Harlon Carter, the man who militarized police and founded the NRA, orchestrated a racial purge beginning with his 1931 murder of 15-year-old Raymond Cassiano. After evading justice due to his father's influence, Carter led the Border Patrol's "Operation Cloudburst," deploying military tactics to enforce white supremacy despite the Posse Comitatus Act. His legacy reveals how gun control narratives often mask systemic racism, transforming local law enforcement into tools for racial exclusion while obscuring the true history of American policing. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:40
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.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego 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 hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad 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 Gillespie 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.
Matt!
Calib, how are you doing today?
I'm good, man.
I just got married.
You did just get married.
I got married former guest Francesca Fiorentini, you know?
Yeah, one of our favorite guests with our least favorite.
Oh, shit.
Gun Laws and Race00:16:00
Oh, how dare you?
I'm just being an asshole.
We love you.
I love you.
That's why I've brought you on to read you a 12,000-word script about...
Oh, a script.
Oh, a script.
That's right, Matt.
Because I do love you.
We have such a good time talking.
And I wanted to celebrate you have embarked on this new chapter of your life.
Yeah, lovely.
I'm making you very sad.
Yeah, I actually, this is the perfect palette cleanser to a weekend of joy.
That's right.
That's right.
Coming on this podcast and just being just torn to shreds emotionally.
Because there's going to be no joy here.
Matt.
Yeah.
How do you feel?
How do you feel?
First off, I guess, have you ever heard of a motherfucker named Harlan Carter?
Harlan Carter?
I don't think so.
Okay.
Okay.
Is that Jimmy Carter's brother?
Oh, boy, not at all.
That would be Billy Carter.
And Billy Carter will be on our episode Behind the Heroes for his invention of Billy Charles.
I thought you were going to ruin that guy.
He seems pretty dope.
Can you imagine back when like the biggest scandal a president had was that like his brother made bad beer?
Right.
Oh my God.
What a time.
Yeah.
What an administration.
Yeah.
It was just like, hey, his brother's too cool.
Yeah.
Dudes were not supposed to rock this much.
That was, you know, that was the biggest thing.
Get this guy out of the White House and put in a dude who's going to do part of a genocide.
Anyway, Matt, how do you feel about the proliferation of firearms in American society?
I'm pro.
Okay.
I think, you know, the more guns, the better.
Obviously, nothing, you know, the only thing that... stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
I think we all know that.
And I think it's 19 good guys with guns stacked outside of a classroom for 78.
Exactly, dude.
Just kind of sitting around waiting to be like, I can't wait to be a hero.
I'll just give it another 45 minutes.
You've got to clock in first.
So it's interesting.
It's fun that we got to the incompetent militarization of police because this is a thing, one of the things that's frustrating.
Obviously, you and I may have some slightly different attitudes towards firearms, but I'm frustrated with American gun culture, which I think is primarily toxic, and also the culture of police militarization, which is 100% toxic.
And the guy we're going to talk about today, Harlan Carter, is the dude who started both of those things.
He's the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the guy who made the NRA.
Sophie's got a picture of him.
He looks like who you would cast if you were putting Kingpin, that comic book villain.
He looks like Kingpin.
He literally looks exactly like Kingpin.
He looks expensive.
Oh my God.
And spoilers.
Sorry for body shaving the NRA guy.
I would prefer any gangster to, it's not even body shaving.
He just looks like his neck is the width of his ears.
No, he's like a literal dickhead.
It is the most dickhead-ish head I've ever seen.
He is a chod someone poured into a suit.
I'm pretty sure.
I'm pretty sure that this is what Joe Rogan was like.
I want this.
And then if Joe Rogan is, someone has been cutting Joe Rogan's HGH with lemon juice just to try to keep him from getting too huge.
But if Joe got the amount of HGH that he intended to shoot into his testicles, this is how he would look.
Yeah, he would look like this guy.
His neck would be even thicker.
He's exactly the way you are picturing him in your mind, listeners.
He does kind of look like, because Alex Jones has that thick neck, but he's like not that smaller.
And Joe Rogan's got that big muscle guy head.
If like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, if you like in vitro fertilized, like cut their sperm in half and like merged them together with the egg from like a dead California condor, you would get Harlan Carter.
What's better is this painting of him where he literally looks like Dr. Evil.
He does.
He does look like Dr. Evil.
Who painted him?
I don't know.
Oh, a lot of people.
He's a very important person.
We would not get drinks with.
So we're going to have to start by discussing the history of gun control in the United States.
And because this is the United States, that also started with white supremacy.
I can only, yes, like just from, this is just a guess, but I bet you gun control laws that have been enacted were mostly racist.
Yeah, it's one of those things when you get these arguments online where like people will be like, gun culture is white supremacist.
And it's like, yeah, an awful lot of it is.
And then folks who are pro-gun will be like, well, gun control is white supremacist.
And you're both right because it's the United States of America.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like if you try, it's like people talking about like, oh, well, the Democratic Party used to be like was a white supremacist party for a very long time.
And it's like, yes.
Yes.
Both major U.S. parties are primarily rooted in white supremacy.
100%.
And it's always super weird that, you know, whenever someone is just like, no, and it's like, what?
Why are you, you don't need to be so attached to being a Democrat that you're just going to refuse to believe that it's...
And this doesn't make an argument one way or the other about gun control because like you could say like zoning laws have a lot of their rooting in white supremacy.
It doesn't mean zoning shouldn't exist.
Right.
Yeah.
Because fundamentally, yeah, factories maybe shouldn't be in the same place as apartment complexes.
But that also that like, yeah.
Anyway, whatever.
We're going to do our right.
Oh, yeah.
We're doing gun control.
We're doing CRT on this podcast.
This is going to be a little, a little bit.
Yeah, we're getting into a lot of stuff, but we're going to be talking a shitload about the Border Patrol.
But first, let's talk a little bit about the history of gun control in the United States.
Obviously, 1619 thereabouts is when the first African enslaved people are brought to the United States.
Well, it wasn't the United States then, but you know what I'm saying, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The colonies against their will.
And not that long after, in 1680, which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back then, the Virginia Assembly passed one of, if not the earliest gun control laws in the colonies.
Now, this law did not restrict the ability of white people to be armed.
It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't gun control, but weapons control.
But this law passed in 1680 made it a crime for any African American to carry a weapon or weapon-like object.
Now, that last term there is interesting, Matt, because you could, I mean, like as a man, right?
Anytime you're out in the world, you think about all the different things you could use as weapons.
Everything is like, it's just a thing that happens.
I enter every room going, what could I use for self-defense and or if I just felt like harming someone?
Yeah, if I had to defend myself against the 84-year-old man next to me in the post office, how hard could I hit him with one of these empty cardboard boxes?
Seriously, in the genes of every dude is just Mark Wahlberg going, I would have stopped 9-11 if I'd been on that plane.
And, you know, that's all of us.
It would have been so funny.
It would have been really funny if he'd like if he'd stopped it, but then he'd had to try to land the plane and had accidentally crashed it into the White House.
Oh, God.
Anyway, so as you might guess, the vagueness around the term weapon-like object meant that this law, it didn't just like ban black people from carrying guns.
It meant that they could be punished brutally for holding any object if it could be used to hit somebody.
This started what wound up being like a more than a century-long tradition of elderly black people being banned from having canes.
Oh, my God.
Because you can hit someone with the cane, right?
As Gandalf showed us, you know?
Yeah, oh, yeah.
They weren't being fooled by that in Virginia in 1680.
Yes, we will part an old man from his walking stick.
I'll know a wizard staff when I see one.
You think I don't know you're going to cast a spell?
Now, this being 60 years after the first importation of African slaves to the continent, the 1680 law was aimed at slaves, obviously, but it applied equally.
There were some freed black people in the colony at this period, and it applied to them as well.
The law was amended in 1723 to specify that African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for any purpose, be it hunting or self-defense.
And again, 1723, it's kind of important to be able to use a gun, you know, just if you're living in the Virginia frontier.
Yeah.
There's a lot of other people with guns, and it seems like it's time to have one.
You need food and stuff, you know?
And there's bears.
Yeah, How do you catch your food if you are not allowed to use a gun?
You can trap, but I think the purpose here, no one's thinking about like, they're not, they're doing whatever they can to make these people's lives harder because like they're terrified of the existence of free black people.
Yes.
And under this law, a free black person who defended himself from a white person using a firearm was committing a crime, technically with any weapon.
Like any tool they were to use to defend themselves would be illegal.
So gun control in the early colonies, most of the time, these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the exceptions of the rule.
Because as a rule, like there were the laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things and more just kind of generally trying to make it possible for black people enslaved or free to challenge white supremacy in any way.
Right.
So it wasn't just guns.
And in fact, because guns were like not as good back then, those were less of a focus than some other objects that might surprise you.
Possession of dogs by black people was heavily regulated in this period.
They couldn't have dogs?
Well, it was not impossible, but it was very hard.
If you were a black person who wanted to own a dog in Maryland in the early 1700s, for example, you were forced to get a license from the Justice of the Peace who was going to be a white man.
So it was not easy to get a license from a Justice of the Peace for this.
And if you managed to get one, you were still restricted to owning no more than one dog at a time.
Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for black people under any circumstances and even allowed slave patrols to kill dogs found in the house of a black person.
So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is very old indeed.
Of course.
I should have known.
Of course, dog control also ties directly to white supremacy.
Well, and it's one of those things you have to, again, weapons, firearms are a lot less deadly back then.
So like a gun, you get one shot and it's not easy to reload.
I think dogs got helicopters.
Yeah, a dog, you don't need to reload, right?
A doberman will keep fucking going until you go.
Yeah.
So that's what white folks were particularly scared of.
And again, it's also worth noting, obviously, the prohibition against black people carrying guns or other weapons makes sense if you're afraid of a slave or just an uprising, right?
Because a group of people with guns can do an uprising.
You can't really effectively organize a bunch of dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together.
It's hard to do.
I'd like to see it, though.
It would be cool.
That would be the greatest.
What they're doing here, they don't want black people to be able to defend themselves from like mob violence, right?
Like individual and families.
They don't want them to have any kind of defense if like somebody wants to do a murder, you know?
Jesus Christ.
It's like inventing laws that are completely useless.
The idea that somehow this is like, oh, well, we can't kill that guy.
He lives in a kennel filled with ravenous dogs surrounding him.
Like he's fucking Ramsey Bolton.
Just like ready with hungry dogs to bite the dick off.
So in the late 1700s, spoilers, the American Revolution broke out.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
And by 1787, we have us a constitution.
You know, we fight them English, we beat them, and then we're like, oh boy, this first government, we tried as a giant shit show.
We should probably like give another shot at this.
And they do a constitution.
And eventually this constitution comes to include a Bill of Rights and the now infamous Second Amendment.
We're going to be talking a lot about the changing ways.
This has been interpreted through time.
And despite what people tend to say on either side of the modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to interpret how the so-called founding fathers intended it to function.
And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in agreement about pretty much anything.
But one thing is perfectly clear.
They did not see the right to bear arms as extending to black people.
Now, black people were not categorically forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States.
But in those states where it was legal for them to own arms, they were always required to register those weapons with the government.
This was not the case for white people.
While there was some hope during the Revolution among black Americans that independence would bring about an improvement in their circumstances, and that was not unreasonable.
Again, the British Empire allowed slavery too.
So at this stage in time, it's not like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that like, well, maybe things will get better when they don't have a king anymore, right?
Yeah.
Obviously, that doesn't happen.
And when that doesn't happen, there's some uprisings in the new United States.
In 1811, a Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed.
And in response to this, New Orleans made it a crime for black people to carry weapons.
And this was, again, primarily even more than guns, banned them from stuff like canes.
Crutches, wheelchairs.
Yeah, any, yeah, definitely no one with an assault wheelchair.
Yeah.
So as we've discussed in our Behind the Police series, many Southern police departments started as slave patrols made up of armed white dudes searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a boot on the neck of even free black people.
In 1825, Florida gave slave patrols the right to enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition, or any other weapons found.
And obviously, as is the case with no-knock raids today, these often were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes by saying you felt threatened.
Yeah.
Now, in the early 1860s, obviously, we have us a civil war over slavery.
And broadly speaking, this goes pretty well.
If you think slavery is bad, U.S. Civil War, broadly speaking, goes all right.
Yeah.
Now, one of the most kind of revolutionary aspects of the Civil War is that for the first time in U.S. history, a shitload of black men are legally carrying guns in an organized way.
179,000 black people serve in the Union Army, which is roughly 10% of its total.
And you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men with guns marching across the U.S. South, which really freaks out people in the South.
Yeah, that's got to be the scariest thing.
They looked at that and they're like, see, this is what I'm talking about.
This is the scary shit I did not want to happen.
Yeah, this is why we're losing, started this war that we're losing.
So post-Civil War, black people are not immediately entitled to the same rights as white people.
So starting in 1865, which is the year the war ends, states like former states that had lost basically start enacting black codes.
And these are kind of, okay, these people aren't slaves anymore, but we want to treat them that way.
So let's just write new, let's just take the old laws that we had that restricted slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control, and we'll replace the word slave with servant or something similar so that we can try to hold them under the same laws.
Lynching and Black Codes00:05:25
In Mississippi, black people were still banned from possessing weapons or ammunition.
And if white people turned them in for this crime, they would be given their firearms as a reward.
And again, this is after they've been freed.
So they like should have the right to bear arms and whatnot.
I want to quote now from a 2021 honors thesis by Alexandra Lenzetta from the University of Colorado.
Quote, Other southern states to enact their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana.
Both states prohibited African Americans, not including veterans, from owning guns without a license or special permit.
Not surprisingly, these permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally obtain a gun.
This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns, making the potential penalties of exposure even greater.
Punishment for having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of the weapon.
Old slave patrols re-emerged to enforce the black codes and to terrorize African Americans.
This, along with a combination of great incentives to catch blacks with weapons and a hatred over their newfound freedom, created a white frenzy, making it extremely difficult to hide a gun as an African American.
White frenzy is the worst frenzy.
It's the most common frenzy, too, in this country.
It's their most traditional American frenzy, but it is not a fun one.
We do love us a frenzy.
We love a frenzy.
We love a good frenzy.
We love a bad frenzy.
1865, right?
Bunch of black codes come into effect to basically try and keep black people in similar positions to how they'd been during slavery, even though the war was over.
So in 1866, the U.S. Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which this is like, there's a big old fight over this.
And this is the law that basically says, hey, you actually have to, these people have the same rights that white people have on the Philafront, right?
Like, that's what that does, you know?
And, you know, things do get a lot better for a while.
You know, it was like, do you ever just like read up on Reconstruction and go like, holy shit, for a hot second there?
We seem to be on a good track from.
We were on a good track.
Like, it seemed like shit was going to like work out.
Yeah.
Things get a lot better for a while, and then there's a violent reaction from the reactionaries.
And they do an insurgency, which is kind of centered around the KKK.
We have talked about this in other episodes.
It ends with a series of demeaning, bigoted laws aimed at maintaining white supremacy in the former Confederacy.
These are, you know, Jim Crow laws, right?
And these come into place alongside a wave of lynchings, which kill at least like 5,000 black Americans.
Obviously, there's no way of knowing the actual total.
Good chance it was significantly more, but at least 5,000.
So in response, black people do what you would expect.
They form militias.
They start carrying guns for what I don't think I need to explain the logic here, right?
And they organize to stop lynchings.
This culminates in Louisiana in 1876, where a bunch of Klansmen who are also government officials, these are like elected leaders in Louisiana who are also in the KKK, are charged with conspiring to disarm a meeting of black Americans.
Basically, like one of these groups of black folks had gotten together with guns to like figure out how to protect their community.
And these state officials like try to take their weapons away.
A bunch of court shit happens.
It goes to the Supreme Court, who rules in favor of the Ku Klux Klan, saying that the state had the legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common good.
God.
And, you know, in this period of time, there's also one of the things that's happening during the lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person who is attempted to be lynched has a gun and they shoot the people trying to lynch them.
And when that happens, a number of laws are passed in different towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms.
And in fact, those are some of the first specific laws against the carrying of concealed handguns.
Now, this is an area where like the kind of the anti-gun control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff.
It's very much worth noting all gun control in the United States in this period is not based in white supremacy, in part because a lot of it is put in areas where like most of the population is white.
And there was, it's worth noting, significantly more gun control in portions of the like the so-called Wild West than there are in a lot of those same states today.
In places like the Dakotas and whatnot, it was common for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted.
In many towns, if a visitor came into town, they would be expected to leave their guns with the local police before entering.
They'd get like a little card or something.
You weren't supposed to like, like there were, it's, and there's, you know, a lot to be said about like why this is being done.
But in general, it's being done because they see that it's perfectly reasonable to say that, like, well, there should be restrictions on what you can do in town with a firearm, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And walking around with a gun seems, I don't know, threatening.
Yeah, they certainly don't want you doing it openly.
And then, like, there's a bunch of, there's laws about carrying concealed, and those kind of vary from place to place.
But it's worth noting that the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral actually occurred because a guy, like it was over gun control, right?
Like a guy was openly carrying his guns in the city.
And, you know, there was, as far as I'm aware, like everyone involved in that, I'm pretty sure was like a white dude.
So I don't think there's anything particularly racist in the gunfight.
You could talk about it involving like police overreach.
Open Carry Threats00:05:16
Sure.
Which people will make the case that like this was this was a case of like a fucking early cop going bug fuck on some people.
Yeah.
Don't tread on me.
And people see this whole time.
I didn't know that that was a real gunfight at the OK.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, no, no, no.
It's a pretty cool story as it perfectly accurately described in the documentary Tombstone.
It's a great dodge.
Starring Val Kilmer.
Yeah.
See, I thought the reason was, you know, like a card game got lost or something, or someone had like extra aces up their sleeve, but it turns out gun control.
No, that would be the documentary.
Shit, was it Maverick?
What's the documentary?
That's the card guy who gets like, yeah, Oh, I need to rewatch that.
That was a good fucking, that's a good movie.
My other guest was going to be a giant metal spider who tries to take over.
My third favorite documentary.
And this is what brought about the famous U.S. law against the carrying of gigantic metal spiders.
Right, right, right.
Which I consider to be the civil rights era of the day.
I think I think access to giant metal spiders should be democratized.
I mean, that's just a legitimate.
Well, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a giant metal spider is a good guy with a giant meter.
I would argue that you can't be a bad guy with a giant metal spider.
Agreed.
Because look, no matter what it's doing, if I get to see a giant metal spider tromping around town, my day's improved.
Like, I don't care what that spider's going to do.
Everyone feels safe and happy.
Everybody feels better with a giant metal spider.
So this podcast is brought to you by giantmetalspider.com.
Promo code giant metal spider.
Pictures today.
We're actually right on time because it is about that time.
Wow.
Well, look, everybody's talking a lot about AR-15s.
You know what's more powerful than an AR-15?
A metal spider the size of the Chrysler building.
That is scary.
Yeah, yeah.
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 that, 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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, 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 luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Mexican American Officers00:15:33
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
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, who did it?
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 chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he 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 are wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
So you have, you know, again, the Wild West, how common gunfights and stuff were, especially in like cities and towns, is exaggerated.
But also, there was a lot of like, there were a lot of robberies.
There were a lot of crimes.
Like, and it's, it's the same as it is today.
Like the gunfights that have kind of come down to history were like the ones that the media went nuts on in the day, like the gunfight at the OK Corral.
Right.
But broadly speaking, by the end of the 1800s, most places in the United States had banned the concealed carrying of handguns, although open carrying remained legal in a lot of places.
We'll talk about when that ended.
In 1893, the government of Texas said that, quote, the mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder, to check it as the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.
And again, he was probably saying that primarily because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns.
This is the governor of Texas in 1893.
So do keep that in mind.
But U.S. gun control in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the specter of armed black people.
And even where laws were perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy, even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law.
Lanzetta writes, quote, Another example of discrimination is found in legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era involved an 11-year-old black boy with a toy gun.
In St. Louis in 1900, it was illegal to fire a gun within city limits, and the boy was charged for violating this law.
However, when his case was being reviewed by a judge to determine his guilt, it was discovered that the gun was fake.
Knowing this new information, the judge should have dropped all charges, given that it is not possible to fire a fake gun.
But this was not the case.
Instead, the boy was found guilty, and the judge fined him $10, almost $310 today.
Which is interesting.
I did.
Again, another thing that goes back very far is black kids being penalized for having toy guns.
Right, exactly.
Quite far back.
Yeah, I mean, it's literally just these are like rulings.
It's like, well, you scared me.
Yeah.
That's the entire thing.
That has been the, I believe, the explanation for the deaths of countless, countless black people.
Well, and it's also just like this.
I was scared.
Perhaps we don't like, perhaps we're fundamentally frightened by the concept, even if it's a toy of like black people having guns, because that's how we maintain our power over them, right?
Right.
Which is, again, even in these areas where concealed carrying or open carrying is illegal, it's generally not illegal for white people to do if they're being vigilantes, right?
This is a key aspect of this period.
And this brings us back to the glorious state of Texas.
Like much of the South, after the Civil Rights Act, legislators had to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm black people were not motivated by racism.
Brendan Rivas from Texas Christian University writes, quote, the post-1865 laws, however, used race-neutral language to accomplish a racially motivated goal.
Most of these laws attempted to disarm black Texans, but some from the 1870s stopped to curb the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone.
For instance, a part of the Texas slave code prohibited slaves from carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer.
And a law passed in 1866 prohibited laborers from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent.
And race-neutral language, the 1866 law, achieved the same result as the slave code, without specifically declaring that African Americans should be disarmed.
Their arming was conditional, subject to the authorization of an interested white party.
Similarly, the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those local offices.
And you can guess which of those happens more often.
And this is the state of affairs legally in the state of Texas when Harlan Bronson Carter is born on August 10th, 1913 in Granbury, Texas.
Now, at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that it was the home of Davey Crockett for a little while.
And every town in Texas was Davy Crockett's home for a little while.
Not super impressive.
And yet.
Every town is just, he stayed at a motel here for two weeks.
Yeah.
Fucking all our hookers.
He's like a celebrated hunter and frontier guy.
And Harlan certainly, like, I heard God knows how many fucking stories about Davy fucking Crockett when I was a kid in my mandatory Texas history class.
I'm going to guess in like 1920, young Harlan Carter is growing up and learning even more of these stories.
Yeah.
And obviously, he's also enmeshed in the local gun culture of the time.
Pretty much everywhere is semi-rural.
So he's, you know, he does a lot of hunting.
He does a lot of target shooting.
He becomes an excellent shot from an early age.
And he develops an intense affinity for firearms, shall we say.
So when he's young, the family moves to Laredo.
And Laredo is a border town, right?
And they moved to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent.
And in fact, is one of the very first Border Patrol agents.
So the year that they moved to Laredo is 1927.
Harlan's 14.
And it's the same year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes a trip to the town and expresses in an official document his shock to find that, quote, Laredo was strictly a Mexican town.
Probably 90% of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent.
He adds with horror, the only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself.
And this is an interesting, like, Laredo at this point, because it's so heavily Mexican, is not a town controlled by white people.
And the police are not a white force, right?
You'll note that quote I read earlier states that like kind of the laws against gun control were usually mainly like put into force against like armed black people, but depending on politics, could be used to try to stop white vigilantes.
Well, this is one of those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police force is not white.
So the Border Patrol, however, is not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican folks are running things, right?
That does not thrill them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, next, you know, they'll start inviting other Mexicans to live here and they won't stop the border.
I mean, I love the idea of these like people going to a town right on the border of Mexico in Texas, which used to be Mexico, and being like, what the hell are all these Mexicans doing?
Yeah, these communities that had been there for decades before a state of Texas was a thing that anyone had thought of being like, these people are going to change the nature of Texas.
Yeah, this is not the Texas I know that we invented about 20 years ago.
Yeah, that we invented when I was 15.
Yeah, exactly.
So this inspector guy, Perkins, again, is exactly as racist as you might expect.
And he decides that Laredo's immigration cops are not going to be able to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, which are, again, geared towards enforcing white supremacy, if the state of affairs in Laredo remains the way that it is.
So he carries out what he describes as a, quote, full-scale house cleaning.
Now, in the wonderful book, Migra, Kelly Hernandez writes, quote, he charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector and border patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrant smuggling and forced just under half of Laredo's 28 Border Patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired.
Perkins then transferred select border patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo sector because all were experienced, well-disciplined fighters who knew the country well.
Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the Border Patrol station from the local Mexican-American political elite.
Tension quickly mounted between the ex-Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo Police Department.
While the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with the local police in most borderland communities, in 1927, several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol got in their Model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling and shooting up the police station.
Holy fuck.
So he cleans house, brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which is like the most racist police force in the United States at this period, and has them shoot up the police station.
Fucking A.
I mean, like on the one hand, ACA.
Yeah, it's like on the one hand.
But on the other hand, I don't think it's A.
I think it's just these particular cabs.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, they're going after specifically an armed group of Mexican-Americans.
It's also probably worth noting that in this period, if you're being a fucking, being a being a Mexican-American police officer in Laredo in 1927 is a bit different from being a police officer pretty much anywhere in the United States at this point, which is part of why the Border Patrol is purging them.
Because he's like, you guys, they're not stopping immigration.
They're not like violently cracking down on people who aren't white.
They're not enforcing white supremacy.
So we have to get rid of them with guns.
And they get rid of, they do get rid of the Laredo police force with guns.
It's the only time in American history that police have been able to be fired.
Yes.
Yeah.
This is the one time it happened.
This is what it took.
The one time.
So it's safe to say that Laredo was a pretty wild place when Harlan Carter was an adolescent.
His father, Horace, was among the first cohort of Border Patrol agents hired in 1927.
And he was transferred to Laredo in 1927 as part of this process.
It's entirely possible that Horace Carter was one of the guys shooting that police station.
And in this period of time, Harlan's father would have seen his job as explicitly to use violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most people were not white.
Quote from Migra.
Although most local stations develop their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican-American leadership.
The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge for white violence within Mexican-dominated Laredo.
So they've turned the Border Patrol prior to this, and they're all like local guys, right?
So they don't really care about like Mexican American, like Mexicans coming into America because that's how they got there, right?
That's like their family, everybody.
And again, they also probably don't see the border as this solid thing because relatives have lived here for forever.
It used to not be like a thing to cross.
But this is the period where the border is really becoming a thing in a way it hadn't been before.
And part of how they do that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of white people and have them shoot anybody who disagrees, right?
Like that's, that's how the border becomes real in Laredo.
The American way.
And it's how borders are enforced everywhere.
Yeah.
That's why borders are bad.
Yep.
Yep.
Although today, I mean, there's a long conversation to be had about the fact that the Border Patrol today is extremely diverse.
Like one of the things people on the left particularly have gotten wrong about Evaldi is like the assertion that like, well, they probably didn't go in because those kids were Hispanic.
And it's like, have you seen a pictures of the Evaldi police?
A lot of them are Mexican-American.
And the Border Patrol guy, like it's, it's, it's a whole thing.
Like if you go down to border communities, you'll see.
Yeah.
It's not that simple.
It's not the same as always as like superficial and simple as it as it seems.
Yeah.
So in 1930, Harlan, aged 16, joins the National Rifle Association.
And again, the NRA is rightfully, again, I'm more pro-gun than most people on the left tend to be.
But the NRA is like undoubtedly, we'll be spending hours talking about this, incredibly toxic.
It's not at this point, right?
It's not, there's nothing wrong with the NRA at this stage, really.
And in fact, the NRA has its roots on the correct side of the Civil War.
There are these two union generals who are like, because again, Civil War, one of the things early on, the South is doing pretty well.
And part of why they're doing pretty well is that like all the boys who like wind up fighting in the Confederacy's military, like they're country boys, right?
They've grown up shooting and hunting.
They're like, and using guns to enforce white supremacy.
They're good with firearms.
Whereas most of the northern boys who get drafted are like city kids, and many of them had never had any chance to use firearms.
So they're like, they suck with them, right?
And these two union generals are like, boy, our soldiers are really bad at shooting, and it takes a long time to train them up.
Maybe if we should get ready for the next war by having an organization where boys who grew up in urban areas can like go and learn how to shoot, you know?
That seems like a good thing to encourage.
So that's, and the NRA up until the early 20th century is like a sportsman's association.
You're doing it for target shooting.
You're doing it for hunting.
Now, it is worth noting that like from the beginning, and this was not seen as problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect to it as well.
It's not like a military organization, but part of the purpose of the NRA is to prepare people to be part of the military, if necessary.
And this is also the military is a really different thing in this period.
You know, we have a big standing army during the Civil War, but we hadn't before, and we don't quickly afterwards, right?
Like this is, again, when World War I happens, they have to like make an army.
When World War II happens, they have to like make an army in a way that like it had not hugely existed prior to this.
So there's this understanding that like if there's an emergency, we're going to need to activate all of these civilians and they need to be ready to like fight and whatnot.
Right.
So yeah, the U.S. Defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons and other equipment to the NRA, which would sell them to members quite cheaply.
Used to be able to get like World War II guns like Guerins for really cheap from the NRA.
It was a bunch of stuff they did like that.
So in February 1931, the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of their house, right?
Dallas Defense Case00:06:22
Now they have no idea who does this.
This is the origin story of so many racists.
Oh, go on.
Oh boy, Max.
So again, as far as I know, it was never figured out who had done this.
But a couple of weeks after their car is stolen on March 3rd, 1931, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harlan's mother sees three Hispanic boys, quote unquote, loitering out in front of the house.
Now, she says loitering, we have no idea.
They may have just been like walking around or what, like, even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this.
But like racist white lady sees people who are not white vaguely close to her house, and she decides that like these boys must have been who stole my car.
Yes, yes, yes.
The earliest recorded incident of Karen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Karen Carter calls the cops.
Karen Carter.
Well, you can't really call.
It's 1931.
Some people do have phones.
I don't know if they do.
It's not easy to call.
It's not as easy to call the cops.
They send a pigeon or whatever those guys did there.
No.
Her son winds up taking this into his own hands.
Ah, yes.
That's right.
I'm going to quote from a write-up in timeline here.
The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn't be home for hours.
So the son picked up his shotgun and walked out the door.
It didn't take him long to find the boys who were between the ages of 15 and 12 at a swimming hole nearby.
He demanded they come home with him.
When they asked why, he wouldn't say.
15-year-old Raymond Cassiano responded, hell no, we won't go to your house and you can't make us.
Carter and Cassiano started swearing at each other.
Cassiano pulled out a knife and asked if he wanted to fight.
Carter lifted his shotgun to Ramon's chest.
According to testimony from that time, Ramon told him not to do it and pushed the shotgun aside.
Then he took a step back and laughed.
Annoyed by Ramon's lack of fear, Carter asked if he thought he wasn't going to shoot.
Then he did.
Cassiano lay dying on the ground with a two-inch shotgun wound in his chest.
Jesus.
So that sounds familiar, right?
There's shades of Rittenhouse.
There's shades of Zimmerman, you know?
Like, this is, again, not, and obviously, I'm sure like if we had been around at the time and paying attention to the news, we'd say, oh, there's shades of like this thing that happened in like 1920 and this thing and everything.
Right.
Like, we just happen to know the most recent incidents.
Yeah.
You know, this is a very familiar incident, right?
And you can imagine if this happened today, it would be a massive culture war.
Well, he had a knife.
He supposed he was just defending his family.
Yada, yada, yada.
So it's worth noting talking about why Harlan felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which there are some, like, obviously it's not entirely legal to carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff.
But this is, you're not supposed to like walk out to try and solve the robbery of your car with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Like, that's not explicitly legal.
But there's a long history of vigilante violence by white people.
And so whether or not this actually is legal is going to come down heavily on the local courts.
Right.
And so the fact because this is happening in Laredo, if this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city of hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue.
But because it's happening in Laredo, this is going to be a problem for Harlan.
Did you call Dallas the city of hate?
That's literally its nickname.
What?
Yeah, that's the nickname of Dallas, Texas.
It's the city, we killed JFK.
Yeah, I mean, good point.
Holy shit.
The city of brotherly hate.
That's wow.
I mean, not anymore, but like that is, that is the nickname of Dallas, Texas.
Yeah.
So because this happens in Laredo, the law is not as on his side as you might expect if it had happened in some other parts of Texas.
Harlan Carter is arrested.
He is tried and he is convicted of murder.
He's sentenced to three years in prison.
Again, you can say like he should have been sentenced to more.
I'm mixed because he was a child, right?
Like this is bad, but also like, I think you have to, if you believe children are not culpable in the way that adult, but anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years.
His family appeals the judgment.
And they complain for about a number of things.
They say the judge is related to the prosecutor, that self-defense had not been adequately explained to the jury, that one of the witnesses was like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy, a bunch of racist shit.
Yeah, yeah.
They were like, well, the judge failed to consider that the victim was no angel.
Yeah.
Although they focus more on like the kid who watched him's friend get his brother or whatever get murdered was no angel.
Yeah, he was also no angel.
So eventually you're legally allowed to kill no angels.
That's right.
That's in the Bible.
That's right.
That's why anytime I see a bunch of floating eyes, I just start shooting.
That was a biblical angel joke.
Sure was.
So eventually a judge with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agrees that like the case was bad and he overturns Harlan Carter's conviction on these grounds.
And because, quote, several of the material witnesses for the state have been discredited, having been convicted of infamous crimes.
It does not seem accurate that they were convicted of infamous crimes.
But, you know, it's also worth noting that like Harlan's dad helped run law enforcement in Laredo.
It's impossible that some of the people who had witnessed the shooting were like targeted by the police to provide plausible deniability for his kid.
And if not likely.
So Harlan gets let out of prison.
His conviction is overturned and he proceeds with life now as a young adult as a free man.
He enrolls in the University of Texas, but he changes his name.
So his original name had been Harlan, H-A-R-L-A-N, and he swaps out the A for an O.
And he does this basically under the understanding that like, well, this will make it a hard, if people go looking for Harlan Carter's criminal record, they won't find anything.
Wait, so he changed it to Horlan or Harlan.
Harlan.
H-A-R-L-O-N as opposed to H-A-L-A-N.
Okay, okay, got it.
And again, it's a marker of like how different the time is that like this works perfectly for him for decades.
Like people are like, ah, well, they swapped an A with an O with no other we can do.
Yeah, I was like, well, the search engine doesn't do other letters, so fuck it.
Getting Away With Crimes00:02:49
It's so easy to get away with crimes back in the 30s.
My God, was it easy?
Speaking of getting away with crimes, dude.
If you walked fast, like if you could walk pretty fast, you could get away with a crime.
Oh, man.
Those are the days.
Those were the days.
Let's bring them back.
Robert Sophie.
Who else gets away with crimes?
The corporation when they hired those mercenaries to gun down union organizers in Latin America?
That was a mob and you took it.
I'm very proud of you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Drink.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If 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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Ward.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, 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 in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
Teenager Shooting Incident00:14:43
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
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.
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 chambers docks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, 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 are wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
And I'm just going to have a nice refreshing sip of oh, it's a classic drink.
You know, that choice is like locking a bunch of nuns and huguenum organizers in a church and lighting it on fire.
God, that's good stuff.
Yeah, I mean, love it.
So, again, it's one of those things.
If this had kind of been the end of Harlan Carter's story, I'd say like, well, that was a fucked up thing that happened.
But I guess I don't believe a 16-year-old should be locked in prison for their whole life.
So, but that's not the end of the story.
It sucks that, like, there are cases where I'm like, it would be sick if he had.
It's like with Kyle Rittenhouse, I don't think the right thing was to throw him in a hole for forever.
Certainly the right thing is not to turn him into a celebrity and give him millions of dollars.
That's maybe even worse, but like, I think fundamentally you have to believe that, like, well, if a child does something, even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused on the possibility of rehabilitation because otherwise you don't actually believe that children are less responsible than adults.
And anytime you like try to set up, anytime you try to be more punitive, it always affects brown people and people of color way more.
And obviously, yeah, like Raymond Cassiano suffers even more for whatever, however questionable you want to think his call to pull a knife might have been.
Although I think it's, again, you could argue, justified because the other kid had a fucking gun.
Anyway, whatever.
One of the problems with guns in America is how often angry teenage boys get a hold of them.
And this is, again, quite an old story.
Yeah.
But regardless of what you think should be done when kids commit murder, Harlan definitely committed murder.
That's not self-defense.
And anyone who says otherwise is probably racist.
But it's worth noting that even modern sources, and this is something, this is where things get really uncommon.
Even modern sources that are like very pro-gun control, very anti-Harlan Carter, who will attack Harlan for his later work with the NRA, tend to tell the story of what happened with him and Raymond Cassiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce Harlan's claims of self-defense.
This is a very strange thing I've noticed in a couple of sources.
I've read a lot of articles about this guy, and his actions can be framed in fascinating ways.
I want to highlight particularly a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler.
And Gunfight, there's actually like five books titled Gunfight.
I think one of them is like, seemed to be slightly grifty.
It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who like does an anti-gun book because I think maybe that's where the money was.
I don't know.
I'm not going to go into date because I haven't read it.
I haven't, I haven't read it.
But like, there's a bunch of books with this title.
The good one, the one that you would actually be worth reading is Winkler's gunfight.
He's a UCLA professor.
And gunfight is a critical history of the battle over the Second Amendment in U.S. politics.
That has a lot of really useful context, including some of what I went over about like the early racism and gun control.
It's a good, and again, very much anti-NRA.
But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter and Raymond Cassiano, which I find very peculiar.
Quote, Carter loved guns from childhood.
He was an excellent shot and would go on to win two national shooting titles and set 44 national shooting records during his lifetimes.
His most infamous shot, however, came at the age of 17 when, in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun into the chest of a knife-wielding Mexican teenager.
Nope.
That's a weird way to describe that.
That's not what happened at all.
That's not what happened at all.
That's such a weird way for, and again, Winkler is like, he's a professor of law at UCLA.
Like he's all over the New York Times writing about this kind of stuff.
It's like really weird that he describes it that way.
Maybe it was just like, oh man, I've done all this other research.
I'm just not going to, I'm just going to go with the autobiography that he wrote.
It's just, it's like calling Raymond Cassiano a knife-wielding Mexican teenager.
It's such an unsettling way to choose to phrase it.
It is strange.
It was just like people forget that Cassiano was guilty because he had a man and knife.
He's guilty of bringing a knife to a gunfight.
It is.
Yeah.
Again, the book is not at all right-wing or reactionary.
There's a lot of good stuff in there.
The fact that he describes Cassiano's murder in this way, though, makes me question some stuff that like maybe I missed in vetting this thing because it's a really weird passage.
It's so strange.
Now, let's compare that to this write-up by a right-wing dude, Dave Koppel, from an article he wrote explicitly defending Harlan Carter's legacy.
Now, in this article, he's critiquing a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that accurately noted, quote, 50 years ago, Carter shot and killed a 15-year-old boy and was convicted of murder.
Arguing against this, Coppel writes, the letter admitted the fact that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang of intruders led by the boy and that the boy was menacing Carter with a knife.
Again, this is also not true.
He was not defending his mother's ranch.
They were swimming.
They were swimming and having a good time and being accused of doing a crime.
That they, I mean, did they do the crime even?
I don't think there's ever been any evidence that they did.
She just said they even stole a car.
Again, this is a little murky, but it kind of seems like what happened is their car was stolen.
A couple of weeks later, she sees some Mexican kids walk past their house towards a swimming hole and six her son on them, right?
That kind of seems like what happened.
That seems and it's it's weird because Winkler and Koppel could not be more apart ideologically.
But their description of this murder is very similar in a way.
Like, I just, it's, I don't want to harp too much on this, but it's like really weird to me that that happened.
Yeah.
Do you have any like inkling as to why that may be?
Or is there just a...
Most people don't dwell too much on.
It took me a while, actually, to find good specific details about what happened that day.
And I think most people take the attitude that just like, well, he said he was defending his mom.
And like, that's the, I don't know.
I, I, I think in part, you know, Winkler's covering a lot of ground, right?
Because his book is a whole, it's not focused on Carter.
It's a whole history of like kind of the how the second amendment has been interpreted and ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries.
So he does have a lot of ground to cover.
It's just very, and I guess that one of the things he did was just kind of brush over what happened there.
It's YouTube.
It's just an unconscious bias.
Yeah.
Like the way I would do it, right?
Because it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history to not go into detail, but I would have just said something like, he confronted, you know, another teenager over like, you know, something his mother said and like, or he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicious, even that would be better, right?
Yeah.
And also, this is, you know, you do a podcast.
This guy's a UCLA professor.
Yeah.
It's just, it's, I, again, I don't want to like shit on him too much because it's like there's a lot of good stuff in the book.
It's, it's just that part.
I don't get it.
I don't get why you would write about it though.
Anyway.
So Harlan Carter commits murder, does two years in prison, goes to college, and then he decides to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Border Patrol.
He becomes an agent in 1936, three years after leaving prison.
Carter's rise was rapid, if not meteoric.
So he joins in 36, having been in prison two years earlier.
In 1950, he's running the entire Border Patrol.
Wow.
Now, again, Border Patrol is a lot smaller back then.
It's a lot newer.
It's easier to become head of the Border Patrol.
And also, his murder was definitely something on his resume.
You know what I mean?
Probably unlike the secret.
I don't think he put it on his paper resume, but I'm sure because he's known in Laredo as dead.
Like I'm sure the guys giving him his first gigs all know about it and think it's bad, right?
Right.
Yeah.
But he also, he does keep it a secret publicly, right?
Like he doesn't brag about it in public.
Again, when he's hanging out with his buddies, I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly.
But it's not like a part of his public persona as a, you know, once you're the head of the Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know?
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
It's not like today in which that would be something he would be celebrated for and talk about on, you know, oh, yeah, he would like he, the shotgun that he used to kill Raymond Cassiano would have been auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars.
And he would have used it to buy an F-350 with the Daily Wire would give him his own column.
Yeah.
He'd, he'd be making documentaries with Matt Walsh.
Yeah.
Times were a lot more chill back then.
It is.
It is when we talk, we're talking about the story of this guy who does like a racist murder as a teenage boy.
And like, wow, he really was less proud of it than he would be today.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
That's where we're at, where we're like, oh, wow, he didn't make that like his whole brand.
Weird.
Wild.
So the Border Patrol had shifted at this point from being geared mainly towards policing the border to being a force for policing Mexican Americans inside the United States on the pretext of them being potentially undocumented migrants.
As a result, their work strayed further and further from the border and increasingly into American cities, factories, farms, and anywhere expected of harboring illegals.
Some Border Patrol agents had difficulty with this, right?
This was not a lot of the folks who had signed up earlier.
This was not like the thing that they had signed up for specifically.
Harlan, though, is hugely supportive of this change.
And in fact, he wanted to expand the Border Patrol's purview even further and use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely.
This was justified in his mind by the fact that a large number of undocumented migrants were living and working, or this was justified publicly, right?
So Harlan, there's like a racial motivation, but you can't use that like as we talked about earlier, right?
Like you have to hide when your laws are racially motivated.
So the justification is that a large number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches and other businesses in the borderlands, often under nightmarish, slave-like conditions.
Now, this is a real problem that's happening, right?
Like as it is today, right?
Yeah, completely.
And yeah, there's this like suggestion of a new of a thing called the Bracero program that will provide kind of like a legal way for these people to like work, but they'll have, you know, there will be more control over the conditions that they can work in, which obviously the people who would be hiring them don't like.
Right.
It's it's a whole thing.
Just fucked fucked every which way.
From the perspective of Harlan Carter, though, this is primarily a humanitarian pretext for carrying out like a purging of Mexican Americans from like the borderlands.
And I'm going to quote from Migra again.
Carter had convened a meeting to request the assistance of the U.S. military and the National Guard to purge the nation of undocumented Mexican nationals and seal the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Border Patrol's proposal was titled Operation Cloudburst and consisted of three basic steps.
First, an anti-infiltration operation on or near the border would seal the border with the assistance of 2,180 military troops.
In addition to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic.
Two metal picket barbed wire fences, eight feet high and eight feet apart, with rolls of concertina wire in between and one roll of concertina wire on top of the fence nearest Mexico built several miles along the border would form the fence.
But previous experience had taught the Border Patrol that fenced areas still needed additional security.
Therefore, the concertina fence would be reinforced by officers and jeeps who will be directed to the scene of any attempted fence or canal crossing by observers in radio-equipped towers.
So this is the first modern, this is the wall, right?
This is the start of it.
This is the beginning of that.
Not that there hadn't been like fences and stuff in different areas before then.
This is the first time someone's like, we need to build a wall and has like a concerted vision of that.
And specifically a vision of using the, of the wall as a system of violence in order to keep the borderlands white, right?
That's what he's doing here.
And he invents that shit, you know?
Border Wall Origins00:08:22
Wow.
Wow.
He's like the Thomas Edison of making racist borders.
That's right.
Yeah.
Wow.
He's the Elon Musk of border racism.
Sure.
Yes.
So to continue that quote.
Race X. Race.
I wanted to do a Christ.
I wanted to do a pawn.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Good work.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So I'm going to continue that quote.
Second, a containment operation would maintain roadblocks on all major roads leading from the southwest to the interior of the United States.
These roadblocks would be used to inspect traffic, including railroad traffic, for the purpose of detecting illegal entrants and to maintain safety patrols around the checkpoints.
The roadblocks were planned for strategic locations that would prevent aliens from fleeing to the interior of the nation when the mopping up operations, the third phase, began.
The mopping up operations would be conducted in northern areas such as San Francisco, where the task forces would raid designated locations such as migrant camps or places of business.
So San Francisco, I don't know if you've ever been, Matt.
Yeah.
Not super close to the border.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
Well, I guess close to like a sea border, right?
No, that we're building towards.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, those are the other aliens that they also want to put a fence around.
Yeah.
Watch out for all those turtles and fucking, you know.
Don't worry.
We'll get rid of those in a couple of decades.
Right, exactly.
Just put a few more of those soda, you know, fucking soda rings in the water.
But yeah, no, not close to the border.
I lived in San Francisco, and I'll tell you, it was a trek to get to Mexico.
Yeah, exactly.
So the primary downside to his plan, right?
This is a pretty good idea if you're a white supremacist, right?
Solid plan.
The only problem with it is that it is wildly unconstitutional.
So there's this thing, right?
This law that kind of gets in the way of this.
So right at this point in time, nowadays the Border Patrol, like you see those guys fucking walking around and they look like soldiers, right?
They've got their plate carriers and their AR-15s and all their fucking cool tactical gear.
At this point, the Border Patrol is like slightly better armed than a modern Boy Scout troop.
They're not packing that much heat compared to what they're going to be packing.
They have a lot of merit badges.
They have a lot of merit badges in racism, but there's not a ton of them, right?
So they can't do this without the U.S. military.
And in fact, the military is going to wind up being a significant portion of the effort if they try to do this.
But here's the problem.
There's this stupid fucking bullshit ass 1878 law called posse comatatus, right?
And that means you can't use the military to enforce domestic laws without Congress's approval.
Oh, damn.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
We all hate posse comatatus.
Yeah, dude.
I, for one, think the military should enforce all of the laws.
Yes, dude.
Particularly jaywalking.
Exactly.
They're the best at it.
You don't want a bunch of Boy Scout border patrols getting a fucking merit badge for walking a Mexican old lady across the border.
We should have drones making sure, watching for people to cross the street illegally.
And we should have MLRS rocket systems to just bombard the area if they cross the street, not at a crosswalk.
Exactly, dude.
We want more Robocops and we want them to be federal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Reinstate the draft and use it to stop jaywalking and littering.
Yeah.
Someone cuts me, you know.
Absolutely.
Someone like cuts you off, someone's speeding Agent Orange immediately.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So this fucking law, posse comatatus really, really grinds Harlan's gears.
So obviously, I should also note here that the fact that the military is not supposed to be used to enforce the law doesn't mean it isn't, right?
If you've casually Googled the Watts riots, you know, the government has a way of finding out, figuring, making it being able to use soldiers to do cop shit when it needs to.
But in this case, the government wasn't willing to push things that far, right?
And the general whose like job it is to like basically the general who's liaising with Carter, this guy named Swing, who really wants to do this.
Like he's a racist too.
But he's like, hey, we can't make this work legally right now, but we could do it if the president issued a proclamation.
Like it's not impossible to do, but like it's you'd have to get Eisenhower on board.
So Harlan Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's people and he tries desperately to get approval, but Eisenhower isn't quite willing to deploy troops.
Now, he, again, not to give Ike any credit, he agrees with Harlan's basic goals.
He just, this, like using the army in this way is a little too far for him.
Yeah.
But again, he's not against this.
So in May of 1954, Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, right?
INS.
We don't have INS anymore now.
We've got whatever.
But these guys are in.
So he's basically, now he's Carter's boss, essentially, this like general.
And Swing had a long history of commanding troops in battle from Mexico to Korea.
Obviously, you could see the fact that now a general is in charge of INS as like the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol.
And Swing is a bastard in his own right, but this is really happening in part because of what Carter is pushing to turn the Border Patrol into, right?
This is not just the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol.
The Border Patrol is going to become the first large police agency to militarize, right?
This happens decades before.
We talked about the Watts riots, which happened like a decade or so from now.
And then the LA riots, which were a big, you know, decades later, which were a big pusher.
This happens way before all of that.
This is 1954.
So, this is like, in a lot of ways, the beginning of police militarization happens because Harlan Carter and General Joseph Swing want to cleanse the borderlands of Mexican Americans.
Yeah.
Quote, as promised, one month after joining INS, Swing announced that he would lead the U.S. Border Patrol in an intensive, innovative, and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
No one questioned how, in four short weeks, he had prepared the officers of the Border Patrol for such a massive campaign.
I mean, at this point, too, what was even the like, what were the migration numbers?
Like, was it even that?
I mean, certainly it's not as much as it was now, but I'm thinking about like what 1950s, 1950s, Mexico was what they had, you know, the Civil Wars not that long ended.
Yeah, the PRI is in power.
It's isn't it fairly stable at this point?
I feel like, yeah.
So it's like, it's like what they were doing, this pretense of like, oh, we got to stop the illegals.
I mean, we're not even talking about like, you know, we're not talking about modern Latin American immigration that we have today, which is used as a pretext for all sorts of racist laws against Latin Americans here legally.
We're talking about labor stuff that's taught.
And again, they have to like do moral panic and stuff about the treatment of migrants.
But like this is all very messy because some of the biggest people opposing the government doing this crackdown are these different ranchers and other employers who are like who want to exploit people's labor.
It's not, there's a lot that's that's going on overall in this issue, but when it comes to Harlan Carter, it's pretty simple, right?
He's he's a racist, you know?
Yeah, he's trying to do a racial purge under the pretext of like, oh man, you know, they're not paying fair wages.
Like he gives a shit.
And it's, you know, he's, he's also like starting the process of justifying, figuring out ways to justify this that are like palatable to large chunks of Americans.
And yeah, that's what's happening in this period of time.
And you know what else is happening right now, man?
What?
Harlan Carter Racism00:05:07
I'm going to ask you for your pluggables.
Oh, hell yeah.
So my pluggables are: I just finished the entire series, The Sopranos.
Pod Yourself a Gun is a podcast that I do with Vince Mancini.
And we just did our very last episode.
We watched all of it.
We watched all the Sopranos.
And you can listen to the series finale wherever you get your podcast.
So check that out.
And also follow me on Instagram because, you know, I feel like that's where all the cool kids hang out.
So like, yeah.
You know, hit me up, hit me up there.
And also be excited because me and Vince, our next show, we're going to be talking about the wire.
That's right.
20 years after the wires come out, finally, two white men will break down the wire because finally, you know, finally.
Someone's got to do it.
I mean, that is the right group to break down the wire season two.
Oh, for sure.
For sure.
Very excited.
You got to make sure at least one of you is a poll.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to get some.
We got some polls who are going to come on.
We got a bunch of Greek Baltimore friends who are going to come on.
It's going to be great.
But yeah, look for that coming.
What are you calling it?
Probably when you pod through the garden, you know, which, you know, kind of continues our tradition of having a really bad title for a TV rewatch podcast.
Yeah.
So check it out whenever that comes out.
But for now, listen to Pod Yourself a Gun.
You can go back, listen to the whole thing, tell your friends.
I need to know who your favorite character on the wire was.
I mean, I relate the most to bubbles because I used to love heroin.
But other than that, shit.
Probably Clay Davis.
Clay Davis is cool.
He's a state senator who says shit a lot.
She.
She.
You know, for a show that is like lifted up as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, there sure certainly are a lot of catchphrases.
It's a weirdly catchphrase-heavy show for something that is incredibly serious.
You go, what the fuck did I do?
You got, you know, you got a proposition, Joe is like, I got a proposition for, it's like, this is a serious show, but they love catchphrases.
Anyways.
I'm excited.
That sounds awesome.
Me too.
Boom.
Podcast.
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