Sophie and Carl dissect John Ross's 1996 novel Unintended Consequences, analyzing its cover art resembling the Elián González arrest and its plot where protagonist Henry Bowman revolts against ATF agents. They critique how Ross cherry-picks history, linking the 1934 National Firearms Act and U.S. v. Miller to authoritarianism while omitting Reconstruction-era civil rights violations and labor movement suppression. Comparing the book to The Turner Diaries and noting Timothy McVeigh's potential influence, the hosts conclude that despite its polished use of obscure details like the Bonus Army massacre, this sophisticated right-wing propaganda alienates allies by excluding critical context yet effectively radicalizes its target audience through selective historical narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:31
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Justice in the Space00:15:57
Oh my goodness gracious.
It's the podcast behind the bastards that this is, that you're listening to right now on the internet.com.
Sophie, Robert, how was that?
We doing good?
You're doing great.
Proud of you.
We're doing great.
We're doing good.
Okay, great.
Well, with me to help me do great is my buddy Carl Casarda from Inrange TV.
Carl, hey, how are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
I'm glad to be here again, though.
I've really enjoyed our last collaboration and looking forward to the topic we have today.
Oh boy.
Today's going to be a fun one.
We're doing another book episode.
We're actually going to record hopefully two today, although we generally just do one a week because this helps me get ahead for some travel that I have planned.
And my goodness, Carl, we have quite a book for everyone today.
So I received in the mail from a fan a couple of weeks ago a hardcover copy of a book called Unintended Consequences.
Now, Sophie, Carl knows this book.
Everyone who's in gun culture is aware of this book.
You want to describe that cover to our audience?
It's a, I think it's the Declaration of Independence on Fire.
Is that what I'm seeing?
That's certainly part of it.
Yeah, I can only see the top of it.
Can you see?
Oh, okay.
One sec.
Let me get my...
Let me see if I can properly.
Here we go.
So I'm just going to Google it.
Consequences.
Yeah.
Cover.
Oh.
I recommend people at home check this one out because it is quite a cover.
I take it back because all I could see was the top, which is the Declaration of Independence on Fire, but it looks like a soldier attacking a topless woman who's been blindfolded.
Yeah, I think she's a Lady Justice.
You can see her scales there, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So it's like some sort of SWAT team operative attacking Lady Justice.
And there's nipples.
You can see, like, it's full, there's full frontal nudity on the cover of John Ross's Unintended Consequences.
Yeah, it's a super hot Lady Justice getting the full Ellian Gonzalez treatment with a full SWAT team guy with an MP5.
Yeah.
What a choice.
What a series of choices.
Wow.
Yeah, and I think he wrote this.
When exactly was this published?
1996, I think, actually.
1996.
So yeah, this would have been right after Ellian Gonzalez.
Because I think you're right, Carl.
They're very clearly like doing, because he's the cop on the front has an MP5, which, if I'm not mistaken, is what the cop who grabbed Ellian Gonzalez in that famous photo had.
And it's his body language is not dissimilar.
No, it isn't.
But honestly, I think this is one of those weird things where the Ellian Gonzalez thing happened after they did the cover art.
So it's a weird thing where like it actually simulated art.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
It's kind of weird.
Yeah.
So in that regard, I guess they kind of nailed it, although it wasn't going after Lady Justice, of course.
Yeah, it was going after, well, poor kid trying to escape.
Yeah.
And it's interesting because I think the main influence behind this book, in brief, this is like a kind of fantasy about gun confiscation leading to a civil war type scenario against like the evil gun-grabbing government.
And I think it was very directly inspired by Ruby Rich, which is kind of like a seminal moment for a lot of people.
And is actually, just so we're clear, an example of the government doing a lot of really fucked up things because they shot a child and his mom to death in a raid gone horribly awry.
Not to kind of like whitewash some of the sketchy shit that like their father was doing, but like it's definitely an example of government overreach.
But that Ruby Ridge kind of leads us into this kind of explosion of action on behalf of the militia movement, which culminates in a big way in the Oklahoma City bombing after the Waco tragedy.
So you've got like these series of largely police overreaches with high body counts, and it kind of ignites this militia movement.
And into that culture comes a guy named John Ross.
Now, John is an interesting guy.
He calls himself, he was actually a Democratic congressional candidate in Missouri in 1998.
But he calls himself a pre-Roosevelt Democrat, which he defines as a Democrat without the socialism, which is interesting because it's not that far pre-Roosevelt that the Democrats were the party of slavery.
How pre-are we going, John?
Is a question I would ask anyone to find themselves that way.
What is your understanding of John Ross?
Because he's a pretty interesting dude.
Yeah, I don't know.
I looked up some stuff in some interviews with him, and it's very clear that whatever he described himself as, that when he wrote this book, he was promoting it very much to the Republican side of things, even back in the 90s and early 2000s, which is not surprising considering how firearm-centric his content was, right?
I don't know a lot about him individually, but I do know quite a bit about the culture around the book and the gun shows and the environment that that was written in, if we get into that a little bit, because what was going on then in the gun community and now, I would have to say, it's hard to believe.
It's actually better now than it was then.
But back then it was a pretty weird space.
Yeah, and this is one of those books.
You would not have found unintended consequences in like a Barnes ⁇ Noble.
Like it wasn't that kind of, I mean, maybe now you can.
I'm sure like places like Powell's books that make a point of selling absolutely everything sell it.
But this was a book that like I started to encounter in the early 2000s, like gun shows.
It's one of those, it's one of those books you would find at gun shows.
And it's not, it's in, a lot of people compare it to the Turner Diaries.
It is not a neo-Nazi book is my understanding.
Although there's some problematic shit in it, as I'm sure we'll get into.
You mentioned that, but when you go to the gun shows, like, I mean, gun shows now are still a thing, right?
There's like some weirdness there for sure.
But back in the late 90s, early 2000s, a gun show was like this kind of dark, dank, musty place with you first walk in and there's the guy in the right corner, the old man with his Nazi paraphernalia on the left side was the Confederate and paraphernalia.
And then there was the book vendor that had all the occult knowledge about how to make this thing full auto or how to make booby traps.
And right there next to that was this book from John Ross, Unintended Consequences.
And it was like, I think a lot of people went to the gun show not only for that, but to go pick up those crazy books that have now, of course, been replaced by the internet.
But you come back and you could have that feeling of being the guy in the know.
And you don't really see that as much at the gun shows anymore.
Yeah, it's in part because there's just so much more money, not just in the gun part, but in the culture part of gun culture, right?
There's like a whole media ecosystem.
There's big name magazines.
There's large, obviously large YouTube channels.
There is like, it didn't feel in that, there was that period, the late 90s, early 2000s, where gun culture didn't really feel vibrant.
It kind of felt like it was something that was dying and not particularly healthy, just in not even in like a, not to get into like a moral sense, but just in like the, it did not seem like something that had a bright future for a while there.
Yeah, this is a topic for another day, but I actually feel, I think that the, honestly, the assault weapon ban of 94 actually made it more vibrant because it got people to, it really woke up in maybe some good ways and in some bad ways, an interesting creation.
It got people involved in a way that I don't think people were that concerned about before the AWB.
And I think that's one of the things that fired it back up.
It did.
And I think you get a lot of funding from politicians and from political action groups and whatnot, from the industry that starts coming in, which is responsible for kind of revitalizing gun culture in a lot of ways and moving it out of this kind of dank gym filled with weirdos kind of space that you were describing.
So what is your understanding about like the overarching plot of unintended consequences?
Have you read this before?
Yeah, I actually, I was one of those guys that picked that up off the counter because I'm like, what the hell is this thing?
Right.
And I mean, the overarching plot, as I know it, is a guy named Henry Bowman, who's the protagonist.
And in it, if I recall correctly, it's been decades since I've read it.
It takes and builds up an argument based on a number of relatively accurate historical events, like the breaking of the bonus marchers, the Ruby Ridge, Waco, amongst others, and then guides that up to a position in which Henry Bowman gets involved in a shooting in which he ends up killing some ATF agents, which then he turns into a essentially counterculture coup revolt to destroy the ATF as they're the reason, or at least one of the reasons that this country's falling into tyranny.
I mean, that's a real simplistic summary, but that's the premise.
And that's interesting because my recollection, like this is not an uncommon starting point for kind of novels in this space that like the ATF, there's some big gun confiscation grab.
This is essentially how the Turner Diary starts.
But the Turner Diary starts with the assumption that like it happened and everything's already been outlawed.
And like that, that's kind of like where it goes from there.
Whereas this, I think, is kind of more of a slow burn to the start.
And I just noticed that my copy from Accurate Press is the publisher of this book.
It has Mr. Ross's signature in it.
Oh, wow.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, I got a real peach of a copy here.
So thank you.
I believe the hard copy version of that's been out of print for a long time and is relatively valuable, actually.
Well, there we go.
I'll take this.
I'll try to trade this for a man liquor M94 or something like that.
This is going to be an interesting conversation because as I remember in the book, this is a challenging piece of work because there's a lot of problems here, obviously, but there's also a lot of stuff in it that's not necessarily incorrect.
Yeah, he's definitely not coming at it, like, especially on a technical level, I think he does know what he's talking about.
Like, it's not one of these, we've laughed about the Ben Shapiro books and the things he gets wrong about guns.
I believe John Ross actually knows how firearms function.
I do.
I agree with you.
And I think he gets some of the historical stuff true as correct as well, to be honest.
Yeah, he's inert about this.
Although I should note, so he had a regular internet column for a long time.
He's kind of an older dude now, so I don't think it's still going.
But his Wikipedia says that his column Ross in Range was where he discussed topics that interest him.
Quote, a recurring theme is understanding and coping with women.
And that was my recollection of this book, too, that like, not a lot of, we're not going to find a lot of well-written female characters here.
But yeah, it notes on the back here, John Ross is an investment broker and financial advisor in St. Louis.
He went to Amherst College, which I think might surprise some people.
And he was an early concealed carry advocate.
So this is also a thing, like when you talk about sort of the history of gun culture and this guy's role in it, there was this period of time, like now most states have some sort of concealed carry a lot.
Even California is getting easier to get a concealed carry license.
I know someone in San Diego who just got theirs, which was like, there's been a series of legal battles around that.
But it wasn't possible to legally concealed carry in a lot of the country like 30 years ago.
Oh, less than that.
It wasn't that long ago that concealed carry was considered a pretty crazy concept.
And as one state after another started really changing to the point where we see a number of states now, which don't even require permits anymore, they're called constitutional carry.
But 20 something years ago, that wasn't the case.
Like you have to go through two days of training and get a background permit and you have to apply for this and have a background check.
And that was in a place that was permissive, like Arizona.
Other places, it was considered impossible.
But like you said, in California, even there are certain counties that I think are kind of shall issue now.
Yeah.
And it's one of those things where even in like a place like Texas, which has, I think most people who kind of aren't super aware of the history see is just like always this bastion of gun rights.
In like the 90s, you could not carry a gun in Texas under very most circumstances.
And in fact, one of the things that changed that, I forget the exact year, you may know more about this than I do, but there was a mass shooting at a Lubies where a guy killed a lot of people.
And at least one of the people who was in the Lubies during the shooting, like had a weapon in their car, but they couldn't bring it in.
And that kind of ignited the concealed carry movement within sort of Texas.
And John Ross was a big part of that in Missouri and was like a major advocate for it in Missouri.
So that's kind of the context of this dude and in which this book is written.
So there's a lot going on here.
And now we're going to start this very small print book.
I should note, this is a massive book.
This is like the size of the first two Lord of the Rings books.
Like this is a this is an enormous text.
So heads up.
I don't think we're ever going to get through all of it, but this is a this is a an interesting piece of history here for people who are can we see how tiny the font is?
Oh, yeah.
Sophie, look at this.
Oh my gosh.
I know.
This is, this is, there are so many words in this book.
Wow.
So, do we have?
I'm going to look up the word count.
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, you should do that.
So, it starts with present day.
It was late afternoon when he finally heard them coming to kill him.
The wind was blowing gently towards him, and it carried the sound well.
Two choppers, he judged from the pitch of the engines, possibly three.
Henry realized that his first emotion upon hearing the sound of the rotor blades approaching was an overwhelming sense of relief.
The waiting was over.
His next thought concerned the relatives of the men that were about to die.
The widows will never understand that their husbands died because the government got a little too heavy-handed after June of 1968.
He scanned the sky until he spotted the aircraft approaching from the north.
This isn't, that isn't quite right.
The Kennedy and King killings weren't the first links in the chain that dragged us here.
No, the death sentence was handed down before World War II.
So, this guy is getting ready to murder a bunch of federal agents coming to his house, and he's thinking about the March of Tyranny and debating with himself whether or not it started with the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King.
And he's the shades of Waco, too, because if you've ever been to the Waco site, there's memorial stones there placed by the Davidians, and they memorialize not only their own lost people, but they memorialize each lost ATF agent, which was sort of impressive to see.
That is interesting.
I actually was unaware of that.
Huh.
That's interesting.
They see they pretty much memorialize it as a tragedy all around, and there's stones there for the government agents that died.
Huh.
I did not know that.
That's certainly like more nuance than I think we're going to get on Waco here.
Although.
So, yeah, it's what is a solo third?
I guess that's the gun he's got here.
Yeah, that's a, I believe that's a 20 millimeter in the same.
Okay, so it's like an anti-anti, yeah, a lot of like it's an anti-vehicle weapon.
Like very big bullet, 20 millimeter bullets is like the size of a small person's forearm.
Yeah, it's anti-material.
Yeah, it's for shooting through armored vehicles.
So he decides after like debating with himself, well, he's willing to kill these, waiting to kill these federal agents, that the thing that ended the end of liberty in the United States was a Supreme Court case involving a moonshiner who was arrested in 1938.
A federal district court had thrown out the charges as being unconstitutional, and the government had appealed.
At the hearing, something very unusual had happened.
Neither the moonshiner nor his lawyer had seen fit to appear before the court to argue the case.
They didn't even bother to file a brief on the moonshiner's behalf.
The court ruled for the government.
Regulated NFA Weapons00:05:08
Judicial precedent was set, and the issue was never again heard by the Supreme Court.
The 1939 ruling became the foundation upon which many additional laws were constructed.
The Supreme Court's been ducking that issue ever since, Henry thought, as he strained to hear a change in the approaching noise.
Well, guys, the time has turned.
It's time you thugs had a little history lesson.
I don't suppose you're familiar with what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.
So you're seeing he's drawing like a line here between the Nazis cracking down on the Warsaw ghetto and massacring Jewish people and charges against bootleggers during that's actually after Prohibition, 1938.
That's interesting.
Like this is this is a weird opening.
I'll give it one thing to him.
He's definitely a better writer than Ben Shapiro, like already.
And if you read the book, he knows more about sex in general, too, even if his even if the way he models his female doctors.
Yeah, I was going to say super low bar.
Robert, I didn't find the word count, but this book is like only has five-star reviews.
Yeah, that makes well, because the only people who read this other than like Carl and I right now are people who are already primed to want to read this book.
It's just very interesting because normally when we do a book episode, it's like the reviews are horrendous.
I have not seen a review that isn't five stars.
Yeah, that makes sense.
There's 500 plus on Amazon, and they're all five stars.
And like, there's even like fan art in the review.
Oh, boy.
I'll bet you don't want to look at that fan art, Sophie.
You simply do not.
No.
Yeah, but so it's interesting, is this what I was talking?
Is he does get into a lot of actually, he does reference a lot of real history.
Like that U.S. versus Miller is that Supreme Court case.
And in that, that moon, that bootlegger had a shotgun that was below legal length, I believe, or something like that.
And neither of them showed.
But the court ruled in an interesting way that the gun that they were persecuting him for wasn't useful as a militia weapon.
Therefore, it didn't apply.
Ah, so this is like the start of kind of the pro that's that's where is that where the law against like short-barreled shotguns came from?
No, we're talking about the 1934 NFA.
Okay, short-barreled rifles or short-barrel shotguns.
But the moonshiner had a shotgun that was, I believe, was below legal length.
And that's what this was about.
But then when the court ruled against him, they didn't rule against him because of they ruled that the shotgun really wasn't viable for militia use, which then opens up a weird door about does that mean specifically that the Second Amendment applies only to guns that are for militia martial use, like an AR-15, for example.
That's where you see this stuff and these arguments come out of.
That's interesting because with DC versus Heller, like there's this kind of understanding, the current Supreme Court understanding is that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to bear arms.
And it seems like in 38, they were saying that this gun is illegal because it is not something that would be useful as part of a militia.
And so the individual does not have a right just to bear arms for individual purposes.
So a gun isn't legal if it's not useful in a militia.
Yeah, so reading this, it says the Supreme Court hinted that an individual right might exist in the context of a common obligation to possess arms and to cooperate in the work of defense and that a sought-off shotgun, the firearm at issue in this case, was not protected because it had no reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.
Now, that's a fascinating ruling because I think basically everyone today would be angry at it.
Like if you're pro-gun control, then you're going to be angry that it's basically saying like, well, weapons that are useful in terms of like fighting in part of a militia are legal, like an AR-15, which I think pro-gun control people generally disagree with.
And if you're pro-gun rights, you're like, well, why would I be able to have an AR-15, but not a much less deadly weapon, a sought-off shotgun that's like way less effective at killing people?
That doesn't make any sense either.
It's a pretty, like, it is a pretty nonsensical ruling, I think, by most standards.
I know there's more wrapped up in that because I think there was a lot of fear over specifically sought-off shotguns as a result of like the bootlegging era, right?
Because that was like a famous crime gun, even though they're not any deadlier than a lot of other weapons that people had easy access to, like a Thompson or something, which would have been pretty widely available in the mid-30s.
Although that was regulated by the NFA, too.
Speaking of being regulated by the NFA, it's time for ad bricks.
Yeah, you know who's not regulated by the NFA is our sponsor, the MAC-10.
If you want a gun that'll, you can make out of a single stamped piece of metal, that's going to be one of your better options.
And they're superb for a gunfight in a phone booth.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Good to know.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
Stamped Metal Options00:02:43
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Standing Blocks of History00:16:43
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm thinking back.
We're back from ads.
I'm thinking of my favorite movie, Gunfights.
Have you ever seen the movie Gross Point Blank, Carl?
No, I actually haven't.
Oh, it's got maybe the least accurate gunfight where like, what's his fucking name?
Let's just go with John Ritter.
He looks like John Ritter.
John Cusack.
It's one of the Johns.
John Cusack is in like a gunfight in a 7-Eleven, and he's taking, he's dual-wielding Glocks, which he's firing blindly and taking cover behind the chip aisle at a 7-Eleven, which provides excellent cover.
I can stand gun rounds.
It's one of my favorite movie gunfights.
Okay, so start of the book, December 11th, 1906.
All right, so we're starting with two guys firing there.
Boy, there is just a lot of, I think one of the reasons this is so popular is this is a lot of just very technical gun stuff.
Like the opening of this chapter is him walking through, like firing tens of thousands of rounds with a Winchester Model 1903, which was an old 22 semi-automatic rifle.
And it's just kind of like discussing how the firearm works and how the rules regarding like this early gun sport worked, which is a thing I think that if you're buying this book at a gun store, you're probably interested in.
But not a thing I think most readers are going to be interested in.
So we're going to skip ahead just a little bit here.
Yeah, this is just a lot of...
Oh, wow.
And now there's a picture of a guy on top of a mountain of...
Are those skulls?
Show us, show us, show us.
I want to see what he's standing on here.
I'm sad that we can't see what you're seeing.
Oh, no, these are target blocks.
Yeah.
So it's, he's, yeah, it's just kind of nerdy gun stuff.
Like he's explaining the, like, this guy.
I'll read you a representative paragraph.
Okay.
When the San Antonio Fairgrounds closed on December 15th, 1906, Ad Topperwine, using three semi-auto Winchester 1903 rifles, had shot 72,500 wooden blocks thrown in the air.
He had missed nine.
More than a half century later, another man employed by Remington would hit over 100,000.
His throwers, however, would stand by his left shoulder and gently toss the blocks straight out along the same path the bullet would take.
Top's record, shot under the rules laid out by another man in the 19th century, would never be broken.
In 1906, skilled riflemen were universally admired.
People like Ad and Plinky Topperwine spent much of their time urging young boys and girls to earn gun safety and hone their shooting skills.
Okay, so he's talking about the birth of the gun culture here.
That's actually quite nice.
I was worried at first that this was because this bears a resemblance to some of the photos you would see of like frontier men standing on top of like buffalo skulls, but it's just a guy standing on top of a bunch of like blocks that he shot during some time, a type of old-timey shooting contest.
Yeah, we're going back to like the shooting these wooden blocks and then like Annie Oakley would shoot glass balls and it was exhibition shooting, which was almost explicitly done with 22 rifles and it was kind of a cool thing and people really did exhibit some amazing skills.
Yeah, and the next chapter is 1918 and we're still going into like the birth of gun culture.
So he's he's kind of framing like the idea of shooting sports as a character in this book.
Again, I get why this is popular among like the specific people it is.
It's not like the Turner Diaries where we jump right into there's a civil war and like here's my here's my like racist theories about whatever.
Like we're we're really talking kind of at length about the birth of gun culture, the creation of the Maxim gun, the kind of stuff we talked about in our in our Behind the Bastards episodes.
Now I think this is probably maybe not the best narratively to start with, to start your fiction novel with a very long, but it does kind of, you know, what it reminds me a little bit of is like Michael Crichton, where you've got these like books that have this, this like science fiction or whatever theme, but the first like 30 pages is him like vamping about chaos theory or whatever kind of mathematical thing he's interested in.
Instead of nature finding the way guns will find the way, right?
Guns will find the way.
Yeah, yeah.
But I think in 1918 there, 19, was it 1919?
He gets into like, this is, this book is really a difficult thing to discuss because it's hard.
It's so, it's a bit schizophrenic, right?
There's this narrative in there of this revolt, but there's a lot of actual real history in there.
He gets into the bonus marchers, which was a pretty fucked up thing, honestly.
And he portrays it pretty accurately.
July 16th, 1932, we get Smedley Butler as a character.
So, yeah, and he's talking about the bonus marchers here.
Although I think it's interesting, like the pieces of Smedley's story that he does take out here, like the opening quote he gives from Smedley here is, take it from me.
This is the greatest demonstration of Americanism we've ever had.
Pure Americanism.
Willing to take this beating as you've taken it.
Stand right and steady.
You keep every law.
And why in the hell shouldn't you?
Who in the hell has done all the bleeding for this country and this law and this constitution anyhow, but you fellows?
Which is, it's interesting because the thing they're taking, and this is the period where, for people who aren't aware, you've got these World War I veterans when the economy collapses who are owed a bonus that's being paid out over a very long period of time.
And because everyone is in dire financial straits, they're like, we want the money now.
Can we just get the money that's owed to us now?
And they have a big march on DC, which is cracked down on via Douglas MacArthur using tanks.
And before it is cracked down on, Smedley Butler, who is like, I think still to this day, the most highly decorated Marine in history, he's certainly like in the running for it.
He had two medals of honor, which he had very mixed opinions of, but he definitely earned them.
And he shows up to like speak in defense of these men and support their cause.
And it's interesting because they're kind of framing what Smedley's doing here as a defense of kind of this idea you see Robert Heinlein talk about a lot.
This is kind of the thing that's come down to us in Starship Troopers, but it's something Heinlein played with a lot that like this idea of like the citizen soldier being the ideal kind of building block of a free society.
And I don't think that's actually what Butler believed, obviously, because by the end of his life, Butler had come around very much against militarism and like was saying things that like, I believe I've only ever been a gangster for capitalism.
So it's interesting that they've picked this specific time to kind of hone in on Smedley Butler and turn him into a character in this book.
Because I'll check here, but I'm not sure if I think we're going to get Butler stopping the business plot.
But that said, this is a really valid piece of history.
And this is one of those things when we talk about like areas where I think it's possible to get people on the right kind of in line with some of the things I believe.
I think it's really useful to talk about history about things like the bonus marchers, where it's like, well, you can't really trust the government.
And when it comes down to who's going to violently crack down on people standing in favor of their liberty, maybe it's these police forces that you're continually trying to like fund and arm heavily.
And perhaps this is a place where we could come together and discuss some shared interests.
Gee whiz, guys, maybe if we actually looked at this, you know, with clear eyes, we'd realize we kind of had a mutual problem here, regardless of our particular peculiarities as to why.
So we introduce this character, Cam, who's this veteran And who's about to, we're told at the end of page 26, Cam Bowman did not know that the government had its own agenda concerning the bonus army.
Cam Bowman had less than three weeks left to live.
And then in the next chapter, we have him getting murdered, along with everybody else, by General Douglas MacArthur.
The soldiers had been instructed by their commander to clear the bonus marchers out of the area by striking them with the flats of their sabers' blades, not the cutting edge.
And this was what the cavalrymen did.
It was like being struck by a three-foot steel bar.
And Lieutenant Cameron Bowman's left wrist was shattered like kindling.
He did not cry out or fall down, but when Bowman saw the soldier prepare to deliver a second blow, he finally accepted his fate and gave ground.
As he made his way to the bridge, his ruined wrist beginning to scream in agony.
Bowman saw three men leading the army troops, and he was stunned by what he saw.
He did not recognize the two army majors who had both later come to prominence.
The man in charge of leading the infantrymen, cavalry and tank division, however, was impossible to miss.
The lesser-ranked soldiers were Major George S. Patton and Major Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The senior officer was the chief of staff of the United States Armed Forces, General Douglas MacArthur.
And this is interesting because that's very accurate.
That's completely true.
It's neat because these guys, all these figures, both of whom would become generals, or all of whom would be general.
I mean, MacArthur was a general when this happened.
Patton and obviously Dwight D. Eisenhower are going to be generals very quickly in World War II.
And they are both, I think, today, broadly speaking, heroic figures for conservatives, particularly Patton.
Eisenhower, interestingly, has a really mixed history there because, you know, he's who the John Birch Society focuses on him as like a secret communist.
So there is this long-standing distrust of Eisenhower on the far right.
But MacArthur becomes a major far-right figure, especially after he gets fired by Truman during the Korean War.
He's a big part of, we just had an episode on kind of some of the early like Christian conservative movements in the United States and like the reforming of the idea of the 4th of July.
He's a big part of this.
So it's interesting to me that Ross is kind of emphasizing his role here, which is a big one, because I don't think that's done a lot in conservative sort of like far-right propaganda these days.
MacArthur, because he was such an anti-communist, tends to be heralded.
So at least this guy so far seems to be pretty consistent.
Yeah, I don't know how that would have been received now versus when it was actually published initially, right?
We have a pretty different world from then, but it is interesting to note that I don't know about John Ross's thoughts on workers' rights, but he's certainly concerned with veterans' rights because these bonus marchers is one of the arguments he uses to portray the government as becoming an authoritarian regime that doesn't seem to care about its people, including its own veterans.
And he uses the bonus marchers as, or the breaking of the bonus march as one of those examples.
And it's really compelling to me because obviously that is a really valid point.
The breaking of the bonus army is totally an example of the government becoming like doing an unhinged authoritarian thing.
But it's also a choice.
And John Ross, I feel like, just based on what I'm reading here, knows too much history for this not to have been a choice to not discuss any other aspects of Butler's career or the business plot or kind of the elements of this that are the government tilting its hand on the scale in favor of capital.
And I think that's because obviously John Ross has his own biases here.
He's worried about communism.
It's fascinating to me that he seems to be tying the destruction of the bonus army, the massacre of these soldiers in with like the creeping socialism in the government.
Because I really don't see it that way.
And I'm sure MacArthur wouldn't have seen it that way.
But also, I have to respect the fact that he is very astutely identifying MacArthur as part of the problem here.
That's really interesting to me.
Yeah, and this is like the first example in the book.
And he goes through and each and every one of these, like I said, he'll get to Ruby Ridge and he'll get to Waco.
And he uses these as an argument that slowly builds up to the culmination of this rebellion that Henry Bowman actually engages in.
Yeah, I think part of what's fascinating to me about this is it is, I don't think John Ross and I have a lot in common, and I don't think we would agree on a lot.
But up to this point, he's not wrong.
I would argue that his analysis of the building problems of authoritarianism in the U.S. government are incomplete, and he's leaving out some really important moments.
But he's also not wrong.
And I have not noticed any like, you know, any racism here so far.
And I have not noticed he's not inventing things out of whole cloth, which is like what you see in the Turner Diaries, right?
And I'm not comparing these two because they're super similar.
For one thing, this is objectively a better written book.
And for another thing, the Turner Diaries, by page 28, you have ingested enough racism to kill a large dog.
And we haven't really seen any yet out of this.
Yeah, no.
And it's been a long time since I've read this, so I don't want to speak to the nuance that might be sitting in there.
Of course.
So this is not a promotion for this.
But I found an interview with John Ross later in which apparently Timothy McVeigh, of course, the bomber of Oklahoma City, said that he was inspired by the Turner Diaries.
The Turner Diaries is a terrible, vitriolic, racist, Nazi book.
It is unreadable if you are not studying it as an academic or a Nazi.
And Timothy McVeigh said that if he had read Unattended Consequences, it might have changed his approach to the problem.
And that's an interesting thing.
So we have these people that, of course, become, I don't know how to put it, they got pushed further down the path of extreme beliefs by things like the Turner Diaries.
And it's weird that Timothy McVeigh kind of argued that the unintended consequences might have actually tempered him, which is a strange thing to think.
Yeah.
Because this book is a revolutionary kind of book.
And I've come across that too.
And I've always wondered, did McVeigh mean he might not have carried out an attack or just that maybe he would have like gone because like the stuff Bowman does, the Turner Diaries, obviously like the thing that inspired McVeigh is they blow up, I think it's literally the Pentagon or it's FBI headquarters.
They set off like a big bomb at FBI headquarters, which was something he considered.
And he picked the target he did, the Murray Bow Building in Oklahoma City, because it had a large FBI presence.
And that was really who he was targeting as a result of Waco, although he was obviously fine with the fact that it blew up like a daycare and a bunch of other things besides.
But I wonder if he's saying, I don't know that maybe I would have like organized with people as opposed to like carrying out a bombing.
Or is he saying, perhaps I would have like done what Bowman does and carried out like a series of armed attacks specifically on federal agents as opposed to like a bombing campaign that was much less discriminate.
Like I'm not sure McVeigh is saying, I wouldn't have done a violent thing if I'd read this book, but it's also probably if he had patterned his attack off the kind of attacks you see in Undended Consequences, probably wouldn't have blown up a daycare.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm not trying to say that this book would have turned Timothy McVay into putting flowers into rifle barrels.
Right.
But it's an unclear quote, but it's an interesting thing to note.
Radicalizing Rights Management00:07:12
Yeah, I'm not trying to like make a broad moral point about like, well, it would have been better if he'd been radicalized into just shooting some feds as opposed to blowing up a day.
Like, I'm not, I'm really not trying to get into the weeds there.
But I think if you are interested in like radicalism and what causes people to do stuff like that, I don't think, I think there might be a tendency to just discount what the Vay is saying.
And I don't know that we should, because I think it is interesting that like when different media radicalizes people, it radicalizes them to take different actions.
And that's not, this is not the kind of like thought I would blast out on Twitter because it's difficult to get out in 280 characters and it's going to seem like you're saying something different than what you are.
But I don't think that's not a thing we should think about and study, perhaps.
Yeah, I mean, it's like art is an interesting thing and books are an interesting thing and fiction is an interesting thing.
I mean, I think one of the most inspirational books that the Unabomber referenced was by Al Gore.
Right, right.
And Timothy McVeigh, just to go back to him, was also heavily influenced by fucking Star Trek.
He was a huge fan of Star Trek and of Star Wars.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's just interesting to see that.
And it's interesting, like, the different kinds of, because both Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, and Ross, you can see broad similarities in that they are both people who advocate for an armed overthrow of the government.
Now, they're both arguing that for different things.
And I think they both see a different world as desirable as a result of that.
But it is compelling if you're someone who kind of studies radicalization to see the different ways they go about it.
And Ross is really building a much slower case that is based on real history about the necessity of a revolt against the government.
And I think it's important that we're like noting the things that he's leaving out.
But the choices he's making here are really interesting.
And you know who else makes interesting choices, Carl?
Monsanto?
They absolutely.
Oh.
So, Carl, have you ever been driving through like a rural part of the country, seeing like beautiful fields filled with corn and other crops and going, I wish those farmers would get thrown in prison if the wind happened to carry seeds from one field to the other that didn't have the legal right to use those specific patented genetically modified seeds.
Have you been thinking that?
Like just driving through the countryside?
I really have.
I really think that all the food we eat needs more DRM around it.
Absolutely.
That's the problem with food is that it doesn't have digital rights management.
And that's the beautiful dream of Monsanto.
Digital rights management for everything.
I think that's a beautiful dream.
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From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
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Oh my god, this is the same man.
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This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
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What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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Oh, we're back.
So you're at the Monsanto kick these days, huh, Carl?
Yeah, I'm a big fan of it.
You know, Reddy Roundup is pretty good on a salad.
I do.
I do.
Subtle Propaganda Writing00:15:15
Who was that?
Was that the Monsanto guy that like someone tried to get him to like drink Weed Killer?
Because he kept saying it was safe enough to drink.
That sounds vaguely familiar.
It's so safe.
Let me chug this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nothing like a Monsanto bong on a Saturday night.
Oh my gosh.
That does sound fun because then also you know you're killing whatever insects are on your weed.
Nice and safe.
All right.
So Carl, page 29, we f our bat.
What?
There's so much history here.
So we're at 1936 now.
We're talking to a woman named Zofia, who I am guessing here is some sort of refugee from the bad things that are happening in Europe.
Yep.
Okay.
Yep.
That seems to be what's happening here.
All right.
So we've got this lady talking with her mom, yada, yada, yada.
Oh, I think we're, okay, so she, yeah.
This is, this is, uh, I think setting up one of our characters.
Yeah, she's marrying some guy named Erwin Mann, who's also a Jewish refugee, which is again, so that's a nice bit of change from the Turner Diaries.
It does seem like a number of our heroes are going to be Jewish people.
So that's this speaking.
This is one of the character.
This character becomes, if I recall correctly, one of the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
And so he's using this character to demonstrate the ability of the individual to fight the government with small arms.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Well, that makes sense.
So 1938, we've got a treasury agent hiding in the woods.
Oh, I think this is him writing out the arrest of that moonshiner.
Is that what's coming here?
Yeah.
That'd be Miller, yeah.
Yep, Okay, cool.
So that's fine.
Let's.
You know, that's an interesting note.
I mean, I wouldn't say that you should read this book like a history book because that would be wildly inappropriate.
However, if you wanted to get like a basic bullet point timeline of things that would be worth further investigation, this book's full of that.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff to like look into here.
And again, it's, it's, there's, he's, he's making a very specific ideological case.
So it's incomplete, as we noted with like Smedley Butler, um, and probably incomplete as we're talking about like uh gun control and prohibition because he's really focused on this 38 case, um, which is kind of late in the history of like arms regular.
Like 34 is when we get the NFA.
So it's interesting to me that he's not kind of focusing on any, I mean, I, it makes sense based on kind of the ruling here, but it is interesting that that's kind of it, that seems to be where he's starting in terms of gun control regulations as opposed to going in anywhere earlier.
Well, yeah, the watershed of gun control is considered 1934.
And then the second, the second strike to the core of the heart of that is the 1968 Gun Control Act, both of which are heavily discussed in the book.
Yeah, and I suspect he's kind of going for this moment in 38 because it's a little easier to build sympathy for the audience for this like small-scale bootlegger rather than like the 34, gun control in 34 was heavily driven by.
You have, like this, this soaring rate of organized crime and you have, like these, like really horrible murders in the street and uh, I think it's probably he's probably making a choice as a writer here that like well, i'm gonna have to put in a lot more legwork to get people on, to get people seeing the government as the the clear bad guy in that one than I am if I focus on this, like small moonshiner who's got this saw-off shotgun and it makes this easy case that like they're, they're kind of making this, this ruling that I can claim is where,
like all of this illegitimate stuff is is descended from.
Like he's making.
He's giving you a very incomplete look at the history, but he's making what I think is a pretty smart editorial choice by folks.
Yeah, he definitely was strategic in what he did with that.
It is also interesting to note the people that don't know this in the audience, the 1934 um uh Nfa the National Firearms Act, which was to regulate machine guns, short-barreled rifle, short-barreled shotguns, suppressors um, isn't actually a gun law, it's a tax law.
Right, it's actually done through the IT'S right, and so uh, it's um what they do, is they?
They don't make it impossible to own these things, but they regulate it as a tax Stamp, which at the time was $200 and was cost prohibited, was actually more than the value of the gun.
But now that we come to the future, you can't make more machine guns, but you can still buy them, but it's still the same $200 tax net.
But it's very interesting that it's a tax law, not really necessarily a gun law.
Yeah, yeah, that's really compelling.
And again, this is something that he's kind of like skipping entirely over.
And what he does here in the next couple of chapters is interesting.
So after we're introduced to like these moonshiners and we get like the start of the arrests that leads to their case, we have a chapter that's November 9th, 1938 in Germany, where they're sending a bunch of, like we focus in on a Jewish family and who they are sending to Dachau, right?
So we've got like the Nazis sending a guy to Dachau.
We get one page of that.
And then, so that's a one-page chapter that literally ends with the line, he was going to Dachau.
And it's talking about like, okay, I'll read the last two lines here.
The watchmaker shared a fate with almost a quarter million of his countrymen and every single one of his relatives who was still in Germany as of November 9th, 1938.
He was going to Dachau.
And then the very next chapter, after that one-page chapter, we get a district, like basically the minutes of a district court meeting for this case, United States versus Miller, involving this bootlegger.
So he's really very kind of directly making a comparison between the Nazis shipping people off to concentration camps and this bootlegger going to court over an illegal short-barreled shotgun, which is definitely like, this is the most problematic the book has gotten so far, at least over our reading of it.
And you can see what he's doing here, right?
Like this is not particularly subtle, although it does, I think, count as subtle within this genre of literature.
Yeah, he's setting up the argument that gun control lends itself to what we saw in Nazi Germany, which is genocide, et cetera.
He's drawing a direct comparison between the agents of the state in both countries.
Yeah.
And of course, it's a much more complex argument than that, but there is some historicity to gun control leading itself to that too.
So he's not entirely wrong.
Right, because a lot of early, and this, it's interesting to me, again, in terms of like the things he does choose to read out.
This is not so far an explicitly racist novel, but he's making the choice to not lead at all with the history of gun control as it involves the suppression of black people's right to carry concealed handguns, which is a big part of early laws against concealed handguns, was to stop black men in the Reconstruction era from carrying concealed handguns, which they did because people would try to murder them.
And he's definitely leaving that out.
He's also, we just did an episode on this with Margaret Killjoy, leaving out a decent chunk of like, there were a number of some of the first gun control laws in the country were also passed in order to stop anarchists from carrying handguns as part of like the labor movement.
And so we're not really getting any of that.
We are really, he is making a really pointed choice by focusing on Miller in 1938 as kind of the birth of all this gun control.
And that's interesting to me because it does, this is kind of, we've talked about how careful he's being.
And this is a very careful book so far.
He is not, it is not like an unhinged screed at all.
And it does not read that way.
But he is making some really distinct editorial choices about what he leaves out.
And I think that's really worth kind of highlighting.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
And I don't recall all of it, but I don't recall this book really getting into issues like the Panthers or civil rights in regards to firearms in their use, which of course is a topic that has been so left off of the American historical record that it's been intentionally ignored.
I call it intentional amnesia, where we don't want to talk about those things where black people use guns to defend themselves.
And the reason they still exist is because they had a gun in their possession.
I don't remember that being in this book.
And it's interesting because you're right.
It would have lended itself even more credibility to his argument if he had included it.
Yeah.
I mean, you could have slotted that in here and it would have like worked as part of the narrative progression he's building.
But I also think that would have really turned off a decent chunk of who he knew was kind of, and it's also, I'm sure this is also based on like he didn't.
I think it's very possible Ross doesn't see that as part of really the history of unfair gun control in the United States.
Now, I don't know the man, so I don't know the degree to which that was a choice or that was just stuff he was unaware of, but he seems so knowledgeable that I do have trouble imagining he wouldn't at least know about like the Panthers and stuff, which perhaps we haven't gotten to.
But again, I don't recall from an earlier reading of that book, this book, I don't recall that being a part of this.
If it's in there, it's not heavily profiled at all.
And I think I would be more along the lines of thinking that he knew the audience he was targeting and did not want to alienate them.
And that's one of the things we've talked about in previous work together is like, you know, the community and the gun community is getting is getting much more is much is becoming a much larger tent, but it's still a big uphill fight.
And that level of acceptance definitely did not exist in 1996 when this book was published.
So by including things like that, I think he would have lost his core targeted audience, which is why we see those five-star reviews on this book, because it's very specifically read only by the people that are going to like it.
Yeah.
And the next like 40 or so pages of this are really heavily dealing with Erwin Mann and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
We're getting into a lot of World War II stuff.
And it's going to be in here that I think it's, is it Bowman's dad that gets introduced as a World War II veteran, right?
Because he start, he comes in here.
Yeah, Walter Bowman.
Yeah.
So by page 93 is kind of when we're introduced to the Bowman family, who's going to be our protagonist family.
And he comes into the story at right after the end of kind of our chunk on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where we have so May 16th, 1945 is when we kind of meet the family of the guy who's going to be our main character.
And I think we'll probably come back to that when we deal with this again.
So that's the introduction to this book is 92 pages of what is effectively like the history of shooting sports and gun control.
Like this is a real slow burn of a starter.
And it's different from any other book with kind of a broadly similar theme that I think I've gone through.
I have to say it's probably one of the smarter pieces of kind of right-wing militant like propaganda literature that I've seen.
And it is something that if you're not of that ideology, there's even aspects of this that you could enjoy because there is like quite a bit of history in here that's interesting.
But as we've talked about, it's also very incomplete history.
I do kind of find this fascinating in a way that, for example, Ben Shapiro isn't, right?
Like there's actually a lot to say about this that's not mocking the writing.
In addition, like the writing is not, it's not particularly like inspired writing.
Like I'm not going to call this guy, this is not like a tour de force of narrative power.
But it's not like there's nothing about it that's jumping out to me as incompetent or bad at all.
Like it's just like, I mean, it's definitely like a slow burn, but kind of in the same way, you know, I get shades of Tom Clancy from this, actually.
Oh, I would agree.
Rockets very much in that vein.
Yeah.
And the writing is, it is readable.
It's, I don't know how, where would I put this in terms of quality?
Like Tom Clancy's a good functional prose.
Yeah.
Kind of like Stephen King.
It tells the story, but it's not necessarily Shakespeare.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like it's certainly not.
You're not like, I can't think of any lines here that jumped out to me as like particularly artful, but nothing like you know, nothing that made it difficult to read.
It's just kind of it's if you're not interested in this history or in the technical details, and this is something I know from the book, he really loves getting into the technical details about how all of his guns work and stuff.
And even if you like in a way that's very Tom Clancy, so if that's your thing, you may find aspects of that compelling.
I tend to think, even as someone who likes guns, that it can be a bit of a slog at times.
Well, you mentioned what you were at page 96 when they just introduced his father.
I think this book is like 530 pages.
So you're like, you're less than one-fifth through the book.
And that's just beginning to introduce the main characters for the storyline.
Yeah.
So we'll, we'll come back to this, but I think it is interesting to talk about how this guy chooses to introduce this book that has become so influential in U.S. gun culture because it's, it's, it's a pretty, he makes some pretty intelligent choices here that I think are going to be surprising to people just based on the cover, which is not a subtle cover.
No.
Yeah, you didn't see, you don't see this much anymore, but like in the early 2000s, this book was influential enough that at the gun shows and on all a bunch of the cars at the gun show, you'd see stickers that said Henry Bowman is my president.
Yeah, yeah.
And this book was a big deal.
Yeah, and it makes it makes sense that it is.
Because I think, number one, there's a lot of people who are going to be attracted to some of the ideas of like revolt against the government and like an armed insurgency and seeing themselves as members of that, obviously.
But aren't going to be drawn to the fact that the, for example, the Turner Diaries is just a piece of genocidal propaganda and is very clearly that from the beginning.
And it makes total sense to me that this book succeeded in drawing those people in and providing them something to identify with, because I really do get why they find this to be an identifiable work.
He does some very smart work early on to make this feel both intellectual to the kind of people who are going to be drawn to it and to make it effectively radicalizing.
I see why this is so effective to the people it was effective on.
I see why a guy like McVay would read this and even feel like, oh shit, I wish I had come across this first.
Yeah, no doubt.
I think I said this earlier.
It is, it's a very hard book to put into a category because as we were going through just these 96 pages or whatever, there's real history in there.
And there are things that people may not have ever been aware of that this government has been culpable of and other governments have been culpable of that he did his cherry picking on to make his argument.
But by his cherry picking, it's not to say that the things that he particularly picked are not true narratives.
Like his discussion about the bonus marchers and later on in the book, other topics are real accurate things.
Foreign and Domestic Enemies00:11:07
And a lot of that, which I don't know if that's for now or some other day, but a lot of this falls under the terrible regime of Janet Reno and some of her actions.
And a lot of that's That's in this book.
Yeah, yeah.
And Janet Reno definitely deserves to be a bad guy in your history books.
Yeah.
So, I mean, he really does demonize some people that deserved it.
But like you said, it's not necessarily holistically inclusive.
And that's what's challenging about it.
That's the thing, too, is like if you're if you're focusing on these people and these moments as like horrible moments and these people as and these trends as like negative, you're absolutely in the right.
But also when you when you make that out to be the whole story, you're very clearly excising chunks of history and particularly like chunks of history of the oppression of black and indigenous people that could be a part of your argument if they were if you were willing to include them as a part of the aggrieved classes that you're speaking to.
And I think Ross clearly is not here.
But you can see how people would find this appealing and also be like, well, I'm not a racist and this isn't a racist book.
And yeah, it makes sense that this has had the impact that it's had.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
I don't know.
I wonder what its repercussions are until now because it's been out of print for a while.
I don't know if it ever came back into reprint.
There was supposed to be a sequel.
I don't think that ever came out.
There was never a really bad B-grade version of it, like Left Behind did with Kirk Cameron and all that.
There was never the Left Behind movie of unintended consequences, right?
But I feel like I suspect that if that pump were to be primed, I bet it would be successful still to this day.
Well, I think there is essentially a reboot of Unintended Consequences written by a guy named Matt Bracken, who's a regular on Infowars, Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
Are you familiar with that story?
I've heard of it.
I've never read it.
Yeah.
It says, yeah, I have not read that one, but I know it's broadly speaking kind of in the same narrative terrain that we've talked about, where there's like this kind of insurgency and overthrow of the evil American police state that is, of course, like a left-wing police state, they see it as.
Yeah, I'll read you the Amazon for this.
Bullets rain down upon a packed football stadium, killing dozens, triggering a panic stampede, which leads to a thousand more deaths.
A police marksman kills the sniper, a mentally unbalanced desert storm veteran holding a smoking assault rifle.
It's an open and shut case, or so America is led to believe.
In the aftermath of the stadium massacre, an outraged public demands an end to the threat posed by assault rifle.
So yeah, and then America passes gun control.
And yeah, it leads to a crackdown that leads to an uprising, right?
That book was written before that event, but man, that is shades of Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas.
And it's interesting because Bracken frames it in his book, apparently, as like, well, this is what leads to like this huge FBI crackdown of the militia.
And it's unjust.
And the militia has to find out the truth about this.
What I'm guessing is like this shooting that was engineered in order to create gun control.
When in reality, we had an almost identical shooting and the result was nothing, like on a legislative level.
I guess bump stocks.
Yeah, bump stocks.
I think it was Trump made essentially a fiat ruling that bump stops were legal.
But there was no assault weapons ban.
Not from that event.
No, there wasn't.
But it is interesting that all of these books hinge themselves that the fight for the fight against an increasingly authoritarian American government is always hinged on the loss of gun rights versus some amalgamation of all sorts of horrible things that the government has done.
It's always that one thing.
It's always that single platform of it's the gun rights being lost that cause us to revolt versus here's gun rights amongst many other problems that cause a revolt.
Like that's interesting to me.
Yeah.
They zero in so much and there's such certainty too.
And you can even see this in like some of the Alex Jones conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, where it's like just historically, looking at the last 30 years, creating a false flag mass shooting is not a good way to get gun control because most mass shootings have not resulted in gun control, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think you see Columbine as being the one that did, which did, which absolutely comes from, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so the argument is that each and every, and sadly, so many of those events have happened since Columbine, that each and every one's going to be the one that does that.
Historically, except for Columbine, that has not been the case.
Yeah, it really, I mean, there have been, again, some like state-level laws that have been, that have been come in the result of like mass shootings.
But even that's not super common.
It is interesting that like that that's still such a focus.
I think there is probably, you could probably make quite a good living if you were to rewrite a variation of this book that was a little bit smarter about your opening cause and that steered more towards trying to reach some of those people on the libertarian left as well as the libertarian right.
You could probably make a pretty good living doing that.
You might need to get better cover art too than John Ross picked.
Although his cover art beats the hell out of Matt Brackens, which is like a really shitty, let me pull this.
You know, I kind of, now I remember, I think I remember the cover of that book.
It's like, it's like the don't tread on me snake with an A15 or something, right?
Yeah.
It looks like clip.
It's like clip art off of like, yeah, it's clip art pasted together.
You know what it looks like?
It looks, what's the name of that, that guy who was, he was in Congress.
He was like a TV host and then he got into Congress and then he had to leave because he sexually harassed somebody.
What was his fucking name?
I don't know.
There's so many of those.
What's his Al something?
Are you talking about Al Franken?
Al Franken.
Al Franken.
Oh, yeah.
He groped people, right?
Yeah, he groped that woman on that plane.
Yeah, yeah.
It looks like the cover of Enemies Foreign and Domestic, it's like this, this like lazy clip art of a snake cuddling a rifle.
It looks like the cover of like a left-wing book making fun of gun culture from like 2003.
Like it doesn't look like the kind of cover.
The only thing that would make that cover art better is some googly eyes.
Yeah, it's really a pretty lazy cover.
Like I wouldn't guess it was a pro-gun book by the cover art because it kind of looks like it's making fun of the Gadsden flag as opposed to unironic.
Whereas at least with unintended consequences, there is no mistaking what kind of like ideological world this book inhabits.
So you said there was a sequel to this Enemies Foreign and Domestic?
I think there's like five of them actually.
Oh my gosh.
Wow.
I think there's a ton of these books.
Matt Bracken may, yeah, there's at least, so there's Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
There's Enemies Foreign and Domestic, The Reconquista, which I think is about Mexicans taking over the Southwest.
And then there's Foreign Enemies and Traitors.
So he's got at least three of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is the kind of stuff that would be so pervasive.
And maybe it still is in some instances at the gun show we talked about at the beginning of this.
Like you'd walk in there and there was that giant book section and it was all sorts of this kind of stuff.
And I guess the best thing you could say about unintended consequences is it was the best of its breed.
It was the most readable way.
Probably the least shitty, if you want to say that, of that stuff.
Like, if, I mean, on one end, you got the Turner Diaries, which is like the most vile thing you could think of.
And then you've got Unintended Consequences, which is much more nuanced.
And then you had stuff like we're talking about now, somewhere in the middle, mostly poorly written, quality of a zine, but Unintended Consequences had the polish of being a legitimate book.
Yeah, I would say this is the gold standard of this kind of, of this particular kind of narrative propaganda.
It definitely seems to be, which does not mean I think most people reading it are going to enjoy it or that I think it's narratively a well-constructed piece of fiction.
Because again, we're 93 pages in and we have not really gotten to the narrative yet, which is a choice.
But it's also kind of broadly in line with this is being written in the period when Michael Crichton is and Tom Clancy are like the biggest authors in the United States.
And it does seem like very much in line with that.
So yeah, you can't divorce it either from the time it was written and what was popular then.
Well, Carl, I think that's going to do us for at least the first episode on Unintended Consequences.
We'll reconvene and see if we want to go more into this or maybe look at one of Matt Bracken's books.
But I'm endlessly fascinated with this species of novel.
There's like 800 more pages of this book, like literally.
There's so many more pages of this.
And Enemies Foreign and Domestic is also 568 pages.
So we're delving into a lot.
Well, I think that we only got this far into it does speak to the density of what it is and how complex a topic this book is.
Like if you wanted to describe the, if you wanted to talk the Turner Diaries, you could summarize that in 30 seconds, right?
I mean, it doesn't, it is not an intelligent work.
Unintended Consequences is.
And that's what makes it interesting because whether or not you want to agree or disagree with any of the content in it, anyone reading it, even if you're against what it's about, will probably find something out in it that they didn't know about.
And I'm not trying to promote anything.
I'm just saying in that regard, it is an interesting work because I'm going from the bonus marchers to the Warsaw Ghetto to Ruby Ridge to Waco to all of those things combined.
There's a lot of nuance in that.
Like most people wouldn't know about U.S. versus Miller, that Supreme Court ruling about that shot-off shotgun.
There's all that's in there.
And while it is cherry-picked, it is done in a way that it's there's there's there's content there above and beyond maybe its intended point.
Yeah, yeah.
And certainly, like, it's, it's not a lazy example of what it is.
It's, it's an ex like, he put a lot of work into this, and I think did so in a pretty intelligent way.
And that's, that's interesting to study, just as someone who's kind of drawn into this, this sort of thing and is interested in its impact on the world.
Like, um, it, it's, it's meaningful and worth understanding that, like, he put the work he did into this and it's had the impact that it's had.
Well, Carl, you want to plug your pluggables before we roll out?
Sure.
Um, uh, you can find me at inrange.tv.
I create uh firearms, history, and other types of content.
Uh, it's kind of all over the place, but it's all somehow linchpinned around the concept of firearms and the history of firearms or the civil rights associated issues around them, including up until today.
So, if you want to check out my video and some of my other stuff, you can find all of my distribution points at inrange.tv.
Yeah, check out Carl.
Check out Inrange TV.
Burt Gummer's Copy00:03:37
Probably don't check out Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
But, you know, you can get a lot of the same things by watching the documentary Trimmers, which is my manifesto.
Oh, my God.
That guy would have been a character in this book.
Definitely.
Absolutely.
Burt Gummer is a character that fell directly out of Unintended Consequences.
It is worth it.
It doesn't really stand out in the movie, but it is worth noting that he and his wife in 30 seconds go from huddling in their basement to making pipe bombs on the roof.
Burt Gummer has seven copies of Unintended Consequences, all of them signed.
One of them with some DNA on it from John Ross.
I guarantee it.
Yeah, this may be Burt Gummer's copy of Unintended Consequences.
All right.
Thank you, Carl.
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