This time, Daniel and Jack talk about Uvalde, Buffalo, the cops, guns, and the discourse. This episode is respectfully dedicated to the victims of these crimes and their families. Content Extremely Warnings Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Shannon Foley Martinez Patreon: Shannon Foley Martinez is creating a different tomorrow | Patreon Last Week Tonight: LastWeekTonight - YouTube Michael Hobbes on Depp vs. Heard: Cancel Me, Daddy: Deep Depp-ception (ft. Michael Hobbes) on Apple Podcasts The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial (readthepresentage.com) Buffalo News, Authorities investigating if retired federal agent knew of Buffalo mass shooting plans in advance “These were like-minded people who used this chat group to talk about their shared interests in racial hatred, replacement theory and hatred of anyone who is Jewish, a person of color or not of European ancestry,” said one of the two law enforcement officials with close knowledge of the investigation. “What is especially upsetting is that these six people received advanced notice of the Buffalo shooting, about 30 minutes before it happened. “The FBI has verified that none of these people called law enforcement to warn them about the shooting. The FBI database shows no advance tips from anyone that this shooting was about to happen.” Agents from the FBI are in the process of tracking down and interviewing the six people, including the retired agent, and attempting to determine if any of them should be charged as accomplices, the two sources with close knowledge of the probe told The Buffalo News. 4plebs archive on Buffalo shooter and "Sandman" https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/379701704 5-4 podcast on Castle Rock v. Gonzalez. 01:47 Peter: Today's case is Castle Rock v. Gonzales, a case that features two of my least favorite things in the world, procedural technicalities and the brutal murder of innocent children. [laughter] 02:01 Michael: In no particular order are those two things, yeah. 02:06 Peter: This case is, I think maybe the most tragic and poignant in a long line of cases in the Supreme Court and in other courts that have allowed police officers and police departments to escape any legal responsibility, even in cases where their actions are grossly negligent and lead directly to the loss of human life. 02:25 Michael: Right. 02:25 Peter: The issue here, simplifying a little bit, is whether the police are liable under the 14th Amendment's, Due Process Clause, when they don't even attempt to enforce a restraining order involving a rather insane husband, shall we say? 02:40 Michael: Right. 02:42 Peter: We'll get into the semantics, but the real question is this, I think, "Do the police owe the public, anything at all?" [chuckle] And the Court thinks probably not. Ben Collins tweet about toothaches and Peyton Gendron. Buffalo News, Authorities investigating if retired federal agent knew of Buffalo mass shooting plans in advance “These were like-minded people who used this chat group to talk about their shared interests in racial hatred, replacement theory and hatred of anyone who is Jewish, a person of color or not of European ancestry,” said one of the two law enforcement officials with close knowledge of the investigation. “What is especially upsetting is that these six people received advanced notice of the Buffalo shooting, about 30 minutes before it happened. “The FBI has verified that none of these people called law enforcement to warn them about the shooting. The FBI database shows no advance tips from anyone that this shooting was about to happen.” Agents from the FBI are in the process of tracking down and interviewing the six people, including the retired agent, and attempting to determine if any of them should be charged as accomplices, the two sources with close knowledge of the probe told The Buffalo News. 4plebs archive on Buffalo shooter and "Sandman" https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/379701704 5-4 podcast on Castle Rock v. Gonzalez. 01:47 Peter: Today's case is Castle Rock v. Gonzales, a case that features two of my least favorite things in the world, procedural technicalities and the brutal murder of innocent children. [laughter] 02:01 Michael: In no particular order are those two things, yeah. 02:06 Peter: This case is, I think maybe the most tragic and poignant in a long line of cases in the Supreme Court and in other courts that have allowed police officers and police departments to escape any legal responsibility, even in cases where their actions are grossly negligent and lead directly to the loss of human life. 02:25 Michael: Right. 02:25 Peter: The issue here, simplifying a little bit, is whether the police are liable under the 14th Amendment's, Due Process Clause, when they don't even attempt to enforce a restraining order involving a rather insane husband, shall we say? 02:40 Michael: Right. 02:42 Peter: We'll get into the semantics, but the real question is this, I think, "Do the police owe the public, anything at all?" [chuckle] And the Court thinks probably not. Ben Collins tweet about toothaches and Peyton Gendron.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And welcome to I Don't Speak German, which is one of the six or so golden tickets in the global Wonka Bar glut that is podcasting, issued by the Gene Wilder version, I should stress.
And Daniel, you're here too, aren't you?
I am.
I am reluctantly here, as always.
Yeah, yeah, I don't think that goes for both of us this time.
So, yeah, this is episode 110, and in this episode, we're going to be talking about two mass murders, which is going to be... Yay!
Great.
And how toothaches are probably not the proximate cause of one of them.
Probably not.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a tad reductive.
I don't know.
Maybe that's just me.
There is kind of an elephant in the room, which we are going to just gesture at before we get into the more important and far more depressing subject, main subject of the episode, which is the thing we said we weren't going to be talking about at all.
And really, we're not going to be talking about it.
We're just going to sort of talk about it to talk about how we're not talking about it, which is, of course, depth versus hurt.
And I think really we just want to kind of point you to other people, don't we, Daniel?
Because other people have done this better.
Yeah, I mean, I kind of, you know, you kind of made the joke that we were doing Depth vs. Herd, like, in the last episode, and I sort of made the, you know, like, I will never, ever, ever talk about this, you know?
And I realized immediately after saying it that that sounded, like, really hostile and really negative, and, you know, it sounded like, oh, I can't be bothered to think about this with my, you know, time.
That wasn't, like, the intention that I was having.
It was more like, So many other better people, namely Michael Hobbes, who has been just brilliant on this subject, has covered it in executive detail.
We will include links in the show notes.
Ultimately, I don't want to sit down and go through hours of trial test testimony just to sort of repeat what he's already done.
Um, if I felt like I had sort of an original angle on it, I would definitely, you know, do the work for it, but I just don't, I just don't, I don't feel like I don't see anything there that's going to, that I'm going to find some nugget that nobody else has seen, you know?
Um, so I will let people who, uh, who, who do that work professionally and delve into it, um, you know, kind of, kind of solve that, uh, solve that particular story.
Um, and I will instead, uh, read the diaries, the 700 page diary entries of mass shooters.
Well, there's a division of labor, isn't there?
Yeah, there is.
Yeah, no, I feel very much the same.
I mean, like, when you said, you know, we made the joke about Depp versus Heard, and then you said, oh, I'm never going to talk about that.
And then sort of you felt bad about saying that because it sounded like you were saying something that you didn't mean.
That's pretty much exactly how I felt when we did a thing at the start of one recent episode where we sort of name checked the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
It sounds on the episode like I'm just kind of brushing it away, because I say something like, well, I'm just against imperialism, and that's it.
And of course, in my innocence, I thought everybody would understand what that meant.
And of course, that is open to various interpretations.
And I think maybe since then, specifically with the Jimmy Dore Part One episode, People know where I stand on that, so I'm satisfied.
But yeah, Depp Heard, I do happen to think it's an important issue in its own way.
Again, go and listen to Michael Hobbs' guest appearance on Cancel Me Daddy, which is a good show even when he's not on it, and also an article that he wrote, which I think is on his Substack or Medium or whatever.
Again, links in the show notes.
Basically, not like 100%, but I would basically co-sign everything Michael Hobbs says on this.
Yeah, no, no, absolutely.
I mean, you know, like Michael Hobbs, friend of the show.
I mean, I've chatted with Michael Hobbs.
He's a great guy.
He does.
He is a consummate journalist of the highest order.
He knows his shit, you know, even where I might disagree with him on some details.
You know, he's great.
Like, yeah, I co-sign.
No question.
Moving on.
So, yeah.
Leaving the relatively undepressing subject behind into the main episode.
Leaving years of spousal abuse behind into the darker material.
Horrors of organized, venomous misogyny.
Leaving the relatively light material in the rearview mirror.
Right, right.
Why do we do this to our audience?
It's just like, come on, man.
Anyway, we got to, we got to do this.
We got to do this because we're going, we're going to talk about two mass shootings today and we're actually getting darker as we go on.
We're going to do the relatively lighthearted mass shooting first.
And I promise you, Again, I feel like new listeners will think that we are mocking this or we are making fun of it, and we do use humor at this in terms of just getting through this material because it is, like, there's no way I'm talking about this without it being either, like, ponderous or, you know, just darkly funny, you know, because we're going to start with Uvalde and the Uvalde Texas shooting by Salvador Ramos.
And the murder of 19 children and two adults.
If you were to write a dark comedy, like a jet black dark comedy, about the failures of the police structure in the United States, and you wrote a scene, a sketch, in which 10 cops stood outside a mass shooting at an elementary school,
Waiting for the shooter to just come out of his home, just sort of twiddling their thumbs with gunshots going off in the background, while parents were begging to go in and save their children, and then they arrest the parent.
This would be seen as the most on-the-nose satire imaginable.
This would make natural-born killers look subtle, right?
Oh yeah, it'd be outrageous left-wing propaganda, wouldn't it?
It'd be, you know, how dare you?
It's just so unrealistic.
But it actually happened, and then the cops lied about it over and over and over again.
Yeah, because that's what cops do.
Yeah, and we'll get into that to some degree here in just a second.
I did want to, I told Shannon I was going to do this, so I'm going to highlight here at the beginning, just in case people don't listen all the way to the end, go support Shannon Martinez because as ineffective and stupid and, well, evil as the police force in the United States is dealing with these kinds of things, Shannon is the exact opposite and more money towards her so that she doesn't have to go back to bartending and can do this full time and hypothetically even hire some people.
to help her in her work would be really useful because a lot of what she does is actually consult with schools around the country in terms of like helping them to understand kind of how these kinds of phenomena happen.
And if there were, you know, if there were more people doing what Shannon Martinez does or if Shannon Martinez could do it more often, that would be a very good first step towards actually combating this in a realistic way.
Yeah.
Of course, the first step should really have been taken like decades ago, but that's the other.
Never mind.
That's the other thing.
Let's take it now.
I mean, that's the thing that you kind of run into.
This is something that Ed Brumilla, again, another friend of the show he's been on, I've been on his Paywall show.
He's the Gin and Tacos guy.
He does the Mass for Shut-ins podcast.
And he, you know, it's like everything, he's kind of on Twitter a lot, kind of talking about kind of the failures of the Democratic Party and the failures of, you know, sort of our system of governance to actually do anything useful.
A deep scope there.
And whenever he kind of, you know, starts talking about this, it's like, well, what, are you saying people just shouldn't vote for Democrats?
Are you saying we should just sit out and just let the Republicans win?
Wouldn't it be worse for the Republicans?
And it's like, yeah, the time to do something about this was like 30 years ago.
And if the Democrats really wanted to do something about it, they would have done it 30 years ago.
And that's a, like Emperor Milla is a professional political scientist, or at least he has a PhD in political science.
He worked, he was a professor for years.
He is now out of academia.
He has, he has other jobs now, you know, he's doing other things because academia is a complete fucking shit show.
But this is not someone like he, you know, advocated for, you know, voting strategically and for like understanding the realities of Democratic Party politics.
For decades, or at least for like 15 years on a block, you can go back and read back in it.
I actually did some of that this week just to sort of go back and go, yeah, he has been advocating for working with the Democratic Party for years and years and years.
And if Ed Bermuda is now going, yeah, this is all a bunch of fucking useless fucks.
That's a sign.
That is a really clear sign of just how far things have fallen.
But yeah, the time to do something about this was 30 years ago.
The second best time to do it is now, obviously.
But yeah, a lot of the so-called liberal solutions, gun control.
Yeah, let's impose some gun regulations that aren't going to actually do anything.
Yeah, that's a really great idea.
Yeah, let's chin up the Republican base even further by giving them the thing they most fear in the world, which is touching their magical AR-15s.
That's going to be the thing, and you're never going to actually enact useful gun legislation on that.
It's just not going to happen, so why are we talking about it?
Yeah.
By fear, what you, of course, mean is secretly wished for, because there's nothing they would love more than some kind of Democrat-led government initiative to take even 0.8% of their fucking guns away.
They would lose their shit, and they would be delighted to have the pretext for doing so.
Exactly, exactly.
And you know, like, who's going to be enforcing these rules?
The same cops that are completely useless, right?
You know, like, that's exactly who's going to.
And ultimately, who is this going to affect more?
Any kind of gun legislation.
Routinely, right now, it is routinely targeted against, it is like, regardless of what's actually written into the laws, it is used to target black and brown people and other marginalized people in other marginalized communities.
Period.
And I am not someone who is doctrinaire about guns.
I'm not someone who has a dozen AR-15s hanging around.
I'm a leftist, but I'm not that kind of leftist.
That's not who I am.
I have a realistic assessment of what the reality of gun politics is in the United States right now.
And any kind of sweeping gun legislation that might actually combat this problem is never going to pass.
And anything that you pass is just going to be used as a way of ginning up Republican rage.
And that's it.
That's it.
Yeah, I feel the same.
I viscerally loathe guns.
I hate them.
Any gun that isn't on a screen and sort of made of chunky plastic and goes and fires laser beams, any gun other than that, I just viscerally loathe it.
But you've got to try to live in the real world, I think.
Exactly, exactly.
Um, so yeah, sorry, we're not talking about Yuvalde, we're kind of like getting to the conclusion first, but we are just kind of talking through this, so I feel like it's fine.
Salvador Ramos, a couple, like a day or two after his 18th birthday, purchases one gun, one AR-15, and then a few days later purchases a second.
Um, like basically the moment it's legal for him to do so.
And a few days after that gets into a fight with his grandmother who had recently kicked his mom out for, uh, they were all living with the grandmother.
And apparently the mother was involved, had some drug issues and who knows what the details have not really come out on that, but was kicked out of the house.
And apparently after a fight over something or other, He shoots his grandmother, non-fatally as it appears, and the details in this are pretty vague, but shoots his grandmother, gets in his truck, crashes his truck a few miles away into a ditch, and then wanders over into the school where he had been kicked out the previous year.
Wonders for a few minutes, apparently does not engage with anyone on the outside.
There were again, many like early reports that indicated like a school resource officer had engaged with him like outside the school, but apparently that wasn't that wasn't true.
Wonders in and just starts like shooting people down.
People called 911 as he was walking up.
There were officers on the scene two minutes, two minutes after he entered the school.
And he was eventually found dead in a classroom, having killed 21 people and injured a dozen more.
So I forget the exact number, but, you know, many, many more people, mostly, I mean, tiny children, to be clear.
And the cops found him.
The cops found him dead.
By all accounts, they found him dead, having failed to enter and having had to call
Not only did they have to wait for the Border Patrol to actually do the entry, despite the fact that all these people had high-end SWAT gear and had trained for this exact scenario a few months before, going against every rule of the book about how you're actually supposed to engage with these things if you trust the sober voices of federal law enforcement, which we'll get to that in a second.
Um, couldn't, couldn't enter, couldn't, couldn't break down the door.
Um, this, this classroom door, uh, the border patrol couldn't knock down the door.
They called the high school guidance counselor to quietly open, open it with his keys or her keys.
I don't know the gender of that person.
And then they walked in and found, um, the dead shooter.
Um, And again, lots of details I'm omitting there.
Lots of stuff going on.
But this is what cops do.
This is more common than you think.
And we just did, as a bonus episode, we just did The Fugitive, which is a great movie.
I mean, you and I love the movie.
We talked it up.
But I mean, Yeah, Tommy Lee Jones, you know, Frank Girard.
It's not like the model of like what cops actually do.
Cops routinely, you know, the Parkland shooting.
Yeah.
Similar situation.
You had one, you know, cop who just kind of stood outside and waited, you know, for backup.
Cops are not required.
I'm going to speak to the US.
This is not like some crazy, loony, left-wing conspiracy when I say cops are not required to take care of you.
They're not required to protect you.
No, that's the Supreme Court.
And I have.
I'm going to recommend.
The first link in the show notes here is to An episode of the Five Four Podcast.
This is probably my favorite podcast right now.
I adore this fucking show.
This is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
And this is one show where I not only- It has plenty of scope.
I not only listen to every episode, I generally listen to every episode twice.
That's how much I enjoy this show.
I learn things all the time.
It's funny, even the hosts, because they started this show in 2019, about like, oh, we're going to talk about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
And then they've talked recently about how going through the process of doing the show, they've become even more radicalized.
Once you actually start reading these opinions and once you actually start digging into what's actually going on here, even if you start from the premise that this institution is ultimately terrible, you just get more and more radicalized.
You just get more and more, let's burn this motherfucker down.
Every passing moment, and it's kind of a delight.
But they did an episode on the Castle Rock v. Gonzalez case, and this is a case, and I'm going to read a bit from the transcript of this episode.
I've linked to it in the show notes again.
Peter says, Today's case is Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, a case that features two of my least favorite things in the world, procedural technicalities and the brutal murder of innocent children.
Later, this case is, I think, maybe the most tragic and poignant in a long line of cases in the Supreme Court and other courts that have allowed police officers and police departments to escape any legal responsibility, even in cases where their actions are grossly negligent and lead directly to the loss of human life.
The issue here, simplifying a little bit, is whether the police are liable under the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause when they don't even attempt to enforce a restraining order involving a rather insane husband, shall we say?
Well, get into the semantics, but the real question is this, I think.
Do the police owe the public anything at all?
And the court thinks, eh, probably not.
This is a case in which a woman, Ms.
Gonzalez, in the aftermath of the Violence Against Women Act passed in 1994, thank you Joe Biden, there was a Colorado statute which required cops to actually enforce restraining orders, you know?
And the Colorado legislature passed this law.
This woman had had a restraining order against her abusive husband.
The kids are missing.
She goes to the cops multiple times over several hours.
She knows exactly where the man claims to be with the kids.
She's asking the cops to please just go find him and get these and save these kids from this abusive man who is like demonstrated to be physically abusive to both her and the children.
And they just kind of sit on their thumbs.
At one point, one of them literally goes and has his lunch break instead of doing anything about this.
When they eventually find the kids, they have all been brutally murdered.
And when she sues, and the case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court goes, well, you can't expect the cops to actually do anything.
They're not required.
And they just literally say, no, the cops are not required to do anything.
So this is not some crazy, loony, lefty, socialist, anarchist idea that the cops are actually just purveyors of capital and have no actual responsibility to the citizens around them.
This is the supreme law of the United States.
It's literally black letter law at this point.
The cops do not owe you fucking anything.
Period.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I mean, I'm not being original, but the gap between the actual reality of the police, not just in America, but it's particularly sharp in America because America is the source of The lion's share of the world's pop culture.
The gap between the reality of the police and the way the police are portrayed in culture is just, it's chasmic, it's galactic, the gap between the reality and the portrayal.
You know, just thinking back over our recent bonus episodes, you and I talking about movies we like, we've done The Fugitive, No Country for Old Men, Fargo, L.A.
Confidential, and Seven.
Every single one of those films features absolutely insanely fantastic fantasy depictions of cops as moral heroes, you know, in some sense.
It's everywhere, and it is a total sick fantasy when you compare it to reality.
Yeah, it's almost as if that's on our mind or something in this podcast.
I think that the other reality here, and I do want to kind of move away from, I mean, we are kind of talking around these subjects a little bit, but I think the other reality here is that even the sort of like the darker and grittier kind of depictions of the police, like if you think about, you know,
The shield, or you think about the wire, you think about, maybe not the wire, but you think about, you know, like the law and order is, you know, it kind of has this patina of being like slightly more realistic and it shows kind of moral gray areas in the law and, you know, what the cops are doing are still kind of fundamentally about cops going out and investigating crimes and actually caring about finding the person who committed the crime, as opposed to just kind of wandering into a crime scene, you know, kind of like,
Half awake with a bagel in their pocket and going like, well, it was probably the black guy.
I mean, a cop show that showed what cops actually do, which is mostly like roust homeless people and arrest blind people for petty crimes, would not be a very entertaining show.
Pull people over on the fact that they've got something hanging from their rearview mirror and that's a violation of code, and then spring civil forfeiture on them.
Re-possesses half their possessions, you know?
People wouldn't believe it.
People would not believe it, because people think... Lots of people wouldn't anyway, because we're soaked in this fantasy version.
We're so soaked in the fantasy version that the reality would seem ridiculous and incredible.
Exactly.
The Uvalde shooter, we don't really have a motive.
We don't really have anything going on here.
There's a lot of speculation.
The big right-wing narrative is that maybe the Uvalde shooter and the Buffalo shooter were in the same Discord chat like that was a that was like a thing being kind of propagating the chance for a while.
There's no there's no evidence for that.
And even like the right wing dipshits will say like there's no evidence of this, you know, but but it is something that kind of circulates a little bit.
The other thing was, oh no, he wore eyeliner sometimes in black nail polish, and so therefore he was trans.
That's it's really like it's the trans people who are, you know, committing these crimes, which, you know.
Yeah, almost instantly, right-wing ideologues started circulating misinformation about the shooter in Uvalde being a trans man, I believe.
And they actually took photographs of a completely different person online, who I don't even know if it's actually a trans person.
But they took photographs of a completely different person, who's nothing to do with this whatsoever, and circulated them.
I believe that was a trans person.
But I think I think she I think it was a trans woman.
I may have my details wrong on this, but like she was literally like posted.
It's like I'm still alive dipshits like and it was.
It is actually like to her credit that she came out and like posted and said like, yeah, those are photos of me and I'm not the shooter because I'm still here to post.
It's pretty brave in the second.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Incredibly brave.
Incredibly brave.
Yeah.
Existing is incredibly brave for a trans person now.
You know, just existing in the world as a trans person is an act of bravery.
It shouldn't have to be that way, but it is.
But yeah, I mean, these aren't verified things, but I've seen reports.
They're coming from Twitter, you know, and they're coming from sources that look legit to me, but I don't know that they're real.
But, you know, I've seen various reports of trans people being attacked in retaliation by people.
Like, one story was about quite a small child, a trans child.
And, you know, on the basis of the misinformation about the shooter in Ovalda being trans, well, of course, it's not really that.
It's not actually that, oh, I've seen this news article.
This thing has been committed by a trans person.
This proves trans people are bad.
Therefore, I will beat up a trans... It's a pretext.
It's an excuse.
It's something people seize upon to indulge in hate and fear and loathing and vindictiveness.
But yeah.
In this story, I haven't personally verified it, but in the account I had, this child was not even believed.
The complaint was not taken seriously by the police.
I mean, you have the convergence right there, don't you?
I mean, there's nothing surprising there, but at the same time, it's one of those things that's simultaneously completely unsurprising and so shocking that it makes you just immediately want to die and melt and seep through the floor.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
No, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it is just, I mean, again, like we could, we could go around this topic all day long, but yeah, no, the cops are not there.
They're not actually there to protect you unless you, unless you are a bank or.
Unless you're property or an owner of property.
Yeah, exactly.
You know.
That imperative is so completely internalized that the people who cosplay as cops, you know, they strap on... I'm talking about Kyle Rittenhouse, of course.
Who's in the news again.
I know, I know, yeah.
Who's in the news again.
Who's in the news again, of course.
I know.
Yeah.
But he, you know, he sort of tries to present himself later on as doing this sort of good Samaritan first aid act thing.
But he and people like him went there with the express intention.
You know, they're cosplaying as cops or paramilitary or whatever, and their intention is to protect car dealerships and to protect gas stations and stuff like that.
They have so completely internalized the fact, whether they're conscious of it or not, that the role of the police is to protect property, private property, and the owners of private property, that that is just instinctive.
That, yeah.
That's what we need to do.
We need to go and protect gas stations from the savages.
Pardon me.
That's not how I feel.
No, obviously.
No, we need to go and protect car dealerships.
And I was actually thinking about this just before we got on because I was watching an interview.
I was actually watching a Sam Seder bit where he was mocking Tucker Carlson a bit with Kyle Rittenhouse.
So, you know, fair enough.
I was thinking about Kyle Renton House, and something that maybe didn't come across in our two-parter on Kyle was, if you wanted to guard the car dealership, all you have to do is stand there with your AR-15 and guard the car dealership, and you have a backup guy there next to you, and nobody would have bothered that car dealership.
He got into trouble, even if you accept all of his versions of events, because he was going off and running around and not doing the thing that's actually protecting capital.
He's going off and he's, depending on whose versions of events you believe, he's going and offering aid, he's going and putting out fires and all this sort of thing.
But no, look, if you had a militia there, And your goal was to protect that property.
And then you just, you designate certain areas that are your protected zones and like, you don't leave it.
And that's, but that's boring, right?
Like that's the boring thing of just standing there and you're not like in the middle of the story.
You're just like doing the actual, like, even, even if we accept this kind of moral guideposts, which I obviously you and I don't, but even you accept this as like some moral, moral thing to do is to protect the small business with a, with a rifle.
You're not doing that.
You're running around.
That's also the thing that happens with these cops, these school resource officers.
Don Oliver had a really nice segment about school resource officers on his most recent show, basically saying we need to get these cops out of schools because what they end up doing The odds that any individual school is going to be attacked in this way is astronomically low.
Most of your time there is not spent actually doing any kind of real security and assessment.
Most of your time is spent dealing with what are ultimately ordinary disciplinary problems.
And when those become criminalized, when suddenly a tussle in the schoolyard becomes something that gets entered into the system, you're criminalizing these young people.
You're taking small children, overwhelmingly black and brown, and putting them into the system.
And you are using the agency of the state against them.
And that's, again... Well, there's already the school-to-prison pipeline, isn't there?
And they've brought it into the school.
We have phone videos of kids who are said to be disrupting class, and the guy comes in and he slams them to the floor, puts their arms behind their back, puts them in cuffs, and of course it's usually a black girl, you know, because the pattern is being reproduced in miniature within this little space, as above, so below.
And it's just, yeah, my God, it's so depressing.
But they've internalized the fantasy as well as the instinctive knowledge that their job is fundamentally to protect property.
They've internalized that fantasy we were talking about as well.
Rittenhouse and all these, you know, this is why cops go around with Punisher decals on their cars and shit like this.
This is why Rittenhouse is doing what he's doing in the middle.
They've internalized the fantasy of being John McClane in the Nakatomi building.
You know, whereas of course, as we know from real cops, the reality is that the guy would just find the nearest cupboard and cower in the cupboard until it was all over.
Right.
And I mean, you know, just to, again, not to play devil's advocate here, but just to sort of like, You can sort of see a logic to any individual piece of the story, right?
We knew the shooter was inside.
We thought we had him cornered.
We were waiting for backup, you know, so that we could go in and do this safely, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay.
We waited an hour, but we were doing all these things.
We ran into problems.
We're waiting for Border Patrol because they were better armed.
We thought we had him surrounded.
We thought we had him cornered.
Any individual piece, even arresting the parents, which is something that really gets people's ire up.
Even that is justifiable in the sense of, well, we don't want to send more people into danger.
Firefighters on a scene will not allow people to run into a burning building to save people or property because that's just another person the firefighters have to pull out of that.
There is an internal logic to a lot of this.
But I do want to move off of this.
If there is a case to be made for having armed agents of the state murder people on suspicion, an 18-year-old man with two rifles walking into a school At 11 o'clock in the morning, that seems like a really good time for that.
If there is a justification, I'm not even saying that is a justification, but if there is a justification, that feels like a time in which, you know what?
I'm okay if you make a mistake there and injure someone you weren't supposed to.
That seems a lot more justifiable than a 12-year-old with a candy bar, for instance.
Yeah.
And look, individual decisions, probably every decision down the line seems reasonable to the person making it.
It still adds up to a catastrophic failure.
And the thing is, if these people aren't actually very good at the stuff that they
Claim to be good at, or people say they're good at, or people think they're good at, the things that they're supposed to be good at that justifies the staggering amount of money and power and prestige and materiel that they guzzle from society, then, okay, maybe we accept it's actually very difficult to have a group of people who can do things like raid a school when there's a guy in there with a gun, okay, but maybe also don't Fund them and arm them so much?
Right.
Maybe?
40% of the municipal budget of Uvalde went to the police department.
Now, whenever we talk about those kinds of numbers, the reason is because many of the municipal functions of that government are actually done on higher levels, either the state or federal level.
So a lot of the stuff that you think of as a town resource is actually funded through state mechanisms.
So Those numbers seem extraordinarily high in many places when they're not necessarily... But it is an extremely outsized bit of money if what you want is cops who are actually going to protect people from violent crime.
If you want cops to solve this sort of thing, then that seems excessive, especially since They had.
There were like photos that came out of recent photos of like these exact cops standing there in their fancy sweat gear with their high-end, you know, thousands of dollars, $5,000 rifles and such.
And they're in their, you know, big armored vehicles and everything.
And then what did they do with it?
They stood outside for an hour and waited for backup.
You know, like Barney Fife could have done that.
You know what I mean?
So what's being revealed is that a huge amount of social wealth and production and prestige and power is being conferred upon people, not for the actual purpose that is claimed, which is that they're there to protect us and keep us safe, and a good guy with a gun saves us from the bad guy with a gun, but for a different purpose.
And you only have to look at what they actually do to see what that actual purpose is.
It is to keep a social peace within a private property-based white supremacist settler colonial society.
That is what the actual money is going to.
And I think they're overfunded and overarmed even for that, to be honest.
But I think the vast, the militarization of the police and the vast sort of loading onto them of funds and weapons and prestige, it's serving an ideological role.
It's creating an impression.
It's creating that myth that we were talking about before.
And that myth itself is structural reinforcement.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I mean, again, just, you know, we can go on forever.
But, you know, I was re-watching Silence of the Lambs, you know, like maybe a year ago.
And if you remember, there's this extended sequence.
That movie's from 1991.
And there's this extended sequence in which Hannibal Lecter is escaping this terrifying killer who, you know, this unstoppable like wraith of a man of unimaginable brutality of which every military police resource is being thrown against this man.
And the SWAT teams are wearing like less armor than, you know, like your ordinary cop who writes you a traffic ticket today.
And that's not even, and that's not even in like New York City or LA.
That's where I live.
The cops are just wearing this absurd amount of armor versus what was considered completely over-the-top militaristic garb 30 years ago.
Nothing gets better.
It only gets worse.
I mean, ditto the cops in Robocop.
Again, the satire version of militarized police in 1984 was understated by an order of magnitude.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
We are doomed to live in a world that makes satire look subtle.
Yeah, again, it is just like the darkest of dark black comedies could not encapsulate this stuff.
On that note, we should probably move into the even darker shooting, the actual Little Kitty Neo-Nazi, who decided to travel to Buffalo, three and a half hours from his house, and shoot a bunch of people at a grocery store.
We covered this to some degree right after it happened, and I knew I wanted to come back to it.
I kind of went back and forth on this.
I was like, Obviously, more details are going to come out.
I think it's worth talking about in more detail.
We were really fragmentary stuff at the beginning.
And then, at the time, I knew there was a diary and there was a manifesto.
And I had skimmed over the manifesto, which is 180 pages, which is absurd.
I mean, it's just absurd.
And we talked a bit about that.
We talked a bit about that.
I read the manifesto, too.
Yeah.
The manifesto is deeply uninteresting, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about the details of it just because it has been widely reported at this point, and I think it's worth kind of digging into some of these details.
Everybody is commenting on the fact that it is largely a copy-paste of the Britain Tarrant Christchurch Manifesto.
The other thing that it is, it is a response to the Halle Germany shooter, whose name I don't have at the tip of my tongue.
Was that Patrick Crucius?
It might be Patrick Crucius.
Anyway, forgive me.
I probably got that wrong.
Anyway, the Halle shooter went off to a synagogue And attempted to shoot through the lock and then enter and then kill a bunch of Jewish people during their worship.
The door was reinforced and there was security inside and he shot the lock a couple of times and was unable to breach the perimeter and then sort of like wanders off.
And I believe he kind of injures a couple of people and is kind of immediately apprehended.
Um, and this is, you know, beyond, um, I mean, obviously this is a horrifying act, but you know, the, this, this leads to a sort of a dampening of the enthusiasm for these things because he looks like a loser to the people that like want to do these things to the people who would be cheering him on.
Um, he's it's, it's, you know, it's the war boy and, uh, Fury Road.
Who is like, I'm going to avenge you, and then falls immediately off the rig, and is suddenly like, he saw me fail.
That is a very real moment for these people.
It's like suddenly, he's a laughing stock.
And not only is he a laughing stock, but part of the purpose of that shooting, if you read his manifesto, which I've read, was hand-making all of his weapons, proving that you didn't have to have access to American-style assault rifles, that you could do this with handmade ghost guns and modified home equipment, that sort of thing.
It turns out that I'm not saying it can't be done, but he certainly couldn't do it.
And a lot of what Peyton Gendron, the Buffalo shooter, was trying to do was detail his gear and explain exactly how in a state like New York State, which has his terms, cucked gun laws, and some of the most cucked gun laws in the world, or in the country and some of the most cucked gun laws in the world, or in the country anyway, he was still able to
And so, it's almost like this little community of people talking to one another through their manifestos.
He's building on sort of the work that has come previous.
And over and over again in the manifesto, he talks about how, you know, The people who come after me are going to learn from this.
They're going to find, you know, I didn't do this right.
He literally like lists in his manifesto, I used this gun for this reason, but if I'd had a little more money, I would have used like this gun.
There's a, I mean, again, darkly funny moment when he literally says, he goes down like the clothes that he's wearing, like the particular like tactical vest, the particular shirt he's wearing.
And in fact, he even lists the underwear he's wearing and then says, if I'd had a little bit more time and money, I would have bought like this particular brand of underwear and worn it.
That's the obsessive level of detail.
That's like probably, I'm like 100 pages of the 180 pages are that kind of like detailed step-by-step.
This is exactly how I planned this.
This is, you know, he's speaking to, there is a perceived community of people.
There is this perceived like larger meaning than just kind of going out and You know, killing people, right?
And that's what's chilling, right?
That's the thing.
He's assuming that he's going to be successful enough that even if he fails, fails in his terms, that other people are going to learn from his mistakes and then go off and do this more effectively.
And that he's deliberately trying to help people to do this, right?
And that's why I like sharing this manifesto.
It's something that you should do at great risk, after great thought.
Jesse Singel, on his Blocked and Reported podcast, just linked to it openly in the show notes.
Just, you know, linked to it.
So, in case you needed another piece of evidence to show you why Jesse Singel is a complete freaking piece of shit.
You know, we've talked about doing a Jesse Singel episode, maybe.
I'm thinking about it.
I'm thinking about it.
But yeah, and, you know, he and Katie Halper, or Katie Herzog, who is his co-host there, you know, their big take on the Buffalo Shooter was, you know, he's just crazy.
He's just crazy.
This is just some nut job, you know.
So, just the same take as Tucker Carlson, yeah.
And, you know, you shouldn't blame Tucker Carlson for this.
Now, I actually sort of agree, because Jindron not only wrote this manifesto, which is kind of deeply uninteresting, it's like meta-interesting, but the actual text is not very interesting.
Yeah.
But he also composed a diary.
And this diary is composed of, essentially, he had a little private Discord link that only he had access to.
And he would type up his little entries in this Discord log, and then would occasionally go and copy and paste them into this big Word document.
And let me be clear about this, because it is unclear exactly how much we can take this as an accurate representation.
Because obviously, he's writing for a perceived audience.
He even says several times in the diary that he has gone back and deleted some, quote-unquote, personal details that he didn't think should be in the public record.
But he also sounds very much like a dumb 18-year-old kid who's planning this.
I mean, if this was a faked document, this is dramatic, dramatic overkill.
You know, I think I think many of the entries, I think you can take this as broadly accurate to at least a representation of how he saw this, even if it has been massaged and edited in certain ways.
Certain entries definitely feel overtly like him trying to deflect blame or whatever.
One of the things that he says is, don't blame my parents.
My parents didn't know anything about this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I find it interesting that his parents have not said anything publicly since.
Both of Ramos' parents have spoken to the media.
Probably not the best thing they could do, but they did speak to the media.
According to reports, they have spoken to the FBI.
But they have not spoken to the media.
They have not made even a kind of anodyne statement like, you know, our heart goes out to the victims, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
They have been just complete radio silence on this.
I think that's probably related to the effect of the Oxford, Michigan shooter, whose parents got prosecuted after it was discovered that they were literally texting with him about his plans.
about his feelings about how much he wanted to shoot up the school um so um that seems to be um i don't want to comment about the parents directly because it's you know all i have is all we have is you know sort of like the daily mail has gone after them by interviewing people who just didn't like them in town and you know so you get like well they're They just seemed weird, off-standing people sort of thing.
They felt like they were better than us or whatever.
That's the most that anybody has really gotten out of them.
Then what Peyton Gendron has to say about his parents.
Over and over again, he highlights that they don't know anything about this.
They know nothing about my plans.
I have been hiding it from them.
He is literally, I mean, again, per his description of what's going on there, he is driving the 45 minutes to campus or the 30 minutes or so to campus, even after he drops out of school.
Unofficially, he is dropped from his classes after he stops attending, effectively, because he was spending all of his time planning this massacre.
He's literally driving to school when he would rather stay at home and nap in his comfy bed.
He's sleeping in the middle of February in New York State in his car, rather than stay home to hide the fact that he's not attending classes from his parents.
At one point, You know, weeks before the attack, he passes his grandmother driving around in town when he's supposed to be on campus.
And he goes into this like mini panic attack about like, she's going to find out about it.
She's going to call my parents.
They're going to ask me about this.
They're going to find it.
And I'm like, he's like, I'm just fucked.
I'm fucked.
I'm fucked.
I've never, this has been a complete failure from beginning to end.
And again, he sounds like, I mean, this sounds genuine to me, you know?
And like, this does not sound like.
Something that he's just making up for effect.
I don't think he's a good enough writer to write this in an empathetic way.
I believe that he was hiding this from his parents.
Now, Some of the things that he's doing with his spare time that he's clearly doing in the garage, like modifying weapons.
um and uh you know some of the some you know i think i think you could ask a question of you know how did how did like all of this completely escaped the notice of of an adult figure you know um you know he seems smart enough to have like you know hidden it but not smart enough to have hidden it well if that makes sense but and this gets back to the cops right he was investigated by the cops after you know he had um the summer last summer
he had uh you know In a senior yearbook quote or something, in an economics exam or something, he had said, it was like, well, what do you plan to do after graduation?
And it's like, murder-suicide was his answer.
And he plays it off as a joke to the psychiatrist, because the psychiatrist recalls he actually spends a couple of days in an institution.
In fact, one of the very first entries in his diary is a photo of the waiting room that he took that day when he was waiting to see the psychiatrist before he was institutionalized.
So, this is a big moment.
People were paying attention, but clearly some balls were dropped.
I think one of the really big question marks is exactly what the parents were doing and how accurate are these kind of recollections in the diary about their involvement, about how worried they really were.
I mean, he's clearly terrified they're going to kind of discover the extent of it.
But it is also like he has several moving violations here.
He has several speeding tickets.
He has an impending court date in which they may take his license away.
That's how many moving violations he accumulates over the course of a few months.
he describes at one point on one of his recon missions for this attack.
When he's in Buffalo, he describes having hit a telephone pole, winged a telephone pole with his side view mirror and knocking the side view mirror off and speeding and kind of swerving all over the lines through his panic attacks.
It is not impossible.
It is in fact almost like, again, a comedy of errors that some cop didn't just look around and ask just a few more questions.
Like, I just imagine, like, what if he had gotten in a minor fender bender three days before the attack?
And, you know, based on his driving record, he ends up spending, you know, two weeks in jail.
And in the process, suddenly the cops search his house and find all these, like, illegally modified weapons and that sort of thing.
Then suddenly what you have is, you know, a nothing story.
Just one of those things that kind of pops up is like, you know, a kid with neo-Nazi, you know, messages in his discord had a bunch of weapons and then it just kind of disappears into the ether.
And this kid was very close to being that.
I mean, very easily could have been exactly that guy, exactly, exactly that story.
And this is again, a sign of like an actual like community-based policing model that was not based on rousting homeless people and giving speeding tickets.
That maybe could have followed up with this kid who had threatened murder-suicide and just started asking him questions.
This is complicated, right?
Because the kid is terrified of this prophecy.
He doesn't want to do it.
He doesn't want to live.
He wants to die.
And he wants to go out doing something meaningful with his life.
But he's also terrified.
Like, over and over and over again, he talks about not just the terror to his own life in terms of like, there's a security guard at this grocery store.
I'm going to die.
What if there's somebody with a concealed carry permit there?
He's actually happy he's doing it in New York.
He says, maybe I'll drive to Baltimore because they've got a whole bunch of black people there, and I could just kill more of them.
But they have actual concealed carry laws, and I'm going to run into somebody who's going to be able to shoot back.
That's a huge thing.
Yeah, I don't want to get shocked.
Come on.
Right.
He's terrified of it.
He's terrified of it.
And again, not to put it all on, but some community support model could have reached out to him and could have prevented this by just being aware, just being in his life.
He's so isolated, right?
He's so, I mean, he talks about like occasionally he'll kind of go out and like play video games with his friends for a day and it's like, oh, I didn't get a lot of work done on my project here because I, you know, was playing, I was playing Fortnite, you know, and that was fun.
I'm really going to miss Joe or whatever the kid's name is.
I'm really going to miss him when I'm in jail.
It is, again, this kind of dark comedy of errors.
Don't think that I'm trying to over-empathize with this kid.
Don't think that I'm trying to pretend that this diary is not filled to the brim with the most anti-Semitic and racist and anti-Black And I say this as the co-host of this podcast.
This is as bad as anything I've seen.
He is full-on siege posting through much of this diary.
He is truly horrendous on an ideological level.
But we also have to acknowledge that there is a reality there.
He posts a picture of his cat.
He has this adorable tabby cat, like an orange tabby cat.
And the cat's name is Paige.
And he's like, man, the last couple of years, Paige, she's been spending a lot of time with me.
She's really going to miss me.
I hope somebody takes care of her.
I hope my parents take care of her.
And it's like, you could have listened to that impulse.
You know what I mean?
Just Have the slightest hint of a connection to this human world and that you don't actually have to go and do this.
Your cat's going to miss you.
That is actually a reason that I want to go to prison.
You know what I mean?
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Or ultimately to not want to kill yourself.
My cat is going to miss me.
There are lots of people who decided not to commit suicide Long enough to get help for themselves by thinking, I don't want to leave my cat.
I don't want to leave my cat alone without me because she's going to miss me.
I feel like I've spent three weeks swimming in this kid's head.
It's so frustrating because every system failed here.
There was every chance for somebody to notice this and to find this kid and stop this.
And I don't mean a good guy with a gun.
I mean a social worker.
I mean a friend.
I mean a girlfriend.
He talks about girls occasionally, not very often.
He talks about finding women attractive, but never ever thinking about wanting to have sex, which is interesting in its own way.
He talks about finding himself unattractive, in part because he says, I have big lips.
I spent some time on this and I was really just thinking about this kid and I have so many screenshots.
I'm not fuckable or whatever.
I spent some time on this and I was really just thinking about this kid.
And I have so many screenshots.
I might want to actually write up something about this and kind of walk through some of the details here because there is a lot of fascinating stuff of just how close he came to not achieving this and how the slightest bit of institutional structure that would have actually been paying attention could have caught this.
Instead, they're rousting homeless people.
Instead, they're doing traffic tickets.
It's the Evaldi cops.
The Evaldi cops hang outside Well, children are being murdered inside.
That's the big, showy example of the police are fucking useless at this.
Jindron is the other side.
He is the much more ordinary side of this, in which not even major flashy, ideologically motivated violence, but ordinary domestic violence, ordinary You know, spousal violence, violence against children, or bullying, all of these things get left behind.
They get dropped because the cops are off doing what capital wants instead of what is actually people-focused.
I think there is nothing that I can imagine that would make people turn to radical abolitionism, police in prison abolitionism, than these two stories.
It's It's like a bright, shining star in my mind.
I can't imagine looking at this and saying, oh, what we need is just reforming the police.
No, it's useless.
These are the wages of the last four and a half decades of the development of capitalism in the West.
Capitalism has developed in this ferocious, predatory way.
Neoliberalism is what we're talking about.
Neoliberalism isn't the problem, but it's the mode of the problem that we live in.
And it's not just deregulated capital to an incredible extent and liberated money for the people who have it to an enormous extent to the detriment of human freedom and human flourishing, and basically privatized or appropriated or enclosed every bit of social wealth or communal wealth that could be prized up, and then And then privatize the nails as well.
It's not only done that, but it's destroyed networks of social support that used to be there, even under old style capitalism, which was still bad.
It was still a rotten system, but all those old systems, as imperfect as they were, and they were riven with sexism and racism back before neoliberalism, do not misunderstand me.
But these systems have been systematically destroyed, from basic things like youth centers and parks for children to play in, but all the way up to welfare systems just systematically and very consciously destroyed and rolled back, and housing systems left to crumble, and the choice was made.
What we do in order to accomplish this vast, basically this vast wealth grab, regrab, whatever, is we will be left with a load of social consequences.
And what we do about those social consequences is not use any Those old systems that we used to have for coping with the social side effects of capitalism, what we do, we scrap all that, we sell it off.
What we do instead, and this has been remarked upon by other people, again, I'm not being original, what we do instead is we have military, police forces, and we build prisons.
That's what we do.
And yeah, here we are.
Right.
And this is obviously racialized, and I agree with everything you said, but at least particularly in the US, it is a direct counter effect of the civil rights era, that once African American people have the right to vote, once Jim Crow ends, or is slowly, it's Ripped away from these societies and those wounds slowly start to heal, although they just end up festering for obvious reasons, that the era of mass incarceration begins.
Just a few years later, you start to see the most draconian prison laws and incarceration laws in the world.
And the war on drugs, which is essentially part of the same racial Absolutely.
And the war on drugs is built.
It's freshly, I mean, it is a deliberate one of those things.
I mean, Nixon, there are quotes of Nixon coming out and saying, you know, yeah, we knew heroin wasn't the problem.
It was just a way for us to go after the black community.
Like that's what it was, you know, like, you know, it is amazing.
You know, Gendron lives in the society that, you know, it's so much physical, Social violence against African Americans.
It wasn't enough to put them in the poorest places in the world or in the country.
It's not enough to subject them to housing discrimination.
It's not enough to put them in the shittiest schools.
It's not enough to do all of these things.
No, you've got to walk in with a rifle and just start killing them.
It's not overt enough.
You know, the system of anti-Blackness that we live under in this country.
It's not enough to do that.
No.
And that's the dopiness of all these Nazis to begin with.
It's like, you're a white man in America.
You're doing great.
And Gendron, I mean, he even says, sorry not to bring it back to the specifics, but Gendron even says at one point in his diaries, You know, I wanted to, I live actually a pretty nice life.
I wanted to get, you know, I was going to get an engineering degree, like both of my parents, both of his parents have engineering degrees.
He graduated high school.
He was in his second semester of college.
He's actually, the diary begins like kind of at the end of the first semester of college, but he's going, one of his, one of his entries is like, yeah, I had a Calc 2 exam and I had like some engineering labs and a physics lab I had to go to.
And I'm like, yeah, I, you know, I did a lot of that myself.
I minored in math.
I had labs.
I probably took some of those same coursework.
It would not be implausible that he and I could have been in some of the same classes had we gone to the same university at the same time.
He lived a good life.
He was living a perfectly fine life.
This is like he lived a good life.
You know, he was living a perfectly fine life, but he got it in his head like he got to do this thing.
Yeah, he was having a relatively okay life, but the people who should have nothing had 0.1% of something, and that's just unacceptable.
You're not necessarily doing great if you're a white man in America.
This is where the class reductionists and the supposedly left anti-feminists and quote-unquote identity politics people have a field day.
Yeah, there's plenty of white men in America who are doing really bad.
But these people, people like Gendron, they're not coming from the bottom of the barrel.
They're not coming from the working class in the industrial cities.
They're not coming from the lumpenproletariat.
They're from the middle class.
He is doing relatively fine.
I mean, the middle class has been squeezed by neoliberalism just like everybody else, but nowhere Even beginning to be as near as other people have, people lower down.
But it's the system of white supremacy that justifies the whole thing through getting the layer of the relatively privileged on side.
And it justifies the whole thing that the hierarchy, you're a couple of rungs up.
You're a couple of rungs up, but you are made to identify with the guy at the top of the ladder over the guy who's just a couple of rungs below you, because the ideology of white supremacy tells you that the guy at the top of the ladder is somehow like you, and these people are often against Government and people they call elites and so on.
But you know what I mean?
On some level, they're invisible, the people at the top of the ladder.
But the people at the bottom, just a couple of rungs below you, but they're different.
So the system of white supremacy says they're the problem.
They shouldn't even be on the fucking ladder.
How dare you be on the bottom rung?
You're going to have to be kicked off.
Yep, exactly.
And I think this leads into, you know, the title of this episode is about a toothache.
So Ben Collins, who by all accounts that I've ever seen as a perfectly fine journalist, He's a good follower.
cover some of these stories is not a fool.
This isn't like a Matt Iglesias or Andrew Sullivan type.
You know, this is someone who is trying to, you know, he's a liberal, but he's doing his best.
And he's, you know, again, from everything I've seen, I have not followed his career closely, but I, you know, I follow him and I think, you know, he has some good takes.
He's a good follow.
He's a good dude, you know?
I like, by the way, parenthetically, I like how Matt Iglesias is kind of just the paradigmatic fool, you know?
He's not Matt Iglesias, for God's sake!
Well, I mean, in the sense that Matt Iglesias... I'm not quarreling with you, I absolutely agree.
It just made me laugh, the way you used him as the quintessence of an obvious idiot.
Yeah, he's not like evil.
I mean, even though he often like, you know, he's like, yeah, no, he's just, he's just a fool.
That's the perfect part for it.
Gotten.
Yeah.
You know, bonus episode on Matt Iglesias.
Let's just find a couple of columns and like laugh our way through them.
You know, anyway, Ben Collins, you know, I don't know Ben Collins.
I've never spoken to him to my, to my knowledge.
I don't think, you know, I don't think he follows me, but He read the manifesto, and I'm using him as this sort of synecdoche for the larger media response to this, from people who are not in this world, who do not understand the memes, who don't understand some of the bigger picture stuff.
I want to tell a quick story.
and came up with, there were a lot of bad takes.
And in particular, the people who read the diary sometimes came up with even worse takes.
And Ben Collins, he starts off in the first tweet of this very long tweet thread is, I want to tell a quick story.
The Buffalo shooter had a toothache.
And then walks through essentially this sort of like logic.
He says, over and over again, he talks about his bad teeth.
He talks about how he had trouble with the dentist.
Went to a dentist and had to go back.
He lost a tooth when he was younger and he had continual toothaches.
In fact, I don't think Colin's noticed this, but at one point he has to push back the date of his massacre because he's getting a tooth filled.
Um, and at one point he mentions, um, you know, like maybe I'll get better, you know, dental care in prison.
Maybe that's it.
And Collins kind of like leaps onto this as this, like, you know, this is a disaffected, you know, youth, a young man who feels like he doesn't really have any, um, anything in his life.
Who's in this kind of constant tooth pain.
Who is, uh, you, if only he had had better access to, to healthcare, he would, he, maybe he wouldn't have done this terrible thing.
Now, I am very sympathetic to the big picture, social democratic argument that improving, in general, the material conditions of people in the subaltern classes and of the lumpenprol classes reduces a certain sense of alienation that leads people to join these far-right parties.
Yes, a broad social… Good things are good.
A broad social welfare system would prevent, in the aggregate, some of this kind of political activity, whether through overt violence or covert violence.
Gains for the working class are worth having.
Yes, exactly.
But I do not think you can read this diary with any degree of sophistication and come to that conclusion in this case.
There are a few reasons for that.
One is, he describes getting to go to the dentist on several... He had perfectly fine access to dental care.
Now, he goes back and forth about whether he thinks the dentist is any good or not, about whether he's actually getting the proper care, et cetera, et cetera.
He's also in a lot of pain, and when people go through medical procedures and they don't seem to work, It's a rant in his diary about the dentist.
He goes back and forth on this.
He's also a stupid kid.
Set that aside.
Also, more than he blames the dentist, he blames, and I apologize, the sugar Jew.
The sugar Jew.
Who has made his teeth bad by force feeding him all these like sugary candies and all this, you know, that there's sugar in everything you eat in this country.
And you know, it's all just a bunch of bad food.
And he would just much rather have healthier food that isn't like contaminated by this, by the sugar, you know?
And he uses that term several, several times, you know?
Um, so, um, not exactly, not exactly a, a, a, uh, you know, a straightforward, uh, conversation about like, uh, lack of dental care necessarily, you know?
Um, also he has like completely conspiratorial like things about like, he eats a ton of McDonald's.
He eats McDonald's spicy chicken sandwiches.
Um, and the reason he eats them every day.
Presumably the Jews were forcing him to do that, though.
He wanted to go to the vegan produce aisle, but they had him at gunpoint and they were forcing him into McDonald's.
Is that right?
This is actually in the diary, and I've got it in my screenshots.
We might put it in the show notes.
We'll see.
He actually complains at one point that he can't go to buy food because his parents won't buy.
They just buy ready-to-eat stuff because they're both at work all the time, because they're professional engineers, by the way, reading between the lines.
But they just buy a bunch of easy-to-fix, microwavable stuff instead of good, healthy, hearty food.
And then he can't go to the store himself.
To buy food because he's broke because he's spending all of his money preparing for this mass shooting.
So that's obviously out.
I would really like to buy more cabbage and potatoes and go and hunt for deer or something, but I can't find a deer in the places I'm allowed to shoot.
Oh my god.
but he eats big donald's every day because uh he works that he has worked at a scam by which uh if you apparently at this one at either the store or you know whatever if you buy a spicy chicken sandwich they give you a survey um and if you fill out the survey you get another coupon you
You get a coupon code good for one spicy chicken sandwich, which means you can then take that coupon code and then go buy another spicy chicken sandwich, which then gives you another coupon, another survey, which you can then buy another spicy chicken sandwich.
So he's literally buying, he's only eating like two spicy chicken sandwiches a day for free.
Off of this little scam that he has.
And he brags about it several times in the manifesto.
You could blame... And then he talks about how the FBI probably put something... I'm feeling Wookiee today.
They probably put something in that spicy chicken sandwich today.
He alternates between this complete paranoia and this kid-like innocence.
And again, that's part of what's fascinating about being there.
But, and again, I do want to get your response to all this because I am just kind of ranting about this, but if you did want to blame a medical condition on what made him do this, the toothache isn't the place to start.
He has tinnitus.
He has severe tinnitus because when he was a kid, when he went out shooting with his cousins, he wasn't wearing ear protection and he got tinnitus, severe tinnitus.
Over and over again, he talks about the headaches he gets from this tinnitus.
Over and over again, he talks about how He kind of spirals into this pain and into this kind of thing of talking about the Jews and talking about violent black people and everything while obviously in, at least through my reading of the text, while obviously in some kind of manic episode brought on by feeling terrible and having these terrible headaches brought on by tinnitus.
So, I mean, And I mean, again, I'm not trying to pick on Ben Collins here, but I feel like this is kind of like the nature that like people who skimmed this, you know, got, you know, it's very easy to pick on one or two things and sort of like build a narrative, like this is the thing that made this happen.
And it's never that simple, but in particular, like when you have like this wealth of material available to you, You really owe it, if you're going to comment on it, from a position of having some journalistic authority, you really need to take your time with this shit, and you really need to understand what it is you're actually looking at.
I feel like, again, not to pick on Ben Collins, the entire liberal media industry just completely fucking failed on this one.
There was just a complete lack of any kind of nuance and understanding.
Even more so, I feel like even Britton Tarrant got better coverage than this.
And I feel like people just found the thing that they wanted to find.
And some of it was malicious when Fox News goes like, well, he says he's a leftist.
So obviously, he says he's not a conservative.
So therefore, it wasn't our fault.
He wasn't a racist.
He was a Democrat.
Immediately, you know, the second it happens, every reactionary from Fox News to the fucking quartering on YouTube is pushing, you know, well, this line in the manifesto proves he's actually a leftist.
Yeah.
I mean, that's almost customary now, that bullshit that they pull.
They take advantage of the garbled and confused nature of fascist rhetoric to, well, it's just, you know, oh, the Nazis were socialists.
It's in the name.
That's all it is.
Just that shit.
When he says, I'm not a conservative, he does say that.
That's also rhetoric that's very common in far-right communities right now.
It's like, I'm not a conservative because conservatives don't actually conserve anything.
Friedrich Hayek said he wasn't a conservative.
Come on.
Yeah.
I mean, Nick Fuentes.
And that's just cherry picking.
And I'm not saying that Ben Collins is doing that.
I think that the liberal response is more looking for a simplified narrative.
And that's not what you see in these kinds of things.
It's not some simple answer that's going to just automatically fix this.
It's a whole lot of stuff that we should have been doing 40 years ago that's going to really solve this problem.
But there is no magic bullet, to coin a phrase, as it were, or silver bullet.
I don't know Ben Collins' politics, It feels like a sort of convergence of the inherent reductionist nature of a media that just has this inherent impulse to narrativize and reduce complex stories down into simple narratives, and almost like moral fables, and a convergence of that with kind of this
This malaise from left liberals across to the Jacobin left, like the social democratic left, in my opinion, It's very misguided.
I mean, people will disavow this when you attribute it to them, but it amounts a lot of the time to, well, if we can just get Medicare for All, then basically all these problems will disappear.
Because they think that this problem is essentially a problem of... They still think, or at least a lot of them do, to some extent, consciously or unconsciously, they still kind of believe the
uh economic anxiety narrative and the white working class narrative and they think well if we just if we just throw the crumbs to these people we just throw them the medicare for all and a couple of other things then they'll stop acting up but that is not and actually in fairness to Ben Collins if if i'm i think i'm right in saying if you read down the thread he actually he tries to make a point about yeah this kid has toothache um just
Parenthetically, the fact that this kid apparently thought that he, the son of two engineering graduates, he thought that he might get better dental care in prison, in the American prison system.
I think that tells you a lot about his worldview, which is shaped by his class position.
But putting that aside, Ben Collins kind of has this thing in the thread where he's talking about the kid having the toothache.
And it's like he's trying to say, well, the only place he could go to express the frustration and the need that he had was into these communities, like these chat rooms and so on and stuff like that.
Which isn't wrong in itself.
I mean, that's true.
These chat rooms and places where he got this stuff, because he didn't actually get it from Tucker.
Tucker is dreadful, but he's not the source of it for this person.
He gets it from exactly the kind of online stochastic terrorism that we've talked about repeatedly on this podcast.
He gets it from there.
Just to be clear, he doesn't seem to be a fan of any particular... I don't get the sense that he's a TRS fan, or an Andrew Anglin fan, or Nick Fuentes guy.
I think he's just a 4chan guy.
He was just an online meme kid.
He was just one of them.
And he was just an online meme kid.
I never see him quoting any of these more mainstream, Mike Enoch, the mainstream Nazi.
You get what I'm saying here.
He doesn't seem to come from a particular side of one of these ideological wings.
He's just seeping in the garbage dump that is these chants and these memes are going around.
In the last episode, I talked about how so much of his stuff felt like it was from 2014.
That's the stuff that gets shared in these shit-tier forums.
I was like, that's the stuff that gets shared in these shit tier forums, is just the stuff that all the smart people left behind five years ago.
And I'm not trying to praise Mike Enoch and the TRS crew, believe me.
These are vile, disgusting human beings.
But the fact that he's just kind of wandering around in this thing and he's just absorbing it, that's actually a really terrifying thought.
Because it means this is just the ordinary state of affairs for young men of his age who have certain kinds of interests.
It really is.
This is baseline.
Every teenage kid has seen this these days.
Yeah.
And that is, I think, that is a sign of a much deeper and wider problem than just this kind of simple or almost moralistic fable, left liberal or soc-dem narrative, which is like, well, he ended up getting this stuff online in 4chan and places like that because he had nowhere else to go to talk about the fact that he had toothache because we don't have Medicare for all.
I think that's a really dangerous reduction of the truth down to a simple formula.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And then Collins goes on to kind of talk about misinformation and disinformation, and he kind of turns into that narrative, and that, you know, the great replacement is disinformation, which, you know, Yeah, we're probably going to have to redo or we're going to have to do another like full episode on the Great Replacement and just kind of like reorient people to some of these things that we did back in 2019.
Just because I feel like I feel like we need to kind of like we did the Richard Spencer redux.
I think we're going to have to do some more of those at some point just to Because I think there are a lot of people kind of coming into it now and who are not like going back and listening to the earlier episodes.
And I feel like our conversation is kind of moving forward.
But I think that, you know, to a certain degree, we are going to have to, you know, kind of recover some topics and at least kind of like, you know, recalibrate some of the conversation around this stuff.
Yeah, because we've looped back to the start of the fucking cycle, haven't we?
That's what it feels like.
I don't know about you, but that's how I feel.
I've been saying for a year and a half now, like, it feels like, you know, everything feels like, you know, 2014, 2015 again.
And, you know, like, you know, given where we know that went, you know, just...
When the Democrats get absolutely hosed in the midterm elections, oh yeah.
Which they will.
They're definitely going to lose the House, almost certainly going to lose the Senate.
Oh, a leftist is saying the Democrats are going to lose.
Oh, you just want the Republicans to win because you just really like Trump.
Oh, fuck off.
No, they're almost certainly going to lose.
And that's just for a whole lot of reasons.
Because they've systematically pissed away every advantage that they managed to achieve in 2020.
As we said they would.
As they made it clear they were determined to do.
to do yeah as we said as we said at the time you know um one more thing i did want to cover then and this is uh this is sandman um Um, yeah, it turns out Neil Gaiman's Sandman is gonna be a Netflix series, so everybody go watch it.
No, um...
The diary is actually split up into two parts.
There's so much that's fascinating about the structure of this thing that we didn't get into.
I am definitely going to have to write something about this.
I wanted to just leave this behind, but I'm going to have to do some big project on this because there's just so much here.
Anyway, the diary is in two parts.
At some point, he loses the ability to edit one of the Google Docs.
It just gets too large.
It's something like 700 pages.
And so, he starts a second diary.
And in the second diary, which begins about two weeks before the massacre, which runs to something like 80 pages, there are three mentions of someone named Sandman.
Or Saint Sandman.
Saint Sandman said.
Sandman said.
And it's like quotes from this guy.
Now, the speculation is that Sandman is actually a retired FBI agent.
And let me just highlight that here from an article in the Buffalo News.
Authorities investigating if retired federal agent knew of Buffalo mass shooting plans in advance.
And then they were talking about there were a few people who got access to the diary and to the manifesto about 30 minutes before the attack, about six or seven people.
These were like-minded people who use this chat group to talk about their shared interest in racial hatred, replacement theory, and a hatred of anyone who is Jewish, a person of color, or not of European ancestry, said one of the two law enforcement officials with close knowledge of the investigation.
What is especially upsetting is that the six people received advance notice of the Buffalo shooting about 30 minutes before it happened.
The FBI has verified that none of these people called law enforcement to warn them about the shooting.
The FBI database shows no advance tips for anyone that the shooting was about to happen.
Agents from the FBI are in the process of tracking down and interviewing the six people, including the retired agent, in an attempt to determine if any of them should be charged as accomplices, the two sources with close knowledge of the probe told the Buffalo News.
This is a reference.
There is someone named Sandman who was quoted, and there is speculation that since we, at least according to law enforcement, and we know law enforcement never lies, that there was a retired federal agent involved, at least was aware of the attack 30 minutes ahead of time and was probably interacting with Jendron.
During at least these last two weeks.
Now, the fact that his name does not appear in the earlier logs, but does appear in the later ones might imply that there were some entries that were edited out that referred to Sandman.
That is certainly a possibility, but I have no way of determining that one way or the other.
But I do find it interesting that he is only in the second diary entry, the ones right before the actual attack, and not in the prior ones, which we know he went back and edited from time to time.
There is a person who went by the handle Sandman, who was active on the 4chanK board, this is the weapons board, who apparently was a 50 or 60-something retired law enforcement official, and who Did not let you know who posted a lot of antisemitic things, etc, etc, etc.
And was possibly known to gender that may be the person that they're referring to.
This is all highly, highly speculative.
And you should not take this, you should take this with the grain of salt or the grain of sand, as it were.
But the real story here, or at least in terms of the I don't speak German audiences, The second you say federal agent with connection to this, the entire far-right narrative is the FBI made him do it.
The FBI made him do it.
And suddenly, there is no connection between the violent fantasies that the mainstreamers on the Daily Shoah talk about, about what politically they would like to do to the Jewish people and to black people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There's no connection between that And the actions of Peyton Gendron and the people like him, because there was a federal agent involved.
Now, Let me just, you know, just for the record, during the global war on terror era, it was routine for federal agents to infiltrate mosques and to, you know, basically gin up people who were saying some nasty things about wanting to blow up people and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Gave them, you know, set them up, gave them fake bombs and then arrested them and then said, like, look at the heroic thing we did.
We saved, you know, so many people and then just enacted Absolutely horrifying civil rights abuses against Muslim populations in this country.
They didn't even have to do that.
They put groups of Muslims in prison for going to holiday resorts and taking footage of taking film, and they just decided that these people were casing the joint, you know, because they were planning to bomb it.
So, because they walked around filming their trip to Disneyland or wherever, so they could just be arrested.
It wasn't all, you know, they weren't just framing people.
They were just sort of arresting people that went to holiday resorts.
But to be clear, what the FBI, the plan was, we're going to set this person up and then make them not do the thing that we say they're doing, and then we get accolades for having foiled a terror plot.
Mm-hmm.
Not let it happen so that we can then claim we need more money.
Like, that's not the way this works.
That's just not the way any of this works, you know?
It's like the dubious police practice, you know, where they say, oh, so-and-so is asking about hitmen, and they fix the guy up with a fake hitman, and there's a camera in the car, and then it ends up on TV.
They don't actually organize a murder and then charge the guy with murder.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, no.
And Gendron, again, as I said, you know, there were every opportunity if there were feds actually following this guy who didn't, you know, who are not like in line with this ideological agenda.
You know, if they're like, they had every chance to catch this guy, like two weeks ahead of time, you know, all you had to do was jenny up a traffic stop, which, you Any cop worth his badge knows how to fake, you know, pull someone over for a traffic stop, you know, long enough to find a bunch of guns in his car.
You've got something hanging from your rearview mirror.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, just follow, I mean, look, you follow anybody, you know, for, you know, 20 minutes and you can find some pretext.
Oh, you, you, you know, one, there's again, another Supreme Court case that 5-4 covered.
There's a Supreme Court case in which the, you know, There was a couple of people in a known drug area who stopped at a stop sign for slightly too long, and this was suspicious behavior.
And therefore, this is our pretext for a stop, and then we get to count all the drugs we found as, you know, it's all perfectly legal search, you know.
A cop will find a reason, even assuming they don't lie, which cops lie fucking constantly, but like even assuming that they're even telling the truth about facts on the ground.
Exactly, exactly.
You know, Peyton Gendron had, I promise you, he committed some traffic violations on his drive to Buffalo that day.
It would have been very easy to pull him over in advance, if that was what they wanted to do.
And they didn't.
So, I think if the Sandman character is an FBI agent, and if he is, then this is someone that isn't a valid white nationalist, isn't a valid siege pillar, terror grammar, etc.
And wanted this to happen, and not someone who is doing the secret bidding of the FBI to entrap innocent white nationalists.
That's not what's happening here.
Yeah.
And it's in its shape.
It didn't happen, even though if it had happened, it would have been good, because they deserved it.
It should happen.
It didn't happen, but it should have done, and it was good, even though it didn't happen.
It's the conspiracy theory view that leads Gendron to say, well, the sugar Jew is making me fat or whatever.
No, there's a structural problem here, which is that capitalism loads all our food with sugar and salt because we humans are probably evolutionarily disposed to want to eat stuff like that, so even our Corn Flakes is full of fucking sugar and salt.
It's not the evil sugar Jew, you know, trying to lure you into McDonald's.
In exactly the same way, it's not the evil feds who are, as you say, tricking the innocent white nationalists into murdering people.
It's a structural problem, which is, you know, that there are white nationalists.
Indeed.
And capitalists, for that matter.
And sometimes the two are one and the same.
Yeah.
Kind of the same thing, yeah, exactly.
All right.
I think we have gone on long enough for this episode.
Again, there is so much more we could, we could go through, but you know, I'm, I'm feeling, I'm feeling done with, with this topic for a while.
I'm going to do some writing on this.
I might wait.
I don't think we're going to do another podcast.
We got other topics to cover.
But yeah, I just wanted to kind of get, get some of that subtlety out there.
And if you are a journalist listening to this and you, If you are curious about my thoughts on this topic and you want to do something to cover this in more detail, in more nuance, please, you know how to find me, so do so.
Yes, indeed.
Well, I want to reiterate, although we have had some laughs and so on in this episode, I want to reiterate that neither of us think that either of these terrible mass murders are in any way funny.
They are tragedies and, you know, it's a cliche, but it's true nonetheless.
Our hearts go out to the victims and their families.
No, absolutely.
None of the levity in this episode should be taken as meaning that we have anything less than total respect and sympathy.
And indeed, this episode is respectfully dedicated to the victims.
Of these two massacres.
Absolutely.
And I'm not, having said that, I'm not now going to puff my Patreon, so I'm just going to say thank you for listening, and tune in next time for another episode.
Do we have a planned topic for that, Daniel?
I think we have a planned topic.
I guess, you know, this is always a bad time to, like, hype something, but I did consult on a video about Elijah Schaffer by the YouTuber Hosier.
Um, and, uh, that turned out to be, you know, that is the Jose obviously made the video and we just kind of shared resources and chatted a bit about some of the perspective.
Um, but he took it in a, in his own complete direction, um, and, uh, made it something really, really interesting about it.
Um, and, uh, your voice is actually in the video.
And I am thanked for my help at the end, and we will put a link to that in the show notes, so you can definitely go check that out.
And we have tentatively scheduled an interview with Jose, and we're going to come on and just kind of talk about Elysian, about some of that larger ecosystem.
So definitely check that video out.
Even if I had not been involved in it, I would say it's very good.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it is very good, as indeed is a lot of Jose's content.
I've long been a subscriber of Jose's and a watcher of his.
It's good stuff.
Okay, so that's another episode down, 110, and we will be back, as I say, probably, with that interview.
Sooner than we were the last time.
This one got delayed a few times because of busyness and illness and just a complete lack of willingness to talk on this topic.
Just sheer, I-cannot-fucking-face-it-ness on my part, mostly, but also, I think, on Daniel's, both of us.
It wasn't even the not wanting to examine the material, because I can examine the material, and it's not like that's fine, but at least I'm used to it.
But then every time I sat down to think, I'm going to talk about this now, it was just nails on a chalkboard to me.
I literally felt like I wanted to vomit sitting and talking about this.
But a little bit of time has passed, and I found the structure, and that's what I needed.
So, Yeah, hopefully you enjoyed it, or, you know, got something out of it.
And we will be back sooner rather than later.
So thanks a lot for listening.
Thank you very much.
Goodbye, everybody.
Take care.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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