of the Supreme Court, like that Supreme Court, the big one. How did they even get in the two the chambers of the Supreme Court.

He was just one of it was one of the people who was showing up at this thing, and that the guy like throws him out of his chair, grabs him, throws him out of his chair, picks up the chair and starts beating the ship out of him reach his own chair in this is indie chambers of the Supreme courts. They beat an abortion doctor with his own chair. And you know, especially Roddy had had security with him, right

because I you know it. It's yeah, when when you're abortion doctor and and people are this target at you, yeah, you have security so you don't get attacked like this. But the court wouldn't let him like bring his private security inside. And their rationalization was, uh, he he had been assured that quote nothing ever happens in the Supreme Court. And the thing about this, right, you cannot find a news article about this. Right, a guy got beat up

by these people in the Supreme Court. If literally anyone who was not a fucking forced birth anti abortion fanatic did this, there would have been a new cycle that would have lasted until the fucking end of time. There have been a movie and and three shows made about it. Yeah, and there's just nothing well like wild like that is really showing like these things don't get These things aren't big problems, right because they aren't challenging to any kind

of power structure. So they're allowed to happen because they're just reinforcing things. They're not actually challenging things. Um. But still it's very brazen. When you're killing like seventeen horses and going into the Supreme Court to beat someone with a chair, you would think that someone would say something. Um. And I've never heard of this before either, Alley gear. I know, this is like the thing the thing I want to emphasize about this. This is the things they

did to one guy, one doctor. This is happening, This is right, Like this stuff, this kind of stuff is happening to people every fucking day across the country, and there is nothing. There is jack shit. You might maybe see a report in local papers like maybe it is a it is a it is a just an incredible campaign of chair. But this guy is like she is staggeringly based he that this is quote from that book. Again, Rodney is used to this type of verbal abuse and

sometimes reacting kind. When a priest called him a murderer, uh, Rodney responded by calling the priest a child molester. When protesters told Rodney they were praying for him, he responded, no, you're preying upon us. There's a difference. So he rules and she likes he'd been a doctor who like did other stuff and when they worshiped people, I think I think it was after they burned his house down, he was like, no, fuck you, I'm only going to do abortions.

Now he's exaggeratedly based like yeah, which which I guess also like this is this is a thing that like so like obviously, like, I don't think any leftist has ever fucking lit people's horses on fire, not that I know of the generally left. Generally they would have more of an instinct to free the horses. Yeah, like that you have to you have to be like genuinely monstrous to to light horses on fire, like they screamed, like

horses scream like when you let them on fire. I mean, and and and cats and dogs animal like at animal abusts and animal murder. But it's it's like pretty pretty despicable. And there's uh just justifying it by saying it's because they were on the property of someone who helps gives abortions. Is some wild some wild thinking, Well, none of those what's in the Bible, Actually there is, There is a

lot of animal murdering in the Bible. Never mind. Yeah, okay, well but but but but I mean, I I will say that there is a thing that can happen where if if you like, sometimes targeted protests on a person just like makes them bin for it, like dig into their beliefs. And that's some tops in and and I think like here, I think like there's a lot of people who are just stunning Lee Brave who go through this ship and just still keep doing it because like

this is something that they believe in. And you know, and those aren't even like that extreme examples of like the kind of stuff that happens again again. We've talked about like again nail bombs, right, like people getting their

head blown off with shotguns. There's there's a systemic campaign of terror that has felt incredibly acutely by the people who need these services, who need to get abortions, who need to get reproductive healthcare, and is felt by the providers of that healthcare, and nobody else in society sees about it or talks about it, and they have you know, Okay, so the I'm gonna read another quote from Living in the Crosshairs about the tactics that these groups use because

they have they have so many things. These tactics include bombings,

arson and threat scares, and mass blockades. Extremists have also thrown beautric acid into clinics, glued clinic locks, shut locked themselves to clinic property using items such as bicycle locks or chains, drilled holes into clinic roops so that clinics flood invaded, invaded clinics, vandalized clinics, made threatening phone calls, try to persuade patients to go to fake clinics, which we've talked about that in our our episode on Cristis

pregnancy centers. But those that is also like part of the systemic campaign of terror is deceiving and humiliating people into not getting abortions. Uh, they put spikes on driveway as they they they'll they'll still stand one of them. This is a very common things. They'll stand on stand outside of abortion clinics talking about how they're gonna make bombs and like the kind of close that they're mixing and uh, yeah, they they'll they'll lay down on sidewalks

in front of buildings. They will they will jump on people's cars. Uh, they will camp out in front of clinics for like multiple day stretches that they send decoy patients like into the clinics to disrupt it. It's just so much Yeah, and like like the brazenness with like again like that if there are things on there, like okay, and like okay, So like I don't want to like make this point too much because like, yeah, you can get away with a lot of stuff, right, even if

the state is hunting for you. There's a lot of stuff that you could do that you can get away with. But like the level of stuff they've been able to get away with, like the fact that they've been able to literally on the air say that you should murder a specific abortion doctor mentioned them by name. And the fact that I know people who have had the FBI show up to their doors because of jokes they made on Twitter, it is it is fucking appalling. Yeah, yeah,

because I mean they're not they don't. The law doesn't exist a lot, a lot doesn't matter. It's all about who's actually challenging the systems of power. Yeah, and then the police are like again this this is one of those They literally do cross burnings, like fucking like, they literally do clan style fucking cross burning. So I I can once again go back to the old rage against the machine classics. Some of those who work forces are the same coop burn crosses because it is literally the

same people. The cops will cooperate with them. Like, Um, there's the other thing that do a lot is they'll just like shoot bullets through the windows of clinics. Yeah, that is constantly, and they never no, no, no one, no one cares. That is very common. Yeah, and like fire bombs happened to do this day that one of the incidents they talked about in that book was, um, so they like this, this is stuff that happened at like one clinic, they set the clinics fence on fire

in the middle of the night. They luged the downspouts on like the roof after like a giant snowstorm, so that like when when the snow melted, the water like poured into this whole they drilled it flooded the entire clinic. Um they had another one where they they drilled holes in the ceiling of the clinic and ran a garden

hose through it and flooded the entire building. And yeah, again like none of this stuff ever makes the news, Like like well you and you you can compare, you compare the re action to this to like how they reacted the Animal Liberation Front right that that caused there was like there were like that, there were there were

like like law enforcement like techniques. There are law enforcement organizations that exist today specifically to stop people like like that existed a specifically because of this campaign to stop the animal liberation friend for freeing animals like these people.

And you know, and I should say this like also like there's this whole push to like, oh, we need to call these people terrorists and like yeah, like Bill Clinton called these people terrorists and like what happened, nothing like they they they got one law that was like fine, that was like that was that was about trying to keep people from protesting grass out of backet struck down

by the Screame Court. Because again, we live in in a size society that is constantly moving towards the acratic fascism. If you torch construction sites or sedans or people wanting to destroy sections the forest, then you're then you're a terrorist. Um. If you mail pops and to kill a whole bunch of horses, you're just you're just some some dudes, I guess. Yeah.

And one of the things incredibly frustrating about the story is there will be people who are being stalked right whether they're being harassed, and like they're they're being intimidated. These people keep showing up, they'll call the FBI, and the FBI will go in, we don't care, And then the next day I'll get shot by the same person. This happens multiple times with multiple and like like that. We talked about this with the person who killed tiller Um.

A lot of the people who do use anti abortion murders like we're just irregular anti abortion prisoners and protesters, and like everything happens a lot is like people will go to jail for an abortion bombing, they'll come out and they'll do it again. And it's like, you know, one of the one of the really scary things about this as well, I know this is this has been stated before. This isn't by any means a new a

new a new thought or framing. But with all of the laws getting enacted around the whole like bounty hunter side of things, for like how there's going to be you know, citizens being deputized to track down both abortion providers people who sought out abortion. Um, it's giving all of this strain of thought, like this whole, all of the striving ideology, it's deputizing it, and it's giving it actual legal backing. So it's no longer just ignored by

law enforcement. It is now being encouraged by local governments. Um. All of these all of these same motivations are now like you can get rewarded for doing this um And oh boy, well people sees on that opportunity. Yeah, And I think that there's a thing we can talk about with with fascism here where it's like Okay, So, like

what what is fascism? And if if you're looking at like one of the one of the things that like, if you if you're using like a strict classical definition of fascism is the integration of of like parties sort of like party paramilitary forces into the state. And this is what we're looking at, is we're looking at these people who have been sucking a bombing abortion clinics for

fifty years, like starting to do this stuff. And I think, like I'm gonna read another passage about the kinds of stuff they do to individual people because like I think, you know, I mean, I keep going back to just like here's the high level terror that they're doing, but like, yeah, like the individual people. Um. After being verbally targeted at our clinic for years, protesters started harassing Tammy Madison through

various written communications. First, the protesters distributed flyers throughout Tammy's neighborhood, including one at Tammy's door. The flyer listed Tammy's address, the make and model of Tammy's car, and listed a telephone number reporter to be Tammy's number. Then the protest disappeared at her home with Science Is playing her name that said she kills babies and hires the baby killers. When they were outside Tammy's house, they handed out flyers

about her. And when walking by, they do things like they'll they'll use like licenses for example, cause again you have to get licenses right to to to provide abortions, to be a doctor. And so they use a licenses to find personal information about people. These the people out there are like I mean their right wingers, right, so they're they're really racist. They like they they love screaming jew doctor at people because yeah, like they racial slurs.

They constantly out people like the nail bob guy also attacked a gay bars. Yeah, there's a lot of crossover in terms of who they want to attack. Yeah, and like they use constant death thrust. There's also a thing I want to talk a bit about, which is like these malicious legal lawsuits. So one of one of the ways that people go after like clinks is that they're constantly these clinics are like constantly under legal for people

are constantly suing them. People people are suing them just to find out personal information about them because the court will give court will give you information. Uh, they get they have like these fake like fake case inspectors who will come in in order to in filtrate the things, like they have. There's legal enormous legal pressure from the state itself, which is often trying to destroy these clinics. They're they're like they'll they'll pass laws specifically to make

us with the clinics can't operate in various ways. Um like people who are just like district attorneys will, we'll do investigations into them over and over again. They also they go after like the kids of providers constantly. I read a story from this book that again, like no one ever talks about, like they they kidnapped this this provider's child like her like twelve year old child like at a clinic and like try to indoctrinate them and

then eventually gave them back after a few hours. But like again, like they they kidnapped a child of one of the people who works at these things, and there no one even talks about it, Like it's never there's never anything. I just I don't know, like I just like the more you go into this is like the more stuff that you see that like like they target people's parents still like show up at like the nursing homes of like the parents of like of these doctors,

like they target their neighbors. They go after the donors to clinics a lot, like they'll they'll they'll send them pictures of like bullets and knives. Um. One of the things they do often is that those burned down completely the wrong clinic. So there's been a lot of cases where they just they attacked the clinic next to it

because they're not the stuff they've gone. Yeah, I want to I want to end on this guy named John Brockenhoff who he bombs three abortion clinics over two decades, Like he's one of the guys who they sent to prison, and then he came out and they bounded another abortion clinic. Um, And I want I want to read this quote from him.

My orders to Vietnam didn't suddenly material materialize unexpectedly. I volunteered to go because I saw the South Vietnamese people were being threatened by a Communist takeover, and I figured if they were willing to fight for freedom, they deserve to be free and deserved help too. He goes on to point out in anywhere of seventy three, I had just returned from voluntary participation in a bombing campaign in support of the liberty of people eight thousand miles away.

So I hope you will believe I will. I would not have turned my back on my own people, American babies, my own people, American babies. If you had asked for my help in bombing an abortion an abortionary in this country, even in seventy three, and especially since it was not mere liberty but very of their very lives at stake, I would have gone with you. So this guy is literally saying he's still fighting the Vietnam War, but he's doing it to bom abortion clinics, and he went to

Vietnam because he want to kill communists. And this guy was at the Capitol at January six. But that that

sounds about right. So yeah, like it's like one of yeah, we're we're like the moment we are at now is this sort of detritus of like every crime the US has ever committed is just rolling back and you know, we're we're we're we're seeing all of these people who, yeah, fought in Vietnam and came back home and like killed a bunch of people who did abortions and did a bunch of bombings, and now they you know, and they tried,

they just try to do a coup. They're probably going to get away with like in actually like a legal coup pretty soon because they've now seen control of the court system and it's like, well they've done they do a really effective combination of violent direct action and legal challenges. Uh there their actions able to be so successful. Uh one because like the tactics they choose that cause material

damage and material change. But also obviously like they're not getting like investigated the same way anyone else would, right because like they are they are capable of doing this effective action because they don't face any any similar level of oppression to any other group that would that would be doing doing this, especially if they're on the left. Um So, like it's it's it's it's always useful to look at the tactics of your enemy and how they

and how they do certain things. But you can always have to realize, like this is the same thing with January six, if it was a whole bunch of people in black block storming, that the response from the cops would have been very different initially and continue on throughout the whole day and these subsequent investigations. Um so yeah, always good to look into tactics, but the response from the government is always going to differ depending on who's

doing the actual challenging. Yeah, and I think, as I said, you thinks about this one, like there are things you can learn from how the right operates. You can't carbon copy their tactics and try to do them from the left because it just won't work because the start to structural conditions for the left are just different. But the second thing is also that like it is simultaneously true that the level of oppression against leftist is higher than

it is against right wingers. And also that's true, and it's also true that you can do stuff and like people have and yeah, I mean none of the change revenge people have gotten caught yet. So like you know, webels people see, yeah comes out and like, well, well we'll see like in general, right, especially when movements are decentralized. Um, but yeah, I mean, wow, they should get they should get to get away with a whole bunch of stuff. You can be doing like pretty public of bombing incidents

for almost a decade and not get caught. If you just can bomb the Olympics and not get caught for like seven years. It's wild. And I'm also just assuming the vast majority of these guys are white, and so they're not. So it's also that and also the fact

that this didn't happen like a long time ago. It's still happening, and that's crazy that we still don't hear about it, Like yeah, like we we talked about we talked about on this show like a few weeks ago, like people people lit another abortion clinic on fire, like that happens still and will continue to happen, and people continue to not care about it because it doesn't and anyone who's in power ins what the media doesn't care. And it's been happening long enough that there's this sense

of like normalization around it. It's not seen as radical, it's seen as oh, obviously, some people think that's justified. It's not. It's not surprising, um, and that normalization allows way more people to both feel capable of doing something and it when it happens, there's not as big of a fuss. I do think it's also true though, like I think there are a lot of people, like I think most people don't know that this happened like I think, I think there's an extent to which the level of

violence has been totally invisibilized. And you know, because I mean they ever think about this again, is the reason that they're working like this is because this this is a completely minoritary and position, right, Like, they don't actually have that many numerical supporters. It's just that they're able to sort of, you know, they they have enough people to wage systemic cam pain of terror and because of that they're able to inflict their sort of able to

inflict their their fascism on the rest of the population. Ah, that was a good ending sigh. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, some of these recordings haven't got the best sound quality. We were walking around the Butterfly Center. We tried the best to block the wind, but some of it's pretty blown out and we still wanted you to hear them. So we've included them, but apologies that the sound quality isn't

what it could be. There was a time when you could have been forgiven for believing that American fascism had been thoroughly beaten back, marginalized, and damaged beyond the capacity for reconstitution. Only the very foolish and dishonest believe that today, every time the far right has taken a serious beating in this country, they've had a place to retreat, to a sanctuary, to reorganize, recoup, and surge it again towards the halls of power. That sanctuary is the U. S.

Mexico border. There's a song I quite admire by the drive by Truckers named after a young Mexican man, Ramon Casiano. In nineteen thirty one, after the kind of stupid altercation young men have been having since time immemorial, Ramon was murdered by another kid named Harlan Carter. Harlan was convicted of murder and then led off by another judge due to a procedural issue with his case. It hardly needs

to be said that Harlan was white. He went on to join the Border Patrol during a period when it was seen as a model of good racial policy by the Nazi government in Germany. Carter rose to lead the Border Patrol, helped to militarize it, and then went on to run the n r A and turn it from a simple gun advocacy organization to the far right culture war institution. It became everything we're dealing with today from the far rights started at the border, and to quote

from that song, that's still where it is today. But the border is more than just a battle ground in America's endless culture war, and it is more than just the system of violencemnlike Carter helped make it into the United States. Border with Mexico stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through the homelands of many indigenous peoples, and across the migratory trails of numerous species, and to many

many people today, it's still just home. Marianna Jones right, runs a butterfly sanctuary that has somewhat improbably provoked the direct ire of a U. S President and become the center of a series of conspiracy theories. She also grew up along the border in the Rio Grande Valley. In high school, she'd take trips to discothecas and bars in Rainosa,

just across the border from McAllen, Texas. Today, she runs the National Butterfly Sanctuary just outside of the nondescript town which seems to have endless strip malls, big box stores, and family run Mexican food joints. You can go there and see wildflowers walk in the woods, and if you're lucky like we were, you might even find a snake in some monarch butterflies making their way across the continent without regard for borders or immigration checks. So you know,

growing up here, we all live very fluid lines. And I used that word. I mean in the nineteen seventies during the Classic crisis, you know, when the Harder was president, we would literally drive to Mexico to gas upper cars and then come back. We would for lunch and cocktas, come back for class to say of class, and come back to football names from the points. We were all in Mexico partying our casts. They had the best discos and clothes, and our parents were over there too, having

to turn. I know people or citizens who lived next because it's more affordable because they have reliable with electricity. Y'all are laughing. But the border for most people living there, sometimes called fronts, is an inconvenience. You have to drive to a certain crossing. Sometimes your truck gets checked, sometimes the port of entry is closed and you're late for work.

But in the public eye, especially during and after the presidential campaign, it looms like a scene from Lord of the Rings, and since then it's also started to look like one. So growing up here I knew there was illegal immigration. It's impossible not to know. I mean nearly everyone knows. Someone who came across is a family on a short term home, or they crossed the river somewhere. But you'll see here our river is hite deep and dangerous.

It's deadly, um. I mean when I was growing up here and I'm fifty two, I had friends who really do weeks ago. Their parents had homes and businesses here and there. Some of them read rode the bus across the bridge every day for school in the morning. I mean, it was nothing. We never thought of anyone's, you know, in terms of citizenship or house. And they also play sort of liminals where two passports to navigate and co trees have since they have nothing, and there seems to

be hardly any in between. In mainstream media, the border is presented as dangerous, as are the people crossing it. But it's hard to feel that you're in danger when you're watching the sunset over the real grand and listening to the owls who begin their work after dusk, and they have a diminishing wild places along the river's north bank. Up until a couple of months ago, we were coming out here four or five times a week, sometimes twice a day on our boat and bringing a lot of

journalists out. It almost never wound up in the portage because they never seen you know. They were like, yes, take us out on the river. We want to see the illegals crossing. We're like, We're like, dude, the only way to do that is to hook up with campaign officials working some of the most beautiful and fragile landscapes in the country along the southern border. Part of Marianna's work is introducing kids to them. I've been lucky enough to spend time in many of them, camping in East County,

San Diego, where the PCT begins. It is one of my favorite things to do. Writing my bike in southern Arizona is an adventure. I take it every opportunity, and I'm not the only one. From jaguars to butterflies, many species of wildlife live along the border and pass over it on a daily basis. The border might look serious on a map, but for much of the last century you'd have struggled to point to it on the ground lest you had a GPS device and far too much

free time on your hands. These kids that will be here this week as part of their academic study, they thought the Rio Rand Valley was a desert. They didn't know you know that we had eleven biologically distinct ecosystems in a four county region that would fit in side San Diego County, California. That you know that we have the river that's not a trickle when everybody flushes their toilets, you know, like it can be an El Paso. I mean, they had no idea that we are the edge of

subtropical you know, America, the neo Tropics. Since eleven, though, the board has become a physical thing, a landscape thriving with life that's somehow found a way to exist in places that can kill you with heat in the day and cold the night, and sometimes both in twenty four hours. Has been torn apart to provide people who have never been there with a chance to grandstand about security, and

various government contractors a chance to line their pockets. Ted Cruz recently posed in a boat, wearing body armor and standing next to a machine gun, just feet away from where we watched recreational boaters sail lately along the river. As we walked from the center down to the river, we spotted some trash on the ground and went to pick it up. Turned out to be a battery, the kind used in a tactical flashlight or weapon light. Marianna doesn't use those, and it wasn't there last time she

walked down a trail. It's not just the wall that's ruining this landscape, she says, it's a constant presence of militarized border patrol. We see the area as a conflict zone, not a conservation one. As I was saying, they're the ones stuff as well. They're very commonly used on the kind of lights yea of the little night. They're so expensive. Marianna knows this only too well. Her butterfly center backs

up to the Rio Grand. It's a beautiful, peaceful place, but since two thousands seventeen it has been under threat from the relentless militarization of the Southern Border. The butterflies, she says, are important for a number of reasons. So butterflies are critical pollinators to all of the green stuff, most of which we don't eat. People know bees pollinate about one third of our food and so they care about bees now because everyone would hate to lose one

third of our food. But butterflies pollinate all of the grasses, wild flowers, shrubs, and trees on the planet. The ones that reduce erosion by holding the ground in place against wind and against rain and floods. The plants that reduce the radiant heat that would come off of the earth if we didn't have the green stuff. They filter the water going into the water table, and they produce oxygen

for us. They filter our air. That's why butterflies matter, and that's why everybody should care about them and do what they can in their commune at ease with their intimate native plants to provide habitat for butterflies. It's not just the butterflies who are in danger either. It's disgusting, um, but it is I hate to say, entirely predictable, but

it's fairly predictable in an in stage capitalist society. We're removing from military doesn't to a border security one where border walls and more security are the United States one. And how most people don't even know about art. I have been shot at by wordpeck many times, and people don't realize it was the CBP drums that we're flying

overhead in Minneapolis. To understand exactly what is at stake, both for the border and the butterflies, it's important to understand exactly what the border wall looks like on the ground. The border wall ecosystem is not just a wall. It's a towering thirty foot steel structure topped with anticlimb plates. Along the barrier, which is often hundreds of yards from the actual border, there's a road wide enough for two of the expensive pickup trucks the CBP drives to pass

each other in remote areas. A road to allow construction vehicles to get to the wall also had to be built for landscapes that had been untouched for centuries. It's been catastrophic. That's why the National Butterfly Sanctuary fought the border wall. In the summer of two thousands seventeen, they found contractors on their land using heavy equipment to destroy

the plants they had worked so hard to protect. After we found the contractors here illegally clearing our land with no right of entry, no eminent domain exercise, no waver of NIPA, and other laws we um you know, we filed suit against the federal government. That brought some publicity and with it a lot of people who said, you know that we if we opposed border wall, we must be for illegal immigration, as though the issue is that simple.

The wall, in addition to being a colossal expense, much of which is funneled to Zeckelmann Industries, a Canadian owned steel company, which was fined dollars by the FBC for legal donations to the Trump campaign, is pretty useless. That the border wall is built miles inside the United States, that Border Patrol picks up ladders every day, um to share photos of ramps built so vehicles could literally drive over border wall like you know the old range rover

commercials and and and also other breaches. UM. We also got a chance to explain to them that up until President Trump, the Border Patrol Union itself had opposed border wall. They had called it a waste of money's ineffective, um, and really irrelevant to their mission of preventing illegal entry to the United States. Walking along the border, we found

half a dozen ladders constructed from old wooden pallets. Alongside them were I D. S clothing And to try this that migrants had either abandoned on their journey north, or had thrown out for them by border patrol agents who had apprehended them. Either way, these discarded things told a sad story of young people, sometimes parents and sometimes children with siblings, crossing a river and then a wall to

try to get a chance at a better life. What the border wall does do very effectively is funnel people through the giant gaps in it. From Texas to California. The Trump had aministration has rushed to build as much wall as it could in order to live up to the wildly exaggerated claims that Trump made in his election debates. We now have as strong a border as we've ever had.

Were over four hundred miles of brand new wall. Of that over four hundred miles, three hundred and fifty odd were repairs to existing barriers or secure fences as they are technically termed, but the rest was built in places that were easiest to access. In southern California, mountains and valleys are simply skipped. The wall stretches across the flat lands in between. People are forced to cross in these gaps in the hardest places, and as a result, many

more of them die. The Butterfly Center isn't one of the hard places. But Marianna has found dozens of identity documents, some of them in evidence bags labeled Department of Homeland Security. She says that people aren't dumping them, they are being stripped of their documents when they are detained. I know that the other side at the end of at the cart counts the ragrance of their phone and there I and that's a littl the migrants to keep phones piffle.

It's how they hit the family to say you have to sit on you know, operated to spur um. The phone is the bank lifelibe not only uh you know, leads for the immigrant the cartel. That's the only way they get paid. And the fact that order patrol is making people undocumented is something folks in the United States

don't understand. They don't see that. We find garbage bands, scroll of medical records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, ideas and other things from mons identities and their illness or the violence that they've they've suffered and every day to make their asylum cases, but more patrol trashes. Throughout the four years of the Trump presidency, the Butterfly Center fought to protect the ecosystem they had created and to keep the

pristine riverbank for barn owls, not border patrol trucks. Marianna isn't alone. The South Texas Birding Preserve was forced to back out of a deal with the FEDS after a Cohinity outcry at the thought of the loss of one of the very few wild places in the area. While they have so far been able to stop the construction of portions of the border wall, they have not been able to stop the multiple armed agencies that police the

border and often each other, from encroaching on the center's land. County. In Texas, there are several overlapping missions to protect the border. Under Operation and Loan Star, Texas National Guard soldiers are deployed to protect the border and prevent drugs smuggling and child trafficking, at least according to the Office of Governor Greg Abbott. Sadly, they're not able to protect themselves from each other. So far, four soldiers have died by suicide,

two in accidental shootings. Texas law allows National Guard soldiers to bring their own personal weapons, which were responsible for both deaths, and one drowned trying to save migrants from the river Because the troops are deployed under state orders, not federal ones, they receive fewer benefits and their families are not compensated as well in the event that they die. In addition to the ten thousand Texas troops, there are also four thousand National Guard soldiers on federal orders along

the border. Task Force Phoenix, as it's called, is a combination of thirty four different Guard units stitched together with very little cohesion or prior experience working together, and has been blighted by low morale. Troops in this deployment are three times likely to have a car accident that sees illegal drugs, and a battalion deployed to McCallan had three soldiers die, the same number as arrest of the National Guard combined that year. D u I use is so

common the breathalyzers are being issued to units. The crisis isn't at the border. The crisis is the border. It's not only United States soldiers dying along the southern border, it's also migrants. According to the Missing Migrants Project, and the state is admittedly better viewed than it is heard. Migrants coming from Central or South America are far more likely to die at the USA's southern border than they

are at any other point on the way there. One thousand, two hundred and forty eight people died or went missing last year and making the trek north, five hundred and ninety five of them at the border. Given that the border, both under Republicans and Democrats', is a weapon that's increasingly effective at killing people an increasingly present in political debate, it's surprising how many people have never been there. The border, at least the bits of it without the wall, doesn't

feel violent. One night, while we were in Texas, we sat on the bank of the Rio Ground and looked across the river as the sunset. Behind us was a wall funded by private donations to a group called We Build the Wall. It's built so close to the river that the weight from the border patrol boats will see it undermined and washed away in less than five years. Across from us, little Cabanias and Bars studied the shoreline.

They looked at Dylick and were it not for the thousands of armed people who make it their job to stop it, it would have been quite nice to swim across for a drink. Swimming over was out of the question. But the peaceful border we encountered was not the one you'd recognize if you've seen Fox News over the past four years. For much of Middle America, the border is constructed as a lawless land somehow also as a desert, despite the fact that miles of it and marked that river,

and a place where cartel violence goes unchecked. Human trafficking runs rampant. A young children are snatched away from their families and sold in sex slavery. Of course, young children are snatched away from their families at the border, but that's your taxpayer money at work, not the zetas or

cartels with dinner. Sadly, the butterfly centers opposition to the wall combined with this political theater at the border to place a group of people who just wanted to be left alone, to be nice to butterflies, at the center of a culture ward they wanted nothing to do with.

At some point, the Trump White House became aware that a hundred acres of Texas grasslands were holding out against all the legal and questionably legal efforts of Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to destroy the little haven along the real ground. We know that Jared Kushner said in May of twenty nineteen, in the Oval Office,

we solved the butterfly thing. And and Steve Bannon had been, uh, you know, the former former special adviser to President Trump, and then he is the one who who started this psyop. And they took aim at us, and instead of us being against the wall and possibly for um open borders, they declared that we were a cartel front and actively engaged in trafficking humans and drugs, that we were not about conservation at all, but we were selling women and

children into sex slavery. Marianna's Twitter bio at a time of writing reads do no harm, take no ship, and that's approach she took. As a marga community began to sling an increasing amount of ship. The North American Butterfly Association filed suit against Brian Cole Fage slash we Build the Wall, Tommy Fischer slash Fishers and Gravel slash TRG Construction, A Lance new House slash new House and Sons. On

December third, twenty nineteen. Call Phage, a US Air Force veteran, attempted to crowd fund the war after Congress wouldn't fund it to the ridiculous extent that Trump desired. He raised over twenty five million. In August of twenty twenty, call Phage was indicted, along with Steve Bannon two other co defendants, on federal charges of defrauding hundreds of thousandth of We

Build the Wall donors. Federal prosecutors said that despite repeatedly assuring donors that call Phage would not be paid, the defendants engaged in a scheme to divert three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to call Phage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle. Call Phage was separately indicted May of twenty twenty one on federal charges related to his

falsification of tax returns. In April of twenty twenty two, Cauthage entered a guilty plea, having accounted for about ten million in spending a little under five miles of actual war. Call Page's attempts to build the Wall in Texas were hampered by the National Butterfly Center lawyers, who argued that it was a flood risk because it is and by various tax issues at call Fedge's team seemed entirely unaware of. While they hope to transfer the war they built, which

they called the Lamborghini of walls, to federal ownership. CBP wanted nothing to do with it, as they were building their own wall outside of the floodplane. After ignoring a ruling, call Fege eventually built about three miles of wall in Texas and then declared the project complete November. With litigation ongoing, call Fadge took to Twitter to accuse the National Butterflies Center of having a rampant sex trade taking place on

your property and the death sick bodies. When we first saw Brian call Fage's tweets and then we build the wall videos using my image and talking about the Butterfly Lady and everything and the Butterfly Center. Um, at first, you know, we we kind of reacted with humor, like this is too funny, Like who in their right mind

would believe any of this? And you know, we even tried addressing I mean, I didn't know who Brian cole Fass was at the time, but you know, we replied like, um, you have a very very active imagination or you're a really you know, twisted person. And we used the hashtag liar liar pants on fire because we really did think it was ridiculous, but any notion that this was not

deadly serious was soon dismissed. And now I've become this or extremism in Americ politics word, as I told others, Yeah, I've had I've had a lot of journalists asked me, what does it feel like to be in the cross roads of the culture wars in America? And I'm like, I'm not at the crossroads of the culture war. I live in the borderlands, which are the proving grounds for fascism in America. That's where I live. And we're gonna see it more and more. Everybody's going to see it

more and more. They test things like the aerostat balloons here, and the fact that we didn't cut them loose and shoot them down and set them on fire. The fact that we were like, oh, that's kind of a pretty innocuous, you know, white balloon in the sky. We can live with it means that now it's gone out from under DHS to d O D and it's being deployed across the United States coming soon were community. A few weeks after cal Fidges tweeting, the Butterfly Center closed its Rusty Gate.

It reopened in late April of two, but the almost three months in between were harrowing experience for Marianna and for the staff. And we arrived at a center in early March. There was a police surveillance tower posted in the car park and young men and hum vys on the road. We traveled down together there despite them, or perhaps in a sense because of them. In the theater they represent, Marianna doesn't feel safe. She carries a gun

on her property even without the wall. The mintorization of the border has had a huge impact on the center. You will go into the river. She shows us some of the roads and access routes had been built. Concrete goes here in the base of the levier, midway in the levee. The gap to make this road up here wide enough for two to three vehicles, and they're down here. They'll have a high speed all weather road. So we

fully expect. There's porter wall and then there's border walls, system, the road, the lighting, the sensors, um those sorts of things part of the system. Clear and alter this par system. Otherwise they come down this high speed all weather road, have to slow down, but and drive along the canal. And we know the number one killer of Troy Agents accidents. As we walk along one of the roads, we talk about the impact that wall has had a wildlife. I tell her a story about idea I saw try to

get around the wall into a point. For whatever reason, it was so desperately sad that I can't forget it. The devastation the border reads on human life tends to get the most pressed and rpefully so. But Marianna has spent years watching the wall spread like a cancer at the ecosystem. She loves the addition of herbicide, you know, keep the enforcement zone dead and free of any vegetation. It has to do with the installation of all night bright lighting that disrupts mammals, and of course the wall

when it eliminates range area. When it when it forms that barrier for land mammals and reptiles, you eliminate yea genetic diversity from from breeding, you eliminate seed distribution, all kinds of other things. So um no, there's no way to build all in the Lower Reo Ran Valley Wildlife Observation.

Of course, the human cost is even high. Marianna first became aware of exactly what was at stake when she like millions of other people, opened up her phone learned about the most recent in a string of hate crimes inspired by anti immigrant rhetoric. A very disturbed young man drove from plane oh to the Walmart and El Paso and massacred twenty two people and injured dozens others. We were very much aware of that, and I believe that is ultimately what we build. The wall seeks to provoke. Here.

The shooter, who openly targeted Mexicans and believed in the Great Replacement theory, which is common among white nationalists, had posted a manifesto on h Chan before he started his killing spree. In that manifesto, he complained of a Hispanic invasion and used rhetoric that mirrored that of Colfage and his fundraising collaborator, Steve Bannon. Two thousand nineteen was the year the eight Chan shootings dominated news coverage on extremism. I found myself as the world media's go to guy

for explaining what had happened. The hardest thing to get across was how much of the hate that had ended in dozens of murders had started with ship posting, people spreading racist memes and hateful jokes. Within the confines of a digital echo chamber. For Marianna, the El Paso shooting was a wake up call, hard evidence that online bullshit

can turn into deadly violence. The longer she spent online reading far right conversations, the more she realized co Fage's baseless allegations might mean real danger for her in her colleagues. After we filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security and and there is publicity about that, And honestly, the timing of that was kind of good because we filed suit at the beginning of December, so by the time media picked up on it, people were really already distracted

by Christmas. You know, they were holiday planning and partying and shopping and all that. So there wasn't this enormous explosion of publicity and negative backlash. But we did start getting what we call disaster tourists, people who would show up going we heard they're gonna build the wall across the Butterfly Center, show us where they're gonna build our

president's big, beautiful wall. And as long as they behaved, you know, we have maps, we would take their entry fee and say, okay, now you've got to walk a quarter mile that way to the canal. That's where they're going to build it, and then walk another one point two miles to the border, to the actual border. And again it gave us a chance to educate people. And uh, there was a lot of head scratching with people going

but why would they build the wall? Things seemed to be going well, but then they took a turn for the worst. Kovach had tweeted that quote. The only butterflies we saw were swarming a decomposing body surrounded by tons of rotting trash left behind by illegals. And his lies had become something of a fixture on the places where MAGA and Q and on overlap. Almost none of these people had ever visited the border, but years of propaganda had given them a fixed set of expectations about this place.

They spun up ever more ridiculous fantasies, and by late twenty nineteen, some of them had even started to show up in person. About that same time, police arrested to young men with Adam Woffen in West Texas and they had been stopped and uh, you know, pulled over, and they had all kinds of weapons and munitions and grenades and uh, you know, improvised explosive devices and everything in the car, and they said they were headed to the border. Then the militia people started coming here. And um, I

was here the day the first ones came. The first that we know of, came inside the building to case the joint. And sometimes I sit here at the conference table to work. Sometimes I'm in this office right here, but I can always hear what's going on at the front counter, and we have a door time. And so there are questions that people ask when their first time visitors. There are questions people ask when they're part of our tribe, when they're naturalists, when they've come for the butterflies and

the birds and all of that. And then there are questions people ask that make all of your spidy senses, you know, go off. And I heard heard that kind of questioning, And whenever that happens, I get my phone open to camera and I go out there. What the question you heard? Was that kind of They were asking about the lay of the land and how they would get to the river from here, And those aren't regular questions.

When most people show up. They're like, we're here on family vacation and not our way to south padre, but we heard there was a butterfly center, so we stopped. You know, so they may say, like where are the butterflies?

People show up thinking we're a betterfly house, and you know, but when people immediately say like how do I get to the river from here, or explained to me where the access points are there, you're kind of like, okay, we know that's And I took a picture of them from behind, and then I went out there and I was like, you know, hello, gentlemen, can I help you? You know, and make sure they you know, it's like we are looking you in the face, we can identify you.

And one of them kind of turned and walked off, and one of them stayed to talk to me, and they were lazing, well, we've just you know, never been here before, and tell us which all are all about. And it was the week of Thanksgiving and we'd actually just had our pot luck for staff and some of our members. So they're like, and you've got food, and they're like, can we have some pecan pie or have a slice of pie? But the other guy who had peeled off, I noticed him walking around. He came and

looked back here. He was noticing the cameras and all the places. He made his way towards the back of the building and started the same thing, and I was like, oh, and I told Luciano, go outside, photograph all the vehicles in the parking lot, you know, get license plates, get all the identifying information that we would need. And sure enough, there were two trucks backed in with the punisher stickers and the thirteen stars in a circle and the you know that don't tread on me and this and that.

One of them was from New Mexico, and I believe the other one was from I want to say, like Oregon or somewhere, but it was, yeah, I mean it was I've still got all that information. And then I uh so after they left, we downloaded the security camera video and put our photos and everything together, and I emailed everything to the commander for DPS down here as well as the Mission police chief and UM and then

asked to meet with them. And of course the Mission p D guys had no idea about the adam often people being arrested in Texas. They had no idea the militia was in town. UM. And then they more and more of them kept coming, and you know, one of them would drive up and down Sherbock and his huge jacked up truck. There's a red truck with the Trump flags, and he had two big great danes that you know, and he would just be loud and annoying. He wanted everybody to know he was here on patrol and and

ready to intimidate. That was disconcerting, but the police responded. They wound up having several interactions with various militia people and even taking at least two of them that we know of, into custody, and at least one of those was turned over to the FBI. The man arrested had outstanding warrants and had been flying a drone in a controlled air space. Another had been impersonating a law enforcement officer.

Seeing the threat, Marianna realized that if she wanted to stay safe, he was going to have to take matters into her own hands. We don't know if it was done here or somewhere else. I assume it was not here because they didn't tell us it was here. Oh No. The mission p D officer who is their liaison with the FBI came and met with me and thanked me for sharing all of that information. I mean, we knew what hotel they were staying at. We and we had We've had to become our own sort of security and

detective force because nobody else is doing it. And I think most people in communities around the country think the police know what's going on and they're out there, you know, safeguarding us, when we have learned the hard way that that is absolutely not true. Soon she was plumbing the parts of the Internet that she'd only heard mentioned on

passing in the news. We were aware of Pizza Gate, Yeah, we were aware that they had declared that Hillary Clinton and associates were running as Saint anach child you know, sex ring with you know, ritual sacrifice and all kinds of other preposterous stuff out of the basement of a d C. Pizza parlor, you know where the pizza parlor didn't even have a basement, much less a Satanic ritual

child sex trafficking ring. Just a few weeks after the shooting an El Paso, we build the war Broke ground on their Phase two project within sight, very much within shooting distance to the National Butterfly Center. Marna was under no illusion about the stakes. They know that they have the ability to incite violence in that way to motivate people to take action, and they use a lot of really inflammatory rhetoric. Even Steve Bannon's broadcast is called the

War Room. You know, we're all at war. We're war against the cartels, and we're at war for the soul of our nation, and we're at war against the Democrats, and you know, and and now they're at war against the Butterfly Center. In addition to her intelligence gathering, she started taking steps to protect herself and her workers. They weren't exactly the sort of thing she'd expected when she took a job. What you'd hope to write grunts and

talk to kids about butterflies. We had to develop some very rudimentary safety plans, like if there were a shooting, where you would shelter, how we would try to safeguard visitors, um, and other things to like the women on staff, even the guys on staff, UM, Like I never have my hair down. I always keep it up or under a hat or something. Because you just learned in basic self defense that somebody's going to grab your ponytail or your hair as the fastest, easiest way to take control of

your whole body. Basically, so we just we all take um a variety of precautions, and it has radically changed the way we we operate here and the way we perceived this place which used to be. I mean, we were blissful idiots coming to work in this oasis of of flowers and butterflies every day. And you know, my children described me as snow white, that I'm out there just with the you know, the butterflies landing on me, in the hummingbirds coming up and saying hello. Luckily she

wasn't alone. As soon as people heard about the threats to her in the center, she began to receive mass us of support. It turns out it's not only right wing grifters. You can summon people to remote part of southern Texas, whether Rio Grand Tristrough the reads a local switch to English and Spanish as a mood suits soon groups him across the country, from veterans to indigenous nations,

reached out to office support. So first we had the water protectors and indigenous people's like the Gattisco, Marugo and Navajo and other nations. People came here and set up camp. They were good being here night and day to be our eyes and ears and a deterrent for the militia entering the property. And along with them came others like the Sierra Club Military Outdoors Program participants who also camped

out here for a week. And we had the brown Berets and veterans for Peace and um even UH folks from the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. I mean, I hate to even include that since we get called pinko comyne, libtards, snowflakes and all of that, but those folks showed up willing to help in the face of UH fascism, in the face of these militia lit all this stress and the need for constant patrols and vigilants to gets told even with support. Being the center of

a fabricated firestorm of lies is no fun. It wasn't just Marianna who's impacted. The constant stressed and the NonStop over flights of the Border Patrol helicopters impacted her staff as well. And then in nineteen like all bets are off. Anybody can say anything they want. They can. You know, I hate to say it, but people hit mental health days now if they pay, if they just for whatever reason, are like I can't deal with this ship. Today they

don't have to come to work, and I've lost good employees. Briefly, we built the wall one an injunction and kept building their privately funded wall. Massive erosion quickly undermined it, but the International Boundary and Water Commission report on the construction wasn't completed until March, by which time we build the

wall had completed three miles of wall. The consensus among hydrologists and engineers interviewed by Pro Publica for a report on the wall said that the Rio Grand had scoured against the base of the wall, causing erosion and putting the wall in danger of collapse. With its very shallow foundation, Coal Fager's wall was an immediate danger of toppling into the river. In response to this, Trump did what Trump

does and took to Twitter to blame everyone else. In July, tweeted, I disagreed with doing this very small, tiny section of the wall, going on to say it was only done to make me look bad and perhaps it now doesn't even work. Should have been built like rest of wall five hundred plus miles. I should also note that he

misspelled perhaps in that tweet. While Coal Flas was still reeling from this condemnation, the acting U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced indictments of Coal, Fas and Bannon for wire fraud. The charging documents themselves are an unusually compelling read. We did a couple of episodes of Behind the Bastards covering them. The whole situation would be much funnier, though, if it weren't for all

of the lives that Colfage and his cronies directly threatened. Anyway, it turned out they had been taking huge sums for their own personal use, while concealing their use of funds that donors thought would be spent on the wall by creating quote sham and voices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes. Initially, all four entered not guilty please. They seem to be buying time, hoping that

Trump would pardon them. In the end, he did pardon Steve Bannon, and you can make of that what you will, but the others were left to hang in the wind. This April call, Fage entered a guilty plea to these and other charges. The failure of Bannon and Colfage's grift didn't stop them from using the butterfly sanctuary as a punching bag and their fundraising grants that they published to whatever sites had not gotten around to banning them yet.

As right wing radicals were d platform from Facebook and Twitter in the lead up to the election, Marianna stopped getting hagged in their rants, But they didn't stop ranting. Soon as it became clear that Trump had lost the election and refused to concede it, he began to lie about the election and then attempted to overturn it by

encouraging his supporters to storm the US capital. At this point, it became clearer that the same people who were fanatical about building the wall had also become entirely detached from reality. Even after Biden had been inaugurated and their lie had failed. Who's who or perhaps a Who's not in jail for sedition.

Yet of MAGA grifters continued to focus their rage at the que and on adjacent fantasies they had concocted about unspecified cartel's smuggling children across a butterfly sanctuary to sexually abuse them. Sometimes, they claimed they cut the heads off of children so that the corpses were easier to transport. It's the kind of habitual, unhinged escalation that liberals and lefties on Twitter love to consume mockingly via aggregator accounts that enable mass gawking at the far right. But for

Marianna it was not at all amusing. Like I didn't even know rumble existed. I didn't know what rumble was. And they and we were sent the video that Christy Hutcherson and Lindsay Something from South Carolina made here in

front of the Butterfly Center. And you know, of course there's the been Berkam stuff, and you know, we don't watch War Room, but sometimes I do have to go find and film portions of those broadcasts where Steve Bannon is still bashing us and and using that platform to bolster um the lies and and you know, really stir up the the the terrible sentiment and and ultimately we fear the stochastic terrorism. Let's stop for a second and go into more detail about the people she's referencing here.

Christie Hutcherson founded a group called Women Fighting for America on their websites about page they today Americans closely held beliefs in freedoms seem to be under constant attack from mainstream media, elitist academia, judicial activists, foreign aggressors, and many times elected politicians. These attacks highlight the two extremely different ideologies fighting for our country's future, where we stand by and let America become a socialist, Marxist or communist nation

and give our children up to this hopeless vision. I should also note that women fighting for America actively solicit donations, which they note are not tax deductible. Hutcherson incited rioters during the January sixth insurrection and is generally what you might call a B list MAGA star. Ben Birkwam is a correspondent for Real America Voice, the network that hosts

Steve Bannon's War Room podcasts. In general, the folks most focused on harassing the Butterfly Sanctuary are a lower grade of MAGA influencer than the major national names, but they all have connections higher up to those big names, and when they do land a successful line of propaganda, it tends to filter up quite efficiently to those bigger names.

In January of twenty two, a year after the failed coup at the capital, some of these MAGA holdouts came to the Rio Grand Valley to pick on a target they thought they might have a better chance of taking. The Wee Stand America Border Security rally was headlined by the few remaining Q and On conspiracy theorists and supporters of former President Trump who had not gotten in trouble

for the Capital stuff. In part, like the entire phenomenon, the conference was a giant grifft, but for many of the people taken up with its religious proclamations and wild lives of child trafficking and sexual abuse, it was the last chance they felt they had to stop something evil. Marianna up until that time, hadn't been aware of how serious the threats against her sanctuary were. Then a friend involved in local Republican politics reached out and told her

be armed at all times or out of town. Ahead of the rally. beIN Burquam appeared in a video on Getter outside of the sanctuary holding a pair of children's shoes, which he claimed were evidence of trafficking, and stated that he and the Butterfly Center were calling on Joe Biden to shut down the border were down here are actually heading down to Benson State Park to look at the end of the wall where Joe Biden stopped building the

wall and this place, the Butterfly Center. They said they were afraid they had some credible threats that something was gonna go on. So we came down here and we want to join our voices with the Butterfly Center and say we stand against the credible threats of the cartel's trafficking children through the Butterfly Center, and we demand we call on Joe Biden to close this border down to protect the butterflies, because we all care about butterflies. I mean,

you know the children that are being sold. These shoes were from one of the children that was trafficked across. This wristband was from one of the children that was trafficked across. Smaller than my four year old daughter's arm. But it really matters to the Democrats are the butterflies. And so we unite with them if that's what it If that's what it's gonna take to shut this border down,

we unite with them and say protect the butterflies. Joe closed down the border because we know you don't care about the kids. The same day, Piper Loomis and hutchardson the p in their own video holding the same suspiciously new looking children's shoes, and they're horrifically overexposed video. They suggested that NBC was quote more concerned about butterflies than the little children, and that the Butterfly Center was used as a route for the sex trafficking of children. Together,

the video's title said they would save America. Hey everyone, this is Lindsay Piper Loomis. I'm here with my bestie, Christie Hutcherson and founder of Women Fighting for America. I went to the border with her last year for six days. We are here at the Butterfly Center. Look at the credible threat. They said, there's gonna be a big protest here. There's no protests. They're protesting. What tell them about the butterflies? Tell them why? Like, what was the big deal? I'm

not really sure, but um, I got news. I've been hit by every single tabloid there is. But there's some kind of credible threat with butterflies here. UM in Mission Texas, UM from we stand America and Women Fighting for America. I can tell you Women Fighting for America loves butterflies, and we care about butterflies very much. So I wanted to come down here and see what the credible threat was, Um. And if we have to protect the butterflies, we need

to protect the butterflies. I agree with that, So Biden, why don't you build the wall to protect the butterflies. Yeah, it's really that simple. UM. But my question to this administration and to the National Butterfly Museum here, why are you more concerned? Why are you more concerned about butterflies than you are than the little children who are being trafficked right behind this center, and they use the butterfly land to come up through and bring these children who

are trafficked and these women who are trafficked. You know, Tom Homing yesterday was speaking on stage and was telling one of the stories where he's seen a little child where he had to rescue and that one child had over twenty two different people's d n A inside of them. That's disgusting. So as much as I care about butterflies, I can tell you this, Lindsay, I care a lot more about our children and the children who are coming up and being exploited from the different countries by the cartels.

That's what I care about. So I've been telling you guys about how children are tattooed according to how they're going to be trafficked or sold into what type of trafficking, organ harvesting, sex, drug and human trafficking. How they use their body, they kill them, They use their body cavities to haul drugs across that border until the bodies start decaying and they find the bodies decaped, decapitated. Told you

about the rape trees. But here we actually have a shoe from and this actually this is this is what so lindsay, this is a little bracelet and there's a little how much money it costs for this person to be brought aside um to to America from the cartels. The other thing is is that the cartels when they're getting ready to move children, they call them tickets. So they have no regard for life. They don't care. They'll throw them in the river, they'll leave them in the

desert to die. Um, and they call them tickets. That's that's how disgusting this whole thing is. And America needs to wake up and understand we are at a war with the cartels. We are at the war to save our children, and every so much. Yeah, and every states the border state and South Carolina is ranked one of the top and then nation for trafficking. Lindsay Piper limits with Christie Hudgerson. Together, we're saving America. God bless. But

this time they didn't stop with posting. On the day he was inaugurated, Biden signed an executive order re sending Trump's emergency Declaration at the southern border and ending some use of the d D funding. Trump had relied upon as an end run around accountability, but he didn't as he promised he would stop building immediately during the Biden Obama administration, Trump campaigned on um build that wall. Are

you willing to tear that wall down? No, there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration number one. Like so much else, Biden didn't live up to his promises on the border. There have been some small victories for basic decency, but Biden's record is deeply mixed. He's reunited hundreds of children with their families, the ended

court negotiations about a financial settlement for them. Migrant apprehensions climbed to one point seven million of record in fiscal year twenty one, but they also reflected an unusually high rate of adults attempting to cross the border multiple times that's because Biden's administration defended Trump's use of Title forty two, part of a seventy seven year old law called the Public Health Service Act, which has been interpreted to allow

CVP to release migrants back into Mexico without booking them. Often this means they turned right back around across again in a more remote and often more deadly place. Biden hasn't lived up to his promises on the wall either. Marianna showed us a pile of wall sections, essentially giant metal poles, just a little shorter than Trump war. You could be forgiven for thinking they're identical, but these is, she explained, well, not technically wall. And you see the

border wall that was being constructed there. Some of it has the tall ballards with the anti climb plate that's and then the short levy repair and guardrail. Well, I snapped moody black and white photos of the wall from on top of the levee, as I have all along the hundreds of miles of landscape that it cuts through

like an open wound. Robot went down to see who made these new pieces of the Biden barrier, but we didn't have much luck finding a label the wall segments lay out in giant palettes surrounded by construction debris and dirt. Every palette is labeled, and so will are all the shipping containers, but the wall materials themselves had no clear maker's mark on them. As we walked back along the dirt road, we asked Marianna about the video that brought

us here in the first place. If you haven't seen it, it's a video of Kimberly low along Odds. Marga congressional candidate from Virginia, really is an interesting figure. She started out as a Sanders backer in sixteen and has radicalized sense to such a degree that most of her local MAGA people want nothing to do with her. Some of them think she's some kind of double agent. Audio from the incident makes it clear why people might view Kimberly

as unhinged. We're not here to cause any problems, I'm sorry. No, you are here to promote your agenda, and your agenda is not welcome here. So you're not for keeping the illgals out. So you're not that has all these four people in the humanitarian crisis. That's what we're here. So you're next trafficked and righted them that is not at all what this is about. We have girl scouts spend the night here. That's how safe it is. Yeah, I have children in the car. It's safe here. Anyway, We're

not here to it now. You're you're here to make a show and to promote your agenda. So you can leave now, thank you for leaving, now, thank you? All right, But I'm sorry that you're okay with children being great. I'm not okay with any of that, and I thank you. Your bullshit is a big problem. I'm going to go help the world. I got a really nasty person. We'll let Marianna explain what happened. So I was sitting here, actually at the conference table, and my son was at

the front counter. He doesn't work here, but he was covering for a staff member who was outsick. And as I was saying, you hear things that are like m you know, So I was on a conference call. I had my headphones in, but my son came over and he gave me a note and it said, you know, this woman says she's running for Congress and has her secret service agent with her, and you know, I thought that was strange. But then I you know, I'm still on this call, but I you know, I took my

headphones out so I could hear them. And the one woman, Michelle, was claiming to be secret service. And I mean, I've had people like bettor Work when he was a congressman come visit Michelle Beckley, who's a state representative. I mean, I've had I've had people come visit and they don't have secret service, you know. So I knew that that was not true, that this woman was not secret service.

And the congressional rep I asked my son get her name, and he did, and I just did, you know, literally like one or two minute Internet search for her, and it was immediately apparent that she was a MAGA candidate. And my son said, they want us to open the back seventy for them, but they don't want to pay admission.

And on her Facebook page, I could see their Facebook live stream from just like five minutes or or where they had driven down Sherbock to the gate where we all have been and seeing, you know, we have a great, big private property no trespassing sign, and then they went up on the levy and interacted with the Texas National Guard there. Her video ended before that, but a reporter with stars and stripes. I know, was on the levee with National Guard and interacted with Kimberly and Michelle. So

they trespassed onto our property. Then they came here demanding that they be granted access without paying admission and declared, just right up front, we want to go see the river and the illegals crossing on the rafts to the Butterfly Center. The rafts they were talking about, we're referencing a doctored image circulating around the right wing conspiracy web. We stood at the dock in the image. On that

afternoon there were no rafts. Marianna decided to try and talk the two women down, so, um, you know, I, I put my phone on record, carried it out there. I got to business cards because it is my job to be professional and grieve these people when they come. So I went out there and I said hello, and the rest of it is history. As they say, you have that audio or um you know of of of me saying I know who you are and what you're

up to. And I knew then it was a setup for someone to come here and say those things and be doing their own uh you know, sort of project Veritas Facebook live stream Border Adventure from Virginia. As they say, none of it smelled right, you know, that didn't work, so she asked them to leave. Well, it was when I told them they needed to leave and if they weren't going to leave, you know, we would call the

e And I told him. I gestured to my son, just do it, you know, go ahead and call the call the police, which he did, and they were like, no, no, we're leaving, We're leading. They went out the front doors, but then they stopped, so I opened the door behind them, like keep it moving, ladies, you know you have to leave. And I was focused on Michelle who was on my left, who was again saying she was Secret Service and laughing

at her. When I turned and Kimberly was on this side of me and had her phone up like this, so I didn't know if she was taking photos or filming, but we talked about how everybody now has their own triggers. I do not want my photo taken. I do not want anyone filming me. I don't I don't want any of that because of how cold Fasion, Bannon and their fake news outlets and everything else have used my image

and have put a target on my back. So she's standing there going we're here at the Butterfly Sanctuary or whatever she called it, and I'm with this not nice lady, and I was like, oh no, and I just put my hand up to block her from photographing or filming me or to swat it away. And then I immediately turned back towards the doors to retreat inside the building.

But I didn't make it inside the building. I was flat on my ass on the ground, and I didn't know if Michelle had grabbed me from behind, or if Kimberly had uh pushed me or whatever. But then my son busted out of the building and was sort of over me um and I'm trying to get up off the ground, and all this is caught on the video camera from the building. In a previous video, the women had indicated that they were armed, which is generally a safe assumption when MAGA type show up accusing you of

child trafficking. The situation was rapidly growing more dangerous. My son feared for my life. He thought Michelle was going to stamp my face or my neck or my head. And she's a big girl, and and at that point Kimberly ran to her car. Somewhere in the midst of all that, she she fled to her car, where she had her three children waiting because this place is so dangerous and lawless and and everything. She brought her three children here for her opportunity to, you know, interact with

cartel or whatever. I mean, it's just the whole thing just gets more bizarre. And uh. And Michelle at that point had taken my phone, and I was just telling her, you're not leaving with my phone, giving my phone back, while Kimberly is again live streaming from her car, yelling at Michelle to come get in the car. Uh. Michelle did walk to the car declare, she's not bothering me about me. Um. But my son had run to close the front gate because he didn't want them. I mean,

he had just called. Unbeknownst to us, there was a visitor in the parking lot who had also dial and you guys have been here. There's police on the corner. There's police, right, I mean, there's police everywhere. So my son ran to close the gate one so they couldn't leave with my phone too, so they would be here

when the police got here. But then the police didn't come, and as she fled the property, she's filming herself and she's gunning it the car as she races towards the gate, screaming, get the funk out of my way, Get the funk out of my way, and then she swerves like this at my son, who had to leap to the ground out of the way to avoid being hit by her red range rover. The center was full of visitors, some of them called nine, but no one stepped into help

prior to this experience. Yes, I would have expected our visitors, any decent human being, to respond to a woman's screaming, help, help, help me, please, please help, but nobody did, only my son. At first, they didn't fully grasp what was happening, but soon Marianna had worked out who her attacker was. And so I relayed all of that to my boss and to the police, and uh, you know, my boss was kind of like, well, do whatever you want. If you feel like you need to close next weekend, then close

next weekend. So we did. We closed that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then we came back in the next Monday, and that's when we saw and people started sending us the videos that Berkewam and Hutcherson had filmed here, presumably on Sunday, And there's probably a lot more stuff out there that we haven't seen. After leaving the Butterfly Center one day, we went for a walk towards some nearby

trailer parks. They're full of people who the locals called Winter Texans, people from the colder parts of the US who spend a few months in trailer homes on the border so they can wear shorts in March and not pay expensive heating bills. We bumped into some Winter Texans who are on their way to a bird sanctuary we just visited. They said they'd missed their usual trips to the Butterfly Center their friends in Minnesota. They said, I can believe that they would go down to the border

in Minnesota. Is not reality as to what's going on in the border down here. Um, people don't understand. You know, all the world wire you coming down and really says the idea of sports of people attacking you know, it's like the people coming out of your brain right now. I mean, that's that's the impression they get, and we

say we go. They do their best to help change perceptions, they said, And then we try to We try to do as much as we can to get factual information back home to people with questions and stuff like that. We worked, Um maybe well we haven't done the last few years because I couldn't. But yeah, um, four or five years ago we were working with the rest of It Center here with topic charities, and there were some men where allow of the people could go over and

on it. The other thing, I come, I don't think that people realize because of the river there's not a straight line, or that you can't just build a wall, and that people live in their houses south of the wall. Yeah, you know, and people's farms are selves of the wall. Yeah, sometimes there's sometimes there isn't. Everywhere we go along the border, we see division. Locals are losing places they love, and people from a long way away of performing a charade

for personal and political gain. But it's not all that cut and dried. One taco shop we walked past has a special parking spot reserve for DHS employees. A trailer park we drive by has sim blue line flags. Fine, despite my best attempts at putting the clueless foreigner card when we call them. They won't tell me why they have the flags or what they mean. Some of the National Guards troops we spoke to have been out of work before they came down to the border. Actually I

didn't have a job. Okay, give me, and I'm planning to say, You're like, okay, yeah, you get active, dud, you pay while you're somewhere where it's like it because border. Everyone on the border wants to feel safe, including Marianna. But the reason the border is remarkable at all is because so many people have to cross it. Some cross will work, some cross for fun, some cross to change their lives. But without people, the border doesn't have any significance.

For Mariana. Without people, she can't even enjoy the quiet calm in the sanctuary. She hopes, she says, they can reopen suit. I mean, honestly, I hope it doesn't last a whole lot longer, because we all miss one another. We miss uh being here. You know, really, of all the jobs that a person can have in the world, one where you get to interact with wildlife and garden and breathe fresh air and you don't feel the rain

on your face. I mean, it's pretty awesome. And uh and interact with people who are absolutely thrilled and fascinated, especially the children, just delighted, gleeful about their interactions here. We want to get back to that, but we have to have more, Um, we have to have more help before we can do that. We we need professional guidance beyond what we've received three years ago when the first wave of community defense and mutual aid hit the ground. Here.

Mariana doesn't know and she'll feel safe, but even with the center poise to reopen as we write this, she isn't secure yet. You know. I feel like it's a cat and mouse thing, and they're the cat and wear the mouse, and that they are going to continue to come back again and again until something really bad that happens. I think it's almost a challenge maybe at this point, from what I can tell about their their psyche. You know. Um, it goes right back to that winning. You know, Steve

Bannon's no loser. He's not used to losing, and anything short of achieving his goal, whatever that may be, is not winning. If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering what you can do to help. If, like most Americans, you live a long way from the southern border, and

I've never visited. It might seem strange take up and travel there to meet a nice lady and talk about butterflies, Q and on, while you have to drive past soldiers in fatigued with assault rifles to look at her pollinated gun. But Marianna says that even the small acts of solid arcty make a huge difference. Even people just sending really nice email or letters is so good. We'll probably have a wall of that when we get back, because the flip side of that is the hate mail, the ugly messages,

the death threats, the voicemails that are so horrible. So do you hear from people that do support us and stand with us and feel like what's happening is horrible. People who write to say, you know, I told my quilting circle about what's happening at the Butterfly Center, or you know, I mean and uh and we're gonna make a quilt for you, or you know whatever it is, you know, Um, it helps, It really does, And then they can share our story because it's not just about

the Butterfly Center. It's about what's happening to our democracy. It's about how these operations work um to manipulate people with lies. I don't I don't want to call it conspiracy theories or misinformation or any of that anymore. They're just lies, and people need to start to understand that, whether it's about COVID or the Trucker Convoys, or trans Kids or the Butterfly Center. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat

Death of the Universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.