Orasami Burton’s Carceral Warfare Project exposes how U.S. prisons became counterinsurgency battlegrounds post-1973, targeting Black Panthers, Weather Underground, and Young Lords with fabricated trials like Panther 21 and surveillance tools like NISIS—modeled on military COINTELPRO. The Attica rebellion (1971), where inmates established a self-governing state, was crushed through torture, solitary confinement, and the McKay Commission’s whitewashed report, while Nixon compared it to decolonization. MKUltra experiments in prisons like Vacaville, involving LSD and psychological warfare, reveal the state’s globalized repression tactics, from PRISE Acts to Abu Ghraib-linked advisors, proving radical movements forced extreme state responses. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I knew you were going to think that I. Because what else would it be?
What else would it be?
Literally, it could be.
My penis itches again?
Your what?
What do you, what?
No, don't try to trick me.
I hate when you're talking about it.
What did you just say?
My penis itches again?
But I did it in an upspeak to denote a question.
My penis itches again.
That's not it all where I'm at.
What did you think itched?
What did you think itched?
Your scalp.
My scalp itched.
Yeah, right, my scalp itched.
Yeah, right, my scalp.
This is, ladies and gentlemen, we are gas meat light.
Thy name is Liz.
No way.
You are the master very clearly by what was just demonstrated here.
What was just demonstrated here?
haven't started speaking yet it's crazy how much better men are at gaslighting the women that
Okay, first of all, nobody, I'm looking up gaslight on Google right now and saying no results because it's not a word.
It seems to have just been something completely invented by you.
But then again, aren't we all just inventions in your mind?
That's the thing.
If you're going to gaslight someone, you got to.
In a way, we all are inventions in each other's minds.
That's true.
Sometimes I think that the entire universe is virtual reality.
And then sometimes the simulation breaks, right?
For instance, I was watching TV the other day, shirtless, and there's a bunch of the Republican guys up there talking, like a debate sort of thing.
Wait, were you watching the debate?
No, no, no.
They were talking against each other.
It was a versus.
I love that you act like you have no idea what's going on at any point when a TV screen is.
I was watching a versus.
You were just sitting watching TV.
It was a verbal combat between many people who were Republicans.
Okay.
And in the middle of this, what do I see?
Literally Vivic from the video game Whirlwind.
And I am, I'm just like, all right, okay, maybe turn it back on and turn it off and turn it back on again.
This simulation is glitching.
And, you know, I write to his campaign.
I donate.
I volunteer.
And I try to get closer to him to be like, you should go back in the computer from 15 years ago.
And I finally get up to the guy.
Massive dude, by the way, 5'9, 5'8, fucking towering over me.
And I look up at him.
But his hair is like four inches of that.
Okay, you're literally thinking of just a different Indian guy.
You're thinking of a nice guy.
I'm not a hair, too.
I'm not thinking of that guy.
I'm not thinking of the McKinsey guy.
I'm thinking of the guy who's running for president.
Yeah, Vivic, has he had big hair?
He did a pickleball video the other day.
He does have forehead, too, is quite fun.
He looks stretched.
You know what I'm saying?
Not to body shape.
Yeah, Stretch Armstrong.
Stretch Armstrong.
Yeah, it's like when you a photo in Kenva.
Yeah.
And so I go up to him and I look straight up into his nostrils and I say, what's up, dude?
Are you real?
And he calls, he calls the police.
A cool thing to ask people is, are you real?
Just because that lady on the airplane did it, which I'm sick of that.
That was, to me, the lady on the airplane, not to talk about the online too much.
The lady on the airplane.
That's what happened like three months ago.
To me, that's the redhead countryman.
That's all the same of a thing to me.
The lady?
The lady on the airplane, you're not real.
You're not real.
Oh, yeah.
She's just the redhead countryman.
I understand where you're going.
That's all the same to me.
Not my.
Get it out of here.
Not my business.
What were those boys?
The Island Boys.
No, but that's another one.
Okay.
The little Trump boys?
What were their name?
What was the school name we were with?
His sons?
No.
Baron?
Oh, God.
Coving Zen?
Covington teams.
They're Covington teens.
They're Covington teens.
Yeah, they're Covington to me.
They're like, they're just.
It's Kivan Covington.
Because my thing is, like, maybe she's not real.
Like, maybe none of these are real.
And it's just like a, it's a bad hallucination.
It's like there's shadow people.
Right.
The shadow people come out when just the world becomes the TV.
I told you about my idea.
I know we have a serious interview, but did I tell you about my idea?
We also haven't said hello to anyone, and I'm not going to.
I'm not going to either.
They can get it when they get it.
Did I ever tell you about my idea for a movie that I came up with in rehab?
I don't know, hit me.
But to add about 20 more minutes in this episode.
So, okay.
You know how there's all these stoner comedies, right?
Seth Rogan.
Seth Rogan.
Like the ones from like five years, six years ago?
What's this called?
Washed.
I'm going to call it smoked out.
What's called, it's the movie where he's like him and Jane Pineapple Express.
Not yeah, not the clear name you were thinking of.
Pineapple Express.
Why do I want to call it smoked up or smoked out?
Half-baked.
But that's like half-baked is, but you know, of the genre, of the stoner comedy, right?
Because weed used to be the number one drug in America.
It's still, it's not?
It probably is, but no.
You know what's kind of rising?
SSRIs.
No, but let me tell you, there's a lot of comedies out there that I would characterize as SSRI comedies.
Methamphetamine.
There's not been a lot of meth comedies.
So my idea is a guy starts in the future.
It starts in the future.
This is, I've done meth frequently.
So this is from not anymore.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we have a guy in the future, right?
As a meth user.
He's a meth add.
And meth is still the same.
They aced that formula.
They didn't have to invent new ones.
He's fucking tweaking.
His old lady, she's addicted to cyberfentanol.
And so she's all like.
What's cyberfentanol?
It's like a fentanyl, but it's you get it in like a chit and you insert it into a thing in your neck.
Okay.
But it works essentially the same.
And so he's like, you know, he's always ready.
He's, you know, you know, wordy.
He's horny.
And he realizes, now that I'm thinking of this, this is probably not the right episode to tell this story on.
I'll just tell the story a different episode.
Wait, you can't do that.
This is like a serious subject matter.
And I feel like that this would.
I'll tell the story next episode.
My name is Brace.
Wait, what?
It's just, it would be just too much.
It would take up too much time.
I'm Brace.
It involves a leprechaun and a lot of time traveling stuff.
But now you got me.
I know, I got you, but I also hopefully got the audience, which wasn't what I did.
I'm Liz.
We're joined by producer Young Chomsky.
This is Truan on Hello.
Hello.
Here's my thing, though.
I do think the idea of like a meth comedy is very funny.
It's really good.
Not as something you want to watch, but like the idea of it as a thing is very funny.
I came up with it in rehab.
Yeah.
Because I just, I had nothing to do but sit and it's fucked a meth.
Yeah.
You know?
I wonder who could do that.
Who could pull that off?
Oh, I'm sure we could just, I could find the skinniest motherfucker.
No, no, but I feel like it takes a certain, you know, a clown of a high aptitude.
High aptitude.
I'm going to clown off a meth, like, you know.
What's his name?
The fucking Corey Feldman?
No, dude.
You don't think Feldman can do it?
What?
No, that's just sad.
I have access to it.
I have access to food.
No, you need a like good.
No, I'm talking about like a good comedy actor who can like get the audience on his side.
Like the thing about stoner comedies is it's like, you're like, okay, these guys are kind of like lovable like losers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Meth.
Look, that's an uphill battle to sell.
Uphill battle.
Yeah, it's an uphill battle.
And the last sort of meth, let's say dark comedy was like, what, Breaking Band?
No, well, yeah, I never saw it.
And so, you know what I'm saying?
So you sort of, that went like too far.
But so you need a kind of, how do you make meth lovable?
I'll be honest with you.
I have about a 15-minute explanation of how I can.
Oh, we're going to do it next episode.
It involves, I got to tell you, it involves a leprechaun.
It is a central character in this.
But a real leprechaun or, like, someone who thinks...
That's part of the, it's a psychological comedy movie.
What's the one with Anna Ferris?
It's not meth.
It's a stoner comedy, obviously.
I don't know who that is.
Stop.
What's Smiley Face?
Have you seen that?
No.
What?
Anya DeArmas?
Anya Ferris?
Neither of you have seen Smiley Face?
I've never heard of that.
I don't know who the actress or the actor.
Oh my God, are you fucking kidding me?
This is a Smiley Face movie.
Is it Smile, the scary movie about Smiling that came out last night?
No, dude, this is a fucking classic.
John Krasinski?
Speaking of this, yeah, yeah.
No, go back to school.
I'm looking at it.
Hi, how are you?
Is what it says.
And Anna Ferris is hugging a 2007 American German stoner comedy.
Yeah, it's Greg Iraqi.
It's a fucking classic.
Go back to school, watch Smiley Face, and then get back to me.
Hello, everyone.
Hello.
We have a hell of an episode.
We have a really good episode.
Yeah.
Skip 45 minutes ahead after I finish telling this leprechaun story to hear it.
No, just kidding.
No, we have a episode.
We are interviewing Orasami Burton about his work on, I guess.
By the way, real quick, Orasami, if you're listening, which you probably are, maybe if you're that kind of person, which is also cool if you are.
I would.
I'm so sorry for the intro to this.
For the, yeah, Liz was rude.
No, the intro that we just did.
We didn't just do an intro.
What are you talking about?
You just started recording the episode.
I hate you so much.
I hate yourself.
Sorry, I literally just walked in the door.
Liz, it's 2 p.m.
Okay.
Yeah, Liz apologizes, but she's in a room by herself, no microphone connected, and she's been in here for the past 57 years, which is how long she's been alive mental state, similar to a certain member of the Kennedy family who had a trepidation.
But me, I'm a real, I'm an elf.
What are we talking about?
What are you talking about?
It's gaslighting.
No, we have a really great interview.
Actually, this does line up because I'm going to say this.
You know where we could call gaslighting is a counterinsurgency tactic, which is exactly how it's being deployed against me.
Maybe you shouldn't be such an insurgent on our group project that we're doing for school.
Liz, it's middle school.
Wake up.
Liz, wake up.
We are interviewing Orasami Burton, author of the upcoming book, Tip of the Spear, on his work about counterinsurgency techniques.
Yes.
MK Ultra.
Yes.
The American prison system.
Yes.
Foreign prison systems.
Yes.
The Attica Revolt.
George Jackson.
And a whole bunch of other shit.
Let's just, you know what?
Why would you hear me say that?
You just need to interview.
It's really great.
Unlike what you all just listened to.
Ladies and gentlemen, prisoners, prison guards, insurgents and counterinsurgents alike, welcome to the main event.
I don't know why I always call it the main event.
I feel like that's like a holdover for my days in combat sports.
No, yeah, that's an MC for a boxing ring.
Exactly.
But you know what?
They've always, I've always said that there's only one thing you can compare podcasts to, and that is professional boxing.
Welcome to the show.
We have with us here today Orasam the Burden, assistant professor at American University and author of the upcoming tip of the spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt coming out in October.
Although I don't have a specific date and I'm going to prod him for that, although that does not appear to be on their fucking University of California press website.
What day?
Halloween.
Halloween.
Is it really?
You're joking.
It's coming out on the scariest day of the year.
That's it, October 31st.
That's nice.
But it is coming out then, and we are fucking stoked to have you.
Thank you for coming on.
Oh, it's a pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We have, we were just talking before we started recording about how we have done a lot of episodes in the past talking about policing technologies and situating the kind of emergence and development of policing technologies in a kind of history of counterinsurgency tactics beginning in like the late 50s and 60s into the 70s.
We've had episodes on COINTELPRO.
We've done episodes on MKUltra, but we've never really done an episode or talked to anyone specifically about the kind of technology of prisons and how the development of prisons are kind of situated within this history and particularly in a history of counterinsurgency within the U.S.
But that's pretty much what your work is about.
So it's good to have you here.
You call this the Carceral Warfare Project.
Can you explain to our listeners exactly what you mean by that?
Sure.
Many of your listeners may have seen some version of the graphs which show the exponential growth of the prison population in the U.S. beginning in the late 60s, but really taking off in 1973, after which there's consecutive growth each year up until 2014, leading to what many call mass incarceration.
Exponential Growth of Carceral Warfare00:15:15
And there are various explanations for this, right?
The conservative explanation is that it's a response to rising crime.
That's not true.
There are other kinds of conservative explanations that sort of frame it as a natural response to demographic and population pressures.
Then there are sort of left liberal explanations, the war on drugs, the war on crime, which are not wrong.
There are explanations around the prison as a solution to the sort of endemic crises of capitalism that prisons had to expand in order to absorb populations for whom there was less and less work for them to do in a neoliberal economy.
And so my work doesn't attempt to sort of dispel these explanations, but it adds another layer that often gets left out, which is the extent to which prisons were a response to radical and revolutionary social movements in the United States, but that were inspired by and materially linked to global third world struggles.
And so my work really focuses on a constellation of organizations, the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the Young Lords Party, the Weather Underground, and other lesser known sort of radical Marxist third world political formations.
And, you know, if we think about the history of the mid to late 60s and early 70s, it was a time of intense instability.
Rebellions, riots, insurrections that were becoming increasingly politicized and that were becoming increasingly organized.
And so you see sort of state actors in the sort of power structure, the hierarchy, police agencies, government start to narrate these movements using the language of insurgency.
They start to look upon these movements as insurgencies.
But not only that, the people who were engaged in these struggles were also thinking about them in that way, right?
And so part of the solution to this problem of intensifying radicalism and rebellion was to incarcerate the movement, to incarcerate the struggle, to incorporate these people, to take them out of circulation and to confine them into prisons in order to preserve the stability of the sort of social order in a moment of intense political and economic transformation.
So I'm still talking about the early 60s to the 1970s.
And so you see the rise of political imprisonments.
So you mentioned that you did an episode on COINTELPRO and the focus of that was Chicago.
So you had the big Chicago 7 trial, right?
Happening at around the same time was the trial of the Panther 21, which was a constant, it was the sort of 21 members of the leadership, some of the key organizers and intellectuals of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, were taken out of circulation and held in jail for almost two years on trumped up charges.
And it was really a political strategy orchestrated by the FBI and the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation, the NYPD's political red squad, to take these political leaders out of circulation in order to pacify the broader population.
So this is the first step of what I'm calling the carceral warfare project, the use of prisons as a method of counterinsurgency, as a method of taking political radicals and revolutionaries and people who were potentially radical and revolutionary, right?
So the lumpen proletariat, people who could be easily radicalized because of the conditions of their existence, because of their biographies of sort of being squeezed by capitalism and racism.
And so therefore they would be conducive to radicalization.
That's the first step.
But my book shows that this strategy essentially backfired.
Because if we think about the prison as a solution to the urban rebellions of the 1960s, which in part they were, that's how they were being deployed, what you see, especially starting in 1968, is an uptick in prison rebellions.
And the prison rebellions become increasingly politicized and organized in very intense ways, very sophisticated ways.
And so, you know, the sort of national security apparatus thought that they could just incarcerate these populations and sort of hold them in prisons as reservoirs.
But what they learned is that the technologies of incarceration were not up to the task of dealing with the level of organization that these people were beginning to develop.
And so prisons themselves had to reform and evolve and incorporate new technologies of counterinsurgency, similar to what police had done, you know, in preceding decades.
And so the broader argument of the book is prisons of today in the U.S. and elsewhere are the way they are in part because they're institutionalized forms of counterinsurgency or counter-revolutionary warfare.
So something that comes to mind, you know, when you talk about, especially, you know, the trial of the Panther 21 or really all, I mean, it's so apparent, even a cursory knowledge of, you know, the history of the Black Panther Party or really in broader, a lot of the history of sort of the radical insurgent left, I guess you could say, in the 1960s through 1970s.
You see so many arrests over bogus charges of leaders and they're sort of sequestered away for a while in the hopes that the movement will succumb to whatever other COINTELPRO strategies are being devised.
And you can see that this is so similar to another, I guess, instance of a state repressing a large amount of revolutionaries, which is Russia in the early 20th century, where they would have the system of internal exile, where they would send out people who were highly politicized into these kind of prison-like conditions or sometimes what I guess you might call a precursor to a sort of strategic Hamlet system,
but far away from everybody else in the hopes that they would kind of just disappear.
But what actually happened is that they would, well, they'd have a lot of time to write and think, but they would have a lot of time to actually strengthen and broaden, I guess, their revolutionary desires and then would return or would be, you know, or would escape and be able to actually strengthen the relationship with the masses because of what they learned there.
And so you see this in the 1960s and 70s, this incredibly targeted state repression of revolutionary leaders with the purposes of whatever, maybe imprisoning for life, maybe killing them, but just getting them out of the milieu that they were in and then putting them somewhere where they hopefully couldn't fuck with any.
And a good place for that is usually it's prison.
You put my ass in prison.
I guarantee, I'm sorry, you're never hearing from me again.
I'm just going to be, I'm going to be in there.
Yeah, I'm going to file that one away.
I'm just probably going to work on myself and maybe get, you know, go to the day of a gym there.
Maybe they let me use it.
Probably not.
But, you know, as you were saying, this backfires.
And prisons become, much like the inner cities of Chicago or Oakland or New York, become a battleground for both the forces of government reaction or reaction in the government and for these sort of street-level revolutionaries are transported from their previous environment of whatever they're from to these prisons.
And as you said, it backfires pretty tremendously.
You used the phrase battleground, which I think is appropriate, especially given the overarching analytic of warfare that I'm employing.
But also, many of the sort of intellectuals of the movement, organic intellectuals of the movement, began to call prisons universities because these were, and you said sort of in jest that, you know, sort of like political prisoners in the Soviet Union did a lot of studying, but of course that's true.
And it was also true in the United States.
And so, yes, they started to call the prisons the universities of revolutionaries.
And part of the theory was that prisons and prison existence is an intensification of the power relationships that exist in the outside world.
And so it's a distillation of the various kinds of dominance and repression.
And so pedagogically, these intellectuals actually found it easier to politicize and radicalize the sort of lumpin' class in prison because they were being squeezed by an unambiguously sort of carceral regime.
And so, and because the resources and the educational resources were so limited, it was really up to them to develop their own political theories.
They had sophisticated methods of smuggling material.
They created their own newspapers, which they sort of rewrote by hand and distributed.
They had secret codes for communicating.
Some of them, you know, learned African languages such as Swahili so that they could talk to each other without the guards knowing what they were saying.
So a very kind of robust and sophisticated revolutionary culture developed within this context.
I want to go back to something you said earlier, which is that kind of understanding the prison as this kind of dynamic technology, as a kind of like plastic or like pliable counterinsurgent strategy is supported not just by the kind of lens that you're looking at this through this, but by how people within the state talked about the development of prisons itself.
And that includes, you know, members of Congress, that includes like, I think, security state personnel, like through the 60s and the 70s, the way in which kind of internally the state would talk about prisons also changed, right?
Absolutely, absolutely.
You know, there's one figure who I talk about in the book.
His name is Robert R. J. Galati.
I'm still trying to find more information about this guy, but he was in the NYPD for over two decades.
He rose to a very high level and became sort of head of a political police squad that I actually hadn't heard of.
I'm not sure if it's in BOSS or if it's something else.
But later he gets hired by the governor, Nelson Rockefeller, to establish a new agency in New York State called the New York State Identification and Intelligence System.
The NEW YORK State Identification AND Intelligence System, or NISIS, at the time was the largest social science database ever created on earth, at least that's what according to them.
It was situated in a new department and basically had the um.
Its purview was to oversee all of the sort of intelligence and statistical information having to do with prisons, having to do with parole, probation courts, the whole sort of carceral system became computerized.
And prior to that, it was all by paper files.
So this was sort of an ex and this is right at the same time when like airlines are starting to use computers to automate the purchasing of tickets.
And so, you know, the carceral system, especially in New York, was really at the cutting edge of the implementation of these different technologies.
Now that same technology, NISIS, had been used a few years earlier to help facilitate the application of counterinsurgency in Thailand.
That was how they kept track of insurgents and kept track of sort of geographic coordinates.
And it was sponsored by the Systems Development Corporation, which was a offshoot of the RAND Corporation, which used to be part of the federal government, but then broke out and became a separate think tank and is essentially one of the largest and most storied counterinsurgency think tanks in the world.
And so, again, in very material ways, the prison, and I think it's important that we think about the prison broadly.
When I say the prison, I'm not actually talking about just the brick and mortar buildings where people are disappeared.
I'm talking about this broader structure of carceral domination, where certain categories of people can be taken out of circulation and neutralized.
People might know that term neutralization from maybe from the FBI.
It's used in COINTELPRO documents, but it's a counterinsurgency term that means convert, capture, or kill.
And so neutralize means all of those things.
And so the prison is a technology of neutralization that beginning in this moment, the pivot between the 60s and 70s, increasingly incorporates various kinds of like biomedical technology, computerized technology, sort of strategies and tactics of war.
And exactly what you're saying is correct.
The best way to think about it is as a dynamic strategy and technology that's constantly changing.
Neutralization Techniques00:15:03
I mean, you see, you mentioned right there, right, that some of these literal technologies were used in counterinsurgencies in South Asia.
And, you know, I think that's kind of a good point to go off of there is because I think the way that a lot of people on the left saw this, especially on the left that was like, you know, towards like the Black Panther Party and these sort of like internal nations in the U.S., was that they were part of a global struggle of the third world against Western or American capitalism.
And, you know, I think, again, to harken back to one of the earlier points we were making, is that it seems like both they believe this and the jailers believe this, right?
And so it's like you have these two groups who are actually the ones who are fighting this war, right?
Like you have the people who are in charge of the prisons, in charge of the FBI, who are actually pulling the triggers on the government side.
And then you have the people who are in prison, who are in the streets, who are underground, who are fighting against that, sort of fighting this hidden war that the public sees parts of, right?
Like they'll see maybe a prison riot or they'll see a shootout at a courthouse or they'll see like sort of parts of it.
But if you actually look at the history of it holistically, you see that this is one long, continuous war.
And the battlegrounds change a little bit.
And certain forces win in one sector and then others in the other.
But they truly both sides sort of were almost united in this kind of weird way of actually seeing how it was, which was another front in sort of this global civil war that was happening throughout the, well, I guess mid-period of the, yeah, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as well.
But I mean, that is something that's really fascinating to me because so much of what happened in America during this time mirrors what was happening also in the Phoenix project in Vietnam.
You know, neutralization, like you're talking about, you know, kill, capture, you know, convert, neutralize through any way.
And that did happen.
There were a lot of converts.
There were a lot of people killed.
There were a lot of people captured.
You know, one thing that you talk about here is just the sort of intense amount of energy that the government was directing at.
They saw that this was a problem for them.
And they were right to an extent.
You know, like they, they, they, oftentimes the government sort of will maybe overreact on some things and they don't repress repress some things that maybe weren't actually happening.
But in this case, there really was a big upswing of revolutionaries taking hold of the prisons.
And so can you tell me some more about some of these other programs that they developed?
I mean, PRIS Acts.
Yeah, for sure.
Let me just say one thing.
You made this really important point, which is like it wasn't just sort of black and third world revolutionaries who understood themselves as an oppressed nation, right?
So one of the shifts between the sort of black power movement and civil rights is an analytical shift.
The demand around civil rights is complete for black people to have complete inclusion into the sort of American project.
Whereas Black Power employed a revolutionary nationalist analysis in which they understood black and other sort of minoritized populations as oppressed nations within the United States.
And so the goal was not for inclusion into the United States, but was for some form of decolonization, right?
And what you said is really important, that they weren't the only ones who were thinking about things in this way.
And so one example of this is one of the Nixon recordings.
You know, Nixon famously recorded all of his meetings, right?
Never do that.
If you're listening to this, never record it, especially if you're just like drunk talking about Jewish people or whatever.
Don't do that.
It's going to get out there.
So Nixon was a key figure in the Attica prison rebellion of 1971, in which nearly 1,300 incarcerated, mostly black, but also Latino and white prisoners seized Attica prison and engaged in what I would call revolutionary action for four days.
And that rebellion was brutally crushed when Nelson Rockefeller called in the New York state troopers to commit a mass slaughter.
And Nixon encouraged Rockefeller to do that.
And so he has this, Nixon has this recording, which I think was recorded on the day of the massacre, September 13th, 1971.
And I believe he was talking, I might be wrong.
He does have several meetings, but I believe he was talking to Bob Dole, who at that point was the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a high-level advisor.
And so in this conversation, Nixon's talking about, he's pressuring Dole to answer the question of, you know, are there any true democracies in Africa?
They're just having a conversation about any of the newly independent nations of Africa, are any of them really democracies?
And of course, the answer for them is no, because they're racist and black people aren't capable of democracy.
But they're having this conversation.
And then he compares the lack of democracy in the decolonizing third world.
And he says, just like what happened in that prison over there.
And at that moment, the only thing he could be talking about is Attica.
And see, you know, part of what you need to understand is that during the four days where they seized the prison, they created a kind of their own form of government.
And the government was really concerned about this.
They were interested in it and concerned about it.
And so it's just fascinating that Nixon, the president of the United States, was also interested and concerned in the form of government that had been established in this prison rebellion and connected it to nations that were receiving, that had fought and won their independence throughout the Third World.
So that's just a kind of an aside.
Just to pause real quick on Attica, I think Attica's very, I mean, Attica is very interesting for a lot of reasons, but also because of what comes after Attica, which is when the kind of dominant, I guess I would say, I don't know, like mainstream liberal narrative of like what's wrong with prisons kind of comes out of that where they say, oh, it's just, you know, kind of the like kettle boiling over sort of theory, like social theory.
And a lot of the sort of more radical history that you're illuminating gets kind of obfuscated, right?
And a lot of the stuff that especially the government is saying or how, or, you know, I mean, Rockefeller, you could spend two hours talking about that crazy guy.
And we should talk about him.
Freak.
You know, a lot of his intentions and the sort of technologies that people were responding to or coordinating against or responding against, all of that sort of gets erased a little bit in favor of this sort of like, I don't know, like liberal social theory that, oh, prisons just, you know, it's just a hotbed.
You know, you get the conditions are too bad, which of course they are.
And people are just responding to and going a little crazy.
And we need to kind of alleviate some of that pain and we can just make them better, right?
And that, and that becomes really dominant.
I mean, I know that the like Attica Commission report, I can't remember the name of it, but it was like a bestseller.
It was very, very popular.
Because at this time, you know, all of those sort of, for some reason, all of these like government social reports became bestsellers.
Yeah, early 70s was big.
Absolutely.
Yep.
The Kerner Commission.
Yeah.
So the Attica Commission report produced by lawyers and law students at NYU, yeah, was sold as a mass market paperback to a broad audience.
And they interviewed hundreds of people.
And, you know, I mean, it really is the sort of dominant archival resource for Attica.
Interestingly enough, you know, after the rebellion, the people who were identified as the leaders of the rebellion and people who were identified as revolutionaries, everyone was tortured afterwards.
People who weren't killed were tortured.
Some people were tortured and killed.
But the people who are identified as leaders and revolutionaries were marked with an X on their back and they were isolated into Attica's solitary confinement unit, which is called HBZ.
And the McKay Commission never interviewed those people.
And so that's really significant because the people who would have been the sort of key organizers, the people who would have been most able to articulate the political dynamics of what was unfolding were excised from that narrative.
And that, I think, was the beginning of this sort of liberalization of the Attica narrative, which has persisted for the past, you know, for the subsequent decades.
And that's really the narrative that I'm attempting to destabilize and explode and demonstrate the extent to which there was an actual revolutionary war unfolding in and through prisons.
And in fact, the liberal narrative that you're talking about is part of the strategy of counterinsurgency to sort of erase that history from our collective memory and to convince us that prison struggles were always only about, you know, the need for more, you know, for better food, for better clothing, for improvements to conditions, which of course are very important.
But that's not all that the people at the front of that movement wanted.
They had revolutionary desires, aspirations, they had revolutionary theory, and they were engaged in communication with people who also were involved in revolutionary struggle, you know, outside of the prison, outside of the state that they were in, and outside of the country.
Yeah, you mentioned that the documents from Attica were being read by South Vietnamese prisoners or by Vietnamese prisoners in the South Vietnam government's prison, which I did not know.
That's extraordinary.
Yeah, so there's this really interesting figure.
You mentioned the Phoenix program.
There's this really interesting figure named Donald Bordenkircher, who came up in the ranks as a prison guard in San Quentin.
San Quentin is where Eldridge Cleaver had been incarcerated and where George Jackson had been incarcerated.
George Jackson, for your listeners who might not know, is maybe the key theorist of the prison as revolutionary war.
He wrote two books, Solid Dad Brother and Blood in My Eye is really a very powerful work of revolutionary theory that folks should read if they're interested in it.
Bordenkircher came up through California.
He rose up in the ranks and then in 1967 he was tapped by the Office of Public Safety, which was essentially a cover for the CIA to be a technical advisor for the directorate of the South Vietnamese prison system.
And so from 1967 to 1971, he was in South Vietnam helping to reform and refurbish the prison system to more effectively work as an instrument for neutralizing the so-called Viet Cong and political prisoners and potential political prisoners.
And in that context, he's talking explicitly not about sort of rehabilitation, which often is a kind of euphemism for other forms of psychological warfare.
He talks very clearly about the need to engage in psyops, but the psyops that he engages in are, it's the same methods that he used in U.S. prisons, right?
And this is the same person who was responsible for a scandal that broke, I think it was in 1970 or maybe 1971, the so-called tiger cages of Vietnam, where it was revealed that Vietnamese men, women, and children who were incarcerated in the prison system there were, you know, being, you know, tortured brutally,
chained naked in underground pits and starved and just horrible.
So this is Bordenkircher who did this.
So he's in Vietnam.
He goes from San Quentin to Vietnam.
He leaves Vietnam in 1971.
He comes back to Washington, D.C. and works for a federal agency there.
And his role there is not entirely clear.
I write in one of my articles about his relationship to Prize X, which I know you want to talk about, Brace.
But after, so then he becomes a warden in West Virginia, known for his brutality and violence.
He becomes a warden in Kentucky, known for his brutality and violence.
But then much later, he goes overseas again, this time to Iraq, where he becomes placed in charge of Abu Ghraib after the sexual torture scandal breaks.
He's the one who's brought in to sort of manage the fallout from that.
So we see this, you know, circulation of these sort of counterinsurgency actors across different sites of conflict and different eras of conflict even.
I mean, that's extraordinary because that, I mean, I don't think I've had a clear example on this show of this thing that we talk about where these sort of these sort of practices are refined on the frontiers, brought back home, and then it seems like exported once again to the frontiers to be used against people.
Circulation Of Counterinsurgency Actors00:03:25
I mean, that is that guy, I mean, especially starting at San Quentin is fucking crazy because so much of the stuff we're talking about centers around San Quentin.
Yeah, for sure.
I think, yeah, and I think that there's this misconception that the flow of counterinsurgency expertise, people often say, you know, it's tested overseas and then it's brought home.
I think it's unidirectional.
Unidirectional?
No.
Or by unidirectional.
Let's say this.
It's dialectical.
Oh, there you go.
It is.
It is.
We got to talk about George Jackson for a second here, too, because like Attica, I think he is sort of one of the main figures of this general thing that we're talking about.
George Jackson, like you said, is a perfect example of the sort of politicized prisoner, of like the lumpin turned into like a revolutionary.
Because as far as I know, I mean, he was arrested not for a political crime, but for petty crime in the early 1960s and discovered politics while in prison and through that became a, I mean, you know, he wrote these two incredible books, but became a really the main theorist of the political movement within the American prison system.
Yep, yep.
And, you know, he became politicized by reading about the Vietnam War.
I mean, by reading about the Vietnam, you know, the anti-colonial movement in Vietnam, you know, and a famous quote that's often attributed to him is, you know, when the prison gates fly open, the real dragons will fly out, right?
Which is which is a sort of statement about the amount of political, radical, and revolutionary capacity that's incarcerated within these prisons, right?
And George Jackson did say that, but in fact, he appropriated that from Ho Chi Minh, who had said that years earlier about, you know, during his political imprisonment in Kongsong Island, the prison in Vietnam and Kongsong Island, which is where Bordenkircher later is deployed.
So yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, George Jackson represents the precise figure that this new carceral counterinsurgency technology is designed to forestall,
to prevent, you know, the prisons had to transform in order to prevent new George Jacksons from being formed because he wasn't political when he went in, but he was intensely political at the time that he was assassinated in prison in 1971, August 21st, 1971.
And so his brief life of incarceration represents precisely what I mean when I say that the prison sort of backfired as a strategy of counterinsurgency, because rather than countering insurgency, it was actually producing insurgency.
And that insurgency was then seeping out of the walls.
Prison as Counterinsurgency00:15:15
It wasn't just staying within the walls.
People were getting out and were developing new political formations.
And so this is exactly what prisons had to evolve in order to control.
And one of the ways that they did that was through a little-known program called the PRISE Acts program.
That's a FBI portmandu for prison activist surveillance program.
And essentially, it's the counterintelligence program, but inside the prison.
So it's just, it's, I mean, you know, that's the best way that I can say it.
There's far fewer documents about the PRISE Acts program than there are for COINTELPRO, primarily because, you know, PRISE Acts emerged at a time when there was intense public scrutiny on the FBI and other intelligence agencies.
So COINTELPRO had already been exposed.
And so I think they just, they changed their documentation strategy, right?
Because, you know, COINTELPRO is formally terminated in 1971, but there's an exception clause.
It says, you know, no more, this is obviously a paraphrase.
You know, the document says, you know, no more COINTELPRO operations will be authorized except in extreme circumstances when such activities are warranted.
And it's always extreme circumstances when activity is not available.
So we can't do it unless it's exceptional circumstances, which of course it always is when we need it to be.
Right, right.
And they called the people that they were targeting extremists.
So they were definitionally extreme.
So their very existence was an extreme circumstance that warranted these kinds of measures.
And so, you know, it becomes a challenge to sort of track and narrate these, you know, historically narrate this stuff because the archival record is very thin by design.
And so, you know, I do a lot of oral history and talking to other people about their experiences because the documents themselves tell us very little about how the program functioned on the ground.
Yeah, I mean, you know, to go back to the term neutralize, right?
You know, you're talking about kill, incarcerate, or convert.
And, you know, looking back at the history throughout the 1960s, 1970s to when things were, I guess you could say, hot on the streets here in America, the government was, I think, you kind of got to be forced to admit, fucking pretty good at it, right?
I mean, they killed most people, or they didn't kill most people, but they killed a lot of the leaders of whatever revolutionary movement.
They flooded communities with drugs and they fucking arrested a shit ton of people and they neutralized the ones that they couldn't.
And so, you know, in terms of how this technology was deployed throughout like the, you're talking about, you know, kind of coming out here in 1974, you know, ongoing.
I mean, it seems like the government really took this stuff seriously and did whatever they could.
So like, what are some examples of what they were doing inside of prisons or like what they were doing to people to prevent, I guess what the government would call to prevent radicalization, right?
Or to neutralize any sort of political instincts of incarcerated people?
Yeah.
So first, I mean, I think you're right.
I think in terms of the government being good at it, I also think we have a tendency to overestimate their intelligence and competence.
I think, you know, there's like tons of fuck-ups and like weird cat shit that they did and stuff that didn't work.
I mean, the thing that they have in their favor is like they're very rarely held accountable.
So they can make mistakes and then just keep trying and trying.
Like they don't end up usually in prison, you know, or yeah from making mistakes.
Yeah, exactly.
Unless someone breaks into your fucking office, no one's going to find out what you're doing anyways.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, until you outlive your usefulness and they just cut the ties.
So in terms of what they were doing, there's different, so part of what counterinsurgency is, is it's population warfare.
And so there's different strategies that are targeted for different kinds of populations.
And so, you know, the first thing that they did was to enhance their intelligence gathering capacity, because that's what you need in order to carry out an effective counterinsurgency.
You need to know who the real revolutionaries are, and who the true believers are, and who the sort of fellow travelers are, and who are the people that you can easily cleave from the movement and sway to your side.
And the techniques that are deployed against these different populations are specific, specifically tailored for the characteristics of that population.
And so PRISE Acts and, you know, MKUltra, which also shows up in my research, those are targeted towards people who can't be bargained with, people who are understood to be and who understand themselves to be actual revolutionaries.
But that's a minority of the population.
The vast majority of the population are understood to be people who can be sort of bribed or bought off or reasoned with.
And the methods that were used to neutralize them were actually seemingly benign and seemingly humanitarian.
So something like, you know, prison education programs, right?
The insinuation of universities into prisons in order to help give formal education to incarcerated people.
This actually came into being in the counterinsurgency context.
Because like I said earlier, revolutionaries were calling prisons the universities of revolution.
And so part of how they tried to destabilize that and to sort of stem the proliferation of revolutionary ideology was by allowing formally trained university educators to come in and to bring in more standard curriculum that was oriented towards encouraging incarcerated people to aspire to sort of buy
in.
into the American system and the American dream and that kind of thing.
So that's one example of maybe a counterintuitive method, a method that is less sort of spectacular and sensational, but one that was extremely effective because it could be effectively cloaked and narrated as a kind of liberal humanitarian reform.
And this again plays into what we were discussing earlier in terms of the sort of liberal narrative of Attica, right?
Because the story of what happens after Attica is this story of reform and how the prisons got better after Attica.
But if you place those reforms within the context of counterinsurgency, they take on an entirely different meaning and character.
You mentioned MKUltra, and we got to pause there because that's another program that obviously looms large alongside COINTELPRO, the Phoenix program, other ones in the history of kind of counterinsurgency tactics and the development of different strategies in the U.S.
And I mean, from my understanding is that you didn't mean to kind of become a kind of MKUltra guy.
Not that you are an MKUltra guy, if that is a guy.
That is definitely a guy.
But you're making a lot of money.
I think I might be that guy.
Yeah, I think we all are in our own way.
Because the problem is, is that you start looking into any of this kind of stuff and you inevitably end up there, right?
Because as much as people have tried to tamp down its significance, MKUltra does loom large here.
And it was a major program that had long-lasting effects in terms of the development of different counterinsurgency tactics that we still see utilized today.
So what is the kind of, where do we encounter MKUltra within the development of prison technologies in the U.S.?
You know, the thing that's hard about MKUltra, at least for me, is again, as you said, I didn't start out wanting to talk about MKUltra.
So it was a slow, gradual process of me sort of eventually just resigning myself to say, okay, like I actually, this is what I'm talking about, to like commit to this, right?
Because, you know, I've been working on this book, doing research on the book for about nine years.
It was a nine-year process.
And I would just get these little hints or these little things that were just weird.
And at first I would ignore them, you know.
You know, so one example is the fact that in 1966, you know, Nelson Rockefeller established a contract for psychologists and psychiatrists from the Allen Memorial Institute in Canada to come to New York to start to do psychiatric programs in New York.
So like that's just a thing that happened, okay?
So anyone who knows anything about MKUltra knows that, you know, the Allen Memorial Institute is home to MKUltra Sub-Project 68, Which the CIA,
in collaboration with the Canadian government and the Rockefeller Foundation, which actually helped establish the Allen Memorial Institute, hired a Scottish psychiatrist who was then based in New York.
His name was Ewan Cameron to carry out a wide array of mind manipulation experiments.
Essentially, he wanted to figure out if he could do what he called de-pattern people's minds to basically erase their minds.
Was that possible to erase the human mind?
And was it also possible to introduce new thoughts and ideas and impulses into human consciousness that were not originally there or that were maybe contrary to the will of the person who's being victimized by these experiments?
So Ewan Cameron is not, Ewan Cameron is not the one who came to New York, but doctors from that institute came to New York.
So like that was one big thing where I was like, hmm, that's weird.
But, you know, it's like for me, you know, because my work, I try to be very historically rigorous because I'm making such bold claims and because I'm contradicting already established narratives that I try to have a very high sort of evidentiary apparatus.
And so I had to reach a really high threshold of data and material in order to finally say, okay, MKUltra was happening in New York.
And it just sort of happened as a gradual accumulation of information until finally I just couldn't ignore it.
So that's sort of how I got into it.
And then you asked, you know, the role of MKUltra in prison and these counterinsurgency technologies.
Well, it's interesting.
A lot of this stuff is public knowledge, but people have just chosen to forget it or haven't, you know, if you put in the right search terms, a lot of the stuff will come up in the Washington Post or the New York Times or the LA Times, right?
So the sort of key MKUltra site for prisons that we know about is Vacaville Medical Institution in California.
Eldritch Cleaver spent time there.
Huey Newton spent time there.
If you Google Vacaville, the list of people who spent time there is pretty impressive, actually.
But the CIA admitted that it was an MKUltra site in 1978 once they were forced to, once the information came out.
And so basically they were just trying to figure out how to fuck with people, how to manipulate people.
Were there certain kinds of people who were more conducive to control?
Were there certain kinds of people who were more resistant to control?
And then sometimes it was just like, oh, we need to test this drug.
Let's just like give it to these prisoners to see what will happen.
And then, and then, you know, maybe the experiment is successful in air quotes.
Maybe it fails in air quotes, but either way, that's more information because the drugs can then be used for a wide variety of reasons.
So there was a whole host of different experiments.
And people were passing through these prisons that were engaged in MKUltra research elsewhere.
So not just in prisons, in mental institutions, in sort of like residential schools for children.
The CIA agents were experimenting on each other.
And the full scope will never be known because Richard Helms, the director of the CIA in 1973, destroyed as many of the MKUltra files as he could.
And so the only reason we know what we know is because there was a misfiled box that someone found in 1977, I think.
One of the things we've talked about on this show, too, in, I think it was in the game series, we talked about Lexington, which was the big sort of both hospital and drug prison, I guess you could call it, but like kind of a combination of the two.
Experiments For Torture's Sake00:07:14
And there were experiments that were ongoing there for years in which mostly black residents slash inmates, because they were both there, were given, I mean, you know, were made to stay up for several days on LSD or were given cocaine.
It was actually kind of insane because they just tested all kinds of drugs on people in ways that you were like, we don't really need to know the effects of like what it's like to stay up for five days on cocaine.
Like, I mean, first of all, I could tell you that.
But second of all, it's, I don't know how much like what medical research that's really giving.
But another way to look at it is instead, like really testing drugs upon inmates who can't do anything about it.
And in the case of Lectington, ironically, mostly who were in there either to get off of drugs or they were sent there because they were arrested for doing drugs, which will follow them around for the rest of their life.
And a lot of these were drug treatment programs.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, you mentioned With a lot of the McGill doctors coming into New York, that was part of a therapeutic community that they were fostering in upstate New York.
And that, you know, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, you start to see the emergence of a lot of those.
We also talked about this in the game series about Cinnanon being contracted by, I think it was the Nevada state government, I think in Arizona at one point or somewhere else in the southwest, to create these TCs within therapeutic communities within the prison system.
And you also, of course, have the case of the Black Cultural Association, which kind of is what gave rise to Donald DeFries in the SLA.
And you see these, and if I may digress for a little bit, which was also, by the way, the guy who was in charge of that worked for the U.S. government in Vietnam, Colston Westbrook, a real fucking creature.
But you can see all of these as not even necessarily being part of MKUltra, although obviously some were, but MKUltra parts, all the other parts that are sort of just like adjacent to it, being part of this general machinery of counterinsurgency, right?
Because something you mentioned earlier was the universities kind of being brought into prisons to replace what were thought of as revolutionary universities.
I think the BCA, the Black Cultural Association, which Colston Westbrook was in charge of, is a great example of that because that was really brought in by the prison officials.
And, you know, sort of all of these kind of black, you know, and Latino and white radicals sort of joining it and volunteering at it.
And then this SLA coming out of that and that being a group, which I think a lot of people at this point have realized that there was probably some connections to the government with that group.
And there's a great, I can't remember what newspaper it is.
I think it's a Michigan newspaper that has a really great contemporaneous sort of expose.
And I know Babe Brussel did a lot of stuff on that as well.
But you can see all of this and the MKUltra stuff, you know, as part and parcel of just the government just throwing all of these different tactics and techniques at imprisoned people to prevent any sort of radicalization, to prevent another Attica or to prevent another George Jackson.
So there's the political aspect, there's the counterinsurgency aspect, but I don't think counterinsurgency can explain all of the fuckery that happens in these places.
So I think some of what's going on is just torture for its own sake.
Yeah, experimentation for its own sake.
So you just need to cruelty, right?
Because it's like, you know, what are they still trying to figure out in 1973?
I mean, they had been doing it since the 50s.
It's like, is it every new, like, are they just trying every single dose of a specific drug?
You know what I mean?
It's like it kind of blows my mind because MK Ultra is formally, again, formally terminated in 1963 or 64, I'm sorry.
So I use the term MKUltra broadly, just like you were saying, Brace.
But yeah, I think, you know, because they were doing sexual experiments on people too, trying to figure out how to manipulate people's sexuality, you know, all kinds of stuff.
And so I don't, I think, so counterinsurgency is part of it, but also I think the CIA just recruits these really sort of grotesque, ghoulish figures and then sets them loose.
And they're empowered to just do whatever they want.
And so I think sometimes they're just doing it because they can.
And that part of it is even more terrifying to me than the counterinsurgency aspect of it.
Fuck.
I mean, that's.
Yeah, I think we should kind of wrap up here just because that's so brutal.
One thing I often say to kind of mitigate the overwhelming sort of brutality of it all is, in my view, I know I just said it wasn't all about counterinsurgency, but much of it is.
And one of the things that kept me going while doing this research is a sense that, you know, the extent that the state was willing to go to develop these technologies is in some ways an index of the strength of the movements that they were arrayed against.
Sure.
And that was one way for me to sort of maintain a sense of, you know, optimism of the will, as Gramsci would say.
And one thing that helped me to not sink into despair, it's like, wow, these movements were this dynamic and complex and strong that this constellation of state agencies had to do all of this to try to get it under control.
And so there's a way in which you can look at that as, you know, kind of in a twisted way, inspirational in terms of the capacity for movements to develop.
Well, I think that's a perfect place.
Before I can ask you any other questions that will just immediately make everyone depressed, I think that's kind of a perfect place to end it.
I just want to thank you again for joining us.
Fantastic.
I'm going to let you sell the book to the people right now.
You tell them what it is, where to get it, what it's about.
Well, I mean, if you want to get A hidden history of the revolutionary movements and insurgent movements of the 1970s and a hidden history of counterinsurgency, domestic warfare, MK Ultra, COINTEL PRO, COINTELPRO 2.0, the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army,
Angels in the Outfield00:02:11
and thinking about what happens when these two social forces collide, then you should pre-order Tip of the Spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, which comes out on UC Press, the University of California Press on October 31st, 2023.
And we'll have a link to it in the show notes so everyone can pre-order it.
Thank you again so much for joining us.
That was a fantastic interview, and we'll see you next time.
Oh, my pleasure.
Thank you. So the leprechaun.
Well, fuck, dude.
Is the leprechaun a hallucination?
Like a meth hallucination?
Well, that's kind of what you don't know.
Like, he's less ambiguous.
There are, so like, he's kind of like the positive thing out there.
He's kind of like an angel of death.
No, like a, no, no, angel of meth.
No, he's a real angel.
He's kind of like, what's that movie?
Is it angels in the outfield?
What's where that dude wear fucking, it's like the mad scientist from Back to the Future place.
Yeah, yeah, Angels in the Outfield.
Great movie.
He's kind of like an Angels in the Outfield, but for the tweaker that the movie's Bryce.
A little tinker bell.
It's about Bryce as the main character's name.
Okay, well, there's also kind of evil, the shadow people are kind of the enemies in it, but also a couple of 1970s Los Angeles beat cops, which you might be saying, oh, interesting.
1970s.
I thought this took place in the future.
Well, where did you see how that happened?
A little looper.
But unfortunately, literally, it would take too long to explain right now.
We're going to have to save this for Friday's episode.
Here's a thought.
If you can't make meth comedy work, because, again, too much of an uphill battle.
Has anyone attempted a ketamine one?
Sorry, that was a joke in ketamine.
It wasn't funny.
If You Can't Make Meth Comedy00:01:40
How could you?
I don't know.
I'm just trying to think of like, if you could take the stoner on comedy as a like little model and use it in the other in other drugs.
Party monsters about?
Because like Alcoholic One, I guess that's a classic.
Yeah, Legion of Las Vegas.
Fucking.
I was thinking about the like 80s, like, you know.
Yeah, I'm a drunk, like frat boy.
Yeah, Cocaine, also, there's some kind of like cocaine comedy.
American Psycho.
American Psycho.
Yeah, that sort of like genre of stuff.
Heroin comedy.
I feel like, honestly, heroin's really more of a literary form.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Because it's like, is Kubla Khan really that funny or is it serious?
Exactly.
Is being happy funny?
I don't know.
All right, let's wrap this up.
I'm Liz.
What?
Nothing.
I said my name.
I'm Brace.
I'll say it again, I guess.
And we're joined by producer Young Chomsky, who's this first episode today, replacing our last producer that we had.
You remember his name, right?
And the podcast is called, of course, you know, Chapo Trap House.