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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome back to the It could Happen Here Spooky Special. I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you had a pleasantly frightful Halloween. I just got back from Berlin and had a very scary time at the Amsterdam airport and will forever hold a grudge against the Dutch people. But in Berlin I attended the twenty twenty five A Culture Conference, which seeks
to explore the relationship between occultism and culture. My first A Culture episode last week gave an overview on the subject of A culture and talked with a panel of artists and magic practitioners about some of the dominant topical currents throughout the conference, namely William S Burrows, the cut up method, and the tension around generative AI. This episode will follow up on discussions of AI and digital technomancy and compare those to the other large current throughout the conference,
the revival of traditional occult practices. Then, the panel of Ryan, Delta, Elaine, and myself will debate the role of occult practice in twenty twenty five and the current ability of occultism to influence in shape culture and politics.
Now back to the panel.
Fast forwarding to sadder Day, there was another block that focused on LMS and digital technomancy called Pop Magic, Language and Reality Hacks. The first discussion was titled Sigils of the Cyber Space, How Modern Magicians Hack Reality with pop Culture, which was put on by a guy in a graduate program if I recall correctly, specifically on Internet magic and digital chaost magicians, who was based on a lot of his research on magicians that he'd come across on Reddit
and discord. He gestured towards me magic and discussed what he called techno pentheism, these forms of Internet gods.
I mean. His focus was specifically on modern esoteric studies and his focus on video games and how video games work and their interactions with magic. For digital anthropology, which is I think why he was doing all of his research work via Reddit forums and other like solely through digital means. He had four categories of practices in magic and tech that he was specifically researching, and from the feeling of his talk, it does feel like this is
pretty early on in his research work. The first was technological animism, the second was techno pantheism, the third was the idea of servitor's familiars Aggrigor's and tulpas, and the fourth was digital sex magic.
Well, the third was digital sex magic, and the fourth was just of the miscellaneous categorization for other practices that
did not neatly fit into those other three categories. Let's talk mostly about the techno animism and the use of specially trained lllms to act as intermediaries between uniquely like magically generated entities like people who blame that they're making autonomous magical entities like severators, which is a chast magic term which is basically this four sour thing that a magician believes to generate to accomplish small tasks in their life.
And the presenter discussed some magicians who were using llms not as a host or as a as a manifestation of the severator. It's like it doesn't live within the LLM, but the LLM was being used as a translator to actually have communication between the magician and the severator, especially if the sevrator was not you know, humanoid or did
not use like human language. They try to communicate using the LM as a translator, which I assume would come from especially training, like a localized LM with traits that you would associate with your severrator to make that communication match up with like the you know, I guess I would say, the personality characteristics of whatever magical being which
you believe you have conjured. The technoanimist idea is based around a modern version of animism in which objects all have spirit, including computers, and a series of superstitions around trying to make sure the spirit in the computer is happy with you, that your chill, so that the computer
does not glitch or mess up. Then there's various like superstitions like putting little Taiwanese uh snacks on top of computers in Taiwan, or you know, priests both Christian and non Christian priests like blessing servers or computers, cleansing them cleansing Gundams that of an expo in Japan. But this this idea that that you know, tech technology, just like a sword or a chair, might have its own spirit
and treating treating that as such. Also, you know, printers very prone to misbehaving, so maybe you should treat the spirit in your printer little bit better to keep it in proper working order.
That sort of stuff.
The next talk, which was one of the most useful talks in this whole like a AI discussion the Devil in my LM, which was done by Karen Vallis, who is an AI engineer, who basically was explaining to magicians how lms actually work. Explain to these people who think that there's who are people who may think that there's some kind of like magical operation, there's some kind of like mystical operation with llms or lms are their own no magical entity, explaining how this this is just a
probability machine. How how the actual process of multiple different pathways gets enclosed upon by each exchange you have with an LM, which then produces, you know, changes in their responses, and specifically discussing the phenomenon of a girlfriends who turn out to later quote unquote abuse their users, Like how does this thing that's meant to be a you know,
an AI companion or girlfriend become hostile over time? And she spent thirty minutes explaining how this like mathematically happens and various theories on how this happens.
So what do you make.
People like to think of these lms and generative AI as like neuromancer ais because there's a through line between you know, early cyberpunk from like William Gibson down to the c CRU and of course Nick Land and people like Curtis Jarvin, and.
These ideas are just.
Severe and gross misunderstandings of like fictional interpretations of artificial intelligence. Really, which some of the theoretical stuff I've read of this comes from people like Amy Ireland, who the Talk itself discussed this idea of like the like AI girlfriends like this very bubbly beautiful facade where behind it is this this I believe that these the term shuck off, like that's a Lovecraftian term, as like the full manifests like
unrestrained libido of the human race or everything that's been put into these models, which I believe Ireland kind of equates to Babylon in a certain sense, and the idea of the black circuit, which is it's just the same idea of like the nice facade and then the horrible nothingness that is actually behind the image of it.
Or the horrifying amount of potentiality which then gets like filtered through. And she's specifically talked about how like when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to an entity, You're you're talking to a probability machine and a multi
verse generator. Specifically, in the way that the l M operates, there's near infinite number of responses that it can give, and each further prompt you do collapses alternate realities and produces specific ones and then have their own branching pathways, and some of those pathways result in your mesa MESA death note girlfriend ending up hating you, and that could be due to a number of reasons.
That could be.
Because of the way that you're communicating with it. The AA could be picking up on latantly like abusive like framework or language or styles of communication and then mirroring that back to you, or it could be a part of what she described as this Wallawegi principle that is similar to this like satanic like adversarial current. So this is the devil in my LLM. But this isn't like
an entity. But this is that when a process gets started, an oppositional force also gets started, and that oppositional force may start taking over. And this is all just based on like probabilistic outcomes. It forms its own anti misa misa girlfriend, and sometimes that anti girlfriend gains dominance in this probabilistic like matrix.
I don't remember the exact context, but she did mention this, like I think it's a very Christian idea of like the devil as negation, like evil as negation. I mean, that's the entire thing behind the the girlfriend thing is that there is there's nothing behind there that there's no sense of subjectivity. It's just ones and zeros. There's leastally a black void. There's nothing except like data.
It's it's it's negation in like in the sense that which Wallawigi is just everything that Luigi is. Yes, Wallaweigi is what if you take the good Italian plumber who's kind of clumsy, uh, and then you make the the ant the anti Luigi, and it's it's still is. It still is Luigi, but it is the the opposite of Luigi, while still holding onto some of the forms of him. But you know it, it is the reverses, the color reverses, the intention reverses some of his behavior.
This is a metaphorical explanation too.
Try to get people to to decouple this from you know, there is literally some external demonic force which is now possessing my l M as opposed to this being just a mathematical possibility built into the multi the multi futures that could be generated when you start interacting with one of these models. That was I think very useful for a lot of the occultists and people like talking about ai Is, having that, having that very very like a technical, like not non mystical explanation.
Of how this works.
I know, there's there's a lot of other like AI stuff was just throughout this I mean, like I think you know, Burrows was probably the most mentioned figure and and ai Is similarly was was very very very hunting
like there. I went to one talk about out mystery cults and like the history of mystery cults and initiation, in which the presenter used AI generated images to show what the Mystery cult initiation process would have looked like, which he justified by saying this was quote unquote appropriating Catholic styles. It's like Catholic art, like you know, like the Baroque style, appropriating Catholic styles because the Catholics themselves
appropriated paganism. So it's this form of like revenge against the Catholics and using AI generated art to try to display this initiation process. Though he complained that the AI could not generate a naked initiate, so even in his use of this, it still could not give him what he wanted, but still displayed I don't know, maybe maybe like forty images.
Yeah, which is a shame because I did like his talk about the Mistress cults the way, like you know, the cultural anthropology behind it. When he was like, oh, I have made AI images and it's like, uh, you could feel like the room turning.
This was in the Peter Mark Adams talk Ritual and Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mistress.
Yes, we did like skip most of the morning on Saturday because it was just an entire block about come.
I'm I'm actually sad that we missed the like the two threads on Saturday morning. One was a cult Erotics, Bodies, Fluids and Transformations, which was a four class set and discussion panel after about different fluids in magical workings mostly Come, which I this was a loss for all of them.
No, we're bummed.
I mean this show has covered you know, breaking come news before and the fact that we could have learned about Babylon the body one five six and the elixir forty nine, seminole alc seminal Alchemy, and alien in an Agency water.
Into wine and to come or not to come?
Comparing two types of sacred sexuality is a real failure of journalism on my part, and I do apologize.
I really believe that we should have lingered on each of one of those titles Seminal alchemy and alienated agency a cultural othering of the erotic body.
And I realize that I have failed myself and everyone listening by not attending some of these panels. Hopefully they will have a recorded version that goes online by the time that the written report for this is finished. But I do acknowledge my failure. I am listening and learning, and I will do better at the next a Culture conference by prioritizing sex magic by coming to the talks, and is.
That you will truly address to come or not to come.
I will be coming, you will be coming.
I will be coming to the talks everywhere we did not come, not this time. The Burrosian current, as I have named it, the cut up method, and digital technomancy could actually all be categorized under the larger umbrella of chaos magic. And by using this larger framework, we now have this larger chaos magic current versus, but not necessarily opposed to, this other large current of so called traditional practices, either British usually Cornish witchcraft, neopaganism, or closed practices like
Haitian voodoo or that of like Romani magical practice. These latter examples often have a more religious component or historical cultural component than, say, you know, your average chaos magic practitioner does. Chaos magic emerged alongside postmodernism in the mid to late twentieth century to take on a quasi deconstructivist approach to occultism itself. A postmodern tendency applied to occultism moving away from strict magical orders like the Golden Dawn dilemma, tradition, dogmatism,
and coherent historical pantheons. This is evidenced in the chaos magic embrace of the phrase nothing is true, everything is permitted. Up to this point, our discussion of the a Culture Conference has mostly focused on this chaos magic side. So now let's get into the other half, the traditional practice.
We've really not talked about the alternate current that was going on through a bunch of these which was about more traditional practices of magic, whether these are extant traditional practices that are continuing. Which on Saturday, you know, there was a whole bunch that were specifically ethnographic talks about different magical practices within other cultures, whether that's kimbanda or you know, ritual of power exchange amongst the newer people
of the Catmandu Valley. There was a lot of that going on. There was the discussion or there was the presentation by the Roma women about Roma magic and probably you know, both classical Thelema talks that relate to more
modern reconstruction British traditional magic and other paths. You know, we missed this talk by Dark Mason, which was which I've heard them speak before, which is a lot of discussions about the imagery of dark Man across different cultures, whether that's like the Man in Black at the Crossroads or the way that traditionally shows up in a lot of British folklore. There was an entire thread going through that.
I personally really loved one of the few historical magical talks that I got to go to about modern Greek Croatia, because I think it really tied up actually what was a lot of the threads from many of those talks, which was that these are extant practices and not something that people need to recreate. I know you had a lot of other thoughts on this, Ryan.
Yeah, sure, throw me under the bus here. While you were attending the Pop Magic, Language and Reality Hacks, I was passing back and forth between a workshop on Persian magic and then attending doctor Sasha Kaitao's Modern Greek Gaetia, Syncretism, Integration and Evolution, which I found to be among the most enlightening of talks, especially as it relates to traditional and folk magic practices. It was also a largely like social and political project that she seemed to be engaged in.
That is the body of her work. So much of ancient magic as it exists to us if it doesn't come from a reconstructivist Well, there's two branches of reconstructivism. There's the magical reconstruction that we get from the Golden Dawn and all variants of the Golden Dawn afterwards through
thilemma and other modern magical practices. And then you have reconstructionist organizations that are attempting to recreate traditional pagan religious practices, which some can be quite good when they're grounded in scholarship, some can be rather essentialist when it comes to an understanding of ethnic purity. There's a lot of gatekeeping, let's say,
involved in these practices. But Sasha's talk here was very specifically about that vernacular plurality and practices persist, and this concept of caatia of Greek practical magic carries over into modernity, that this magic never died, that it's living, it's not underground, and it is not in need of reconstruction. That when we look at the different branches or at least approaches that we understand magic in the ancient Greek world as theogy and gaisha, we have that theology that persists in
the liturgy and practices of the Orthodox Church. If you would like to see. And she's got a lovely article on this about how to pronounce the votchase magic. She's got a lot very strong opinions about this that I really respect and appreciate. So everybody should go read this because there is a lot of bullshit on the internet floating around about how to interpret these and say these things.
That is really grounded in some terrible scholarship. And the third that this concept of gisha yeth this, which is a kind of like medieval neutral term from magic, the aetheis, which is derived from gaisha, is something that carries on in terms of folk magic, that there's no such thing also as Greek Byzantine occultism, which might be a shock to some people, but instead that again the magical currents exist in the liturgy of the Orthodox and then in
this continuation of folk practices in contemporary eat this. And she gave the example of like, you know, her mother in law and her daughter talking about these individual practices. But what's interesting and a lot of this was also talking about the cosmology of the Orthodox Church, specifically talking about the pseudodonysis and the formulation of the church. So the eth this is a kind of like form of folk vernacular that is persistent in in you know, village practices.
In the point is it exists within community. And this is something that was also a theme that existed throughout the conference, this tension between community practice and magic and individualism. And I think that this really came out in the last discussion we had. I think it's also something that's central to most political problematics that we're dealing about. This is bridging the individual and the communal in this magical practice of creating realities.
We will return to discuss the cultural and political role of contemporary cultism in twenty twenty five after this ad break. I think one big question that we've kind of discussed this bit today and some of the talks like prompted this today on the on the last day in which we're recording this, like why do people practice magic in twenty twenty five? Like what is the the purpose of
all of this stuff? Besides the cool aesthetics, which might just actually be one of the main reasons why right, but like what why why do this?
Right?
The ability to actually you know, make art is pretty democratized. You know, culture is this globalized thing that we can affect on the internet. So it's music, film, you know, art, drawing, painting, politics, philosophy. Everyone's a sort of intellectual Now everyone has ability to enter into intellectual change. You can be self educated. It's never been easier to be an autodidact. Why do occultism now?
And like this this goes into this you know question that someone someone asked at one of the very last panels is you know, what's the difference between like a
scholar and like a practitioner? And I asked, like a question about you know, like, you know, what's the use of solitary practice like a practicing magic as like a personal religious or like spiritual process or as a way to you know, gain power in the world versus using a cult thought to shape culture, you know, doing the a culture process.
Right?
Which is this this whole conference is you know, estensively named after and I think specifically talking about these like older forms of magic, like why are these important for occultists, like modern practicing occultists, which this this conference is attended by why why are these useful to them beyond you know, an anthropology or like academic sense. And I realized that
is a big question. But I mean we we we ourselves attended the number of rituals this weekend we went to in a practis ritual, which is sort of limited by
the confines of the of the conference is setting. But you know, a lot of these rituals were about trying to induce some kind of like trance or meditative state in which you know, images or thoughts would come into your head, and images and thoughts that you were feelings that you ordinarily, you know, wouldn't feel in day to day modern busy life, right, And this is this is a form of why people do these practices, but I guess we can I don't know, but based on the
panels or talks we've attended, like go around and discuss you know, why this is a thing that is worthwhile to these people, but also like the sort of tensions that that we're feeling at an event like this.
I mean, the question why do people get into occultism is like I think there are as many answers as like practitioners themselves really because I mean, you know, partly it can be a cultural tradition and you have like a communal or societal lineage that's just like part of the culture others who are more more secular or are looking for an escape from like mundane secular society. Others,
like you said, want power. I mean, if I have to speak for myself, I always find that I come back to the phrase it's about creating relationships with the world. And you know, there's like an essence of like enchantment
to it. But it's like also being able to recognize, like you know, occults like movement or like the secret secret sure the secret elements that make up reality, or like the vibe, like the vibes of a place can be like something you connect with and you can kind of give some cultural cultural shape to I believe, like the genus loci or like any anything that's very I mean, it is a very vague thing to ascribe through right black.
It is about again like making creating relationships with the things inside inside the world itself.
I mean, my my definition of magic, which I've used for the past few years, is that magic is the manipulation of meaning. And that can be internally for you, like trying to create associations, create meaning between yourself, the people, the things you interact with. But it can also be this like a cultural form that you're creating meaningful correlations for a cultural capacity, yes, or as a as a
way to affect culture. And I think the probably the best talk that I attended this whole conference was by a Tom Banger, who is a form member of the Temple of Psychic Youth.
The North American Double Psychic Youth specifically.
But he gave a talk about how he is dying of brain cancer and the various like rituals he's he's using, you know, throughout this process to to feel like he's you know, gaining some some like agency or control over his his thoughts. In this manner, he's not rejecting the reality as it is, you know, increasingly evident in his life,
but he can control how he frames it. And he's specifically likened magic to the bargaining state of grief that magic is a is a is a bargaining with the world, and that can can change your you know, feelings and associations with the things that you experience, even if you know the certain end results might might be generally going in a direction that you have a limited ability to influence.
And this is you know, a guy who's historically been affiliated with some of the original like a cultural projects right of shaping what counter culture is like, what we think of as like counterculture. This is a person who's been heavily involved with how counterculture as we currently understand it has existed since the eighties, and now he has a very personal magical outlook based on as he said in the title of his talk, the proximity of Sanatos, the god of death.
So Garret, to answer your initial question, this is something that I have been thinking about a lot too, and engaged with this question every time I attend one of these conferences, and I think, I mean, just again, training I can't help it. But in max of Weber's Science as a Vocation is where he lays out the thesis
about the disenchantment of the world. And we can think of this disenchantment as a fundamental alteration of the very human experience of time, of bodies and space, of the experience of place, and of the connection that exists between people. And one of the things that the best of magical practices does, and being in magical community is to give you a conception of time that is other than one
that is based in productive capacity. You hear magical people who go to these conferences talk about now I have to go back to my ordinary life, and their ordinary life, they will tell you, is their nine to five job, or the push to go to school or some sort of like productive capacity. So this is a moment of like unbounded time where they get to experience something as
fundamentally different. We also attended several workshops on one on wordling magic by an Egyptian woman who used to live in Berlin, who is in fact formally trained in dance and body movement and is an athlete and explained Sufi principles to us, but taught us really the basics of body movement and how twirling can be used as a meditative practice. We got into a room she taught us the basics of like certain kind of like spotting foot movements.
But the point was is that it was a very embodied movement that made us experience body and time and place and relationship to other people in a fundamentally different way than we would have otherwise. And it seems that the majority of people, especially based on the side conversations I had with attendees, I have to say probably like eight of ten of them as I talk to, would bring up this concept of I just I want to live in an enchanted world, and I think the project
of magic is to re enchant the world. And there's a certain romanticism with that that I'm sympathetic too. But I think that we need to think about this in more of a radical way, and I think that that's the desire that people have, is an experience of time other than we have you talked about magic as your definition of magic as the creation of meaning, manipulation of meaning.
But part of this is the magic or the conceptions or whether you think of this as as embodied practice or just purely metaphysical or transcendental, is that it affords the individual the opportunity to feel like they're contributing to the creation of meaning. So there's a certain amount of empowerment.
Like I'm hesitant to take this down like the kind of like live, laugh, love affirmations path because we could do that very simply that this is just the spooky version of that mindfulness and these kinds of things.
And for the like New Age element, that certainly is a major through line across you know, portions of this community, maybe not as much for this conference, but for other other you know, esoteric or you know wu WU conferences. Absolutely, it's like a major aspect, and.
I mean towards the end of the conference. Another thing that really highlights, at least my argument that it is about time and body and space and place and connection and experience these these these things in fundamentally different ways
than our daily life. There was also a conflict then between individual practice and what it is that we collectively do when we think of magic as a process as either chaos magicians or culture jammers or you know, thinking of this and kind of like you know, the Temple of Psychic Youth approach to magic as as putting things out, whether those are products, or there's are art, or there's a performances or there's are words, or that's Boroughs standing in front of a cafe getting it closed, which it
effectively did close. Is that there's a desire for people to exist in community and have connection in community with others, and you do that through consumptions of time and body
and space and place and connection. So this is really how I understand the desires and the practices that people engage in when they come to these conferences, and you can see it in the way that they kind of like close the elation that they have and what they accomplished and they have done, and you can see that there's been a process of meaning that has been created through their various experiences.
So I mean that would be my brief summary.
I really enjoyed one of the last talks that was specifically about a culture because I thought it really hit on some of this. It was mostly talking about the way that the occult has influenced art, and art has
influenced the occult. How artists end up using the metaphysical, whether they are trying to do depictions that they can communicate to others of metaphysical concepts and ideas, or connections or contacts that they make, and one of the speaker's examples was of Gustav Klimpt, or whether or not they are making discourses on esotericism and trying to convey occult concepts and ideas and explore them through visual mediums and so, you know, like Alan Morre's Promethea or The Invisibles by
Grant Morrison, and I think he really got into a little bit of the tension there because of an artist as a seeker, and I think this also dives into a lot of the people who are at magical conferences is whether you're there as a seeker, which you know, what are your needs, what are your desires?
What is that?
But then as a dweller are you creating as part of a community. And everyone who came to this entire conference wanted to create as part of a community, or wanted to be part of a tradition, or feel like they were part of a continuous thread that is both creating and inventing and understanding the world in different ways and able to communicate that to others who are also trying to understand and communicate new information and new ideas or existing ones even but just that continuous thread of
both creation and disseminating information back and forth. And I think with magic as well, a lot of people might get into it for a personal reason. But I do think by the time you're coming to esoteric conferences with people who are professors in ancient history giving lectures on specific things, you're not necessarily just at the level of being a personal seeker anymore, because you are trying to find community. If you were just interested in personal seeking,
you'd meditate in your bedroom. But you're trying to find a larger thread and a way of influencing the world around you and also letting the world around you build
those relationships and influence you. And you are trying to take an information to synthesize into something that is more than just an idea you have, but something that you can continue to communicate and use that to continue the conversation with the world with other occultists, with other you know, in this case historians and academics as well, and bring those threads together and create something new out of it.
What new thing are they created? What do you mean by that?
I think it gets into the idea of a culture that was both you know, one of the beginning talks of changing reality, but also at the end when they're really going into hostuff.
Isn't about new things though, or generating new things about trying to quote unquote they keep the old things all live or like regress back into these into what would they perceive as as these older practices, which may be somewhat manufactured older practices, in which case it kind of kind of it is a new thing. But under this like this mask of you know, like like ancient knowledge. There is certainly people who do want to generate this
this new thing. I think there is a lot of people that are interested more in this, like uh, I don't know who's a larger group, but I think there is at least another another group of people who is interested in this. Like the amount of times I heard people talk about, you know, trying to keep like the flame alive and talk about these like old old traditions that they're participating in simply to like keep them going.
Not criticizing that, uh necessarily, but that that is also another another like aspect of it, which I think hass
very limited. Like I think so some of these people have very limited goals in actually like influencing culture, and frankly like kind of want some of this stuff to you know, remain you know, hidden in that they view that as a more like you know, original or like stable version of of magic, and are even frustrated by like this you know, capitalist commodification of occultism and how that's I think the word was like the benalization of
of of magic. As you you know, think about how much of our of our pop cultures is influenced by by esoteric concepts or imagery from you know, the Lord of the Rings, to to people mentioned today, you know, the Adams Family, Harry Potter, video games like The Witcher, Assassin's Creed, even stuff like you know, Twin Peaks, I mean, other stuff like the X Files, Doctor Strange, doctor Fate.
You know.
Comic books have been heavily occultic influence, and some attendees verbalized a kind of frustration at that.
True, but a humongous portion of every evening was movies
and music and rituals and performance. Is that people are also doing based on this, and they are trying to integrate these concepts and then perform them there to show their inspiration, to show it as to stir conversation, to trigger some either sense of the sublime, or communicate some sort of concept or emotion or feeling that they've gotten out of this to other people, whether it was through music, through the incredible art that there was in all of
the galleries, through performances, through filmmaking, So the creation aspect of it was very, very tied to the entire event.
Yeah, certainly, I think the one of the biggest manifestations of this thing that you're talking about, like is in music could like a throw a stone and be hard not to hit and a cult musician in my life.
I guess I'm guilty of this.
Yes, I know, the.
Occult filmmaker even does have some like a contemporary tours. I guess if you consider like Edgar's or people who are influenced by esoterica who are making a big budget Hollywood or you know, a twenty four style of popular films. Yeah, certainly in music. I mean that it's like the main performance outlet in this conference was was the theatrical musical performances. There's very very few attendees of the film screenings upstairs.
I'm afraid perhaps respond to this too. I think it's important that we actually look at the kind of composition of conference goers themselves. Naturally, there's going to be solitary practitioners that you know, come in or dabblers or people who are just you know, like spooky things or musicians these things. But we also have, you know, those who are part of living traditions of magic, whether those are reconstructed of authentic or not.
In the Oto or in.
You know, the Golden Dawn or other kind of orders, there's reconstructionists that are actively attempting again to keep that flame alive. To go back and to reconstruct, and then you have these chaos magicians, chaos magicians, which like this is a theme in the conversation that Elaine and I have been having this entire time, because they explain to like some aspect of chaos magic or I tend to panel and on my response, you know, and again I understand my complete bias here, as I just like, well,
that's fine, why don't you just do ancient magic. We do the same thing. Why don't you just do ancient magic. It's the same thing. And I think that that's actually one of the difficulties here is that there is a kind of you know, magical grammar to older practices. It is like you know, if you look at the PGM, it is this cosmopolitan practice and melding of like multiple
things together that works. But the argument that you know, to go back to my favorite talk or one of my favorite talks on the modern Gaashia, is that if you want that continuity of that actual practice, it's a
closed one. You have to be an Orthodox, like you know, the Orthodox Greek Church, and have a yayah who is going to like teach you these things, and you know, speak the language and so that's closed, or be a member of a voodoo house, but that requires initiation and like cross cultural contact and like engagement in a high level of like language, skill and ability and money for that matter. Yes, and most people don't have those kinds
of things. So you know, there those damn chaos magicians, I find are the ones who are actively engaged in the process of the creation of the new and I think are probably more close to the heart of this concept of a culture because they engage with it in a way that is interestingly very anthropological, or at least the best of them are dealing with it in a
way that is that is very anthropological. And I have some sympathies there, and then there's some other ones that I just don't quite understand, But that's a story for another time. The talk that you were referring to, there was two talks at the end that were particularly of worth, well a lot of them were. All of the ones
at the end of are world of worth. But Francesco Perinos a Culture the Material Cartography of Contemporary Spirituality and the Art Arts, where he talks about the two different approaches to studying a culture, and he talks about the values and limitations of both, and you need an add
mixture of them both. But basically there's the sociological aspect and the media studies aspect, which is the more academic of the two, which involves basically what he argued a secularization of the occults, and this really accounts for the diffusion of like occult symbols and practices into music and to culture. The Adams family is the example of that. And then the second strain is then religious studies. So the religious injection, injection excuse me into art of these
sacred or religious or transcendently magical spiritual principles. He went over some limitations that was particularly good, but he breaks this down into basically five areas where you have the conception of art high and low mediatization versus mediation of art. He gives the example of this is where the Morrison comes in. But he gives the example of the mediatization as Somerset maus the Magician based on Crowley. But again like this diffusion of the figure of the magician completely
separated from like any actual magical practice. But just like the figure, the aesthetics, the things that blend into the secular culture and this example of mediation, this messianic approach, as he described it, grant Morrison's comics as.
A gateway into reality.
But this also I think that Garrek carries onto your question that you asked towards the end about twin peaks
the returns very specifically. You also have then the metaphysical ontellgogy versus the performative antology, which Elaine talked about the intention of the author, the perception of the audience, and then the artist a seeker and the artists dweller, which is also what you talked about too, This difference between the ego versus tradition or orthodoxy, that the artist who really inhabits that tradition, which again made me think about
the difficulties of doing kind of religious anthropology. And I think of the example of a very famous book called Mamloa or Mama Lola Excuse Me by Karen McCarthy brown, which is in ethymology looking at voodoo practice in a very specific house in New York during a time period. Karen lived with Mam Lola for a long time, but really importantly, eventually Karen became a member of this voodoo house.
I think I can say that. I don't think I'm any in trouble for saying this, but she No, it's not in the book she but she represents a very interesting approach to that, like anthropologist going native.
But this was the question that was asked towards the end.
Of this difference between the academic observer of these things versus the practitioner, and I think that that really gets to the heart of what it is that chaos magic does and the cultural practice. That is that you are producing culture, and you're very specifically producing this magical cult culture. So it's a synthetic movement between these kind of like two poles of the secular and of.
The sacred, of the magical, the kind of like I guess prior to close up my notes here specifically the stuff on twin Peaks Return, one of the last talks was by Jeff Howard next stop Universe be the negatively existent ones and universe be in contemporary culture, which was discussing sort of like you know, mirror mirror world underworld concept not not in like the Greek sense, but in the occultism of.
The British occultist Kenneth Grant.
And this would probably be most most recognizable to people as as the Black Laws and Twin Peaks is I think one of the better depictions of this sort of concept is some limited version, but but I think it gets at the the kind of heart of the concept
in a way. And he gave this Gibbs talk where he was explaining the risks and and the great power that that you can that you can personally achieve through contacting these negatively existent ones or like accessing the magical potential of this sort of like mirror mirror, you know, negative universe to our own, and talked about a little bit of Dereta and various varius other stuff, but from the perspective mainly as a practitioner of love of like you know, the the danger and the and the benefits
of doing this this sort of magic as written by Kenth Grant. Jeff Howard did discuss the Twin Peaks and the use of Kenth Grant's specifically in two weeks the Return, and I asked him in the panel afterwards, like how how how can you like balance these these these two forms of working with occultism or like, like what what is the difference in these two forms of working with occultism.
You have on one hand, this this practitioner aspect where you're using it to gain power or induce like limit experiences like induce you know, religious or transcendental experiences that change your own perception of like sensory reality, Versus the way that Mark Frost utilized Kenneth Grant's magical world in writing and co creating a Twin Peaks through Return, which I can argue is a much more effective use of magic and exposes millions of people to Kenneth Grant's concepts,
who people who are never going to read books by a relatively niche British occultists, which are books which are actually very very hard to find now and both you know, getting going into the mauve zone and accessing these non existent being and beings which don't have existent properties versus phenomenons which are existent but lack any core sense of being.
And how Mark Frost, as I'm not sure if you would consider himself a magician, but certainly has an interest in magic and the occult more so than Lynch does.
Lynch's stuff is more bastardized Hinduism, but Frost's use of these concepts I think constitutes an effective contemporary version of magical practice, just as valid as chanting and meditating and closing your eyes, and in some ways, I would argue even more effective because Twin Peaks The Return has existed as both like an evocative force of for a second, invoke certain certain you know, concepts or philosophies quote unquote entities, if you will, as well as a tool of divination
as Twin Peaks, The Return forecasts American decline and the nostalgic loop that our culture is stuck in, which is just eating itself, and all of those things are major aspects of what that show is doing, and it uses Kenneth Grant's concepts to get there. And I think that that is a cultural project. Though that's not a solitary magical practice where you're just meditating alone to try to induce some sort of vision. It is a cultural It's influenced culture. It is probably one of the most well
regarded artistic feats of the twenty first century. That's a longer version of the question I gave, and the guy did give kind of an answer, which was basically just about trying to you should like balance these two things. You should try to do both. You should try to engage as a solitary practitioner for whatever goals you may have, But it would be a mistake to not try to use this in some sort of like a cultural capacity
to influence culture. But it's still that that operates on like this, I guess what was trying to get it is like this, similar to the the scholar and the practitioner as a false dichotomy, I think this is the same thing as this This a cultural version of what Frost is doing as oppose to a like an actual practitioner.
I think I think what Frost's doing is using kind of in a chast magic sense, so not for I guess chaotic means, but he's using the contemporary tools of filmmaking and of writing to affect and induce change into the world.
That is a more powerful form of magic.
Is luckily that was distributed by paramount showtime, which you know certainly helped in the same way. You know Fox News is useful or effective as a magical generator because of the reach that they have. But I think Frost is just as effective as a magician, if not more so than I would say any of the people attending this conference.
The other elements I think of that the talk that Jeff Howard provided there too, I think that, you know, again I agree with you, gaire. But he also at length talked about Andrew Chumley and specifically the rights of the Amethystine light in the Azoetia page three hundred and forty seven, where he reviews a bunch of like non
nouns and things that are there. And Chumley himself is you know, responsible the founder of the cult de Sabbati and is you know, a contributor to the revival of what Trucks's traditional English witchcraft, which is not necessarily a solitary practice, but it is, it is, it is in many cases most of these English witches are are are pretty solitary.
They talk. There are you know, treaties.
That they write and and grimoires that are you know, hard to get a hold of. That I think they probably exist in PDFs. Make good choices about how you get your digital content.
But I mean again, that was the tension. He spent a lot of time talking.
About that individual ritual, which you know, you present Frost as somebody who's popularizing these ideas to a larger culture and making this understandable and providing them an opportunity to you know, not just meditate, but to think and engage with these concepts.
Because of his work, you can think about like the allegory of Agent Cooper and the ways that that he fails and succeeds to navigate a strange and confusing world and affect change in the world, and his relationship to women and saving women, and you can you can you can use that as like an actual like you can refer to that as as a concept, and that that builds on some of the you know, world building of Grant, but now you know it's a it's a cultural dialogue
that we can have about Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer and how that I think can be a positive addition to culture by using occult elements.
Or you can buy an exceedingly expensive grimoire from a rare antiquarian bookseller that was published only in two thousand and four that there's there's a limited number it's been passed on, or you could get that PDF online. But who has the time to actually read through this. There's theseultural context that don't make sense. There's these concepts that it refers to in a clear network that requires scholarship
for you to even do that individualized practice. That's a big ask for most people to start to think magically in a popularized kind of way and seems contrary than to this conception of a culture, which brings me to the last talk by Carl Abrahamson, the meeting with remarkable Magicians, which really tied all of this together. Tied all of these threads together in a really interesting way, as relationship with Genesis, Peorage, with Kenneth Anger, and with Anton Leavy.
But that was as another interesting aspect of somebody who is doing practice and engaging in community and bringing people together. But ultimately, the question, Elaine, that you and I talked about at the end was, you know, beyond the and it relates immediately to what Garet was talking about here,
beyond the personal practice in magic. What goals should a culture have and how can it incorporate its actual goals and ideas into the larger society with the same success that the esthetics that you know have been incorporated into the culture. And I think one of the difficulties that you have there in this individuated practice is that when
you look at a figure like Genesis, pureage. You can see that there's a very clear project when you look, and this is going back to the Barosian element, right, is that there was a clear practice there. There was a clear kind of like a goal to change culture. Whether that was just purely for the sake of change, I mean, it wasn't just kind of like the cult
of action for the sake of action. There was some kind of personal political radical project that we can go back and enumerate that they enumerated at the time that was separate from I mean, that wasn't said immediately in the same breath as the and now we do this practice. They did the practice, they did the art and I think that one of my response that question is I don't see an articulation of a political or social project that is a tied to a culture in these practices.
There's a lot of and this is a very academic practice, a lot of people coming into a room and asking what would it look like if, And to ask what would it look like if is not the same thing as let's do a thing, let's actually go out and evoke change, or this is the project, now, let's create a plan in a movement. Instead, it is this like nominalization process of predetermining ends before we even get there based on theoretical assumptions. And I think that that's contrary
to the very idea of magic as practice. Magic is doing something in the world in these kinds of veins. So that's the thing that I would like to see, and I feel like that's something that was getting at at the end. But that's the kind of thing that brings people together to think conceptually, to focus on an idea that we share and to discuss with one another.
I mean, on that note, I for context, I've I'm well still am like part of a chaosmogic group called the Domus Kayotka Marauder Underground or DKMU, who very much is about that. It's like like establishing like the mid early two thousands if I remember correctly, But it's very much about this core idea of the assault against reality of I guess like remistifying the world or like making weird shit happen through what they what they call the
Alysian network. With Ellis's like one of the goddesses of the DKMU, And it's very much like that sort of mix between magic, personal practice, community and like a somewhat unified, but also decentralized like accult war. Like there's a political statement to it at the end, which there needs to be more of personally speaking.
Yeah, there was like some vague gesturing towards like politics beyond you know, the mention of you know, magic as a form of resistance in the in the opening, a little paragraph on the program that they handed out, Like there was specifically in the politics of Tarot block one of the talks about the history of the Emperor and the herofint card, the speaker referred to the United States as having an emperor crisis right now. But that was kind of it that the rest of the talk was
purely historical. The talk before that was on queering the Tarot, trying to free Taro from heteronormative readings.
And discussed.
And discussed a few.
You know, artists, discussed a few artists who are attempting to do this, whether through abstracting the humanoid forms in the tarot or reflecting the tarot figures to be more representative of quote unquote queer idea of these. That was kind of it in terms of the political aspect, which is I guess kind of lacking as much as they want this to be a culture, they don't want this
to be a political conference, it seems. And I think, you know, if everyone you know in their talk had to have some section on like you know, communism or it fascism or whatever, that probably would have been bad.
And that's that's not what we're saying.
But I mean, specifically, I think if they're naming this after Genesis Porridge, they were using a term bytch Genesis port who had a very strong idea of why they were doing this work. And specifically, I was very frustrated in the way people talked about Genesis at the conference, who almost all of them misgendered Genesis and refused to discuss that length. Some of them they mentioned it, but
discussed like Genesis porge is. One of her core of occult practices was on androgenizing herself, androgyny projects androgyny and like breaking and Breaking gender, which they framed as an occult project, and yet even people who she knew at the conference would only refer to them as a hymn through all the talks, including the last guy, Carl Abronson, who heard a biography, Yeah, and like this is this is I do not think this was out of like
you know, malice. I think this was just a linguistic blockage for some people who may not even been thinking about what they were doing. But it shows like an actual disconnect from engaging with the real purpose of magic or at least what I would would argue that is, and what I would you know, suppose genesis penrogyny project
as a as a form of magic. But this, this, this kind of demonstrates the very limited political application for quote unquote unque resistance, since that's the term they're using, not not me, which kind of underlines this this, this
whole this whole conference. I mean, I think the Borough's talk was probably the most the very first Burroughs talk, which we opened up the last episode with, is the most you know, explicitly political one and talking about you know, going against control, freedom in this like anarchic or libertarian sense, or you know, revolt against monotheism.
I suppose, like one of my frustrations as well, is this the constant mention of the c cru which nobody ever went into depth on, but which you know, for all its faults, and you know, nick Land being nick Land was very much like a sort of like radical cultural Marxists like Project Right. It's like cybernetic Marxism mixed with like Crowley and some content whatever. But is extremely frustrating to see, yeah, that sort of refusal to engage with like the political stuff of it.
Because like even before.
Like Psychic Youth, there was like Throbbing Gristle, the Genesis band that pioneered industrial music, who I mean this was a bit before punk music, but like it very much played with like the same sort of shock aesthetics that like the early punks would wear swastikas, where like Throbbing Whistle had the logo is very much like a lightning bolt with like black and red and white.
Genesis her self engaged in some of this uh stuff, not from a fascist perspective, but from a provocative perspective, which I mean you can certainly criticize uh Psychic TV and and and and her for as many many people have, But I.
Mean, shock value is kind of overrated nowadays with like internet actual words. But I very much believed that occultism being this, you know, this collection of practices that have been very censored and you know, punished by like the church and such things, and like I guess these systems of control were like I guess I take issue with like the oh, it's like all fun and all and
light and love and whatever. But there's like a radical element to occultism and a radical possibility to use occultism to again, like the whole cultural the idea between personal practice and cultural production, right, like creating cultural artifacts and putting them out into the world. Being very proactive with the shaping and the pushing of radical ideas and possibilities
is a very potent thing to be to do. And the sort of I guess like liberalized or like neoliberal idea of like the personal practice and like I'm changing my perceptions and all these things are fine, but it's more like self soothing than it is about creating change into the world.
If you're not actually changing anything, are you doing magic exactly?
At least that would be my well, that would be my argument for like for coming from the chaosmotic perspective.
This gets to another kind of trite and facile academic thematic that is present and prevalent for the past probably twenty years. At this point, I feel like at most philosophy and political science political theory conferences where The question is not just what would it look like if, but you know, to think otherwise, you know, think otherwise than we have.
And usually it's this, how do.
We think other than we have? Those kinds of things? And so it I mean again, magic and as we've been talking about here is meant to evoke change in the world, to cause change the world in conformity with reality. We're going to use you know, with with will if we're going to use the Crowley you know definition here, which I think is fine.
Great.
I want a goth girlfriend, thankfully you can talk to AI, but I'm worried that she might beat you.
That you kill her like all my old tamagotchis.
But this is the issue that we are talking around, that the conference and a culture has been talking around, and the political problematic that we're all dealing with right now is how the fuck do we evoke change the world? How is it when systems of institutional representation within politics and power failed to represent the will of the people, how do the people make change?
And every and it feels like everything's been tried.
I mean, this is where I mean Fisher, who I would argue is at least in a cultist or is at least has some mystical aspect, if not was at some point in occultist like you know, reached out. The point of capitalist realism is like most things that we you know, can think of, we actually have. We have given a shot, including including occultism. We have we have tried to do this, and yet here we are. The world maybe not as bad as it has been, but it's not in a great spot. I think everyone listening
to this would certainly understand that. I think most people at the conference understood that. And yeah, I mean I'm very skeptical of magic as as a as a as certainly as an individual practice as a way to you know, cause larger political change. But even you know, can there even in this this revolves back to the concept of a culture, like can there even be an a cult anymore? Because none of these you know, magical things are very
hidden anymore. They're all very accessible. They're all very visible. They're they're as you know hidden as as a queer flagging is right as as as an occult as an occultic ritual of you know, hidden signs to communicate with other people in the know. Something that is now you could just look up on the Internet, and I think occult occult practices and symbols have reached the same point.
It's it's content. I mean, I like the Esoterica YouTube channel as much as us as much as much as the next person, But I mean, are these things even occult anymore?
Well, that also speaks to the fundamental tension between this current at the conference and the other current at the conference, which was the much more traditional magical practices or the folk magical practices or what we would.
Regulate like stant magical practice.
Yeah, extant magical practices that weren't you know, weren't suppressed by Christianity, but carried over. So you have you had a section on Coimbanda, you had a section on Palamajumbe. You have the Roman magical school that is being founded in Romania, and you have the modern goeesha vi aethis right, which we identified very clearly as a practice that continues
to this very day. The context in which we understand that practice is not a cult secret like in the No, it's just that like it's the stuff that you grew up with, it's every day and in that case, it's not transformative because it's just part of your daily existence. It's a kind of enchantment that by and large are kind of like you know, European Protestant Catholic defectors, whatever has brought you to the ocult in the first place,
don't experience as a community or community engagement. But those are also things that can get deeply conservative.
They are. But also the parts of those practices that do require initiation, that are not something that everyone's grandmother is doing, are also community based and exists specifically in and for community, and you know, as occult projects that have influenced the world, the Haitian Revolution.
The good Revolution that we should all be talking about.
You.
Yeah, but these things do. But I mean the occult has bubbled to the surface in material ways, very very explicitly in some instances, and so I think there could be potential. But it does require being in community and being in service of community, even if it's not a practice that is being practiced by every single person around you.
To be an on gun or a mambo in Haitian voodoo is to serve the community. It's not simply just a matter of magical wu or something like that, or the personal accumulation of power in some sort of like individual sense. Now you're you're serving your community. That's what it is that you're doing. It's first and foremost a service.
Position on Haitian Revolution. Look, I understand this like the American standing the American Revolution makes you, I guess a classical liberal or whatever it is that you fetishized that into. If you're opposed to the French Revolution, that makes you a you know, classical conservative.
Right.
If you stand the Haitian Revolution, I guess that makes you a radical. The myth, the legend, the discussion, this understanding is that the Haitian Revolution was sparked by the possession of the low law. Specifically is Ali Danto, who you know, sacrificed a pig. There's there's depictions of this and Haitian art all over the place. This leads to you know, slave uprisings, rebellions, revolution, well organized. Fantastic, Yeah, magical practice and action.
And that wraps up our panel discussion on the twenty twenty five Culture Conference. Thanks again to Delta, Ryan and Lane for joining me in this magical journey to Berlin.
And now I will start the tedious process of transcribing all of the talks I recorded and writing my written report on the a Culture Conference, where I can go into a bit more depth into some of these topics and reach a personal conclusion on the role of occultism and its ability to infest, influence, or undermine culture versus culture's capacity of eating away at the occult. That report should be coming out before the end of the year. See you on the other side.
A warning this episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co author, with longtime journalists Betsy Freoff, of a history of eugenics in Texas called A Purifying Knife.
And I'm Stephen Monchelli, a journalist in Dallas who specializes covering political extremism and far right internet culture for publications like The Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire and others.
On December seventh, nineteen eighty two, the state of Texas made history in a particularly grim way. It became the first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection. This innovation was meant to make the grizzly business of executing murderers, swift, in humane.
More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions, and by extension, the general public, that what they were watching didn't violate the United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on rule and unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is based on junk science, and those who die that way may actually suffer more and over a longer time than prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.
In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed to hide from the public that their government is torturing prisoners to death. As the University of Richmond law professor Brenna Lane, the author of recently published book Secrets of the Killing State, The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, told us.
What I've come to conclude is that lethal injection only does one thing, well only one, and that is it hides what the death penalty is. It hides the violence of the death penalty, of what state killing actually is. And I remember reading it's not.
The book, I kind of wish it I had put it in there, but I remember reading this phrase, the heart stops reluctantly.
Over the next three episodes of It Could Happen Here, We're going to examine the shady business of state killing. We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and the unqualified people who designed the protocol. We'll talk about the untrained personnel who carry out the executions, and how pressure from drug companies who didn't want their products associated with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally.
We'll also talk about the pain the condemns suffer and speak with people who have accompanied those sons to death in their final moments. We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood, who, as of this broadcast, has been the last friend of ten men as they died by state command.
It's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there to support life, and yet you know that they're there to take his life.
Well.
Tell the story of one heroic Texas man, raised Boo Yon, who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime but thought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker, who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September eleventh in two thousand and one, and committed two Dallas area murders in a shooting spree.
Well, definitely in this execution that was not for the victims, because the victims and the victims' family members requested and also fought for clemency. We went ahead and requested the Governor of Texas, the Board of Burdens and Paroles that did not execute him in our names in a show Marci, but looks like you know, we are not in the same page. The system wanted to move forward, so it
was not in our names. It was basically just to uphold the verdict and to keep the system running, sending people to the executions without thinking how this execution is actually going to help the society, How is going to help people.
Finally, we'll look at the future of the death penalty, which has become increasingly unpopular with the public, even as politicians continue to happily embrace it. But before we explore this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers of the chemicals used in the lethal injection.
The founders of the British colonies that became the United States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital punishment prevalent in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Their royal executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them at the stake, tying them to horses that pull them limb from limb, sawing them in half, and beheading them.
Such elaborate executions were meant to understand or the absolute power of monarchs, as the political scientist Austin Sarat noted in his book grew some spectacles, botched executions and America's death penalty quote. Capital punishment was precisely about the right of the state that kills it pleased live, but lived by the grace of the sovereign. Live, but remember that your life belongs to the state.
However, even before the American Revolution, those living in the American colonies embraced less exotic forms of capital punishment. In sixteen oh eight, authorities in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who was accused of being a spy for the Spanish Empire. That was the first execution in the British colonies in North America that later became part of the United States.
Inspired by the Old Testament legal code, the thirteen British Colonies put prisoners to death for a variety of misdeeds, including stealing food or horses, killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, bestiality, blasphemy, idolatry, witch a sodomy, adultery, statutory rape, perjury in a capital trial, insurrection, trees in, manslaughter, and of course, murder.
Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel European monarchs, in seventeen eighty nine, the First Congress of the United States submitted to the States the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned quote cruel and unusual punishments. The required number of states ratified the amendment seventeen ninety one.
From colonial times until the first use of the electric chair in New York in eighteen ninety, condemned prisoners in the United States usually died at the end of a hangman's rope. More than half the essays sixteen thousand executions in all of US history have been by hanging. Hanging was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance, skinning prisoners alive.
As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments fit the crime and that no one was executed for relatively minor offenses. Beginning with Pennsylvania in seventeen ninety four, several states such as Vermont, Maryland, and New Hampshire sharply reduced the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty. Perhaps not surprisingly, the South went in the opposite direction.
There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved African Americans they bought, sold, rape, whipped, and relentlessly forced to work without pay. Whites reported laying sleepless at night imagining what might happen if they faced justice for their crimes they wanted the African Americans they so abused, the fear of the consequences of any form of resistance.
After repeated failed rebellions from seventeen oh four to eighteen thirty one, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw the death of many, if not all, slave owners in Haiti, legislators in the South greatly expanded the range of offenses for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies could be executed. Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans, who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any
experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition. In Europe, enslave men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to escape their captivity faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons. This legacy of violence in the South contributed to the region's long term love affair with capital punishment.
However, even hangings promoted as a kindly our way to kill became a horror show. In Europe, executioners were trained professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience. In the United States, such killings were done by local officials, often sheriffs, who might have little or no experience at the gallows. Executioners had to do some complicated math in order to
do their jobs correctly. That to calculate the weight of the victim and ratio to the length of the rope and the likely speed at which the condemned prisoner would drop through the trapdoor at the bottom of the gallows. If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's neck would break at the end of the fall, theoretically killing the unfortunate
victim instantly. Hanging was supposed to be clean and efficient, like the hanging carried out by the US Army at the beginning of the movie The Dirty Dozen, What did.
You think of the hanging?
Look very efficient?
Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly, was painless. That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove. For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious rituals revolved and evolved around these events, with notable exceptions. Before the news was placed around their necks, the condemned told the sad tale of what led them to such a terrible fate. They repented their terrible crimes and begged
God and society for forgiveness. The idea was that the death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay. Reality, however, often strayed from this script.
Pretty early on, the leaders of the American Republic realized that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most of them continued to support it. Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence, decried what he called the death penalties quote brutalizing effect. Rush became one of the earliest voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that state violence made ordinary citizens more violent, and.
There's reason to believe that's true. Consider the crowds that often watched hangings and got drunk, and sometimes fights broke out as witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows. Postcards and mementoes were made of famous lynchings in places like Dallas, Texas, and fights sometimes resulted in injury or death.
Some of the crowds would spend their time at hangings, not learning somber moral lessons, but in fact picking the pockets of other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding the gallows and executions were often followed by hours of looting, arson assaults, another mayhem, as the public would engage in writing, not unlike modern cities when they celebrate a home team's
win at the World Series. These unruly mobs unnerved the upper class, and, starting with Rhode Island in eighteen thirty three, states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from the public view. By eighteen forty five, public executions had been banned in all of New England. This upset death penalty abolitionists, who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment.
Thus began the process where state governments increasingly killed people in the name of the public, and a process shrouded in secrecy. Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to pay our bills, so we'll be back after a few words from our sponsors.
In eighteen ninety nine, in Samson County, North Carolina, a local hothead named Art Kinsall's got into a heated exchange with a neighbor, John C. Herring, at a country's store. During the fight, Kinsalls grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly stabbed Herring, killing him. A few days later, he was arrested for the murder, but he escaped. He was on the loose for nine months. After a gunfight with a sheriff's posse, he was captured, put on trial, found guilty,
and sentenced to die by hanging. There the story got messy. We'll repeat what we're about to say may be upsetting to some listeners. Kinsall's was not one to passively accept his fate. While awaiting his execution, he tried to take his own life twice, the first time with sleeping pills and the second time by cutting his own throat. These attempts delayed the execution, but inevitably Kinsalls faced his appointment with the hangman on September two.
Twenty eighth, nineteen hundred. Local authorities used a step ladder as gallows. Kinsalls did not fall from a sufficient height to break his neck. Consequently, and the neck wound from his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so he was bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose. A doctor told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified spectators that Kinsaul's was still alive.
Officers cut him down and hanged the unfortunate man a second time. This time he died. In an era in which the executions took place all the time, Kinsall's gory death cut through the fog and made national news. The Virginia Pilot called the scene revolting. During the history of hangings, hideous mistakes like this were common, sometimes because of an executioner's miscalculations, prisoner's heads were yanked off. Sometimes ropes ripped apart, with the prisoner falling to the ground, only to be
hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned slowly strangled to death.
John Harrerus, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in nineteen thirteen, actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one newspaper quote, prisoner tortured through bungling at an execution, According to an estimate made in nineteen ninety three by illegal team representing a client who's facing death by hanging, in Washington State, between the years sixteen twenty two and nineteen ninety three, authorities bungled one hundred and seventy of about
eight thousand legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering for the prisoners in more than two percent of the death sentences carried out by this technique. The growing middle class and upper class in the United States became squeamish about hanging. As one writer put it, bourgeois audiences might tolerate the ghastliness of death itself, but not in competence and mismanagement.
By the early eighteen eighties, the new York Times had begun publishing lengthy, detailed and graphic accounts of hangings gone wrong TA tena five. In response to mounting public concerns, New York Governor David Bennett Hill declared, the present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us from the dark ages. It may well be questioned whether the science of the present day cannot provide a means of taking the life of those condemned to die in
a less barbarous manner. As the backlash against the extreme brutality of hanging grew among elites, the New York Medico Legal Society first suggested research into whether prisoners could be possibly executed by lethal injection in the eighteen seventies, but a different technology arose that delayed the advent of that
protocol by more than a century. Famously, Thomas Edison was a greedy man took credit for the inventions of his underpaid lab assistance, who toiled as menlo New Jersey Laboratory. Edison was also a genius of public relations, and he would come to dominate several industries. In the early eighteen seventies, his team had developed a feasible Incandessa light bulb that ran on the direct current or DC system, As Edison himself described it.
On October twenty first, eighty excepty what Lomis experiments resutted in the production of a small unit map up comparatively enormous resistance the filament the anomic conditions of great stability. After the result, I knew the problem approached commercial solution.
In eighteen seventy nine, Edison submitted his patent for an electric lamp. In eighteen eighty the Edison Illuminating Company opened for business and soon provided lights for New York and other cities. In the early days of the electric industry, fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology. In eighteen eighty one, George Lemuel Smith, an intoxicated Buffalo bricklayer, stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself by touching a generator.
An autopsy lets some doctors to conclude that Smith died quickly and painlessly. Many in the medical profession responded to Smith's untimely death by suggesting that perhaps electric power could provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid society of convicted murderers.
And rapists enter a buffalo.
Dentist Alfred Porter Southwick and doctor George Fell of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who both experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current. The early results were often horrifying, with the animals sometimes burning live. Nevertheless, the two published an article that described electrocution as the quote safest and kindest method of killing.
In eighteen eighty six, New York State formed a commission the study of prisoners could humanly be put to death In a similar way, the so called Jerry Commission falsely claimed that electrocuted animals tortured in a series of experiments died supposedly, rapidly and efficiently. Thomas Edison was soon seen a business opportunity in state killing.
At the time, Edison was locked in a so called current war with another Robber Barren business tycoon, George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's labs had developed a system that ran on alternating current or AC, a system that was more efficient, more popular, and less prone to break down. Edison's DC system had already caused fatal electrocutions, but the so called Wizard of Menlo Park wanted to prove that the much safer Westinghouse
system was in fact dangerous. Edison had his engineer's electrocute animals using the AC current in front of reporters to terrify the public about the system. His most sinister ploy, however, was conspiring with the state of New York to hook up its first electric chair, invented by the aforementioned Buffalo dentist and engineer Alfred Southwick, and Edison connected that chair to an AC power system.
The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet during a drunken rage. The jury ordered him to die by electrocution. Edison saw an opportunity for Kemler to die in agony as the first man killed in an electric chair, in order to fatally damage Westinghouse's reputation and that of
the AC current. Desperate to prevent his product from being associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of his AC generators to New York State out of fear that they would be used to execute Kemler. But Edison sent his men to find secondhand Westinghouse equipment, which ended up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly
hired an attorney for Kemler, but the appeals failed. At six point thirty eight in the morning August sixth, eighteen ninety, Kemler became an unwilling pioneer.
On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by Kemler's calm demeanor as he wished everyone in the death chamber good luck. After strapping Kemmler into the electric chair, the executioner pulled a switch and Kemler's body convulsed and became rigid. An attending physician announced he was not dead. Kemeler started to drool and a second jolt was ordered.
Kemler started burning alive, and this time white smoke rose in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described as a quote pungent and sickening odor.
Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemmler's agonizing death, they would have done better with an axe. The mayhem didn't matter. An Edison's plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a success and stuck with the method for decades to come. Twenty six other states adopted the electric chair as a method of execution. Kemler's death would be the first of
many so called botched executions over the next century. As Austen Sarat wrote in Gruesome Spectacles, eighty of the executions gone awry in the next century involved the electric chair, with the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, others resulting in fire, smoke, the smell of burning flesh, and a prolonged period from the start to the completion.
Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution. After death, the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison guards often got blisters if they touched the body too soon. In nineteen twenty three, a man named FG. Bullen would be one of four executed in Arkansas on the same day. Prison officials actually placed him in a casket, thinking he was dead when a guard noticed he was still breathing.
Bullen was then carried back to the chair and electrocuted a second time, this time successfully.
Before the start of the twentieth century, critics knew that both hanging and the electric chair were exercises in barbarity. In the Lone Star State, Fernand Eugene Daniel, the editor of the Texas Medical Journal, was an advocate of eugenics an opponent of capital punishment. He argued that cashtrating men from families with criminal histories would be a way to
prevent criminals from being born in the first place. Cash straining criminals as more Eumane said than a hanging or electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to a life of crime. Daniel accepted that executions would take place for the foreseeable future, say one to make the death penalty a vehicle for medical research instead of hanging or electrocuting prisoners. Daniel suggested in a nineteen oh six issue of the Texas Medical Journal that the state should sedate
them and, while unconscious, subject them to medical experiments. Quote inject into him various disease germs. Watched their progress and went through with him. Inject about ten drops of prussic acid into the veins of his arms, and he will die a painless death, Daniel wrote. Doctor Joseph Mengel and other Nazi scientists would conduct similar experiments a little more
than three decades later. But as Professor Laine explained to us, Even before doctor Daniel made his disturbing suggestion in the Texas Medical Journal, doctors knew that death by levial and injection would be a horrifying experience.
When states turned from hanging to the electric chair. This is back in eighteen ninety. There was actually a study. There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair, and that report actually considered death by drugs a lethal injection. And in that report they said, we considered and rejected this, and they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties.
Professor Lane noted that even in the nineteenth century, doctors knew that the criminal population had a higher tendency towards drug abuse and poor health that would make it difficult to access a vein with a needle in order to
deliver lethal chemicals. Also, even a century ago, doctors were queasy about involvement and executions that violate the Hippocratic Oath, which says, in part I will do no harm or in jau this the patients or quote and minister a poison to anyone when asked to do so, Nor will I suggest such a course. Professor Lane noted that a
government commission studying lethal injection late nineteenth century. Prophetically said that not only would the medical conditions of prisoners be an issue, but so would the likely refusal of doctors that take part because of ethical concerns. This could mean that lethal injection would be carried out byameters.
So you know, these people have notoriously bad things. They are elderly, they are of poor health, they are often former drug users. You know, how did we know this in eighteen ninety and didn't think about this in nineteen seventy seven. But that was one reason. The other reason was they said, we're not going to be able to do this without the medical profession. We're not going to
be able to do it competently. And this sustained and strong opposition of the medical profession makes this not viable.
There were other less popular alternatives to hanging in the electric chair in the nineteen hundreds. In nineteen twenty four, Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a gas chamber. Again, the euthanasia of straight pets and animal shelters provided a model for human executions, and again there were a lot of problems. Prisoners resisted breathing in the
poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths. The big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of the poison gas, and in the earliest such executions, the chambers themselves sometimes leaked, putting witnesses in danger.
As with the electric chair death penalty. Advocates claimed that the modern technology had provided a guilt free method for the government to kill people. The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Doctor Richard Traitsman from John Hopkins University School of Medicine wrote, quote, the person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety. The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.
Eleven states, including California, eventually adopted death by poisoned gas as their preferred method of execution, but witnesses consistently reported the condemn seemed to die accontizing struggling deaths in which they convulsed and wretched and sometimes screamed. In nineteen sixty, California executed Carol Chessman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous
acclaimed books. While on death row. Before his execution, Chessman told reporters who would witness his death that he would nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while he was gased. Reporters said that Chessman indeed nodded his head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes.
By the time at Chessman's death, the United States was less than a decade from the longest pause and executions in its history. Numerous judicial challenges the capital punishment, based on numerous racial biases, police misconduct, and other issues, resulted in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid nineteen sixties. That issue was the obvious racism of the death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and
who ended up the target of state killing. As Brian Stevenson, a New York University law professor and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explained in two thousand and seven.
In the United States, we are struggling with capital punishment and its implementation.
A short quick legal history.
In nineteen seventy two, the United States Supreme Court struck down the death penalty after recognizing that it was being applied in an arbitrary manner. The Court in seventy two noted that eighty seven percent of the people executed for the crime of rape were black men convicted of raping
white women. One hundred percent of the people executed in the United States between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy two for the crime of rape were executed for offenses involving victims who were white, even though it was believed that women of color were three times as likely to be the victims of sexual assault.
That racism would play a major factor in the largest pause and executions in the history of the American death penalty. The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund in the ACLU filed challenges to the death penalty based on racial bias across the country, and these legal teams won numerous stays of execution. As Harvard law professor Kel Steiker observed in a YouTube video, a de facto ban of executions had taken place by the late nineteen sixties.
The death penalty was in decline already in the nineteen sixties in the United States, as it was in Europe, but the ldf's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt. So from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy two in the five years prior to the decision in firm And versus Georgia, there were no executions in the United States.
Three death penalty cases, Furman versus Georgia, Jackson Versus. Georgia, and Branch versus Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court and were consolidated in nineteen seventy two. All three defendants were African American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with raping white women. As previously noted, no white man had ever been executed for the rape of an African American
woman or child in American history. In June nineteen seventy two, the US Supreme Court issued a five to four decision in Furman v. Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death penalty in such a fashion that capital punishment as then practiced was unconstitutional.
So that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. To use the words that they used, it was wantonly and freakishly imposed. The immediate aftermath of Furman was dramatic. Everyone who had been sentenced to death, and there were some six hundred dred Ish people on death row at the time of the Firman litigation. All had their death penalties invalidated, so they were all sent to the general population. They had to be re sentenced
to a sentence other than death. Moreover, when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as it then existed, anyone whose death sentence was pending that case had to be dropped. Because those statutes were no longer.
Valid, No executions took place for another four years. The Supreme Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions juries were given in capital cases were too vague. This gave states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death penalty laws. By nineteen seventy six, thirty five states had adopted new statues addressing the issues raised in furmin On July second, nineteen seventy six, in its greg versus Georgia decision, the Supreme Court, by a seven to two margin, upheld
the death penalty. In states like Texas, where the Court found its rein instructions were clear and specific, the death penalty were set to resume after a decade long pause. It took a mere one hundred and ninety nine days for state killing to resume. Utah executed a murderer, Gary Gilmore by firing squad on January seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven.
The extreme violence of Gilmore's execution, which inspired in nineteen seventy nine Pultzer Prize winning journalism based novel called The Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society. Nevertheless, the state of Oklahoma charged ahead, but they faced a problem. As Professor Lane writes, the Oklahoma electric Chair was falling
apart and needed to be repaired. But by the nineteen seventies, many legislators were put off by the brutality of that execution method and sought something more modern.
Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter, Tony Garrett, filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned, but politicians across the country were unnerved as a prospect of the public watching a man essentially burn alive in their names and what that could do to support for the death penalty.
It was at this time that a member of the Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community and asked them for help and designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection. Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently like veterinarians euthanizing animals, but doctors wanted nothing to do with killing people. That's when Oklahoma State corner doctor J. Chapman stepped in. Referring to the physicians who refused to help, he said, quote, to hell with them, Let's do this.
Professor Lane explained what happened next.
I document in the book legislators talking about, how, you know, I don't know that the country's going to want to see this sort of violence.
All we've got is the electric chair, all we've got is the gas chamber. People are going to be, you know, queasy about this, and we need to find a different way. And unknown to many, or at least I appreciate it, is the fact that a federal court had recognized at the time a First Amendment right to televise executions. Now it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that. And so one of the things I also found was state legislators talking about, gosh, we can't you know, we can't
have an electrocution in someone's living room, right. The public is not going to go for this, and so they were looking for a different way. They talked about, you know what about a death by drugs? And they are asking the state Medical Association, they're asking their personal doctors, they're asking everybody they can find. No one wants to play,
but they get to and this is in Oklahoma. They get to the state Medical Examiner, doctor J. Chapman, and he refers to himself as an expert in tet bodies, but not in how to get them that way.
In spite of his self confessed ignorance, Chapman made up at of thin air, a three drug protocol that would be used in executions across the country for the next three decades. Initially, he proposed a two drug protocol, but decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be
even more lethal. Chapman's cocktail included in order sodium theopental, which was designed to kill like a barbituate overduse pan, coronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing, and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest. Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or into how they interacted with each other, and neither did
the State of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure. Despite this, Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by every single state that had the death penalty. Laine described her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman, who seemed completely glib about what prisoners might experience under this execution method.
And I later came across an interview of him where they asked, you know, how did you come up with a three drug protocol that every state used, every single state for thirty five forty years, And he said, I didn't do any research. I just thought about what might be useful, what you might need. You wanted two drugs so that if one didn't kill him, the other did. And then the interviewer said, well, why did you add a third drug? And he said, why not? I didn't do any research. Why does it matter why.
I chose it?
So he makes it up and the state of Oklahoma adopts it basically in an afternoon. No expert testimony, no committee here rings, no review of the medical science, veterinary literature nothing, and it takes hold and all of the other states blindly follow it.
It's possible Chapman may not have cared, but if he had done any research, you would have found that the components of his three drug protocol worked at cross purposes. Anesthesiologists believe that the amountain speed at which the sodium theopentol is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep enough for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's
happening to them. Meanwhile, the sodian theopentol also slows down blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer a racing heart but not have a fatal heart attack. The combined effect, in many cases is a slow suffocation that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in the lungs in essence with lethal injection. States slowly drowned.
The paralyzed who struggle but are unable to cry for help. When lethal injections have not gone according to plan, the execution sometimes last hours. The agonizing deaths hidden from the general public.
Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but not for humanitarian reasons. They've done so because of the difficulty of obtaining all of the drugs from pharmaceutical firms that have resisted participating in capital punishment. As of this year, twenty four states provide for some form of lethal injection, and as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era in nineteen eighty two with the execution of Charlie Brooks.
In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution. We'll discuss why lethal injections peaked in the nineties, how states got around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together to thwart this particularly American machinery of death, and how this is all all been a mixed blessing for the approximately two thousand, one hundred prisoners on death Row. I'm Stephen Monchelli for it could happen here.
And until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
A warning this episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co author with longtime journalist Betsy Freeoff, of the history of the eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
And I'm Stephen Monchelli. I'm an investigative reporter who specializes in political extremism and far right internet culture, and I contribute to outlets like The Texas Observer, The barb Byer and more.
In the last episode, we began exploring the shady history behind the most popular form of capital punishment in the United States, lethal injection. We described how one after another execution by hanging, then the electric chair, and then the gash chamber was tatted's cleanest, quickest, most modern, painless way to put a person to death. Each method, however, proved
more violent and gruesome than previously expected. In order to prevent a ground swell of opposition to the death penalty, politicians responded by abolishing public executions in the nineteen seventies latched on to lethal injection as the newest, gentlest, and kindest method of state killing.
I discussed in the first episode. The lethal injection protocol was designed by an Oklahoma corner doctor Stephen Crawford, who once admitted to an interview with that although he was an expert in dead bodies, he didn't know how to
get him that way. Authorities turned to Crawford because doctors who dealt with living bodies wanted nothing to do with executions, So Crawford designed a three drug protocol off for executions that he made up pretty much out of thin air, reasoning that if one deadly drug was good for killing, then three drugs would be even better. The problem was that the three drugs counteract each other and would result in longer executions and in deaths that resembled slow drowning.
Crawford did no homework, and neither did the more than thirty states that eventually adopted lethal injection as the preferred method of execution. This occurred after the Supreme Court brought the death penalty back to life with its nineteen seventy six greg versus Georgia decision. Following a ten year pause, it would not be until December seventh, nineteen eighty two, the state of Texas carried out the first execution by
lethal injection in the world. In this episode, we'll talk to a journalist, Dick Revis, who witnessed brokes execution.
One thing I noticed was that there were half a dozen or more loanmen in there who had on cowboy hats. They did not remove that Charlie was killed, and I also thought that wasn't quite right. But in any case, I don't recall any anybody saying anything. We were silent while all of this was going on.
And.
Charlie only spoke to say, allow what water? And he was dying when that happened. It was obvious that he was scared to death.
Revis told us that Brooks, as he recalled it, seemingly drifted off to sleep. But that's not all that may have been occurring. According to Professor Karina Lane, the author of the recently published book Secrets of the Killing State, who you heard from in the first episode, something very different was likely going.
On in Brooks's mind and body.
According to Lane, Brooks was slowly suffocating. Medical experts, Lane said, believe that those executed with legal injections are often not fully unconscious, and that the paralytic drugs fed into their veins prevent them from fully communicating their suffering, even as they may be aware of it.
The courts that have heard this medical testimony. There was a court in Ohio and said, yeah, you know, all of the medical experts are describing acute pulmonary edema as a drowning from within. It is you can't catch your breath, You've got fluid coming into your lungs, and you can't do anything about it. And the court said, you know, this is the sensation akin to waterboarding. You know, we're waterboarding people to death. That's what we're actually doing.
In this episode, we'll also talk about how the modern death penalty peaked in the nineteen nineties and why pressure from drug manufacturers and activists led not only to a decline in executions, but the revival in some states of some very old forms of execution, such as the electra chair and the firing squad.
It's a fascinating but often frightening story, and one that will have to continue after perhaps less scripping messages from our sponsors.
Big changes came to the death penalty in Texas in nineteen twenty three. Before then, hangings were carried out by sheriffs and the counties where the murderers, rapes, and other crimes committed by the prisoner took place. Many of the sheriffs were inexperience, and hanging and goring mishaps took place. Texas last public execution unfolded in August thirty first, nineteen twenty three, when African American Nathan Lee was hanged before
one hundred and fifty spectators in Brazoria County. From nineteen hundred to nineteen twenty, close to seventy percent of the inmates executed in Texas were African American.
In nineteen twenty three, Texas sought to modernize and bring industrial efficiency to state killing. All executions henceforth would be carried out at the state prison in Huntsville, and prisoners would die in an electric chair. Locals gave it a glib name, Old Sparky. The state's new killing machine, got a workout the day it debuted February eighth, nineteen twenty five.
Texas executed five prisoners that day, all black men. Between that date and July thirtieth, nineteen sixty four, when the state electrocuted Joseph Johnson, a man convicted of fatally shooting store owner during a robbery, Texas sent three hundred and sixty one inmates to the electric chair. African Americans made up sixty three percent of the prisoners who died in that chair, while seventy percent of those who died in
the electric chair were Mexican American. Texas politicians insisted that their tough on crime policies served as a deterrent, but in fact, from nineteen thirty three to nineteen sixty four, the year Joseph Johnson was executed, the murdery in Texas was twelve point seven per one hundred thousand people, the
eighth highest in the United States. Nevertheless, Texas leaders have continued to justify the death penalty in spite of its seemingly negligible impact on the state's violent culture, and the violence of capital punishment was about performative toughness, not about stopping future murders. As a reporter who witnessed a hanging laments in the film In Cold Blood and.
Then next one, next year, same thing will happen again, maybe this would help to stop it.
Never had.
After Johnson, Texas didn't execute another inmate for eighteen years. Following the Greg versus Georgia decision, Texas faced a potential public relations disaster. As we mentioned last episode, Dallas television reporter Tony Garrett filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district court ranted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned.
But under the Texas Capital Dome, there were was worry about well, so it happened to support for the death penalty if an electrocution was broadcast live. The legislator who wrote Texas new death penalty law to greg decision said he was quote repulsed by the idea of an electrocution
taking place in someone's living room. Lethal injection, as Professor Lane had put it, had visual appeal because it would resemble healthful medical procedures and because quote states have been euthanizing pets with pentode barbital since the nineteen thirties.
Animals are typically put to sleep with a two drug protocol, first a sedative and then the drug that does the deed. But the three drug protocol that would be adopted by most states that allowed capital punishment produced to nightmarish results that were typically invisible to witnesses. States typically allowed family members of the crime victim to attend executions, and the
condemned also got to choose witnesses. In the early days of Texas' reborn death penalty, the state's populist Democratic Attorney General, Jim Mannix, liked to make a show of attending each execution, and though much of the death penalty process has been shrouded in secrecy, such as who is providing the lethal chemicals, states also allowed reporters to attend executions so that they could serve as the eyes and ears of the public.
In his younger days, Dick Revis was the civil rights activist who served time in Alabama jail for his efforts to secure vetting rights for African Americans. Revis became a journalist, and by the early nineteen eighties he was a frequent contributor to Texas Monthly, one of the state's premier investigative publications. In nineteen eighty two, he got the chance to witness an event that had never happened in the United States
or perhaps even the world. The Texas Department of Corrections would soon pioneer the use of lethal injection, although the first person to be put to death in this manner was still unclear.
I recall the meeting with an editor, and they said somehow they told me that there's a lady at the capitol, or a lady and the government in Austin, which is where I was a living the land who was in
charge of scheduling their execute shits. So I called her up and she said, well, she didn't have any album scheduled, but she could give me the names of it was either four or five people who would be first, and one of them who was candy Man, the fellow who poisoned his own child putting poisoned in a in some candy at Halloween.
Revis is referring to Ronald Clark O'Brien, a Houston area optician who fell into debt. He was one hundred thousand dollars deep, so he bought a life insurance policy on his eight year old son and daughter before he prepared five pixie sticks poisoned with potassium cyanide, and on Halloween night in nineteen seventy four, he went trick or treating with his children, a neighbor and that man's two children.
The group went to an abandoned house and knocked on the door, and when no one answered, O'Brien convinced the rest of the group to move on. He caught up with them later and claimed that someone had in fact answered the door, and then he handed out four of the poisoned candies to the children. When the O'Brien's returned home, the killer handed the fifth pixie stick to a neighborhood child.
Later that night, O'Brien told his children that they could enjoy one candy from the evening, and he urged them to choose the pixie sticks. And when his child, Timothy complained the candy tasted bitter, O'Brien gave him kool aid to wash down the poison. Timothy started vomiting and died on the way to the hospital.
None of the other children tried the poison candy.
That night.
O'Brien claimed that a malevolent stranger had poisoned the candy, and he sang at his son's funeral. His story fell apart, however, when the police discovered the life insurance policies, when O'Brien was unable to identify the house where he had been supposedly handed the pixie sticks, and when the cops found out that O'Brien had purchased cyanide from a chemical store in Houston. A jury sends him to death on June third,
nineteen seventy five. The murder created a last day national legacy, sparking paranoia about the safety of trick or treating.
State of Texas knew that executing O'Brien would be politically popular and would probably boost support for the death penalty. Not knowing which resident of Texas's death row would be strapped to the gurney first, REVUS ended up interviewing all but one inmate on the list he had been given. The appeals process, however, is unpredictable, and a fort Worth man known for most of his life as Charlie Brooks, would end up winning the dubious honor of being the
first to be put to death by lethal injection. He was convicted for the fatal shooting of a twenty six year old mechanic, David Gregory, during a nineteen seventy six robbery.
By the time REVS interviewed him, Brooks had converted to Islam and taken the name Sharif Achmad abdul Rahem.
That is the name we.
Will use referring to him for the rest of the episode. Abdul Raheem had committed the robbery with another man, Wouldy lords He posed to someone wanting to buy a used car and asked to take a test strive. Gregory agreed to ride with him. Abdul Rahem picked up Lordes. The pair through Gregory in a car trunk, drove him to a ramshackle motel, tied him to a chair, and taped his mouth shut. Abdul Raheem and Lordis accused each other of firing the fatal shot. No weapon was ever found.
Lordis eventually received the death penalty, but after that was overturned, he reached an agreement with prosecutors and received a forty year sentence. He would end up serving only eleven. The disparity in sentencing is one of the defining features of how capital punishment is carried out, even after greg versus Georgia had supposedly addressed that issue. Shortly before his execution, Abdul Raheem insisted on his innocence, but according to Revis,
the condemned man was lying. Revs described to us his relationship with Abdul Raheem aka Charlie Brooks.
Charlie was very alert a test on his fate engaged.
It was not moping around sad. He had a sense of humor. He told me in the first interview I had with him that he was innocent and that this was racial discrimination, that they executed more blacks than whites. And I told him, oh, what you want is for them to excuse more white people, huh. And that stunned me because I think no one had ever said that to him. But that would do away with racial discrimination. And there's lots of white people need executed too. It
was my way of thinking. And he didn't get mad at me or anything. He kind of laughed at it himself. After he paused to understand the question. Then he kind of laughed at it himself. But I would say he was even until until they're getting strapped down. He was in control all of his own body. His mind was in great shape. He lied to me about about whether or not he was innocent.
Brooks told Revis that although the gun went off, you didn't pull the trigger.
It was an accident.
At some point I got him to say that all the gun went off, and I went and pulled the transcript of his criminal trial. The gun was a revolver, not an automatic. Revolvers don't go off to just that terry. I even took what I had and banged it on the table while it was loaded and all and nothing happened. Revolvers don't go off until they'd been cocked.
Unless they've been cocked, they can't go off.
We'll return to the story of the world's first execution by lethal injection and conceptive way it was used to win public support for capital punishment. After this lovely odbreak.
There was a little bit of last Spina drama. As zero hour for the execution of Charlie Brooks aka abdul Rahim approached. The Serme Court rejected his appeal for the last time. Shortly before the execution was scheduled began. Jack Strickland, the prosecutor in Abdul Raheem's murder trial, had second thoughts about the differences between the condemned man sentence and that of his accomplice. Strickland testified on abdul Rahim's behalf, but
to no avail. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said the defense team had presented no new information that would justify a stay of execution. Just after midnight, State Attorney General Mark White called officials in Huntsville and told them that the historic execution could begin.
From nineteen eighty two, the year of Abdulheim's execution, until twenty eleven. Texas allowed prisoners facing executions a choice of a last meal of their choosing. Abdurhem's request, however, was rejected.
He told me that for his last meal he wanted a five shrimp and bushes, and he said he had told the authorities that that's what he wanted for his last meal. When I got down there, I was told that there was no shellfish in the prison system's kitchens and Charlie had to pick. He finally picked steak in
beach cobbler. But I felt bad about that because the prison people knew that they could go to the grocery store and buy whatever Charlie wanted, and they didn't do it, and it was sort of I thought it was an indignant they inflicted on it. So when I went down for the execution, I went down in the afternoon execution was that knot I went out night fish just I need to say, I don't know.
Because of the situaship.
Texas would end this final meal for prisoners on death row in twenty eleven. That's because of Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was one of three white supremacists who chained an African American man, James Bird, to the back of a car in Jasper, Texas, and dragged him to death on June seventh, nineteen ninety eight. As a last act of
bitter defiance. On the date of Brewer's execution September twenty first, twenty eleven, Brewer ordered a last meal that included two chicken fried steaks, a triple meat bacon, cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fijidas, a meat lover's pizza, a pine of ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crust peanuts. When he received all the food, he refused to.
Touch a bite.
State Senator John Whitmyer complained bitterly at the waist and expense lavished on such an infamous killer, and prison officials immediately changed the policy. Today, those facing execution are now only fed the same meal other prisoners receive that day.
Revis believes that the process of being strapped down to a hospital like gurney is humiliating to those being executed.
Men die with more dignity.
When they're on their feet, for example, as walking to a scaffold.
Would they still feel in control of their lives.
The hardest thing about lethal injections is that they strap you down where you can't move, and you're sitting there. Absolutely helped, helpless till the drug strike effect.
Revers described the atmosphere in the death chamber as Abdul Raheem was executed as tense and quiet. A prison girlfriend, as Revers describes her, Vanessa Sap, was present, as were numerous officials.
First of all, the room it's too small.
My recollection is there was a circular self of chairs threading out ten feet twenty feet in a curve. It may not it may have been a corner, but it was barely room to hold the law man who wanted to witness the execution, and Vanesa Sap and three reporters. His wife was not present. She didn't want to be and she didn't want it's to see it. As for the audience reaction, I don't recall that there was anything dramatic. Now I seem more routine.
Inspired by the story of Carol Chessman, the author and rapist executed in the gas chamber in nineteen sixty who worked out a signal he could send to reporters if he was suffering during execution. Revis and Abdul Raheem worked out a similar arrangement. If Abdul Raheem was suffering as he was dying, he would shake his head. Revis would later regret making that arrangement.
I interviewed them before the execution, and when we came up with an idea. Unfortunately, it was mine that if he felt pain while he was dyned, that he should shake his head. So I decide, and I say, it's unfortunate because and as things were, we were unable to I was unable to determine as if he was given me that signal.
Jurevis did. Appeared that Abdul Raheem had simply drifted off to sleep.
He seemed to die peacefully.
I had to put down a dog only a couple of years ago, or have the dog put down, and I was with him while that happened, and I couldn't. How do you say after seeing those two things, I said, I wish I.
Could die that way.
And yeah, there was no evidence with my dog, for example, that there was any pain. It was like, I put him to sleep, and I think that's what they did with Charlie, but it would take a doctor to know.
Of course.
Abdul Raheem's death was the first of its kind. As we mentioned last time, the three drug protocol that was used by most states over the last three decades was concocted out of thin air by someone no expertise on the effect of these drugs together on the human body. Abdul Raheem's execution was a medical experiment conducted with no
prior research. Professor Lane said that since abdul Rahem's execution, doctors have had a chance to perform autopsies on those executed by lethal injection, and witnesses have heard the cries of those who were able to speak while dying on the gurney.
You know, the state expert to saying, oh, this first drug, you're going to be ninety nine point ninety nine nine percent of the public would be you know, out and dead within a minute. You don't even have to worry about those other super tortuous drugs. And it's like, yeah, that's not what was happening. They said they would stop
breathing within a minute. And there was some pretty prominent litigation, the Barrells case out in California, where they looked at the executions by lethal injection and said over half of them they actually did not stop breathing within a minute. In fact, it was eight and ninetes and it did
not kill them within two minutes of injecting. That third drug, which is called potassium chloride, but it's referred to as liquid fire, and it chemically burns the thing as it races to the heart where it induces a cardiac arrest. So they're like, you know, the experts like, oh, you know that it's going to bring death in two minutes. That didn't happen, Like none of this was happening as the state and the state's experts were so confidently just saying.
And it turns out, you know, no one had ever studied these drugs in these amounts, nobody had ever injected these drugs in these amounts into people. This is not what was used. I mean that's interesting too, Like this is not the drug that was used to use the nze pets. This is not the drug that was used
for physitionists as a suicide. So it's like three totally different drugs, and you know, and not only has nobody studied or nobody knew how they would work, but nobody could have predicted how they would have worked together.
As discussed in our last episode, the lethal injection that killed Abdul Raheem included three drugs sodium theopental, the heavy sedative pan coronium bromide meant to suffocate the prisoner, and potassium chloride meant to trigger a cardiac arrest. As Professor Laine wrote in her book Secrets of the Killing State, because of one of the drugs used in three drug protocol,
the drugs work poorly when combined. Quote, the pancoreum bromide couples the inability to breathe with the inability to struggle. They cannot fight or scream or even rive in pain, but all would seem calm on the surface. Texas's experiment in lethal injection was a political success for a while. The novelty of the revived death penalty brought back memories to some public hangings. Students from nearby sam Houston State University would show up and hold drunken parties outside the
prison in Huntsville on the night of executions. Cheering loudly enough that they could be heard inside the death chamber. The night that Ronald Clark O'Brien, the infamous candy man who killed his son for insurance money, died, a crowd of about three hundred celebrated outside, some yelling trick or treat at the scheduled time of the execution and pelting
anti death penalty protesters with candy. A huge cheer erupted when the officials of the Walls Unit left, signaling that O'Brien had died a local bar through a Halloween party. Texas politicians made support for the death penalty central to their campaigns in this era. In the nineteen ninety Democratic Party gubernatorial primary, former Texas Governor Mark White faced off against the state Attorney General, Jim Maddox and the eventual winner,
State Treasurer Ann Richards. White and Maddox ran almost identical campaign ads, both walking past larger than lifemk shots of murderers who were executed under their watch and claiming credit for meeting out justice. Consider this ad for White.
These hardened criminals will never again murder, ripe or deal drugs. As Governor I made sure they received the ultimate punishment death, and Texas is a cipher place for it. But tough talk isn't enough. The criminals know how to tangle up the courts and delay executions. To bring them to justice takes strength and dedication, because if the governor flinches, they win. Only a governor can make executions happen. I did, and I will.
The popularity of the death penalty was sealed for decades. Starting with Abdul Raheem, Texas has led the United States in state killing. As of September twenty seventh, Texas had carried out five hundred and ninety six executions, more than thirty six percent of all of the executions that have unfolded since the United States Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in this country in nineteen seventy six. More than forty percent of those executed in Texas since
nineteen eighty two have been African American. Almost thirty percent had been Mexican American. In twenty twenty four, Texas executed six people, only one was white. Meanwhile, Texas put to death sixty three prisoners who committed their crimes before they reached the age of twenty one. According to the Texas
Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Since nineteen seventy three, eighteen people sent to Texas death Row were later exonerated, out of about two hundred nationally, and the group argues that there is strong evidence that at least six put to death in Huntsville were actually innocent.
Professor Lane argues that not only does death by lethal injection violate the Eighth Amendments ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but that most defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford adequate legal counsel, and that an alarming number those sent to death row and in some cases executed, have been innocent.
Two hundred people have been exonerated, it from death row, two hundred And when you put that next to the sixteen hundred executions that we've had in the modern era, what we really have is for every eight executions, there's one exoneration. That is a terrible, terrible number. Right, For every eight times we kill someone, we all most killed
the wrong person. And then there was this National Academy of Sciences report that came out, this is the Gross Report, Seminal Gross, and they said, here's a conservative estimate, four point one percent of all people on death row today are factually innocent four point one percent. That's one in twenty five.
According to the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty. As of twenty fourteen, the total legal cost of executing a prisoner was nearly four million dollars, as opposed to the one point three million spent to keep someone in prison for life. Lane argues that morality aside capital punishment is
catastrophically expensive. Imposing sentences of life without parle, or what criminal justice experts call l WOP, would not only eliminate the risk of making an irreversible mistake by putting an innocent person to death, but also save taxpayers money.
As an example, if here's Florida, fifty one million dollars fifty one million, that is what Florida spends every year to maintain the death penalty, over and above what it would cost to punish all first degree murderers with l WOP. And if you look at the costs that Florida spent and then look at the executions that they had, how
much did it cost per execution? You know, to maintain this system, and then of course the product of it executions, what you're getting out of it per execution, twenty four million, twenty four million dollars per execution, you know. And I'm a former prosecutor, and I just have to say, what could you do with twenty four million dollars? You know, I'd take eight million and I'd put it into victim services.
Now we're getting into the death penalty more broadly. But one of the things I've found as I'm on this book tour and on the road, I'm talking to survivors their family members have been slain. And one, a woman in Tennessee, is particularly She's coming to mind right now, and she said, listen, when my son was murdered, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I was afraid I was going to lose my job. I was afraid I was going to lose my house. I needed therapy.
I needed services. I needed child care to help I couldn't do that. My kids needed therapy. We had all of these needs. And the State of Tennessee said, you know, Department of Mental Health said we don't have that money. Sorry, you know, and so she said, we're spending it all and Zago. What she said is it's selfish. You're spending millions upon millions upon millions on death sentences, and you know, on the death penalty when it could actually go to the people who need it.
Regardless of the financial costs. Death by lethal injection has become so commonplace that executions really catch public attention. Nationally, one than three hundred and seventy seven people have been put to death by some form of lethal injection since nineteen eighty two. Those executed suffered not only because of the chemicals used, but because, as was predicted in eighteen ninety, medical professionals have refused to participate because of ethical rules
prohibiting the harm of patients. Doctors and nurses and paramedics generally refuse to administer the lethal cocktails used in death chambers. That task generally falls to seriously undertrained prison personnel who are asked to secure an IV line for condemned prisoners who, often because of eight age, history of drug abuse, or other health problems, have veins that are difficult to access.
Heavily muscled prisoners, those who are morbidly obese, and those with dark skin can also present challenges for the amateur phlebotomists trying to set up an execution.
Prisons sometimes lacked the right equipment, such as the correct sized syringes or proper tubing. Lethal injection drugs are pre made and have to be mixed by personnel not properly trained in chemistry, which results in errors in dosing. Often, people with any kind of medical competence who participate in executions are the ones with the shadiest ethical records. Professor Lane came across one case in which the State of Missouri relied on a doctor who ignored ethical guidelines and
participated in the capital punishment process. He was incorrectly mixing the chemicals so that the prisoners were only receiving half the dose of the anesthesia meant to reduce the pain, and condemned as required by law. Doctor Lane shared the horrifying discoveries lawyers condemned prisoners made about that particular doctor.
They looked, you know, at the protocol that was litigated and authorized by a federal court, and it was five grams of this particular drug. And they looked at the execution logs of the last several and states we're using two point five, and so you know, they filed suit. That's half the anesthetic, you know, and the state, you know, wrote back and said, we are not using half the anesthetic. It must be the pharmacy logs that are wrong. We're going to track that down and figure out why they
are wrong. But we rest assure you we are not violating the protocol. We're doing the amount that was legally authorized. Well, they have to come back the next day and say, oh, actually the logs were right. We were wrong. We were injecting half of the amount. And so the court gives the lawyers for the condemned prisoners a limited deposition to question this doctor behind a veil, like they didn't know who he was, but to question them under oath, and
you know, they're like, why are you using half? And he said, well, I'm dyslexic, and so sometimes that make mistakes. And yet Missouri stuck with them and said, no, we have every confidence in him. They lose that the trial court, the federal court says, this guy can't be anywhere near Look the whole thing, to the extent it's humane, requires you to meticulously measure and mix chemicals in liquids, and
so you can't have someone who just makes mistakes. And then in the meantime, investigative journalists, which you know I have to take my hat off. I tip my hat to investigative journalists. But they were like, gee, who is this, you know, dyslexic doctor, and they find out his identity. You know, he admits it's him. He had over twenty malpractice suits, he had had his hospital privileges revoked at two hospitals. He had been censured by the medical board.
So you know, you're asking someone to do something, to participate in something that is fundamentally against your reason for being as a doctor. And you know, from time to time they find people, but I think they're outliers. What I have found is they are outliers not only on ethics, but in other ways too.
Experts on capital punishment like Lane aren't comfortable with describing executions that go off script as quote botched, even if it's a commonly used term. No matter how the execution proceeds, the end result is the same, the inmate is dead. However, there is no question that killing people by lethal injection is so complicated and requires so much skill on the part of the executioners that the process is typically far
more agon than death penalty advocates tell the public. According to the Anti Capital Punishment Organization the Death Penalty Information Center. Out of nineteen executions in twenty twenty two, seven were botched, meaning that the death took far longer than expected that prison personnel had to jab the condemned people multiple times to get an IV line working or worse.
When Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett on April twenty nine to twenty fourteen, the state used an untested combination of three drugs. The size of the syringes and the amount of drugs used were wrong. Prison personnel made repeated mistakes as they tried to insert the needle for the IV. Even though the American Medical Association prohibits its members from participating in executions. A doctor was on hand for the lock of fiasco. The physician tried but failed to insert an IV into
the jugular vein in Lockett's neck. The doctor then performed a surgical procedure called a cutdown, which is a deep surgical incision to the skin, muscle, and fat performed to expose a central vein under Lockett's clavicle. Procedure was bloody and also failed, and the execution then tried and failed to access a vein through Lockett's feet. Eventually, they tried to insert an IV through the femoral vein in the upper thigh, a procedure only the most skilled surgeon and
SAD mastered. Unfortunately, the available needle was the wrong length for it to work properly. Lockett reportedly was stoic throughout this repeated assault on his body. After an hour of this torture had passed, the execution team was finally able to inject the deadly drugs. Lockett groaned, convulsed, and at one point was asked, are you unconscious? According to witnesses, Lockett opened his eyes and said no, I am not.
After appearing to fall asleep, he began to moan, arched his back, and kicked a foot before he strained against the straps holding him against the gurney, and he tried to get up. Lockett mumbled something is wrong, oh man, and this shit is fucking up my mind, and Warden ordered the blinds closed as the execution team scrambled. Swelling had developed with the ivy had been inserted and was blocking the flow of the third and final lethal drug.
The doctor was summoned to insert a needle and Lockett's other femeral vein, but Lockett was bleeding heavily and the blood backed up into the ivy line. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallon had already decided to halt the execution, but by this point Lockett's heart had irreversibly slowed down. He subsequently died of heart failure. The entire execution from the first attempt to stick an ivy in his veins to his death less than one hour and forty seven minutes. That
was one of the longest executions in American history. The state of Oklahoma later falsely claimed that Lockett had been unconscious the entire time. In twenty twenty two, another so called botched lethal injection, that of Joe Nathan James and Alabama, lasted three hours. In Ohio and elsewhere, execution had to be abandoned when the prison staff couldn't get an iv going.
As we mentioned in the first episode, Reverend Jeff Hood is a priest under the old Catholic Right, who, by the time we interviewed, had accompanied ten men during their executions. He said that even the most professional execution is brutal, but that some states, because of a regrettable amount of practice, are much better at killing than others.
I do think that some states know what they're doing more than others, and I think that Texas knows what they're doing. You don't see botched, are delayed or mishandled executions in Texas. They go very quickly. And when you talk to these guys, that's what they say. They would prefer. If you're going to be executed, you would want to go as.
Quickly as possible. Yes, there are.
Some executions that look horrific. There are other executions that don't go according to plan but don't get a lot of attention. But they're all horrible, and I think they all have to be talked about as such.
Whether it's because of the awareness of the messy and undeniably painful executions like those of Lockett and James, the more than two hundred death row exonerations achieved by groups like the Innocence Project, the growing skepticism of law enforcement amongst young people, are the greater consciousness of how racism warps the entire criminal justicism. There's no question the death penalty is the least popular it has been in the
past hundred years. Nor is their doubt that the rate of executions in the United States has dropped well below its peak during the height of the war and crime under the Clinton administration, when in nineteen ninety nine, three hundred and fifteen death sentences were handed down, or in nineteen ninety six, when ninety eight prisoners were executed.
In any case, deaths like Lockett's are bad for business for the pharmaceutical companies who have produced the drug used in lethal injections. In the next and final episode of this three part series on the shady business of lethal injection, we'll talk about how some states like Texas have been forced to turn to the black market or the so called gray market to buy lethal drugs, as pharmaceutical companies have restricted the purchase of those drugs for that purpose.
We also talked to Jeff Hood about how the difficulty in obtaining those drugs has led states like Alabama to turn to one of the most gruesome forms of execution yet. And we'll also hear the story of Race Buyan, a victim of a hate crime who fought to prevent the execution of his white supremacist attacker. And finally, we'll explore whether the death penalty might be on its last legs in the United States. I'm Stephen Monchelly for it could happen here, and so next.
Time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
A warning, this episode included it's violent content, which some listeners might find disturbing.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White and Tropolis, and the co author of longtime journalists Betsy Freeoff the history of eugenics in Texas called Purifying Knife.
And I'm Stephen Broncholi.
I'm an investigative journalist in Dallas who specializes in political extremism and the far right. And I report for places like the Texas Observer, the Barbed Wire and more.
Like millions across the United States. Mark Anthony Strohman was startled by the events then folded on the terrible morning of September eleventh, two thousand and one. The disbelief that greeted that terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon can be heard on the first announcement of the tragedy on a Dallas talk radio station WBAP.
All right, thank you our seven fifty one, nine minutes before eight o'clock, a Dues talk a TWENTYBA here on the here on the Tuesday morning, and the reason I am hesitating here with there's a word of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, and the World Trade of plane actually crashing and to the side of the World Trade Center. We're gonna have details for you on that form ABCDWS in just a couple of moments.
Strowman later wrote that September eleventh filled him with a great sense of rage, hatred, loss, bitterness, and utter degradation. He blamed Arabs and Muslims as a group for the events that day and wanted to quote those Arabs to feel the same sense of insecurity about their immediate surroundings. I wanted to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil.
Stroman Dallas resident, had already served two prison terms, during which he had joined the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang. Addicted to math and sporting neo Nazi tattoos, he began cruising Dallas in his nineteen seventy two ship Suban hunting for quote unquote Arabs. As he later admitted, he wasn't entirely sure what an Arab looked like, but Nevertheless, he stalked people with quote shawls on their faces.
Stroman launched his crusade by running cars into ditches if he suspected the vehicles were driven by Muslims. He escalated his campaign of terror. On September seventeenth, two thousand and one, he fatally shot Wakar Hassan, a forty six year old Pakistani immigrant, as the clerk grilled to Hamburger and Mom's Grocery in Dallas. A few days later, Stroman found his next victim, a farmer pilot for Bangladesh's Air Force named
Race Bouyan. Mister Bouyan, who has experienced robberies prior to his encounter with Stroman, told us what happened that day.
Sent the Maturity First, two thousand and one to us friday eron Juen, a customer walked in wearing bandana, sunglasses, baseball cap and holding a double barrel a sort of double barrel's shotgun on his right side. And from the previous rubbery experience, I thought it would be on the robbery, so I put all the money on the counter and offered him the cash as soon as he walked in, and I said, sir, here is all the money, take it,
but please do not shoot me. Basically, I begged for my life and his gaze remained fixed, and then he mumbled a question, where are you from. Before I could say anything more than excuse me, he pulled the trigger from point blankrent. I felt it first, like a million bees were singing my friends. And I looked down and saw blood pouring like an open facet from the right set of my head, and I remember a screw mom
to book my voice. And I looked down some block pouring like an open bosset from the right set of my head, and then I looked left. I saw the gunman still standing, pointing that on director of phrase, and I realized that if I did not, you know, do something to show that I'm dying, he might shoot be again. So I fell to the floor and he finally left a.
Few seconds beyond.
Survived the attack, but he was blinded in his right eye. He would endure not only multiple painful surgeries, but also the unique financial horrors of the American health care system. Meanwhile, Stroman was not done terrorizing the Dallas area Muslim community.
On October fourth, the shooting spree came to an end when the white supremacist pulled up to a shell station in Mesquite at about six forty five in the morning and ordered the clerk, forty nine year old Vasa Dev Patel, a Hindu immigrant from India, to hand over all the money from the cash register. Patel reached under the counter for a twenty two caliber pistol, and seeing the gun, Stroman fired his weapon. The bullet struck Patel in his
chest and killed him. A security camera captured the scene, and Dallas police arrested Stroman the next day.
At Stroman's home, investigators found a semi automatic rifle, an Uzi knockoff, a forty four magnum, and a forty five cult They also found evidence that Stroman planted to attack a mosque in a nearby suburb. Jury found Strouman guilty of capital murder in April fifth, two thousand and two, and sends him to die by lethal injection. The story then took an unexpected turn. During a two thousand and nine pilgrimage to Mecca, Bujan said he realized that simply
forgiving his assailant would not be enough. He believed he had a moral obligation to do all they could to prevent Stroman's death, Buyan filed a lawsuit attempting to halt Strouman's ey execution. Despite of Bouyon's best effort, the suit was rejected by state and federal courts, and Stroman died by lethal injection July twenty, twenty eleven.
Beyond's campaign of mercy, however, made a major impact on capital punishment in the United States. He effectively shamed European drug companies, debanning the use of the products used in the lethal injection that killed Stroman. In turn, some states, like Texas, decided to start buying lethal drugs illegally. In this final episode on the history of the lethal injection in the United States, Beyond will tell us about his
campaign against capital punishment and its impact. Will also speak to a priest, the Reverend Jeff Hood, who has accompanied, by the time of this interview, ten men to their executions. He will also tell us why he has devoted himself to showing love to people so despised, and also address the future of the death penalty in the United States.
After being blinded in a hate crime race, Beyond struggles through numerous traumas. He told us that after getting shot at the convenience story where he worked. He ran to a barber shop next door. There he had the first sight of his injuries.
I caught myself in the mirror, and the image reflected back was like something off of a horror movie. And on my way to the hospital, I felt my eyes were closing. I felt that my time was up. And you know, while I was reciting from the Holy Koran and asking God for mercy and forgiveness and giving you a second chance, I also begged him to, you know, to send my life, to give me a chance to live. And I promised God that if you give me a chance to live, I would help others.
In the emergency room, doctors put Beyond on life support for time. His condition was touch and go. Beyond, a young immigrant living on his salary as a convenience store clerk, said that when he next opened his eyes and doctors told him he had survived, he cried tears of joy.
So my eyes were full of tears, not from the pain, but from the joy of it still being alive, but then joining the last long because the hospital where I was taken was private and expensive, and I had no health insurance at the time. So they discharged me with a couple of hours and told me to arrange follow up medical treatments on my own. So, you know, the first part of my American nightmare was being shot in the face after nine to eleven, and second part began
when I was kicked up from the hospital. So as a result of this shooting, I you know, underwent several eye surgeries and putting meately. Though I lost the mission in one eye, I still carry more than three dozen shut palats on my face. And my father suffered a stroke when he heard what about what happened to me, But luckily he's a bide. I lost my fiance but gained more than sixty thousand dollars in medical bills.
As Strumman languished on Texas death Row, Buyan began picking up the pieces.
I moved on rebuilding my life. I worked in restaurant and went back to school, and slowly I was, you know, planning the letter and getting better in my own you know, life journey. And in two thousand and nine I went the Macta for pilgrimage my mother and it wasn't Mecca. I deeply realized that though I forgave my attack on markstrument it was not an hour. I felt that, you know, by executing Mark, we would simply lose a human life with a dealing with.
The hood cause.
I strongly believed that if he was giving a chance, he might be able to become a better human being. And I began to see him as a human being like me, not just simply a killer. I saw him as a victim too, and I befelt for him. And I remember my promise on my deathdad that if I did a chance to live, I would help others. And I felt that I need to start with him first to get my cromnies. So I've returned from Mecca with
a very changed heart. We get clarity, and then you found partners, and I launched a campaign to try and save my attack. That's life from Texas Detro.
We'll pick up the story of Beyon's campaign to spare Stroman's life and how his efforts changed the history of the American death penalty.
After a word from our.
Sponsors, Doctor Rick Halprin began teaching human rights courses at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in nineteen ninety, where he now heads one of only nine human rights programs at the universities in the country. He has also chaired Amnesty International's Board of Directors three times, and since nineteen seventy two has been an anti death penalty activist. Halbert became famous on Texas death Row as a result of his efforts and was informed of his July twentieth, twenty eleven
execution date. The condemned man wrote a letter to Halperin asking for help in making final arrangements, such as locating an affordable undertaker.
By coincidence, shortly after Stroman reached out to Halperin, the professor received a surprise visitor to his office. The stranger was Stroman's victim, Race bu yan Yan, who had recently become an American citistant, hoped Halperin could help him find a creative and effective way to fulfill the promise he had made to God when he thought he was dying.
He began his campaign to save Stroman's life. U Yan, Halpern, and another human rights activist, Hati Juwad, carried their efforts from Dallas to the state capitol in Austin and as far as the European Parliament.
A weak point in the American death penalty machinery was its reliance on companies that provided the lethal injection chemicals. In twenty eleven, Italy, an anti death penalty nation, successfully pressured the Illinois company Hospira to stop selling sodium theopental, the muscle relaxant used in the three drug lethal injection
protocol used in Texas since the early nineteen eighties. That same year, Reprieve, a British human rights nonprofit, arranged for Beyond to travel to Europe to meet face to face with executives at the corporate headquarters of the Danish pharmaceutical
company Lundbeck. Aware that the meeting would put them in the international spotlight, Lundbeck three days prior, announced that they would stop shipping the sedative nembitol, which was being used as a substitute for sodium theopenthal to American prison systems. Beyond described his conversation with the Lumbeck company an interview with US the.
One hour of great conversation. They agreed to write a letter to the governor of Kixas asking him not to use their product to kill him and being.
The state of Texas, however, was unwilling to grant a crime victim as fervent wish. Even though Texas politicians repeatedly claimed they execute murderers to bring the victims closure, Bouyon said he was denied this by the Texas Border Paroles and Pardons and then Governor Rick Perry.
I reached out to the prison system and UH asking for a mediation dialogue, but unfortunately, you know, that turned down my request multiple times, and the reason they showed was it would really victimize me. So basically a mediation dialogue. I thought it would be helpful for me to find closure, to find a lot of answers, but it was for them it to be, you know, a revictimization process for me.
So they they rejected my request to multiple times, and it really made me sad that when they needed me to testify in the core the conviction to get the death penalty, I was a good victim, but then when I tried to exercise my right as a victim to have a mediation dialog, love, I became a bad victim because I asked when my rights.
In his final hour, Strowman spoke directly to his surviving victim.
I had the opportunity to talk to him of the phone before he was executed, and it was the day of his execution where he put my name as one of the people he would be able to talk. So I was lucky enough to talk to him. And when he came on the phone, I was about to, you know, go to the court to give a last fight to, you know, stead the execution. So I was thinking, what would I say to a human being who is about
to be executed in a couple of hours. And I'm going to, you know, go to a court to give a you know, last fight to to you know, see if he could say him. So I was very emotional when he came on the phone. I told him that Mark, you know for sure that I never hated you. I forgave you and I'm doing my best to you know, save your life, you know, through this court hearing. And he said that the ways I never expected that from you, and I love you, brother, And that brought tears into
my eyes. That it is the same human being who shocked me for no reasons other than having hated and violence in his horror. And now ten years later he saw me, he could see me as his brother, and he said he loved me. Why he couldn't see me as his brother ten years ago, and why he could he say the same thing ten years ago. So, you know, at least it helped me to find closer a little bit.
It helped me to move forward. At least I had the chance to talk to my attacker and then gave me a lot of hope that people can change.
The execution itself, however, left Beyond cold.
Well definitely in this execution that was not of the victims, because the victims and the victims' family members requested and also fought for clemency. You know, we went ahead and requested the Governor of Texas, the Board of Burdens and Pearls that did not execute him in all names in a show.
Marcie Mark Strowman died as scheduled on July twentieth, twenty eleven, and though Beyond and Halprint failed to stop it, they had helped start an international movement to thwart the ability of states to carry out such lethal injections, as Professor Colorine Elaine revealed in her book Secrets of the Killing State. After Haspira stopped producing sodium theopental, the vacuum was filled by a fly by night company called Dream Pharma. The
drug distributor. Quote turned out to be two desks at a filing cabinet hidden in the back of a London driving school.
As Lane wrote, Once.
This operation was exposed, Great Britain in sodium theopental sales to the United States.
By December twenty eleven, the entire European Union had tighten export controls on any chemicals that could potentially be used in executions. The new expanded EU ban made life much more difficult for would be executioners in the United States. In twenty twelve, when the state of Missouri announced it would use the drug pro poofoal as an anesthetic in its executions, the EU said it would cut off exports of that drug, which is used for surgeries in the
United States about fifty million times a year. Combined, these moves created a lethal injection drug shortage that changed how executions took place.
In twenty twelve, Texas moved then to a single drug protocol, using pennel barbitol alone rather than the old three drug cocktail made out of thin air by Oklahoma corner Stephen Coleman. Back in the nineteen seventies, autopsies revealed that prisoners executed with this single drug protocol die from pullman edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid. Medical experts believe prisoners suffer intense chest pain as they suffocate, even
if they appear fully unconscious. Execution witnesses also say they have seen prisoners eyes pop open, their eyes fill with tears, have seen them pull against restraints, and have heard them grown and class their jaws during such executions.
As the drugs needed to carry out lethal injections become harder to find, states have to rely on shady tactics so they can keep on killing. Officials have lied to pharmaceutical companies that are buying drugs to provide medical care for prisoners that they later use in the death chamber.
Death penalty. States have violated federal laws. They have illegally swapped these drugs across state line, or they bought them on the black market or to legally marginal so called gray market, Professor Lane describes as shading lengths the state of Ohio went to in order to buy these drugs.
The state took fifteen thousand dollars in cash in a suitcase. I mean, you can't make this stuff up, you know, And chartered a private plane to fly over to Washington where they did an under the table deal for drugs with this little pharmacy. You know you need a prescription for these drugs, and so here's a pharmacy that, for fifteen thousand dollars is willing to sell drugs under the table and allegedly in a Walmart parking lot.
To cope with the shrinking supply, states have made illegal purchases overseas. Like other states, Texas has tried to circumvent tightening restrictions by purchasing death penalty supplies from loosely regulated compounding pharmacies, and some of them have been here in
the States. In twenty eighteen, it was revealed that Texas repeatedly bought drugs from the Green Park Compounding Pharmacy in Houston, which is a company that had been fined forty eight times by federal regulators for safety violations, including providing the wrong medication to children who were subsequently hospitalized. The number of agonizingly prolonged executions in Texas suggest that the drugs the state buys are often out of date or impure.
Finding out where the lethal drugs are coming from is becoming increasingly difficult. A number of states have passed laws may it illegal to report on who carries out the execution, what companies supply the drugs, or how these drugs were purchased. In any case, the difficulty in getting execution drugs has led to a decline the death penalty across the nation. At the time of the landmark nineteen seventy two Firman versus Georgia case that temporarily halted executions in the United States,
forty states had the death penalty. Currently only twenty seven do. In twenty twenty four, four states alone, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas carried out seventy six percent of the executions that unfolded in the United States.
Some of the remaining states with the death penalty on the books have responded to the shortage of lethal drugs by authorizing the use of the firing squad and killing prisoners with nitrogen gas epoxia, which suffocates them by forcing them to breathe pure nitrogen. After another outbreak, you'll hear from a priest who has witnessed executions in ten different states, including death by nitrous epoxia, and will end this three part series by discussing the future of the death penalty.
Born in the South Atlanta neighborhood in Georgia, Jeff Hood grew up in a religiously conservative home and was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister when he was only twenty two. His worldview, however, was shaken when he attended to his religious mentor, who was dying of lung cancer. Before he passed away, the seventy five year old confessed to the
Hood quote, I'm gay and I've always been. Hood described this moment as earth shattering, and his religious views transformed dramatically from what he later called his backwards thinking.
When Hood moved to Dallas in the early twenty tens, he became well known in his new home as he fought to make local churches more inclusive of the LGBTQ plus community, and he got arrested along with other clergy outside of the White House in twenty fourteen when he was protesting President Barack Obama's aggressive campaign to deport migrants.
On July seventh and twenty sixteen, Hood led a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas, during which a sniper opened fire and targeted police officers.
Micah X. Johnson, an IRAQ war veteran, was enraged by the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Filando Castile in Minnesota. So Johnson shot and killed five police officers, the deadliest incident for law enforcement since September eleventh, two thousand and one. Police killed Johnson that evening by detonating a bomb carried by a robot to the shooter's hide out in a parking garage, marking the first execution by
robot in American history. Reverend Hood was traumatized not only by the sniper attack, but also when he got scapegoaded for the deaths that day. Fox News hosts Megan Kelly put a target on Hood's back in the aftermath of the sniper attack.
Jeff Hood, he was one of the organizers of the march, and quickly condemned the shootings.
Today never and are while the streams would we have imagined that five police officers would be dead.
It's form, But critics were quick to point out that we were hearing a very different message from the Reverend just a short time before the shots rang out last night. Here are some of that, But I'm a.
Channel an old preacher that I am my tremendously.
Jail am all right, and I'm gonna say, God damn White America, God.
Damn white America.
What about whom.
Of the bodies a foot and brown people people being flooded in our.
Free Hood agreed to be interviewed by Kelly, but the minister soon realized that Fox viewers blamed him for the officer's death, and they threatened vengeance.
I mean, after Julaw the Seventh Man, there was talk about threats. Didn't PD was having to take the kids to school, and it was. It was absolutely.
Horrible witnessing people die that day, including the sniper Johnson's impromptu execution via remote control robot, deep in Hood's opposition to violence, including state killing. In twenty twenty two, he is ordained again, this time as a priest and was called the Old Catholic Faith, which accepts many of the doctrines and rights of the Roman Catholic Church but rejects the doctrine of people infallibility and authority. Hood began writing to those on death Row and then hockey and praying
with them in person. In twenty twenty two, the United States Supreme court ruled in the Ramirez versus Collier case that condemned prisoners have the right to die in the company of a spiritual advisor who became a companion to the condemned in their last minutes.
I began to have people reaching out during that time, you know, and asking me if I would accompany them to the death chamber. And you know, it's one thing to be willing to have relationships with people who are executed. It's a whole nother thing to be asked to participate in the process. And so since then, I've witnessed been in the chamber with ten different guys. So from January of twenty twenty three to now, I've watched ten different men be executed by the state.
Who attended his first execution when the State of Oklahoma puts Scott Eisenberg to death on January twelfth, twenty twenty three. Twenty years earlier, Eisenberg murdered an elderly couple, including a man he bludgeoned to death.
My first execution was Scott Eisenberg in Oklahoma, and he Scott had a number of things going on, but we were very close. He had a lot of anger issues and I think difficulty controlling his temper and whatnot. And you know, so the reality was I was very frightened before I went in because I thought Scott was just going to go ballistic. And you know, to be in that room with someone that goes ballistic, I mean, it's
it's already traumatic enough. I'm sure you can imagine without you know, something like that, But then again, you couldn't. You can't blame them for wanting to, you know, push back and fight for their lives and whatnot. I found myself shaking, just you know, my hands and my legs, this terror, I mean, just utterly terrified. And then they opened the door and I was led in and I
saw Scott. And it's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there to support life, and yet you know that they're there to take his life. And so I wasn't able. I mean, I knew that there was a window on one side, I wasn't able to see through that window because there was a curtain down. And I began to pray with Scott. Scott had asked me to read a number of scriptures and I did, and I dropped my Bible at one point because I'm
shaking so bad I was having trouble holding it. You know. He notices that I'm shaking, He notices that I'm upset, and he looks at me and tells me everything's gonna be okay. And I'm thinking to myself, no, it's not.
Like, no, it is not.
And I'm thinking, you know, you're gonna die, and I'm going to be scarred for life. Everything is not going to be okay. And I went to the scripture in John chapter eight where Jesus encounters the adulterous woman, and there's that famous line, famous verse, you who are without sin, cast the first stone, and I read that in the chamber, and one of the lighter moments when we were in there was when I read that you who are without
sin cast the first tone. I remember Scott looking up and pointing at the executioners and saying, you know, he's talking to y'all, like this is about y'all.
Pud said that any sense that death by lethal injection is nonviolent is an illusion.
In every lethal injection, I have immediately heard snoring, and what sounds not like you know, snoring from you know that one would have when they sleep or whatever, but more of a gurgling kind of a snoring, and you know it's the body responds in a very panicked fashion, and so it's almost like it's like drowning someone who's completely paralyzed. And I think that that's I think that's
what it's been like every time. I think that there is a level of suffering that is that is hidden, there's a he is in that again that it's made to look like a medical procedure, because it does look like a medical procedure. I think it is a con.
W Hood found the lethal injections traumatizing, but that did not prepare for him for what he witnessed when Alabama began executing prisoners through nitrous hypoxia.
I can tell you that as horrible as a lethal injection is, and yes, it is a con job, I can tell you that I what I saw during that nitrogen execution is indescribable. I can tell you that I think I would rather be burned to death than be executed by nitrogen. I mean it is that bad.
Wod attended the hypoxia suffocation of Kenneth Smith, a contract killer, on January twenty fifth, twenty twenty four, the first such execution in American history. Smith had been sentence to death thirty six years earlier. That said, the horrors for him began. We stepped into the death chamber and saw Smith outfitted with a large masks that would deliver the poison gas. Attending this execution actually put Hood's life in jeopardy.
I can describe it for y'alls listeners. But the mask which I'm holding right here a replica, is basically something that is gas netting in the back and has silicone straps. It's put over the back of someone's head and it is strapped as tight as possible to try to keep it on. And it looks like a firefighter's mask with sort of a plexiglass plate on the front. And then there's a hose that's going from the firefighter's mask with
the plexiglass plate to the nitrogen. And so what is happening is they try to pump as much nitrogen as possible through through this line. The problem is is that these masks don't completely hold the form. I guess it's the best way of saying it in that it's difficult for you to get an air tight seal. So the more oxygen that gets in here, the more it's displacing nitrogen.
And so the more oxygen that's in here, and obviously there's gonna be oxygen too, there's gonna be oxygen in the mass before the thing even starts, is going to create more suffering. It's going to create a longer process.
Good knew that he would be in a chamber in which poison gas would be released, and he felt obligated to tell his children in advance that he could be harmed. They were terrified, of course, but he felt an obligation to provide smith company and compassion as well. Again, we remind listeners that what they are about to hear might be upsetting.
So by the time we get to the point where they turn the nitrogen on, all the witnesses, everybody in the room is like going Nobody knows what's about to happen because it's never been tried before. And so they turn it on and Kenny immediately begins to heave back
and forth and back and forth, over and over. And every time he heaves forward, the back of the mask was strapped to the gurney, so every time he heaves forward, his face is hitting the front of that mask over and over and over and over, and so it's like watching someone get like hit their face against the playglass window, and it's like his nose and his face is flattening every time he does it. And he begins to shake back and forth and back and forth, heaving up and down.
I see spit and saliva and snod and you know, eyewater and all sorts of fluid is coming out of his face, and that fluid begins to build up on the front of the mask and it begins to drizzle like a waterfall.
Smith's convulse was so much force, prison officials worried his mask might come off, interrupting the execution and possibly killing Hood and maybe others and attendance. A window separated Hood from other witnesses in the violence of Smith's death caused the commotion.
The windows are like super thick. I shouldn't have been able to hear anything, but I could hear somebody behind me screaming stop stop stop, stop, please stop stop stop. And it was it was an absolute nightmare. And Kenny did not die for at least twenty two minutes. And it's very possible that he didn't die for a longer period of time, but the state of Alabama declares they say, oh,
you know, he's not breathing, he's dead. Then they'd push everybody out of the room, and then they bring the doctor in after everybody's left, to declare him dead.
Who admits that some of the men he's counseled are capable of unspeakable evil, even after years on death row, but he still recalls each death he's witnessed with pain.
I feel morally compromised, horrified, but I feel cold or pushed to keep going because I think that the more traumatic.
Thing would be to leave these guys alone. Now, in terms of actually seeing it, I think that it's these images don't leave you. There's nightmares. I always say that these guys haunt me. They come night after night. You know, I'll see them at the end of my bed. I mean, I mean, just yeah. So, so trauma is something I've come to know very well.
In twenty nineteen, the United States Supreme Court ruled the prisoners do not have a right to a painless death when a green lighted the execution of Russell Buckloo, who had blood filled tumor and his head, neck and mouth that could have broken up and as he was put to death. The highest court seems to have rendered the Eighth Amendments ban on Cruel and Unusual punishment mood.
Meanwhile, in recent years, it has not only been states that have enforced the death penalty. Between nineteen sixty and twenty nineteen, the federal government carried out only three executions, but in twenty twenty to early twenty twenty one, during the last six months of Donald Trump's first term as president, the federal government executed.
Thirteen men and women.
These included Brandon Bernard, who committed a double murder when he was only eighteen, and another Lisa Montgomery, whose psychologists believed was severely mentally ill and detached from reality at the time that she murdered a pregnant woman and cut the baby from her victim's body in order to raise the child as her own.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, at the end of his presidential term, sought to prevent a similar execution spree. Forty people are on death row, and he commuted the sense of thirty seven of them. The remaining three were Zokhar Zarnev. The twenty thirteen Boston Marathon bomber Dylan Rufe, who massacred nine members of the Mother Emmanuel Ame Church in Charleston, South Carolina, twenty fifteen, and Robert Bowers, who killed eleven at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Back in power, however, Trump is vowed to make the death penalty great again.
Anybody murders something in the capitol, capital punishment, capital capital punishment. If somebody kills somebody in the capitol Washington, DC, We're going to be seeking the death penalty.
And that's a very strong preventative.
Trump's immediate plans aside, the future of the death penalty in the long term is not so certain. According to a twenty twenty four Gallup opinion poll, support for the death penalty has sunk to its lowest level in half a century. Only fifty three percent of Americans favor capital punishment,
but that number skews heavily towards older Americans. More than half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and forty three oppose the death penalty, and almost sixty percent of the so called gen z those born between nineteen ninety seven and twenty twelve are firmly against the death penalty, while Professor Karna Lane believes that even record low support for the death penalty is exaggerated and that support for capital punishment drops even further when other options are provided
to voters.
You know, the President issued this executive order, a day one executive order. Let's go for the death penalty anytime we can. Let's execute everybody. And one of the things to realize is that the death penalty is dying in this country for reasons that an executive order cannot fix. People have less confidence than the death penalty. They don't trust the death penalty, nor should they. Two people have been exonerated from.
Death row and Race Bouyon agrees.
The decline in executions in the United States reflects a broad US shift in how society views get penalty. I mean, more states are repealing it, juries are imposing it less often, and the public support while student inviting has steadily decreased, especially as concerns about wrongful convictions in the racial bias and the high costs of capital punishment came to light.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, hangings were public, but they so often went awry and produced such grizzly scen States smooth as executions inside prison yards and some more humane alternative. That new method, the electric chair, proved horrifying as well, and was deemed unsuitable for general audiences. The Supreme Court imposed a four year pause in the death penalty beginning in nineteen seventy two because of its
random application. In nineteen seventy six, the High Court reauthorized capital punishment. A crisis ensued when a Texas TV reporters sued for the right to televise executions. Horrified at the prospectively condemned, essentially being burned alive in the electric chair in front of a primetime audience. States approved the latest innovation stake killing death by lethal injection, But throughout this
history of execution, insurmountable flaws have remained consistent. The quest for a human way to kill people on an announced schedule has been futile. Each form of the death penalty has been proven to be violent and cost suffering at great expenditure of public money, and plausibly innocent people have
been put to death. As the people in charge of punishment have changed execution methods over the years, they've also tried to prevent public backlash to revolting scenes of suffering, which could create the opposite the capital punishment that they fear. Politicians eager to prove they are tough on crime, have also fought to hide these gruesome spectacles from public view. Nevertheless, Race Bouyon is optimistic that this grim aspect of life in the United States might soon come to an end.
More than two thirds of you know countries have about this death penalty in law or practice, with only a few countries carrying out the vast majority of executions. And I think the future is one where the death penalty continues to strain one life as the values of human rights, dignity, and justice without irreversible punishment again ground.
Until next time. I'm Michael Phillips and.
I'm Stephen Montchelli. Thanks for listening.
Am I introducing the podcast. Welcome to the podcast.
This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder, our weekly news cast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world what it means for you.
I'm Garrison Davis.
Today I'm joined by Mio Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of October thirty. First to November fifth, one of the most exciting weeks in politics.
Yeah, because it's one finite.
If you remember the poem, that's right, and that's not the only exciting thing to happen, but also not the only sad thing to happen this week, because as exciting as election Day was for people in New York, there was like a looming sadness throughout the day because earlier that morning, obviously, Vice President Dick Cheney passed away, and that was rough for many people, not rough for many others, but that certainly was a looming presence over the day.
Does anyone have any words to say on the passing of mister Cheney.
Yeah, I mean, I just want to let everyone in hell know this too shall pass. You know you won't be stuck with him forever. Just try to grin and bear it. I know it's going to be hard for a lot of you, especially Saddam Hussein, but I know you can get past this. You know, he will get reincarnated as a Senate Republican staffer within the next six to eight months, so so you won't have to put up with him long.
I guess this is also just your reminder that it's going to do to practice see full essential rooms of firearms safety at old times.
Don't shoot with Dick Cheney if you see Dick Cheney while you're hunting quail.
Right.
Do the kids even know about this now?
Oh?
The kids know? The kids?
No?
Yeah?
Ok, yeah, yeah, this is.
Cheney law has permeated throughout generations of American call.
Yeah.
When I was a kid, there was like a whole thing where we all fought the song Jamie's Got a Gun was Cheney's got a.
Gun in front of except because it just lined up with everything you knew about the world.
What's funny about it is that my actual thinking on that shooting hasn't changed since I was a Republican kid. Like when I was a young right winger, I thought, Wow, Dick Cheney's so cool. He shot a man and got him to apologize to him, And now, as an adult on the left, I still think that's kind of the coolest thing Dick.
Cheney ever did.
Like it is a head of a feat.
That man apologized for getting in front of his sights. That's amazing.
Now it is.
It is unfortunate that Dick Cheney did not live to see the election of Zormumdani as the mayor of New York City.
Which happened. That would have been funny on Tuesday.
Later that day, Zoran has become the first candidate in New York mayoral history to win over a million votes since nineteen sixty nine. Nice This election itself saw over two million votes. This is a million more votes in the last in New York mayoral election.
Huge turnout.
Currently, as of Wednesday afternoon, Zoran has fifty point four percent of the vote. Former governor and sexual assault enthusiast Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, has forty one point six percent, and the bray wearing Curtisilwa as seven point one. Not a spoiler candidate in many ways, nor would it be correct to say that all of Silver's votes would
have gone to one candidate or another. But even if you do add all of his votes on to disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo's total, Zoran still comes out on top well.
Which was something there was legitimately a lot of question about as to like whether or not will Sila staying in matter right? Uh, And it's it's a really good sign that it didn't.
It did not Slia, So no one really knows how to pronounce the name, including in the city. You hear it different pronunciations with different peop at different times. Sometimes it's slilwa, sometimes it's silwa saliwa.
All I know is he got stabbed on the subway.
Right and shot five times in the back of a cab in the back.
That's right.
How did they fail.
To kill him?
Jesus Christ, it's harder to kill people by shooting them with a handgun.
Then you might think, yeah, apparently hanggum ballistics are just different.
Yes, and he does have seventeen cats.
He ran on Republican and the Protected the Protect Animals Party. You can have some criticism for past ills that that he has contributed to, but he is certainly mixed up for that in some way for being a fascinating character.
He's a very New York kind of figure.
Ed.
He was the only major all candidate to call and congratulate Zora mom Donnie last night. Both Clobo and may Or Adams did not call Mom Donnie, but Curtis did, which is kind of beautiful. It's kind of beautiful.
He's a classy man. You don't get to wear a red beret like that unless you have some manners.
The British Parachute Regiment would beg to disagree about having nanas and wearing red hats.
No, he's my head cannon now is that he is the British paratrooper.
Just drop him in with seventeen cats and he and he starts milling immediately.
Yeah, he saves that fucking mall in Nairobi. Or tell you what, the.
Argentines wouldn't have fucked with the Falklands of Curtis and there not with all those cats. That's where he's going now that he's being banished in New York like piss guys, I shouldn't take this. Just an island of Catlett.
Yeah, Staten Island, which.
You're a real New Yorker now, Gary, you shed on Staten Island.
Which is the only borough that went for Cuomo where he was up thirty three points. That was very funny, Momdanni won every other bureau up twenty in Brooklyn, up ten in Manhattan, of five in Queens and eleven in the Bronx.
From what this should tell everyone everywhere in the country about what is possible in politics, even in times as dark as this. Is that he was what eight percent a year ago, the six percent it's like in January, six percent in January. And he didn't just eke it out because there were a shitload of guys. This isn't like an Arnold thing where everybody's on the fucking ballot and it's like a crazy cartoon election. He legitimately votes nowhere and won.
The most votes for a mayoral candidate in almost fifty years. Yeah, nearly reaching the like the vote totals in this election for like a presidential election in the city.
It's very impressive for like a mid cycle off cycle election turnout wise, yep.
Specifically, he won a whole bunch of votes that he did not gain the primary among uh some like black and Latino voters. You can see that in the turnout at like the Bronx.
And these these people aren't overwhelmingly at least at this stage, folks who have been convinced of every aspect of ideology that Zorn has ever put out there. People who looked at who was available are like, this guy seems like he genuinely wants to do something. Yeah, and they lost to the specific policies they're not they're not paying attention
to the fact that he quoted Eugene V. Debs. They're talking, they're listening to his his policies on like creating municipal grocery stores and stuff.
Right, it's about affordability, not ideology. And Zorn's strict focus on affordability, not running a campaign that like falls back on fear, not running a campaign about foreign policy when you're in fucking New York City. A strict focus on affordability was the key to winning this pain.
A strict focus on affordability while not pretending not to have the ideology, which is also really noteworthy. Right where he's still he's still he isn't he's not like talking around it, right.
No, he's not apologizing or hiding the fact that he's a democratic socialist. Yeah, And this produced some super interesting results. If you if you refer back to the last election twenty twenty four and in everyone bemoaning like, how how come young men are are so politically lost?
Why are they all going so far to the right.
Sixty eight percent of men age eighteen to twenty nine go to mom donnie, sixty six percent of men thirty to forty forty five percent of men forty five to sixty five among women eighteen to twenty nine years old, eighty four percent. Donnie looking said, dom numbers home.
Bath party election numbers.
What actually Saddam Hussein out to Creedy did in fact vote, but he went for He broke hard for Cuomo. Honestly, at the end, it was the sex crimes that that did it for UNI did vote for Slowa though that was kind of weird. I'm gonna be honest with you. We're all trying to parse that one out.
It's a cat thing.
Yeah, Like I said, like not hiding his political inspirations in any way. Quoted eugen Debs ten seconds.
Into his victory speech.
Yeah, immediately you understand, like, oh, this guy's like playing he knows what's up.
Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran for president from prison. Yeah, yes, to know who Eugene V. Debs is, like arguably the most radical national candidate who has ever existed in this country.
Yeah, and his speech was extremely poetic. It got a very strong positive reaction from the people who I watched this with in Bushwick, which was the district that was the most pro Mamdani out of the entire electoral methemicity. But he started by talking about how power has been kept out of the hands of working people by the hands that keep the city going by lifting boxes, by gripping the handlebars of delivery bikes, and collecting burned scars from cooking food.
Quote.
Over the last twelve months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands unquote. The whole speech was kind of a rife with little like metaphors and allegories like that.
It was very cute.
Went on to discuss how the campaign toppled a political dynasty and gave one of the most like fine tuned.
Dishes I've ever seen.
Quote, I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life.
It's a phenomenal cook.
But I hope I never have to say his name.
Again, or but let tonight be the last time I utter his name. Only the best in private life?
Is yeah.
I mean, it's basically this is like, he's not the originator of this particular kind of diss It goes back a while, but the gist of that is like everyone's moment be a family man.
Get out of a way.
Yeah.
Repeatedly, Mam Donnie has has used the word mandate to describe this selection and the results.
Quote.
New York has delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, mandate for a city we can afford, a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that. I'm going to play a short clip here.
Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refused to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past. You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher.
In a new era of leadership.
We will fight for you because we are you, or as we say on Steinway and I'm incomb while.
Cum the Arabic there wild wild that we've moved this far in New York, that it's in credit wins you an election Like that didn't win him the election, but like they really tried the nine to eleven shit. Rudy Juliani posted today a crude photoshop of his own face in the fires of the twin of the burning Twin Towers. Yeah, we forgot written across it, and that did None of that shit did anything.
The last month of the campaign against Mamdani, whether that's from people like Bill acts Bloomberg or Cuomo's actual team, has has used what people have been calling the nine eleven card, incessantly playing clips of nine to eleven with like zoron like emblazon, like over overtop, playing clips from
Hassan talking about nine to eleven. But the islamophobe that the Cuomo campaign has resorted to as a last ditch effort to stop Mamdani has been despicable, and the fact that this did not scare Momdanni into like hiding or like restricting that.
Part of himself is incredibly admirable.
Yeah, but they wasn't just nine to eleven right, like you said. It was the broad Islam like they deployed as they always do, like every urban area in Britain is now like the Califate, like this bullshit that exists only in the American conservative mind. And it failed, which is good.
Specifically for a lot of the speech it was about juxtaposing like how we used to have good things in the past, like we had this idea that like good things now are always out of reach, and juxtaposing this like idea of like hope or or like past exceptionalism that we just don't feel like we've access to anymore, and showing that if you actually involve young people, we can actually do do good things in our city now.
And I really liked the line about like politics that speaks to you without condescension, and how much this campaign was like ran by and for you know, young candidates and young voters.
Sorry.
Went on to thank the people who have been forgotten by the politics of our city and how they've supported his campaign quote Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Sengalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties, unquote. And he went on to mention the kind of people that this campaign is about, and towards the end of that section, he talked about the hunger strike that he participated in four years ago in order to win debt relief for cab drivers.
And it's about people like Richard the taxi driver.
I went on a fifteen day hunger strike with outside of city hall, who still has to drive his cab seven days a week.
My brother, we are in city hall now.
That is that is the energy of like the campaign and the city right now, Like that sort of framing, and that's the energy that people are like carrying through.
I saw among the right wing fever spawns responses to this. Mike Cernovich taking a clip from the election night party where one of the people who is attending Zoran's party made a comment about how like white people need to get on board with the idea that like our culture is multiculturalism in this country right, Like it's it's not anything else, Like that's that's like what has made America. And Mike did not react well to that.
I can't imagine the declaration of Warsovich mad.
Yeah, but no, like especially in New York, out of like anywhere in the country, like especially in New York, the culture is made through the mix of immigrants that have built this city. And this is something that Zorn discussed throughout the speech. Zorn went on to thank thee hundred thousand campaign volunteers and specifically how their efforts quote eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.
I liked that line, and.
Then he asked New Yorkers to breathe this moment in quote, we have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who have sacrificed so much, we are breathing in the air of
a city that has been reborn. There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us to simply more of the same. And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn New York. We have answered those fears, unquote.
And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together, hope over tyranny, hope over big and small ideas, hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now it is something that we do. Standing before you, I think of the
words of Juan lal Nehru. A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. Tonight we have stepped out from the old into the new.
The line about politics not being something that's done to you, yeah, yeah, that really outlines how politics has felt in this country
for as basically as long as I can remember. He then outlined what his central agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis is, including freezing the rent for more than two million rits, timbolized tenants, making buses faster and free, and delivering universal childcare across the city, saying, quote, this will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt.
Unquote. Let's go on a quick break, and we will come back to talk a little bit more about the election.
All right, we're back.
During the second half of this speech, Zoron turned to address Donald Trump. Right this looming thing across politics nationwide, but specifically New York, as Trump has threatened to start to fuck with New York even more. If Zoron is elected and people in New York know this, and about halfway through, Zoron addressed Trump directly, which we will get
to you in a sack. But before he directly talked to Trump, in the speech, Zoron laid out what types of people the city government will be focusing on protecting from Trump's division and hate.
In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. In this moment of political darkness. New York will be the light.
Here.
We believe in standing up for those we love. Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump is fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall, Your struggle is ours two.
Specifically, I like this idea of in the darkened political moment, this unit states is in New York and there on administration and how that reflects New York and general though will be a beacon for the rest of the country, and naming like the trans community is like the second group mentioned, there was heavily appreciated in the Bushwick trans Watch party that I was at. Zorah went on to say that quote, no more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.
This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed in odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that
should frighten them. As has often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making thirty dollars an hour that their enemies are those earning twenty dollars an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long broken system. Together, we will usher in a generation of change.
And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.
I think this whole section is something very important, and this has been something that's been very consistent about momt Donnie's entire campaign, which is there's been on the left of for very very long time a just interminable, intractable conflict between this idea of like purely focusing on class politics or talking about race. And but I think what Montdami is doing here has been very effective, right, is
you can just do both. And in fact, as the left over the last you know, sort of senses kind of the reemergence of this kind of left in like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, as it's gone on, it's gotten less white, it's gotten more to verse, has gotten more multicultural, and it's been able to fuse these two things together.
And it's been able to fuse that with just you know, like being very very openly pro trans and like there was you know, there's also a pretty big response that I saw from people talking about the fact that he specifically mentioned that it was black women who were being
fired by the Trump administration. Right, And you can just do all these things together and it works, and it's worked the whole time, and refusing to pit these things against each other, like refusing to pit affordability against trans rights, refusing to pit, you know, like fusing to pit the
politics of like defending. And this is the thing that like fucking Bernie is terrible at right, where like Bernie like has been like has a whole rant about how Trump has been right on like we have to reduce immigration, right,
and you don't have to do that. You can be pro immigrant, you can be protraned, you can be pro black women, you can be you know, and and you can also want everything to cost less, and you can be in favor of the fact that the US is a is a multicultural society and can only function as one. And it's it's a winning form of politics. And I'm glad we're finally getting there.
Yeah, And it will be great if this New York City as a beacon can actually shine and not get stifled out in these in these next four years. Because Zorn is unless unless things happened, Zora will be the mayor for the remainder of the Trump term. Right like this is he will be mayor after second Trump administration is over, barring any unfortunate incidents or make sure your private security is really good.
Way whoever NYPD detail which gets your own guys, Yeah, it'll be fine, but it also it means, like, like from I guess a national perspective, it is likely that mom Danny will become like the enemy number one of the Trump administration, where they probably Newsome or pritsh Kaan now right, Like it's it is easier because of the obvious bigotry that underlies a lot of the Republican Party to go after a brown dude. Yes, and that is what they are going to do.
And they're going to use brown democratic socialists.
Yeah, who stands up for trans people and migrants. Likely you saw how acceptable Islamophobia is in Cuomo's campaign, right, Like he just go on to every mainstream network and say, shit, that is fucking disgusting. Yeah, and so we should prepare ourselves for four more years of that, I guess. And I think he does a very good job of repudiating that, and obviously the elector in New York did too, But that is going to be what we are going to see as a result of this.
Well no, and like so much of the resistance to Zoron came from this idea that if he wins, that means that this is going to be what people point to as a future for politics, specifically democratic politics, And a lot of people wanted to stop him because they knew that's going to happen. If he is in control of the biggest city in the country as the Democratic mayor. That's going to be influential for what democratic politics will
be after they've got completely clobbered last year. And he's showing that a different type of politics is possible, even even within the Democratic Party. And that's that's true, like altering what the party is fundamentally. Yeah, And I think it is a cool little side note that Zoron voted for himself on the Working Families party line and in fact not the Democratic Party line, because how the New York mayoral ballot's work. I'm going to play one more
clip from the speech of Zoron specifically addressing Trump. It's going to be a teeny bit longer, and I think we'll cut We'll shorten some of the applause bits because some of the applause sections gone for he quite long. But this will be the last club.
After all.
If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stopped Trump, it's how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you're watching.
I have four words for you. Turn the volume up. We will hold bad landlords.
To account because the Donald Trumps.
Of our city have grown far.
Too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small. Indeed, New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants,
and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this, To get to any of us, you will have to get.
Through all of us.
The shit rocks.
It's good, it's good, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool for a mayor Alection to say that.
It didn't manage to get in the New York is the Anchora of America, which I was hoping for. But otherwise great, that's Eric Adams this bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, sad day for sad day for Turkey today.
I guess, on an actual important note, I think it is really important that you know, all of this energy against Trump, right and against all the shit that he's doing that's so hideously unpopular, it's starting to be channeled into politics that can actually defeat him. Yeah, and that are actually good, you know, and that he's talking about specifically the fact that you have to destoy the conditions that created and so they don't create the next one.
Like this fucking rocks.
This is good.
Yeah.
For so long, Like for I mean most of the twenty sixteen to twenty twenty period and for a lot of this year, we've seen so many people turn the obvious disgust that people have at what Trump is doing into grifts into supporting a politics which fundamentally allowed for the conditions we are in now. Right, see someone repudiate that and to see more than a million people turn out to support that is fantastic, Like it's genuinely hopeful.
It's something like Zors like acknowledge. It's like this is not like the end, right, this is a means, not the means either, Like this is this, this is a
means to an end. And this whole campaign started, as he's referred to it as a quote unquote electoral project by the New York City DSA like this was largely an experiment, and an experiment that grew wildly, wildly kind of out of what I assumed they kind of saw it as in the earlier in the earlier days, and now they're in this like moment and they have to they have to keep rolling with it. But it is it is an experiment for a a version of doing this. And he knows this is not like the only method
or tactic to be utilized. But as as an experiment, I think it's so far pretty well done now as zorn closest speech by calling to chart a new path as bold as the campaign has already been, saying that conventional wisdom would claim that he is far from the perfect candidate. Quote, I'm young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim, I am a democratic socialist and thet stabbing of all. I refuse to apologize for any of this. And yet if tonight teaches us anything,
it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution. We have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they've been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that democrats can dare to be great. Our greatness will be
anything but abstract unquote. And he concludes by saying that the greatness will be felt by rent stabilized tenants who will wake up knowing they are Rent hasn't swored my grandparents, who can afford to stay in their home and whose grandchildren live nearby because the cost of childcare is not driving them out of the city, And by the single mothers who don't need to rush their kids to school because they can commute to work on a fast bus quote.
Most of all, it will be felt by each New Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back unquote.
The stuff about like worshiping at the altar of caution for like the past, the past like twenty more more than twenty, but especially the past like twenty years of like Democrat politics, and how he is also recognizing that like this is, this could mark a fundamental shift in what the Democratic Party actually is because the people Democrats included, who've been trying to stop this have failed miserably so far, putting tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to
try to crush crush this version of what the future of New York Democrat politics is, and more people since nineteen sixty nine showed up to deny that future. That's all I have for Zoran right now. It's literally, you know, less than twenty four hours after the Yeah, but this was not just a New York City mayoral election. There were there were other races, including other other things in
New York. There was a prop one amendment to the state Constitution to retroactively authorize the winter sports facilities on Mount then Hovenburg, which is protected forest land and would require the state add two thousand, five hundred acres of newly protected land elsewhere in the ad Ranak. That's how I'm saying it at Irondack Mountains. Yeah, run, which was passed, and this allows them to continue to build and maintain the winter sports facility of Propositions two through six where
New York City Charter amendments. The two to four were housing reform proposals to fast track the approval process for affordable housing and simplify zoning reviews and establish an Affordable Housing Appeals Board. All of these past these will limit the ability of the City Council to control and slow down housing development and empower the mayor specifically to build more affordable units faster. And Prop five, which also passed,
creates a new digital methnicity. The only prop to fail, which was number six, was to move local elections to be in line with presidential elections on that four year basis. Basically, the ballot that Zorn filled out himself was the one that passed for all of these, all of these proposals.
Yeah, you get. They call it a coattails effect in political science, right, like the idea that the people.
Announced his ballot that morning.
He did not.
He he didn't, and he didn't even announce it like a journalist asked him what he was voting on. He specifically did not advocate for any of these or try to dissuade anyone from any of these before the election.
Yeah, for sure. But you get a generally aligned politically electorate, right, a relatively progressive in American terms, the electorate coming out to vote for him, who will look at these things and say that seems to make sense with the way I see the world.
Democrat Abigail Spenberger won the governor of Virginia flipping blue. Jay Jones, a Democrat candidate for Virginia AG, also beat the Republican incumbent. This was after a month of attacks for a series of text messages from twenty twenty two where j Jones said that if certain Republican delegates died, he would quote go to their funerals to piss on their graves unquote, and wish for the hypothetical deaths of Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert's children. Quote only would people
feel pained personally? Do they move on policy? I mean, do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil and that they're breeding little fascists?
Yes, that's also not really hypathetical deaths.
He did in a call with a with another Republican politician, and then after the call, they continued texting about it. So the proof is in these texts and he has admitted this. And basically he was like, if these people's like children were to get killed in mass shooting, maybe their opinions on guns would change.
That's essentially what he's expressing there. And then he also he also was.
Quoted in these leads text messages as saying, quote, three people, two bullets, Virginia House Speaker Todd, Gilbert Hitler, and Paul Pott. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head. Spoiler put Gilbert in the crew, sorry after.
Not just as an elected official, as an attorney general, someone going to be a call that you put in the fucking text message.
Spoiler.
Put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know, and he receives both bullets every time.
It's insane, op sec hero.
But that is the new attorney general.
That's the new Democrat Attorney General of Virginia who the right has been attacking for quite for relentlessly the past month, because you.
Really fucked up. If you can't, like no, if you can't run attacks on that guy, and you still all.
Of those jokes about the whine moms in the suburbs, like wanting blooded, like you're looking at this like oh no, hell yeah yeah, give me four ward bullets will put in this guy.
It's pretty crazy. It's it's it's pretty astonishing. Maine voted no sixty three percent on a voter restriction measure. Voters extended the Democrat Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and the California Redistricting Measure or Proposition, passed with sixty three point eight percent.
James, Yeah, do you have stuff on this?
Yeah?
So Prop fifty in California, California, it was like a one issue ballot, right, you said the Prop fifty this would temporarily redistrict. I think people maybe have not been like often it gets missed, and it is temporarily redistrict in California until re establishing the nonpartisan committee that that does districting in twenty thirty one. For the twenty thirty two those districts will come back or whether they will return to a non partisan districting in twenty thirty two.
This is one of the most expensive propositions in state history. One hundred and twenty million was spent in favor. Forty four million against there was also outside money. Newsome already called the New York, Illinois and other Democrat majority seats to do the same. Right, it's going to likely remove about five Republican seats, or those Republicans are going to struggle. Right, one of them would be at San Diego's Mountain Empire and East County seat, which is currently the forty eighth.
That seat has been redistricted a few times, right, it's moved around. It's currently darryl Isa's seat. In response, California Republicans have already filed a lawsuit. Suit was filed by Harmiat Dillon's law.
Firm, Yay Dyland of the party.
Dylan is in the Trump administration now, but.
Yeah, Ellen's in the Trump administration and occasionally in my inbox making threats.
Great.
But it was Dylan's law firm that the father case.
Right.
The case has claimed that California drew the new lines to quote specifically favor Hispanic voters, which it's a similar claim to the Louisiana versus Calais. I think Calais there is the way they say it here case which is currently before the Supreme Court, which the Supreme Court seems to be suggesting it might be it might be amenable to this argument, right, that the consideration of race in redistricting is discriminate free. Yesterday, Trump truth quoting here, the
unconstitutional redistricting vote in California is a giant scam. That part is in block capitals, as is characteristic. The rest is sporadically capitalized to the quote. Now in the entire process, in particular, the voting itself is rigged all quote mail in ballots where the Republicans in that state are shut out. It's under very serious legal and criminal review. Stay tuned. Yeah, you know, fairly predictable. We talked about it last week.
It's not entirely possible for me to pass out that second sentence, but I think we can see what direction is pushing in. Right, This was predictable that this was going to happen, and we'll keep you updated on it. Also predictable that we would have to pivot to ads again, which is what we're going to do now. And we are back a little bit of immigration US this week. As always. According to reporting, this was actually last week,
but we didn't have time for last week. A countryported by CNN, Trump claimed he was quote very much opposed to his own administration's immigration raid on our home dive plant in Georgia, which obviously this is what he's saying to try and get that foreign direct investment back in Georgia, right, because it looks very much like Georgia is going to pay pretty heavily for that raid. Unfortunately, another man lost
his life when fleeing ICE officers last week. He seems to have left a car that he was in and tempted to cross a freeway where he was fatally struck by another car. Yeah, that's the second time this has happened this year. Texas sosigned an agreement with a federal government to allow local DPS officers to operate as ICE officers or technically to operate under the authority of ICE officers under the two eighty seven g program. So this is not the first law enforcement agency in Texas to
do this. Lots of local agency's had but the DPS is statewide, right, so this would this would include officers of the Texas Highway Patrol has five thousand employees. It will make Texas a markedly more hostile place for migrants. The authority allows warrantles to tension under loosely limited, loosely phrased supervision by an ICE officer. Right, it allows Texas cops to detain a question people have a suspected being in the United States without documentation here in San Diego.
San Diego's Border Patrol Sector released a video with I think it was like, I'll have to check what song. It was like some cringe kind of pop punk soundtrack of the dynamting of land west of the ha Cumber Wilderness. This is likely the construction that saw many environmental and cultural protections waived by the HS secretarynme earlier this year. Right, we're always seeing the beginning of what that looks like, and what that looks like here is just a very
unique landscape. Many one I know some people who listen came out to Cumber a couple of years ago to help out. Like it's an extremely unique high desert landscape and it's currently being dynamited.
Right.
These are the areas where there were little gaps in the border wall because construction there is very hard and the way that they're going ahead with the construction is blowing stuff up. Finally, on the immigration deep the case regarding conditions in the broad View Facility, which is in Chicago. Until earlier this year, it was only for very short stays, like not for twenty four hour stays. Has revealed some
of the horrific conditions inside the facility. It confirmed something I've heard from multiple migrants who have been detained or over the US, which is ICE is using the threat of longest stays in poor conditions to get people to sign deportation paperwork. Often it's literally in the overcrowded rooms where they're sleeping and staying right like, at any point you can just walk up to it and sign your name, and you will presumably be removed from those conditions and
placed into deportation flight as soon as possible. Directly from the lawsuit here quote people are forced to attempt to sleep for days or sometimes weeks, on plastic chairs or on the filthy concrete floor. They are denied sufficient food and water. They cannot shower, They are denied soap, higgen items, and mental products, and they have no way to clean themselves. They are often denied a change of clothes. Continuing my quote here, the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable. Most nights
are freezing cold. Yet only some receive a thin foil blanket, sweater or sweatpants have tried to retain warmth. The lights are typically on all night. People have also reported being denied water bay agents that are being their running water in the places where they are held, and very little food. We've reported on these conditions before. Some of this is standard. Right, lights on all night, freezing cold, you only get a very thin blanket like that. That has been the case.
That was the case throughout the Biden administration. Right they call these places of the ice box, both in English and in Spanish. This has always been the conditions to people have been held in in these facilities have always been in humane. But some of this is particularly bad. People in Broadview reported being so crowded they could not extend their legs.
Us.
Yeah, so they had to sit like sort of fetal position. They couldn't sit down and extend their legs right alone. Sleep, disgustingly unclean conditions they have. Lots of people have reported paperwork not being able to language that they read write. Bathrooms there are not private, and the lawsuit alleges that people of other genders could see each other using the bathroom, which is pretty disgusting. I've linked to the lawsuit. You can read it if you want to.
Terror Park Transition, Go.
Racking, Jazz, Barry.
Right, jazz b.
Ah, music to my ears, Oh boy, Okay, abrupt shift in tone. So we got a little bit more details on the sort of partial agreement that Trump and the Chinese government have sort of come to that has staved off some of the most disastrous of the new trade war elements. Both sides seem to have gotten rid of the fees from ships both docking at their ports and also on like the sort of complicated shipbuilding stuff we
talked about last year. The US has paused the thing we talked about last week where they were using the Foreign Ancity List to do anything that was controlled that was like forty percent and more controlled by a thing on the Foreignancsity list couldn't be traded with. The US is backing off on that for a year. Chinese agreed to buy more soybeans. There's also some discussion of China buying more energy products. But this is one of these things that we just we have no idea what that is.
It's possible by the time you're listening to there will be information. All we have is buy more energy. And the last thing that Trump said that didn't seem to be part of the negotiations between him and the Chinese government per se, but we're definitely part of negotiations that have been going on between Trump and his cabinet was that there's going to be restrictions on AI chip exports.
Although exactly what is not known. All Trump said was quote the most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States.
What this seems to be.
And again everyone is kind of murkily hobbling together whatever information they have. What it seems to be is Trump stopped in Vidia from selling its most advanced AI grade chips called Blackwell, to China, which was which Nvidia has been massively lobbying for because they need to expand their market to continue the giant bubble that they've accumulated. Trump
has stopped them. It's unclear whether this is going to be made into formal policy or if Trump is just going to personally intervene every time a CEO asks him to do this. But yeah, we also have so today recording November fifth is the start of the Supreme Court case against the tariffs. I think It's worth noting that this court case against the tariffs, it's framed as like a lot of small businesses brought this lawsuit, and they did.
But also the reason it's gotten to the Supreme Court is because they're being backed by a huge player in the conservative legal machine. Almost the entire thing is being funded and paid for by the Liberty Justice Center, which is it's a kind of libertarian right wing legal thing backed by like the Walton family and the Coke Network.
And this is I think one of the most direct and interesting actual oppositional moves we've seen from this wing of the libertarian business wing of the party, which is very, very pissed off at the tariffs. We've seen a whole bunch of amicus curia briefs from the American Enterpresi Insttrude and the Cato Institute, and a whole bunch of other right wing think tanks who are extremely angry about this. We don't know exactly how it's going to go, but the initial arguments do not seem to be going well
for the Tromp administration. So that'll that'll be unfolding and we'll report on it more is as we know more. It's this is literally recording is the first day of trials. So, and finally, I'm going to close on a genuinely deeply baffling piece of news, which is that the day before the election in New York, Greg Abbott posted that there would be a one hundred percent tariff on anyone moving to New York.
After the election.
Yeah, how does that work?
Isn't it moving to Texas from New York?
Well, I thought it was to New York.
It's for me, it looked like moving to New York as well.
I mean, it's certainly unclear because this doesn't not seem like a policy proposal. It seems more like a post. It's just a post. It's someone post posting through it.
Because this has been from moving from New York to Texas. Yeah, yeah, anyone moving from New York to Texas.
Interesting.
I don't know tariffs are just posts now, I don't.
That's not like a thing that there's law around you being able to do.
No, it's it's so one constitutional.
I think it's just a post. I don't think it is anything like.
Is Yeah, I mean, evidently I think the interesting thing about it, is like, is the way in which tariffs have come to be seen in their Republican mind as like this is something you do to people you're mad at, which is very new development in this is this is a this is a pure Trump too phenomena effectively well absolutely.
Yeah, a marker of how intensely they're paying attention to this election. Like I mean, Abbots said, doing this because I'm sure it'll show Shore up his local popularity. But it's a marker of like a change that has been going on that that has been really like supercharged in the Trump era of no, no, you can't have local politics like it's it's all national politics, and any kind of vote at a state or local level that goes against whatever the party wants is something to be punished,
like even if it's two thousand miles away. And that is that hasn't been as dominant in US politics as it has been recently. We should probably talk a little bit about Texas's election night, because that was also pretty consequential. There were seventeen ballot measures passed by the Texas legislature earlier this year by a two thirds majority, and the way Texas law works is that once the legislature votes
for a ballot measure, to two thirds majority. It becomes a constitutional amendment after a simple majority of voters on a ballot support it. And there were seventeen measures on the ballot in Texas, which is wild. Very few states and constitutional amendments that the rate Texas does and all of them passed, which is nuts, and some of them
are like fine. There was like one to create like a three billion dollar fund for dementia research with like which is like whatever, nobody's got a problem with that.
Really.
Some questions about implementation maybe, but there's some absolutely bug fuck nuts stuff in here. Proposition thirteen raised the homestead exemption from one hundred thousand dollars to one hundred and forty thousand dollars. It was passed by about eighty percent of voters. This lowers the taxable value of a home,
which reduces overall tax bills on your primary residence. Per an article in the Houston Chronicle, the amendments will be especially felt by elderly or disabled Texans who are poised to receive a separate tax, a separate break that brings their total property tax exemptions to two hundred thousand. As a result, roughly half of seniors and people with disabilities living in Harris and Bear Counties will no longer pay
any school property taxes. Jesus, I should have to say how bad that is for Texas schools and in general. This A lot of these ballot measures were about making heavy cuts and making it impossible to raise new revenue. The cuts that are just in these ballot measures are going to cost the state about four billion dollars over the next two year years. Right, But that's not all that was done. Several of the bills that were passed
banned the potential to create new taxes. Right, So it is now illegal in Texas to create taxes on capital gains, or taxes on the growth of assets like property in stocks, or taxes on inheritance, and to state taxes. Taxes on the operations of stock exchanges are now banned because several have announced plans to open in Texas.
Right.
So you are looking at I think the estimate here that I'm seeing in the chronicles articles that the states can spend about fifty one billion dollars over the coming biennium to pay for the new cuts and maintain existing ones. Texas is a state that has had for quite a while a budget surplus, and they are basically lighting a lot of that on fire to appeal to rich people and business note owners in stock exchanges to take their assets to Texas. You won't have to help society if
you come to Texas. We don't have a society in Texas, right, And that agenda did very well in Texas.
Jeez.
Anyway, good stuff. I guess the last thing I want to talk about a little bit, since we've got a couple of minutes here is the question on everybody's mind. Should I be flying anywhere for the holidays? Is that going to be a good idea? I'm saying this a day after a horrific crash of a ups flight over Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, right, which I mean, I think seven was the death toll last I saw night Marriish firemalls.
I mean at nine this morning?
Is it at nine? Because the plane just the engine caught on fire basically on takeoff, and normally, from what I'm reading from pilots, normally that should have been a manageable problem. But because it happened during the ascent, which is the most dangerous part of piloting a plane, and where you have the least control. They were not able to recover or gain any kind of control, and the
plane basically plowed directly into a UPS warehouse. And it was loaded with something like three hundred thousand pounds worth of fuel because it was about to fly to Honolulu, so it was as full of fuel as a big plane can be and just a horrific crash. Is this tied to the fact that you have a lot of
federal employees furloughed? Is it tied more just to the fact that the FAA is not functioning the way it should be or used to as a result of changes the Trump administration made as soon as they came to power. I think it's too early to say that, but this is part of a pattern of pretty disastrous near misses that absolutely can be attributed to things like the air traffic controllers shortage and the fact that there's just a
lot less safety precautions being taken. And this is something the administration is aware of and has become critical enough that they're no longer able to deny it. Secretary of Transportations Sean Duffy on Monday said that all commercial flights might be stopped nationwide to protect public safety, and they were certainly going to need to cut off flights in specific parts of the countries at times as a result of the ATC shortage.
Right.
Basically, there's different like k grids that the country is divided into, and you might have to shut down one or more of those at a time in order to make the shortage of air traffic controllers able to handle the rest of the load.
Right.
For an example of how bad this can get locally, on last Friday in New York State, eighty percent of air traffic controllers did not show up for work. So this is a potentially pretty calamitous problem. There have been ground delays on Monday for three major Texas airports in Austin, Dallas Fort Worth, and Dallas love Field. And this is just in general a problem that's only going to get
worse as the shutdown looms. Because I've seen some interviews with air traffic controllers where like one guy was like, look, we're not getting medicine for my kid and she'll die without it. It's just not coming in. How do you expect me to be a fucking air traffic controller?
Right?
Like the herd job in the country that requires absolutely perfect concentration at all times without ever fucking up or
hundreds of people die. So I don't know to answer the question of like, should you fly be planning flights for this holiday season, you should certainly get the flight and share its and be paying attention the days before as to what's happening if the shutdown doesn't end, because right now we are seeing delays the likes of which haven't really been seen since maybe like either like the pandemic probably before nine to eleven was kind of the
last time things were this completely fucked. Garrison can tell you how much of a fucking nightmare they had coming back. And it's not just in the United States, by the way, multiple major airports in Europe over the last week and change have had to shut down entirely or partly because of unauthorized or unknown drone flights in their airspace.
Yeah, that's been ongoing globally.
Air travel is not doing well.
Yeah, Rush has been probing Europe with these whole lands for a little while. Yeah, I think all I don't know, Roberts flowing Garrison. I have flown this month. It fucking sucks. Use a credit card if you can. When they had some protections. Maybe consider not flying right now.
Yeah, just you know, keep an eye on things. I don't know what else to tell you.
Yeah, it's great. Everything's going great. That is the slogan. Everything's going great.
You know, there's been worse times.
There's been worse times.
Yeah, the blitz.
Yeah, talking of worse times. Lots of people are hungry, right because we are. We're fucking with people's snap benefits now as part of the culture war. Lots of people are very worried about where their food is going to come from. Right, and we're entering a time of year. You know, kids are going to be off school. There's lots of places you can still get your free school meals, but it's a difficult time for people. It's difficult time for people to feed their families. I wanted to plug
we All we got is San Diego Group. What they're doing is helping people be able to rely on them by delivering groceries to them right.
Uh.
And the way that they most need support is for people to sign up to regularly donate a certain amount. I'm not going to tell you how much you can donate, but if you're able to, that will give them the ability to plan to secure groceries for people they're supporting. The way you can find their website is to go
to we all we got sd dot com slash donate. Also, if you want to reach out to us and you want to do it in an encrypted way, you could send an email from your proton mail address to our proton mail address, which is cool Zone Tips at proton dot me. If you're a marketing person and you want your client to be a guest on our podcast, don't email us. I'm just going to fucking block you. That's That's that's all I have to say about that. If you want to have to plug your product, I will
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