This line of research has turned up SO much. Have we got a series for you! This goes so many places. First, we look at John Stennis's pre-Senate life. He eventually white privileged himself into being a Mississippi prosecutor. In that role, he went after 3 black men for a murder they almost certainly didn't commit. The case was so bad it became a landmark Supreme Court case. Content warning: this episodes contains mention of horrendous racial violence. Feel free to email us at lydia@seriouspod.com or thomas@seriouspod.com! Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke, if that's still what this is called.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How are you doing?
I'm pretty good as the co-host of what I believe to be Where There's Woke, but I guess we'll find out what's going on.
It's been a while.
I don't know if anybody like eminent domain or podcast or anything.
Squatter's Right Star podcast, I'm not sure.
I've been in the closet the whole time, so just waiting.
I said we'd talk about that later.
Anyway, how's everybody doing?
Yeah, it's been a minute.
Where do I even begin?
We're several different genres of podcast now.
Let's recap how we got here, shall we?
Let's do it.
I did get a note that someone had a hard time remembering or following, like, what was happening last episode, and it's like, oh man, if we end up recapping everything every single time, we're never gonna get anything done.
At the same time, I totally get it, because I already forget what's happened.
Me too, and I did it.
But we did the long series on renaming Jelliscope Telescope Space Telescope because of James Webb.
I even had the initials.
His name is Jelliscope Telescope.
I'm so woke I've erased his name from Thank you, friend.
That was a test.
You remember his name, so you're a racist.
Anyway.
Sorry, you're against gay people.
James Webb and James Wellscope.
We're the famous Wellescope family of NASA people.
And, you know, we did that whole thing, obviously.
And we came across all the emails, the FOIAed emails, and then we FOIAed our own emails, our own FOIA thing.
Yes.
And in that, we saw Space Karen, who is truly just the worst, mention a sentence which we agonized about.
We're not going to do it again here.
No, we've been through it enough.
Or even if we do fight about it for another hour, we're definitely not keeping it in this episode.
Yeah.
But Space Karen said, ah, the director's got to decide because you can't have equity.
Mission equity.
You can't have mission equity in Stennis.
And you and I both were like, what the hell?
We both went to researching whatever Stennis was.
And you've already done your Stennis.
Yep.
And we got to hear, that was the previous episode, I think, as you're hearing this, or no?
Was it?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
It was the previous episode as you're hearing this.
There's a lot of good stuff there.
We got to hear his Southern voice, which is weirdly pleasant.
Why are all these racist old white Southerners something about their weird accent that is nice to listen to?
And yes, it is Foghorn Leghorn-esque, but there's something about Foghorn Leghorn that I guess, that's like, you know, it's, yeah.
He was racist as well?
Yeah.
Did he own slaves or was he just, no, anyway.
I don't actually know anything about that.
We can't go down that rabbit hole.
We're gonna cancel Foghorn Leghorn next.
So in my research though, and I had you go first because mine just kept snowballing and snowballing.
Yeah.
As it does.
Because I don't think you have ADHD.
So Lydia will often be going first.
But mine kept snowballing and snowballing.
At first I saw that Stennis was involved in a certain case because Stennis was a lawyer and then he was a judge.
I'll go into it in a little more detail.
Before he was a senator.
So I saw that he was involved in a case and it was notable enough that it was in his wiki.
And this case is called Brown v Mississippi.
It was a good case in that it was a good decision.
And the decision is that a defendant's involuntary confession cannot be entered as evidence, which is pretty fucking significant.
So like, that's a wow.
I mean, that's a right that like we've heard of.
You know, like your average person would be like, hey, if you just kind of like make someone confess, is that cool?
I think the average person would be like, no, there's got to be some sort of case named something like Brown v. Mississippi about that, I would think.
That's what your average man on the street would say, I believe.
And so that's kind of that's interesting.
And then I realized, oh, he's on the other fucking side of that.
Of course.
It's going to be fascinating to contrast Stennis' life with the life of non-white people from this time.
Because his life reads like someone making a parody of white privilege.
I don't know how much you and your research went through this.
Basic stuff, he was born in 19-goddamn-01.
And he's from Mississippi, blah, blah, blah.
Here's a quote.
"Stennis went on to the University of Virginia in 1924 and convinced the dean of the law school to accept him without ever filing an application." - Oh my God. - I know, it's full of stuff like that.
Like, oh, he got into this.
And then he's like, hey, buddy, you want to, you know, let me into law school?
And I'm like, sure.
Why not?
You know?
And it gets better.
Why did they say yes?
I don't know.
This isn't something I put time into researching or fact checking.
Yeah, pause the show.
We have more research to do.
Someone can do a debunk of me and figure that out or something.
If this spawns another podcast devoted to that.
And then it says, while in law school, he won a seat in the Mississippi House.
So he's going to school, and then his dad dies.
His dad probably owns slaves or something, so fuck it.
I don't know.
Who knows?
But he left school, and then it says... Here's this quote.
Stennis's friends and neighbors urged him to seek an open seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives.
Oh my god.
He was elected and took the oath of office in January 1928 at the age of 27.
Wow.
So it's just like this comical fucking white privilege life like, ah, I'm gonna go here.
Hey, I'm not gonna apply to your law school, but let me in.
Sure, why not?
Leaves law school, doesn't finish yet.
People are like, you know, You're so white that you should be in the government.
And he's like, you know what?
I agree.
And so do the great people of fucking Mississippi, apparently.
And from there, he was elected district prosecuting attorney.
And that is the role that he was in.
I can assume he made it back to law school and finished.
Yeah, I think he did.
Or did he just say, you should just give me my JD and admit me to the bar?
Yeah, it could have been just a series of people telling him, you know, you should be fucking this.
And then someone's like, oh, you should be center.
He's like, you know what?
It's probably not far from that.
So, a content note because, I mean, if you couldn't guess, this involves racial violence.
And specifically, take care any non-white listeners we have.
I cannot tell you how heartbreaking this stuff is to read.
Just know that this is something that I just don't do because I can't handle it.
I'm too sensitive to handle this stuff.
It's really hard, actually.
It weighs on me a lot.
I'm going to tell elements of the story, but I'm not fucking dwelling in gory details to the extent that I think other people do.
Often there's this pornographic aspect of the stuff that I find really repulsive, and I'm just rest assured that that's nothing I would ever do.
And I'm just going to tell things as necessary for the story and context, but it's not something that is anything other than heartbreaking to me and just disturbing.
That heavy content note aside, I see that Stennis is involved in this case, and I see that he was the prosecutor.
And I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a, you know, I do have obviously some knowledge of the law, but like, specifically also in Mississippi in fucking 1936, that's not a place and time that I've practiced law.
Among the infinite places and times that I've never practiced law, that's one of the most.
Yeah.
When I read that, like, oh, he was the prosecutor, I didn't, I don't, I was like, okay, does that, I don't know necessarily, like, how much does that mean this, fuck this guy?
Yeah.
Because I already know the punchline that this case leads to a Supreme Court decision that's like, hey, you can't fucking force confessions.
By brutal means.
So I already know it's fucking bad, but I'm thinking like, all right, how directly is Stennis implicated?
So trying to answer that question was kind of the origin of any of this research for me.
And it just kept going and going.
It just forever.
I mean, there's so many things.
And by the time that was all said and done, I originally was going to tell you all about like, How I found what I found here and you know, like why I'm doing this series and like how it relates to where there's woke as a project and all that.
But then I realized it would be like 45 minutes until I get started on the story I'm trying to do.
So I'm actually, I've moved that to the end.
Don't worry.
So later, after we do a bit of the story, I'm going to tell you some of that stuff, but let it suffice to say, just in trying to answer that question of like, Oh, what actually happened here with Stennis, you know, with this trial and all that.
Here's what it led me to, and this will serve as kind of a preview for this entire series.
Coming attractions include, you know, this entire trial, some of the characters involved.
And by the way, a few of whom are truly heroes that I can't wait to introduce you to.
Amazing people in history who should maybe have stuff named after them rather than, you know, certain other people.
Also the kind of legal situation of the time, you know, 1930s, not just Mississippi, but the United States as a whole.
So there's a lot on that.
There's quite a lot on that.
And then we take a bit of a detour and get in a time machine and travel to the future.
From where we were.
We were, sorry, we were already in the time machine that was in Mississippi, except, nevermind, I would never do that.
We have to go back.
I'd take it back, yeah.
To the, back to the future.
I would never take a time machine to Mississippi in the 30s.
No.
Ever.
So I just got in the time machine and went like, made some sounds and pretended we went there and then did this.
And then.
While I was doing this research on kind of the legal situation that got me on something I stumbled on a story I have to tell and it's a bit of a long one but worthwhile about some more recent Jurisprudence along similar lines that might suggest we haven't come as far as we would have hoped.
And as if that wasn't enough, there's a super top secret bonus thing that, that makes it sound too fun, but there's a thing I found that like, seriously, late after I thought we were finally, finally, we're all done with everything.
I found another thing that is mind blowing.
That kind of connects back.
And so that's kind of the top secret final part that I haven't told Lydia about yet.
No, I just got a message that said OMFG.
Yep.
Yep.
100%.
That was about what it was.
And so that's a little bit of the preview of this series.
And so buckle in.
It's gonna, it's gonna take a minute, but.
Hop in that DeLorean, folks.
I think it'll be, yeah, assuming it has a stereo you can play podcasts on, yeah, and then listen to us while you're time traveling.
I assume you're killing Hitler and doing all the normal time travel stuff.
Yeah, of course.
That's the coming series, so we'd better get into it.
There are so many ways to paint the picture of, you know, how fucking racist and shitty the time period we're in, or that I pretended to time travel to but actually tricked you, I didn't want to do it, chickened out.
I believe you mentioned the horrible racists he beat out in the primary.
Yes.
The person who essentially died and made Stennis a senator, Theodore Bilbo, I'm bringing him up now because he comes back later in the story in a really interesting way.
But he's the guy who died and made Stennis a senator, and again, in 1937, after the story I'm going to tell, but I'm flagging it here.
That guy was such a colossal piece of shit racist, That that's part of what made Stennis seem amazing by comparison.
Yeah.
Remember the trigger warning, but like just to give you an idea of how a senator, Theodore Bilbo, now this quote is from when he's a governor, but it's a fucking, a governor, that's also pretty prominent, a governor A senator?
This is somebody at very, very high levels in the United States at this time.
This is so fucking horrible.
Apologies, content note.
This is the out-and-out racism that Stennis had the brilliance to decide to not, like, display.
So, quote, "During Bilbo's first term as governor, Eugene Green, a black man, was lynched at Belzoni, Mississippi in 1919.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People inquired of Bilbo as to the circumstances surrounding the lynching.
And in response, playing upon the association's name, Bilbo said, "Eugene was advanced all right from the end of a rope." And in order to save burial expenses, his body was thrown into the Yazoo River.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
It's unbelievable.
That guy was such a piece of shit, but like, that was common.
So that's the outward racism.
I guess give Stennis a modicum of credit for not being that, I suppose.
Just in case you weren't horrified enough that there was a little bit more from that.
I think this is from the book, actually.
An adamant opponent of federal anti-lynching legislation Bilbo denounced a proposed anti-lynching bill on the floor of the U.S.
U.S. Senate in the late 1930s, inquiring, quote, "What senator will not understand that the underlying motive of the Ethiopian who has inspired this proposed legislation, the anti-lynching bill, and desires its enactment into law with a zeal and frenzy equal, if not paramount and desires its enactment into law with a zeal and frenzy equal, if not paramount to, the lust and lasciviousness of the rape fiend in his diabolical effort to despoil the Oh my god.
I don't even know that that sentence had a subject and an object and a whatever.
I actually lost track of what the fuck he was saying.
But like, another thing that blew my mind during this is like, what happens after he says that on the Senate floor?
Yeah.
They're like, all right, lunchtime, I guess.
Robert's rules of order.
Yeah, like the amount that we live kind of in different worlds, you know, and this is not to absolve the North or anything at all, but like this story is a lot about how these fucking asshole fuckers in the South were so fucking horrible.
The lynchings, the everything going on, and then the fucking gloating over a lynching that a U.S.
Senator did.
And we just like coexist with that.
You know, like the rest of the country, the other senators are like, OK, that's my colleague.
So let's talk about where we are.
We're in Kemper County in Mississippi.
I finally decided late in the process to actually just look at fucking Google Maps like an idiot.
I've been doing this whole thing, this books, the research.
And I was like, why don't I just look physically at the place this was?
And just doing that actually kind of helped put a lot of it into perspective geographically.
Yeah.
And the main locations for this story and this case and the trial and all the stuff are a town called Dekab, a town called Skuba, and the slightly bigger, like, I don't think you could call it a city, but the bigger place called Meridian.
And that's the closest, like, Kind of more populated place that becomes a little bit important.
You know, that's where the paper is, the newspaper that covers it.
That's where some of the jail facilities are.
So Meridian becomes important.
And if you look at a map, I mean, this is Mississippi.
It's on the east border, like very close to the border of Alabama.
Right when you think it can't get any worse, it goes into Alabama.
It's just these little towns along a highway, you know, and then DeKalb and Scuba are kind of a little bit parallel.
And then Meridian is to the South.
It's actually impressively far for 1930.
You know, it's like 45 miles from Meridian to DeKalb.
And I wonder like, how long did that take in 1930s cars?
I don't know.
I have no concept of how fast they went, but here's something I also neither of us realized this entire time.
We actually know something about the little town called Scuba.
Any guesses?
You got it!
Oh my god, how did we not realize this?
Okay, so, hearing the name Scuba, I was like, I know that name.
Why do I know that name?
And I could not figure it out.
And then when you presented to me, like, we do know this, I was like, oh, okay.
I'm pretty sure.
I'm pretty sure.
I did not remember that.
My favorite show ever, you mean?
Yeah.
That show is so good, it got Lydia to watch sports.
That's how good it is.
But this was the first two seasons.
This is the first one.
East Mississippi Community fucking College.
Great seasons.
So I cannot believe the racial horror we are about to talk about.
A lot of it takes place in Scuba and around that area.
And now, if you go to Google Maps, this fucking place is so tiny.
Literally, just put in Google Maps, Scuba, and the whole place is just the community college.
That's all there is there.
It's so tiny now.
These are places, by the way, that are less populated now than in the time period we're talking about.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, you're right.
They're tiny.
And actually, I was going to talk about that.
At the time we're talking in the 30s, this whole county, Kemper County, entire population, 21,000 roughly.
Entire population.
Mind you, that's the whole county and Meridian is like more of the population.
The main like two little places we're talking about are a thousand people, you know, it's nothing.
The population peaked in like around this time because once stuff got more industrialized, like this was all, it's mainly just farmland and then as you needed fewer and fewer people to work farms, like they just moved, you know.
Yeah, I do remember some of those like town shots that they would do.
So depressing.
Yeah, and I do remember commenting on it like, oh my gosh, I'm even more depressed about just, it's just, why is that place even there?
They have a Stennis Hall.
Of course they have a Stennis Hall because Stennis, I don't know that he was literally from Scuba.
It actually doesn't say in his Wikipedia, but he's from Kemper County.
Maybe he was from, I don't know.
That's close enough.
I'm sure they would have a Stennis Hall regardless.
But speaking of the name Kemper County, just cause I can't help while we're here, county's named after Reuben Kemper.
Okay.
Who do you think that is?
A racist.
Probably, yeah.
I mean, it's so funny.
I only mention it because the Wikipedia is a little sparse.
This wasn't part of any of my deep research.
This is just kind of fun little tidbits that I don't go any further than Wikipedia for usually.
I just wanted to bring it up because the first line is of the Wikipedia, Reuben Kemper, February 21st, 1771 to January 29th, 1827.
Was an American pioneer in filibuster.
And I was like, what?
Yeah.
I actually didn't know you could be a filibuster.
Like I was, in my mind, I'm like, did he invent the filibuster?
One who busts filas?
I don't think he did that.
Yeah.
Like early in the filibuster period of the Senate, like they had him come in to like waste time.
Like it was actually was the, and uh, no, it's nothing delightful like that.
It's actually the fucking, one of the worst things you've ever heard.
Oh god.
What?
Yeah, it's someone who, just click on that Wikipedia, someone who engages in an unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country or territory to foster or support a political revolution or secession.
What?
The term is usually applied to United States citizens who incited insurrections across Latin America, particularly in the mid-19th century, usually with the goal of establishing an American loyal regime that could later be annexed to the United States.
Ugh, that's gross.
So, uh, that guy fucking sucks.
By the way, Wikipedia editors, if you're listening, it says Kemper settled down peacefully as a planter in Mississippi.
Nah, I bet that... It doesn't say that he owned slaves, but I bet he did, and if you own slaves, there's no such thing as owning them peacefully.
Sorry, fuck you.
No, just call it out.
I mean, like, why are we hiding behind that kind of flowery language?
Settle down slaveholderly, racially, as a planter.
As a person who made other human beings do everything.
Yeah.
And fortunately, he died in 1827.
It's so funny how quickly stuff goes to horrible.
You're like, oh, let me click on the name of anything in the South.
Oh, what was that?
Oh, filibuster.
Oh, fucking God.
It's just within two clicks, you're to the worst racism and imperialism and whatever else.
If it makes you feel any better, the Kemper brothers were defeated in their whatever filibustering fucking crusade.
Oh, good.
Then again, it's because the people there were satisfied with Spanish rule on account of Spain's support of slavery.
So.
Oh, okay.
I mean, I'm sure they all were going to support slavery, but the people there were already like, eh.
Both sides.
Yeah.
That is a both sides situation.
That is a both sides.
They're like, we already have slavery here and like, you know, it's secured.
We don't need any changes.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Anyway, fuck every, literally everything about all of that.
As if, you know, you need any more things to horrify you about this place.
Kemper County sucked.
I'm sure it still sucks, but I'll just speak for the time period I've looked into.
Horrible place for black people.
Majority of the county was black in 1890.
I tried to find like closer info to 1930, but actually it wasn't showing up anywhere.
So, but I assume it stayed pretty stable.
And I think that's one of the reasons why there's so much racial violence where it's like, Slavery is technically over, even though not really, but technically over, and white people find themselves in a place where, oh, there's actually more black people than us in this place.
We're outnumbered.
Yeah, and they lash out fucking horribly.
And so there's this really... I almost bought another book.
Goddamn, I almost... And it's from 1877.
Oh my gosh.
And it's called The Chisholm Massacre.
And I was wondering what fresh fucking hell this is.
But it's actually kind of interesting because Chisholm et al, who were the ones massacred, were actually white.
And I did a little more reading for this one.
Couldn't help it.
Like I said, I almost bought the book, but I read like 30 pages of the preview.
I couldn't help it.
It says a mob of 300 Ku Klux Klan members stormed a jail and killed Chism.
And I'm like, well, this has to be a black person.
Like there's no, you know, like that pattern, but actually not.
It's kind of interesting.
It has a lot to do with reconstruction.
It says this, this is less than a month after reconstruction era was brought to a close, which Fucking 1877.
I have to admit, I thought Reconstruction lasted slightly longer than that.
Yeah, I'd be like, I don't think we're done yet.
Yeah, like one fucking undergrad, essentially.
I guess that's maybe 10, 12 years or whatever.
But boy, I did not think it was that short.
But yeah, that was these racist assholes saying, no, we're not going to be reconstructed.
There's going to be no reconstruction.
We're going to go back to just about as bad as slavery was.
And that's part of the political situation with this massacre because this sheriff, former Sheriff William Chisholm, was a Republican.
And if you remember, they were the good guys back then.
And the Democrats back then were the asshole, awful racists, including KKK members, at least in Mississippi here.
And so that was a big part of it.
It was this very bitter political rivalry.
And so while it wasn't black people who were massacred, it's still ultimately I think race is and racism, especially when you see the mob was KKK members.
You got to figure racism is somewhere on the list, if not number one, always.
This is something I stopped myself from doing a deep dive on, but I wanted to bring it up because it's a very consistent pattern that we're about to see of people being led to the jailhouse and then mobs intervening.
Boy, there's a lot of examples of this.
And in this Chisholm massacre, it was Chisholm, his son, his daughter, and two of his friends all killed by these KKK members.
And then like, basically there were no consequences for it.
Wow.
And so the book I was reading was actually written by someone at the time, like shortly after.
And the language is just so, it's so fascinating and like it's a little bit propagandistic because it was someone who was like, everyone needs to know about what happened.
And they're, you know, they're right.
Like everyone does need to know about what happened, but it's written in this late 1800s propagandistic flowery language that I found really interesting.
Anyway, I stopped myself from doing a full deep dive, but I wanted to bring it up because 1877, you know, that's within living memory of the time period we're in, and it involves a lot of these same dynamics.
You know, you're in, oh, you're in protective custody in jail.
Well, not if enough people show up.
So that was 1877.
1906, there was actually quite a lot of racial violence.
And again, this whole county is fucking two people, and yet there's so many significant racial events here.
And it's always the same pattern where it's like some tiny nothing happens.
For example, in this one, I guess there was like a fight between white people and black people on a train.
And this was, I guess it was maybe a white conductor and black passengers, maybe, who knows what it was.
They were being unruly or who knows if they were doing nothing wrong or whatever.
But whatever the case, word gets out to this fucking county of murderers.
And then by a month later, there have been a total of something like 20, 25 black people killed by whites because of that, whatever that incident was.
Wow.
You know, it was like this campaign of terror, I guess, you know, like this is in America.
This is the original terrorism.
It is white people terrorizing black people.
And that is a huge, huge theme of all of this story.
It's horrifying to imagine.
And I don't think that as white people, we have grappled with what that was like and what the, and yeah, we're in the thirties.
That's a while ago, but like that campaign of terror continued for quite a while and into today in some ways and not.
Obviously not as bad.
There also was a lynching so horrible I don't know how much I want to talk about it, but it's just the worst thing.
I mean these are, it's so depressing that among the worst things humans have ever done to humans is this.
It really is.
Is our fucking country not that long ago.
Angry white racists just publicly murdering in a crowd innocent black people is just the... It's among the worst things that have ever happened.
It absolutely horrifies me, and I can't believe it's fucking real.
I just don't think we've ever reconciled this.
I don't think we've ever made this okay, ever, you know?
And that's thing number 900 on the list of things we haven't made okay when it comes to systemic racism and racial violence, but like, It's just so infuriating.
But once again, that sort of double lynching was a mob taking people from the Kemper County Jail.
So two black men accused of whatever the fuck, nothing they probably didn't do, stolen from a jail.
And the weird psychology of how the white mom always wants to get some sort of confession, even though they're killing him anyway.
Yeah.
I know it's neither here nor there, but that part just weirds me out.
I don't get, because they kill, one of them never confessed.
They killed him.
And then the other, like they said, oh, I think I heard a confession.
They killed him.
So like, what is it?
It's just this weird psychological component that just makes it even fucking grosser and weirder in a way that I can't even grapple with, like, what is that?
It's just this quasi, like, Inquisition-y thing that they felt meant something to them.
I don't understand.
Like, anyway, that was only a few years before the story we're about to get to.
So this stuff, talk about living memory, this is fresh in the memory.
And every single black person we're going to kind of meet in this story, I'm sure knows of this or even is connected to it or knows someone who knows someone.
Yeah, it's not a big place.
No, not at all.
It's a tiny place, and they have to somehow live and conduct their lives and have families and do all that in the midst of that absolute terrorism forever, for their whole lives.
And so now, Dub-T-Dub is dipping into true crime a little bit.
Play the music, do the exploitation.
No, we're not doing any of that.
I never thought I'd see this day.
No, you never will in that way.
I can't understand that kind of like just complete, almost reveling in horrible things that have happened.
That I don't get.
But for our purposes, we do need to discuss some of the true crimey stuff.
To tell the story.
And as for the crime, let's go back to our consult our map, basically.
So SCUBA, as I mentioned, that is now entirely a community college with a great football team near the Alabama border, where this murder happens is six miles to the east of that.
So even closer to the Alabama border.
In a little place called either Giles or Giles, I'm not sure which, which is not even like a town technically.
Maybe it was then, but the only thing I see on the map as a remnant of it is the Giles Neville Cemetery.
So maybe that's where this guy's buried actually.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's like, there's not enough people to even have a town, but like, here's where the people used to be.
And we also buried the town there.
Yeah.
And so in that, you know, somewhere in the farmland of this tiny place, I emphasize the geography because what, what's about to happen kind of blows my mind.
So Raymond Stewart, a white planter, again, fucking, I don't like that word cause I don't know what that means.
It kind of means slaveholder even in the thirties because of sharecropping and all that.
But that aside, he was murdered probably sometime in the middle of the night with an ax, hacked to death.
Oh my God.
Gruesome crime.
Then sometime the next day, neighbors were expecting him or something.
One way or the other, they go discover what happened.
He's actually still alive at that point?
How?
I don't know.
He's kind of still barely breathing, but by the time they call, so they call doctors, but by the time the doctors get there, he's passed.
But crazy that he survived that long.
Yeah.
So this is a gruesome murder.
And what the book says is that very quickly, Or at least, I don't know how quickly, but sometime in that afternoon, 200 people had gathered, you know, outside his house, essentially.
That's like the whole town.
Exactly.
That's what I was doing some math.
I'm thinking like, wait a minute.
Holy cow.
The whole county is 20,000 and more than half of that is black people.
So if 200 people, and you can assume most of them are white, although I, you know, I guess maybe it could have been Mixed at that point because you know, it's not like a lynch mob yet But that could be 10 20 percent of the entire white population of the county and we're in a small-ass Part that's nowhere near the population centers.
Yeah, so I don't even know how that works.
I guess just all the surrounding farmers, you know, they Somehow we're like, hey, you know how there's nothing to do because it's 1930 a guy died and they're like, yep Alright, there's my day.
I'll go there.
And what did they do?
Well, they completely ruined any chance of catching anyone by stomping all over everything, you know, making it impossible for the dogs that the police brought to track anything down.
And, yeah, so that's what they all did.
Maybe they should all be suspects now because they're sentient.
It's like instantly these dumbfuck racists ruin any chance that they- Literal mob.
Yeah.
Obviously, this is my interpretation.
Take it with a grain of salt.
But what I perceive to be being stuck without any fucking leads at all, white racist piece of shit police did what white racist piece of shit police pretty much always do in this situation, which is find the nearest black person and decide that he did it.
And I don't even think that's an exaggeration, actually.
So the nearest unfortunate black guy was Ed Brown, who's a 30-year-old tenant on Stewart's farm.
And Ed Brown had been living on that property and helping Stewart for almost three years.
From everything I gather and from reading the testimony and stuff, like who fucking knows, you know, it's almost a hundred years ago, but it feels like this guy had a pretty good relationship with the murder victim.
Like Ed Brown, this black guy, you know, three years, that's kind of a long time to be working with somebody.
And there's examples of, like, they kind of trusted each other.
The white guy trusted him with, like, valuable stuff and he lent him his gun.
Oh, wow.
Like, here's my gun.
Use this for something.
I forget what.
But, like, that's an example of, like, that's heartbreaking.
I don't think Ed Brown murdered this guy.
You know, like, I don't fucking know.
I find it hard to believe that he would have killed the guy.
The alleged motive being that he owed him a little bit of money.
It's like, well, he lives there, you know, like, for three.
Anyway, so the police find that guy.
Apparently they decide, well, even though you've been living on the property in a trusting working relationship with this guy for three years, you must have just decided to axe him to death one day and then go back to your house and not know about what had happened.
That must have been the evil plan.
The diabolical plan of Ed Brown was Murder the guy you've lived on property and worked with for three years and then just go back to your house and not know it happened.
That's how they often do it, these diabolical murders.
This is the thing that I actually cannot suss out and I've read over the transcript a million times and they just don't bother saying it.
I don't think they had to try that hard to prove their case, so like, There's a lot missing from the trial.
There's a lot of sequencing missing.
There's, there's dates missing.
There's like, I don't know the order of what happened.
And I've, I have fucking tried so hard to figure this out and I can't, there's just not enough information that I have.
But for some reason, police thought this can't be a one person job maybe, or what?
Or maybe they figured like, why not just frame more black people if you're already doing it, I guess?
Like, honestly, it could be that.
So the next day they nab, Literally the next closest black guy.
Oh my God.
And his name is Henry Shields and he lived half a mile away.
So we got Ed Brown who lived on the property.
We got Henry Shields lived half a mile away.
And I can't emphasize how much that this was probably the rationale.
You often hear people say he said the quiet part out loud.
But we're in Mississippi in the 30s, so scientists haven't even discovered the quiet part, like the concept of a quiet part.
That would be confusing to these racists.
They would be like, why would you be quiet ever about my racism?
Like, why would I ever not yell it?
Just in one of the many hours of random research for this, this was an old newspaper clipping I found from the Chicago Tribune, and this was after the Supreme Court decision, but in it they quoted one of the citizens of this town.
I have to read you this quote.
Quote, in spite of the recent Supreme Court decision, The feeling in Kemper County toward the three- Oh, and by the way, sorry, stepping aside.
I meant to say this at the outset.
You won't hear me using the N-word because I'm never going to use that on a show.
It's not a C-series inquiries only for scientific reasons why that's not a good idea.
But the language of the time uses the word Negro a lot.
That's just like the common word.
It's in a billion places that I'm going to read.
And so I will be saying the word Negro.
Just wanted to note it.
That's a conscious decision based on my understanding of scientifically what the best thing to do is around that.
So I will never be saying the n-word in full, but I will use the word Negro when it's a quote.
And so back to the quote.
The feeling in Kemper County toward the three Negroes remains unchanged.
It was expressed the other day by a leading resident of DeKalb.
Is it DeKalb or DeKalb?
That's a great question.
I forget because there is a isn't there a DeKalb County, but I don't know if that's a different thing.
Yeah.
Cause I can't just read a fucking quote because of course I can't.
I was about to go pronounce the county and I realized that in all the fucking month long of research, every time I read it, I thought, oh, I should figure out how to pronounce that.
And, but I'm like, well, why I'm not saying it.
I'm just reading it for now.
So I don't need to know how to, it's like how, when I used to read Harry Potter, I was like fucking Hermione and God knows what else, but it's, DeKalb.
Okay.
But I just have to share something funny that I saw when Googling how to pronounce it.
I just have to share this because it's really funny.
DeKalb is the trickiest of silent L words.
If you're talking about DeKalb County, there's no L. It's pronounced DeKalb after an American Revolutionary War hero.
But if you're referring to DeKalb County, Illinois, named after the very same man, you do pronounce the L. Why?
Oh, so good.
Weird.
And then I'm realizing as I say that, hun, that this isn't a county.
I just looked up how to pronounce DeKalb and realized that it's, I was looking at DeKalb County, Georgia, because obviously there's a bunch of these.
This is not a county.
This is DeKalb, which is a little fucking town.
Yeah.
And so I actually don't know now.
I can't find, I keep Googling.
How do I pronounce DeKalb, Mississippi?
And it's not, I can't get a straight answer out of these people.
So.
They won't tell me.
But we'll say DeKalb because, I don't know, I figure if that's the more southern way of saying it, if the county is that, so we'll say DeKalb.
But anyway.
Okay, back to whatever the fuck I was talking about.
Okay, this quote.
I'm gonna reset the quote because that was two interruptions and that's too many.
Quote, in spite of the recent Supreme Court decision, the feeling in Kemper County toward the three Negroes remains unchanged.
It was expressed the other day by a leading resident of DeKalb.
Quote, we believe they are guilty, he said.
When asked why the prisoners were suspected, he answered, quote, well, they worked for Stewart.
They were the only Negroes on his plantation.
That's the end of the quote.
There's no more.
They asked the guy... Black people.
Yeah, they were the only... Why are they guilty?
They were the nearest black people.
Like literally, I was making a joke and then I found a quote that was like, oh, no, no, no.
That's that's it.
They were the nearest black people.
So the way the rest of it goes, I want to tell it through this piece of shit racist newspaper run by a fucking piece of shit racist.
First thing to know that I gathered from those from like kind of how it was reported at the time because you figure gruesome murder, you know, it's big news and this was in the newspaper like every day because of it.
So first, I don't think there was any evidence whatsoever at Ed Brown's house or on him or anything.
And that fits, because again, just to recap, Ed Brown lives on the property.
They literally were like, who's the closest black guy?
It's that guy.
They go to his house and he's just there.
Yeah.
He's just like, hi, what's up?
And they're like, well, you probably killed this guy that you live on this property and work with, and you're just doing a real good job pretending you didn't know he was dead.
And also there's no evidence or anything, but you probably did it.
Hacked somebody to death and there's like no physical evidence.
I will say they suspect he was murdered in the night and they didn't discover his body.
No one discovered his body till around noon the next day.
So, you know, conceivably time to like dispose of evidence.
But like, I don't fucking think this guy did it.
I just don't.
So as I said, nothing really on Ed Brown.
That didn't stop them from still just, you know, arresting him and suspecting him.
But then they had to arrest another guy, maybe because of that.
I don't know.
Maybe they felt like they needed to find someone else because there wasn't really much evidence at Ed Brown's house.
So they found Henry Shields.
At Henry Shields' place, they found what might be evidence.
Bloodstained jumper, arguably.
More on that later.
And overalls that had strands of hair that allegedly was the same color as the murdered white, probably racist.
Here's how the newspaper reported it.
Here's what a racist paper run by some of your grandparents, if you live in Mississippi, said.
When Shields was confronted with this evidence that they found at his place, quote, the Negro Shields was said to have broken down and made a statement that implicated Ed Brown.
End quote.
So now they got Ed Brown.
OK.
And then the newspaper reports.
So then that because of that, Ed Brown confessed as well.
So he's confessed.
But then they also arrest someone named Arthur Ellington, who went by Yank Ellington.
And wouldn't you know it, he also confessed and corroborated the other confessions.
So according to the newspaper, that's like fucking awesome.
They nailed it.
These are the best white fucking racist cops.
Yeah.
Naturally, there's already a lot of fear of a lynch mob.
just the minute this kind of thing happens.
The sheriff fears that there's going to be a lynch mob and so moves them to like a different county jail.
So the sheriff is doing everything he can to prevent a lynching.
And seriously, tons of people are guarding the prison and he's even like inquiring about the National Guard.
Like we might need the National Guard because this is something that like I'm not an expert in, but the lynchings are a weird thing just from the perspective of the sheriffs and the police.
It's their job to kill innocent black people.
It's not the citizens' job.
So in their racist minds, they're like, no, we can do it.
Don't worry.
We'll get there.
All you white fucking racists, you need to wait like a day.
That's what it essentially is about.
But for the time being, that means that the sheriff is trying to protect these black people.
I guess.
He doesn't want them to be lynched.
For whatever reason, the sheriff is like, don't do that.
And so this creates this weird dynamic that I can't help but talk about.
The newspaper is kind of trying to help the sheriff prevent this lynching in a way.
Because that's what all this coverage is written like.
It's like, hey, check out, it's like they're a PR firm for how great a job the sheriff and the police department is already doing at executing these innocent people.
Like, you don't need to come do a lynching.
Like, we promise.
We're gonna, like, execute him right away, just so fast.
And it works!
That, like, gets the mob to not do a lynching, which... How are these people just part of the country?
Anyway, so that holds them off.
They do a ridiculously fast grand jury indictment, and then the trial is about five fucking minutes long, and they're found guilty.
And they're scheduled to hang fucking immediately.
Check out this quote.
Only one week after the discovery of a dying Raymond Stewart, therefore, Ed Brown, Henry Shields, and Yank Ellington had been arrested, indicted, tried for murder, and sentenced to be hanged.
My god.
One week.
And then the fucking newspaper that I just was telling you about is like patting the county on the back for this.
This is unreal.
Listen to this.
In an editorial titled Kemper Proves Itself, published after the trial, the Meridian Star praised the manner in which Raymond Stewart's murder had been solved and punishment meted out to those guilty of the crime.
Quote, three Negroes are sentenced to die in Kemper County in the early part of May.
The case had been, quote, handled expeditiously, with due justice to the accused, and with due consideration for the social order, end quote.
So, like, see?
We don't need to do lynchings by having a mob break into a jail and then, like, gruesomely murder the black people themselves.
We do it properly using a five-minute sham trial, and then we killed it.
Like, it's fucking... That's crazy.
I don't even know.
Yeah, it's like I... The wheels of justice do not tend to move that quickly.
No.
And so that was the local racist fucking newspaper version of what happened.
The only way we could really debunk that is if we had access to the trial transcript.
Well, fortunately, I was eventually able to find that.
Now is where I want to talk a little bit about that stuff I teased at the beginning, how this came up, how this research journey went.
I've just got some odds and ends and why I think this is so fascinating.
Lots of stuff.
So this was sort of the unfolding of how I kind of discovered information.
I always start at Wikipedia, we all do, and then, you know, you go for the mail, you click on the sources, and I've got other, I've got new and improved research methods that I'm excited to share.
I used some of them for this, including Ancestry.com, which I never thought would be something I would need or care about because I don't care about my family, really.
And then I was like, Ancestry.com.
It's funny aside on that, I used Ancestry.com, which is also tied to these newspapers.com, which is very cool and very key in some of this research, you know, looking through historical newspaper articles.
And that has just really, that has grabbed me so much.
I always fucking hated and sucked at history in school.
And I was thinking about this as I was reflecting on doing this episode and even this show, because a lot of the show is like, fucking, I love looking into this history, you know?
And I was trying to think of, like, why I hated history as a kid.
And I realized, like, A, it's because of ADHD, so I couldn't focus on what anyone was saying.
So for me, history class was like, all right, how do I try to pass a test about something?
And it ended up being like, you know, all right, memorize the fucking four things that were in this.
And dates.
Yeah, who are the people and what year was the thing?
And I fucking hated it.
And I couldn't do it that well because that's a kind of a memorization that is not logic based.
You know, you have to just know a lot about, you have to just fucking, there's no shortcutting it unless you're someone who's good at memorizing random shit.
And I'm not good at memorizing random shit.
I'm good at memorizing stuff when there's a logic to it.
or whatever, you know, and they have that like framework.
And so I hated history.
I didn't really get it.
But I've always, you know, I've obviously always enjoyed learning.
I've always enjoyed like documentaries and stuff.
And then as I'm doing this research and I'm just searching and searching, I'm going through old newspapers and reading articles.
It's just the most fucking fascinating thing to me.
Just seeing like these people in the 30s led the, you know, they led these complete lives.
They had so much going on.
You know, like I think I have this stupid idea in my brain for some reason that like Now, when there's all this fucking technology is when things got like interesting or something or like, you know, things got complex because we were connected across the world, you know, before you weren't, you didn't have the internet, you weren't connected across, we didn't have TV much, you know, really.
And so I guess my brain was like, well, things were simpler or something, but like, not really, you know, like there's, There's so much, and it blows my mind how much these people, everybody throughout history, I mean people have always been people, they've always been smart, especially around politics and human relationships and stuff and like all that stuff is just so fucking fascinating to read from that perspective back then.
Seeing some of these people and what they did And yeah, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have TikTok and all that shit.
But what they did have was like magazine articles, and they would write letters.
And like a lot of this story, the more positive components of it, Are people reading about something somewhere, randomly getting picked up by a newspaper, and then that gets picked up by a magazine, someone reads about it, sends a letter to somebody, donates something, like just all this stuff that I'm like, God, it's just so interesting, you know?
It's not the internet, it's not email, it's not all that, but it's still the same thing in a way, and it's still sort of the same function.
Yeah, that network, yeah.
Yeah, and it's just so fucking interesting.
And then also to darken it again, to see the legal system, some of it is just, some of this is just a joke.
It's just a fucking joke.
We're gonna go through it, but like, to call it a sham trial is an insult to sham trial.
You know, like, to call it a kangaroo court, I don't want to insult kangaroos or whatever the fuck that's based on.
Right.
That's probably some racist thing too, let's face it.
For one, I don't know how much of this is, well, small, rural area, 1936.
I don't know what the norm was.
Well, the first trial was in 1934.
I don't know what the norm was back then, but I've Now read the entire transcript of this 1934 trial, like literally the whole thing.
And there's a lot of it that I'm like, is this fucking really how we did it?
And so simultaneously, I'm reflecting on the fact that like, you know, people say, you know, slavery was legal.
The Holocaust was legal.
Yeah.
All these things were legal.
There's a way in which the legal system, you look at the terminology they're using and the objection, overrule, all that stuff is there.
All that same hearsay, all that same stuff is in this transcript and it feels really sophisticated.
At the same time, it's sophisticated and yet it's just being used for evil.
Like it's literally- In the service of.
Yeah, like, it's not this dichotomy of, well, is it evil racism, or did the legal system come and save us, or whatever.
Like, it's not that.
It's one in the same, specifically in Mississippi.
That dichotomy is something to keep in mind as a theme, because ultimately, you already know, the Supreme Court did rule well.
They did a good thing here, which is not always The case, but looking at that relationship, you know, of like when the law is just, yeah, it's sure it's this sophisticated thing.
Aren't we so smart?
Aren't we so great?
Yeah, except it's being used to ensure a racial fucking hierarchy, to ensure white people's ability, white Southerners specifically in this case, is ability to do the most horrible things to black people and treat them like not people.
But you have all these law words, so then it's sophisticated and fine.
Here's another thing that's tough.
How do you find anything from 1936?
Yes, we have the internet, but not everything's on the internet.
We haven't gotten the budget yet to be able to travel to universities where they have papers.
I actually have tried to locate some of these things and just see if there's an online version of it, and it'll be like, oh, Stennis' library, whatever.
It'll be at a university, and it'll be like, They have all of Stenis's, he donated, you know, all his effects and papers and all that.
And it's like, it would be so cool to be able to search that.
Yeah.
You're like, let me click a button then.
I know.
I'm like, okay, why hasn't everybody instantly uploaded everything to the internet ever?
That should be mandated because I would love to see it.
But no, they haven't.
I mean, some of this stuff I couldn't find.
I did a good half days worth of research coming to the conclusion of like, well, I guess I'm not really going to know.
Like I was just like, I just won't know because yes, I can find the fucking Supreme Court decision.
Sure.
That's easy.
And I did.
And I read that and fucking A, but it references stuff like in the transcript or it references stuff in the, you know, in the evidence and the whatever.
I'm like, where is that?
I don't know.
I'm still learning this stuff where often I'll find a decision, but the decision will reference.
Even if it's not Supreme Court, even if it's whatever level of court.
It'll reference evidence.
It'll reference exhibits.
It'll reference other stuff.
And I'm like, where is that?
Is that somewhere?
Like, how do you find that shit?
I don't know.
Do they keep all that, you know?
Do they keep the photos or a description of it?
I don't know.
And so I saw this one sentence though in the wiki that said, the transcript of the trial indicated Stennis was fully aware, et cetera, et cetera.
And I thought, well, that's bad, obviously.
But that's all I had.
Like, I couldn't find anything else.
That didn't have a source to it in the wiki.
I couldn't find the fucking transcript anywhere.
First, I found, like, a really good write-up about it.
And I was like, all right, I'll do the episode just using this write-up and the Supreme Court decision.
And that was, like, the first time when I was like, all right, I'm ready.
I'm going to do this fucking month ago.
And then I just happened to somehow find the transcript.
It's, like, on this university website.
I don't know why.
It's on, like, some...
The URL I'm on is like a university, like users dot something edu.
Like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to be on.
I don't know what this is.
I have no idea how I found it.
Like, I don't know if I accessed some student's fucking thing, but it's the whole transcript.
And so I found that and I was like, Jesus Christ, I cannot stop reading this.
Let it suffice to say, I have done fucking hours on this.
I've just got hooked on researching the story and the people involved and the case, the legal component.
Give you guys an indication.
Time to reveal this bombshell.
I read a fucking book.
I read and I read it like, okay, all right.
Confession, I only read most of it.
Then I figured out I could make my phone read it to me.
But I physically read a book for a lot of it.
It's a short book.
But for me, that's a lot.
I can't physically read.
It's hard.
I tried to even order it.
It was like, you can't order it.
There's nothing.
It's like, fuck.
But I found the like, ooh, there's a little bit of a peek inside the book.
And I started reading that.
And that was giving me things that were like, I have to find out more.
It's so interesting.
I have to find out more.
And so I was like, wait a minute, I can get this on Kindle.
I don't have a Kindle, but I can get on Kindle.
And so I did that and then I've got it on the Kindle app.
And then I realized I could have the phone yell it at me in a monotone really fast.
And so I decided to start doing that.
I want to shout out this book because it's so good.
It is so goddamn good.
So this book is called A Scottsboro Case in Mississippi, Cullen, the Supreme Court and Brown v Mississippi by someone named Richard C. Cortner.
And this is so obscure that I can't tell if this person's alive or dead.
Richard Cordner was born in 1935, so I don't know.
There's no Wikipedia on him.
I see, when I search him, I see stuff that says, was a this, but it also, like, other places it speaks in the present tense, and it says, Nothing says he's... Anyway, point is, this book was amazing.
And this was published in 1986, this book, the year I was born.
And unlike me, he didn't have the internet, I don't think, but he did have like the old fashioned way of getting a hold of... For one, he was, I think, in Mississippi.
I think he probably was somewhere where this made more sense.
And got a hold of like all the documents involved, like the personal letters, the this, the that.
There's detailed stuff about finances.
that's gonna be so interesting to talk about.
I just wanna shout this book out.
It was so cool to read.
In case you're out there, Richard C. Kortner, who's fuckin' what, 88 or something?
What would he be?
Yeah, if you're listening, you're amazing, because this book fuckin' ruled.
So I gotta do a big shout out there.
If he listens and he's like, there's a little too much swearing for my taste.
Yeah, apologies about the swearing.
Also, hopefully he's not one who's like, yeah, sorry, the woke went too far.
I'm the anti-woke now.
Fuck, goddamn it!
Yeah, can't win them all.
The mission of this show, in brief, has always been debunking these fake anti-woke stories.
But it's a little bit more than that as well, because there's also kind of the reason why I, at least I'll speak for myself, consider myself progressive and I guess of the side that people would call woke, although even before that word was ruined by anti-woke people, I would have never self-identified as that, because it's just a weird thing to say.
Well, fuck it.
Whatever.
I guess I'm quote-unquote woke or whatever.
But there's really good reason for that, and I've also always seen that as a mission of the show, too.
Because just debunking stuff without providing the reasons why I proactively am on this side And see this as a valuable project, you know, that doesn't tell the complete picture.
There's an overarching reason why the anti-woke side is always fucking wrong, and why the woke side is largely correct, even if, you know, obviously you can find individual people everywhere that are going to be wrong about something, but like, Like, largely the mission of quote-unquote wokeness, I find to be incredibly important.
One major component of that is reading anything about history whatsoever.
Actually learning real history, not taught in like a whitewashing, America-friendly way, and really grappling with things that happened, it's just pure horror.
Like it's just horror for most of all time.
And I truly believe that most people don't grapple with that.
But reading that, just like stumbling upon this, this weird ass fucking chain of custody we've got, you know, just like one thing leading to another to another.
And it all inevitably, like everything we research, if you go back enough, you find this horrible shit in history.
Mm-hmm.
And telling the real story of historical figures is a part of wokeness.
Now, Stennis is not like a household name anymore, probably at least except for in fucking Mississippi.
Yeah, exactly.
But he's an important, actually quite important figure in the Senate historically.
Yeah.
Joe Biden loves him.
We'll get to it.
We'll get to it.
Everybody loves those people for some reason.
Every single Dixiecrat who was a racist but then lived long enough to die in the 90s or 2000s Somehow everyone worshipped them after they, it's the weirdest thing and that's part of this actually.
But that accurate grappling with just the reality of the horror that has been inflicted on black people in this country.
Again, as someone who, I mean I know this stuff, like I know, I'm not like naive about this stuff at all.
I'm not saying I know a bunch of history because I sucked at history.
I don't know a bunch of history, but I'm not someone who's like, yeah, and then we're always the good guys and it's great, right?
It's like, I'm not that guy at all.
And yet still, I'm just like repeatedly shocked and shocked and shocked over and over and over.
And it's not gory details.
It's more just all the stuff around it.
Like this awful shit happens and the way it's dealt with or not dealt with.
The way life goes on, the way nobody fucking cares after certain, like all that stuff too is particularly shocking to me in reading what I've read now and going through all this research.
Not only for all those reasons do I want to talk about, but also it's just so fucking fascinating.
You've heard me two or three times today just be like, this is the most interesting thing.
As much as I doubt myself every five seconds, because I'm so fucking fascinated by this story, I have to trust that the listener will be as well.
And so even though this isn't a anti-woke debunking, but it is history and it is about telling accurate history and it is about how do we judge historical figures.
Kind of what's fair in that, and then also making sure we have the accurate information when we do that, because I think there's two levels of it.
There's a level of, oh, you know, man of his time, people didn't know any better.
But there's also a level of denial about, like, what the details of these things actually are.
Well, I think we're going to leave it there for now, but don't worry very soon.
I'll give you part two.
Patrons especially.
I will try to make you wait as little as possible.
And also for patrons, I've got a special message kind of update that I will be putting out right away.
So look forward to that as well, or maybe pledge at patreon.com slash where there's woke to hear that.
And by the way, if you're a patron, um, what can you know, you find on patreon.com slash where there's woke.
Some really awesome bonus stuff that we did recently.
We did Rob Schneider's comedy special pretty recently.
And then we have a very, very cool, for the top two tiers of patrons, we'll be hanging out, chatting.
Thomas and I will answer any questions that folks have, maybe No, we're just playing fucking code names and you're going down.
I need revenge.
You're mad because I beat you last time.
Oh yeah, soundly, but like, I think the board was rigged.
I was looking at the code on the back end.
I don't know about that.
Horse-paced and I think you... So are we just gonna play code names until you beat me?
No, we're gonna play code names until the proper victor is crowned.
Okay.
That could be you, I don't know.
Yes, it's me.
Yeah.
So if you're not already signed up on patreon.com slash where there's woke, get signed up, get into those top two tiers and come hang out with us.
It's a whole lot of fun.
We had a blast last month and really looking forward to doing it again on November 30th.
So next time on Where There's Woke, did they really just like confess?
Like, phew, I'm so relieved to just confess all of what happened right now.
And you know what?
He was involved and he was involved.
Is that how it happened?
You think?
No, you already know that's not how it happened.
But next time, the actual transcript.
God, there's so, fuck, there's so much interesting stuff about this.
