Garrison Davis joins the discussion to dissect Blaine Lee Pardot's "Blue Dawn," a right-wing fantasy depicting an Antifa-led 2020 coup establishing the socialist "New America." The hosts analyze plot points where China and Russia fund the revolution, the White House is seized, and wealthy citizens are deemed non-essential in nationalized hospitals. They critique the narrative's reliance on conspiracy theories regarding Big Tech collaboration and the fictional "Social Enforcement" agency, contrasting these dystopian elements with real-world DHS reports. Ultimately, the episode exposes how such literature weaponizes alternate realities to satirize current political anxieties while reinforcing specific ideological biases through its world-building. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Behind The Bastards Book Episode00:03:37
Cool zone media.
What hasn't slept in days, my host of this podcast?
It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast hosted by a man who is just an absolute wreck of a human being.
And as we always do, whenever I'm a wreck of a human being, we're doing a book episode, everybody.
You know, we actually don't do these all that often anymore because for a long time, I couldn't find any good books for us to do.
It's harder than you would expect, but the audience loves a books episode.
It lets us get by with a little bit less research one week, and we don't have to do a rerun.
So it keeps the new content flowing.
And I know all you maniacs love that.
But I finally found a fresh, you know, like in the movie Fury Road, how a Morton Joe lives in that citadel where there's all that water, you know, inside the big rock.
I found the book equivalent of that.
And to pour it, I'm just going to splash it all over our guest today, Garrison Davis.
Garrison, how are you doing?
I'm tired, but hanging in there.
Wow.
Yeah, this is the day after both the union negotiated its contract and Donald Trump got convicted of 34 felonies.
It was a crazy day tonight for a lot of people.
It was a crazy day in there.
I also got to take some of our co-workers to Waffle House for the first time.
So it was really just a whole bunch of W's, as they say.
Yeah, this is actually now for the first time, Donald Trump can truly have the Waffle House experience, which is eating at a Waffle House as a convicted fellow.
Wow.
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
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On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
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All right, Garrison, are you ready to warm this open the fuck up?
I always am.
Obama And Vanity Press Books00:14:40
Okay.
So what?
This is Behind the Bastards.
This is behind the Bastards.
Yes, it is Behind the Bastards.
It's a book episode, and I'm going to tell you what book it's about.
But there's a lot of setup that we need for this, guys.
So, you know, Garrison, being a victim of state repression is a terrible thing.
You know, having the force, oh, really?
Yeah, you don't say, yeah, yeah, very frightening having the force of a nation's like legal system and law enforcement arms brought down on your head just for, say, speaking your mind or, you know, lifting your voice in protest.
Or doing 34 counts of financial fraud.
Yes.
It's it sucks actually being oppressed, but pretending to be a victim of censorship is great because you get all of the victims, the benefits of being a victim.
You get that sympathy, you get to feel like a hero, you get to make like grand speeches about how you won't be silenced, but you don't actually have to face any consequences for any of your shitty behavior, right?
And in the long list of fake victims in this country, I think probably the fakest and one of my favorite is a guy named David Thomas Roberts.
Now, David wrote a book back in 2012 called Patriots of Treason.
And the plot of this book, this is not the book we're covering this week.
Okay, okay.
But you need to hear about it to get to that book.
The plot of this book is that an unhinged Barack Obama stand-in president many such cases.
Yeah, it's one of those.
It's like one of those right-wing, this is what Obama's right about to do books because he publishes it right before he gets re-elected.
I'm like, I'm like, I think, I think we've seen this film before.
Got it.
Got it.
It's almost the Ben Shapiro story.
His, his, yeah, his not Barack Obama stand-in is Tyrell Johnson and is also a black president.
Ooh, don't like that.
No, it's, it's, it's really not great.
Now, the plot of the book is that an Iranian American student, like because Tyrell Johnson is unpopular, he attacks Iran.
That's actually, that's actually suggested, like, this is what the evil Democrat will do is bomb Iran.
He's not popular.
And so he bombs Iran.
And this Iranian American student who is both angry that his sister died in the attack and also loves the founding fathers of the United States and the Tea Party, carries out an assassination attempt against evil Obama.
And because they find some like Tea Party literature in his house, they use it as an excuse to arrest conservatives en masse.
It's very funny.
Very, very scary.
I love conservative alternate histories that are exactly the opposite of what happened in real life.
My favorite detail about the book, which I got from a Texas monthly review of it, is that the fake president in the book, Tyrell Johnson, was originally just named Barack Obama, and they did a find and replace.
And you can tell this because each chapter starts with an epigraph, and one of them is a real quote from Rick Perry about Barack Obama.
But in the Perry quote in the book, Obama's name is replaced with President Johnson.
Oh, oh, that's funny.
That's just funny.
Call of Obama.
That's pretty good.
It's good stuff.
It's good stuff.
It's a perfect snapshot of the kind of mania among conservatives that existed around Obama in this period.
This fear that, like, one of like a pretty milquetoast liberal president was going to like become a dictator and Massacre everybody to the right of uh, I don't know, fucking uh John McCain.
Yeah, very, very funny.
Now, the reality is that in 2009, a Homeland Security analyst named Daryl Johnson wrote a report titled Right-Wing Extremism about the danger of groups like the Oath Keepers and other militias.
And once the paper went out, got out, it went viral among people like Alex Jones and also more mainstream right-wing commentators who complained they were being persecuted.
Johnson was forced out of his job, and the report was retracted by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
Again, the exact opposite of the right-wing fiction.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, like a perfect opposite.
So, if the plot of this book I've described sounds like the result of Chat GPT gobbling up like 100 hours of Fox News and spitting out a novel, that is what Roberts has laid out as his creative process.
He described how he gets his ideas this way in an interview with Blaze Media.
I watch Fox News, get mad, can't sleep.
Then I turned the TV off and wrote my first book thinking it would just be therapy.
So, we're like in Senate.
We're like in so many layers of like fiction.
It's like fiction based on fiction.
Whoa, yeah, no, the guys in the fucking Plato's cave are writing stories about the shadows on the books.
Oh, the shadows.
Yeah, That's good.
That's good.
The publisher that he uses for this is like a vanity press, like one of those places where you pay at least some of what it costs to get your book published.
And the fact that he had no trouble getting published through this press or starting his own vanity press, um, and the fact that he gets interviewed by like Texas Monthly as well as the Blaze does not seem to have done anything to convince this guy that he is not, in fact, oppressed.
And he said this to Texas Monthly: For a long time, the left was the champion of free speech.
Look at the McCarthy era and the protesters in the 60s and the Vietnam era.
But today, I think it's mostly the conservative voices that are silenced.
Now, the specific act of persecution he claims to have endured is that his vanity publisher, aka Publishing, didn't display his book prominently at a 2012 event.
Um, and again, this is a vanity, this is not a real publisher.
2012, he's early, yeah, yeah, he's really he's he's really uh honestly on the cusp of things, yeah.
And he's going to, because of this horrible, the horrible cruelty of not being as prominently featured as he thinks he should have been at one of their events.
He founds his own publishing company, Defiance Press.
And I think these guys are going to be the host of a lot of our future book episodes, Garrison.
Um, out of their tug, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stay clean.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
I, want, I, I, I, if I, I'm sure, I'm sure if I look into Defiance Press, I'll get too excited.
So, I, I, I, I'll, I'll, I'll keep myself in the dark so it'll be more interesting when I get surprised.
Yeah, yeah, you might, I, I, we'll see how surprised you are.
There's at least one surprising title in here, but it is a vanity press.
You, you have to pay some of the costs.
They call it hybrid publishing, um, which is again, just not a real publisher, you know, like it's it's it's a vanity press, it's a one step above like Amazon, like yeah, yeah, Tingle publishing or whatever.
Yeah, they just madmen the title, right?
Yeah, um, now their top titles, like the book Texit, make the case for like that makes the case for Texas Secession, and it sold about 10,000 copies, which is like not bad for a real book, um, but you know, that's that's kind of the best any of their things do.
Most of their products are non-fiction, uh, but there are books.
Well, Texas Monthly describes it as like books that stretch that definition with titles like Corona Fascism, Trump and the Resurrection of America, uh, and Hunt It, Kill It, and Drag It Home, which is apparently a self-help book.
Um, so that all sounds like a lot of fun.
Are they talking about like dating or like going like hunting for food?
Think they're talking about how hunting for food is like a metaphor for how you should handle everything in life.
Totally.
That seems healthy.
Yeah.
Like, you know, in relationships, just like in hunting, sometimes you have to smother your body in deer urine so that you smell like deer puss.
I have been hearing this, actually.
I have been hearing.
Yeah.
I am, I am, I'm currently soaking a pack of zinns in a whole bunch of deer puss right now.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah.
You'll like this.
They have a young adult book called Looks Like a Cheetah to Me that's apparently an anti-trans fairy tale.
So, of course, I'm sure that one's great.
As soon as you said that, I'm like, okay, I can see what they're like, how could we do attack helicopter, but legally distinct?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that article in Texas Monthly on Defiance Press included so many different book summaries that I felt were perfect possible subjects for Behind the Bastards book episodes.
And I want to read you a quote about one of them that we're not covering this week, but we may in the future, probably later in the year from Texas Monthly.
Chadwick Bicknell's 2022 novella, An American Carol, reimagines Ebenezer Scrooge as Alex Le Dumas, a militant gay lefty who has sworn off attending a Fourth of July party with his relatives because many of them support a Trumpian president after visits from George Washington, the ghost of America's past, Marilyn Monroe, the ghost of Bizarrely America's present, and death, which apparently is what the new future, the near future holds for us if we don't watch out.
Le Dumas realizes the right is more tolerant than the left, recognizes that the Trumpish commander-in-chief has actually made America great again and is spiritually reborn as a docile gay Republican.
That sounds amazing.
I think we're going to have to get into that one.
That sounds on my top 10 list of this year, to be honest.
Steppenwolf's been pretty good.
Steppenwolf's a fine novel.
But Hesse could never.
Alex Le Dumas.
That's stunning.
Now, there are a lot of hideous books these people have put out, but the one we're going to actually do in this episode, or maybe episodes, we'll see how it goes, is a little title named Blue Dawn.
And the author, Blaine Lee Pardot, is best known for, according to his wiki, his battle tech and mech warrior novels.
Now, there may be some easy, cheap jokes I can make about it, but from my reading of his books, he's actually kind of competent technically as a writer.
He's not a Ben Shapiro.
He knows, like, I wouldn't call him a good, I don't think his book is good, but like he, his sentences are structured well and his like chapters are, he understands like the flow that a book is supposed to have.
Okay.
Um, as opposed to like a Ben Shapiro who like does does not understand how you are actually supposed to like structure things happening in a chapter.
Um, you know, because he's, yeah, he's a, he's a workmanlike writer, right?
He's like a guy who's got to put out genre fiction for a living.
He also seems to have had some kind of real career as a military historian.
So I was interested, you know, in Blue Dawn.
Part of me was like, if this is just going to be kind of like slightly right-wing, mediocre fiction, this might not work for us because there won't be much to make fun of.
And I was very wrong because Garrison, this is a right-winger writing a novel about like, what if all of our anarchist dreams came true?
Like he is like envisioning an alternate modern day if like the Antifa from Fox News was real.
And it's fascinating to see what he thinks was just about to happen in 2020 because there's a lot of courage that you have to have to write near future speculative science fiction, right?
Like if it's really close.
And he publishes this in July of 2021.
And it opens with a fictionalized version of a coup in 2020.
But it's a completely different coup than the one that we got.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
Writing something that gets that is like talking about like 2026 is oddly like harder than going to like 2052.
Yes.
You have a lot more like runway.
And he doesn't give himself any runway.
So this comes out months after an actual coup attempted by his people.
And he's writing like the whole book opens with like the Antifa coup that takes the White House and the Capitol building.
God, that'd be so cool.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
I'm going to read.
First, I'm going to read you a summary of the book that I got on the Defiance Press website.
And then we'll get into the actual text itself.
Sounds good.
Almost five years ago, America, as everyone knew it came to an abrupt end in a spectacular coup d'état.
It was called the liberation by those progressives and radicals that screamed for its outcome.
The fall by its victims whose freedoms were trampled.
The White House and Capitol were overrun by anarchists and the leaders of the once proud nation were either imprisoned or sent to social quarantine camps.
The president was arrested and eventually died in prison, or so everyone was led to believe.
America was rebooted in a new progressive socialist image.
New America.
The United States of old was gone.
Its history erased and rewritten.
Its icons destroyed.
By the time people tried to organize resistance, it was too late.
How is New America spelled?
One word or two words?
It's one word, just New America.
And everyone calls it that.
Everyone calls it that without being like, that's the stupidest.
It's been five years.
Like, you're not kidding, everyone.
Like, everyone buys into this entirely new Orwellian language, which like works in 1984 because it's been generations since the government got in place.
They're talking like that, and it's literally been five years.
I don't think New America is going to catch on.
I'm going to be real.
I don't.
I think that Gavin Newsom should use that as his campaign slogan and ruin it for them.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, give him ideas.
He's like, oh, yeah.
He's like, cool.
He's like putting more hair gel on his hair.
He's like, oh, noose?
New America.
That's the one.
They do, but Gavin Newsom allied with the fucking anarchists is exactly like the level of politics that this book is capable of.
Yeah, I am ready to hear like what his version of like the utopian dystopia is.
Absolutely.
Well, Garrison, we'll take that little journey together into New America.
But first, first take a journey into the products and services that support this podcast.
And it's not Gavin Newsom's hairdol.
We don't know that.
We don't know what brand he uses.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Sophie And Gavin Newsom Hair Gel00:03:02
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.
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I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
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 of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished fire.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
Yeah.
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On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
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Portland Violence And Anarchist Cells00:12:01
Ah, wow.
Sophie, I'm back and I am just feeling I put a solid pound and a half of that Gavin Newsom hair gel.
Which, by the way, folks.
It's just horse semen, you know, but it works incredibly.
Sorry, Sophie.
I already committed to making that bit.
It's okay.
It's okay.
I laid it up for you.
You got it.
You got to move past that LA hair jail, Sophie.
Yeah.
They get it all from that cowboy ranch in the middle of the city.
So it starts with a character, Jack Desmond, a secret service assistant.
Yeah, so it's pretty, again, he's like a workman-like genre writer, perfectly fine protagonist name.
He's a secret service man.
He's at the White House as it's under siege.
And this entire White House siege garrison is based on some clips this guy watched of Portland from Andy No's social media feed.
It's very clear.
But it starts with him talking about like how the nation has been collapsing since the 2020 election.
And this is clearly Trump is the president and the election has just happened.
Anarchist cells sowed further division.
Their desire was that the entire political system be violently taken down.
Many politicians looked the other way and even funded their efforts, hoping it would damage their political opponents in the upcoming elections.
Little did they realize at the time that they were empowering people that were willing to take them down as well as their opposition.
Classic Democratic politicians funding the anarchists.
I'm interested to see how much this is going to differ from Alex Garland's understanding of American politics.
Yeah, I am kind of curious about that as well.
Although I think in this one, my understanding in that is that like the bad guy president who bombs America is the Trumpian stand-in.
And in this, Trump is like almost like a helpless child before his mob.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like the climax is still like the West Coast forces are invading the White House.
So like, there you go.
Yeah.
In this, it's, it's...
I think there's soldiers in that at least.
In this, it's just, it's literally just an anarchist that has fireworks.
And yeah, we'll get to it.
So here's another paragraph from that intro.
The presidential election became a quagmire of fraud, both perceived and real.
The lawsuits drew bitterness and only added to the insecurity of daily life.
The drawn-out legal process led to protests, which morphed into rioting across the country.
Brute force was applied to restore law and order, but it only generated more resistance and hate.
Law and order began to dissolve.
Indecision as to who had really won the election tore at the American people.
Months at being suppressed by restrictions tied to the virus made their anger transition into undirected violence.
And I find it interesting because that's like the opposite of where people were by that point.
Like all that happened.
You had an election that was deeply controversial.
I mean, not for good reason, but it was.
But like, there wasn't widespread rioting and people were mostly just exhausted by everything that had happened in 2020 by the time November rolled around and were glad for it to be over.
Very exhausted.
Very tired.
Also, and then Biden dies.
As soon as like in early winter, the self-proclaimed president-elect who were led to believe is Biden has a cerebral aneurysm and dies.
And then the vice.
Not a bad prediction.
Not a bad prediction.
And then Kamala Harris gets assassinated by a right-wing extremist.
And so that's so boring.
That's how we get a constitutional crisis.
And China and Russia leap into the breach to take advantage of all this chaos.
And they send money to the anarchists, which is what makes the revolution possible.
I don't know how they get it.
Are they Venmoing it to different food not bombs groups and like bail funds?
How are they sending all of these weapons over?
What does this actually look like?
That's really funny.
That's really funny.
A choice.
Russia is funneling some money to people, quote unquote, on the left, but it's certainly not anarchists.
No, and it's certainly not like they're like they get mortars.
They're attacking the White House with actual with actual mortars at some point.
But parts of this do read like Portland fan fiction.
And I'm going to go back to the book now.
Secret Service Assistant Chief Jack Desmond sat in the hot seat of the service's emergency response center, two stories under the White House and glared at the screens.
The protesters had been getting bolder in the last few weeks, a few clamoring over the fence in Lafayette Park and then attempting to scale the perimeter fence around the White House.
Each night the numbers grew.
Each night new tactics were employed.
The majority of the perpetrators had been apprehended, but there was method behind their madness.
The increased use of fireworks was part of a strategy.
Desmond saw a pattern, which was a part of his job to go beyond the raw data.
They're testing our response, watching how we react.
It spoke to him of a level of sophistication that the FBI and the DOJ were not assigning to the leaders of the protests.
When the two groups hit the perimeter fence at different times, he finally convinced his superiors they were planning something bigger, something far worse.
They're coordinated, organized, and upping their game.
It's funny because it is definitely just Portland Pantheic, but also wildly underestimating the FBI and the DHS's presumption of complexity.
Yeah.
Because they have some very interesting theories on how these types of protests operate.
Well, yeah, the reality is that they were like obsessed with attempting to find a leadership cadre behind the 2020 George Ford protest that like never existed.
Yeah.
Which is like, yeah.
And on the same token, like when there was actually a siege at the Capitol building, they weren't ready at all because they had not in any way prepared for the one that actually came their way.
This guy is kind of Fox News brainworms.
You can tell he just kind of mainlined a raw diet of Andy No during the 2020 election.
Here's his description of the White House surveillance system.
There were cameras everywhere around the White House on micro drones, some planted on the fence, some camouflaged as nothing more than bolts, satellite surveillance, not to mention the agents that mingled with the protesters, decked out in all caps, Antifa black.
Every single time Heath uses the word Antifa, it's in all caps.
As if Antifa Banta black from that one guy, that would be so cool.
Just good shadow people.
And he talks about how like some of them have took out cameras with paintball guns, which is a real thing that people do.
Others have strobes to overload the night vision gear and others used signs, large banners, and makeshift shields to conceal their nefarious activities.
Yeah, this is just Portland.
Yeah.
What are you concealing with a shield, guys?
They're concealing that they're trying not to get shot with rubber bullets.
One of the things I find fascinating and kind of enlightening about this is that every time he talks about the crowd, he talks about it as if it's like a hive intelligence.
Like not like it's a group of actual people, but like it's some sort of like alien species where like the entire organization of people has a collective mind.
So yeah, here's like wrong sometimes.
It isn't wrong about how fear works.
He is crediting them with like, again, you and I have been to these kind of things and seen how hard it is to get a group of thousands of people to take down one line of fence, right?
Absolutely.
In very brief moments, you'll see a group of like 50 people move as like a fluid cluster and do something really cool.
And then it breaks out and get into like entropy.
But if they do, they're wearing charcoal black, not anti-like.
Yeah, we probably didn't have the right color of black in Portland.
Yeah.
Honestly, that may be it.
Just like a charcoal or like a faded or, you know, black would be nice, actually.
I agree.
It's great.
It's a great color.
It's a great color.
So here's another great line.
The rules of engagement for a massed assault were known, and he knew people would hesitate.
Thoughts of mowing down American protesters on the front lawn of the White House was the kind of thing that got you hauled up to Capitol Hill.
He had reviewed the rules carefully with the teams at the start of his shift.
As he watched the screens, he saw that the crowd was monitoring his people on the rooftops and their assorted perches.
The problem was that the crowd was willing to risk it.
Fueled by hate and organized by all caps, Antifa and other radical groups, they had gotten more sophisticated.
It's the Antifa all caps for me, baby.
Yeah.
And then we get our actual Portland reference, Garrison.
The arrest of several cells in Portland and New York had resulted in bombings and two assassination attempts on department heads, leaving one director in the hospital.
This was beyond protests.
This was now war, though the press played the entire thing down as minor incidents of violence and otherwise peaceful protests.
Sure.
Yeah.
Again, it's this like they did arrest a lot of people that they claimed were like leaders in Portland and elsewhere.
And you know what didn't happen is any directors of federal agencies got murdered.
No, unless I missed that in the news cycle.
Yeah, I feel like they would have hit on that pretty hard.
Yeah.
I did want to, anytime one of these guys gives me something to drill in on, particularly in this, the press playing down incidents of violence at peaceful protests and stuff.
I want to like dig into that as much as I can.
And there's a couple of good articles on that by some scholars who have actually analyzed the way in which the media tends to cover social justice protests and what things they tend to highlight in their coverage.
One of the first papers I found was by Danielle Brown and Summer Harlow in the Journal of Press and Politics titled Protests, Media Coverage, and a Hierarchy of Social Struggle.
This is what they write.
Scholars across disciplines have scrutinized press coverage of collective action, exploring the institutional, organizational, and individual influences that shift the quality and quantity of coverage.
Many different structural, organizational, and institutional features of media production and social disruption affect media coverage of social movements.
However, most scholars have shown that the institutional logics of the mainstream media do not favor social movements, and only the most appealing or newsworthy features of a movement are likely to result in news coverage.
And when we talk about like what are the most newsworthy features of a movement, that's like incidents of violence or anything that can be characterized.
A police card is on fire.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the like if that happens, that's the only thing that's winding up in a lot of coverage on a protest.
If a dumpster's on fire on day one, it might get something.
If dumpster's on fire on day 25, no one cares.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's become the norm.
And Harlow also wrote an article for the Washington Post in 2021 where she summarized the data she's collected during years of research into how the media covers protests.
Quote: My own research analyzed about 1,500 protest-related news stories published throughout 2014 in mainstream alternative partisan and online news publications.
Articles about conservative protests, like protests opposed to immigration or LGBT rights, or protests supporting Trump and gun rights, are less likely to be negatively framed as riots than other types of protests.
In contrast, Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to be framed as riots, as news coverage focuses more on violence, property damage, and confrontations with police.
For example, a 2017 San Antonio Express News article about an anti-white supremacy protest, which was included in another study I did, started with a reference to brawls that broke out and the arrest of protesters who swarmed the sidewalk, hurling insults and chanting.
The aim of the protest was placed in quotation marks, white supremacy, which arguably delegitimizes protesters' grievances.
Trump Orders Soldiers To Shoot Legs00:07:27
And yeah, pretty normal stuff.
She surveyed 100 journalists from Missouri, Virginia, Arizona, and Texas in 2018 and 2019 and combined those surveys with an analysis of 932 protest-related stories from newspapers in those states and found that most journalists said that they were neither supportive nor unsupportive of protesters generally and were less supportive of racial justice movements than they were of women's rights or immigrants' rights, which I found interesting.
That is interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, again, it's the opposite of what this guy reports because reality is the opposite of what actually happened.
But let's return to the fantasy of China-funded Antifa taking away the money.
It is more fun.
It's a lot more fun.
So this next line here gives us both collapsible ladders as a sinister weapon and gives us our first anti-mask line.
Sir, the captain seated in front of him spoke up, pointing to the far left monitor.
Look, I think those are collapsible ladders.
Jack saw them too.
In the crowd, they were hard to make out, even with night vision.
They'd used them before to toss up makeshift barricades, but tonight, tonight felt different.
Leaning in, he toggled the microphone on and tore off the black mask he'd been forced to wear since the pandemic began.
He couldn't afford to have his voice muffled.
Not now.
This is rabbit to all stations.
Southeast Corner.
Ladder spotted.
Prepare for breaching attempts.
I like that the collapsible ladder is hard to spot, too.
What kind of ladders are they carrying that you can't very easily see?
An extendable ladder is like three times the height of a man.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love this, how sinister the ladders are.
Yeah, it's it's all beautiful.
That little anti-mask line.
He is really proud of that one.
Oh, it's so good.
So the protesters working with military precision penetrate like right after this.
He gets a call that while they're sieging the White House, rioters have already penetrated the Capitol and taken the Speaker of the House hostage.
So he has to order a condition red because protesters are headed for them next.
The crowd surges forward and the cops start shooting.
He could not hear the gunfire in the ERC, but he heard it over the speakers.
Rubber bullets at first sprayed a swath of the rioters, but they did not recoil like they had before, though a dozen or more dropped from the kinetic impacts.
Most got right back up and continued the climb.
Body armor.
Fucking Amazon and eBay.
They would run out of rubber bullets soon.
Then things would get ugly and bloody.
Fucking Amazon and eBay.
You can get body armor on eBay.
I wouldn't recommend it, but they don't sell it on Amazon.
Anyway, whatever.
Maybe they mean like motor cross gear.
I don't know.
Like airsoft.
I mean, airsoft armor is fine for rubber bullets.
Yeah.
I don't think they mean like ballistic armor.
I think they mean just like padding.
Yeah.
That does make if these guys are all dressed as airsofters, though, it does make them seem a little bit less threatening.
Now it's unclear to me because he makes a big deal about how they're using fireworks at the start.
He starts, there's a line here where like they start, he yells mortars because things start exploding.
This is an Andy No thing.
Andy No calls all fireworks mortars.
When they say mortars, they don't mean like actual military mortars.
They mean 4th of July fireworks.
In this garrison, it's both because he starts by talking about fireworks and meaning mortars, and then he says mortars, and it becomes clear over the course of the fight that they are actually shooting real mortars at the White House.
Presumably the Chinese gave it to them.
But these are, these are now that we are both getting like fear-mongered of like they're using fireworks to test the defenses, and now they have real mortars.
Okay.
All right.
So that's where this goes.
We now cut to a new character, Charlie, spelled just with an I, Kaczynski, who is a lady Secret Service person who works on the president's detail.
And she busts in the Oval Office.
This is, we presume, President Trump.
And she's like, you know, we got a real problem here.
The Antifas are about to take the White House.
Part of why this is very funny to me is that the first thing President Trump says is like, I can't leave.
What about my family, my wife and son?
And real President Trump absolutely would not be concerned with that in this situation.
Absolutely.
He would leave them to die.
Several shots at the bulletproof glass of the Oval Office.
Snap cracking on the armored glass.
The president rose as another explosion went off outside, throwing tiny bits of grass and dirt on the window.
He moved to her side as two additional agents rushed in, flanking him.
My family, my wife and son.
So she promises to get his kids.
And yeah, there's a Charlie takes him down an elevator.
We're informed that the elevators in the White House can be electrified after use, so they'll kill anyone trying to access them.
And there's also a gas system to pump knockout drugs into the shaft if it were breached.
I looked into this.
I couldn't find any evidence one way or the other.
Maybe, maybe that's true.
I hope so.
So he calls, our boy Jack calls the Secretary of Defense and tells him to scramble the troops.
And the troops are under attack too.
The military base, Joint Base Bowling, was just hit by two car bombs and is being shelled.
And so is Andrews Air Force Base.
So the Antifas have carried out on the same night overwhelming attacks against two military bases, the Capitol and the White House.
And again, in the most impressive actions you and I saw, they were able to tear down a fence after like five hours.
After like two weeks of practice.
This is an unprecedented level of coordination.
Yeah, this, this is, I'm really wondering what the signal loops are like for these Antifa.
Those signal chats got to be going crazy.
Hey, guys, we're bombing Joint Air Force Base Sandruz.
We're in the Pentagon.
We are in the Pentagon.
We've got the speaker.
Oh, yeah.
It's really funny.
So there's a moment here where the Secret Service head, or sorry, where the president tells the Secretary of Defense to send the army in to crack down on the protests.
And the Secretary of Defense won't do it.
He's not willing to send American troops in to like fight Americans on American soil.
And this is again, like a thing that happened, right?
Now, in real life, what happened is President Trump asked General Milley, his Secretary of Defense, can you just shoot them in the legs?
Yeah.
And Millie was like, no, I can't have the army just go shoot protesters in the legs.
Anyway, I find that very funny.
But, you know, Garrison, what's not funny and what won't shoot you in the legs?
Our lovely advertisers.
They might shoot you in the legs.
If it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again, they'll definitely shoot you in the legs.
Wow.
Yeah.
All right.
So we'll come back.
But first, here's some ads.
Social Enforcement Teams Tactics00:14:45
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He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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And he's like, just give it a shot.
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All right, Garrison.
So that's our cold open, right?
The White House is sieged and taken.
The president is, it's kind of unclear what happens to him.
Like, we know from the summary that he's supposed to have died in this.
Yeah, because he was like taking captured or died in prison.
Allegedly.
We don't see him die in this, right?
As a spoiler, he's not actually dead, Garrison.
Donald Trump is alive and living in secret five years.
You're sure he's going to lead some like resistance force, hopefully.
Yeah.
Oh, Garrison, you've predicted exactly where this book is going.
I mean, yeah, of course.
Of course.
So chapter one.
It opens with a character named Andy Forrest.
And Andy is in a cancer ward at a hospital watching his dad die.
It's National Hospital 114 because all of the hospitals were in a sinister manner nationalized.
They're communist hospitals now.
They're communist hospitals now.
Yeah.
And his father is classified as non-essential, non-contributing.
So there's debate about whether or not his recovery is even worth it.
And he's angry that he had to fight to get the treatment he got and it's still not working.
And just like, yeah, just like in Canada.
I don't know.
Like his experience sounds a lot like the hospital experience I just had with my dad that exists in our current system.
But yeah, he's unhappy about it.
And part of why he's unhappy is that his sister's here and his sister is a sinister member of the new Antifa law enforcement agency, the social enforcement agency.
Oh, Gary.
Garrison.
They have Antifa cops.
Garrison, they sure do.
And they are literally, they're literally Antifa mobs that follow people around and harass them if they're bad.
That's funny.
That's funny.
So I'm going to read you me.
So this is it.
This is the description of his sister.
Oh, first, actually, there's a line I need to read here about the hospitals.
Andy wished he could afford private health care, but at the same time, was glad he couldn't.
If I made that kind of money, it just would have put a target on my back.
In New America, making money was a curse.
Is it?
Because that doesn't actually make sense.
Can you buy better health care with your money or not?
Is it a curse?
Or is it a curse?
I forgot about New America for a second.
He will not let you forget.
Garrison, you're about to get so many different fucking acronyms and shit shoved in your face.
Oh, I'm so, I'm so thrilled for acronyms.
I love me some fake three-letter agencies.
Are y'all ready for this?
Banana?
Anyway, okay.
Here's a description of his sister.
The woman wore her black shirt with red piping on her collar, showing her rank in social enforcement.
Where the National Security Force, NSF, was a potent arm of the FedGov.
Social enforcement was a less controlled and thus more dangerous.
Born out of the all caps Antifa and BLM mobs during the liberation, they acted as informal police dispensing social justice as they saw fit.
Oh, wow.
That's really something special.
Isn't that beautiful?
That's amazing.
That's really, that's really nice.
I like the caller piping.
Classy.
Classy.
Nice.
It's good to know that we still have style when the Antifa mobs are made part of the government.
NSF has like a good, a good ring to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's like.
Dispensing social justice is just deeply, deeply funny.
It's extremely funny.
Her name is Karen.
And the first thing he notices about her is that she's put on weight since the last time he saw her.
Cool.
Because, of course.
Cool insult, my guy.
Yeah.
So they have a fight.
He says it's because she and her social justice goons got their dad fired from his job.
Quote, because of the SEs, he lost his house, our mom, almost everything he had, and his reputation because of the investigation.
The policers like cancel culture.
The police are, that's literally what they are.
They took his mom from him.
Oh, fuck.
It's so funny.
So she's like, no, he was a bad, our dad did a bad thing.
He supported a domestic terrorist group and he didn't change his class curriculum to the standard.
The man was a professor at Sojourner Truth U and refused to adhere to the rules.
So Andy gets angry first because Sojourner Truth University is supposed to be Mary Washington University, but all of the schools with Washington in the name got purged during the Great Reformation.
Nice, nice.
And again, it's like, actually, yeah, I think Sojourner Truth deserves a university more than Mary Washington.
I agreed.
Yeah.
But whatever.
I don't know that anybody cares that much.
Here's him describing what happened to his dad.
His father had been a respected historian, but the NSF had ruined him.
Surely Sojourner Truth would have been opposed to that.
They had sent social enforcement teams to follow him everywhere, harassing him to the point where he couldn't get to his classroom.
They broke windows at the house, set fire to his car, and relentlessly followed him, screaming and shoving to the point where businesses wouldn't allow him in.
Everything he typed was monitored, screened, and often edited.
Big tech monitored every keystroke he made, or so he claimed.
This is the retribute of justice blueprint.
This is what we need to get.
Big tech and Antifa mobs hand in hand.
Yep, big tech working perfectly with random mobs of people breaking windows.
Sending in keystroke love bars to gangs.
Mark Zuckerberg just can't wait to partner with an Antifa mob.
He would love this.
He would love this, definitely.
This has been his dream since the beginning.
Andy's sister was part of the social enforcers, or SE, a part of what the FedGov called the Great Reformation.
Again, he's already introduced all these concepts before, and now we're getting the info dump on them, which is just a little sloppy.
That's what we call it.
Literally would have called this.
No, that's what we call solid writing.
That's called a world building, Robert.
The overview of the government was called the liberation by almost everyone out loud.
In whispers, however, it was called the fall.
Karen had consumed the Kool-Aid of the riot.
Yes.
So yeah, he'd gotten fired by the school who didn't even care that he'd done nothing wrong.
And then came the NSF interrogators, separate from the SE.
They were just as bad, if not worse, because they had a fragment of legitimacy the social enforcers lacked.
The NSF claimed he knew radicals and that he had incriminating materials in his possession, materials that were never produced, only alleged.
They allowed him to be hauled before two people's tribunals, the kangaroo courts of the SEs, with no evidence.
And he lost two years of his life, exiled to a social quarantine camp, denied his freedoms.
He had come back from social quarantine, a hollow shell of a human being.
In the end, Karen had done nothing for her father other than attempt to persuade him to provide the names of his associates.
She'd been in social enforcement and could have vouched for him, perhaps called off their dogs.
Instead, she let their father die emotionally.
Now the cancer was doing the rest.
And Andy reveals that the terrorist group he was charged with being a member of was the Republican Party.
Oh my God, that's funny.
And Karen's like, no, he actually had ties to another group called the Sons of Liberty.
And Andy.
Oh, he's an actual, an actual terrorist group.
And Andy's like, well, when did it become illegal to support a cause?
Well, Andy, you've just been inconsistent there.
Was your dad just a member of the Republican Party or was he a member of this terrorist group?
But it's fine.
Anyway, Karen and Andy continue to argue.
He calls them a bunch of thugs who go out to administer, you know, self-described justice to innocent people.
And Karen says, we don't go after innocent people.
Innocent people have nothing to fear.
Yada, yada, yada.
It's, mostly the rest of their argument is there's some good world building when we get to the end of this chapter here.
This is just like a boomer writing his own scary enemy and then getting scared himself.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where Karen saw him as flawed.
Andy saw him as a man who honored his friends.
The mention of their mother hit hard.
When their father had lost his job and was tormented non-stop by the social enforcers, she had left him.
His mother lived under a crowd of a cloud of fear that she would be attacked while stepping out to get groceries.
That was part and parcel with the tactics of the social enforcement teams.
Harassment was a weapon in their hands.
She moved in with a friend but was unable to get work.
Her name was on a list because of their father.
She took her life six months later, never even speaking to Andy's father.
He had not been released for her funeral.
Karen laid the blame at their father's feet.
So that's their totally realistic situation here.
Yeah, I found it powerful.
Very, very scary.
Yeah, very scary.
So that's our opening.
And then we get to the district.
So we're introduced to a new character, Kaylee Leitrim, who I think from reading this was former CIA and is now a part of the FedGov actual law enforcement agency.
So not the anarchist mobs, but like basically the FBI and the CIA and all of the other law enforcement groups got amalgamated into a different organization that didn't have the name police in it because that's scary now.
It's really just the word that we have a problem with.
Nothing that they do systemically.
To be fair, there's definitely like a third of, I don't know, people on the left that I've met that just want to make the police their own police.
No, that is, that is true.
But, you know, another third who just wants the scenario as written here.
And the other third who think of something a little bit better than both of those.
Yeah.
But and the reality is that all three of those groups together are about 200 people.
Like not quite enough to overthrow the White House Capitol and two military bases.
200, though.
Every one of them on Twitter.
So there's some great descriptions here when the boss of the National Support Force, which is this law enforcement agency, comes in.
And you really, you get a lot about the author from how he describes her because I think this is supposed to be AOC.
The secretary of the National Support Force came into the room, a perky woman, probably the same age as Kaylee in her mid to late 30s.
The secretary had a quasi-Hispanic look to her.
Jesus.
No.
No.
What is quasi-Hispanic?
See, how do you write that?
The editor would have caught that.
The editor would have caught that.
What is what is quasi-Hispanic?
Anyway, he's very, again, it's like whenever Ben Shapiro talks about AOC, you can just like, you can feel the thirsty.
Yeah.
The secretary had a Hispanic look to her.
Dark skin, pristine, long, straight hair, and almost perfect makeup.
She wore the single gold pip on the collar of her jacket that signaled her rank.
Other than that, she wore a small black flag pin adorned with the white outlined fist and arrow lightning bolts stabbing downward.
The old flag had long been banned, deemed far too racist and prejudiced to ever be shown in public.
Nice, nice, bass, base, base.
Wow.
I like that.
Also, they have like Star Trek uniforms with like peaks on them now.
They get little bits.
Ben Shapiro Versus AOC Dynamics00:14:11
Yeah.
No, that's good moves.
It seems like the new government's making some solid choices.
I like that they like add in details that they're like, by the way, she's hot.
Hair luscious.
Makeup almost perfect.
Almost perfect.
She fucked up one bit of it.
They're like, one eyelash out of place.
XOXO.
Yeah.
Weird.
So, you know, she gets into some sort of bullshit argument with the secretary lady who is like, have you been briefed as to why you were brought here?
And Kaylee, we can tell is like the bad girl who doesn't, who doesn't play by the rules, but gets results.
So the secretary asks, have you been briefed as to why you were brought here?
And Kaylee responds, no, I presume it's because somebody fucked something up and you need me to unfuck it.
Watch your language, Kaylee, her direct supervisor, Burke Dorn, said from his seat next to her.
Dorn was the oldest man in the room and had been FBI back in the day.
When they formed the National Support Force, the FBI, DHS, state, and local law enforcement had all been combined.
The word police had been dropped because it had been deemed offensive and potentially racist.
And I do love that all of these old FBI guys and shit are still cops.
They stand to call themselves something different.
No, it shows it is a weird, like fundamental misunderstanding of like everything.
Yeah.
It's it's very funny that like, yeah, it is basically the same guys.
It's just AOC is in charge of the CIA now.
Finally, the leftist revolution has accomplished its goal.
So they're, they're all concerned because the sons of liberty are back.
There's some, they had thought that they killed all these guys.
Kaylee was like, I buried the bodies myself.
We took them out.
But there have.
AOC buried the bodies.
No, no, no.
Kaylee, who's our, I think our self-insert girl character.
Yeah, the co-author.
So we thought.
But there have been some recent acts, bombings, cyber swipes, and an assassination or two.
We had our friends in Silicon Valley crunch it, and they say there's a pattern.
You think the Sons of Liberty are the SOL are back?
Her use of the acronym is important.
The use of a full name gave terrorist groups identity, using an acronym to humanize them.
They weren't people.
They were just a thing and needed to be dealt with.
It was the language of the FedGov, which made it the language of New America.
What a line?
Wow.
There's a lot.
There's a lot to unpack.
I don't know if we have to unpack that.
The level of dehumanization of three-letter acronym terrorist groups.
I'm like, whoa.
What about the FBI?
The FBI is an acronym.
Yeah.
So it becomes clear that what's happened is they wouldn't, you know, when these attacks started, they started like following up on any leads who were kind of close to some of the Sons of Liberty people that they took out.
And they saw on like a security camera footage next to a car that used to belong to someone who was in the Sons of Liberty, they got a clear picture of Donald Trump.
They think there's a 53% chance in their facial recognition that it's really him.
And Kaylee's like, I don't know.
That's not very high.
And they're like, no, take a look.
And she's like, I'm confused.
He was arrested and put in prison.
I saw the pre-trial motions.
He died of a heart attack in his cell.
Everyone saw the body.
It was all over the net.
Dorne diverted his eyes to the conference room table, and the secretary drew a long breath before continuing.
What you saw was what the country needed.
Closure.
Our friends in Hollywood helped us craft something that would help everyone heal.
He survived.
We were unsure.
We haven't seen any trace of him or his details since the liberation.
We believe there was an almost zero chance of him being alive.
The city was on fire and citizens were roving the streets.
The traitor president wasn't a quiet man.
If he had been alive, he would have popped up.
We did some good CGI with our Hollywood associates and gave the people what they wanted: justice.
And there's an Epstein reference.
Jesus.
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We couldn't have him Epstein himself.
He was dead, which was all we wanted.
But now it's clear he's not dead.
And you can see, I think Kaylee is going to turn out to be a good character because she's disturbed that they lied about the president being dead.
I love the idea of Donald Trump living in hiding in the underground.
He would hate hanging out with these guys.
Oh, my God.
Because they are not the same class level.
He does not fuck with these people, actually.
And he's not going to want to hang out with the sons of liberty.
He's able to spend five or six years completely silent in the underground when the real Trump gets cut off of Twitter and creates a new app so that he can tweet on the toilets.
Like the discrepancy between the real man and this like cold-blooded operator president is extremely funny to me.
Sure.
Anyway, Kaylee's concerned because she's used to being able to see through the propaganda and she hadn't caught that they lied about this.
But now she's like, you want me to assassinate the president of the United States?
He is not the president, not anymore.
The secretary had rage in her voice.
It was understandable.
She and the president had been sworn enemies years before the liberation.
On top of that, they've already declared him dead.
The United States is what we've made it, not what he was in charge of.
That country is no more.
He's a war criminal.
The man is a monster, an abomination.
What I want is for you to do your job.
The world thinks him dead, so we need to maintain that.
Can you do it?
And yeah, she's like, yeah, I need all the money you can give me and I need a team.
And she's told that she's going to be, she's going to have to fight against the SE groups out there, right?
So the remnants of the real cops have a conflict with the social enforcement cops because they don't actually follow any rules.
They're just mobs of people who break windows and light your car on fire, which is the best world building in this book so far.
But apparently AOC is in the process of trying to destroy the social enforcement organization.
It's great because it's like, what if the world was full of like there's maybe like 20 anarchists who are actually like this, but what if everybody was those 20 people?
Yeah.
And what if there were enough of them to overthrow the government?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And they just like keep going afterwards, too.
They just can't stop breaking windows.
Yeah.
And we get a little inside AOC's mind here.
Six years ago, I was an outspoken junior congresswoman, a radical in my own party.
Now I control the most powerful agency in the FedGov.
So yeah, she's, she has, she, she pushed through the Restore Civil Liberties Act, which rolled all of the different police agencies together.
So that's, that's fun.
And yeah, there's like a line about how they had to fire a few thousand cops to make this new cop agency that's all the cop agencies.
And that's a small price to pay for to restore public confidence.
Now, the New American people can feel a sense of confidence in their law enforcement.
Even in her own head, it's Numerica.
So there's like the real cops and like the cancel culture cops both working independently at the same time.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, Garrison.
That's my understanding.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sure.
Now, that ends chapter two or chapter one.
And now at chapter two, we start in Alvaredo, Texas.
That was all one chapter.
That was one chapter, Garrison.
A lot of grounds.
He made moves, you know.
We're almost done with this episode, but I want to introduce you to Raul Lopez, who is, he's 18 years old and he's trying to decide: should he join the youth corps?
No.
Most of his fellow high school graduates stood in line for reparation points and stimulus relief rather than to land jobs.
The TV news said Numerica was prospering, but he never saw it.
Many businesses had been damaged by the riots and closed up forever, and others had simply left, their buildings gutted for copper wire and plumbing.
So what's changed?
We still have TV news.
We still have businesses.
Yeah.
What's different is that the entire economy seems to be based around reparations.
Oh, reparations and stimulus.
Yeah.
So we have like universal basic income and reparations and nationalized health care.
It's kind of unclear.
We did it, Joe.
And the cancel culture cops.
Yeah.
The cancel culture mob cops.
So he Raul goes into the recruiter's office for the youth corps and she's like hot.
That's the first thing he notices is she's hot.
She's got a small triangle insignia on her right collar, which he says is probably a rank.
I think it might actually be like the queer triangle, like for concentration camp inmates, because she's about to talk to him about the different minority groups he's a part of and how many points he'll get from them on his reparations.
It's bad.
It's bad, Garrison.
So weird.
Also, this is a personal pet peeve, but he describes that the electronic device she's using as a digipad and like, just call it an iPad, man.
You wrote this in 2021.
It's set in 2025.
They didn't invent a new set of tablets.
It's just give her an iPad.
This is so fine.
Just say tablet.
Like this is a tablet.
Right.
Digipad is so good.
Digipad?
Come on.
Come on, man.
Like, we have tablets.
So Raul was the first person in his family to graduate high school, and she, his mom, wanted him to go to college.
Raul had tried to explain to his mother that his grades had been low, that jumping straight into college was not really an option.
The problem was that when college had been made free, everyone wanted to go.
The colleges couldn't handle the massive influx.
Students got in based on race, sexual preference, poverty level, even with that ring.
Jesus Christ.
What are we doing?
What are we doing here?
How many dicks have you sucked?
Is on the application paper?
Jesus.
Oh, my God.
It's so funny.
Sorry, not enough dicks for the graduate program.
Not enough dicks.
So your grades matter.
Literally, that's what he's like.
It's like, because of all the different things that count, your grades actually matter and my grades aren't high enough to get in.
And that's like why the system's broken.
That's so funny.
Like, it sounds like the system's still merit-based then.
Yeah, it's very funny.
So this lady is like, no, you could go to college.
If you do two years in the youth corps, you get into any school that you want, right?
And there's even classes in the evenings to help you prepare for school.
And those grades can boost your high school grades retroactively so you can get into better colleges.
It actually sounds like the youth corps is a great deal, Garrison.
That sounds like a pretty good deal.
You get paid.
You get free room and board, on-the-job training, free admission to any college you want.
That's not a bad deal.
Yeah.
Sounds great.
So he asks, does it pay?
And she tells him, we pay off the freedom scale.
It isn't a lot, but we're providing you room board and training.
You'd be ranked by reparation points.
You are Hispanic, so that would give you some points, but being male will hold you back for points based on sex.
By any chance, are you gay, transgender, or part of an oppressed religion?
See, I'm fine with them giving cis men less points, to be honest.
I'm like, that's exactly what she says.
She tells Raul, you'll still make more than a privileged white man.
There you go.
There you go.
You're still on the team, buddy.
And Raul asks, even if we did the same work, of course, the recruiter said with a smile.
Of course.
The scale ranks people by their oppressed status.
The more oppressed you are, the more you're compensated.
It's based on the reparations scale used for monthly checks.
It's all designed to make things fair.
See, there's just, this is so Fox News break.
Like, this is so high number of people who genuinely believe like this is what the Democrats want to do and have already done for colleges.
Like, people think this is already what is happening.
Like, this, this is DEI.
This is like it's, it's really funny.
And it's like, he's, he's like, I don't, what prevents somebody from just lying about being gay to get more money, but he, he also doesn't do that, which is kind of like suddenly working against the author's point.
Anyway, I think this is a good place to end for now.
We've seen our vision of the terrifying Antifa Utopia, Garrison.
I think it's interesting to see this actually laid out by somebody who's like a baseline level of competent at writing.
So you can really actually see what they think is going to happen or what they think the Democrats want.
Fascinating stuff.
I do wonder what my oppression level would be.
Like, how much do I make?
I would love to try to quantify this, honestly, but maybe that's for another time.
Yeah, maybe that's for another time.
Well, Garrison, you know what's not for another time?
The end of this episode.
Your plug.
And you're right now.
Oh, yeah.
What do you got to plug, Garrison?
I don't know.
There's probably something could happen here in an episode on some terrible thing that's happened that I put out recently.
So go check out a good year.
Sometimes we talk about good things too.
So you never know.
It's always a gamble.
And then you can find me on X, the place to go to see what's happening at Hungry Bowtie.
Yeah, that's where Garrison will be whipping up his social enforcement mob.
I'll try.
I'll try.
Yeah.
Garrett, it was really uncomfortable hearing you call it X.
I was like, what are you?
I was like, what are you talking about?
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
We did it.
It's fucking over.
Bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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Financial Literacy Month Conversations00:01:50
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