What was America's first terrorist threat?

feeling high, feeling gay and feeling ready to go? Good. Well, let's do this all right, okay, um, Chuck, Josh, Yeah, Wait a minute, wait, let me relish this. There's no plugs, there's no lead ins, nothing here. Pretty good, okay, Chuck. Yes, have you ever heard the terrorism? Terror? Terror? War? Is no terror? Or? I know? I have a thick tongue terror or terror? Yes? I have you have? Yes? Did you know it's from the French? Um? I did not know. That.

Pretty surprising, isn't it? It is to me it's from the French. Terrorism. That's how I assume it's pronounced. You have to say it like you're condescending. Sorry, uh yeah, nice, um. But it was coined during the reign of terror in the sev during the French Revolution, So uh, did it have the same meaning like unconventional means of warfare that involved citizens. It was basically it did have roughly the

same the same meaning in that it involves citizens. This is the one thing that terrorism is always pointed to. It's um. It's it's when citizens, innocence are casualties, are

directly involved in big problems. Yeah, and not just you know, of course there's casualties all the time, including nowadays with US drone strikes and our own wars, but literally abandoning the rules of war, which we've done a podcast on in favor of you know, homemade guerilla tactics to all outside those rules and to terrorize people and to terrorize people, but you're you're directly targeting normal, everyday citizens, which there

in lies the terror right. So terrorism, it's been around the last couple of hundred years, although in the US here it's it's just only in the I guess the fifties it started to become kind of a household word. Definitely by the eighties. Once um, hijackers started taking over airplanes all over the place. We knew what terrorists were. Yeah, boy, remember that hijacking was such a big deal because I used to be terrified of that, and of course that

was a central component of nine eleven. But um like hijacking as far as just taking over the plane, that was like a big deal back in the day. Remember that very iconic image of the terrorists holding a gun to that pilot's head on a tarmac and I think cypress and leaning out the window. Yeah, I remember that. It was before they had the good sense to keep those doors secure or use metal detector before you got on the plate, so you couldn't get a forty five

onto a plane. You're just on the plane smoking your cigarette with your gun, right exactly. Pilots doors open, if you want to tour the cockpit, just come on up, right. Do you mind taking your burlap hood off right so we can see who you are? Man? Things were so lax, so weird, so um. So we we came to understand terrorism from maybe the sixties of the eighties on. But the United States has been dealing with terrorism literally since

the moment it was born. Especially if you call piracy terrorism, and for our purposes today we will yes to fall in line with the title of this article. We're going to yes. Uh, from the moment we gained our independence from England before them, yeah, before then, because Europe was dealing with it as well. He's um on the North African Coast, the Barbary Coast, so named for the Barbarossa brothers. Yeah, care and Dean. No, that's sorry, that's one guy. Car

Dean was one Barbarossa. Yeah, I'm not quite sure who he was, but there were brothers, a rouge and his ear. Yeah, and Barbara Rossa, Barbara Beard Rosa, Red red Beard, red Beard, just like the Ferrari Testa Rosa, the Red Testes exactly. And uh like former quarterback then he Testa Verde. But my friend he's called Bevinny green Balls, so I thought was pretty funny. And he played that he was like fifty so he probably did have said he played for the books, right. Oh, he played for a bunch of teams.

He was known to play for the Buccaneers, he was and then later with the Jets, and he was all over the place. Yeah, I was just associated with the Buccaneers. Yeah, well he I think he played a portion of his career there, but when he played for twenty five years or whatever, you're gonna get around. You know, there was never a better Heyday for team logos than there were

than the seventies and eighties. Like the old Raiders logo, which I guess is still around that the Raiders stay pretty concer but the Buccaneers used to have a great one orange. The New England Patriots had like that min man who was ready to hike the ball. They were, They were just great. The Pittsburgh Pirates had probably one of the better ones of all time. Uh well, yeah they were baseball of course, sure, I know, yeah, I

said sports logos. Okay, I think I said sports. Yeah, you're talking about the old stove top hats that the Pirates were at the flat Caps they had. Oh yeah, yeah, those are awesome with the yellow bands. Yeah they were terrible. So speaking of Pirates, we were talking about the brothers red Beard, Barbarossa and um. These guys were actually Turks, but the Spaniards were the ones who named them. Barbarossa and the Spaniards were well versed in the school of

the Blade, taught by a rouge and his year Barbarossa. Yeah, and these pirates specifically were helping out Muslim Moore's driven away from Spain by Christians, and this just reinforced to me like Christians and Muslims, man, they've been fighting for a long time, like anything you see on the news these days, just like, yeah, this has got quite a bit of history here. Yeah, is a really big year

for Spain. Sent Columbus over here to the New World and drove the um Spanish Muslims a k a. The Moops from Spain or they the moops, No, the Moors. Remember that Seinfeld where he's playing can we pursue with Bubble Boy and he's like the Moors. He goes, no, it's the moops. Yeah, I forgot about that. I feel silly because I thought that might have been. Yeah, yeah,

the Spaniards like Moore's moops. Who cares? Okay. So after this happens, the Mediterranean Sea right there between North Africa and Southern Europe, all of a sudden, because it was such a heavily traveled trade route, became a haven for piracy because there was lots of stuff to booty, Yeah, lots of stuff to lots of booty to pillage. Yeah, because at this time it was that was the route between Europe and the East Indies, and that's where Europe was making all of its money from the spice trade

and all that um. And so to get there you had to go through the Mediterranean. When the Christians drove the Moors to North Africa, and of course the North Africans are like, hey, we're living here, the Berber folks, and that where Barbary comes from. No Barbary comes from Barbarossa. Oh I thought it said it was so named for

the Berber people. Know, the Barbarossa brothers. Those guys were so bad they named the entire North African coast after them, the four states of uh, Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli, which is what we know know is liberal Libya, liberty. That's the Barbary Coast named after the Barbarosis. So you've got all this piracy going on. It's stepping up in earnest after and everybody's just getting taken every which way

but Sunday, that's right, Uh, every which way. So Muslims and Christians were both you know, getting it on the piracy game. We don't want to like sling stones to good point only at the Muslims. But um, because of where it was, it was just a haven for it. And I think you point out this is your article right, Um, in the seventeenth century at one point and estimated twenty people were captured by the Barbaries and held in Algiers alone.

Twenty thousand kidnappings. That's like a couple of good sized cities back then. Yeah, that's significant. So they were doing a pretty good job. I guess it's the piracy. Yeah, that's like the average attendance on a Tuesday night of a Pittsburgh Pirates game in the late seventies. Tuesday night, late seventies. Yeah, they were pretty good. Yeah, but Roberto Clemente era, he can fill those seats. He was earlier than that. But yeah, the Willie Stargel era, that's what

I said. Let's call it that. Um so European. They they did so much pirating. They thought, you know what, we can make more money if we start to extort people. Not only can we pillage their booty, we can extort money from them a k a. Getting tributes paid, Yeah, which is really just extortion. It's a protection racket. Yeah, it was. We will protect you from ourselves. These guys are like Sicilians. All of a sudden, it's like, hey, we wouldn't want anything to happen to your ship. Give

us some money, we'll make sure it doesn't. But they weren't even as sly as the average Sicilian. They said, if you don't give us money, we're going to attack your ships, take your goods, and kidnap your crews. And they had certain things so in addition to to tribute and then capturing goods, kidnapping a person could be kind

of lucrative no matter what the person's station was socially. Well, yeah, because well, first of all, pay us if and we won't kidnap you, and then we will kidnap you and then get try and get you to pay us the ransom, or if you won't do that, then we'll just sell you as a slave. And we're gonna make money one way or the other, one way or another. If you are a member of a Barbary state and you're a pirate,

you know how to make some coin. Yeah, And it was such a racket that nations included line items and their budgets to pay these tributes. It was like an actual. I guess you'd call it legit. I mean, it wasn't legitimate because it was uh, you know, plundering, but they legitimately included it as like, hey, we gotta pay these guys off exactly this much money per year, so we just gotta think about that. Yeah. Um, and the I think the United States in its four fiscal budget had

eight grand set aside to pay as tribute to Barbary governments. Yeah, that is crazy. And um, that was actually small at first. Two Well yeah it um, I think you pointing out it goes up to a million dollars by and they paid a million dollars annually for fifteen years. It's a lot of coin. Back then. That was ten percent of the federal annual income at the time. Well million bucks. The reason it went up so much was the Barbary states actually had tribute on a sliding scale. They they

the European nations right at the time. If you think of them as corporations, because essentially it's what they were, Like the British East India Company was pretty much one and the same as the British government. Um, they would use the Barbary pirates to um, they would use their diplomats to get the Barbary pirates to attack some nations

leave theirs alone. They would pay some tribute, but they were It was definitely part of the political maneuvering was to just kind of keep this Mediterranean shipping channel open for the superpowers and squeeze out the little guys. Well of Barbaries were like, yeah, we like making money from you, but we also want to make it from the little guys too, So we're gonna establish the sliding scale and based on the size of your economy, that's how much

tribute we're going to extract from you. And when the US was born, they're like, oh, you're tiny, just give us like eighty grant how about that? And then within like ten years they were like, oh, yeah, you guys have a whole continent of raw material. You show no scruples that stealing it um from the natives who are living there, right, So how about a million a year from So they did that for fifteen years. Um. One of the main reasons they did this for so long

was because they were trying to form a navy. They didn't even have a navy at this point the US. Yeah, and then in fact this is why the navy was born. It would have been born at some point anyway, because you need a navy. But this is what really spurred the creation of the navy in the US. And Thomas Jefferson comes along and was, like I told John Adams, was like, dude, we can't be paying these this old world stuff and worrying about paying off these tributes to

these guys. Like we got to expand west brother, Like this is where it's at. We're sitting here playing these old games, paying these guys money and trading and over the Atlantic. Screw that, Let's just stay over here, expand westward, and that's where the future of this country is. Right. He also made a pretty good point that it would be more cost effective to take that million bucks and put it into a navy and pound the Barbary States into submission, then to just keep paying him a million

dollars a year, you know, ad infinite. Um. I wonder what the because this is while they were doing this, concurrently they were building a navy to try and stop this. Like if that was ten, I wonder how much it costs to build the navy, Like a substantial portion of the federal government's funds was tied up and stopping this at the time, including building the navy, paying these ransoms or tributes or extortion fees depend which way one. And it was a big problem, like we said, right out

of the gate um. But it wasn't handled for a while because Jefferson ideas, I guess, his westward expansion concept and then building a navy rather than paying tribute um. He was in the minority. He was the diplomat that succeeded Benjamin Franklin, who was the America's first diplomat or France. And Benjamin Franklin had he took the tech that most people at the time took, which was this was just part of doing business with the East Indies, and you know,

we'll we'll do what we can. Before we used to be under the protection of Great Britain. While we split from Great Britain, we're not under the protection anymore. We're still kind of a fledge nation, so we need a protection of superpower. So Franklin knew how to charm the French, and he set up the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of seventeen seventeen seventy eight just directly addresses this pretty much. Yeah.

It actually had mentioned the Barbary nations by name in this treaty and basically said France, you got help us out here in the Mediterranean and France said okay. They did say okay, which is good. So Jefferson, Um, he doesn't have any real pull at this point yet. It was not until he became president that actually really enact his plan, which was to get out of this whole mess. Yeah, and once he did, he basically said, you guys are toasted. Yeah.

I mean, as soon as he was sworn into office, the Turkish ruler Pasha demanded an extra two hundred and fifty dollars from this new administration. They were like, well, you're the new guy. Well we just need a bonus payment because you're now in office, right, And I, Um, I looked this up. I was like, god, I thought that was so much money. Back then it was about three million dollars. It was less than three million, which is not that much. Yeah, and you never hear about this,

Like I didn't learn this in high school. No, I know, you know, I remember getting out of high school and realizing, like, there's so much more to history. Yeah, I didn't realize what else Jefferson was doing in Paris. You know, he was doing a lot of crazy stuff. Yeah, and some not so crazy romantic things. But you didn't learn about that in high school either, about him. I bet I wonder if they teach that stuff now. I'd be curious to sit in on a high school history class. I

imagine it's very much the same. Yeah, there's a certain uh, there's a certain school of thought that you're indoctrinated into, and there's stuff you need to know and things you shouldn't know, and you don't need to know about that. We don't need to talk about that kind of thing. And then college was where I first started getting my real education, had some really good history teachers. Yeah. Um,

all right, So where are we? We are in office as Jefferson, Yes, and he already hates the Barbary States because he's been trying to get everybody to turn against him for fifteen years. He's finally got the power to do something about it. That's right. Uh, they had taken control of a couple of crew members captured American chips and they and you know what, we'll release these guys if you increase your tribute. And Jefferson said enough of this crap. We've got ships now, six of them. I

think at first, Yeah, that's cute. You gotta start small, and we're coming over to pay you a little visit in our ships. And the First Barbary War from e ten o one to eighteen o five, Uh, it was, it was, but pretty happen in war. I mean it was mostly at sea and it lasted four years, right, yeah, But um, at one point they captured Uh well they captured because the US the USS Philadelphia I think, ran

aground and got stuck. So this is one sixth of the entire US fleet at the time, I think, so, yeah, so I got stuck and like working order still, So they captured the ship, take control of the crew, and they used the ship as a gun battery against us because it's just parked right there, I guess cannons aimed out towards the sea. So they just used it that

way for a while. And um, it was Stephen Decatur, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur of the Navy led some marines and recaptured the ship and burned it so they couldn't use it. And that guy is he's I think there are forty six communities in the United States named Decatur, including one where you live right here in Atlanta, and Jerry So named yeah, and Jerry So named for Stephen Decatur. And there's a pick there's a statue. Is that Decatur Jefferson? I think there's a Decatur statue right there at the

is the one that we shot at though, Was that Jefferson? Oh? Was that Jefferson the guy writing? You know, man, I don't even know that's sad, like molested the statue. We don't even know what statue was, but I know there is a Decatur monument in the center of Decatur. Stephen Decator, he was, but yeah, this is where he really kind of proved his stripes as an admiral. And apparently he

came very close to being killed. But one of his crew members when they were going to attack the Philadelphia, one of his crew members threw himself in between Decatur and a barbary I guess pirate, and um, he survived, but like he threw himself in in between the sword and Decatur and Decatur went on to um even greater stuff. Um. But yeah, so they destroy the Philadelphia. They get out very daring and you said marines were there, Yeah, I mean led by a naval officer, but it was definitely

the Marines the dirty work. And that's why if you listen to the Marine Corps him in the first line, it's from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. This is what they're talking about. Pretty cool. Um. So the First Barbary War last from eighteen o one to eighteen o five, it was mostly with Tripoli. They're the ones who were giving us the most trouble. Tunis and l Jeers Um basically said, you know what, We're just gonna stand over here for a little bit. We're fine.

We all of our alliances with you were not to break up. We're pirates. We're all pirates, everybody, What did you expect? And then several years later, Thomas Jefferson retires the Monticello and James Monroe comes into the presidency and we have trouble again, but this time it's with Tunis and l Jeers and James Monroe takes a totally different tack than Thomas Jefferson. I think because we had a

much bigger navy by then. For the Second Barbary War, was it just a little more aggressive we just went into the coast of Tunis and Algiers impounded their cities with our cannons and they said, okay, okay, sorry that. Right after that the US said no more, We're never paying you another dime. Yeah. And in the First War they you pointed out that they used the tactic used by the Green Berets, which was to find local insurgent

groups to help them do the fighting. And I think in this case there were some Greeks and Arab and Berber mercenaries that we like enlisted to help fight against them on land, what little fighting it was on land, and it worked, and it was the first time a U. S Flag was ever raised on foreign soil, thankfully. Man. I am just overwhelmed with jingoism right now? Are you a jingoist? I for the moment, Eve, until we Keith growing around? Man, that guy, what happened to him? He's around?

I'm sure, okay, I mean, I don't keep up, but nothing's happened to him as far as I know. He's still gingering it up. Uh So is that it? I've got nothing else, I've got something else. So we were talking about how you said Christians and Muslims alike, we're not shy about resorting to piracy, enslavement, all that stuff. And um, the Mediterranean had seen piracy for millennia, but it all really started in the Crusades, and that's when one side was just you know, capturing the other people.

Never that at some point the Crusades. Yeah, I mean we could only have to be an overview obviously, because we could do like tin shows on the Crusades. Sure. Um, but through at this time there's this order called the Mathurians, and they are a French Catholic sect and their whole gig was raising money to use to ransom sailors who couldn't pay their own ransom to keep them from being

sold into enslavement, which is a pretty noble pursuit. And these guys were like they were you know, they took vows of poverty, so they like weren't holding any of the money themselves. They were getting fatl this they really used it, and over three centuries, um, they ransom ninety thousand sailors that were captured. Yeah, and um, one of those guys turned out to be Miguel de Cervantes who wrote Don Quixote. Really he was captured in the Mediterranean,

And I suppose wrote that after he was freed. I don't know, I would say so, well, that's just a guess. An that cool though. Thought about one more thing too, apparently the slaves. I mean, it was not great to be captured as a slave, but it wasn't like European and uh American slaves like you could actually gain wealth

and possession and status as a slave in Africa. Yeah. Yeah, African slavery is much different than Portuguese style slavery that we're used to here in this and and most of the time it was not like a great thing, but you could. I think one guy even rose to a position of advisor to a king of Algae. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And by used to I meant uh aware of and disgusted by, right, not used to? Yeah, accustomed to? Is that is that it? Yes? Okay, well that was America's

first terrorist threat, pirates. That's the answer. If you want to learn more and uh read the article that I wrote, you can type in first terrorist threat. There's a lot of terrorism stuff. We should do one on how terrorism works in general. We no, um, you can find all that stuff by typing terror into the search bar. How stuff works dot Com. I'll bet he'll bring up some surprising stuff. Uh. And since I said search bar this year, mail,

not quite yet, my friend. Okay, quick little TV show plug. Yes, by now everybody knows we have a television show coming out on Science Channel UM at ten pm Eastern Standard Time on Saturday, January nineteen. Yes, and we're very excited about it. Yes, we were following the series three premiere of IDID Abroad that Carl Pill contender Ricky Gervais will get pretty pumped up about. And then comes our show. And if you don't have TV or cable, you can

still get this on iTunes. You can purchase each show each week I believe the following day for about ninety nine and the first show is free. Yeah. So Saturday, January nine at ten pm is the world premiere of Stuff you Should Know television show, and then at ten thirty PM is episode two, back to back episodes on January nineteen. There'll be a big deal. So what listener, male time? Now? All right, Josh, I'm gonna call this a sexual healing is your coin? Did you make that up? Yeah?

That's awesome, guys. When I first saw the podcast on a sexuality. I figured it had to be about a sexual reproduction, like single celled organisms or c sponges. It was a little trepidacious when I saw I was actually about a sexuality as a sexual orientation. Often I am not particularly happy with any brief overview of any subject they care about or have much knowledge about. I was pleased I had no such negative reaction to your podcast, though,

in fact it was extremely uplifting. You described much of the difficulty I had growing up. The talk of being confused by your friends suddenly being into girls was particularly evocative. In high school and college, I also had a lot of really awkward or negative interaction with people, especially girls who just didn't get what I was. I even had a female friend stop being my friend when I turned

down her sexual advances. I can only guess as to why, but I always felt like she just didn't believe me, and that really sucked um. I Also, it also made me realize that, at thirty one years old, I'm not as okay with my sexuality as I'd like to think I am. No matter how much I've told myself and others, I'm a sexual and I'm cool it. I've always had that itch in the back of my head that has told me that I'm crazy or delusional or there's something

wrong with me. Knowing that this is a real thing, with such a relief, I'm now looking into a d E N and finding all sorts of exciting stuff. So thank you very much recovering the subject. Nice. Yeah, congrats, And that is an anonymous listener who got something out of the show, which is nice. Got a sexual healing out of the show, I hope. So that's really cool. That is what we do, man, that's why we do this, psychic healers. Uh. We've asked for it before it we'll

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