Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is about bad people, and it turns out there's a lot of those in the world, only more of them every year. It feels like to commiserate with me about that point. My guest today, Jack O'Brien, Doctor Jack O'Brien, mister Colonel Jack O'Brien, President Jack O'Brien. All of the titles, esquire what other titles are there? Do we have titles for?
Like I don't know, I like colonel the honorable colonel, because that that's one that when they give it to you, you can just start calling yourself that, Like you just did an episode about this dream the colonel dream was just like just like somebody called him that one time, I think in like New Orleans and they were like, we'll make you honorable colonel, and he was like started trying his name on legal documents.
Oh yeah, what if I ever if I was ever made a Kentucky colonel or whatever other kind of anytime. The second I get made a colonel, I am never introducing myself any other way, like I.
Like to think.
So when we went to the R and C and DNC, they had this display of President's shoes. I like to think if there was like a podcast version of it, it would just be Jack's, Jordan's.
Jordan's Yeah, I have some behind me right there. Yeah. I think that's very nice with you, Sophie. I don't think I can take credit for all podcasts.
You know what's not nice of me? Maybe I thought they're telling you the telling you the life story of Greg Bovino. No, I really like the Robert.
Can you share the working title that you did, because it's it's a great working title.
I just I don't know, you see, I was I went back and forth on it because I feel like it's too obvious. I just called him America's Kirkland brand Gestapo chief.
Yeah, yeah, I love it. I like it.
I like that there's there's the thing because like there are people. He gets angry that people compare Ice to the Gesta and he's not with Ice, he's Border Patrol. But you know they're all gestapo esque and people get angry about them. And there's there's like three different kinds of people here. There's like normal people who are like, yeah, it seems like some Gestapo kind of thing. There's like closet Nazis and Trump administration being like, first off, it's Gestapo and second.
Second, you're using the wrong font to make that accusation.
And then there's guys like me who tries to switch between the two. Yeah, just because I've read too many books and watch too many documentaries about the Gestapo. Wow, we're doing Yes, I'm not being sus.
Shocked to hear that about you. Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
Yeah, so, Jack, what do you know about Greg Gregory? That time we had a Greg commit like crimes against humanity in this country? Now, yeah, it was about it was not about time, but I feel like it hasn't happened before.
I think, you know, diversity of first name is really important. So I was also welcoming when Greg showed up on the scene.
Finally, finally, some Greg representation in the crimes.
I host a daily news show called The Daily Zeh as.
A man, you were a man who needed no introduction. But clearly that's irresponsible.
Well no, but I mean due to that show, do have some experience covering the latest happenings. But we do that show twice a day, and therefore I don't I didn't have a lot of time to dig in to his backstory to really, uh see what makes this guy tick? You know, Yeah, I have a feeling. I I was just like kind of uh using context clues and making educated guesses about what makes him tick. Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't know that much other than that he his rapid rise and precipitous dismissal.
Yeah yeah, and that's actually happened once before in his career. We're not tad about a little bit. Yeah, not Greg Greg again. You can't mean, like like you go back to like the other crimes against humanity this country has committed. You can't imagine like a greg having some significant role in like the displacement of the Native Americans, right, or like you can't imagine Greg like Greg's not an old It's like, yeah, it's I have trouble imagine. I can
imagine a Gregory. I can imagine like a Gregory something are there being involved in one of this nation's great crimes. I can see that name signed on too, like the order to in turn people. But not a Greg you know, like there weren't Gregs until very recently. I feel like it's certainly not in a position where they could do crimes against humanity.
Like Gregg Gregg. It's like kind of got like a gen X like quality to it, where it's, yeah, yeah, you can just call me Greg.
Would it be better worse if he was a Craig, Like would we believe him more or less? Because I feel like Greg, I do believe Greg doing more than Craig.
Greg is worse.
Craig is a is a trustworthy name, you know, Greg. There's a little something sketchy about it.
Yeah, when did Gregg's first start showing up just not Gregory's but Greg.
Greg It had to have been like the seventies.
My cousin Greg succession.
There you go, that's the birth of Greg.
Greig is a young person's name.
Further point, but literally in that show, he decides he wants to be taken seriously and he's like asks people to call him Gregory, but he says it like, uh gregor as.
On the wrong syllable, Yeah, the wrong syllable. Uh Yeah. I recently met a seventy something year old man named Corey. You're are you the first Corey? And I did? I did ask him that, and he didn't think it was funny. Cory is such a young person's name. Yeah, yeah, Greg.
Well, we've all tried to learn about this.
Joyd hearing more because it's gonna be upsetting.
I will be over on my end googling historical Greg's first Greg History Comma uh so I said to have to write this episode the week mister Bovino lost a special job dressing like a Naziqual overseeing Border patrol operations alongside ice in Minneapolis. He made the news several times for statements in the wake of the murders of Rede Good and Alex Pretty, and during the first year of the Trump administration had generally turned himself into the physical
embodiment of the regime's violence towards Americans. It's too early to say what the future holds for Greg, but given that he just took a turn a sin eater for the Trump administration, I think it's time we look into who this guy is and where he came from. And
in short, he's not quite the guy I expected. There's very little in Bovino's early life and even in most of his career with the Border Patrol that would have led one to predict he'd have turned into this I'm not saying you'd have expected him to be like a great guy, but that like the fact that he wound up in at this moment in history doing this thing is like a little surprising most of his former Yeah, he's not. He doesn't seem like he was built for
this his whole life. And you don't get a lot of quotes from his pre people who used to know him being like, oh yeah, that makes sense for old Greg, you know, yeah, most.
Of more just like they don't really remember him no more of like, uh huh that guys doing that. Huh.
It's the general reaction. It's it's again like if this guy in your school who wasn't super bad at anything, but wasn't very good at anything and never really stood out at anything winds up on the news dragging Americans out of their home and tear gassing them in the street for no reason. You're like, is he dressed like a Nazi?
Whereas like Stephen Miller is like the James of Nazis, Like where everybody in high school was like, this guy is going to be Nazi the world?
Did you just say the le bron James of Nazis.
I think it's a good comparison, so.
That he was a standout Nazi from from the very earliest ages. People you couldn't miss chosen.
He was the lebron or Stephen Miller in sixth grade. You knew what they were growing up to do. This guy is gonna be the best basketball player where ever, and this guy's gonna be a fucking Nazi.
Yes, yeah, I think you're right money with that, Jack, Not really.
No, there's maybe one piece of evidence, but it's not good. So most of the evidence is that he's kind of like not the guy you'd expect to have done this. Now that said, we don't have a lot about Greg's early life. The only journalists who have really dug into Bovino's life in a credible way are Dan Mihelopolis and Lauren Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Sun Times, and they did great work. They did both a podcast and an article
looking into his backstory. Aside from them, there's just one Daily Mail article that talks to his sister, and so we have a lot from his sister, who I don't consider the most credible witness about this guy. Right, So there's just not a ton of detail. And then there's some sketchier sources on the matter, so we got some open questions still. That said Greg was born on March twenty seventh, nineteen seventy in San Bernardino, California, which I bet you didn't call San Berndino Baby.
You know that's good I didn't because I don't know. I cannot differentiate any like any of those la.
He's the pieces. That's such a West La thing to say, too, Jack, It's.
A I'm bad at LA stuff too.
I'm just like I.
I grew up on the East Coast and I'm just like San.
Yeah, Inland Empire, Jack Inland Empire.
In about San Berndino from the Frank Zappa song San Bernandino, And hearing that Greg Bobino was born in San Berdino makes me also think of the Frank Zappa song Baby Snakes, because at this point he's a baby snake, you know. Yeah, and those are bad right they can well really but yeah baby snakes. Sure, yeah, absolutely, It's not their fault.
They're just snakes. But yes, yes, he's born there. And because he would embark on a career of at and facilitating the brutalization of immigrants, a lot has been made of the immigration history of his own family. And I have some qualms with this because you're mostly bringing this up to be like you're hurting these people, yet a generation or two ago your family was in the same situation. Can't you see why that's fucked up? And my answer
to that is no, they can't. They're bad people, right, Like It's like, at a certain point, are you like you could again people do this thing with Stephen Miller's background or Trump's and it's like, yeah, I mean they're bad. They don't care. They don't care, they're bad people.
They suck Like, oh, that didn't work pointing out the hypoglypsy of the behavior their background.
Yeah, I feel.
Like a three million time we do it, it's just gonna like break through it and be like a damn and they'll be like.
Yeah, it's the too many people believe their moms when they were like that bully. You know, if that bully knew he was hurting you, he'd feel bad, and it's like, right, he's a dick. That's not how they work. So yeah, it's it's also just like, yeah, basically every white person, if you go back two generations, has like an immigration story in this country because it's the United States. That's kind of how it happened here for most people. But as you might have guessed from the name, the Bavinos
were originally Italian. In nineteen oh nine, Michelle Bovino, who is Greg's great grandfather, left the village of Alprigliano in the mountains of southern Italy. His home was racked with poverty and dominated by organized criminal cartels, much like certain countries. Our administration doesn't think he should be sending us immigrants today, so it is a pretty direct comparison.
Not a popular source.
Of people back then, right, No, no, they were not. The United States not thrilled these people are coming over. So Michel, who I'm sure was immediately called Michael as soon as you can't be going by that here, left his wife and kids behind. So they are staying back in Italy, and I guess he's sending them back money as he seeks to make a life for himself in
the United States. So he's doing that for years until this takes a while, until in May of nineteen twenty four, there's a panic over immigration in the halls of power in the United States, and this was you know, the result of kind of a long simmering pot. From the early eighteen hundreds, most immigration into the US had been Western and Northern Europeans, aka the whitest of the white people.
And we had some issues with some of them, right, There's some like, oh, a welshman's here now, but like you know, for the most part, it's like, well, they're
all pretty We're all pretty white, right, these people. You know, not to say that nobody faced bigotry when they came here, but they're all you know, this is like the founding stock and the ideas of people by that point in time, by the time you hit the eighteen hundreds, and by the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundred, shits starting to shift. Immigrants are now coming more from Eastern and Southern Europe, where the white people are not quite as white.
The first twenty or so years of the nineteen hundreds also coincided with the largest search in immigration in US history. Up to that point, eugenics was beginning to become a popular topic of discussion, and among educated racists, it was believe that many different European nations were also effectively different races.
Per an article in the Migration Policy Institute, The influential eugenicist Charles Davenport considered Italians prone to crimes of personal violence, while Jews were characterized by intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest. Since eugenicists believe individual races possess different characteristics and abilities, Davenport argued, the government should be careful not to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.
And you know, and what this was in what small corner of the internet. Oh wait, this was in academia.
This is this is in Congress at this point, I mean, this.
Is it was so popular, Like Americans don't understand how popular that was in the early twentieth century. If you've seen a picture with a man with like a stethoscope or a fucking pince nez or whatever and doctor in
front of his name. In nineteen ten, he believed the most racist things you can imagine because he read it in the text book that was like the dvs Czech has these characters like a D and D source book where it's like, oh, they get plus two to strike, you know, like that's literally how these people are like learning this shit. It's in textbooks, and it's in the textbooks that our congressmen are reading, and they're going to yell at too about all of the Italians that are
coming into the country. Enter the Dillingham Commission, which was set up by Congress to study the consequences of immigration.
It released report in nineteen oh nine, that's right after, but two years after Michelle came to the United States that argued northern and Western Europeans were just kind of better people from the other parts of Europe, and it suggested the Dillingham Report suggested a wide range of policies to discourage immigration from unworthy places, including literacy tests and racial quotas. Right, that's where a lot of this stuff, you know, is when America really starts thinking about immigration
and the border in a very modern way. You know, there'd been panics over it before, and you know, legislation, but a lot of our modern apparatus of how we think about immigration, of how we think about white genocide, and that sort of all starts right in this period of time. And to make a long story short, the
Dillingham Commission releases that reported nineteen eleven. You know, things still move slowly in the halls of power, but this eventually culminates in nineteen twenty four in the Immigration Act, which restricted immigration in an attempt to ensure most deriving immigrants were from the good places.
For the MPI, it closed the door in almost all New Asian immigration and shut out most European Jews and other refugees fleeing fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe. One of the most restrictive immigration laws in US history, it played a key role in any of the previous era of largely unrestricted immigration. So this is when immigration as like a modern concept really gets started. And Greg Bevino's ancestor, this is just.
A relevant context for people who are like, this is not what America is about.
Well, it's kind of been the way we have it for a while in the last one hundred and something years. And Greg Bavino's ancestor knew that this posts a threat to his plan because he's making money and he's sending it over to Italy. But his plan is I want to bring my family with me right to the lane of opportunity at some point, and he sees this Act to get passed and He's like, shit, that's about to
get a lot harder. So within days of the Immigration Act passing, he files paperwork to start the process of becoming a citizen. Once this process was completed in nineteen twenty seven, he brought his family over and they became citizens through a process known as chain migration. Here's how The Sun Times explains what happened after Michelle was naturalized
in nineteen twenty seven. He was reunited with his wife and four children and at Pennsylvania Cold Company Town after their arrival on the steamship the SS Giuseppe Verde Record Show. Then the kids, including Vincenzo twelve, Gregory Bovino's future grandfather, automatically benefited from a derivative citizenship law for minors. Luigia would become a naturalized citizen. So all is it's, you know, chain migration is kind of exactly the thing that they're
trying to stop now. It's to be part of why they want to reverse some of the citizenships that have been granted, because a lot of them are granted in ways that are very related to this right, right, and it's what they want to stop because they want to stop families from coming over here and getting larger.
They've just they've benefited from this random crapshoot of laws and everyone did.
Yeah.
They don't want anybody else to get lucky like they did.
Right, And they don't want any other ethnic groups, as they see it, or racial groups to come here and start breeding, right, which is what Italians did. You know, It's what everybody did. It's kind of the entire point of the country, you know.
Kind of the whole deal. The melting pot is a very chaste way of saying a lot of people came here and started fucking each.
Other pot, right, and.
Everything kind of mixed together. I do love how rigorously Italian everything. It's an incredible name of the boat that they came over all.
Yeah, just Agenzo. Yeah, they were nearly out of pizza by the time they hit the dops. Yes, I know. The Trump administration has cited the nineteen twenty four immigration law as an example of the kind of reforms they seek to make. They've also repeatedly cited chain migration stories like this as an example of things like why birthright
citizenship and Juwsoli need to be revisited. For his part, Baveno does not seem interested in his family background, and I don't know that it was much of a factor in his raising. For him, the most influential thing that happened in nineteen twenty four may not have even been the Immigration Act because that is also the year the Border Patrol was created, and that's going to be Greg Bavino's whole life. So, like I said, he's born in San Bordino because his father had just been drafted to
fight in Vietnam. So don't worry. Like my native Inland Empire people, they don't stay very long. They're just stationed on a military base nearby, and two years later, when his father gets discharged, the family moves back east to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, which is the real name of a place. Don't make fun of it, you know.
Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
When you first mentioned San Bernardino, I was like confused because he doesn't give big Inland Empire energy.
No, he's not an Inland Empire guy. No, he's there two years.
Yeah, so this this makes more sense.
He does give Blowing Rock energy.
I do. I do kind of wonder is there any and he doesn't say anything about this, so maybe I'm reading into it. Maybe two years isn't enough time. But I've lived in parts of uh, you know, the the deep rural areas where oh, you didn't come here to you were two. You're not really from here, boy, you know. So I don't know if that was any part of his background or not.
New family.
Coming up here. That was twenty years ago.
Mark called him Hollywood, here comes Hollywood.
Yeah, I could see that, but they don't say anything about that. That's purely a head cannon for fucking Greg Bavino. And to be fair, probably not the case because his dad's side of the family's just come here, but his mom's side of the family goes back at least they say,
eight generations in the Blowing Rock area. The Bavenos had two more children, Natalie and Nicholas, born in seventy four and seventy nine, after moving back to their part of the country, and one gets the feeling that young Greg may have benefited a bit from only child syndrome, because he's a good bit older than his siblings, right closer to his sister than his brother, but he's got some
oldest sibling memories. At least his younger sister, Natalie is one of our few semi detailed sources in Greg's childhood. Although she seems to idolize her brother and I don't credit her with a lot of skepticism or scrutiny about him. She describes their early childhood as Rockwellian, which means reminiscent of the paintings of Dorman Rockwell, right, and is also
based I think, often on some misunderstandings of them. But like she's thinking of like those nice paintings of kids hiking in the woods and you know, idyllic Christmases with the family gathered around the fire and stuff, right, Like, that's what she means. There were about a thing.
Norman Rockwell like fucked up.
I actually know he's pretty good politics. I mean he's not perfect. There's some stuff you know, you find with any illustrator of that period. They did some uncomfortable illustrations if you look back far enough, right, But no, he did a lot of He was like super pro integration, super pro civil rights movement. Like he was just like the.
Carefully curated version of the paintings that make it happen to be curated by white supremacists.
As is often the case, a bunch of white supremacists have taken his paintings to be like, this was the ideal America before everything got when Norman Rockwell was just painting pretty things.
You know, Norman Rockwell, Yeah, he was also painting like because he did some paintings of like civil rights movement, like protests and stuff that were contemporaries.
It wasn't all but you know that. Yeah, they forgot.
So you're sure she was referring to Norman Rockwell when she said Rockwellian and not the eighties artist who's saying somebody's watching me.
Yes, I do not believe she's referring to the eighties artists who sick somebody's watching me. Thank you though for bringing that up.
Norman fucking rock Well.
Yeah, there were about a thousand people in their hometown, which she describes as literally perfect. So again she has these idyllic memories of their early childhood. The Bavino's benefited from a tight family and an extensive one, right. They have a lot of in laws and relatives, and they had money too. They're doing very well for a while. Their father had started a successful bar, the Library Club, And the reason why it's such a big deal here is that their town is like the lone wet county
in the middle of a bunch of dry counties. So there's a bunch of bars in town. And it's kind of like a vacation town. So it's both where people come on vacation, but also if anyone nearby wants to drink, they have to come to Blowing Rock, right, and the library Club's like one of the biggest places they're going to go to.
You can make a good living by having the brilliant innovation. We are in a town where I can open a bar, and no other towns around those over the bar. I bet people will drink here.
I bet people will drink here. And they different did.
Because people talk about like being able to like how you know, previous generations you could buy a house for this and like everything was so much cheaper. It was also so easy to like succeed.
Backless less ideas had been had, you know, Like I don't know, I think people will use plastic in the future room getting into plastics.
Yeah, you become a millionaire.
Yeah, it's it was easier. It was easier most of the sources I find out. I will say, though, Jack, I don't know that we fully understand how the Library
Bar made its money. Most of the sources I find just describe it as a bar, and weirdly enough, the thing that made me think maybe something more was going on here was that interview I found with Natalie and the Daily Mail where I don't think she's trying to let on that her dad was a criminal, but that's kind of how it sounds, because here's a quote from her. In those early years, the family was living the good life, thanks largely to the success of the Library Club, and
here's Natalie. The bouncers would drop huge sacks of money off stacks and stacks. He did incredibly well. The family was able to buy their house into both they'd ride on Wataga Lake and the membership in a country club where they ran a side business, a drink stand on the ninth hole. And that's not how.
We don't come to your own with sands of money.
Yeah.
I've known a few bar owners and none of them have the bouncers drop sacks of money off at their houses. That's your dad was moving something.
Yeah, he was moving.
On the ninth hole. Is such a fantastic detail.
Wow. Yeah, Well, we were basically millionaires for the time because he had a drink stand on the ninth hole of a golf course.
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that doesn't sound like the way you bribe the judges about it.
They droven ice cream truck getting sallar.
You know, the bouncer's dropped sacks of money off at the house as is normal. Maybe she's not remembering things right, but that sounds sketchy as a fuck to me.
And speaking of stacks and stacks at stacks.
Speaking of sketchy as FUCKO, here's the sponsors of our show, and we're back. So yeah, I don't know. Greg grows up to be fair. Whatever the truth is about their dad, the kids didn't grow up aware of anything sketchy. Greg spends his early childhood hunting fish and and exploring the woods. His parents got him his first shotgun at age eight. He reads hunting magazines voraciously, which is how he encountered his first pieces of pro border patrol propaganda. And this
is interesting because I got a different answer. Every other article I read was talked about a thing we'll discuss later. There's a movie he watches and the like, and this is the first time he encountered the border patrol and it's actually talking to his sister that the Daily Mail gets this piece of information that I think might be more accurate, because it feels more accurate to me, at least. The hunting publications featured columns written by old time border
patrol agents such as Skeeter Skelton and Charles Askins. The young boy had found his calling. He thought it was the wild West. Natalie Babino to The Daily Mail, it was like a true frontier. It was those old timers that inspired that in him. And that is more believable to me than the other story, just because, like I too was a young boy once, and I've read a lot of similar articles and a lot of similar magazines. I could see that happening to this kid.
You're familiar with the works of Skeeter Skelton.
You know what, Jack I am. That's what we're going to talk about next. Because the second, as someone with a comedy background, the second I read the name Skeeter Skeleton, like we gotta deal with that, ask Skeeter, Peter.
Skeeter Skelton fucking rules, I'm sorry.
What is that short for? Like skeet Tropolis? Like, what the fuck?
Skeeter?
I've known a couple Skeeters, but I never thought it was a given Christian name. I'm gonna be honest, is it. Yeah, that's what it seems like. It's written on everything that it's it's byeline. I don't know. I don't know the man's birth certificate, Jack Skeeter Skelton. It's just weird hearing the name, seeing the name Skeeter written and a real publication is supposed to hearing it across the bar, which is how you're supposed to.
Those guys usually don't make it out of the library club are usually there. They do not.
I just am thinking of that that Nickelodeon show called Cousin Skeeter from like the nineties.
Oh geez, I don't even remember that one. Yeah, I read the name Skeeter Skelton. I had to look into it more. And he was a lawman from Hereford, Texas who served in a bunch of different coproles. He did everything. He was in everything from the Amarilla Police to Border Patrol, to DEA to customs. And he starts writing for Shooting Times, which is a magazine that still exists in nineteen sixty six. And again it's one of those like no one had
had the idea to have a magazine about shooting. So they start having one in sixty six and he's like, I'm gonna write about handguns. It's like, no one had that idea before. So he goes from pitching them to becoming the handgun editor in the next year because they're like, what a great idea people in America writing about handguns. You're a genius, Skeeter, And he had.
Guy whose nickname is just a slang term for mosquitoes, as a genius.
Oh God, Skeeter Skelton. Yeah, he's the handgun editor of Shooting Times until his death in nineteen ninety eight. If you want to know his main claim to fame, he's generally credited with reviving interest in the forty four special round, which is the bullet Dirty Harry uses. So without Skeeter Skelton, we may never have Dirty Harry.
He popularized it before Dirty Harry.
Oh he's not.
Yeah, okay, he's got like Dirty Harry actually stole that ship from me. I do know, I got it. So we're doing a new version of TDZ where we dive into icons. We just did a Marilyn Monroe episode and we found this character named George Solitaire, who I can't stop thinking about and talking about because he had a claim to fame. Uh, he was just Joe Demaggio was like drinking buddy, and his claim to fame was that
he invented the phrase Splitsville and Dollsville. And he was like he had a whole origin story about it that because he was born in Brownsville and moved to Bronxville.
That's just he thought about vil.
Yeah, like Bill in a Blood Yeah. But otherwise he was just a guy who got drunk with Joe DiMaggio and he's like all over the historical record, and he was like love it. Scalper was just like like that, having a claim to fame that is that specific and stupid is just like my hat's off to like what a weird world?
What.
It's one of those things the second someone tells you that, they're like, you know, I kept up with that word Splitsville. You're like you must have would claim to have done that, Yeah, that's not a thing anyone would pretend.
Yeah, like to be like I popularized this one round, that's kind of shit.
It's kind of if an ancient man came up to me and said I made the forty four. Popular'd be like, you probably did.
Yeah, I guess, I don't know. I would like about to lying and like get it to just find a lie.
So specially there you go.
People, nobody would ever be like, what, Okay, Yeah, I guess so that that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll believe it. And so I haven't had the time because he wrote articles for twenty something years, I haven't had the time to go through all A. Skeeter's old articles on shooting times. But I found you one article and I read.
And I read the first.
Paragraph of it, Jack, And this kind of tells you all you need to know about what young Gregory might have picked up reading Skeeter's columns.
Oh my god.
Almost all the objections to the three point fifty seven magnum as a police weapon come from city police departments.
It is argued, with some justification, that an officer who fires a magnum in a crowded city is more likely to kill innocent, non combativets than he would be if armed with a standard thirty eight special, Not much as given to the fact that the same officer runs a hell of a lot more risk of being killed himself when his low powered thirty eight fails to put an armed opponent out of action.
Yeah, so just.
Like, look, some city cops say, this bigger bullet gets regular people killed because it goes through doors and stuff, right, but have you thought about the danger of not killing a guy?
Yeah?
Out action?
I love? And you see also because this was this is actually like was published right after his death, but he wrote it a little before, so this was published like posthumously in eighty eight. But you can see the early birth of a lot of the warrior ethos, like warrior cop shit here the whole well, you know, you could say, you know, an officer was more likely to kill innocent non combatives as opposed to like innocent people, innocent civilities. Nona could have done something right, right.
Everything of the assumption that someone's attacking you. That's how you leave the door in the morning. Yeah, everyone is entering on that situation right with It's it's worth the risk to have a gun that shoots through four people in a crowded urban environment exactly.
And so this is the kind of shit he's reading as a kid, Like the early precursors to a lot of that is what Greg Bavino is the fact that like, as like a nine or ten or eleven year old, he's reading yes, something like because he was born in seventy, so he would have been born like a couple of years after this guy started writing for Shooting Times. So from the time he's a little kid, he's reading stuff like this, like he's almost patient zero for this, like
warrior cop ethos bullshit, like he may have been. He's among the very first kids who got hit with this stuff as a child, you know, he's not an earlier generation. Yeah, right into the bloodstream and it just takes over as far as we can tell. So Natalie's interview is the only place I found reference to Bavino reading these magazines, and every other piece on him lists as I said, a very different, inciting incident for his interest in the Border Patrol as a career. Here's how the Chicago Sun
Times describes it. Bavino has said that he was inspired to join the Border Patrol when he saw a movie called The Border that came out when he was just eleven, produced by a distant cousin of his mom. It just starred Jack Nicholson and Harvey kai Tell as agents, but the end, Bvino was crestfallen that the movie portrayed the agents as bad guys and said that he was moved to join the Border Patrol in nineteen six ninety six to show that he was the opposite a good border cop.
Making the border secure is my personal responsibility, Bavino said on a podcast in twenty twenty one. And I wonder is it that maybe he saw the movie and then started reading the magazines. But his sisters describes the magazines
as kind of the first thing. So is it that Bovino doesn't want to admit that, like, well, I read some magazines by some Border Patrol guys and thinks that because this is a more convenient right wing, modern right wing narrative, right that, Like well, I saw the liberal Hollywood movie about the Border Patrol, and I wanted to prove him wrong, you know, which is kind of what I suspect.
And it's like, you're instead of having to rely on people wanting to learn more about Skeeter Skelton, you can just br like it had Harvey Kaye Tell and Jack Nicholson like that, those are names you've heard before. This will stick in your brain. I don't have to say, Skeeter correct those guys, rather than being like, well, have you read the works of skied Skill? No? Yeah, that's a name you just made up?
Man, Yes, it's not a real guy. So the idyllic perfect part of Greg's childhood also ends the same year the Border comes out. When he's eleven, his father drives home drunk one night from work. I'm sure it wasn't the first night, can't have been right, and he winds up crashing his truck directly into a car, killing a young woman and brutally injuring her husband. They were twenty six and twenty nine years old, respectively. It was a
bad crash. There was no sign that Bevino tried to break before hitting the other car, which the local paper described as bold. Over by the impact, Mike was unharmed. The victim's husband sued the Bovenos and sued Mike's bar and uncle. Ultimately, Mike pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of death by motor vehicle, but the judge in his case ordered he'd be sent to state prison a treatment for his alcoholism, and he stays there for four months.
There's an article written about him While he's in jail, he tells the Charlotte Observer that he'd long struggled with his drinking and that he'd gotten drunk the night of the crash because his wife had begged him to quit sauce and that had made him angry. He promised not to do so again after getting out of jail, saying I've got a dead woman on my hands. Getting dead drunk just isn't worth it. I don't know how else you frame that, but that's not the best way. Maybe
I don't know. The lawsuit destroys this.
Clever bit of word play.
We need you kill the woman. Why are we doing word play here?
We could just skip the fucking Hallmark poster And yeah, I stopped drinking a horrible thing as a result of my drinking.
Yeah, that's a weird way to describe it. Yeah, yeah, just I killed a woman would have been enough to say. The lawsuit destroyed his business, obviously forcing him to sell it. Betty decided she'd had enough and divorced him after this, gaining soul custody of their three children. Mike left the family and settled in New Mexico. Greg was fourteen when his dad left so this takes a while. You have
to imagine this is a bad three years. And he enters high school right around the same time divorce was finalized. He was not recalled by his peers as an overly memorable student, right, He's not someone who really makes a mark. When he started it would talk a high school. He joined the wrestling team. And if you have seen photos of Greg around other people, he's not a large man, right, No, man, he's he's a smaller fella, right. And height isn't everything.
There's weight a classes and stuff. It's not everything. And wrestling it's.
Great for wrestling to be small.
Yeah, it can, it can be handy. But he's also, even in that world, kind of small, right, And he doesn't seem to have developed in other ways to compensate for that. And everyone who talks about his time in wrestling is very polite about this, but he was not good at it. Sometimes people actually talk to his old high school coach, who it seems like a very nice man because when they bring up was he good, he's like, well, when he was, you know, he wasn't the biggest boy.
He wasn't the biggest guy. But at the end of his senior year, he got the Most Improved award, which is something even though the team had an unusually tear season, which is a very sweet way to try to describe this boy.
Yeah, our team got so shitty that he was actually like kind of par for the course for our tea.
Yeah, that's kind of what he's saying.
How I am just curious, now that you've researched three thousand of the worst people to ever live, how common is the like not remembered versus like, oh yeah, I remember that shit ahead.
Like mostly you know, generally, when we come across a guy who there's not much about their childhood or background, it's because they were like some weird con person the eighteen hundreds, and it's like they just hopped onto the historic record when they were thirty and we don't know what the fuck was going on previously. Yeah, or it's someone who's such a minor weirdo or creep that there's just not a lot, you know, no one, no major you know, they haven't been covered by a major newspaper,
no one's dug into them that much. With someone like Greg, this is it's not common. They have this little We actually talked to a bunch of their classmates in Peers. That's the weird thing.
The one thing that we that we typically come across that's like a common commonality is like somebody who has crazy ambition, and that's what people remember. Yeah, I'm not I'm not hearing that here for Greg at all.
Nobody says that about about because that's.
Like that that is a very common bastard tradi is that they had way too much ambition at an early age and then they, you know, become like Jeff Bezos or whatever.
They were like, Yeah, yeah, he was voted person least likely for you to be asking this question about them because he thought he wasn't gonna do ship.
Because Greg, seriously, Greg.
Gregg, Well, first of all, Greg, Greg, Yeah, did.
You realize his named Greg? Sorry, the Greg's out there. I just it's hard to It's not even an insult. It's just hard to imagine a Greg being like the mouthpiece of a.
Fashion I do literally have a cousin and he is delightful. Cousin Greg, if you're listening to this, I love you, cousin Greg.
Yeah, I'd have trouble imagining your cousin Greg is the mouthpiece of a fascist regime.
You know, we literally all cousin Greg. They're all great, My cousin Greg rocks except Greg. Bavino's cousin has a cousin Greg. Not so great.
Not so great.
Yeah, So Greg's coach said this about him. Quote. Greg was not bashful, He had no problems asking the coach questions, and you know, he liked to tell stories, funny stories. He also expressed when these reporters ask him a lot of surprise that he went into law enforcement. And he says so in a way. I love this. The coach says this in a way that makes me think, like, oh, I think this coach might not like the police very much.
Quote.
That was a real surprise. I just didn't picture Greg being in law enforcement. He was always very pleasant and I didn't see him as that. That to me didn't seem to fit his personality. It wasn't did beg him for a huge asshole.
He turned into a piece.
He was that kind of pricks coach.
I love it, cool guy, when you go back like it's it's also interesting when they don't have anything interesting to say, because, like I do feel like most of the time when you're asking a normal person about like that they'll have made up a memory about them. Yeah, you know, because just to be interesting at like dinner parties.
Yeah, I remember he never stopped reading that book about Ryan hard Heidrich. Just love the guy like something, you know. Yeah, but no, there's very other other than his sister being like he read Skeeter he read.
And his coach being like, I didn't think he was a big enough asshole to be aoud be a copy.
Yeah. Jason Perry, his wrestling teammate, also expressed surprise at what had become of Bovino. He described Gregan's school as very polite and added, I don't think Greg would not do his job, and like, if they're asking him to do something that's not fair to minorities, I'm sure he's hating it. This is kind of a Bible Belt community, so I know Greg was exposed to compassion and love for his fellow man, but it's dangerous to speculate what
a man is thinking. I hope whatever happens, I hope it works out good for him and his family and the people that are being mistreated. You know, is such a middle of the road thing. I hope both the guy hurting people and the hurt people are get better.
Okay, it's crazy because I know he's aware of compassion, like he's heard of it.
Like, yeah, he's aware. He's not supposed to He must not like what he's doing because he's not supposed to act this way he has heard of Yeah, I know he's not supposed to be doing this shit. Yeah yeah. Now, if you spend any amount of time looking this guy up on social media, you'll run into some claims made by a purported former classmate of his on Reddit that are much more negative than the recollections gathered by The
Sun Times. It opens with the opie head bar nine three one six writing, I just found out I know
Greg Bovito personally. Here are some things you can tell him when you next see him, And the poster claims that he's a current Minneapolis president who used to live in Boone, North Carolina, near where Bvino grew up, and that they went to the same school, and he posted a clip from a yearbook with a picture of Bevino on the wrestling team as evidence that said a bunch of these pictures are floating around, not guaranteed that that means he actually went to school with this guy, and
then he provides a bunch of suggestions for things that protesters should say to Bovino. Hey, Greg, you're the reason your dad got drunk and killed that woman in Blowing Rock, which led to your parents' divorce. And I don't think that that's necessarily accurate. I think his dad killing someone and bankrupting the family is probably enough of a reason. That might be a bit of a dick move, but I think we're just being an asshole to this guy.
That doesn't really expand our knowledge about Greg though, Right, so let's move on to the next one. Hey, Greg, do you think it's weird that the Wataga High yearbook has you listened as most likely to shit his pants in public? Now they don't seen this yearbook. That's a nice burn. But also yearbooks don't do that. That's not a thing. Like no public school yearbooks not are you someon go.
To jail in the South?
In public school, You're not allowed to do that for a lot of reasons. It's abusive to the students. Again, he would have been eighteen, Like, hey, Greg, your history teacher thinks that you're a pathetic Nazi punk. No wonder you failed all his classes. This doesn't seem to be accurate based on again it's a burn, But I don't think it's true because I think his grades were decent.
At least it sounds like that I could. I can believe some of his teachers hate him now, but I just I don't think he actually did fail all of his classes. I haven't found the evidence of that. So another extal allegation is that a local store banned him for sniffing shoes after people tried them on. Don't have anything about that, one way or the other.
Right, it's a good one. Now we're getting too like pretty good lies to tell about someone. Yeah, kind of weird and specific enough, like having invented Splitsville. It's like, no, yeah, he had to be from pay less shoes.
The last one is really specific and again not when we can back up in any way, Hey, Greg, do you remember eating that the Wataga Pioneers wrestling team's soggy biscuit? Is it still gay to eat stemen off of Bojangles biscuit? Or was that just an eighties thing?
Now?
Again, first off, he was born in seventies, so he wouldn't have been I mean, yeah, yeah, that could that works out. I guess, yeah, yeah, that does work out. The timing works out. The Bojangles biscuits make sense. That said, I can't back up the rest of this, and there's enough wrong with the previous parts of this that I maybe this is someone who went to school with him and is just like throw it out shit because they didn't like him. You know, maybe he did sniff shoes
in a local shoe store. I can't prove it, but there's no evidence. People are gonna bring this up because it went crazy viral. I can't back any of this up, and there's nothing here.
I feel like we can confirm both of those things happened in that guy whoever in the post. Yeah, yeah, and like he's just like spific because those are like good and specific weird, Like, yeah, those are real. He's probably just taking those and being like these having a Greg Bovino And.
Yeah, I believe some guy did those things.
Yeah for sure.
I mean, yeah, again, maybe, but I can't I can't prove it, and I can't find any specific reason to believe that this post that people are sharing around is real. Uh boy, if anyone can prove that Greg Bovino got banned from a store for sniff and shoes. Let's have it. But nobody else seems to be sharing this yet great, some cub reporter go down to boone figure this out break the mystery.
So just looking through microfiche looking for sho.
Sniffing microfiche in the basement of the shoe store. It's all just shoe store related articles, all right.
So I'm gonna come clean here and say, I like the smell of new shoes.
What is it?
So if you're smelling, if you're at a shoe store, wait to finish on shoes, right, So are you taking their shoes while they're they're existing shoes while they're trying them on? Because yeah, that's you.
Can see how you'd shoot this in a TV show, right where like you have you have somebody putting on take off the shoe, put it up, and then you have like, oh, Greg sneak around the corner check see that the coast is clear to the shoom.
I think new shoe, new tennis, ball, and new car are underrated, like synthetic chemical smells that I enjoy, Like I will I will pair of sneakers that I just opened the box on and take a nice deep deep huff and I, okay, should I be banned?
Yes, for.
Nobody's worn them yet, I don't know. Shoe sniffer, A new shoe sniffer, brand new shoes.
Brand new. Come on now, all right, So that's that's the myth about Greg Devino that I had.
I don't know.
It's not even busting, it's just pointing out I've seen this going around. This doesn't directly comport with anything else that's independent, and I have no specific reason to believe this is all true. So anyway, His sister describes him as a voracious reader in high school, and I've seen a few other accounts that match this. He liked military history and cowboy novels, particularly the work of Louis Lamore, and his favorite book was probably Robert Heinland Starship Troopers.
Surprising no one. His sister told The Daily Mail that he reads Starship Troopers once a year, which completely makes sense. Yeah, oh man, yeah, and I get so did I back in the day.
But no, wait, I know the movie is satirical. Is the book also?
No, not at all. So Robert Robert Heinland was an interesting guy, a very influential science fiction writer. One of his books, The Moon's a Harsh Mistress, is often seen as providing a lot of the ideological underpending for the libertarian movement. Right Like, it's a foundational text for American libertarianism. Yeah, by the way, I said influential. I said influential. That's
that's not a value term. And he's a guy he started out as a socialist and then he had his like weird super reactionary right wing like John Bircher period, and then he became kind of more of like a normal libertarian sort of deal. But Starship Troopers was It's it's often seen as a fascist novel, and that's certainly
a very valid reading of it. There's a lot of it that reads very fasci It's also, if you understand Heinland's life, there's a lot of it that's like, oh, yeah, you were a guy who like joined up during World War Two and served in the military during that period of time. Of course you have a very positive view on what the state and the military could do together, right Like, there's also a bit of that in it where it's like, well, you just feel there's some like
nostalgia towards that period of time too. In this but it is. It is a book about no Literally, the best type of government would be the military runs everything right. So I can see why Greg Bavino is attached to this book as a kid, especially without any of these slight mitigating factors in Island's own life. And Heinland pretty racist guy. I'm not that interested in mitigating it. I'm just saying there's a little bit more there than there
would be with a guy like Baveno. So once he graduates high school in nineteen eighty eight, Baveno went to Western Carolina University, where he studied natural research conservation before becoming the first member of his family to graduate college. He then joined the Border Patrol in nineteen ninety six. He graduated as part of class three hundred and twenty five. One of his classmates, Jason Owens, would wind up his
head of Border Patrol. The two have podcasted together per The Sun Times with Jack you know is the strongest bond that two people can share. During their their podcast together, Baveno claims Owens had better grades and graduated at the top of the class, but that he was better at pe and marksmanship, and he makes this claim a lot that he was the best shot in the border patrol. Basically,
I haven't seen independent confirmation of this. Seems like he might be kind of just jazzing himself up a little bit. But pretty easy claim to make, Pretty easy for you to make.
Rarely do people be like, all right, that's it, let's go to a range together, right now.
Yeah, you know, yeah, you got used. Usually like at least an hour long thing to set up, you know. He starts working at the famous El Centro sector, which is on the border of California, not far from what he where he'd been born, but across the country from his home. For the Sun Times quote, Bavino told Owens later that he was impressed when the sector chief showed up in the field alongside the agents. Bavino said it showed him the need to get into the fight. It's
not a fight. It's a bunch of hungry people walking across the desert, not a fight. Not a battle. Seeing a couple of battles, they don't look.
Like that enemy bugs out there.
I mean, there are hungry people stumbling around battlefields, but you don't look at them and go, ah, the fight. You look at them and go that guy's starving. To death because he hasn't eaten in three weeks.
Non combatants, we'll call them for bat is good to see though, if they got any weapons.
They might get into the fight. Yeah, that's right. So he was promoted steadily over the years and wound up transferred to Washington, where he got a master's degree in national security at the National War College, and then New Orleans where he led a sector. In twenty twenty, he was sent back to El Centro as a commander. He also spent some time in tactical units. Per his sister, who makes this dubious claim, early in his career, Greg would run into cartels and be the first one in
the door because he had the best marksmanship. There you see that claim again. A lot of times it was drug cartel base, which he said is now infiltrated every major city with the crime and corruption. And again, I don't think Natalie knows all that much about this stuff.
Now.
I think her big brother just told her this and she's like, that's the way it's got to be.
By the way, if you talk to the sun or like sister, or you know, children of any law enforcement officer who are gullible enough, this is the same first person in You guys don't know how dangerous it is out Yeah the door. Their dad is actually secretly the sickest marksman.
Yeah, he's the best for the gun.
Like it's crazy. They thought, ye how yeah, yeah, that's amazing, but it's great. You you know, it's a certain type of person who lies about stuff to their sister, right.
Because I haven't found this claim repeated elsewhere, clearly not anywhere credible, but we do have documentation of his career running El Centro, where he oversaw about eleven hundred employees. Critics say that under Boveno's leadership, BP employees were violent and cruel towards migrants. The acl you accused one of his agents of assaulting a Salvadoran migrant in twenty twenty two, separating her from their ten year old child for nearly
a year after presumably she was beaten. The woman was charged with assaulting an agent in detention, and then the charges were dropped. The Suntimes quotes Monica Lungerica, a senior attorney for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, as saying, I think it was a prosecution that sought to silence her, stop her from speaking out about the assault that she experienced. We've seen it here at the border for a very long time, and obviously, you know, Bavino has taken that
show on the road. And I bring this up because you can see this exact pattern and the rest of it in his most recent chunk of his career, right, yeah, right, where.
Someone is being assaulted by the people under his command and that is treated as an assault somehow.
Yep. There, Yeah, it's interesting, yep. So for his part, Bavino has bragged that the consequences El Centro agents force upon migrants lead to fewer people trying to cross in the first place. Earlier in his career he seems to have had more of an interest in portraying himself as a good guy to members of the public. Not long after he got transferred back to lead El Centro, a local activist Edie Harmon eighty one complained about border patrol
vehicles harming wildlife. Bavino fancies himself a conservationist. He's gotten a degree on the subject, and he once wrote a thesis about the danger of illegal immigrants post to animals in the Southwest. So he agreed to go hike with Harmon and he wrote her a thank you note, insisting
Border Patrol cared about the environment too. For The Sun Times, she said Movino tried to win her over by offering to install a guzzler a watering tank for the sheep and to dedicate it in the name of her dead husband. She said she declined because no biologists recommended that. Before Mavino left their hike, He's asked to take a photo with Harmon each standing on opposite sides of a cactus. And that's just.
So weird, man, so weird weird. That's weird guy behavior.
What do you mean, what do you mean the Biden administration. I think he's trying. He's got to pretend he cares about the environment. And I think he also sees it as because he's got this background. This is a wedge you can drive between the liberal conservationists and the the quote unquote illegals, right, is if you're like, well, they're bad for the environment, you know, and.
For the environment, Greg fuck off off.
And and Harmond made the very good point that like he wanted to install a water tank for that the reason the sheep are in dangerous because the Border Patrol keeps putting concertina wire up across their grazing ground. It's the razor wire that's bad for the sheep. They need water. Them lying around.
Now, they're gonna want some water. Robert, Yeah, that is true. As somebody who has done three thousand podcasts on Hitler, I'm wasn't Hitler also like very into animals and animal rights US not at all for those two things to overlap.
No, And I think, you know, this may just this may be Vino. Maybe there's another version of Greg Levino who just went into conservation. But also maybe it's just it's there's a degree. I think certainly by the time he's back at Alcentro, there's this understanding that like, well, maybe this is a way we can drive a wedge between the people that I want to target and the majority of the voting population of this state. Right. Baveno is one of the guys who completely drank the Border
Patrol kool aid. Right. He loves to use the nickname the Green Machine to refer to the Border Patrol, which is what they call themselves. I think they think it's cool good.
That's like a naked juice. It's like what they that's like a naked Juice flavor.
Yeah it is, yeah, after the green juice from Naked Juice that like some it's really like sometimes fine and sometimes it's so fucking bad. Had a bad green juice I have? I had one of those, Yeah, like seven eleven green juice can go can go off.
Yeah yeah, speaking of random products, Robert, it's about that time.
Don't want me to keep talking about how native juice green machine can sometimes go off.
I've never seen you drinking naked juice. I sat next to you for years.
Yeah, that's because I had a bad experience once.
You're a round dew guy.
That's right. Sophie's seen me at my finest.
That's your green.
Juice is about That's right. Why what were you talking about? I once did a money phone in front of Sophie with a six a mountain dew.
You at that picture.
If I do know that that picture is somewhere, I am gonna have them put that up on the nutfla.
My finest work.
All right, everybody, here's ads and we're back. Sou But Vino, as I said, really drinks the Border Patrol kool aid.
He will.
He loves reciting the agency slogan on her first with little provocation, which at least one Border Patrol whistleblower has said is often used by men in the Border Patrol to mean on her first because they like to sexually assault female agents and women in there. Credit cust today, good stuff the Border Patrol. Bavino described the Border Patrol as his life's work in Brandon el Centro, the premier sector. He's the one who considers it that. It is a very busy sector. It's a big it's a lot of
people come through it. But he's like, no, this is the this is the state of the art. You know, this is this is the best one. You know, We're the standard from which all the other sectors are set. I appreciated with One journalist for calmatters dot org said about this, it's similar to the way states have mottos on license plates that aren't necessarily used by anybody else to describe that state.
Right, there's some good ones of those.
Yeah, there's some good ones of those. So state, Hey, now hey, now hey, now I gotta stand but actually that that's that is an insult to people from Missouri.
Yeah, why do they do that? Why they do that?
It dates back to again like the eighteen hundreds. But it means that, like people from Missouri were so dumb that like if if they wouldn't believe you unless you showed them something. Right, he just tells someone like, oh there's there's big boats, now you gotta they got to see the boat because they're dumb.
Right, don't believe in dinosaurs, that sort.
Of thing, right, right?
Yeah, Calling something the premiere anything is a great like weasel where like that that's got to be one of the MVPs of like bad movies posters. Yeah, like we're like the premiere crime.
It's like Miller calling itself the Champagne of beer. Yeah, okay, guys, no, no, no, it's gonna call it that unless we're joking the poetry of lying, you know. Yeah. During the Biden years, Bavino started running into trouble, first for tweeting. He made a He made a lot of tweets that got him in trouble. One of them was about a citizen who had been killed by a documented person driving drunk that his superiors
made him delete because it was too political. He claimed to be a political and did not understand what was wrong with his post, but he would later prove to have something of an obsession with the subject. He has in the Trump years, the most recent year in Change at least repeatedly brought up the threat of undocumented immigrants driving drunk as a reason for aggressive immigration rest. Yes, yes, wow, nothing psychological there, Okay, Okay, that's okay, great, Like that's
so fuck. Last year's Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, which is where theveno and not where he first gained widespread national visibility, but it really, really massively increased his visibility was in honor of a twenty year old who'd been killed in a duy, right, Like this is a thing for Greg And it's like again, man, like, Okay, you didn't want to go to therapy, but he's taking your anger at your dad out on some random people, almost none of whom did anything wrong, Like almost none of
whom have ever driven drunk.
Right, this is up there with Tucker. I'm sure you guys have talked about it before on the show. But Tucker Carlson's we got to get our tucky of hippies and women and then his mom left his dad for like a French hippie and like his mom was a hippie. It's just like, damn man, it's almost like too obvious, Like how do you land where you are without being like this is like everybody's know what? This is so bad? Yeah?
Yeah, that's often the case, and you know it. It's the case with old Greg right now. One thing that made Bevino's El Centro stand out is that he had five agents whose whole full time job was making videos, which is interesting and it shows again he understands he's at least someone who sees how good a shot Trump has it coming back in the Biden years and is like, I know what to do to get on this fucker's radar. Is I need to start making some shit that goes viral.
I got to piss off some libs. Right. Here's how cal Matters describes a representative example. Two agents sitting their vehicle at night listening to a news broadcast about an undocumented migrant charged with the rape and murder of a sixty four year old woman in Santa Maria. The news clips from a real CBS report from ten years ago. An agent shakes his head and discussed and turns off the radio, saying, man, that's the second one in less than a week, things are getting out of hand.
Oh wow.
And if you're trying to make the case that, like, wow, every week, multiple people are getting raped by immigrants, and it's like, yeah, your one example was from a news clip from ten years ago.
Their most powerful weapon maybe is selection bias, where they will find a will find and make it seem like it is constantly happening right next toward you. Yeh, yep.
Now at that moment, dispatch comes over the radio and it tells the agents there's a nearby vehicle loaded with migrants. The agents catch three of them in, but one gets away and sneaks into any Town, USA, where he murders an American citizen, taking the man's cell phone and running off, and the screen goes dark, and the message every apprehension matters. Do you know who got away?
Again?
So much plot, it's so much plot for such a shitty ad.
Like thirty minutes of a Chuck Norris movie.
Yeah, yeah, that's the opening of a Check Norris movie. Only about one percent of the people the border patrol encounters have a criminal conviction, compared to eight percent of American citizens. But there's a little point in bringing reality into this. They don't care, right.
They just to treat these people like complete shit, right, and so it's like a chance. Yeah, it's bully tactics where you just find the person who's the least protected and then.
Yep, go after him.
Yeah.
So Bavino was called to testify before Congress in twenty twenty three. He discussed how crossings in his sector had increased significantly and basically made the border hot case that the Biden administration was failing to protect the border. Bavino's own history came up, including what turned out to be repeated issues with social media. One relevant quote was, I think there was one post with two Yameni's terrorists. I
was ordered to take that down. Ravino was relieved of command after his testimony, which the Republican House members who convened the hearing saw his retribution, and it probably was right like retribution.
For him, say, being a dick this stuff and being.
Me at a fucked up asshole. But I guess that counts, and it's also those retribution. I was fired as retribution for being bad, as he's bad at his job in this right because he's his old claim is that like you got to be brutal to reduce crossings, and he admitted that crossings were at at all time high and he's in charge. I don't know, man, maybe you were just saying you sucked at your job. But he didn't
suffer any consequences for his actions. Those House members complained about his demotion, and he was reinstated at El Centro. And you know what happened not long after Donald Trump won re election. On January seventh, twenty twenty five, the day after Congress certified as victory, Bavino led sixty five agents in operation returned to cinder per calmatters dot org. Most of the official information about the raid came from
Vino's Facebook comments. He posted blurred photos of three Latino men alongside a photo of thirty three pounds of marijuana in the trunk of a car. He wrote, here, in the premier sector, we go the extra mile or five hundred of them to protect our nation and communities from bad people and bad things. So congratulations, Greg, you protected California from pot Like great man, keeping that welled out of a store smelled it here ever since that thirty
three pounds really put a dint in the state. Wow, seventy eight people were arrested. The Border Patrol told local business owners that the raids were targeting criminal activity, but this was obviously untrue, and a cal Matters investigation partnered with Evident in Bellingcat, showed that the Border Patrol had no prior knowledge of criminal history of any kind. For seventy seven of seventy eight arrestees, this was very likely illegal.
In the acl you has sued on behalf of the farm workers agents are accused of failing to id themselves or percent warrants, and of using brutal force. In one case, they slashed the tires of a US citizen and then arrested them for seemingly no reason. I say, very like, this was very illegal. You know, this is all very illas.
Slashed the tires.
They loved doing that, they loved doing it.
What so on what grounds were they arresting them if it wasn't for them having like warrants or anything.
Here legally here, illegally here, illegally.
Yeah.
I mean that's their argument, is that like they were doing, that's the illegal thing they were doing.
You know.
Son the papers, right, Yeah, that's who they all are. Minjucho, a senior lawyer for the ACLU called this operation a pilot project for the ones that Bavino would leader spearhead around the country. He earned the attention of the Trumpet administration for his combative presence on social media and willingness to use federal forces to brutalize people. On June of twenty twenty five, he was named tactical commander of a mass rate in Los Angeles, which sparked protests across the city.
And you're all pretty familiar with what happened next. We're not going to go into crazy detail about everything Bavino did in the last year because you all lived through it, right, we don't need to do a ton of that. His agents helped ICE agents as they brutally detained random Angelino's. They blew up indoors to houses, They gas people in the street. Bavino had his video to Division craft ads depicting his men's violence to regular working people as action
movie scenes. He led his agents in an armed patrol outside of a political rally held by Gavin Newsom, which some might suggest could be seen as actual treason. Bavino claimed not to have known that Newsom was in the building. Continue his habit of giving answers to questions that present only the The only other answer is like, well, so the end, you're incompetent, right if you didn't know he was in the build, like what the fuck was this about?
Dipshit? We just like saw a crowd and we just yeah kind of we were like, oh shit that patrol does. Was that also when they did the military rage of uh MacArthur Park.
And yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, which we should be talking and he was like, we're giving this back to Maul and Paul America. And it's like, man, the people who live there are the ones that you're fucking with. They're the ones who use the park dipshit. But again he knows this. I'm not going to give a blow by blow of every violent act as men perpetrated, but I should read this quote from an article by Gabrielle Cannon and The Guardian. Two undocumented people have died trying
to flee Babino's agents. A Mexican farmworker fell from a greenhouse, and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle following a rate at home depot. In another episode, the paper reported they detained a disabled fifteen year old high school student in a case of mistaken identity, after drawing their guns and handcuffing him, leaving unfired bullet. It's on the ground, so cool people just like well trained, good at their jobs. Raveno's obviously sent to Chicago after LA,
where he enacts similar violence. On one occasion, he throws tear gas on camera against a crowd of peaceful protesters. He and his agency had just been enjoined against using gas without justification, so Bavino claimed that he'd been hit in the head with a rock and had no choice. Bavino later admitted that he'd lied to the US District Judge Sarah Ellis about this.
That seems fireable. Robert should spirable doing violent, a violent thing, and they hit me in the head with a.
To do I'm a huge piece of shit, sorry, guys.
Uh.
In October of twenty twenty five, he had been declared Commander at Large of the Border Patrol, which is not a real job but basically removed him from the normal Border Patrol hierarchy without giving him formal control over the whole group. In other words, it's the job you give a guy who you want, you want out there in public, you want to let him do stuff for a while, because you know eventually you pissed people off too much and you want to be able to make him your
sacrificial lamb. Right, it's make him a job that'll put him out in front of everybody, because this dipshit is not going to be able to help himself. He was the face man for Trump's brutal mass deportations, and his main job, again, I think, was to provide a focus for public outrage walking around in his Nazi coat looking like Doogie Howser at the end of Starship Troopers. Shit like this serves as a useful distraction, but Vino has
gotten to defend his choice of outerwear several times. In interviews per globalsecurity dot org, he explained that he purchased it around nineteen ninety nine as a young Border patrol agent and had worn it for more than twenty five years in cold weather or formal settings without prior controversy. He pointed to a twenty twenty two Department of Homeland Security ceremony under the Biden administration where he wore it
and received only compliments. Survivors argue that the design draws from long standing US military traditions such as the m nineteen thirty nine style overcoats or bridge coats used in law enforcement and formal uniforms rather than exclusively fascist imagery. But we know why you're doing it, Greg, and we know why you like it. You like it because it makes you look like Doogie Howser at the end of Starship Troopers.
And also to be like it's not fascist, it's from the US military. He's like, well, okay, let's take a look at the US military history. Yeah, there was something we were talking on Zecho about how the like they're thinking about bringing ice to the Winter Olympics, and there there's just a quote from somebody in Italy talking about their prison camps over there, like they're deporting Albanians and taking them to like a black site. And they were like,
it's like Italian Guantanamo. And I was like, oh, we use Nazis as like our touchstone. The other countries use US as they're They're like, yeah, it's it's almost like we're America as they're like fascism touchstone.
M yes, yes.
So anyway, I'm not sure how much there is to say. I mean, there's a lot more, but you've all lived through it. Right, you know, we know where he is right now. After two murders in Minneapolis, he was picked to be the face of the Trump administration's miscalculation. He was removed from his fake job and sent back to El Centro. I'm sure this is not the end of us hearing about Gregory Bavino. They're kind of keeping him in the cooler, right.
Yeah.
He had made a couple of claims previous, even previous to Minneapolis, about wanting to retire in the next two years, which I think was part of why the Trump administration this may have even been an open like, Look, we're gonna give you a special, fancy job. You're gonna be on camera. You're gonna get to be the face of the border patrol doing all this fascist bullshit you've always wanted to do. And then when stuff gets too hot for us, we're gonna cut bait, right, and then you'll
just retire with full benefits. Doesn't that sound good to you? You can get a nice job on Fox News or something, and you're retired.
You get to wear that jacket that you keep asking us to wear to every meeting. You get to wear that on the news.
You can wear that every day, buddy, Greg, anytime you want to wear you dumbedge, please put it on. Put it on a la fuck it like anyway. That's that's my read of the Greg Bavino story. We will maybe do an update on the fucker if more becomes of him, but it may also just be a thing. We'll wait around a little while in elcenttro you know, probably get get his rocks off a few times, hurting people down there, and then retire, you know, like he'd plan.
To, right. Did you see the video of the woman who was just like kind of dragging him outside of a seven eleven and his response was just he's like, oh, that's real nice. Oh you're being real nice. It was just like, I don't I don't know, man, that's I don't think your place is to tell people that they're being not nice. At this stage.
He's a weird little guy that got too much power, and I hope to never see him again, but I think, unfortunately, the way this world's been working, we probably will.
Yep. Yeah, there a lot of weird little guys. I feel like someone should make a show about that.
Yeah, we should probably have a show about weird little guys on our podcast network.
Oh great news. I have a great news.
Molly Conger has a show called Little Guys.
They figured out how to launch a second podcast.
Wow, Jack, is there anything you like to plug here at the end?
Oh my god, Sophie, thank you so much. First of all, such a pleasure to be with you, guys, Robert uh The my first intern at Cracked, our first intern discovered by the great Daniel O'Brien, and so so fun to have been working with you on the podcast base all these years. And Sophie Lichterman, one of the greats to ever do it. So thank you guys so much. I always enjoy being back Daily Zeitgeist is a show that I do twice a day with Wonderful day suffering cou
Miles Gray. And we just published our two thousandth episodes.
Oh congratulations, dude, two thousandth main episode Crazy, the second.
We didn't even count the second one, but lord, we did it. We made it to two thousand. What it is We're not sure, but we did it.
Wow.
And then, like I mentioned, we have a new series that I think fans of the Cracked podcat the old Crack podcast will like, called the iconograph where each Monday, me and a researcher do a deep dive into a different icon. What's an icon, you ask? By our definition? So our first episode was about Einstein and our second
was about Erkle. So it's just any of these like big pop culture wore cruxes that drive a lot of meaning in the zeitgeist, and it lets us do a show that isn't about the news, which is so nice.
Fun Sophie lore for you. My first ever crush was Einstein's like great grandson.
Are you serious? Damn?
Yeah, for sure.
I should have had you on to this talk about that.
If you're listening to this, Yes, I loved you. It was first grade. I loved you.
Yes, Hi. You don't think he knew?
Oh no, he I was not cool, you know me. I can't hide any anything. I've never changed. I've always been this way, Like.
He for sure knew, He for sure knew.
And the way I know he knew is I got teased about it by this other guy, so I kicked him in the shin and then I got in trouble, so.
He knew he knew. I've been this way my entire life.
And I picture you kicking him in the shin and his shin bone snapping backwards like Steven Segal.
Yeah, yeah, no, he definitely knew but h and.
His name was Greg Einstein, Gretin Simon Einstein.
Shout out if you're listening to If you're listening to this, I loved you.
I was in grade. But yeah, anyways, that's a fun one. Those come out every Monday morning. We're calling the iconograph. We just did Marilyn Monroe, which is a really fun episode. Dolly Parton, Tony Hawk's coming up and Robert would love to have you on one. So sure. We like to reach out to the guests and be like, Okay, here's our list. Who do you like or pitch us the icon that you want to go over. So maybe a chance for you guys to talk about people you don't who aren't the.
Worst, Sure, people who aren't the worst? Yes, icons, icons, Yes, like the iconic Jack O'Brien, who thank you for being on our show.
It's so wonderful being here. Also Jack underscore O'Brien on Twitter.
And yeah, one last plug against the State by James Stout, our colleague. His book is available now, please buy it. It's fantastic. Love James, That'll do it right, Robert.
Yep, That'll do it Holy shit?
By bye.
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