Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Who Are the Shooters? w/ Ken Klippenstein | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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Who Are the Shooters? w/ Ken Klippenstein | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying.
• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The new world struggles to reborn.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now is the time of monsters.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: With those words from Gramsci, I welcome you to the time of monsters podcast.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is sponsored by the Nation magazine.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm Jeet here National Affairs correspondent for the Nation.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's been a spade of shootings recently, unfortunately not a new thing in American society, but many of these are falling under a broad category called political violence, which is actually perhaps not accurate or is an umbrella term that causes more confusion than it solves, but is at least the way these things are being portrayed in the media.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking of course about
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the shooting at Ice Facility in Dallas, and even on the same day as the Kirk shooting, a school shooting in Colorado where the shooter seemed to have some sort of Nazi ideology or used neo-Nazi phrases.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I think one of the best reporters who's like covering this is my guest Ken Clippenstein, who can now be found on his sub-sackkenclippenstein.com, which I highly recommend everyone subscribe with you.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a great source of news and especially he's been
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: doing very, very valuable work in each of these cases of tracking down actual information about the alleged shooters, what people who know them say, and the picture that he sort of paints is more complicated, nuanced than what's going on.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, welcome to the program again.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me, Jeet.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think as I mentioned, there's a term floating around, which I myself have used called political violence.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm kind of increasing and unhappy with it.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that there is an attempt on both the part of the Trump administration, but also a lot of people in general on both the right and left to give a certain coherent political ideology to these events.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And do you want to talk a little bit about that?
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, and why that might not be the best way to analyze what's going on?
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's been one of the most striking parts of just talking to friends and people close to these last two high profile shooters was realizing how much the world of politics sickers like you and I who follow things very closely and spend a lot of time thinking about you know different ideologies of viewpoints where we stand within all of that how much that does not reflect the experience I think of most of the country.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is one of certainly disdain, probably contempt for both of the major political parties, but not a whole lot of thought beyond that, and that's certainly the case that I found, at least based on the accounts provided to me by people that knew these two most recent high profile shooters.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know that that's specific to shooters.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, I think that's probably just most of the country.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, yeah, no, I think that's actually very true.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, I mean, something I've written about in the other sort of context, which is that the sort of framework of left and right, which, you know, comes from highly political people doesn't have to apply to like contemporary.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: political situation where I think there's a broad strain of anti-system thought in America and that sometimes takes rakeling forms or left wing forms or even very often.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So weird combination of left or even things that are completely off the spectrum.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It terms up like not really, you know, things like concerns about UFOs or cover-ups about UFOs, a lot of the Q&A on conspiracy theory types, you know, some of them named political things, but some of them are about, you know, there is about celebrities, yeah, I'm not quite sure how that you can map that on to politics.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, I think that one way to think about this is all is that there is a kind of, you know, broader trend towards anti-system thinking,
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's shared by like a large number of Americans, some of whom have guns and, you know, like commit these shootings.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But let's maybe like specify like this.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, who, as far as I know, has not confessed to his crime and so so I want to make that very clear.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about an alleged individual.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, his alleged killer is Tyler Robinson, who comes from Utah, I think, several miles away from the university at which Kirk was speaking when he was shot and killed the neck.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's interesting about this individual is he is just like the personification of what we were just talking about, which is dissatisfaction on the status quo, but does not fit neatly into the categories
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: and New York City and you know and I lived in Washington for several years before I moved back to Midwest and the impression there is like it's it's almost like a team sport like people socially want to know which side you work because everybody is most people have jobs if not explicitly in government it's like near it and so you know there's two sides and and as I talk to friends close to Robinson it quickly became clear that you know I knew that not everyone thought that way but there are people that really don't think that way so
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: libertarians kind of anti-authority streak, I would say, but then addition that cared strongly about LGBT rights, had a trans lover at the time and if the, you know, if the reporting is to be believed and what the Justice Department's been saying, that figured in prominently to the alleged shooters motive with regard to the shooting because Charlie Kirk is someone who's, you know, going around saying very negative things about
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: regards trans as trans gentrism as mental illness.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says this very openly at these universities.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when I when I started talking with friends and getting uh I was thinking you know I I did send me messages from their chats or something and I was expecting it to be something you know straightforwardly extreme like um there was a lot of speculation at the time that oh maybe he's a groyper which is some very subcultural reference who is certain type of I don't
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Young male ideology.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't necessarily think I'd find that, but I think it'd be I thought it would be some identifiable category a type of person and it wasn't the case at all because I quickly found out that in Utah Guncultures common You know masculinity is common, but then younger people have more open-minded ideas about LGBT and so a lot of the kind of you know idea that we have of politics is like I'd compare it to
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't want to have Washington brain which leads people to think someone like Marco Rubio all the little Tina is going to vote for him because he's Latino in reality that we found that certainly not to be the case with him but in all sorts of different ways people are way more messy than than we thought and then so I think because of the coverage being concentrated in areas where maybe people are a little bit more straightforward politically.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: there's been a lot of confusion about this because each side will say oh look he's into guns so therefore he must be right wing he's probably a gripper or you know on the right wing they're like oh he has a trans lover therefore he must be some kind of radical leftist and that's just not how people are.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't think I see people were like always that way.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would remind people that, you know, Donald Trump's great mentor, when he's coming away, he's just very cool and you know, he's like, you're closeted, but like very actively gay, but also, you know, like a prodigy of Joseph McCarthy and a heart-grade Republican.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think that these sort of messy personal things have always been there, but it's very hard for people who have sorted themselves up politically in Washington, as you say, and maybe in some of these newsrooms in New York in Washington.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: to actually see that.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the other thing that came out in your reporting on Tyler Robinson, and I don't want to be clear about this.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying that this is the cause, but I think that it is essentially about the social world, in which these shooters are commonly coming from, which is a social world just of young people in general.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I mean, he's like very online and very meme conscious.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I've heard the phrase a meme kid thrown around.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to say something about that?
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and again, like just at a score This is not like the cause of it, but I think it gives us a way of understanding where this guy is coming from
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, any cause in a situation like this, I think it's gonna be very multifactorial because, and you know, just in life, if you think of any serious decision that one makes, I can't think of a more serious one than killing somebody, there's not one reason you do something.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's usually in a glomeration of different,
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: motives and reasons and factors and things.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So with that being said, he was a very online person.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even for me reporting on this, I'm 37 years old.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I spent plenty of time on the internet.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have as long as I can remember since, you know, my dad was a scientist.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we had we had internet early.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I was
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: using the old one of the first Macs, like first types of Macs, just experimenting with technology.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, so I think of myself as like not, you know, totally foreign to it.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I can't keep up with the words and and link on things.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as I was looking at the text messages that some people in what are called discord, it's kind of like, what's that for gaming?
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, the media, and when they talk about this, there's so much obscuring to them around it, like, oh my god, the, you know, the, the, the,
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: the shadowy discord chat room.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like it's literally just video and audio and text.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's all it is.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And people tend to use it what's called servers which is just like a channel around video games.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So say you're playing a video game and you just chat on it or maybe you text about it afterwards.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, just really straightforward stuff.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know there was a kind of moral panic like, you know, are your kids on discord?
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I like, yeah, I do, I looked at the numbers.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: This app has, I think, like, over a hundred million people on it.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, everyone, it's like saying, are your kids on what's app?
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you know what I mean?
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a very common thing, but, but, I mean, it's the interesting thing.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's very revealing that in the Washington, the discourse was like, you know, oh, discord.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is something wrong there.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is obviously,
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: some sort of this is like the place where uh, antifa conspirators gather together, you know?
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like it's some headquarters or bunkers.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and looking at, you know, some of the ground work for that has been laid by the government already because in 2023, Jack Torshira, the then US airman posted a ton of highly classified documents to his own, his own server on the same platform.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because of that, I do a lot of national security reporting.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: The military, the intelligence community, they've been really paranoid about what is this, what is the scary app where things are happening?
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think really understanding that this is just a chat room like anything else.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean,
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: It has more capital behind it, but essentially the same is any other chat room.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So going into it, the government has already kind of teed up to be like, oh, God, here's that scary platform again where nothing good is happening.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I did up, you know, FBI Director Cash Patel testified to Congress this past week, I'm working on a story about this now.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was almost like Tipper Gore, it was like the scary, he literally said he says we need to get in those chat rooms and see what's going on.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, you just feel this gravitational pull towards
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, understandably wanting to respond to these horrifying things that are happening and have them now happen, but then simplifying it into the silly solution that we know doesn't work because we've already been through this with the Columbine school shooting and all the freak out about doom and violent video games.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's tons of sociological evidence to suggest that.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, if, if there plays any role, it's one of many,
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: um, factor.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's been kind of disappointing to look at that.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not much of a game on myself, but I know that a lot of young people are.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so my impression based on just not just that storybook in general is like, if you remove those games, it's not like they're just going to go outside and be like, all right, time would be a social being like, I would, that'd be nice if that happened.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, but what might happen is they just go to something even worse than then the level of isolation you experience from, you know, being in this gaming in this gaming culture.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I felt honestly a little bit sympathetic for the press because I was looking at some of the words and I was like, what is the I thought I knew stuff It may be feel old Do you know what I was online and I don't understand half of these things.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there was also like a a lot of Temphty like decipher these memes because I think In Tyler Robinson's case, I mean, he seemed to be pretty hard course.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm they were pretty obscure and I heard some conflicting Interpretations or whatever, but I mean, I think I get all of that goes to
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fact that this is not like, you know, like I think applying a sort of normal ideological analysis doesn't quite work.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think that, you know, one of the messages that Robinson sent to his, what I assume is his partner, but he says something like the effect that, you know, he is, you know, going to be thrilled if Fox News reads out the messages on the bullet casing, which are these memes.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, what the memes was, something to the effect of, you know, if you can read this, you are gay, LM AO, and, you know, like...
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't quite see that as quite a political thing.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I see like, it's like an act of trolling where there's anything else.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some of these errors, even on the part of the FBI, I can see why they would come to the wrong conclusion because there's subtext to all of these things.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you can't just take them like, it's chatGPT saying something like, there's often a rich, I mean, you know this, and I know this because we spend so much time on Twitter.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But things are referential, they're self-referential, I mean, there's a, it's just like when you study literature in school, somebody writing something is writing it in response to some, in a context in which it's responding to some other work.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a whole sociology to this that I think really complicates things when you have an FBI director that is just throwing everything out into the ether, the moment they find it.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, and people read it and they understandably only see the overt uh, text and they miss the subtext because how could they know I didn't know these things.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: My advantage wasn't being someone who's online.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: My advantage was knowing from being online that I don't know how people talk and you have to get a sense of
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's just like anthropology.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to go in chat with people in chat, say, what does this mean?
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, he's referring to a joke from last month or something, or yeah, yeah.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I didn't see like, I mean, from very early on, like the sort of FBI and the Trump administration was kind of like leaking to the press to put a heavy ideological span, some of which has real consequences, because I think, you know, one of the early stories that was going out was that there was like a sort of like
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and pro-trans messages on the bullets.
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think even more scandalously, like an attempt to suggest that they were like, that this was more than just like one person that there was like a kind of shadowy network of people, which I think was designed partially with the legal intent that if you can find more than one person, you can design me to does a terrorist group or whatever, and then bring a wider swath of legal enforcement in play, right?
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's partly what's going on.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So under US law, you can't formally designate someone at terrorists unless there's some nexus to a what's called a foreign terrorist organization of FTO.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: That list of FTOs is determined by the state department.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So whenever you see somebody scrambling or wanting Trump scrambling on, talk about, oh, we're going to find some foreign group.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's because then you can hit them with the authorities and resources and institutional prioritization of a terrorism.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: designation.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, that doesn't mean that they can't treat things and investigate things as terrorism, but it means they can't bring charges in front of a court of terrorism.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a kind of subtle, it's a subtle distinction.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, and I think they're trying to sort of change this legal background because Trump had an executive order saying that antifa is a terrorist group.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is like something that is like not even a group.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's an ideology.
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And but I mean like they're trying there there's a kind of attempt to circumvent those kind of like, you know, like appropriately strong barriers for designating something as terrorism, right?
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like they're trying to break down some of those barriers.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the danger is that terrorism is essentially pre-crime.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The idea is that you are going to prevent a crime before it has happened instead of the traditional law enforcement role of a crime happens, or you have evidence of someone going crime, and you go and you try to stop it or disrupt it.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: The idea is you're going to
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: anticipate it and stop something before happens and I don't necessarily mean that in a derogatory way one can imagine situations where you want to prevent a crime but the civil liberties implications are really important because when you talk about terrorism you're talking about ideology and you're talking about speech and that's why we've seen very clearly a Trump administration come out in recent days I think a lot of this is related to
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: the psychological fallout of the Kirk Association, which I don't want to downplay.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they're probably friendly with him.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can imagine if someone you knew got shot.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'd be pretty shaken.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're openly saying, like Trump decided to interview.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The interviewer said, oh, you know, you're making these comments about how free speech needs to have limits because of the security issues or whatever.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Charlie Kirk didn't stand for that.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He would have wanted it.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what do you think of that?
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then Trump literally says he says, well, I don't think he'd say that now.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: He literally said that in interview.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that gives you a sense of the psychology here, which is like, you know, we're in defensive crowds.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we need to invoke extraordinary measures for extraordinary threats.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's always, I mean, this seems very similar to like, you meet an aftermath of 9-11, except among a more narrowly-based group.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think the shock of 9-11 was widely shared, and there was a kind of, you know, retrenchment on civil liberties and free speech that had a wide consensus behind it.
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now I think what's happening is that within that more narrow mega world, there has been a kind of rethinking of this.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it has sort of like a very risky political outcomes, because I actually don't think that there's a sort of buy-in in the wider society for this.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's going to be some real conflict coming.
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: out of, you know, the troubled administration turned to clamp down on civil liberties.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I think possibly meeting resistance, even perhaps not from the Democrats, but for a wider civil society.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I totally agree.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the problems with national security reporting.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So much of it happens in the shadow.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So much of it is non-public.
• 18:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you have frustrations with a lack of transparency,
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: In government, you know, national security world is just that on steroids, I mean because they have not just the classification but they have a culture of secrecy where the idea is that by not disclosing you are protecting people and by and if you were to go and talk about something you're in dangering things.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So one of my frustrations is reporting on this stuff is how good they've been in various respects at hiding these moves towards Trump announces the terror designation.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the question is, what does that look like?
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: How is that implemented at the bureaucratic level?
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's very little insight into what's going on there.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, and in fact, they're actually like actively trying to also criminalize even like people in the government talking to journalists, right, or to make it, you know, or that we have Pentagon reporters could lose their status if they take off the record material.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, so it does seem to be like a part of a broader clamp down and also with excess Pentagon.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I mean these are all very wearing trends.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to actually just go back to the other Shooter Joshua John because you also did some very good reporting on him and and there's been some more information that We're recording this on there's they some more information.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just came out about him.
• 20:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So like can we sort of flesh out who this Guy was
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so John was a 29 year old man who drove to Dallas, Texas with the intent of shooting at an ice facility, and I'll get into the reasons why later.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so once it happened, there's obviously pandemonium, no one knows what's going on, because this person ends up shooting at an adornier in ice vehicle and killing at least one.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: detainee.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the question is, well, you know, was is where they're targeting detainees, where they're targeting ice, the Trump administration of course comes out immediately.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It says, oh, this is an assault on our ice officers.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Clearly, it's anti-file blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so within the first hour, it was crazy how fast it was.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I cover national security for years.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I can't tell you how much more deliberative they ordinarily are around these things where they'll be like, I can't interfere with an ongoing investigation.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's only because of they want to have the case work in order for that when they go to court,
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in this case, Cash Patel takes to Twitter, or actually whatever you call it now, and posts a picture that the FBI agents on the ground got of an unspent shell casing from the guns and etched on one of them is anti-ice.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this just is like triggers.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: This obviously huge, I mean, the rights start saying, oh, this must be anti-phone.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is what Trump has been saying, because just two days prior Trump
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: domestic terrorist organization.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's on that's certainly on the right's mind.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They go there and then I see a lot of people on the left at least online saying, oh, this must have been planted or like the language is weird like who talks like the anti-Is usually it's abolish eyes for you know stronger language.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: So
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I got curious about at that point and I thought, you know, I tend to come from the perspective of like, all right, well, let's take, let's take this on its face and then proceed from there.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like it looks like it's anti, I see what I can find.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I start talking interview three three people that knew him at various points, but they all knew him at least since middle school, one since elementary school.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they had a pretty good idea of him until the last couple of years when he fell at a touch, which I'll get into in a second.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, but what was amazing to me was, um, they, they each had, they diverged on different things.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, some of them, some of them liked him more, some of them were more critical of, of what it became, as we came more isolated and spending more time gaming and becoming more of a kind of edgy online type, um, aesthetic.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things they all agreed on was that this guy is so sarcastic and so ironic and so just like when I said, oh, the anti-ispo, it's like that means he's anti-ish, right?
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were like, they were all like, there's no way he would say something that sincere and that just like straightforward.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like they said it's possible he's anti-is, but if he was he would express it in some kind of
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: way that's consistent with because it wasn't just the internet, they sent me videos that he had posted trying to do comedy and it was kind of sad.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of them said that you're reminded them of the Joker movie and that we're chilling parallels.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But watching some of these videos, he was somebody that never liked to come out and say what he was thinking, he always was tongue-in-cheek and that was basically their thought, not that they had any insight information about.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: What happened, but they just looked at it.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like, this is very unlike him.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: They just have like a really straightforward thing.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: That said, they all described him as having, there were some parallels with the Tyler Robinson case.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: They described someone with a libertarian bent who didn't like authority in the government in general.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: One friend mentioned that he disliked Trump during his first administration and had made a couple comments of that effect.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the impression I got was that he didn't like, he's probably like most Americans.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't like any of it.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just disgusted by all of it.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: upset with all of it.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, again, that probably is the mean position by most people in the country.
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I guess I think people read that.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like, oh, he's in coherent.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, well, your average person doesn't, doesn't, hasn't spent the time to create a belief system that you would consider coherent.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean?
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure that that's unusual, but in any case, that was what he was and subsequent to my report based on my interviews with his friends, his own brother comes out and says, yeah, he was never really put it.
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember him saying anything, certainly not about it.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: ice and then this this afternoon the FBI had a press conference where they announced they give an update on the investigation and they said we can't find any evidence of political affiliation and they said we still think that he was anti ice that he really didn't like ice.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: that he didn't like the federal government, which is consistent with, you know, what you'd expect of the libertarian.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But aside from that, it was kind of extraordinary.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was amazed.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: They said it because they're basically undercutting everything we were just talking about, which is what Trump said, what Vice President J. Advanced said, what the FBI director said, they said, we can't find any evidence of a connection to any or even an affiliation with a specific political group.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it's kind of weird to see.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Almost the entirety of media coverage trying to answer that question saying which side was he and then a second time not having a clear answer to that and it's like at what point are we going to be like okay well maybe most people don't see things that way and so we should approach this question a little bit differently.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, like, what's side is the honor, what is the ideology?
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, presupposes a very different world than we're living in.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, the world in which people have a coherent ideology is like, you know, the sort of 20th century world of mass political parties, where, you know, like, you have a membership of a party, you know, communist party, Republican Democrats, Nazi party, you go to meetings, you get indoctrinated into speeches,
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's still people that do that, right, like sickles, as you said, but that is actually like an increasingly like, you know, small minority of people, like there's actually been a kind of bizarre.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was just thinking, we're in a context right now where the Democrats have the lowest approval rating from their own party in history, like ever recorded.
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I saw it was something like 70% of Democrats want to not just remove the lead, but completely just kick them out, kick out the leadership, get rid of Chuck Schumer, get rid of He came Jeffries and just completely started new.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And those are extraordinary numbers.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can you imagine that five years ago?
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, from the center of the Democratic Party.
• 26:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, we're in the fact that Trump was able to take over the Republican party precisely because he was not a Republican.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's not been a Republican for most of his life and had like, you know, some at least views or statements that seemed very unrepublican and was hated by the party establishment.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think those were all like pluses for him.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in this world of sort of political disaffiliation, you know, and political alienation, like like to suddenly expect that like the most odd ball of odd balls, people who actually, you know, like, pick up a gun and go shoot.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I could read the ones with coherent ideology.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing.
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: If people read this and they're like, oh, he was incoherent.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That must mean that he was kind of crazy.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I stopped to think about it for a second.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, wait a second.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have contempt for both of the parties.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And everyone I know does.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought about it.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, you would have to be, I think there's something wrong with you.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you don't have some level of frustration with, do you really mean like, that's probably the most normal thing about this guy that he was like, I hate these sides, you know?
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In both cases, I actually do think, I mean, it is a disturbing thing that they do seem like very normal, you know, young men, in a lot of ways, like in both, you know, the lack of a coherent ideology and also in the sort of, you know, social alienation of like, you know, like spending more and more of their lives online and not having like, uh,
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: affiliations and not and losing contact with people, like it's like the sort of life story of these guys.
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: seems like very almost commonplace like and then you apply to like tens of millions of people that are not assassins.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was one of the most chilling parts about reporting on this was because I come into this thinking it's going to be like mind hunter where I'm just finding these sociopaths.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god look at this trail of bloodshed that they you know you study I remember I taking course in psychology they were talking about sociopathy and it's like
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, just become some sociopathic see like whatever it's like there's a period of in adolescence you're you know mistreating people you're mistreating animals you're being casually cruel these kind of things and certainly title or up in since case I found no evidence of that and I was very surprised to find out there was actually pretty polite
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: everyone I talked to said that both they and the people that they talk to knew him this is I think part of what caused the so much confusion initially was because when he went on the discord chat and announced everybody hey I'm sorry that I've created all these problems blah blah blah you know the trumpet administration and certainly a lot of people online they responded with
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, surely they were all in on it because why would he say this to people, but but I was given the chats and people were shocked and then when I talked to them They were I think it was it's kind of a sad story because the FBI director said we're gonna investigate every single person and every single one of these chats that he was in this guy was in chats with dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, uh, and when I talked to them, they were traumatized by this.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can you imagine that, yeah, it sounds like that, where someone you didn't expect to did that, you'd probably be like, I, I, I know I wouldn't be in a good place.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now they have to worry about the FBI and all these crazy, everyone I'm going to talk to you said they had gotten these threatening messages from people saying, oh, we know you're in on it or whatever.
• 29:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, they were just as shocked as I was investigating it, realizing it.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: With the second person, it was a little bit more mixed.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, not the signs of like the kinds of signs of sociopathy and anti-sociality that you might expect.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, he would make like offensive jokes and kind of be off putting and he'd like to be an edge lord and things like that.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like a little bit closer, but still not someone who's like torturing animals or, you know, getting having all these problems with the law or whatever that you might expect.
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, even being an edge lord is not like that uncommon, right?
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, like, guys, you spend time online.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it is, you mentioned, you know, like, the Joker movie and, sort of, Joker vacation, you know, I then, I, the older model that, which the Joker movie was based on is, you know, the King of Comedy with a Rupert Fimkin who, you know, is a sort of failed stand-up comedian who kidnap somebody.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's, he's like, like, the almost, um, the kind of, like, model for the sort of stuff.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and again, like, not, like, that not totally,
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: like abnormal, but like also not like coherent mainstream politics either.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's almost like more than anything.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It felt like a reflection of trends in the broader society, which is so like in news, you know, there used to be cable networks and there was kind of this consensus picture of reality more last with like the various outlets.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now it's been fractured into a million different.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like when I do a story, I have to post it on Blue Sky, then I have to post it on Twitter and then I have to post it on Facebook and then I have to post it on Threads.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I'm just thinking about it, that's a kaleidoscope, that's so chaotic, like all these different, so I think there's all these micro, I was just talking to musician friend and she was saying, you know, there used to be like a Madonna figure and there can't really be as much of that anymore because everybody has their micro celebrity favorites and things.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that's part of what's happening here.
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no unified reality.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I think it's good that there are more voices that people can listen to, but maybe we're in this transition point where now we have to figure out how do you have a unified picture where people care about everybody else when we're all in these different little because diversity is good so I'm inclined to say that that's not necessarily bad, but we also want to be in touch with we don't want to be able to drift away from everyone else so I don't know how to yeah that's I don't know that's my
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's my armchair now, so yeah, I don't know how he does seem like, yeah, I mean, like, I think you could probably agree that like, or think that like a lot of these technologies and trends aren't bad, except, you know, there are a few people that sort of like fall through the cracks or, you know, going to the sort of darker crevices that, you know, one wouldn't want people to go into, but like it's hard to come up with a social policy to address this, right?
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, yeah, if you have cars, you're going to have, like, some guys that, you know, like get into car accidents or whatever, like, but, you know, like
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, a lot of other people that use cars responsibly.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, it is, it's hard to, I think one kind of like frustration that people have is like, they want to have like, you know, the magic bullet solution, whether it's like, you know, blaming antifa or flat blaming the, going first or whatever.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't seem to me that this is open to that kind of analysis.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Totally totally.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that's what I found.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Researching because that's kind of like, okay, well, what are my views on how you would improve this and I don't think that'd be any one thing because there's so many there's the corrosiveness of isolation there's You know, I think polarization It's not like a sentence.
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, I think polarization probably has led people to dehumanize Political opponents and that's certainly something I've reflected on in the wake of this
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's also, you know, genuine material inequality that leads to indignation and unrest that kind of thing.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's all kinds of different things.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, what I can tell you, what it isn't, it's not just demonizing video games and making it so that these
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, isolated people have one less thing to look forward to in life.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it might be sad to look at someone that just Only has this, but it's kind of like, you know, I said this at the top.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like if you took away a video game, they're not necessarily going to just go out into the world and start socializing with everyone.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's not how it works.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's right and it's not just video games and it's not just like sort of ideology and I'll mention that the ideological analysis comes from both left and right there are a lot of liberals You know, putting up these charts while you're most like of these killers are right wing and
• 34:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, maybe like, you know, but like even the right wing ones, you know, I mentioned, you know, the Colorado, you know, shooter who did seem to have like, you know, anti-Semitic racist, you know, not to use like with the Desmond Holly, it's also the case that he was also like a real fan of other shooters he had.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: like, you know, he seemed to have collected information about calling, like other school shooters, and that seems to me something a little bit distinct for ideology.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I do want to like caution people, you know, like this is not just like it's bad that the Trump administration is trying to put an antifa analysis on this, but this is something that people on the liberal and left side of things do as well.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, totally.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even just when people ask me, so was it political in that, I don't quite know how to answer that question because you know what I've settled on is I say, I don't think the attacks were partisan, but they had political character in both cases.
• 35:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, but that's so subtle and it's so does not lend itself to major meeting of coverage and certainly to TV.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you know what I mean?
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like so hard to have a conversation about this.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: these blanket answers don't actually work but I did actually want to return to the Trump thing because I do actually think the way that they're trying to you know create this boogie man of antifa is very risky as you said you know you know this is not something
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: that like the state department has designated as a terrorist group.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like the people who study it as far as I can tell, you know, their statement is, you know, antifa is an ideology.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like feminism, right?
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they're like feminist groups and they're anti-fog groups.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's no like, you know, it's not like Al Qaeda where there's like a mastermind living in a cave somewhere, like directing people.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even Al Qaeda had elements of being like an ideology.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: as well as like a movement.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this attempt by the federal government has designated ideology as a foe and then to use the resources of like, you know, Rico and all the things that the government can do and to tie in more mainstream people, like George Soros with these groups.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like it seems like the potential for civil liberties abuses huge.
• 36:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the most frightening parts was when I started talking to FBI people that I knew and realizing I thought at first for sure this is just rhetoric that there I thought it was just they're trying to find some kind of pretextual basis To find some foreign link that lets you take off the gloves and use all these counterterrorism authorities and resources and things
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I quickly learned was, no, they actually believe this stuff.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you have to remember this administration.
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: They have Sebastian Gorka, senior director of counterterrorism.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Literally, that guy is, so everyone laughs at him, I do too.
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he is in charge of the entire counterterrorism portfolio.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And after these shootings, he's been posting stuff about the quote, I'm not making this up.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says quote, the trans conspiracy.
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: He actually believes there's somehow coordinating and collaborating on this stuff.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's really scary.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that is the kind of cauldron out of which this crazy designation about, you know, the site, like you were saying, that there's some network.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And part of it, too, is that the principal figures in the administration prosecuting this war on Antifa or how we want to call it.
• 37:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: They come up in the war on terror and so they were trained to look at things as like network mapping and figuring out who the secret because with al-Qaeda Obviously, you can't openly fund it because of sanctions and things.
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they have covert financing and and Transnational relationships between Afghanistan and maybe the good maybe golf donors that kind of thing So they're taking that framework and applying it where it's coming home now because the global war on terror is more or less been declared over It doesn't mean we're not still focusing on it, but it's not an overwhelming priority
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the coming weeks, we're going to see they're going to release the national defense strategy and as I understand it, big focus on homeland defense, quote homeland defense.
• 38:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so a lot of that means counter terrorism and you're seeing them use that label they're just throwing it around everywhere like with cartels for instance.
• 38:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: historically seen as narco traffickers now being treated now formally designated as terrorist organizations which allows them to just blow them out of the water as we've seen think they blew up their fourth drug boat recently and so this is how this is the glasses that they view the whole world through it's like they can't see an enemy without seeing these shadowy actors around in the case of cartels again I thought it was just politics and they were saying oh the Venezuelan government is bankrolling and I started investigating it no they really believe this stuff they
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know, that is terrifying.
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't even know that that's just like an entire episode in it of itself that we could be talking about, because it could lead to very dangerous things.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I would just end on like some maybe concluding note.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it always was a sort of critique of the global war and terror and of that, there was a risk of a boomerang effect,
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you have a war, the apparatus for fighting has, you know, can be applied at home as well.
• 39:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that, you know, one way to understand Trump is that this is the boomerang from what, you know, George W. Bush and Dick Taney did.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we're both to see, you know, like all of the horrible things of, you know, like rendition and extra judicial killings and, you know, special ops assassination teams, what happens when that's applied at home.
• 40:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's something we have to think about.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, completely aside from the civil liberties concerns, which are real, there's also the opportunity to cost of all this social capital being put towards a problem that's real, and that exists, and that we should do something about, which is seems to me to be, you know, young men becoming violent and feeling hopeless to spare all that.
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that whole complicated list of stuff we were talking about, that's a real thing.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, people are deserving of empathy and we need to solve it so that people aren't hurt, not just the individual, but the people they're shooting too.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when we're chasing shadows and foreign act, all this stuff, it's like, so sad, because it's like, man, can you imagine what we could do if we actually used resources in a somewhat rational,
• 40:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: because because there are other countries, you can take set Korea.
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: They play more games than we do by a mile, and they don't have anything like the violence that we have here.
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this stuff is like soluble, I think.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 41:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is, there's like, I mean, it's absolutely the wrong tool kit.
• 41:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the problem, it's like it's hard to think of like a worst tool kit.
• 41:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, for the, you know, seriously, because you're just kind of further alienate them.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: The whole point is that they feel alienated and now you're going to call them, like, even now they have horns and we have to blow the, you know, treat them like killer.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't even, it's just, it's sad, honestly.
• 41:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I mean, if you have anti system anger, like, you know, like varying the sort of full fangs of the state is,
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I mind a good way to like, like, great work of it.
• 41:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we will see where this all goes.
• 41:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But unfortunately, dire note, one of these days, I have good news three.
• 41:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I want to thank Ken once again for being on the program.
• 41:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, I will link to his sub-stack, but very strongly encourage everyone to be reading it for forgetting first-rate journalism on this and many other matters.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me.