From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nola.
They call me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. If you are listening to our strange news program the evening it comes out, Welcome to Monday, November eleventh. We have a lot of strange news to get to tonight. Thought maybe we could start with a
little bit of good news for our cold open. Did you guys remember our earlier brief conversation about the mystery song that was played in Germany?
I do not recall.
All Right, So, decades ago a German team recorded a song that they heard on a radio.
Right.
You know how listeners of a certain age might have a cassette tape that you used to record radio broadcast live. This has become the most mysterious song on the Internet, and it was finally solved quite recently by a couple of intrepid researchers on Reddit. The name of the song to spoil it is Subways of the Mind by a band named f e X And I don't know if you guys just real quick for a cold open. If you guys are okay with it, can we play a brief clip of this song? I want to see if
it's familiar. Absolutely, that's just the opening part. Quick question. Does that sound familiar to either of you guys?
No?
Is it a U two song?
It just sounds vaguely late eighties. I don't know, kind of new wave issue. Well, I don't remember the context of this. Where were people hearing this? What's the mystery? And why should people care?
Yes, people care because people like mysteries, and we care because we like good news and we like mysteries being solved. This first came into the zeitgeist in two thousand and four. Internet user Darius S recorded this from a radio broadcast in Germany and posted it on a website that tracks down mysterious songs, and people have been looking for it forever.
It went viral again in twenty nineteen when I think a kid in Brazil uploaded the song to YouTube, and everybody was trying to figure out where the song came from. We do know it was a band named f EX. The song is called Subways of the Mind, and one of the members of the band, Michael Hadrick, who is sixty eight years old, now released the song confirmed the identity. So one mystery solved a little bit of good news.
Oh ray, can you imagine having some song that you recorded with a band like twenty something years ago, maybe even more, and it gets resurfaced and who is this? It's amazing and it's just something you did in basement.
It was me or maybe it was just like a non hit. I mean, it sounds professional. It sounds like, you know, like I said, like mid late eighties kind of stuff. But what's the country of origin of this band?
The country of origin is Germany.
Oh, there you go.
It sounds yeah, one d percent And the name FMEX is very kind of kroud rock vibes. But that's so funny. I mean, you know, there's a million songs that probably were like micro hits or underground hits in other countries that most of the world is just blissfully unaware of.
And so I don't know.
It's interesting that it became such a thing, because I'm sure we could find any number of examples of this.
So this time, of all times, we wanted to start off strange news with a bit of good news. We're going to get to a lot more less happy solved mysteries. There's a mystery in Oklahoma. Uh, there is a bit of hard justice on the part of one or Northern Europe's favorite furniture manufacturers. But before we do any of that, we're gonna pause for a word from our sponsors on our cold open And when we return, we're going to talk squirrels.
And we have returned with today's first piece of strange news, and along with it, before we get into it, I would like to put forth a theory.
Guys.
I think that a viral internet squirrel may have swayed the presidential election here in the United States.
You guys know about Peanut.
You know, I've heard the name, and I've seen it in headlines for a couple of days. Now. I have no idea who this person character.
Well, yeah, sure, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, the squirrel doesn't necessarily have personhood, as is evidence by the way the government treated it. But he does have a person, a quite beefy fellow, often shirtless, by the name of Mark Longo, who resides in a beautiful countryside part of I believe upstate New York.
Called Pine City.
It is, in fact, y'all against the laws of New York State to possess or to keep, to have as a pet what would be considered a wild animal like a squirrel peanut. The squirrel was rescued several years back when Mark witnessed its mother being hit by a vehicle and the tiny squirrel known as a kit by the way,
didn't know that. That's the thing I learned from a really great article on vox by alex Abad Santos, leaving the little peanut, who was nameless at the time, for dead, I believe, with the piece of his little tail severed by the accident.
Yeah, I know, it's said.
So, Mark, who has a passion for mussels and tattoos as and animals, scooped up the little guy and brought him home and nursed him back to health and kept him indoors in his home, which is quite a sizable piece of property. It's referred to in a lot of the reporting as a farm there in Pine City, New York.
But the big part of the story, there's a couple.
This is sort of a multi pronged story, is that the New York Department of Environmental Conservation conducted a raid on Longo's property there in Pine City, New York, because of reports that Longo was keeping wild animals as pets. In this particular case, the wild animals in question are Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon. Fred the raccoon did not, however, play into the election results, I would argue.
In conducting this raid, officers involved were told basically that there was a potentially dangerous wild animal or animals on the property. A big issue here is the potential for rabies. During the course of executing this, I guess, search warrant or raid or what have you. Peanut the squirrel did bite one of the officers, which I don't know if it was that or if this was their intention the whole time, but let's just say, for the purpose of telling a story, led to the officers taking Peanut and
Fred away from the property. And unfortunately I'm not quite sure about I believe is that this is also the case with Fred. They were youthanized. Both of these Both of these animals were euthanized. Peanut had, in the course of his time with Mark amassed hundreds of thousands of Internet followers, had had an account all his own where he would be seen doing fun stuff with his his you know person, Mark, while Mark was often shirtless or you know me, perhaps wearing a little bit of risque
outfits or in certain poses. And apparently, you know, everyone loves a good Instagram or social media account devoted to a pet, but it would seem that the owner was also part of the draw of this particular account, because
it was often them hanging out together. And an interesting twist on this is that Mark Longo kind of parlayed the success of this Instagram account with Peanut the Squirrel and to it equally if not more successful account and a much more lucrative only fans account going by the
name Squirrel Daddy. Uh So, Yeah, Mark a long ago and I believe and his wife you know, filmed and uploaded and served to their subscribers videos of them you know, having sex together, guy selling it old man, then doing doing sex acts with one another, which of course is completely legal and absolutely within you know their rights to do it. It has become a significant source of income for folks that do this, and and obviously there are some people who have a problem with this. I am
certainly not one of them. It is important to know, sir. I thank you, Matt. I was about to say, it is important to note that the squirrel had nothing to do with any of these videos. The squirrel specifically, it was only featured on the Peanut the Squirrel Instagram account. And just really quickly, just to give you a sense of scale of peanuts popularity, uh seven and twenty thousand Instagram followers as p dash nutt like sort of like the bass player for three to eleven.
You might wondering, Yeah, just interject, Yeah, I only know about your earlier question you asked. I only know about Peanut because of the Instagram account, which I found in endearing and in Longo's defense, Noel, I am under the impression that he released the animal, released Peanut into his backyard and did the right thing, tried to find a shelter, Peanut returned, which launches the sawga.
Absolutely, Ben, that's that's entirely true. He did make every effort beyond what you were even describing to seek out an animal shelter or refuge that would take Peanut the squirrel, But when none could be found who would take Peanut in, he decided to take care of him himself. And he you know, did feature him on this Instagram account. They're often posing together doing fun, cute things. And he also was able to parlay his success on the Only Fans
account into starting an animal refuge of his own. They know, when he found that there was nowhere there was no room at the end for Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon, he decided to take it upon himself and use some of his uh, you know, funds that he was receiving from from all this Internet stuff and open his own shelter, which I think is pretty cool.
Yeah, that's that's incredible.
The Peanuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary. I do think it's a noble pursuit.
It's a noble pursuit and an amazing name.
And when the news came out that Peanut the Squirrel had been taken, it was not an initially released.
That he had been euthanized.
There was quite a you know, a stir created on the Internet and a lot of people banded together and started a go fund me with the express purpose of collecting.
Money that Longo.
Could use it if he needed to pay for legal defense to defend himself. And this is a statement from the DEEC. On October thirty, ath DC seized a raccoon and squirrel sharing a residence with humans, creating the potential for human exposure to rabies. In addition, a person involved with the investigation was bitten by the squirrel to test
for rabies. Both animals were euthanized. And there's there's a pretty telling quote from the Vox article that I mentioned where the author alex Abod Santos references something that one of his colleagues said. A colleague by the name of Karen Landren, who's an MD with training as a physician and epidemiologist. She pointed out that it seems like the DEEC may have overstepped a little bit or and measures that were not necessary. She described them as over aggressive.
I'll just read from the quote from the piece. Longo had been raising peanut in his home for over seven years. If the squirrel were acting rabid, he would have had a short lifespan.
The animal was also captive.
She pointed out and could have had his blood tested without being killed. Quoting an interview from The New York Post with Longo himself, he refers to the raid like this. They treated me like I was a terrorist. They treated this raid like I was a drug dealer. The raid apparently went on for upwards of four hours, close to five hours, is what's being described, And it seems like they turned his house over and were pretty aggressive. So the question becomes was just kind of too full. We'll
get to the little political twists at the end. But who ratted out Longo? Who had it in for Peanut the squirrel?
It's interesting too, and I'm glad that you're starting with that one, because we could say, for many of us in the audience this evening, you probably know someone who has for some reason taken in what a non domesticated animal, right, perhaps a corvid, perhaps raccoon, perhaps a squirrel. I would pause it and correct me if I'm speaking out of
school here, I would posit. At least part of this is due to the phenomenal success of the account on social media, by which I mean the Squirrel's account, not the only fans account.
That is exactly right, Ben, and that's what Longo himself seems to believe there's a New York But he did a couple of interviews with The New York Post, which we'll come into play a little bit when we talk briefly about this political twist that I keep referencing. He had this to say, maybe it's someone who thinks I used this place to make a lot of money. Mark said of his rescue farm, did this do wonders to my only fans? Absolutely, it's making a lot of money from this.
So he seems to.
Believe that there were forces within the New York City government that had a problem with what he was doing. He says, I had my own kind of squirrel dat account, my own Instagram. I just tagged my squirrel dat account from the peanut video I posted, so it gets double the clip views every once in a while, a shirtless photo.
But I completely separated myself from the entire thing. Obviously, people were going to find both and try to associate them, whether or not it's somebody within the New York City government or it's.
Just a prudish neighbor.
Apparently one thing that sort of tripped his Spidey senses or smell tests when they arrived at his property. One of the first questions that was asked of him was do you have any cameras on the property, which he believes was a reference to the adult material that he
was filming there. He also mentioned that he and his wife sometimes babysit the neighbor's kids, and he's wondered if someone felt as though he and his wife were exposing children to adult material, which again I think it's you know, I hope as a society we're past thinking that just because someone you know does sex work, or someone you know does adult content or something, that they are somehow unfit to do normal human things, you know, like like
deal with children or like have children of their own.
I just think that's a really outdated model.
And certainly we know there are issues, there are problems with people who do take advantage of children, and we know these cases exist, but I do not think they are you know, one and the same. And so it does seem like maybe someone jumped to that conclusion and ratted him out. So I think that's a pretty valid theory.
What do you guys think.
I don't know. I'm stuck on this concept that you, as a government organization have to go in there and remove these wild animals, even though they're clearly domesticated, even though from you know, babies, they've been raised around humans, technically tamed. You're right, tamed. Yeah, I mean, you're you're correct,
but I guess. I mean, if it's been in an environment with humans, it's used to being fed by humans and around humans, and it's not just running out in the woods all the time, there's a very low likelihood that it's been exposed to anything that would give it rabies.
Absolutely.
Also, I mean the point that the Vox article made about how long he'd been keeping it and how you know if it had rabies, it probably would have died already.
Yeah.
Well, and if you go into a house during a raid situation, you are risking It doesn't matter how domesticated any animal is. If there's a bunch of people that are kind of big and scary and look scary coming into a house, you risk getting bitten by whatever creature.
Longo himself actually said he had been bitten multiple times by peanuts. You know, I'm not certainly not from being I mean, the guy is a little big, he ain't scary, though he's seems like a lovely dude. But it happens squirrels. No matter how much you domesticate them or, as you put Ben, tame them, you can't always get all of that wild out of them. So there's going to be a little nip every now and then. I mean, it happens with my cats.
Yeah, well, then I guess it's on the human being that's keeping that animal to decide. And it seems as the longo made those decisions Ben, as you pointed out right, and those attempts to do the right thing. Oh, it's so weird. It seems like an unnecessary situation.
Definitely, definitely a interesting expenditure of finite government resources right to get this one person. And I just I'm not the kind of person who looks at people on Instagram, much more affiliated with legatant policies. And then cute animals are kind of I think way for many viewers to sort of disassociate Peanut, by the way, I think was largely innocent in this whole debacle. But Noel, I'm sorry for derailing us to make us go a little longer at all. You said that you feel in this a
political bent. Could you describe it?
Wus yeah, I mean, I'm joking.
You know, obviously we just experienced a pretty divisive election cycle here in the United States, whichever side of the isle you happened to fall. But the individuals, you know, who were campaigning on the right side of the isle, did seem in the last days before the presidential election to kind of glom onto this whole peanut thing, Peanut the Squirrel, and use it as an example of government overreach.
Like you know, Elon Musk said at a rally type event that it was absurd that the government could come into your home and steal your pet and have it killed. And vice president to be a vice presidential candidate at the time, JD.
Vance said something very similar.
About how they killed they killed Peanut the squirrel, kind of likening this government agency, you know, the DEEC, to the Democratic Party, which is an over reach in and of itself. I think we could all agree, but it's
an interesting talking point. There was even rumor floating around and a fake what was determined to be fake press release from the former president Donald Trump himself mentioning Peanut the Squirrel, But then the Trump camp came out and said that that was fake, even though it did bear whatever a logo kind of.
See anyone can mock that up on photoshops.
So yeah, I'm you know, obviously I'm joking a little bit when I say that Peanut the squirrel swayed the election.
But it is interesting, especially given.
Some of the rhetoric around, you know, migrants eating pets and stuff like that.
That they would choose to go this route as a talking point. I did. I couldn't help but find it a little amusing.
Dang well, no matter how you feel about the election, doesn't matter who won, because in the end, lockeed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing are still in charge. Sorry, not really kind of.
I couldn't agree with you more, Matt.
I've never had had a particular fondness for either side of the political spectrum.
I just think the whole thing is rigged. So let this be an opportunity to put that out right now.
And I think Peanut the Squirrel should be an apolitical issue. Let's just remember Peanut the Squirrel as he lived, wearing a cute little cowboy hat and hanging around with a big old bear. So with that, let's take a quick break.
Here are worth from our sponsor, and then we'll return with more strange news.
And we've returned, guys, I've got two very specific stories. I guess, well, before you get into those, let's go ahead and say, because I don't think we've mentioned this yet. We talked about the Boeing strikes in a couple of Strange News episodes where we just kind of mentioned it because it was one of the factors going into Boeing's
woes at the time. But the machinist strike has officially ended and there's a contract that has been accepted, So Gay at least, I don't know, that's good news right for now. Gay for now, the people who assemble the planes for Boeing are actually gonna see some positive stuff in their life, and it's been mostly negative, especially if they ever picked up a newspaper or you know, looked online, just the general rhetoric about the company they toil for.
So that's a positive thing for a lot of human beings on the planet, and hopefully it means good things for Boeing in general and the planes that you know, when we fly through the air sometimes we get on those planes.
And if I could say just very quickly to interject the machinists who are part of this contract back and forth. When you read those damaging headlines about Boeing or the news about things messing up, it's not really those machinist's faults. So Boeing is a big, big company. Please don't please don't lump them in with the actual problems, which are indeed structural and systemic.
Absolutely is the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Definitely not the same thing we've talked about on the show. But if you look past the headline and any of the articles written about Boeing's woes, it all has to do with manufactured parts that are generally manufactured in far flung areas of the world and then sent into one of the major Boeing facilities where they get assembled. Right,
it's not the same thing. Okay, here we go. First story, guys, I did not know this was a thing until it landed on the reddit ar news page that I browse obsessively. I'm sure you guys do the same. I'm just going to read the headline IKEA will pay six million euros to East German prisoners what forced to build their furniture in a landmark move.
I'm sorry, I need more context, Dan, this is wild sounding.
Well, first of all, when's the last time you heard East Germany or or anything East german Men in a news article outside of the piece on history, right outside of a piece on the Cold War?
I didn't even clock that detail, Matt.
Yeah, but so that first of all, you go, what and six million euros? That seems like a lot, not a crazy amount for a huge corporation like Ikea, but I mean that's that's a significant amount of money. Prisoners. What are we talking about here? I guess we can just start by I don't know, do you guys just want to give a quick overview on what East Germany was, how it became a thing, and then why there would be a lot of prisoners involved in that state.
I'm talking about like East and West Berlin, right, I mean with the wall, yes, and then one side being under Soviet control, on the other side being German.
Correct. And in East Germany there were a lot of issues. A lot of it had to do with the newly imposed government structure, of the societal structure that rested on one side of that wall versus the other. And in the East German side it was. It was communists. That word is so strange, and it's been it's been used and weaponized and manipulated so much. But it was the Soviet controlled side of a split city and the country.
Yeah, just real quick, the name of that is the German Democratic Republic from nineteen forty nine to nineteen ninety, which means several of our fellow conspiracy realists listening tonight, remember when the wall.
Fell and Mabe I got a piece of it.
Yeah, some of us are lucky enough to have a little chunk of history in the form of debris from
the Berlin Wall. To your point, Matt, the question about prison labor goes to the massive surveillance state that was active in that vassal organization because the GDR was very much a puppet of the Soviet Union, and as a result, any descent or suspected descent you got cracked down on, you got locked up, and just like here in the United States, when you get locked up, the labor laws don't really apply, so they'll put you to work.
It's fascinating.
The whole part of the story with the Stazi, you know, like the secret police, and I was in Berlin a few years ago for the first time in my life and with the dear friend Frank of the Friend of the Show, and we went to the Stasi Museum, which is actually housed in this compound in Berlin, which would have been East Berlin where actually you know, functioned at the time. It's like an office park, and they kept a lot of the furniture the same, and you can look.
It's really cool if anyone's.
Ever there, highly record checking out, but they demonstrate and have on display a lot of the crazy kind of trade craft spy gear that they used.
And just one last point there too, to interject quickly, you can see the economic consequences of that Cold War divide. Even now like East Berlin and East Germany are still struggling with some things from that time because history is way closer than it looks in the rear view mirror.
Oh jeez, Okay, So let's take these things and then connect them somehow to IKEA. So there were a lot of human beings that opposed that force the Stazi, this this overwhelming thing that is telling you what you can do, what you can say, what you can think, really.
Not even opposed, just had things that were off message and the Stasi found it out.
That's a really great way to put it. People who were just living their lives and now this new machine is in and says your life doesn't match up with our machine. Something that's got to give. We're going to
send you to prison. As you said there, Ben, you would literally go to prison for doing things, stuff that like we've heard of in I was gonna say in China and the DPRK, places where when you when you say things you're not really supposed to say out loud out even you could get in trouble to the point where you might wind up in a jail, a prison, or in a camp. Essentially that is for manufacturing, like literally a factory, a prison factory. So that's all occurring.
And this is nineteen forty nine to nineteen ninety. So one of the things that the government over East Germany realized is that we've got all these prisoners, we can use their bodies literally as a machine to create stuff, to manufacture goods. And they made a lot of things.
Think in your mind to maybe news stories you've heard growing up about places, I mean places all over the country like India, China, Taiwan, Malaysia countries where there is access to relatively cheap labor compared to other countries in
the world. Manufacturers, big corporations across the world look to places like that to have parts manufactured and then have those parts shipped over to other factories where they're assembled, just like in the Boeing thing we were talking about, because you can get those individual parts often for much
less money, right at the cost of human lives. Really, your product gets to be cheaper, and that is exactly what East Germany realized they could do with their prison population, and corporations, big companies across the world, not just Ikea, realized that they could have stuff manufactured on the cheap in these prisons and they would make gangbusters with the MSRP.
But Matt, I think I might have a question that some of our listeners might be having as well. Don't we assemble Ikia furniture ourselves once we buy it?
Yes?
But what well, that is absolutely correct. You, as the end user of much of Ikea furniture and goods, assemble them. But the individual slats on a bed you buy from Ikea have to be produced specifically to order, right, The smaller pieces of metal and other pieces of wood and plastic, and all those things have to be assembled somewhere in a factory. Those were the things, the smaller things that were being assembled by prisoner labor. So it was a known thing that prison labor was used in a lot
of these different companies. But other companies, you know, especially like Ikea that has a long history, some of them didn't even necessarily realize that this had been occurring. And that's whether or not you believe, you know, the official
statements of giant corporations. But Ikea especially said they were unaware of this until they were notified, and then they had Ernst and Jung do a full audit of their company, full investigation, and they found that as recently as the nineteen seventies and eighties, prisoners were producing furniture for.
Ikea, and that investigation only began in twenty twelve.
Correct, correct, very recently, well, fairly recently. And only now after all of this investigation is Ikea saying, hey, we're willing to compensate victims of this practice.
But is there I mean, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but in the United States, well, it's not particularly a good pr look for a corporation to be found to be using prison labor.
It's not illegal.
So as the law, I don't understand what is creating this need to compensate. It just seems more like a PR debacle. But like we hear all the time about prison labor being used for private industry here in America.
Well, it's not about it being illegal at least if you listen to you know, folks from Ikea who are representing the company we're talking about this, and folks from the Union of Victims Associations of Communist Dictatorship or the UOGK, which has also been it's been quoted as something else in other places. That's according to CNN.
Yeah, if you go to European sources or UK sources because they're different now apparently you will see it also referred to as the Union of Victims Associations of Communist tyranny.
Got you.
Oh, But the whole point is it's not illegal. It's like shame, right, It's like our company did something shame the PR.
Yeah, Ikea is not legally compelled to donate this. H what'd you say, Matt, six million euro.
Six million euros exactly, it's towards a new government fund that's being established for compensation specifically for victims of East German dictators.
And I'm not meaning to completely belittle the company of Ikea by saying it's a PR move. I mean there's more to it than that. I've always found Ikea. I mean, as far as corporations ago, I don't have much bad to say about Ikea.
I think they're pretty cool.
I like going to Ikea, I like their products, and it does seem like they pay their employees well. And I've never really heard too much scuttle but about you know, nastiness on the corporate level.
So the cafeteria slaps are so good. You know, I still think the guy who lived in Ikea for a while is a ridiculous hero. Shout out to you man for getting away with it. But also, you know, internal motivations. Aside whether or not this is a PR stunt, it is still ethically a good thing to do.
Oh yeah, I think so, I agree with you.
And let's actually look at the words officially from Ikea. This is from Walter Kadener, who's CEO and Chief Sustainability Officer at Ikea Germany. This is a quote We deeply regret that products for IKEA were also produced by political prisoners in the GDR. Since it has become known, IKEA has consistently worked to clarify the situation. We have given our word to those affected that we will participate in
providing support. We therefore welcome the implementation of the Hardship Fund and are pleased to be able to keep our promise, which is kind of cool.
I think it's really cool as far as corporate acts go, you know what I mean, it does seem pretty relatively humanitarian.
We made a mistake, We're going to make it right.
Yeah. And it is weird too because in those prisons, guys, it's not just you know, political prisoners that opposed the thing. It's also people that likely should have been imprisoned because of crimes. So it's like it is, you know, it all becomes a very uh, you know, a complicated situation.
The thing that we need to keep in mind and to think about for future episodes and maybe updates, guys, is that according to Rayner Wagner, who is the uo KG chair, and that's the organization that is you know, looking into this stuff and trying to figure out which corporations. We're doing this, he says, this is just the tip of the iceberg. He's saying that there are a lot of other companies that benefited specifically from this prisoner labor, and others need to at least be thinking about it.
And let's also point out, folks, we are well aware. I don't think we did an episode on this or even a conversation in Strange News, but we are well well aware that the founder of Ikea was an absolute genius at dodging taxes for a long long time, and for a time he was the eighth wealthiest person in the world so far as the public news. So we're not saying Ikea is perfect. We're saying it appears they did the right thing in this instance.
Is that fair to say, guys?
I think so.
And I was just going to say, I mean, you know, by many metrics and the ability to figure out ways around paying more tax is considered, you know, good business. I'm not saying I agree with that, but that is certainly a perspective, and it's certainly not illegal unless it's done illegally, which is called tax fraud or tax evasion.
There we go, guys, there's another story here that I wanted to talk about, but we don't have time. So and guys, I think I saw a listener mail message come in about that, So why do we save that for our listener mail episode?
I thought I taught a putty that it.
Has to do with some weird resignations. We'll get into it for now. Let's hear a word from our sponsor and we'll be right back with more strange news.
And we have returned for the final act of our weekly strange news segment. Let's do a cavalcade of some good stories, some bad stories, some wild stories, dare we call them strange? We were talking about this a little bit offline in a group chat that we engage in occasionally. The US Department of Justice says they caught a guy who was going to use a quote weapon of mass destruction to destroy an energy facility in Nashville.
This is Skylar.
Yeah, yeah, that's what Skyler said when they caught him.
Okay, seriously, I love it.
May as well, because we're looking at a situation that might not get as widely reported for a little while. There's a lot going on here in our neck of the Global Woods. A twenty four year old from Columbia, Tennessee, Skyler Philippi phi l Ippi, was arrested by the FEDS and charged with this attempt to use a drone laden with explosives to destroy an energy facility basically a power plant out in the Nashville, Tennessee area.
Uh, we're calling that. They they called that a weapon of mass destruction.
It was C four. Oh god.
Oh. Actually, the way it's reported by the DOJ is this kid believed it was C four because the C four, or the purported C four was supplied by the federal government itself.
Oh, it's just like an M eight inside some clay.
By undercover agents. Yeah, we're talking about this. This feels like maybe he got played from the jump pretty well.
And it reminded me.
Wanted to share this with the group because it reminded me of our earlier episode years back, even before we're doing strange news and listener mail segments on whether the FBI is manufacturing terrorist Yeah, remember that with the with the mosque where they tried to radicalize and make some some guy went to a mosque, they tried to make him a terrorist through some undercover stuff, and then the mosque reported it to the FBI who was running that same agent.
Yeah, oh yeah, I remember that. It sticks in your mind because it just feels like such a strange tactic. But I remember that also happening with what would be called white supremacist groups or like white nationalist groups, where somebody goes in and says, hey, I got a lot of explosives, and it's an FBI agent, And like, what happens if that FBI agent doesn't go in there and says, hey, I've got explosives? Do they ever come up with that on their own?
Right?
Especially considered? I mean, because at that point you'd be looking at some homemade stuff, or you'd be looking at a military supply chain, which is not impossible unfortunately, but you could track.
That stuff, right maybe at least coming you know, if somebody's ordering a bunch of fertilizer and stuff, and I'm assuming the Bureau is watching that stuff pretty closely.
Yeah, I mean it's their job to do that, right. So this guy, I love that you bring up, well, I don't love it, but it's very accurate. They're bringing up white supremacist ideology. Scalar Philippi was uh, came onto the FBI's grid, you know, across the five Eyes or the Eye of sour on there, because of comments online, because of associations with known white power groups, because of a manifesto that he shared in part with the undercover FBI agents who contacted him.
I love a good manifesto. I's just putting that out there. I've been writing this thing.
Hey, you gotta have some craft, you know. I mean, I hate a bus snoozer of a manifesto.
You know, hit asking for notes on your manifest.
Wouldn't that be fine?
This guy had no opsec.
Uh.
We haven't read the manifesto in full at the time of this recording. I don't believe the full language has been released to the public, probably because he just got arrested and has not yet been convicted. He definitely did not vet the undercover agents who this is the pickle of it, all right. So they find this guy, this young man twenty four years old again and they have embedded undercover operatives who are befriending him, glad handing him
and saying, hey, we love your writing. We have a couple of notes, but you know it would be dope. Tell us if you're actually planning to do something.
And then this.
Guy said, yeah, I am, I just need the following things. And then an undercover operative said, that's interesting that you're looking for that, because it turns out maybe we can help you. So they got to the side of the power station where this guy's going to do the attack, and he was there with two undercover agents and then they waited until they definitely saw like he thought it was real, whether or not it was real as something
will come, you know, come to light. Later he thought he really had a drone with these explosives, is about to take it off, you know, puld my beer watch this guy's and fly it into this power station, which would have been terrible for Nashville. And then they arrested him. They let him it all the way to that point.
I clever or.
SD like, think about the investigation. That's the best evans you have. This guy thought he was doing the thing. Yeah, but I didn't realize he was only twenty four years old.
They had to show the intent, which, again to previous conversations, is one of the difficult things to prove. Is this just an armchair internet troll? Is this an actionable threat?
Is this a political act?
Though Ben, it's a political act that the vast majority of a marias would not agree with or understand. Well, this guy's super into you know, white supremacy and like the the Nordic oded myths, which are totally unrelated to white supremacy.
By the way, I have to.
Do with power stations, though, is he just trying to plunge us into a world of darkness?
Like?
Is this prophecy wish fulfillments?
Like the idea is is chaos ensues if you've got darkness for an an elongated period of time.
I'm I guess.
Yes, the idea that's chaos.
But that affects the white people too, y'all. I don't understand. This seems very misplaced, you know. I'm sorry.
I don't know why I'm trying to identify with the motives of a seemingly mentally unwell person.
Well, it's it's interesting for that to be mentioned because it shows us the dearth of long term planning for that kind of thing, because a lot of times in these sorts of groups, uh, the plan will be to create chaos and then know that you're in group can have their compound or their safe place for some sort of time and then it's just I don't know.
Well, yeah, it a diversion where you then do a second thing, or is the first thing the only thing?
You know what I mean.
That's interesting too, because if you were operating in a domestic terrorism kind of apparatus, then you wouldn't want everybody to know what everybody else is doing. So maybe this kid was a pawn in a larger plot, which is quite possible. We know that bomb threats have been called in across multiple states in the US quite recently, and a lot of those have been traced to surprise Russian email domains.
This also comes from the FBI.
Also heard today, I just mean a little bit unrelated, but related that there were some attempts at voter disruption of polling place disruption, calling in bomb threats that were traced back to Russian operatives.
Yeah.
So what we know is the FBI in advance of this election, which was for any non US conspiracy realists, it kind of took over the news for a second. In advance of this election for many different government positions, the most notable of one, which would be the president of the United States. The FBI said that there were bomb threats targeting polling sites in multiple states that appear to be first non credible, but two effective enough to interfere with the voting process, and three pretty.
Much coming from Russia.
And this happens in step with weaponize social media and AI. It really like, without getting to ideological, if we're talking about the operational aspect of this, we have to acknowledge that this kind of interference is going to continue, not just in the US, but across multiple countries in multiple ways. China's big in the game. We know a lot of the Russian money hasn't stopped in terms of like be concerned about elections in Central Europe, for instance, be concerned
about elections in Latin America. These conspiracies are real.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, especially given the regime change on the way here in the United States, and you know, the incoming president's relationship with Russia and the fact that they were often trying to prop him up and help out his cause. I do wonder if this relationship is going to be more one of foreign policy manipulation rather than stuff within the United States.
I wish we could just do that thing where everybody, let's countries vote on their own but then we see what happens in places like Venezuela, where you know, maybe that's happening and it doesn't matter.
I don't know. I want more funny crime.
Is the thing moving on? Because I know right at the time, here's a funny crime that I really liked. There were these hackers over in France just a few days ago who hacked Schneider Electric, big electric company, energy company in France, and they stole something like forty gigs of data from this engineering energy group. They penetrated what's called their GRAS system j I r A might be familiar to a lot of us from back in the day. They when they broke in, they said, all right, we're
doing ransomware. This is a cyber heist. You have to give us a ransom the equivalent of one hundred and twenty five thousand US dollars in bum bum bum bagets.
Like the bread or is this some currency that I'm not aware?
Hope it's the bread.
That's a lot of Now, well that is a lot of bagats.
Hold on, is this a language joke? Like? Is it a joke?
I think it's for the lulls.
I think they wanted actual bagets, and they said, look, you, if you admit that we breached your system, then we're going to cut the ransom in half. If you go public, the ransom demand will be increased or decreased. Excuse me to sixty two, five hundred US dollars worth of baguettes and credit where it is due. I would love to give a fantastic shout out to our pal Mark Tyson over at Tom's Hardware for the best line of this.
When he's talking about the proposed reduction in ransom for going public, he said, even with a fifty deduction, that's still a lot of dough his back as his bread. It's a bread joke.
Yeah, wow, that's yeah, that's a lot.
I don't think you could use that many bagats without them getting stale.
I think you'd run up against that problem.
Man.
You'd have to do some crew tion action.
Oh that means good. You could toast them and in giant some sort of industrial kitchen situation, or perhaps pass them out to like a like a Robin Hood type situation or Jesus.
Oh yeah, Ben, I just read the subtitle of that article.
Cake.
Can you read that?
Yes?
Thank you for pointing out Matt, hand over the dough or your forty gigabytes of secret data.
Is toast stand that's good and tennessee.
Palin triforce, please please give us some weird sound cues on that one.
Your bag ats all your life.
There's one last weird crime that we should talk about very briefly. It is conspiratorial. It is indeed strange news. If we travel over to Equatorial Guinea, we'll see that. Just yesterday, as we record, the government authorities have said they're going to install surveillance cameras in pretty much all the government offices in response to a sex scandal with a government official who slept with hundreds of people and were slept with a bunch of people and recorded hundreds
of sex videos. This is Baltasar Ebang in Goonga, the director of the country's National Financial Investigation Agency, just got suspended. They found four hundred sex videos of him in multiple women, some of them wives and relatives of other senior government officials.
Wow, this guy had the riz.
Yeah, there is and the goods I mean, I mean in terms of like using this as blackmail material, right, I would imagine let's go to ap news.
They're still pretty legit by Emmanuel Dumanjong. Part of my pronunciation there, Emmanuel, it's t u m a n jo n g reported from Caberroon. It looks like the investigators searched this guy's computer in Gonga as part of a probe into alleged corruption and embezzlement, and while they were looking for financial crime, they found this horde of sexual content, more than four hundred individual videos. Unfortunately, it was not clear at this time if these sexual activities were consensual.
It is not clear at this time if any women depicted in these videos, because it was all him with women had made formal complaints. This is yeah, this is incredibly chaotic news for.
Getty because he's the National Financial Investiation Agency. So potentially, and this is full speculation on my part, he could be looking at let's say the husbands or the family members of some of these women and saying, hey, I've gotten you.
Oh wow, yeah exactly.
And we also know, as this is still developing strange news, we also know that the Prosecutor General, speaking in public about this, Anatolio and zog Gimma said quote, the authorities want to establish whether the man deliberately used these relationships to spread a possible disease among the population.
What yikes.
Yeah, And this is where we get the surveillance cameras. This is where we know that a lot of senior officials are incredibly upset. The Vice President's office recently said this denigrated the image of the country.
Uh.
These videos also flooded social media. Telecom companies have been asked to quote kurb the spread of this media. He is reportedly to the question about riz. He's reportedly nicknamed Beyo or Bello b E l l o, meaning beautiful, okay.
Good looks. It's a rough one.
It's also a scandal to the point where we don't know what the ultimate fall out would be. But I'm thinking it's something like what if the what if the head of the Federal Reserve got caught with all this stuff? You know, what would happen here in the States?
I don't know.
I have no idea.
We are not you know, none of us have been to Equatorial Getty. We want to hear your quite if you are from this part of the world or have spent some time there, because it's such a red meat story. Whenever they're they're these sexual allegations that you have to always wonder about timing, you know what I mean. It takes a while to make hundreds of these videos.
Right, hmmm, yeah, well no, I don't think about either.
But then the question is too, like where was he storing them that you have like private servers?
What was the tech? I mean, maybe I'm overthinking it, but like, right, what was his long game?
Is he cuckholding people just to be a jerk? You know what I mean? It reminds me of some allegations that came out with the recent Epstein recordings, which have you if you're not aware of, folks. A journalist named Wolfe has recently released recordings with the disgraced financier and child abuser and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and he got these recordings a few years back when he was interviewing Epstein about the subject of a book he wrote called Fire and Fury.
Dude, and just to take it back in our own episode to make it a nice little circle. Cuckolding was one of the tactics that came forward to the FBI and other agencies used to infiltrate white supremacist groups and other like Black Panther movement and other things. They would do that on purpose.
Well, and I think I know this term like and as like a kink, you know, or someone wants to watch someone else have sex with their partner, but it's all consensual.
What do you mean by cuckolding in this term in this context?
I don't think I understand in this case, like just infiltrating a relationship, right, so that specifically your target, I don't know, is weakened in some way psychologically.
Well not just weakened psychologically, but weakened operationally. What's kind of like the best way to learn a foreign language is to begin a romantic relationship with someone who speaks that language. The best way to learn the inner workings of someone, if you're targeting them, is to get inner working source, and often that's someone in a romantic relationship with that person.
It's like one of the most devious things a human could do. Congratulations.
Yeah, it's also evil and psychologically damaging.
Just be honest with people, you know.
This is something that we're going to keep an eye on, just to see if there is a conspiracy afoot. What happens next? You tell us?
Folks?
Thank you so much as always for tuning in We wish you the best of Novembers. We'll be back soon to follow up on this and many stories we didn't get to in the meantime. Tell us your thoughts, Peanut the squirrel, other famous animals on social media. Let us know what you think about IKEA attempting to make good. Let us know other strange attacks on power stations that maybe haven't made the radar. And if you want to
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